9

It was one of those nights when everything felt more vivid. There was no chance of sleep because everything, including him, was monstrously, throbbingly alive. Maybe it was that the moon was full. The room was mostly dark, but he could tell the moon was full because, through the shutters, it cast six bright bands of pale-blue light against the bed and the walls.

He turned onto his other side, faced the air conditioner. The unit was loud, but he could still hear things above it: crickets, frogs, the shrieking of other creatures, birds of some kind, monkeys maybe. Something big scampering across the roof of a nearby bungalow.

He got up. Tiptoed to the door and found the iron ring-pull. The porch was in darkness, but beyond that everything was bathed in the same bright, but kind of washed-out blue. Short, bare trees and tropical flowers were motionless and finely detailed against the grey sand. He wanted to lie down on that neatly raked sand, so soft and cool-looking, but he dared not do this — who knew what was crawling around there at night — so he stepped out barefoot onto the path and looked up at the sky. Looked for the moon, but now it was hidden. The upper reaches of the tallest trees above him moved a little in some higher breeze, and he looked around for the monkeys, but there was no sign of them.

He followed the path towards the beach. The restaurant was dark and still, the boardwalk was dark and still, all the signs and all the people packed up for the night. The beach was cooler, the merest breeze, but it was not inviting. He worried about rubbish, about stepping on a needle that had yet to be raked under the sand.

He turned back and went the other way, all the way back through the grounds to the entrance of the hotel and the curving white-pebble driveway. There, outside a row of low-lying buildings set off from the entrance to the hotel by a knee-high rope fence — they had peeked into these buildings one day when a door was left open to see a mess of mattresses, sheets, and towels in plastic — a woman was getting onto the back of a motorcycle. He recognised her from the hotel. She had served him breakfast at least once, brought drinks over to the pool. She was in jeans and a T-shirt now. Her traditional clothes — her uniform — were hanging in the room with the mattresses maybe. If she saw him, there was no acknowledgement. She got on the back of the motorbike, folded her arms in front of her, and rested gently against the man’s back, and they drove off.

He went back to the room. Pushed open the little cupboard-sized doors that led to their secret room with the daybeds. He picked one, lay down, and looked out at the wall of green that shielded the room from other guests. He thought of taking a look at one of the job ads Madeleine had sent through to him, but he didn’t have the energy left to get his phone from the other room. He didn’t really want a job, anyway. A permanent job. Being an uncontracted sessional was a nightmare in many ways, but it was his nightmare, and he had found his place in it. He could do without a whole new set of things to worry about.

The whole thing was too depressing. All the hope people like Madeleine had for them and their ‘careers’. The word career itself was exhausting. The reality was that he had no great love for his field, no real interest in pursuing it, no projects he was excited about embarking upon, no ideas for a book proposal. He wasn’t angry about the whole thing, not anymore; he was simply jaded. And ashamed. All the effort, all those years of research and writing, and peer assessment by experts and editors of journals no one had heard of. All of it going into something whose only real justification was the perpetuation of itself. The need to publish. To have published. So you could support a claim to a contract, which in turn helped the funding cause of the faculty and the university. But not, primarily, so your work would be read. So you could contribute anything real. No.

He wasn’t an architect, a builder, a planner, a designer — someone who had any influence on the built environment or our negotiation of it, now or in the future. He was someone who wrote about these things. Someone who, if he ever wrote a book, which was less likely with every passing year, would write one that no one would read. Possibly almost literally, no one would read his book. Surely there was something more worthy of his time, what was left of his energy.

