True Stories

by Helen Garner

  Next morning, I returned to the hospital. The weather had not broken. When I walked into the ward I saw that Mr Tiarapu’s appearance had undergone a shocking change. His face was no longer brown at all; the colour had left it, his cheeks had sunk right in, and he seemed to find it difficult to open his eyes. But he saw me and took my hand and held it.

  I said, ‘You look tired. Didn’t you sleep well?’ I did not know whether to call him vous or tu so I said vous.

  ‘Not very,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of my wife, and I was worried.’

  Before the doctors came on their round, the door at the end of the ward burst open and two cheerful nurses entered. They approached Mr Tiarapu’s bed and seized his chart. ‘Yes, this is the one,’ said one of the nurses. She directed a powerful, jolly smile right into Mr Tiarapu’s face. ‘We’re moving you today!’ she announced. ‘Different ward!’ She grabbed a corner of Mr Tiarapu’s blue cotton blanket.

  Mr Tiarapu’s face was grey now with fear.

  I said, ‘He doesn’t understand what you are saying. He doesn’t understand any English at all.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the nurse, stepping back.

  At this moment the two doctors came into the ward. They said good morning to all concerned. Mr Tiarapu gazed from my face to theirs, waiting.

  ‘Can you explain to him why he is being moved?’ I said. ‘Because he has only just got used to being here and talking to the bloke in the next bed.’

  The doctors looked at each other. One of them said, after a short pause, ‘We have to move him to another ward to do tests.’

  I translated to Mr Tiarapu that he was going to another ward in order to have more tests. This information did not cause the look on his face to alter.

  ‘Which ward?’ I asked the doctors.

  ‘Oncology,’ said one of them, and he looked me right in the eyes with an expression at once blank and challenging. He said oncology. He did not say cancer. And I was not absolutely certain, not one hundred percent certain, that oncology did mean cancer. And I couldn’t ask because Mr Tiarapu was holding my hand and staring at me and the doctors with his grey face, and the French word for cancer is so similar to the English that it would have been impossible to disguise it.

  ‘Do you want me to explain what you mean?’ I said to the doctors.

  They looked embarrassed, moved their feet on the spongy lino, and glanced at each other. ‘If you like,’ said one of them.

  ‘But do you think I should?’ I said.

  They both shrugged, not because they didn’t care but because they were very young, and because they probably didn’t know any more than I did whether he was going to live or die. The longer we talked and gestured like this, without my translating anything, the clearer it became to Mr Tiarapu that there was something someone didn’t want him to know. The responsibility for the transmission of information had been shifted squarely on to me, and I was not adequate.

  I said to Mr Tiarapu, ‘They are moving you to a different ward because they have to do the tests, and they’re still not sure what is wrong with you, and they can’t do the tests here.’

  Mr Tiarapu nodded, and lay back down.

  I said to the doctors, ‘Don’t you have interpreters here? Because I have to go back to Melbourne tonight. I can’t stay any longer.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I think so,’ said one of the doctors. ‘There’s supposed to be a woman somewhere round, but she’s renowned for her lack of tact.’

  The nurses got Mr Tiarapu ready for the move. I stood between his bed and that of my friend, who had been watching this without speaking. When Mr Tiarapu was on the trolley and it was time to go, he took my hand again and said, ‘You have been very, very kind to me. I will always remember your kindness.’

  My friend also said goodbye, and Mr Tiarapu was wheeled away.

  1980

  PART ONE

  A Scrapbook, an Album

  The Schoolteacher

  IT’S HAPPENED TO me half a dozen times, lately. I’m coming home through the Edinburgh Gardens, or along Brunswick Street at dusk, and I see them a block in front of me, ambling along, shoving each other, heading towards me, their legs a moving thicket—heavy kids, eight of them, maybe ten. I keep walking, but I keep my eyes on them, and my feet wait for the sign to take off.

