by Robin Klein
When we got to the top, the view wasn’t all that marvellous. Just trees, and other hills with more trees on them, and the school camp about a thousand kilometres away on the horizon. I didn’t have the strength to look at the view, anyhow. Even my eyelids were stiff and exhausted. I sank down, groaning, with all the other groaning kids. Alison was the only one who didn’t. She walked all over the mountain top taking pictures of the view with the school camera. She didn’t look tired, and she still wasn’t puffing. I gazed at her with bitter, black hatred.
All the good things in the world lavished on her: beauty, nice manners, braininess, lovely clothes, photography skills, long eyelashes, A’s in her work folder, a house in Hedge End Road, Kyle Grammar School, the world’s healthiest pair of lungs.
It just wasn’t fair.
And added to all that she owned the most glamorous dressing-gown in the world as well.
e had to have a shower when we got back from the hike, then Kangas, the group I was in, had to go over and set the tables in the hall. But I was so tired I sat down in the shower recess under the warm spray and had a nap instead.
‘Erica, are you by any chance trying to get out of dining-room duties?’ Miss Belmont demanded, thumping on the door. I dragged on some clean clothes, combed my wet hair with my fingers and went over to the hall. Barry Hollis was already standing outside in disgrace.
‘I don’t know why you bothered to come on this camp,’ I said. ‘You haven’t got any idea how to behave in company.’
‘Only came along to see the action tonight,’ he said, ‘First night of camp, that’s when the Basin Skins come up the mountain and give this place a going over. Always do, every year. Real tough lot, the Basin Skins, tougher than the Eastside Boys even. They sneak in when everyone’s asleep and help themselves to trannies and any cash left lying around.’
‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘Last year’s Grade Six always spread that old story about the Basin Skins, just to scare the next lot coming up here. They don’t even exist.’
‘As if you’d know. About midnight, that’s when they strike. Year before last they tattooed my brother’s forehead without even waking him up. This place is haunted, too, did you know? Something real peculiar comes up out of the creek and claws at the windows, soon as it gets dark. That’s how come our school can afford it here. We’re their only customers. No other school in the state’s game enough to come to this place. Too dangerous. And that room you’re in at the end, that’s where the murder happened. Peel back the rug and you can see the bloodstains. Funny things happen in there. Dunno why they bung poor innocent kids in there. Cruel, really. Bet you start bawling and wanting to go home tonight.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said coldly. I went into the hall and was told off by Mr Kennard because everyone else had already finished setting the tables. Mr Kennard said that I didn’t have the proper camping spirit. ‘I couldn’t help being late,’ I said. ‘While I was having a shower my hair got caught up in the holes in the spray thing. I had to prise it off with a nail file.’
The camp manager, who was also the cook, stuck his head through the serving hatch and said, ‘You kids aren’t allowed to go messing around with any of the fittings in this camp. You just remember that, young lady.’
It wasn’t fair, being told off for something I hadn’t done, which I couldn’t deny now I’d already told Mr Kennard I had. The camp manager rang the bell and everyone came over. Barry Hollis was allowed out of exile, and Kangas had to go around and serve out the food.
When I finished taking bowls of tomato soup around, nobody had saved me a seat at their table. The only spot left was down at the end table where there were only boys with uncouth manners. They all yakked on about the bridge they were going to build over the creek and I could have been invisible for all the notice they took of me.
I suddenly realised that I hadn’t ever been away from home before. Not even for one night. For as long as I could remember, evenings had always meant Mum laughing at things on the telly, Valjoy nattering on the phone, the fridge door being opened and shut, Harley’s and Mum’s and Valjoy’s friends dropping in, and the cat curled up in a self-satisfied bundle on the end of my bed. A familiar, soothing ritual I’d always taken for granted.
None of that tonight. Instead, the Basin Skins creeping in through the camp windows after transistors and kids’ pocket money. Maybe it was true. Russell Griggs who was in grade six last year reckoned he found all his clothes chucked around the room and BEWARE written on the window with mud.
