by Chloe Hooper
I’d only been out of Teacher’s College for a few months when I first started working at Endport Primary School. It had seemed a good idea to take the job, just for a year, while I figured out if teaching was really what I wanted to do. On the first day of class, I got the kids to reorganize their desks in an unconventional configuration. When I called the roll I’d ask them, instead of just answering “Here,” to call out their favorite food, or favorite hobby: a way of us all getting to know each other better. During creative exercises I’d encourage them to forget about spelling, to express themselves. Then, I would find myself standing before them, reading aloud a story about a nine-year-old girl who’d vomited “so, so, so much” that there were pyramids of vomit; all the seven wonders were re-created in bile, until eventually, this triumphant bulimic had her own entry in The Guinness Book of Records.
It was no wonder, under these conditions, that I fell into adultery. One afternoon, a month after I started, Thomas appeared at my classroom door looking for his son. It was some kind of destiny: a baby-sitter had already collected Lucien. Thomas drove me home instead. The following week, he made a very similar mistake and I asked if he’d like to come inside for a cool drink. I scurried around, kicking dirty laundry under the couch. Would he want to kiss me? I’d read an article on the merits of having an affair with an older man. A woman wrote about her lover always beating her friends at Trivial Pursuit; the benefits of napping in the afternoon.
Thomas did want to kiss me and the liaison conformed to my sense of what teachers ought to do. In high school I’d swapped long notes with my best friend speculating as to the sexual intrigues amongst the staff. Oh, the orgiastic world of adults: at the center of our fantasy was the ruddy sports teacher, who delighted in confiscating miscolored ribbons or stray jewelry. We found the harshest disciplinarians to be also the most libidinous—Miss Morgan really requested long service leave, after her sex change, because Miss Longley had started going behind her back with Mrs. Gay Hardacre, from front office, thus proving my suspicion the sports department is going downhill. Understanding our teachers’ frustrations helped my friend and I, both still virgins, feel more kindly toward these people trading in petty humiliations.
• • •
Finally, I lurched through the door of my classroom. It was an aluminum portable with canvas blinds and fifteen nine-year-olds, holding a boisterous session of crayon-wielding wrestling. I fiddled with my skirt, still twisted from running, and praised the God of small-time floozies: the unsupervised children hadn’t attracted the principal’s attention. “Okay!” I clapped my hands. “I want everyone sitting down before I count to three. One . . .” A skirmish, purely melodramatic, began of Oh-oh-oh! Get to the chair quickly! My desk was at the front of the room. The children’s desks occupied the middle, and along the back wall was a silent-reading area with beanbags; bookshelves; a cardboard mailbox, where kids deposited notes to each other; and a “self-portrait wing” consisting of a low hanging mirror, beneath which the children sat and drew.
“Two . . .” Behind me, my teacher handwriting, all kinkless vowels and chubby consonants, spread like white lies over the blackboard. I could feel the sex still in my body; the more decorously I behaved, the more blatant its presence. At least I looked only mildly disheveled compared to these casualties: some had sweaty hair stuck to their foreheads from playing tiggy; bits of tanbark hung from their clothes.
“Two and a half . . .” Our studies related to endangered species. The endangered birds’ names now sounded like love-talk: come to me my buff-breasted button quail, come to me my crested shrike tit and do what you do so well. Oh, you’re my helmeted honeyeater, my big regent honeyeater. Yes! my swift parrot, my night parrot! . . . I never really meant to become a primary-school teacher. After leaving high school I started an arts degree. I had minors in a range of employer-unfriendly areas, and approaching graduation there seemed like absolutely nothing I wanted to do. I switched to Teacher’s College, because I did enjoy baby-sitting. I really liked children. I liked the things children said when they grew candid. A three-year-old asks her five-year-old sister, “Can I join your burp club?” and this sophisticate answers, “No, I’ve closed it down.” I liked reading children their stories. And I liked the stories: dogs and cats had magic powers; nasty people suffered slapstick doom. The world seemed manageable, its scale of anarchy to my liking. By becoming a teacher, it was like crossing to the other side. The staff room had the air of a bunker in a strife-torn, foreign land; the teachers, each morning, offered around mugs of some herbal tranquilizer, and I took tiny sips feeling like a spy.
