Will

by Maria Boyd

  I heard a noise coming from the other side of the desk. I knew that was my signal to look up. I attempted to make eye contact, but all I could do was stare across the desk at the photo of Danielli, his wife and their three kids.

  Danielli began to speak, shaking his head as he flicked through my ever-expanding file.

  I’m going to have to ring your mother, Will. You leave me no choice. I spoke with her just last week to comment on some small improvements you were making. She is going to be so disappointed….

  Forget disappointed, Mum will be majorly, majorly mad.

  Sit down, Will.

  I began to list in my head the stuff I’d been involved in over the past couple of months. Busted for smoking in the toilets. But the point was I wasn’t smoking. I know that’s what everyone says but this time it was true. I mean, I had tried it a couple of times but I worried too much about my fitness level for soccer to smoke seriously. That time in the toilets I was truly the innocent bystander, catching up on the latest weekend “who did what” when Deputy Waddlehead walked in. Guilt by association. They were doing a crackdown and I copped a suspension with the real smokers. Mum eventually believed me, but only after she threatened to do what her mum did to her and make me smoke three cigarettes in a row. I pointed out that they had laws against that these days. She told me to be quiet and I was grounded for a month.

  What else was there? They’d busted me for jigging but I don’t reckon that was fully my fault either. One of the Year 12 guys who drove was able to leave after recess and he offered me a lift, so I took him up on it. I honestly didn’t think anyone would notice. I got home, watched some telly and then spent most of my time on the guitar. My argument: it wasn’t as if I was out terrorizing nanas or anything. So in the scheme of things it shouldn’t have been that big a deal, although at the time Mum and Danielli didn’t agree. Then there was the usual wrong haircut, no blazer, no tie stuff. But nothing that I thought was a really big deal. There was something else, though … I know there was something else … what was it?

  How many times have you been called to this office in the past six months?

  I shrugged. That’s what I was trying to figure out.

  I’ll tell you. Six times in the past six months and this makes the seventh. Smoking …

  But, sir …

  Listen! Smoking, truancy, failure to meet deadlines in Modern History, underachievement in mathematics, repeated uniform and hair offenses, including that outrageous hair color, water-bombing the girls at the bus stop …

  That’s the one I forgot about, the water bombs! Even though that was definitely my fault, Jock and Tim were in it as well, it was just that they didn’t get busted.

  I know things haven’t been easy for you over the past six months, and we have tried to make concessions, but you have pushed it too far this time. Really, Will, indecent exposure! Mrs. Young said the phones haven’t stopped ringing with anxious members of the public alerting the school to a flasher on school grounds!

  I bit the insides of my cheeks, trying so hard not to crack up. I couldn’t help it.

  Danielli’s chair bounced off the wall as he stood.

  You think this is funny?

  I looked away. No, sir.

  You very nearly single-handedly created a riot. Did you stop to think what would have happened if anyone had been seriously hurt?

  But they weren’t.

  No, sir.

  He picked up my file and waved it in the air.

  And as for your academic performance, you continue to underachieve. This is Year Eleven, it’s time to consolidate and move out from the rest of the pack. You want to secure a good University Admissions Index, don’t you?

  I shrugged again.

  Well, don’t you, Will?

  Yes, sir.

  The truth was I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do, let alone whether I needed a UAI.

  Do you care?

  I stared straight back at Danielli’s family photograph.

  Will? Look at me, please. Do you care? Honestly?

  I thought about how I should answer. He said honestly, but the problem is they never want to hear honestly. I looked up at him.

  Honestly, sir?

  Of course honestly, Will.

  Not really, sir.

  Mr. Danielli shifted his gaze to the papers on his desk and didn’t speak. He looked disappointed more than annoyed. See, they’re the ones who can’t handle the truth. Why did he ask in the first place if he didn’t want to hear it?

  Well, you know there will be severe consequences for your actions today.

  Yes, sir.

  OK, Will. He released a sigh that filled the entire office. An interview has been scheduled for you at three-thirty Monday afternoon with myself and Mr. Waverton. Given her present circumstances, we will not require your mother to attend; however, I will be speaking to her by phone. If Mr. Waverton decides on the most severe form of punishment, she will of course need to be called in.

  He looked up from his papers. I’ll leave it up to you whether you tell her over the weekend.

  I hate it when teachers do that. Forty-eight hours of sick-in-your-gut guilt trip and they bloody well know it!

  You do know that this latest escapade, combined with the other serious incidents you have been involved with, could mean permanent exclusion from the college?

  I said nothing.

  It is a very real and serious consideration.

  Again nothing. He eyeballed me directly.

  Do you have any idea how serious this actually is, Will?

  Yes, sir.

  He continued to stare and then his face crumpled into a frown. He sighed and his voice softened.

