says, leaning across Jakob. ‘I saw Matthias on Kaiserstrasse.’
At first I say nothing. Jesus-Jakob continues to stare straight ahead.
‘What was he doing?’ I say finally.
‘He was walking along the street,’ Rebecca says.
‘What?’ I say, my voice weak. ‘Just like that?’
‘I know,’ Rebecca says. ‘How dare he?!’
We’re interrupted by one of Rebecca’s friends. I stay there beside Jesus-Jakob, thinking about Matthias.
Matthias and I were together for four years. To begin with, everything was great between us, then it was bad. We argued about him smoking too much weed and never helping with the housework. After every fight Matthias would buy me a bag of liquorice as a peace offering because he knew how much I liked it. Like I was 6 years old.
In a last-ditch attempt to save our relationship, we decided to move to his home-town, Vienna. Everything was great between us again. I learned to say Grüss Gott, rediscovered Sundays and practised not getting run over all the time by the trams. Matthias got accepted on a photography course and because the college wanted to foster its students’ understanding and respect for the fundamental creativity of photography, our new bathroom was transformed into a dark room. The window was covered over with black bin-liners and gaffer tape and my make-up jostled for space with bottles of chemicals. I bashed my head countless times on the enormous enlarger that stood between the shower and the toilet. But it didn’t matter. Matthias had finally found an aim in life. He spent our paltry monthly budget on books about Mapplethorpe, LaChapelle and Corbijn, and during the whole of his first year I was a willing model as he experimented with contrast and composition. He stopped smoking weed every day and his eyes grew clear again. Everything was OK, even when Vienna frOnT went bust, because Matthias’s happiness came before everything else. That was back when I still believed that true love meant completely forgetting myself and only letting my moon orbit his planet. That was when I still believed I’d be the one who would save Matthias, get him to reach his full potential and become the well-rounded being none of my friends seemed to be able to see.
The first time I realised something was wrong was during his second year on the photography course. I saw that one of Matthias’s records had been left out, though it hadn’t been there when we left the flat together that morning. Without giving it any more thought, I blew off the flakes of tobacco on the sleeve and put it back among the other records. Then I started noticing that the lock had only been turned once, rather than being double-locked like I always left it. And suddenly we were back to arguing almost every day and the kitchen shelf was overflowing with packs of liquorice.
Then came the call. I was in bed with tonsillitis and had just been contemplating taking a nap. The telephone rang and a woman with a soft voice said they’d found one of Matthias’s portfolios and wondered whether he’d like to come in and pick it up given that he was no longer a student there.
She told me that Matthias had stopped attending classes back in October, but that it wasn’t until a month ago that they’d officially taken him off their student list. It was March now. For over six months he’d been pretending to go to college every day. For over six months he’d been telling me little stories and anecdotes about things that had happened at school that day. For over six months he’d been telling me how much he was enjoying the course and that he was looking forward to becoming a professional photographer. I almost threw up with the telephone receiver in my hand.
I immediately started searching the flat for clues. Hidden in a bag behind the panel that was loosely attached to Matthias’s desktop computer I found hundreds of joint roaches. The plastic bag was carefully fastened with several elastic bands. Why he hadn’t simply thrown the roaches out was a mystery. And it struck me that his textbooks were still in exactly the same order they’d been in at the start of the academic year, and that the developing trays in the bathroom had acquired a thick layer of dust.
When Matthias came home at quarter past six – after ‘a whole day at college’! – I confronted him. He didn’t deny a thing.
‘But why?’ I asked.
‘I knew how angry you’d be,’ he said, and in a single stroke he made it my fault.
For the last six months he’d been going to a café in the sixteenth district where the owner let customers smoke weed all day as long as they bought something to drink. If the café was closed, he’d come back to the flat as soon as I’d gone to work and then leave before I came home. It turned out Matthias was a cleaning whizz after all. At least when it came to removing all trace of what he’d been doing in the flat this whole time.
At first, every time I told someone how things ended between Matthias and me, and about his double life, I’d try and turn it into a funny anecdote – ‘I’m just grateful he didn’t put on my underwear and call himself SaMANtha!’ But I stopped because no one ever laughed. There’s nothing funny about the story of me and Matthias.
After two hours at O’Malley’s I make my excuses.
‘It’s not because I told you about Matthias?’ Rebecca asks nervously.
‘No, God no,’ I say.
When I get home I cry into Optimus’s fur until he runs and hides behind the sofa.
I shower in the kitchen. Not because I want to shower in the kitchen, but for the simple reason that the shower is behind a little wall in the kitchen. That’s how it is in most of the Altbau flats in Vienna. You always find the kitchen, bathroom and toilet in the most unexpected places. In the building where Claire from Berlitz lives, in the sixteenth district, the unheated toilet is in the corridor and she has to share it with her neighbours.
When I’m showered and dressed I go to work, even though it’s the weekend. I’m one of the few teachers who always agrees to teach on Saturdays. It’s not like I have anything else to do. Today I’ll be teaching a group of 10-year-olds who’ve had the misfortune of being born to ambitious parents.
‘Saturday is shell day,’ a little girl says to me cryptically before taking some shells out of her bag.
I’ve never taught this group before, so I have no idea why ‘Saturday is shell day’. For the rest of the lesson, the shells lie there on the table like a worrying reminder that I probably should have made a bit of an effort to find out what the class have done in previous lessons. But in spite of the shells, the four 10-year-olds are a joy to teach. When they’ve been corrected once, they never make the same mistake again, whether it’s vocabulary, grammar or syntax – in contrast to my adult students. We play the memory game, read stories about sharks who eat people and make up our own versions of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’.
‘What do your parents do?’ I ask.
The children stare at me.
‘What jobs do they do?’ I clarify.
The children look relieved and carry on colouring in pictures of dinosaurs with the felt-tips I brought from home.
‘My mum is a doctor,’ says one boy.
‘My dad works as a professor,’
