by Anne Manne
At the end of Grade 5, as everyone streamed out of the classroom for the summer holidays, he pulled me aside.
‘Anne, I am taking Grade 6 next year, and you will be in my grade again.’
He waited, grinning his deathly smile.
My heart sank. I was aghast. Not another year with Old Emu!
Previously I would have blurted out something honest like ‘Oh no!’ This time I paused. There we were, staring at each other, his flinty eyes gleaming shrewdly behind his spectacles, his mouth peeled back in that awful grimace. I stood there dumbly for a few moments before I realised he had been looking forward to enjoying my discomposure. So I fibbed airily, ‘Oh, that’s good’. It was my first recollection of a social lie. He looked startled for a moment and then lied back, ‘I like you, too’.
I was now more than ever convinced of our enmity, and our mutual awareness of it, because otherwise why on earth would he protest that he liked the student he kept sending down to the lower grade for punishment, or up to the headmaster to be strapped? No—no teacher confessed liking for any student, let alone one as defiant as I was. The next year, I thought, was going to be total war.
I plotted all summer.
The jokes at his expense and the drawing pin pranks intensified, while he took pleasure in denying me. When a play was to be performed at the local hall, for all the parents, the class was to choose the actors. He mentioned the first part and my companions, well acquainted with my acting skills in impersonating Old Emu, cheered ‘Anne!’ Then he asked them about the next part, the main one, and they shouted my name again. ‘Aha!’ he said, with unmistakeable glee. ‘But you have already chosen Anne for the first role. We must choose a new person.’ Everyone subsided, confused. This wasn’t what they wanted at all. ‘Can’t she do both?’ someone asked, but Old Emu pronounced ‘No!’ with great satisfaction. How he loved doing me in the eye!
I was never an ink monitor, refilling the ink wells. Nor was I chosen as a bank monitor, collecting the children’s saving books with coins and sometimes ten-shilling notes, nor the milk monitor, carrying pallets of shiny milk bottles, on which moisture from the morning’s dew condensed and gleamed, as we pulled off the shiny silver foil caps of our quarter-pints and drank them in all their cool creaminess.
None of that mattered compared to my struggle to be granted the privilege of using a fountain pen. Old Emu had many charts of lists of spelling words and grammar displayed in magnificent Victorian cursive, written on parchment paper, hanging on the side wall. His writing was beautiful, perfectly formed, the letters joined gracefully by elaborate flourishes. Those children whose handwriting was not yet neat enough did not progress to the fountain pen, so still used a pencil or were allowed to practise with an ink nib dipped in the ink wells on the corner of the desks. But, one by one, my classmates all were anointed as Pen People. As they came to school with shiny Parker fountain pens—I would have even settled for the lower status Platignum brand—it was a status I desperately coveted. My handwriting was always an untidy scrawl no matter how I sweated over the letters, so Old Emu continued to creep up behind me, his hips creaking and squeaking, pouncing and pronouncing with satisfaction that I would have to stick to the humiliating pencil. I felt sure I would never be granted rights to a fountain pen. Worse, all the girls had neat writing. Except me. Old Emu was fond of pointing out that all the girls, except Anne, now had pens. Just a few delinquent boys, the no-hopers of the grade, were left writing with pencils. And me.
Of course, I retaliated. It was the ink smeared on his beautiful charts of Victorian cursive handwriting that did it—made him choose the final, worst punishment. Much worse than the strap by our one-armed headmaster or the demotion to the lower grade for the day.
I was no longer allowed to borrow any books overnight or on weekends from the class library at the back of the room. He knew I was a passionate reader, and how much I relied on those shelves to make life in his class bearable. When he announced that I would have no more reading rights until the next term, he was exultant, while I was, briefly, overwhelmed. I covered my face with my hands and wept. Then, when I looked up and saw his face, gloating at finally having drawn blood, I was so furious my anger buried any feelings of being bereft without access to the library. Deeper than the deprivation was the sense that he had won. I simply couldn’t bear it.
A plan began to form in my mind. As soon as I thought of it I must have looked chirpy again. When he next looked at me I smiled back, rather too happily. He looked at me uneasily, eyes narrowing, his brow growing heavy with its familiar frown, but lightening when he looked at little Susan and Kay sitting neatly in their ironed frocks and with clean, cool hands, which when not writing neatly in new Victorian cursive, were obediently folded. He was perhaps wondering why my spirits had revived quite so quickly.
So what was the plan? I would steal the books each night and smuggle them out, read them overnight and replace them the next morning. And the way I would do it had to do with breasts. We were in Grade 6 and, for many of the girls, breasts were beginning to bud. Underneath jumpers and tunics were the small, unmistakeable outlines of puberty. I was a year younger than my classmates, having started school at age four, so there was not much happening with me yet. But Old Emu didn’t know that.