“Three!” The children sat at their sloped wooden desks, the surfaces of which had long ago been carved up with initials. The fan was spinning, lazily, above. I checked the clock again. “Well done.” There were still some busy whisperers. “Billy and Lucien, are you concentrating on your work?”
The two boys looked up sheepishly. They didn’t really get along. Billy was the most popular boy in the class. Sandy-haired and reasonable, he was considered the voice of moral authority, having earned this status through his prowess at sport. I gazed at him sternly then turned to Lucien for the old double take: he was a replica of his father. He had the same beautiful face, which he could wear completely blank, adopting a slightly curled lip. He had a grave adult stare as if, in Saint-Exupéry’s litmus test, he’d just seen a hat rather than the boa ingesting an elephant. Lucien, like Thomas before him, considered the other children to be profoundly stupid, and spent most of his lunchtimes with a book.
“So you really like reading?” I’d remarked at the beginning of the year. For a moment Lucien had looked at me with sympathy. I’d repeated the question. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he’d answered politely, “I thought you asked, ‘You really like breathing?’” I may as well have. He was the most erudite nine-year-old I had ever met. Talking to Lucien one forgot his age. He was a little conquistador stockpiling knowledge, and my class had been thrown into much turmoil due to his theories on everything from portraiture to the nonexistence of God. The publicity surrounding Murder at Black Swan Point could have explained his lack of faith. It conferred celebrity, which also came from being a city kid; however, his classmates parroted their parents’ opinions of the book, most of which were decidedly uncomplimentary. It was fair to say when Mrs. Marne’s true crime story was published, a lot of people felt very surprised. A lot of people also felt very betrayed: “Why couldn’t she let the dead rest?” was the general sentiment, or more specifically, “She’s opened up a Pandora’s floodgate of worms!”
It became important for me to find invisible ways to protect Lucien. He was very good at drawing, something that gave him some status in the classroom, and it was mainly for his benefit I’d set up the self-portrait wing. Lucien would sit down and draw himself as Frankenstein’s monster with pins in his head and blood dripping from his temples. “No, no, no, you’re so handsome, this is silly,” I’d said the first time. Not wanting to draw more attention to him, I hadn’t really known what else to do. Lucien had continued in the same morbid vein: he’d draw himself with no eyes, a bird flying off, dangling his optical nerve in its claw; he’d draw himself with a bullet in his forehead and his tongue lolling. When finally, desperate, I’d told Thomas of this, he’d seemed bemused, as if Lucien were only doing it to gain my attention.
I thought there was another reason. What it meant for this child psychically, to have a mother obsessed with death and gore, I could only speculate. One day during crafts, Lucien had made a dream catcher, a contraption of net and feathers you hang from your bed as protection against bad dreams. He’d told me he wanted to give it to his mother. Then, on Mother’s Day he’d drawn a picture of Veronica at work. She was perched over a wobbly keyboard which was stacked with enormous misshapen keys, like a mouth of dreadful teeth. Various suspicious images were surrounding her. “What are these?” I’d asked Lucien. “They’re photographs of the houses in the murder,” he’d said plainly. In eac
h one was a bloodied body in a still more gruesome pose.
“How much does Lucien know about Veronica’s book?” I’d asked Thomas.
“Well,” he’d answered, “his mother tries to demystify things. We both think that’s best. He knows a soul leaves a dead body, et cetera . . . I mean, there’s no point treating Lucien as if he’s a little half-wit. We’ve always spoken to him like to a short adult.”
Under the subheading PROBLEMS, Lucien was now writing about our unfortunate koala population and their various diseases. “Very good, Lucien.” He made a steeple with his fingers on which to rest his chin. His blazer was hanging on the back of his chair. “That’s very interesting.” Next door, Billy was writing about the northern hairy-nosed wombat: Wombats generally eat plants. A wombat never eats meat. Wombats can break into farms and damage farm animals’ legs. It was like a syllogism gone wrong: my favorite thing about these reports was just how badly they’d been cribbed from any source the kids could find. I was watching plagiarism in its rawest form; how could a wombat, a forty-centimeter-high wombat, break into a farm and kneecap all the animals? Who’d have suspected this creature, so seemingly earnest, was the thug of the animal world? “Good boy, Billy.” The point was for them to gain more confidence in their research skills.
