How to Fall in Love with a Man Who Lives in a Bush

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it , while at times based on historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, Sweden. Published in the English language by arrangement with Bonnier Rights, Stockholm, Sweden

Emmy Abrahamson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Nichola Smalley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the translation

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Emmy Abrahamson 2018

English translation © Nichola Smalley

Cover design Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008222338

Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008222369

Version: 2017-12-21

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Author’s Note

Questions for Further Discussion

A Conversation With Emmy Abrahamson

Being the Man in the Bush

About the Author

About the Publisher

1

‘I love cock!’ the woman says cheerfully.

I look down at my notes, scribble something illegible, place the ballpoint on the table and clear my throat.

‘What you’re trying to say … I think … or I hope … although I’m happy for you if you really feel that way … is perhaps that you love to cook. To cook. Not … cock.’

It’s the eleventh lesson of the day, and I’m so tired I’ve started rambling. What’s more, I’ve spent the whole time looking down at my mint-green information card to remind myself what the student’s name is. Petra Petra Petra. Worryingly, I also notice that I’ve taught this student at least three times before. And yet I have no memory of her. It’s as though all my students have turned into a single, faceless blob that’s unable to distinguish between Tuesday and Thursday, and stubbornly refuses to use the perfect tense. A blob that continues to say ‘Please’ in reply to a thank you, despite my hundreds of reminders about saying ‘You’re welcome’. A blob that believes language learning is a process that occurs automatically as long as you’re in the same room as a teacher. With a quick glance at the clock I realise there are still another twenty minutes till the lesson is over. Twenty minutes of eternity.

‘And, er … Petra, what kind of food do you like to cook?’ I ask.

It was never my dream, or plan, to become an English teacher. But after four months’ unemployment, the advert saying that Berlitz was looking for teachers was almost too good to be true. The training course was only two weeks long, and as soon as we were finished we could start teaching. Even so, I spent the first few weeks glancing at the door and expecting the ponytailed guy who’d run the course to come rushing in and breathlessly exclaim: ‘It was only a joke. Of course you’re not allowed to teach. We were just having a laugh!’ before throwing me out onto the street and escorting the student to safety. That was when I was still sitting up late every evening preparing the next day’s lessons. I carefully drew up lesson plans, making sure each class was varied and entertaining. I made copies of interesting articles, wrote down questions, drafted inoffensive role plays and laminated photos that would lead into relevant themes for discussion. All to get my students speaking as much English as possible.

Now they’re lucky if I even glance at their information cards before entering the room. This minor rebellion on my part started the day I realised I’d been teaching for significantly longer than the six months I’d planned and – even worse – that I was good at it. I was both patient (who’d have thought that would be the main ingredient for a good language teacher?) and had a knack for getting my students to speak English. Now that I’ve stopped planning my lessons and they’ve become a mystery to both me and my students, life has become a bit more exciting.

‘Oh, everything. Schnitzel, sausages …’ says Petra.

‘Complete sentences,’ I say, encouragingly.

‘I like to cook schnitzel and sausages,’ Petra says obediently.

Because the basic rule of the Berlitz method is that you can learn a language through everyday conversation, I can keep a lesson going for as long as I can come up with things to talk about. My three years as an English teacher have turned me into an expert in small talk. Once I got a student to talk about the lock he’d changed on his garage door for a quarter of an hour, just to see if I could.

‘And what’s your favourite drink?’ I ask.

Petra considers. ‘Tap water.’

‘Complete sentences,’ I repeat with a strained smile.

‘My favourite drink is tap water,’ Petra says.

I continue to smile at her, because I genuinely have no idea what to say to someone whose favourite drink is tap water.

For the final fifteen minutes, we do a cookery-themed crossword. When the bell rings I let out a little pretend sigh and turn down the corners of my mouth to show how sad I am that we have to finish. We shake hands, of course, and Petra disappears off home, probably to a dinner consisting of schnitzel and sausages washed down with a glass of tap water.

Everyone crams into the tiny staffroom so as to avoid any contact with the students during the five-minute break. On the walls there are Berlitz posters with multicultural faces and sentences followed by exclamation marks. The three bookshelves are full of Berlitz’s in-house magazine Passport and some Spanish, French and Russian textbooks that appear to be completely untouched. The English books, on the other hand, are so battered that most of them are missing their spines or are held together with tape.

