Chapter One

I had it narrowed down now: She was definitely Thai, Indonesian, Japanese or Malay. Well, or Burmese. God, it was getting worse – the longer I stared at her, the more cultural traits I began to discern. Was that a hint of Japan around the eyebrows? Something almost… Turkish about the way she held her head? Could that be… could that be traces of Siberia in those amygdaloid eyes?
‘John.’ I tapped the shoulder next to mine on the sofa, interrupting its morning coffee. ‘You’re an English teacher - what does ‘amygdaloid’ mean?’
‘What?’
‘Amygdaloid. It just popped into my head. I must have got it from you.’
‘It means almond shaped, Andy. Staring at that new bird again, are you?’
‘I am not,’ I said indignantly, ‘It’s got nothing to do with that, it just popped into my head and I wanted to know what it mean- oh Christ she’s leaving? Quick! Should I say something?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’ll be back in forty-five minutes.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Because she’s in my fucking class, mate, and we’ll be taking another break in forty-five minutes and she always comes down to the Coffee Room in the breaks and you know that, and I know that you know that because we’ve been having this same conversation, or variations there-fucking-of for the last week.’
‘Are you angry?’
‘No mate. This isn’t angry. Angry was last weekend when we took them all on that day-trip to London and five of the wops decided to be two hours late for the bus home. That was angry, this is just marginally choleric.’
‘Okay… you know you really shouldn’t call them wops.’ I tried to adopt a frown of moral superiority. ‘It’s racist, and this is a language school after all.’
‘Exactly.’ He finished his coffee and stood up.
‘What do you mean, ‘exactly’?’
‘Well what better place is there to be racist? It wouldn’t do me much good down WH Smiths, now would it? Well – not in Cheltenham, anyway. I did once have a good go at a Nigerian bloke in a bookshop in Wolverhampton, mind you.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘No, language schools are where it’s at if you’ve got any racist tendencies. Jim Davidson would have a fucking field day in this place.’
‘John, we really do need to talk about this at some point.’
‘No we don’t. In terms of Teacher Training for the new lot, you might be the boss, but us experienced guys, we’re way beyond your conformist cack.’
He turned and started to leave.
‘Are you going back to class?’
‘Well they won’t teach themselves!’ A dawning look of revelation came into his eyes and he lifted a hand to his mouth, suddenly lost in a thread of thought. ‘Mind you, with a bit of work…’
‘John.’
‘Eh?’
‘John… the new girl…’
‘What, you finally want me to tell you her name? Where she’s from? About fucking time.’
‘Erm…’ Did I? Did I really want to know? Wouldn’t it destroy my delicately designed daydreams, take away the illusion of imagination, shit all over my parade? ‘Well… go on then. Yes. Yes, I want to know. Tell me everything.’
‘Okay. Her name’s Joyce and she’s an Egyptian prostitute.’
‘Joyce,’ I said desperately, as he walked out. ‘But my Grandma’s called Joyce!’

With John gone, I was now the only person in the Coffee Room, alone with the horrific revelation and the sense that, perhaps, I was doing it again. Having made it to Head of Teacher Training at a fairly prestigious language school by thirty-two I might have been ahead of the game professionally, but in the book of love I was still struggling through the prologue, checking every fifth word in my dictionary. During over a decade of traveling the world training English teachers, I had clearly failed to learn the very basics of how to judge people: Laura, the Spanish massage therapist, Edit, the Hungarian girl I always seemed to bump into on the same street corner, Choi, the Korean karaoke singer. And now Joyce, the Egyptian prostitute. Mind you, going on past form she would fit right in. At least there was some honesty this time.
‘I might even just pay her, and have done with it.’
‘What you say, mate?’
‘What?!’
‘Sorry, I coming back for cup of char to drunk in the classroom.’
It was Amy, a Taiwanese girl who had been at the school for several months. Her English appeared to be actually getting worse, though now it was sprinkled with local flavor and inappropriate slang.
‘Hi, Amy.’
‘Cheers Mr. Andy. Why have you got on the horse’s face?’
