The PIA

After just three hours of what masquerades as sleep, I’m jolted violently conscious. The muezzin wails from the facing mosque, his plaintive (and, frankly, half-hearted) call to prayer amplified obscenely through a sextet of speakers on the minaret.

 

At interview I had been promised three star quarters, stridently promised in fact. “No more than three star but three star. Three star.”

 

Swollen eyes survey a grubby space that occupies terrain far outside the stellar ratings system. The bed is adequate but that’s as far as I would go. Once-white walls are pockmarked with random holes, the couch is squalid, the insolently vibrating AC unit the oldest I’ve ever seen.

 

I would have experienced a far more powerful shower had I used an Evian bottle. It would doubtless have been warmer, too.

 

As I cross the street, skirting a skip crammed with reeking garbage – “Riyadh: the clean city” - I must concede the apartment’s proximity to work is unimprovable. I am less than midway through the morning’s eighth cigarette before the rear entrance to the PIA heaves into view.

 

Saudis who covet cushy governmental posts spend a year at the PIA’s Americanised English Language Center going through the motions of an intensive English course. I am to deliver one of these courses. More accurately, and as will soon become abundantly clear, I am to go through the motions of delivering one of these courses. I’ll be working at the rotten core of a stacked system.

 

It’s just 6.53 and my day is not kicking off as I would have designed. My rendezvous with Wolfsheim, the purported co-ordinator and bona fide shitsack, takes place in the smoking area. He allots himself a single Saudi riyal each day in the cafeteria. Fifteen pence. He brandishes the minuscule Styrofoam cup of Nescafe yielded by pocket change. I have a pair of mochaccino decanted into a large aluminium beaker.

 

“Heyup, mate.”

 

The faux-cheer issuing from Wolfsheim’s pursed lips is instantly replaced with venom…

 

“He’s a fucking cunt. I waited in for him last night. Never turned up.”

 

“Who’s a cunt?”

 

“Fucking Aidan.”

 

Wolfsheim spits out the name of our employer like a spoiled oyster.

 

I am sidetracked, though, by the quite singular cut of Wolfsheim’s jib. The atrocity of his mottled dome is magnified by hair cut too short for someone with an egregious skin complaint (but not quite short enough to mask terminal baldness). He stands no more than five feet three although I allow he claims five-five. His trousers skim his shoddily-shod ankles while his crumpled jacket is far too long. The supposedly handmade shirt looks like a dishrag, the shiny £2 tie the logical conclusion to a shocking ensemble.

 

Wolfsheim. He’s a man I immediately pity and soon grow to view with naked contempt.

 

The aphorism “You have two ears and one mouth for a reason” could have been conceived with Wolfsheim in mind. The man simply wants to reel off his limited repertoire of unamusing and unoriginal vignettes to anyone who will listen. He exhibits no interest in anything you throw into the mix.

 

Three days in and his material is exhausted. Per most liars and fantasists – and Wolfsheim is assuredly both – inconsistencies increase exponentially with the time you spend in his company. One day he’ll boast, apropos of nothing whatsoever, that he cashed out of his Middle Eastern aircraft-fitting career with two hundred and fifty thousand sterling…

 

“Cash, mind. All cash...”

 

The following week he’ll deposit on his sparsely populated Facebook page a grainy decade-old photograph of a court jester labouring under a wooden yoke doubled over with sundry foodstuffs.

His caption? “We’ve all gotta start somewhere in Thailand…”

 

When I later see this image it is all I can do not to comment suggesting this to be an unusual choice of hustle for someone with a string of property – he claims to own eight Thai apartments operated alongside a money lending venture – not to mention that quarter of a million in red fifties.

 

Anyway, after enduring whatever tedious diatribe Wolfsheim was spinning out, I head indoors and up to my office. The go-to man, GHB, is sequestered directly opposite so I knock and enter. An Armenian American with half a portion of chips on his shoulder, GHB earned his nickname at the end of a particularly heavy bong session. Chongi suggested that perhaps, along with several other direct hire staff, GHB spent perverse and debauched weekends being sucked off in glory holes.

 

“You won’t be teaching today. Do what you like. Start next week…”

 

It seems clear that these brief statements constitute in entirety my welcome to the PIA from Glory Hole Boy. I retreat chuckling to my new HQ.

 

The spacious lair, double the size of that occupied by most other outsourced teachers, is ideal in all respects save its other occupant, a Kashmiri moron from Birmingham. At twenty-three The Animal knew it all (but knew fuck all). A supposed English Lit graduate, he proudly joked of never having read a book.

 

“You’ve got to understand, mate…Aidan’s a cunt. This job’s fucking shit, mate. Shit. You’ll never save fifteen grand a year here, mate. No chance.”

 

I counter that for someone whose previous employment constituted twelve-hour days at a call centre for little more than minimum wage, for someone with neither legitimate qualifications nor a jot of teaching experience, our gig was perhaps the best he could have hoped for. More than he could have hoped for.

