False Friends

False Friends

A Brief and Insignificant Novel by

Fitch O'Connell

Chapter 1 The sun had recently set in spectacular fashion, appearing as a glowing, glowering and very squashed egg-timer, beyond the Ponte da Arrábida Bridge, turning the Atlantic a brilliant ruby-orange for a few awe-inspiring minutes. Beyond the river and up a calf-stretching and ankle-bruising hill there was the Canterbury School of English, high above the centre of Portugal’s second city, Porto. No one there saw the sunset. No one had occasion to mutter words expressing awe except, perhaps, the solitary fly which circled the centre of a westfacing room. It has to be said that the fly, like all flies, was genetically incapable of muttering, however awesome the sight. The fly always circled the room. It was what it was good at – circling, silently; never muttering. It was frequently the most interesting thing going on in classroom number nine. That evening, however, at 8.07, there was some slight activity of possibly more interest other than just watching the circling, non-muttering fly.

The class was staring back at Tim with a tangible, measurable degree of hostility. As was usual during those rare moments of subtly heightened interest, the attack was being led by Carla, her eyes holding his in a steady, deep brown stare. Tim blinked, and felt his pulse quicken and his mouth go dry. Carla flicked her long, black hair.

“I am not understand,” she said, her dark voice containing a hint of menace in it.

“I didn’t understand,” Tim corrected her absentmindedly. “Not ‘I am not understand’” “I didn’t said that. You must to listen well.” The menace was now unmistakable.

Tim blinked again, paused, then once more demonstrated what he wanted the class to do. It seemed so simple. Why didn’t they understand? They had done this kind of exercise dozens of times before. Surely they recognised it for what it was? He suspected, and not for the first time, that there was a class conspiracy not to understand anything he wanted them to do. But conspiracy by its very nature demands communication, and as far as he could make out communication between the students was as unfruitful as it was between them and him, which itself was as rare as a cocktail bar in the Namibian desert. But, for once, the whole class had a single point of focus. Him. He couldn’t avoid glancing at the clock on the wall. Oh Christ! Still 50 minutes to go.

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It took a great deal of reluctant grunts, hostile glances and shuffling of seats before he got them working in small groups, gleaning minute but vital details from a text concerning ancient Chinese papermaking practices which Tim had found quite interesting. This interest didn’t seem to immediately transfer itself to the class. He watched the ‘group work’ for a few moments. The only sounds came from breaking pencil leads, and the occasional shuffle of feet or rummaging in bags. ‘Working together’ seemed to consist almost entirely of furtively looking to see what a colleague had written and copying it down, without a word being exchanged, and glancing at mobile phones switched to silent for text messages from the outside world.

He had given up trying to get them to communicate with each other verbally. He had tried in the first few weeks of term, but after a few mumbles and mutters the engine of conversation, whether it was in English or Portuguese, had always shuddered to halt and silence had thence reigned supreme. He reflected on what a motley crew they were, and indeed on the various natures of the crews that made up his various other classes. Before him sat Carla and another girl called Beatriz who were about the same age as each other and both university students, though he’d forgotten which one of them was studying management and which one was studying computer sciences. Then there were the two students from the economics faculty, and Tiago, a boy in his last year at high school, who always looked flustered when he was asked to work with Carla, who was, or would have been, Tim corrected himself, strikingly attractive if she wasn’t such a witch. A trainee witch at that. In addition there was a post-graduate chemist who only turned up every third lesson, and two doctors who insisted on keeping their mobiles phones switched on in case there was a medical emergency. The only calls they appeared to get - each of which shattered the icy air from time to time - seemed to be about what they wanted for their suppers when they got home after class. Tim wasn’t to know this as he hardly understood a word of Portuguese. An anonymous group of engineers filled the middle ground, and two businessmen made up the older element of the class, 14 strong when all hands were counted, which they rarely were.

Of the businessmen Tim could only remember the name of one of them, and that was because José Manuel took it upon himself to single himself out by regularly falling asleep during class.

Sure enough, after just five minutes with the text on Chinese paper making, the sonorous resonance of José Manuel started to emanate from the corner of the room. None of the other students remarked on this, or even looked his way or at each other, and José Manuel’s snoring was treated as being as normal as the fly buzzing over the heads of the students, which indeed it was. Tim did what he always

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did in such a situation – nothing at all. He reasoned, when occasionally pricked with guilt, that the fewer of his students who were actually conscious during class then the easier it would be for him, the teacher, to get through to the end without being totally embarrassed or flummoxed. In any case, he knew that within 5 minutes the snores would subside into a gentle, rhythmic breathing which would last, quite magically, until just before the class ended but, equally magically, until after that week’s homework had been assigned, if, that is, Tim could be arsed to assign any. He frequently couldn’t. Tim had reasoned carefully over this topic and had come to the conclusion that the fewer students who did homework, the less marking he’d have to do and the easier his already difficult life would be. As the school seemed to operate an unspoken rule that no-one could fail a year, and that every student would automatically be promoted to the next level at the end of each academic year regardless of their achievement, it didn’t really seem to matter one way or the other what they, the students, did. By extension, this meant that it didn’t matter what he, the teacher, did either.

The moment of release was upon them, and José Manuel woke up with a start, blinked, startled for a second, and joined the others in silently packing his bag with his unread text. Then, slipping ghost-like from the room, neither a word nor glance being exchanged between teacher and any student, José Manuel and his colleague’s disappeared into another world, a world beyond Tim’s comprehension. Tim’s relief at the end of class was tempered by his growing suspicion that the class he had just taught hadn’t actually existed. His touchy imagination, rarely stable and hardly ever effective but always directionless, flicked briefly onto the subject of ghouls, and then back to what really troubled him – the fact that he hadn’t actually taught them anything at all. Oh yes, he’d just spent 83 minutes in the same room as nine reluctant students, who were paying dearly for the privilege of sharing the same air as Tim, but whose level of English hadn’t changed a jot, not an iota, in all that time. Indeed, he hadn’t even attempted to teach them anything. He had learned that if he just recycled the stuff they already knew, but in different formats then it would give the illusion of learning and teaching without the dangers of failure, the drudgery of hard work or the deflation of dented self-esteem. Here he was referring to himself, because he didn’t give a tinker’s cuss what happened to the students who, he reminded himself as he stuffed papers into his battered nylon briefcase, probably didn’t really exist outside his tortured imagination anyway. He didn’t teach, they didn’t learn, no one communicated.

How could this, then, be called a class? What’s more, he thought, if he didn’t believe that he had just had a class, they couldn’t have been

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people, and the chance of them having an existence outside that room, outside his imagination, was very slight indeed.

His reverie on fending off failure was interrupted by a whirlwind of activity at the door as Jenny rushed in, catching her heel on the small ruck in the carpet, and dropping the pile of grammar books she had been clutching onto the floor. Jenny was surrounded by a swirl of words, all being spoken breathily and all at once, and they made no sense at all to Tim. It must be said that very little of what Jenny said ever made any sense to Tim, though her mood was always clear by her manner and the urgency of her uttering. But then again, Jenny was always in the same mood, or so it appeared to Tim, for he saw her only as ball of panic, a bundle of nervous internalised energy, a collapsing star that sucked energy in from others to feed its destruction. In other words, she was an hysterical, self-obsessed martyr. At least, that is what Tim thought, and he didn’t care who knew his opinion about her. He would tell anyone who cared to listen.

Indeed, he had already written and told his mum about her.

What Jenny was actually saying was rarely of little importance to anyone except herself. As it happened, she was panicking that the CD player in room nine wasn’t going to be working - again - and she just knew that the air in the room would stink because it always did when Tim had his class in there. She blamed that little slut, Carla, who always splashed herself with some evil smelling perfume, and she blamed that dozy sod who sweated and slobbered and, she’d heard, fell asleep during lessons. (That fact didn’t surprise her: what did surprise her was that the whole bloody class didn’t fall asleep during one of Tim fucking Baine’s classes.) But she especially blamed Tim fucking Baines himself for never opening the window of that stuffy little room whenever his pack of poisonous dwarves entered it.

She had been right. The air was rank and the CD player still wasn’t working. It never worked. She needed it for this lesson. It was essential.

“Why doesn’t this fucking thing ever work?” she screeched. Tim was just leaving the room, but her words fumbled past his indifference and into his ear, and he turned around and blinked.

“What doesn’t work?”

“This bastard of a CD machine.”

“It was working an hour ago. I used it.”

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“So what the fuck do you do to it then? It happens every fucking week!”

“It always works for me.”

“Oh fucking does it? Lucky fucking you. Look at this. It isn’t fucking working for me.”

“Er, why don’t you turn it on” “Turn it on? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Turn it on. Press the switch. Look, this one.” A little red light came on.

“You mean we’re supposed to know this stuff? Why the fuck don’t we get some training in this? Wait till I get hold of Charles. He should have organised some technical training. We’re not all fucking engineers.” She stared hard at Tim. “How the fuck did you know how to do that? Have you been on a course? Have you been trained when I haven’t? Some kind of fucking hierarchy, some kind of favouritism going on I don’t fucking know about, huh?”

“Training? No, why…….?” comes naturally.”

He flapped his arms.

“It sort of …..

“Comes naturally? Really? There’s nothing natural about you! I’m seeing fucking Charles about this.”

Tim left Jenny to her rage before she sucked out of him the little energy and enthusiasm he had left. He still had one more class to do before going home at 10.30., and he wanted to spend about half of his brief break between classes by standing outside in the cooling air and shutting off from his job, his colleagues, the building, and be by himself.

As bad luck would have it, or, to be more truthful, as a result of Tim’s appalling sense of judgement, he had to give up trying to snatch a few minutes peace on the doorstep of the School almost immediately.

Hoards of departing students were clashing with hoards of arriving students in the narrow street, which was blocked by a solid line of cars that were disgorging or picking up aforementioned students. The cars peeped and parped at each other in a ritualistic honking of horns; the steps of the school and the surrounding pavement were packed with struggling humanity, rich as the average pocket was, and as basic as the average instinct was. There was no peace to be found

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there. Retreating to the staff room he passed Luke on the stairs.

Luke didn’t even see Tim. Luke was locked into adoring eye contact with none other than Carla. Tim sensed that Carla knew he was there by the way she studiously avoiding looking in his direction. But what on earth was Luke, a teacher of about the same age as Tim, and a person known for his sensitivity, doing talking to Carla? And why did he look so happy to be in her presence? Luke looked, Tim dimly perceived, even radiant in her company. How was this possible? He was perturbed by these thoughts, and as he pondered them he made his way into the staff room where Bertha was huddled over some books and files. She was sitting in the same corner of the room that she always occupied.

She looked up from writing in her register. She watched Tim come into the staff room with a complete lack of interest. The flick of her eyes back down to her register might have been seen as a dismissal of Tim, for there was a sense of negative acknowledgement in her withdrawal to her red pen. This visual dismissal might have been interpreted vocally as, “Hmmph!”

Tim, however, very rarely picked up on any kind of signals or even the most obvious displays of body language. Tim was too concerned about his own ability or inability to communicate with others to worry about other people’s attempts to communicate with him.

Bertha, on the other hand, had become famous – within the four walls of the School at any rate – for communicating in a totally negative way with all her colleagues. In fact, it was generally agreed, she had a larger collection of negative statements or answers to make about almost anything at all than anyone else that any of the other teachers had ever come across. According to popular wisdom (which was normally found emanating from the small group who gathered around the photocopier expressly for the purpose of exchanging gossip), her top three favourite expressions were “No. I don’t think so” “Certainly not” and “You must be joking.”

But she never said “That’s no problem!” Not even to herself. Not ever.

In recent years she had only used just one fairly positive expression.

This was: “Ooh, Jesus! Do that again!”

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But no one at the School had ever heard her say that. A rather agile young male who lived some one hour’s drive away to the east had heard her say this, after a lot of negativity that had almost, but not quite, put him off pursuing his intentions. The fact that he only heard it once probably means that he didn’t do it again, whatever it was. But that would be another tale altogether.

Outside the staff room, clustered around the photocopier were the normal group of soothsayers, sages and gossips. In the staff room there was only one other occupant apart from Bertha, and he was staring at Tim over his glasses.

“Ah, Tim. ‘Who passes in the sunlight / By ways that know the light footfall?’” Ben had a languid way of addressing people, rather like a cat might that knows the mouse has been firmly attached to a nail by a short length of string.

“Eh?” said Tim nervously.

“Nothing, Tim. Nothing of interest. But how are you? You look quite frazzled. You frequently do.”

“Frazzled is exactly what I feel. I always feel frazzled. When I’m not here I don’t feel half as frazzled. But even thinking about coming here….”

“Ah, welcome to Frazzled School, where you can teach English while you lose your wits.”

“And learn English while you lose a fortune,” muttered Bertha from the corner. “’She speaks! O, speak again, bright angel!’ or is it case of ‘The Kraken Wakes’?”

“Piss off, Ben.” “Well,” Ben said looking back at Tim. “That has certainly put me in my place. A woman of few words is our Bertha, but always such pithy words.”

“Ah, women,” Tim ventured unwisely. Ben looked expectantly, waiting for him to continue. Tim hesitated, his eyes downcast. He fumbled with his briefcase. He mumbled, “I mean, like in my class, there is this awful woman. Terrible. A real witch.”

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“When you say ‘a real witch’ I take it you mean she is really like a witch, not actually a witch.”

“No,” Tim flushed and stammered. “She’s really a witch. A real witch.” He could feel the little hammers in his head working overtime; they always did at moments of high panic, like now, when he had to fill in the colours of a new and surprising reality, a new reality of his own creation often as not, with his own paintbrush.

“She’s a real witch? A genuine, spells, broomstick and black-cattotting witch, is she?”

“Oh yes,“ said Tim, under his breath. “She sometimes brings her broomstick to class. I’ve seen it. She keeps it in a special nylon bag, and it twitches.” Tim didn’t make it clear whether it was the bag or the broomstick that twitched. “And when she leaves, there is always a black cat waiting for her in the street.”

“Her familiar waiting to take her home. That’s really quite sweet, don’t you think so Bertha?”

“Get lost, Ben.” “Certainly, madam.” And with that Ben got up from his chair and picked up his briefcase. “I bid thee adieu. Class 4.9 will be waiting, no doubt champing at the bit.”

The gaggle of gigglers around the photocopier outside the staff room grinned at Ben as he strode through them, and he executed a courteous bow and flourished his hands as he did so. But his apparent dismissal of the garbage that Tim had been saying had disguised other feelings. He still recoiled at the memory of entering Tim’s classroom with a sack over his head and a broom in his hand after Tim had claimed that the room had been invaded by a massive swarm of angry bees, while all Ben had found was a solitary fly buzzing around in a studious sort of way. This had been no more or less funny than Tim’s hysterical phone call to the School two weeks before that when he claimed that the new flat he’d just moved into had a dead woman in a cupboard. Ben hadn’t attended that emergency, but he had been concerned when he heard that Tim had, in fact, been terrified by an upended mop. Without another thought about witches or broomsticks or cats, Ben went off to teach.

Tim fiddled with the clasp of his briefcase.

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“Bertha,” he said uncertainly, “could I borrow your copy of ‘FCE Practice Tests’ – just for a few minutes? I need to check….”

“Certainly not,” boomed Bertha without looking up.

Tim carried on fiddling with the clasp of his briefcase for a few more minutes in the uncomfortable silence that had descended on the staff room. Then he left, silently, for the last class of the night, his spirits low, his energy reserves dipping to zero. It was a fairly standard night. ***** “Beers?” came the cheery prompt from somebody in the photocopier crowd. “Who’s for beers?”

The animated response came on cue, and would have fooled an eavesdropper into thinking that this was an isolated or perhaps unusual call, maybe a sudden celebration or the need to mark an important event. But it wasn’t. It was as regular as the sun setting and classes finishing, and was a cry heard six nights a week. It was 10.40, the night was young and the beer was cold. And no one present in the building was required to be in work before lunchtime the next day.

Alice and Jorge Silva owned the Café Banana, which had the unfortunate luck to be situated not only in the same street as the School, but which was also the closest dispenser of alcoholic beverages, apart from Ben’s locker. This made it the natural candidate as ‘official’ bar of the School, the place where the teachers, at least, could most certainly be found if they weren’t slaving over a hot classroom or idling away their time in the staff room. Senhor and Senhora Silva had gained many years of experience in providing for the Brits and their drinking habits, and had become quite accustomed to the sight of young women drinking tankards of beer, and of empty bottles piling up as an evening progressed. Coping with the Brits drinking habits is not an exact science, they had discovered, and if not handled correctly it could be a rough trade indeed. They had developed their own techniques for dealing with it, and the main one had included a change of bar furniture some years earlier which primarily involved replacing the large, square, moveable tables with small round ones which were screwed firmly to the floor. This limited the number of empty bottles and glasses that could be left on tables that couldn’t be put together to increase the surface area. This, together with the added and very deliberate habit of never clearing the table until the clients had left meant that, after a fairly short period of

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time, the Brits would be deterred from drinking more due to the severe lack of storage space, and would move on. In this way they hoped they were making an honest effort to deter public drunkenness while extracting a regular sum of money from these curious foreigners.

Tim sometimes joined the gang at the bar down the road in an effort to help them fill the table tops, and to generally assist in that easiest of tasks, persuading the locals that the Brits were nothing grander than a bunch of drunken sots. The actual quantity of beer consumed each night per head was lamentably small by British standards - four bottles or the equivalent of two pints would not have caused a flicker of interest in Islington, Moss Side or Motherwell (except, perhaps, to indicate that the consumer might be a little under the weather due to their modest, nay, timid intake) - but here in Porto more than a single beer on normal days, or a large brandy after coffee on New Years Eve might be considered somewhat risqué, at least in public, and therefore was only attempted by art students, anarchists and priests.

While this prudish public reaction to alcohol consumption might have concealed a hidden home consumption way above the European average, the general reaction to the Brits from the School piling up bottles every night was the relish of local gossip, and exaggeration played its usual role in such tittle-tattle, and so it was that the students of the School who frequented the bars in the street for the pre or post class coffees heard horrible tales of debauchery and licentious behaviour about their teachers. Few believed the stories, though most pretended to; no one was impressed, and some were even embarrassed. Not that any of this bothered the Brits one little bit.

Tim was an outsider to this group. It wasn’t because he disapproved of their drinking, or was at all sensitive about what the locals thought (in fact, he had no idea whatsoever what the locals thought) but Tim was an outsider because he was a natural outsider. He didn’t cultivate outsideness as such, it was simply that he had not a clue as to how to be anything else. His diffident mien, his inability to meet anyone’s gaze, his ineptitude at answering direct questions, his lack of a sense of humour and a certain misdirection of a fertile imagination, plus his watery blue eyes, meant that he would always be on the fringes of groups, even of fringe groups.

One of those amongst the assembled throng, however, was very keen to join up with Tim in some fringe activities of her very own. She stared across the tiny tables at him with no attempt whatsoever to disguise her desire. Like a leopard waiting quietly for its moment to strike.

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Only vaguely aware of Eileen’s seductive smile, Tim fiddled with his glass and pulled absentmindedly at the label on his bottle of beer, his attention slipping in and out of the conversation around him.

“Do you know what was eating Charles today, Tim?” It leapt out at him from the crowd. Dear God, a direct question.

Marshall your thoughts, man. Play for time.

“Charles?”

“Yes, Charles, you know? Your boss? The one who signs your pay cheques? Remember? Charles – tall, grey hair….”

“Yes, yes…….I know who Charles is….”

“Amazing” “A special day,” said a voice from the crowd.

“But I haven’t seen him today,” pleaded Tim. “Don’t talk drivel, Tim. You had lunch with him today.”

“I did? That was me? Yes, of course. Ah yes, now I see what you’re getting at. I know, he had chicken and salad.”

“What?”

“He ate chicken and salad for lunch. And he had a Pepsi Light” “Tim – concentrate. Listen.” The voice became slow and deliberate.

“Not ‘what was he eating?’ but ‘what was eating him?’ Percebes? On second thoughts, Tim, forget it. Just drink your beer.”

“You’re sure?”

“We’re sure.”

Tim did as he was told.

Jenny came and stood behind him. She had calmed down a great deal now, and didn’t spill too much beer down the back of his shirt from the glass she was holding as she leaned forward to pass on some information. She needed him to know that she was having an Observed Lesson, part of every teacher’s assessment process, in two

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days time, on Friday, immediately following the class Tim would have with Carla et al, and could he please make sure that the equipment worked properly and that the room was well ventilated, etc.

“I’m relying on you, Tim. And for pity’s sake don’t over-run your time,” (little chance of that, thought Tim), “and if anything, can you finish a bit early so I have time to sort the room out?” Tim warmed immediately to this idea.

Jenny wandered off, slopping her beer over any one who stood in her way.

It seemed as if Eileen never walked. Indeed, as no one had ever seen her legs or even her feet, her means of locomotion were sometimes debated around the photocopier and elsewhere. She floated, she drifted and she wafted, but it was her favourite form of arriving that she chose on this occasion. She materialised behind Tim’s chair, scenting the air more effectively than an incense burner in a Cathedral, and her swishing silk-like clothes joined with the jingling of a myriad bracelets, tiny chains and other baubles and bangles hanging from her neck and wrists. She proceeded to dab Tim’s wet shirt with a large silk scarf, one hand resting on his shoulder, kneading it gently. She leaned forward over her self-imposed chore, and the regular, circular movements of her forearm caused her body to rock slightly, and the large silver crucifix which she wore around her neck responded with a gentle swinging movement, which rhythmically tapped the back of Tim’s head every few seconds, and occasionally clinked with the gold Star of David that also hung close to her throat.

The silver crescent moon of Islam was hanging too high on her neck to join in.

“Is that better, Tim?” her voice was dark and smooth.

Eileen tended to touch people as she spoke to them, and she was much given to hugging and caressing them, both male and female.

The hugs and caresses that she reserved for Tim were special, though, and they were a constant source of conjecture by the photocopier crowd. They went completely unnoticed by Tim. “We’re going on to ‘Amigos’ bar. Are you coming?” Once again, the sensuousness of the way that this was said was marvelled at by the assembled horde, but completely lost on Tim. “No,” said Tim simply.

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He went home on foot, alone. He lived by himself with his misgivings and a great deal of clutter, but almost no dirt. He was a scrupulously clean person and he frequently filled his unoccupied moments, of which there were many, with little chores around the house. Some might say it was obsessive behaviour, but he was addicted to collecting second hand toothbrushes with the sole purpose of using them to scrub around small objects, like door handles, kitchen taps and ketchup bottles. He took care to iron every item of his underwear, taking enormous care with his socks in particular, but he never found the same need to be extended to his shirts or trousers, which he seemed to prefer scrupulously clean, but unironed. And he never, ever put anything away. The floor was his cupboard, his wardrobe and his bookcase.

That Wednesday evening he got home just after midnight, and once he had washed himself, went straight to bed alone, except for a deep sigh.

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Chapter 2 September 30th Darling Timmy, It was so lovely to talk to you last weekend, and I’m so glad that you are settling in there. I still think you could get a job nearer home, though. I’m sure there are lots of opportunities in Basildon. Are you sure you’ve really looked?

Joey has just gone into town to do a spot of shopping so I thought I’d sit in the garden and enjoy one of those occasional days when the sun shines and write to you. I hope that this will make you write back very soon. You know how much mummy loves to get letters from you!

Your friend Ben sounds like a very nice boy. I’m glad you are getting on so well. The trip up the river (what was it called?) together sounded like fun, and I was very proud of you when you told me how you had to rescue Ben from the water. It sounded very dangerous.

Until then, I didn’t even realise that piranha fish even lived in European rivers. I’m sure Ben will be forever grateful to you for saving him. But do be careful, darling. Mummy does worry so!

I wasn’t so happy to hear about that woman though. Helen, wasn’t it?

She sounds a dangerous type to me, but then so many young women seem dangerous to me these days, not like the young ladies of my day. You really can’t be too careful, Timmy. She might get you into trouble if you’re not very, very careful. I know you’re a big boy now and all that, but you’re still mummy’s little boy and I don’t want you to get influenced by some of these types. Oh dear, I do seem to be nagging a bit, don’t I?! It’s only because I worry about you, darling.

I think you’re quite right not to go around telling people about what happened when you left that horrid school in Spain. I’m sure they wouldn’t understand and might even think that you had something to do with the fire and all that just like those dreadful Spanish police did.

Mummy knows you didn’t mean any harm, but they might not see it the way I do because they don’t know what a brave soldier my Timmy is, do they? So, I think you’re right to keep mum on that score (just my little joke!)

The garden is looking lovely in the autumn sun. I wish you could see it. I do hope you can make it back for Xmas. I know its too early to make definite plans for Xmas but Joey will be here (of course) and

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John and Penelope are threatening to come over on Christmas day, which would be lovely. So let me know when you’ve made your plans – don’t forget to include us!!

Well, I think that’s all for now. Write soon, Timmy darling. I look forward to getting a letter from you very soon.

All my love Mummy.

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Chapter 3 The Friday following Tim’s appearance in Café Banana, he was once again facing the prospect of another bout of hand to hand combat with Carla, another round of the somnolent reaction of José Manuel to the English language, and yet another example of the chasm between himself and the rest of the students, caused by their studied indifference and his indifferent ineptitude. He surprised himself by finding that he was facing these appalling odds with an admirable degree of equilibrium and stoicism. It was time for another lesson. It was becoming easier, he found, to dismiss the whole experience of being himself there - in that country, at that school, with that class especially - as a piece of theatre which was as inconsequential and unrewarding as it was unrehearsed. Teaching was a sham, a piece of theatre, and most of it improvised.

Soon, he reasoned, the performance would be over and he would instantly forget it, so there was no point in being too aware of the present. The students weren’t in slightest preoccupied with present time while they were in his classroom, and spent their time there either reliving the recent past or anticipating the immediate future.

His desultory progress through the front door of the School and up the main staircase which had accompanied his thoughts had been viewed discreetly from a distance by Charles, whose actual title was ‘Academic Director’ but who was always referred to as ‘the Director’ or, occasionally, ‘The Laird’. Charles was quite new to the job, and the presence of some of his colleagues puzzled him, and none less so than Tim who, Charles had realised on first meeting him, wasn’t up to the job. It didn’t matter what the job was, Charles was sure he wasn’t up to it. Not for the first time did his troubled mind start to trace the events that had led him to finding himself running a language school on behalf of an unpleasantly aggressive Portuguese couple. A school, he reminded himself, which appeared to be staffed with halfwits, raving lunatics and prima donnas. Indeed, he had recently heard some stories about how the school had been set up in the first place, and he felt uncomfortable at what now appeared to be his collusion in such a shabby scheme, as innocent as he knew his part was.

It had been over twelve years since Abílio Gomes Santos had come up with a devilishly clever plan to dislodge Senhor António and his barmy wife. For two years before stumbling across the plan, rotund and greasy haired Abílio Santos and his sharp tongued school teacher of a wife had tried every trick they could think of to dislodge their unwelcome tenants from the enormous house that his mother had left them. The dogs proved a complete failure, and the Santos’

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suspected that the six sharp toothed canines of the fierce Serra d’Estrela breed had ended up in an improvised version of that meat stew so favoured by the northern Portuguese, Cozido à Portuguesa.

Similarly cutting off the electricity and then the water supply had done little to disturb the ancient routine of Senhor António and his barmy wife. Indeed, it seemed to strengthen Senhor António’s resolve and add quaintly to his wife’s barminess. In fact, following the incidents which led to the loss of these amenities, she had taken to wearing loaves on bread on her feet instead of the more traditional fluffy carpet slippers when she treated the neighbourhood to her customary early morning selection of favourite folk songs from the Minho region.

She was accustomed to delivering these from her vantage point on the roof of the house - clinging on as she did in all weathers to the chimney stack by her fingertips. Senhor Santos’ attempts to turn the house into a rat farm, a malarial swamp and finally a refuge for aggressive hippies had all turned to failure in one way or another, the rats having left in apparent disgust at the conditions, and the hippies being quickly tamed when they all went down with a rare form of swamp fever. The rent laws, in place since the revolution of 1974, had meant that they could not move Senhor António and his glutenshod spouse from the magnificent nineteenth century granite house.

The house, bought speculatively by Senhor Santos’s mother in the 1950’s, was magnificent, or once had been, and boasted exuberant decorative tiles, a glorious tangle of a garden containing a neglected pine and a seriously attractive jacaranda tree. There was an expansive view over the tumbling red-roofs of the houses that fell away to the river Douro below. Nor could they charge them a level of rent that could even hope to cover the cost of minimal repairs to the structure. It was decaying slowly through lack of investment, and property developers had had their shark-like eyes on it for some time.

The devilishly clever plan had come one into being one wet afternoon in late January when Senhor Santos had charitably, and therefore uncharacteristically, agreed to pick up his wife from the state school where she taught, to help her with an unexpectedly large number of books that suddenly needed ferrying home while the school principal was off work with a heavy head cold. The dingy state of the school had immediately impressed Abílio Santos, and the unheated, dampridden classrooms especially so. His enquiries led him to discover that the piles of broken timber which were stacked up seemingly at random in each room were, in fact, the pupils’ desks and chairs, and the icy draughts blowing in from each of the unglazed windows turned out to be a permanent feature of every classroom. There appeared to be no repair schedule envisaged, and there was no money in the kitty even if there had been. All this, it seemed, was par for the course and tolerated by the city authorities. It was the similarity between the

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conditions at the school where his wife worked at the thankless task of screaming at hordes of cold, hungry children and the general state of disrepair of the crumbling mansion where his stubborn tenants held out that sparked the first twinkling of an idea. Within a month the master plan was ready. He was going to turn the house into a private school where he could perfect his scowl and his wife could teach raggedy children from the local neighbourhood, the bairro de Sé.

They would offer free, extra school lessons, evenings and weekends, thereby ensuring a constant round of maximum inconvenience for his tenants. The children would be encouraged to play anywhere in the house that they wished, except the one room that would serve as a classroom and to which Senhor Abílio Santos would to apply a lick of paint. He would apply the paint mainly in a spirit of spite.

Maria Fátima, his wife and a teacher of German and English, wasn’t so sure it was a good idea.

‘Who’s to say the children won’t end up in a cozido?’ she asked.

‘What makes you think that they,’ she paused meaningfully at this word while glancing in the general direction of the old house, ‘they will be more bothered by kids than by the rats or the mosquitoes or the hippies?’

Her husband tapped the side of his nose in a knowing way, and settled the coat slung over his shoulders with a practised twitch. He had a plan.

Six months after the ‘school’ had been running, busy with rowdy urchins from the nearby and impoverished neighbourhood of the Sé, and who were being encouraged to undertake every adventure and take every risk in the house except the dangers of education for fear of learning something, Senhor António was at last beginning to look a little rattled and his wife was a little less certain about singing lusty songs on the rooftop. Hordes of scruffy kids had taken to hurling broken slates and tiles at her every time she opened her mouth. It was then that Senhor Santos produced his masterstroke and by means of judicious contacts within the local town hall managed to have Senhor António and his barmy wife condemned as a fire hazards in ‘a place of education’ and a court order enforced their removal from the premises, an act unkindly assisted by a large number of children from the neighbouring bairro of the Sé who had been mysteriously tipped off an hour before the eviction was to take place.

