Page 43 of Proof By Contradiction
‘A conversation.’
‘About the work?’
A pause.
‘About the conditions under which the work can continue.’
It should be ridiculous. It should be the least romantic sentence ever spoken by a man with beautiful hands.
It isn’t.
He talks. I listen—the policy, the risk, the professional consequences, the duty of care. Reasonable words, responsible words. Words that sound like they were written by someone else and memorised on the train here.
He sayscareers ended for less. He saysletters to your parents, referral to the Senate Committee, termination with no right of appeal in the first instance. He is speaking a language I have not, until ten minutes ago, known he speaks—the dry language of university tribunals, procedural sentences with the exact weight of a door closing on a corridor you are never going to walk down again. He speaks it with the care of a man who has rehearsed it alone at a kitchen table.
He says, at one point,I like my job, and the sentence is almost comic in its smallness, set against the architecture of everything else he’s built on top of it.
Under the table, my knee drifts half an inch towards his, touching or near to. His trouser leg is close enough that wool brushes denim with the smallest shift of fabric. His sentence stumbles on a preposition. One preposition. He recovers on the next clause, but the stumble is in the room now, a data point he can’t erase with the spoon.
He says with his voice:This is inappropriate and must stop.
He tells me a different story with his eyes: my lips. My neck. The collar of my t-shirt, where the fabric meets skin. Back to my lips.
His hands betray him: restless—the spoon, the cup handle, the edge of the saucer. Fingertips drumming once, catching himself, going still.
The conviction drains, word by word. He’s defending a position he stopped believing in before he sat down.
He finishes, or runs out. Hard to tell the difference. Picks up his cup, brings it halfway to his lips, puts it back down. Doesn’t drink.
Somewhere a milk jug hisses—a chair scrapes. The café hums on around us like a room the two of us aren’t in. I let the silence stretch until it stops being silence and starts being a fourth person at the table, breathing.
‘I read the policy too,’ I say.
He looks up. Surprised.
‘Staff-student relationships, section four, paragraph two.Staff shall not engage in intimate, sexual, or romantic relationships with students for whom they have direct academic responsibility.’
He goes still.
‘Direct academic responsibility,’ I say. ‘Interesting phrase.’
‘Carrick. Stop.’
‘You teach Mathematical Methods. I’m Economics. Your module is compulsory, yes, but it’s a service module. It’s not my degree subject. You’re not my personal tutor. You’re not supervising my dissertation. You don’t control my funding, my accommodation, or my progression.’
‘I mark your work.’
‘Some of it.’
‘I assess you.’
‘Within one module.’
‘That is direct academic responsibility.’
‘It’s a spectrum.’
‘No.’ His voice is quiet enough that I actually shut up. ‘That is exactly what it isn’t.’
