I grabbed her elbow and began to push her, not too gently, away from the desk.
“Could you help me find some of those history books? I’ve got a big project due next week, and —’’And on and on. I just kept rambling until we were behind the nine-hundreds shelf, out of sight.
“You okay?”
She nodded. And smiled a little. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mind Parnell. He’s harmless.” I decided to risk a question of my own, now she wasn’t under the microscope. “What did he mean, he’s heard a lot about you?”
Suddenly, the nervousness was gone, and a new light came into her eyes. “Maybe he heard about my last school.”
She paused and I nodded. “Yes?”
“I murdered three kids. They brought their books back late, so I slashed their throats with the librarian’s letter-opener and hid the bodies behind the fiction shelves.” She looked down at her fingernails, pausing again for effect. “Other than that, I don’t know what it could be.”
Mind your own beeswax, Tanja!
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to …”
But suddenly she was relaxed. “Don’t worry about it. I’m used to it. Do you still want some help with those books?”
She was younger than me, and ten centimetres shorter, but I got this strange feeling that I was looking up to her. I nodded dumbly, and she turned to scan the shelves, while I wondered exactly what it was she was “used to”.
Later, I worked it out. Being singled out; having people look at you like you’re different. But by that time I was already her friend, and she certainly didn’t seem “different” to me. Not in any way that really mattered.
“Here we are,” she said. “ ‘Gold Rushes of the 1850s’. It’s not the best book, but it’s a good start.”
She was right about that. It was a good start — in more ways than she realised.
7
COMPETITION
“I guess it would be all right,” I said. “If you really think it’s good enough.”
It was second half of lunch, and I was in Miss Vegas’ room again. But this time, for once, there was no problem. In the first few weeks of the year I’d spent quite a bit of time in that room, talking to her about “things”. It wasn’t like I was unhappy at the school or anything. Not really. It was just that I’d had a little trouble “settling” — that’s what teachers call it; it means behaving the same as everyone else, not making waves, getting on with the other kids … and with the teachers.
Miss Vegas held up the sheet with my poem on it. “Let’s have no false modesty, Lisdalia.” One thing I really respected about her was the fact that, nice as she was, she didn’t pull punches. You knew where you stood with her. If you went fishing for compliments, you were wasting your bait. “You know it’s good enough. And I certainly wouldn’t be wasting my time asking you if I didn’t think it was.”
“Okay, then. You can send it.”
“Your father won’t mind? I wouldn’t want —”
“I doubt it. It’s just a writing competition, after all. Besides, I might just forget to mention it to him. If I don’t win, it won’t matter, and if I do, there won’t be a lot for him to complain about, will there?”
She smiled. We’d had talks about my father before. Now it was settled, she changed the subject. “How’s Michael feeling?”
“Not too bad. His mum says it’s just a virus; he’ll be back on Monday.”
“That’s good.” She sounded as if she meant it. As if she was really interested. A lot of teachers weren’t; once you got out of their subject area, you didn’t really exist. I guess that’s why Miss Vegas got the job as our coordinator, even though it was only her third year of teaching. You have to care — and have a lot of patience — to deal with all the problems a bunch of Year Sevens can throw at you.
I’d never really had problems at school, not since they’d skipped Year Three and jumped me straight from Second to Fourth. But that was Primary.
High School was a whole new experience. You had lots of different teachers, and each one expected you to react in a different way. Most of them were okay, and a couple were great, but I had trouble with one or two. The same sort of trouble I had with my dad. They didn’t listen to you. They used phrases like, “It’s my way or the highway” if you didn’t do things exactly the way they wanted. Their lessons were boring, and when the kids did little things — mostly pretty harmless — to liven them up, they’d hit the roof and throw detentions around like confetti at a wedding. It’s funny how the teachers who kept you interested and actually taught you something never had to give out detentions or any of the other pointless punishments that were so much a part of other lessons.
Most of my “interviews” with Miss Vegas had been about the problems I’d had “adjusting” early on. A couple of the kids had given me a hard time — you know, calling me a T.P. (that’s “teacher’s pet”) and a crawler, just because I answered questions and actually did the little bit of work that we were asked to do. But they were never a real problem. They didn’t know me; they came from Greenvale Public, and they hadn’t had the chance to get used to the way I did things. Most of the kids, the ones who had come through from Boundary Park with me, simply ignored them, and the whole thing died down. Just like Miss Vegas had said it would.
My real problem was our Science teacher, Mr Plamenatz.
Now, I know that anyone with a name as unusual as mine shouldn’t throw stones, but his first name was Wardell. Wardell Plamenatz. And I found myself tending to agree with Tanja that perhaps going through life saddled with a name like that might have had some sort of effect on the way he developed.
Mr Plamenatz suffered from a major personality problem. He thought he had one. A personality, that is; not a problem. He had a huge ego, but his main claim to fame was his unique ability to reduce a class of thirty kids to a state of screaming boredom in less time than it took to say “Open your books to page fifteen and copy out the first five paragraphs”.