None of the Berlitz staff are real teachers. Mike’s an out-of-work actor, Jason’s finishing his PhD on Schönberg, Claire used to work in marketing, Randall’s a graphic designer, Sarah’s a civil engineer, Rebecca’s a violin maker, Karen has a degree in media and communication and I still dream of one day becoming an author. The only one who’s a trained teacher is Ken, so he’s hated almost as much as Dagmar, the administrator at our Berlitz branch on Mariahilferstrasse.

Ken stalks into the staffroom. ‘Ooh, busy, busy,’ he says cheerfully, trying to squeeze his way through to the photocopier holding open a grammar book. Everyone ignores him. At the window, Mike and Claire huddle together, trying to smoke through a gap of about a centimetre.

‘Now I have four lessons in a row with the same group,’ Claire sighs, stuffing her lighter back into her cigarette packet. ‘I won’t be done until eight.’

‘Just a little longer and you’ll never have to do this again,’ Randall says. Claire will be going back to London soon to do a Masters.

‘I’m about to have my twelfth lesson,’ I say, and an impressed murmur goes round the room. There are only three topics of conversation in the staffroom: how many lessons we have to teach that day, how annoying our students are, and how much we hate Dagmar.

‘I just had an AMS group,’ counters Mike.

Everyone sighs in sympathy. AMS is the Austrian employment office. A few years ago, Berlitz won a state contract to provide English lessons to every unemployed person who applied for them. There are few things more depressing than teaching an AMS group.

The last student of the day is new. She’s already in the room when I come in, standing looking out of the dirty window. To my relief I see that her English has been classified as Level Five – that is ‘A high level of competence’. The higher the student’s level, the less effort I have to make.

‘Hi, my name is Julia,’ I say, offering my hand.

The thin woman puts out her own hand, which is surprisingly warm. Within a quarter of an hour, I’ve learned that she’s called Vera, is originally from Graz, that she works as a PR consultant for the Austrian People’s Party, and is a single mother with an 8-year-old daughter. Unfortunately, she then starts asking me questions.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Sweden,’ I answer without thinking.

A crease immediately appears between Vera’s eyebrows, and I realise my mistake. Even though my English is both accent and error free, no one wants to hear that I’m not from an English-speaking country. Even Dagmar discreetly asked me not to mention it to the students. Rebecca once told me about the time she was moonlighting as a waitress at a barbecue restaurant in Cairns. Even though she always remembered everyone’s orders, she had to pretend to write them down in her notepad because she noticed that the customers got nervous if she didn’t. That’s kind of how I feel every time I have to lie about where I come from.

‘Swindon,’ I correct myself. ‘In England. Northern England.’

Vera is still looking at me. ‘Isn’t Swindon in the south of England? Near Bristol? I took a course there once.’

I feel my cheeks and neck grow hot.

‘This is another Swindon,’ I add quickly. ‘A smaller Swindon. We call it … mini-Swindon. So, Vera, tell me what you like to do at the weekend. What are your favourite pastimes?’

Vera continues to observe me with slight suspicion, and I think that I really ought to follow Rebecca’s advice and stop having so many lessons a day.

Unfortunately, Vera’s English is almost perfect. But towards the end of the lesson, she says ‘in the end of the month’ rather than ‘at the end of the month’. I finally have an opportunity to correct her and stop feeling like a useless stage prop.

On the way home I suddenly have an idea for a book. It’s so highly charged and creepy that I stop in my tracks, and the hairs on my arms stand on end. The story will be about an unsuccessful author who gets a job as a caretaker at an isolated hotel resort. He has to spend the whole winter there with his wife and young child. The child will be a boy. Or a girl. No, a boy. During the winter, the author begins to lose his mind due to the isolation and the evil spirits haunting the hotel. It all ends in a chaotic bloodbath. I can see it all laid out before me so clearly that it’s almost frightening. The blizzard whining round the building, the deserted corridors, the hotel rooms where nothing moves, and the author sitting at his typewriter. What a gripping, spooky book it’s going to be! I almost run home so I can start writing, and I’m astounded that no one’s thought of this story before.

2

In the evening I meet Leonore at a cocktail bar in the sixth district.

