Shauna's Great Expectations

by Kathleen Loughnan

  When Jenny and I are done salivating over Parisian fantasies in the common room, I go back to the dorms. After a ten-minute wait in the eternal queue for the phone in Miss Maroney’s office, I ring home. My dad answers in his usual chipper tone. Still excited, I tell him about the plans for Paris, but he doesn’t really get it.

  ‘What about university, Shauna?’

  ‘I’m still going to university, Dad. I’d go to Paris during the holidays.’

  ‘You don’t even have a passport.’

  ‘I can apply for one at the Barraba Post Office.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should be concentrating on your HSC?’

  ‘Paris would be after the HSC.’

  Dad’s silent for a few seconds. Then he says, ‘What do you want to go to Paris for anyway? You’ve already been to Toulouse.’

  Aaaaargh! I could scream at him, but I don’t. God, it drives me crazy that he has so little understanding of my life. He has no idea about how things work, even when they’re basic, and even when I spend time explaining them. He may be in Barraba and I may be in Sydney, but we are a universe apart. He and Mum live in a jar with the lid screwed on tightly, and if I still lived with them, I’d never go further than the lid.

  ‘Come on, Dad . . . who wouldn’t want to go to Paris?’

  ‘Well . . . I suppose if you had the money . . .’ He tries to rally some enthusiasm. ‘Yeah, I s’pose it’d be an interesting place to visit. I’d like to have gone, if I’d had the opportunity.’ He clears his throat.

  My dad’s a nice bloke, a softie, a pushover even. He may be a big, burly, bearded truck driver, but there’s nothing tough about him.

  ‘How’s Mum?’

  ‘Oh, she has her spells. She still sleeps a lot.’

  ‘Has she been doing much painting?’

  ‘She finished a beautiful tropical fish painting last week. It’s huge. I’m taking it into the bank tomorrow to see if they’ll buy it. They’d be crazy not to.’

  Lately Mum’s been selling some of her work to local businesses. She makes the most amazing paintings, using tropical colours, a lot of blues and greens and purples. She never painted much before Jamie died, but she’s obsessed with it now. I guess she has more free time because I’m at boarding school.

  ‘Do you want to speak to her?’ Dad asks.

  I don’t know exactly why, but I find it hard to speak to Mum on the phone when I’m at Oakholme. I always get emotional, on the edge of tears, and there’s always this queue of impatient, aggressively sighing boarders waiting just outside the door. Sometimes they knock and yell exhortations to hurry up. (Sometimes I do, too!)

  ‘Nah, don’t worry. I don’t want to bother her. Tell her about Europe, though?’

  There’s a short pause. Then: ‘I thought you wanted to go to Paris?’

  Oh my God. . .

  I tell him I love him and hang up. I fling open the door of Miss Maroney’s office and see that Olivia Pike’s next in the queue. She looks shocked to see me, then afraid, and finally airily contemptuous. I stalk past her and trot up the stairs past the painting of the old perv Reverend Doctor Sterling McBride.

  It’s been a few weeks since my first meeting with Olivia and we’ve managed to avoid eye contact since then, in spite of living, studying and eating in the same building. Sure, I’ve seen her around, watched her try to but not quite fit in with the other young boarders she bunks with, but I still haven’t made any attempt to talk to her. Bugger her. The other day I noticed her heading into the sick bay with the nurse, Mrs Davis. She looked over her shoulder in terror at me, but said nothing. It probably won’t be long until Olivia scuttles back to wherever she came from.

  When I get to my dorm room, I sweep up an armful of French books and head back downstairs to the prep. hall. The whole top floor of the building is dedicated to dorms, and downstairs are ‘service’ rooms, like the dining room, the rec. room, the offices and good old prep. hall. Prep. hall is a theoretically quiet, peaceful place where boarders can go to do their homework. It has all the outer dressings of study – desks, chairs, computers and printers – but precious little actual homework ever gets done there. It’s more of a place to congregate with friends and rake over the daily muck before dinner.

  Almost everything at Oakholme – the rooms, the decor, the furniture – is old. There’s some nasty synthetic-looking blue carpet in the library that must be from the eighties, but everything else is antique and ornate. In the prep. hall, there’s a magnificent crystal chandelier hanging overhead, but no one ever looks at it. The good taste that the Oakholme parents pay for is largely wasted on its students.

