by John Larkin
I’M DRAWN UP TO THE NEW DAY, MY NEW YEAR, BY THE SOUND OF tinkling. It’s late-night, early-morning and I need another few minutes so I turn over to face the early morning traffic as it Dopplers past. The bench is so narrow that I’m only able to sleep on my side and even then it’s a balancing act that I’ve lost a couple of times throughout the night. Luckily I managed not to slice open an artery on the broken glass when I fell. But really, a bus shelter is about as uncomfortable as being homeless gets. Hiding beneath door number 4 at Death Valley is a five-star hotel compared to this.
That tinkling sound. It’s closer now. Right beneath me.
I open my eyes and gasp. I pull my sleeping bag tightly about me.
‘Sorry,’ says the man. ‘I’m just trying to clean up this mess before you cut yourself. Didn’t mean to wake you up.’
He reaches underneath the bench and picks up the rest of the glass, scooping it up in his unprotected hands, which are as big and as leathery as baseball mitts. He then drops it into the bin on the other side of the bus shelter.
‘There,’ he says. ‘That’s better. We won’t be slicing ourselves open now, will we?’ He doesn’t complain about the broken glass or offer any opinions on the character or racial background of whoever might have been responsible for it. It wasn’t his mess. It wasn’t even his problem. He could have just stood there waiting for his bus, but he cleaned it up anyway. He also seems to think there’s nothing unusual about a fourteen-year-old girl sleeping in a bus shelter. His only concern was that he woke me up, not that I’m here to begin with.
I sit up and start getting myself together. I yawn, stretch, squirm my way out of my sleeping bag and slowly roll it up. My technique at squeezing all the air out of it is improving with practice.
As I’m stuffing my sleeping bag into its carrier, I notice that the guy is wearing one of those bright yellow shirts that you see a lot around the outer suburbs. The sort favoured by men in trucks. Men on building sites. Men digging up roads. Men who need to be highly visible so that they don’t get squashed by industrial machinery. I once heard someone call those shirts ‘fluorescent wife beaters’, supposedly because labourers have a higher incidence of domestic violence than those working in other professions. It’s probably not even true. And it certainly isn’t fair on the millions, billions, of working men who don’t beat their wives. My father never wore a wife beater – yellow, orange, blue, lime green or any other colour – which is kind of ironic. Neither did Creepo for that matter, yet he wasn’t above hitting Serena. So there’s the theory out the window. Women wear them too, I imagine. When they need to be seen on building sites. Though I suppose that’s the point. They rarely are. And even then they wouldn’t be called wife beaters, surely. Husband beaters? I doubt it.
The guy also has one of those mullet hairstyles that dropped out of fashion in the nineteen-eighties. They still crop up occasionally, on the covers of Serena’s old, dog-eared romance novels or on Country and Western CDs. He’s also wearing a big, thick gypsy earring. Another relic from a bygone era.
‘Rough night?’
I consider ignoring him but he seems okay. I mean, he didn’t have to pick up that broken glass. The world’s a marginally better place because of what he’s just done. People will be able to use the bus stop today and won’t even realise that they’ve got this guy to thank for it. He doesn’t seem to want any credit or acknowledgement. Not even from me.
‘About as rough as it gets.’
‘Parents kick you out?’
‘Something like that.’
‘That’s rough.’ He shakes his head. ‘Any bloody idiot can have kids, but you need a licence to own a dog.’
The wisdom of the west.
‘You’re not getting into drugs, are you?’
I’m actually quite offended. Not all teenagers are druggos. ‘No!’
‘Good for you.’
I notice his yellowed fingers. The nicotine patch on his arm. The hypocrisy hovering over him. Just because his drug of choice is legal, he thinks it gives him the right to preach to others. Which bit of ‘Smoking Kills’ don’t you get? Or do you think the picture of that woman with half her face chewed off by cancer is on the packet for artistic reasons?
‘My son got into drugs.’
Oh.
‘Not that hard stuff. Just a bit of mull.’