I hate Leonore. In my defence, Leonore can barely stand the sight of me either, but we’ve both realised the symbiotic advantages our friendship offers us. Because all my other friends are in relationships, and therefore turn into pumpkins on the stroke of midnight, she’s the only one I can go out with, and with me Leonore can pretend to be young and single again instead of old and married to Gerhard, or the Beige Man as I like to call him (not in front of her).

Leonore is from England and has a son of pre-school age who always wears an eyepatch for some reason. The Beige Man is the manager of Red Bull’s finance department which means that Leonore never has to work again and instead she’s able to devote all her time to producing, directing and marketing plays in which she takes the lead role. Last February she played Malcolm X as part of Black History Month, sponsored by the American Embassy. Leonore’s not black.

‘Does Mike still work at Berlitz?’ asks Leonore.

I nod and take a sip of my vodka tonic. Fuck you, Stephen King.

‘I don’t know if I should give him a part in my next play or not,’ says Leonore. ‘I’m planning on staging Closer by Patrick Marber. He could play Clive Owen’s role.’

I circle the see-through plastic stirrer between the ice cubes. I’m still bitter about Stephen King having written The Shining almost forty years ago, a small detail I only remembered as I put my hands to the keyboard to start typing.

‘I saw Mike today, and I’m pretty sure he’s sick of being an English teacher,’ I say. ‘He’d probably be really glad to get a part in Closer. There’s a limit to how many times you can have the same lesson on the difference between the present tense and the present progressive, believe me. If I have to explain one more time why the McDonald’s slogan “I’m lovin’ it” is totally unacceptable, I’m going to bang my head against a wall. God, I get so angry with McDonald’s every time I think of it. So yes, you should probably give Mike a part.’

If her forehead wasn’t full of Botox (there are eleven years between us, after all) Leonore would have creased it now to show how much I was boring her.

‘I don’t know if we have the right chemistry,’ Leonore says.

I’m not sure whether we’re still talking about Mike.

‘Yeah, you probably don’t have the right chemistry,’ I mutter, and take another gulp of my drink.

After the cocktail bar we go to Passage. The nightclub is already full of people, and we have to wait behind three dark-haired girls in tiny skirts and white high heels before we can hang our coats in the cloakroom.

‘Don’t you think all the girls here look like high-class prostitutes from the Balkans?’ I shout at Leonore over the music.

‘I hope you mean us too,’ Leonore shouts back.

Before I can reply she pulls me to the bar. We order our drinks and pretend to chat to each other while we look at the guys. I actually have no idea why we always end up at Passage. The DJ plays unbearable music, the drinks are watered down, the toilets are filthy, there’s nowhere to sit, and the guys are all from Germany and have girlfriends.

Within half an hour we’re each standing talking to a guy. Mine has grinning sweat patches under his arms and eyebrows that meet in the middle, but he’s not wholly unattractive.

‘Where are you from?’ he asks in German.

‘Sweden,’ I say in English. To be honest, I can speak German, albeit with my own interpretation of the grammar, but I decide to speak English to give me the advantage.

His eyes widen and he smiles at me.

‘Have you been to Sweden?’ I ask.

‘Nah,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘But after reading so many Swedish crime novels it almost feels like it. Sweden is Wallanderland.’

‘Wallanderland sounds like a theme park,’ I say. ‘One where everyone dies.’

I see Leonore trying to make eye contact with me. Probably because the guy she’s talking to is a head shorter than her and is wearing a necklace with a Mercedes symbol on it. Going to a nightclub in Austria often feels like being thrown back to a time when eighties jewellery wasn’t worn ironically and Ace of Base still ruled. I ignore Leonore and turn back to my guy.

‘A Swedish told me there’s not actually any crime in Ystad,’ he says.

‘That’s because Kurt Wallander’s solved all the crimes,’ I reply.

The guy laughs and suddenly I hope something will happen between us.

‘Where are you from?’ I ask.

‘Munich,’ he replies. I tick box one.

‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ I ask.

The guy looks surprised at first, then smiles boyishly.

‘Yeah,’ he says. After a few seconds he adds: ‘Sorry.’

I tick box two. In spite of this, I give him my phone number when he asks for it.

When I get home I watch eighties porn on RedTube and give myself an orgasm to help me sleep. But it doesn’t work. I lie on my side and stare at the dark wall. I decide that next weekend I will arrange my books in colour order.

