[The Language School: January–July 2005 (Part-time)]
The night before I flew out to The City of a Hundred Spires in The Former Communist Country I went to stay with my oldest brother in The Great Wen. Or rather—so it turned out—to stay in a hotel room he’d been provided with near Liverpool Street Station, where an event he was putting on for The Music Website he was working for was taking place. His friends’ band were supporting Babyshambles, and I was tasked with DJing after his friends’ band to warm the crowd up. I’d never done this before, but my oldest brother showed me how easy it was nowadays; you could simply plug your laptop—or, in my case, his laptop—in to the fuck-off big speaker system they had onstage for the bands, and blast out any old shit you’d ripped from a CD or illegally downloaded from Soulseek and burnt onto a CDR.
My slot was around 8:30pm to 9:15pm, and I treated the throng of mostly teenage mostly female Peter Doherty fans to a carefully curated playlist featuring Cadaverous Condition, Helium Vola, Antichrisis, and many other bands I knew they’d probably never heard of, and—judging by their choice of gig to attend—probably wouldn’t like. It was, my oldest brother agreed, exactly what they deserved. We spent a lot of time that night going up and down in the hotel lift to take drinks from the bar to and from my oldest brother’s hotel room. At one point the celebrity singer himself—with a friend or two who may or may not have been in his band that week—was already in the lift when I got in it. He was much taller than I’d hoped. And smellier too. I didn't attempt to converse with him, because he didn't look capable of that, and (albeit for completely different reasons) I knew I wasn't. When the lift got to the bottom, and the doors began to open, a throng of teenagers were assembled to greet him—arms outstretched in awe. I managed to push my way through them toward the bar and turned to see the celebrity and his friends looking both uncomfortable and sweaty, still in the lift, as the doors began to close. The numerically Superior teenagers had managed to restrain themselves from rushing the objects of their adulation; probably because of the unexpectedly pungent stench emanating from the lift. The band, or whatever, went up and down in that lift, with and without the singer, a couple more times that night; but they never took to the stage when they were supposed to—or at all. My oldest brother was annoyed, but took it well. I knew from the testimony of my friend Indiana (a student and music promoter from The University in The City of Crushed Dreams) that if you invited any band he happened to be in to play a gig in your town, this would result in him doing heroin on the rug in your front room at least twice during the visit. But back then he had at least managed to perform. By the time I’d somehow become his warm-up act—a fact I’m sure he neither knew nor cared about—he was regularly failing to meet commitments. What did I learn? Well... I’ve never to this day tried heroin, Prospective Employer. Because I just love meeting commitments, and could thus never tempt myself with anything that might encourage me to kick that habit.
I’ve never DJed in such an official capacity since that night. (Only a few sets in a couple of pubs.) I got very little sleep. And the next morning, justly hungover, I boarded a plane for The City of a Hundred Spires, where I was taken from the snowy airport to my temporary home by a man called Honza who I gathered from his demeanour hated either me or his Job. I hadn’t expected it to feel like landing on Another Planet; but it did. Miles upon miles of huge snow-blanketed fields gradually gave way to brutal concrete tower blocks. And in a flat in one of these, with ominously padded walls and oversize light switches and bedsheets made of flannel, I met the first two of my fellow TEFL student teachers.
Don III was a softly spoken California Man with absurdly expensive trousers and a fastidiously maintained teenage haircut that he ought to have outgrown by his thirties but hadn’t. And Chester was a hobbitlike self-styled “southern gentleman” who liked to open doors for women so that he could look them up and down from both sides as they walked through them. That first night I went out with just Don (III) because Chester was still laid low by jet-lag—Don, I soon learnt, had medical means to counter that complaint. We managed to drink beyond the Metro closing time, and—waiting for a taxi that Don was going to pay for—I offended Don’s masculinity by refusing to believe he’d once been a promising boxer, on the grounds that he looked more like someone who worked in a women’s clothing shop. (Yeah, Prospective Employer: I’d know.) Don offered to prove himself by punching me in the face, and being drunk and on Another Planet I said “sure”. Maybe I was thinking he was my Tylor Durden, and I was about to punch myself? Maybe I wanted to feel something other than numb? Who knows?? He hit me. Once. I laughed it off. It hadn’t hurt like I thought it might. I told him so, and said he couldn’t have been that good as a boxer. So he took the bait and hit me again—and a chip from the inside edge of my second bicuspid, lower right, came free. So I acknowledged that he was indeed very good at boxing. And every time the tip of my tongue touches that chipped tooth, Prospective Employer, which it does every day, I feel that dental Memento to the TEFL course, and Don III. It reminds me that The Background Check can be a double-edged sword; because what we learn in the process of vetting another might not only change our impressions of that Prospective Employee, but could also result in an irretrievable loss of dental mass.
The others on my course, whose names I’ve also changed, were as follows, in order of how likely they are to reappear later in this memoir, from most to least:
Art: a Saskatchewanese philosopher-farmer of German and Russian extraction. He disliked me at first for showing him insufficient respect. But he gradually earnt my respect and grew to like me; not necessarily in that order.
Cosmo: a Southeastern US hippy who was writing a novel combining Jewish mythology with UFO conspiracy theories.
Orla: a California Woman with frequently cited claims to Cherokee ancestry.
Eliza: a middle-aged veteran teacher from New York state.
Gus: a middle-aged Yankee who’d been living in Germany, and kept complaining about all the graffiti on the old buildings.
Hardy: an escaped village idiot from somewhere nobody's heard of in Texas.
Sarah: the only one of them who was nearly as young as me. I think she was from The Big Apple, or a suburb of the same.
The course was to last 20 days over four weeks, and those of us so inclined went drinking after every class. The first few weeks was theory: how we learn, how we teach, how we physically move around the classroom (pretty damn Weirdly in the case of the Bossman who was teaching us to teach). And how it was all about “eliciting” not in fact “teaching” at all. This struck me as all very well if the necessary Knowledge was already there; and indeed the Technique was far better than the stuffy rote learning that many of my teachers—and indeed lecturers—had practised. Of course it’d be useless applied to lower-ability learners, because there’d be no knowledge there to elicit. But as TEFLers in The Former Communist Country we would almost always be dealing with students to whom the floodgates of Global English—AKA American—had long-since opened. So the theory was generally sound.
