by Suzanne Leal
The woman—Mel—brushes the compliment away. ‘Look, my son can be a bit of a ratbag but deep down, he’s not a bad kid.’ She touches Rebecca’s arm with her hand. ‘Listen, I know you’re new and everything, so why don’t you take my number? That way you can call if you need anything.’
When Rebecca nods, suddenly shy, Mel takes out a mobile phone. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Rebecca,’ she says softly.
Mel keeps her eyes on the phone screen. ‘And your number?’
Her number? She doesn’t know it. She doesn’t even know her phone number. Taking out her own phone, she scrolls down until she finds it. She hesitates as she reads out the still unfamiliar numbers. Once she is done, the woman rings her. ‘There you go,’ she says. ‘Now you know how to find me.’
Terry
There are a couple of lawyers in Raleigh, but he’s not keen on Raleigh people knowing his business. Especially not this, and especially not with Michelle being at the surgery and all. Confidentiality and the rest of it, he knows that’s what they’ll say to reassure him, but in his experience, confidentiality or no confidentiality, people still talk. And he doesn’t want people talking. That’s why he’s taken the bus into the city to see someone he hopes doesn’t know anyone in Brindle or Raleigh—or Jinda, for that matter.
The building itself has an enormous foyer, with a ceiling so high it could house an aeroplane. Why do that? he wonders. Why make a foyer as big as that?
In front of him is a directory listing every business in the building. Among them are a number of law firms. He counts seven, eight, nine: so many of them in just one building.
Clare became a lawyer, that’s what he’s been told. Little Clare, a lawyer. It had surprised him to hear it. Never in a thousand years would he have pictured her in a law firm. It would have made her mother happy, though, that’s for sure. Mrs Sorenson would have been purple with pride about it.
Mrs Sorenson.
God.
He doesn’t need to be thinking about Mrs Sorenson.
He needs to be thinking about the task at hand. And to do that, he needs to focus. He needs to find where the hell he’s supposed to be in this skyscraper.
Again his eyes scan the directory: level fifteen, that’s where he needs to be, for his appointment with Simon Fernandez.
Simon Fernandez, it turns out, is a knowledgeable lawyer with a good understanding of this particular area of the law. There is a lot he can explain to Terry, and he does it well; he is sharp, he is clear and he is pleasant.
But in the end, it’s all very simple. There’s nothing to be done. There is no one who can reconsider Terry’s case; there is no appeal he can lodge. He’s a prohibited person and prohibited people can’t work with children. Not ever. In short, it’s all over, red rover.
He ventures just one question. ‘But it was so long ago,’ he says. ‘Can’t they take that into account?’
Simon Fernandez shakes his head. ‘Not when it involved a child.’ Terry’s face burns. No more, he thinks. He can’t stand it any longer. He needs to get out of here—now. But there’s still one more thing he needs to know. It’s not an easy thing to ask. And the words themselves are hard to form. ‘The school,’ he says. ‘Can I pop into the school—just from time to time—to check how the kids are going?’
The man’s eyes flicker. ‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ he says. ‘I really wouldn’t.’
Terry swallows. ‘Just wondering,’ he murmurs.
He’s back home again by lunchtime.
He has to call Michelle. He’d promised he would.
Bouncer follows him into the lounge room and sits by his feet while Terry tries to work out what the hell he’s going to do with himself now. Now that everything’s become such a mess.
He misses the kids. God, he misses them. When he can, when it doesn’t make him too sad to think about it, he tries to picture them in the classroom, all sitting at their desks, everything the same as it was. Just without him.
The phone is sitting on the coffee table, right there in front of him. He just has to lean forward, pick it up and dial the number. But it’s harder than you’d think just to pick up the phone and dial a number. It even makes his hands shake. And yet he does it. He dials the number, she answers and he tells her. ‘No good, love,’ is all he says. ‘No good.’ And it kills him to hear the intake of her breath, because what could she possibly say? She’s there on reception so she can’t move a muscle without the whole world knowing about it. He feels so ashamed, so very ashamed of what he’s put her through. The looks, the whispers, the gossip. Because privacy laws or no privacy laws, you can’t stop people asking questions about a retirement that’s come out of the blue, can you?
