The Professor. Charlotte Stein

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      He never lets anything go. He once made the captain of the football team cry for failing to hand an essay in on time – or so the legend goes. And I believe the legend, because that is exactly how terrifying Halstrom seems. His gaze is as flat and still as the surface of an undiscovered lake, yet oddly penetrating with it. I always get the impression that he sees absolutely everything about you in one stroke, yet finds you so dull and disappointing he can’t quite muster any emotion in his eyes.

      He just takes you in, then spits you out.

      And that’s not even the most intimidating thing about him.

      No, the most intimidating thing is his enormity.

      Every other lecturer at Pembroke is normal sized. They all look like academics, from their hunched, narrow shoulders to their neat little shoes. Occasionally you’ll come across one with a pot belly or maybe an unnervingly large head. But none get anywhere close to Halstrom. He must be somewhere north of six foot five, despite how ridiculous that number sounds to me.

      Every time I leave his lecture hall I think, No, he can’t be.

      And then I return and see him towering over the tallest guy in the class. He’s talking to Ricky Callahan when I next slink in, and the disparity between them is shocking. It gives me a little jolt to realise that even a champion rower with a bull neck and a fondness for tight shirts looks small beside Halstrom.

      But it remains true – and not just in terms of his height. His shoulders are so broad they nearly eclipse Ricky completely. When he turns to pick something up off his desk they strain the seams of his suit, and his chest does the same to his waistcoat. One day he will bend down too quickly and rip right out of all of that tweed.

      Like a werewolf, I think, tearing off his human skin to reveal the man beneath.

      Then quickly force myself to think about something else. Melissa Gorlinski is applying sticky red nail polish to her squat little nails, and I try to train all my attention on that. I watch the brush swishing back and forth – the strokes slow and steady at first but then with more impatience – and will myself to be hypnotised.

      It doesn’t work, however. No matter how hard I try I keep imagining what he looked like when he opened what he thought was my essay. Did he blanch at the first ‘cock’? Or did he just raise one of those too thick and too dark eyebrows? I think it might be the latter, but doing so doesn’t help me in the slightest.

      If anything it makes it worse. His brow is curiously mobile, for someone with a face like a slab of stone. In fact it often seems to say things that his eyes and mouth won’t. If someone answers him back in class, his eyebrows register the fury or the shock. They almost kiss in the middle of his forehead, in this oddly querulous way, while the rest of him maintains complete control.

      I expect it was the same when he read that part about her wet and aching cunt. The one that makes the blood surge in my face whenever I remember it. Why did I have to be so graphic? It seemed a good idea at the time, in the fever I often get into while writing. But now it feels like the height of bad manners. He will say I did it deliberately, to try and get some sort of reaction from him.

      Even though I’m not that kind of person at all. I never raise my hand in class, in case it turns out that I’m wrong. I rarely argue a contentious point in my essays, for fear that I’ll get an F instead of my usual B. Sometimes I see other students outside my bedroom window, glittering in gaudy costumes for some fancy-dress party that seems to be always going on, and I wonder how they dare. Don’t they care about being laughed at? Don’t they mind that they might fuck everything up?

      I guess they don’t.

      But I do. It’s why my body floods with relief when he tells us we may pick up our essays at the end of class. Somehow I’ve been spared, even though he never spares anyone. It was only a couple of weeks ago that he filleted Thomas Brubaker’s essay ‘Why Feminism Is Dumb’ for the edification of the entire class. He read out excerpts and licked his finger with a flourish before turning pages, teeth almost snapping around the most deliriously poisonous comments.

      I even remember one of them now: ‘It seems Mr Brubaker labours under the misapprehension that women are put on this earth to wipe his arse for him. Would that he had done so himself with this essay, and spared us all the horror of having to hear a single ghastly word of it.’

      Yet he lets me go without any punishment? It seems incredible, considering how much more appalling my story was. I never said feminism was dumb, but I did describe a penis in extensive detail. That to me seems ripe for his brand of brutal criticism, but when I pass his desk and pick up my essay he doesn’t even raise his head. He just keeps scratching out words in the leather-bound book he always carries around with him, as I file out with the rest of the class to my freedom.

      Or at least, I think it’s my freedom.

      I get as far as three quarters out of the door when I hear him say:

      ‘My office at five, Esther. Do not be late.’

      His office is at the very top of the Haverforth building, which is a problem all by itself. I see it looming in the distance and almost turn back right then and there. On a good day it looks like the ruins of some haunted house, from a film where everyone dies at the end. But in the middle of this dark November day it seems at least ten times worse.

      The whole front of it seems blacker, and more wasted, as though someone set it on fire not long ago and now only a husk remains. And though I could have sworn it had windows before, I cannot make a single one out. There is only blank, sooty stone and then more stone than that, until finally it gets to the crazily jagged roof that most resembles a set of demonic broken teeth.

      And it gets no better inside.

      His office is at the very top of a rickety, winding staircase – so rickety in fact that I worry that I might go through the wood every time I stand on one of the steps. I find myself watching my feet, but watching my feet hardly helps me at all. Now I can see the strange dusty darkness that is revealed whenever my weight parts one section of wood from the other, and none of that seems comforting.

      I practically cling to the banisters for support, only the wrought iron is just as warped and unstable as everything else in here. At one point I could swear something bends, like toffee left out too long in the sun. Paint flakes off on my hands, as fine and papery as spider webs and just as disturbing. All of this is disturbing. I actually let out a sigh of relief when I get to the hallway at the top.

      Even though it is barely a hallway at all.

      It’s really more of a box, with a ceiling that slants so violently I have to wonder how Halstrom ever gets to his door. He must have to oil himself then squeeze through on his hands and knees – a ridiculous image I try to shake as soon as it enters my head. It makes me think weird things like I bet he’s really hairy under his clothes, and I just don’t want those thoughts to be there when he comes out.

      I want to be cool, and calm, and proper. And I manage it, too. I sit on the single crumbling chair beneath the one window, hands folded neatly in my lap, expression completely neutral. Every inch of me perfectly tidy and carefully covered, so as to not give the wrong impression. And then the door abruptly opens, and all my efforts are reduced to dust. I might as well have worn stockings and suspenders. I should have painted my mouth red – after all, red is how it feels when I take him all in. I see his flat, still gaze and his broad shoulders and his enormous hands, and I finally understand.

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