I walked around the classroom reading the other reports. Despite horrible stories about starving echidnas and obese possums, it was really the human condition on display here. Darren would proudly acknowledge his position as the class bully. He was in a codependent relationship with Alastair, his main victim, a fleshy boy who was deeply unintelligent. (In Alastair’s astounding sentences—a shantytown of corrugated words—the child described the endangered Leadbetter possum, claiming as one problem: my dad runs over them all the time.) Alastair accepted Darren’s lack of respect with teary fatalism. But to make matters worse, he had an unrequited crush on Danielle, a little gap-toothed Aryan.
Danielle was now describing, without much empathy, the fate of the Forester kangaroo, hunted into near extinction down here. She sat next to Eliza, a businesslike child, small for her age, with a blunt-cut orange fringe. Eliza had done a project on the Tasmanian tiger. Past and present tenses merged; it was unclear whether the animal was endangered or extinct. PROBLEMS: People shot all the Tasmanian tigers because they ate their chickens. SOLUTIONS: If anyone ever finds any tigers they should be put in a zoo. REFERENCES: We used a World Book Encyclopedia. We couldn’t find out much about it in the World Book Encyclopedia.
Someone cleared his throat. It was Henry Ledder, a blue-eyed boy with curly dark hair. He had a scribble of red marker on his neck from a lunchtime pen war. “What do you do if you’ve finished?”
“Those of you who’ve finished might like to draw yourselves with your endangered species.”
At their desks were old yogurt containers full of stubby crayons and pencils. Henry drew himself eating cake with a honey possum. Next to him, Anaminka, a quiet thoughtful girl, drew herself dressed in her pajamas standing by a tree of night parrots. When my fourth-graders first started working on endangered species, all the children chose pretty birds, and the girls cried because the tiger reminded them of their Labradors. They didn’t think it was fair: it wasn’t fair that all these animals were dying out, or had died out. Supposedly this was a moral breakthrough: before the age of, say, eight, traditionalists claim experiences are really only understood as unfair if the child himself is somehow disadvantaged. Q. What isn’t fair? A. Telling them where the donkey’s tail is at my birthday party. Apparently only later can they see things from another person’s point of view. Q. What isn’t fair? A. If someone crashes his bicycle and dies.
Perhaps people confused a savagery in children’s responses for a lack of moral depth. What the children hadn’t learned to do was to modulate, or translate, their thoughts into the refined, socially coded answers of adults. It was true their moral logic was occasionally skewed, but their opinions were still considered. And I wanted to know what they thought the difference was between right and wrong. Despite our initial hiccup, examining the metaphysics of local history, it seemed a good idea to get the children thinking further about ideals of truth and justice. I found a cartoon of Plato, and explained that he was a man who believed in an invisible world where everything existing on Earth was in its perfect form. “What if we lived in a world where everyone told the truth?” I asked my class. “Can you always know truth?”
Anaminka: You need research to find out, but some things are impossible to research.
Eliza: You can’t research God.
Anaminka: You can’t research bacteria at this age.
Billy: But if everyone tells the truth, you could talk up to the sky and say [putting on a deep voice], “God, are you real?” and he’d have to tell you.
Henry [pretending to be God]: “G’day!”
Lucien: But how would you know if that was the truth?
Billy: Because everyone told the truth.
Lucien: But how do you know if everyone was telling the truth?
Billy: Because that was the truth.
Lucien: But how would you know?
Lucien had made it clear he disagreed with most of what was being said. Finally I called on him to share his impressions. As usual there was a mind-spinning adultness to his speech, and then a strangeness as it slid back into nine-year-old patois. I was ready to find his pretensions endearing, but the depth of his ideas left me and the others near speechless.
Lucien: About seven thousand years ago everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. Now it’s not true. It was true then, but it isn’t now. So my point is you can change the truth. But it usually happens after years . . . Truth is a flexible substance.
