The Final Mission

by R. A. Spratt

  Now April had to spend every science lesson sitting at the back of the class on her own, perched on a stool with no desk and no scientific equipment. There was even a circle with a two-metre radius drawn on the floor, which she was not allowed to leave and no one else was allowed to enter. As a result, science for April had become a dull subject. She couldn’t even enjoy making sarcastic comments, she was sitting so far away, they got lost in the din of the class.

  So April was in a black mood by the time she stepped into the classroom, blacker than usual, which was really quite something because as soon as she opened her eyes in the morning April was always in a towering rage. She glared at the floor as she tromped to the back of the room. For the safety of her classmates, Pumpkin was no longer allowed in the room. He was tied up outside. But this may well have been a misjudgement on Ms Quinn’s part. April was less volatile when her dog was by her side, not much less volatile, but a little bit.

  ‘If she had any decency, she’d pull out.’

  April was still mentally fuming at Mrs Pilsbury, it took her brain a moment to register that what she’d overheard was probably about her.

  ‘Huh?’ said April, looking up and seeing Matilda Voss-Nevers glaring at her. ‘Are you talking to me?’

  ‘No, I’d never talk to you. My mother doesn’t want me to associate with delinquents,’ said Matilda. ‘I was talking to Daphne. And I was saying that if you had any decency, you’d pull out.’

  April glanced at Daphne. She looked a lot like Matilda, admittedly where Matilda was blonde, Daphne had brown hair. Where Matilda was short, Daphne was tall. Where Matilda had blue eyes, Daphne had brown. But they still looked alike, because they both had the same self-satisfied, judgemental look on their faces. April glowered.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked April.

  ‘If you had any decency, you’d pull out of the Potato Pageant,’ said Matilda. ‘It is supposed to be for nice girls, who do nice things to make the town nicer. Not for people like you!’

  ‘I’m nice . . .’ April began to retort but then realised this was a tremendous lie so added, ‘. . . enough.’

  Everyone in the classroom burst out laughing. They were all listening now.

  ‘You’re horrible and everyone hates you,’ said Matilda.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Daphne. She might have been a supportive friend for Matilda, but was evidently not great with rhetoric.

  April glanced around the room. All the faces were glaring or jeering at her. She noticed Fin sitting on his own at the front. He was scrunched up like he was hoping she wouldn’t spot him. They locked eyes for a second. Fin shrugged. He didn’t say the words out loud but basically his body language was saying, ‘They’ve got a point’.

  ‘We all want you out of the pageant,’ said Matilda. ‘Before you ruin it for everybody. You’re just going to make fun of it and attack people. And steal all the attention from the nice girls who actually care.’

  April watched as the rest of the class nodded and mumbled their agreement.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kieran, he always liked to chip in with his two cents. ‘It’s a Currawong competition for Currawong people.’

  ‘And you’re an outsider,’ said Animesh. In case April had been too stupid to get Kieran’s point.

  ‘And you all feel this way?’ asked April. She spoke quietly and calmly, but Fin, who knew her best, was well aware this was a bad bad sign. Her fists were clenching ever tighter and that should have been a clue as to what was about to come next.

  ‘Well you can all get STUFFED!’ yelled April as she leapt to her feet. ‘I’m not going anywhere! I’m not dropping out! I’m going to go in this pageant and I’m going to beat you all! You’re going down Voss-Nevers. I’m going to crush you like a bug. Like the bugs you crushed when you cheated in the cockroach races, which everyone seems to have forgotten about because you’re all a bunch of mouth-breathing hypocrites!’

  ‘Achem.’

  It was the sound of someone clearing their throat. The class turned to see Mr Lang standing in the doorway. He was wearing a tie, which was unusual. It showed he was trying harder than normal to appear competent.

  ‘If you could all take your seats and stop bellowing abuse at each other, I’d like to introduce you to your new science teacher,’ said Mr Lang. He stepped into the room and the new teacher followed behind him. ‘Her name is Dr Banfield and she is a very highly qualified scientist, particularly in the field of palaeontology.’

