Turn off the Lights

by Phillip Gwynne

  Then, with a spiralling sense of urgency, I powered up my desktop, got online and started googling.

  Lights. Electricity. Power. I googled everything and anything that came into my mind.

  I knew it wasn’t the way to tackle a problem like this. I knew I should be approaching it slowly and methodically. But I couldn’t help myself. With the terrifying sound of those throbbing engines still in my ears, I kept frantically googling, website spawning website, breeding exponentially like bacteria.

  Then my phone went off.

  Charles calling … So I answered it.

  ‘Hey, where are you?’ he said.

  Though Charles Bonthron was on my running team, I wouldn’t exactly call him a friend. However, the familiarity of his voice served as a sort of circuit-breaker. I looked at my computer screen: there were websites swarming all over it, literally hundreds of them.

  ‘I’m home,’ I said, slumping in my seat.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, which couldn’t be closer to the truth. I was doing nothing except wasting what little time I had left.

  ‘We were supposed to work out our Civics project, remember?’

  ‘Civics?’

  ‘Yes, Civics. “The History of Sewerage in the Gold Coast”, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ I said.

  ‘You have?’ said Charles.

  ‘What about –’ I started, before I was interrupted by a rat-a-tat-tat on my door.

  ‘Hey, can you just hang on a sec?’ I asked Charles.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  ‘Who is it?’ I said, my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece.

  ‘Toby’s on television in fifteen minutes,’ came Miranda’s voice from the other side of the door. ‘It’s probably a good idea if you were there to watch it.’

  ‘Okay, thanks,’ I said, and returned to my conversation with Charles. ‘Like I said, I’ve got this idea …’

  SUNDAY

  GREEN TEA AND LYCHEE

  When the first judge from Junior Ready! Set! Cook! took a spoonful of Toby’s green tea and lychee ice-cream, a look of absolute pleasure appeared on his large round face.

  He opened his mouth and said one word, drawing out all the syllables, as if they too were to be savoured slowly.

  ‘Ex-tra-ord-i-nary.’

  ‘Toby, my darling!’ Mom yelled at the screen.

  And later when the three judges gave my little brother three perfect scores of ten, our lounge room, packed with various friends of my parents, erupted into applause.

  My hands were working as hard as anybody else’s – clap, clap, clap. Actually my hands were probably working harder than anybody else’s – CLAP, CLAP, CLAP – compensating for the fact that inside I actually wasn’t feeling so happy-clappy.

  I was genuinely pleased for Toby. How could I not be? Three perfect scores – that was totally kicking culinary butt! But wasn’t I in a sort of contest, too? One in which the stakes were a fair bit higher? But nobody was allowed to clap for me.

  When the clapping receded, and I felt as if I could safely let my arms drop to my sides, Miranda took one of my hands and squeezed.

  She knows, I thought. She’s an amazing sister.

  ‘We are so lucky to have such a talented brother,’ she said.

  Right then, I missed Imogen.

  Missed her so much it ached.

  I couldn’t tell her about The Debt, about all my accomplishments, but what I could say was something throwaway like, ‘Geez, Toby and his rambutans,’ and she’d say something like, ‘Yeah, I know exactly what you mean,’ and that would be enough: I’d feel better.

  When they announced that Toby had made the next heat there was even more applause.

  My phone rang.

  It wasn’t a number I knew.

  I answered it anyway. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Dom,’ came a fractured voice over the phone.

  ‘Yes, who is it?’

  ‘It’s me, Mr Jazy.’

  Immediately the world simultaneously expanded and contracted. All the people talking about Toby, what a culinary genius he was, what a future he had, were now miles away. But the voice emanating from the phone seemed incredibly close.

  ‘I’m ringing from the hospital,’ said Mr Jazy.

  I could hear my own voice say, ‘Is Tristan okay? Is he okay?’

  There was nothing from the other end but crying, but sobbing.

  ‘No!’ I yelled, and everybody’s eyes were on me.

  The sobbing at the other end stopped and Mr Jazy said, ‘He woke up, Dom. My son woke up!’

  First Mom was going to drive me straight to the hospital, but then she decided that she had to see her guests off first. And then Dad was going to do it, but he decided he’d better help Mom. In the end Gus said he’d drive me. And Miranda, for some reason, decided that she’d come along too.

  I’m sure there are slower drivers than Gus in the world. The recently deceased, for example. Or the legally blind. And yes, I know the old chap only has one leg, so I shouldn’t be so mean. But as soon as Mr Jazy said those words, ‘My son woke up’, I wanted to be there, wanted to see Tristan awake.

  His exterior, not just his interior, alive.

  I almost wished it was Hound de Villiers who was behind the wheel, spurring Gus’s old ute through the traffic. Besides driving at an excruciatingly slow pace, Gust also insisted on talking about the upcoming race. Apparently he’d been on the phone – or ‘the blower’ as he insisted on calling it – talking to some old running contacts of his.

