In the Real World

by Nōnen Títi

  “One of the most vivid examples of this happened with Christianity during the rule of the Romans; the first people to speak out were thrown to the lions, yet a few hundred years later those same masses happily burned anyone at the stake if they didn’t support the Christian views of the dictatorial regime that was led by the churches.

  “Christianity itself, however, was nothing new in the time of the crucifixion. The idea of one single deity had been around since Plato and he probably got it from the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten a thousand years earlier. And who knows; he, in turn, may have had it from ice-age civilization which we know nothing about except that they were seafarers who had mapped the entire globe.

  “So, global views and democracy are neither permanent nor progressive and whether we like it or not, our assumption that we have gained knowledge from the past and will therefore be okay is based on wishful thinking.”

  As usual, Mr Fokker ends his lecture perfectly on time for the bell.

  Next is civics, where I sit with Kathleen while Miss Coven introduces her newest activity. “Mr Moralis believes it’s a good idea to have you all take part in a pretend election to prepare you for turning eighteen.”

  “How ironic.”

  “Look, Mariette. I’m a teacher. I don’t design the curriculum, I just teach it.”

  I ignore her in favour of my library book. I will no longer get caught up in useless discussions with her and I won’t participate. She leaves me alone.

  It’s not just her, either. For some obscure reason all the teachers seem to be tolerating my dissent. Maybe they don’t like PM either. Who knows, maybe there’s still a chance to make people see the wrongs of the system. If I could convince the students and some of the teachers maybe they’d outvote him. Would that have any influence? I’d have to be clever about it; no taunting, but promoting serious issues in a mature manner, like Grandpa Will said. Maybe I could involve the school paper, get an all-student vote, get Miss Coven’s re-enactment outside of the classroom. But I can’t ask her that or she’ll run straight to PM. It has to grow like the freedom movement in the sixties did. I need a John Lennon kind of example; an idol to move the masses. How did he do it? Slogans, short and catchy – Kathleen has some.

  I write my idea in a nearly essay-length scribble for Kathleen to read.

  Let’s meet behind the milk bar next period, she writes back.

  I can’t. I have to go to Mr Fokker’s room.

  Why? He’ll be in assembly.

  I don’t know. How about we get together at my place Sunday?

  Kathleen sends the entire e-mail-like conversation on to Fred and Jerome. The reply comes just as the bell goes: Revolution?

  That might be pushing it a little, but it sounds good.

  While the others trudge to the assembly hall I return to the history classroom. Mr Fokker hands me back my story. It’s marked with an A+.

  “You’re mocking me, right? I wasn’t even finished properly and I didn’t check it over.”

  “You may have received a C for English but I don’t judge style or grammar; I’m a history teacher. Think you can write me a sequel next week?”

  “A sequel? That would be just a rewrite, wouldn’t it?”

  He smiles, closes the room and leaves the building. I walk beside him until I realize we’re heading for the gym. “I thought you said history?”

  “I did, or you would have left. Now you can attend the assembly like everybody else, but from now on you won’t sit with your friends. You can stand beside me so we can prevent history from repeating itself.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re all so keen on keeping me from being expelled.”

  He lightly pushes me in the back to make me enter the gym. That sends a pulse of heat to my brain, which in turn makes my face hot. I keep feeling the point of contact long after his hand is gone.

  I do stand next to him against the side wall throughout the entire charade. I repeat: I stand already. “Charade” is the right word because Fred and Kathleen take turns using hand signals to ask me for a bet on glasses-pushing. They go around collecting the fifties for the pot. I shake my head; I don’t feel like those games anymore.

  During the anthem I look around from my new vantage point. Less than half the people actually sing the words and most of them are year seven and eight. Mr Fokker doesn’t.

  After the sing-along PM starts one of his lengthily stutter speeches about the bleaching of uniforms. A letter has been sent to all the parents stating that no defacing will be allowed and the punishment will be detention.

