by David Savill
RE: CULTURAL ACTION PROJECT FUNDING. The paper carries the familiar letterhead of the British Council. It is one of those applications for training programmes the Council is so keen on: community theatre, Shakespeare performed by the paraplegic, et cetera. To exactly what kind of project the letter refers, William can’t quite tell, he is too distracted by the poor English of someone employed by the British Council. (No one alive seems to know the difference between ‘subsequently’ and ‘consequently’.)
‘This is a letter responding to your project application?’
More nodding and smiling. Anchali has only scraped her way into the pre-intermediate class, and William has been wondering whether she might not need another semester in Basic. It’s a difficult decision with the poorer students, the ones who squirrel away every spare bhat for the fees because they have no formal qualifications and English might just provide them with a better life. The students whose Daddys hold some political position, or who claim some distant relation to the royal family, the ones whose ancestors have already ripped off the state, these students William would resit in a second. But Anchali from the food court – Anchali from the food court appears to have strung some philanthropic community project together, and now he has to tell her about the British Council’s rejection.
‘I understand, Mr Howell.’ (The vowels in his name are a particular torture.) ‘But do you know the letter, if it says why I don’t understand.’
‘Why you don’t understand?’
‘Yes. Why.’
‘Does the letter tell you why you don’t understand?’
‘Yes. Don’t understand.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t quite—’
‘Why no funding.’ Anchali smiles.
‘Ah! Does the letter tell you why you didn’t get funding!’
‘Yes!’
‘You don’t understand all of the letter!’
‘Yes, Mr Howell.’
‘No.’ William reads over the short letter again. ‘It doesn’t say why you were refused funding.’ And because he feels guilty the school has not done a better job of helping the woman through her Basic English class, because he is frustrated that even the British Council can’t accurately employ the English language, and because the ghost of Anya is still standing behind him, William makes his excuses and leaves Anchali in the classroom, telling her he will keep the letter, call the British Council and find out.
And then there is Anya’s voice. If she has really gone, why can he still hear her voice? Anya who tells him he should go out of his way to help his pupil. Anya who sits Will down at his office desk and has him looking for the number of the British Council. Anya in the bar of the student union telling a sleepy assembly of activists what the agenda of their next meeting will be. Anya who, at the age of nineteen, owned a Filofax she carried everywhere, its pages bristling with pink and yellow Post-its because she had to write everything down. Will who, at the age of nineteen, had nothing in his life worth writing down. When they moved in together she had filled their flat with those notes, THINGS TO DO went up on the fridge, career plans on the cork-board above the desk in a space which had to do for bedroom and lounge. It looked like chaos to Will, but out of it, Anya made her own order.
‘Where do we want to be in twelve months’ time?’ No one had ever asked him such a question. William thought the point of being twenty-one was not to know what you wanted to do with your life, let alone with the next twelve months.
He scribbles the number for the British Council on a Post-it in his office and tacks it up with the others on the cork-board above his desk.
That suitcase isn’t going to move itself, Anya says as he puts the pen down.
Yes, yes – he is going to pick up the phone and ring the airport. He is going to arrange a courier for Anya’s suitcase. But someone knocks on the door, and suddenly, he has to decide whether to hide, or, in the course of answering, reveal the door to his office has been locked so that he can be alone with Anya.
‘Missy Ammanucci called.’ It is Karin, the school secretary. ‘Something about work permits. Said it was urgent.’
William takes a note from Karin’s hand, and feels her examining him through the thick lenses of her glasses. She has always made him feel like he was the child, and she his mother.
The order in chaos. He is not as good at finding it as Anya is. His computer desktop is littered with documents. There are folders within folders. Eight different titles for the draft timetabling. He has to resort to a search on the name. His folders on employees have somehow become mixed up with Upper Intermediate Scheduling, 2002. Who the hell was Missy Ammanucci? He finds a CV, and a letter of application. Missy Ammanucci is the new American teacher who, because William wasn’t paying attention, had breezed through her interview. He opens the file on her employment. For each employee he keeps a Scanned Documents file, a record of the paper trail between the school, the Ministry of Education, the Bureau of Employment and the Immigration and Visa Office. Missy should have six documents. But there is only one: the receipt from the Department of Foreign Workers. He has not done his job. He has not made an application to the Bureau of Employment for a new work permit for Missy. He has not collected the receipt for the application. He has not, therefore, taken the receipt to the Immigration and Visa Office in order to generate a new work visa. As far as the authorities are concerned, Missy Ammanucci is an illegal immigrant.
Take responsibility, William.
He picks up the phone, but whatever Anya says, he is stopped when he thinks about the apologies he will have to make. He could blame administration at the school, but fears the wrath of Karin. Putting down Missy’s number, he picks up Anchali’s letter, and calls the British Council.
‘We can only talk directly to the bidder.’
William looks at the name beneath the signature on Anchali Changkhaochai’s letter. Mark Heatherington.