I don’t know what mull is, though I’m guessing it’s marijuana. Just because I’m sleeping in a bus shelter doesn’t mean I automatically know about this sort of stuff. How streetwise can you get when you practically raise yourself on Roald Dahl novels? Matilda and Miss Honey didn’t fund their extravagant lifestyle by dealing in the play- ground. Despite evidence to the contrary, George’s marvellous medicine didn’t contain a single ounce of cocaine. And although Willy Wonka wandered around the chocolate factory completely off his face, this was because he was injecting Hershey bars rather than heroin.
The guy carries on with his anti-drugs campaign, but he doesn’t realise that he’s preaching to the converted.
‘Scrambled his brain,’ he continues. ‘He was at school, doing real well. Wanted to be a carpenter, maybe even go to uni, then he got in with the wrong crowd. Weed sucked out all his ambition. All his get up and go. Him and his moron mates lived by that stupid expression. You know the one – live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.’
I nod in agreement, though I haven’t heard that expression.
‘They all went out to this party one night and got completely stoned. Then one of them, Danny his name was – not much upstairs but a really good footballer – well he ended up wrapping his car around a telegraph pole. There was nothing good-looking about his corpse, let me tell you. Closed casket funeral that one.’
There’s a pause while he fumbles for the cigarettes he doesn’t have.
‘Anyway, it shook my boy back onto the straight and narrow. He’s working up north now. In the mines. No qualifications but at least he’s off the wacky weed. Giving it a go, anyway.’
This is all very interesting, in an Oprah sort of way, but I’m not sure why he’s telling me.
‘You still at school?’
Right. Here it comes. The school of hard knocks, the university of life lecture. ‘Yeah.’
‘Then you stay there as long as you can. Get yourself a trade or go to university.’
‘I am going to university.’
‘What? Really?’
My sleeping rough hardly bothers him. Tell him I’m going to uni and his eyes pop out on stalks like a cartoon character.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘It’s just that you seem so young.’
Oh. ‘No. I mean I’m going to go to university. After year twelve.’
‘Good for you.’
‘I’m going to be a doctor.’ I hold off on the African eye-eating worm bit. He’s fidgety enough as it is.
‘A doctor? You’ve set your sights high.’
There’s a pause while he considers me.
‘Can you go home?’
I shake my head. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’d rather not say.’
‘Father not . . .’ he trails off. ‘Not messing with you, is he?’
‘Uncle.’
‘Bastard!’ He shakes his head. ‘You need to tell someone.’
‘I’m handling it.’
He looks around the shattered spider-web bus shelter. I’m obviously not handling it very well.
He reaches into his bag and pulls something out. It’s a book. I didn’t expect him to have books in his bag. Booze maybe. Racing guide perhaps. Nunchakus. But if I’ve learned one thing on the streets it’s that not everything’s as it seems.
He passes the book to me. ‘You should read this.’
I take
it from him and study the cover. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Interesting title.
‘It’s about this Frenchman. He’s only in his early forties or something, when he has a stroke. Something to do with his brainstem, whatever that is. Maybe you can tell me when you become a doctor. Anyway, he gets locked in his own body. All he can do is blink one eye. Blink and dribble. They thought he was pretty much a vegetable, but someone eventually sees that he’s trying to communicate by blinking. So they sat a secretary in front of him and she would read out the letters of the alphabet and he would blink when she came to the one he wanted and then she would write it down, slowly forming words, sentences and what not. Do you know what he asked for?’
‘No.’
‘He asked to write a book. So they set him up with a stream of assistants and off he went. Took him about two years and something like a quarter of a million blinks but he did it. Not long afterwards, he died.’
Good one, God! What? Have a plan, did you? Bit short on blinking guys in heaven? Why didn’t you test his faith a bit more by giving him cancer of the eyelid or something?
‘He died?’
‘Of pneumonia, a couple of weeks after it was published.’
‘That’s really sad.’