  A messy middled-aged woman wearing a pleated skirt, corduroy jacket with elbow patches and an unironed blouse stepped out from behind Mr Lang. She poked the arch of her thick-framed glasses to push them up her nose and peered at the class. It was Mum standing right there in their classroom. Just when April thought she couldn’t get any angrier, she felt her rage kick up another level. It’s a miracle she didn’t have some sort of brain embolism. It is staggering she could fit so much rage into one normal-sized head. She had no idea what was happening. Was this a trick? Was it a nightmare? Was Mum about to start karate chopping people left and right, and putting them in chokeholds? She certainly hoped so.

  Mum was being old Mum, the way they had known her for the first eleven years of April’s life. She smiled absently as if surprised to find herself in a classroom, and then smiled again as if bewildered to find students there too. She straightened her glasses, tucked her hair behind her ear, which only dislodged a clump of messy hair from behind her other ear and said, ‘Good morning year . . .?’

  ‘Eight,’ said Mr Lang. ‘This is year 8.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mum, adjusting her glasses again and peering at the students. ‘They look awfully big for eight-year-olds.’

  ‘Year 8,’ said Mr Lang, beginning to appear slightly unnerved by the ignorance of his new employee. ‘They’re thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds.’

  ‘April is twelve,’ said Kieran, ever the dibber-dobber.

  ‘Really?’ said Matilda. ‘That explains her emotional immaturity.’

  ‘It doesn’t explain her freakish Hulk strength,’ said Animesh. He had been the victim of one of April’s crash tackles just the previous day when he had tried to pacify Pumpkin by feeding him a ham sandwich. April never let Pumpkin eat ham – it was too high in nitrites.

  ‘How do you know my age?’ demanded April. She spun around to confront Mr Lang. ‘He’s been looking in my personal files.’

  ‘It was Fin. He told me when I asked if you were twins,’ said Kieran.

  ‘You,’ said April, turning on her brother.

  Fin tried to scrunch himself up even smaller.

  Mr Lang clapped his hands twice. ‘That’s enough!’ Everyone fell silent. Not that they respected Mr Lang, but because they were so surprised to see him try to exercise authority. They knew it was just to impress the new teacher. ‘That’s better. Now Dr Banfield is a highly accomplished scientist. We are lucky to have her join the staff at our school. I expect you to treat her with the respect she deserves.’

  ‘You mean, you don’t want us to drive her off,’ said Kieran.

  Mr Lang sighed. ‘Yes, that is exactly what I mean.’

  ‘Well, don’t look at us,’ said Matilda. ‘It’s the Peski kids who cause all the trouble.’

  ‘Yes, you might want to keep an eye on the Peskis,’ Mr Lang said to Mum, pointing out Fin and April so she knew who they were. ‘They’re still settling in. There have been some behavioural issues.’

  ‘Really?’ said Dr Banfield. ‘Both of them? But they’re a delight at home.’

  ‘What?’ said Mr Lang.

  ‘April and Fin,’ said Dr Banfield. ‘They’re a delight at home.’

  Fin wished he could sink into the ground like acid burning through the hull of a spaceship in a science fiction movie. Or that he could be instantly sucked into the vacuum of space. Anything to avoid the ultimate humiliation of having your mum turn up to teach your science class.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Mr Lang.

  ‘Don’t say
it,’ whimpered Fin, scrunching himself up further, if the earth wasn’t going to spontaneously swallow him up or expel him into the stratosphere, he could hide under the desk.

  ‘They’re my children,’ said Dr Banfield.

  Fin groaned.

  Mr Lang looked like he was going to faint. If he didn’t have such a low centre of gravity (he had eaten a lot of junk food while working as a roadie for Metallica) he may well have done so. His mouth just opened and closed silently for a few moments.

  The whole class was agog now. Heads whipped around to see how April would react. She was staring at a point on the ceiling as if she could not be less interested, so they immediately knew it was true. Plus there was a family resemblance. April had the same messy hair, and Fin was really short.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Lang,’ said Mum, briskly, as she plopped her tired, old briefcase on the teacher’s desk.

