by Ted Dawe
This took a fair bit of eye bulging and spit spraying but he got there in the end.
Then he calmed down and got onto the real stuff. I could tell it was the stuff he’d been longing to say since I first arrived. He could see why they had kicked me out of my last school. His school would not become a dumping ground for city trash. One bad apple can spoil the barrel. I should have been given a good kick up the bum when I first started to get out of line – that would have sorted me out.
What did I have to say to that one?
Well, I had to agree with that last statement. So I said, “Yeah. A kick up the bum does sort things out. You could ask Noel Cudby about that one. He’ll be riding home side saddle for a few days.”
Boyne wasn’t impressed. “You’re not worth talking to,” he blurted, and stormed out, banging the door.
SUSPENDED … AGAIN!
ABOUT half an hour or so later Aunty Lorna and Wee Jock showed up in the Landrover to collect me. We were both taken into Carson’s office so that he could “read the riot act,” he said. As it happened he didn’t read anything. He just gave his version of the fight and made the point that he couldn’t take the risk of allowing me to go home on the bus with other normal boys and girls because no one had any idea what I was going to do next. What would happen now was that the school board would decide how long I was to be off school and meanwhile treatment would be organised for my “violence disorder”.
I could have argued the point but I couldn’t be bothered. Once adults have made up their minds it takes more than a kid to change them. It made no difference that I had just been on the receiving end of a king hit. The sort of punch that would have dropped a bullock. They didn’t see that one. Noel Cudby’s bruised knuckles were said to be a result of the fall from my unprovoked attack. I had nothing more to say so I stared at Carson’s face and focussed my mind on the bowl of sheep guts that I had seen on the hydatids poster. It must have worked because his talk tailed off quickly and the next thing I knew I was carrying Wee Jock out to the Landrover with Aunty Lorna.
Halfway home I got this funny feeling in my gut. It came from nowhere. I hadn’t even eaten my lunch but I knew that if we drove any further I was going to be sick everywhere. Aunty Lorna took one look at me and pulled over quickly. We came to rest in front of the gates to a country graveyard.
I burst out of the Landrover and went into the cemetery looking for somewhere to sit down. I put my head in my hands and had this heaving feeling deep in my gut. It was like car sickness but it wasn’t. I felt sweat break out on my forehead and kept very still trying to hold it all together. After a while I knew it was passing. I had this huge feeling of relief, like something had flown from my body. I looked up and Aunty Lorna was there a few steps away, holding Wee Jock. She was smiling at me encouragingly but keeping her distance. I stood up, all shaky and light headed.
“Feel better?”
I nodded.
“What happened?”
I shrugged. She walked over and touched me on the head. “Your head is very hot.”
It was, and my hair was full of sweat.
“Come for a walk, Sandy.”
So we did. It was a small cemetery but very old. Some of the graves were so weathered and covered in green stuff that you couldn’t read the names. Others were little graves belonging to babies.
“Just think,” said Aunty Lorna pointing at a small stone cross. “This baby, Bartholomew, was younger than Wee Jock when he died, and he’s been gone a hundred years.”
I just walked; for once I didn’t feel the need to say anything. It was nice to be in sunshine, in this graveyard with just Aunty Lorna and Wee Jock. It made me feel calm. Down near the back were a few newer graves. They were still twenty or thirty years old but the concrete looked fresher. On one grave there were the footprints of a bird that had walked across while it was still wet.
“Look at that,” said Aunty Lorna. “Two memorials. One to …” she squinted at the grave stone “… Helen Barrett. There are lots of Barretts around these parts. And the other to a blackbird, out taking its morning walk.”
With her finger she traced out how it had done a series of hops and then stopped to swish its beak on the cement, and then hopped on to the other end, where the trail disappeared.
“Is that all we are, Sandy? All this cemetery is? Just tiny scratchings, the footprints of brief lives?”
I thought about it, the bird foot prints, the woman’s grave. “I don’t know, I like to think that my mum is still with me somehow. But I don’t know how. I guess it doesn’t make sense.”
Aunty Lorna picked a dandelion and put it in Wee Jock’s hand.
“I have this theory, Sandy, that all we are is vessels for love. That all the world’s problems are caused by imperfect love. World wars, playground fights.”
“Is that William Blake?”
She shook her head. “Frank’s the Blake specialist, I get my ideas from all over the place.”
I was a bit surprised.
“You and Noel Cudby. Your fight. The Vietnam War. The endless fighting in the Middle East. They are all the same. Indivisible. Microcosms and macrocosms.”
She spoke on like this for a while and managed to lose me in the process. There were big words and small words but what they had in common was that I couldn’t understand a lot of them. Went over my head. Girls’ stuff really, I thought. Still I knew she meant well. Was worried about me. Unlike the two men back at the school who just saw me as a problem, something sent to irritate them. To them I was, what my dad would have called, “a bird crap on the windscreen of life”.
What Aunty Lorna did tell me, something which I can remember now, was that she never regretted anything and that I shouldn’t either. In the long run everything serves a purpose and our life’s challenge was to recognise what that purpose was.
Here’s an example.
