Maya is standing in front of a whiteboard with a lump in her throat. She hasn’t taught a class since July and suddenly the prospect of doing so again fills her with dread, even though she knows that by 9.30 p.m. she will be on a high, that feeling of having faced a challenge and overcome it. This is what Maya does. She tests herself. This is why she travelled to the jungles of Colombia at eighteen, this is why she runs distances that don’t suit her legs, this is why she signed up to be a volunteer teacher at the Hazelworth Collective College. This is why she is trying, still without success, to work out the alchemy of the macaron. Jacob is getting a little fed up with icing sugar all over his cramped kitchen at the weekends, but he can see an end in sight because Maya is looking at flats to buy and soon Jacob’s girlfriend Amelia will move in.
Even though Maya feels a bit sick right now, the memory of two years of hilarious, bizarre and engaging students makes Maya marvel in nervous anticipation. Who will walk through the door this year? Stab turns to tingle and Maya shuffles her notes.
In walk students who might also be feeling a little nervous to be taking the plunge, doing something they talked about doing for years. Or perhaps they signed up on a whim when they passed by on the open day last weekend. Maya looks at new faces as they enter the room and tries to look as friendly as possible. She has been told her resting face can seem a little serious.
‘Wow you look like a dream!’ A big New York voice comes out of a very small woman as she shuffles in. ‘How are ya?’
Maya smiles. ‘Welcome. You are…?’ Maya looks down at her list of names and looks back up – or down rather – at the tiny bundle of a woman with cropped grey hair and thick bottle-end glasses.
‘Velma. Velma Diamond, pleased to meet you, Miss…’
‘Oh, just Maya.’
‘Well Miss Oh Just Maya, that skirt is darling, you look like a movie star from my era! I just know we are going to have fun!’ Velma Diamond clasps her veiny liver-spotted hands together.
Maya blushes and smooths down the enormous bulk of her voluminous minty green skirt. ‘Pleased to meet you Velma, find a seat, it’s going to be great.’
Nerves fizzle and fly out of the classroom door and Maya has a hunch that Velma Diamond makes people feel upbeat and at ease in every room she shuffles into.
A photographic scene of an Italian harbour fills much of one wall in this high-ceilinged Georgian classroom that has been ruined by eighties decor. On the opposite wall a poster in bold black capitals on light blue paper reads:
POLISH
SWEDISH
FOR BEGINNERS.
When Maya was learning cake decorating she marvelled at that poster on the wall, black and blue, lit by strip lighting that gives everything a yellow tinge. She envisaged an old white-haired carpenter like Geppetto taking his yellow duster in hand and teaching a group of amateurs how to polish miniature models of Bergman, Blix, Benny and Bjorn, buffed and brushed in a most proficient way.
More students file in, trying to look as if they’ve done this before.
‘Hi, I’m Gareth,’ says a fifty-something in guyliner, a checked shirt and DMs over rolled-up jeans as he extends a cold hand. ‘This is my daughter, Cecily.’
‘Ahh, I did see we have a few students with the same surname on the list. You must be the Taylors. It’s great when people come to class together because then they can spur each other on with homework.’ A serious face softens and smiles.
‘Homework?’ says Gareth. ‘You didn’t tell me I was signing up for homework!’ he laughs as he nudges an adoring daughter, who rolls limp eyes lovingly, adorned with the same eyeliner as her dad’s.
When everyone has settled, Maya welcomes the class and asks them to introduce themselves and say why they want to learn conversational Spanish.
There is Gareth and Cecily – an A Level student who joined because she couldn’t fit Spanish into her timetable at school, and she’s brought her dad along in the hope of him meeting a nice woman. Everyone laughs, except for the two women nearest his age bracket who look nervous and explain they are both happily married with two adorable children each thankyouverymuch. Housewife Esther Patterson has two boys who are eight and five, Doctor Helen Cruikshank’s girls are twelve and nine.
‘I don’t fancy either of them anyway,’ Gareth whispers to Cecily.
Jan and Doug Kinsella hope to open a B&B in Andalucía; Glyn Davies – a six foot seven inch giant wearing head to toe beige – just wants to get out of the house because his wife is addicted to soap operas. This is the fifth course he’ll have done at Hazelworth Collective College. He also took the cake decorating course last year, despite not knowing how to bake a cake let alone cover it, so Maya recognises Glyn and it explains why he does look like he’s done this before. There’s Nathaniel Francis who is ludicrously handsome and looks about twenty years older than he probably is, wearing a cravat and a blazer. He’s there because he thought learning Spanish would be ‘jolly’; there’s Ed Noy, in his early twenties, whose girlfriend Valeria lives in Argentina. Ed wants to impress Valeria and her family by learning to speak their language. And of course there’s Velma Diamond, tiny but indomitable, who decided to learn Spanish because she wants to retire to Florida like a Golden Girl. ‘And if I’m gonna go partying in Miami Beach, I gotta speak the lingo,’ she smiles.
Maya is fascinated, and wants to know how a seventy-something New Yorker with plans to retire to Miami Beach ended up in Hazelworth. But right now she has a class to teach.
‘OK I think we’ve covered everyone apart from… you,’ she says, looking from a man in the doorway to her list. ‘You must be… James Miller?’ A heavy skirt turns to the gormless-looking man with long hair hanging lankly over an undercut.
‘No, I’m Keith Smith,’ says a voice devoid of any character.
‘Oh I don’t have a Keith on the list, sorry Keith, hello – why do you want to learn Spanish?’
‘Well, you could say I’m partial to an Ibero-Romance language, heavily influenced by Basque, Arabic, French and Italian,’ he says in a monotone as his eyes dart under heavy, furious blinks.
Everybody stays silent.
‘Ah, great. Do you speak other languages then, Keith?’
‘No.’
‘Wonderful, let’s get started!’
Maya crosses out James Miller with her black felt-tip pen, not knowing that it will be a name she will soon yearn for, and writes Keith Smith on a new line below it.