I never did react very well to boredom, but I’m also, usually, very polite. But for some reason old “Valium” Plamenatz brought out the worst in me.
It wasn’t just that he was deadly boring, and that he didn’t know his stuff — or at least couldn’t get it across to his students — it was the fact that he was an arrogant egomaniac and a bully.
As I said before, most kids will do little things to relieve their boredom — flick pen caps around; write dirty notes; ask stupid questions like, “What page are we on?” when he’s already told them ten times, and anyway it’s there on the board in bright red chalk (the kind that never rubs off properly, so you can’t exactly read whatever it is he writes next).
They didn’t do any of those things for long in his class.
Mainly because he humiliated them.
He was a big man, and he’d lean over them like King Kong and say something hurtful and personal. He seemed to be able to home in on whatever it was that worried them — everyone has something they feel insecure about — and he’d hammer away at it until they were so embarrassed they wouldn’t dare open their mouth again.
And, of course, he was never wrong — just like my father — even when he wasn’t right. But at least my father had his good points. We never detected any in Mr Plamenatz.
So, I began my own little “payback campaign”.
It was probably because he decided to pump up his ego by picking on Aaron Herbert, the most harmless and likeable kid in the whole form.
Even Shane Thomas had always left Aaron pretty much alone. Aaron had been in an accident when he was young, and he could be a little “slow” at times. He forgot things, and sometimes he’d daydream a little and wouldn’t have a clue what was going on around him.
Just the sort of victim Plamenatz could handle.
It was last period, a few minutes before the hooter — not Aaron’s best time of the day — and the poor kid was having trouble remembering some minor point which just happened to be right there
on the board in front of him.
Plamenatz had launched into one of his performances, leaning over him, and announcing to “the audience” that “Mr Herbert” was in line to be the first kid in the history of the school to get a minus score on his report card for Science.
I looked across at Aaron. He was confused and scared, and there were tears forming in his eyes, and then I heard myself saying: “Leave him alone! You’re not so perfect yourself.”
There was a sudden, horrible silence, and I saw Plamenatz stiffen.
His gaze slid slowly across the room until it met mine, and there was a look in his eyes which might have been hate or fear, but before he could speak, the hooter sounded and everyone began to pack up.
As I threw my things into my bag, forcing myself to look down, I felt him loom up in front of my desk.
“You wait behind, my girl.”
My girl!
If I was his girl, I’d apply for adoption.
Then I did the bravest — and scariest — thing I’d done in my life up to that point. I picked up my bag, turned on my heel, and threw over my shoulder, “I’ve got a bus to catch.” And I walked slowly towards the door, expecting at any moment to feel his hand on my shoulder, dragging me back.
It didn’t happen. When I reached the door, I risked a quick glance. He hadn’t moved, but the look on his face now was definitely one of hate.
From then on it just got worse.
He didn’t say a word about it the next day, or in the days that followed. But he kept finding things about my work to criticise — something I had never experienced before — and he began to talk down to me in a “superior” voice, that only made him sound … childish. Once he even called me “Lisdalia the Failure”, which a couple of the Greenvale kids picked up on and used for a while.
So, I began to fight back.
I kept picking him up for spelling or punctuation mistakes on the board (he made quite a few, it’s quite easy to do), and I’d ask him curly questions on whatever topic we were studying — ones I knew he wouldn’t be able to answer. I’d spend half my free time in the library, looking up books for items to catch him out with.
It was war.
But he had more weapons.
He’d do something to get me to react, then he’d slap me with a punishment or a detention — which I’d refuse to do.
That was how I ended up seeing so much of Miss Vegas. Before they put me on school detention and contacted my parents, they decided to give her a go at me. I think my Primary record might have helped; I’m not sure Shane Thomas would have got the same deal.
I came to her room all defensive, ready to … I don’t really know what I was ready for — I hadn’t planned any of it. In the end, it didn’t matter. Within five minutes, we were talking like old friends, and by the end of that lunchtime, I was just a little closer to “adjusting”.
“Remember,” she said, as she closed the door behind us, “you’re not there to compete with him — or anyone else. You don’t know everything …” she paused, and smiled a little. “Not yet. Mr Plamenatz and all your teachers are there to help, but they can’t do it if you’re fighting with them. Or if you’re on school detention.”
“But he’s …” I began, but she cut in.
“A teacher.” There was a finality in her voice, but the expression on her face softened it a little. She ruffled my hair. “What do you expect me to say? Look, just try to find a way to work with him — or at least not make things any worse. There will be a lot of things in life that don’t go the way you want, and you can’t go fighting all of them. Roll with it; it’s good for building character.”
So I tried. I called off the war, and we entered a sort of “armed truce”.
At least he didn’t pick on Aaron again. Even when the poor kid fell asleep out of boredom in the middle of a lesson, or copied paragraphs from the wrong page, and then couldn’t answer any of the questions on the board.
8
JUST FATE
It began gradually. Dad was never one to complain about physical pain and he didn’t this time, but over a period of weeks, by about the end of June, it became obvious that something was wrong.