As the weeks progressed it became apparent that Hardy was incapable of being taught, and would surely thus find teaching itself even harder. His eyes would rove around the room and he’d mutter incessantly while the instructors were speaking, as if unaware of basic social norms. But he can’t have been completely unaware of them, because his seemingly compulsive spitting habit did not extend to indoors—where it was mercifully replaced with a tongue-click followed by a gulp. Sarah seemed bright and capable at first, but would passionately argue with everything that any course tutor attested to be a pedagogical truth. Every time she spoke, Don III would nudge me with his elbow, roll his eyes and whisper in a mocking tone: “Just another Jewish princess. Right?” He’d then snigger to himself and nudge me again. I’d no idea what this meant, having no first-hand experience with Jews or Jewishness, and not knowing whether this phrase was a popular-culture reference, or an anti-Semitic trope I’d yet to be made aware of—or both. I felt it my duty, Prospective Employer, a mere 18 years later, to Google the phrase thus to educate myself. My best guess having done so is that the comment was a reference to a Frank Zappa song. But I’m unwilling to confirm that by listening to it, because it’s a Frank Zappa song.
The rest of us bumbled along—I admit to more bumbling on my part than most, save the two mentioned above. My Nerves remained a barrier. Though being on Another Planet, and dealing with students mostly my age or older, might have helped a little. I don’t know why either thing would help. Maybe they didn’t; maybe it was simply the immersion aspect. I survived an early caution about my Unprofessional Dress by taking a trip to the city’s H&M—after a panicky phonecall to my mother citing a lack of funds for necessary teaching equipment—and I subsequently always, while teaching and being observed, dressed exactly like a member of Kraftwerk on the cover of “The Man-Machine”.
The next of my numerous hurdles came in the form of a full-blown bout of Mumps. My new American friends found this hilarious, reinforcing as it did their perspective of Brits as anachronistically Mediæval. I was baffled. Half like them, I’d half-thought Mumps no longer existed—or at least that I’d had the MMR vaccine. Maybe I missed it by a year or two? I definitely had my six-pins, polio, BCG… but there’s no mistaking Mumps, and I had Mumps. Mumps was (or were) rubbish. I was wretchedly ill, but still had to get up early, get on the metro and into town to learn to teach, and teach. In that long-ago pre-Covid world nobody cared that I had Mumps—though the condition was quite visibly represented in the “parotitis” that had swelled the lower half of my face till my head looked like a giant testicle. Nobody even suggested I stop teaching to rest, or reduce the risk of infection to others. This was, after all, an intensive course. And the Mumps undeniably made it more so; not less.
In the end we all passed, except Hardy and Sarah. Sarah, I think, went back to The Big Apple. But she stayed around for some months at least, and we’d chat if I saw her around; though Don seemed keen to discourage this. Hardy, though unqualified, was inexplicably employed by some other language school. He’d stop us in the street and tell us what new drugs he was into, and Don (taking a dim view of failure, apparently) would insult him and he would insult us, and spit on the floor near our feet. I offended Gus unintentionally, while drunk and before contracting Mumps, by noting while we stood in a mirrored lift that I could see the top of his head. I learnt this way that he was very sensitive about his baldness, Prospective Employer, and that my comment—closely followed by Don’s uncontrollable sniggering (I rarely laughed at the same time as Don, and he often found me amusing when I hadn’t intended to be)—had been taken as a put-down; so I also learnt that one should not make Personal Comments in the Workplace, even to Colleagues out-of-hours, for fear of causing unnecessary Offence. In this case it didn’t matter, because Gus was going back to Germany—having been more-or-less equally unimpressed by each of the City's hundred spires.
The role
It wasn’t a given that I’d take the role I was offered, Prospective Employer. I wasn’t in love with teaching. It still filled me with Dread. But I’d got a Certificate to say I could do it as a Job, and an offer of a Job in January. Eventually I also got an offer from Orla and Cosmo and Don III to come and live with them in a flat they’d found, at a discounted rate, in a tiny box-room that was advertised as a cupboard. So having no better ideas, I accepted, and borrowed more money from my mother—keeping a record of my mounting debts to her on a file on my computer—and got back on an Easyjet plane, and heard the same, soothing, unintelligible warning broadcasts on the bending airport bus again...
And so my new life began. In The Cupboard In The Studio Apartment on the border of the Old and New Towns of The City of a Hundred Spires—at least five of them visible from our living-room window. But none from my room, which had no window. It had a high shelf where winged insects came to die, and a tall wardrobe—but no third thing alas, Prospective Employer; which I must point out, lest you think me A Bad Writer. I had a mattress that would only fit if I put the last bit in the open wardrobe. I used my padded Matalan jacket, folded over twice, as a pillow. And I borrowed a sheet from Orla—and two squares of polar-fleece blanket from Chester (and some gaffer-tape from Art) to make myself a blanket. These plus my open suitcase constituted my bedroom for half a year of my Life. It didn’t need to be more sophisticated. I wasn’t likely to share it with anyone.
I got last dibs on lessons from the secretaries at The Language School, so only got a couple of regular slots. My timetable looked very part-time; but that was okay because it would give me plenty of (unpaid) time to plan, and I could always pick up more classes later, and fill the gaps with supply slots. Or so I thought—but my mobile phone was stolen by a prostitute in the first week. Of course, Prospective Employer, no actual transaction took place between us. She merely made a beeline for me in the street, shoved her hands in my trouser pockets and muttered “sex, blow-job, sex” then ricocheted away as I raised my hands in protest and said “No money. Busy. Sorry.”
I noticed just in time to be much too late that she’d taken my Sony Ericsson. She probably wasn’t even a real prostitute; but I feel like it’s more of an anecdote if I introduce it that way, you know? A disappointing anecdote, yes; but an anecdote, still. The important thing as far as I’m concerned, Prospective Employer, is that I don’t let A Good Story get in the way of The Truth. That’s what this is all about, Prospective Employer: The Truth. Why are we here, if not for That? And Good Stories don’t stop you being A Bad Writer; and A Bad Writer and An Unreliable Narrator are one and the same, for my Money. (Which obviously I didn’t have any of anyway at that time, or at any other point in my Life so far.)
My lack of mobile phone, coupled with the lack of a land-line or internet in our flat—Primitive times, Prospective Employer; I hope you never suffered them—would ensure by the lack of my ready Availability to The Language School secretaries that I never climbed much above the bread-and-beer-line in that city. But life was not hard. I was not to be overworked. Sometimes, I admit, I was underworked. I could go out and buy good beer—much better and cheaper than the stuff at home. Or someone would buy it for me; because it was so cheap, and I’m not such terrible company. And it was just as cheap to eat out in restaurants as it was to eat anything vaguely proper in—cheaper yet if you chose Chinese; so choose Chinese we often did. I lived well in those six months: I had a lot of time to think, to dream, to start to write a few of my first not-terrible poems, and to plot the majority of a contemporary chick-lit novel I’d never get round to writing. Before the engine started edging off the rails...