  This is the conversation I walk in on when I enter prep. hall to join my posse – Lou-Anne, Indu and Bindi: ‘One day I just decided where my eyebrows would go and I had the rest of my face lasered.’ Bindi raises the highly arched, impeccably sculpted eyebrows in question.

  ‘I detest the very idea of it,’ says Indu, who has a basic philosophical objection to depilation. ‘What if one day in the future you decide you want to regrow your eyebrows?’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  Indu looks pensive for a moment. ‘What about when you’re a granny?’

  ‘You think I’ll want a monobrow when I’m a granny?’

  ‘I think that perhaps you’ll want to look a little less quizzical than you do right now.’

  Everyone, including Bindi, cracks up. I plonk my French books on the table.

  ‘Bindi, you are over-groomed,’ declares Indu, leading to more uproarious laughter.

  ‘She means naturally beautiful,’ adds Lou-Anne.

  They’re both right. Bindi is naturally beautiful, with huge eyes, high cheekbones and an elegant, aquiline nose. But she also has eyeliner tattooed on and she straightens and lengthens her naturally curly hair – all of which she gets away with in spite of the school rules against make-up, perms and hair extensions. I suppose the school can’t force you to wipe off things that are semi-permanent or irreversible.

  Still chuckling, I open my French novel, L’Étranger by Albert Camus.

  ‘I don’t know how you can read that,’ says Lou-Anne.

  ‘I can’t read it while you’re talking to me.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to read a book written in French?’ Lou-Anne continues.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t get into my head through osmosis,’ I tell her. ‘I have to read it.’ I glare pointedly at her Christian Studies textbook. ‘I think you’ll find the same applies to the study of religion.’

  ‘What’s osmosis?’ asks Lou-Anne seriously.

  Indu and I share a subtle eye roll.

  Indu’s in Year 11 like Lou-Anne, and she’s pretty bright. Sometimes I wonder what will happen to Indu and Lou-Anne when Bindi and I leave at the end of the year. Will they become best friends? Will they take to their new dorm buddies? I try to imagine what it will be like for Lou-Anne to suddenly lose me. Next year I’ll be at university during the semester and, hopefully, overseas with Jenny during the holidays.

  Jenny and Lou-Anne have a frosty relationship – more of a non-relationship actually. They don’t have a thing in common except me. Lou-Anne is my all-time best friend, but during school hours Jenny often trumps her. I downplay the friendship with Jenny to avoid Lou-Anne getting huffy. Jenny, on the other hand, seems to understand that I’m closer to Lou-Anne and doesn’t hold it against me.

  I go back to L’Étranger and try to read, but Paris creeps into my brain.

  Jenny and I had the time of our lives in Toulouse at the end of Year 10. Even though it was the middle of winter and freezing like we’d never known, we loved it. Jenny said that she felt glamorous, like the star of an old movie. I fell in love with the city for different reasons. In France, I had this feeling of being unknown, and I liked it. No one knew me or anything about my past. No one made any assumptions about my character. Shopkeepers didn’t follow me around the shops. Commuters didn’t stand in the aisle rather than sit down next to me. I fel
t free. I liked the indifference, the sense of being just another foreigner. Being a foreigner in a foreign country, as opposed to being a foreigner in my own country.

  I read the same paragraph of L’Étranger six times before surrendering again to my daydreams.

  4

  IN FRENCH THIS year we’re reading a short story called Boule de Suif by a nineteenth-century French writer, Guy de Maupassant. The title literally means ‘Ball of Fat’, and it’s about a group of people who flee the German-occupied city of Rouen in a stagecoach during the Franco-Prussian War. Among them is the Boule de Suif herself, a chubby prostitute called Elisabeth. All the other ‘respectable’ passengers look down on her and ignore her until she produces a basket of beautiful food, which she generously shares with them.

  The group is then captured by a German officer, who agrees to release them only if Elisabeth has sex with him. At first the other passengers support Elisabeth’s refusal to sleep with him, but as time passes, they put more and more pressure on her to do it so they can leave. When she finally goes to bed with him and they’re allowed back into the stagecoach, the respectable passengers go right on ignoring her and in the end refuse to share their food with her.

