'Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I'm going to become a teacher.'
'A teacher? Teaching what?'
'English.'
'I can't see much future in that, dear. Everyone we know speaks English.'
'Yes, Mother. I am going to teach people who do not speak English.'
'But why?'
'I'm going to Sri Lanka. I'm going to teach children at Tom's orphanage.'
'You are going to teach English to orphans?'
'Yes.'
She sat back and shook her head. 'You like this one, don't you.'
I nodded. 'I don't know why,' I said.
'There is no why, dear. It's that thing, you know, chemistry. Now hang on to him for heaven's sake. Don't go and sleep with all his friends, or whatever it is you do.'
'Mother, what are you saying?'
'You know what I'm saying. You're my daughter.' She paused. 'Not too tightly, mind you. They hate it if they feel suffocated.'
I wasn't drinking, I'd told her that, but she added a sip of white wine to my sparkling water for form's sake. She raised her glass and I followed suit.
'Good luck, darling,' she said.
We clinked glasses.
'Thank you,' I replied.
'You know I love you, don't you?'
'Of course I do.'
'Matt's weak. Don't think I don't know that. You're strong, Katie. I admire you for that.'
'I don't know what to say.'
'That's certainly a first.' We both laughed. 'You, teaching English. Who'd have thought it.'
I poured some wine in a wine glass.
'To you,' I said.
'To me,' she replied.
Piers Ashton, head of the Winston School of English, wore a beard, brown leather brogues and a white shirt with a top pocket bulging with pens and a spiral notebook. It would not normally have been acceptable to begin a course before completing the foundation work, but due to the extenuating circumstances, and incidental to the £1,200 on his desk, I was provided with a course book and a timetable printed on plastic. At nine, together with eleven other would-be teachers, I took my place in a classroom with whiteboards, chairs with writing trays that levered over your lap, and posters with grammar rules illustrated by cartoon ants with studious expressions and oversized heads.
I had thought it was going to be easy. It wasn't. Teaching English in a way that people who do not know the language will learn and understand is not the same as writing English for an English-reading audience. I had spent ten years bending and breaking rules, projecting my ideas beyond the obvious. Now I had to climb right back inside the box.
At lunchtime, I read my books while I had a sandwich and carrot juice at Pret. I called Tom immediately I got home each evening. It was a little after six my time, just before his bedtime. I was tempted when he asked me what I had been doing to tell him, but I didn't for reasons that were still not entirely clear to myself. I read up on Sri Lanka and asked him about the orphanage, the children, his work. We skyped good night kisses and I went back to my books.
Saturday, heart drumming, I booked a ticket from Heathrow to Kankesanturai in Jaffna. I adored the taste of the word on my tongue: Kankesanturai, its foreignness, its spicy flavour, its colour, the hard k and soft vowel ending. I reserved a room at the hotel where I had stayed that bleak night before Tom left on the same journey, the two bookings – and the promise of financial loss for cancellation – more a show of positivity than excessive confidence about the upcoming exams.
I worried myself sick, the same as when I was at school. I studied every night and the TEFL certificate presented to me by Piers Ashton at the end of the course took on the status of a passport to a new immigrant. It only occurred to me why I hadn't told Tom that I was taking the course when I had the qualification in my hand. To have failed would have been too much to bear, and now that I was 'one of those people who can do things,' and could prove it, it struck me that perhaps the last thing they needed at that moment was teachers. We skyped. We kissed. I would present myself as a fait accompli, and I finally removed the video camera from the box to pack in my luggage.
Lunch Sunday with Mother and Matt. He was starting a course in film editing and was going to borrow my flat while I was away. I spoke to Father, kissed the smoking man on the cheek and caught the tube to Heathrow.
Airports at night are a sort of Purgatory, neither heaven nor hell but an interval in life, a mini-death. The cold hand of hotel bedsheets. The half sleep. The roar of the alarm call. The long walk down dimly-lit tunnels, the wheels on the suitcase echoing behind me. The exhausting wait for the flight to be called. More tunnels. Sparky girls in pressed uniforms. A window seat with a glimpse of green light rising over the horizon. The assertive voice of the pilot with his weather report and expectations, the wheels folding beneath the undercarriage as London scatters behind us.