An unforeseen by-product of the ‘school’ was the emergence of a small group of children who not only actually seemed to want to learn

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a little in the way of foreign languages but were actively being encouraged in their studies by their parents. So supportive of offering their little darlings every opportunity to get ahead were the parents that, when Senhor Abílio and Senhora Maria Fátima announced that the school was going to be closed down, they offered to dig deep into their threadbare pockets and reassess their meagre income so that the extra studies could be continued. Never being ones to turn down the offer of money for old rope, no matter how poor their customers were, the owners of the ‘school’ agreed to continue offer studies on a Saturday mornings for those who could pay. German was dropped from the curriculum, and Senhora Maria Fátima, who had never let her considerable inability to speak even vaguely fluent English to stand in her way, set up classes in ‘de Inglish’ and soon the little school was earning more in one weekend than Senhor António and his barmy wife had paid in rent for a whole year. And so was born the ‘Cantaburry School of the English’, later changed by advice from friends to the ‘Canterbury School of English’ in Porto.

After two years the school had grown so much that they had been forced to employ two part time teachers, one of whom – a young woman who had grown up in South Africa and who was bilingual – proved to be immensely popular. Enthused by the project, and with a keen eye on investment, Senhor and Senhora Santos spent not inconsiderable sums in improving the building so that it progressed from being a hovel to a slum, and thence to a modestly improved building and finally to a magnificent example of a superficially restored nineteenth century house set in its own gardens. As it grew the fees became higher and the clientele shifted from the sons and daughters of impoverished shopkeepers in the bairro of the Sé to the sons and daughters of wealthy businessmen, doctors, lawyers and local politicians. The success of employing a native speaker early on had been built upon, and the school now adopted a policy of employing British nationals for the snob value of ‘British’ rather than ‘American’ English, as long as these native speakers were young enough and inexperienced enough to be employed at a very cheap rate. Six years after the hapless tenants of the house had been evicted the Santos’ took a back seat in the running of the school and employed a manager to do the work for them. The manager was given a fairly free hand in how he ran the place, with the proviso that he would guarantee an annually agreed income for the owners, an income that meant that both Senhor Abílio and Senhora Maria Fátima could have given up their chosen careers, had they wanted to do so.

The first manager had been a fiercely pleasant Irishman who had taken enormous pleasure in establishing a system of control and management that, while being extremely effective, relied entirely on

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his presence for it to work, its modus operandi being obscure to those less reliant on Jameson whiskey as fuel. Once having established his idiosyncratic style of management and structure he left in a hurry, rumour had it to set up another such establishment in Dubai. Charles had therefore been the second person to be employed as the manager of the Canterbury School of English. He had apparently inherited a system of management that had to be scrapped and started again, and a small staff who, it appeared, had been employed mainly due to their claims to be oddballs. Or so it might have seemed to an outsider. Charles was an old hand at this game, however, and he knew that management systems in EFL schools were usually conspicuous by their absence, not their eccentricity, and that the only kind of people who left their homes in the UK or elsewhere to teach English abroad were oddballs to a person. So, instead of complaining about the hand he’d been dealt, Charles’ first mission was to persuade the Santos’ purse to open and invest a little money in modern technology, such as computers plus a serious amount of educational software, assuring them that this was a real investment which would reap multiple returns. This proved not to be a difficult task as Senhor Abílio had just recently discovered the delights of the Internet for himself and was a natural enthusiast, as was Senhora Maria Fátima, who was a fan of anything that could be plugged in, or could run on batteries. They left him thereafter with a brief to run the school efficiently, by which they meant that he was to ensure that their recent outlay on expensive electronic equipment would be quickly recouped.

Charles’ confidence that this would be done was dimmed somewhat as he considered Tim’s inelegant progress into the building, and he wondered if it wasn’t time for him to visit one of his classes to observe and to assess for himself the damage he suspected was being wrought. ***** Lifting his briefcase wearily from the chair in the staff room, Tim went to teach his class. He was more than reluctant; he was desperate.

He was a few minutes late, and passing the open door into Luke’s class he saw the faces of happy, smiling students, their bright eyes gleaming as they looked adoringly at their teacher, while the scrawny, stick-insect-like figure of Luke perched, elf-like, on the desk in front of them, his arms outstretched as he made a point expansively.

“How does he do it?” Tim thought, and the last few trudged steps to the classroom became even heavier.

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In contrast to the room next door, all the eyes of the students in room nine were averted from Tim’s entrance, and he felt as if he were walking into a very large sack of damp flour. He unpacked his bag, and total silence reigned throughout.

Carla was remarkably subdued that evening, Tim observed, and his lesson on the present perfect continuous tense produced exactly what he had planned – meek acceptance by the students with the minimum of effort by himself. They turned to the correct pages of the course book with dumb acquiescence, fiddled with their pens, screwed up balls of paper and wondered what they should do that weekend while Tim explained some grammatical point in a deliberate monotone.

They doodled in the margins of the worksheets instead of filling in the required answers, knowing full well that Tim would never check. Tim pointed out yet another reading text on fishing in the course book that had clearly been chosen for its utter lack of interest to any member of the human race. José Manuel, right on cue, fell into a nasally sprightly sleep before subsiding into a slower, quieter version of the same activity. It must be observed that his brain activity at this point was higher than had he been awake in the class. By the end of the lesson Carla had not said a single word to Tim nor had she even glanced in his direction. Tim had decided, yet again, not to give them any homework that evening. Once more his decision was based on the obvious outcome that it would remove any extra work from him.

This neither pleased nor upset the students who knew that, even if he had required them to do some homework, they wouldn’t have bothered to do it and Tim would probably never have asked to see it anyway. The lesson ended in a flash, a few minutes before the scheduled time, and the classroom emptied in a flurry of activity, the only moment of interest or indeed activity of the entire evening. The one exception was José Manuel, who was continuing his deep slumber in the corner of the room, clearly oblivious to the world. Tim was just thinking about the best way to wake him when Jenny flew in through the door, her naturally frizzy hair sticking out sideways, giving the impression that she’d just stuck a wet finger in an electric socket.

“Christ, you remembered my Ob. Thanks!” she spluttered. Tim had, in fact, forgotten that Jenny had an Observed Lesson. She was in full flight, powered entirely by adrenaline and a sophisticated shade of insanity.

“Have you checked the CD player? No? You didn’t use it?! You shit!

I asked you to. I’d better check………..what the fuck is he doing there?” At the tip of her outstretched arm was an accusing finger, pointing at the figure of José Manuel slumped in the corner.

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“Fucking get him out of here, now!” She managed to shout through clenched teeth, a remarkable feat in itself, in a stage whisper that would have wakened the dead.

Or not. When Tim shook José Manuel’s shoulder, the hands, which had been lightly clasped on José’s lap, slipped lifelessly to the side, and his head lolled forward. His left leg shot forward pulling the whole body sideways into a grotesque position that would have been extremely uncomfortable to those that were able to feel pain. The absence of any movement in the room was the most striking thing for the next fifteen seconds. Even the house fly had stopped flying around in dizzying circles and had alighted on the ceiling, presumably to wait and see what happened next. No one was breathing, not José Manuel, not Jenny not Tim. No, there was some movement – the arterial blood pumping through the necks and across the foreheads of Tim and Jenny was evidently increased. Not so that of José Manuel.

Jenny reacted first. She clasped one hand in front of her mouth and said, her voice a true octave higher than normal “The bastard’s dead” Tim pondered the moment. It certainly seemed that Jenny was right.

“I don’t believe it” Jenny continued.

Tim was about to suggest the various ways that suddenly occurred to him about verifying this fact when he realised that Jenny had not meant that she hadn’t believed he wasn’t dead, but something else.

“The bastard’s done it deliberately to fuck up my lesson, my Ob!” She raged, fists clenched, her knuckles stretched white.

Even while the whirl of his thoughts that made up his state of consciousness roared around him, Tim thought this an unlikely scenario. After all, as far as he knew José Manuel hadn’t even known of Jenny’s existence and consequently would have had no reason to die simply to spite her. Not that paranoid Jenny would have accepted this as a valid excuse.

Jenny turned her venom on Tim. “I might have known it. Trust one of your students to do this to me.” She clapped her hand to her quivering, t-shirted bosom as she said this.

Tim was having difficulty in adjusting to this curious reaction in the face of death, and wondered, not for the first time, if he’d momentarily

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passed out and missed some vital part of the plot. He marshalled his thoughts as best he could, and put his hands up in what he hoped was a manner invoking calmness and reflection.

“Erm,” he said, “um, hmm.” He felt that summed it up quite neatly.

“Get rid of………it,” hissed Jenny, pointing at the crumpled figure in the corner.

“What?” Tim heard himself say in a quavering voice.

“You heard. Get …him….out of here. Now. Go, go, go.” She exploded into activity. “I’ll check the tape recorder is working, and then I’ll need to set the chairs in groups of four and…….what are you waiting for?” Jenny was nothing if not insistent.

Tim suddenly discovered what it was like to be a statue, frozen by confusion and indecision to the spot. He tried to ask for clarification.

What he said was “ - ”.

Jenny huffed a great huff at Tim’s lack of movement or involvement in getting the room ready for her lesson, and looked around wildly, truly a woman possessed, her general rage sparking itself indiscriminately against tables and chairs while her intense personalised hostility was directed at Tim and José Manuel. Tim thought, at that moment, that he would gladly have exchanged places with his late student.

Suddenly a desperate conviction gripped Jenny.

“Quick. Take his head. I’ll take his feet. The fire-escape. Quick.”

Tim blinked.

“Fucking hell, Tim. My class starts in five minutes. Get your fucking act together.”

“What?”

“Chrissake. Grab his shoulders,” she was already tugging at his feet and José’s body was being dragged from his seat. Tim caught his shoulders as they plunged downwards and he gasped under the unexpected weight - the cut of José’s suit had expertly hidden a large proportion of his corpulent body. Using her feet to kick open the crash-bar on the emergency exit, Jenny forged ahead onto the fire escape like a spirit possessed. At the last moment Tim had placed

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José’s briefcase onto its late owner’s stomach as the hapless trio lurched through the open door and onto the metal platform that formed the top of the fire escape, and the briefcase slid to the floor again, where it stayed. For a brief second Tim breathed in the cool night air, and looked over the garden at the back of the building to the backs of the buildings opposite, and hoped that no one in any of them was looking out of their window at that moment in time. Within that brief second Tim also reflected how fortunate it was that the evening was unexpectedly cool, for that would reduce the chance of encountering students in the garden below. He gritted his teeth.

“Quick!”

They clattered down the staircase, Tim breathing heavily after just six steps, his shirt wet with effort almost instantly, partly, though not solely, through the difficulty of carrying a heavy body down a steep flight of steps in the dark. Fear made him sweat too, as did the horror he was experiencing of clutching the still warm armpits of a dead man. At the platform on the floor below they were required to make two rapid 90º turns. Jenny had been travelling downwards at such a speed in her haste to get back to the classroom to arrange the chairs into groups of four that Tim, being tugged down at an increasing rate of knots and tied to Jenny by the impediment of the dead weight of José Manuel, crashed against the guard rail with such a force that he was forced to let go of his grip. It was a full three steps that José’s head clunked sickeningly down the metal treads before Jenny realised that something had happened.

“Chrissake, you wimp. Fucking pick him up.” Tim could have sworn at that moment of crisis within a crisis that she was steam or possibly smoke had issued from her mouth. Perhaps he had even seen a flicker of flame issuing from the dark space beyond her jerking lips and jabbing teeth.

They reached the bottom of the steps.

“Now what?” gasped Tim, leaning against a fire escape support and keeping José Manuel’s body off the ground by a tight grasp to his collar at the back of his neck. Jenny looked around in jerky, insectlike movements.

“The garage.” she announced with finality.

The garage wasn’t really a garage at all. They just called it that.

Nothing less than a small battle tank or some other caterpillar-tracked vehicle could have accessed it from the road in front of the school due

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to the low wall and high pavement that separated them. It was used to store stationery and other bulky deliveries, and as a hiding place for embarrassing mistakes (like the order for 1000 poster sized portraits of the H.M. the Queen), a final resting place for broken or outdated equipment and now, it would seem, defunct students. The thought crossed Tim’s mind that perhaps he might later be expected to enter José’ Manuel’s name in the ‘Faults’ book in the staff room.

They were still standing at the bottom of the fire escape. Jenny was giving him a hard look.

“OK, the garage,” Tim said, having no other suggestion to make, “And then what?”

“Later. After the lesson. We’ll sort it out later,” she snapped.

José was laid to rest on a temporary mortuary slab of conveniently placed boxes of A4 photocopying paper, and Tim found himself unavoidably folding José Manuel’s arms into the prayer position on his chest, in the style of alabaster fourteenth century knights in English Parish Churches. While he was doing this Jenny, without a word, had already run back up the fire escape, taking the steps two at a time. She had her priorities.

Tim had none. He looked at José, laid out there so peacefully on those stacks of boxes, and tried to make sense of what had happened in the last five minutes. José, a middle-aged student who, now that he came to think about it, Tim had never heard speak a word of Portuguese – let alone English – looked calm enough. There had been no panic, no surprise in this death, thought Tim. Except to himself. Jenny was clearly only worried about the inconvenience to her own arrangements and Tim, until this moment of reflection, hadn’t had a moment to be worried. He had been too busy being bossed about. He closed the rear door of the garage. Now what? Well, there was the small matter of the last class of the evening to teach, and he was already two minutes late for that. He surprised himself at just how easily he managed to switch off the unreal experience of the sudden death that he had just encountered, and he plodded upstairs, collected his things (which had clearly been hurled out of room nine into the corridor) and settled into giving a lesson. His occasional lapses into a mentally detached state caused by recent events went unnoticed by his class who had already all decided, individually, and largely unknown to each other, to register for someone else’s classes, anyway, the following term.

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It was the last lesson of the evening, and it ended with its usual whimper. Tim hung around the staff room instead of adopting his normal routine of shooting off home immediately after classes so as to avoid the usual Friday night jolliness and beeriness. He found himself in the decidedly unlikely position of looking for Jenny. In the past he had even been known to duck behind chairs and hide under tables to avoid coming into contact with her, but now, impossible as it seemed, they were bound together in an unholy alliance. She appeared quite suddenly and unexpectedly, looking rather flushed and, unusually, grinning broadly. She saw him staring at her.

“Tim, my love,” she positively beamed while Tim blanched “How nice to see you still here, and yes, it was brilliant.” She almost giggled.

“Really, I was quite fantastic. Charles couldn’t do anything but be very, very impressed. And how nice of you to wait around and ask.”

At first Tim looked nonplussed, then the penny dropped.

“The observed lesson. Great.” He didn’t sound very enthusiastic, but Jenny was soaring too high to notice.

“Er, Jenny….?” His barely heard whisper contrasted sharply with Jenny’s raucous bellow.

“What is it Tim? Going for a celebratory drink then? Come on, I’ll buy you one.” She really was flying high tonight.

“Er, no. Its just that……well, what shall we do about….. you know?”

Jenny looked blank.

“You know…..the garage. José. What should we do?” His voice had descended to something less than a whisper.

“What? What should we do? About what?” She was annoying loud.

Tim felt the little bit of reality that was left to him slipping away rapidly.

He gave a sadly pathetic mime of carrying something heavy. It did the trick.

“Oh, that. Your student. What’s his name? Joaquim, wasn’t it?” she was shouting, and Tim’s hands were attempting to raise themselves above her body to quieten her. Recognition now positively twinkled in her smiling eyes. “What do you want to do about it? I mean, what is there to do? He’s not hurting anybody, is he?”

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“But we can’t just leave him there” he hissed, exasperation mixed with disbelief.

“Don’t be so melodramatic. Let’s think about it in the morning.”

“The morning?! But .. but it’s a holiday tomorrow and the place is closed.”

“Monday then. Sure you’re not coming for a beer? Oh, I found his brief case on the floor by the fire escape. Give it to security, will you?

Tell them a student left it behind.”

Tim shook his head in defeat. He felt that events had already swallowed him up.

Now he was being buried with them.

Nevertheless he handed the briefcase over to security with a mumbled explanation and watched as Jenny breezed off, chatting happily with the photocopier gang, all clearly intent on big beers.

“Still feeling frazzled, or worse?” Ben had been staring at him.

“Worse. Much worse.”

Ben looked suddenly serious. He was about twice as old as Tim but far younger in spirit. His wisdom and counsel were frequently sought.

He was the School’s resident uncle.

“Let’s go somewhere quiet and you can tell me about it, if you like.”

Relief flooded Tim’s face, and tears of gratitude, enhanced by his need for his mother, were only just hidden from public scrutiny by a deft flick of the head. They went into an empty classroom, and Tim explained the sequence of events of that evening as best he could, though with each word he spoke he felt himself drifting more and more into a dreamlike state. He finished with his confusion about Jenny’s apparent lack of concern.

“Of all the things that worry and confuse me about this story,” Ben lingered on the word ‘story’, “Jenny’s failure to recognise a problem that she doesn’t see as her own is the least of them.” He smiled kindly at Tim, whose misery was now evident. “What does bother me, though, is that the concept of a dead student in your classroom, or in the garage for that matter, might appear to someone more cynical than me to tie in rather snugly with recent strange phenomena that you’ve reported. Like another student of yours, who brings a broomstick to class, or a room full of non-existent bees. The awful

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threat posed by a dry mop. So, you will forgive me if I ask you for some evidence of this event.”

He paused, and smiled at Tim, who grinned back weakly.

“Another thing that bothers me is, if this is story is true, why you didn’t tell anyone else immediately instead of moving the body. It doesn’t add up, you know.”

“Well, there were lessons and things….”

“Oh for Heaven’s sake…”

“And Jenny wanted …….”

“Ah, yes, Jenny, we must all obey Jenny, mustn’t we?” Ben was studiously calm. He always was. Or appeared to be. “Look, the best thing to do now is for you to take me to see this recently departed student.”

Tim started and looked flustered. Ben looked him in the eye. “You don’t have to look, but I do.”

As they walked through the garden at the back of the building and towards the garage, Ben put a reassuring hand on Tim’s shoulder.

“What on earth are you teaching them to bring about such a reaction?

Can I have the lesson plan?” Neither of them smiled, and Tim held back while Ben opened the door and switched on the light.

The piles of neatly stacked boxes of A4 paper were there, but they supported no body. In fact, there was no sign of José Manuel at all, dead or alive. Tim pointed to the stacked boxes.

“He was there. Lying there.”

“Well, he’s not there now.” Ben was looking directly into Tim’s eyes.

Tim’s face was white with shock. “Perhaps he got bored with waiting and left.”

Silence descended between them.

“Look,” said Ben with quiet patience, “why don’t we retrace your steps, and you tell me again what happened. But in reverse, as it were.”

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Grateful for something to do, Tim led the way out of the garage and back up the fire escape towards room nine. Half way up he nearly fell over an obstacle that was concealed in the dark. It was José Manuel’s briefcase.

“See,” said Tim excitedly, “this is his briefcase. I put it on his, er, stomach. It must have fallen off when Jenny yanked the …. him….around the corner here.”

Ben picked up the briefcase, and looked thoughtful.

“Look,” he said, “let’s leave this with security, and then we’ll go and find Jenny. I think we know where she is. I need to hear her story.

And let’s check where Charles is. He needs to know about this.”

Charles, it appeared, had left the building almost immediately after observing Jenny’s lesson. He hadn’t, by all accounts, been looking at all happy. He was going away for the holiday weekend, and wasn’t, it appeared, going home first.

“Try his mobile.”

The signal was unobtainable.

“He usually turns it off on the weekends. Sensible man. Annoying man.” Ben looked at the ground. “Come on, let’s find Jenny.”

Jenny more or less confirmed what Tim had told Ben, but the main thrust of her tale was the inconvenience that this had caused to her lesson preparations and the fact that she barely had time to sort the room out before the lesson started.

“The body’s not there. It’s gone.” said Tim simply.

“Gone? Not there?” parroted Jenny.

“No, not there. Ben and I have looked in the garage, but it’s not there any more.”

“Oh well, you know what they’re like in that place. Always moving things about. Once they put a file of mine into Rachel’s pigeonhole, can you believe that? Took me days to find it. I was fucking livid, I can tell you. So I expect it’s just been put somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else?! Why would…..Who would…..?! Oh Jesus!” Tim crumpled.

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“What is his problem?” commented Jenny as she picked up her beer and started to turn her back on this unwelcome intrusion into her night of triumph.

Ben stood up and surveyed the defeated figure of Tim, and the defiantly ecstatic figure of Jenny as she regaled the assembled company about her brilliance as a teacher.

“You are both,” he said in a voice full of theatrical importance and pomposity, “off your heads. When you have regained your senses then I will be glad to help you. Meanwhile, I’m off.”

Tim looked up out of his pit of despair, and clutched Ben’s sleeve.

“But what shall I do?” he wailed, “Should I tell the police?”

“And what exactly would you tell the police, Tim? That a dead student you’d stuffed in the garage because he was inconveniently cluttering up the classroom has disappeared? And even if that were a good idea, how would you do this, Tim? Your use of the Portuguese language barely extends to ordering a toasted cheese and ham sandwich and a coffee. How will you communicate with the friendly officers of the GNR? Take my advice and don’t even try.” He said all this without any malice or aggression, but with quiet concern. He turned and left.

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Chapter 4 Tim spent the whole of that holiday weekend with a whirling mosaic of half remembered images, imagined sounds and silences and confused thoughts buzzing through his head. On Saturday he spent a totally inappropriate amount of time scrubbing tiny handles, door locks, sink taps and joints in the casements of the door with his collection of toothbrushes. During both Saturday and Sunday nights he had been woken up by the sound of deep, rhythmical snoring and, startled, he had sat up in bed expecting to see José Manuel Azevedo slumped in the corner of his bedroom. Each time he suspected that the source of the snoring that had woken him up had been his own nasal passage, though he was unable to recall if he habitually snored.

No one had ever told him so. His brother had never mentioned it, but they’d stopped sleeping in the same room when he was ten, so that probably didn’t count. The only other person who had spent any nocturnal time in the same room as him, Angela, had never mentioned it, and had left him for other reasons altogether. Or so she had said.

Eileen rang him early Saturday evening.

“You looked very unhappy last night. Are you all right? I’ve been worrying about you.”

“Yes, thanks, Eileen. Just ……… nothing really. I’m just confused.”

“Are you? I hope your confusion doesn’t include me, Tim. Surely you’re clear in your mind, or at least, in your heart, how I feel about you? Can I help in any way? Would you like to talk about it? I could come round if you like, or perhaps you’d prefer to come round here.

Would you do that?”

The sentiments expressed and the intention behind the invitation completely escaped Tim. He thought of Eileen as a kind, thoughtful and very nice person who always seemed concerned for him, but she wasn’t Mummy, who was the person he wanted most now. Mummy was the only woman he had ever really been able to talk to. The rich sensuality that exuded from Eileen defeated Tim’s comprehension, though it has to be said that it did make him pleasantly uncomfortable.

“No, no, that’s OK. I’m fine. Actually I’m very busy,” he held up a toothbrush as if to show her how busy he was, and he adjusted his trousers with a hand in his pocket to relieve his pleasant discomfort.

He hardly heard her sigh in velvety disappointment.

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“On a holiday? Shame on you! Well, if you’re sure. You do know you can ring me any time of day or night, don’t you. Or come round. Any time. I’ll pray for you tonight.” She paused. “I always do.”

On Sunday he tried to busy himself by planning lessons for the week ahead. He understood that the principle of lesson planning involved more than just a cursory glance at the current course book and a look at the answers in the teacher’s book. However, he didn’t really know what else was required except to occasionally find a similar exercise in another book and photocopy it and call it a worksheet. Students seemed to like worksheets. They felt that they were getting value for money if they had worksheets. Sometimes Tim found something in a book that he could use, but mostly he was perplexed by the amount of time some of his colleagues spent altering things they had found, or, rumour had it, actually inventing material of their own. He couldn’t see the purpose of doing this nor the way in which it was done: copying was feasible, plagiarising a challenge, but inventing was attempting the impossible and, what’s was more, completely unnecessary. Nevertheless he spent a few useful hours looking at clever ways to use the present perfect tense and neat little games that could while away half an hour or so collected by someone called Mario Rinvulocri; in other words, he spent a few hours doing absolutely nothing at all. But they were useful in that it occupied him for some time instead of allowing his well-developed ability to indulge in the luxury of despair to have a total field day. The part of Tim’s brain that should have been occupied by an effective imagination was, in fact, occupied by a desert worthy of Shelley’s Ozymandius, a desert which, in this case, would no doubt have been skirted by the barren Sea of Wallowing. As a result of Tim’s endeavours to discover the secrets of Lesson Planning, he claimed a few hours away from that fell sea, and wallowing only had a partial field-day, if field-days can do things in vulgar fractions.

Late in the afternoon he went down to the local shop and bought a litre bottle of ‘Très Marias’, the cheapest wine on offer, and proceeded to drink himself to sleep.

By this time, and partly as a result of his time-wasting experiments with lesson planning, Tim had convinced himself that what he thought had happened on Friday evening had merely been a figment of his unpredictable imagination. Perhaps Ben had been right and he was simply believing in something that he thought had happened, but hadn’t. It had been simply another non-event in his non-existence in this non-world. He fell into a drunken non-sleep and dreamed of

33

absolutely nothing at all. Against his desperate hopes, he found he nevertheless continued to exist. **** Eventually Monday poked its bleary head around the door, and at the crack of noon Tim made his dishevelled appearance at the School.

He looked sheepishly around the building to see if Ben was there.

He required moral support. Ben wasn’t to be found. He searched for Jenny to corroborate his story, but she was nowhere to be seen either. Then he remembered that they, like him, usually worked Saturdays, so Monday would be their day off. Before going to see Charles, who he had made a point of checking was in, and who was, by now, expecting to see him, Tim went first to room nine on the outside chance that José Manuel would be sitting in his seat, waiting, perhaps, to be told the lesson was over. The room was empty, save for the slowly circulating fly that was clearly in training for that night’s performance with a live class.

He furtively poked his nose around the garage door in case José had made just as an impressive act of reappearance as he’d managed one of disappearance, which, he conjectured, couldn’t have been any more difficult to achieve. Of José there was no sign. However, Nuno, the security guard, was there, moving boxes of paper about the place.

Tim was amazed to hear himself say: “Nuno, excuse me, but have you seen a body about? Around here?

At all?”

“O que é?” came the predictable reply.

Indeed it was one of the two replies that Nuno ever gave to Tim. The other was “Como?”, which had the same intention and effect. Nuno didn’t speak English to any useful effect. Tim knew this, but always addressed him in English. This was mainly because Tim didn’t know any other languages.

“Er, body?” Tim pointed to his own body with small, downward movements of his hands. “Body? Aqui? Body…Corpo? Aqui?”

Nuno smiled patronisingly and nodded his head.

“Yes? You have seen?” Tim said excitedly. “Where?”

“Yiz,” smiled Nuno, and turned away to his boxes.

“Nuno! Where? Body where?”

34

“Ah, Tim. Yiz. Nice titcher.” Nuno smiled again and pressed Tim’s shoulder in reassurance. “Iz good? No?” and he walked away carrying a box of paper. *** Charles listened to Tim’s explanation of the events of the previous Friday without comment or expression. He was reported to be a mean poker player. He waited for Tim to run out of steam, and when this arrived following a suppressed hiss and a final splutter he asked: “You say you left the briefcase with Security?” Tim nodded miserably in acquiescence. “Well, let’s hope it hasn’t vanished like its recent owner then, shall we?”

He picked up the phone and, in fluent Spanish peppered with some Portuguese, asked for the briefcase to be brought to his office immediately. Two long, silent minutes later the bulging briefcase was sitting on his desk like a wall between them.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Charles in his Scottish gentleman’s voice. The photocopy gang called him ‘The Laird’.

“In fact, I don’t know what to think.” His bushy eyebrows rose and fell to emphasise his inability to mentally process what he’d just heard or to incorporate the weighty briefcase that stood before them into this process.

“Assuming what you say is true,” his steely blue eyes penetrated Tim’s watery blue ones with such intensity that Tim had to blink twice.

“Assuming that, in the first place, why didn’t you report the incident immediately?” Tim stared woefully at the briefcase, unable to answer.

“Secondly, why on earth did you even think of moving the body, and thirdly what the hell were you doing teaching your last class that evening instead of sorting out this whole bloody mess? Why?” “Jenny?” Tim’s voice was a barely audible squeak.

“Oh, yes. Jenny. How can I forget Jenny? Which brings me to another amazing fact: after supposedly carrying a body downstairs and concealing it in the garage, on a pile of paper, she managed to go back to teach an observed lesson as if nothing had happened. Now how likely is that?” He threw his pen onto the table before adding as an aside “Mind you, I suppose that might have explained why she

35

might have been, perhaps, even more inept and incoherent than usual.” He glanced at Tim. “I didn’t say that.”

“I didn’t said that,” Tim uttered mechanically.

“What?”

Charles pursed his lips and put his hands up to his mouth, the fingers of his two hands forming an arch under his nose. He stared at a point exactly one inch in front of Tim’s nose. This caused Tim’s nose to itch, and he had to muffle a sneeze.

“I don’t suppose,” Charles continued, “you have thought of trying to contact this student, what’s his name? José Manuel Azevedo. It didn’t occur to you to try to contact him over the weekend, did you?

Don’t look so surprised. I don’t mean by using a medium or a Ouija board or anything like that if that’s what you’re thinking. I meant the telephone. Or, if you were that really worried, going around to his house. You could have found out where he lives. We do have access to that kind of information, you know.”

Tim shook his head sadly. He hadn’t felt so miserable since Mr Walker, the Head Teacher at his Secondary School had accused him of being part of the syndicate that stole and then sold school tests.

Tim had been caught buying a test from a bully from the year above who’d threatened to ‘do his face in’ if he didn’t part with a pound and buy a copy. The school naturally assumed that Tim was the one selling it, a claim enthusiastically supported by the bully as he slipped the coin into his pocket. Mr Walker expressed his regret that corporal punishment was no longer one of his options. Tim, meanwhile, was regretting that Capital Punishment hadn’t been one either. He was currently experiencing a return of the misery he’d felt while facing Mr Walker. A quick execution twelve years earlier would have saved a lot of grief, not just now, but also in the intervening years.

“Well,” resumed Charles, “let us try and contact him now.”

He reached for the phone again and left instructions for Senhor Azevedo to be contacted immediately, at whatever place they could find him, with the loss of his briefcase as the motive.

“I don’t know whether I should class this incident as gross negligence - after all losing students is not something we encourage, - or dumb stupidity or ……… tell me Tim, are you on drugs or anything like that?”