  Only in French class would the pristine minds of Oakholme College students be exposed to a book about a prostitute who does the wild thing with a German officer for a leave pass. I think that Mrs Green and the other high-ups would be shocked if they knew. I was shocked when I read it over the weekend.

  ‘What’s this book really about?’ asks our French teacher, Mademoiselle Larsen. She scans the room, looking for shrinking students to terrorise. ‘Tell me – in one sentence.’

  A few words about Mademoiselle Larsen – she’s the J-Law of the Oakholme staffroom. She’s a leggy, shapely glamourpuss who rocks a platinum blonde bob, but otherwise doesn’t try too hard. Jenny’s mum heard through the grapevine that Mademoiselle was more or less forced to resign from another Sydney private school because she invited her girlfriend to a musical performance. I don’t know whether it’s true and I really don’t care. Oakholme would care, though, believe me. Religion is a big part of school life. We have several chapel services a week and Christian Studies is a compulsory subject until the end of Year 11. Saucy business, especially if it’s homosexual, is frowned upon, to say the very least.

  Mademoiselle Larsen’s great value if you take her in the right spirit. She rules our French classes with un poing de fer (an iron fist), but never raises her voice or punishes anyone. The worst you can expect from her is ridicule or some scathing and probably vulgar comment muttered in French. Somehow that’s even worse than Red Marks or detention.

  ‘Keli Street-Hughes, you’re looking particularly guilty this afternoon.’

  Everyone turns to Keli. She trots out her nauseating gap-toothed grin. In spite of still not being able to speak French convincingly after five years of classes at a very expensive private school, Keli annoyingly manages to maintain her status as one of Mademoiselle Larsen’s favourites. She has a drawling, bogan charisma whose appeal I’ll never understand. The one thing I’ll concede is that her French accent is pretty good. She seems to get by just by pronouncing English words like Inspector Clouseau. Even I grudgingly admire that brand of sass. Very grudgingly.

  ‘Mademoiselle Larsen, I hope you’re not suggesting that I haven’t read the book.’

  Last year, when we were reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons), Keli made the mistake of confessing that she’d only ever watched the movie.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Keli. So tell me, in a nutshell, what the book’s about.’

  ‘It’s about a whore’ is Keli’s deadpan response.

  Everyone except me cracks up. Even when I think Keli’s funny, I can never bring myself to laugh. I dislike her too much.

  ‘That’s a literally correct answer,’ says Mademoiselle Larsen, ‘but it’s not very insightful.’

  ‘You asked for a nutshell. There’s your nutshell.’

  Mademoiselle’s withering gaze comes to rest on me. ‘Shauna? What do you think? In one sentence.’

  I know I’m not going to get a laugh, but I give it my best shot.

  ‘It’s about a group of people who consider themselves morally superior to someone unpopular, but when it comes to the crunch they’re they ones who turn out to have lower moral standards.’

  When Mademoiselle Larson smiles, her crooked overbite breaks through her painted lips. I know that I’ve delighted her, and that’s almost better than a laugh from the class. Pleasing Mademoiselle is kind of important to me. Possibly it has something to do with my early days in her classes, back when I was a sullen little turkey. I was spectacularly rude, and if there’s one thing Mademoiselle can’t stand it’s bad manners. When I decided to be polite to her, though, it seemed like she’d decided to give me another chance. I suppose I want her to keep her good opinion of me, knowing she doesn’t just hand it out no matter what.

  ‘Bravo, Shauna. Exactement. It’s a critique of French society at the time, isn’t it? The people in the stagecoach are a macrocosm of French society. The political class. The clergy. Business people. They all consider a prostitute to be so far beneath them, but in the end they use her to get what they want.’

  Mademoiselle grills a few more girls before throwing a question to the whole class. ‘Consider some unpopular groups from our own society and how they’re used by the media, politicians and others in power to advance their own interests. Can anyone give me an example?’

  Jenny puts her hand up. ‘Boat people. Refugees. Every election cycle they’re used as a political football.’

