A Taste of Cockroach

by Allan Baillie

Bruce squinted back at him. ‘The Shah is worried about the school. Thinks he’s going to get shot at.’

  The Shah stopped in the asphalt and stared at Bruce from under his eyebrows.

  ‘Right, Shah?’

  ‘Oh, leave him alone.’

  The Shah straightened, took a breath and strode from the shadow of the building. He stood alone in the sun for several seconds with his fists by his side.

  Bruce shook his head and pulled his plastic ruler from his bag.

  ‘Alvays ready for ze attack, eh, Inspecktor …’ and sliced the air near The Shah.

  The Shah bobbed sideways, danced out of range, and watched Bruce, with sudden caution glittering in his eye.

  ‘Zo!’ Bruce tried again, and The Shah swayed, ducked, shimmered around Bruce as if Bruce was an old bull. Bruce began to get red about the ears.

  ‘Stop it, Bruce, you’ll hurt someone.’ Pearl looked worried.

  The Shah whirled away, but suddenly he was looking at Bruce with some strange sort of understanding. Bruce leapt at The Shah with a wild yell, swinging his ruler from above his head as if it were a sword. The Shah watched it coming. He did not move.

  The ruler struck The Shah on the collarbone with a dull whack and clattered to the ground. Bruce stared in alarm at The Shah, who was just standing there.

  ‘I am a soldier,’ The Shah said, and walked away.

  ‘Boy …’ said Bruce.

  * * *

  We pretty well left him alone for a while. And we thought he was avoiding us. We’d be hanging around, talking with about five kids, and then we’d notice that he was standing twenty metres away, watching us.

  Invite him in and he’d turn away. But it wasn’t just us, it was anyone.

  He’d be walking down the street and he’d see three men ahead, goofing off on their shovels or something, not going anywhere, and he’d stop. He’d stay stopped until the men moved. Bruce reckoned The Shah was just too tough for anyone, and anyway, he wasn’t much fun to tow around.

  But Pearl saw him by himself and he wasn’t so tough.

  ‘Hussein was in a plant nursery,’ Pearl said.

  ‘Hussein?’ Bruce said. ‘Oh, you mean The Shah.’

  ‘Hussein. I was taking Suzy – my kid sister – to the library when we saw him running his fingers over a small mandarin tree, as if he couldn’t believe that it was there. Smelling at the fruit, pressing at the earth and even listening to the leaves.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Bruce.

  ‘Said, “Hi Shah” and he turns. “Whatcha doing? This is Suzy, she’s three …” And his cheeks are shining.’

  ‘Shining? Like wet or something?’

  ‘And gives me a shy little smile, says: “See? It’s growing. They’re all growing.”’

  And that was it. Didn’t make sense then, but Pearl carried on as if she was getting to understand him. Anyway, she started calling him Hussein instead of The Shah and she couldn’t be budged.

  But The Shah kept on doing weird things at school.

  Like the swimming afternoon. We got ourselves pretty close to the canteen and the starting–finishing line. Fine for something to watch if you have to. Then Mr Henney raised the starting pistol and The Shah made a funny little sound, like a strangled cat, and shrivelled in his chair.

  Henney fired at the roof and eight girls were splashing down the pool. But The Shah was staring at the roof, as if he was looking for the hole Henney had made, and he didn’t stop trembling until Pearl grabbed his hand and smiled and squeezed it.

  A few races later, a few more shots fired at the roof – and The Shah still couldn’t find any holes in the roof – then he was lining up for his race. Wearing a purple T-shirt. Very modest, says Bruce.

  Henney put the starting pistol down on the judge’s table while some girls finished their relay. The Shah stepped out of line and picked up the starting pistol. Miss Ryan started to say something, reached for The Shah’s arm, but Henney saw The Shah and nodded and waved Mrs Ryan away.

  The Shah hefted the pistol, tilted it left and right, moved his finger against the curve of the trigger, and aimed at a tile five metres away with both eyes open. All this with a slight frown and his lips pressed together. Then he broke the pistol open like he’s been doing it in his sleep, pulled a cap from a chamber, frowned some more, examined it, put it back, flipped the pistol closed and returned it to the table with a shrug.

