Disaster Day

The disaster day feels like it was a long time ago now. Maybe I’ve grown up a little bit since that momentous Friday. It was one of those days that was so exquisitely awful that it makes you think ‘at least all the other days of my life can only be better than this’. I’m not making a word of this up, how could I? It’s too ludicrous to be fiction.

It started with a tour of a school. I’m still not sure how they managed to drag me into doing it. A month ago, Zuzana and I did a presentation in one of the more striving (see also ‘pushy’) schools in the city. The English teacher was very grateful to us for doing the presentation, and thanked us by taking us to see the headmaster. Now if I were to direct a gangster movie set in the heart of Siberia, and I cast this headmaster as the head honcho of a mafia/cartel/super scary crimey gang, I would definitely be criticised for overdoing the character. People would go ‘did you see that new gangster movie? I mean sure Marlon Brando was a bit menacing in The Godfather, but the main character in this new film was just ridiculous’. The headmaster was a hulking man with close-shaved hair and a bowling ball of a head, his hands were bedecked with glittering rings, and his massive figure was squeezed into a pristine pinstripe suit. He was reclining in a huge black leather swivel chair at the head of an oval table with no people round it. There was a Russian flag standing on the oval table, and a picture of Vladimir Vladimirovich on the wall. The room was sparkling clean, air conditioned(?), and you had to go through his personal secretary’s office to get to it. Anyway, I can’t for the life of me remember quite what he said. I think he probably said very little. But somehow he got me to agree to come and be given an English language tour of the school as part of some pupil’s end of year exams. Of course, this didn’t fall under the remit of my work with Interra, so I did it in my free time. I had to be at the school for 8:40, and no buses go there from my house, so I got up early and walked there in -23˚C. It was bracing. My breath steamed up in front of my face and then froze onto my eyelashes.

When I arrived, I had to ask the lady at the reception desk to let me through the turnstile. ‘Passport.’ She barked. I handed over my passport and she stared at it with disgust. ‘It’s not in Russian.’ She snapped.

‘Oh it’s not?’ I asked. ‘Ah sorry about that, I’d never noticed! That must be because it’s a British passport. Silly Brits.’

She fixed me with a look of pure hatred, then walked off into the school with my passport, leaving me wondering exactly what I was meant to do next.

Five minutes later, she returned with photocopies of my passport. I gave her a venomous grin and reached out my hand to take my passport back, but she pulled her hand away. She shouted to another woman, who was inexplicably sitting at a desk opposite us doing seemingly nothing. ‘You speak English right?’ she asked.

‘Yep.’ I said. ‘Kinda comes with being English, it’s like a package deal.’

‘Not you!’ she hissed. ‘I was talking to my colleague.’

Her colleague got up robotically and walked across the corridor to retrieve my passport. She took it back to her desk where she had a clear view of the floods of students who were pouring through the turnstiles without a single one being asked for their passport. Then she began painstakingly transcribing it into Russian.

Ten minutes later, and once I’d got several worried texts from the teacher who was running the event, my passport was returned to me. I went to go through the turnstile. ‘Not so fast!’ said the (first) receptionist. ‘We still don’t know why you’re going into the school!’

‘I already said, I’m going to be given an English tour of the school.’

‘Which teacher’s organising it?’ snarled the receptionist.

‘Basilio.’

‘I don’t know any Basilio in this school.’ She snapped, triumphantly.

‘Well that’s not my fault!’

I called Basilio, who said that I simply had to tell them I was here to be given an English tour of the school. I assured him that I’d already said this.

After five more minutes of arguing and another phone call, Basilio himself came down to the desk to release me with his authority.

‘Who are you then?’ Asked the receptionist.

‘What?’ Basilio said. ‘I’m the head of languages here. How do you not know me?’

‘Well I haven’t received notice that this guy was coming.’ She said sternly. ‘Or a scan of his passport in advance of his visit.’ She added.

In total, I must have been waiting at that desk for the best part of half an hour, but it felt like an eternity.

The tour itself was fine. Probably about the only thing in that day that was. On my way out of the school, a young man strolled past me in the opposite direction dressed in khaki and with a humongous rifle hanging over his shoulder. Neither of the receptionists batted an eyelid, never mind demanded a passport.