At the end of the day, during reading time, I would mingle with the children putting books back or borrowing new ones, carefully returning, under Old Emu’s vigilant eyes, the one I had been reading that day. But in fact I had actually taken two, and hidden one in my desk. Before home time, as we reached inside the desks for our belongings, with the lid still up, I shoved the book up my jumper, the two sharp ends of the book end showing … just like the points of two small breasts. How could he possibly know?
Old Emu looked very hard at me and inspected my bag. He divined, correctly, that I was far too happy for his punishment to be working. But he couldn’t work it out. I read furiously on the bus, and all that night. The next morning I got to school early, slipped into the empty classroom, and replaced the book.
This went on for the duration of my punishment. It was entirely thrilling.
I had to read very fast to finish the book, lest there was a mishap the next day with the smuggling plan. I read sitting on fence posts waiting for the bus, on horseback, in the bath, even on roofs, for I climbed the apricot tree to the garage roof, where I could read undisturbed while my sisters shouted angrily down below for me to come and do my chores. I read over dinner and breakfast, although never at school lunchtimes, for a reading child always signalled a loner and social failure, and that was never safe. I read on the old bus going home, as we lurched along, and continued reading as I climbed off the bus. I read as I stepped down the steps, and went right on reading as I walked towards our house. There was a tree in the way from the bus to my house, but I could step sideways without stopping reading, and still get to our gate. One day, I sensed somehow that the bus had not moved. I turned around and realised that the whole bus was watching me, laughing. They must have been amused by this oblivious child, so the bus driver had paused long enough for the passengers to watch me step sideways at the tree, with my nose still stuck in my book.
After that, I waited just long enough to get in the door.
In the last few weeks of school, we did a lot of tests to check whether we were ready for high school. On the very last day of the school year, and our last day of primary school, Old Emu got us to stand up and began calling out our names. Gradually, one by one, my classmates sat down. I was the only child left standing. Then he left the room, leaving me on my feet. I began to feel embarrassed. Was this like the fountain pen fiasco, another, to my mind pointless, skill at which I had failed? The girls tittered and some of the bad boys up the back were laughing, suggesting ever more hideous reasons why I might be the last person standing. Soon they had the whole class laughing. Then Old Emu returned. So why was I the last one on my feet? The children had sat down, in reverse order of merit, on the basis of the
results of our final-year primary school tests. I had done the best in the tests.
But before I could feel any sense of honour, let alone glory, the final school bell of the year had rung and it was summer holidays! Children were shouting and laughing with excitement and streaming out into the corridor, looking forward to swimming and fishing and camping.
Nobody cared two hoots about my being Dux.
Neither did I.
What I really cared about was that Old Emu had won. He had won! I understood exactly what had happened. He had transformed what might have been a moment of pride into one of blushing humiliation. He wanted to rob me of any pleasure in the moment—and he had succeeded. It was unbearable.
I gathered my things and walked slowly out the door, staring at him. We were the last two in the echoing classroom, the sounds of happy children wafting upwards through the fringed leaves of the peppercorn trees outside. He smiled down at me in total triumph, his lips peeled back in the ghastly, ghastly grimace that passed for a grin. ‘Goodbye, Anne.’
I could hardly bear it.
I left primary school, and along with it, childhood, with a lasting feeling of defeat. There wasn’t even another opportunity for vengeance.
Until now.
There is nothing to mark this day from any other. Beneath a sky shot with the delicate blue light of late autumn, a sky no longer leached of colour by heat, there are two children on ponies. A brother and a sister. They are doing what they do every day after school, riding their ponies until dusk. I often paused and watched them briefly while walking home from school, for the sister was my best friend. They are laughing, the sounds spiralling upwards and away into the blue. The ponies are heavily flecked with sweat, panting. They will have just one more race before nightfall.
The girl is taut, angular, competent. She holds the rein tightly as her pony tosses its head, snatches at the rein, shakes its head angrily to gain freedom. She wheels her pony around sharply, and gives it its head so that it breaks into a full gallop in a few strides, its neck outstretched, its body flattening in a long, low shadow over dusty ground. She is all of one piece with it, sitting lightly, easily. She leans way back as the pony slides into the fence at the end of the paddock and, laughing, looks around for her little brother. He is blond and plump, and no horseman. He sits uneasily, scrunched up over the mane, round little body bouncing high into the air at every stride, as his pony comes lumbering after its mate, his face hovering at that moment between exhilaration and fear. As he nears the end he forgets to sit back, just hunches and hangs on, hangs forward. The pony keeps galloping towards its mate, unchecked, then swerves violently at the last moment towards it, away from the fence. His sister’s face still bears traces of her laughter, as the boy falls heavily, awkwardly, head hitting a black metal star picket on the way down and lies still.
There was praise for the older sister, how she did everything right. How she had behaved so responsibly, far beyond her years, in fact, phoning the ambulance, then the parents, then waiting with him, covering him, the desperate, solitary wait in the deepening dusk till adults came. She did everything she could, they said, everything was done that should be done, but nothing could be done for the little boy was already dead.