Her accident. One moment she’s in a crowd of people in Sydney, partying away, not a care in the world. Next moment she’s stuck under a runaway Mercedes, losing her hair and a good amount of skin and flesh. All broken and mangled. Clinging to life by a thread.
She said the hardest part was not the dozens of operations, the hardest part was understanding what had happened. What the accident was trying to tell her. During her year in hospital she realised that she had been wasting her life looking for happiness in the material world. It had been hovering above her on angels’ wings all the time. She realised that happiness and contentment could never be bought in a shop or found in a new dress: it had to be courted. You had to lay out the right conditions and it would visit you. If you did it really well, then it stayed a long time. That’s what she and Frank had done and now they had lives that wanted for nothing.
She turned to me and said, “Even the hardest and most painful things that have happened to you will one day be precious jewels. You will give thanks for them. We are like the oyster and the pearl. Sharp bits of experience embed themselves in our soft flesh. We have to keep covering them with the nacre of love and wisdom, and then one day these sharp things will be beautiful, glossy pearls. They will no longer hurt us but will be a source of pride and joy. They will transform us.”
She didn’t say anything about my mother but I knew that’s what she was really talking about. Maybe that’s what lay behind my kicking Noel Cudby, behind the punching of that kid at the other school. But how can you be sure? Who knows why you really do things?
When I got back home, Uncle Frank was nowhere to be found. Aunty Lorna said he wanted to see me so I felt all that tightness come back into my stomach. I couldn’t help it. When he did show up I realised that I was wrong. He never even asked what I was doing at home. He wanted to show me a bird’s nest that he had found in the hedge. We talked about how it was made and we both wondered how the bird could have learned to be such a clever builder.
At 4 p.m. the rest of the boys got back from school. By that stage I was out helping with the milking and no one said anything about
the fight. That was fine by me.
The following day after the older boys had gone off to school, Uncle Frank took me out fencing with him, way down the back, near where the farm turned into bush. We dropped off all these posts and battens and then dug a series of holes. Uncle Frank had invented a clever little device for making sure the line was straight. Bit like a telescope, a bit like gun sights. When I asked him about it he just laughed.
“Been around in some form ever since the Egyptians were building the pyramids. It’s all out there boy, all you need is to be in the right head space to see it.”
I held the battens while he belted them in with a big hammer. I was a bit scared because I was sure he was going to miss and smash my hands. He knew this and let me have a shot while he held the batten. The sledge hammer was so heavy I could lift it but I couldn’t swing it.
“It’s no good,” I said. “I’m just not strong enough.”
Uncle Frank points to my heart and my head and says, “Strength is in here and here. All the rest is just muscles.”
I say, “I’m too small … it can’t be done.”
Uncle Frank wouldn’t have a bar of it. “If you can lift it, you can swing it. If you can swing it you can hit it. What’s holding you back is your mental chains.”
“My what?”
“Your limitations. Mental chains, William Blake used to call them, because that’s all they are. Our potential is without limit.”
I was thinking, “Oh yeah, that’s easy for you to say.”
“Try again.”
I shook my head.
He looked at me fiercely. “I know you can, now hit it!”
He was staring at me and holding the batten about an inch from the top. I knew I could swing it, that much was true, but I was also sure that I would miss even slightly and break his wrist. My stomach felt weak and squelchy.
“Swing!”
His words were exploding in my head; I swung the hammer down with every atom of my strength. I felt the sweet shudder of a direct hit. Saw the post move half a foot into the ground. Uncle Frank never took his eyes off mine. I felt like crying. I also felt older, like I had grown up in one swing. He never asked me to do it again. And he didn’t rub it in either. None of that, “See, I knew you could do it.” It just sat between us like our own little secret. It’s still there, his steady eye, his fierce stare, the mighty swing, then the enormous relief of a direct hit to the middle of the batten. It is hard to think of any other single action in my life that was so risky and so satisfying.
In the afternoons I would sometimes leave the milking and go down to the gate to wait for the boys to come home. It had been a while now and I was keen to get back to school. It is quiet in the country and I could hear the whine of the old bus’s diff ages before it rose over that last dip in the road. They all piled out of the bus and gathered around me telling me the news of the day. Just dumb school stuff I guess but I missed it, I guess no one likes feeling that they have been missing out on something.
One day, Uncle Frank made a trip into school and some sort of deal was worked out. A guarantee given I guess. I was afraid I would have to apologise to Noel Cudby, say how sorry I was, or make promises I wouldn’t be able to keep, but it never came to that.
THE THREE MUSKETEERS
WHENI got back, the power balance had changed in the school and I had a celebrity status. Wherever I went it was “Hi, Sandy!” and “Would you like to play with us?” Well maybe not everywhere I went but most places. There were still a few little clusters of enemies around the place but I had certainly thinned them out. A couple of the small kids told me that Cudby had been the evil ogre terrorising them. How he would like to perform feats of strength on them which usually meant that they got hurt. The very day that I decked him he had hung a couple of smalls on the hooks in the cloak bay. Now he had been subdued by my killer boot he had pulled his horns in a bit. Everyone was better off for that.