  The kids are not sharpies. They are Greeks and Italians, all boys, all wearing green or maroon cardigans with a double black stripe round the chest, Levis or Wranglers that fit just right, showing a bit of sock and reddish shoes with big heels. I move across to the outside of the footpath to let them pass without a confrontation. They spread out a little, taking the courtesy as a right. They’re close enough now in the almost-dark for me to see their faces. And it’s all right, because the front one is Chris from Fitzroy High and he says, ‘Hello, miss!’ and the others are kids who have grinned and nodded at me a hundred times in the yard at school.

  I’d already been teaching at Melbourne’s Fitzroy High for a year when, in 1972, I moved into a house right opposite the school. Some teachers, the kind who think if the kids know your first name they’ve got something on you, told me I would find things difficult if I didn’t separate my work from the rest of my life. It was the only house I could find. But I’ve never been sorry.

  The evening I moved in, I was standing at the front gate wondering if I was too lazy to clean up the yard. Two boys from my old second-form class strolled past and stopped for a talk. Jim, a wiry, clever boy considered by most teachers to be lazy, was known as the King, and treated respectfully by people with social acumen. Spiro was one of those boys who are men at fifteen. There were twelve children in his family. I had seen him in the park with some of the smaller children: he was perfectly at ease with them, unabashed to be holding a child in his arms. He had a trick of looking at you through half-closed eyes, with his head tilted back. His courtesy was instinctive. He rarely came to school, and ignored the uniform rule, so was disliked by the administration, but he could not be fazed. Teachers’ tirades simply flowed around him.

  ‘You movin’ in here, miss?’ asked Jim.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why, miss? It’s a dump.’

  I looked at the house. Its paint was peeling, there were holes in the roof, the garden was full of weeds. It was a dump, if you lived in one of those scrubbed shining cottages in Woodhead Street, kept that way by women in black scarves who speak no English and rest in the evenings on chairs on the verandahs, impassively surveying the street.

  ‘Well…I like it, I guess,’ I replied, feeling a little apologetic. We stood in companionable silence in the evening air. Jim whistled calmly through his teeth. Spiro examined the neglected garden.

  ‘What are you gonna plant, miss?’

  ‘Flowers, and some trees.’

  ‘Flowers? Miss, you don’t need flowers. You need tomatoes, and lettuces and beans.

  ’ We considered this advice. They prepared to stroll on.

  ‘One thing you can be sure of, miss,’ said Jim with his ironic, cordial smile. ‘Nothing will be stolen from your house.’

  We said goodnight. The vegetables were never planted, but nor was anything ever stolen.

  I had taught migrants before, but Fitzroy High is one of those legendary inner-suburban schools which can no longer be properly described as Australian. In none of the classes I took were there more than four kids with Australian names. A blond head was a surprise. The administration battled to assimilate these kids into a recognisable mould. In a hundred subtle ways they were defeated. The first official handout of the year included an instruction to teachers about pumpkin seeds. We were told it was a Mediterranean custom to eat them, and that they were not permitted in the school. The reason given was that the shells made a mess. As far as I could see they were no more messy than Cheezels.

  Most of the girls had pierced ears and had worn gold earrings since they were babies. The line was that plain gold sleepers were the only ear decorations allowed. At the time when it was fashionab
le to wear a zillion coloured plastic bangles up your arm, teachers strove hopelessly to prevent this display of gaiety. The girls went on wearing them, and pulled their sleeves down when they saw a senior mistress coming. One of the older women teachers whispered to a hushed staff meeting that girls who were virgins did not wear the bangles: the number of bangles a girl wore indicated exactly how far from virginity she was. ‘And after all,’ the teacher added, ‘one of the things we must teach them is good taste.

  ’ There were weekly segregated assemblies. I don’t know what they told the boys, but at one girls’ assembly I actually heard the senior mistress say, ‘As girls we must be modest, quiet, hardworking and well-groomed at all times.’ One woman teacher had a habit of saying, ‘Girls, if you stood up straight and got your hair out of your eyes, you could really make something of yourselves.’

  What astonished me, the product of a provincial girls’ school, was the stubbornness of the kids’ resistance to these rules. They didn’t organise or protest. They defied. If the pressure got too much for them, they stayed away. And yet they hated to be suspended. One boy was suspended for a week, and every day I’d see him leaning against my front fence, staring wistfully at the school where his mates were tight-roping their way dangerously through the day.

