‘It’s written in lines ... going down the page. And sport is at the back.’
‘Right. I know what you mean, the articles are written in columns. And yes, articles about sport are always at the back. What’s your name?’
‘Hosannah.’
‘Thanks for sharing, Hosannah. I appreciate it.’
An understatement, Beth thinks. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do if no one responded. She walks down the middle of the room.
‘Yesterday,’ she says, ‘you all learnt about the parts of a newspaper. Who can remember what we call the words under a photograph?’
Silence.
‘Come on,’ says Beth. ‘It’s not a trick question.’
Hosannah raises her hand again.
‘It’s okay, Hosannah, thank you. Let’s try something else.’
She tells them to find their notes from yesterday and use them as a checklist. ‘Write on your newspaper. Label the parts. Make the words mean something to you.’ She glances through the louvres, and then turns to Lena. ‘The weather’s fine at the moment,’ she says. ‘Can we work outside in the garden, do you think?’
The students look stunned.
‘You heard Misis Beth,’ Lena says. ‘Move, please.’
The students grab their gear and head outside. Beth and Lena wander through the garden, watching the kids bent over their newspapers, talking and scribbling away.
‘They talk fine,’ Beth whispers. ‘Maybe give them time to talk with each other first and then share with the bigger group.’
But when she heads towards the library, she sees a couple of the bigger boys lying on their backs, newspapers by their sides.
‘It’s not the weekend yet, boys,’ she says.
They scramble up, reach for their newspaper, mumble, sorry Misis.
‘Keep going on with your work,’ says Beth. ‘You can sleep tonight.’
She walks off, heart thumping, relieved when there’s no comeback.
At the end of the lesson, the students gather under the flagpole, where Lena tells them they will soon write their own articles. Beth is about to say something, then hesitates. She doesn’t want to take over the class, risk making Lena feel resentful, and yet ... she thinks her idea might work. She looks at the students, then turns to Lena.
‘What about the students making their own newspaper?’ she says.
To her relief, Lena nods.
‘You could even sell it,’ says Beth.
‘Really?’ asks a boy called Dennis.
‘We need to check with Misis Val,’ Beth says. ‘But if we can cover the costs of photocopying, I think she’d be happy for you to do that. You could put the money towards something. Maybe CDs to listen to at lunch.’
‘What about a CD player?’ says a boy at the back. He has a shark tooth tied to a string around his neck. ‘We need a player first.’
‘Yes!’ Lena says. ‘You could do it.’
‘Great idea,’ says Beth. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Abraham, Misis.’
‘Well, Abraham, maybe you could find out how much stereos cost at Lim’s.’ And then she remembers: Eva gave her some money before she left. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she says. ‘You people create a newspaper you can sell and whatever you make, I’ll match it. We’ll have enough for a CD player, for sure.’
*
Beth finds working with the younger children easy. When she asks a question, they strain to have the highest hand raised in the air, chests puffed out like roosters, Clem would say. She reads them stories she’s found in the library, some with a sticker saying Donated by the Kununurra Rotary Club: just holding those books makes Beth feel closer to home. But then that thought quickly turns in on itself, and she feels the ache of Sam. She puts more effort into reading then, as if to spur herself on: using accents and different voices for characters, varying her pace and volume. The kids giggle or grow frightened, bunching behind one another, or collapsing into laughter and begging for One more, Misis Beth, please Misis.
At lunch, Beth asks Val if she can set up some reading circles in the school, where a Year Eight student can read to three or four younger kids.
Val screws up her face. ‘Some of our little kids can’t sit still and behave themselves for too long,’ she says.
‘We could put two older kids in with them then,’ Beth says. ‘Crowd control.’
‘Okay, okay. And I guess the older kids get to practise reading in English. Which is good, because exams are coming up and they need all the help they can get.’ Her face brightens. ‘Let’s do it after lunch, every Thursday,’ she says. ‘And let’s take some photos and send them to the papers. About time those Moresby schools see what a little island school can do.’
*
At the staff meeting in the library, Beth sits near Lena. Val’s briefing them about the coming semester: Year Eight examinations, excursions, fundraising ideas. She mentions, too, that there’s an outbreak of typhoid on the island.