3

My first group the next day is an AMS group. When I come into the room they’re already sitting there like three wax dolls. There’s a woman with a double chin and gold rings that cut into her fingers. A young girl with white-blonde hair and dark roots is sitting tearing her cuticles with her teeth. The guy with a moustache and a checked shirt has a spookily absent gaze, but at least he’s ready, pen in hand.

‘Hi!’ I say. ‘My name is Julia and I will be teaching you today.’

None of them responds.

Once I actually had a job I loved. Just after Matthias and I moved to Vienna I got a position as a journalist. The paper was called VIenna frOnT – the capitals were meant to show the paper’s disregard for norms and traditions. We had a tiny office in the fifteenth district and we were fuelled by Almdudler, Leberkäse sandwiches and irony. Aside from covering the domestic news, I also got to write columns about right-wing politicians’ fondness for tying jumpers round their shoulders, and analyses of the German-speaking world’s relationship to yoghurt drinks. VIenna frOnT was supposed to hold a mirror to the world and make it draw breath. We lasted five months before the paper went bust.

‘Hello, what is your name?’ I say to the woman with the sausage fingers.

‘Bettina,’ she replies.

‘My name is …’ I correct her gently.

‘My name is Bettina,’ she says.

Bettina’s cheap, pink, butterfly-print viscose top strains over the bulges of her belly and her eyes have that desperate look that says ‘don’t hate me’. Because this group is Level Two, getting any information out of them is painfully slow. Once, an AMS student started crying when I asked what her last job was, so since then I’ve stopped asking what AMS students used to do for work, which has unfortunately halved the number of subjects we can talk about. But after three long classes I know that Bettina gets out of bed at 4 a.m. so she can have some time to herself before her kids wake up; Steffi has a bichon frise called Toto (after the band, not The Wizard of Oz) and Hans likes gardening. We’ve also practised common questions and greetings. All the way through I’ve tried to smile and be enthusiastic (‘Learning a new language = NEW OPPORTUNITIES!’) to avoid dashing any hope that these lessons will actually have an impact on their job hunt.

During the break, I light up when I see Rebecca in the staffroom. She walks up to me with wide eyes.

‘I think one of my AMS students is drunk,’ she whispers and takes my arm.

‘I have an AMS student who gets up at four every morning just to get some peace,’ I whisper back. ‘Why not just stay asleep and be undisturbed that way?’

‘Four?!’ mouths Rebecca.

I nod.

‘But what can you even do at four in the morning?’ Rebecca says at normal volume.

‘Says she reads magazines and does sudoku,’ I reply, also at normal volume. Being with Rebecca always makes me happy. She’s my Good Witch of the North – in contrast to Leonore who would have got the part of the Wicked Witch of the West if I’d been Dorothy. Rebecca and I met during the Berlitz training course, and I decided she was going to be my friend as soon as I heard she was a violin maker. Someone who makes violins can only be a good, sensible person, like people who help lepers. Sadly, building violins hardly pays at all, which is why Rebecca also became an English teacher. But just think – I know someone who’s a violin maker! One day I also hope to have the following friends: a lesbian, a computer geek and someone from Brooklyn. And Elfriede, of course.

‘How many lessons do you have today?’ I ask.

‘Just three,’ she replies. ‘With the same group. And you?’

‘Ten.’

Rebecca’s eyes immediately narrow.

‘Stop taking on so many lessons!’ she says. ‘You should be spending your time writing books or freelance articles and interviewing people and going undercover and so on.’

‘But I’m undercover here,’ I say defensively. ‘I’m pretending to be an English teacher.’

And with that the bell rings and I have to return for another lesson with Bettina, Steffi and Hans.

With two bags of groceries in my hands I walk slowly up the stairs of the art nouveau-style building in the seventh district where I live. On the second floor I stop and look, as I always do, at the door that leads to the flat on the left. The one that faces onto the street, rather than the back yard like my fourth-floor flat. It normally smells faintly of smoke and coffee outside the door, and a few times I’ve glimpsed a shadow moving behind the frosted-glass windows. By the doorbell there’s a little plaque that says ‘E. Jelinek’ in ornate lettering. It took a couple of months before I realised who it could be. Then I asked the Serbian caretaker if it belonged to the celebrated novelist Elfriede Jelinek.