  In the three other schools I’d taught at, I’d been an authoritarian, a ‘good disciplinarian’. It wasn’t only political or educational thinking that changed my attitude at Fitzroy High. It was the kids themselves. I suppose I fell in love with the whole nine hundred of them. In other schools, I’d known kids who were ‘trouble-makers’ or ‘over-achievers’, or ‘responsible’ or ‘antisocial’. But somehow the kids at Fitzroy cut right through those categories.

  To begin with, they made me laugh. I can’t remember ever knowing such exuberant, merry kids. Every class had more than its share of natural clowns. The plays they invented were full of hilarious delight. In a second-form class I had for a year, two Italian boys called Claudio and Joseph used to present weekly plays so excruciatingly funny that we lay across the desks aching and wiping our eyes. The plays were always about a waiter and a diner in a restaurant—an ancient comic relationship. A kid called Ilya wrote wonderful, magical stories; he could write fairy tales his grandparents had told him in Yugoslavia, or stories about going to a soccer match and not realising till he stood up at the end that he’d been sitting on a piece of chewing gum. Lemonia could break your heart with a story about a lost fountain pen, and Dora with an account of her dreams. Their English may have been rocky, but there was a pure, delicate humour lying bone-deep in them that nothing could corrupt.

  Not only did they make me laugh—they looked out for me, came to see me at my house, played with my daughter, shared their food with me, brought me their family photos and pieces of wedding cake. They took care to include me in jokes and games. Looking back on it now, I don’t know for sure which came first—my decision to make my classroom as free as I could, or their open friendliness to me.

  The second year I was there, somehow we started spending as much time out of the school as in. In the warm weather we went to the baths and the park. Having no money, we walked everywhere, in great squads: to the museum, to Melbourne University, the Fitzroy Gardens, along the Merri Creek, to the Carlton theatre, the cemetery, St Patrick’s Cathedral.

  They combined a sophisticated ability to handle their immediate area with astonishing ignorance of how this area fitted into the city as a whole. From our upstairs classroom most form one and two kids weren’t sure in which direction the city lay. Some had never been closer to the city than Johnston Street, the boundary of their suburb but barely a kilometre from Bourke Street. On the other hand a few (boys, of course) sold papers in the city and brought back tales of drunks, working for bosses, swimming at the newsboys’ club. At the end of one school year we took a day trip to a beach on the Mornington Peninsula, an hour’s drive to the south-east of Melbourne. Most of them had never heard of it. It seemed like the end of the earth to them.

  The more time I spent with them, the clearer it became that I was on their side of the fence. I still don’t understand how it happened. I got certain insights when the senior mistress told me to stop wearing jeans to school (I did for a while, then changed my mind). On our long walks, and times in the park and at the baths, I got to know the kids pretty well. If a kid’s rubbing sunburn oil on your back, or if you’re putting a bandaid on her blister, the talk is likely to be frank. Some of them started to call me Helen, but old habits die hard, and they’d address me like this: ‘Helen, I’m going down for the lunches, miss.’ A couple of times I was even called ‘Mum’ (this happens to a lot of teachers)—always by boys, for some reason. They were always mortified by this slip.

  On the long walks they worked hard at teaching me to read the Greek signs in Smith Street. The Clifton Hill kids took me to meet their sixth-grade teacher when we walked past their old school. We got good at ignoring each other’s roles and, when it was appropriate, ignoring each other. They were very easy to be with. Once we spent an afternoon mucking round down the Merri Creek. One of the boys, an Australian called Johnny, stayed with me for the whole afternoon. We talked pleasantly about this and that as we scrambled along the creek, then agreed it was easier to stroll along the level grass at the top than to battle through the rocks and weeds with the others.

  ‘Anyway,’ remarked Johnny, ‘I’m too fat for all this exercise.’

  ‘And I’m too lazy,’ I said.

  ‘So am I. Or…no, I’m not exactly lazy. I just can’t be bothered.’