But let’s not, just yet.
My West Midlands uncle visited me early on when the place was still covered in snow—remember him, Prospective Employer? “The man I always thought of when I thought about A Working Man?” We’re barely a third of the way through this CV, Prospective Employer. Maybe you’d like to take a nap and come back tomorrow? My West Midlands uncle was in town with his Bossman for a Business Trip. So we met for a drink and a meal, and I brought some Americans with me too, because he'd once taken me to America so I imagined he'd like those. And it struck me for the first time that I really was an adult now. I was living in a Former Communist Country. I had a Job (of sorts). I had friends much older than me, who could talk to my uncle like equals. In fact, I realized with Horror: he was talking to me that way too! He’d always liked to teach us things—my brothers and me. Now, walking through The Old Town on that winter’s evening, having been living there long enough to have picked up a couple of things, I could point out this or that building or statue and say what it was called and why they’d put it there—and he was interested. It was an odd but, the more I got used to it, not-unwelcome feeling.
But back to The Role:
The regulars
My only constant class over those six months was in a Zone 2 office-block entirely clad in rainbow-coloured glass. One of the least-known, most-beautiful buildings in that ubiquitously beautiful city. I had a “conversation class” with three clever young people from a market research Company. I prepared elaborate, sometimes baffling, hour-long lessons three mornings a week—notably an entire murder mystery (spread over several weeks) based in colonial-era Africa, featuring a gigantic rodent killer called The Great Mole Rat. I learnt from the cleverest of my students (or the best at speaking English) that, actually, by dropping the bomb on Hiroshima the Americans probably saved more lives than they took. He was, by his own admission “quite conservative” and I enjoyed setting out my vaguely liberal sometimes-socialist notions of how things Ought To Be, so he could deftly dismantle them with his post-Communist neoliberal logic. I didn’t care whether I was right or if he was; I enjoyed our discussions, and I think we all learnt something in those classes; even if it wasn’t always necessarily what I was supposed to be teaching. (“During Communist period, we already have billboards. But only for advertising something like… chicken. ‘Buy chicken’ the billboard would say. ‘To feed your family.’ So you go to the shop, but there is no chicken!”)
I had a class with two professional women in a bank. For the eight weeks before it was taken from me and given to someone else, they cancelled four of the lessons—two by more than an hour in advance, so I wouldn’t even get paid. And they never both turned up at once; so the lesson-plans I prepared each week—for two learners to partake in, and play off one another—were useless. All I managed were four bumbling hours’ worth of failed attempts to persuade either of those women that I was any more than a waste of their very precious time. The one I saw more times than the other had described the past year of her life as “dynamic” in our first encounter. She’d also said that her favourite English word was “dynamic”. So when I pointed out, after further questioning, that I didn’t think she’d quite got the full sense of the meaning of that word, I suppose I’d already dug a hole from which I’d never quite manage to climb. In their joint email of complaint about me to The Language School, they wrote that my lessons—not one of which, mind you, they’d both bothered to turn up for—were insufficiently “dynamic” to meet their needs.
I was shuffled for a while to regular one-on-ones with a school-age student who was studying for something equivalent to an English GCSE. She was much more willing to learn, and although she was barely ever able to meet my eye, presumably due to general teenage Awkwardness, I gather she got a good grade in the end—so I’m happy to claim some credit for that, in the absence of Contrary Evidence.
Because of the Complaint I’d incurred—and regardless of my wholly ignored attempts to refute it—I was put under Observation, and had to teach a new class for six or so weeks in The Language School itself. It was a “conversation class” in which no one, however much I begged them to, would volunteer to speak. I already knew that “in some they will, and in some they won’t”; but in this one, they were like the grave. The back and forth with my Observer thus lasted for quite some Time, and was beginning to really Stress me out; but in the end she conceded that I’d done everything she’d suggested, made every change in my approach that she’d requested, and that I couldn’t be asked to do any more. “If they don’t enjoy this lesson,” she said, looking over my last submitted plan, “they’re morons.”
They didn’t.
There was one course called “Banking English” with its own specially commissioned text-book, full of typographical mistakes, that a few of us taught for a while. There were quite literally hundreds of bankers, brought in from all across the country from branches of one of the numerous major banks. The lessons were lethally dull, and if you deviated from the book at all—and anyone found out—you’d instantly lose the gig. So we went by The Book, just following orders like Nazi (or, for that matter, Communist) prison guards, and we watched the poor sods suffer through roleplay after roleplay where they had to imagine they were working in a bank. I thought roleplay was supposed to be sexy, Prospective Employer. Or at least to involve some element of fantasy. But no. I recall one class where I’d taken along some CDs; because one of the things we were taught was to put on quiet background music to lighten the mood any time they were doing work in silence—like end-of-term tests. The classes had been so dismal, and our opportunities to make any kind of entertaining dent in the strictly enforced order had been so rare, that I had to do something. I was sick of the sight of all their suicidally miserable Former Communist faces. So I thought fuck it, and put in “Cruelty and the Beast” by Cradle of Filth and cranked up “Lustmord and Wargasm (The Lick of Carnivorous Winds)”. It raised a few ears and eyebrows, I can tell you, Prospective Employer; but none of them said anything. I tried to ride it out, just sat there reading my Bohumil Hrabal book while they worked, trying to resist the urge to turn the record off and admit I’d made an error of judgement. It wasn’t fair; you shouldn’t do things like that to the students of Banking English. I’d gone fully James Hetfield. It might have seemed like an amusing notion to me, but there was no reason to expect them to find it amusing. It was Inappropriate, and if I’d received a Complaint I would have deserved it this time. But I didn’t. I kept the Job. I even got an extra hour, and got to teach a Pronunciation class; which was the one time I saw any of them laugh, because of my Speech Impediment. It was the first time I’d ever been grateful for my Speech Impediment, and I did my best to exacerbate it by choosing as many words beginning with S and Th as I could.
I sat in on some assessments too, and through this I met some of the rudimentary tools—i.e. fellow TEFLers—who’d actually written the punitive, error-riddled text-books that tortured us and our students every day. There was this undeniably odd-mannered, long-haired student from a backwater town, who I’d grown to like. He was a cashier at a bank, and, I suspected, some kind of genius in his spare time. He dressed like a vampire, spoke English like a Shakespearean stage-actor, and baffled me and Cosmo with unanswerable questions about archaic conjugations of the verb “shall”. His Bossman and the text-book guy interrogated him about why he was still a cashier, and hadn’t applied to become a client advisor yet, despite having been in the branch for six years. He developed a slight Stammer in his voice, that he’d never had when talking to us, as he responded: “I am a cashier. I like being a cashier. I would, thus, remain a cashier.” I had a tremendous amount of respect for that man, even though I still think he might have been an actual vampire. They made us mark him down on his oral exam, even though he spoke better English than any of us dickheads, because the text-book guy—a Brit, like me—said “No one talks like that. He sounds ridiculous. Like he’s from the past.”
