Kasey and Georgia exchanged SGs—aka “significant glances”. I couldn’t read what the SGs meant, but that was nothing new. I could think of a million times when I’d be in one conversation and there’d be this other, totally silent one going on between Mom and Georgia. Was that secret language a girl thing, an adult thing, or did everyone on the planet get it except me?
Mom was still looking at me weird—all kind of spaced out and dreamy, like the time I’d seen her in hospital just after an operation to fix her broken ankle. I decided to check in later with Kasey about those SGs.
“Sorry I was making jokes about the band earlier, Rafe,” Mom said, smiling serenely. She closed her eyes and placed the palms of her hands together in front of her face. “Namaste,” she said.
Namaste? MAYDAY! MAYDAY! This yoga-experimentation thing was getting completely out of control!
I looked at Kasey and Georgia, but they didn’t seem to have noticed.
Noodles and tofu were one thing, but namaste was getting dangerously close to Mom turning into a full-blown hippy.
My social status in Hills Village was already at dangerously low levels. I might have been mutating into a hipster, but I could not afford Mom becoming a hippy. It was only a matter of time before she changed my name to Butterfly and moved us all to a commune in New Mexico. I didn’t want to be called Butterfly! I lowered my head to take a forkful of noodles and hunkered down behind The Great Wall of Tofu, my good mood at hearing the news about the KRMY comp fading fast. It was, after all, still Sunday night … which meant one thing: Monday morning and SCHOOL was coming right at me like a stampeding rhino.
NO RHINO, but Monday morning still came charging in uninvited like it always does, and the first thing I saw when we got in was this:
“No pressure, then,” I said.
Kasey shrugged. “That’s rock and roll, dude! Awesome work by Millo, hey?”
I was impressed, to be honest. I didn’t think Miller was organized enough to design and print and stick the posters all over school.
And they were everywhere. Miller must’ve been up early. Even though I hated the fact he was telling everyone we were going to win, the poster campaign was still impressive.
Plus, everyone knowing about The People came with an added bonus.
If you’ve read any of my stories before, you’ll know that me and HVMS don’t always see eye to eye. There have been a few popularity issues (as in me being unpopular), a few problems with following the massively dumb Code of Conduct, a few suspensions and expulsions and suchlike, but—apart from one epic split-second when I semi-accidentally made the football team—I’d never been cool.
Now, though, word had gotten out that I was in a band and it was like a switch had been pressed, transforming me from Rafe Khatchadorian, slightly nerdy, totally uncool goofball, into Rafe Khatchadorian, uber-cool rock-and-roller.
Even though no one at HVMS had heard a note of what the band sounded like, Miller’s posters had kicked things up another level. Kasey and me walked to class through a sea of fist bumps and back-pats and shouts of “Go The People!” Jeanne Galletta even complimented me on the poster and Dingbat Wall.
It was awesome.
It couldn’t last.
IT DIDN’T. Last, I mean. I was so happy being kind of cool that after lunch I’d sort of forgotten I had a DOUBLE music lesson with Mr. Mann. That’s right, less than 48 hours after I’d zinged him between the eyes with The Spiderzz album sleeve, the evil school timetable had come up with a double period of music.
I tried to psych myself up to survive 80 minutes of learning about Belgian opera singers of the nineteenth century, but it was impossible. No one can psych themselves up to survive Belgian opera singers of the nineteenth century. Not even Belgian opera singers.
As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about.
When Mr. Mann arrived for the lesson, I could see there was something different about him. I don’t mean the bandaid he had taped across the bridge of his nose. I mean that he walked different and talked different and looked different. If someone had asked me exactly what it was that was different about him, I wouldn’t have been able to pin it down. He was just different.
Kasey jogged my elbow as Mr. Mann began writing names on the blackboard behind his desk. “Check out the daks,” she whispered, chuckling.
Although I thought I spoke fluent Strayan, “daks” had me beat. What could it mean? Ducks? Darts? Donkeys?
“The pants,” Kasey hissed, gesturing to Mr. Mann’s legs.
“Pants? How do you get ‘pants’ from ‘daks’?” I whispered.
