So. This cast of horrid types with their noses running and their hair growing, these variously unsatisfactory specimens who didn’t seem to have any inkling I was the centre of the world, these were to be my schoolmates. Mum and Dad had told me I would make new friends at school. Just another of the lies with which they had lured me to the place. Who could make friends with such macabre children as these? There looked to be about five different species of unsatisfactory infant seated in this room.
As I stared at them I knew school was not for me. And I began to imagine what Mum was up to without me. To see how she struggled at her various tasks alone. Maybe it was golf day. A morning on the broad fairways reciting facts and figures I’d memorised from the Pears’ Cyclopedia to Mum’s perpetually astounded friends was far preferable to this Gomorrah.
I went to Miss Stoddard and told her I was leaving school. It was golf day and Mum needed me to caddy and I didn’t like these children she had gathered together. Australia was fifty-three times as big as Nepal and I was sure Mrs Simson and Mrs Newton didn’t know this yet. I was off to golf to tell them. It was the kind of surprising fact that would have them lowing like cattle. Miss Stoddard took my hand and led me back to my desk and told me to sit down. I was hers until, sometime deep into the afternoon, someone would ring the final bell, and then I could go home. As she was explaining this a girl sitting at a desk behind me with a haircut like the Jack of Spades and long socks as white as snow who had been giving off occasional whimpers and sobs wet herself. Or rather, wet herself and the girl sitting alongside her. As the urine splashed down, dousing and yellowing her socks and puddling on the linoleum and running along the seat and soaking her deskmate’s dress, that deskmate scrambled to her feet and began to cry. The Jack of Spades girl began to bawl as well. Her socks, weighted with piss, fell to her ankles.
Half the class began to cry at the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I horror of the event and at the sudden humiliation of the girl. The other half burst into laughter. Miss Stoddard led the urine-soaked twosome caterwauling from the room. A dark-skinned boy bolted out the door while she was gone and was brought back by his mother, using his ear as a handle, an hour later. So, it was to be this sort of place. An arena in which profound foibles were paraded as slapstick. A cage where the frailties of my fellows might be put on display and fed peanuts. A place where we could scoff at each other’s infirmities and cry havoc and let slip the hilarious mayhem that preyed on pants-pissers. So. A morning of golf with Mum and her amigos suddenly seemed tame. Let those old biddies cram the Pears’ Cyclopaedia into their buggies and look up their own fascinating facts. I smiled and settled into my desk for further exciting developments. At morning playtime we broke from our lesson, and milk monitors, large boys from senior years, delivered a crate of small bottles of milk and we were given one each. We peeled the red and silver foil tops from our bottles and drank. This milk was warmer and tasted more milky than the milk at home, hinting of a corrupt, cheesy future. I skolled mine to show everyone how fast I could drink milk and spent the rest of playtime eyeing off the milk of more abstemious individuals who sipped and smacked their lips and lorded it over those rash few who had drunk theirs hoggishly. The girls in my class proved to be especially able to ration and enjoy their milk and glowed with an annoying smugness to us guzzlers. They held their bottles up alongside one another to measure who had most left. Every day for my seven years at North Shepparton Primary I hogged down my milk and promptly set about coveting the milk of those who hadn’t.
One day, a few years later, the dairy delivered the school seven hundred little bottles of milk gone rancid in such a bacterially covert way that none of us could taste its wrongness. We drank as usual, the greedy coveting the milk of the sippers, the show-offs skolling their own milk and the milk of the unwary, then smacking their lips and aahing theatrically.
Within a half hour the student body became queasy. The colour drained from its many small heads and it laid its palms gently on its seven-hundred fragile stomachs. I feel sick. I feel sick too. I feel really sick. I really feel sicker.
You will have seen that film in which a ping-pong ball is thrown into a room carpeted with mousetraps all set and loaded with two ping-pong balls each. The first trap hit fires off two balls that hit two traps firing four balls etc. The air is suddenly ablaze with flying balls and the white storm of multiplying consequence is over very quickly.