  Will, you are better than this, and the real shame of it is that you have such leadership potential. You’re well liked among the of the boys, especially the ones who get a hard time. I know you’ve always been a bit of a larrikin, but you used to know when to stop. Now …

  What the hell was I meant to say to that? Isn’t a guy allowed to have one bad year?

  He sighed again, disappointed there was no reply. You’ve let a lot of people down, William.

  I was sorry I’d let him down; I felt even worse about Mum. All around I was feeling like crap. But I didn’t know what else to say so I relied on the old standby.

  Sorry, sir.

  Yes, Will, so am I.

  Planting the seed … or not?

  I had resigned myself to spending the whole weekend hanging out at home. The only other real option was the Holden House of Chaos, but Chris and the Holdo boys had gone away on one of their father and sons camping love-ins. I had scored an invite—I always did, and I usually went. Due to a lack of siblings, I liked being a Holden ring-in, especially when it meant I had a legitimate right to beat up the twins, but this was the first one since … well … this year and I didn’t feel like it.

  Will, are you ready?

  Mum was at my door; faded purple overalls, bad paisley gardening hat, two pairs of gloves, mud-covered boots and one of the happiest faces I’d seen on her in a long time.

  Come on, the soil is just about damp enough.

  I tried hard to look enthusiastic. But being enthusiastic about having to put down your guitar and get off your bed to go and work in the garden with your mother on a Saturday afternoon is a very big call.

  I grabbed the bad granddad type fishing hat Chris and I had bought as a joke in some ancient servo we’d rolled into on a previous Holden road trip, and followed Mum out the back door. The backyard was a decent size, decent enough for a pool, something I’d reminded Mum and Dad of every day of the summer holidays since I first made it into Tadpoles at the local pool. They were dead against it. Said it was a needless extravagance when it only took us thirty minutes to drive to the beach. That didn’t mean, however, that the backyard escaped being an Armstrong Family Project.

  Ever since I could remember there had always been a big stretch of untouched grass right along the back fenc
e. Mum and Dad always went on about how perfect it would be for a veggie patch. In seventeen years they’d never got around to it. That was until one day earlier this year when Mum came out dressed in exactly the same gear she had on today. That time she didn’t stop at my door to ask for help; she walked straight out to the back shed, grabbed a spade and a scary-looking pitchfork and got started. Mum’s not that big, and even though she’s a yoga-head and looks pretty young for forty-seven, she’s not exactly a teenager, but none of that counted because, man, she made a huge mess. Normally she would have been really careful about cutting up the turf and stuff, but that time she didn’t care. She just kept hacking. Whenever I offered to help she smiled, shook her head and took another swing. She kept going every afternoon for three weeks, until there was no green anywhere in sight. It was just brown dirt turned over and over, like it had been ripped apart by mini explosives.

  I had thought that was going to be the first Patricia Armstrong Solo Project but I was wrong. One night Mum came and sat on my bed and talked about launching the first Armstrong Mother and Son Project. All that digging must have done something good because it was the first time in a long time her eyes had come alive. There was no way I could refuse.

  After the hacking came the fertilizing. This is where I got to be involved. We put in a whole pile of manure that smelled worse than anything Jock and Tim combined could produce, which was saying something, and waited until it didn’t stink so much. Then last night Mum finally announced we’d made it to the planting stage and if I didn’t have anything on, tomorrow would be the perfect day to get started. So here we were, just me, Mum and a whole lot of cow shit.

  How has your week been?

  It was no surprise that as soon as we got down to work Mum started firing questions. That’s how she operates. It’s all about sharing quality time together, and quality time in Mum’s world means she asks the questions and I answer.

  Um … Yeah, good.

  My gut constricted. If I didn’t play this right my hands weren’t going to be the only part of me to be in shit this weekend. It could have been the perfect time to spill it all but I figured, why spoil the weekend when the next hundred were going to be hell? Then again, maybe it was better to tell her myself before Waddlehead had a go. Knowing Mum, she’d rate the fact I’d fessed up before someone else had to do it for me. But that would mean I’d have to spend the next thirty-something hours watching Mum look like crap again.

  Bloody Danielli, he knew that giving me the you can tell her before we do option was going to mess with my head all weekend.

  I watched Mum as she dug a small hole in the soil. She extended her hand, indicating for me to pass the tomato plant. She then gently shook off any excess dirt and carefully placed the seedling in the ground, making sure all the roots were where they should be. She’d swung into a gentle, soothing rhythm.

  Mum …

  Hmmm …

  My gut constricted again. I couldn’t. I wanted to but I couldn’t.

  Here. I shoved another plant in her direction.

  She’d been edging along the ground like a crab. At this point she looked up, smiling, trying to blow away the hair that had fallen into her eyes without using a muddy glove.

  So?

  So! What did she mean, so? So I could be chucked out of St. Andrew’s forever, and here’s another tomato plant. So had Danielli changed the rules and secretly rung Mum and they were both waiting to see if I would confess?