‘The hor...? Oh! Erm…’
I knew Amy fairly well; she was one of the ‘guinea pig’ students who had proper lessons that she paid for every morning, and then got experimented on by my trainee teachers for two hours every afternoon. You could always tell the ‘guinea pig’ students, as they wandered round in a constant state of confusion and were prone to horrific flashbacks, often needing me to step in and do some careful counseling to keep them taking the classes. So I knew her fairly well, but did I know her well enough to unload all of my emotional baggage?
‘Is it because student Anita?’
‘Who?’ I had no idea who student Anita was.
‘New student Anita. She in teacher John’s class. You watching her every day like she is Eastenders soap opera.’
‘Oh, no. Well, I am, but that’s Joyce - the Egyptian girl?’
‘Huh?’
‘The new girl in John’s class, that’s Joyce. From Egypt.’ Something in John’s tone of voice was coming back to haunt me, and at that moment I realized I was being had. Though, of course, Amy would never have to know that. I would just pretend there was another new student, a mysterious Joyce from Egypt and then before Amy would get the chance to meet her she… would die. Somehow. In a nice way, perhaps.
‘Mr. Andy, I think you have got had. By Mr. John’
I considered her words for a moment, before deciding that this way was slightly embarrassing, but in the end a whole lot easier than inventing someone that didn’t exist, giving them a life and a schedule that didn’t coincide with Amy or anyone she knew and then killing her off. Even if I did it in a nice way.
‘Yes. Yes, I think I have. He’s funny, Mr. John.’
She nodded her head. ‘Yes, he funny. But he doesn’t like the wops.’
‘Amy, you can’t say that.’
‘I can now.’ She said cheerfully. ‘Mr. John make us repeat several times for improving pronunciation. I can also make sentence with it.’
‘No, don’t make a sen-’
‘The wops are two hours late, as usual.’ She enunciated perfectly.
I was starting to get a headache, and not just because John’s class was, in fact, mostly made up of Italians, but also because now someone other than John and the other teachers, most of the trainees and the lady who came in to clean three times a week knew about my obsession. And it was a student. Mind you, Amy probably hardly knew this Anita, she’d only been in the school for five days.
‘Anita is also from Taiwan. On weekend we go to London to get Europe visa. I introduce you in Monday.’
‘What?’
‘It okay.’ she patted me on the shoulder. ‘She very friendly – don’t shit yourself about it.’

It’s funny what three days without much sleep can do to you. As I found myself back on the sofa that Monday morning I was a shadow of what I had once been. All around me students of all nationalities buzzed like bees, sharing the weekend gossip, finishing their homework and trying to get the coffee machine to make cappuccinos by shaking it furiously as the liquid came out.
‘Fabio, stop that,’ I said to the Brazilian teenager. ‘It is not going to make a cappuccino just because you shake it. That’s not how coffee works.’
He turned from the machine, a delicious looking cup of foamy cappuccino in his hand and stalked past me with a look of haughty indignation.
I slumped further into my seat. I was so tired that even the rudimentary arts of beverage preparation had become a mystery to me. If I was being outwitted by South American teenagers, perhaps it was time to stop being so ridiculously hung up on foreign girls, staying awake at night wondering what might be and risking dismissal by hanging around the Coffee Room all day. There were three teacher training courses going on, and I was only marginally involved with any of them. For the last few days I had managed to fob the actual input sessions off onto two of the more experienced teachers and one freelancer that we occasionally brought in. My participation now ran to spending three afternoons a week watching trainees attempt to teach grammar to pained looking students, while wondering just how I might be able to convince the new girl to join the group. On the one hand, having her there would give me something nice to fantasize about while the trainees stumbled deeper and deeper into the mists of English grammar, but on the other hand I would be exposing her to something that was probably closer to water-boarding than it was to education.
As if to prove my point, Ed walked into the room looking red-faced, confused and every one of his fifty six years. This was normal for Ed – well, for the three weeks I’d known him in any case
‘Hiya Andy.’ He sounded relieved to see me. ‘I wanted to talk to you about the lesson I have to teach this afternoon.’