When he hears the first knock on the door, he ignores it. A door-to-door salesman, no doubt, and he can’t face the inane conversation. The second knock he ignores, too, then waits for the third one, which, from past experience, he knows will be the last. But this time the bugger doesn’t stop. This time he just keeps on rapping at the door until, with an annoyed grunt, Terry gets out of his chair. ‘All right, all right!’ he yells. ‘I’m coming.’
Scowling, he opens the door to find Sid standing there. Too surprised to say anything, Terry just stares at him.
Sid gives him a crooked smile. ‘Hello, Terry,’ he says. ‘Couldn’t get you on the blower so I thought I’d better come and see what’s what.’
Seeing him there—so matter-of-fact, so unchanged—makes Terry want to cry. Instead he grunts. ‘S’pose I’d better let you in then.’
So he leads him down the hallway and into the lounge room. There Terry follows Sid’s gaze out over the water and across to the port. ‘Last couple of months, there’s nothing goes on out there I don’t know about. Anything happens, I’ve seen it.’ He tries for a chuckle, to show he’s made a joke, but he doesn’t get a laugh out of Sid.
‘Not the same,’ he says, ‘at the school. Without you being there.’
Terry chews on the inside of this lip until he can trust himself to speak. ‘Every morning, soon as I open my eyes, I’m ready to get up and head off to school. Every bloody morning. Every morning, I forget for a minute or so. You’d think it would click after a bit. No such luck.’
His eyes still on the waterline, he keeps talking, soft talking, like he’s talking to himself. ‘Days get a bit long, though, just watching what’s going on over at the port. Drives Michelle mad, having me moping around the house. She’s even started leaving me lists of things to do—a whole lot of fix-it jobs.’
He turns to Sid, arms crossed hard in front of him. ‘You know me,’ he says. ‘Doing them’s not the problem. There’s still enough of the old chippy in me to turn my hand to whatever needs doing. It’s just the starting, Sid.’ He coughs, then, to try to cover the faltering of his voice. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I stare at the bloody list and it doesn’t matter what I do, I just can’t get going with it. It’s like it’s in Chinese or something. And I think, Christ, I must be losing my mind.’ His eyelids are heavy over his eyes, so heavy his eyes seem closed.
Sid’s voice, never rushed, has a flicker of urgency to it. ‘You need to get out, Terry,’ he says. ‘You need to get out of the house. Have a hit with me. That’s what you need. Bit of a hit of an afternoon after I knock off.’
Terry shakes his head. He’s almost whispering now. ‘But I can’t even do that. I haven’t even got it in me to get on the line and give you a ring. Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? But Christ, Sid, it’s all I can do just to haul myself out of bed in the morning. Michelle’s at me to get a job. But what can I do, Sid? If I can’t teach anymore, what can I do? And who the hell wants a fifty-seven-year-old carpenter who hasn’t been on a building site in twenty years?’
He doesn’t tell him about the one job he did go for. It wasn’t anything great. Just a day or two a week at one of the nursing homes over in Henley, doing all the bits and pieces—any repair work that needed doing, a bit of gardening, a bit of
general maintenance. Nothing demanding, just something to get him out of the house. Michelle’s words, not his; left to himself, he’d have just stayed put.
So he made the call, then found himself sitting in the manager’s office wondering what the hell he was doing there. He sat quietly as John or Dave or Kevin or whatever his name was yabbered on about the rubbish and the garden and the rest of it. The bloke was sounding keen and Terry was answering his questions—when he’d be available, what he’d done before—when, out of the blue, came this one: Just out of interest, Terry, why did you stop teaching?
It was a simple enough question, and there was a simple enough answer to it. I retired. That’s all he needed to say. Nothing more than that.
Instead, he’d yanked his head up in surprise and started to gabble. ‘There was a problem,’ he heard himself bluster. ‘I had a problem at the school. So I left. That’s why I left.’
