by M J Dees
“What do you think Teresa?” she asked while Teresa’s brain was still assimilating the conversation that had just taken place regarding the new policy for lunch and break duty.
There was a long pause while Teresa absorbed the discussion that had just taken place among the others. This was one of the few subjects in the meeting about which she had no opinion.
“I’m happy with whatever the majority decides,” she said, at last, giving the impression she hadn’t been following the conversation.
“Well that was worth the wait,” said the Headmistress.
As the meeting ended, Teresa tried to retreat to the class without becoming embroiled in conversation with the rest of the assistants. Before she could get away, Mariana stopped her.
“Teresa,” her voice was excessively enthusiastic for Teresa to bear. “A few of us are going for a drink after work if you’d like to join us.”
“That sounds great,” Teresa lied. “I’ve got something I’m meant to do, but I’ll try to get out of it,” she lied again.
“Great, we’ll come and get you,” said Mariana.
“Why don’t I meet you there?”
“OK,” said Mariana. Concern was creeping into her voice. “Is everything OK?”
“Yeah, fine,” Teresa lied a third time, expecting to hear a cock-crow. “Just a little busy. That’s all.”
“Yeah, there’s always so much to do eh? Oh well, see you later,” Mariana smiled. Teresa smiled back, and they went their separate ways.
On the way home, Teresa wondered what she had done all day. She’d kept herself busy but couldn’t remember what she’d done as if she was working on auto-pilot.
The metro made her feel anxious, and she was glad when she was home behind a locked door in her living room.
Teresa poured herself a large gin and slumped on the makeshift sofa staring at the television, which was pumping out the usual soap opera. A sudden terrible fear that perhaps she had forgotten to lock the door shook Teresa from her reverie. She rushed over and checked it. Locked. Through the frosted glass, she could also see that she had padlocked the security gate. Despite the evening heat, she closed the windows and checked she had fastened them. This eliminated any possibility of a cooling breeze from entering the flat, let alone an intruder. She slumped back on the sofa, breathed a sigh, took a large swig of her gin and sweated.
She slept poorly that night, a combination of heat and gin, and awoke tired, hungover and unprepared to face the terrible ordeal of bus and metro, followed by school, followed by metro, followed by a bus.
As she showered, Teresa rehearsed the conversation she would need to have with the chirpy Mariana about what a great time the girls had had last night and what a terrible shame it was that she hadn’t been able to go. Teresa wondered how Mariana managed to be so happy all the time and tried to recollect a time when she had experienced such gaiety herself but was unable to identify a single period in her life when she hadn’t felt even a little bit miserable. She wondered whether she would ever reach the point where she was happy like Mariana. Why couldn’t she just be more positive? What was wrong with her? Did she lack self-discipline? Maybe she just didn’t have what it took to be like Mariana.
Teresa rushed into the class, five minutes late. Thank goodness, that this was preparation week and that the children wouldn’t be here for another two days.
“Cheer up, it can’t be that bad,” said Brenda, seeing the dark look on her face as she entered the class. Brenda was a large gringo, the teacher whom Teresa assisted.
Teresa forced a smile.
“Sorry,” Teresa was used to apologising for her mood.
“Catarina was looking for you earlier,” said Brenda. “She didn’t say what it was about.”
‘Shit,’ thought Teresa. ‘The head knows I was late. I’m in for a right bollocking now.’
“Is everything OK?” Catarina, the formidable headmistress, asked. Teresa took a seat facing her desk. “Did you have a good holiday?”
“Yeah fine,” Teresa lied. “And you?”
“Well I spent most of the holiday in England,” said Catarina.
‘Bitch,’ thought Teresa, jealous that she wasn’t the one that had just spent five weeks in England.
“You seemed a little distracted at yesterday’s meeting,”
Teresa struggled to find an answer. Catarina took her silence as an admission of guilt.
“We had our little discussion at the end of the last term didn’t we Teresa?” Catarina spoke as if she was addressing a naughty child. She waited for a response. Teresa nodded.
“I had hoped that we wouldn’t need any pep talks this term. Hmm?” Catarina raised her monobrow. All Teresa could manage was a weak smile.
“Whatever it is Teresa, you’re just going to need to snap out of it.” Teresa wanted to slap her boss.
Teresa emerged from the meeting feeling guiltier than ever. She didn’t know how to snap out of it. She felt guilty that she seemed to ruin the lives of anyone with whom she came into contact. She appears to be the kiss of death.
“Everything OK?” Brenda asked when she returned to the classroom.
Oh God, Teresa didn’t want to embroil Brenda in all her problems. Brenda had enough of her own just as a full-time teacher, let alone trying to raise a disabled child at the same time.
“Yeah.” lying was becoming a habit for Teresa.
“What did Catarina want?”
Why was she so nosey? Teresa thought for a moment.
“Oh, she just wanted to talk about yesterday’s meeting. About the rota.”
Brenda raised her eyebrows with boredom. Teresa returned to cutting out name tags and hoped the conversation was over.
After a moment, Teresa looked up again and saw Brenda busy typing away on her computer. It was almost as if Teresa wasn’t there as if she was observing a play or a television soap opera.