“Will you just take a closer look?” Kasey snapped. Eye-roll, 6.5.
I took a closer look. Mr. Mann’s daks were gray, just like all his other pants. Okay, these pants were a bit looser than the kind he usually wore maybe, but I still didn’t get what it was that had Kasey—
“Yoga pants!” I yelped.
Mr. Mann looked up from his list of Belgian opera singers. “Did someone say anything?” he asked.
I swallowed hard and picked out a name at random. “François van Campenhout!” I yelped again—I was in full yelp mode—trying to make it sound a bit like “yoga pants”. It wasn’t very convincing, but it was too late to stop now. Kasey covered her eyes and groaned.
“What about him?” Mr. Mann asked. He was smiling pleasantly enough, but it wasn’t fooling me. Mr. Mann was like a snake (not a good snake either, but one of the bad, eaty-bitey kind), waiting for me to get closer before he pounced, and I had nothing on François van Campenhout to help me. I’d only seen the dude’s name for the first time eighteen seconds ago. This is François van Campenhout, btw:
After the whole being-hit-right-in-the-face-with-an-album-sleeve incident, Mr. Mann didn’t need an excuse to make mincemeat of me. This Belgian opera singer stuff probably meant I was toast unless I came up with a real good reason RIGHT NOW why I’d shouted out François van Campenhout.
“I, uh, like him?” I said. “His, uh, singing and all?”
A vein in the middle of Mr. Mann’s forehead twitched. “You like him?”
I nodded vigorously. “Yeah, uh-huh. He’s, uh, cool.”
Kasey was trying to put as much distance as she could between us. Traitor. It seemed I was digging a hole so deep it would take twenty guys with a backhoe to get me out.
“François van Campenhout died in 1848, Mr. Khatchadorian,” Mr. Mann droned. “There are no recordings of his voice in existence. None.”
Gulp. There was no escape. Kasey was leaning so far away from me she was almost out the door.
But, as I considered my options (there were none), I noticed something strange going on with Mr. Mann. He twitched, shook his head, and licked his lips as though he was fighting an overpowering urge. I figured he was fighting an overpowering urge to strangle me on the spot.
Oh boy, I thought, this is it. I could almost see the headlines: Dumb Kid Sparks Teacher Frenzy! “He Just Went Nuts!” Says Witness. Substitute Teach In Middle School Meltdown!
Then, just as I was about to fess up that I’d shouted “yoga pants” and not “François van Campenhout”, and beg forgiveness for being such a total loser, Mr. Mann threw back his arms, put his chin in the air, and started singing a rock version of the Belgian national anthem at the top of his voice.
None of us had seen that coming.
NO ONE IN the class knew the Belgian national anthem. I mean, why would we? None of us were Belgian or had ever set foot in Belgium or knew any Belgians. We only found out later that what we were hearing was the Belgian national anthem. I’m not even sure that many Belgians know it, and the way Mr. Mann was belting out the words, I’m not sure the dude who wrote it would know it. We also found out later that it’s in three different languages, which must make it one of the most confusing national anthems on the planet. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
“O dierbaar België, O heilig land der Vaad’ren, Onze ziel en ons hart zijn u gewijd!” Mr. Mann sang. He
put one foot up on my desk and used a pen as a microphone. He put his other arm straight up in the air with his fist clenched. “Awooooooooooooooooooooooo!” he sang, nodding his head to an imaginary beat. He was really getting into it now, although I was pretty sure “awooooooooo” wasn’t part of the Belgian national anthem. I looked at Kasey, but Kasey was watching Mr. Mann.
Mr. Mann took his foot off the desk and strutted across the front of the classroom, his head bobbing forward and his arms tucked behind his back like a chicken. When he reached the side of the classroom, he lifted his microphone-pen and leaned in toward a terrified Suzi Schultz.
“À toi notre sang, ô Patrie!” Mr. Mann screeched in Suzi’s face. “Oh yeaaah!”
Again, I was pretty certain “oh yeaaah” wasn’t in the official lyrics, but I wasn’t about to argue with Mr. Mann in this mood. The mild, boring substitute teacher had vanished completely and in his place was a swaggering, cocky, wailing rocker ripping out the rockiest ever version of the Belgian national anthem.