In light of this, Clara’s attempts to get out of it, to find something else to do besides being an academic, a writer of books that were not read, a worker in an industry that had fewer jobs every year, seemed sensible. But she had never found the right thing. Organic gardening, landscaping, a ranger for the national parks … she’d had many ideas, some of which were accompanied by short bursts of enthusiasm that inevitably petered out. It didn’t dishearten her. She knew she wasn’t without talent; that it had never been honed strongly in one direction or another seemed to be okay by her. Sometimes he wondered if one of her greatest talents was to be so magnanimous in the face of all of that. To be basically untroubled by not having one great calling or whatever, however silly the idea sounded when you said it out loud. She tried things, they ran their course, and she moved on to the next one. She had downgraded these ideas for alternative careers as time went on, and as she found more work teaching and more success getting her work published — found herself to be, after all, a talented academic who wrote things people, in fact, wanted to read. And, rather than escape hatches, they became hobbies that ran alongside her research: pottery, after his mother had taught her some things; photography; sewing. Things that made her precarious work and her interminable doctorate bearable. While he stuck to his one thing, his only thing, terrified that it might not work out because he had no idea what else he would do if it didn’t. He didn’t have anything else, but even if he did ever think of pursuing other things — once there were musical aspirations, but nothing ever got off the ground — he knew he would be too scared to actually go through with it, to switch so late in the game.

But he liked teaching. Or he did now. The first time he thought he wasn’t going to make it through the semester.

That first class was an introductory, survey subject on urban history, which he had taken himself four years earlier, but barely remembered a thing about. He was given a week’s notice. He took beta-blockers and Valium before every one of those twelve classes.

It was made worse by the fact he had a difficult student that first time. A tall, fleshy, vaguely unkempt twenty-year-old called Brendan, who carried around with him an apparently empty backpack and a scuffed-up notepad full of scrawled notes and doodles. His presence in the room was disruptive from the beginning; everything about his demeanour suggested boredom and hostility. The way he arrived late and shuffled noisily through the tables to his one friend, Shella, an alert and sly-looking young woman who smirked at Tom nastily through class. The way he then sat slumped in his chair with his hands in his pockets most of the hour, staring at the ceiling, the notepad sitting untouched in front of him on the table — when he wasn’t passing it back and forth with Shella and sniggering.

Each week, Brendan’s attitude would be an undeniable yet silent presence in the room until close to the end of class, when he would snap out of it as if from a nap, or as if, suddenly, he had reached the absolute limit he could take of all this inane bullshit. He would take over completely then, and, while still staring at the ceiling or the door, drone out a long diatribe on some very minor technical point of contention — the efficacy of early modern bastion forts against cannon fire, for example — or on something big and discursive and obliquely insulting, like the hopelessly romanticised version of Jane Jacobs v Robert Moses that was being taught in the class.

Tom was repeatedly caught out of his depth on these subjects, his knowledge not extending far beyond the readings and, if he was lucky, a few other, half-remembered points he had picked up over the years in other subjects — he had forgotten so much, it seemed. But he managed to keep up with Brendan intellectually at least, he thought. He managed to hold his own, and sometimes he was able to successfully mount counterarguments, or, better yet, use Brendan’s rants as the basis of class discussion, assigning to sections of the room opposing positions, which sometimes, miraculously, seemed to go well. As far as he was concerned, anything that got them talking, for even a few minutes, was a win; making it through the hour each week was such a task. But Brendan never softened up. He remained as begrudging and mute and suddenly overbearing as ever.

Brendan was late with assignments. He feigned surprise when they came up, and when he got them back and was marked down for his lateness, his lapses in expression, his grammatical errors, the lack of referencing — although Tom was too scared to mark him down too strictly — he waved away the marks, claimed to have done the assignments in an afternoon.

In the second half of semester, the students gave talks on their research essay. Nothing too formal. Tom wasn’t going to force them to put together PowerPoint slideshows or even, if they didn’t want to, get up in front of the class. His increasing desperation to get them to like him, to get them onside, made him wildly flexible with most assessments — and this one was worth so little, he couldn’t care less how they approached it, although getting to ten minutes was important to him because it was time off the clock.

When it was Brendan’s turn to speak, he looked around the room, like always, as if he’d just woken up.

Oh, that was today? he said, although they had been going through the roll alphabetically, and Tom didn’t really think this was lost on him. He dismissed Tom’s offer to move his talk to the following week, however, and got up from his desk.