  Fin sincerely hoped there wasn’t a bomb in that bag, or some sort of torture device.

  ‘Now that I have your attention, let’s begin.’ She opened her briefcase. It was the old-fashioned kind with a hinged top. It seemed to hold way more than appeared possible from the outside. She took out a squashed sandwich wrapped in gladwrap, a muesli bar, an empty but not terribly clean coffee cup, a brick of perspex with a very large grasshopper preserved inside and finally a thick wad of files. When she looked up Mr Lang was still staring at her.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ asked Mum.

  Mr Lang shook his head. Not to indicate ‘no’ but to try and get his brain working again by kick-starting it with kinetic energy. ‘I just had never imagined . . .’ he trailed off for a moment as he gathered his thoughts, ‘. . . I never imagined that the Peskis had a mother . . . and if I had imagined . . . I don’t know what I would have imagined . . . but it would have been . . . someone very . . . um . . . different.’

  Mum stared at Mr Lang myopically, tilting her head back so she could get a close look at him through the reading part of her multifocals.

  ‘This is it,’ thought Fin. He braced for the probability that his mother was going to punch Mr Lang in the nose and drive the bone up into his brain killing him instantly.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Mum. She smiled. ‘You’d better run along, Mr Lang. I’m sure you’ve got a million things to do.’ She went over and held the door open for him. ‘Or at least several hundred if you set your mind to it. Even if it’s only half a dozen, it won’t get done standing around here watching me teach year 8, will it?’ Mum laughed wholeheartedly at her own joke.

  The class looked at her bemused.

  Mum shut the door behind Mr Lang and turned to face them.

  ‘Let’s get started,’ said Mum, bustling back to her desk where she started flicking through the papers. ‘They’ve given me this tremendously interesting syllabus to teach from. And I see you’re up to osmosis. Splendid stuff. But that’s not terribly hard is it?’

  She looked up at the class to see if they agreed with her.

  ‘It’s a pretty simple concept,’ continued Mum. ‘If you can mix yourself a glass of cordial you can understand the concept of diluting a liquid. And if you sweat, you can understand the concept of a semi-permeable membrane. You can all mix cordial and sweat, can’t you?’

  She paused for a beat, waiting for an answer. But the kids of Currawong were not fast talkers. Kieran had begun to draw breath to respond, but Mum had already moved on.

  ‘I thought so,’ said Mum, slapping the syllabus closed. ‘So we can set this aside and learn about something much more interesting.’ She picked up the whole thick document and dropped it in the wastepaper bin at the end of her desk. ‘Does anybody here know about the possible causes of striations on a fossilised dinosaur specimen?’

  No one did. Well, Fin did, but he wasn’t going to put his hand up.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Mum, happily. ‘Then we are going to have so much fun! Take out your pens and notebooks and jot this down . . .’ Mum stopped, the whiteboard marker frozen in mid-air as she looked back over her shoulder at the class. ‘You do study Latin here, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said Kieran.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mum. ‘What a shame. Latin is tremendous fun. And so useful in everyday life.’

  ‘Not in Currawong,’ said Animesh.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ agreed Mum. ‘But it comes up all day, every day when you’re a palaeontologist. So let’s start there. Today we’ll learn the fundamentals of Latin scientific classification.’

  The class groaned.

  ‘I know,’ said Mum. ‘You’re disappointed, aren’t you? You can’t believe you’ve had to wait until year 8 to learn this. But don’t worry, we’ll make up for lost time by really working hard.’

  Fin wondered if Mum was actually trying to kill the entire class through boredom.

  Meanwhile at the back of the classroom, April was seething. She couldn’t take it any more. She leapt to her feet. ‘Where is Ms Quinn?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Ms Quinn,’ said April. ‘Our regular science teacher.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mum. ‘I’m afraid she’s met with an accident.’

  ‘No!’ said April. While she did enjoy wrestling and setting her dog on her enemies, she would never wilfully injure a teacher. Even Ms Quinn, who had banished her to isolation at the back of the room, even she didn’t deserve to have someone as ruthless as Mum attack her.