We made friends with some of the other banking conference students, and even went out drinking with them now-and-then when they were in town. Those were the ones from companies that didn’t have their own shonky text-books written, and let us teach normal conversation classes, where the imagination was allowed with the body to leave the bank—at least for a while. I later learnt that two of our favoured students—between youth and middle age; the male one married, the female one pretty—were conducting a longstanding affair on these trips. This made me uneasy, Prospective Employer; to think that my Job was partly responsible for enabling their infidelity. I heard a lot of similar stories. The students themselves would tell me this was common; but also that affairs in general were endemic to married life in The Former Communist Country—more-or-less expected, if rarely openly acknowledged within the marriage. This may have represented a genuine cultural difference between Sexual Practices in The Former Communist Country and The Country of My Birth, Prospective Employer. But I’m wary of Confirmation Bias. To put it Bluntly if Inelegantly: the people who say certain Things are “normal” where they’re from, are often the same people who do those Things; because most of us think that most of what we do is normal. I by now believe we can—and should—only ever speak for ourselves in such matters, Prospective Employer. And I was, I knew by then, when compared with my peers—whether by accident or design—a Sexual Conservative. Probably, I feared, the worst kind of Conservative.
Probably my polar opposite in that respect was one of my last-established regular one-to-one students, some kind of Bossman at some kind of bank in town; a Moravian, a Catholic, a happily married father of one much-adored infant son. And as regular an adulterer as he was able to be those days. It was tough, he would confide, to find Opportunities now—what with his high-stress Job, his beloved wife, and his boy. He said he sometimes sensed opportunities at the swimming pool where he took the kid on the weekends. He asked me in our first lesson together whether I’d like to join him at the pool that Saturday. I made an excuse; I was unsure at that point whether he was fully Weird, or maybe wanted to hook me up with one of the single mums, or—much the likelier option, I think—wanted me to watch his son for a bit while he got up to some adultery in the changing rooms. I was fascinated by The Moravian. His outlook on life—his priorities, I guess, but moreover his actual Character—was so different to mine that it made him seem an alien to me. He found the set work dull, and much preferred to tell me misty-eyed tales of his magic-porridge-pot sexual awakening, set in an idyllic rural Moravian youth—think Cider With Rosie, Daisy, Doris, June, Fanny, Jana, and Katka too. He liked the band The Cure as a teenager, and used to translate their lyrics for girls in his class; but admitted to being disappointed with the results. The lyrical results that is; the actual outcome of his efforts pleased him very much. “Alexander, I have had many women.” Oh right? Cool. “No: you do not understand. Many, many women. Have you had many women, Alexander?” Not many, no. “I have. Always. Have you ever had…” (Here he paused.) “What is it called? With many men and one woman?” No. Definitely haven’t done that. He grinned. “Why not? It is good—if the woman is happy.” Shrug. (I was relieved by that qualifying clause, at least.) After our second lesson he sent an email to The Language School to tell the department he was particularly happy with his teacher—me—and that they—I—deserved special Commendation. Like I said: Weird guy. Completely Sex-Obsessed; that was surely more Weird than me, I thought. I didn’t tell him I was a Virgin because I didn’t want to make him Sad, or make him think I was Weird and maybe want to cancel the class. But I think he might have worked it out. I mean, I never lied to him. Except to get out of going to the pool with him and his son—but that’s basically the dictionary definition of a White Lie, right, Prospective Employer? He gave me a bottle of wine from his Moravian estate. It was corked and disgusting—impossible to drink. I told him it was delicious. Another White Lie. (I don’t make a habit of being Deceitful, Prospective Employer: I am, as far as I know, a mostly Reliable Narrator.) We went for drinks once or twice. I sometimes wondered if he was a Compulsive Liar. He was kind of pallid and unhealthy looking—like lots of Office Workers. But he had beautiful eyes; and he’d been promoted pretty far for a guy that was in his early thirties. We actually kept in touch for a few months after I left the city, but the relationship fizzled out; he wasn’t an Abstract kind of guy, and he liked chatting about Sex more than emailing about Life in general.
Another one-to-one I had leading up toward the end, in another bank, was with a woman a year or two older than me. She didn’t get on with either of her middle-aged co-workers, she told me, as they left. “It’s okay. They don’t speak English.” Waves, brief smiles. I was helping her revise for some language-level thing she needed to apply for a Promotion she didn’t really want. “I never want to work in bank,” she said. “But... [gesturing around her] now I work in bank.” She was friendly, and pretty, and married. She showed me pictures of her holiday two years ago in Morocco, before the wedding. There was a folder on the desktop of her work computer. She said she never went out these days because every Saturday she was decorating the flat she’d bought with her husband, while he was out with his friends. I imagined he was just like The Moravian, so I hated him. (Her husband, I mean; not The Moravian: he was lovely.) One day she told me, out of the blue, “I am parachutist!” No "the" or "a" as usual; because they have no articles in her first language. Her husband once bought her parachute lessons for her birthday, and she’d got really into it. Now he didn’t like her going, because he said it was dangerous. Like I said, Prospective Employer, he sounded like a real dick.
And there were those two women in the bank in the suburb town, that took me a two-hour round trip on a double-decker train to get to. One of them looked like my Bosswoman from the Women’s Clothes Shop, and the other looked like Charels’s girlfriend from university. (I was beginning to wonder if you only get so many faces in one life, and then they start repeating.) They made me open a bank-account on the first day I was there. But I never used it, because I had one already where The Language School would pay my wage, and I would promptly withdraw the lot in notes, each month. So now I had a second account, with just the equivalent of about a fiver in it, for about five months—but I got a free mug and T-shirt; which was good because crockery and clothing were both in short supply, and I had no Money left in my monthly budget for buying such things. It was a funny little town: just a few miles from The City of a Hundred Spires, but it always felt like a zombie apocalypse had recently swept through. I took Cosmo to one of my lessons there once. He entertained my students by pretending to be interested in opening a bank account, then playing hard to get. He was a handsome guy, and charismatic. They loved him. On the way home we stopped in a pub for a couple of drinks, and two local college students asked us to play pool. One of them was very in to Cosmo, and her friend was very indifferent to me. They followed us to the train station, and Cosmo’s “one” made me walk behind at a distance with her friend, who didn’t want to walk with me or talk to me, and kept crouching down in the middle of the road and howling at the clear night sky. What’s up with her, I asked, when I caught up—deliberately interrupting their romantic moment. “She has pain inside, you know?” said Cosmo's "one". Oh right, I said: I know the feeling. (You see, I was thinking it might be something like Existential Dread, Prospective Employer.) But no: Cosmo’s one shook her head, looking at me like I was a simpleton. “You do not know this feeling," she said. "It is not something men have.”