‘Still. He wrote a book. How many people can say that? How many people say they’re gonna do this, they’re gonna do that, and then never get round to doing it? Doing anything? This guy did it. He blinked a fucking book, pardon my French.’
I stare at the book. It’s not very thick. About a tenth of the size of Pride and Prejudice. Then again, Jane Austen didn’t have to blink it. Maybe if she did she might have cut back on a couple of characters. Edited out Caroline Bingley for a start, who is just weird
I hand it back to him. ‘I’ll get a copy.’
‘No,’ he replies. ‘I want you to have it.’
‘Oh no, I couldn’t.’
‘I’ve read it. Three or four times. Please. I’d like you to have it. Let’s call it a birthday present.’
‘How did you know it was my birthday?’
‘Er, I didn’t. Is it really?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘Well then, happy birthday. You’ve got to take it now.’
‘Thank you.’ I look down at my present, my birthday present, the nicest present that anyone has ever given me. More liquid patheticness wells in my eyes.
He looks at me and smiles. ‘If someone who can only move an eyelid can manage to write a book, imagine what you can do if you put your mind to it.’
His bus wheezes up, coughing and spluttering to a stop, and with a nod and a smile he’s gone, giving me a final thumbs-up through the window.
One of the maths teachers, Mrs Grimshaw, heaves herself out of the bus’s rear door. She stops to catch her breath and stares. Glares at me. At my sleeping bag. Then she glares at me again. Sitting there with my book, my backpack, my weekend clothes. Oh no. The plan was to drop my excess stuff at Alistair McAlister’s café and then make my way to school. But things went a bit pear-shaped yesterday, so here I am. It’s only seven o’clock. I didn’t think anyone would be here this early.
Of all the people to bust me, why did it have to be Mrs Grimshaw? While we’re on the subject of Matilda, Mrs Grimshaw makes The Trunchbull look like Miss Honey. No matter where you are in the school you can always hear Mrs Grimshaw ranting and raving about something or other. Something trivial. Even though Mr Thompkins initiated a no-shouting policy amongst the staff, she still goes off like an industrial foghorn. I swear one day she’s going to go off so badly, she’ll just explode. Lighting up the afternoon sky with her innards and entrails and erupted spleen.
‘You’re that new girl aren’t you? Tiffany something or other?’
‘Yes, Miss.’
‘Well. What are you doing sitting there?’
‘I, er.’ Come on, think. ‘I, er, had a sleepover last night. At a friend’s house. She doesn’t go to this school. They had to leave early so they dropped me off first.’
‘Well, you can’t stay here, it’s not safe. Whole place is full of hooligans and ruffians.’ Hooligans and ruffians? She sounds like a late-night black-and-white movie set in London during a dastardly German bombing raid. I didn’t know people still spoke this way. I actually snort out loud. It’s involuntary but it’s loud so I quickly bring up my hand to cover my face.
‘And use a handkerchief when you blow your nose, girl!’
‘Yes, Miss.’ And I’ll keep a sharp eye out for those ruffians while I’m at it. Oh, no! Why did my brain have to do that? I’m practically convulsing now. A fountain welling in my eyes again. I quickly turn to the side to make it look like I’m getting my stuff (rather than my shit) together.
‘Come on, then. Hurry up. You can wait in the staffroom with me until Mrs Lee opens the library.’
‘Thanks, Miss.’
‘And get a handkerchief for that nose of yours.’
‘Yes, Miss.’ I follow along behind Miss Grimshaw, trying not to explode with laughter. It’s sheer agony but a great way to commence my fifteenth revolution around the sun.
Mrs Lee arrives early with her serious connoisseur café-bought coffee. I don’t know where she’s from originally but she just oozes class. She’s so stylish and attractive that she could come to school wearing nothing but a sack and it would still work on her. Like everyone else in the school, she seems really lovely and caring. Even Mrs Grimshaw’s got her good points. She refused to leave me outside with the hooligans and ruffians, after all.
