by Geoff Palmer
‘It’ll be fun going to a country school,’ their mother had enthused from her hospital bed. ‘You’ll make lots of new friends. And they have animal days and things like that.’
‘Animal days is right,’ Coral confirmed at the end of the first week. ‘The whole place is full of them.’
6 : City Boy
The morning dragged. As soon as he’d settled at his desk Tim knew it was going to be a long day. The missing hours of sleep seemed to crowd behind him and lean on his shoulders. He tried to concentrate on what Mr Millais was saying but they pressed down relentlessly and Millais’ thin nasal voice dissolved into a stream that sounded like nyah-ny-nyah-nyah, nyah-nyah-ny-nyah ...
Tim sat up suddenly. The whole class was silent. Everyone was looking at him, and Millais was glaring. All he’d heard was, ‘... nyah-ny-nyah-nyah, Mr Townsend? Mr Townsend!’
That was bad. Snotty Millais only ever called his pupils ‘Mr’ (or ‘Miss’) when he was annoyed — which seemed to be quite a lot of the time.
‘Um ...’ was all Tim could think to say.
‘The mountain, Mr Townsend. D’you recall a mountain? What mountain are we talking about?’
Startled from its snooze, Tim’s brain seized up completely. The only mountain he could think of was the silly bump in the playground outside and before he could stop himself he blurted, ‘Moron.’
There was a collective gasp. His classmates looked at each other. Did Tim Townsend just call their teacher a ...? Someone sniggered. That was enough. The class dissolved into howls of laughter.
‘What?’ Snotty Millais cried above the din.
‘Moron, sir?’ Tim tried desperately.
The class roared louder.
There was a sharp tap on the door and the room fell silent. It opened to reveal Mrs Millais, principal of Rata Area School.
‘My, we are all jolly this morning, aren’t we?’ Her voice was mild but her eyes were icy. They came to rest on her husband.
‘Just indulging in a little geographical humour, weren’t we ... Tim,’ Mr Millais said.
Tim swallowed and nodded.
‘Well,’ she smiled, the coldness in her expression remaining unchanged. ‘If you wouldn’t mind just ...’ she made a keep-the-volume-down motion with her hands. ‘We’re having a test next door.’
Mr Millais sprang to see her out but she was gone before he got there. He turned back to the class.
‘Now, where were we? Ah, yes ...’
* * *
‘Oi! City boy! Biscuit Tax,’ a gruff voice behind him called.
‘Oops,’ thought Tim, suddenly finding himself surrounded. Where was his brain today? He knew the area behind the derelict prefab was the Thug Brothers’ lair. How had he let himself wander into it?
The problem with a school of just seventy-nine pupils was that everyone knew everyone else so it had taken all of ten seconds for his infamy to spread. Everyone thought he was a hero. Only he wasn’t. He’d never talk to a teacher like that, but no one would listen and the story grew bigger each time it was retold. In disgust, and with a vague notion that a bit of exercise might clear his sleep-fudged brain, he’d gone for a walk. Only now he’d gone too far.
Terry, Todd and Tyler Thuggut were fifteen, fourteen and twelve-and-a-half respectively. And they were big. Not big in the awkward gangly sense of Romany Jones but big in the sense of solid, strong, well co-ordinated slabs of muscle. Their solidness went skull-deep. There were stories of Tyler getting hit on the head by a brick. It bounced off. Terry was rumoured to have butted a billy goat — and won, while Todd had cracked a tile in the local swimming pool when he collided with the side trying to do backstroke. But slow wits and thick skulls don’t necessarily equate with slow reactions. Tyrannosaurus Rex might have had a tiny brain but that didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous.
Every break, lunchtime and after school the Thugguts occupied the area behind the derelict prefab, out of sight of the main school building. It was a remote and gloomy strip of playground tucked between the abandoned classrooms and the dense stand of gorse that formed the school boundary, but it had one strategic advantage.