  ‘Right, boys, behind your blocks,’ said Henney. He picked up the pistol as if nothing had happened.

  We lined up as the girls gasped in. Pearl came last, as usual.

  ‘Take your blocks.’

  We stepped up and The Shah was holding his elbows and seemed to be pretty cold already. He was still staring at the pistol.

  ‘You taking off your T-shirt, Hussein?’ said Henney, just a polite reminder.

  The Shah’s eyes flared wide and he pressed his arms into his sides.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Okay.’ Just like that. Anyone else and Henney would have his head off. Maybe Henney’s getting old. ‘Face the water …’

  And we were crouching on the blocks, all of us except the Shah, who was still watching that starting pistol.

  ‘Ah …’ said Henney. ‘This gun doesn’t seem to be working.’ He put the pistol on the table. ‘Ready, set …’

  Henney started us off by clapping his hands.

  * * *

  We started to get used to The Shah. He kept on being as secretive as a pet rock, but we figured that was all right, it was his business. Maybe we didn’t want to know anything else. Except we kept on finding out things anyway.

  Bruce came to school looking like he’d been trying to think things out for a long while. ‘Went to The Shah’s place, yesty.’

  ‘You did?’ Pearl was surprised. Bruce hadn’t had much to do with The Shah since belting him with the ruler.

  ‘He caught me coming out of the vet with my rabbit. Told him I was going to eat it so he wouldn’t laugh. Didn’t laugh, didn’t believe me either. Said he had a pet mouse at home, would I like to see it? Well, what can you say? But there’s nobody at home but an old uncle and the mouse and a few old photos.

  ‘There’s one photo and it shows this woman smiling from a chair, and a skinny man holding The Shah on a wooden horse. But The Shah is maybe three years old in that photo and there’s no newer ones. He won’t talk about the photo, about anything, just keeps talking about the mouse. The one he’s got now, the fat white one sitting up, sniffing at my rabbit, and the one he had in that city he was in over there. A skinny brown one, very fast. Caught it in a wrecked house and kept it in his cellar. He thought it would last because it was so fast and smart. But it didn’t. He said nothing lasts.’

  * * *

  Then The Shah had a go at footy. No worries for a while, he could mark, bounce, tackle and kick fairly straight. But then he took a great leap, trying to pull a high kick out of the sky. It was dropping towards him from the sun, and maybe he saw something which was not there.

  Anyway, one moment he was up there, flying like a bird, the next he was crouched into a tight little ball, falling into the mud. The ball bounced beside him.

  Henney caught the ball and knelt beside The Shah. I was just close enough to hear what he said.

  ‘It’s only a ball, Hussein, look at it,’ he said. ‘You’re not there any more. Just here.’

  And he offered the ball to The Shah. The Shah looked away, but he took the ball, stood up and suddenly exploded in anger. He drove his boot into the ball with a high shriek, spinning it far down the ground.

  * * *

  Maybe we would have slowly got to know and like The Shah without what happened to Suzy, or maybe The Shah would have stayed The Shah, a funny kid with his private tribe of goblins. I don’t know, I just wish that wasn’t the way we got to know Hussein.

  Suzy is Pearl’s giggly kid sister. Was. One afternoon she got hit by a truck on a crossing with flashing lights and everything. By the time we heard abo
ut it, Suzy was dead. Pearl was off school for two days and when she came back nobody knew how to talk to her. She walked into the schoolground and I could see some kids walk away. Bruce and me, we were waiting for someone else to speak.

  And then The Shah walks up to her, looks at her and squeezes her arm. She puts her hand on his and tries a very weak smile. He nods and leads her away. All this without a single word. As if he had learned just what to do. As if he had done it many times before. As if other kids had done it for him.