  “China?” I ask my guard.

  A faint smile is all I get for that.

  At home I put my Little Lamb story into my folder. I quite like it.

  JEROME

  “‘To deface’,” Mariette reads from the dictionary once Kathleen and Fred have arrived on Sunday and we’re all gathered in my room. “‘To mar the external appearance of; to injure by effacing significant details from.’”

  She turns a few pages. “‘De-’…Prefix from Latin, as in to reverse or to remove, and ‘face’ as in front or face.”

  She holds the letter that was mentioned at the assembly and which clearly reads: no defacing will be allowed. “So if a uniform isn’t allowed to be defaced, it means you can’t obscure significant details, which would be the logo.”

  “Only if you consider that significant,” Kathleen says.

  “Right. It also means that you can’t mar the front of it, but it says nothing about the back or that you cannot remove the face of it, but since there’s no face on it, we’ll have to put one there, you see; we’ll have to face it.”

  “How?”

  “Something removable or else all the parents will have to keep buying more shirts, which won’t get us their support.”

  Fred suggests we enlarge Morality’s face from the brochure, print copies for all the students and hand them out with pins on Monday.

  Kathleen is all for it, but wants to do it on Friday instead. If everybody comes into the assembly with it, she says, PM can’t prepare a speech and will have to respond on the spot.

  I’m not sure this won’t cause another riot. I bring it up carefully.

  “Look, Jerome, all we’d be doing is follow the instructions of the letter literally. He can argue common sense, but no more than that. It’s his own fault for wording it too vaguely,” Mariette says.

  “What about the marring of the appearance?”

  “Theoretically that’s a subjective judgment about the aesthetic value of the appearance, which we may consider improved with the facing of it.”

  “With Prime Moron’s face? You’ve got to be kidding,” Kathleen says.

  “It isn’t about the details, it’s about the principle.”

  “You’re right in that; his face, to be specific.”

  “In principle it isn’t wrong to put the principal’s face on the face of the school shirt,” Kathleen jokes.

  Fred makes it a point to write down everything the girls blurt out to use as a defence. He’s grinning from ear to ear. I can’t help getting involved as well then, at least with the wordplay. “So if it’s a vice to put the face of a virtue on the front of a shirt, surely it wouldn’t be a vice to deface it.”

  “So let’s make a flyer,” Fred suggests.

  Four hours later and with a ream of paper and a large box of pins from Bellevue, where we also had lunch with Uncle Gerard, we finish the message for the printout using the same kind of blown-up language the letter does. It starts with the dictionary definitions underlined and our comments interspersed and reads as follows:

  deface

  to mar the external appearance of (your school shirt)

  to face

  to confront impudently (how shameless)

  a face or façade

  a false, superficial or artificial appearance or effect; a disguise or a pretence (like a school brochure)

  de- (prefix)

  to do the opposite of (as in de-
face, meaning not to face), which is NOT allowed, so if you have arrived in full school uniform, which has not been defaced in any way, you are violating an accepted rule of conduct as stated in the letter and it would be right to heed this double negative and stick a face on your shirt. Here is a suggestion:

  Underneath the photograph we printed the slogan: Morality on display is a vice in disguise.

  Not too long after Kathleen and Fred leave, the phone rings downstairs. Aunt Karen brings it to me, still talking into it. “No, she seems to have stayed this time. Anyway, here’s Jerome. Grandpa Will,” she says.

  “How’s Dad?” I ask before properly saying hello. He scolds me for that.

  “Like I told you last week, Charl needs more time. Nothing has changed yet. They’re being extra cautious this time.”

  “Is it really helping, Grandpa Will?”

  “What you’re asking me is if I trust the doctors. How can I answer that, Jerome? All we can do is send cards and maybe I can arrange a phone call for you.”