There was a knock on the classroom door. All the children looked up to see the principal standing outside. Lillian Hurnell, neat in her tweed suit, wore so much foundation she glowed orange. I rushed to let her in, asking, “Children, how do we greet a guest?”
“Good afternoon, Miss Hurnell.”
“Good afternoon, 4B.” She turned to me. “Miss Byrne, may I have a brief word?”
“Certainly.” I followed her to the door. Lillian was from the equivalent of Tasmanian royalty; her family settled very early and their dessert spoons and embroidered christening dresses had been donated to the town’s museum. Her family homestead had bluestone walls. And one wall was papered with pages from an old Woman’s Weekly. My mother had told me Lillian’s aunt became pregnant to a farmhand and the young woman shot herself. The Hurnells covered the stained bluestone with pretty pictures.
Lillian stepped outside. “I was just checking you were all right.”
“Yes, fine.”
“Elsbeth saw you limping back late from lunch.”
“Oh! I had a doctor’s appointment.”
“You do look flushed,” Lillian agreed.
“A little fever. Thank goodness I can spend the weekend sleeping. By Monday I’ll be fine.” I paused. “Luckily the children all seem to be in perfect health.” I turned and saw, through the window, each child’s face staring back at me. “They’re all doing really well.”
Lillian, having followed my gaze, became self-conscious. “Right, I’d better let you get back to it then.”
“Thanks for the concern, Lillian.” I nodded gravely. “It’s appreciated.”
“Kate?”
I turned, holding the door handle. “Yes?”
“There’s a snag in your panty hose.”
“Oh dear, Lillian.” I smiled. “I’m so glad you noticed.”
I closed the door, confident that Lillian was offended by no more than my lack of grooming and punctuality. I continued checking the children’s work: Eliza colored in an earnest tiger; Billy, a loglike wombat. I stood still, watching them draw. It was amazing how their skills advanced: at approximately thirteen months, infants grab pencils with their fists to spread scribble all over anything; around the age of three, children start drawing spirals or cir
cles as if putting to paper their memory of floating; then the circle becomes a head, and arms and legs are fastened, like sunbeams radiating off the sun. These children, now, took up their colored pencils and they seemed so assured. Each line bore no trace of doubt or ambivalence. They believed their drawings to be straightforward, and they were: like the beautiful maps to some lost world.
The only child whose pictures made me worry was Lucien. He had drawn a family of blind koalas, all hanging limp from a tree. Koalas apparently suffered from skin cancer, morphological abnormalities due to inbreeding, and chlamydia, which led to blindness and infertility. Ninety percent of the population had died in the last ten years. President Clinton has been written to about this, Lucien claimed. We need his help to write the National Koala Act. He was diligently drawing himself with hulking shoulders, and a square, robotlike upper body. Hopefully, he thought chlamydia came from too much sun. Bolted across his arm he drew a large water pistol. “Lucien,” I asked, “you’re not going to hurt the koala, are you?”
“Nooo,” he said, “I’m protecting it.”
“Oh, so you’re, like, on the same team?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yep.”
“Very good, Lucien. Well done.”
Once I’d asked Thomas, “Do you worry about your son’s education now that we’re lovers?” “On the contrary,” he’d claimed. “You’re being far more attentive, far more tender to my son.” He’d taken a deep breath. “In fact, I’m only doing this for his education.” I had balked. “No really, he’s flesh of my flesh. You’ll see him. You’ll see him first thing in the morning. You’ll see him when he leaves. You’ll stroke his hair and think of me, and he’ll have no idea.”
I looked out the window. Slowly, the mothers were gathering in the playground. There was an old ship’s bell under the jacaranda. In five minutes, at half past three, it would ring and all the children would run outside. I loved the way they fell out the classroom door, as if being disgorged by a sea monster; then, the theater of matching them to their mothers—the blond to the brunette, the charismatic to the deeply dopey. All these glaze-eyed, drowsy kids would suddenly be sharp as lawyers, doing deals on sleepovers. They would run to dump their schoolbags, before showing off on the monkey bars.