My phone alarm goes off. I get up, turn on the light and put on my trousers, singlet, socks, jumper and jacket. I’ve taken to wearing my puffer jacket inside because it’s so cold. I live with my parents in their comfortable, middle class house. It’s not Warsaw circa 1945, but I do get cold easily.
I open the curtains and the window. It’s dark outside. Overnight the moisture from my breath has condensed in clear drops on the glass. I cross the landing and turn on the light for the stairs, walk down the stairs, open the door into the TV room and walk through to the kitchen. I pop open the spring lid to the kettle and look inside to see how much water there is. Swirling it, I can see little plates of encrusted lime float off the bottom. I hold it under the tap and fill it half full, then switch it on.
In the TV room I start the projector and push the button for the screen to start descending. This is one of the new things in the new house, a treat from dad to himself. My parents moved last year, while I was overseas, from their place over on the other side of town, the big old house on Mount View Road that I grew up in.
Spain are playing Morocco in their last group game. They have looked pretty decent in the first two games of this World Cup, in a tournament in which all the big teams- Germany, France, Brazil, Argentina- have faltered. I use the remote to fast forward the recording until the players are leaving the tunnel, occasionally rewinding when the broadcast shows an attractive girl in the crowd.
I got back six months ago. I didn’t like the new house at first because it doesn’t have all the trees and the garden that the old one had and there isn’t much privacy from the neighbours, but I understand why we moved. The upkeep for such a big property was soon going to be too much. I was sad about it at first but now I’m used to it, and it’s comfortable.
I was unemployed for the first month. I had a dream of organising some sort of online income that I could use to fund my future travels, and occasionally relief teach when the work came up (also called ‘substitute teaching’). It’s transpired that I’ve gotten quite a lot of work and am scandalously well paid. Relief teaching, for the most part, is a brilliant job if both sides are willing to play their roles, roles that have been set since time immemorial.
The students know that because they have a reliever they don’t really have to do anything but, up to certain limits, they should pretend to do something. The teacher pantomimes, so as not to undermine the edifice maintained by all teachers, that the work is, in some undefined cosmic sense, important, rather than something hastily bolted together by the teacher who woke up that morning with a terrible head cold and must think of something for the reliever to give the class. The traditional roles and assumptions of the myth- that school is primarily about learning, that the learning is inherently important, that the task at hand has been chosen for some larger goal- must be maintained.
There is a structural reason for this. The absent teacher who sets the work knows that the reliever is unlikely to either know the subject or know the class well enough to actually teach it and, given that limitation, the more realistic hope from them and senior management is to survive the hour without anything catastrophic happening. Like property damage or bodily harm.
So as a relief teacher I try and meet the students at their level of cynicism which, for the most part, rises in parallel with the age of the students. The juniors, bless them, fresh and shiny from junior schools, mostly still believe in the infallibility of teachers. Most trust that there must be some larger purpose to what they are being asked to do. It is a rare disengaged student, often of above average intelligence, who is already questioning this in their first years of school.
Rising through the year groups the transparency increases. I can admit that I am babysitting, that I want to get paid, that their regular teacher might not be too concerned about what they do. But, come on, be an adult and help me out here. Appealing to a teenager’s most desperate urge, the desire to be a part of the fraternity of grown-ups, is almost always effective. Well, maybe second most desperate urge.
This can go on more or less indefinitely unless one or the other part steps beyond their prescribed duties: if the teacher expects too much genuine diligence from the students, or the students make the mistake of thinking that because they may not actually be doing any work then they also don’t need to even pretend to do any work.
In nine out of ten cases the teacher and students then play out a choreographed charade. The teacher, hopefully jovially and gently, reprimands the students. The students, ideally with humour and faux guilt, then affect contrition.
The relief teacher’s nightmare is the edge case: the student who doesn’t want to play the game. Perhaps this student simply can’t move past the insincerity of the dance. Perhaps they know it would be easier to play along, but in this particular lesson are just bored. Perhaps they are trying to prove something to someone else in the class, and antagonising the teacher is how they will do that.
But that barely ever happens and the liberty from being released from the responsibility of caring is great, up to a point. It’s excellently remunerated, if getting a little stale. And in truth I don’t want to do it for too much longer. I actually like real teaching.
So why am I here, in Whanganui? The first answer to that question is to save money. The second, of course, is that mum is dying.
Three years ago the cancer that we thought had been taken care of when I was thirteen returned. That was when I was in Bhutan. It’s why mum and dad moved houses. The prognosis at that point was two or three years. That was almost three years ago and mum is still living. In fact she still works, socialises and even goes hiking. So we live on in this purgatory, lucky as we are to have it.
I have another cup of coffee from the plunger. It’s gone cold so I put it in the microwave for twelve seconds. Dad told me that a full rotation takes twelve seconds, so if you put it in for twelve seconds, when you open the door again the handle has returned to its original position. I do this every morning.
In this routine existence, the World Cup has assumed a gigantic role in my life. I prepared assiduously in the weeks preceding the tournament. I read a nine hundred page global history of football. I read Knausgaard’s book of correspondence from the last world cup. I digested podcasts. I set up a fantasy league with my friends scattered around the world, tweaking my team each day, refining it further and further.
I’m back in the town that I grew up in. Many of my group of friends from high school has dispersed somewhat. Those that are still living in Whanganui have bought houses, gotten married and are preparing for offspring. Others are around the world climbing mountains, exploring new artistic frontiers or otherwise engaged in general international debauchery.
In March Jake and Brooke and their heavenly little daughter Saioa moved from Wellington to a house just up the road. Most weekends after football I will go up there and play Xbox. Maybe we'll walk the dogs on a Sunday. Or I will go to Fraser’s, who lives five minutes’ walk away, over by Virginia Lake. That’s about it.
The game finishes and I bring my cup through to the kitchen and put it in the dishwasher. Dad backs the car out while I set the house alarm, lock the door and put on my shoes. He’s using his bike today so he’ll give me a ride. He puts on a Joan Baez album for the short drive down the road to where it meets Parsons St, then down the hill and around Springvale Park.
I’m heading off again in October. I’m flying to the States and heading down the Pacific Coast to Mexico where I’ll see how long my savings last before pitching up in Brazil. I’m dreaming of the sunshine at the end of this long Whanganui winter. I’m pencilling in two years. Whether it’s longer or shorter depends on mum and the cancer in her lungs.
Outside school, some distance from the main entrance, dad pulls over to let me out. I have four periods today. Geography, I think. Probably putting a video on. It’s sunny so I tell him I can walk home. Retired, he has the rest of the day free, after giving his son a ride to school.