  In morning recess they were talking a lot, both of them looking solemn. Bruce tried to break in, but they immediately stopped talking, like they had something between them that they couldn’t share. Bruce finally saw that Pearl was still very close to breaking down and he didn’t know how to handle that so he backed out. At lunchtime Pearl and The Shah were swapping lunches, her Vegemite sandwiches and his flat bread, and he was doing most of the talking. In the afternoon recess The Shah invited us to join them. Pearl was still pale and shaky, but she was calm and beginning to talk. She even made a joke about The Shah’s lunch and The Shah even laughed.

  That was the last time we called Hussein ‘The Shah’. Even Bruce moved over to ‘Hussein’, to ‘Huss’, to ‘Horse’, without working out why. Pearl liked the change and sometimes calls Hussein ‘Horse’ herself. (She sometimes calls Bruce ‘Moose’.) Pearl says it’s all right; before we were calling him for what he was, now it’s who he is. Hussein seems to like it, too.

  But I guess Hussein changed a bit from that day. Before, he must have thought we were a pack of apes, had to be watched and treated carefully – ’specially after Bruce’s ruler attack – but Pearl showed that we were people too.

  We saw Horse’s city on TV soon after that. Buildings with shell-holes, walls scarred by bullet patterns, streets coated with dust, blocked by car wrecks and rubble. Nothing green, nothing growing. Teenagers, kids, running about with automatic rifles in their hands.

  ‘Sorry, Hussein,’ Pearl said at the swimming carnival next day.

  He opened a hand in resignation, as if to say there was nothing more he could do. He walked to the blocks, his purple T-shirt clinging to his body.

  ‘Hey, Horse, going to beat me today?’ Bruce said, and smiled.

  Hussein smiled back. ‘Why not?’

  He hesitated for a moment, then pulled the purple T-shirt over his head.

  The main scar, a bloodless seam, ran from his right shoulder to his left hip. The second scar was a second bellybutton punched in his side.

  Marks of shrapnel and a bullet. A soldier’s wounds.

  ‘And only ten,’ murmured Henney, and shook his head. ‘Right boys, take your blocks …’

  REBEL!

  In 1990 Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide election in Burma but the ruling military junta refused to give up their power. A friend, Dr Than Lwyn, told me of a remarkable incident in Rangoon in that year. I wrote and Di Wu illustrated the picture book Rebel! to tell that story. This version is more accurate. The military were still there in 2005.

  The officer’s jeep hurtled down a Rangoon street in the morning, scattering Burmese peddlers and shoppers. The officer impatiently patted his baton in his palm as his driver wrestled with the steering wheel. Three old army trucks thundered after the jeep, loaded with young soldiers and piles of paper forms.

  The jeep swayed towards a technical school, but the driver braked when he saw that the iron gates were closed.

  ‘What are you doing, boy?’ The officer threw his hand against the windshield.

  ‘But —’

  ‘I’ve got no time, boy!’ The officer pointed his baton at the gates.

  The driver winced, accelerated and closed his eyes. The jeep ploughed into the gates, shattering one of its headlights and bending back the mudguard. The gates squealed, warped, before shuddering backwards.

  The jeep lurched into the school’s quadrangle and the trucks followed. Soldiers leaped from the trucks and used their rifles to herd students and teachers towards the jeep. Other soldiers unloaded the forms from the trucks.

  The officer climbed onto the bonnet of his damaged jeep and looked down at the students and their teachers as he thumped his baton on his trousers’ leg. ‘So …’

  The students and the teachers stared at the officer; gold flashing on his hat, rows of medals on his chest, a polished revolver on his hip. Nobody spoke.

  ‘There was an election. A stupid election,’ the officer smiled at them.

  Nobody smiled back.

  The officer narrowed his eyes. ‘Some people say a stupid woman won the election. That is rubbish! Our glorious military have ruled you for almost thirty years and we shall rule for another thirty years. Without us, China, Thailand, India would march over our country. Burma would not exist …’

  The driver widened his eyes and a sergeant coughed.

  The officer hesitated. ‘Yangon would not exist. But Yangon is the envy of all the other countries in our region, far better than the old imperial Burma. We hold the borders safe, we are fighting Karen and Shan bandits on the Thai borders all the time – do you think that stupid woman could control them? She couldn’t even bring you a bowl of rice!’