  I tell Lizette about this via e-mail, since she asked. I talk to her on the phone as well sometimes when calling Rowan. Stuart has left them and gone back to his mother and sister. He sends me the occasional e-mail, as well, but I haven’t heard from Toine or Glen.

  At dinner Aunt Karen asks about Dad, so I tell her about his last attempt and that now he isn’t allowed to leave the ward. “Even Grandpa Will isn’t allowed to visit. They say it’s out of his hands. Dad gets forced to take medication but I can’t believe it’s doing any good.”

  “You have to accept that the doctors know what they’re doing, Jerome. They’ve studied this.”

  “But how can he get better if he isn’t allowed to have any contact with the people who care about him?”

  “They’re only afraid he’ll succeed next time,” Uncle Gerard says.

  “A person should have the right to take his own life as long as the world is a shithole and over-populated,” Mariette says and is immediately told off for her choice of words.

  “You might not be quite so radical if it were your dad there,” I tell her.

  She glances at Uncle Gerard for a moment. “But what they’re doing now is keeping him prisoner and poisoning his mind even though he hasn’t done anything wrong, Jerome. Murderers get off if they have the right lawyer. So it’s okay to kill someone else, but not yourself?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But that’s the message they’re sending. They use the law to stop people from committing suicide and then they send them to war and that’s suddenly okay. It’s hypocrisy. That’s the only thing that’s stable in this world.”

  “You’re exaggerating again, Mariette,” Aunt Karen says.

  Mariette doesn’t deny it and Aunt Karen doesn’t carry on, so the meal ends peacefully.

  On Monday we tell Pat and Mick about our plans. Mick is one of the more intellectual danglers who has talked against the system more than once. Pat is alone at the milk bar when we arrive because her friends have taken the afternoon off to go to Bellevue. Officially we’re not allowed to leave the school grounds at lunchtime, but as Kathleen points out, “If they want to keep their prisoners, they’ll have to build a better fence.”

  “That’ll be next,” Mick warns. “We’ll have to carry one of those DNA IDs and need a permit to go to the loo and they’ll send the police around the shops to pick up any kids of school age who can’t produce a written doctor’s note, and nobody will protest the new rules because they’ll be introduced one at the time and parents will be made to believe they’re for our safety.” He explains that in the US kids are being searched for guns and drugs before being allowed into their schools. “With dogs, even. Talk about being treated like criminals before being proven guilty.”

  We show Mick and Pat what we’ve done so far. Pat thinks it’s fantastic and promises to join in on the prank.

  “Morality isn’t a virtue,” Mick says, which annoys Kathleen, who doesn’t like him very much.

  Mariette, on the other hand, seems to like him a lot. “He’s smart and not afraid to say what he thinks.”

  By Wednesday Fred’s list of explanations has grown a lot thanks to Mick, who is very particular in his interpretation of the words in the rulebook, the way Kathleen’s dad was in the meeting before the term break.

  “Look at the code of conduct,” he says. “Under students’ rights it says we’re to have a legitimate voice and be able to express our concerns. Under students’ responsibilities it says we are to follow all reasonable instructions from the teachers and follow school policies, in which, however, we never had that legitimate voice. Under rules it says we have to follow reasonable instructions from staff, so now it’s not just the teachers but the custodian as well, and under the last heading it says the school will not accept disobedience to staff – reasonable or not apparently. Now which of the four will they enforce, do you think?”

  “No kidding; who wrote that prospectus?” Kathleen asks, flipping through the book as if to make sure he isn’t joking.

  Next we decide to use Miss Coven’s classroom vote as a base for our actions, since in a democratic government issues are brought forward by the politicians and not by the PM. We’ll use the class reps as party leaders, since they’ll be in civics with us and they in turn will invite the school captains if we want to make this a whole school event.

  There’s suddenly an awful lot to arrange, and we have to do it without alerting the teachers. Mick suggests we devise a code to indicate who will be informed and in what situation. “You’re number one,” he says to Mariette. Code A info will only go to the six of us, code B will include the reps and code C could involve a group of organizers, like when we want to hand out the leaflets in a fast and orderly fashion.”

