“Oof.”
She’d slumped down on the couch, expecting herself to sink into it, but it turned out it was a lot harder than it looked, and now her backside was telling her to be a little more careful next time. She winced, leaned forward and placed her drink on the table with what she thought was ladylike delicacy, but which was actually cack-handed drunkenness.
“Hey Kris,” yelled a familiar voice over the din of the club. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” she yelled back, aware that her head was lolling like a ragdoll as she turned to look at the person who had addressed her. Through her blurry wine goggles, she could just about make out the figure of her best friend Maxine, who had a habit of looking out for her any time she got drunk.
Maxine and Kristina had come out on a Saturday night for once. Kristina didn’t normally like to do this, but she felt like she didn’t see Maxine anywhere near often enough these days, especially with the fact that her evenings were normally taken up with extra work. Maxine never turned down an opportunity to go out to their favourite club — well, it was more Maxine’s favourite club than Kristina’s — and, more often than not, watch Kristina get steadily drunk over the course of the evening.
She wasn’t drunk right now, of course; she was in full and perfect possession of all her faculties, and any lolling around was purely the result of tiredness, not the “few” glasses of wine she’d consumed this evening. “Few” was the descriptor she used when she’d lost count, which was usually the case after two small glasses of pungent house wine. This evening, she’d actually had five; Maxine knew that, but Kristina had, as usual, lost count, and as usual it was apparently up to Maxine to ensure she didn’t get up to any mischief. Keeping an eye out for Kristina over the years had helped Maxine develop an astonishing tolerance for alcohol, so much so that she was pretty confident she could drink even the most hardened football hooligan under the table at a moment’s notice.
“I’m fine,” Kristina reiterated, even though Maxine hadn’t said anything else to her. “Totally fine. Absoposolutely fine. Hey, that guy’s pretty fit.”
Maxine chuckled.
“He is, isn’t he? But I’m not sure you’re in any state to strike up a conversation with him right now.”
“I told you, I’m fine,” Kristina slurred, picking up her glass and taking a big swig, then wincing. “I just… bollocks, no I’m not. Excuse me.”
She snatched up her handbag , stood up hastily and trotted as quickly as her heels could take her towards the toilets. Maxine sighed.
“Classy chick,” she muttered to herself.
* * * *
Not long after, a slightly sober Kristina was walking arm-in-arm with Maxine down the road. Kristina throwing up usually meant two things: firstly, that she would almost immediately become a lot more alert; and secondly, that she would probably want to walk home. Maxine knew that Kristina didn’t need the support to walk any more, but held on to her arm as a sign of affection towards her friend regardless.
“I’ve had a shit week,” said Kristina. “Life sucks.”
“I don’t understand why you’re still in that job, Kris,” replied her friend. “You obviously hate it. Why do you still do it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, wafting her free arm into the night air in an exaggeratedly philosophical gesture. “Denial, perhaps. I don’t want to feel like a failure.”
“And why should you feel like a failure?” Maxine asked. “Incidents like that little scrote you told me about earlier aside, you’re doing all right, aren’t you? You told me most of the other kids seem to quite like you.”
“They do seem to,” she said. “But I don’t know if that’s because I’m a pushover, or because they actually like me. I shouldn’t care so much, I know; I’m not there to make friends with them, but still. But…” She trailed off.
“But?”
“Well, the school got inspected last week,” she said, hesitantly.
“Oh, right,” said Maxine. “I remember you telling me. Everyone was stressing out about it.”
“Yeah,” replied Kristina. “Well, it turns out that I’m an ‘unsatisfactory’ teacher.”
“What? Says who?”
“Says some bitch who came in, observed twenty minutes of one of my Year 9 lessons in the afternoon, then wandered out before we got to the interesting bit. Oh, I really wish I’d let her have it when she gave me her ‘feedback’.”
“Oh, fuck her, Kris. You just said yourself, that doesn’t sound like a fair assessment at all.”
“That’s not all, though,” Kristina continued. “Now the school’s in Special Measures because it sucks so bad, and I feel like it’s my fault.”
Maxine stopped walking and turned to face Kristina.
“Look, Kris,” she said seriously. “If something like that’s happened it’s pretty clear that there’s something very wrong with the whole place, not you. I really doubt they’d put the whole place in Special Whatevers because of one person. Not that I believe you did anything wrong anyway.”
“I… I guess,” she said. “But every time I hear the Head talk about the results of the inspection and the feedback and I hear the word ‘unsatisfactory’, I just feel like they’re talking about me. It sucks.”
