by Robin Klein
will never forgive my mother for calling me Erica with a surname like Yurken.
When an emergency teacher was taking our grade (we got a lot of emergency teachers at our school because the ordinary ones were often away with nervous problems), the emergency teacher would say something like, ‘Girl in the end row with the dark hair, what’s your name?’ But before I could answer, kids would screech out ‘Erk!’ Or ‘Yuk!’ Or ‘Gherkin!’ Except Barry Hollis who always yelled out something worse, but emergency teachers were given a counselling session by the Principal before they came into our room, so they knew enough to pretend not to hear Barry Hollis.
Erk, Yuk, or Gherkin. When I grew up and left school and left Barringa East for ever, I planned to change my name to something really elegant. It was a waste of time doing it before then. Elegance just didn’t fit in Barringa East, which was what is known as a socially disadvantaged area.
Mum sometimes said we ought to move out of Barringa East to somewhere a bit more posh, but she really quite liked living there. She said she’d even got used to the sound of the police sirens chasing after the Eastside Boys late at night, though they didn’t seem to have much luck catching them.
The Eastside Boys were the big brothers of the kids at our school. They wrote their name with spray paint everywhere: Eastside Boys Wuz Here. It was written all over the footpaths and on the waiting-room ceiling at the station, and on our school tuckshop when it was busted into. It even got into the local papers: ‘Eastside Boys Go On Rampage Through Shopping Centre’ or ‘Eastside Boys Brawl at Skating Rink – Manager and Staff Barricade Themselves in Office’.
‘In spite of the Eastside Boys, there’s advantages about living here,’ Mum said.
‘Name just one,’ I said bitterly.
‘Well, Barringa East Primary School for a start,’ she said. ‘You ought to be grateful, Erk. What about all those nice things the government bought for that little school?’
That was because Barringa East Primary was classified as a Disadvantaged School. The kids weren’t supposed to know it was called that in case they got a complex. I only found out because I spent a lot of time in the temporary sick bay, which was between the secretary’s office and the staffroom. The walls were made of thin masonite sheets. The Eastside Boys had burned down a couple of classrooms and the proper sick bay, so everything was cramped and partitioned until funds came through for rebuilding.
Because our school was classified as being Disadvantaged, we were given all this equipment, such as a photography darkroom, two table-tennis tables, lots of excursions we didn’t have to bring money from home for, and an annual camp for Grade Six.
The Grade-Six teacher at Barringa East Primary was Miss Belmont. She was terrifying, but very stylish. She had a lovely figure, and her hair was silvery grey tipped with blonde streaks. Her face was smooth and tanned because she played a lot of sport. She didn’t smoke, so her teeth looked like television-ad teeth. I liked carrying her bag from her car each morning because both were expensive looking, and I liked to pretend that they belonged to me.
She could keep a class in order better than anyone else in the whole school. She could even squash Barry Hollis. The reason she was given Grade Six was because Mr Kennard told the Principal he would resign and get a job on the Council garbage truck rather than take our class. (That was one of the things I heard through the masonite walls in the sick bay.) Although she was a dictator, Miss Belmont had some admirable qualities. The first day of the term she said, ‘Dark-haired girl in the end row, what’s your name?’ and everyone did their thing about Erk, Yuk and Gherkin.
Miss Belmont glanced coldly from one yelling face to the next, right round the room, and that glance was as effective as a series of sharp slaps. The faces stopped yelling, one by one, like falling dominoes. Even Barry Hollis kicked the desk in front of him more quietly.
I said with dignity that my name was Erica Yurken.
‘Erica’s a very nice name,’ Miss Belmont said. ‘It means “great heroine”.’
‘It means . . .’ said Barry Hollis, and gave his own personal definition.
‘And what’s YOUR name, young man?’ Miss Belmont asked. ‘Barry Hollis, is it? Right, I’ve committed it to memory, Barry Hollis, AND IF YOU DON’T STOP KICKING THAT DESK THERE IS GOING TO BE A HOLE IN THE WINDOW PANE EXACTLY YOUR SIZE AND SHAPE IN THE NEXT THREE SECONDS!’
