Standing by the whiteboard, I suddenly can’t remember how to spell ‘house’. I send small SOS calls to my internal English dictionary, but hear nothing but an empty, unanswered echo. In panic, I stare at the words I’ve already written on the board:
ANNA LIVES IN A BIG
Bettina, Steffi and Hans look at me. From the next room I hear Claire and her students laughing at something. The green marker pen hovers a couple of centimetres from the whiteboard while I stand glued to the spot. Haus? Huoz? Oh Anna, you everywoman, where do you live? In a flash of inspiration I turn to my students.
‘Who can spell “house”?’ I exclaim with a smile.
Slowly, Hans puts his hand up and I give him the pen. As he walks up to the board I sit down on one of the chairs and glance over at Bettina and Steffi. Have they noticed how strangely I’m behaving today? That I haven’t corrected half the mistakes they’ve made and that Hans has been free to tell us he is Christ, rather than a Christian, because I’ve stopped caring? That the whole day is just one single long countdown to five o’clock when I can meet Ben again?
‘I am afraid of dogs,’ Steffi reads slowly from the book.
‘Ich bin erfreut von Hunden,’ translates Hans quietly to himself, nodding.
‘No, no, it means …’ I start, but I can’t finish, as I’m suddenly struck by the feeling – no, the knowledge – that Ben will have forgotten that I said we should meet at Starbucks. He’ll be standing there outside Berlitz waiting for me so everyone can see him. When the five-to-five bell rings I’m the first to hurl myself out of the room and I’m close to pushing Bettina out of the way because she’s faffing so much. First I head for the toilet for a pee and then I rush down the stairs. Please let him not be standing outside Berlitz. Please let him not be standing outside Berlitz. Please let him not be standing outside Berlitz. When I come out onto Mariahilferstrasse I look around at all the shoppers and immediately catch sight of him. He’s leaning against a tree a couple of metres away, smoking. With a tense smile I walk over to him.
‘Hi,’ I say.
‘Hi,’ Ben says. He smiles back and throws his roll-up away.
‘Didn’t we agree to meet outside Starbucks?’ I ask.
‘Did we? I thought we were meeting outside Berlitz at five o’clock.’
‘No,’ I say.
To my relief he at least doesn’t smell, although this could be down to the fact that the weather is colder today. He’s also in different clothes. The jeans are the same, but he’s wearing a baggy hoodie that was probably dark blue once upon a time. He’s still barefoot.
‘I managed to have a shower at a hostel, but not to clean my clothes,’ Ben says. ‘But luckily I found some others when I was looking through my wardrobe. I don’t think they smell as bad.’
Proudly, he does a twirl to show off his new outfit.
‘Your wardrobe?’ I ask.
‘A plastic bag,’ Ben replies. ‘I keep it hidden in another bush. It’s a miracle no one’s stolen it yet. You look very nice today.’
‘Thanks,’ I say and look over at the entrance to Berlitz, where Steffi is just coming out. She immediately lights a cigarette and hurries off down the street. A few seconds later, Bettina comes out. She’s talking on her mobile, and gives me and Ben a curious look as she gets a cigarette packet out of her bag.
‘I was thinking about you all day yesterday,’ Ben says with a big grin.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ I say quickly.
We walk to the first district and buy loads of food. Then we sit on a bench in the Volksgarten, where almost all the roses have already withered. There’s only one rosebush that is still in flower, with white, crinkly petals. I lay out the food between us. Ben immediately opens one of the Ottakringer beers and downs the whole can.
‘Do you drink a lot?’ I ask.
For the first time I notice that Ben looks uncomfortable.
‘All homeless people drink,’ he says at last, in a tone that suggests that’s obvious. ‘Otherwise you can’t sleep. The only way to sleep rough every night is to get drunk. Then you don’t feel the cold either.’
I look at the white roses a bit further off and think how different the worlds we live in are. Ben’s, where it’s essential to get drunk to survive the night, and mine, where the day’s biggest tragedy was that the photocopier in the staffroom was broken and Ken had taken my favourite coffee cup.
‘How long have you been sleeping rough?’ I ask.
‘For about a year,’ Ben replies, opening another can of beer.
I seem to be the only one interested in the bread, cheese, salami and olives.
‘What did you do before that, then?’
‘I drove tow-trucks for a while. In Canada I mean. And worked as a removal man. For a whole summer I picked earthworms.’
‘Earthworms! I didn’t even know that was a job.’
Ben nods. ‘It’s a big thing in Canada. Mostly completely illegal, and they generally only use Pakistanis or Vietnamese or desperate people like me.’
‘How do you even pick earthworms?’