Next up was a presentation in another school. On the opposite bank of the river Yenisei. It takes about thirty minutes to get to the other bank, and I had thirty-five minutes before I told the school I’d be there and ready to give my presentation. I ordered a cab as soon as I was back outside in the face-numbing cold. The taxi company was unable to get a cab to me within the next ten minutes, because all drivers were busy. This had never happened to me before. When the driver did get to me, we got stuck in a traffic jam.

The bridge across the Yenisei. The river steams in the cold for some reason

Running from the cab to the second school of the day, my hat must have fallen out of my pocket. I was only five minutes late, but there was a room crammed full of expectant teenagers waiting for me there. I did my best to gasp out a presentation of sorts. The students had no questions for me, except for the standard ‘what do you want to do when you’re older’ (to which I obviously responded with sewage treatment worker), and ‘why Russian?’ (to which I responded with a hasty ‘I just really want a fur hat’).

I raced out into the freezing cold again, and ordered a cab to take me BACK to the left bank, where another school was expecting me for a presentation. When I reached into my pockets, I realised that I was without hat. I tried putting my gloves on my head, but turns out that’s not a thing. So I just pulled my hood up and faced away from the wind in the shelter of a low fence.

This time, the cab company outdid itself. ‘The driver will finish his current journey before heading your way’, the app told me. The previous presentation had overrun, so I had an unlikely twenty-five minutes to make it back to the left bank. Ten minutes later, I pulled my phone back out of my pocket and used a bit of data to track the path of the driver, who should by now have been ‘heading my way’. He was not ‘heading my way’, he was very much heading away from me. Then he pulled into a small residential car park and his car stopped. In the interests of not lying, the words going through my head right then were something along the lines of, but not necessarily exactly ‘What the DUCK?!’ I zoomed in on the map and saw that he was parked opposite a small grocery shop.

Another ten minutes later, and just five minutes before I was meant to be on the other bank of the river, my phone finally pinged to tell me that my driver had arrived. He was in the wrong place, but I ran around the block to find him. Now the mystery of the shop stop was explained. He was pouring a new bottle of de-icer on his windscreen. ‘Oh hi.’ He said ‘don’t mind do you? It’s just the wipers have broken.’ After each splash of de-icer, he was grabbing the left windscreen wiper and dragging it across the windscreen in an attempt to clear the liquid out of a huge crack in the glass. His car was actually a Honda Jazz, but it was in a much worse condition than dad’s (I mean, naturally).

When we finally hit the road, we got caught in another traffic jam. When we were painfully close to the school, the driver’s optimistic attempt to take a shortcut ended in us heading down a one-way road in the opposite direction from the school, and being funnelled onto a dual carriageway. I arrived at the school twenty-five minutes late, and, in my hurry to get there from the cab, both of my gloves fell out of my coat pockets. Yeah. Sounds like a crappy trope-laden kids’ story, doesn’t it?

So, without gloves or hat, I panted up three flights of stairs to get to a room full of angry students who’d been waiting quite a long time for me, and an even angrier teacher.

I did find one of my gloves by re-tracing my steps back to the road after the presentation though, which felt like a small victory.

On the bus to work, all I was thinking was ‘please, Theo. Please don’t lose anything else today.’

The whole afternoon at work was spent doing small admin things.

I decided I deserved a treat after that monstrous day, so I bought myself a chicken shawarma. Then my phone ran out of charge, so I had to wait half an hour in the cold for a bus, because I didn’t know which was the best stop to go to.

When I got home and put my phone on charge, I had a text from Kiril asking if I wanted to go to the gym that evening. In spite of a head pounding from the cold, I decided that this was an excellent idea. What better way to snatch my day back from the jaws of crappiness than run on a treadmill with a supportive friend?

Bad idea. Seriously stupid idea.

First I lost my gym locker key. It didn’t take long to find it though, it had fallen out of my pocket on a sit-up bench.

Then I lost my house keys. I raked the gym for it, asked every member of staff if they’d seen it, including the cloakroom people and the cleaners, looked under the lockers, and even rummaged through the contents of two bins. Nada.

I rang the intercom to get back into the flat, and collapsed into the kitchen, probably looking like a character from Lost after a couple of months on the desert island. I was almost in tears. At this point, I’d have been utterly lost without my flatmate Max. ‘Ok, take your coat and glove off, sit down and have some food and drink, and then we’ll look for the key.’ He said. So we did, and you know what? It was in my hoodie pocket.