It was as if time had flowed along the surface of one world, towards one point, and then stopped. Just a split second divided the flow of time when a boy was breathing, laughing, swaying in the saddle, and the moment later. But that one moment flashing out of time, changed everything. It erased the future and gave a different past, for all experience would now be shaped by before and after that moment. For when time resumed its flow, so lightly, so easily and without compunction, those who loved this little boy had been flung into a different universe, a shadow world with the same physical shape, the same colours, textures, hues, surfaces, but where every taste, every sensation, every perception was transformed by the one great and terrible fact of his death.
The funeral was held on one of those days when autumn seemed to have sharpened quickly into winter—a long, slow, chill drizzle with grey skies weeping. The mourners gathered, hardly speaking. In the small, dark church there were the sounds only of the minister’s voice, and rainwater softly seeping, trickling down the roof and hitting the ground with a hiss. Everyone said later, voices trailing into the thin, damp air, what a lovely service it had been, how well the minister had spoken, but none of these commonplaces could soften the hard edges of that day. And at the graveside, as the coffin, horribly, terribly small, was lowered into the ground, the ragged sound of the mother and the sister weeping, wild and hopeless, on and on, on and on.
But it was the frozen face of the father, which haunted me most. His grief was a silent, mute thing—a grief made more terrible by its silence. He walked, shepherding the women, trying to hold things together—to do the manly thing I suppose—stick-thin, legs sort of stiff and snapping. There were grown ups I heard making soothing noises about time healing and suchlike, but it was not how, as a wide-eyed child, I saw things. Such commonplaces wheeled away from what is unbearable but true—that things happen in life for which there is no consolation. For there was no recovery, only a grave kind of quietness which fell over the family, shutters drawn in on the hush of grief. They were hardly ever seen in the town. I saw the father about a year later walking alone, thinner, thoughts sunk inward, face completely closed. People peeled away from him on the pavement, faces averted as if from the afflicted.
They moved away after a time, up north. It was for the best, everyone agreed. There was no mistaking the relief in people’s voices, the soothing thought that physical relocation might give them back the future that had been taken. There was something darker, too, in those voices, a kind of sullen anger, as if this family, by being ruined and not disguising it, had torn a skin from the smooth surfaces of their lives and left something raw and terrible, exposed and pulsing. As if they blamed the family for reminding them of the sheer, appalling contingency of life, and their vulnerability before it. Made them see things they did not want to see, reminded them of the spider’s thread from which all existence hangs.
After they had moved for some reason I kept thinking of how the father might answer the cheerful and careless questions: ‘Just the one child then, just a girl?’ What it would be for him to answer: ‘No, there was a boy’. I often wondered what became of them, particularly the father, for it was him I remembered most. One day I heard Les Murray read his poem ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’. It is about a man weeping in Martin Place in the middle of Sydney.
There’s a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.
…
but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body
not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea—
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.
It was the father I felt sure. I thought of him standing there, weeping, weeping, never stopping till it was done, years and years of silent weeping finally flowing out into the world.
In Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs, he speaks of the quality in Australian suburban life of lives lived within the ‘luxury of ordinary tragedy’. One knows instantly what he is speaking of and the truth of it—the kind of remoteness of suburban life from the Holocaust or war-torn Europe, from politically inflicted suffering or its understanding. Only it does not seem quite that way, neither a luxury nor ordinary, to bear witness to the grief of an ordinary man, when that man has lost his boy.
Old Ma Doak was shaped like a kind of oblong. Or maybe a rhombus, since she always moved with incredible speed. She seemed wider than she was high, but that may have been one of those strange misapprehensions of childhood. Although Old Ma Doak moved everywhere
with great velocity, I can’t ever claim to have seen her legs move. At one point I thought she had wheels, but every time I looked down there were only men’s Blundstone work boots caked in dust and with thick army socks wrinkled and rumpled above them. Above these boots she always wore men’s khaki army trousers and a khaki army jumper. I never saw her in a dress, at a time when such garments for women were almost compulsory. It was a time when women were frowned upon for wearing ‘slacks’ to work, with all the remissive implications of slacking, laziness, failure. Old Ma Doak had a round, red face with a cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth, and white hair cut short like a man’s. She also had enormous pendulous breasts, and never wore a bra. Nobody in the entire history of our town had ever seen her wear anything different. Even to church.
There was a purpose to her clothing, however, since despite the heavily sex-segregated workplace with its male mechanics and female hairdressers, Old Ma Doak worked in one of the road gangs which grappled regularly with jackhammers and was seen on steaming days pouring sulphurous bitumen into potholes dug by summer rains. It was rumoured that she ran the road gang, and was a stronger, faster worker than any of the men. She was, it was said, worth three men. Old Doak, her husband, was another oblong, but smaller. He dressed in identical clothing. He was rather submissive and called her Ma, trotting behind her like an obedient cocker spaniel. He adored her. Old Doak also worked on the road gangs. Nobody ever said anything about what his work might be worth. No one thought about Old Doak much at all.