36

“Drugs?” stuttered Tim, “well, I had two aspirin this morning because I’d got this….”

“No, Tim. Hallucinogens. Stimulants. Anything that might have caused a ……….. temporary disorientation. Make something appear to happen which didn’t.”

“Charles, it really did happen. Honest. Really it did. Ask Jenny.”

“I intend to. She’s on her way now.”

“She is? But how did….why….?”

“Ben has spoken to me already. He is concerned that ……… never mind that now. I already knew some of your story before you came in.”

The phone rang. It was Charles’ secretary. The expression on Charles’ face changed, and he looked worried as he put the phone down.

“There is no one answering the phone at Senhor Azevedo’s home.

And he hasn’t turned up for work today. No one seems to know where he is. It seems he hasn’t been seen since Friday.”

At that moment the door burst open and Jenny exploded into the room.

“What’s all this about, Charles? It’s my day off. Why am I here?”

“Come in Jenny, and thank you for knocking first.”

“Knocking? You’re a control freak, you are, Charles. Has any one ever told you that?”

“Yes, Jenny. You have. Almost every time we meet you remind me that this is the case. Not that anyone else does, but I suppose it simply slips their mind.”

“Every time we meet, eh? Been counting, have you? Control fucker.”

“Why don’t you sit down Jenny?”

“Yeah. Whatever. Hello Tim. What are you doing here? In trouble with the boss, eh?” She cackled with a phlegm-filled cacophony.

37

“He’s here for the same reason that you are, Jenny. Last Friday night” “Friday night?” she furrowed her brow and thought.

Friday! But what’s that to do with Tim?”

“Oh, yeah.

Charles owed his position to being one step ahead of the pack.

“Not your observed lesson, Jenny, but just before that. The student?

The fire escape? The garage?”

“You brought me in on my day off to talk about that?! For Chrissakes, Charles, what are you playing at? What’s the fucking game?”

“Jenny, will you please sit down. You don’t seem to think that the possible death of a student in the School is serious enough for us to discuss?”

“Possible death? He’d snuffed it, sure enough.” Jenny finally settled into a chair. “Of course it’s important, Charles. How could you suggest otherwise. After all, it nearly ruined my lesson. Nearly, mind you – but I rose to the challenge, didn’t I? I was great, wasn’t I?” She didn’t look for confirmation of her statement. “So I hope you remember the circumstances when we come to discuss it, Charles.

But, hey, it wasn’t a problem because we’d got it sorted out before the lesson started, so what’s the problem? Was there a dead body in the classroom when the students came in? Was there hell!! I’d got it sorted. Not drippy-features here. He was all of a dither. It was me. It wasn’t a problem. It’s not as though it was some regular, frequent problem, like some crappy broken CD player. That, I might point out, happens every week, isn’t that right, Tim?. It’s a regular fucking problem, that is. Not like a dead student. Fuck me, that’s only happened once. I don’t see you calling me in on my day off to talk about crap broken CD players that have given up the fucking ghost.”

“So you say that, as far as you’re concerned, Senhor Azevedo was dead?”

“Was that his name? If you say so. Yeah.”

“What did you do about it?”

“Chrissake, hasn’t Tim here had the gumption to tell you? We got rid of the stiff, then I checked out the CD player, the data projector and made sure the chairs were in groups of four. You must have seen that for yourself.”

38

“Hmm. What I find hard to believe is that you didn’t mention the …. I don’t know how to put it …. the problem you’d encountered just before the lesson started. With the body.”

“That? He wasn’t that heavy. There wasn’t a problem.”

An astounded silence descended. This was followed by a moment of levitation when Jenny stood up.

“I can see my time has been wasted. I’m off. Don’t fucking do this to me again, Charles.” She left in a blur.

“And peace and love to you,” murmured Charles.

He stood up after the reverberation of the slamming door had died down, and pushed the briefcase on his desk towards Tim. “Go down to the office and see if we are able to contact anyone he knew. Did he have any friends in the class?” Tim shrugged mournfully. “Take his case with you; I don’t want it. Make sure it is stored safely with security. Let me know what you find out. Do it now, and don’t leave the building without telling me what is happening.”

Tim picked up the briefcase. His shoulders were now more slumped than ever, and his head drooped tragically. His feet barely left the ground as he dragged himself towards the door.

“For God’s sake, Tim, get a grip. It’s not as though you actually killed the poor guy, is it? Or is it? What were you teaching them that lesson?”

Tim stopped and turned round, his eyes firmly holding the carpet.

“Present perfect. Er, based on a text we’d done before about deep sea fishing.”

“Oh. Perhaps you did then. Drowned, probably. Lucky for you there were survivors. There were survivors, weren’t there? You do still have class to teach, don’t you? You haven’t lost all of them? Dear God.” Charles maintained a stiff, expressionless face.

Tim waggled his head in a way that didn’t commit himself to yes or no, and shuffled off.

39

***** In the office Lurdes gave him her usual brilliant smile and happy greeting. She had developed maternally protective feelings for Tim, and tried to cheer him up whenever she saw him, because he always looked so lost and frightened, which he usually was, and she often worried about whether or not he was eating properly, which he wasn’t.

She didn’t exactly equate him with her own three children, the oldest of whom was about Tim’s age, but she couldn’t help her feelings for the little-boy-lost.

“Tim, you lose a student?” she chirped breezily.

“Something like that. Charles wants us to find anyone who knows him and try to find out if they’ve seen him.”

“Tim, what happen? This is very not usual. We not responsivel to where are our students outside the School.”

“In this case we might be.” Tim decided not to elaborate further.

Lurdes looked through the files on the computer, shaking her head as she did so.

“Here we have nothing. No more information. I look here.” She started to leaf through some paper files.

Tim sat down, clutching José’s briefcase to his chest, and fiddling with the lock in an absent minded sort of way. The lock sprang open. Tim stared at the slightly open flap in hesitation. Never one to make decisions when he could get others to do it for him, he looked up at Lurdes.

“This is the student’s briefcase. He left it here. Do you think we should look inside it? To help us?”

Lurdes didn’t hesitate for a second, and snatched the briefcase from Tim’s grasp and pulled out a section of its contents and spilled them onto her desk. Her almost permanent smile disappeared, to be replaced with a puzzled frown almost immediately. Even Tim, whose grasp of what was happening in the world around him rarely coincided with anyone else’s measure of reality, couldn’t help but notice what was in front of him. Apart from the familiar purple cover of the class text book, there were files, folders and individual papers, all looking very official indeed with the names of military and government offices, covering the desk, and many of them were overprinted in red lettering

40

with the words ‘Top Secret’. Two or three of the files had the letters ‘C.I.A’ printed in the top corner, and Tim recognised the NATO logo on others.

Tim and Lurdes gasped in stereo. Lurdes then started jabbering in high-speed Portuguese while Tim, unexpectedly, seized the moment and stuffed the papers and files back into the briefcase, and fled to the door of the office where he turned and said, “I’m taking these to Charles,” and Lurdes looked visibly relieved at not having to deal with the situation herself.

“Yes, yes,” she hurried him and, especially, the briefcase out of the office.

But Tim didn’t go to see Charles. He literally ran out of the building and high-tailed it down the street.

41

Chapter 5 Tim went straight to the park. He was deaf to the voices of the security guards at the door and blind to colleagues greeting him in the street. Driven by forces he didn’t acknowledge let alone understand, he plunged headlong through the crowds along the shopping streets.

He shot across pedestrian crossings against the lights, oblivious to the furious honking of car horns and to the raucous squeal of tyres when an orange bus avoided hitting him at the cost of dumping half of its passengers in ungraceful positions all over its floor. He didn’t stop until he got to a park bench with views across the river, which curved away majestically below him as it wended its way the last few kilometres to the ocean.

He sat down, hugging José Manuel’s briefcase tightly to his chest as if it were likely to spring legs and scurry away from him if he didn’t. His normally rather weak grip on reality was coming completely unstuck.

The misty, tenuous world he usually inhabited had collided head on with a kaleidoscopic, vibrant but brutal world that he didn’t even know had existed, and for a time it seemed that the collision might wipe both worlds out. As the seagulls screeched and wheeled above his head, and as the Eagle Owl with the torn ear in a nearby, ornate cage looked at him with malign intent out of his one remaining, blazing red eye, he struggled with his sanity. The world, both his own, intensely personal mental picture of it, and then the alternative version now being played out in front of his eyes turned upside down and inside out. The colours, the smells and the sounds of these worlds, these two worlds burned into one, twisted and turned, blended and separated, became jagged and contorted and then, abruptly, turned smooth as silk; ripples of reflecting pastel shades suddenly turned to violent gushing polychromatic waves and nausea swept over him.

Faster and faster this gut-churning flip between colours, patterns, sounds and even smells sucked him out of himself into the vacuum between worlds simultaneously crushed into the heart of a black hole.

Then gradually, out of all the chaos, one single sound started to hold everything together. It started as if it came from the back of his skull, and gradually crept forward, expanding inside his head, filling all the folds and crevasses in his overheated cerebrum before dominating all the confusion that was spinning out of control all round him. He realised for a brief second that the noise was his own voice. Then the whole world, both worlds in fact, stopped being and the noise ceased and everything went black.

They said afterwards that he had passed out after screaming hysterically on a park bench, and had infringed a number of park by-

42

laws including seriously disturbing a convalescing Eagle Owl, but Tim knew that he hadn’t passed out. He had been conscious throughout; it was just that he had been conscious in a world where there was nothing to be conscious of. The Universe, all possible Universes, in fact, had ceased to exist for some not inconsiderable time – or at least the Universe had gone on a holiday for a long weekend at some undisclosed resort - but he had remained a solitary, sentient being in this totality of pure nothingness. The nothingness that had come before the Big Bang. He knew that these were Big Thoughts, but in his oblivion he knew that he was up to the challenge. He knew he was close to understanding the meaning of life and was very, very close to making the final statement encompassing eternity and the real purpose of Big Macs and lip gloss as a product of evolution when, suddenly, he found that the Universe had got itself reinvented. He discovered himself at the centre of attention, and noticed that he was lying on the ground. The meaning of life, eternity and existence faded beyond his grasp, and the true symbolism of Macdonald’s flickered into insubstantial pathos. The jabbering voices that encircled him changed pitch when he opened his eyes and looked at them, and the bright colours of the day hurt his eyes. Eileen was kneeling down beside him, stroking his head, the large silver crucifix swinging in an arc one millimetre above his nose.

“You poor boy,” she was oozing sweetness like a broken beehive.

“What on earth happened? Did you faint or what?” Her concern was genuine.

“I don’t know,” said Tim in a voice that sounded very far away to him, a thin, tinny disembodied voice. Newly invented stars were twinkling and exploding in his personal firmament. “I….I thought I’d died.”

Eileen went very still, and stared directly into his eyes, so intensely, in fact, that it might have appeared that she was searching to see if his memories were reflected in them. Her hand clutched at her crucifix instinctively, stilling it immediately.

“Did you….um ..... did you cross over?” her voice was barely audible, gripped as it was by excitement and fearful emotion. “Did you go to the other side?”

Tim was momentarily puzzled, but then he felt an uncustomary flash of insight, and he understood what she had said, even though it had been a direct question.

“No, I don’t think so. I think I just fell off the bench. That’s all.” It was Eileen’s turn to look puzzled.

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“Oh Tim, you must learn to take these things seriously.” He had been serious. Humour was a wild human emotion that Tim had rarely managed to tame. “I would like to know what you felt. What did you see? What exactly do you mean by saying that you died?”

“I don’t know how to explain it. But something happened. I can’t find words for it.”

“Tim,” she said with deliberation, “there are no words for what you have experienced.” She clapped her hands together, both the crucifix and the Star of David in between them, and looked up to heaven with a beatific smile on her radiant face.

The crowd, sensing that they were to be cheated of further entertainment and amusement from these two foreigners, muttered amongst themselves and turned away. Suddenly Tim sat up in panic.

“The briefcase! Where is the briefcase?” He looked around wildly.

He looked under the bench where he’d been sitting, and stared wideeyed around the grass that surrounded the bench, and Eileen turned from resembling a saint to an eye-flashing, witch-hunting inquisitor in a flash, as seems to be standard practice in such cases, and she berated the backs of the departing crowd for concealing the missing briefcase. As she twirled around, Tim caught a glimpse of a welldressed man carrying what looked suspiciously like the missing briefcase away with him, and he struggled to his feet.

“Stop him. See? He’s got it,” but by the time he’d got to his feet, and by the time he’d got disentangled from Eileen who’d turned to him at the sound of his voice (and who then seemed curiously reluctant to get disentangled from him) the briefcase thief had vanished into the crowd. Tim’s head was still spinning, and galaxies kept crashing into each other and moons kept getting born and contracting in fits of hiccups, but the well-dressed man with the briefcase was nowhere to be seen. Tim, contrary to his own expectations, didn’t wilt. A new light shone in his eye, and he found his resolve was mysteriously stiffened. Now he knew, he absolutely knew what had been going on over the past few days. Some things still needed to be fitted into place, but he understood the overall plot. For the first time in his life he knew what was going on.

“What was in your briefcase? Anything valuable?”

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“It wasn’t mine. It belonged to a student of mine. I expect it was of value to him, but it isn’t of any value at all to me.”

“It wasn’t yours?” Eileen asked. “So this doesn’t belong to you either, then?” she produced a buff folder with the image of a bald-headed eagle looking over a starred shield stamped on the cover.

Tim’s recently discovered equilibrium wobbled a little at the sight of it.

“You dropped it when you left the office.” she continued, “That’s why I followed you. But you were running so fast, I couldn’t catch you. Until now.”

He took the folder from her, and flicked through the pages inside.

Inside were photocopied sheets of paper with lists of names and numbers and dates, and each page was stamped with either the initials of the CIA or F.B.I. on it, but one in particular caught his eye because it had the Royal Crest of Her Britannic Majesty on it and appeared to be a top secret memo from M.I.6. He glanced over the page but could make no sense of the encryption, though someone had pencilled two large exclamations marks by the side of one paragraph. He handed the folder back to Eileen.

“You’re going back to the School?” he asked “Yes, I have to. I’ve got a class in about an half and a hour.”

“Will you give this to Charles, and tell him where it came from? I don’t think I want to go back there again today.”

“Well, I can do that. But what are we going to do about you? You look better than you did five minutes ago, but I think you should see a priest anyway.”

“A priest?!”

“Oh yes. They do help in situations like this.”

“What situations?”

“Near death ones. Like you’ve just experienced. You should talk to Father Bernardo. He’s a friend of mine. He’s very good at this kind of thing. He doesn’t speak any English, I don’t think so anyway. But he’s very good.”

“But I only speak English, so how would that….?”

45

“You are a child of the earth. communicate. Go to him.”

You will understand.

You will

“No, really. I don’t need that.”

“But you should. Oh really, Tim! Perhaps later, then. When you’ve thought about it. When you’ve reflected on what you’ve experienced.”

She looked at him with something akin to envy. “What about seeing a doctor then? Just to be on the safe side.”

“No, really, I’ll be all right. Really. I think I’ll just go home and lie down. Thanks.”

Eileen looked at Tim with indecision.

“I’d love to take you home, poor boy. And tuck you in,” she cooed.

“But I have to get back.” She beckoned in the general direction of the School, and she jingled as her body rippled with the movement.

“What a pity.” She toyed with the idea of ringing in to get out of the class and to accompany Tim to his house, but she couldn’t think of a single plausible excuse that she could give, and her toes and fingers, to say the least, trembled at the lost opportunity of tucking Tim up into his bed. She reluctantly let go of the idea.

“I’ll see you into a taxi, then. You should rest.”

She walked him to the park gate, her arm linked through his, ostensibly offering support, but this didn’t explain the way her fingers kneaded the muscles on his upper arm, or the constant stroking of his hand, or her purring in his ear.

They found a disappointment.

taxi

almost

immediately,

much

to

Eileen’s

“Go straight home, Tim. Take care.”

Once he was in the taxi, Tim gave instructions to the driver in the form of one word.

“Ribeira.”

Tim had decided not to go home at all.

The taxi driver sighed, and executed a perfect and highly illegal U-turn on the main road, and proceeded to the old quarter of the city,

46

situated on the river front. Tim handed over a five euro note and declined the change. He felt confident and strong. He wandered to one of the café’s that clustered around the Cube fountain with its stone pigeons, and ordered a beer and marshalled his thoughts as he stared at the swift flowing water of the river that sparkled greeny-blue in the early afternoon light.

In the first place, he reasoned, he knew that José Manuel Azevedo had died that evening, because both he and Jenny, that bitch, had carried his dead weight body down the stairs, and he clearly hadn’t been breathing and there had been no pulse. Had there been any sign of life, they would have noticed.

In the second place, a dead body doesn’t get up and walk, at least not since a certain event in a cave in Galilee some 2000 years ago. So clearly someone else moved it. Who? Thirdly, it now appeared apparent that José Manuel was involved in some way in espionage at an international level. The contents of his briefcase left little doubt of that. Why did he have this highly sensitive material in his briefcase at the time of the lesson? Had he been in the process of delivering it, to some ‘dead letter’ drop after the class?

Then the thought struck him, ‘During the class?!’ But who would have been his contact. Tim’s mind glowered at the thought of Carla, but he dismissed her as being an unlikely contact as he couldn’t conceive of someone who was both a spy and a witch at the same time.

So, fourthly, it was most likely that the person – or persons, for he was a heavy weight – who had moved his body were connected with the spying business. Somehow his body would have been an embarrassment to them if it had turned up on the coroners table.

Lastly, ‘they’ had obviously been following Tim, because at the first opportunity they had grabbed the briefcase and run off with the secrets it contained. It crossed his mind that ‘they’ might have drugged him somehow (but when?) which caused his momentary collapse in the park, allowing them to steal the briefcase.

The cold, brutal logic impressed itself on Tim’s brain.

What next? Well, thought Tim, I’ll have another beer and then perhaps go and see a film Pity that Eileen was so old, he conjectured - she was at least 5 years older than himself, he reckoned - or he might have asked her to go along with him.

47

José Manuel? No, thought Tim, that was now Charles’ problem.

Ordinary teachers shouldn’t be expected to deal with international spies regardless of their state of health in the classroom; that was what Directors were paid for.

48

Chapter 6 At about the same time as Tim was having his close encounter with infinity; Carla was drinking coffee with two of her friends in a café not far from the park. She was talking about Tim. “Olha, I only joined his class,” she was saying, but in Portuguese of course, “because he looked so cute. His blonde hair and blue eyes.

Very pretty. But he’s such an idiot.”

Raquel and Joana giggled, but Carla continued to look serious and glared at them.

“No, shuttup, you two. He’s seriously boring. disappointment.”

A complete

“Don’t snap at us, just because you couldn’t get into his trousers,” teased Joana.

Carla reddened slightly, and hid a smile.

“Então, but he’s wasting my time, our time, in fact – the whole class and our money. We’re not learning anything with him. He’s hopeless.”

“Perhaps he’d be better if you had private lessons,. One to one.”

They giggled again.

She pointed a finger at them, “Nothing would make me stay alone in the same room as him. Nada! Everyone in the class feels the same.

No one can wait to get out of the room at the end of the lesson.”

“So why do you keep going? Why don’t you complain? Why don’t you stay away?” Raquel asked.

“Or is it because you really do still fancy him? I’ll bet that’s what it is.”

Added Joana.

“Não! He’s a complete washout. A total waste of time.” Carla was shrieking.

“Let you down, has he?”

“Not living up to expectations?”

“He needs sorting out.”

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“Com certeza. He needs to be cut down to size.”

“Yeah! Make him really regret he ever met you.”

“Oh, come on,” said Carla. “Don’t exaggerate the situation. He’s an idiot and I’m wasting my time and that’s the end of it.”

“And your money.”

“And it makes you bad tempered.”

“It does not!”

“Really? Try listening to yourself from time to time, Carla!”

“I don’t know,” said Carla. “I can’t see the point in doing anything about it. It’s pointless. I’ll just leave the school.”

“Why don’t we just have a little fun with him? Surely that would be alright?”

“Fun? With him? You must be joking! A very unfunny joke, too” “Oh really, Carla. Don’t be so serious! We’ll just play a few little tricks on him. Make you feel better, won’t it? Or don’t you want to because, really, deep down….” Joana mimed Cupid releasing an arrow.

“How, exactly?” Carla put her tongue out at Joana, but was a little intrigued by the suggestion of playing tricks.

They all looked at each other, puzzled. Then they looked down and stirred their coffees thoughtfully, Joana and Raquel stirring anticlockwise and Carla clockwise. After a while Joana looked up with a mischievous grin, and the three heads got together in a conspiratorially huddle, where they stayed for 30 minutes in whispered but animated conversation, abrupt gesticulations and the frequent bursts of laughter.

Carla got thoroughly into the spirit of things, and enthusiastically discussed what she would like to do with, or preferably to Tim. Meanwhile, Luke, the colleague of Tim’s, had taken a vital step in carrying out his plan about what he’d like to do to Carla. He was feeling well pleased with himself. Having just finished his afternoon class for Intermediate students, he was now in possession of a priceless piece of information that he’d been anxious to obtain for

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quite sometime. Once he’d discovered that one of his students in the Intermediate class, Marta, was Carla’s cousin, it hadn’t been too difficult to come up with a lame excuse to get Carla’s mobile phone number. Not that Marta had been hoodwinked for a minute, and the ‘mutual friend’ routine had been just too bogus to believe in. But what Luke hadn’t realised was that Marta herself was already completely besotted by him and would have lay down in front of a speeding train had he asked her to. While giving him her cousin’s phone number all she had noticed was the sun striking his frail frame, obscuring the baggy shape of his oddly assembled wardrobe with their mismatching colours, but turning what was left of his thin, fluffy blond hair into a halo of light. She felt blessed, and slipped silently from the room.

To that date Luke and Carla had only met occasionally in the corridor at the School, although the meetings were not quite as accidental as Carla might have imagined.

They had swapped jokes and pleasantries, but Luke had developed an overwhelming passion for Carla from the first moment that he had seen her, and when he returned home after the night of their first and genuinely accidental meeting, he had penned two poignant poems that expressed his feelings, and contained words like ‘vision of beauty’ ‘ephemeral being’ and ‘rose scented night’. One day, he knew, he would share them with her.

Not even noticing Marta’s departure, he felt it was time to develop something more tangible with the object of his desire, the vision in his dreams, and in the most meaningful way possible. This, clearly, meant sending her a text message from his mobile phone. For this to have maximum effect it had to be created and sent in the right environment and in the correct frame of mind. He climbed carefully and with dignity onto the table, and crossed his legs into a form of the lotus position to induce harmony and well-being together with reflection and balance. He produced from his hand-stitched shoulder bag a small, scented, pure bee’s wax candle, lit it and placed it in front of himself. The flame flickered and his face took on an inscrutable look as he composed his thoughts and his message, the silver Nokia held eighteen inches in front of his eyes, clasped reverentially in his cupped hands. The fact that he had chosen a table in the centre of the staff-room to perform this act of devotion didn’t seem to faze him at all, though the four other occupants of the room gave each other knowing looks, and tossed their heads and shrugged their shoulders.

By the time the text message got through to her, Carla was almost doubled up with laughter with her friends in the café as they discussed what they’d like to do to Tim. Her mobile, placed in front of her on the table, beeped and she stared at the number blankly. As

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she read the message her face showed perplexity, and then she read it out loud to Joana and Raquel.

‘I think of you all day. I dream of you all night Am I love’s fool? Luke (Marta’s teacher) Raquel giggled when she read it, and Carla translated it for Joana.

They looked at each other in bemused silence for a few moments, and then they all collapsed simultaneously into helpless laughter, hardly the behaviour of well brought up young Portuguese women in public. They howled with merriment, and Raquel hit the table with the palm of her hand in place of words. Carla caught her breath in excitement and momentarily went rigid.

“Perfeito! This is perfect! He,” she pointed to her phone, “he can be our link to the horrible Tim. I can use him.” She looked triumphant.

“How?” chorused her friends, wiping away tears of mirth.

“You’ll see,” and she immediately set about composing a text message in reply. She showed it to her friends before sending it.

Raquel squealed with frightened delight when she saw it.

“What are you doing?” she wanted to know, “he’ll think you are interested.”

The message read: ‘Not fool i think. Tell 2 me more kisses carla’ “Let’s see what happens next.” She carefully placed the phone in front of her.

Luke was still sitting cross-legged on the table in the staff-room when the reply came back. The apprehension that had been gnawing his stomach with exquisite pain suddenly turned into a bird of joy and lifted his spirits, and the light of Paradise filled his very being. This showed itself on his face very clearly by means of an idiotic grin and a maniacal expression in his bespectacled eyes, not that any of his colleagues were looking at him. In fact, they were studiously making sure that they didn’t catch his eye in any way, so as not to get caught up in whatever it was that he was doing.

Luke leapt from the table and ran two steps at a time down the stairs to the garden, where stood and leaned up against the jacaranda tree.

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He tried to harness his racing thoughts and emotions into a single coherent, decisive thought. It suddenly settled upon him like a rush of air, and he slid down the trunk of the tree to sit on the roots and to compose two lines.

‘From uncertainty drifting in the air Your arrow of hope pierces my being.’

Its presentation on the little screen didn’t enhance it at all, but he sent it immediately, hugging the Nokia in a state of ecstasy to his chest as the message fled into the ether.

Carla was anticipating Luke’s immediate reply, and the three girls cackled with delight at his response, even if they didn’t understand it very well. Its intention and its message were clear enough.

“What should we do now?” said Joana.

“O Luke compreende português?” demanded Raquel.

“I don’t know. Porque?” replied Carla.

“Well let’s find out.” She rummaged in her bag for a small book that she always carried around with her, and produced it with a flourish. It was a collection of the poetry of Fernando Pessoa.

They excitedly flicked through pages, chose and discarded, argued and eventually agreed. The text message committee finally sent this verse: Todo o começo é involuntário.

Deus é o agente, O herói a si assiste, vário E inconsciente’ do you understand? kisses carla’ During that afternoon, Luke and the committee (though for Luke it was just him and Carla alone, of course) exchanged no less than thirty two messages, not many of which were poetry, though most claimed to be. Luke remained sitting below his tree in a state of frozen agitation, the phone pressed to his knees which he had drawn up in front of him. From time to time Charles glanced out of his office window which overlooked the garden and saw Luke’s preoccupation with his knee and each time he looked out, he shook his head sadly. He glanced through the conclusion on his report about Jenny’s recent observed lesson.

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“Jenny seemed,” he had written, “to have some difficulty in engaging the students desire to participate more fully in the lesson. She appeared to see questions and comprehension checks as ways of catching the students out. She refused to accept that some of the alternative answers put forward by the students might be plausible, or even a valid point of discussion. She didn’t give any explanations of why some answers were clearly wrong; she merely repeated her version of the ‘correct’ answer. “A more positive attitude to her students might help her develop a better rapport with them.” He grimaced when he glanced at the box underneath his comments on the standard observation feed back form.

It said “Teacher’s comments.” He could read them without them having even been written.

Just for good measure, Charles picked out the personal files on Tim and Luke and flicked through them. He noted that Ben had observed a lesson of Tim’s very recently. Ben had written: “Tim seems to have no connection whatsoever with the students in his class. I felt that he might as well have been teaching a brick wall for all the attention he paid them. The students, predictably, were clearly bored with the very routine exercises he had laid before them.

I recommend that Tim be put on notice of improvement of performance for four months before his position with the school is considered. This period of extended probation should be coupled with support and training.”

Tim had completed the box for his comments with just two words.

“I agree.”

A report on Luke, dating back to the previous academic year caught Charles’ attention. He read, “I have never seen anyone adopt the ‘silent way’ method of giving a class by substituting the spoken word with text-messaging. Clearly Luke had ensured that all his students had come to class equipped with their mobile phones. I was even more surprised to note that this did not in any way diminish the strong relationship that Luke had built up with this class – his personal commitment to the students was engaging and much appreciated by them. An unusual but highly effective lesson.”

Luke had added:

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“ithoughtitwentextremelywellandifeltthestudentsgotalotoutofit iknowidid Familiar thoughts ran through Charles’ head: ‘Where do these people come from?’ ‘Why have they all congregated in one place?’ and ‘Why is that place here?’ He wondered if there might be a convention of the weird and strange going on in town, and he thought back to Tim, and wondered why he hadn’t seen him again that day. Perhaps he’d simply been unable, after all, to carry through ‘the dead student’ stunt and had chickened out, though why he’d tried to do it in the first place Charles couldn’t work out. He had been in the business long enough not to be surprised by anything that the sad minds of those employed in the profession came up with, but Tim was an especially tragic case, he thought. Perhaps he should do something about him, he was thinking, rather than just dismiss him as an idiot and making a note not to employ him the following year, when another thought crashed into his conscious world, and he got up from his desk, went downstairs and walked out into the garden.

“Luke,” he said in a distinct and very businesslike voice, “you are supposed to be in class. Why aren’t you there?”

Luke held up his palm to Charles in a gesture that might have meant ‘be quiet’ or might have been interpreted as ‘peace to you’, but Luke’s eyes didn’t waver from the little screen on the Nokia for a single millisecond.

“Luke!” Charles’ voice had notched up another ten decibels, “Get your arse into class while you still have a job.”

Luke blinked up at Charles and tried to fathom out what had just been said to him.

“Class?” he mumbled, “oh – class!” He looked at his watch. “Oh dear.” He was thirty minutes late. Even by Portuguese standards he was now a tad overdue. “Yes. I’m going.”

As he went, walking in the full glare of Charles’ disdain, he texted back a final message.

‘Others call me now but I am urs. Until l8r.’

As he wrote the message he also spoke it aloud. Charles, hearing it, suddenly felt extremely nauseous, and had to stop and lean against the tree, gulping deep breaths before he could go on.

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Luke walked into his classroom. It was class of young adolescents who had up to then been amusing themselves through a variety of electronic entertainment that they had produced from their little backpacks. They quietened down when Luke stood in front of them, leaning back against the empty whiteboard, his hands clasped over his stomach and his head slightly bowed.

“I am in love,” he announced.

This wasn’t the kind of information that a class of 13 and 14 year olds could easily assimilate and handle, and a variety of noises ensued – whistles, hoots, jeers, cheers and a great deal of embarrassed laughter. One rather tubby fourteen-year-old girl received this news with alarm, and tears filled her eyes as she wondered what the procedure for becoming a nun was.

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Chapter 7 When Carla sent the final message of the day her friends applauded the afternoon’s performance, which had taken over three hours.

When they stopped clapping, Raquel said “That was fun, but what I don’t understand is how this,” she nodded her head towards the phone “is going to help you get even with Tim.” “You’ll see. Wait until tomorrow and you’ll see. But meanwhile,” she switched off her phone, “I think that’s enough sport for one day.” ******* Tim wandered into the school sometime after lunch the next day, more in control of himself than he could remember ever having felt before.

“Good afternoon, Nuno. breezed.

How the devil are you?” he positively

“Olá, Tim. Yiz. Iz nice titcher. Yiz,” Nuno breezed back.