At break time, Teresa tried to sneak down to the lunchroom for a quiet coffee alone, but chirpy Mariana dropped into the seat next to her.
“Hey, how was last night?” Teresa tried to be polite. “Sorry, I couldn’t make it.” Another lie.
“It was incredible. We all missed you. You should have come.”
Teresa offered an apologetic smile which was meant to say “yeah, sorry” while saying “yeah, right.”
“No. We missed you,” said Mariana, seeming to divine Teresa’s true feelings. “Is everything OK?”
Teresa wasn’t sure for how long she could maintain the deception.
Mariana persisted with a manner so endearing that Teresa felt it difficult to resist her charms.
“I’ve just been going through a bit of a rough time,” Teresa admitted.
“Would you like to talk about it?”
Teresa looked around the filling lunchroom, fearing another assistant might join them at any moment.
“Not right now,” she said. “But thank you.”
Mariana smiled.
“Remember, I’m always here if you need me.”
The next morning was bright and sunny. Teresa tried to remember this as she entered the metro. In her head, she had already imagined an aggressive argument with an imaginary fellow passenger and had to remind herself that this was a daydream and took some deep breaths to calm herself as she reached for her travel card.
06:50 the clock read as the already full train pulled into the station. Teresa positioned herself in the middle of one of the carriages so that she was in a good position to occupy a vacated seat should any of the seated passengers decide to alight. However, by Paraiso, which she knew was her best opportunity to get a seat, she was still standing and so resigned herself to the fact she would be on her feet the entire journey. Her legs were already tired.
A man pushed past her to access the other half of the carriage.
‘Why didn’t he just use the other door,’ Teresa thought with annoyance.
At Paraiso, the carriage filled, and women of dubious age, disability or pr
egnancy occupied even the preferential seats.
Teresa always wondered why they included obese people on the list for preferential seats. Standing would help them burn a few calories and do them a bit of good.
At Trianon-MASP, the stop before her’s she moved from the centre of the carriage toward the doors.
‘If everyone did this,’ she thought. ‘There wouldn’t be any need to push past people blocking the doors.’
Changing lines at Consoloção involved a long walk and crossing the paths of many people whose intention was to go in another direction. Teresa hated having to judge how fast or slow the other commuters were walking to avoid a collision. In Teresa’s mind, the Paulistas seemed to walk how they drove - aggressively. By the time she reached the yellow line platform, Teresa was a nervous wreck.
Teresa did her best to go unnoticed while entering her classroom. After exchanging half a dozen forced smiles, she managed it. The list of to-dos on her desk didn’t seem to get any smaller day by day. Cutting display paper, fixing it to the walls, preparing reading journals, homework, there was always something to do, and in a couple of days the children would come back to school, and there would be break and lunch duty, library sessions, taking them to and from classes.
Teresa knew she wasn’t very good at what she did but did her best in her opinion and if her best wasn’t good enough then what else could she do?
Chapter Twelve – Carl Dixon - 26th January 2015
Carl Dixon placed the Native American headdress on his head.
Hallucinations flashed in the mirror.
He removed the headdress, having to catch his breath from the devastating effects of its power.
Interesting. This effect had not happened when Dixon had tried on the very same headdress in Wyoming. Perhaps the stories he had heard were true; the results varied not according to the user but according to the place of use.
Dixon placed the headdress on his head a second time and this time he removed his hands.
Hallucinations flickered in the mirror once more and this time resolved themselves into precise forms. A collection of silver implements lay before him and in the centre, a large silver knife of the type found in the kitchens of professional chefs.
Dixon reached out and touched the knife. He could feel its cold steel. He wrapped his fingers around the handle and, tightening his grip, found he was able to hold and lift the object.
Dixon twisted the blade in front of his eyes and watched the artificial light reflecting off its surface.
Just then the door opened, and the black security guard rushed in followed by the other hotel guests that had witnessed Dixon’s rant in the bar earlier.
The guard halted in his tracks when he saw the knife, stretching out his arms as a warning to those following him that Dixon was armed.
In an instant, Dixon had plunged the blade deep into the guard’s chest and was wrestling with the hotel guests who were trying to pull him off the guard’s twitching body.
Van Helsing who, up until this point had been an observer in the whole affair, reached into the affray and plucked the headdress from atop of Dixon at which point the latter collapsed onto the guard’s bleeding corpse causing the entire mass of struggling bodies to fall in on itself like a bloody rugby scrum.
Chapter Thirteen - Back to school - 26th January 2015
The day the children were due to come back to school, Teresa felt more anxious than usual. Perhaps it was the dream about the headdress, from which she had just awoken or perhaps it was because her head was sore from the gin the night before, maybe it was because on the way to the bus stop she had heard a striped cuckoo.
Every day the same bus seemed to pass her on the same stretch of road. Teresa imagined that she must be travelling to work with the same groups of people every day, although she didn’t recognise any of them.
In her mind, she was going over an annoying email she had received from her husband and her even more annoyed reply which she now regretted.