I looked furtively around at the other tables. All the other kids seemed really excited about being away from home. They were tucking into their food and earbashing the teacher who was sitting at their table. (There wasn’t a teacher at ours. Probably they’d given it a miss on account of Barry Hollis sitting there.) No one else in the whole big echoey dining hall looked even faintly homesick. Not even sooky Leanne, but she was being mothered by Mrs Wentworth, who was buttering a slice of bread for her and cutting off the crusts.
I tasted some of my soup but something peculiar was happening to my throat. It felt lined with cement, like when you get a strepthroat. Usually I thought having a strepthroat quite interesting because of the possibility of it turning out to be tonsilitis. I’d always felt cheated that it was Valjoy instead of me who had her tonsils out. But that lumpy sore throat I had on the first night of camp was definitely not interesting. It was terrible.
And there was this stinging, burning sensation behind my eyes, exactly like conjunctivitis, and I felt keyed up and nervous, as though I was coming down with a temperature. I sat at the table having all these interesting symptoms, and none of them gave me any enjoyment at all.
‘Chuck over the salt,’ said Colin. ‘How many times do we have to ask?’
I passed it along the table silently, because I could hardly locate my voice beneath the cement.
‘Yuk’s bawling,’ Barry Hollis hooted. ‘Hey look, a big fat tear just plopped in her soup.’
‘I am not bawling,’ I snarled. ‘For your information, I’m allergic to tomato soup. I always get runny eyes if there’s tomato soup around.’ I pushed the bowl aside and concentrated very hard on the menu chalked up outside the kitchen. Tomato soup, sausages, chips and salad, creamed apple rice. The chalked letters trembled and shifted as though I was reading them under water. I put my elbows on the table and my head in between my hands, and stretched the skin of each temple tightly. My eyes felt slitted and uncomfortable, but at least no tears could bust out.
I was supposed to get up and help clear away the soup bowls and bring around the next course, but I thought if I stayed quiet and hunched up like that, nobody would notice I was missing. Alison Ashley was being efficient enough for both of us, anyhow. Some dopey kids on duty were making trips with just one single bowl or one spoon in their hands. But Alison cleared each table intelligently by stacking the soup bowls with the spoons in a tidy nest on the top one. She came to our table and I shot her an inscrutable oriental look from under my stretched eyelids. She put a big bowl of salad in the centre of our table, and a plate of sausages and chips down in front of me.
‘Thank you,’ I said icily, and I must say that even though I was so upset, my voice achieved the exact tone I wanted, that of a rich haughty lady thanking a parlour maid for picking up a dropped fan.
‘Are you all right, Yuk?’ Alison asked uncertainly. ‘Want to come and sit at our table? We could all move up a place.’
‘Whatever for? I’m quite happy sitting here,’ I said. Two fat sausages and a pile of chips on my plate, reminding me achingly of home. The sort of meal Mum dished up because it was quick and easy and could be eaten in front of the TV. I put my knife and fork down.
‘Want me to get one of the teachers?’ Alison said. She said it into one of those clear sudden silences that happen sometimes, for instance when plates of food are set in front of kids and they all have their mouths full. ‘What’s the matter, Erica?’ she asked, and the w
ords bounced and echoed all around the silence in the hall, and everyone stopped chewing and turned their heads to stare over half a fat sausage speared on their forks. ‘Are you homesick?’ asked Alison Ashley. ‘Is that what the matter is? Would you like me to get you a paper tissue? Why are you crying?’
It was awful. Everywhere I looked I met curious eyes, all shamelessly gawking, the way kids always do when someone bawls in public. And I knew at once that Alison Ashley had chosen that exact moment when the hall was silent, just to embarrass me. That was the underhand scheming way she worked.
So I jumped up and dumped the bowl of salad right over her head.
Even then she didn’t look undignified, though everyone was really staring by then. She just took the bowl off her head and began to gather up bits of lettuce and radish and replace them neatly in the bowl. As composed and dignified as though she was shaking off a few raindrops.
‘Erica Yurken, you can go to your room for that sort of behaviour,’ Miss Belmont boomed across the hall. ‘I will not allow silly horseplay during meals.’