Tim usually approached staircases with a nervousness bordering on fear. He had convinced himself, probably at an early age, that stairs were probably an optical illusion and that those which appeared to be going up might in fact be going down, and vice versa, and he dreaded the damage to himself that such an encounter would bring. In all his 27 years he had never actually encountered such a phenomenon, but this didn’t decrease his thinking that staircases were sinister artefacts and that due care and caution should be taken in their presence. Tim had a similar problem with dark shadows on sunny days. Something lurked in the back of his mind to tell him that far from being shadows these were places that did not actually exist. Should he be foolish enough to step from the sun-kissed light to the Stygian black then, who knows where he might end up? He therefore walked with caution on sunny days. Footbridges were another constant source of suspicion but not because he thought they didn’t exist but because he was convinced that after crossing a footbridge one would find oneself on the same bank of the river, or whatever one was crossing, that one had started from. No amount of explanation, diagrams or experience would shift this notion. Strangely, road or rail bridges didn’t have this effect on him. However, on this fine afternoon none of these fears seemed to be coursing through his brain for he could be seen bounding up the stairs at a brisk rate of knots. Ben, who was

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standing at the top of the stairs, looked down at Tim’s bounding figure with interest.

“Afternoon!” Tim practically barked.

“Good afternoon. Mr Positive, isn’t it?”

“That’s me,” grinned Tim, “Mr Tim Positive.”

“Heaven help us,” Ben muttered under his breath. Then, in an audible voice he told Tim that Charles had been looking for him, “……. and he’s pretty pissed off with you. Guess why?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” dismissed Tim. “I don’t worry, my friend. But you should.”

Tim shrugged.

“I’ll go and see him now, then.”

“You can’t. He’s in London. Conference. Back on Friday.”

A little of Tim’s newly found self-confidence and elation evaporated.

“London?” Tim blinked, “but he can’t be. He’s supposed to ….. to be….to be in charge. You know. Taking care of things.” More to the point, he thought to himself, why isn’t he here taking care of the José Manuel problem? In Charles’ absence the little problem of a missing, dead student seemed to shuffle a few paces closer to Tim. “Well, he is in London, and I’m in charge until he returns, and more fool me for agreeing. But if you have any more tales about missing bodies then I’m off to London too.”

Tim felt a little more of his elation seep out into the bright light of reality. Whatever force he had encountered in the park the day before had been powerful alright, but he now found himself wondering just how permanent the effect on him would be.

He went to the staff room, passing on the way his pigeon hole where messages and notes were left. There were three. The first was from ‘the office’ informing him that he’d made some mistakes in his register the previous week and asking him to sort it out before the day was over, and the second was from Charles and took the form of a severe scolding for not having got back to him the previous day about his

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“allegedly missing student”. The third message was attached to a rather familiar buff folder, the one which contained a surprising number of ‘Top Secret’ messages from the CIA, MI6 and the FBI. A message was scribbled on a yellow Post-It and stuck onto the front cover. It read: ‘Can’t remember what I was supposed to do with this so I’ve put it in your pigeonhole. Much love. Eileen,’ To this she’d added a sketched smiley face and a heart with E + T written underneath it, plus a crudely drawn crucifix, a Star of David and a Taoist symbol.

More levity hissed out of Tim, almost audibly, and he felt a familiar intrusion of confusion, a feeling of being the underdog, of not being in the race. The human race, that is. But not completely so. He mustered his bravado and greeted the photocopier enthusiastically, acknowledging the absence of the photocopier gang in his thoughts, and dumped his briefcase on a chair near the window in the staff room, and put the buff folder on top of a filing cabinet while he thought what to do with it. Ben had followed him in.

“Let me say this. If your, um, erstwhile deceased student turns up on, when is it – tomorrow? – then keep quiet and we’ll forget the whole thing. If he doesn’t turn up, then perhaps you’d better see me and tell me. Will you do that?”

Tim nodded, in spite of thinking how absurd Ben was being – of course José Manuel wouldn’t turn up, and, of course, whether he did or whether he didn’t, Tim wouldn’t go and see Ben or anyone else for that matter about it. He was shot of the whole business, he had given the whole problem to Charles, and if Charles hadn’t realised that and had irresponsibly gone off to London then that was his problem.

Except, he reminded himself, there was that buff folder. That was clearly still Tim’s problem. Until he managed to dump it onto someone else, that is. Ben, for his part, thought for a moment and then decided not to warn Tim that Luke was in a very strange state of mind and that he’d be better off not trying to get any sense out of him.

Ben decided that neither Tim not Luke would probably have noticed each others presence at the moment anyway, so he let it pass.

Luke, meanwhile, was sitting under the tree once again, staring hypnotically at his Nokia. There had been an unexpected lack of messages returned overnight, even though he’d gone on texting after his last class and until four a.m., after which he’d fallen into a fitful sleep, and dreamt of tender kisses and holding hands under a starry

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night sky, and of cement mixers and small alligators, though he couldn’t quite work out what these all symbolised. The messages started again at 11 a.m. that Tuesday morning, but they came from a different number than from the previous day, starting with the message ‘Please to tell me you did slepped well in my thoughts as I did slepped in your arms I have a new phone number now the other is brake beijinhos carla’ The messages had continued regularly all day, though he was becoming a little perplexed at the varying level of the English being used - occasionally it was so fluent it seemed as if Carla was almost a native speaker while at other times it hardly seemed to make sense at all, and he had a real problem deciphering the message. Occasionally he was confused by some of the idiomatic Portuguese that he received. Nevertheless, he exalted in the knowledge that each message built upon the previous one and poetry and light and sheer joy passed from one display panel to the other. What Luke hadn’t realised, of course, is that the texting committee had grown overnight from just Carla, Raquel and Joana, to nine other friends of Carla.

Using Carla’s recently discarded, unsophisticated and, at six months old, hopelessly outdated mobile phone, they had agreed – with a minimum of ground rules – to share text message duty. This hopelessly outmoded mobile was passed from hand to hand on a strict rota of 60 minutes per committee member. Their job, for one hour at a time, was to keep up the replies to Luke’s continuous stream of messages (which by four p.m. had reached 58 since his very first message about 24 hours previously), and to encourage, even feed his desire. Carla, meanwhile, had lost interest altogether because by 2 p.m. she’d obtained the information that she’d wanted from Luke in the first place – Tim’s home phone number - from which it would be easy to find his home address, this having been her sole objective from the outset. Luke had been rather touched that Carla had wanted to speak to Tim personally about why she wouldn’t be able to go to classes that week, and that, yes, speaking on the phone to him at the School would sound, well, so formal.

Luke had ascended a spiritual spiral staircase to heights that, while he had dared believe could exist, had never thought that he himself would ever glimpse. His inner calm was, curiously, strengthened by the tumult the rest of his conscious mind was experiencing and he knew that he was, without doubt, in the grip of the greatest of earthly ecstasies. His inner being was capable of touching the very edges of the universe.

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Charles had warned Ben about Luke’s changed state of mind, and had told him to keep a look out. Consequently, Ben was waiting to see if Luke would remember to go to his first class of the evening. He didn’t. Like Charles the previous day, Ben had to remonstrate with him, but Luke’s indifference to the real world and his shell of otherworldliness had increased from the previous day to such an extent that Ben had a hard time of it. In fact, he had to lift him bodily from the ground and then frogmarch the trance-like Yorkshire lad to his class with the help of Nuno, Luke unable or unwilling to take his eyes off the holy shrine of the Nokia clasped in his outstretched hand for a single moment. All the while he was being frogmarched he was continually muttering what sounded like a holy mantra. Unless, that is, you listened closely enough to decode the patter of vowels and consonants: ‘I love her so very much; I really love her so.’

Ben propped a plank-like Luke up against the whiteboard in the classroom, and shook his head in despair at the sight before him – a rigid, text-messaging Buddhist jabbering to himself in front of a small group of middle-aged housewives who were sitting patiently, waiting to be reminded of the thrills and excitements of continuous tenses (both present and past). Ben departed to find out who was on substitution duty, and to his dismay discovered that it was him. His sense of duty overcame his real desires, and he manoeuvred Luke out of the classroom, and forcibly bent his frame into a sitting position in a chair in the corridor. The only flexible parts of Luke were his fingers, which even as he was being forced into the chair were darting over the tiny keyboard of the mobile phone. Ben went to teach the class himself, with the minimum of explanation to the clearly puzzled students.

Meanwhile, Tim had been to ‘the office’ to sort out his dereliction of duty concerning the previous weeks registers, but on returning to the staff-room had found that his briefcase was missing. He clearly remembered having placed it on the chair by the window. No one else was in the staff room, and enquiries led to the discovery that no one remembered having seen it or knew what could have happened to it. It seemed to have walked off all of its own accord.

He was somewhat distressed, because now, instead of relying on the answer book for in-class assistance, he’d have to rely on his knowledge of the structure of the English language as well as his natural cunning – neither of which were his strong points – to survive the evening’s lessons. He looked around the staff-room for a spare course book for his first lesson, but the only one he could see was being held in Bertha’s hands as she entered the staff room. She saw him looking at it.

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“Don’t even ask,” she growled.

As a result Tim had to wing the lesson, a totally unfamiliar practice for him, and to his surprise this proved to be a lot more successful than his usual lessons. Indeed, anxious to spin out whatever he could to fill out the lesson time, he had to let the students follow their noses to a certain extent, and as a result he heard a number of interesting tales about their lives, and the students for their part quite enjoyed the unexpected freedom of being allowed to talk, and to be themselves for a change, and not just plod away at relentless exercises and plough through dull texts.

In the break between lessons, Nuno, the security guard, with the help of a passing student dragged in as a reluctant translator, told Tim that his briefcase had been found in the street some fifty metres up the road, just outside Café Banana in fact (it had been Sr Silva himself who had retrieved the pasta and brought it to the School) and that the contents had been strewn all over the pavement. Tim checked, but nothing seemed to be missing from the briefcase. No one had seen anything. No one knew anything. It was a mystery. The ghost of an idea flickered across Tim’s mind. He dismissed it. For now.

At 8 p.m. the text messages stopped coming. At ten o’clock, when Nuno tipped a quivering Luke into a taxi with strict instructions to the driver to take him straight home. He even handed him the keys to Luke’s house, to make sure he got inside. Since the messages had stopped arriving Luke had been experiencing a deflation of spirit in inverse proportion to the giddy heights he’d reached. He was now plummeting down towards his personal pit of despair. The last message, received at 7.56 had said: ‘That’s all for now, folks. So long, sucker’ Luke had gone into an almost immediate state of shock.

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Chapter 8 Café Banana had five different shifts of clientele. In the morning office workers rushed in for quick shots of expresso coffee, small cakes and, occasionally, almost lethal doses of bagaço, illicit hooch kept in an unlabelled wine bar in the fridge under the counter. Then at lunchtime Sr and Sra Silva made their money and served lunch to upwards of 40 clients; the pratos económicos offering meals which might include a drink as well as soup and a main course of fish or meat and potatoes and rice (the idea of serving a choice between potatoes or rice being an alien concept in the land) for around 5 euros. Occasionally these eaters would include staff from Canterbury School up the road, but more often than not it consisted of silent individuals or sullen couples who slurped and munched in a silence that was more or less guaranteed by the volume of the TV set above the counter area, though the public interest in the lunchtime news was only obvious by the flicks of mainly male heads as information about Porto, Benfica, Sporting or some lesser football clubs was made available. The afternoon clientele were usually shoppers returning home, and they took tea and cakes, but in amongst the tea drinkers were dour men with greasy, grey hair drinking thin glasses of Super Bock beer who looked around hungrily or looked around with disinterest. Then, in the evening, the challenge of the Brits was preceded by a small group of unattached men who lived in ‘rooms’ near by and who didn’t have anywhere to cook or anyone to cook for them, poor souls, and thus were dependant on Sra Silva for their evening meal. This was always, without fail, the least popular of the three choices on the lunchtime menu and the glut of untried portions of tripe, bean stew or rancho was made available for the seven regulars of this service at a vastly reduced rate. Each had their bottle of wine, carefully corked after each meal and set aside to await the next supper, and each had their own table and preferred direction of sitting. Everyone, except Humberto João Sousa, faced, in one way or another, the TV above the counter and got images trapped in their eyes. Sr Sousa was affected by an eye complaint that prevented him from watching the television. He also suffered from tintinitus, which made it painful for him to listen to TVs which boomed at high volume, as was frequently the case at Café Banana. Sr Sousa also detested beans, tripe and the chick peas and pasta that made up the bulk of a plate of rancho, but he was a true stoic and never complained. He had been, in fact, in love with Sra Silva for thirty years, ever since he had first tasted her caldo verde soup when he was a recent widower of 40, and she was just 25 and newly married to his second cousin, Sr Silva. He, of all the evening diners, had a linen napkin instead of a paper one, and his wine glass was stemmed, not a tumbler.

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Later on, the Brits came in to drink beer.

At 11 o’clock on the same evening that he had been thrown into a cab by the ever attentive Nuno, Luke was sitting in Café Banana with his mobile phone placed in front of him, his eyes continuing to worship it as if it were a religious relic. Unlike his colleagues, his glass of beer was untouched, warm and flat. After the taxi had taken off with him in it, it had stopped at the traffic lights at the end of the street, and he had simply climbed out and walked back to the café, deaf to the cries of the taxi driver who wanted some kind of payment, and oblivious to the urgent jangling of his house keys which the taxi driver still had.

(Being an honest sort of fellow, or because the School gave him plenty of work anyway, he simply circled the block and handed the keys back to Nuno who gave the taxi driver, on assurance of a written receipt, 3 euros for his trouble). Luke was sitting silently transfixed by a mobile phone that refused to speak to him. The photocopy gang tried in vain to include him in their conversation. Their cheery repartee fell on deaf ears and their smiling faces failed to lighten any shadows in the gloom that was gathering behind Luke’s eyes.

Tim entered the café and with the help of Kevin, who spoke good Portuguese, tried to find out more about the mystery of the ransacked briefcase which Senhor Silva had found, but as Senhor Silva had already told Nuno everything he knew, he was unable to elucidate further. Tim joined the small group of drinking teachers none the wiser. Tim sat next to Luke. He had no way of knowing that there was a reason why the seat next to Luke was empty.

“Hello, Luke,” he ventured.

Luke stared at the Nokia.

“How was your evening? Horrible, eh?”

Luke continued to stare at the Nokia.

“That bad , was it? actually”

Had an odd afternoon myself.

A bit weird,

Luke’s fixation with the Nokia was unchanged.

“As a matter of fact, I think I’m in the middle of some terribly serious business. I’m scared, as a matter of fact. To tell the truth, I don’t know what to do. I hope you don’t mind if I tell you this.”

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Could that have been a flicker of interest in Luke’s staring eyes? No, it wasn’t.

Tim sipped some beer, and looked uncertainly at the jolly types across the table. After a few minutes, Senhor Silva came over to the tables, which were already looking dangerously overloaded with bottles and glasses and told Tim that he had a call on the phone at the bar. This came as a great surprise to Tim, who had never received a phone call in a public place before, and was a great novelty to the others, who had never seen Tim take a phone call at any time.

“Hello?” he said tentatively into the mouthpiece. All he could hear at first was static.

“Hello?” he tried again, and this time he could hear rhythmic breathing. It sounded like a man.

“Hello. Who’s there?” The breathing stopped and there was a muffled sound, and then the receiver at the other end was replaced.

“So, who was that,” chortled Linda, “someone we know, or is it a secret?” She nudged the members of the photocopy gang on each side of her and they smirked.

“No. It wasn’t anyone. Well, it was someone, but they didn’t say anything. They breathed.”

“Oh, fancy that,” chipped in Kevin, “a person, breathing. What ever will they be up to next?”

“You know what I mean.”

Linda looked a little concerned.

“They didn’t say anything at all?”

“Not a word.”

“But there was definitely someone there?”

“Definitely. A man, I think” “How strange.”

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“What’s strange?” asked Eileen, sitting down next to Tim after running her hand through his hair.

“Tim’s secret admirer.”

“Girlfriend, more like.”

Eileen’s eyes hardened, and the muscles in her face stiffened, and she put her hand protectively over Tim’s.

“What girlfriend?” If anyone was looking to introduce a student of English to the idea of what “an icy voice” or “a steely look” were, then Eileen had both of them developed to perfection.

“I haven’t got a girlfriend,” protested Tim. “No?” Eileen’s voice had warmed immediately, and she stroked his hand. “Are you sure?”

Senhor Silva came over again. There was another phone call for Tim. “Ah,” said Kevin. “They must have remembered that they’d forgotten to speak last time.”

Tim went to the phone, and exactly the same thing happened again, the same sound of breathing but no words. This time Tim was convinced that it was a man.

“If it happens again,” said Eileen angrily when he returned to his seat, “I’ll come with you and tell him what I think of him.”

But the phone didn’t ring again, and neither did Luke get any text messages. By this time he had managed to remove any expression from his face and eyes altogether, and it was impossible to tell what was going on inside his head. Which was just as well, as it would have frightened even the most hardened clinical psychiatrists.

They left the café at 11.45, and Eileen offered to walk home with Tim, even though she, like the others, lived in the opposite direction.

“No, that’s OK,” said Tim, somewhat distracted by the phone calls.

“I’ll pray for you, Tim,” she whispered fondly into his ear, and hugged him. Kevin winked at Linda and they both smiled knowing smiles, and they all departed in their various directions, except for Luke, who they’d forgotten all about.

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Luke remained as motionless as a cardboard cut-out at the table, his beer as untouched as it had been two hours before. The Nokia remained silent. This caused Senhor and Senhora Silva some problems when they tried to lock up fifteen minutes later, and Senhor Silva was on the verge of calling the police when his wife had the presence of mind to pick up Luke’s mobile phone, which in itself caused a ripple of panic in Luke’s frame, a muscular spasm not unlike a twitchy limb after a particularly violent death, and placed it on the pavement outside the café. Luke followed, like a sleepwalker, and settled himself in front of where the phone had been put, his back propped up against the wall of the café.

As Tim arrived home, his phone was ringing.

“Hello,” he said. He was met again by the sound of regular breathing.

He listened for a short while, and was just about to hang up when he heard a heavily accented voice.

“You will pay,” and the call was disconnected.

Tim’s confusion and uncertainty returned to its natural destructive state, and all of his recently acquired self-confidence seemed to have left him completely. He started vigorously scrubbing the switches on the electric hotplate with a red toothbrush, and tried not to think about too much about anything except the importance of cleaning electric hotplate switches just exactly so, but the sequence of recent events was once again threatening to overwhelm him. Were the phone calls and the mystery of his briefcase linked? Had any of this got anything to do with the disappearance of José Manuel’s body? As he scrubbed and as he polished a likely scenario began, uninvited, to unveil itself in his head: Whoever had removed José’s body had also taken José’s briefcase in the park, and had then taken Tim’s briefcase and rifled through it, throwing it away when they didn’t find what they wanted. So, what did they want? Without doubt it must have been the buff file that Eileen had retrieved, which was the only one missing from José’s briefcase and which was now sitting on top of a filing cabinet in the staff-room where Tim had left it that afternoon. Not having got what they wanted, they were now attempting to frighten him through a series of mysterious phone calls. They were being very successful; he was gradually disintegrating into a sack of jangling loose nerve endings, and this sudden revelation about what had been happening wasn’t making him feel any better.

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****** “You will pay!” mimicked Carla to her cousin Carlos as he put down the phone. “What did you say that for?”

“Não sei,” Carlos was chuckling, “It just came into my head. I heard it in a movie, I think.”

“Então, estava fantastico!” laughed Carla, and Joana joined in the enjoyment as the three of them stood in the phone booth near the sea front.

“But, I’ll tell you what” continued Carla looking at her watch, “I’m going home. I have to be up early in the morning for a class at the faculty.”

As the trio got into his car, Carlos said, “I think I’ll give him another call – perhaps at two. What do you think?”

“Make it three o’clock,” giggled Joana.

“Pois! It’s worth staying up for,” agreed Carlos.

At two minutes to three that morning, Tim’s phone rang again. He was in bed, but he hadn’t been to sleep, not for a moment. He was too miserable to sleep. He listened to the breathing again. Then he heard a message before the receiver clicked off.

“You gonna get it, you motherfucker,” drawled the voice in lusoamericano.

‘No,’ thought Tim in what appeared to be a remarkably calm state of mind, though this was simply because he’d gone the other side of fear or reason, ‘I’ve already got it. It’s you who want it.’ And then he tried to work out how you give a document to someone when you don’t know who they are or where they are. If he gave them the buff folder, he reasoned, then the harassment would stop.

Carlos had hung up, well pleased with himself, and had switched off the light.

“You motherfucker,” he repeated to himself in a voice honeyed with pleasure and he drifted quickly into a pleasant sleep.

Alas, the comforts of sleep never reached Tim that night.

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Chapter 9 Dearest Mummy Just a brief note, I’m afraid. Things are, as usual, hectic here at the moment! As always I seem to find myself in the middle of a crisis not of my making but for which, once again, people are looking to me to solve for them. How they got on here before I arrived beats me!

Ben seems to have recovered from his piranha shock now. I took him horse riding in the mountains the other day, just to help him recover some of his courage and to try to overcome some of his fear of the wild! Poor man! Yes, he is nice, but he does need looking after!

Lucky I’m here!

Of course I’ll be home at Christmas. Whatever could you be thinking of?!

Love to Joey. By the way, you didn’t mention Tigger. Has she recovered from the experience at the vets yet?! Give her a kiss and a tickle for me.

Lots of love Timmy.

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Chapter 10 I Luke didn’t sleep that night either, not that he noticed this inconvenience, nor any of the other inconveniences that were to happen to him that night. Nuno had eventually tracked him down to the pavement outside Café Banana, where he had successfully placed the keys in Luke’s tasselled shoulder bag, but had been somewhat unsuccessful in trying to extract some money from him for the taxi. Luke hadn’t been aware of either the keys or the reasonable demand for monies owed. Nuno had then spent a frustrating half hour trying to make sense of what was best for Luke, and only relinquished his burden when he’d managed to get Luke to his feet, and get him walking in the direction of home. Nuno walked with him for half a kilometre until he was sure that Luke was sufficiently focussed to find his way home before turning back and going home himself. He had been on duty for 18 hours that day, and in just 6 more hours he would have to get up and start another shift. These British, he thought, they are such hard work. They need so much looking after.

Judging how focussed someone is when they are not at all well is one of the areas prone to the greatest error, especially when shifting from one language or culture to another, and Nuno, through no fault of his own, had got it wrong. Luke was soon to be found sitting crosslegged on the granite floor slabs in a corner of the entrance hall of the main railway station of São Bento, a little under half a kilometre down the hill from Café Banana, his perambulations after Nuno had left him having been somewhat circular. He was sitting under the giant scene depicting glorious scenes of Portuguese military action in their historic past and a bucolic paradise that had never existed, these noble scenes, made entirely of blue and white tiles, filling three walls of the atrium and which therefore dominate the station in a way that the visitor rarely expects a train station to be dominated.

After midnight the station was an echoey silence, the last trains for Campanha, Régua and all stations to Aveiro having already left. The station was the haunt of shabby pigeons, muttering drunks and a recumbent, deeply troubled text-messaging Buddhist English teacher from Bradford. Outside a solitary taxi driver was waiting in case there was any action, and in alleyways up the side of the station small packages were exchanged for hard cash, and women in tight skirts and even tighter shirts spoke to furtive men briefly before they hurried off together.

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At two o’clock in the morning two officers of the law on duty around the station had realised that pickings from the adjacent scenes of crime were thin that night, and that they were unlikely to draw off much more in the way of pay-offs, and in a state of relative boredom walked over to Luke, and prodded him with a stick. Luke’s grunts confirmed that he was, indeed, nothing unusual in the station at night and subsequently only deserved the standard treatment, which involved some playful kicking of the legs and bats around the head until the victim stood up simply in self defence. It was then an easy matter to persuade him to move on. Luke walked up the hill towards the grandiose town hall situated in the grand Avenida dos Aliados, in the middle of which imaginative contemporary architects had cleared away unsightly trees and bothersome flowerbeds to construct a concrete desert of flagstones. There he sat on a bench. His eyes unfocussed, the mobile phone ignored, though it was still held tightly in his hand. The battery had failed, but he hadn’t noticed, and even if he had it is doubtful that he would have cared – his decline was very serious. In the doorway of a bank nearby two figures wrapped in grubby blankets muttered in their sleep. Luke stared with dull eyes at nothing. At four o’clock, two more policemen who had been watching him for fifteen minutes from the comfort of their squad car came over to him and demanded to see his Identity Documents. The conversation was, alas, all one way with Luke doing an impressive imitation of a brick wall having totally lost the ability for sparkling repartee and after he’d repeatedly failed to respond, they lifted the dejected, rejected figure between them, his slight frame easy to lift.

Luke remaining in a squatting, semi-seated position as he was carried to the squad car, and promptly thence to the police station. For once, the report which said that an itinerant had been ‘arrested for his own protection’ was probably true. He was put into an interview room where he was questioned repeatedly for an hour. In all this time Luke said not a word, nor did any police officer manage to catch his eye in any way. Luke simply wasn’t hearing, and he wasn’t looking at anyone, at least anyone who existed in the same temporal dimension as the police officers as they went about their business. Eventually, after many fruitless attempts to get him to speak, they searched his bag. The contents were hardly revealing: A comb; a book of poetry by some Spanish poet, damaged; a small bottle of Aramis aftershave, three quarters empty; two biros; one Parker fountain pen, old, heavy; a pack of tissues; a half used pack of Imodium tablets; a notebook, containing scribblings in at least three languages, but with an opening statement in Greek; a letter, without its envelope, which was in English and started ‘Dear Luke’ and was signed ‘love, Maschi’; a hand written taxi receipt from a local taxi firm; an out of date invitation from the British Consulate in Oporto to attend

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a garden reception for the birthday of HRH Queen Elizabeth. There was no official ID of any kind.

Having decided that he might, therefore, be British they could see no other option but to wait until the offices of the British Consulate opened in the morning, when they would ask for a representative of the Consul to visit him. In the mean time they locked him in a cell, where he sat, dull eyed, facing a wall.

Luke knew nothing of this. Though when they had tried to take his mobile from his hand and place it in his bag, his nerve ending twitched violently, and the grip he placed around the Blessed Nokia was stronger than anyone could have predicted. He was already in a living hell far worse than any Portuguese police cell, but he wasn’t going to lose his only contact with a Higher Being.

He had been rejected. He had been vomited out. She had discarded him. Not one of the eighteen messages he had sent following her rejection message had been replied to. He was a sucker. She had told him so, and he wasn’t even sure what it meant, except he knew it was the worst thing he could be.

From time to time a police officer would peer into his cell to see how he was. On each occasion he could be seen to be silently whimpering and rocking on his backside while clutching his ankles with his one free hand. The police were not impressed.

At 8, Luke ignored all attempts to interest him in breakfast, as simple as coffee, water and bread was as a meal.

By the time the Representative of the British Consul arrived, shortly after 11, Luke had stabilised at the bottom of his deep, black pit, and was showing complete disinterest in his surroundings, which was a great improvement on his state of being unaware that he had any surroundings. The Consul’s Representative was efficient and exuded just the right amount of concern for Luke and the strange condition he seemed to be in.

“Odd night,” said a policeman to her, “we had another man in who seemed completely out of it. Couldn’t remember a damn thing, it seems. But at least he was Portuguese and spoke to us.”

“Be careful,” said the Representative. “Remember that bad luck tends to come in threes. What do you think could happen next?”

“Special duties,” said someone glumly.

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As Luke had not registered at the Consulate, they didn’t have much idea about whether he was a resident or a tourist, though of the contents of his bag seemed to indicate that he was, in fact, a resident.

The mobile phone would help them, reasoned the Representative, as it would surely contain the stored phone numbers of some of his contacts. The problem was that they needed Luke to punch in his PIN before this was available to them.

The battery was flat. It didn’t take long to find a compatible battery charger, and while Luke clung desperately to the defunct apparatus, a thin wire was fed through his fingers and plugged into it, and shortly Luke’s Nokia was back in the land of the living. Would it were that Luke was.

They tried coaxing him, threatening him and cajoling him, but it wasn’t until the Representative was a little underhand that they had a result.

“Luke? Hello, Luke? You’ve got some messages to read, Luke.

Don’t you want to see them?” Luke’s eyes suddenly came back to life.

“Messages?” he croaked. It was the first word he’d spoken in 18 hours, and he immediately punched in his PIN. The Representative wasn’t wrong. He did have two messages. Both were from ‘Carla’, a.k.a. Marta.

The first said ‘Good morning. I am well. Are you? love Carla’ The second said ‘Do you not talk to me? Why not answer? Are you not loving me? C’ Powerful engines roared into life, and the thick plumes of grey and white smoke mixed with steam from the liquid hydrogen tanks were back-lit by fiery red flames that issued from the booster jets. Slowly at first, then gaining height with impressive velocity the rocket rose from the deepest, darkest pit ever dug on planet Earth and soared skywards – destination, the furthest stars.

All of them.

Simultaneously.

Fingers flicking over the keyboard, Luke was once more animated, his features once again illuminated, but, alas, he was still beyond reason.

During the time that he passed from a state of total, utter depression to a state of ultimate awakening he passed, briefly, through normality, or at least a state where senses and emotions were more or less in

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balance. During this period of relative normality a policeman lit his cigarette lighter, but this period had passed before he had managed to light his cigarette with it.

Luke wrote, with fevered fingers. ‘My soul had died and now is reborn. iloveyouiloveyouilove’ As he pressed the send button his puny frame was shaking and copious amounts of sweat were pouring down his face, and his teeth were displayed in a grisly passion. He was also screaming at the top of his lungs. He was saying that he loved Carla from the bottom of hell to the top of heaven. What actually came out of his mouth was: “Aaaaaaaarrgh!”

The Representative looked at Luke, and then at the policeman.

“Hospital?” she asked.

“Hospital!” he agreed.

She snatched the mobile out of Luke’s writhing, twisting fingers as two police officers held him back and she started to write down the local numbers she found stored in its memory.

An ambulance, it seemed, would not be available for some time.

There had been yet another accident on the Ring Road, the fourth that morning. Officers Ferreira and Monteiro volunteered to take the crazy Englishman to the hospital which was on their way to their regular patrol duty, just to get him out of the station.