I don’t have anything ready, but I’ll do it now anyway, I guess, he said, and he ambled through the tables to the front of the room.

May I? he said, gesturing to the whiteboard, and he uncapped a marker pen and began drawing on the board. It was a complex diagram, and messy. Tom noticed that he held the marker in his fist, like a child. The class sat in silence for several minutes while he finished. During that time — Tom pretended not to notice — Shella was watching him with something like malicious glee.

Brendan’s talk was rambling and convoluted, but Tom could not deny that it showed an impressive depth of knowledge and an ability to connect disparate facts across centuries and disciplines (in a talk on the contemporary town hall, there was something about wheat-eating as one of the causes of sewage problems in the Late Middle Ages, which Tom wanted to stop him to explain but didn’t dare). He used the entire whiteboard to illustrate his points, drawing several diagrams of alternative street layouts in Australian country towns, and then roamed the room authoritatively while he spoke, occasionally rubbing his temples or grumpily pushing his fringe out from his eyes — the only signs he was more nervous in front of the class than he let on. He even stared out the window for a portion of it, thoughtfully, as he tried to pull it all together at the end, which he struggled to do, stammering a few times through his closing remarks.

When he finally finished, after almost twenty minutes — Tom had raised eyebrows at him a few times at twelve minutes, then fifteen, but was ignored — Shella led the class with an ovation, while holding Tom’s gaze meaningfully, as if to say, See? That’s how it is done. Tom remembered trying to return to her a similarly meaningful smile, an indulgent smile, hoping to convey to her that the kid had been a touch over the top, of course, but sure, it was entertaining, and, not to worry, he was not threatened by him — in fact, he found the whole thing mildly amusing. And he could see how this infuriated her.

At the end of the second-last class for the semester, as the students filed out of the room, Tom wished them well on the final essay and felt an overwhelming sense of relief. He was elated. It was finally nearly over. In the break, he would sleep twelve hours a night and not leave the house for a week. Then he would snap out of it and mark everyone’s work.

He gathered his things, moved through the chairs and around the large tables that crowded the room, and saw something underneath one of the tables on the floor. It was Brendan’s notepad. Brendan had left early, like he always did, with Shella following him — by this point Tom wondered if they were romantically involved — so there was no use chasing after them, they were long gone. He pocketed it. But not before looking inside. He almost didn’t, but he couldn’t help himself. He reasoned he had to be sure whose it was, although he knew that notepad well. There were very few actual notes, of course — mostly pages of doodles and several pages of chat with Shella. Several of these chats mentioned Tom and the class, as he suspected they might. This class is stupid, Brendan had written. Ugh, I know, she’d replied. He doesn’t know anything; the guy’s an idiot; so annnooyyying; you should be teaching this class; I should be; ha ha.

Tom wondered if he should just bin the notebook — surely Brendan attached very little importance to it himself and would not miss it — but in the end, he didn’t, because he relished too much the opportunity of presenting it back to Brendan the following week.

You left this behind last week? he said, as diffidently as possible, although his hand was visibly shaking. And Brendan, blushing, not meeting his eye, took it off him without a word. It was everything Tom had hoped for. He was the grown-up here, and he had claimed the moral high ground by overlooking Brendan’s badmouthing of him and the class, by being gracious and mature about it, and also by giving Brendan a break by maintaining the pretence — which Brendan clearly knew to be a pretence; after all, his name was not on the pad — of not seeing what was written inside it.

Brendan’s major essay for the class, worth 50 per cent of the subject’s overall mark, was, like his earlier reports and his talk, an undisciplined polemic that roamed freely from topic to topic and made, in the end, no coherent argument. Or not one Tom could easily fathom. Tom was at a loss with how to mark it. He was privately glad it was a mess, and thus probably couldn’t be given a high mark, even a mediocre one, but he also feared Brendan might dispute the mark, or complain about him if he didn’t reward him for being the smartest person in the class. He might expose Tom as the fraud he was as a teacher, or at the very least give him a scathing student evaluation — although that was probably coming either way. In the end, he passed it on to the coordinator of the subject to mark, his supervisor, Henry Ales.