  I turned and pretended to look for another plant, feeling my face redden with every second.

  So?

  Her eyes were lasering holes into my back.

  What was good about it?

  The week, that’s what she was asking about! Idiot! I could feel my guilty blush, something that had given me grief since the time I learned how to lie, wash away with relief.

  I don’t know. The same as usual, I suppose.

  She looked at me for a long moment, spade in one hand and baby tomato plant in the other, then sighed.

  Are you going out tonight? she asked after she’d planted the next seedling.

  I’ll probably head over to Tim’s later…. The boys are planning a big night.

  A Lakeside girl was meant to be having a party, some girl Tim was convinced was into him because she happened to say sorry when she stuck her artwork into his backside on the bus. I pointed out that her response was called everyday politeness. Tim, however, was certain that she wanted him, especially his backside.

  Oh. Mum nodded. OK then. And she returned to the digging, shaking, planting, patting.

  She stopped suddenly and looked at me again, her face a strange combination of a frown and a tight-lipped smile.

  What?

  How big a night?

  I grinned back. Relax, Mum, you can trust me. She rolled her eyes and returned to her plants. We had both found our place again and for the moment everything was as it should be.

  The weekend of guilt

  It turned out I didn’t go over to Tim’s place after all. No real reason, but I figured I’d seen Jock and Tim make idiots of themselves plenty of times before so I wasn’t missing out on much. Hanging out at home was pretty usual for me these days, so Mum didn’t pick anything up on her maternal radar as she usually would have when there was drama in the air. Anyway, I reckon she liked having me kicking around the house.

  Mum looked pretty happy with herself after our quality time in the veggie patch. She always loved a project, especially anything to do with the house. That was her thing, the house. Well, if I was really honest, it wasn’t just her thing, it was her and Dad’s thing. You couldn’t separate the three of them. It was like the house was another member of the family.

  They bought this place the same year I was born, and it definitely needed a lot of love. It was a dump! But that’s what they wanted. They were into DIY way before it was on telly every night of the week. They wouldn’t go anywhere near IKEA or Freedom, though, like normal people did. Oh no, the Armstrong family had to get up at the crack of dawn every weekend and go to garage sales, junkyards, smelly old nana stores and freaky run-down warehouses. They would spend hundreds of hours happily trawling through crap, dirty crap, and get really excited when they found something that no one in their right mind would even touch. Then they’d spend what was left of the weekend and every weekend after that getting whatever piece of junk they’d found back to how it was originally. It seemed like a huge waste of time to me. So I’d point out that we were in the twenty-first century in case they’d missed it and they’d both smile as if I was the idiot and keep sandpapering the latest 1850s table they’d scored from somebody’s skip.

  Stuff was different now, though, weekends were different. There was no junk in the backyard, and no Armstrong projects. Except for the veggie patch.

  Which was how Mum spent most of Sunday morning, staring at the veggie patch over her pot of tea. Then she flicked through the weekend papers. That was weird. Before, she’d never allow them through the front door. She’d carry on that they were a journalistic disgrace and full of trash. Dad reckoned that was exactly the reason why you should buy them. They would sit at opposite ends of the kitchen table and throw smart-arse comments back and forth at one another that I had to dodge every time I went to the fridge. Now Mum’d actually go and buy the papers, sit down at the table in the same position and mutter as she flicked through them. I told her she sounded like a madwoman and she told me to get used to it because it was going to get worse with age.

  Sunday nights always make you feel sick in the gut. It’s that time when you remember all the crap for school that you haven’t done over the weekend and are too tired to do now, which means you know you’re going to get in trouble for it tomorrow. Or in my case, the fact that I had had all weekend to tell Mum everything before it hit the fan, but I hadn’t.

  But that’s how the you can decide whether you tell your parents thing works. The whole time it sits in your belly reminding you that there’s somet
hing you have to do. Then you go and catch up with the boys, kick the soccer ball around, hang out in your room messing with chords on the guitar, and you forget. But then you hear your mum singing in the kitchen, happy after working in the garden all day, or you watch her settle back with a glass of wine and a chick flick and that’s when it hits. It comes up from your gut and sits in your mouth like you want to vomit it all out. Then you see that she’s dressed in her home trackies she’d never be caught dead in anywhere else, lying on the couch laughing at the telly, and you know you can’t. You just can’t. So you walk back to your room and decide that, like most things lately, it’s better to swallow and pretend that it’s gone away.

  Monday

  Even though I knew it was all going to hit the fan with Waddlehead and Danielli this afternoon, I was more than happy to be entering the grounds of St. Andrew’s. This was a Mum-Free Zone, which translated into a guilt-free, end-of-guts-churning zone. No, I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty tonight, but at least for the moment I had escaped.