‘The bidder is a student in my class,’ William explains. ‘She wanted me to call and get a clear picture as to why her application for funding was turned down.’
‘Ms Changkhaochai is welcome to call us herself.’
‘Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Anchali is a student in my pre-intermediate class, and she’s not quite capable of—’
The man interrupts to explain the rules of privacy in the application process.
‘Is there a fee,’ William asks. ‘To apply, for this kind of project?’
‘As I said, sir, I can’t really comment.’
‘But this is a line of general enquiry about the bidding process. Forget Anchali’s application for a moment, I’m just asking you about the fee.’
‘The Cultural Projects Funding application round is over.’
‘But if I want to apply next year, is there a fee?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much?’
‘Eighty-five dollars.’
‘And did you meet Anchali?’
‘As I said—’
‘OK – so if I apply for a Cultural Projects Fund, how does it work? Is there an interview? Do I come and get the form from you? Do I apply online?’
‘If you were to apply for a fund, you would come in, and we would talk before issuing an application form.’
‘So presumably, when Anchali came in to talk with you, she did so with an interpreter? Or do you speak Thai? I mean how many people exactly do you discourage from spending eighty-five dollars for the privilege of just filling in these forms? Wouldn’t it be sensible to discourage someone who clearly doesn’t have the basic language skills to make an application, or resources to execute a project? Mr Heatherington?’
The fan above William’s head seems to hurry the beating of his heart.
‘Thank you for your enquiry.’
Heatherington hangs up. William redials.
‘Hello?’ It is a woman’s voice.
‘I’m calling for Mark Heatherington.’
‘You’ve come back through to the reception.’
�
�But I was just speaking to him.’
‘You spoke to him? And you want to speak to him again?’
‘No – the phone didn’t – I mean, yes, I was speaking to him and we got cut off, then I rang you back – I mean him, through you, and now his phone isn’t answering.’
‘Mark has probably stepped away from his desk for a moment.’
He tries to imagine the receptionist at the British Council as a real human being. She has a young voice. Someone just starting out in life. Landed a good job with travel. Probably highly educated. She does not think that she will live her life as a receptionist, she does not for a moment think she will live her life teaching English as a foreign language, or directing the business of a language school.
Life has happened despite him. Not enough twelve-month plans.
‘Hello? Sir?’ The voice in the phone sounds suddenly distant.
‘Hello.’
‘Would you like to leave a message?’
William cuts her off.
How do people do it? How do people keep going?
What do you think other people do? Anya had asked him that morning. But he couldn’t just do things any more. Brushing his teeth had been a decision. Showering, a decision. Food was the most difficult decision. The decision to eat was life or death. He had followed his feet as they took him out of the apartment into the lift and outside. It amazed him so many people had made the same decisions. To wake up, to care for themselves, to put fuel in their bodies and keep going. Did they see the ghosts too? Did they feel the absence of people who had decided to not wake up that morning, or who hadn’t got as far as the shower before jumping out of a window or taking a lethal dose of prescription medicine?
It’s not all about you, Anya said, and William had found himself standing in front of a class of students, talking about conditional tenses, and somewhere in there, somewhere around the distinction between the modals could/would/should in relation to the pluperfect tense, he had not been thinking about where Anya might be.
He is still holding his finger on the receiver switch and there is a ringing in his ear. Is the phone ringing at the other end? Or is it his phone ringing? He lifts his finger.
‘Hello?’
‘Is that you, Will?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Anthony. I’m calling to confirm Saturday. Will? Are you still there, dude?’
‘Sorry.’
The phone has moved, revealing the edge of a card.
Don Muaeng Airport Baggage Handling.
‘Will? Are you there?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Saturday, Will. The tennis match. You’re coming out. And if you don’t I’m going to come round there and drag you out.’
Flight: PA 342 Phuket – Bangkok
Items: 1
‘Tennis.’
‘Yes, the tennis. Are you all right, Will?’
Date of Arrival: 17 February
Collection: Please collect within 48 days of notification.
‘Fine.’
‘Not having a moment?’
He looks at the date on his computer. Anya’s luggage has been ready for collection almost seven weeks now. It should be on its way to her parents in England.
‘None of this is easy for you, dude. We do appreciate that.’
Dude. Something about the ridiculousness of the word in Anthony’s English, public school mouth restores him.
‘Are you sure you’re OK, dude?’
‘I’ll see you Saturday,’ he says.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes,’ Will lies. ‘Everything’s good.’
11 November 2004
London
Until she read the obituary, Anya had never seen his full name: ‘Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa’. Yasser Arafat was dead. As a teenager, Anya had bought an ‘Arafat’ headscarf before she even knew what it symbolised. In her first year at university, a campaign to see Israeli forces withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip became the occasion of her first march. It had been William who scrounged MDF offcuts from Homebase. They had constructed the placards in her college room above the Cash Convertors on Whitchurch Road. ‘Israel Out’, ‘Liberation not Occupation’, ‘Terrorist or Freedom Fighter?’ Anya supplied the words, and William, with his artistic gifts, had supplied the penmanship. In the cold February air of the Whitehall march, William’s signs had drifted, bobbing away like ocean debris over the heads of the crowd, until they were lost. To see that bit of William, to see his voice lose itself among all the others, had somehow been the most moving part of the day.