Henry smiled when Tom told him about Brendan and, when he read the essay, agreed with Tom’s assessment of it — that while this was obviously an impressive mind, he had a long way to go with his academic writing, and what he had handed in could not really be called a research essay at all. There was so little proper referencing, and it would have to be marked accordingly. Henry told him not to worry, he would deal with it, and that Brendan would be given the option of failing or rewriting the essay for a pass. Inside, Tom rejoiced. He never did find out which option Brendan had taken.

It wasn’t a good start, and the next few semesters were almost as bad. Beta-blockers and Valium before class, frequent trips to the bathroom during the hour to guzzle water, wipe himself down, and huge relief and drinking too much once it was over. Unshakable exhaustion. Sometimes, at home, he caught Clara looking at him with something that was probably concern. But over time, he no longer needed the beta-blockers or the Valium, and, eventually, teaching became his favourite part of the week.

He was lucky for a few years to have the same subjects each semester. This built his confidence; he knew the material well and needed little preparation. And he began to establish a good rapport with his students. He increasingly received positive, even glowing, student evaluations — he was still a pushover — and he enjoyed the feeling of being an authority that was appealed to, of having an opinion that was taken seriously. More seriously, usually, than the students’ own.

Teaching had been so fraught for Tom at the start, he believed, because he let it be so intimately bound up with his sense of self-worth, so bound up with his ego. He remembered asking Henry about it once — panicking about the first class, but trying not to let it show — and Henry saying something about it being a performance, in a way, a version of yourself that you presented to the world when you taught. But Tom couldn’t seem to do this, mask himself in this way; he was right there, vibrating on the surface. And when he had been challenged by Brendan in that first class, it was as if Brendan, and then the rest of the class — which Brendan’s attitude had swept through and infected — had seen him for what he really was, which was mediocre at best, and, at worst, incompetent.

He knew he wasn’t impressive, then, as a tutor. His nervousness was palpable in everything he did, and his all-consuming anxiety meant that most of his knowledge was wiped clean from his brain before he walked into the room. But in these classes, it was as if his legitimacy was being challenged not just as a teacher or an academic, but as a person, and he felt himself crumbling under the challenge, under the scrutiny. The avalanche of anxiety that he just barely kept at bay with medication, and sometimes was not able to under the strain of Brendan’s hostility — having to spend ten, fifteen minutes in the bathroom, or walking the halls, vibrating, trying to calm down, while the students did readings in the room — felt like the dissolution of his very being, a sense that everything he normally considered to comprise his most essential self was being dismantled. And he was left exposed for the ridiculous, insubstantial person that he was, in truth.

Sometimes he felt that there was nothing more to him than a kind of quivering thing. He pictured, for some reason, a candlewick, which appeared upright and substantial only because of the material around it — his feeble defences — but which, if the wax was melted down around it, was really nothing more than a piece of limp string lying in a puddle. And he hated it, that he was so vulnerable to this kind of attack, that his sense of self-worth was so flimsy, so fragile, but he didn’t know what he could do about that.

He thought, too, that his classes were as bound up with his sense of self now as they were then, but for the opposite reason, in that having the respect of his students, their admiration even, was one of the only things that made him feel good about himself. His ego was as fragile as ever. If he came home from class and felt that things hadn’t gone well, if he came home and didn’t feel entirely confident of his students’ respect and admiration, fretting that they did not laugh at this or that joke, or seem quite convinced by his explanation of some important or complex argument, or readily agree with his opinions on things — if, in essence, he didn’t feel his ego stroked — he would fall into a pit of self-loathing. Why was he so vulnerable, so deeply, pathetically vulnerable, to the opinion of others? He visualised himself then in a different way, unoriginally, as a structure built from matchsticks; the merest breeze could rip him apart.