And although the bloke kept on nodding, Terry saw his eyes cool and his head move back. He knew, then, that he wouldn’t be getting the job; it didn’t matter how good he was, it didn’t even matter if there was no one else on offer.
Sid’s looking at him, but what’s he going to say? That he can’t even get himself a job taking out the rubbish?
‘I’ll keep an ear out,’ Sid promises him. ‘I’ll tell you if something comes up.’
Thanks, he wants to say, but instead of the word that awful taste rises up again. He grimaces as he tries to swallow it back down. Beside him, Sid is quiet.
‘At school,’ Terry says finally, his voice thick, ‘what’s news? With the kids, I mean?’
Sid screws his eyes up like he’s trying to get a good look at something across the water. ‘Ethan Thompson got himself in trouble last week.’
Terry raises an eyebrow. ‘What happened?’
Sid shakes his head. ‘He was having a go at the new kid.’
‘What new kid?’
‘Can’t remember his name. Something posh. Benedict, Nathaniel, something like that. Foreign kid. Ethan got stuck into him, so the boss hauled young Mel and Adam into the office.’
Terry makes a clicking noise with his tongue. ‘Silly little bugger. Thing with Ethan is that he’s got to learn how to control his temper; force himself to simmer down. It’s always been his problem. Soon as it looks like he’s going to blow up, that’s when you’ve got to get in quick, work out what it is that’s got him so upset then get him to settle. You know what I used to do with him? I’d make him count. When I’d see he was about to explode, I’d pull him aside and say, Right, mate, before you do anything, count it down and when you get to ten, work out whether the idea’s still a good one. Oftentimes, that’s all you’d need with Ethan. Because he’s a good kid, really, just a bit of a hothead. Probably needed running out. Get rid of the excessive energy.’
He looks across at Sid. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘if you get a chance—don’t make it a big thing—just say I told him to keep his nose clean.’
Nina
Friday afternoons are for art, and today Nina has given them the theme Animals of the Rainforest for inspiration. On each table she has set out an array of paints, cardboard and craft materials. At the front of the classroom are pictures of rainforest animals. Each child has to choose an animal as a basis for their own painting or collage. It’s a good idea, she thinks. More than that, it’s part of her plan to slowly transform the room into a fabulous rainforest scene: first, by hanging the animal creations from the ceiling, next, by covering the walls with an assortment of painted trees and vines. She might even get some cheap brown matting to cover the lino. That way, as soon as the kids walk into the room, they’ll be stepping into their very own 6F magical rainforest.
But right at the moment, Elsie is demanding most of her time. The project she’s chosen is an ambitious one—too ambitious, perhaps, but Nina doesn’t tell her this. Instead, she sits beside her and together they trace the outline for a large toucan. It would be easy enough to cut out the toucan and paint it in bright colours, but Elsie is set on making a collage. And so, painstakingly, they rip up yellow, red, blue and green crepe paper, then roll each tiny piece into an even smaller ball. When they have enough of each colour, Nina uses a thick paintbrush to coat the paper toucan with glue and, once she thinks Elsie can manage it alone, leaves her to cover it in paper balls.
At the back of the room, Kurt, Ethan and Cody are huddled together in a group. They have chosen gorillas as their animals and, at Nina’s suggestion, are using strips of black crepe paper as fur. Kurt has elected himself the silverback of the group, so, as well as black strips, he needs a line of silver to run down the back of his gorilla. Nina doesn’t have silver crepe paper, but she does have a roll of silver ribbon she lets him use. The final result is fantastic, she tells him. It’s so fantastic that Cody and Ethan are at her for some silver ribbon, then, too. But because there’s only ever one silverback in a group, not three, Kurt vetoes the idea. Cody and Ethan don’t push it.
She’s already screwed hooks in the ceiling—one for each student—and cut lengths of green ribbon to attach to the artworks so they can be looped onto a hook. That way, instead of leaving them on the desks to dry, each picture can be hung up straightaway. Sid has lent Nina his stepladder and if they stand on the top rung, all of the kids—apart from Bridie, who lets Nina do it for her—can reach high enough to loop their own ribbon onto their own hook.