Meredith Hanley was the first metaphorical ball that landed in the queasy campus of North Shepp Primary. She vomited while being comforted by two slightly less ill friends. But not so less ill that they didn’t both reflexively vomit in response. Within a minute fusillades of milky spew were raking the campus, dousing would-be medics and drenching educators. Infectious geysers of albino bile sought out the innocent and smartly dressed. Never one to waste a crisis, I chucked up on Terry Holmes because he owned a book called Stig of the Dump which I thought might be better owned by me. Terry, being a shy boy and not wanting to disturb anyone, vomited into his own lap.
The desks had flip-up lids, under which was a compartment to store our books and pencils. Two ceramic inkwells sat in holes at the far corners of the desktop. We were too young to be permitted to use ink, so we filled the inkwells with dead or maimed flies and treasurable nose pickings. The classroom smelt of sour children and was full of flies and boy would bet boy as to who could kill the most during the course of an afternoon.
The silent and efficient method was to let one land on your face and then slap it gently, trapping it, so you could roll it down your cheek until it was smeared and maimed, whereupon you’d pop the twitching prize into the inkwell, leaving a few legs tangled in the peach fuzz on your jaw. At day’s end the contestants would upend their inkwells and count the flies. Amorphously astounding nose pickings would also tumble forth, but these, while admirable, weren’t scored.
Bomber Johnson from the Housing Commission soon became the acknowledged champion of the fly cull. Flies newly born in cowsheds and offal bins in other latitudes picked up Bomber’s scent as a guiding star and, bypassing galaxies of cowpats and several town rubbish tips without looking sideways, they made their quavering pilgrimage to him. We knew he was a bit whiffy, but one day he casually revealed his house was unplumbed, and that no one in his family had ever had a bar … bar … bath or shar … shar … shower so far as he knew.
We took this badly. It was the sort of advantage about which a fair-minded boy would have told his opponent before entering into a fly-culling contest. It was virtually an admission of professionalism in an age of amateurs. Not quite above board. But we didn’t know this until late in the game, and Bomber had many days of glory before we realised he was a bacteriological Siren calling winged Argonauts along a violin-note flight path to certain doom.
Miss Stoddard sat me next to Kelvin Woodhouse. She might as well have sat Charles Darwin next to a whelk. I was curious and I was bristling with quasi-scientific tools of investigation. It was an unhappy day for Kelvin, and if he vectored into criminality and unsociability in later life, became what the news reports call ‘a loner’, then I accept my portion of the blame. Because he was a sensitive kid and his sensitivity was a Lalique vase to a vandal.
Miss Stoddard was an elfin young woman who sat out front of the class in a short skirt, up which I tried to see, reading to us about John and Betty. Two bigger dicks than John and Betty you’ve never met. I quickly became disgusted at their goodness and pliability as they frolicked, actually frolicked, with their happy, yappy dog Spot. Illustrations showed Spot never had four legs on the ground at once, which bespoke a limitless capacity to be gay and amusing. John, or Betty, or both, also owned a witlessly personable cat named Fluffy.
I once asked Miss Stoddard what would happen to Fluffy if I fired her from a cannon at a tin shed and she made me stand outside for an hour beating the wadded felt blackboard duster with a ruler and thereby raising a cloud of coloured chalk dust. I beat that duster frequently after that, and al
ways went home hued the colour of that day’s lesson. If, for instance, Miss Stoddard drew a red hippo eating yellow grass on the blackboard alongside a song about hippos, I would ask if it was a picture of Deidre Lowe. Deidre Lowe would hunch and snuffle miserably to be compared to a crimson hippo and I would, at lesson’s end, be punished by having to erase the blackboard and then take the duster outside and clean it by beating it with a ruler, thereby raising an orange fog made of red hippo and yellow grass. As my skin became wet I would march back and forth through the orange fog and it would settle brightly on me and I would cycle home the colour of an Oompa Loompa.
If Miss Stoddard thought I found this embarrassing, she was wrong. I enjoyed leaving school as gaudily coloured as an Oz extra. The eyes of one particular old couple leaning on their wire fence in Cotrell Street would widen as I rode past on my way home. Her eyesight was going and he would narrate my passing for her. ‘Look, Doris. It’s the coloured boy. Orange today. Orange as orange can be.’ I imagined they thought me a sprite leapt from the flagon of sweet sherry that was always plugged into the horse-manured garden bed between them. Most old people were drunk in those days. ‘Why is a boy riding around orange?’ he’d ask her.