I went across to the deserted dormitory block and sat on my Mount Everest sleeping bag and considered. I could pack my things and leave, only I didn’t know how to get to the nearest railway station. I didn’t think any of the teachers would drive me home, either, even if I asked nicely. They all looked too tired from Miss Belmont’s mountain climbing.
I could pretend to be taken seriously ill with gallstones, only I couldn’t remember which side the gall bladder was on. Or I could feign a different minor illness every morning and spend the whole five days in bed, only the thought of lying there for five days having to look at Alison Ashley’s magnificent dressing-gown was too depressing.
It was lonesome being in the building all by myself. Birds walked scratchily up and down on the roof, and it sounded like people prowling around up there in the dusk. The Basin Skins. I began to feel nervous, but I knew it was probably only a matter of time before Barry Hollis was sent over in disgrace to his room, too. Back at school he never ever got through one lunchtime without being sent out in disgrace. At least I’d have human company, even if Barry Hollis barely made the rating. Sure enough, he soon came clumping down the concrete steps from the dining hall. I watched him through the window. He stopped at the terrace and switched everyone’s wellington boots into a jumble of odd pairs, filling some with gravel, before going into his room.
When everyone else came back from the dining hall, I had to find Miss Belmont and say I was sorry about the salad, even though I wasn’t. ‘I can’t think what came over you, trying to start a fight with Alison the first night of camp,’ Miss Belmont said. ‘Especially when you both asked on your ballot forms to be put in the same room. I’m certainly not going to change anyone around now. One of the purposes of this camp is for all of you to learn how to get along with each other. So just don’t let me have any more trouble from you, Erica, or I’ll telephone Mr Nicholson to come straight up and drive you home.’
Alison Ashley didn’t even mention the salad. She just went off to the bathroom and washed her hair and came out smelling of expensive hair conditioner instead of mayonnaise.
Miss Belmont organised an evening of team games, which we all had to play before we were allowed to go to bed. She had a piercing whistle on a medieval chain slung around her neck. We played games like passing balloons along on the ends of straws, and getting into clumps of numbers, which Miss Belmont signalled with shattering blasts of her whistle.
People were yawning, but Miss Belmont wouldn’t excuse anyone, not even the other three teachers. Miss Lattimore looked bored as well as exhausted. She hadn’t wanted to come along to the camp. From the sick bay I had heard her having a fight with Mr Nicholson in his office about it. She’d threatened to quit the Education Department and earn a living making macrame flowerpot hangers for craft shops. But since none of the other teachers on the staff, except Mrs Wentworth, wanted to come to the camp, Miss Lattimore had to give in. Mr Kennard didn’t have any choice. He was straight out of teachers’ college.
At 9.30 Miss Belmont had to wind up the games – people had fallen asleep and Barry Hollis was miming a stripper. With one last piercing screech of her whistle, she sent us all to bed.
Immediately everyone found new vigorous energy and excitement because they were sleeping away from home. There were midnight feasts on in every room, only we held them at 10 p.m. because lights had to be out by 10.30. Even Alison Ashley had brought along food. (Some sugarless muesli cookies and an apple, and as soon as she finished eating them, she cleaned her teeth again.)
The midnight feast didn’t cheer Leanne up. She sniffed and bawled so much from homesickness that Mrs Wentworth let her sleep on the spare bed in her room. Margeart couldn’t find any of the supplies she’d bought for the feast. I helped her search through all her things, even in her sleeping-bag and in the battery compartment of her torch, though she hadn’t ever realised the lid came off. Then she remembered where she’d packed all her midnight-feast things. In her desk at school.
At exactly 10.30 Miss Belmont switched off the lights. Then she, Miss Lattimore, Mrs Wentworth and Mr Kennard went into the teachers’ sitting room, which was next to our room, carrying cups of coffee. I put my ear against the wall, but as there was solid brick in between, you couldn’t hear a word. It seemed a pity, because teachers’ conversations must be much more interesting when they are away on a school camp than in a staffroom with the Principal present.