Drama
I found the Americans a bit dramatic for my taste, Prospective Employer. I don’t know what I was hoping for—maybe nothing, except my shoebox room and some drinking buddies. Orla was a darling. She mothered us. Cooked us breakfasts on Saturday mornings. Did the admin for the flat. Told us when we stank. She thought it was cute that I was a sexual failure at my age, and threatened numerous times to “devirginize” me—but in a jokey more than a rapey way. Anyway, she was much too busy sleeping with Don III to lust after me, to my relief. Don got a local girlfriend as soon as possible and as young as was legal—and younger than was allowable according to The Dating Equation (i.e. half your age plus seven, minimum). But that didn’t stop Don sleeping with her—and Orla. And the new girlfriend didn’t stop Orla sleeping with Don. Orla had an actual bedroom, as did Cosmo. But Don slept at the rear of our front room on a double mattress on the floor, which technically made our flat a Studio Apartment. He’d sneak into Orla’s room at night when he got home from a pub or club, if he wasn’t somewhere else with the local girl. I knew from the start that Don was into drugs; but living with him for a bit it became apparent he was on all kinds of prescriptions—little plastic bottles—as well as being a full-on cocaine addict. Imagine being addicted to coke?! Coke in the morning, coke in the evening… I tried coke a few times. It was fun for the first five minutes. Then it made me simultaneously Anxious but able to talk shit to strangers without sounding Anxious. Then I’d stay up way too late and feel like I had a cold the next day. Weird hobby.
We all smoked a lot of weed, which Don would buy from the same place he got the coke, and sometimes we’d help pay for. And we drank a lot of beer. We’d drag suitcases full of bottles back to the supermarkets to cash in for the “pant” then fill them up with new ones and drag them back home. I told one of my students this, and he said they probably thought we were homeless. The beer was cheaper than water there, and tasted much better. It felt like living in the middle ages, in that way. Orla and I would sit on the “couch” most afternoons—not because we were Workshy; our Job was inherently Flexible in Nature—binge-watching her Sex And The City DVDs and drinking some cocktail, if it’s even a real cocktail, made of equal parts vodka, vermouth, and cranberry juice. We called them cosmopolitans, but they weren’t cosmopolitans. There wasn’t really internet on phones back then. Even if you got to The Language School, or a café, and logged on to the internet, it wasn’t like what it is now.
Cosmo meanwhile would wake annoyingly early, work on his UFO-Moses-in-the-Southeastern-State novel, and spend a lot of time at actual Work too. He got really ill at one point, and Orla and Don kept taking the piss out of him for being a hypochondriac. He went to the doctor and came back with a Weird look on his face; I’ve never seen anyone announce they have Pneumonia so smugly. (At least he didn’t get Mumps.) Relationships between Cosmo and the other two became strained. He announced to me over coffee one morning that his denim jacket had been stolen, and that Orla and Don were the main suspects. He’d drawn up a list and everything. He was sort of kidding, but also completely serious. They reacted badly when he accused them. Told him he was being a dick. But he said they were trying to mess with his head. We were all smoking lots of weed, Prospective Employer. For my part, I found it conducive to a Balanced Existence free from Existential Dread; I’d henna my hair and write a poem. Go ride a tram. Look at a sausage on a bench, or whatever. But I think it was bad for them, when taken with whatever else they had going on. I tried to remain neutral in their Civil Wars. Don and Orla’s love-triangle. Art and Chester’s bickering. (They’d moved in together, way out of town, and were already sick of each other.) Then the Cosmo's missing jacket thing... Whatever. I never took sides. My Neutrality was Legendary; Orla took to calling me “Switzerland”.
It turned out that two homeless men took the jacket. We found them sleeping on the stairs together one morning. A couple of old dudes. Maybe just middle-aged. Huddled together in a single sleeping-bag in the corner. I wondered what we should do. Whether we should maybe make them some tea. Don III woke them roughly and shouted about calling the police. (“POLITZIE! You understand that?!”) I didn’t make them any tea. They got their things (including Cosmo’s denim jacket) and hurried away obediently, down the many flights of stairs and through the door with the broken lock, into the snow-carpeted streets below. The city that winter was as enchanting to me as it must have been insufferable for them. It felt like being in a snow-globe. The Americans wanted to travel, and see The Country, while they were there. Art and Cosmo would take the train and go to ice-hockey games, sometimes with Orla. Chester was doing his “travelling” by servicing a German woman he’d bagged. He taught me the word “fuckbuddy”—which I’ve never had occasion to use before, and never expect to again. I mostly stayed at home, because I never had any Money, except just after Payday. Nevertheless, once the thaw began, I decided to go to The Shoemaking Town with Art and Cosmo, because it was so far away—right on the other side of The Former Communist Country. Surely the journey alone would be worthwhile?
The landscape was dark green and sort of... dull. Huge, somehow characterless fields. It still felt like Another Planet, even without the snow. But less enchanting. I was starting to miss the UK, but didn’t want to admit it. Mercifully, the snow returned, halfway across the country; and when we got to The Shoemaking Town the local police tried to shake me down for £200 for not having my passport on me: more Money than I had to my name at that Time, let alone about my person. A Gaunt Old Man came over to argue with the police—telling us “You do not pay. It is too much. You do not pay.” I eventually agreed to a heavily and, I sensed, arbitrarily discounted fine of a fiver. Up in the town, in a warehouse or something near the hockey arena, as unlikely as it seemed, Cradle of Filth happened to be halfway through playing a gig. The doorman let us in, and we caught the last few songs, including “Nymphetamine (fix)” which I’d just recently got the Americans into. It was wild. The Moravian black metal fans were 100% metal, but also so polite and nice. We partied at a metal club in a haze of substance-abuse and sub-zero cold, and slept like corpses in a dank hostel with a snoring French oaf.