When Kurt climbs up to hang his silverback, he starts to snort as though trying to swallow back a laugh. And if that’s his aim, he’s unsuccessful, because soon he’s laughing so hard Nina worries he’ll lose his footing.
Just dealing with him—day in, day out—is exhausting. ‘Enough,’ she tells him, ‘that’s quite enough.’ She has no idea what he’s finding so funny, but as they take turns to put up their own gorillas, Ethan and Cody also start to guffaw.
Only when the rest of the artworks are up does she notice. It is then she sees that, to each of the three gorillas, a large penis and scrotum have been attached. And because the oversized genitals, all three of them, have carefully been covered in strips of black crepe paper, they’re not immediately obvious.
After the surprise of it, her first reaction—if she’s honest—is one of admiration: that these boys, so lethargic with the rest of their work, have managed such a creative collaboration. Still, she uses her disappointed voice as she orders the three of them up to stand in front of her desk as she tries to work out what she’s going to do: give them a dressing-down there and then, send them straight to Laurie or ask them to take down the gorillas and start again. In the end, she settles on an apology, neatly written and at least five sentences long.
When, later, the bell has gone and the classroom has emptied, Nina lines the stepladder up under each of the gorillas and, scissors in hand, lops off the offending parts.
Immediately, she regrets it. Because, in the end, what exactly was the problem? What exactly had they done wrong? Simply copied, more or less, what they had in front of them: a naked gorilla. And what’s the issue with that? Perhaps there is none. Perhaps the problem is hers.
Don’t be so stupid. It’s Steve’s voice that fills her head then. They’re a bunch of idiots who spent the afternoon drawing oversized dicks. I’d be giving them a whack across the ears, not some award for creative bloody effort.
This makes her smile. For a moment, it almost makes her laugh until, once again, she remembers and, once again, there is a sinking feeling in her stomach.
Sitting down, she takes a deep breath then picks up the first of the three apologies that have been left on her desk.
It is Ethan’s and it is short.
dear mrs foreman
sorry about puting a penis on my gorila. it wasn’t the right thing to do. plese don’t tell my mum or dad because I already got in troubel to ms mathew and my mum and dad said the shit wil hit the fan if it hapens again. that’s what I want to say to you in this leter to say sorry.
ETHAN
; ps this is 4 senteces not 5, but one of them is quite long.
Cody’s is shorter still.
Dear Miss
This is my apolage for making a penis for my gorilla. I will not do it again. I will take it off if you want. I can do it easy. And it won’t take very long.
Cody
By contrast, Kurt, who usually writes little, has filled the page.
To miss
You told me to write an apolagy about the penis and balls I made for my gorilla. So this is my apolagy. I’m sorry I made a penis and balls for my gorilla, even if every silverbak gorilla I ever heard of has got a penis and balls anyway. But that’s probly just something for real gorillas not ones you make for a stupid rainforest that we didn’t even need anyway because we already did really good art stuff with our real teacher Mr P but you just threw that away when you came and we didn’t even get to take it home or nothing, even though it took ages to make, most of all my paper mashay planet which was venus. I don’t think it’s fair that you threw out our stuff when it wasn’t your stuff—it was our stuff and Mr P’s stuff. Specialy his rug. Because that was a really good rug for sitting on and for having in our clasroom. And it wasn’t even your rug and you shouln’t throw other poeple’s things out.
Kurt Ward
6P (NOT 6F)
The anger that radiates from the page so shocks her she finds herself on the verge of tears. Don’t, she mutters, as she lets the page drop from her hands, don’t, don’t, don’t. She’s managed worse than this. Kurt is always tricky so she shouldn’t take it so personally. She certainly shouldn’t be crying about it. But, to her horror, she finds that she is, that she is hunched over her desk, weeping.
A knock on the door startles her upright.
‘Come in!’ she calls out, trying to stop her voice from catching. As the door handle turns, she picks up the letter and tries to appear busy. When she looks up, she finds Tania Rossi at the door.