‘Yes,’ says Mrs Samin. ‘The corner market by the airport is closed down.’
‘Wow, typhoid,’ says Beth. ‘So different to home. At our staff meetings we talked about the length of the girls’ skirts and whether they had a red or white ribbon in their hair. Any other colour and it was detention. And as for disease ... the hardest one I had to deal with was an eating disorder.’
‘What is eating disorders?’ Ruth says.
‘People who refuse to eat, who ... you know ... starve themselves. To be thin. It’s horrible.’ A collective intake of air. Beth looks around the room. ‘Or they make themselves vomit after a meal,’ she says. ‘They weigh themselves constantly. Some of my favourite students—I know we shouldn’t have favourites—had an eating disorder. It affects their brain ... everything.’ Beth stops herself from telling them what she’d witnessed over the years, the things that made her howl in the quiet of her bedroom: girls refusing to lick postage stamps, convinced they’d gain weight; a fourteen-year-old who split her oesophagus ‘purging’ in the school toilets; girls who hid stones in their knickers while they were weighed in hospital, determined to be let home.
It’s devastating, is all she says.
‘Why no eating?’ asks Lena, her eyes big and searching.
‘So many reasons,’ Beth says. ‘We had lots of staff meetings about it. Maybe it’s the media, you know, how women should look, the pressure on young girls who often have no say in their lives. And in a crazy, competitive world, it’s the only thing they can control. Or self-hatred. The list goes on and on.’
Lena shakes her head. ‘Some of our students only get rice,’ she says. ‘Morning and night. No tinned fish. No chicken. No lunch. No snacks. I hear their bellies in class, cry like a lion. Loud. Terrible.’ She looks at Beth. ‘And your students, no eating?’
‘That’s right.’
She has nothing else to say.
*
By now Beth’s worked in all the classrooms: reading stories, orchestrating portrait painting, teaching the evolution of the telephone using two plastic cups and a length of string. She’s presented a mini lecture on the Romantic poets to Lena’s bewildered Year Eights, who look old enough to be at university, with their broad shoulders and dark moustaches.
‘Some of them are eighteen,’ Val tells her at the end of the week. ‘They come to school if their families can pay the fees. Some years there’s no money and they stay in the village and work, then they come back. Education isn’t free in PNG, you know. Even the government schools are the same.’
In the mornings when Beth walks through the gate the younger children are now eager to see her. They clutch her hand and walk her to the office, and the boys rush to take her water bottle, rugby-throwing it to each other as they run around the back to the tanks. They proudly bring it to the office, filled to the brim, water dripping down the sides, puffing and smiling. From eight till four Beth works hard, and later, she walks to the beach and plunges into the sea, washing off the day. Home before dark, she cooks tuna pasta, e
ggs on toast, rice with the vegetables Moses leaves at the back door, wrapped in newspaper. Soon she’ll buy fish. Each night she sips tea in the haus win with Lena, planning lessons and marking homework, as Grace wraps the long spirals of her hair around thin, dark fingers, again and again and again.
Lena tells Beth she’d always wanted to teach: she’d stood under a coconut palm one day and two nuns from the mission school walked past, talking about books. They’d looked so beautiful in their flowing blue gowns and she knew she wanted to be just like them.
‘Not nun. I knew I wanted pikinini one day, susa,’ she says, laughing. ‘I wanted to teach.’ On the weekends, she practised on the younger kids, using an old piece of copper left over from the war for a blackboard, and charcoal for chalk.
Sometimes Ruth joins them and Beth sits, entranced, listening to their old-time stories of the island, taim bipo white masta. Or they tell her about the woman down the highway who farms eels as thick as a man’s arm; the carved and painted masks used in burial ceremonies to help the soul travel safely to the spirit world; the religious woman from Ireland who’s lived behind the church for over twenty years, translating the bible into the island’s many languages. Often Lena and Ruth take turns with Beth’s guitar and sing rousing songs in local language or Pidgin.