Alison fell asleep instantly without any trouble at all. Margeart got her pillow stuck in her sleeping-bag zipper. She thought the pillow was supposed to fit inside the hood, but once I got her straightened out, she went right off to sleep, too. And snored. I rolled my socks up into earpads and put my pillow and a spare blanket over my head, but nothing would block out the sound of Margeart’s snoring. I lay for hours suffering from insomnia and homesickness and night terrors. I listened to Margeart’s snoring, and the scraping noises on the roof that sounded like the Basin Skins trying to get in with a tin opener. A Basin Skin crawled along the roof and then back to the other end, no doubt hampered by a length of bicycle chain and a flick knife. Bushes outside the window moved like machetes being rattled. The Basin Skin on the roof was joined by the rest of the gang, and they scuttled and pattered all over the roof.
Margeart didn’t miss one beat in her snoring, and Alison Ashley slept like an angel on a cloud. But I crept out of bed and constructed a booby trap under the window. It was made from two chairs upended on the table, with a stretched windcheater tied to the rungs as a trip rope.
I started to think about home and Mum, Jedda, Harley, Valjoy and Norm. Even Lennie. I knew Lennie wouldn’t ever let any Basin Skins break into a camp meant for school kids. I felt so miserable I would have given anything for the sound of my mum’s voice. Or even Lennie’s. I looked at the time on Margeart’s new watch. That watch was really wasted on her as she couldn’t tell the time.
It was 1.30 a.m. I didn’t think Miss Belmont would give me permission to use the common-room phone so late, so I didn’t ask. I sneaked down the corridor and past Barry Hollis where he lay sleeping like a werewolf. He’d been sent to sleep in the common room all by himself, in disgrace for talking after lights out. I tiptoed into the telephone cubicle, shut the glass door and switched on the little light above the phone. I dialled our house number.
When Mum finally did answer, she demanded in a loud panicky voice if I’d broken a leg, if I’d been bitten by a snake, if the camp was surrounded by a ring of bushfires.
‘I only rang to chat,’ I said.
‘You know very well how nervous I am about answering the phone late at night,’ she said indignantly. ‘I thought it might be that weirdo who rings people up and says he’s just poisoned their cat. Not that Norm ever eats anything unless he’s pinched it from the kitchen table, and nobody could get close enough safely to poison him, anyway. But the idea, Erk, phoning at this hour! And I went to all the trouble of fin
ding a paper bag and blowing it up ready to bust in his ear over the phone if it was that cat weirdo, and I’m that out of breath now, and it turns out to be only you!’
‘ONLY me?’ I said. ‘If that’s the way you feel, I’ll hang up. I just thought you might like to hear the sound of my voice after all this time.’
‘I heard it only a few hours ago when I saw you off,’ Mum said crossly. ‘And you should be in bed, this hour. What are those teachers thinking of, letting you kids roam around past midnight?’
Behind me in the darkness someone suddenly yanked open the door of the telephone cubicle. I gave a strangled, snorting yelp.
‘I’m always telling you, Erk, don’t talk with Throaties in your mouth,’ Mum said. ‘They can slide down and get stuck in your windpipe. Gargle with water and get right back into bed. And don’t you dare disturb my beauty sleep like this again, and give me palpitations thinking it’s someone doing Norm in.’ She hung up.
‘Barry Hollis, get out of here when I’m making a private call,’ I said furiously.
‘Who are you ringing?’ he asked. ‘Your mum?’
‘Certainly not! As if I’d be doing anything so immature.’ I turned my back on Barry Hollis and spoke into the empty phone. ‘I’ll give you another ring tomorrow night, Leo, after all the little kids are asleep,’ I said. ‘And I’ll be free on the Saturday when we come back from camp to go parachute jumping with you.’ Then I hung up.
‘Who’s Leo?’ asked Barry Hollis.
‘Someone I know,’ I said. ‘You certainly wouldn’t know him. And he certainly wouldn’t notice you even if you did know him. Anyhow, no one’s allowed to use this phone without permission. You haven’t got it. You’re supposed to be asleep in the common room, in disgrace.’