‘Yeah? What’s up?’ I said without much enthusiasm. Although one of my duties was to help calm the trainees down before their observed practice, it rarely did any good and Ed was failing the course so absolutely that it really wouldn’t have made much difference to the end result if I’d offered to do the class for him. Actually, given that I hadn’t taught proper students in a classroom for several years, it would almost definitely make things worse. Not that this would matter much to Ed in the end anyway; his goal was to open a carpentry workshop in Paris, with an English as a Foreign Language classroom in the loft.
‘Well, I’m having a bit of trouble with this grammar point.’ He reached into his knapsack and pulled out a folder bulging with badly organized notes.
‘Mr. Andy!’ It was Amy.
My heart dropped a beat and I smiled politely at Ed’s notes, trying to guess a way out of this situation and find out what was happening with my obsession.
‘Erm… that’s great Ed – listen, I’m a little busy right now. Why don’t you…’ I looked around me, desperately trying to find someone appropriate. Ah, there he was, scooping up the last of the foam with a spoon and looking rather pleased with himself.
‘Why don’t you go and talk to Fabio, he’s a very strong student. It’s always best to get these things from the student’s point of view.’ I tried to sound knowledgeable and professional. ‘They are the ones, after all, who are taking the lessons.’
‘Sure.’ Ed didn’t look convinced, only disappointed. ‘Right-o then.’ And he lumbered off towards Fabio, who had a look of growing horror on his face.
‘Amy!’ I turned to give her my full attention. She was alone, and looked rather distraught. ‘How was your trip?’
‘Oh, it was the dog’s arse,’ she said. ‘We go there at seven o’clock in morning and wait four hours. And too many people, so have to come back the next time.’
‘Oh no. And, erm, how is…’ I looked around the room as if to indicate someone who should be there. ‘Anita?’
‘Oh, a good news for you!’
‘Oh no.’ God, she hadn’t told her all about me, had she? I was hoping for at least a few weeks of fantasy before it all went horribly wrong and I found out she was a married lesbian who found my appearance about as enticing as unwashed anal hair.
‘She comes to the practice lesson this afternoon. She will be hamster!’
‘Guinea pig,’ I corrected. ‘We call them Guinea Pigs. Did you tell her about me?’
‘No. You can to tell it to her after the practice lessons. Today, East-enders soap opera episode will be love story!’ She paused and thought for a moment. ‘Or like horrible surprise show with Jeremy Beagle.’
I looked over at Ed, l who was completely lost in conversation – on several different levels – with Fabio, and I knew, I just knew what kind of television we’d be making later on.

‘So then,’ said Ed, ten minutes into his half hour slot. ‘That was my ice-breaking in activity. Does everybody feel… broken in?’
From the looks of the nine students, they most certainly did feel broken in. Anita was sat in the middle, and somehow, now that I knew her country of origin, her features had achieved an undeniable Chinese cast previously unnoticed. Right now that Chinese cast was doing a fair approximation of disappointment, with a hint of having been cheated and a liberal splosh of staring accusingly at the trainer in the corner every now and again. For once, I was not staring at her, in fact I was concentrating studiously on Ed, in the hopes that he was somehow an underappreciated genius and that the lesson so far had been an ironic gesture aimed at reminding us all what not to do in a practice lesson. Any minute now, it would all come together and by 4:30 we’d be cheering the perplex-faced carpenter as we hoisted him on our shoulders and paraded him round the room.
‘Good,’ said Ed, staring at something written on his hand. ‘So now it’s time for the grammar…bit.’
The students tensed up. I wondered whether he would find it terribly upsetting if I went for a coffee at this point, but decided I needed to see this through. At least it would give me and Anita something to talk about – a shared tragedy that might bring us together, much like the Titanic brought people together. Well, those of them that didn’t drown, anyway.
‘The passive tense,’ he started, ‘is a tense. In English.’
Some of the students were nodding. At least he was still on safe ground, it remained to see whether he was going to stay there, or wade off towards an iceberg.
‘Can anyone give me an example of the passive tense in English?’
Hang on, this was actually quite good. He was going to rely on the students’ knowledge to get him through. Of course, what that meant was they would be teaching him, rather than the other way round, but at least he wasn’t going to be leading them completely up a small, sewage filled river and throwing away all the manual propulsion equipment.