About two and a half years after that first teaching experience he met with Henry. He hadn’t seen him for a year, since the submission of his thesis. Over that time, he had been doing sessional teaching for the university, contributing papers to conferences, and had even managed, through great, painful effort, to adapt two chapters of the thesis into articles that were published in middling to high-ranking journals. He had become a much more confident teacher over that time. He was not entirely panic-free, but he was better prepared for it, and knew what to do if it happened, knew how to leave a room like he wasn’t fleeing. He had started seeing his therapist by then, and had been taught some breathing exercises and some de-escalation techniques.

He had worked for Henry only once during his candidature, in the subject with Brendan. That had gone well enough, he’d thought, for a first time, despite Brendan’s disruptive presence — though he had started to wonder about that. The department was obliged, essentially, to offer candidates at least one chance to tutor, and, as he struggled to find subjects to teach each semester and had started finding work in other departments tutoring history, philosophy even — mostly through his secondary supervisor, Rebecca Maynard — he had started to wonder if Henry’s unfailingly affable and encouraging tone wasn’t masking the fact that he had nothing else for him and probably never would. Not that it was his job to find him work, Tom understood. But to offer him no leads, no introductions, not to email him over all that time with a single opportunity … Once the most basic of obligations were met, there just seemed no investment or interest in him at all. The silence was deafening. And he became paranoid.

Did Henry just not rate him as a postgraduate? Or was it simply that Henry’s hands were tied — that he was either obliged to give the work to new candidates looking for their opportunities or, when coordinating roles or lecturing roles came up, obliged to go with more experienced and better qualified applicants? Whatever it was, he felt cut adrift. What stung the most was that, as soon as he stopped teaching each semester, he lost not only his desk in the shared postgraduate office, but his email and library access too. How was he supposed to do new research? How was he supposed to pay the rent? It was demoralising to be in a worse position for having your PhD than you were while undertaking it. You finished, and then there was … nothing.

As the second year wore on like this, and he was working less and less on his own research and tutoring subjects in fields further and further away from his own, his certainty intensified that the early-career position he’d dreamed of was never going to materialise. His feelings towards his former supervisor, which included gratitude and admiration, became complicated by resentment, and, yes, paranoia. Once, at a conference, he had seen Henry with a major figure in Tom’s field across the room and had made his way over to them, and felt sure he saw Henry subtly but firmly, with a hand in the small of his back, guide the visiting professor away from him.

He sent Henry an email. He tried not to sound desperate, but he also wanted to make it clear that he was worried that soon he might have to give up altogether on looking for academic work, and he could do with advice. Henry suggested they meet.

It was a staff-only club in a double-storey Victorian building, which sat conspicuously out of time on a curve of Professors’ Walk and in the shadow of seventies-built department buildings and the hulking glass cube of the new arts department. The building was dwarfed, and yet, with its grand, gleaming portico and its ivy-covered walls, it was imposing enough. He was running late and had rushed. He had been hoping for some time to catch his breath and cool down before entering, but it wasn’t possible. Henry was standing on the steps waiting for him.

Henry was a tall, wiry, slightly awkward man who looked younger than he was, with a boyish, unlined face and wispy, tussled hair. He had a smirking, almost embarrassed grin that spread across his face slowly. As he approached, Tom watched its progress.

While he’d rushed, Tom had only grown more confused. About how he was meant to feel about Henry, about how he did feel, whether he was grateful or angry. And about how he should act. Should he be frank or supplicating? Earnest or cool? He certainly didn’t want Henry to think he expected things to be handed to him, but he also thought that surely Henry had heard of opportunities or had his own to offer that Tom might have been qualified for over the years. On top of that, he hadn’t seen or heard from him for a year and the nature of their relationship was unclear. He was no longer his supervisor, he wasn’t a colleague, wasn’t really a friend — what was Henry to him? The mentor-type figure Tom had hoped he’d found when he was first confirmed and Henry had helped him secure a scholarship had never really materialised. Something about all of this made him nervous in the days before the meeting, and, as he approached him on the steps of University House, he realised he was no clearer on any of it. What he could feel clearly, however, was the heat that had accumulated as he rushed through the campus and how the cool air of the July afternoon was doing little to mitigate it.