“Nous le jurons tous, tu vivras!” Mr. Mann yodeled. He yanked off his tie and whirled it around his head. “So blühe froh in voller Schöne, awooooo! Zu der die Freiheit Dich erzog, wooh-ah, whoa-ah! Und fortan singen Deine Söhne: Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté! Oh, yeah!”
Mr. Mann wiped the sweat from his brow and picked up a (totally invisible) guitar. Screwing up his face, he jumped onto my desk and began playing a (totally imaginary) solo.
“Dum duh de dum, weehoo, nee-naw, zoing!” he shouted, imitating the guitar noises. “Weeehow! Weehow! Weehow! Dum dum de dum dum de dooooo!”
Mr. Mann was tapping his foot on the desk to give a backbeat to his “guitar”. I had to admit, it was kind of catchy.
The class was roughly divided between those who thought this was the coolest thing they’d ever seen and those who were figuring out the quickest escape route. Back on stage—at this point I considered the front of the classroom a stage—Mr. Mann had leapt off my desk and was building up to a big finish. He smashed up his imaginary guitar, strutted to the imaginary microphone stand and belted out the last lines. Then he stepped back and put both his arms high above his head, his middle fingers tucked in as he gave us a rocker’s salute.
“G’day, America!” he yelled in a broad Australian accent. “You’ve been awesome!”
“I REALIZE,” Mr. Mann said in his regular voice, “there have been many different versions of the Belgian national anthem since Van Campenhout wrote the melody, which he’d based on several traditional French and Belgian folk songs. The composer was influenced by a French song called ‘The Tune of the Polish Lancers’ and it was first performed in September 1830.” Mr. Mann picked up his tie and put it back on as if nothing had happened. He leaned back against his desk and looked at us. “Any questions?”
There was a stunned silence.
None of us had ever seen anything like what had just taken place. Suzi Schultz wore an expression that suggested she might need therapy for about, oh, six hundred years. Miller the Killer was staring at me and twirling a finger round and round at the side of his head. Did you see that? he mouthed, taking care that Mr. Mann couldn’t see him. Total fruitcake or what?
At the far side of the room, Nathan Orlap and Jessie Bamforth had turned purple trying not to laugh. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kasey put up her hand to ask the total fruitcake a question.
“Yes, Kasey?” Mr. Mann said. “You have a question?”
Kasey nodded. “Can you do that again?”
Mr. Mann laughed. I couldn’t remember seeing him laugh before. He flicked a speck of dust off his yoga daks and turned back to the blackboard. “Maybe next week,” he said, then carried on writing the names of Belgian opera singers. “Now, please open your exercise books and copy these names.”
As he wrote, Kasey leaned in close. “You know what that meant, don’t you?” she whispered.
“That our substitute music teacher is a total fruitcake? That I should call a psychiatrist?”
Kasey kicked my shin. “It means we’ve found Niki Blister.”
OF COURSE, WE couldn’t let a discovery like that just sit there without doing something. We’d found Niki Blister! Kasey was right. Everything Mr. Mann had done in the class was what Niki would have done on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, or Glastonbury, or somewhere. She’d also done a bit more digging around on Niki and discovered, tucked away in an old newspaper interview she’d found online, the info that his mother was … Belgian. It was another piece of evidence. Kasey’s theory was that Mr. Mann had been keeping his true identity pushed down for so long that it was just bursting to come out, kind of like a volcano.
“It was only a matter of time. All that pent-up rockage was probably bubbling away under the gray suits.” Kasey paused. “He looked totally at home on stage, didn’t he?”
Mr. Mann had been as relaxed as anything while he was doing his rock version of the Belgian national anthem. “Something must have pushed him over the edge,” I said. “Was it something I said? Something I did?”
Kasey frowned. “I don’t think so. All you did was blurt something about his daks.”