 

“But I wanted to buy a 6 Series BM this summer, mate.”

 

I tune out the third complete bell-end I’ve met today but, before I have time to fire up my MacBook Air, the landline sings out and is answered by The Animal.

 

He smashes down the handset then motions his head towards GHB’s office.

 

“He wants to see you, mate.”

 

Mate. One of the least sincere and most overused words in The Animal’s anorexic lexicon.

 

“You are teaching after all.” GHB wheedles. “Here’s the class list and book. Room 101.”

 

Having experienced a trio of fools I console myself thinking that a room without expats might just be the most positive environment around here. I am briskly disabused of that notion.

 

I’ve taught in Saudi previously but at a small language school with a contracted maximum of six students. The PIA is a bottom-line only outfit. This, put plainly, is a numbers game. Being confronted by thirty-odd boisterous youths in identikit white thobes and chequered shemaghs is a perfectly singular experience. These often sullen and juvenile young adults seep entitlement. Raised sucking heavily on the state tit, they need a dedicated Filipino in the cafeteria tasked solely with pouring tea, upending milk onto cereal, prodding a button on the coffee machine... Cosseted from birth and waited on by females from that point forth, simple things elude them.

 

I’ve been tasked with teaching merely listening. The schedule is counterintuitively cleaved along rigid lines with each language skill mooted to be taught in isolation.

 

Calling the register is a Sisyphean effort. Eight Mohammeds, four implausibly sharing the same middle name, jostle with seven Sultans for primacy. Some students appear unable to provide a vocal response. The third time I holler Abdulkarim, a barely animated behemoth groans as if his overworked intestines are leaking from his fifty-inch waist.

 

During this first quarter of the lesson, latecomers trickle in like they’ve been condemned to a decade’s hard toil rather than being paid to learn English.

 

Several aggressive tugs on an ancient, brittle mouse leads to a request for my username and password. None have been provided. I disturb a non-native speaking teacher, a colossal Czech unit, and take his details as a stopgap. Return and fire up the Smart Board.

 

Not one student has a textbook. I survey at best four notepads and not many more pencils. Opt against flashing up the book’s PDF file as it seems work, today, is off-menu.

 

The computer is running Windows XP. I glance at this then at the $5000 Smart Board. I am perplexed.

 

Labouring with these primitive tools, I freeform a warm-up lesson. This consists almost entirely of me speaking with occasional visual aids. I am regularly hamstrung by out-dated browsers and a risible Internet connection. The accepted ratio of student to teacher talk-time is inverted. I am soon to discover that any idea of properly presenting a lesson is also violently tossed from the same window. When you approach students head on and, almost to the man, they lack the ability to think critically, you will simply lock horns by trying forcefully to elicit information. Better to perform as they are accustomed to their teachers performing. Smile winningly then a blithe, “Page 3, exercise A.”

 

Fifty warped minutes later and I’m back in my office. Done for the day after a single class. I’m expected to remain on the premises until 2.30 but that’s hardly onerous. The campus is impressive and the facilities more than acceptable. The office is fine. Or was…

 

“Check out my mate’s limo company, mate. Stretch Hummer. Stretch Range Rover. Stretch…”

“Nice.”

“Do you smoke, mate? I like Bensons but they’re 8 riyals here so I smoke Gold Eagle.”

 

He is rejecting his favourite fags in favour of factory floor shavings because The B&H top out at £1.50 a pack.

 

We descend to the courtyard where staff and learners congregate for nicotine.

 

The Viper’s Nest.

 

The area is a hotbed of inane work-related gossip, of outright rumour, of baseless chatter undercut with malice. There could be no place less relaxing to spend a break than amongst its scumbag denizens.

 

“Hey, man, I’m Mike. What’re you teaching?”

 

This is what I think the middle-aged Canadian staring me down asks. His delivery is shotgun, his voice a mash-up of Stephen Hawking and Darth Vader. Spittle drips from his plain brown fangs like venom from a Komodo Dragon’s claws.

 

Dirty Mike. The man looks not merely unhygienic but contaminated. Although the tarred gums and those brown fangs seize your attention first, that attention is diverted in short order to the clothes, clothes which redefine unkempt. The shirt could not have been creased more prodigiously if you spent the night sleeping in it. The threadbare nylon trousers are skimming filthy deck shoes. The terylene tie sports an unfocused picture of the Mona Lisa. His haircut is beneath contempt.

 

“Listening.”

 

Before DM has the opportunity to continue, a bearded pensioner intercedes - “What was that?”

 

This is to be Andrew’s leitmotif.

 

Fuck all to do with you is what that is, cocksucker is what runs through my head when this tiresome prick strong-arms his way into the conversation. Any conversation will suffice. Like Wolfsheim – like many of these fantasists, these monologue artists – all that Andrew requires, in the final analysis, is a facsimile of a living audience, several sets of ears.

 

“When I was in Jeddah five years ago…”

 

I turn on my heel and head indoors.

 

I must quit smoking.