It sounded weird, a voice that fierce and immense coming out of such a ladylike teacher. Even her hair looked violent, as though it would send off a shower of electric sparks. Everyone sat as still and quiet as new Derwent pencils in a box.
‘That’s more like it,’ Miss Belmont purred. ‘Now we’ll do some WORK!’
Usually on the first day of a term people romp lightheartedly around the room and fights break out about who’s sitting where and the teacher tears her hair and fusses about timetables and maths books and such. But Miss Belmont had all that organised before school even started, and you’d never believe the work we got through that first morning.
She seemed to have eyes like a fly, with multiple sections that could see sideways and backwards, and into things that hadn’t even happened yet. Such as into Barry Hollis’s desk where he had a packet of cigarettes and a copy of Playboy.
By the morning recess we all had writer’s cramp and mental exhaustion, but Miss Belmont looked quite calm and relaxed as she sailed into the staffroom for coffee. I’d never cared to associate with the riff-raff in the playground at Barringa East Primary. I went into the office and asked Mrs Orlando, the school secretary, if I could lie down during recess because I had a headache. On my medical card in the office it said I was prone to nervous headaches, rhinitis, sinusitis, bee-sting allergy, rheumatism; suspected hypersensitivity to wattle pollen, horsehair, dust mite, clover and Clag glue; tested for diabetes, arthritis, gallstones and hiatus hernia; and that I didn’t have to put my head under water when we went swimming because of a punctured eardrum. Mum didn’t write all that information on the sheet they’d sent home for parents to fill in; I’d supplied it to Mrs Orlando over the six years I’d been going to Barringa East Primary.
Mrs Orlando said I could lie down during recess, but that I had to go straight back to class when the bell rang. She didn’t sound all that sympathetic. She always looked as though you were a nuisance, even if you just wanted a bandaid, because she had to leave her typewriter and fetch the key to open the first-aid cupboard in the sick bay. The key was kept on a nail high up, under the office ceiling, ever since Barry Hollis pinched everything out of the first-aid cupboard and sold it to the Eastside Boys for gang warfare medical supplies. The sick bay was my favourite place at school. It was exciting to lie hunched up and groan and pretend that your appendix had just burst when kids stickybeaked in through the window. And also, it was the best place in the school for gaining classified information.
When Mrs Orlando went back into her office, I put my ear to the wall. She wasn’t saying anything particularly newsworthy, only, ‘That pest of a Yuk is just as neurotic as ever.’
The new grade-two teacher who had crept in there to ask what she should do about the dirty big hole someone kicked in her classroom door, said, ‘Who on earth is Yuk?’ New teachers at our school always seemed to creep around looking pale and stricken for their first few weeks.
Mrs Orlando said, ‘Erica Yurken, the school hypochondriac.’ (It’s always interesting to listen to people talking about you behind your back.)
Mrs Orlando got on with her typing. She always had a lot of it, because Mr Nicholson, the Principal, was a workaholic. Which means that he threw himself into work like someone hurling themselves off a cliff. He seemed to stay in his office a lot, with the door shut, and if you sneaked up and pe
ered in through the window from the outside, he sometimes had his head in his hands and a glass of water and a packet of Quick-Eze on his desk. He probably found that being the Principal of Barringa East Primary was daunting.
I put my ear to the staffroom wall. They were all going on about what they did in their holidays, and their boyfriends – except the new teachers who didn’t seem to be saying anything. Maybe they had their heads in their hands, too.
‘How are you getting on with Grade Six, Helen?’ someone asked Miss Belmont.
‘How do you mean?’ she asked.
‘All those ratty kids in that grade, how come it’s so quiet up your end of the corridor?’
‘They’ve been working quite well,’ she said. ‘I’m not having any trouble. Why should I?’