I made a show of nodding and pretended to write something in my notebook, in order to give Ed some encouragement that everything was okay. He noticed my enthusiasm, smiled, and tapped the side of his nose, indicating that he knew exactly what he was doing.
‘Yes, you.’ Ed pointed at Amy, who had her hand up, and then struggled for her name. ‘Erm… the small cute Japanesey girl who’s been here a while.’
Great. We were in safe hands now. Full of inappropriate slang and slowly losing her communicative grasp of English she might be, but fifteen years in the Taiwanese Education System meant Amy had an expert grasp of English grammar. Just very little ability to use it. She was good enough for a few spot on examples though. Well done, Ed!
‘Active sentence.’ She leaned forward. ‘For example: ‘The boy kicked the balll’. Passive sentence, for example: ‘The ball was kicked by the boy.’
She rested back in her chair and the Saudi Arabian boy in the next seat gave her an admiring glance that probably had more to do with her denim shorts and tight t-shirt than the grammatically correct examples.
‘No, no no…’ tutted Ed, filling me with unease. ‘No, that’s not right. Active sentence…’ he raised the volume of this voice ‘…THE BOY KICKED THE BALL!’
Oh no.
‘Passive sentence…,’ he continued, lowering his voice to a whisper, ‘the boy kicked the ball.’
Oh Christ.
Eight of the nine students now had their hands up, and were looking really rather confused. The ninth student, however, was staring intently at me; a frown on her face that for the first time made her look really rather Germanic.

‘Right, Emily – you get off to Room 13 and do the session on phonetics, Ben, you’re in the teaching practice room, observing the trainees, and Harry…’
‘Yeah?’ Harry was our freelancer and was in the middle of packing his rucksack, ready for an afternoon over in Bristol doing some external assessment on an end of course practical.
‘Harry, could you just pop out and grab me a coffee from the coffee room before you go?’
‘I’ve got a train to catch – why don’t you get it yourself, you lazy sod?’
‘Well, I… I sort of can’t.’
‘What do you mean you can’t?’
‘Actually,’ Emily piped up from the door, ‘we’ve been getting him bloody coffees for the last two days. Anyone would think he was hiding from someone.’
Ben nodded vigorously in agreement, his glasses almost falling off.
‘Ha, ha, ha, ha,’ I said. ‘Very funny, yes. Hiding from someone. At my age. Oh, come on.’
‘Oh honey, who is it then?’ Although only in her forties, Emily saw herself as something of the den mother.
‘I know who it is,’ said Ben, picking the teaching practice room keys off the table and heading out the door. ‘The cleaner told me.’
‘Fess up Andy,’ added Harry. ‘It’s not one of the trainees is it? I don’t think I could go through all that again.’
I shook my head, fiddled with my pen for a bit and then decided that given I’d told just about everyone else in the school, there was very little point in keeping quiet.
‘It’s Anita, the new Taiwanese student.’
‘Awww, she’s cute Andy. Nice choice.’ Emily gave her cocked head comforting smile, which was meant to be encouraging and maternal, but always came off as false and slightly patronizing.
‘I’d do her,’ said Harry, ‘but right now I’m off to Bristol to watch a very tasty bit of crumpet get an ‘A’ in her final lesson.’
‘Oh, hello dear – Andy, isn’t this her?’
‘Huh?’ I dropped my pen and experienced the familiar tingling of a panic attack.
‘Hello Mr. Andy. Why you are shaking like leaves?’
‘Oh, thank God – Amy, how are you?’
‘Hello there little Amy,’ said Harry. ‘Come to see your Uncle Harry, have you?’
‘No,’ said Amy, shaking her head. ‘No, I didn’t come for that.’
‘Leave her alone Harry, she’s only tiny,’ tutted Emma, before disappearing outside.
‘What’s up Amy?’
‘Well… it’s Anita.’
My heart took a swan dive into my stomach.
‘Look – I’m really sorry about Ed. He got confused. I should never have let him teach that lesson.’
‘No, no – it was very useful lesson! Before that lesson we think passive tense is something else absolutely. Now we know very well to just speak more quiet if we do not know who the agent of the action is or do not care.’
‘Erm.’
‘It much more easy than changing the grammar around!’