According to the French doctors in the Paris hospital where Arafat died, the Palestinian leader had suffered an ‘haemorrhagic cerebrovascular accident’. It wasn’t just the stupidity of humanity against them now, it was the Gods. (If indeed this was a natural death.) Arafat had been in a coma for weeks, and his survival the only topic of discussion in the Middle East section. Now her colleagues were hunched over their phones to fixers and journalists in Ramallah, Beirut and Cairo, not to gather news, but to dig up the gossip. Arafat had been declared dead at 3.30 that morning, and according to the BBC, the interim president of the Palestinian Authority had already been declared: Rawhi Fattuh, a moderate from the legislative council.
‘Fattuh will be gone in months,’ Rhidian told Anya confidently. ‘It’s all about Abbas now.’
An image of Clinton embracing first Arafat, and then Rabin, slipped over the screen in the office. Placards above the heads of wailing Palestinians, not in William’s hopeful hand, but strongly suggesting Ariel Sharon’s violent death. Clinton seemed an historic figure now, a man whose smile only evoked the thought of what his lips had persuaded another young woman to do. Arafat was dead, and Anya was probably as old as the tutors she had hated for being part of a scarred and pessimistic generation.
In the soiled newspapers of her college bar, she had religiously followed events leading to the handshake between Rabin and Arafat. She was one of those students who celebrated that night, one of the few, in fact, who knew what there was to celebrate. Clinton’s easy smile, and porch-front talk, had convinced the young Anya that the Oslo Accords were a ‘new dawn’. She had read into the history of the conflict, and argued in tutorials how, like the problem of Northern Ireland, the Middle East might be resolved now a new generation were coming to power. But a new generation doesn’t always make progress, her professor would counter. Take the Balkans, he said, the Balkans were still a horror show. And the crimes there were committed by the generation succeeding Tito. Politics in the Balkans were over.
All anyone could do for the Balkans in 1993, was rattle tins in the Arcades. And so they had. Anya and William had joined the Socialist Workers, raising money to spend on baked beans (which, as it turned out, the Bosnians hated), toilet paper, sanitary towels and soap. Men and women who were older and braver than Anya and William had driven donated trucks to towns declared ‘safe havens’; towns with names made familiar from the news reports: Stovnik, Tuzla, Banja Luka. For these towns, they had climbed into a van with a cab that had the tired smell of weed, and been driven around the suburban supermarkets of Cardiff collecting unwanted grocery boxes. Not an enormous sacrifice, but as much as two students could reasonably do.
Hiding from the Middle East desk, Anya called her mum, but couldn’t think of a way to introduce Arafat into the conversation, let alone explain why his death somehow felt like that of a distant relative. Instead, she spent a few minutes listening to her mother talk about the temerity of the council’s plans to institute new zoning for parking. And when Mum began to talk about her father, and how whenever she saw him he was wheezing and psoriatic, Anya felt too sad to carry on. She could hear the wine glass clink against her mother’s bracelet, and it was only midday.
With a hurried excuse she put down the phone and found herself staring at her desktop monitor, nursing a vague sense of guilt. She was so much better at work than she was at her family.
Anya shou
ld take a holiday. At least that’s what people kept telling her. From her desk at the Office for National Statistics, Beth had even sent a link for something called Solitair, a company which organised walking holidays for solo-travellers.
‘You think he was poisoned?’ Jack took a chocolate from the communal bowl Anya kept on her desk.
‘I would say it was a distinct possibility. How could the peace process go anywhere as long as Arafat was still alive?’
Jack looked nonplussed.
‘I mean – if someone poisoned him, and it turned out to be for the greater good?’
‘That’s dark.’
‘But Abbas is a moderate. America can talk to him. So it’s win-win.’
‘What a world.’
‘The world we live in.’
Jack walked across the office with a defeated look. She watched as in the glass-box kitchen he hunted the cupboards for his fruit tea. It was hard to imagine him in her bed, lying next to her, let alone imagine him inside of her. Afterwards, Jack had slept as soundly as a child. Anya had stayed awake most of the night, going over her conversation with William. Why had he called? Why now? In the rehearsal of the call she didn’t babble on about herself. She asked him directly why, after three years of total silence, he had decided to call her. By seven o’clock she was scrambling eggs, and when Jack didn’t appear, she ate them alone. He finally emerged fully dressed, and hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. Should he leave? Anya told him he was perfectly welcome to eat. He had eaten the eggs quickly and quietly in front of her, like a boy late for school.