Ben points at his legs. ‘You have a bucket tied onto one leg, which you put the worms in, and on the other leg you have a bucket of sand. Then you creep across a field the whole night, hunched over. You have to sand your hands down to get a good grip on the worms, and make sure you get the whole worm without it breaking. Sometimes you don’t get a single worm, and sometimes you get thousands, particularly during the mating season.’
‘It sounds awful,’ I say.
‘It was,’ Ben says. ‘I’ve had jobs so shitty I’ve just wanted to cry sometimes. Like being a removal man, carrying someone’s piss-stained mattress for a few measly dollars an hour. Compared to that, this life seems much better. So, what’s the worst job you’ve had?’
I think about it.
‘Most jobs have been pretty terrible because they were so boring,’ I say. ‘But once I worked as an assistant for an architect who had lost a bit of his brain. He’d been in a flying accident and had a big dent in his forehead where the brain was missing. That job was awful because it was hard not to stare at his forehead whenever he was talking. So I always stared at the handkerchief in his breast pocket – which might have been the reason I got fired in the end.’
‘But he was totally normal otherwise?’ Ben asks. ‘Without part of his brain?’
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘He was just quite nasty sometimes. And all the pencils always had to be super-sharp, but perhaps that’s some sort of architect thing?’
‘I must draw a skyscraper now!’ Ben shouts. ‘A sheikh in Dubai wants to have a skyscraper that looks like an enormous cock!’
‘No! No! None of the pencils are sharp enough!’ I cry. ‘My career as an architect is over!’
‘You bitch of an assistant,’ Ben says. ‘This is your fault! If I had a forehead I would slap myself on it right now.’
We grin at one another.
‘Perhaps Berlitz isn’t so bad after all,’ I say. ‘What do your parents do?’
Ben takes a sip of beer before he answers. ‘My mum works as a cleaner and my dad was a bricklayer. Then he had problems with his throat so now he just sits around at home and watches TV.’
‘Do you have any siblings?’
Ben shakes his head. ‘Just a cousin,’ he says. ‘Who died.’
‘What happened?’
Ben shrugs his shoulders. ‘He started hanging around with the wrong kind of people in Vancouver and that was the end of that.’
We’re silent for a while and I think again what different worlds we live in. In mine and Rebecca’s circle of friends, ‘the wrong kind of people’ are fully-grown adults who still tell you that they’re Team Edward or Team Jacob.
‘Tell me about the guys you’ve met,’ I say with a smile. ‘Since you became homeless.’
A big grin spreads across Ben’s face. ‘Swiffer! In Amsterdam there was this Albanian who everyone called Swiffer. He was a total addict, of course. But what made Swiffer unique was that he loved cleaning. So people would invite him over and for half a gram of coke he would be up the whole night and clean the entire house in between sniffing lines.’
Behind us on Ringstrasse, a tram rings its bell. Ben finally takes a bit of bread and a little cheese, and starts to eat.
‘Then there was a Serb, Drago – we called him Drago & Gabbana – who only stole designer clothes. He went into shops and hid the clothes under his own and then he sold them. But he wasn’t a very nice man. Once he beat up another guy who he thought had looked at him weird. You know, you’re really vulnerable when you’re homeless. When I was in Geneva, a group of teenagers poured petrol on some dude and set light to him just because he was lying asleep on the ground, so now he has no face and is completely blind.’
For a long time, neither of us says anything.
‘I really know how to seduce a lady, don’t I?’ Ben says after a while.
‘One more story about Albanian cleaners or people getting burnt and I’m yours for life,’ I say, grinning.
‘You’re actually my first girlfriend,’ Ben says. ‘My first and last.’
I almost choke on an olive. ‘You’ve never had a girlfriend?’
Ben shakes his head. ‘I have gone out with girls, of course, but I’ve never seen the point of relationships. Although girls always think I’m going to change my mind if we sleep together. How many boyfriends have you had, then?’
‘Quite a few,’ I say. ‘Although most of them were idiots, I now realise with hindsight. You’ve really never had a girlfriend?’
Ben looks at me and shrugs his shoulders.
‘I knew that one day I’d know when I’d found The One,’ he says, taking another piece of bread. ‘And now I have. I stood watching you for a really long time when you were sitting on that bench in Karlsplatz, and I knew that you would be my wife and the mother of my children.’
‘You just saw me sitting on the bench and you knew all that?’ I ask.
Once again, Ben nods.
‘My mum’s psychic,’ he says. ‘So I probably get it from her. Every time anything bad is round the corner she dreams about dogs, and depending on how they behave she knows what’s going to happen. I looked at you and you were so beautiful and I just knew.’
Behind us, a tram dings again. My body suddenly feels feverish and my groin is on fire.
‘Come on,’ I say.