He reached Henry and took his outstretched hand. Henry, gracious and warm, turned and guided Tom through the heavy double doors of the club.

They walked through a carpeted hall with pale-pink walls, past glossy bureaus with plastic display cases carefully arranged upon them and by the open doors of several rooms. It was dim in the hallway, but sunlight streamed in through the double windows of every room they passed so that the whole place was bathed in warm, refracted light. Through one doorway, he spotted a small group of people, no one under sixty, sitting around a coffee table taking tea. In another, several uniformed young men were at work setting a long table, one with a white tablecloth in his hands, another with a vase full of flowers.

At the end of the hall Henry motioned through an open doorway to a cafeteria counter, which felt out of place in such a setting, like a cafeteria in the middle of someone’s house. Another young man in uniform was behind the counter, a look of professional discretion fixed on his face. He gave all his attention to Henry, and Tom felt it was obvious to the young man that he was only a guest here and not worthy of his deference. In his agitated state, Tom was sure this young man could see more than this, could see the whole situation clearly for what it was. That Henry bringing him here was an act of charity, and that, essentially, Tom was a ridiculous figure, and one who was only just beginning to understand that about himself. Perhaps, Tom thought, this was where Henry brought all his lost causes.

Henry ordered coffee and asked if Tom wanted anything to eat. Tom said, No, thank you — Henry asked if he was sure, the sandwiches were good — Tom said he wasn’t hungry, had just eaten, which wasn’t true. But to order something, he ordered a tea, knowing it was not a good choice if he wanted to cool down, but he had to order something.

They moved into the dining room, a large, bright space with a bank of windows and an atrium made from many panels of glass along one wall. Through ivy, dappled sunlight splashed over the tables and cast a wide arc of gold on the floor. The room was mostly empty: at one end, three older men were arrayed around a flat-screen showing the cricket, in armchairs pulled in close, and at a table sat several women to whom Henry murmured greetings as he passed.

Henry chose a table in the sun. It was bright and warm, and Tom felt himself squinting painfully as he settled into his chair and turned to respond to Henry’s polite questions about what he’d been up to outside academia: his casual work at a local second-hand bookstore run by a famous curmudgeon that Henry knew well, his occasional book reviews in academic journals and newspapers.

Tom was wired. He hadn’t slept well, of course, the night before the meeting, despite taking an Ambien and two Valium, and it was only becoming clear to him how weird he in fact felt. How sick. And how out of sync his vibrations were with Henry, and with the rest of the room. He was thrumming.

Henry, he noticed, was squinting, too, though he was facing away from the wall of glass. At first, Tom wondered if this was sympathetic squinting, the way he sometimes found himself taking on the mannerisms and gestures of the people he was speaking to, but then he remembered that Henry did this, squinted and blinked as he spoke, compulsively. It was a tick of his; he did it in his lectures, too. But it had got worse since he’d last seen him, seemingly. Now, while he spoke, he eyes were almost as often shut as they were open, his fluttering eyelids creating two deep creases, like asterisks, where his eyes should be. Of course, it might also have had something to do with how visibly Tom was shaking.

He thought he’d been concealing it well enough until the drinks arrived. But then, following Henry’s lead, Tom poured the tea into his teacup and added sugar and milk and lifted the cup from the saucer — and found he couldn’t bring it to his lips. His arm was too weak. It trembled under the weight, seized up, and he was forced to return the cup to the saucer. How much of this Henry saw, as he sipped his coffee, was hard to tell. Tom tried to cover for it, make it look like he’d simply changed his mind about drinking the tea at that moment, but when he looked up at him, Henry was blinking furiously.

The conversation, meanwhile, was as convivial and relaxed as ever. They spoke about the progress of Henry’s book on town squares, about a tour of the university for urban planning students he was conducting, and only after what seemed a long time of fairly idle chatter did the conversation turn to Tom’s request for advice.

