How to Fall in Love with a Man Who Lives in a Bush - Nichola Smalley

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She’ll come to my door to borrow a cup of vinegar.

      ‘I’m a writer too!’ I’ll exclaim and Elfriede will raise her eyebrows in surprise that a colleague – and possible future soulmate – is living in the house. Then her face will become serious again.

      ‘To observe is a male privilege,’ she’ll say.

      ‘Hmm,’ I’ll agree, nodding slowly.

      ‘My writing is a polemic against the tyranny of reality.’

      ‘But have you been to Prater? Sometimes it’s pretty good fun there, Elfie,’ I’ll say, getting a nickname in as quick as possible.

      ‘Follow my tears and the sea will soon take you in,’ Elfriede will say.

      ‘Now you’ve lost me, but do come in, Fifi,’ I’ll reply – an alternative nickname, in case she didn’t like the first one.

      Then, over many cups of tea, or maybe whisky, we’ll sit at my place and talk about how tough it is being an author.

      With a little sigh I shift my grip on the bags and carry on up the stairs. They smell of cleaning fluid and cold stone.

       4

      For the rest of the week I hope the German guy from Passage will ring. But of course he doesn’t. I pretend it doesn’t matter and fill my time with teaching, going to the gym, eating uninspired meals and watching The Simpsons and Grey’s Anatomy dubbed in German. Verdammt noch mal, Meredith, hör auf mich! I take the train to a suburb and adopt a castrated stray cat called Optimus. With Optimus by my side I continue to eat uninspired dinners and watch attractive young doctors in Seattle fighting to save lives while learning all of life’s great lessons.

      Sometimes I worry that the TV series I watch are more real to me than my own life. That the love life, family and work problems of Meredith from Grey’s Anatomy are more tangible than my own. Sometimes I even start thinking I am Meredith Grey and wonder why I’m sitting explaining the difference between ‘some’ and ‘any’ rather than standing in an operating theatre, repairing a ruptured mitral valve. Once I looked at Rebecca and got confused for a few seconds over why she wasn’t Cristina Yang. And I still catch myself feeling totally crushed over the deaths of George O’Malley, Lexie Grey and Derek Shepherd. There’s not an earthquake in Turkey or a collapsed factory in Bangladesh that can bring me to tears like the fact that Denny Duquette died without Izzie at his side. He died without Izzie. Died. Without. Izzie.

      One evening I was sitting at my computer about to order a set of Grey’s Anatomy scrubs. But then I realised what kind of person I was turning into. I slammed the laptop screen shut and quickly rang Leonore to see if she wanted to go out. Sometimes I still dream of ordering them. Especially the short-sleeved light-blue tunic with two front pockets and a secret pen-compartment.

      This evening, Rebecca is celebrating her birthday at O’Malley’s at Schottentor. When I get there the pub’s already full. The walls are dark green and covered with Guinness posters. I find Rebecca in the claustrophobic cellar and sit down beside her husband Jakob. Jakob is also a violin maker, and looks like Jesus. Even Jakob’s brother is a violin maker, and he too looks like he’s stepped out of the Bible.

      ‘I have to tell you something,’ Rebecca says, leaning across Jakob. ‘I saw Matthias on Kaiserstrasse.’

      At first I say nothing. Jesus-Jakob continues to stare straight ahead.

      ‘What was he doing?’ I say finally.

      ‘He was walking along the street,’ Rebecca says.

      ‘What?’ I say, my voice weak. ‘Just like that?’

      ‘I know,’ Rebecca says. ‘How dare he?!’

      We’re interrupted by one of Rebecca’s friends. I stay there beside Jesus-Jakob, thinking about Matthias.

      Matthias and I were together for four years. To begin with, everything was great between us, then it was bad. We argued about him smoking too much weed and never helping with the housework. After every fight Matthias would buy me a bag of liquorice as a peace offering because he knew how much I liked it. Like I was 6 years old.

      In a last-ditch attempt to save our relationship, we decided to move to his home-town, Vienna. Everything was great between us again. I learned to say Grüss Gott, rediscovered Sundays and practised not getting run over all the time by the trams. Matthias got accepted on a photography course and because the college wanted to foster its students’ understanding and respect for the fundamental creativity of photography, our new bathroom was transformed into a dark room. The window was covered over with black bin-liners and gaffer tape and my make-up jostled for space with bottles of chemicals. I bashed my head countless times on the enormous enlarger that stood between the shower and the toilet. But it didn’t matter. Matthias had finally found an aim in life. He spent our paltry monthly budget on books about Mapplethorpe, LaChapelle and Corbijn, and during the whole of his first year I was a willing model as he experimented with contrast and composition. He stopped smoking weed every day and his eyes grew clear again. Everything was OK, even when Vienna frOnT went bust, because Matthias’s happiness came before everything else. That was back when I still believed that true love meant completely forgetting myself and only letting my moon orbit his planet. That was when I still believed I’d be the one who would save Matthias, get him to reach his full potential and become the well-rounded being none of my friends seemed to be able to see.

      The first time I realised something was wrong was during his second year on the photography course. I saw that one of Matthias’s records had been left out, though it hadn’t been there when we left the flat together that morning. Without giving it any more thought, I blew off the flakes of tobacco on the sleeve and put it back among the other records. Then I started noticing that the lock had only been turned once, rather than being double-locked like I always left it. And suddenly we were back to arguing almost every day and the kitchen shelf was overflowing with packs of liquorice.

      Then came the call. I was in bed with tonsillitis and had just been contemplating taking a nap. The telephone rang and a woman with a soft voice said they’d found one of Matthias’s portfolios and wondered whether he’d like to come in and pick it up given that he was no longer a student there.

      She told me that Matthias had stopped attending classes back in October, but that it wasn’t until a month ago that they’d officially taken him off their student list. It was March now. For over six months he’d been pretending to go to college every day. For over six months he’d been telling me little stories and anecdotes about things that had happened at school that day. For over six months he’d been telling me how much he was enjoying the course and that he was looking forward to becoming a professional photographer. I almost threw up with the telephone receiver in my hand.

      I immediately started searching the flat for clues. Hidden in a bag behind the panel that was loosely attached to Matthias’s desktop computer I found hundreds of joint roaches. The plastic bag was carefully fastened with several elastic bands. Why he hadn’t simply thrown the roaches out was a mystery. And it struck me that his textbooks were still in exactly the same order they’d been in at the start of the academic year, and that the developing trays in the bathroom had acquired a thick layer of dust.

      When Matthias came home at quarter past six – after ‘a whole day at college’! – I confronted him. He didn’t deny a thing.

      ‘But why?’ I asked.

      ‘I knew how angry you’d be,’ he said, and in a single stroke he made it my fault.

      For the last six months he’d been going to a café in the sixteenth district where the owner let customers smoke weed all day as long as they bought something to drink. If the café was closed, he’d come back to the flat as soon as I’d gone to work and then leave before I came home. It turned out Matthias was a cleaning whizz after

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