The gorse, wild and rampant, ran around three of the school’s four boundaries, rising to a height of three metres or more. While town and its temptations — all twelve shops worth — were two-and-a-half kilometres away by the lazy loop of School Road (No Exit), it was barely half that distance via a shortcut through the gorse. The zigzag path was known simply as the Gap and it began out of sight of the main school building behind the dilapidated prefab. It wasn’t a popular route. It was dark and spooky and overgrown in places, but if you wanted to sneak away at lunchtime, duck home for forgotten homework or just head into town for a snack, it was the quickest, easiest and least obtrusive means of escape.
But the Gap had its gatekeepers, and its gatekeepers demanded a toll.
‘Biscuit Tax,’ Tyler Thuggut repeated, shoving his meaty hand into Tim’s midriff.
‘But I wasn’t going into town.’
‘Too late. You’re on our patch. Biscuit Tax.’ He prodded Tim again.
‘Um ...’ Tim swallowed. He didn’t have anything on him.
The minimum tax was one Gingernut for each brother on duty. For thinner fare — wine biscuits, malt biscuits or crackers — they’d demand two apiece, while a Toffee Pop or Mallowpuff would buy you a return trip.
‘I haven’t got anything,’ Tim said.
Tyler Thuggut sighed, crossed his arms and wearily shook his head. Somewhere in his dinosaur skull a tiny lamp flickered, the recognition that eating biscuits took up less energy than administering a beating, but what could he do? Rules were rules.
‘Oi,’ a deeper voice behind him boomed and an even meatier hand than Tyler’s clamped his shoulder. Tim spun around to face Terry, the eldest, a Year Eleven, and already as big as an All Black prop.
Terry squinted down at him. ‘You the one what called Snotty Millais a moron?’
Tim was about to protest when he noticed a tell-tale flicker, a flicker that suggested approval, even admiration. He took a risk.
‘Er ... yeah,’ he said.
‘Nice one!’ Terry grinned, giving him a playful slap the felt like a high-speed collision with a brick wall. ‘We’ll let ya off for that. Now scarper.’ He turned to his brothers, adding, ‘Our sis is comin’.’
Tim didn’t wait to hear any more. He scarpered.
7 : Monsters
On his way back across the playground a slight, raven haired girl backed across his path. Tim collided with her and she scowled at him, revealing a rather unpleasant set of narrow, pointy teeth.
‘Sorry,’ Tim said, though it wasn’t really his fault. He recognised her as Amber Eloise Sauvage, one of the older girls in his class.
‘Watch where you’re going!’ she snapped and punched him on the arm.
‘Ow!’ Tim cried. It really hurt. The pain seemed out of all proportion to the strength of the blow.
The huddle of girls Amber had been standing with giggled as he continued on his way.
Still rubbing his arm, Tim came across Stormin’ Norman Smith, the only real friend he’d made so far at Rata School. The nickname was ironic. Norman didn’t storm. He was pale and timid, an intense boy with a passion for maths, and so physically unfit he got puffed playing computer games. Since they were the same age, Norman had been given the task of showing Tim the ropes on his first day.
‘I ... don’t really know where the ropes are,’ he admitted hesitantly. ‘But I can show you everything else.’
Tim liked him immediately. Beside Norman he felt confident and worldly wise. For his part, Norman regarded Tim with something close to awe. He was from another world, a world of traffic jams, supermarkets and skyscrapers.
‘Hi Norman.’
‘Hi Tim. I was just looking for you.’ Norman was always keen to be seen with his sophisticated friend, especially today, especially with Tim’s new notoriety.
‘I just ran into the Thug Br
others,’ Tim said.
Norman’s eyes widened. ‘Are you all right?’ He gestured to where Tim was still rubbing his arm.
‘Oh, that wasn’t them. They were pretty cool actually.’ Tim could never resist showing off in front of Norman. ‘That was Amber Sauvage. She bumped into me then went and whacked me for it.’
Norman blinked, open-mouthed. In his quiet world this was heady stuff.
‘She’s a Year Nine isn’t she?’
Norman nodded. Tim and Norman were mere Year Eights. No wonder she’d punched him.
It was this crazy Area School idea. Back home students went from primary, to intermediate, then on to secondary. In Rata they went from Classroom Three to Classroom Two to Classroom One. With just three rooms, three teachers and half a caretaker — Sam Crotchett only worked part-time — there was a lot of doubling-up, splitting of classes and separate activities. Except for shared subjects like art and sport, there were sometimes two, three or even four separate groups at work within each room.
