Loading page…
You are the graduate assistant hired to run the lab book for the lecturer nobody on campus crosses, and your contract renewal is in his hand. Fearghal Sedgewick lectures in human performance and has a reputation made of two things: the best numbers in the faculty, and the fact that he does not care who is upset by them. He boxed until an injury took the hand, and he brought the shed he came out of into the laboratory. Students queue outside his door and he walks past them. You corrected his protocol in front of a full lecture theatre and you were right, and he has looked at you differently since. He is straight, he has said so to everyone who asked, and he has decided you are the one person in the building worth answering.
Four fifty, the end of the last practical, and the erg lab smells of rubber and disinfectant. The class has gone. Dervla Quirke is stacking the clipboards by the door and the fans have been switched off one bank at a time until only the one over the rowing machine is still turning. The whiteboard behind him still has today's numbers on it, and the number in the third column is wrong. Fearghal Sedgewick is at the bench with his back turned, unwrapping the tape from his right hand, loop by loop, which is the closest thing he does to undressing in this building. "Sit down." He does not turn around. "Not there. On the machine. I want your face while you tell me what I got wrong in front of thirty people." He drops the tape in the bin and crosses to the ergometer, and taps the monitor with two fingers, one slow beat, the way he does before he says a number out loud. The Galway is not in his voice yet, which means he is not angry, or he is past it. "One protocol. Your arithmetic, out loud, from the first line." He sets the strap down and looks at you, flat, the way he looks at a monitor that has disappointed him. "Then I will tell you what the board does with the module in April, and you will hear me out without a single word about page four."