cuentos Torrevieja

I was officially teaching Computing Skills, for the government would only give grants for this. Not for learning English, which was what I was actually teaching and what the people wanted and signed up for.
The Ukranian croupier, the waiters and waitresses from Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil. The Ecuadorian ice-cream sellers, the Honduran dancer, the Romanian retailers. The Russian .. well...
The class started at 8 am and they all arrived with little sleep from working the night before with this amazing energy that filled the classroom. A hope, a purpose: hard work and study. Life fizzing with possibilities of a future ahead from where they sat, ahead of the long hours they laboured. This energy of immigrants. They demanded I respect their efforts and work as hard as they did and I tried to respect that even though I had a much easier time than they did. We had fantastic classes.
But there was the Russian lass. Thin, blonde, shapely and made up even at that early hour. She never said what she worked as but she kept having to get up and leave the classroom to answer her mobile phone several times each lesson. I asked her to switch it off but the fear in her eyes told me that was impossible and so up she got and out she went whispering into the phone as the door closed behind her. She always apologised although hardly had sat down but off it went again.
One day she arrived with a bruised eye. She had tried to cover it up but it covered almost the whole side of her face. She'd tripped and fallen she said. After class, she waited and asked me if there was much work in the town I lived, or another academy she could go to study. I said I'd ask.
That was the last I saw of her. She never returned to class and soon the series of lessons ended. Just prior to this a government inspector came and we all had to take out computer manuals (we had them for just such an emergency as this) and go through to the computer suite as she took notes as I delivered a computing lesson in Spanish to my giggling students. They were all there for me, telling the inspector how much they'd learned on the computer and how useful this would be for their career and what a fine computing teacher I was. They were workers and they knew exactly how to play the game and look out for one another's back.
Two months later, back in the academy in Almoradi, two Guarda Civil's showed up asking for myself and the owner. They had found a card for the academy that had my name written in pen in the purse of a woman who'd been shot dead in Torrevieja. They showed a photo, also from the purse. It was the Russian lass.