The Representative agreed to travel with them, not least because someone who could speak both English and Portuguese fluently needed to be with them. She sat in the front of the car, next to the driver, and Officer Monteiro, the stronger of the two police officers, sat next to Luke, just in case he tried to do something silly Which he did. The Representative still had his mobile phone, and was still scribbling down likely contacts as Officer Ferreira careered through the streets at an unnecessarily high speed, and with the lights and siren warning all and sundry of their progress. Luke caught a glimpse of the silver-grey casing of his most treasured instrument, his contact with a higher Universe, his muse and his way of prayer, and took an inexpert lunge across the back of the Representative’s seat to regain possession. Though Officer Monteiro might have been as strong as an ox or two, his reflexes were not much sharper than a fluffy cushion, and as his ponderous but weighty arm swung slowly

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forward to intercept the frail figure of Luke darting forward, he only succeeded in hitting Officer Ferreira on the side of his head with a blow that would have stopped a train. It didn’t, however, stop the car, which was now speeding out of control through the busy city streets, the driver slumped, dribbling over the wheel while Luke was scratching and clawing in an attempt to take the Blessed Nokia out of the Representative’s hands. His hands caught hold of the phone, held tightly in the surprisingly powerful grip of the Representative just as Officer Monteiro’s second thrust with his meaty forearm caught Luke under his armpit. As a result, Luke was catapulted over the seat and landed upside down into the lap of a very bewildered Representative, but neither of them let go of their grip of the silvergrey box. Officer Ferreira’s unconscious head was vibrating against the steering wheel as Luke’s head hit the floor of the car below the passenger seat. Luke’s left hand was thrust between his thighs, locked firmly onto his beloved machine while his legs flailed alarmingly around the ears of the panting Representative. At that moment Officer Monteiro, the only one with a view of what was happening outside the car, gave a great bellow and the car disappeared into one of the enormous and virtually unprotected holes that were dotted about the roads as a result of the city fathers’ massive city improvement scheme. Plummeting downwards in a shower of sparks and festooned with the strips of red and white plastic tape that had been placed around the hole, presumably to prevent just such a disaster, the police car bounced onto its side just before the sickening thud as it hit the bottom of the hole. Keen observers of this moment of the crash would have seen the front passenger door fly open as the car flipped sideways, and a slight body being catapulted out of the car, landing in a pile of soft mud.

Those with an eye for details would have noticed that in the rapidly ejected person’s left hand was a silver-grey coloured mobile phone.

II Ben was also having a somewhat difficult day. Luke’s strange behaviour pattern over the previous two days was his main concern, he had thought as he arrived at work that morning, while the problem with Tim seemed to be resolving itself. When he and Charles had discussed Tim’s outlandish claims on the phone the previous night, Ben had agreed with Charles’ assessment that Tim must have made up the whole incident about the missing student, and Tim’s changed behaviour on Tuesday, when he’d appeared so buoyant and positive, seemed to bear this out. They surmised that Jenny had simply been in yet another self-seeking mode by supporting his absurd tale. All that remained was to discover why he’d done it. He’d leave that to Charles to sort out when he came back at the end of the week, and to

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any psychiatrists who might have to be drafted in. However, if Ben thought that those two incidents, as bizarre as they were, were the full sum of his trials and tribulations, he had an unpleasant awakening to come.

As a general rule - on the rare occasions that Charles was away and left him in charge - Ben worked from his ‘office’ – a corner of the table in the staff-room. Occasionally he needed to gain access to Charles’, genuine, office to retrieve some vital piece of information to perform his in locum duties properly. On this particular Wednesday morning at about 9.30, (which incidentally was approximately the time that the police were phoning the British Consulate to try and find out if someone could help them to discover more about their zombie-like detainee), was one of those occasions, and he borrowed the key to Charles’ office from Nuno. He was somewhat surprised, therefore, to find the door closed but unlocked. His surprise turned to shock when he opened the door and went into the room. Sitting behind Charles’ desk was Desmond, wearing a dark suit, a light blue shirt and a regimental tie that he wouldn’t have been able to identify, even if he’d wanted to. The shock wasn’t just at seeing Desmond in a suit and tie instead of tracksuit bottoms and grubby tee-shirts, though this was enough to boggle the mind, though this forced Ben’s sense of reality to shift joltingly from one plane to another.

Desmond, or Dancing Desmond as he was infrequently known, was usually only seen at the School on Saturdays, the only day on which he taught there. They were so desperate for teachers on Saturdays that they would take on almost anyone who could string a sentence of English together, and Desmond was as borderline ‘almost’ as anyone could get. Desmond, however, was only rarely seen in the School on any other day and had never before been seen in Charles’ room and had, therefore, never, ever sat behind Charles’ desk before. But here he was, calmly studying papers, and he had apparently switched Charles’ computer on and, by the look of it, accessed Charles’ personal profile. In front of him sat the Fluffy twins, Elsie and Freda, also part-time teachers at the school. Ben took all this in with one, amazed glance.

Otherwise he was frozen to the spot and, uncharacteristically, lost for words. Desmond looked up, a thin smile on his lips, and it was he who broke the silence.

“Ah, come in Ben, do, there’s a good chap. Lot’s to discuss. Lot’s to think about. Lot’s to do!”

“Desmond,” said Ben in as steady voice as he could manage, and ignoring the Fluffy twins who’d turned towards him with sweet smiles and chirrups of friendly greeting. “Just what the hell is going on?”

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Desmond stood up, smoothing down the sleeves of his jacket.

“Good man. That’s the spirit. Exactly what is going on here, eh? I’ve been asking that question for months now, and got some pretty rum answers, I can tell you. ‘What the hell is going on’. Jolly well put.”

Desmond spoke, as he usually did, a few decibels louder than was strictly necessary, giving the impression of a suppressed bellow.

Ben stared at him, and then at the sisters who were still smiling sweetly at him, and who then looked reverentially back to Desmond.

“I’d like you all to leave now. We’ll discuss this somewhere else. But first, you have to leave,” he was pointing to the open door and his voice was strong and measured.

Desmond moved round the desk and went to the door. But instead of leaving the room, he closed the door and turned and faced Ben. The thin smile was still playing around his thin lips. He gesticulated to chairs around the long table, put there for committee style meetings.

“Ben, please sit down. There are many things to discuss and we might as well be comfortable. Elsie, Freda, please,” he motioned that they should also sit at the table.

“I am not sitting down here to discuss anything with you, Desmond.

You are going to leave, all three of you, and you are going to leave this room immediately. Then you can give me an explanation for…this,” he waved his hands in the air and paused. “Where did you get the key from?”

He walked over to the computer to turn it off, but Desmond moved deceptively quickly, his years as a professional dancer suddenly becoming evident, and held Ben’s wrist in an iron grip.

“I wouldn’t do that, old boy,” Desmond looked hard at Ben, his steely grey eyes had lost their sheen of humour and his thin, grey moustache bristled over his thin, bloodless lips. His thin smile had also disappeared.

“I shall not be leaving this room,” he said, standing between Ben and the computer, “until I decide, and where I got the key is of no concern of yours.” He ignored Ben’s outraged protest. “But I wish to appraise you of the situation. I ….,” he glanced at Elsie and Freda, “…. we have assumed command.”

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Ben’s mouth opened but no sound came out “Things have got completely out of hand, that’s why we took over. As from today things will be different, you’ll see. Just needed to get that damned fool Charles out of the way to get going. And, hah, bingo! here we are.”

“Ooh,” squealed Elsie. “Don’t say that about Charles. He is ever so sweet.”

“Being sweet is not a quality required for good, determined leadership,” Desmond said firmly.

“Yes, of course,” simpered Freda, “but Elsie was right you know. He is sweet. So is Ben.” She looked adoringly at Ben, and gave him the prettiest of all possible smiles.

“Get out!” Ben shouted, almost loud enough for the windows to rattle.

The Fluffy twins squeaked with alarm in unison Desmond moved calmly and with grace, and sat down again behind the desk.

“I take it, then,” said Ben in a slightly, but only marginally more reasonable voice, “that you are not leaving of your own free will? Any of you?” His gaze shifted to the twins whose faces and postures had frozen the moment he had shouted.

“It is not you who give the orders here,” said Desmond in a threatening voice. “That is my job. I have been forced to assume the heavy mantle of command.” He looked at Ben, his eyes demanding understanding. His voice adopted a more cajoling tone. “Ben, you are a good teacher and I would hate to lose you, but I will not have mutiny in the ranks. You can see that, can’t you? You know that things had got out of hand, don’t you? You know that this is the only way, surely? I want you to join us and help to make this School an institution to be proud of. So, are you with me or agin me?”

Ben stared, once again driven temporarily speechless. He clenched and unclenched his fists, which he found were instinctively protecting his chest, twice. He turned his attention to the sisters.

“You two had better get out now. I don’t know why you’re wrapped up in this stupidity. Frankly, I’m totally shocked to see you here. This is serious; I wonder if you realise how serious it is. Please, do the sensible thing and leave right now.”

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“Oh dear,” they said more or less in chorus, “we thought you’d be so pleased.” They looked pleadingly at Ben. “You’re both so clever!” said Freda, fluttering her eyelashes. “But he’s being so brave, and doesn’t he look lovely in a suit?” and she returned her adoring gaze to Desmond.

“Right!” snapped Ben, and he turned smartly on his heels and left the room, leaving the door as wide open as possible. As he stomped down the corridor he heard Desmond give a command.

“Shut that door, one of you.”

Ben went straight to see the security guard who was at his post by the front door.

“Nuno,” he said, “there are three people in the Director’s office who have no business being there. Get them out now.”

Nuno looked stunned. “Three people?”

“Desmond, Elsie and Freda. Make sure that they are escorted off the premises and don’t let them back in again unless Charles or I tell you.” He paused. “By the way, you didn’t supply them with a key, did you?”

Nuno looked like a terrified rabbit and shook his head violently. Ben nodded at him, and Nuno shot off to eject the unwelcome occupants of the Director’s Office.

Minutes later Nuno had tracked down Ben to the latter’s ‘office’ in the staff room, where he was unsuccessfully trying to phone Charles.

Nuno’s face was white, and he was clearly in a state of panic and close to tears. Ben replaced the receiver.

“What happened, for God’s sake?”

“They….fired me. I’ve lost my job!” Nuno’s voice was choking back the tears.

“Oh, bollocks to that!” Ben said in English before switching back to Portuguese “Of course you’re not fired. They can’t fire you. They have no authority to do that.”

“But Desmond said that he was the new Director, and he told me I had to go. He didn’t want me. He fired me.”

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“Desmond is not the new Director. You haven’t been fired, and you don’t have to leave.” He paused for thought, and then said calmly and kindly, “Go back downstairs to your post, and don’t worry. I can guarantee you that you haven’t lost your job.”

Nuno looked meekly thankful but not 100% convinced, but he scurried off to his post in case Ben changed his mind and threw him back to Desmond.

“Shit,” said Ben, not just to himself. ******** When Officers Monteiro and Ferreira and the Representative crawled from the wreckage of the police car, they found themselves at the bottom of a deep hole around the top of which a substantial crowd had gathered, and who were casually watching to see what would happen next. No one had climbed down to assist but, more worryingly for the police officers, there was no sign of Luke. And there was no sign of the mobile phone.

For those that knew where to look, there was a trail of muddy footprints leading up the side of the hole and out across the road and into an narrow alley that was darkened this sunny day by shadows cast by the tall, nineteenth century buildings that lined it. Sherlock Holmes, had he been there with his magnifying glass, would no doubt have studied the prints and declared that they had been made by a thin-framed man with wispy, fair hair, who was lightly bearded and blue eyed, wearing round, wire framed glasses, aged perhaps midthirties, and who was running, carrying a small, lightweight object in his left hand. Sherlock might also have said that he had a tasselled shoulder bag slung from left to right across his body. And, do you know, he would have been right. ******* Tim arrived at the School at lunchtime. He looked and felt wretched.

He came into the staff-room just as Eileen was thinking of leaving it.

At that moment the phone rang in the corner of the room, and Tim shrank back from its sound, and screwed up his eyes as Bertha answered it, only relaxing slightly when she snorted.

“No! Not a chance.”

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Eileen looked at Tim and tears of heartfelt concern, love and sympathy sprang to her eyes, and she couldn’t stop herself leaping forward to greet him with an all enfolding, totally inescapable hug.

She was a generous woman in every single sense of the word, and she used her generosity as a weapon when it suited her. Tim was overwhelmed by enormously strong arms, her vast bosom, strong, musky perfume, the clinking of many chains and bracelets, not to mention the weight of a fairly substantial collection of religious artefacts which she wore around her neck which were pressing painfully into his sternum.

The night of nightmares without sleep had stripped him of any resistance, and besides, Eileen was a comforting bulwark against the elements, he thought, and tears started coursing down his cheek, though he wasn’t crying. She let go of him, slowly and reluctantly because she felt his lack of resistance to her meaningful hug, and mistook it for acquiescence. He choked, grateful to be able to breathe freely again.

“Oh, my dear, what a state you are in,” she gushed concern. “What has been happening? What a terrible state you are in. Do you think you should be here? Don’t you think you should be at home in bed,” her toes tingled at the thought. “You don’t look at all well.”

He shook his head, not denying or rejecting anything, but simply trying to clear his senses which had been partly overwhelmed by her perfume which, if caught close up, would probably have been classed as illegal under the International Convention on Chemical Warfare.

She understood his shaking head as meaning that he wanted to remain at work. She glanced at him, and the look of her concern would have broken the heart of any observer, however cynical.

“Have you had lunch? No, I thought not. Come on, neither have I. Let’s have lunch together. Just you and me, eh?” Her voice conjured a scene of warmth intimacy, perhaps on an exotic island by a palmfringed, silver sanded beach. This was unlikely to be achieved at Café Banana, which was where she intended to take him.

She led him from the staff-room by the hand, and he followed like a lamb to the slaughter, though looking far more miserable. As they passed the double doors that separated the corridor where the Director’s Office was situated they paused for a moment to look at the extraordinary spectacle of Ben and Nuno piling up furniture in an apparently haphazard looking way in the corridor.

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“That looks like a fire hazard,” commented Eileen. “I wonder what Ben is up to.”

They trotted off to lunch. Tim was getting an uncomfortable feeling.

He was beginning to suspect that he might be the main course. ****** Luke, meanwhile, had gained a degree of equilibrium. This might not have been a level of balance that was immediately recognisable or measurable except by specialist scientists with extremely sensitive equipment, but compared with Luke’s recent inability to hold onto the bits and pieces that seem to make our day to day lives work, he was vastly improved.

After all, he’d just woken from a dreadful dream (God, what a night!) in which a small alligator (what had happened to the other one?) and two trolls had forced him onto a flying tea-tray which had then crashed into an extremely large sugar bowl, containing very little sugar. Now that he was awake, or so he thought, being unaware of the immense relative meanings contained in that word, he found himself in a coffee shop, inexplicably covered in mud, but absolutely no sugar at all.

The waiter had looked at him with something akin to disgust, but had taken his order for milky coffee and a double round of toast regardless. Food and hot coffee brought him a stage nearer the kind of reality that the majority of the rest of humanity might recognise as more or less normal. He now had regained enough strength to know that he had been neglecting his duties, and he had a sneaky suspicion that he had somehow been letting people down and had, as a result, probably lost a great deal of respect. It was true, he told himself in a self-deprecating tone, that he had failed even himself.

Now he would make amends. It was time to compose and send many text messages. He owed this to the world. It was expected of him.

Humanity as a whole expected it of him. In particular, Carla would be worried sick by his silence.

How long had it been? How long had he been silent? He had no idea, but he knew that it was a golden rule of life, handed down from generation to generation for countless years, that if a text message hadn’t been answered within twenty minutes then clearly the very foundation of the world, the existence of the Universe in fact, was at risk. There could be no other explanation, apart from death (though some cultures would regard this excuse as merely a weakness), for not answering text messages within this measured time frame. If not, then there was something wrong somewhere. Answering text

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messages immediately was not only a cornerstone of modern civilisation, it was an essential element of life. His fingers scrabbled at the keyboard. There was a message from his mother, his sister, three friends and a firm of air conditioning engineers. But there was, above all, an unread message from Carla. ‘you love me still! i am so happy thank you yours faithfully carla’ Within two minutes the following message had been sent back ‘The centre of my world My being My Universe Is you Forever Ten, painful minutes later, the following message was received by Luke.

‘When can we be together? When have time with you? We meet?’

This was difficult, at first, for Luke to comprehend. They had, after all, been meeting, talking, sharing the same thoughts and space and time for – how long had it been? –forty eight hours? They had been communicating from their souls, indeed each had bared their souls one to the other. They had travelled the world together. What did she mean? What could she mean? It was a few minutes before he realised that she was proposing that they should actually spend sometime in the same room together or share the same park bench together, breathe the same air. His immediate reaction was to feel disgust that such a beautiful relationship should be sullied by something so commonplace and trite as a face to face meeting. He momentarily shivered as a reaction to her suggestion that the proximity of flesh was in any way a substitute for the purity of electrons passing through space in the uninhibited way in which they do. His second, and overwhelming response was to feel an unexpected bulge in his trousers.

‘When? Today?’

‘Não é possivel’ ‘When?’

‘Friday is feriado’

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‘Where What time?’

‘Parque da Cidade 12H00’ ‘Heavenly joy I can’t wait The days will be so long’ Midday on Friday – Hallelujah, just a brief 48 hours away. Dear God, 48 hours? An eternity

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Chapter 11 Ben had not been successful in getting hold of Charles on the phone.

Each time he tried the number in London that he’d been given, where Charles was taking part in ‘an important international conference’, he was told that he was in ‘an important meeting’. Ben tried explaining that he had really urgent business with his boss and was on a mission of utmost importance, but it was clear from the attitude of the person he was talking to that anything ‘urgent’ or ‘important’ outside of London was, clearly, of far less importance than anything, absolutely anything, that was happening inside it, and therefore only required the dead hand of dismissal.

He left a message that Charles should call him back as soon as possible, which he suspected if left to the message taker to interpret ‘as soon as possible’ would mean only when London was reduced to the status of a provincial backwater, and so for good measure sent an e-mail message and a voice mail and text message to Charles’ mobile phone.

‘Palace coup! Ring urgently. Ben.’ Within the hour, Ben and Charles had discussed the matter in some detail.

They had done this with more jocund comments and general frivolity than the casual observer might have thought appropriate, given the apparent seriousness of the situation.

“Usurped by Duffy Desmond, my God,” Charles had said, almost gleefully.

“And by the twins from planet Fluffy, don’t forget.”

“Mm, yeah, really threatening they are, don’t let us forget that. Now, if I’d heard that you had joined their ranks, I would have been worried.”

“Me? Join that trivial trio? I might be many things to many people, but I’m saddened to hear that you think I’m also stark, staring bonkers. Thank you very much!”

“Do you want me to get back there?”

“No, I’ll get it sorted out. Stay on at the conference. Them being in your office is more of an inconvenience than anything else. They haven’t tried to interfere in the running of the place. Not yet, any way. The thing that worries me, though, is how they got hold of a key to your door, and how they knew the access code to your computer profile. But that we can look into when you get back.”

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“Reassure me again they haven’t tried to take control of any of the financial aspects, have they?”

“Not a chance. The only thing they’ve got control of is your room. Besides can you imagine Elsa letting them get their hands on any financial details?!”

“Which is the reason we employ a fire-breathing dragon as our accountant.”

The apparent isolation of the trio led Ben to consider the next move. As yet, very few people knew what was going on, and he intended to keep it that way. If others were to know, then it would have to be on his terms, not Desmond’s. He went to see Senhor Coelho.

Senhor Coelho was the School’s part-time technician. He kept the equipment going. Some people said that he kept the whole school going.

Others disagreed and said that the school functioned in spite of him. But he knew his equipment. As luck would have it, Wednesday was the one day a week that Sr Coelho spent the whole day in the building.

“That’s easy,” he said after the situation had been explained to him. He had been sworn to an oath of secrecy, which meant it would be known all over town by the second brandy after lunch.

He accessed his computer, and tapped away for a few seconds and following a few deft clicks of the mouse he looked away from the screen and at Ben, “There. It’s done. Next time they try to use the computer, nothing will happen. They’re stuck on the same screen that they have now.”

“Which is?” prompted Ben “Er, well it’s a Word document called ‘Memoproc.doc’, but at this moment I can’t tell you what it says.”

“Because you’ve frozen the profile?” Senhor Coelho nodded. “But normally you could access it?” Senhor Coelho nodded again, his colour having reddened somewhat. Ben thought about the implications, but hid his thoughts behind his next words.

“What about the phone? Can we block that?”

Senhor Coelho stroked his thick black moustache for a moment, thinking.

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“I think so,” he decided.

They went down to the office, and Senhor Coelho sat in front of the little telephone switchboard-cum-fax machine. He twiddled the ends of his moustache, and then stroked them upwards, first the left and then the right, and started work.

Less than thirty seconds later he said, “I think that is done. They will find the line busy every time they try to make a phone call.”

“Excellent. Is there any chance that we can phone them?”

“Oh yes, as long as you do it from here. It won’t work from any other phone.”

“Then please connect me to them now,” said Ben, rubbing his hands together.

It was either Elsie or Freda who answered, it was difficult to tell on the phone, but at least it answered one of Ben's unasked questions -– the role designated to the Fluffy girls in Desmond’s coup attempt. Clearly, they were office girls, telephonists, messengers.

“Hello, Ben,” she almost shrieked with unfeigned delight. “How really lovely to hear from you. Are you all right? Mmm?” “Er, yes. Fine. Look, what I need to know is when you two are going to leave Charles’ office and come to your senses. Haven’t you had enough yet?”

“Don’t be so silly, Ben. It isn’t Charles’ office any more. He’s left. He’s gone to London. So now it’s Desmond’s office. Desmond, Elsie and me, I mean.”

“Freda,” he responded, “Charles is coming back on Friday. That’s the day after tomorrow. It’s his office, and you simply have to leave it.”

“Charles is coming back on Friday? Oh, that’s lovely. He is such a nice man.” Freda lowered her voice, “My sister thinks he’s wonderful.” And she simpered before going on. “But if Charles is coming back, what’s he going to do? I mean, what will his job be now that Desmond is the Director?”

There was the sound of a phone being dropped and then picked up again.

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“Hello? Ben?” the barking sound was Desmond’s voice. “What do you want, Ben?” “Desmond. I hope you’ve had a chance to think this over. I am hoping that you’re open to reason and will come out of the office when we can discuss your grievance reasonably and calmly.”

“The time for discussion is well and truly over. You’ve all had your chance.

Now is the time for action.”

“As far as I know this protest, or whatever it is, is the first time you’ve expressed any opposition to the way things were going. Who did you discuss this with before deciding on such drastic action?”

“Many people, Ben, many people. The fact that you don’t move in the same circles as me is your problem, not mine.”

“I take it, from what you’ve said, that you haven’t discussed any of this with anyone at the School then?”

“A lost cause, my dear boy. What would have been the point? No, I needed to talk to people with energy, vision and discipline.”

“I take it you’ve been talking to the semi-retired and semi-conscious around the bar at the English Club, then.”

“That’s as may be. Is there anything else? I really have work to do, you know, not wasting my time in idle chit chat.”

“Anything else? Nothing much, except I want you out of that room in the next five minutes, that’s what I want.”

“Ben, you obviously have problems with your hearing. This is now my, our office, and we are not leaving it. If this carries on, Ben, then I am going to have to give serious consideration to replacing you. I don’t want to have to do this. I am disappointed in you.”

“Well, that is a shame, Desmond, because what you clearly haven’t grasped is that while one of us will certainly be losing his job, it won’t be me. I can hardly see Senhor Santos agreeing to pay for a Director who he hasn’t personally appointed you. He may not have much to do with the school, but Senhor Santos insists on that at least.”

“Who?” a note of hesitation crept into Desmond’s voice for the first time.

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“Senhor Santos, and his lovely salamander of a wife. The owners of the School.” There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Christ, you didn’t you know, did you?”

“Owners? But, well, they’ve got a foreign name.”

“Actually, Desmond, it is you and I who have got the foreign names. If you mean they are Portuguese, then yes.”

“Portuguese? Owning the Canterbury School? Well, that explains an awful lot, I must say. It sounds even more imperative that I stay on and do my duty. Can’t have Johnny Foreigner running the show now, can we?

We’re staying. This is my office.”

“Not ‘ours’ now, then? Forgotten about your two cohorts, have you?”

There was a brief silence, apart from the slight crackle of static. “But look, you’ll have to come out quite soon. What about food? What about, erm, facilities? You can’t stay there all day and night.”

“All taken care of, Ben. We’re self sufficient. I expected that we would encounter a little initial opposition, so I took precautions. Efficiency, Ben. Planning. Looking ahead. That’s the name of the game. That’s what was missing here. That’s why it was essential for someone like me to take over. To bring some order to this chaos.”

“You don’t think you’ve done the opposite, then? You don’t think for a minute, do you, that you have introduced an element of chaos where there was none before? No? Well, tell me this one thing: if you claim, as you seem to do, to be the manager of this place, who do you think you are managing? How will you run this place without the support of the staff?

No one even knows what you’re doing, for Heaven’s sake.”

“Ah, but they soon will. I was just about to send round a memo to everyone and an e-mail explaining what is going on. I expect a very good response and a great deal of support. You’re in for a surprise, Ben.” “No, I think you’re the one who’s going to be surprised. I mean, how do you intend to distribute the memo? By hand? Let’s just see what happens when to try to send that e-mail.” Ben rang off, not waiting for a response. “’For Allah created the English mad – the maddest of all mankind!’” he quoted at the nestling receiver.

“Right,” he said to Senhor Coelho, “let’s collect Nuno and make sure that none of those jokers up there can leave without our permission.”

“Eh?” said Senhor Coelho.

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“If we can’t talk him out of leaving the office, then we’ll have to force them out. The first to leave won’t be able to get back in. They can’t stay in there forever. By the way, can you turn off the electricity in that room?”

“Tricky,” some more moustache rubbing went on, “we might have to lose power in some other rooms too. I’ll check.”

Nuno was looking apprehensively at Ben’s approach, and blanched when asked to accompany them back to the Director’s office.

“Don’t worry, Nuno, I’ve spoken to Charles. You still have your job here.

Would I be asking you to help us if you didn’t?”

Nuno thought about that for a moment, and relief gradually spread across his face as he trotted behind the other two. Then they started moving furniture into the corridor outside the Directors room, lots of small tables and chairs from the nearest classrooms. Senhor Coelho glanced at his watch after a few minutes.

“I have an important meeting,” he explained, and melted away. It was lunchtime. As he humped chairs on top of the tables Ben glimpsed Tim and Eileen disappearing down the stairs in suggestively close proximity to each other.

“But,” said Nuno looking at the positioning of the stacked furniture, “this means that anyone leaving the Director’s office can only go into room four.”

“Exactly!” Ben smiled. “And for the time being I will set up my office in room four, and all classes in that room will have to be relocated, for today anyway.” ****** Over lunch, Tim told Eileen everything. He told her about José Manuel and the garage, about Jenny’s attitude and of Charles’ reaction. He explained what he had found in José’s briefcase and the significance of the file she had brought to him in the park, the theft of his own briefcase, and the frightening anonymous phone calls he had been receiving. He was trembling as he spoke, and while he was explaining all this in half finished sentences and with words tumbling over each other in breathy haste, Eileen was holding his two hands gently in both of hers. He didn’t attempt to pull them away. It wasn’t as good as talking to Mummy over cocoa in front of their log-effect electric fire at home in Basildon, but it was a step in the right direction. When he finished his tale, he broke eye

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contact, and his head dipped mournfully, tears welling in his black-ringed, sleep-deprived eyes.

“You poor soul,” mothered Eileen. “What are you going to do?”

“What can I do?” he was close to blubbering. “Unless I give them back that file, they’ll be after me and hound me……….forever. Perhaps,” his voice took on a dramatic hush, “they’ll even kill for it.”

Eileen jerked one hand away from Tim’s and it flew to her fleshy mouth to stifle a startled cry.

“Where is the file now?” she asked, once she’d recovered herself.

“I put it back into my briefcase. I thought perhaps they would try and steal it again, but this time I’m making sure that they’ll find it.” He didn’t sound as hopeful as his eyes implored.

“Oh, Tim, I’m not sure. Do you really think they’ll look in the same place twice?”

“Well, I do, all the time, if I’ve lost something. Three or four times, in fact.

But you’re probably right. They probably aren’t as sad as me. But I don’t know what else to do.”

There was a silence while Tim wallowed a little and Eileen thought a lot.

“Here’s what you should do,” she announced suddenly and decisively, “next time you get one of those phone calls you must speak to them. As soon as you hear that breathing, tell them that they can have the file. Tell them that it’s in your briefcase and that you’ll leave it, oh I don’t know, somewhere where they can easily find it. We’ll work out the details later.

Somewhere public, I think.”

“Do you think….?”

“Well,” Eileen said irritably, annoyed by even having a hint of a question thrown back at her brilliant idea. “Have you got a better suggestion?!”

“No…..”

“OK, so that’s settled then,” she paused, and squeezed Tim’s hands with hers and added gently, “Don’t worry, Tim. It’s going to be alright.”

They discussed the matter for another ten minutes. Tim felt somewhat reassured. Perhaps her plan would work. At least he now had a plan,

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even if it was only a tiny plan, and he felt the dark cloud lifting from him a fraction, taking his spirits up a little with it.

When they got back to the School they noticed that the corridor outside Charles’ office was now almost completely filled with furniture stacked high. Jenny was standing facing the barricade, and she wasn’t happy.

“This is fucking ridiculous.” she was shouting at no one in particular or perhaps to every one in general, “Just how are we to supposed to get to the toilet, huh? And I’ve got a class in room four at 5.30. How am I fucking supposed to get there, tell me that? Just what the fuck is going on?”

Ben’s head appeared from room four, almost opposite the Director’s Office. He peeked through the barricade and spoke through the improvised battlement of chairs.

“We’re having a few problems here, Jenny, and the toilets and Room four are out of action for a while. Sorry about that, but you can use the toilets on the other floors,” his voice sounded extremely reasonable and almost comforting. He found that he was actually enjoying the bizarre course that events had taken. “If you look at the notice on the board in the staff-room you’ll see that your class has been relocated, just for today.”

“What’s Charles fucking doing in there?” Jenny was impervious to reasonable behaviour and language, as well as usually incapable of using it herself “Why isn’t he dealing with this? I want to speak to Charles Fucking Control Freak MacGregor now.”

“Charles,” explained Ben quite patiently, shifting his head to get a better view through the barricades of Jenny, who kept bobbing and dancing about in her agitation, “is in London. You’ll have to deal with me, or wait until Friday.”

“Not there? I don’t fucking believe that, you slimy bastard. He’s just too fucking frightened to face me. You’re just covering for the cowardly fuckshit,” her voice notched up to maximum volume. “Come out you fucking cowardly bastard you! I’ve got your number, pal!” Her face was taut with rage, her cheeks flushed with crimson and white streaks, her hands clenched defiantly in front of, her knuckles white She turned away furiously, and looked at Tim and Eileen who were gobsmacked witnesses to the event. She addressed them directly.

“You’re not taking that crap, are you? You know he’s in there, don’t you?”

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“Well,” Tim said nervously, “I know he went to London yesterday, so….” his voice trailed off under the withering intensity of the rage focussed on him by Jenny’s eyes.

“Don’t you take fucking sides, Baines!” she spat, and stomped off.