It’s then that Beth’s thoughts return to school, thinking how different the place, and the kids, are from home. Not better, or worse, just different. She thinks of—for a moment she struggles to name it—the resourcefulness of the kids she teaches here. After helping Mr Reis with tie-dyeing in art, Beth had taken Nin and Ramona with her to hang the creations on a rope clothesline, which they tied underneath the raised bamboo staffroom. Beth had flopped a square of fabric over the line but when it kept slipping off, the girls had quickly searched for twigs, broken them into smaller pieces, split them with their nails and made tiny pegs. The whole process done and artworks pegged and ready within five minutes! Beth had applauded their ingenuity. She wasn’t sure they knew the word but they looked impressed when they’d walked back to class. Beth had waited a moment longer, looking at those tiny pegs and dyed fabric squares, like colourful, shrivelled nappies.
She thinks about the success of the reading circles, how she walks along the school verandahs and through the gardens on Thursdays, seeing clusters of big and small kids, sharing books, chattering away. They’re like a balm, these moments, reminding her that good things still happen. She’d photographed Hosannah and Constance reading to some of Ruth’s smallest students, and emailed a copy to The National and the Post Courier.
Every night, Lena and Ruth say how hard Beth works, that parents have even commented. They’re grateful she is with them, and Beth is grateful too; they leave her no space, no time, for memory.
Clem can’t fathom it, can’t believe Beth’s gone. But he knows she can’t stay, either: Fremantle or Hope Valley, neither place is right. And these past few months he’s seen her waste away, some stick version of herself. Still, he’d struggled when she first moved to the city, only two hours by car, and even worse when she left with Sam, the two of them heading east to Sydney and then on to Kuala Lumpur. Hell, he hadn’t even known where Kuala Lumpur was. And he hadn’t even met this Sam joker.
He remembers Beth’s face, all flushed and shiny, when she’d told him they were leaving. Her blue eyes had blazed and she was beautiful, his girl, leaning against the wall, babbling away. She’d looked just like Rose standing outside MacMillan’s store, all those years ago, dress flapping, dirty socks and work boots caked in dust, big pack behind her on the ground. He knew this day was always going to find him.
‘I get it, Bethy,’ he’d said, slowly. ‘I get it, love.’
A couple of wild geese circle above and then come skidding onto the dam. Red, lying on her belly next to him, stirs. Beth will be in PNG for three whole months. He usually lasts about a week and then he’s on the phone, asking when she’s coming up or inventing a reason—new shearing gear, a sheep sale in Midland that Smithson’s asked him to go to—so he can come to Perth.
At least he knows she’s gone to Val: no-nonsense, blouse-tucked-in, Jesus-loving Val. He’s never left the state but he reckons a change of scene, fresh things to look at, is just what Beth needs.
‘Well, ol’ girl,’ he says, leaning over and patting Red on the back. ‘Least I’ve still got you.’
She eyes him, then sinks lower onto her front paws, and starts snoring.
Beth’s week at school is hectic. She helps Lena’s class with their articles, teaches life drawing in art with Mr Reis. She shows Ruth’s students how to skip with ropes donated from a school in Toowoomba, and on Friday, Val asks her to drive Mrs Samin and the Year Eights for their excursion to the post office. Mrs Samin sits in the cab reading The National while Beth makes sure that fifteen kids climb on the back safely and are sitting down. As she drives along the golf course she glances in the rear-view mirror: all those black bodies, squashed against each other. She can hear them call out in Pidgin as they pass people walking on the side of the road. The sky is heavy with cloud and rain is threatening, so Beth drives a little faster. But as soon as she rounds the corner by Lim’s, down it comes: a few fat drops, then it’s bucketing. Beth goes to pull over, checks in the mirror and sees the students scrambling under a blue tarpaulin—she didn’t even know one was there. Lights on and wipers flat out, she drives through the pelting rain, hearing the kids hoot with laughter. Dodging a pothole and then a wayward dog, she pictures the luxury minibuses at her last school, thinking how much Clem would love this story.
Inside the post office, Beth recalls the one in Claytonville, where she went on her own school excursion in the eighties: mail sorting bags and a grid of square wooden post boxes, stamp folders, a big silver till. But guards smoking cigarettes weren’t part of the picture, or chains and lengths of wood. She’ll tell Clem that story too.