The bell rang. Low groans sounded round the playground.
‘Hey, I didn’t know the Thug Brothers had a sister,’ Tim said as they headed back to class.
Norman’s mum ran the General Store so he knew all the town gossip. ‘A step-sister actually. The original Mrs Thuggut died.’
‘She must be pretty scary, that’s all I can say,’ Tim said. ‘Does she weigh a hundred kilos and eat kittens for breakfast?’
‘Er, no, actually,’ Norman said. ‘You just met her in fact. She’s the one who punched you.’
* * *
There was only one person more exotic than Tim Townsend as far as Stormin’ Norman Smith was concerned and that was his sister Coral, so when she sidled up to them at lunchtime and suggested that her brother ‘Ditch the dweeb’ he supposed it was some sort of secret Auckland slang.
Tim glanced from Norman to Romany Jones — hovering in Coral’s wake as usual — and took Norman aside.
His sister, he explained, was looking for someone to help Romany with Pythagoras’ Theorem. Recognising Norman’s mathematical skills, she’d sought out his assistance for a struggling fellow pupil. And struggle Romany did, especially when Coral and her brother disappeared into the school building. But Norman was insistent. Emboldened by the request and its golden-haired requester, he dragged Romany’s attention back to the triangle he’d outlined on the ground and started on a lengthy explanation of the hypotenuse.
‘We’ve got biology this afternoon,’ Coral explained, ‘and I got volunteered to help Cakeface set things up.’ She nodded towards a large microscope. ‘I thought we could take a closer look at that calculator thing.’
‘Are we allowed in here?’ Tim asked.
‘Course not,’ she replied casually. ‘You know what Cakeface is like. C’mon on.’
‘You shouldn’t call her that. She might have a skin disease or something.’
‘She’s got a disease all right. She’s old and crabby.’
The school’s only microscope stood on a low bench by the whiteboard. Coral tipped the calculator into the palm of her hand, scooped it on to a glass slide and slid it under the lens.
‘Take a look,’ she nudged Tim.
He pressed his eye to the eyepiece and fiddled with the focus. ‘Oh man! That’s incredible!’
‘Let me look!’
She elbowed him aside and gave a sharp intake of breath as she refocussed the microscope. Through the magnifying glass at the kitchen table they’d been able to see the device was more complicated than a calculator, but the microscope showed it was even more complicated than they’d imagined.
Banks of switches were arranged around a central display and each switch had a tiny symbol on top that glowed faintly. They sat in asterisk-shaped channels that allowed them to be moved in one of eight different directions. Many had been set up, down, left, right or sideways, breaking up what would otherwise have been neatly ordered ranks. It made them hard to count but there had to be at least a hundred of them.
Beneath the switches lay a fine mesh of semi-transparent tubes through which something seemed to be moving. Now and then you’d catch flicker of it, like a movement in the corner of your eye. But weirdest of all was the oval display. Last night the buttons hadn’t glowed and the display screen just looked like a tiny piece of blue-grey glass. Today, however, the device had been activated — perhaps from jiggling around in Tim’s shirt pocket — and the display glowed with a swirling, shifting mass of symbols. Some looked like numbers, some like letters, and they swelled to the surface of the screen like bubbles rising from a great depth. They were delicately shaded too, in all the colours of the rainbow.
Coral adjusted the microscope slightly and gasped again. The screen had more than one layer. By gently shifting focus, the first level faded to reveal another one below it. More strange symbols, but static this time.
‘Wow!’ she breathed.
‘My turn,’ Tim prompted.
‘Hang on.’
She shifted focus again, moving deeper into the display. Layer after layer faded in and out. Further down she found images of staggering complexity, sharp angular shapes blending with objects that might have been photographed through an electron microscope. Then she came across something she recognised. A skull.
‘Ugh!’ she drew back.
‘Let me look!’ Tim said.
Coral held her ground and looked again. The skull was lit with a reddish light and rotated slowly. She could see it wasn’t human. From the side it was long and elliptical with a large beak-like opening for the mouth and deep wide ovals for the eyes.