“Unless it’s your side, right? Bitch!” snapped Eileen at Jenny’s heels before clasping Tim’s hand and gently leading the frightened lad to the staff room.

Jenny glanced over her shoulder malevolently and gesticulated violently.

“Fuck off, hippy,” she added to conclude the debate.

Tim spent the rest of the afternoon in a spirit of genuinely ineffective activity. He stood in front of a class or two and mumbled, he hedged his way through the odd question thrown at him, and he bluffed his way through explanations of noun clauses and the use of prepositions related to time. In the back of his mind was a growing discomfort caused by the forthcoming lesson with Carla and the late, and the now deeply lamented José Manuel. The prospect of facing that class, with the inevitably empty chair where José Manuel usually slept was a painful one. Even facing Carla wasn’t going to be as hard as that. He half-convinced himself that José Manuel would be there, mumbling in his sleep, and everything would be normal, as awful as normal was. He started to believe that this nightmare would disappear and that José Manuel’s slumbering frame would be proof that he’d imagined the whole sorry episode.

In the middle of the afternoon, Ben got Nuno to take his place in room four, and gave him strict instructions. He went down stairs to the office so that he could call Desmond.

“Hello,” he said cheerily as soon as he heard Desmond’s voice on the other end. “Everything going fine with you, is it?”

Desmond was almost speechless with rage. But not quite.

“This is outrageous. You must know, Mr Gaskell, that you no longer have a job at this establishment. I demand that you leave the premises immediately.”

“No, Des, old bean,” mimicked Ben, “the boot’s rather on the other foot.

It’s you who has to leave.”

“Inform me, if you would be so kind, what you have done to this computer, and to the phone system. You will ensure that they are working again,

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immediately. Is that clear, Mr Gaskell? How can I be expected to do my job and run this establishment if….”

“You aren’t being expected to run anything, Des old fellow, and what’s more, you haven’t got a job here any more. I think I can guarantee that.

By the way, I hope you’ve brought lots of batteries and candles with you, because the electricity is going to go off shortly” Ben hung up, and cut off Desmond’s slightly hysterical reply.

Ben was making his way up the stairs back to room four when Luke stumbled in through the main door, covered in dried mud, his shirt torn, congealed blood from a wound smudging the area above his left eye.

However, the gleam in his eye contradicted his appearance, for within the spark that lit his eyes could clearly be seen hope, optimism, and love, as well as his regular level of insanity. Ben stared at the contradictory figure in front of him.

“You’re not thinking of going into class looking like that, are you?” he demanded.

“Like what?” Luke was genuinely confused.

“Just take a look at yourself, Luke. Then either try to get yourself smartened up, or go home. It's up to you, but I would appreciate it if you would let me know which option you choose.”

Luke was still confused, for he didn’t know what Ben was talking about, but said, “I’m staying.”

“Good,” and Ben. “But make sure you look in the mirror before you do anything else.” He went up the stairs rapidly, to resume his vigil in room four.

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Chapter 12 Following her morning classes at the University, Carla had spent most of the rest of the day thinking about her next move against Tim, and the last message she’d sent to Luke. She had to admit that she was, in general, enjoying herself enormously, but that she had a twinge of guilt about the way she’d dumped him once she’d got what she wanted from him. João, her boyfriend, had sometimes told her that she could be a real bitch, but she had never taken him particularly seriously. Besides, João, with his confident air and expensive car, could say things like that to her and get away with it. But now she was beginning to wonder if, at least on this occasion, he might have a point.

Getting hold of Tim’s briefcase had been so easy. She had known that that cute security guard at the School would let her in without question because she had frequently made a point of flirting with him, mainly because he had such a perfect, pert little bum, but also because she was a compulsive flirter. Sure enough he had waved her into the building without any trouble and with a broad, or possibly lecherous smile. Then it was only a matter of waiting in concealed lurking distance of the staff-room in sight until the teachers had all gone into class and nipping into the staff-room once the coast was clear. Then she would see what she could find of Tim’s personal property and doing something – anything – to it to annoy him. She’d heard that the teachers all had lockers with their names on them, and that few of them bothered to lock them. It was going to be a piece of cake, or at least a drop of chicken broth.

What she hadn’t reckoned on was Tim having a free period while all the other teachers were in class, and he nearly spotted her when she popped her head around the staff-room door. She lurked down the corridor for a little longer, and when Tim eventually wandered off with a piece of paper in his hand, she shot into the staff-room, looking around it quickly. She spotted his distinctive, battered briefcase immediately and grabbed it without a second thought, dropping it into the Zara clothes shop bag she had brought with her just in case. It was then simply a matter of leaving the building in as bold a way possible, waving an old receipt for fees under the security guard’s nose as she did and saying “Thanks!” so that he would think she’d been to the office to pay her school fees, if he’d thought about it at all. Nuno didn’t think about it for a moment; he just ogled and found himself indulging in a brief fantasy.

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Half way down the street she glanced furtively around her. No one, she hoped, was looking at her as she slid the briefcase out of the Zara bag, unclipped the fastening and tipped the contents onto the pavement, dropping the now empty briefcase on top. She scurried off, feeling very pleased with herself.

They had officially wound up the text messaging committee on Tuesday evening after her final ‘so long, sucker’ message, but one of its members, Marta - Carla’s cousin and Luke’s student, the one who had given Luke Carla’s phone number in the first place - had other ideas. She had her own agenda. She was the only one of the original text message committee not to volunteer to be a member of the Tim Harassment Committee, which had been formed almost immediately to replace the now defunct text messaging committee.

She managed to slip Carla’s old mobile, now once again relegated to the scrap heap, into her handbag while her cousin’s back was turned, and it was she who had been continuing the good work by sending Luke encouraging messages. The first of these were the one’s which lifted him from his pit of despair in the police station. Unlike Carla, she actually meant what she wrote to Luke. She was hopelessly in love with him, and she had been for months. She had been trapped in what she had considered a hopeless passion, but her cousin’s deceitful conspiracy had opened up a way. She hadn’t given it a second thought when the opportunity to tell Luke what she thought of him arose, even if he didn’t know it was her saying it. Love can be like that. Now her biggest problem was what was going to happen on Friday when she met Luke in the park at midday, as they had arranged. Obviously he would realise that she wasn’t Carla, and quickly surmise that it had not been her and not Carla who had been sending the messages (at least, since Wednesday at any rate). The family resemblance was strong, but not so much, she reckoned, that he would actually mistake Marta for her cousin. Not even Luke, whose other-worldliness was one of his most attractive features. She would just have to cross that bridge when she reached it; the prospect of crossing it made her nervously excited.

The friends were having a late afternoon snack and drink in Marta’s kitchen when Carla’s guilt about her ‘so long, sucker’ message finally got to her and she decided to make amends.

“Does anyone know where the old mobile is?” she asked the four assembled friends.

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Marta hesitated to hand over the device to her cousin as it was unlikely that she would give her own property back to Marta without awkward questions being asked.

“I really must send one last message to Luke,” Carla announced.

Marta reluctantly handed it over, and if her cousin was surprised to see her produce it from her bag she didn’t comment on the fact.

Carla looked at the machine for a few moments, and then wrote ‘I am sorry. I think is best if we haven’t such a relationship Forgive me It is best Goodbye Carla’ She sent it instantly, without showing it to any of the others, and then, to Marta’s dismay, slipped the phone into her own bag. Now, thought Marta, I’ll have to use my own phone. She hoped that wouldn’t cause problems for her later.

It is easy to predict the effect of this message would have on Luke, especially following hard on the heels of the loving messages which had been feeding him all day. Catastrophic might be an accurate prediction. But a few more unforeseen things were to happen to Luke before that occurred. ******* Inside the Director’s Office the atmosphere was getting a little strained. Desmond’s initial determined and gritty manner of the early part of the day was beginning to turn rather sour when he found that he had been more or less completely cut off from the outside world.

He cheered up a little at lunchtime when he produced his camping stove from the large grey metal box that that they’d heaved and hauled into the Office before anyone else was about. For about fifteen minutes he busied himself opening packets and cans, and mixing powder with water.

“What are you doing?” Elsie wanted to know.

“Lunch, my dear. Making us a delicious and nutritious lunch.”

The twins exchanged glances.

“Where’s the salad? We always have salad for lunch. I don’t think we want to eat that.” She screwed up her nose as she pointed to at the stew that was being concocted, and Freda put her hands to her eyes.

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“Nonsense, my dear. It’ll do you good to have a change. Full of vitamins and proteins, you know.”

“But we don’t eat vitamins and proteins. We only eat salad.”

“There you are, my dears. Salads are full of vitamins. Not many proteins though.”

“Has that stuff got meat in it?” Freda enquired.

“Of course it has. You can rest your minds on that score. Oh yes, certainly. Beef stew, after all. Bound to have. Reconstituted meat, and no doubt some soya as well, but undoubtedly it contains meat.”

“But we’re vegetarians.”

Desmond stopped stirring for a moment, and looked at them.

“Really? I didn’t know that. Gosh. That’s a bit of a shock. An inconvenience, to say the least. Well, can’t be helped, I suppose.

Pity though, as I’ve got a month’s supply of this in that trunk,” he indicated the grey box in the corner, “so you’ll just have to leave the meat on one side, eh? Have to make do. Times of emergency, and all that, for the greater good, what?”

They looked at each other again.

“Can’t we just pop down to the baker’s and get ourselves something?

Or go and have lunch out, somewhere nice?” they entreated.

“Oh, my dears, but of course not. Quite impossible. You’re not thinking clearly. Not until things have settled down a bit. Not until we’ve consolidated the support for our cause a little more.”

“Did you say you’ve got a month’s supply of ….. that in the trunk?

How long will it take …….to consolidate our support? A whole month?”

“No, no, of course not. Just a precautionary measure, you see.

Planning.” He tapped his cranium with a finger. “No, we’ll soon have enough people on board to make it work famously.”

“It isn’t quite as we’d imagined,” whined Freda. “The others don’t seem at all pleased with what we’re doing. Ben even seems quite

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angry with us. And no one has been to see us. We thought they’d be dozens of us by now.”

“Give them time. They will. They’ll come round to my…our way of thinking before long. A bit of patience, eh?”

“And Ben said that Charles hasn’t left to take up a job in the Vehicle Licensing Centre in Swansea like you’d said, and that he’s coming back here this week. What’s he going to do? I don’t understand it,” Freda sounded very perturbed.

“I know,” Elsie chipped in excitedly, “he can work with us, can’t he?

He can be, ooh, I don’t know, a teacher! Yes, wouldn’t that be good.

I’m sure he’s a wonderful teacher.”

“No, no, I don’t think so. He’s, er, well you know, um…. Look, are you sure you don’t want to try some of this?” He proffered a bowl of steaming brown goo.

“No thank you,” and they started to nibble on some rather hard, rather tasteless biscuits. Desmond slurped his stew.

“Oh, I say,” he carried on, “this really is jolly good. Jolly good. Look, are you sure….? Pity. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

The twins nibbled some more on their biscuits, but even more mournfully than before, and suspected that they did know very well what it was that they were missing.

After Desmond had lunch he, helped by the Fluffy twins, started to draw up a list of English language course books that would have to be proscribed under the new regime.

“Can’t have all this context and situation stuff. Oh dear no. Must get back to basics. Back to good old grammar tables and some decent rote learning,” Desmond had explained. Had he explained that this meant that there would definitely be no more singing, music or roleplay in the classroom then the twins might not have been so quick to help him out with his list.

Later that afternoon, at 4.35 to be precise, Ben, in the room opposite, room four, heard a commotion coming from the Director’s Office.

Voices were raised.

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“We can’t possibly. Ooh, how could you possibly even think such a thing. No, no, no!” The twins took it in turns to vehemently declare the impossibility of the action.

Desmond was pointing to a large, blue plastic bucket.

“It’s the only way. For heaven’s sake. Look, I’ll turn the other way. I’ll put my hands over my eyes. I’ll put my fingers in my ears, even. I promise.”

“No, no, no!” the twins squawked in protest.

Elsie made a move to the door, but Desmond leapt in front of her and held his arms outstretched, the blue bucket in one hand, to stop her from reaching it.

“Where do you think you’re going, young lady? You know you can’t go out. Not yet. Don’t break ranks. Where’s your backbone?

Where’s your spunk? Where’s your determination? Doesn’t your country mean anything to you? Why don’t you use your heads and use the bucket, dammit.”

Freda suddenly snatched the bucket out of Desmond’s hand and before he had a chance to react rammed it over his head. At exactly the same moment, twinnish instinct having broken out, Elsie kicked Desmond savagely on the shin. The double action of shoved bucket and violent kick caused Desmond to lose his balance and totter sideways out of their way to the door. Seizing their moment, the Fluffy twins twisted the door handle and fled into the corridor.

They stood momentarily bewildered by the furniture scattered all around them, but their eyes were drawn by the arrangement of an opening in the morass of tables and chairs leading to room four, where Ben stood partially framed by the doorway, rubbing his hands and smiling.

“Ladies!” he said, and beckoned them into the room. “”Desmond’s being horrid. He wanted us, well, you know, to…” Freda waved her arms about vaguely, “…..in a bucket!”

Elsie was smiling super-sweetly at Ben. “Ladies, if you use that other door over there, you’ll find the loo, of course.”

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As they rushed to avail themselves of the conveniences that Horrid Desmond had denied them, Ben thought to himself that that had been the easy bit. He didn’t fool himself that it would have been any other way. Removing Desmond himself was going to be a much tougher nut to crack.

He rang down to Nuno, and a minute later Nuno and Kevin had made a passage through the barricade and were standing in room four. Ben did the talking.

“Nuno, the Fluffy twins are in the toilet. They can only exit to this room. When they do, make sure they stay here with you.”

“What’s going on, Ben. This sounds serious,” Kevin was perplexed.

Ben filled him in with some selected highlights of the day’s proceedings, and Kevin looked suitably impressed.

“And what do you want me to do?”

“You’ll come with me if you don’t mind, and we’re going to get Duffy Desmond out of the Laird’s Lair, even if we have to carry him out.”

“Right you are, skipper,” and Kevin gave Ben a smart salute.

“Ah, ladies,” said Ben to the Fluffy twins who had re-entered the room, beaming and waving little waves to Kevin and Nuno. “Would you please be so kind as to stay here with Nuno while we go and have a little word with Desmond? Promise you’ll stay here until I get back.”

“Oh course, Ben,” they said, “but I don’t think Desmond will really want to talk to you. He seems to have quite gone off you. I can’t understand why,” added Elsie.

“Funny that,” replied Ben, then, to Kevin said, “Follow me,” and they crossed the hall.

They paused, one each side of the door to the Director’s Office.

Ben’s hand was resting on the doorknob. The caught each others eyes, and nodded. Ben flung open the door and they both burst into the room. They froze instantly.

Desmond was pointing a very large and clearly very old gun at them.

An old fashioned blunderbuss it might have been, but it was still a gun. The bulbous barrel was pointing directly at Ben’s head, and Desmond had a particularly evil glint in his eye. He waved the gun

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upwards, and took a step forward. They came to the rapid conclusion that they would be better off not remaining in that room, and they backed out of the door, slowly and carefully. Their hands were held instinctively above their heads as Desmond glared at them. Neither they nor Desmond uttered a word.

“That changes everything,” said Ben, visibly shaken, once they were back in Room four. “We can’t deal with this by ourselves any longer.”

He instructed Nuno to take the twins with him and keep an eye on them downstairs and told him to call the police. Nuno’s eyes opened wide when he told them what had just happened, while the twins opened and closed their mouths like fishes. Elsie gave a little squeak.

“Kevin,” said Ben, “go and tell everyone else to leave the building and keep away from the garden.”

As the four of them departed, making the hole through the barricade bigger as they went, Luke was coming out of the staff-room, intent on visiting the toilet, and by sheer bad luck managed to miss seeing or being seen by the others. The nearest toilet was next to room four, so that was where he was going. While Ben was on the phone in room four, trying to persuade the receptionist in London that what was happening in Porto was a damn sight more important than a mutual back patting session get together in a plush conference hall in London, and that it was imperative that he spoke to Charles MacGregor pretty damn quickly, he briefly glimpsed Luke stumbling past the open door. Luke was in his normal state of half-awareness, but he was content with his lot because, as yet, he had not received Carla’s second message saying goodbye, because Carla was only at that precise time asking if anyone knew where the old mobile phone was because she had to send one last message to Luke. The pile of furniture in the corridor had momentarily disorientated him, and he mistook the Director’s door for the toilet, and blundered straight in.

“Luke,” said Desmond menacingly, “I’m not sure if I had you on my original list of people I wanted working for me, but, give the paucity of volunteers to date, you are most welcome anyway. Please sit down.”

He shut the office door and beckoned him to the corner with the trumpet-like end of his blunderbuss.

Luke mumbled something, and Desmond responded, “Use the bucket, lad.”

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Within five minutes of relieving himself without any apparent embarrassment, Luke had received Carla’s final ‘goodbye’ and ‘I’m sorry’ message, and all at once a sickeningly familiar feeling of falling, falling, falling into a black unknown crept all over him. Deeper and deeper he went. Even deeper than before.

Desmond looked at him. Luke was curled up in the corner, squatting on his heels, his arms around his knees, rocking gently backwards and forwards for a few minutes before seizing up and becoming rigid, like a dead, gnarled tree root.

“The perfect hostage,” Desmond thought.

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Chapter 13 The police station that received the phone call from the very distressed security guard was none other than the one that had offered overnight accommodation to Luke the previous evening. The comandante was still trying to make sense of a rather garbled report put together by officers Monteira and Ferreira, and concerned the sequence of events that lead to a squad car being wrecked and why Ferreira had had to be treated in hospital for serious bruising caused by a blow to the side of the head by his colleague. The comandante was also toying with a note which asked him to return the call of the British Consul as a matter of utmost urgency.

“What on earth is happening to the British today? It’s not a full moon, is it?” This was serious enquiry, and he got someone to check the almanac. It wasn’t, but it would be the following week. The comandante wondered if things would get worse over the next seven days. Later, he dispatched a police officer to the school so that he could get a better assessment of the situation there than from rather hysterical account given by the school’s own security guard.

The police officer duly radioed in his report.

“Seems like we’ve got a gunman and a hostage situation here, chief,” he explained. “Pretty serious, I’d say. Seems as if a lunatic has barricaded himself into an office and has taken a teacher as a hostage. Two others managed to escape earlier, but it seems he’s armed with some kind of gun.”

“A school, isn’t it?

Make sure that all the students and all unnecessary personnel are cleared out of the building.”

The GNR Hostage Retrieval Team was based, as luck would have it, just around the corner from the school. Its dynamic apparatus burst into life, and within just eight hours a team of twenty specialist police officers had assembled in the garden of the School and in room four, equipped with an impressive array of electronic equipment and massive display of lethal firepower. The first thing they did was to dismantle the barricade.

“Fire hazard,” explained one officer to Ben, who shrugged.

“Now, said the officer in command, “does anyone know what kind of weapon he’s carrying – handgun, rifle, Uzi or what?”

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They had great difficulty in explaining what a blunderbuss was as even the biggest and best dictionaries in the school didn’t have a translation for the word. In the end Ben had to resort to drawing on the whiteboard in room four, which was quickly being transformed into a police command post, and the officer scratched his head.

“Does anyone know what kind of ammunition does it takes?”

“I’m not certain, but as far as I know it fires absolutely anything that you can stuff down the barrel.”

“Caramba!”

With classes cancelled, the teachers assembled down the road in Café Banana where they shared what little information they had. The three principle players weren’t available, as Ben was needed at the School and the Fluffy girls were ‘helping the police with their enquiries’ at the police station where, by pure chance, were being interviewed in the same room in which Luke had been asked questions, which remained unanswered, some 18 hours earlier.

Although they were willing to talk, and would have done so to the rear limbs of any donkeys if asked, they made little sense to the cabo interviewing them. They contributed as little to his knowledge of the world in general, or the case in question, as the taciturn Luke had done to the same cabo the previous day. Kevin, who was at the Café, knew more than anyone else gathered there as he had actually been inside the ‘hostage’ room and had seen the gun, so he was centre stage, and what he didn’t know he invented. In his version, Desmond was dressed in combat gear, with bandoleers of bullets slung crisscross over his chest, and had at least two heavy machine guns at his disposal and, (though he couldn’t be sure of this), he thought there was an anti-tank rocket launcher behind the desk.

There were whistles of amazement, and Kevin’s cool in the face of such overwhelming odds was greatly admired.

“What would he want an anti-tank thingummy for?” someone asked.

Kevin shrugged his shoulders and said, “Who knows. Who can tell what a person like Duff Des is thinking.”

There was a general consent amongst the photocopier crowd that the day had been a highly successful one. The criteria for success was clearly not the same criteria as set out and debated by management, and might, indeed, be seen as the antithesis of management’s

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dearest wishes. The photocopier crowd was supremely happy because a rich sauce of mischance, happenstance and general mayhem had provided them with an even richer source of gossip which would supply them for the foreseeable future with a store of items for discussion, complaining, congratulation and back-biting. It had, indeed, been an excellent day.

Tim was too detached from the real world, the world of what was actually happening to take a great deal of interest in the proceedings.

He was simply grateful that classes had been cancelled, which meant that he didn’t have to teach that particular class in room nine that evening and, given the fact that there was another holiday due the following Friday, he wouldn’t have to face them for another week. He stayed at the café until about nine o’clock and then, in spite of Eileen’s pleading that he shouldn’t be alone, he went home to try and catch up with some of his missed sleep. Before he went she made him promise that he’d keep to their plan by telling the international spies what they’d agreed, should they decide to ring. She made him repeat what he was going to say three times before she was satisfied, and let him go home.

Tim lived on the second floor of a fairly run down block of flats in an area of town that was not known for its salubrious streets nor its wellheeled inhabitants. The lift wasn’t working, again, but this was a mixed blessing or a mixed curse depending on how you saw these things, because it always stank of stale urine which made him gag, and was much slower than walking anyway. He trudged up the stairs.

The landing outside his front door was badly lit, but not so badly that he couldn’t see that the door had been forced open. He stood two steps from the top of the flight and looked.

One of his neighbours had clearly been waiting for him to return, for as he stood and surveyed the damage from a safe distance her door opened and she poked her head around.

“It happened this evening. We didn’t see who did it, but we’ve been keeping an eye on it until you got back.”

Of course, all this was spoken in high speed Portuguese and made doubly obscure by the speakers heavy Porto accent. Tim didn’t understand a word. He simply nodded glumly.

Inside, it appeared that his flat had been turned upside down.

Drawers had been emptied over the floor, shelves similarly cleared and even the bed linen had been ripped from the bed and lay in a

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heap. It looked, in fact, almost normal, though not quite. Tim noticed the difference. His clutter, his mess, had a little more order to it.

He didn’t even bother to check if anything was missing because he knew that what the burglars had been looking for had been with him all day, in the briefcase he still held in his hand.

He was aware that his neighbour had followed him into the flat, and she was standing just inside the front door surveying the scene. She was tut-tutting and shaking her head repeatedly and rabbitting on rapidly, but he wasn’t listening. Then she kept repeating the word polícia, vocalising it in a dozen different ways. He turned to her in panic, “Polícia, não! No police. Nein!”

She shrugged and muttered something which sounded like she agreed with his decision, and she shuffled off back to her own flat in her carpet slippers, pulling a thin woollen shawl tighter over her shoulders as she went, the muttering having become a constant incantation.

He forced the door shut with much creaking and cracking against the broken door jamb, forcing it to close as well as he could. The following day, he thought, he’d get someone at the School to arrange to have the door fixed. In the meantime, he hunkered down for the night by wrapping the stripped bed linen around him in a higgledypiggledy fashion, and resigned himself for another night without sleep, and waited for the phone to ring. Ring, ring, he pleaded, and glanced at his briefcase and mentally pictured the bulky buff folder inside.

The phone never rang that night. And he was wrong about the other thing too, because within five minutes he had fallen into an exhausted sleep. Throughout the night he remained in an upright, squatting position, shaking and jerking from time to time, and shouting out odd syllables and nonsense words occasionally, as frenzied dreams racked his troubled unconscious. Luckily, in the morning, he would remember none of these. Mother Nature, at times, can be merciful like that. ****** Luke, likewise, remained all night in a squatting position. But he wasn’t twitching or shaking. He remained completely motionless. He didn’t sleep so he didn’t dream in the normal sense of the word, but he was hardly in a state that most of us would call awake either. He

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was caught somewhere between the true waking world - from which most normal people are looking actively for ways to escape through work, impassioned love affairs, alcohol or drugs - and a medical coma. It was as if he was in a vegetable state with motor functions operating more or less normally. Though one might spend some time debating which vegetable he most resembled, peas and beans possibly being high on the list due to their ability to climb about, this is probably not the time to do this. What is more important is to realise that the state of Luke’s mind at this time was so severe that he had even lost interest in the one thing that, for the past two days, had kept him in touch with the human race. Or at least, with a small part of it.

His Nokia. It lay abandoned, forgotten in the deeper recesses of his hand-stitched shoulder-bag which is a shame, because impassioned messages from Marta a.k.a. Carla were building up in its memory bank.

Not even the spotlights that the police shone through the windows from the garden disturbed his deep, catatonic state.

“Put the lights over there, in front of that tree,” someone in uniform had suggested.

Behind the lights, and nestled high in the branches of the tree, sat a police officer in black combat fatigues, and he was carrying a pair of ordinary binoculars and a pair of night-scopes. He stared down into the room through the uncurtained windows to survey the scene before Desmond thought to close the blinds against the light.

“Poor sod,” he was saying. “The hostage is bundled up in the corner.

Looks like he’s tied him up so he can’t move at all. He’s being forced to squat in a corner.”

“We’ll get that bastard,” someone growled from the darkness below him.

Desmond was bothered with the intense lights that cast such violent shadows across the floor and walls. He tried to close the blinds, but only one worked properly; the other remained jammed half open and half closed, slanted at a jaunty angle.

“Blasted thing,” he complained. “Typical of what this place has turned into. With proper checks and maintenance procedures this kind of inconvenience could easily be avoided.”

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He edged up the bottom of the window a little. This was observed by the policeman in the tree, who was relaying his observations by radio to his superior officer.

“Can’t quite see what he’s doing. The window is open a bit, not much….a little bit….no …what? ……O God! Watch out”” A deafening roar split the night air as a brilliant flame poured forth from the window, and hundreds of startled, previously sleeping pigeons fluttered up into the dark sky. The spotlights exploded in a flash of light and smoke and a tinkling of falling glass.

“What in God’s name was that?” said someone on the ground. A split second later there was a crashing of branches above him and a black-suited officer of the law dropped out of the tree and rolled about on the ground, moaning, “I’ve been shot. Oh my God. I’ve been shot. Blood! Meu Deus! I’m bleeding!”

They held onto the stricken officer and looked at him in the lights reflected from the School. His black balaclava and his black jacket were streaked colour.

“What the hell?”

“Can you move?”

“Can we move him? Quick, get him inside.”

Four men sprinted to the safety of the building, carrying their injured comrade-in-arms between them. They laid him gently on some tables that had pushed together and looked at his injuries.

The peeled off his balaclava and saw that his face was mercifully unmarked, except for where he’d cut himself shaving that morning.

They did the same with his jacket, but could see no recent wounds.

One of the officers was gingerly sniffing at the streaks on his clothes, and looked puzzled, and passed the clothes questioningly to a colleague, who also sniffed them.

“Printer ink. Lexmark?” he sounded aggrieved, and the third policeman sniffed.

“No,” he declared, “HP.”

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The stricken man had nothing more than a bruised shoulder where he’d fallen from the tree, but they took him to the hospital just to be on the safe side. There’s no telling what printer ink can do to an armed police officer.

The policemen remaining in the garden looked around the debris of the broken lights and searched under the tree where they picked up broken printer ink cartridges. They also found shattered paperclips, parts of a stapler, splintered pens and a torn battered tin can with the charred legend ‘Beef Stew’ just visible.

“The blunderbuss,” said the platoon corporal, “that’s how he managed to hit three lights and Nestor with one shot.”

Unknown to the police in the garden, the blast from the blunderbuss had not only destroyed the weapon itself, but its recoil had hurled its hapless handler, Desmond, against the opposite wall which he had slid down, concussed. He settled into a brief, unscheduled sleep, where he remained briefly side by side with rigid Luke, his head resting gently on the shoulder of the love-lorn lad and they lay together briefly like two snuggling bunnies. This would have been the perfect moment to end the siege, if only the police had known about it.

However, the officer who had been blown out of the tree and taken to hospital had taken the only pair of night-scopes that the assembled officers of the law possessed. By the time they realised that they were blind and had retrieved them, Desmond had regained consciousness and was staggering around the room in a very woozy state.

Back in the garden the police continued to look at the damage caused by the blunderbuss.

“OK,” said an angry cabo. “Now we know he means business, let’s try again to find out what he wants.”

During the night, the list of demands grew. However, there seemed nothing that the police themselves could negotiate on.

‘A clearer system of Line management’ ‘Abolition of upward appraisal’ ‘Nescafé to replace the expresso coffee machine’ ‘Pasteurised milk in the fridge’ ‘Typhoo triangular tea bags to be provided’ ‘British National Anthem to be played at the beginning (or end) of each lesson’

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‘Portrait of the Queen to be hung in every classroom’ ‘Tea and scones in the garden during the summer term’ ‘Withdrawal of Britain from the European Union’ By breakfast time (2 sausages, bacon, fried eggs, grilled tomato, a slice of toast and a cup of tea) the list had grown to fifty items, the most obscure of which being ‘Bring back the Rotten Boroughs’ “When is your Director arriving?” asked the senior officer to a bleary eyed Ben, who had been catnapping on the only comfortable chair in the staff-room.

“Not until mid-morning. There is no earlier flight. He has to change at Brussels.”

“Poor man,” sympathised the senior officer. “Is there anything he can do?”

“I doubt it. But he needs to be here.”

“Why, if he can’t do anything?”

“It’s really his responsibility and, besides, I could do with some proper sleep,” he grinned wearily.

“He’s the owner of the school, is he?”

“The owner? No….oh, Christ, I’d forgotten. We have to contact the real owners.”

The Santos’ already knew what was happening when the police finally managed to track them down. They’d seen it on the breakfast time TV news.

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Chapter 14 News of the hostage crisis had spread rapidly, and the street outside the School was beginning to fill up with hundreds of inquisitive spectators, TV crews, radio reporters, local and national hacks who had turned up to cover the event. As a result the police had to cordon off the street, which then meant that an adjacent six streets also had to be closed or to have the traffic on them diverted. This had to happen because of the narrow streets of the city, which made a tortuous one-way system inevitable. This, in turn, created serious problems at four major intersections and by the time Charles’ plane touched down, nearly one third of the city was enveloped in a state of traffic chaos rarely dreamt of even in a city planner’s worst nightmares. Thousands of cars were paralysed in a grid lock of unimaginable proportions, and the ensuing fracas between frustrated drivers and their near environs was beginning to seriously drain the city’s overstretched police resources. The drivers had decided, as if some common purpose had been achieved by mass hypnotism, to attack each other, as well as on shops that lined the roads. Then there was a particularly savage wave of attacks on pedestrians whose ease of locomotion and facility of movement the incarcerated drivers felt was being flaunted provocatively. Among those attacked was Charles who, having abandoned his taxi from the airport some fifteen blocks away from the School, was now trying to make all possible haste to where he was needed, lugging heavy bags. An impromptu gang of two men and two women set upon him with rage and long nails, and though he managed to hang onto his luggage, his shirt was ripped, he lost all the buttons off his jacket, and his face suffered a long, deep scratch.