One day Miss Stoddard was teaching us a song from The Sound of Music. She had drawn an alpine scene on the blackboard, luring us to sing of a lonely goatherd. But I had substituted ‘old turd’ for ‘goatherd’ and sang too loudly, ‘High on a hill was a lonely old turd, Oh diddlee oh diddlee oh oh oh …’ You know how it goes.
My punishment was to erase those mountains and then go outside and clean the duster. Once outside I beat the duster and writhed in the fog made of that obliterated mountainscape upon which the von Trapps’ lonely goatherd had fed his mangy flock.
As I rode home I saw the old couple standing holding onto their fence watching their swatch of streetscape. I pedalled along on the footpath, right up close to them to hear what they said. ‘Well … jingoes, Doris … He’s green today. Green as clover.’
‘Who? The boy?’
‘Yes. The coloured boy.’
‘Sing out to him and ask him why he’s green.’
‘Why are you green?’ the old duffer shouted at me.
‘Because “goatherd” rhymes with “old turd”,’ I shouted back. I think that cleared it up for them.
John and Betty had picnics and held hands. Were they lovers or siblings? I couldn’t tell. They seemed to fill both roles at various times. Why read to us of such suspect types? John skipped rope like a girl, and handed the rope over to Betty without a fight when she wanted a turn. John, John, John … John made me gag with abhorrence. John sported the invulnerable happiness of a labrador or a sitcom housemaid. What chance did John have of fooling anyone into painting a fence for him? John and Betty were supposed to awaken an appetite for reading in us. They awakened an appetite for throwing John and Betty down a well in me.
Mid-morning, and John and Betty were frolicking as best they could given the stilted, haphazardly emphasised reading of Miss Stoddard. (She would, for instance, read a sentence like, ‘John could jump ever so high.’ Putting the emphasis on ‘John’ or ‘jump’ or ‘so’ – the only words where it made no sense at all.) I took Kelvin’s shiny new red-lead pencil out of the trough where it lay on his side of our desk and bit it clean in half. Kelvin made a noise like a sensitive boy who has had his new pencil bitten in half by a less sensitive boy, and Miss Stoddard stopped reading right when John was admonishing Spot for barking at a squirrel and invited Kelvin to come out front of the class and explain to us what he was making silly noises about. Kelvin hung his head and sat in his seat. The front of the classroom was bathed in a scarifying limelight that made him wince and squirm. ‘Come out here at once, Kelvin.’ He drooged draggingly out to where she sat and she spun him around to face us. ‘Now, tell the class why you’ve put an end to story reading with your silly noises.’
‘I … but … Miss Stoddard?’
‘Yes, Kelvin.’
‘Can I tell on a boy who did something?’
‘Yes, Kelvin.’
‘Anson bited my red lead in two bits.’
The class laughed wildly at this crazy idea. Though I was a known vandal it was a dentally implausible feat. A boy is not a beaver. Miss Stoddard wandered back and looked down at Kelvin’s pencil trough. I had replaced his mauled red lead with my own, which was perfectly unmarked.
‘Kelvin.’
‘Yes, Miss Stoddard.’
‘Go to Mr Schatz’s office and tell him you are a liar. Mr Schatz despises liars.’
I stood up. ‘It’s all right, Miss Stoddard. I don’t care about that lie.’
‘Don’t you? Why not?’
‘Kelvin’s been telling whoppers all morning.’ The class laughed so loud Mr Smith, a grade six teacher, came from next door to make sure Miss Stoddard wasn’t injured. And here was my first inkling that I might be an insurrectionist par excellence and a smart-arse of note. The thrill of the class’ laughter was like nothing I’d known. My ego took its first intra-aural hit of notoriety and was hooked and I never again strayed too far for too long from the centre of attention. The laughter of schoolmates was an anaesthetic pay-off that denied the pain of the canings and detentions and other punishments it instigated.