‘Yes… yes, well. So… so did everyone… they liked the lesson?’
‘Oh yes! It was… top hat! He help us to remember very hard.’
‘Yes, he did rather, didn’t he?’ I said, remembering the various sentences Ed had made them repeat in a whisper for about twenty five minutes.
‘So…h-how is Anita, then? I didn’t see either of you yesterday. Or the day before.’ Of course I didn’t, I hadn’t left the office since Monday. Not even to go to the toilet.
‘No – we had go back London to get visa yesterday. Anita okay, she misses you.’
‘What?’ A warm glow started to expand through my body; maybe everything was going to be okay. ‘She misses me?’
‘Huh?’
‘You said… you said that she misses me?’
‘Oh! No - she message you,’ Amy pronounced carefully. ‘She message you that she will be in Hamster class again today. Teacher Ed say he will teach present perfect continuous, and we are very look forward to it.’ She leaned in closer and whispered. ‘We are very look forward to it…passive!’

‘I had have not understanding that very well,’ said Amy, who appeared to have gone slightly cross-eyed. We were sat in the coffee room, drinking espresso as strong as the machine would allow and waiting for Anita. She had promised to meet us after the lesson, but we’d had to leave her outside of the practice classroom, when she got into an intense and impenetrable discussion with a Taiwanese guy I’d seen hanging round her for the last few days.
‘Don’t worry about it Amy,’ I said. ‘The first time you learn about the present perfect continuous, it’s always confusing.’ Especially, I mentally added, if the orang-utan teaching it has somehow managed to mix it up with every other tense in the English language system and then just decided to teach it anyway. The result was that Ed had inadvertently shown them how to form a mega-tense, consisting of twelve individual tenses in the same sentences and referring to just about anything that happened, has happened is happening or will happen. Consequently, there were thirteen puzzled, but quite excited students now loose in the building who believed they had just learnt the whole of English grammar in thirty minutes. Like a plague, this was going to get passed round the whole student body in the next day or so and was quite possibly going to get us closed down.
‘Here she is!’
I stiffened, and found I was suddenly unable to turn my head to greet her. I was frozen in place, my heart woodpeckering away like it had a forest to get through.
‘Hello Amy. Hello teacher Andy.’
‘Hello… Anita.’ I stared forward, aware that this probably seemed quite strange, but my hands were shaking again and I was undergoing some kind of temporary paralysis. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
Thankfully, she appeared from behind me and took a seat on the sofa.
‘What Samson want to talk you about?’ Asked Amy.
‘Oh, he wanted me.’ She said matter of factly.
‘He wanted you to what?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she turned and gave me a heartburn-inducing smile. ‘He wanted me.’
‘Oh. Well… I see.’
‘He too young,’ said Amy. ‘He only nineteen or twenty.’
Anita pushed her playfully. ‘How old you think I am? Huh!’
‘You thirty one – you told me that,’ Amy answered, perhaps rather too indiscretely and Anita folded her arms in a huff.
‘Oh don’t worry,’ I said casually, desperate to get my relative maturity into this conversation somewhere, ‘I’m thirty two, so you’re young compared to me!’
She smiled. ‘Thank you teacher Andy.’
‘I got to make like some wind,’ said Amy. She stood up. ‘See you later crocodiles.’ And she left, proving that she had a fair bit more tact and awareness than I’d previously given her credit for.
‘Erm, so… Anita. How are you?’
She gave a distracted smile and sighed.
‘Well… I am very flat-chested.’
‘Erm…’ Oh fuck.
‘I am really, really flat-chested.’
What was this, some kind of test?
‘No, not really,’ I tried. ‘In any case, I…I don’t mind. It’s not that important.’
She wrinkled her nose.
‘Not important? Amy say you like me, but you don’t care I am flat-chested?’
‘No, I don’t care.’ I tried to inject some compassion into my voice; there was something very wrong going on here, and I felt completely out of my depth.
Now she looked like she was going to cry.
‘But…but we had…having to, am did wait at Europe Visa office all day for second time, and I feel so flat-chested and…’
‘Hang on,’ I interjected, a feeling of despair washing over me. ‘You mean frustrated, don’t you.’

And that’s how it all began.