I was about to say something sarcastic when I stopped short. Kasey’s words had helped a couple of things tumble into place. Yoga pants. The yurt. Mom going to the yurt. Mr. Mann wearing yoga pants. The twitchy way Mr. Mann had looked at me just before he did the whole rock star act back there in the classroom …
Was I imagining things, or could it be that Kasey’s Pent-up Rockage Theory was right and Mr. Mann had mutated back into Niki Blister partly because he was guilty of liking my mom? It was a lot to take in.
I decided to do the sensible thing and not think about it for the rest of my life.
I WENT STRAIGHT to Gudonya after school because Sid had asked me to work a couple of hours. He’d started keeping the place open in the evening when he was, like tonight, busy with yoga in the yurt. I was happy to head in. This was a chance for me to make more progress with THE MISSION to fill Dingbat Wall with drawings. I hadn’t forgotten how Jeanne Galletta had looked at me in school now word was out about The People. Perhaps me finishing the wall of noodly doodles on top would woo her into actually having a thing for me. It was possible … right?
When I walked into the cafe, The Spiderzz album was on the turntable. Two or three tables had customers, including (shudder) Hairy Harry. Sid was behind the counter, his hipster head bobbing up and down in time to the music.
“Mega retro cheesefest choons!” he said as I got closer. “Total ’80s, dude!” He smiled and gave me a fist bump.
“I thought you’d heard this before?” I said.
Kasey and me had been playing The Spiderzz on rotation, but now I came to think about it, mostly when Sid was out.
He shook his head. “Nah, never heard it.” Sid picked up his yoga mat and headed for the back door. “Catch you later.”
Hairy Harry got up and followed him to the four o’clock session. He’d upgraded from a thong to a kind of diaper and singlet combo. It wasn’t much of an improvement, tbh.
Two hours later, leaving a sweaty Sid to finish up at Gudonya, and with three more sketches up on the Great Wall, I turned down Sid’s offer of a freebie vegan beetroot, kale, and wheatgrass smoothie, and ducked into Swifty’s for a guilty greaseburger. With a couple of hours’ band practice ahead, I needed something more solid than tofu and beansprouts inside me.4
When I got home, I dumped my bag on the porch and walked toward the garage without going inside the house on account of me not wanting to get into the whole Swifty’s greaseburger thing with Mom. I grasped the handle of the side door just in time to hear the unmistakable wail of The Spiderzz’ big hit, “Kangaroo Krush”. It sounded fantastic. The People had been busy learning this song, so I figured Kasey was playing it again to get us in the mood. But there was something different about the vocal. It was louder, more raw. It sounded … live.
I opened the garage door.
Kasey was leaning again
st the opposite wall, watching the band. Miller the Killer was behind his drum kit, banging away like his life depended on it, and The Changmeister’s fingers were flying across the keyboards.
And there on vocals and guitar, in full rock-god mode in the middle of the Khatchadorian garage, was long-lost mystery Aussie rock god Niki Blister.
TO SAY I was surprised to see Niki Blister in my garage in full rock-star mode wouldn’t be true because “surprised” just doesn’t begin to describe it.
I was stunned.
I was shocked.
I was flabbergasted. My flabber hadn’t been so totally and completely gasted since a mob of bloodthirsty zombies had tried to eat me on my first ever trip to Australia. (Don’t panic, it all worked out okay—check out the deets in Middle School: Rafe’s Aussie Adventure, available from anywhere on this planet that sells books.)
My second reaction, once the whole flabbergasting thing had died down, was that we’d been right all along. Mr. Mann really, awesomely, magically, no-question-about-it whatsoever, was none other than Niki Blister! This was absolute one hundred percent proof. There was no mistaking that voice doing that song. There was no mistaking those rock-star moves. This was a genuine rock-out happening right here right now in the Khatchadorian garage. The People had never sounded so good. Mr. Mann/Niki Blister nodded to me and smiled before he screamed out the last lines of the song.
Long way from home out Woop Woop in the bush, Where the sun’s got my brain all turned to mush, That’s when I need you bad, my kangaroo krush, Oh yeah, I need you so bad, my kangaroo kruuuuuuuuuuuuush!
As he belted out the last word of the song, Mr. Mann/Niki Blister brought his hand crashing down for one final booming chord that made the walls of the garage vibrate.
G'day, America Page 6