  There was silence.

  ‘Hah! We gave you a place to show your thanks for what our courageous soldiers had done for you, but you turned to bite the hand that fed you. We will ignore this treacherous election, for the country’s good. But you have another chance with these forms …’

  Some of the soldiers carried some of the forms to the jeep.

  The officer jabbed his baton towards the piles. ‘You can say how good the military rule has been to you. When you fill out these forms you must write your name, so we know who said what. Now you can tell the world how much you love your army!’

  But the students and the teachers were not looking at the officer any more. They had seen a small, battered thong being thrown from a second-storey school building window. A thong cracking at the sole, a smear of dry mud and a faint red line around the edge.

  ‘Let’s see …’

  The soldiers blinked at the spinning thong, a sergeant frowned at it and the officer’s driver stared at it in horror.

  ‘… how she looks then —’

  The thong hit the officer behind the ear. His hat dipped onto his nose, bounced on the bonnet of the jeep and flopped into the dust.

  Nobody moved, nobody breathed. Everybody waited through a long and terrible silence.

  The officer stared down at his hat, upside-down in the dust, with the thong propped against it. For a moment he seemed not to believe what had happened, then his face mottled like a bruised mango, his baton shivered in his hand.

  He turned very slowly to the technical school building where the thong had come from. He began to beat his baton hard against his leg, jolting his shining revolver in its holster.

  The driver darted forward and picked up the officer’s hat and the thong, as if he was trying to reverse the moment.

  ‘Who did that?’ roared the officer at the building.

  There was no sound, no movement from the school building.

  The driver looked at the thong in his hand for an instant, then he put it on the jeep’s mudguard and yanked a cloth from his pocket. He hurriedly dusted the officer’s hat, adjusted the peak and presented it to him, with a lowering of his head.

  The officer snatched the hat and rammed it on his head. ‘All right! I will have this clown and jam him into a parrot’s cage …’

  He saw the driver lifting the thong from the mudguard and plucked it from him with his baton. ‘Hah!’ he said and flashed his teeth.

  He lifted the thong from his baton, curled his lip and jabbed the baton at the sergeant and his soldiers. ‘Go into that school and find the lout who wears only one thong. Drag him to me!’

  The soldiers swung their rifles as the sergeant led them into the school building. For a long ten minutes the officer, the driver, the other soldiers, the teachers and their students in the
quadrangle looked at the school building and waited.

  There were no shots from the school building, no shouting or running. Finally the sergeant and the soldiers marched onto the crowded quadrangle. They were bringing a full class – twenty-five students and their teacher – not just one single, quivering student.

  Some of the teachers frowned and there was a murmur in the crowd as they approached.

  ‘Trouble, Sergeant?’ the officer said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the sergeant said, saluting.

  The soldiers brought the class before the officer. They stood straight as posts, the twenty-five students and their teacher, and looked through the officer.

  The officer stared at them and his face darkened.

  The other soldiers looked at them and began to cough, their faces beginning to twitch. The teachers and the students in the quadrangle smiled and grinned and someone, somewhere, began to giggle.

  The officer stood on his jeep, his revolver glinting, his medals shimmering in the sun – and broke his baton.

  For in that school building there was a large pile of thongs, and the twenty-five students and their teacher had nothing – nothing at all – on their feet.

  The officer touched his gun for a moment, but then looked at the sea of faces in the quadrangle. He leaped down from the bonnet, jumped into the jeep and careered out of the school. The soldiers hastily clambered into their trucks and bucketed after the jeep, abandoning the stacked forms in the quadrangle.

  The officer roared through the streets of Rangoon, past the noisy shops, round the ancient pagoda and over the river bridge …

  But he could still hear the laughter.

  THE BED-SITTER

  Towards the end of 1990 someone – probably students – put some furniture on Avalon Beach one night. By next morning everything had gone.

  Shirley knew there was trouble before Sok had muttered a word. He had dodged her completely for the first hour of school and when they did share classes he had kept his eyes away from hers. When he finally came to her at lunchtime he looked grey.