The big surprise was that Lara seemed to have changed. She called me Sandy now, not Bolt, as she had before. She still didn’t play with us at lunchtime, I guess that was too much to expect. I had to use my powers of stealth to get near her. I would look for opportunities which would seem to everybody else to be chance encounters. I would volunteer to help to clean up at the sink after art. Lara was really good at art so she spent a fair bit of time over there. I would lean over and admire her pictures. They were always pictures of either princesses or horses or princesses on horses. I guess she was a specialist.
Being a naturally modest sort of guy I didn’t gloat. It is easy to spoil these things by making too much of them. After the “Bolt Upright” campaign by Lara I had already decided that heroism was not my mission. Cudby for the most part gave me a wide berth but sometimes he needed a bit of a reminder. So whenever I saw him getting a bit big for his boots (so to speak), I would put my foot up on the desk and start to give it a bit of a polish. That usually brought him into line.
After a few more weeks I had accepted my fate: I was here in the country for the duration. I had a couple more goes at ringing up Dad but never made contact. The last time the woman at reception just said he had checked out the day before, and she had no idea where he had gone. I knew he was avoiding me. He was ashamed. I don’t blame him in some ways, he had plenty to be ashamed about but I still wanted to hear from him. Find out how things were going. It was tough, but I learned that there are some things that kids have no say in and this was one of them.
By this time I was entirely used to the country existence and I began to quite enjoy it. Me, Iain and Jamie became a kind of three musketeers. They were both a bit younger than me and thought that because I was from town I knew a bit more than them. This was crap of course. There was so much country stuff I was really dumb at, but you always admire what the other guy’s got, what he knows, more than what you know yourself. Human nature, I guess. Anyway, I didn’t mind, it’s nice to be looked up to, especially if you’ve never had a brother.
My return to school had made their life a bit better too. Before, they (and I) had been called “Culties” by the other kids all the time. Especially the ones who didn’t like us. I know why now. It’s because country people (the adults mostly) can’t handle anything out of the ordinary. They thought that we were all a bit bent. Screwy in the head. Rubbed off on their kids, that sort of stuff. That’s why the boys used to cop it on the bus and in the playground. You know how this sort of thing works: imagine the scenario.
Country Dad (in between enormous mouthfuls of mashed spud): Keep away from the Culties, Elmo, they’re after your mind.
Country Kid: Okay, Dad. No one’s going to touch my brain.
Country Dad: On ya!
Country Kid: Grunt.
That’s all it takes from an oldster when you’re a kid. A bit of parent poison goes a long way.
However as Batman (the caped crusader) probably said, “Actions speak louder than words.” After my great kick, this stuff all dried up. We may have still been Culties but no one messed with us now.
THE FALLS
AS the school year drew to a close, the days lengthened and the weather warmed up. The atmosphere at the little school began to change too. Now all the buzz in the playground was about the school camp. Evidently it was an annual thing for the kids in the senior part of the school. It was particularly important for the Year Eights as it served as a farewell before they went off to the high school in Inglewood.
The camp was held at a place called McTavish Falls, halfway up Mount Taranaki. Strangely enough, for most of the kids it was the first time most of them had been up on the slopes of Egmont (as they called it). Weird, huh? It’s like they hadn’t noticed this big white pointy thing, sitting over there just beyond their left shoulder. Country kids eh? Not a lot of imagination there.
The camp was a three day/two night thing and we had to carry all our gear in on our backs. Mr Boyne, being one of those hairy-legged, boot-wearing tramper types, was the organiser. We had a series o
f meetings at lunchtime and after school when the plans and arrangements were worked out. There were going to be eighteen of us upper-school kids plus Boyne and his curly-haired wife. She came to these gatherings with their three-year-old Nigel, who was coming with us in a backpack. A couple of parents who had nothing better to do were going to come along too. I guess Boyne was worried about being outnumbered.
In the days leading up to camp the briefings became more frequent. There was endless discussion about what to do if this or that happened. I couldn’t believe there could be so much planning needed for a walk up a hill.
What to do if an avalanche came.
How to fix a broken leg.
How to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together.
In the end I got a bit sick of this and began to throw a few of my own questions in too.
What happens if we eat a poisonous berry?
What about if the mountain erupts?
Attacked by yetis?
Boyne took me seriously at first and then got really annoyed. I was sent out of the meeting to “jog around the big field a couple of times and think about things.”
There were long complicated lists of things to bring and even a list of things not to bring too. Stuff so stupid I wondered why they had it there. I mean, who takes a rifle along on a school camp? Cudby maybe, but not a normal human being.
Just when I was starting to believe it would never happen, the day arrived. Camp day. The school bus dropped us at the end of a dusty road that seemed to lead to nowhere. From then on we became beasts of burden. Iain, Jamie and I had to not only carry our own stuff but bags of food too and we had cooking pots and pans tied to the outside of our packs. I looked around suspiciously to see whether Boyne was loading everyone up in similar fashion and my suspicions were quickly confirmed. Our packs – being full-sized adult ones – were much heavier than anyone else’s. And out of the three of us, I had the heaviest. It was like what they do to frisky race horses to slow them down. Or more likely what you do to “city trash” to shut it up and bring it into line.