  One day we walked up to Nicholson Street to the monumental mason. I’d told them how dangerous the workshop was if they weren’t extra careful: great blocks of marble swinging overhead or propped casually against each other, an immense thundering and sawing in the air, dust everywhere. Like all dangerous places, it was terrifically attractive. We got permission to go in, and the workers were explaining to the kids what they were doing, when the dusty air was rent by a frightful scream. Someone had bumped against a block of marble and knocked it on to the foot of Angelo, a chubby Greek boy. He shrieked with pain and fear. Two men lifted the marble and got his shoes off. His foot inflated instantly like a pink balloon. I got the others outside. Their faces were white. Angelo had stopped screaming, and was sobbing quietly. I put him and two of his friends into a taxi, and the rest of us walked back to school, gloomy and frightened. What worried them most was what would happen to me. It wasn’t your fault, miss, it wasn’t your fault!’ they kept saying.

  Back at school we found that Angelo and his friends had taken nearly as long as we had to get back, because the taxi driver had driven round and round the Edinburgh Gardens, pretending he couldn’t understand their directions. ‘Miss we could even see the school, but he kept going round and round!’ They were all nearly crying. We took Angelo to the office and called his mother who worked in a factory in South Melbourne. By the time she got there, Angelo was starting to enjoy himself, resplendently swollen outside the principal’s office. His mother and I took him to the doctor to get an X-ray. We spent three hours in the waiting room, and she spent twelve dollars on the bill. Nothing was broken.

  Next day the kids wrote the story of Angelo’s terrible accident. Their hearts were hard and they turned it into comedy.

  ‘“It ’erts! It ’erts!” shouted Angelo, tearing out his hair,’ began Ronnie’s unsympathetic version. ‘In fact, he made such a song and dance about it that we had to go back to school.’ When Angelo came back a few days later wearing a carpet slipper, he read the stories and knew he was a hero.

  Every week I asked them to write what we called the weekly report. It was to be about anything they liked—something they’d done, thought, heard or read, or seen on TV. I promised that this report would be confidential. After a while, a lot of the kids were writing me what amounted to letters. Many of them even started, ‘Dear miss.’ They wrote about new cars, school rumours, love affairs, market prices, los
t keys, relatives arriving from Europe, tears shed at airports, family fights. (‘From 1860 comes this head you got,’ one kid reported having said to his mother.) At first some of things they wrote scared me a bit, because I had to make up my mind finally which side of the fence I was on. I got to know who was wagging, whose parents didn’t know, who was stealing and what and from who, who’d been sprung and who was in trouble with the police, who bashed who in the yard, who was in love and who was scared. I kept quiet about this.

  One kid was sprung breaking into a house up in Carlton. The school had abandoned all hope of controlling him, and he’d been given an exemption from school to get a job before he was fifteen. He went to work in a shoe factory. He wrote goodbye in his last weekly report.

  Girls who disappeared from school tended to do so with less administrative fuss, but more tears. Some were sent to all-girl Catholic schools because they’d become ‘uncontrollable’. One girl simply vanished. Girls who were sprung shoplifting or wagging took their punishment with lowered heads, except for one girl I remember, Vera, a strapping Yugoslavian who was wrongly accused, by a furious man teacher, of having thrown something out of our room at his classroom window. She burst into screams of rage, right there in front of the class, spouted tears, sobbed aloud, and protested her innocence with such vehemence that she forced him to leave her alone.

  Except for people like Vera and several girls from Clifton Hill, it was the boys who dominated the classroom and the yard with flamboyant outbursts of noise, violence and laughter. The girls, by twelve and thirteen already sharply aware of the roles they were expected to fulfil, were easier and less spectacular company. I seem to have fewer anecdotes about them because they were calmer, more constant, less concerned to impress and amuse me, and physically more at ease with me. When we went walking I had a girl on each arm. They’d hug me without embarrassment, sit crammed up beside me in the desks, ask me what was wrong if I looked worried. Once when I was sick at home with flu, at lunchtime three of the form-one girls burst into my bedroom carrying a wad of cotton wool and a bottle of metho. Ignoring my protests, they soaked the cotton wool in the metho and clapped it onto my throat with a scarf. ‘There, miss,’ they said severely. ‘Now don’t you take that off till you’re better.’