  During civics, which is the last class on Wednesday, we promote Charlotte and Paul to party leaders. They each have a fair amount of followers, which roughly divides the class into gender groups. Together, under our instructions, they ask for the chance to address serious subjects, not just sports and the canteen.

  “You may bring forward any issue you like; make this as life-like as possible,” Miss Coven says.

  I have to admit that my worries about getting into trouble are rapidly vanishing. As long as we organize it properly we have a good chance of securing a say for the students as the prospectus says we have a right to.

  Fred and I involve the editor of the school paper. He’s a year twelve guy named Josh I immediately feel comfortable talking to. Josh listens to our request and promises to join us for a meeting at the milk bar.

  Mariette asks him if he’d be willing to run a separate student paper and she asks a whole lot of questions about his sincerity, which he answers without questioning her authority, even though he’s a year twelve.

  We have a similar interview with the school captains the next day to let them in on it. By Friday we have eleven people officially involved and each of us has a stack of paper and pins, except Mariette who has to report to the history room before assembly. “Don’t make them suspicious, just go,” Mick advises her.

  “Okay, until I’m back everybody reports to you,” she replies.

  We each take our post. It takes a minute to explain the idea to the first group, thirty seconds for the next and after that most accept the paper without question since they’ve seen it handed out to those in front of them.

  Once inside I’m confronted by a buzz of excited voices from the students. As long as they’re sitting most papers aren’t visible. Fred holds up his thumb and I return the gesture. I’m in on the big thing. I recognize this as the ego boost I always imagined others had. When Mariette comes in she gives us a quick thumbs-up as well.

  As soon as PM announces the anthem the entire assembly stands up, proudly rattling their papers. As Kathleen predicted, the principal has no idea how to respond. He even squints to read it and then turns red. “Who is responsible for this outrage?” he demands, but his voice trembles and he must
have noticed this too, because he more runs than walks out of the gym.

  “Bull’s-eye,” Kathleen says to Mariette, who puts her finger to her lips, but her captor, as she now calls Mr Fokker, sees it. He says something to her and she responds with feigned innocence.

  In the meantime the assembly has become really noisy. Mr Shriver calls for silence and asks that those responsible for this hoax come forward or nobody will go home. Without hesitation Mick walks to the front. He’s not known as a troublemaker and the teachers are visibly surprised. Then he does a great job explaining the literal meaning of the words and that we only followed the instructions and therefore cannot be accused of any wrongdoing. The moment he finishes all the students cheer. For lack of a better answer they then send us home with the message that this might have been a nice joke, but nothing like it will be tolerated in the future. Everybody is smiling.

  “How was school?” Aunt Karen asks as she always does.

  “It was fun,” I answer honestly.

  The weekend is a little disappointing. There’s still no positive sign about Dad, though I’m allowed to call him on Sunday. Only there isn’t much I can think to say to him. “I don’t care if you’re not the model father, Dad, I just want you back.”

  “I’m trying, Jerome. Can I speak to Mariette?”

  I wasn’t expecting this and I say yes before wondering why. “My dad wants to talk to you.”

  She takes the handset from me. “No, I haven’t seen anything,” she answers, then adds that I miss him and he had better recover fast before hanging up.

  “I don’t know if it helps to make him feel pressured, Mariette.”

  “Well, no pressure seems to do nothing.”

  “Not everybody is like you,” I answer, a little miffed.

  That night I dream of Dad sitting in a little cell somewhere and no matter how I try I can’t reach him. Somehow I end up rowing in a dinghy while Mariette sails by in a larger boat. “You’ve forgotten someone!” she yells and throws me a book. I look through it but every page is empty. From then on the dream turns into the now-familiar replay of that night, from which I wake up at four in the morning. I go to the bathroom and take a long shower.