She knew she wasn’t in a very positive frame of mind for work but felt helpless to do anything about it. She had to stand on the metro again. She didn’t feel sad about anything that had happened, her father’s death, his abuse, she didn’t feel angry. She didn’t feel anything.
As she walked along the stationary moving walkway, she ran her hand along the handrail until she imagined how many germs coated its surface and pulled it away.
At the school, Mariana met Teresa almost as soon as she walked through the door.
“Hey,” she bubbled. “How are things? A few of us are going to play volleyball after school tomorrow. I thought you might like to join us.”
Teresa forced a smile. It sounded awful.
“Great, I’ll try to remember to bring my kit.”
Teresa’s headache stayed with her the whole day. It was a hot day and to make matters worse at 09:00, in the middle of some photocopying, the lights flickered then the power went out. That meant no air conditioning. Twenty-four hot children in a hot classroom with no lights, no computers, no projector. She cursed Saci and remembered the striped cuckoo. It was a long, long morning. At lunch, in the staff canteen she had to eat in the dark, and all day she was unable to quench her terrible thirst because the water from the communal fountains had a very strange taste. People said it was because the water in the reservoir had got so low that now the tap water contained all sorts of heavy metals. She would have bought bottled water if she had enough money to spare.
At the end of the day, Teresa trundled back onto the metro with the rest of the tired looking commuters. Again, she found herself having to stand in the middle of the carriage. The strap of her bag, it was filled with stuff Teresa never used, cut into her shoulder. She always promised herself she would have a clean-up and get rid of all her junk, but she never did.
Sometimes she would buy herself a new bag, and that would resolve the issue for a while but in her current financial position that was not an issue. It was still a week and a half to payday, and she wasn’t sure whether she had enough money on her travel card to get her to work until then. She’d have to manage with whatever food was in the cupboards. She’d have to be pretty creative. Another month in which she had failed to put anything aside for her savings fund to buy her tickets to go back and visit Annabel.
At home, she opened the rice container. Unseen eggs had begun to hatch into tiny insects. She couldn’t afford to throw the rice away. She tried washing the rice to get rid of anything that didn’t look like rice. The trouble was, it all looked like rice, so she washed it as best she could, cooked what she hoped was rice and crossed her fingers.
In the evenings, the water company had already stopped supplies to save the dwindling levels in the reservoirs, and so the washing-up would mount up in the sink and tiny fruit flies buzzed around the sticky remains. Teresa had been saving buckets of water from the washing machine as it emptied and collected this to flush the toilet. The used detergent smelt terrible as it decomposed. Every week there were heavy storms that made slight work of São Paulo’s older trees. The irony was that the rain that fell in torrents in massive electrical storms disappeared via the drains into the river Tiete, too polluted to treat, and went on its way through the interior of Brazil, finding its way in-between Argentina and Uruguay into the Atlantic.
It was hard to sleep in the heat and to make matters worse, the neighbours on one side arrived home in the early hours, and the neighbour’s at the other side left their dog outside so that it whined for hours in the rain. It made sleep all but impossible.
By the morning, Teresa’s bed sheets were a wet puddle of sweat, and she felt more tired than when she had gone to bed.
She stood all the way on the metro again, and the offer of a seated passenger to hold her bag did nothing to lift her mood.
Teresa had managed to remember to forget her trainers providing herself with the perfect excuse not to join the game of volleyball that she knew full well would have done her a bit of good.
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During the morning, she had to take a group for reading, and two boys in her group insisted on chatting through her instructions despite several attempts at shutting them up. Teresa wanted to take them over her knee and give them a good spanking like her mother would have done to her, but she knew that it was more than her job was worth. She remembered when she was their age the teachers didn’t use to think twice about hitting their students and Teresa’s parents had made a point of telling the school that they were in support of any level of physical violence the teachers cared to inflict on their daughter.
Now, of course, things were very different and children, rather than having facts beaten into them, absorbed knowledge through a series of ‘learning experiences.’
It was on the weekends Teresa felt loneliest. In some ways, she preferred being alone, when there was money. Teresa was free to do whatever, whenever. She longed to be with her daughter but saving the money to return to the UK was proving impossible. She missed playing with her, comforting her, sharing her life with her. She sometimes wished she could at least have someone in Brazil with whom she could share things.
On Saturday, she slept late. Catching up on the week’s sleepless nights. She made herself a large coffee, resolving that this would be her last and that from now on she would drink nothing except green tea. She didn’t have any green tea. That would have to wait until she got paid next week, but at least the right intention was there.
She ate a bowl of muesli with soya milk and flicked through the hundreds of cable channels, but nothing interested her. She had heard that muesli was good for her heart and for the same reason would drink red wine whenever the opportunity presented itself. Fiscal restrictions meant that the opportunity did not present itself very often and so she resorted to working her way through the leftovers in the various bottles of spirits that she had accumulated. Gin, cachaça, rum, port, brandy, even a bottle of single malt whisky that seemed to have sat there forever. She was working her way through them and intended to buy more as soon as she got paid. Even whisky, which she used to hate and would drown in as much dolly cola as possible, now seemed palatable. She consoled herself that by drinking spirits, she was saving water and thereby contributing to the common interest.