Charles’ torn and bloody appearance didn’t inspire the police officer on duty at the cordon at the end of the street with the confident belief that he was, in fact, the Director of the School and that his presence at that august but presently troubled establishment was required.

While Charles was patiently waiting for the aforementioned officer to get on his radio and seek orders, Charles’ eye was caught by someone else who was staring at him in a hard and disagreeable way. It was Jenny.

“Why aren’t you in there sorting out this fucking mess? I mean, I want to check my e-mails and how can I with these goons cluttering up the place?”

“Just trying to get there now, Jenny, just as soon as I can.”

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She glanced down at his luggage and saw the airline baggage check tags tied around the handles. She nearly said something, bit her lip, then thought better and changed her mind. Instead she said, “So what’s going on down there? Is it true that a gang of Finno-Irish Mafiosi have got loads of guns and are holding a class of students up for ransom.”

“I seriously hope not, Jenny,” and he tried to picture what a single Finno-Irish mobster might look like, let alone a gang, “I think you’ve been listening to too much gossip in Café Banana.”

“Don’t you put me down, you bastard. Not that you’d fucking tell the truth, anyway. You fucking have to have all the fucking control don’t you, and fucking information control is what you are fucking best at, isn’t it? Information is power, yeah? You bastard!” It was lucky that her teeth were all her own, for she otherwise would have been in serious danger of spitting them out, such was her venom.

“If you say so, and so eloquently put, Jenny.”

“Don’t you patronise me, shit head.”

“Wouldn’t know how to. But listen, it’s no secret that someone in there has a gun and is in my office, and that he appears to have taken a prisoner. It’s serious, all right, but perhaps not quite as bleak as you suggest. Hopefully” The policeman returned and told Charles it was alright for him to proceed, and started to move the crowd control barrier aside. Charles had a sudden thought, the beginning of a plan, perhaps, and held his hand up to the policeman to wait a moment.

“Don’t you want to know who has taken over my office, and why he is holding the School up to ransom?” he asked Jenny.

“What’s it got to do with me, apart from stopping me reading my mail?”

“I just thought you’d be interested, that’s all. After all, you do work there,” Jenny shrugged, looking bored. “I’ll tell you anyway. It’s Desmond, and he thinks that I’m a lousy boss and he reckons that he can run the place a whole lot better than I can. That’s his protest. He wants to replace me and take over as Director.”

Jenny suddenly looked very interested indeed.

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“Yeah? He wants to do that? Fucking brilliant. Wish I’d thought of it first. Frigging ace, that is.” Then she glowed a little less brilliantly.

“Desmond? You mean Duffy?”

Charles nodded.

“Yes, Duffy Desmond. Awful isn’t it. Can’t believe he thinks he could do a better job than me.”

Jenny recovered quickly.

“Well, he’s got my vote, that’s for sure.”

“I thought he would,” muttered Charles, and turned to the policeman waiting patiently by the barrier.

“I’d like to bring this young lady through the barrier please. Is that OK?” The policeman shrugged his shoulders and nodded. Why should he care who the scruffy Brit brought with him? He opened the barrier, and Charles led Jenny through.

“What is this Charles? I don’t fucking trust you.”

“I gathered that, but you don’t need to. But you might be able to help.”

“Help?”

“Perhaps, let’s see.”

Jenny hung back, unsure.

“Suit yourself. You don’t want to read your e-mails, then?” said Charles, and Jenny followed like a lamb.

Outside the School, and standing just proud of the pillars that flanked the main door, strutted Senhor Santos in his finest coat and hat and his inappropriately jewel-bedecked and fur-clad wife, Maria Fátima.

They were torn between the press cameras, such an unfortunately long way down the street, the images from which, nevertheless, they trusted, would have them dining out for months if not years to come, and the interior of the building, where the integrity of their school, their business, their dream was being threatened. The sight of Charles

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trailing up the street towards the building was an enormous relief to them, and they greeted him with hugely affected enthusiasm, attempting to ignore or even tolerate his ragged state, always with one eye to the cameras whirring at the end of the road.

“Ah, Senhor Charles,” she pronounced his name with a soft ‘sh’ at the beginning and the end of his name. “You are come to resolve this problem. This is good.” Maria Fátima smiled deprecatingly at her husband. “You are the man for the employ; now go and stroke while the metal is hot.” Her arm flourished in a gesture of heroic endeavour towards the door of the School.

“After you,” Charles affected a mock bow, indicating the open door, guarded by a uniformed policeman. “Clearly you and your husband will lead me through the difficult negotiations ahead, and I will do everything I can to assist you in this troublesome time.”

Senhor and Senhora Santos held their ground and stared at him with amused, but dismissive smiles.

“In what concerns this, we have our work doing here,” her eyes flicked towards the cameras. “Is best you go and do hay while it rain cats and dogs, no?”

Charles reluctantly lowered his hand, which was indicating the open door of the School.

“Of course,” he said about nothing at all. “It is wonderful to know that you will be backing me up all the way.”

He turned and walked into the building, followed nimbly by Jenny.

Maria Fátima looked at her husband, and he simply hitched his Italian made woollen coat draped over his shoulders with a flourish. Feeling confident, whatever the outcome, they moved a little nearer to the cameras, and Maria Fátima made sure that her right side was always kept in a half profile to the lenses gleaming from the barriers.

Ben was relieved to see Charles, and puzzled to see Jenny.

“What’s she doing here? Charles, she’s a liability!” he hissed.

“Come to read her e-mails, I believe,” said Charles so that Jenny could hear. He waved her towards a nearby computer. “Right, Ben, fill me in. What’s the state of play?”

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Ben glanced sideways at Jenny and then showed him the list of Desmond’s demands.

“Hmm, I like the idea about tea and scones. Does he want them with cream and strawberry jam? Hope he doesn’t want fresh Devon cream flown in every day.”

While Jenny was busy accessing her e-mails, Charles met the police comandante with whom he felt an immediate rapport, as unlikely but interesting as that seemed to him.

“So, who is the girl?” enquired the comandante.

“Someone who, I hope, will be of use to us. Once she’s finished what’s she’s doing.”

Charles then outlined to Ben and the comandante what his idea was.

Ben was immediately taken with its potential, but the comandante was seriously against it.

“It breaks every rule in the book!” he protested.

“What book?” asked Ben. “Well, I don’t know. I’ll have to speak to my chief about that.” Charles proffered the phone, but this was declined, as pride in the act of decision making rather than decision seeking took over.

Jenny had finished what she had come in for, and was concealing her disappointment at having received no e-mails from anyone at all as she took up her place behind the comandante.

“Jenny,” enquired Charles, “you think Desmond has got the right idea, about a change of management here, don’t you?”

“Too fucking right. This place needs someone who will listen to what I have to say.”

“But do you think that Desmond with a gun is the right way to go about it? Is it the way to manage the School?”

“Of course not. You fucking know I’m a pacifist. Hate violence. I’d kill any fucker who tried to tell me otherwise. He’s gone way over the top with that one, I agree with you there. Bleeding hell, Charles, there’s a first. Agreeing with you.”

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“Well, if you agree with what he wants,” Charles had already made a mental note not to let her see his list of ‘demands’, “but not his methods, perhaps you could persuade him to adopt a different method.”

“Me?” “You.” “Fucking hell, Charles, what’s your game?

Why would I do that?”

How would I do that?

“You’re a very persuasive woman, Jenny. You have, er, a way with words,” she preened herself very slightly. “And you know that we have got to get this right. This might be our only opportunity. Of course, you can just leave if you want, and have nothing to do with what happens here.”

Jenny’s eyes burned brightly.

“Ben, how can we talk to Desmond,” asked Charles.

Ben explained the phone set up, and they all adjourned to the office, along with a puzzled comandante who had agreed to try every nonviolent method of solving the current dilemma, but felt that co-opting support on behalf of the hostage taker somewhat opposed to everything he’d been trained to believe in.

“Desmond? This is Charles.”

“Charles? What on earth are you doing here? You have no right to be here, you know. I demand that you leave.”

“I don’t intend to stay for long, Desmond. I take it you aren’t thinking of leaving …… that office anytime soon yourself?”

“I’ve got a job to do. A job which you didn’t do, and the sooner those blasted police are out of the way then the quicker I can get on with it.”

“Very well. We’ll see what we can do. By the way, I have here one of your fans. A fervent supporter of yours.”

“Really? You do? Oh, I say, how splendid!”

“Certainly. Do you want to speak to her? It’s Jenny.”

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“Jenny? Pleasant girl. Smashing! Put her on the blower, old bean.

Hey, I must say you’re being very sporting about this. Top class.”

Jenny and Desmond had a conversation for about ten minutes during which it was clear that a lot of agreeing was going on and, at one point, a certain amount of cooing and flattering talk was exchanged.

The fact that it was being done in English meant that the comandante didn’t have to listen to what he would otherwise have thought was a lot of subversive talk, though Charles and Ben received it all with gentle smiles. Jenny put down the receiver with finality.

“I want to join him,” she demanded.

The comandante spluttered in outrage, and protested that this really was a step too far. But Charles flapped his hands to try to soothe and quieten him.

“I thought you’d say that,” he said to Jenny.

It took another ten minutes of persuading the irate officer that, having come this far, this was an option they couldn’t ignore.

“It’s against all logic,” protested the officer. “The usual procedure is to try and take people out of a hostage or potential hostage situation, not to put them in it. It’s a crazy idea.”

Another policeman thought he understood the plan.

“I understand. You are going to plant a microphone on her. A bug?”

“No,” said Charles, “not a bug. No wires. Just Jenny going in alone.

You’ll just have to trust me on this. I’m sure we’ll end up with no hostages at all instead of more of them.”

“Well, you’d better be right,” said the comandante eventually, “or both you and I will be out of a job tomorrow.”

“Will that be so bad?” said Charles wryly.

All this argumentative behaviour between the figures in authority had done nothing but strengthen Jenny’s determination to join Desmond in his fight against dictators and bullies in general and to establish a fairer system of justice, peace and harmony amongst the staff at the Canterbury School of English. And to get what she wanted, for once.

“Let’s do it!” she demanded impatiently.

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When they contacted Desmond to make the arrangements, though, he was cagier than they’d expected, and he reminded them that he had a hostage and a gun (and the police didn’t know that this was no longer strictly true – the shattered remnants of the ancient gun being embedded in many different and various parts of the room). He also told them that he would not hesitate to ‘damage’ his hostage if any moves that he didn’t like the look of anything which took place. A small group of heavily armed policemen wearing bullet proof vests were ordered to stand some four metres back from the door of the Director’s Office. This frustrated them as they were champing at the bit. Two of them, Officers Monteiro and Ferreira, were desperate to release their pent-up anger following their car accident the day before, and jumping into a room with an armed criminal in it and spraying the room with machine gun fire, probably throwing in a few stun grenades as well, would have satisfied them very well. Their chief told them to wait. He spoke of pleasures to be anticipated.

Jenny entered the room with ease, and she closed the door herself behind her. Desmond was hiding behind the desk. Those waiting outside the door held their breaths and listened. The door wasn’t relocked after her.

“Now what?” said the comandante.

“Now we wait,” replied Charles, and he settled down to finish the Guardian crossword he’d started as the plane was making its final approach before landing.

At first, no sound at all could be heard from the Director’s Office. For about thirty minutes it was quiet. Then an occasionally raised voice could be heard, usually Jenny’s. Within another 10 minutes the outbursts were becoming more frequent, and the volume was gradually creeping up too.

The comandante looked at Charles nervously. If this went wrong, he told himself, he might as well jump into the river Douro. What had made him listen to that foreigner, that civilian, that fool amateur?

What had caused him to throw away years of careful police training and experience to the wind, and follow the whims of someone who clearly came from a nation of mental defectives? He looked wildly at Charles, who glanced up from the letters page and gave an expression which was both reassuring and calming. Why? After yet another 10 minutes the yelling and screaming were almost continuous, and frequently two angry voices were heard screaming at

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the top of their lungs at each other simultaneously. Charles looked up from the sports section of the paper.

“Get ready,” he said in a voice so calm and gentle that no one could doubt its authority.

The comandante beckoned the group of five burly policemen, including Ferreira and Monteiro, who immediately took up their positions each side of the door of the Director’s Office. Monteiro was limping a little due to getting his leg trapped under the seat when the car crashed, and Ferreira had a large, purple bruise covering most of the right side of his face. They had been pressed into service due to the severe strain on police resources that day. They gripped their awesome weapons in readiness.

No sooner had they taken up their positions than the door of the Director’s Office burst open and out fled Desmond, his purple-hued face contorted with a mixture of rage and fear. His clear intention was to seek shelter from the demonic whirlwind following closely behind him, and the kindly police officers who were standing outside the door seemed to offer him the shelter he sought. They responded by slamming him to the ground and wrenching his arms behind him before snapping the handcuffs shut, an operation which, from the moment of the door opening, had taken a touch over three seconds.

Behind him, now in the doorway, was that demonic whirlwind, and Jenny’s hair was crackling with discharging static electricity and her hate-filled voice drowned out the sounds of violent arrest, the clanking of weapons against furniture and the bellows of the arresting officers.

She caught sight of Charles, who was grinning from the room opposite, room four.

“He’s fucking worse than you are, for Christ’s Sake! He fucking is….He’s a fucking nutter. A fucking fascist. Chauvinistic fucking bastard.”

Charles spread his hands in a gesture of acknowledgement of this unusual backhanded compliment. “…..and he’s fucking got dead animals in here. The bastard!!” She spat the last word out, as she swung around her head a saucepan of beef stew for all to see, showering Desmond and his arresting officers with a greasy brown sauce.

She continued shouting and swearing hysterically as she was led down the corridor by two substantial policewomen to an ambulance

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waiting in the street outside. As she reached the end of the corridor, she turned back and faced Charles, and shouted, “You knew this would fucking happen, didn’t you? You fucking shit, you.”

Charles nodded his head in grateful acknowledgement.

“Impressive,” said Ben, clapping a hand on Charles’ shoulder as they watched a squad of bulky policemen lead a whimpering Desmond away.

“Ah,” said Charles, “put two opposing sets of ritual behaviour into one time frame and, well, the outcome was fairly predicable.”

“It was? Sounds risky and totally unpredictable to me.”

“Yes, it is that too.”

“Impressive,” repeated Ben as he picked up his jacket and made for the door, “I’m going for a drink. Coming?”

“In a minute. Don’t you want to see how Luke is first?”

“No. Not especially,” and Ben sauntered off, his jacket slung over one shoulder.

Officers Monteiro and Ferreira, meanwhile, had gone into the office, cautiously, as if a large, evil, black bear was waiting for them behind the door. Instead, what they found was a pathetic bundle of rigid humanity which, even in the foetus position it had adopted and with the head hidden, looked familiar. They knelt down and gently prised Luke’s head up. The eyes were open.

“Fogo, it’s him!” They both jumped up and took a step back, and both instinctively pointed their assault rifles at his head. Then they hesitated.

They lowered their weapons and looked at each other. Luke didn’t move. He remained in exactly the same position as they had left him in, forced him into. They didn’t know how to treat him – was he a criminal, a hostage victim or a hospital patient? Monteiro nodded to Ferreira who went to ask for instructions from the cabo, who asked the comandante who in turn said to Charles, “Is he one of yours?”

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“Sadly, yes,” Charles replied.

They agreed that he should be taken to hospital.

“What about his mobile phone? Do we take it off him? It seems to have been the source of most of his problems. Or shall we let him keep it?”

“Well, I’m not 100% sure,” replied Charles, “but my gut feeling is that he should keep it.”

As Charles’ gut feeling had so recently proved to be spot on, nobody argued with his decision. So it was that Luke was taken down the corridor, on a stretcher, now in dissolving foetal position, with the Nokia held loosely in his limp hands, which were draped across his chest.

Charles went into his office and looked around. The remains of the exploded blunderbuss were embedded in the scorched wall, the blackened ceiling, the splintered desk and in the shattered keyboard of his computer, and on the floor an upturned blue bucket had spilt some kind of liquid into the carpet. On the conference table stood a camping stove, which was surrounded by congealed gravy and numerous half-empty packets of a yellow powder, much of the contents of which lay in piles, stuck in the gravy.

“Could be worse. Could have been a lot worse,” he thought.

“You can’t stay in here, sir,” said a uniformed officer from the door, “Forensics will want to look at it first.”

“I have no desire,” said Charles languorously , “to remain here for a second longer.”

Tucking his torn shirt into his trousers, he went and joined Ben for the drink that he felt they both deserved.

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Chapter 15 The teaching staff were pleased to hear that the continuing police presence at the School would mean that they would have yet another unscheduled day off work. What with the following day being yet another holiday, a religious one at that (it was the day of ‘Our Lady of the Milk Shed’ or somesuch) that would mean a total of three days off in a row. However, they were less pleased to learn that Saturday was to be a normal working day.

“Define a normal working day,” Kevin had asked as they sat around three tables in Café Banana.

“Fucking crap,” replied Jenny, recently released from her brief check up in hospital.

The decision about coming back to work on the Saturday had been made by Charles, with Ben as the devil’s advocate.

“Why not leave it until Monday? Give us a day to clear up.”

“Clear up what, Ben? The only physical mess in my room. Give them too long off and it will dwell on their minds and create problems where none exist, believe me. No, the sooner we put this all behind us the better it will be for all of us. Saturday. Nine o’clock sharp.” ******** Tim, like most of the staff, had missed most of the shenanigans at the School. That day, he had slept until midday. He awoke suddenly and enormously, but with a woolly head that suggested that he had drunk far more than his normal quota of two bottles of Super Bock the previous night. He struggled to think back to the night before, but all roads seemed blocked, all doors seemed locked until, that is, he saw the broken timber around his front door and the memories came flooding back. He buried himself in the bedclothes which had mysteriously ended up on the floor, and tried to get back to sleep. He failed to do so, but managed to delude himself that if he stayed completely buried under the blankets and the duvet, head and all, none of that wicked world out there would ever trouble him again.

The phone rang, and he realised why ostriches could never have been contenders in the race to invent the telephone.

The phone! His heart stood still and leapt both at the same time, quite a painful experience. What was the message he had to give?

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What were the words he had rehearsed? Eileen had made him go over them time after time. What were they? He remembered.

‘I will leave the file in a black briefcase under the third table on the left in Café Banana at nine o’clock tonight.’ The alternative wording was at nine o’clock tomorrow night, if he was rung after 8 p.m.

His pulse was racing as he lifted the receiver. Finally he was going to finish this nightmare once and for all.

It was Lurdes, from the School.

“Ah, Tim. Not lose yet more students? No? But listen, the School it is closed today, yes. Big problems there. Don’t go there today, OK, Tim?” “Lurdes. Thanks…what’s the problem? You really don’t know?

OK….by the way, can you help me? I need some help with my door.

It is broken. It doesn’t close properly. Can you help me?”

“Tim, I am the secretary. I not know to repair the doors.”

“No, no, what I mean is, can you help me to contact someone who can fix my door. Someone, not you, who can repair my door.”

“OK, OK, I understand. Yes of course. Now I try.”

Ten minutes later she rang back.

“OK, Tim, a carpinteiro will come soon this afternoon. Stay in home, yes?”

“Yes.” The carpinteiro never turned up. Tim didn’t expect him to. After all, he’d been in the country for a few months by then, and he knew how things worked. Or didn’t. ****** If Carla had felt a twinge of guilt about the earlier message she’d sent to Luke, ‘dumping’ him, then she felt something akin to remorse after what she and Carlos had done by going to Tim’s flat. Before the event it had seemed like a good idea, and both she and her cousin had looked forward to throwing a few of Tim’s belongings from their ordered places on shelves and in drawers, hurling papers up into the

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air and letting them settle where they liked. They even anticipated tipping some furniture upside down, but she had missed out a vital stage in her thinking. This stage didn’t occur to either of them until they stood outside the door of the flat and wondered how they were going to gain access. Faced with this gap in her thinking, Carla was all for giving up and going home, and finding another way to annoy Tim - criminal damage hadn’t been part of her original plan at all.

Carlos, however, was more enthusiastic about the project, and, ignoring her protests, ran down the dingy stairs to his car, where he quickly found the wheel brace in the boot. He bounded up the stairs again, with the brace concealed up the sleeve of his jacket. Carla’s rather feeble protestations did nothing to prevent him from applying the wedge end of the heavy wheel brace to the gap between the door and its frame, just above the lock, and giving it a firm tug. The door sprang open surprisingly easily with just a slight cracking sound as the wood splintered around the lock.

Once inside they were confronted with a scene that shocked them both equally. The flat was in such a terrible state of untidiness and undisguised mess that anything they might have done to it could only have constituted tidying up, and who ever heard of intruders breaking into someone else’s house with the intention of committing a bit of cleaning and dusting? In the sitting room, books, magazines and papers lay strewn over the floor, chairs and the table while the bookshelves remained virtually empty; in the kitchen there looked to be about two weeks worth of washing up to be done, though, it has to be said, the knobs on the electric hob did look remarkably clean and shiny; in the bedroom discarded clothes completely obscured the floor and all the drawers on the chest of drawers were in various states of openness. They both looked at the half-made bed and then at each other and then, without a word, each grabbed a side each of the bedclothes and tossed them onto the pile of dirty underpants and socks. It was a pathetic gesture, they knew, but to have broken in and done nothing would have been even more ridiculous. It was at that moment that Carla decided to finish the mini-campaign against Tim right there and then. The scene had quite disturbed her and told her more about Tim as a person than anything in his lessons could have prepared her for. There was, however, the problem of the anonymous letter already in the post, which she imagined Tim would receive the next day or two, but there was little she could do about that now.

“Let’s go,” she said, and Carlos needed no further prompting.

*********

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Half way through the afternoon, while Tim was fruitlessly waiting for o carpinteiro to turn up and fix his door, he rang the School to see if Lurdes could tell him more precisely what time he was coming. All he got was a recorded message saying that the School was temporarily closed ‘due to unforeseen circumstances.’ At six that afternoon, Eileen rang and he sounded so despondent that she ignored his protests and caught a bus and came round his flat immediately.

It was the first time that she’d been to his place.

“Oh my God, Tim! What a mess. Oh you poor darling. This must be so awful for you.”

“Mmm” “Did they do all this? Heavens above, they must have been desperate people. How terrible.”

“Mmm” Eileen’s instinct was to immediately start sorting the place out. Tim’s instinct was to do nothing at all. So, while he sat idly by, just staring at the briefcase containing the buff folder, she scurried around with a speed and dexterity that belied her not-inconsiderable bulk, drifting from sitting room to bedroom, lifting, folding and putting away, and she floated into the kitchen and got to work in the sink, though she doubted that the piles of washing up had been caused by the intruders or if it had, she thought as she tried to scrape congealed, mouldy grease from a pan, they’d stayed for a few weeks.

She glanced back at Tim who was simply staring morosely at nothing in particular, and wondered why it was that he should still be living like a student at his age, before turning back to her chores.

“Men!” she said to the suds, but what she really meant was that Tim needed taking in hand and sorting out, and that she was just the woman to do it.

After three hours the flat appeared cleaner than at any time since Tim had taken up the lease a few months earlier, a fact which completely failed to impress itself upon Tim. She looked in the fridge but could think of no tasty, nourishing meal that involved just lumpy milk, a piece of cheese that had a thick layer of startling green fur around it, a fruit yoghurt which was four weeks past its sell by date, one egg, two cans of beer and a half empty jar of marmite. She popped out for a

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few minutes, and within half an hour they were sitting down in civilised comfort at the table eating generous cheese omelettes and salad, which Tim ate rather absentmindedly. But the effect of the food was noticeable, and, by the end of their repast Eileen was able to hold Tim in fairly trivial conversation for up to 30 seconds at a time, after which she got him to examine the state of the front door to which, they discovered, they could make some temporary repairs.

She paused after lifting the telephone receiver to call a taxi to take her home. It was one in the morning, and the prospect of leaving the object of her affection, distracted as he was, was causing her a toetingling moment of disappointment. Without dialling the number she replaced the receiver in its cradle, and led Tim to the centre of the room where she made him kneel down next to her. She offered some prayers to a higher being, invoking, as she did, a variety of references, for hers was a peripatetic kind of faith, and she took from each different method of worship that she liked, made sense or which she found cute. So, for example, she combined the symbolism of the Catholic faith together with the comfortable middle-class suburban ways of the Anglican Church, the ritual of Judaism, soothing vowel sounds which Eileen thought of as somehow Buddhist, as well as something of the fatalism of the Muslim faith. In her rather long and rambling prayer she invoked peace for all but most especially for Tim and her, but pronounced a curse on the heads of Tim’s enemies, who were therefore her enemies too, and a deeply expressed request that the buff folder be returned to the bastards who had been hounding poor, dear Tim. She intoned a final ‘In the name of the Father,’ and then promptly grabbed Tim’s shoulders and yanked him round to face her, whereupon she kissed him full on the lips, pushing her tongue briefly, but tenderly into his mouth, withdrawing it reluctantly when she found that there was no discernible response from the rather startled Tim. Deciding on another route, she hugged him to her chest and breathed deeply, sighing heavily at the difficulty she was facing in making this boy see the inevitable route that had been laid out for them.

Tim had a different perspective of this particular moment, and had been wondering what to do about his unusually large tumescence which was causing him some discomfort in the trouser department as Eileen was passionately kissing him. He sensed rather than saw the single light in the room being extinguished and, in a dream-like state, became aware of a solid presence in the pitch blackness which gently prodded him backwards onto the bed while soft, silky fingers removed his clothes with an expert sliding motion. The soft, fleshy lips once more swept over his, and he found himself drifting off into an unexpected land of rising and falling rose petals that jingled and

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jangled. He felt himself being swallowed into a warm, swaying world filled with subtle rhythms and resonance which made perfect sense and use of his tumescence. Beyond his sense of hearing Eileen moaned in an ecstasy, which had been made all the greater by its anticipation.

Later, when he reflected on the dream-like occasion, Tim found that he felt surprisingly good about what had happened. However, he couldn’t help wondering if he should have said, as she had eventually and reluctantly eased herself out of the bed to go home, something more profound, more meaningful than “Uh?” ***** It was at exactly the same time that Eileen was purchasing a dozen eggs and 250 grams of cheese that wasn’t all furry, that Luke had sat up suddenly in his hospital bed, once again in contact with that tiny part of reality which was reserved just for him.

The doctors put it down to a short but successful re-hydration regime and pointed out the glucose drip lines fastened to his wrist, but Luke knew that the real reason for his rapid recovery had been that the moment had arrived when his inner being had finally managed to balance the three previously unequal sides of his spirit, bringing an equilibrium to his mortal part, allowing him to reconnect to the world.

He also recognised that he had received a direct, powerful and personal spiritual message from somewhere about 16 kilometres the other side of infinity, which had reached him by means of a tickling sensation under his chin which had woken him. He had interpreted this as telling him that he would be rewarded if he reactivated his Nokia which, he was delighted to see, had been placed on top of the cupboard next to his bed.

Marta had sent a dozen messages earlier that day, each one getting more and more frantic about the lack of response they were eliciting.

She’d been using her own phone and she wondered if Luke had been replying to the old number instead of the new one she’d given him, but as Carla had disappeared with João for a very long weekend, she had no way of checking this. Doubts and confusion whirled around her head and she started to become quite depressed, a feeling she was finding hard to shake off. Then, on TV, she saw the news about the hostage situation at the School and her heart went instantly from being in her boots to being in her mouth. Somehow she knew, she just knew it to be true, that Luke was caught up in the dreadful events

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and simply couldn’t contact her. She knew he wanted to, she knew he had been desperately trying to contact her all night and all that morning, but he was being prevented from doing so, probably by some evil monster with death on his mind. Oh, no! How much danger was he in? Was his life being threatened? Was he, in fact, one of the twenty hostages that the gang of bandits that the TV news mentioned were holding at gun point? What terror! Her mind seethed with conflicting scenarios and she felt sick to her stomach. Oh my poor, brave, darling Luke! Hold on! Hang on! And she squeezed her eyes shut and projected positive thoughts, forcing her mental energy into the natural ether; making contact.

Fifteen minutes later the TV were reporting that the siege was over, an arrest had been made and a hostage released. The TV cameras were too far away to see clearly who the hostage was, being carried out on a stretcher, but she knew, oh yes, she knew, that it was her brave, heroic lover. Well, not lover, perhaps. Not yet, anyway.

She tried to find out more information by phoning the School, but all she got was a taped message, and when she contacted the police and the hospital they weren’t giving out any information. She even tried the TV station, but they didn’t know any more than they had broadcast, and what they forgot to tell her was 50% of that they had invented anyway.

She spent a desperate, lonely afternoon. Her soon-to-be lover was needing her love and care and affection right now (even if he didn’t realise that himself yet), and as no one apart from herself knew about their special relationship they had, there was no way that she could be near him. She put her head in her arms across the kitchen table and wept.

Then, at ten minutes past nine that evening Luke sent her a message.

Over the course of the next hour she received a constant stream of messages from him; he was clearly writing her an epic, impromptu poem of undying and heroic love, but the message size limit on her mobile phone caused this to be spread across 30 separate messages. On and on they came, and with each one Marta’s soul rose, floated and finally was flying as high as the jet stream winds that circle the earth. Her tears of sadness and frustration turned to tears of ecstatic joy. Only fourteen hours, she thought, and reminded him in one of the fifteen second breaks in transmission, and they would be together.

She still hadn’t decided how to handle the fact that he thought he was going to meet Carla.

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****** Tim slept quietly in his bed, his dreams smooth and sensual, his body relaxed and warm, enjoying the forgotten pleasure of clean sheets.

Eileen, now five kilometres away after her 4 a.m. taxi journey, hugged herself for the rest of the night, and rocked slowly from side to side, singing quietly ‘All things bright and beautiful’.

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Chapter 16 Tim’s mummy looked over the letter she had just written to her beloved son before sliding it into the Basildon Bond envelope. Each line sloped downwards from left to right, and she vowed to go back to using the lined paper she had habitually used before.

“Darling Timmy,” she read, her lips moving slightly as she did so.

“Thank you so much for your letter, which I received this morning. It was so lovely to get it and isn’t the post quick from Portugal? But I have to say that I was a little upset by receiving such a short letter – more of a note, really.” She pursed her lips and crossed out ‘upset’, replacing it with ‘disappointed’. “They are obviously working you too hard if you don’t even have time to write properly to your poor mother.