You must publish, Henry said. Publish or perish, they say, and it’s true. He sipped more coffee. No one can survive very long without a book or an ARC grant, and they are increasingly competitive. There are a few, of course, who seem to make it through somehow. Dale Patel. He seemed to get through for years without publishing a thing, but that was a bit of a mystery. He chuckled. It is, now, very rare.

Henry asked him how much he had published since he had completed the thesis. Tom told him, and he said, Well, you have to get a couple more in soon, in the next year if possible. Two or three articles in the next year, and you’ll start looking competitive.

But it all takes so long, Tom said, aware that now he was straight-out whining. To get anything written, for it to be accepted, to do edits, it can take a year for a journal article to appear …

It’s true, it’s true, Henry said, with resignation, and finished off his coffee. He seemed to be thinking about something else now, or struggling to think of something to add. The blinking was less intense, now, and occasionally he opened his eyes very wide, perhaps stretching back out sore muscles.

Henry asked him about papers and was he going to conferences, and Tom said he had been, which was partly true. He had given one or two papers in the last year, at conferences held at the university, but it was increasingly difficult to attend conferences further afield with no funds for it, and recently he had more or less given up on submitting abstracts for consideration. He had never found conferences very encouraging. Had never found the camaraderie he’d hoped for. Instead, he found himself hovering around trestle tables in foyers by himself, eating half-sandwiches and occasionally chatting politely to other postgraduates, who all seemed to be wondering how interested in each other’s work they needed to pretend to be.

Tom knew he couldn’t drink the tea. He looked down at it, but didn’t dare try again.

He decided to bring the meeting to an end. It was humiliating, they hadn’t been there long, but he had got what he’d come for now. A feeling had stolen over him. He knew. He would give it up. And he’d decided this, or it had dawned on him, while he was telling Henry precisely the opposite — that, yes, of course, he would keep plugging away, that he had drafts that were coming along, articles under consideration at journals, fellowship applications underway, hope that it would all come together. But somehow he knew it was over. He had his subjects to teach, but any illusion that he was actively an academic, still researching, writing, working on a book, would fall away. How long he could keep getting work without at least pretending to do all this was hard to say, but he felt strangely at peace with it: he would happily do what he could until they cut him off.

He felt sure, too, that this was the last time he would ever meet with Henry. He couldn’t feel any anger about the whole thing, the way he was treated — it was just the system, the thing that everyone warned you about, but that you never took seriously because somehow you felt sure that it wouldn’t be like that for you, that somehow you would dodge all that and come out victorious, come out with a job. A career. He was resigned; there was nothing Henry could do. It was simply up to him, to press on, to keep pushing, or to stop.

His decisiveness, or his relief, that this was it, the moment he would give it up, seemed to break through all his timorousness, and he found himself picking up the cup and draining it in one gulp. No, he felt no animosity towards Henry. He had obviously felt Tom’s email was the kind of desperate gesture that required a sensitive response, and Tom appreciated it, in an embarrassed sort of way. But Henry had nothing for him. Nothing he didn’t already know, and he felt stupid for asking to meet with him to find out. But he hadn’t wanted to leave wondering — hadn’t wanted to give up without at least seeing what Henry might say to someone in his position. And here it was: a round of polite patter.

He wondered how he might extricate himself, but soon Henry had to leave anyway, had another appointment. He paid for the drinks, and stopped and chatted briefly to the men around the flat-screen about the cricket. Then they left.

Out on the steps they promised to stay in touch, keep abreast of each other’s work. As they parted and as Tom was walking down the steps away from him, Henry told him to hang in there, that soon there would be generational change, and jobs would be opening up at universities across the country. He chuckled a little as he said it, knowing it to be the chestnut that it was, knowing perhaps, too, that his colleagues weren’t giving up their positions any time soon. He reminded Tom to look out for international jobs, too, although admittedly, he said, these were often taken by US academics, who were over-represented in international universities and were taking their jobs too now. He chuckled again.