“Oh, Kris,” said Maxine. “C’mere.” She wrapped her arms around her friend and gave her a hug. Kristina sniffed and reciprocated the gesture. The two girls pulled apart at a “weeeeyyyy!” of encouragement from a gang of drunken men a little further down the road, and continued on their way.
“Point is,” Maxine continued, “you can’t blame yourself. You can use this as an opportunity to improve, or you can use it as a kick up the arse to go find something else to do if you’re really having such a miserable time.”
Kristina said nothing. She knew that Maxine was right, but didn’t want to admit it. The pair continued walking in silence for several minutes — Maxine knew when not to push her luck.
“Thanks, Max,” said Kristina after a while. “I needed tonight. I know we didn’t do much, but, still. Thanks.”
“Any time,” she replied with a smile.
* * * *
Kristina wasn’t quite sure what time it was when she woke up on her couch, but the TV channel she’d apparently left playing for background noise while she drifted off to sleep was displaying nothing more than a digital “this channel will be back later” page on the screen, so she figured it probably was the early hours of the morning. Someone — she figured either Maxine or herself — had put a heavy woollen throw over her, and it was lovely and warm, but she still felt a little uncomfortable. Peeling back her makeshift blanket, she realised that she had apparently fallen asleep in her clothes — though at least she had taken her shoes off.
“Ugh,” she groaned to herself. “Real classy, Kristina.” She swung her legs down off the couch, pushed the throw to one side and reached around behind herself to unzip her dress. She wriggled out of it and tossed it on the floor, then unfastened her bra with an exaggerated gasp of satisfaction — she was convinced that she wasn’t wearing quite the right size, but she did like that one — and similarly flung that aside, too. Then she wrapped herself in the cocoon of her makeshift blanket once again, enjoying the feeling of the warmth enveloping her bare skin.
She closed her eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come again. She felt completely sober now, but too tired to get up and actually go to bed properly, so she decided to stay on the couch for now. There was no-one here to judge her, after all. Fumbling around beside herself for the remote, she flicked the TV onto a channel that didn’t close down in the early hours of the morning, then closed her eyes again, only half-listening to the dull mumbling of what passed for late-night TV on whatever channel she’d randomly hopped to. She was dimly aware of it being some comedy show that she didn’t find at all funny, but the number of times it had been repeated meant that it was comfortably familiar, and a good way to break the silence in her flat.
She didn’t like silence, or the dark, but was ashamed of these feelings; they felt childish and silly, and she had never admitted them to anyone, not even Maxine. But she had a good enough reason for them; given no other stimuli, her mind would inevitably be drawn to the things that were making her more anxious than anything else — her job; her lack of love life; the fact that she didn’t really know how to make friends with her colleagues; and, of course, incidents like the one that had unfolded on Friday.
Oh, why did she have to think of that? Now it was creeping into her head again, even with the sound of the TV distracting her from her unwanted thoughts. Her eyes still shut, she fumbled around for where she thought she’d left the remote, and found the volume button by touch to turn up the sound and drown out the noise in her head.
It worked. For now. But it was only a temporary measure; sleep would soon take her, and that’s when her subconscious would get to work. She was tired of the nightmares, but knew there wasn’t anything she could really do about them; sometimes she wished that life was more like a fantasy story she’d read as a teenager, in which a young girl banished nightmares from people’s souls and minds with the help of a magic blade that allowed her to enter another dimension — the land of dreams.
Before long, her mind wandering through idle flights of fancy caused her to drop off to sleep without noticing.
“Based on what I saw there, that was an unsatisfactory lesson,” said the sour-faced woman.
“Fuck you!” bellowed Edward, bursting through the door.
“Your behaviour management needs some significant work,” continued the woman, apparently oblivious to the profanity-spewing teenager in the doorway. “And the pace of your lesson is all wrong. You didn’t have a starter, and you spent too long on teaching time.”
“Fuck you!” cried Edward again, throwing a table aside.
“Unsatisfactory,” said the woman. “Special measures.”
“Fuck you!”
Kristina covered her eyes, dimly aware that what was unfolding was nothing more than a dream from her subconscious, but terrified of it all the same. She didn’t know how much more of this she could take, and things were only going to get more and more difficult in the coming weeks. What could she do?
On the couch, her unconscious body twitched in its sleep, an occasional moan escaping from its lips. But there was, of course, no-one around to hear it; she was, as she had been ever since she left home, completely alone.
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