Kelvin was allowed to go back to his seat. I was made to stand in the corner facing the wall for my silly joke. But my ego had become another nerve and I could feel the eyes of the class upon my back like early morning sun while lying on a favourite riverbank.
Kelvin was moved. Thus began a rotation of students sitting alongside me that continued right through primary school. Most kids could only last a few days of my incessant persecution. The toughest could last a week or so. I wanted to keep my hands off them and their possessions. But always, in the end, my inability to restrain myself, my overwhelming need to tease and stir, to see what would happen if I took this possession, asked this question, or poked that bit of flesh, led to tears, a fight, or some kid hiding out in the library and refusing to come back to class. Then they would be relocated.
After a few weeks of Betty and John I started to develop a yearning to stand up while Miss Stoddard was reading and say, ‘Fuck John.’ I had a great faith in swearing then. I saw it as the language of elevated urgency. Adults used it when cars burst into flames or fine porcelain smashed. It was a kind of Latin to speak to the God of emergency.
The word ‘fuck’ was the greatest act of insurrection I knew, and it seemed right for John, and my yearning grew stronger by the day. I convinced myself it was for the greater good. That by my brave renunciation of John the Banal my classmates would be freed from the pale spell of goodness he had cast over them. I thought through the repercussions time and again, and it seemed to me after a brief outrage people would come around, would blink and shake their heads suddenly aware of the dangerously happy trance in which John had held them captive. Then, having debunked this effete svengali who was taking them on inglorious picnics with his sister/girlfriend, I would be feted.
Nearing the end of first term, having played the triumphant scenes that flowed from my proclamation over and over in my head, having imagined Miss Stoddard gaping in new hostility at the John and Betty primary reader and dashing it to the floor and agreeing with me. ‘Quite right, Anson. Fuck John. And fuck Betty too.’ And stamping her foot on that book and grinding its pages beneath her heel before whipping a copy of Huck Finn from behind her back and announcing, ‘Now … now we really read.’ Having conjured this happy coup so many times, I was ready.
I stood up from my desk while Miss Stoddard read of the dull duo heading out on another maudlin jaunt and I said what I had to say about John.
The outcome wasn’t the one I’d fantasised. Teacher and students were stunned silent by me bringing the playground commonplace ‘fuck’ into the classroom and lobbing it at an adult. A boy alongside me mimed ‘fuck’ slowly, reviewing the horror of what I’d said. Miss Stoddard laid the John and Betty primary
reader on the floor beside herself quietly and came to me and took me with gentle portent by the elbow and led me out of the room. Looking over my shoulder as I left I saw fear on the faces of my classmates, which sent a flow of heroism through me and straightened my spine.
Remembering this I feel a happy affinity with my young self. For even today I can barely sit through a movie, certainly not an opera, and only napkin-twistingly through a speech, without feeling a deep urge to stand and say the same of the leading man, soprano or blowhard.
To Mr Schatz’s office, then. It was our first meeting, and with the sumptuous malevolence only a truly fat man can display, he puckered his lips out and elegantly indicated where I should stand and mimed how I should hold my hand. He unrolled a leather strap as large as a cobra and whipped me across the left hand with it as loudly as a cad is slapped in a pantomime. I walked back to class shaking, breathing a ragged overture to tears, and holding my hand before me as if begging change.
This hand was thereby transformed into a wonder for a day and I became briefly famous. During lunchtime boys from the upper grades crossed illegally from their zones into our infant area to ogle the welt across my palm and say they’d seen worse. But it was clear from their eyes that I had wrestled a croc and lived.
Buttoned up in grey shorts and shirt and grey school jumper, with socks pulled high and secured by garters, the bike ride from Talinga Crescent to North Shepparton Primary School took about fifteen minutes if you were really going for it. If you went along The Boulevard you rode the gauntlet of fast trucks and their monstrous after-suck, and drunks shouted up at you from the riverside bush. You passed Stuarts meatworks where the pigs that had squealed across the neighbourhood during the night were being portioned into various smallgoods. Then the plaster works where ghost-white men in dustman caps smoked and leant and called filth at you as you pedalled past.
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