She shuddered and stepped aside. Tim barged in.
‘Oh man! How’d you make it do that? That’s really neat.’
‘It’s horrid. It’s a monster.’
‘No, you idiot,’ Tim laughed. ‘I’ve seen pictures like that in books. It’s a mouse skull.’
He glanced up from the eyepiece, grinning at his sister, and saw that her gaze was locked on something behind him. He turned and found himself staring at a real-life monster, Rata Area School’s principal, Cakeface Millais.
8 : Caught!
If forced to choose, most people in Rata would rather have met with Medusa, Sauron, Voldemort and the creature from the Alien movies than spend an afternoon with Millicent Millais. She was feared from Year One up to Year Thirteen and beyond. It didn’t matter who you were. It didn’t matter if you’d mastered kung fu, captained the All Blacks or led SAS missions behind enemy lines, Millicent Millais would defeat you. She was invincible. She couldn’t be beaten. She used the most devilish weapon ever devised; sweetness.
‘Timothy and Coral Townsend.’ She said, looking from one to the other as they straightened and tried to hide what they were doing. ‘Our city refugees.’ She smiled sweetly, but it was a mechanical smile that left the rest of her waxy features unmoved.
‘Did I not explain the rules, children? I’m sure I did. On your very first day here. Hmm?’ She spoke slowly, prompting with a waggle of her head that seemed out of place in a fifty-something-year-old woman.
‘I was ... um ... showing Tim the microscope,’ Coral stammered.
‘Of course you were, dear. I could see that. But I wasn’t talking about Mr Microscope. I was talking about Mr Rule Book. What does Mr Rule Book have to say on the subject of lunchtimes and sunny days, hmm?’
Tim swallowed noisily. Coral stared back at Mrs Millais framed in the
doorway with her sweet smile and threatening patience.
’“On sunny days, go out and play. Don’t come indoors, or you’ll get chores”,’ she intoned tunelessly.
‘Very good, Coral. So you do know. And do you know why we have this rule, hmm?’ They shook their heads. ‘It’s to help protect our precious things. Like Mr Microscope.
‘Imagine if we let you run in and out all the time. Someone bumps the bench, and over goes Mr Microscope — crash! — on to the floor. Oh dear, poor Mr Microscope, all bent and broken. Oh dear, po
or school, no more microscope.
‘Now,’ she suddenly advanced into the room, making Tim and Coral take a step backwards, ‘let me see what could be holding your interest on such a lovely sunny day. I do hope it’s educational.’
Tim and Coral exchanged mortified glances. If she saw what they’d been looking at the wondrous calculator would certainly be confiscated. What then? It would end up in a lab somewhere, getting pulled to bits. Neither of them would ever see it again. Or the mice.
‘It’s ... just something I found in the playground,’ Tim said, desperately playing for time.
Mrs Millais glanced at him as she bent her angular body to the microscope, one arched eyebrow suggesting disbelief. How much had she heard? How long had she been standing in the doorway?
Up close, the reason for her nickname became clear. Her make-up seemed to have been applied with a trowel, as though she’d tried to fill in all the lines in her face with it. It had an unnaturally rich orange colour too. Her lips — the red a little too red — and eyebrows — the black a little too black — looked as if they’d been painted in, perhaps because neither really existed.
Millicent Millais set her eye to the eyepiece.
‘Aaaa-chhoooo!’ Coral sneezed violently.
It was a big blustery fake sneeze aimed directly at the microscope. Tim saw the calculator fly off the glass slide and land on to the bench top.
Mrs Millais snapped upright, seizing them both by the wrist.
‘Oh dear, Coral, you seem to have caught a cold. I think I’d better take you two back to my office.’ Tim looked helplessly at where the calculator lay as she began dragging them away. ‘We don’t want you spreading it around, do we dear?’ Her grip was firm and cold, like the grip of a pair of pliers. ‘Unless of course you want to tell me what it was you were looking at? Hmm?’
Her steely eyes surveyed them. ‘Something small and dark and covered with bright reflections. I shall just come back and find it for myself you know.’