Then I couldn’t listen to anything else because this wailing little kid came in with a bump on his head the size of a cantaloupe where Barry Hollis had donged him with a triangular carton of frozen orange juice. Miss Belmont marched into the sick bay to see what the noise was about. When she saw me in bed, she said, ‘Out you go, Erica, into the fresh air if you’ve got a headache.’ And to the bawling little kid she said, ‘Stop that ridiculous noise. There’s no need to make such a fuss about a small bump on the head. And what do you mean, will this antiseptic sting? Of course it will sting, and you’re quite old enough to cope with pain.’ And to Barry Hollis, lounging about in the doorway where he’d been dragged by the teacher on playground duty, she said, ‘Wait outside the office until Mr Nicholson finishes his morning tea. Erica, be gone by the time I count one.’
So I couldn’t find out if he got detention or not, though Mr Nicholson didn’t keep him in very often because every time he did, Barry Hollis’s big brother in the Eastside Boys would come to school after dark and rip up shrubs or break windows. Barry stuck his foot out automatically to trip me up, but he did that to everyone, and you developed good swerving reflexes. Luckily he wasn’t at school all that much, only on an average of three days a week. The rest of the time he travelled. He went to all sorts of places, and had seen more of Victoria than my mum’s new boyfriend, who was a truck driver. Only Barry went by train without paying.
When I got home from school that first day, I took my secret theatre notebook out from under my mattress. The sole ambition of my life was to become a famous actress. The notebook was a sort of teach-yourself training manual. I wrote down all the memorable things Miss Belmont had said that day.
Then I practised saying them aloud in her voice. I don’t want to seem boastful, but I got it absolutely perfect the first try: tone, pitch, everything. There was no doubt whatsoever that I was destined for a glittering, brilliant career in the theatre.
That’s if I ever managed to escape from Barringa East.
eople outside the area gave you funny looks when you told them you lived in Barringa East. Mum had never stayed married long enough to save up for a house elsewhere. She received a social-security pension, and also a wage from her part-time job as a barmaid, but she didn’t tell the government about that in case she lost her pension. Which meant that she was lying to them, even though she was always going mad at me for lying, except in my case I thought of it as decorating statements to make them sound more interesting.
Besides me in our family, there was my big brother, Harley and my two sisters, Valjoy and Jedda. (Mum had a weird taste in names.) Harley left school two years ago. He’d been looking for a job ever since, only he didn’t really look all that hard.
‘How come they haven’t found you a job yet down at that Commonwealth Employment Office?’ Mum demanded. ‘What did you tell them, that you were an out-of-work admiral, or a taxidermist, for heaven’s sake! What about that telegram they sent on Monday?’
‘I went out for the interview,’ said Harley, sly as a swagman’s kelpie.
‘So what happened?’
‘My foot stuck in this grating thing by the factory door, and they had to find a metal cutter. And by that time a hundred other kids queued up and got interviewed.’
‘Let’s see the bruise, then.’
‘Haven’t got one. It was an old bit of grating all covered in soft moss.’
Harley liked loafing in his hammock studying books about astral projection. That means you can make your spirit leave your physical body and move around without anyone knowing. Harley had this idea that if he could train himself to do that, he might be able to get a really interesting highly paid job as a spy or detective. And he wouldn’t have to leave his hammock to go to work, either.
Mum said it was a lot of creepy nonsense, and who in their right mind would want to leave their bodies and float around like wisps of smoke? There wasn’t anything smoky about Mum. She really enjoyed being alive, and getting dressed up to go out. She went to Bingo nights, and dances, and Tupperware parties, and Parents Without Partners, which was where she met Lennie, who was her new boyfriend. Valjoy said she had a nerve joining Parents Without Partners when she’d already had two partners and a whole lot of boyfriends as well.
Valjoy was named after Mum’s two sisters, but she hated them both because they were always telling Mum if they saw her hanging around the pizza parlour with any of the Eastside Boys. She said she wished her name was Danielle or Monique, but the crowd she hung round with didn’t ever call each other by their proper names, anyhow. Everyone in that crowd wore black T-shirts, with their nicknames on the front in iron-on vinyl letters. They all had names like Spook, Blonk, Dagger, Scum, Dracula and Titch, and Valjoy’s nickname in that crowd was Curves.