At the time, this all felt more serious than it turned out to be, of course. When Tom walked away from Henry, he was sure that by the end of the year he would be out forever. Thankfully, luckily, Rebecca Maynard asked him to take on one of her classes while she took sabbatical leave, and this led to another class, and then another, until he had two classes per semester, sometimes three, that he was coordinating, lecturing, and tutoring, and he had kept them for the last three years. These could be taken away from him at any moment — and would be eventually, no doubt, with his lack of publications — but he would find something. In his perpetual exhaustion, he couldn’t bring himself to worry about it anymore. It would be fine. It would have to be.

But, the shaking. That time with Henry was the first. Before then it was sweating, dry mouth, or the opposite of dry mouth, too much saliva, constant swallowing, and now he had another thing to worry about. It was true that it hadn’t happened much since then, a few times not long after the meeting with Henry, a couple of times when he was out and couldn’t raise his drink to his lips, but it had been a while, maybe a year or two, until the flight. That was under exceptional circumstances, of course. Becoming anxious during turbulence was no big deal — it was to be expected, at least to some degree. But the violence of it, the shuddering, the convulsions.

His mother shook. Historically, mostly in the hands, but now it was everywhere. Her trembling was the product of her illness and the medication she took for her illness, the cocktail of drugs she was on — steroids, antibiotics, anti-nausea medication, SSRIs, various other medications he didn’t even know about. And yet it was her anxiety that led her to self-medicate with nicotine and alcohol in the first place, so in this sense, anxiety had made her shake. What he did remember of it, before the illness, was how jumpy she could be, how fretful. And paranoid. And she had panic attacks; he had seen that. In many ways, they were alike. But was he making himself in her image?

The shaking was particularly cruel to Marianne initially because she was a potter, and while it had already become difficult for her to do the physical work of pottery — she had long since stopped wedging clay or using her kick-wheel — she no longer felt confident in her hands. The control was gone. For a while she continued, and joked about it, said she was going through her wonky mug phase — a style of pottery she had always despised. But now she could not do it at all. The emphysema had depleted her to such an extent that she struggled to do things that most people took for granted: bend down to pick up objects, walk through a room. At times, Tom’s condition debilitated him in similar ways. Hindered the same basic functions. Like drinking from a cup. And neither of them could breathe deeply. The main, of course not insignificant difference was that, for her, none of this ever passed.

For Marianne, leaving the house was a major undertaking that involved planning, coordination. His own confinement was voluntary, up to a point. When he was not well, many of their calculations ran along similar lines. Would there be stairs? Hills? How much walking would be involved? Any kind of overheating for him had become a trigger. What kind of place were they going to? Where would they sit? How easily could they leave if they needed to? Who would be there? His mother was able to discuss all this, map it all out, make plans for escape. And it was his father who had to do a lot of the work: gather the details, get her into the wheelchair, out of the car. Tom’s calculations were private. No one really knew how much of a shut-in he had become, he didn’t think. He did a good job disguising things, dissembling. He was working from home because he preferred it that way; he was driven, not someone using work as an excuse to never leave the house. Had he admitted that even to himself, in such a blunt way? Maybe it was being away from it that allowed him to see it more clearly for what it was.

He wasn’t sure how much Clara knew. They’d had conversations about performance anxiety in front of classes — about concealing sweat marks, about dealing with stressful situations — and all of these conversations had subtext. But everything they discussed fell within the normal range of nervousness that most people experienced, he thought.

Fundamentally, the anxiety that he shared with his mother kept them both from experiencing the world, the built environment, with the ease that people like them — white, middle-class — usually enjoyed. The world as it was designed did not easily accommodate them. There was no architecture for anxiety, no planning for it. Of course, mental health was always a stated concern of planners, of architects in their pitches, and it informed so much theory, especially now — neuro-architecture, environmental health. But how much could really be done for people like Tom and his mother was hard to say. For them, it was the fact that other people shared the world that they had to contend with. Indoor plants and adjusting the height of ceilings in public spaces just wasn’t going to cut it.