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Georgetown he met a man who was real bruk up at the side of the stall where his friend Sanil sold cassava and eddoe and plantain in Bourda Market. The man had been there every day he walked through the market for the five months of money-hunting that Ed had been doing to help his brother, to keep his mother in her house in Berbice because she refused to move, and this man was worse off than Ed. There were a whole lotta them worse off, but this very-very man he felt for: his hair was natty, his feet were torn up, his arms scabby, but in his face was something you could see that was quick-quick. Ed took the man home and gave him a shower and cleaned up his feet and let him sleep in his bed for twelve hours before sending him on his way. And, boy, this was the best Ed had felt since leaving London, missing his woman and his daughter. He wanted to keep the feeling, so he did this time and again with this man and others in Georgetown.
    So, Carol at Rippleside Cemetery will be contacted on behalf of Anna-Marie Hunter, dead at forty-two, and there is the vicar to book, and he has to see about a place in the community plot,or whether she must be cremated. Of all the London jobs he’s done—insurance, accounting, his stint in Housing—this job is the proper place for him.
    And that is another thing he must tell Olivia: that after Catherine moved and told him not ever to try to find them, he learned to feel lucky for the things he didn’t lose. In Guyana plenty people have nothing.
    Olivia is training to be a lawyer, imagine. She already knows these things about life. Could be she got that from him? It’s a notion he keeps in his cheek like a squirrel keeps winter food. When he thinks of the man in the Mazaruni River, Ed knows that the proper teaching like Olivia is getting would have helped him to know how to act, what to do in the face of a crime, no matter who committed it. She will not be like her father who was expelled for truancy and bad grades from Corentyne High School. Even so, there are things she can learn from him: he can tell her about Marabunta Creek where he played as a boy, and about orange hibiscus with red veins, about frangipani, about Gafoors Shopping Complex in Rose Hall, the town where he was born, about Bartica and the wide Essequibo River like a thick vein in his own neck. Okay, yes, he has to stop thinking or tonight he will not sleep either.
    Anna-Marie Hunter is his priority now. But the most important thing about this woman’s death? Man, he is ashamed to admit it, but the abiding boon to this sad event is that it will bring him Olivia again. She wants help with her research, needs it to complete her studies this year, and this, this is what a father must do.

ROBIN
    These departmental meetings are more frequent, the days for his research less so. His head is filled with jargon:
research income
;
collaborative partners
;
knowledge transfer
;
impact
. These are the terms that govern all of them these days, and those who rarely showed up for meetings when he first started at this university now attend regularly. “Concepts are centres of vibrations,” says Deleuze, and his more politically astute colleagues are tightly wound to the academy’s tradition of knowledge for its own sake. Until a few days ago and the announcement of his fatherhood, Robin was ready to stand alongside them, to take strike action in support of the principle of excellence. But now, in this meeting called for the film department, he sits at a desk near the back of the room like a third-class student and doodles with the Polish waitress’s pen on the last page of the agenda. Richard, department head, tells them that the dean is implementing the first measure of restructuring ordered by the vice-chancellor’s group. Film Studies and Film and Video Practice will merge, beginning in September.
    “There’s an initiative towards practice-based programmes as the key to our students being better prepared for employment,” Richard