The next night we watched the ice-hockey game, and I couldn’t see the puck. Someone was passing round home-made plum-brandy (“slivovice”) and Art’s back gave out toward the end—an old hockey injury, he said. He was groaning so loudly on the floor, I wondered if he was going to die, but I couldn’t guess what of. We had to go to the local hospital with him, where all the Staff wore red—which seemed ominous to me. We just about made the last train home. Stopping for drinks in an unpronounceable junction town where we had to change trains, we sort-of crashed a private birthday party in a bar where no one spoke a word of English. But they invited us in anyway, and we ordered beer and something sickly called “Dr Vamp” that was red and came in test-tubes. We drank in the corner and some of the littler kids stared, but most of the revellers just ignored us.
What I loved about living there, Prospective Employer: I loved hearing people talking and having to guess what they were saying; I loved it even more when I found someone I could talk to, and we didn’t understand each other’s actual words at all. It made Communication more Interesting. More of A Challenge. More Fun.
Things started unravelling toward the end. Don III stopped sleeping with Orla, and she took it personally. He’d already treated her poorly I thought, but: blah-blah-blah, consenting adults, etc. I wasn’t getting involved. He carried on seeing his teenage girlfriend, and started bringing her round more, and PDAing on the sofa more. Obviously this was difficult for Orla and it seemed increasingly deliberate on his part. He also started making demeaning jokes at Orla’s expense; not when his girlfriend was around—but when we were all together. One example that sticks in my mind: a few of us, we’d made up stupid nicknames for ourselves. I don’t remember why, but I guess it was the weekend. Art was Arctic Force. Cosmo was Desert Fox. I was—I forget, I’ll WhatsApp Art; wait a minute… —I was Aquatic Badger. And Orla was The Oracle: her choice. The nicknames we’d given ourselves came up over dinner in a restaurant with Eliza and her husband. And we each volunteered the stupid nickname with enthusiasm. When Orla said hers (“The Oracle”) Don turned to me—Orla was opposite him and I was to his right—and said “More like The Orifice, right?”
He started sniggering right away, then turned to make sure she’d heard, saw her deadpan expression, and burst out in a fit of uncontrollable giggles. He kept elbowing me and laughing. I’m not sure anyone else heard—though they must have noticed the state Don was in. Orla sure heard; and that was what mattered. Other conversations continued, but Don just couldn’t or wouldn’t stop laughing—or elbowing me in the ribs. I think he found my unease just as hilarious as Orla’s abject disgust and disbelief. I almost found the situation funny; I almost laughed—at Don; at how funny he found himself. This middle-aged Upper Middle Class American kid: his Childishness, his Brazenness, his utter disregard for Decency. But I physically couldn’t laugh—because I was still in shock. I was thinking what is wrong with these people? Why can’t they just be nice? Or if not nice: repressed and polite? I’d never felt so Foreign. I don’t remember what happened next—either Orla went to the toilet or I did. But I do remember what happened next.
One day I came home from a Job and Cosmo was sitting at the kitchen table with that serious some-shit’s-going-down look on his big handsome hippie face. Had someone stolen his hat? He wasn’t wearing his hat…
“Alex, we’ve had to throw Don out. Orla asked him for money for rent, and he punched her. In the face.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
“Fuck,” I said.
Fuck.
I thought about it. And it wasn’t as hard to believe as I wanted it to be. But it was still hard to hear. Don was our friend. Orla was our friend. He’d been out of control for months, I guess. Weed. Booze. Whatever was in those plastic bottles of pills. Coke in the morning, coke in the evening… But he was Charismatic, Professional; he usually turned up for Work—never got complained about like I did. His students liked him. Pretty much everyone who met him liked him, if he wanted them to. I remembered then—as if it was years ago—that he’d punched me in the face, that first night we met, last December. Twice: for doubting his boxing skills. And yes, I basically asked him to; I’m not saying the situations were entirely comparable; But… there was that one common element: the punching part. If you’re happy enough to punch one person in the face for one reason, then why not another, for another—and then another, for yet another? Was it really so different, punching different people, for different reasons? Once punching people was something you did—one of your Skills? I couldn’t say, Prospective Employer; I’d never punched anyone, except my older brothers, if they were punching me. And I hadn’t seen them for…
Actually my two older brothers came to visit for my 22nd birthday. About a week or two before or after this fresh Rupture. Everyone was excited to meet them—especially my oldest brother; because I’d played the Americans his debut solo single when we were doing the TEFL course, and I’d recently shown them the issue of The NME that he was on the cover of ; so even in The Former Communist Country, I was Living in His Shadow.
Cosmo and Orla asked if I was okay with their decision to throw Don out. Of course I was. Once was enough. Someone else could give him a second chance, if they liked. I reckoned he’d had a few before. Don was sheepish when I saw him in The Language School. He invited me to the pub a couple of times, and eventually I went. If I mentioned The Rupture he’d say “I honestly… don’t really remember…” He knew he’d been drinking too much. He was full of regrets. Wanted to sort his shit out, for “the girl”. It was best for everyone that he and Orla were apart: they brought out the worst in each other, he said. About a month later I introduced a visiting friend from England to Don, because Don had emailed saying we should catch up. We went for cocktails. Don insisted on paying. “He seems really nice,” my friend said afterwards. Yeah, I agreed. He did.
Cosmo and I agreed to go out with Don to some horror disco party thing at The Language School. A month later? Two? Toward the end, some time. We were out with the others that day when we suddenly remembered our date with Don. Orla, understandably, was not going; and neither was Art. But neither presumed to pass judgement on us for going. We’d said we’d meet him back at our flat. But the closer it came to the time, I think we just thought “fuck it”. We ended up forgetting—but half-deliberately, I think. I had no phone, and Cosmo’s battery had died. I regret not saying something; that’s no way to behave. When we got back to our building and climbed the stairs to The Studio Apartment we found two broken bottles of red wine on our doorstep, intermingled with a pool of piss. And a massive “D”—burnt into our wooden front door by Don with his fancy-pants lighter.
I pictured Don—son of Don, son of Don—out of breath, having scaled eight flights of stairs to meet us at our flat—dressed up like a vampire in the summer evening heat, plastic fangs and a cape and all—knocking ever louder on our door, and still getting no response. And I felt sad for him. Like I’d been A Bad Friend to A Bad Friend. Cosmo and I ran into Don in the street that week, at a sausage stand in a busy square. He was laughing about the damage he’d done to our door. “Good luck getting your damage deposit back!” he said. And he giggled and flipped us the bird as he walked away. That was the last time I saw him.
We were running out of money toward the end of term. Orla moved out a few weeks early and went home to California. Cosmo and I could barely afford the last month’s rent. I’d known for a while this Job was over; I handed in my notice and booked my plane ticket home. Another guy moved in shortly before I left. A northern English dude called Kieran. Softly spoken. Looked like he might have played bass in your eighth favourite early-nineties indie band, but left before the breakthrough album to pursue a doomed solo career. Then turned up here, half-dead.