Jaffna sits on the edge of a lagoon surrounded by fan-palms and oleander. I could pick out the temples dotting the shoreline, the cluster of modern buildings, the dark presence of Jaffna Fort. The plane banked through low cloud, the engine roared and the runway slid beneath the skidding wheels. We create in our minds high walls and barriers, reasons for not doing things. When we do them, the walls we thought so high aren't there at all, they are just figments of our own self-doubt. Perhaps Tom had changed his mind; perhaps he doesn't like girls with murky pasts and broken fingers after all. If that's the case, it won't matter. Once the walls have come down, we can move on.
From Kankesanturai Airport, the taxi raced down the new roads of the commercial centre before twisting through a patchwork of colonial bungalows that emerged like polished teeth from the mature foliage. The driver wanted to practise his English; he was with the right person, a teacher with a new certificate. I glanced out at the places I had read about as he told me that he was married now and his wife was having a baby; he hoped it was going to be a boy and he was saving to buy their own house.
'Now tell me, madam, how is my English?'
'It is very good.'
'A gold star?'
'Two gold stars,' I said and he blasted the horn exuberantly.
The journey, with stop-overs, delays and the time change, had taken 24 hours. I had left at sunrise and, as we circled Jaffna Fort, I watched the labourers climb the scaffolding ready to start work on restoration. I had seen photographs of the 17th century stronghold, read the history, the arrival of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, 400 years of battles, exploitation, promises lit by the morning sun.
We curved down a winding unsurfaced road overhung by trees and the sea came into view. The sun was warm when I stepped out of the taxi and entered a low prefabricated building carrying my luggage. A woman in a yellow sari was mopping the floor. She was thin, dark, her smile lighting her tiny features.
'Good morning,' I said.
'Good morning. Good morning.'
'I'm looking for Tom.'
'Tom?' She looked puzzled.
'The doctor.'
She smiled again. 'Am. Am. Yes. Yes. Not here.'
'He's gone,' I said, and she seemed to understand my disappointment.
She went to the door and pointed to a track between the trees.
'Swim. Doctor Tom, he swim.'
She took my luggage without my having to ask, stood the suitcase and bag in the corner, then continued mopping the floor.
I set off down the track listening to the morning birdsong. It was sandy underfoot and I carried my shoes. I saw him chopping overarm through the sea, a tiny figure vanishing and emerging through the waves. There was a towel and a pair of size 10 thongs close to the shoreline where I sat and continued to watch as he swam away from me, turned, and swam back.
He ran up the wet sand and stopped when he saw me. He had a puzzled look, a look of such disbelief I thought at first he was angry. I stood. We approached each other slowly, like two animals meeting by chance and testing for danger. I stopped. He smiled and hurried the last few steps. He held me ti
ght and kissed my hair, my cheeks, my lips.
'You came.'
'You don't mind?'
'I wondered how long it was going to be.' He paused. 'Mind?' he then said. 'I told you, if you didn't come, I was coming back.'
'I don't remember that?'
'On camera.'
'On camera?' I repeated.
'I left a message on the camera, the camera I bought.'
'I never looked at it. I'm sorry. I've been so busy.'
He smiled. 'Of course, you've finished your book.'
I shook my head. 'No. I took an English course, for teachers, I can teach English.'
'What? That's amazing. You never told me. You never looked at the message I left for you.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Sorry? Katie, you never need to say sorry. It was stupid, and cowardly. I should have just told you to your face.'
'Told me?'
'You know very well,' he said and I smiled.
'Yes, Tom Bridge, I do.'
We made love, hidden by a fold in the dunes. We swam and, later, we sat in his room staring at the small screen on the camera as Tom in his fisherman's sweater on a grey morning five weeks before said, in that mumbling English way, those things I had wanted to hear.
From the Author
Katie in Love is my sixth novel. The others came out with mainstream publishers Xcite and Random House. This time, I decided to go it alone and join the proud army of indie self-publishers – ten times the work but strangely satisfying.
If you love Katie in Love and would like to continue reading the Chloe oeuvre, may I suggest you begin where it all began with The Secret Life of Girls.
Poor Bella gets cheated out of her inheritance by her mother and wicked stepfather. With her good looks and awakening sexuality, she sets out on the path of revenge.
Available on Amazon.
During the 12 months I spent writing Katie in Love, I also started a blog at www.chloethurlow.com. If you are not a subscriber, do sign on and once a week you will find in your inbox a delicious slice of saucy erotica with a serious subtext and a tang of humour. Read one of the blogs on the diary page and you'll get the idea.
People often ask writers what they are going to do when they have published a new novel. The answer for me is quite simple. Start writing another one. That's what I am doing.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 26