I’d often catch him massaging the palm of his hand with his thumb, or testing the movement in his fingers, wriggling them slowly in the air, like he was playing an invisible piano. Or sometimes making a fist. And though he struggled to hide the grimace of pain, it was there in his eyes the second before he turned away.
Then he started to lose his grip on things; the cup that crashed to the floor and spilled hot coffee down his leg; the box of groceries that ended up spread across the tiles on the veranda when it “just slipped” out of his hands.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
That was what the doctors called it. A pretty impressive title for the end of life as he knew it.
It’s a problem with the nerves that operate the hand. They sort of knot up where they pass through the wrist-bone. It’s incredibly painful, and you lose most of the use of your hand — in my father’s case, both hands. It isn’t uncommon for it to happen to both hands, though usually it doesn’t happen to both at the same time. With him it did, and the pain must have been unbearable — though he almost never let it show.
For a while, he fought it. He went off to work every morning and struggled through the day. But it couldn’t go on. It got to the stage where he couldn’t lift a wheelbarrow or work the concrete. A concreter lives by his hands; Dad had for more than twenty years, but in the end he had to give in to the pain.
Maybe eight months, the doctor said. More likely a year. Then, if everything went well, he could go back to work. Of course, it all depended on the operations, and how well his hands recovered. Concreting was hard physical labour, and his hands would never be quite the same …
I had gone along with my father to see his specialist, Dr Raymond. It wasn’t so much that Dad really needed a translator — his English wasn’t all that bad. He just felt more comfortable knowing that there would be no trick words to trip him up or confuse him.
I watched his face when the doctor broke the news.
Twelve months.
I could see him calculating. And I noticed the colour draining from his tanned face. We were pretty comfortable; he’d always worked hard, and he had a little bit of money saved. But twelve months? A whole year without anything coming in?
He had his own business, but it was only small. Just himself and Gabi, the labourer. It couldn’t run without him. He didn’t say a word, but I knew him well enough to guess what he was thinking. How he was feeling.
“Why so long? Couldn’t you …” My father’s world was collapsing before his eyes, he was lost for words.
The doctor was a nice guy, very professional, very precise. He leaned back in his chair; I remember it was one of those high-backed leather ones that reclined and swivelled.
“You must understand, Mr Petrantonio. It is a serious condition, and a very delicate operation. If you try to rush it, the recovery could be impaired. Permanently.”
My father didn’t understand “impaired”, but he knew it couldn’t be good.
Driving home, he was quiet, thoughtful. I watched the pain in his eyes whenever he changed gears, and I wondered what was going through his mind. Here was something he couldn’t just stand up to, or refuse to recognise. His pride and principles had no answer for the fact that his own body was letting him down. There was no one to blame. Not the doctor, certainly. It was just Fate.
When he turned into the driveway and cut the engine, I got out and moved towards the house, but he just sat there behind the wheel, staring at the garage door, as if somehow it might hold the solution.
It didn’t. Five minutes later, I heard him come in through the back door, and call to Mum. They disappeared into their bedroom, and shut the door behind them.
9
TANJA’S STORY
I know Mr Petrantonio must have been hell on wheels to live with at times, but he w
as a great host.
Whenever I visited, after school or for the weekend, he couldn’t do enough to make me feel welcome. Or rather, he couldn’t get Mrs P and Lisdalia to do enough; but you know what I mean.
And he was great with Mike, which was a bit of a surprise, considering Mr Petrantonio’s general attitudes and how close the boy was getting to his only daughter.
Not that there was a lot going on. They were still only kids. They hadn’t reached the holding-hands-and-gazing-into-each-other’s-eyes and other heavy stuff stage; that would come a fair bit later. But they were getting close, and Mr P was nothing if not old-fashioned.
I think he just liked Mike. He could talk to him. They’d sit there and discuss cars or soccer, or the way they were finally rounding up the Mafia in Italy. And it wasn’t one-sided. Mike didn’t just sit there and nod politely; he argued, he asked questions, and you could tell that Mr P enjoyed it. I think John and Tony were too busy most of the time with their jobs, their girls and their weight-training to sit down and just talk with their dad.
Mike enjoyed it too. His dad was still away in the Navy then, and I guess the male conversation did him good.
That’s why the change was so noticeable, after they got the news from the doctor.
Lisdalia had told both Mike and me about it, of course — we had a no-secrets clause in our friendships — but even if she hadn’t, we would have picked it instantly.
He no longer walked around singing snatches of opera, he didn’t shout to his wife to make some coffee for us — “the real stuff, not that powder garbage” — when we arrived. It was almost as if he’d grown … old and tired overnight.
And Mrs P was no better. She looked worried, and though she tried to smile, it was forced and totally unconvincing …
10
BITTER MEDICINE
“Worried” didn’t come close to describing it.
Our house was huge, and we’d only been in it about five years, so even though Dad had built it quite cheaply, using all his work contacts, they still had a big mortgage to pay off, and sickness benefits just weren’t going to be enough to see them through.
Lisdalia Page 3