Five minutes in:
“Have you ever tried needles?” he asked.
Not sure if he meant drugs or tattoos: “No,” I said. “You?”
Couldn’t see any tattoos… Slow-motion nodding. How had the conversation got here?
“Amazing,” he said, staring through the wall and into something else.
It turned out Kieran had come to The City of a Hundred Spires to try and kick that habit. Hot continental summer cold turkey. A lot of people from the UK and the US went overseas for similar. “Pack up your troubles.” And take them with you: alcohol, cocaine, burnout, failure, Midlife Crises, Existential Dread. Packing my suitcases full of clothes and CDs, I looked up from my stuff to The Studio Apartment where I was leaving Cosmo with this (maybe, hopefully, reformed) junkie. Our flat was by then half-full of those metal barrier things they use to keep cars away from dug-up roads; and numerous stolen road signs—one with a concrete base and a metal pole still attached. That had been a good find! But I couldn’t fit any of that in my suitcase. I couldn’t even fit the pair of second-hand corduroys I’d just bought and already hated. What was I even doing in The City of A Hundred Spires? I thought. And what the fuck am I actually for?
I went to the pub for one last session, with Cosmo and junkie Kieran. The rolling news on the pub TV was saying something about bombs on trains and buses—in The Great Wen. July 7, 2005. I was flying back to England tomorrow.
“My oldest brother lives there,” I said, still staring up at the TV. “I’m supposed to be staying with him tomorrow.”
“Oh, right?” said Kieran, looking at his phone, texting the girl he’d hooked up with last night.
“Shit,” I said. “I hope he’s not dead.”
Good Job or Bad Job?
Teaching can be Lonely, Prospective Employer. Teaching on Another Planet, or even in Another Country, maybe more so than regular teaching. And although we were all in the same boat—all teachers, all teaching, and all employed by The Language School—I found the Solidarity limited in TEFLing. I made very few friends; just tried and ultimately failed to hang on to the ones I’d made on the course. Americans weren’t as similar to Brits as I’d thought; though the locals couldn’t tell us apart, and shouted taunts about “George Bush” to me and Canadian Art as often as they did to them. None of the Americans you met in Europe had voted for George Bush anyway—except maybe Hardy (if he knew how to vote)—they were all small-l liberal, as tended to be the Brits. But what were Brits to me anyway? I was English in Wales and Welsh in England; but I’d never thought myself a “Brit”. There in The Former Communist Country, I often found the Brits even more unpalatable than the Americans. Maybe they reminded me too much of me. I didn’t seek their company. And I made no local friends, though I got on with some of my students. They were busy. They had lives, wives, kids. Or they were women; local women, who I therefore couldn’t possibly think about seeing socially, whether or not they were married.
As for my flatmates and coursemates, on the rare occasions we had similar classes—like when Cosmo and Orla and I were on the “banking English” Jobs—we could at least sympathise with each other’s plights. But there wasn’t much we could do to support each other. Few of our classes took place in The Language School itself. We had our own only-slightly-overlapping shifts in the Working Week; and I found it Weird to think they’d never met my favourite students. We were out and about all over the city and beyond for classes. And I was uncontactable, what with my lack of a phone. My mother says she sent me a replacement phone when my old one was stolen. But I know I never got a contract for it; that level of administration would’ve been beyond me. And more Costs would’ve meant more Work. The phone would’ve won me more Work, with which to pay for the phone. Okay, I didn’t do the Maths, Prospective Employer; but I’d realized I could maintain a Subsistence Lifestyle in that city on something like a third of the hours of a Full-Time Job—with maybe another 10–20% set aside for Unpaid lesson-preparation, and another 10% for Commuting. The rest of the Time was mine to waste.
And I enjoyed my Existence in The City of a Thousand Spires for a bit. All was wonder for as long as the land was cocooned in its coat of winter snow. I can still hear the sound of the Cuban heels of my leather cowboy boots compacting inches of fresh snow on the pavements of far-flung suburbs as I hurried, map in hand, with barely a second to spare, toward the estimated location of a one-time-only supply class. I can still see me sitting there at the front of a class, looking like a kid—in that daft Matrix-style leather coat I’d had since the Christmas when I worked in The Corner Shop—cheeks flushed by cold, flicking through a selection of dodgy-looking fruit teas, quietly pining for some Lady Grey and full-fat milk. And I can still smell the stale sweat and cigarettes on every morning tram, and the lavender-rich “Ooh La La!” soap I’d buy every month from Lush and use each morning in the shower. Do you know, Prospective Employer, I loved to be going to work on those frosty mornings when my breath was smoke, and when I smoked in the mornings, for the first and last time in my life, just because it was so cold. And I loved to be done with Work for the day as well. Especially when it was barely afternoon.
I felt I was at best a welcome Distraction for my students, from the Business of serious Work. Was my teaching Productive, Prospective Employer? Did my students Learn? Improve their Language Skills? Benefit from my Professional Guidance? These questions haunted me. I hated to think I might waste someone else’s Time—my own Time was quite another matter, since I’d only be wasting that in some other manner anyway. But... I no longer think I was A Bad Teacher, Prospective Employer; which I did think by the time I left that Job. I now believe I was an adequate teacher. I cared about the Job, and I was Qualified. And even the complaint that knocked my Confidence early on—which I knew was unfair—did not prevent my gradual improvement over the months I worked at The Language School Job. But I never found a groove; I never developed anything like a Portfolio of teaching techniques or lesson plans, much less a teaching style. I was never quite Comfortable as an English teacher; the amount of preparatory work I had to put in to get a really good lesson seemed to me Unsustainable if I were ever to increase my hours to something closer to Full-Time, and thus make my TEFL a Proper Job.
I mentioned these Qualms to Cosmo and Art, and Art said I was worrying too much. He told me to sit in on one of his classes. So I did. Observing Art, I saw that he could teach a perfectly decent conversation class with no prep whatsoever. He just turned up, leant back in his chair, twirled a pencil on his thumb, and said “Okay folks, what do you want to talk aboot?” It took a while to get them going. But he coaxed a conversation from them in the end. (He always did, he said.) He even ad-libbed grammar points on the white-board when they suggested themselves. For some reason we’d decided to say I was visiting Art from Finland, and that was why I was sitting in. But it turned out one of his students, a teenage boy (they were all kids in that class), just happened to be the world’s biggest Finland fan—and he listed all the facts he knew about Finland, and asked me if they were true. So I said they were, and commended him on his knowledge of “my” country. (I could only assume he’d done his research.) I had to avoid The Language School for weeks after that, and eventually dyed my hair with henna so if the Finlandophile saw me again, he wouldn’t recognize me and ask why I hadn’t yet gone back to Finland.