As the students mill about outside, waiting to climb back onto the ute, three little kids, clothes tattered and filthy, noses leaking, run over to them, speaking quickly. Beth strains to catch Pidgin words she might know, then realises they’re talking island language. She sees Abraham take some dough balls from his pocket and the kids snatch them, rushing to a nearby bush, scoffing them in seconds. Beth knows that Abraham’s family doesn’t have much money, and that he’s probably given away his lunch.
‘Misis Beth,’ says Hosannah, stepping forward. ‘I have money. Can I give?’
Beth nods, and Hosannah, then Dennis, then Nin, walk over to the kids. Hosannah is talking but Beth can’t make out the words. She wishes she’d brought her own purse, or some food. Something. The kids flash big smiles as they take the coins, then scurry towards Lim’s. And when Beth reverses the ute and heads for school, everything is heightened, intensified. And right then she realises: white or black, exclusive Perth school or this island one, kids can always surprise her, shake her up a bit. Teach her.
*
A few days later, when Beth’s hunched over a desk in the library, taking notes on Elizabethan theatre, Val breezes in and plonks a newspaper in front of her.
‘Inside cover,’ she says, smiling.
Beth opens the front page of The National and there, bottom left, is the photo she took of the kids in their reading circle. With the heading Boosting Island Literacy, and some words of praise from Val.
‘I’ve already had the international school in Moresby on the phone,’ says Val, clearly chuffed with herself. ‘They want details. Thanks, Beth. It’s the first time we’ve ever got into the paper. And with this group of Year Eights, it won’t be the last.’
She reminds Beth that the national exams are coming up, and she’s sure Hosannah will be among the top-ranked students.
‘She’s a smart girl, that one,’ she says. ‘And she’s got integrity. She could be a future prime minister.’ She walks towards the door, then calls back over her shoulder: ‘She could run this country right now and do a better job than the current one.’
/> *
Beth and Lena sit in the haus win, sipping tea, coconut husks burning on the fire to keep the mosquitoes away. After they’ve prepared English lessons for the next day, Lena turns to Beth and asks: ‘Nogat man? Nogat husband?’
Beth bristles, looks at Lena. ‘No Lena, I have no man.’
‘But you pretty one,’ says Lena. She touches Beth’s chin with such tenderness that Beth shivers, then Lena brings her face closer. ‘Big blue eyes like plates, like the sea, and this hair, soft. Not like black meri’s hair.’ Beth feels herself blushing. ‘You getting old too, you need a man.’
Beth says nothing.
‘Bah! Men are no good,’ Ruth spits, stomping into the haus win. Sitting on the bench, she sends Lena and Beth shuffling quickly to make room for her squat bulk. Her legs don’t reach the sand. ‘They’re all the same,’ she says. ‘Too hard to find a good one anywhere.’
‘Don’t listen, Beth,’ says Lena.
‘Beth, girl, you better without one,’ says Ruth, eyes flashing. ‘I had one, in Moresby, we going to marry. I was teaching pikininis and when I come home he is drinking steam, this beer from the settlement. He was from my island’—she points behind her—‘long way, many days by boat, and he found me in Moresby. I tell him, You get job, you work man, and he says he will but he never does. I work, I cook, I clean. Very hard I work. He drinks steam. Make him crazy. Sick. Shit like water. In the end, I get job here through church and leave him under a pawpaw tree. Never wanted one since.’ Ruth crosses her arms over her heaving breasts.
‘Ahh, not all men are like that,’ Lena says, stroking Grace’s back. The child lies curled like a possum in her lap.
‘PNG men are!’ Ruth says fiercely. ‘They mean. They lazy. They drunks. They beat their wife.’
‘Not all, look at—’
‘You see Theresa at the market, yeah? Black lump near her eye, eye all red and puffed up like a fish? She can’t even open it.’ Ruth lowers her voice: ‘Matthew bastard husband.’
‘Tsk Tsk.’ Lena frowns at Ruth, and covers Grace’s ear. ‘My daddy never hit my mummy. Never. Our village was good, at the other end of the island. We play on the beach all day, we have mission schools. We work hard. We go to college in Madang or Lae or Moresby. No man hit their woman in my village.’
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