Ken stalks into the staffroom. ‘Ooh, busy, busy,’ he says cheerfully, trying to squeeze his way through to the photocopier holding open a grammar book. Everyone ignores him. At the window, Mike and Claire huddle together, trying to smoke through a gap of about a centimetre.
‘Now I have four lessons in a row with the same group,’ Claire sighs, stuffing her lighter back into her cigarette packet. ‘I won’t be done until eight.’
‘Just a little longer and you’ll never have to do this again,’ Randall says. Claire will be going back to London soon to do a Masters.
‘I’m about to have my twelfth lesson,’ I say, and an impressed murmur goes round the room. There are only three topics of conversation in the staffroom: how many lessons we have to teach that day, how annoying our students are, and how much we hate Dagmar.
‘I just had an AMS group,’ counters Mike.
Everyone sighs in sympathy. AMS is the Austrian employment office. A few years ago, Berlitz won a state contract to provide English lessons to every unemployed person who applied for them. There are few things more depressing than teaching an AMS group.
The last student of the day is new. She’s already in the room when I come in, standing looking out of the dirty window. To my relief I see that her English has been classified as Level Five – that is ‘A high level of competence’. The higher the student’s level, the less effort I have to make.
‘Hi, my name is Julia,’ I say, offering my hand.
The thin woman puts out her own hand, which is surprisingly warm. Within a quarter of an hour, I’ve learned that she’s called Vera, is originally from Graz, that she works as a PR consultant for the Austrian People’s Party, and is a single mother with an 8-year-old daughter. Unfortunately, she then starts asking me questions.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Sweden,’ I answer without thinking.
A crease immediately appears between Vera’s eyebrows, and I realise my mistake. Even though my English is both accent and error free, no one wants to hear that I’m not from an English-speaking country. Even Dagmar discreetly asked me not to mention it to the students. Rebecca once told me about the time she was moonlighting as a waitress at a barbecue restaurant in Cairns. Even though she always remembered everyone’s orders, she had to pretend to write them down in her notepad because she noticed that the customers got nervous if she didn’t. That’s kind of how I feel every time I have to lie about where I come from.
‘Swindon,’ I correct myself. ‘In England. Northern England.’
Vera is still looking at me. ‘Isn’t Swindon in the south of England? Near Bristol? I took a course there once.’
I feel my cheeks and neck grow hot.
‘This is another Swindon,’ I add quickly. ‘A smaller Swindon. We call it … mini-Swindon. So, Vera, tell me what you like to do at the weekend. What are your favourite pastimes?’
Vera continues to observe me with slight suspicion, and I think that I really ought to follow Rebecca’s advice and stop having so many lessons a day.
Unfortunately, Vera’s English is almost perfect. But towards the end of the lesson, she says ‘in the end of the month’ rather than ‘at the end of the month’. I finally have an opportunity to correct her and stop feeling like a useless stage prop.
On the way home I suddenly have an idea for a book. It’s so highly charged and creepy that I stop in my tracks, and the hairs on my arms stand on end. The story will be about an unsuccessful author who gets a job as a caretaker at an isolated hotel resort. He has to spend the whole winter there with his wife and young child. The child will be a boy. Or a girl. No, a boy. During the winter, the author begins to lose his mind due to the isolation and the evil spirits haunting the hotel. It all ends in a chaotic bloodbath. I can see it all laid out before me so clearly that it’s almost frightening. The blizzard whining round the building, the deserted corridors, the hotel rooms where nothing moves, and the author sitting at his typewriter. What a gripping, spooky book it’s going to be! I almost run home so I can start writing, and I’m astounded that no one’s thought of this story before.
In the evening I meet Leonore at a cocktail bar in the sixth district.
I hate Leonore. In my defence, Leonore can barely stand the sight of me either, but we’ve both realised the symbiotic advantages our friendship offers us. Because all my other friends are in relationships, and therefore turn into pumpkins on the stroke of midnight, she’s the only one I can go out with, and with me Leonore can pretend to be young and single again instead of old and married to Gerhard, or the Beige Man as I like to call him (not in front of her).
Leonore is from England and has a son of pre-school age who always wears an eyepatch for some reason. The Beige Man is the manager of Red Bull’s finance department which means that Leonore never has to work again and instead she’s able to devote all her time to producing, directing and marketing plays in which she takes the lead role. Last February she played Malcolm X as part of Black History Month, sponsored by the American Embassy. Leonore’s not black.
‘Does Mike still work at Berlitz?’ asks Leonore.
I nod and take a sip of my vodka tonic. Fuck you, Stephen King.
‘I don’t know if I should give him a part in my next play or not,’ says Leonore. ‘I’m planning on staging Closer by Patrick Marber. He could play Clive Owen’s role.’
I circle the see-through plastic stirrer between the ice cubes. I’m still bitter about Stephen King having written The Shining almost forty years ago, a small detail I only remembered as I put my hands to the keyboard to start typing.
‘I saw Mike today, and I’m pretty sure he’s sick of being an English teacher,’ I say. ‘He’d probably be really glad to get a part in Closer. There’s a limit to how many times you can have the same lesson on the difference between the present tense and the present progressive, believe me. If I have to explain one more time why the McDonald’s slogan “I’m lovin’ it” is totally unacceptable, I’m going to bang my head against a wall. God, I get so angry with McDonald’s every time I think of it. So yes, you should probably give Mike a part.’
If her forehead wasn’t full of Botox (there are eleven years between us, after all) Leonore would have creased it now to show how much I was boring her.
‘I don’t know if we have the right chemistry,’ Leonore says.
I’m not sure whether we’re still talking about Mike.
‘Yeah, you probably don’t have the right chemistry,’ I mutter, and take another gulp of my drink.
After the cocktail bar we go to Passage. The nightclub is already full of people, and we have to wait behind three dark-haired girls in tiny skirts and white high heels before we can hang our coats in the cloakroom.
‘Don’t you think all the girls here look like high-class prostitutes from the Balkans?’ I shout at Leonore over the music.
‘I hope you mean us too,’ Leonore shouts back.
Before I can reply she pulls me to the bar. We order our drinks and pretend to chat to each other while we look at the guys. I actually have no idea why we always end up at Passage. The DJ plays unbearable music,