  Across the classroom Keli’s gripped by an eye-rolling frenzy. Mademoiselle doesn’t seem to notice. Keli’s sour little flunkpuss, Annabel Saxon, puts her hand up.

  ‘Yes, Annabel?’

  ‘What about farmers, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘I’m not sure about that. Farmers seem to be a fairly popular group in Australian society.’

  ‘But Greenies accuse us of damaging the environment.’

  ‘Climate change,’ groans Keli with another eye roll.

  ‘But if it weren’t for farmers,’ says Annabel, ‘then no one would have food on their table. Greenies included.’

  ‘They’d be eating witchetty grubs,’ giggles Keli.

  ‘Girls, you’re on the wrong track,’ says Mademoiselle with a note of irritation in her voice, ‘and I think you both know it. Farmers are a well-loved and powerful group in Australian society. I’m asking you to consider people who are looked down on and discriminated against. Like boat people, as Jenny pointed out.’

  ‘But boat people come to this country illegally,’ says Keli. ‘They commit crimes and chew up resources. Don’t they deserve to be unpopular?’

  Class discussions involving Keli always follow the same path. Everything boils down to her virtuous family and other people like them shouldering the burden of undeserving folk, like Greenies, boat people and moi. I’m getting really sick of it. As if Keli Street-Hughes’s ever worked a day or paid a cent of tax in her life.

  ‘Keli’s right,’ I say calmly, but inside I’m beginning to seethe. The rest of the class looks at me as if I’ve just lost my mind. In what circumstances would I be on the same side as Keli Street-Hughes?

  ‘She’s absolutely spot-on about boat people. Just look at the lowlifes, leeches and criminals who’ve landed on our shores since 1788.’

  Keli fixes her narrow, yellow eyes at me. I fold my arms, refusing to break eye contact.

  ‘Maybe we should change the date,’ drawls Keli. ‘Maybe we should change history, change reality, so that some people don’t get their feelings hurt.’

  ‘What about acknowledging the reality of Australia’s history then?’ I shoot back, my voice tremulous with anger. ‘The decimation of my people by criminals from England!’

  ‘How dare you call my people criminals!’

  ‘Girls,’ sighs Mademoiselle, ‘this discussion h
as gotten completely off track, okay? Please turn to your novels and—’

  ‘First of all,’ preaches Keli, ‘they were convicts, not criminals—’

  ‘It’s the same thing!’

  ‘—and second, without us you’d be starving to death in the dust!’

  Jenny grabs my arm and squeezes hard, just as I’m opening my mouth.

  ‘Keli. Shauna.’ Mademoiselle’s voice is dangerously low. ‘Ça suffit comme ça.’ (That’s enough.)

  ‘She’s not worth it,’ whispers Jenny.

  Keli and I exchange homicidal glares for a good minute after everyone else has opened their novels to page thirty-six. When I look down at my book, my hands are shaking. Why, oh why, do I let this stupid bigot get under my skin?

  When the bell rings, I wait until Keli and Annabel have left the classroom before sloping off to the dorms. I walk around in circles for a while, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut. Usually I ignore the scrubchooks, even when they’re baiting me, but sometimes they make me so mad I can’t help myself. Now I feel like I need to take a shower, and that’s the problem with getting into a fight with a pig. You get dirty, the pig gets dirty, but the pig enjoys herself.

  About the only thing that makes me feel dirtier than confronting Keli Street-Hughes is cyberstalking her. It’s a shameful habit, made only slightly less shameful by the fact that I occasionally do it with Jenny on her smuggled-in phone. Otherwise I do it on my parents’ phones when I’m home during the holidays. It makes me feel pathetic and gross, but for some reason I’m compelled. I guess it’s the thrill of getting a behind-the-scenes glimpse of someone who’s seemingly bulletproof. I know people don’t usually upload bad or incriminating photos, but I’m still hoping for a slip-up, a chink in her Tampon Princess armour. I haven’t found anything yet, just a range of images of her blockish, ginger self pulling trout mouths and jug-jawed grins in various glamorous locations. Keli Street-Hughes in the owners’ box at the Melbourne Cup. Keli Street-Hughes at Tetsuya’s for her nanna’s birthday. Keli Street-Hughes in the Italian Alps at Christmas.