Mum went mad every time Valjoy wore that black T-shirt saying Curves, but Valjoy had a worse one hidden away, which she sneaked out for parties. It had ‘I can be very, very friendly’ written across the front.
Valjoy was fifteen and still at Tech but she was planning to leave at the end of the year and become a motor mechanic or a boilermaker. She said it was dumb to go into an office job where you’d only meet hundreds of other girls. You’d have more fun if you were, for instance, the only girl driving a crane with a firm that employed twenty other crane drivers, all fellers.
Valjoy was sort of boy mad.
Then there was my little sister, Jedda. Jedda was sort of horse mad. Although she was already six, she went round wearing a tail made out of plaited pantyhose pinned to the back of her jeans. She was utterly embarrassing, and I had to share a bedroom with her. She made stables out of the furniture on her side of the room and slept in them instead of in her proper bed. She ate in there, too, which I didn’t think was very hygienic. There was always a long line of ants parading across the bedroom floor after Jedda’s leftover jam sandwiches and soggy cornflakes, but Mum never ticked her off about it.
Valjoy wouldn’t let me in her room and I wouldn’t have wanted to share a room with her, anyway. When she was in a bad mood, it was like being with a dangerous animal with a thorn in its paw. Also, she learned martial arts, another way she figured she might meet boys, but she said it was a real letdown, because that karate centre was full of nice polite Asian university students who were so brainy she couldn’t understand what they were talking about. I was careful not to annoy her since she started learning martial arts. She said she knew how to paralyse people for life, just by using her elbow.
As though our house wasn’t already small and noisy enough, Lennie was always dropping in for meals. He had this great, clanging, bumper-bar voice. Every time he came out with some unfunny remark, which I personally thought more polite to pretend he never said, Mum would shriek and fall about laughing.
It was always bedlam at our house. Valjoy was forever slamming out of the front door hollering that she was going, this time for good, and not to expect her home ever again. And Mum would yell after her that it was the best news she’d heard since she won the fridge in the football-club raffle and good riddance – only she didn’t ever mean it. And in the background Jedda would be whinnying or watching the TV racing results with the sound turned up full blast. She knew all t
he names of racehorses and their trainers. I didn’t think it was very elegant at all that a little kid understood how the TAB betting system worked, but Mum and Lennie egged her on.
‘Call a race for us, love,’ Mum would say, and Jedda would start chanting, ‘Irish Mist getting a clear run on the rails, followed by Uranus, King Herod sneaking up on the outside, followed by Percy Boy, followed by Champagne Charley, with Sky’s the Limit and Take a Gamble well back in the field . . .’
Yet our house wasn’t as unrefined as some of the others in the street. As a matter of fact, we had some pretty peculiar neighbours. Nobody sat in judgement over anyone else in Barringa East because they had too many skeletons in their own cupboards.
Mrs Pegg next door had a lot of travelling expenses. She had to visit her son Terry who was in a home in the country for uncontrollable teenagers because he liked driving. He didn’t have a licence or a car of his own, so he borrowed other people’s without asking. The first time he did that, they let him out under the supervision of a parole officer, but he borrowed the parole officer’s VW without asking and drove off to Perth.
The family on the other side of us were threatened with eviction because they didn’t pay the rent. They nailed boards across the windows and doors and barricaded themselves in with a supply of tinned food. It was even exciting for a while, seeing who would win, but Mum felt sorry for Mrs MacMahon and went down to the real-estate office and paid all the back rent out of the $300 she’d saved up for a fur coat.
‘You’re crazy,’ Valjoy said. ‘She’ll never pay it back. And what if social security finds out you had all that money stashed away for a fur coat? Pensioners aren’t supposed to go around wearing fur coats. One day you’ll get sprung about that hotel job.’
‘I’ll worry about that when it happens,’ said Mum. ‘Lennie said he’d buy me a fur, anyhow, the day I make up my mind to marry him. What kind do you reckon, Valjoy? That pale goldy-colour fur, or dark, or something really eye-catching, like red fox?’