Although the library isn’t supposed to be open before school, Mrs Grimshaw hands me over to Mrs Lee, who doesn’t complain. She calls me darling and tells me that I can either do my homework or help her shelve the returned books and when we’ve done that I’m quite welcome to stay and read in one of the big comfortable chairs.
I ask her if I can help her every day and she takes one look at my sleeping bag and says yes.
This is my second birthday present of the day. Working in a library where it’s warm and dry, and where I can shelve and read books to my heart’s content. Mrs Lee doesn’t know it but she’s opened the gates of heaven.
We’re designing a book poster in English when the hooter goes for recess. No one moves, which is weird. We’re normally like a pack of wildebeests tearing out the door and across the Serengeti plains to the canteen or the quadrangle.
Miss Taylor is in the storeroom so she obviously hasn’t heard the hooter. She must be up to something in there that she doesn’t want us to know about. Texting her boyfriend, perhaps.
Then slowly, cautiously, she steps out of the storeroom carrying something. It’s glowing and I see that the glowing things are candles and they’re on a cake. A birthday cake. It must be someone else’s birthday as well.
The lights are dimmed and Miss Taylor starts singing happy birthday and the whole class joins in. I start singing too but then Miss Taylor places the cake down in front of me. We’re singing happy birthday to me.
Halfway through the song there’s a knock on the door and Mr Thompkins and Mrs Lee steal into the room and join in the song.
I’m so choked up I can hardly swallow. Following a deafening hip hip hooray, Mr Thompkins calls for a speech. I just about manage to splutter out ‘thank you’. I don’t even know why Mr Thompkins and Mrs Lee are here. Maybe they’ve heard something. Realised that I’m not going to be here very long. At the school. On the planet.
When I cut the cake and make a wish, Miss Taylor actually hugs me. I mean, really hugs me. I hold onto her so tightly, I never want to let her go even though I’m dripping tears onto her top.
‘It’s all right, sweetheart,’ she whispers in my ear. ‘Whatever it is. You’ll get through it. You’re strong.’
‘What’s the matter, Tiffany-Star?’ says Janyce, one of the Islande
r girls who keeps a lookout for me. She hands me a slice of cake that has pink a ‘Tif’ on it – the icing sugar remnants of Narelle’s stupid name. Miss Taylor still has her arm around me but my eyes must be blood-red. ‘Aren’t you having a nice birthday?’
‘No,’ I sniff. ‘It’s the best birthday I’ve ever had.’
Miss Taylor squeezes my hand.
Janyce hits play on Miss Taylor’s CD player and pretty soon the whole class is bouncing around the room.
‘Does this happen on everyone’s birthday?’ I yell to Janyce above the music.
‘Yeah,’ she replies. ‘Miss Taylor is awesome. How many teachers want to see you actually have fun?’ She pauses for a second. ‘I reckon you really need it too. That’s all right – we’ll all make sure you have a good time here, Tiffany-Star.’
I tilt my head to one side. I’m not sure what she means by this. But Janyce just smiles.
And for a moment I do feel special. I feel like this is the happiest moment of my life.
MISS TAYLOR SOUNDS PRETTY AMAZING.
She was. I mean, she is. But everyone was at that school. Even Mrs Grimshaw. She shouted a lot, but she shouted because she cared. She knew the kids who didn’t want to learn were hindering the ones who did. I could just as easily have picked a school in the next suburb when I was looking, but I’d heard it was rougher.
More hooligans and ruffians?
Exactly. Mr Thompkins didn’t just know every kid’s name in our school, he knew their hobbies, their grades, their home life – good and bad. Hell, he even knew their favourite football team. He encouraged us to get involved in everything. To give things a go.
Because he cared.
That’s right. And he made sure that the school did. He didn’t bully the staff into caring about us, he chose teachers who did. Even the office ladies were less dragon-like than at other schools. You know something, I only went to that school for about six weeks but I still miss it. Even now I want to make Mr Thompkins, Miss Taylor and Mrs Lee proud of me. They say you should choose your parents wisely. I think it’s just as important to choose the right school, especially if you stuff up on the parent selection thing.