Perhaps next time you can find some more time. Why can’t you get Ben or some other friends to take on some of your work? I’m sure they aren’t nearly as busy as my little soldier.

“I got a phone call yesterday from Mr Archer – you remember him, don’t you? He rang to say that the insurance company said that the damage to his tractor was covered after all – what a lot of fuss about nothing! He said something about his premiums going up and said he’d send me the bill for that, but he can sing for that I can tell you.

He’s such an unpleasant man, and I know that it wasn’t your fault that his tractor got damaged. What I’ve always wanted to know is what was he doing on the main road on that thing anyway? No one has explained that to me, and the police don’t seem interested. Besides the damage to Uncle Rory’s car was much greater, and Uncle Rory isn’t complaining. I don’t think so anyway, but then he hasn’t spoken to me since he got out of hospital after the accident.

“By the way, old Mrs Armitage at number 21 was taken into hospital the day before yesterday – she’s had a second stroke or something.

Still, they can’t blame you for that one, can they? You being so far away at the time. Not like they tried to last time. Sometimes I really don’t understand people.

Joey has gone down with a head cold, but does this stop her from going into work? Course not! Typical of your sister! She’s just like you in some ways – making yourselves indispensable at work!

Sometimes I wonder how the world would have got on without our family’s contribution!

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So v. v. glad to hear you’re planning to come home again at Christmas. I know you manage to do every year, but I’m always frightened that perhaps you’ll forget all about us one year and spend Christmas somewhere else. Silly me! But I can’t think of Christmas without you and Joey and Tiddles and silly me at home!

Don’t forget to write. Ring next Sunday if you can. I’ll be waiting by the phone all day.

Lots and lots of cuddly love Mummy

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Chapter 17 Friday morning broke quickly, as if the day was anxious to get it over and done with, and the sun shone and there was a promise of rain later. It had been one week since José Manuel had mysteriously disappeared from the garage of the School, and it was the morning that Tim received the anonymous letter. In his enfeebled and exhausted state, the appearance of the letter – with each letter separately cut and pasted from newspaper and magazines, an obvious plagiarism of numerous film scripts – was worse than the phone calls, the brief disappearance of his briefcase and even the break-in at his flat. To him it was a real, touchable, tangible threat, because the message was so clear.

YOU DON’T GIVE TO US WHAT IS WE WANT. ENOUGH! NOW IT ENDS. He needed a strong coffee, and decided to go to the little café across the road, where he could also get a sickly sweet cake. After that, he thought, he might just have to commit suicide.

Shortly before Tim had opened the envelope containing the dire warning, the late, lamented José Manuel had been whistling an aimless little tune as he prepared his few things to leave the hospital.

The doctor had given him the all clear less than an hour before, satisfied that the injuries he had received to the back of his head posed no serious threat. José Manuel was relieved, for it had been two days since he’d regained much of his memory and the hospital routine, not to mention the food, was beginning to pall, and he was anxious to resume his life.

His memory still had some murky holes in it, however. His last clear memory before the biggest blank spot had been when he’d been given a dreadfully dull article about fish to read by that vile young man at the School. He surmised that, as so often happened, the utter dullness of the events at the School had once again induced his recurrent medical condition of narcolepsy, which had become an increasing worry for him anyway without foolish callow youths aggravating the state. He remembered being handed a photocopied sheet of dense black print, and as he couldn’t remember anything about the rest of the lesson, assumed he must have fallen asleep almost immediately. How he’d received the bumps to the back of his head he couldn’t recall. He seemed to have lost a whole weekend, and if it hadn’t been for the actions of two policemen who had found him wandering confused and bloodied on Saturday morning he

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wondered that something worse could have happened to him. As it was, they had taken him to the police station and had then taken him to the hospital, where the staff decided that his apparent amnesia might disappear after some rest and sustenance. He owed a great debt to Officers Ferreira and Monteiro, and was looking forward to thanking them in person later that day. But at that moment he was able to return to his normal life, and he thanked God for his safe delivery.

Tim ordered his coffee and pointed to the cake he wanted, and he then settled down in the corner of the café to contemplate his preferred method of self-destruction.

He’d already crossed off shooting from his list as he couldn’t think for a moment where he’d be able to get a gun, and felt that wrist slitting sounded a bit messy (and he’d heard that it wasn’t as easy as all that anyway); poisoning sounded gruesome unless he could find something quick and relatively painless (but where could he get hold of such substances?) and he rejected jumping off the Dom Luís bridge into the river on account of his dislike of cold water. He was just about to consider the relative merits of immolation, hanging and leaping from high structures onto solid surfaces when he saw something that made him completely change his mind.

Just entering the café were two men, and the taller of the two being none other than the man who had stolen José Manuel’s briefcase in the park the previous Monday. Tim dropped the sticky cake, which landed on his shirt, stickiest side down, of course. The man was still carrying José Manuel’s briefcase. Tim knew he couldn’t be mistaken.

The tall man and his companion, a plump, balding fellow, sat down at a table and ordered coffee, and started a deep, serious conversation, which seemed centred around a map that the balding man had produced.

Tim knew he had to act. If he didn’t give them the buff folder then ‘it ends’, as they’d threatened in the letter, and Tim knew that ‘it’ could refer to only one thing - his life. His thoughts of suicide were now shelved until later as he tried to work out his best method to survive murder.

He dashed out of the café, signalling furiously to the owner that he was going to return immediately and then pay – a means of communication which totally failed to do anything except confuse the owner. He ran across the road, and leapt up the steps in his apartment block two at a time, and crashed through the half-repaired door. He rugby tackled his briefcase, convinced it would otherwise

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escape, and dragged out the buff folder. Then, half bounding and half falling down the stairs he reached the street in record time, and shot once again across the road, dodging honking cars and taxis. He stopped outside the café and looked through the window. The two men were still in the café, talking animatedly and jabbing fingers at the map they had spread between them on the table. Tim composed himself, entered the café once again and walked with deliberate steps up to their table, where he stopped. As he stood there they stopped talking, and looked up inquisitively. The taller man had flat eyes, like a shark, and the grey streaks at his temples gave him a menacing countenance.

“Here,” Tim said as he put the buff folder on top of the map, between the two men. “Yours, I believe.”

He turned and walked out of the café, calm slowly returning from where it had been hiding somewhere over the horizon, and the first hint of a spring in his step appearing. Emerging from the heavy veil of depression, he heard the first strains of the brass band of joy; the trumpets of hope sounded fresh and resilient; the tubas of contentment anchored the day. He crossed the road once again but once he’d reached the other side realised that he’d forgotten to pay for his coffee and cake. Retracing his steps once again, he fumbled in his pocket for some change.

The men were no longer in the café. But the buff folder was still there, on the table, exactly as he’d left it. At the sight of that malignant object he froze, shocked, and then he panicked. Calm retreated back from whence it came, once again his step was springless, and the brass band of joy started to creep back under the veil, and changed key to E flat minor. He rushed to the door of the café and looked up and down the road, and to his relief he spotted the two men just getting into a taxi at the taxi rank a few doors down the road. Once again, fevered activity took over, and he grabbed the folder off the table and sprinted down the street just as they were closing the taxi door. The window was open. He threw the folder in.

“It’s yours,” he panted. “I don’t want it. I never wanted it.”

An unintelligible reply came from the interior of the taxi, and the buff folder flew out of the window and landed on the pavement, a few sheets of paper detaching themselves and floating off on the air. The taxi pulled away. Tim scrabbled the loose papers together with the folder and, clutching the bundle to his chest, jumped into the next taxi in the rank, shouting,

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“Follow that cab!”

The driver had evidently seen enough Hollywood movies to know what he was supposed to do, and quickly getting into the thrill of the chase, took off with tyres squealing, blue smoke pouring from them.

The driver jabbered away in a language which for Tim might as well have been Bantu or Innuit, as he veered and swerved, braked and cornered his way through the busy city streets, and shot through a set of red traffic lights in pursuit of their quarry.

Officers Monteiro and Ferreira, sitting in their squad car placed near the traffic lights, watched as the taxi executed at least five traffic violations in front of their very eyes before they turned to each other, shaking their heads.

“Want a coffee?” asked Monteiro.

“Good idea,” replied Ferreira, and they both climbed out of the car.

While most taxi cabs in the city looked remarkably alike – generally speaking they were tan coloured Mercedes – the car in which the two men had climbed was remarkable in that both sets of brake lights were working simultaneously. This was a sign distinctive enough for it to be easy to follow in dense traffic filled with numerous other tan coloured taxis plying their trade, each displaying only one operative brake light. Left or right – there wasn’t a hard and fast rule about this.

The taxis headed west across the city and Tim soon found that they were on one of the approach roads to the Arrábida Bridge which carries the motorway traffic south to Lisbon, across the river Douro. It was at this point that he checked the contents of his pockets, and found he had just 9 euros on him, and already the taxi meter had reached 5 euros. He was also vaguely aware that once they’d crossed the bridge different tariffs applied, and what was shown on the meter didn’t necessarily correspond with how much you would be expected to pay, which was clearly a figure invented by the taxi driver on the spur of the moment, or else whatever the odometer was saying at that particular moment. Whichever was the higher figure. This taxi driver was now well into his role as pursuit car driver, and was checking the channels on his radio for some music that suited a chase rather than the chat show predictions of FC Porto’s chances against Sporting that evening. As the meter clicked past 9 euros (actual amount unknown) Tim inwardly shrugged. He’d bluff his way out of it, somehow. His mission was far more important than mere money. His life was at stake. The thought that his passenger might not be able to pay the fare had not crossed the mind of his driver for a

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second. After all, he knew his passenger was a foreigner, and it was common knowledge that all foreigners were rich.

Meanwhile, Senhor Júlio Gusmão and Herr Karl Schwarz in the first of the two taxis, a little frustrated at the slow moving traffic at the junction off the VCI road, had told their driver that if he could get them to the aerodrome by midday then they would pay him double fare. This encouraged him to increase speed to well over the legal limit as they cleared the obstruction at Madalena, but when Tim’s driver tried to follow suit, he found that his older, leakier engine was causing them to be left behind. The palms of Tim’s hands were sweating, and he could hear the blood rushing around his head as a loud hiss in his ears, drowning out the vibrating of the elderly taxi as it was pushed to its limit. Senhor Gusmão and his business partner Herr Schwarz were keen to keep their appointment with their hired light plane and its pilot, so that they could carry out the next stage of their plan to build a new clothing factory to the north of Porto. The wanted to survey the proposed site from the air. The incident with the demented Englishman in and outside the café was all but forgotten as they discussed budgets and the timetable for the project, a potential problem which had been worrying the German investor.

Their taxi driver earned his bonus with five minutes to spare, and a few minutes after he had slipped the roll of notes into his pocket Tim was sliding out of the back seat of his taxi. He ignored the pleasant request for payment from his driver who was still enjoying the flush of excitement of the chase. As Tim moved away from the car, the balding and pot-bellied taxi driver realised that he was about to be cheated and shot out of his seat with a speed that defied his physique. He deftly nipped around the side of the car, complaining loudly and gesticulated threateningly at his passenger who seemed to be making not the slightest effort to put his hand into his pocket. Tim tried to dodge around him, but the driver was too quick, and his meaty fists shot threateningly close to Tim’s face, and he positioned his body between Tim and the aerodrome. Catching sight of his prey walking across the grass to a waiting Piper Tomahawk, the engine of which was just being started, Tim handed the taxi driver the entire contents of his wallet, wallet and all, and ducked around the momentarily distracted taxista, and legged it after the two men. He was still 75 metres away when the door of the plane closed on them, and almost immediately the plane started to move forward, and made its way to the end of the runway, clearly preparing for take off.

Tim looked around wildly. Sitting on the grass, next to the end of the runway where the Tomahawk had been waiting, was a tiny ultralight plane, its engine running, the pilot standing some distance off talking

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to someone wearing mechanics overalls. At the same time Tim heard a bellow from behind him, and turned to see the red-faced taxi driver bearing down on his as fast as his wobbling pot-belly would allow him.

He’d clearly decided that the contents of the wallet – nine euros, two supermarket receipts and the stub of a cinema ticket – were not sufficient for the twenty-five euro fare. Tim didn’t bother to sum up the situation, he simply ran at full pelt to the ultralight and threw himself in, bothering only to keep a very tight hold on the buff folder. He sank so far back into the reclining seat so quickly and unexpectedly that one of his hands instinctively shot out to steady himself and he grabbed a bar in front of the seat. At the same time as he pressed his feet firmly on the floor in an attempt to stop his backward slide, inadvertently pushing down the accelerator. The little Rotax engine went from a burble to a whine, and the craft moved forward onto the runway just seconds before the taxi driver reached it. By completely random movements of his hands and legs Tim found that the plane could be made to go forward and wiggle from side to side, but the pure randomness of his uncoordinated actions meant that he hadn’t got a clue what action caused which reaction. As a consequence the little plane lurched down the runway, zig-zagging from side to side.

He was heading up the single runway towards the Tomahawk, which was now roaring down straight towards him. The pilot had reached the speed when he was committed to take off. Tim had no plan, and had not the slightest idea about planes, his only time in a cockpit having been at the Duxford Air Museum some ten years earlier. He simply knew he had to stop the two men and deliver the buff envelope firmly into their hands so that they would cancel the contract they had taken out on him.

The erratic course of the tiny ultralight coming in the opposite direction terrified the Tomahawk’s pilot, who also knew he had no option but to continue his take off. His two passengers were completely oblivious of the dangers, and continued to study large scale plans of the planned factory and maps of the surrounding area.

Their pilot metaphorically crossed his fingers, hoping against hope that they wouldn’t collide with the ultralight, which was now on his left but crossing jerkily to his right, and behind which, he noticed almost casually, ran a rotund red faced man and another figure in a flying suit, both waving their hands about desperately. At the critical moment when they would actually leave the ground the ultralight was heading straight for them, and only metres away. As the nose of the Tomahawk lifted and maximum throttle was applied by a pilot, who suddenly realised that his life had been too short to have done even a quarter of the things that he had wanted to do, the ultralight passed under his line of vision. The pilot closed his eyes in fateful resignation.

The base of the wheels of the Tomahawk cleared the top of the wings

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of the smaller craft by less than 5 centimetres, but it was clear space and the Tomahawk was away safely, its single engine now howling.

The downdraft of the bigger plane swept over the featherweight frame of Tim’s craft, and it threw him from side to side, and he pushed forward on the bar in reaction. Another reaction of the turbulence was to send a blast of air under the ultralight’s wings. This, added to the pure chance having reached take off speed, caused the ultralight soared into the air. The shock of this caused Tim to pull back on the bar, and the little plane levelled out, and stayed in the air. He was flying ***** The hospital staff were stunned by the rapid recovery that Luke displayed overnight, and by the time the doctor came on his early morning round Luke was so bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and lucid, positively blooming in fact, that the doctor could see no reason not to accede to Luke’s request, put more like a demand, that he be allowed to leave the hospital there and then. Luke had spent the whole of his time in hospital in nocturnal messaging under the blanket with Marta, who was still calling herself Carla. The bond between them was growing stronger by the pixel, and their meeting was now only hours away.

Luke busied himself getting ready for the tryst. First of all he returned home to perform the sacred ritualistic duty of recharging the battery on the Nokia, and then to have a shower and discard the clothes that he had been wearing continuously since Tuesday. Even he was beginning to notice their lack of fragrance. Then he went to hunt for a gift for Carla/Marta which would be imbued with meaningful significance. He wanted something that symbolised the week he had experienced with its massive heights and desperate lows, the growing bond of affection between him and his beloved, and their future together. Clearly, at least clearly to Luke, he needed to buy her a tree. A living symbol of growth, regeneration and longevity. He went straight to Bolhão Market near the town centre where he quickly found a stall holder willing to sell him any one of a variety of saplings, all of them fruit trees, which seemed even more appropriate. He rejected the lemon and orange trees, however, in favour of an apple tree. It’s significance in the Adam and Eve story didn’t escape him, and its status in that story as a giver of self-awareness, pain, and sensual pleasure made him smile and clap his hands together in satisfaction.

Purchasing the metre and a half high tree he knew that to complete the offering he needed to drape a snake in its branches. Half way to the shop on the other side of the Avenida dos Aliados that sold exotic pets, however, he decided that perhaps a real snake which, to be

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really authentic would also have to speak or perhaps just bite on demand, wouldn’t be the most practical of tree decorations. He decided that, perhaps, he could get away with a rubber snake; it was, after all, a symbolic gift.

Finding a rubber snake was much harder than he anticipated, and in the end he had to settle for purchasing a plastic fish from Tribo, which at least looked scaly and slithery. The particular model he bought was, he supposed, a representation of a trout. He surprised the shop assistant by asking for a length of sticky tape, which he used to fix the fish onto a branch of the tree, and asking her what she thought about it as a gift for a beautiful girl. The shop assistant was obviously lost for words, which Luke took to mean that it was indeed a very fine and appropriate gift. As all this had taken rather longer than he’d anticipated, he realised he’d have to catch the bus to the City Park immediately rather than search for a card to accompany the symbolic tree and fish. He was quite unaware of the stares of his fellow passengers, or the comments from the bus driver. Instead he busied himself with his Nokia, just to make sure that ‘Carla’ was, like him, on her way to their meeting place. She was. ****** Eileen had received Communion that morning. She didn’t usually, as she didn’t consider herself to be a Christian any more than she considered herself a Jew, a Muslim or a Sikh, a Buddhist, a Taoist or a Shamanist, but today was a special religious holiday celebrating the apparition of the Virgin Mary to a courting couple behind the milking shed one hundred years previously, and, as such had a special significance for those in love, and especially those with problems in their love life. To this end a statue of Saint Gonçalo, who was a specialist in marriages, was usually present at religious meetings on this day, which Eileen felt would be an appropriate time to ask a higher authority to help in the final stage of her campaign to ensnare Tim. After the service the congregation gathered outside the church as the procession got itself in order, and effigies of the Virgin Mary and St Gonçalo were lifted onto the shoulders of strong men with big moustaches, and a truck battery was fitted to the illuminated cross that would be carried at the head of the procession. The faithful shuffled in a line behind it, carrying what looked suspiciously like phallic symbols reverentially in front of them. The little procession was going to head towards a car park near the sea, where, popular wisdom had it, the milk shed had stood and where a simple blessing was to take place. Eileen joined in this crowd, which consisted mainly

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of single people and old women in black, as well as a small group of bewildered Japanese tourists who had got lost when they started following the wrong umbrella.

As the procession started off, José Manuel passed by in a taxi, on his way home from the hospital.

“Stop, here,” he said to the driver, “I’ve changed my mind. much?”

How

Having seen the procession he knew that it was essential that he joined it to give thanks to Our Lady for his miraculous survival, and pray that the few days missing from his memory returned so he could work out what had really happened. He had to know.

*****

The ultralight, in Tim’s inexpert hands, was twisting and turning and soaring up in alarming climbs, which from his semi-recumbent position in the pilot’s seat, made him that he was about to fall over backwards. Each time this happened, he became aware of not being strapped in and this caused him to instinctively try and protect himself by pulling on the bar in front of him, which caused the craft to suddenly plunge downwards. In turn, this caused him to panic further, and he pushed on the bar, which made the aircraft plummet downwards again. This pattern repeated itself over and over again, causing spectators to comment on the exciting roller-coaster ride the pilot must be having.

On the ground the taxi driver was still red-faced, and he was shaking his clenched fist above his head, and stamping the ground at the same time, his moustache twirling in outrage. Next to him stood the owner of the ultralight, his face pale with shock and his hands hanging limply by his side as he watched his pride and joy being thrown about the skies with such reckless, untutored abandon. He also knew that the moment of truth would come very soon as the fuel tank was seven-eighths empty and so there was only enough fuel for less than 20 minutes of flight. When the tall, pale, insane looking stranger had jumped in and stolen his machine, he had, in fact, just been asking the mechanic for help to fill the tank, the tank cap having jammed somehow.

The far more powerful Tomahawk carrying the two businessmen was quite a few kilometres up the coast when Tim finally levelled out his

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craft and caught sight of them. He had eventually found a winning formula between what worked in terms of pressure on the accelerator and pressure on the bar in front of him to keep the craft more or less steady, but even at the fastest speed he could manage the larger plane was disappearing north, back towards the city, at a vastly superior rate of knots than he could muster. This did not prevent Tim from attempting to pursue them. The wind buffeted buff folder on his unbelted lap saw to that. ***** Marta had decided that she would speak first, and she would immediately tell Luke that it had been her and not her cousin who had been exchanging amorous messages over the past two days. It would be a test of Luke’s reaction to his purported love of what said he saw in her messages, and if he rejected her because she wasn’t her, admittedly more attractive (but flighty) cousin, then so be it. She would walk away with dignity, and a broken heart.

She waited on the opposite side of the car park from the main entrance to the park, keeping an eye out for Luke’s arrival at the entrance. She wanted him to be there first.

At ten minutes past midday she finally spotted him, waiting. At first she hadn’t realised that it was him because he seemed to be camouflaged, or at least disguised, as a park, and it wasn’t until she saw his glasses glinting through the foliage of the fish-laden apple tree that she realised who it was. She went straight up to him, and while his brain was still trying to sort out the message his eyes were giving him, she supplemented this information with an oral one.

“Luke, oh, Luke. Forgive me, please. It is me you write to. Not Carla.

Not Carla always, but it is she for me your messages come and I reply. No, Carla, not.”

She realised that this might not have been the clearest of explanations, for the mist in Luke’s eyes hadn’t cleared at all. So she tried in Portuguese.

“I’ve been sending you the messages, Luke, not Carla. Amo-te.”

The mist disappeared from Luke’s eyes and he simply looked startled instead.

“You mean,” he said cautiously, “you wrote ‘I can’t wait for us to cuddle like lost bunnies’?” She nodded. “And ‘I will give away my FC

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Porto season ticket just to be with you’?” She nodded again, a weak smile playing around her lips at the fond memory.

“And I also wrote ‘when the sun sets tonight, it will rise again in my heart because of you.’” Tears were running down her cheeks when she said this, and Luke’s eyes were far from being dry.

They fell into each others arms and embraced with the passion that Marta had imagined, and which Luke, until that moment, had been reserving for Carla. That is to say, both of them had imagined the unbridled feelings of the moment but neither of them had included a tree in their imaginings. Luke had been holding it in front of him all the time that they had been affirming and confirming their text messages of love and it, subsequently, became part of their embrace, its branches and leaves tickling their chins, cheeks and bare arms, and its rustling and creaking playing duet to their amorous sighs.

There was a sudden, loud crack that startled them and they drew apart, briefly. The plastic fish had snapped under the pressure of their intimacy.

Luke acknowledged the presence of the tree for the first time, “The tree of our love,” he sang.

“You are my tree of love,” she cooed.

A passer-by overheard this exchange and immediately felt extremely nauseous and his knees suddenly felt very wobbly.

They embraced again, though this time the tree and broken fish, now pushed to one side, acted merely as uninvolved observers. ***** The procession was approaching its destination, and was just passing the main entrance of the city park when the Rotax engine of the Scorcher ultralight gave its first little hiccup. Eileen was almost in a state of trance as she walked rhythmically behind the swaying effigy of Saint Gonçalo, her hands clasped fervently together in front of her as she asked her various gods, or God with various names, for her beloved Tim to have his eyes opened to his true fate and accept that there would be a golden time ahead with her if he did.

Nearer to the front of the procession José Manuel was thanking his deity for his deliverance and was offering a prayer for the gaps in his memory to be filled in. As he walked and prayed, no less fervent than

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Eileen, part of his prayer started to be answered, and a trickle of memory came into being. What had happened to his briefcase? He suddenly remembered, he had taken his briefcase to that damned English lesson. What had happened to it? He clearly didn’t have it, but he couldn’t remember where or when he might have lost it. That was going to cause a few problems, he knew. He just hoped that the props department of the film company where he worked had got some extra copies of the props he had borrowed. Damn, that was it! He had been taking that collection of the standard ‘spy files’ for a rehearsal of ‘The Sixth Spy’ at the theatre at Campo Alegre as a favour for a friend. He’d have to ring his friend as soon as the procession was over and explain what had happened. Ah well, no real damage done. Annoying though. It was a damned good quality leather, that briefcase.

Luke and Marta, in the way that lovers get interested in absolutely everything around them – or nothing at all – were attracted by the procession, its movement, its gentle noises and its swaying religious images, and moved to the side of the road, arms around each other and tree in tow, to watch it passing. The two halves of the plastic fish clicked together playfully in the gentle breeze.

Each time the fuel supply got an air bubble in it, as the tank became drained, the engine hiccupped. Then it coughed and spluttered, and each time this happened Tim’s instinctive reaction was to jiggle on the bar in front of him, and so assisted the plane’s unsteady descent to earth. The coughing and spluttering got more and more frequent, and the little plane was falling in starts and jerks, straight towards a little column of people who were passing a park.

The first member of the procession who spotted the tiny craft heading straight for them did so at about the same time as it ran out of fuel completely, at which time Tim gave up trying to steer it at all. Some of the procession had the presence of mind to scatter while others, Eileen included, were so intensely involved in their devotions that they hadn’t seen the danger diving down on them from the heavens. One of the wheels of the ultralight clipped the top of the illuminated cross, which simultaneously caused the cross to become suddenly unilluminated, and flipped the tiny plane forward onto the ground with a sickening crunch and a rather surprised sigh, ejecting as it did its unbelted pilot and his precious buff folder into the air. As the hordes scattered, dropping curious phallic symbols under their feet and toppling the Saint onto his side as they did so, Tim was flying through the air, without the benefit of wings or engine, straight into arms and soft bosom of Eileen. They tumbled back together onto the road, a tangle of arms and legs. Eileen looked up at the figure on top of her.

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She had never expected such a rapid and overwhelmingly positive answer to her prayers. She thanked her gods, each and every one, and embraced Tim in arms that fate had now decreed would never, ever let him go.

The surging crowd, fleeing that which had fallen from the sky, were screaming and running and pushing and shoving each other out of the way, and included in this shoving and elbowing were the embracing figures of Luke and Marta. One particularly hard shove made Luke’s embroidered shoulder bag swing up in the air, still attached to his shoulder, showering some of the heavier contents onto the ground.

Included in this shower was his Nokia, its silver grey casing being immediately crushed by the first heel that it fell under, and its SIM card being destroyed by the second. Within seconds it was a mass of broken pieces of plastic. Luke saw all of this happen. He merely smiled, and he and Marta started a kiss that was to last for a very, very long time.

The first drops of rain hit Tim’s back as he lay, helpless, on top of Eileen, her arms holding him in a vice-like embrace. He wasn’t, at that point, to know that this embrace would last, in one way or another, for the rest of his life, but a sense of resignation to his situation was starting to come over him, though not before he had seen the individual pages of the contents of the buff folder being blown past him. The rain was getting harder, but Eileen seemed in no mood to move. The base of his chin was jammed into her shoulder and she was murmuring many sounds into his ear, none of which made sense to him. He mentally shrugged. He started to relax. He found it was actually comfortable like this, in spite of the rain.

The raindrops became so hard they started to bounce up off the road.

Tim stared up through the slight mist that the impact of the drops caused, marvelling at the unique view he had of the city in the rain, and slowly his eyes focussed on the unmistakable figure of José Manuel, his collar up against the rain, flagging down a taxi. Tim stared for a full half-minute at his resurrected student, who was now standing surrounded by the soggy contents of what had once filled a rather important buff folder. Getting into the taxi, José Manuel had shaken his foot with irritation, attempting to dislodge a wet piece of paper that had clung to his shoe. Tim could clearly see the letters ‘C.I.A’ stamped on the top of it. Once his 30 seconds of contemplating a world that had always seemed so mysterious to him was over, Tim capitulated totally, and Eileen blessed the day as she heard him sigh while he sank willingly into her bosom.

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Chapter 18 Epilogue Mummy eventually agreed to attend her Timmy’s wedding to Eileen the following summer in the leafy Manchester suburb of Didsbury.

Her anger at Timmy’s engagement to someone she hadn’t met and vetted was well expressed in series of letters and phone calls. At first she chose Ben for these missives, and who she berated for being such a poor friend as not to shield the poor lad from the machinations of someone who came from Manchester. Her reference to ‘a fine way to repay someone who saved your life’ had Ben more than usually perplexed. Later she turned her attention to Charles who, she pointed out with a certain venom, had let her ‘little soldier’ down badly when he had failed to act as a wise counsellor and father figure and had clearly not even attempted to forbid ‘this highly unsuitable match.’

Charles simply filed this letter in Tim’s personal file, and continued to pen his formal letter of regret to Tim, telling him that he hadn’t come up to scratch and shouldn’t expect further employment at the school after the end of the academic year. Tim was stoical about this rejection, and meekly agreed that he wasn’t cut out for teaching.

What he was cut out for he hadn’t a clue, and neither Charles nor Ben could offer any advice on this subject.

He needed time to think over what his choices were, and while he thought it over, Tim secured himself a temporary job as a counter clerk in the Post Office in Kidlington, Oxford, which was handy because his espoused had already secured a good teaching position at a premier English Language school in Oxford City. She was, after all, a highly qualified and successful teacher of English as a Foreign language.

Jenny continued to work at the Canterbury School. No one had the courage to suggest that she did anything else, and anyway, following her experience with Desmond she quietened down in her attitude to Charles, which left only Luke for Charles to worry about.

Luke and Marta had a whirlwind romance that lasted for a magical nine weeks. Quite what caused the abrupt end is not known, and Luke’s immersion in one of the public fountains at midnight one chilly night might or might not have had something to do with it. It must be said that he did have a mobile phone with him at the time (acquired, it appears, the day after the loss of his old Nokia) and that he was texting Bulgarian poetry at the time. He managed to stay on at the school, a shell of a person, until the end of the academic year after

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which, it was rumoured, he took up with a rune-reading troglodyte in the strange Andalucian town of Guadix.

Meanwhile Senhor José Manuel had given up going to the Canterbury School, and had signed on at the British Council instead, on the assumption that things could only get better if he went there. His naivety was compounded by his dismissal of the loss of the film-set props, that is, the files which included the buff folder, as ‘just one of those things’ which had caused no harm to any one at all.

Carla learned more from this experience than might be expected.

Indeed, she reconsidered her whole attitude to life in general and people in particular. She dumped her avaricious boyfriend and her own avarice at the same time, and was highly supportive of her younger cousin Marta, who came to her in a dreadful state after her tempestuous love affair with a teacher at the Canterbury School had ended. According to Marta this had happened when the teacher – what was his name? – had developed a fixation for a Nepalese yak herder he’d read about on the National Geographic website.

At the end of the academic year Ben and Charles went off together for a meal in an expensive restaurant. It was a chance to treat themselves and review the year that had just ended. They discussed staffing, the curriculum and finances. They reminisced about various events that had enlivened the year, and of high points and low troughs.

Charles raised his glass as the meal came to an end.

“To an average year.”

“The one just finished, or the one that has yet to happen?”

“Who can tell?” replied Charles.

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