  ‘You’d better sit down, sweet pea,’ said Mum. ‘So you can write your notes.’

  Kieran chortled, ‘Sweet pea.’

  The rest of the class sniggered.

  Mum turned back to the board and continued writing out her Latin lesson. April spent the rest of the period fuming.

  April was all for confronting her mother straightaway at the end of class, but Fin got to her first.

  ‘Walk away,’ he whispered, as he grabbed April by the upper arm and steered her from where Mum was wiping her notes off the whiteboard. Fin tried to pull April into the tide of students pouring out of class and moving on to their next lesson.

  But April never took kindly to being manipulated or manhandled. Really anything with the prefix ‘man’ didn’t work for her. She simply twisted Fin’s thumb until he squealed in pain then brushed him aside.

  ‘No way,’ said April. ‘I’m having this out. She can’t knobble our science teacher and get away with it.’

  ‘You hated Ms Quinn,’ Fin pointed out.

  ‘I hate everyone,’ argued April. ‘She can’t go around incapacitating everyone I despise. She’d unleash a one-woman pandemic of violence.’

  But Fin could be stubborn too. He grabbed hold of April’s backpack, which halted her forward momentum.

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded April.

  ‘Don’t do what you’re about to do,’ said Fin. ‘Don’t make a scene. Think of the consequences.’

  April rarely thought of consequences. Certainly not before doing things. She often thought about consequences afterwards and how bitterly unfair they were. For April consequences so often meant punishments of some kind. Fin grabbing hold of her backpack had slowed her down just enough for her rational mind to catch up with what her body had been about to do, or rather her mouth had been about to say. April hated it when Fin was right, but she realised he was – she shouldn’t make a scene. Not here. She could make one later at home.

  ‘Fine,’ said April, whacking Fin’s hands out of the way. She stomped from the classroom, pausing at the door to glare hard at their mother. April called out, ‘I’ll see you at home. And I’ll have questions.’

  ‘Bye, sweetie,’ said Mum. ‘I’d love to answer all your Latin grammar questions.’

  April just growled.

  Fin followed her out the door. He didn’t make eye contact with Mum. For some reason seeing her pretend to be the bumbling academic again just made him want to cry. It reminded him what a lie the first twelve years of life had been.

  That night at home, the gloves came off.


  ‘Where is she?’ demanded April.

  ‘Who?’ asked Dad in alarm. He had no idea who April was talking about, but she had said ‘she’ and there wasn’t a woman in Dad’s life he wasn’t terrified of.

  ‘Your ex-wife,’ snapped April.

  ‘Oh,’ said Dad. ‘Your mother?’

  ‘How many ex-wives have you got?’ asked April.

  ‘Only one,’ conceded Dad. ‘I think.’ So much of his life had been nothing more than a cover story so he couldn’t be entirely sure. Plus he had almost married Ingrid so she felt a bit like an ex too.

  ‘She just turned up at school today!’ yelled April. ‘She got a job as a science teacher!’ For April this was apparently more horrifying than having a mother who was an international espionage operative. ‘Who does she think she is?’

  ‘Um . . .’ said Dad. ‘A scientist.’

  ‘Don’t defend her!’ snapped April.

  ‘Did she bring Ms Quinn here?’ asked Fin. He was breathless. He’d spent the first two minutes since he’d got home running through every room checking all the closets and storage spaces. Pumpkin was dragging from his sock. The small dog always got over excited when people started running around.

  ‘What?’ asked Dad.

  ‘Mum,’ said Fin. ‘Did she kidnap Ms Quinn and bring her here? Is she in the basement?’

  ‘The house doesn’t have a basement,’ said Dad.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Fin. ‘Perhaps Mum had one built when you were out one day.’

  ‘I never go out,’ said Dad.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past her to sneak earth-moving equipment in here somehow,’ said Fin, glancing about looking for possible places where their mother could have installed a hidden trapdoor.

  Suddenly, Mum stepped into the room.

  Fin yelped with fear.

  Pumpkin let go of Fin and barked with excitement.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ asked April. ‘We didn’t hear the front door open.’