But I avoided The Language School anyway, unless I needed the internet. The place was Cursed, for me. First there’d been the Mumps. Then those dreadful observation classes, after my complaint. And then, in spring, I’d been officially cautioned for my “unprofessional dress”. Unprofessional dress, indeed! It was a skirt, Prospective Employer. The skirt was a long, black, pleated, flowing thing, with subtle gold embroidery. “Made in India” said the label. I’d found it hanging from a lamp-post in the Old Town one evening. Clothes being expensive, I’d claimed it immediately. I never wore it to lessons, Prospective Employer; though even if I had, I’d fail to see the problem. I wore it on the weekends so I could wash and dry the black H&M jeans I wore for the Working Week. And on that particular Saturday, for which I was cautioned, my outfit also included a burgundy-coloured renaissance-style doublet with gold stitching and frogs (which my mother had made me for my birthday several years ago), a headband with an embroidered skull-and-crossbones motif that was given to me by my oldest brother, and some maori-inspired warpaint that I’d applied to my cheeks and lower brow with liquid eyeliner. I was on my way to our weekend football game, down by the river: a regular fixture since the thaw. There were three big teams, and each played each at least once every Saturday. One was made up of EFL teachers—mostly Brits. One was city folk—mostly students. And one was gypsies. The gypsies always won, so those games were damage-limitation; but the matches between the teachers and students could go either way. I explained all this to the senior teacher tasked with cautioning me—the same local woman who’d observed me after my complaint: that my outfit was designed to intimidate my footballing rivals; that I wasn’t teaching that day anyway; that I’d only been in The Language School for five minutes, to meet some friends before heading down to the river. None of this mattered to her. She said several people had complained. Complained? Who had complained? And about what, exactly? I wasn’t to be given the satisfaction of answers to these questions.
“Everybody was talking about it,” she said, ominously—as if this fact in itself was Evidence of Wrongdoing on my part. (I considered quoting Oscar Wilde at this point; since Don had lent me his complete works, and I was making my way through the plays. But I thought better of it.) Was it my fault that “everybody” had nothing better to do with themselves on a Saturday than complain about how I was dressed—on a Saturday? The Solidarity of those Extracurricular football matches was undermined for me by this episode. I resented the notion that my attire was “Unprofessional”—if anything, I thought my “dress” was Extra-Professional: the make-up was applied with care and skill. The outfit took at least ten minutes to plan and put together. The skirt was lovely. The doublet (which, to my endless amusement, Orla kept calling a “Dorset”) was very bloody Professional; try making (or even buying) a doublet of such quality, and you’ll find they don’t come Cheap. Nevertheless, I was told I’d brought The Language School into Disrepute. Perhaps they were right, Prospective Employer. But it felt heavy-handed to me; I wasn’t even being Paid to be there at the Time for which I was cautioned. I resolved to simply avoid the place thereafter and to dress however I fancied—wherever I happened to be, and whether or not I was at Work. My Dignity, it seemed, was not fully compatible with my Employer’s.
But there were good times in that Job. And all of them involved talking to—and moreover listening to—the Students who I was lucky enough to spend time with. The young and old and male and female of The City of a Hundred Spires, and the wider catchment of The Former Communist Country. An old man I met only once spoke for two hours about his top-secret business trips to China in the ’60s. I threw out the lesson plan and just listened. That one supply class was enough to outweigh any Qualms I had about my Employer. But I couldn’t see a Career in TEFL for me. The teachers I spoke to who’d travelled the world and been doing TEFL for years weren’t wedded to the Job, but the Lifestyle it allowed. I’d liked both well enough for a time. But that Time was at an end. The city stank of sewage in summer. The Americans were at war with each other. And the endless busloads of stag-weekend Brits in vomiting conga-lines round the mediæval quarter—lurid beneath the accusing neon of strip-club signs—made me feel at once ashamed and oddly homesick. Sick of being an Emigrant. A Foreigner. A Non-Belonger. Sick for the lack of the countryside I loved, and sick from living too long in a city. Maybe even sick of not having access to whatever particular foods I used to eat and now wasn’t eating—whatever they were or might have been. Certainly I was sick of a lack of Lady Grey tea.
“Tell you what,” that chef in my Kitchen Porter Job had said. “Going out there; it’ll make you appreciate what you’ve got here like you never did.”
And, to my disgruntlement, she had finally been proven right.
The Language School Job was—just about—A Good Job, Prospective Employer. But I gave it up as A Bad Job, and headed home with no mementos to those months but a chipped tooth, a block of stinking Danish cheese—whose smell would permeate through my worldly possessions for weeks—and a book of Czech fairytales: a leaving gift from the woman I taught one-to-one in the bank. At the airport I had to hurriedly unpack my CDs and clothes and throw an armful into the bin so that my load was light enough for them to let me on the plane.
Concluding notes
I never returned to The City of a Hundred Spires, and I’ve only seen two of the people I met there since—Art and Cosmo. Both visited the UK independently on several occasions and sought me out.
Don III got in touch on LinkedIn(!) a few years back. Six years sober (he felt the need to tell me) and still teaching—but back home in the USA. He also informed me, lest I was unaware, that my namesake or eponym, Alexander III of Macedon, was a homosexual. I think of him (Don, not Alexander The Great) every time my tongue touches the bit of my tooth that he chipped. Orla went home to The USA too, like I said. Found a guy, got married. She emailed once to ask me the name of the Alkaline Trio song she liked on the tape I used to play. (It was “Queen of pain”.) Cosmo was in Brazil, last I heard—married with kids, still teaching. Art went back to university to continue studying philosophy; now he’s married with a kid and back in Canada, farming canola. I’ve no idea about the others. But I hope they’re happy, wherever they are.
I made use of my TEFL certificate—or rather my training; the certificate itself was never requested—once subsequently. A woman I’d met in Cornwall on The MA Course (we’ll call her Anya) was working at a Language School that needed extra teachers over Easter. I taught a class of unruly Upper Middle Class Parisian teenagers for a fortnight. The boys—including one who’d been on crutches since the day of his arrival—kept rushing out of the class, en masse, to attack the Spanish boys, who were taunting them through the window from outside. There was a football tournament ongoing, or something, so testosterone was flowing. The boys were little bastards. The girls were okay. It was An Average Job. I got paid. The kids gave me a card on the last day that said they liked me better than Anya. I made no decision never to TEFL again; but I’ve not been paid for teaching since.
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