  ‘These Kenyans,’ said Gus. ‘They’re running sub-fours.’ My brain, my mind, whatever it is that deals with this stuff, registered the fact that these Kenyans were running sub-fours, which was at least a second faster than my PB.

  I wanted to react, say something to Gus like, ‘Wow, that’s going to make it tough.’

  But my brain, my mind, whatever it is that deals with this stuff, had moved on and was now screening a short film titled Tristan and Dominic:

  The Highlights.

  There was Tristan moving in next door to Imogen, strutting around like some kind of rock god. There was Imogen and me coming up with our saying: Rap is crap, sharks are cool, dads shouldn’t wear Speedos and Tristan Jazy is so not okay. The pile-driver punch in the guts. Me sucking up to Tristan, getting him to invite me to Reverie Island. Finding the Zolt’s lair. Getting shot at. Tristan dropping me overboard. And then, finally, the crash. Fade to black.

  ‘I hope it’s not temporary,’ I said. ‘I hope he doesn’t lapse back into a coma.’

  Gus gave up after that and the only sound in the ute as we crawled along the road was Miranda tapping away on her iPhone. When we got to the hospital Gus refused to pay the exorbitant rates in the car park, so we ended up driving around and around the block looking for a spot. And when we eventually did find one, it took Gus ages to reverse the ute back into it. By the time we walked into the hospital I was sure that Tristan had lapsed back into his coma. Or had succumbed to old age. But as we exited the lift on Tristan’s floor, I knew I was wrong. There were people everywhere. And they were smiling, chatting away.

  They must be relatives, friends of the Jazys, I thought.

  Somebody said the word ‘miracle’. Not once but twice.

  And I knew then that he was still awake. But now I felt reluctant to go any further, to intrude.

  Siobhan, the Irish nurse, saw me through the crowd and beckoned me over.

  ‘Tristan has been asking for you,’ she said.

  Asking for me?

  Mr Jazy appeared.

  ‘Dom,’ he said as he enveloped me in a bear hug, except Mr Jazy wasn’t the bearlike being he used to be and his ribs were like little elbows.

  Leaving Gus and Miranda in the waiting room, I followed Mr Jazy into Tristan’s room.

  It was crowded inside. Mrs Jazy was there, of course. And Tristan’s sister, Briony. And some older people I assumed must be his grand
parents.

  And there, sitting on one side of Tristan’s bed, was Imogen.

  Imogen!

  I smiled at her. Tristan was awake now, surely she couldn’t keep blaming me for whatever it was she was blaming me for?

  And in return I got … well, I wouldn’t call it a smile; it was more like the seed from which a smile grows. But it was something, and if I’d been feeling good before, I was feeling gooder than good now.

  As I moved closer to the bed I could see that Tristan’s face was still pale, but it was no longer so pale it was lost in the white pillows that propped him up. And all the machines seemed quieter now; there was less blipping and beeping.

  ‘Tristan, Dom’s come to say hello,’ said Mr Jazy.

  Tristan turned his head until he could see me, and he had this look on his face, like he was trying to work out who I was. If humans had hard drives, then his would have been whirring like crazy. But then there was a smile, which surprised me, because I’d always thought Tristan was only capable of smirking.

  ‘Hey, come here,’ he said, patting the bed.

  The other people in the room moved aside, creating a passage for me.

  I perched on the edge of the bed, right next to where Imogen was.

  Tristan grabbed me by the hand, squeezed it quite hard, as if to make sure I was real. I wanted to pull my hand away, but when I looked up at all the faces smiling at me, I knew I couldn’t.

  I wasn’t sure who had cast me in this role, but I sure hadn’t ever auditioned for it, and now that I was in it, I wasn’t sure of my lines.

  ‘It’s really excellent that you woke up,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure you won’t have to catch up on all the homework you missed.’

  This got a couple of laughs from the audience. Not from Tristan, however. Again I could hear that hard drive whirring.

  Finally, in a half-whisper, he said, ‘Those jerks really did shoot at us, didn’t they?’

  Immediately my eyes travelled around the room. Nothing was registering on anybody else’s face except Imogen’s – she was the only other one who had heard Tristan’s words.

  ‘What jerks?’ I said, keeping my voice low.

  ‘Those rednecks on Reverie that day,’ said Tristan.

  I knew that if I said no, that if I told Tristan that he’d imagined it, then Imogen would probably believe me. Tristan would probably believe me as well. He’d been in a coma for twenty days; who knew what crazy weird stuff had been going on in his subconscious.

  But who was I to deny him the truth? Actually, who was I to deny myself the truth?

  ‘They sure did,’ I said.

  Tristan smiled at me.

  Smiled, not smirked.

  ‘Jerks,’ he said.

  And when I looked up, Imogen’s face was like stone.

  No smile.

  No seed.

  Just the stoniest of stone.

  My hand in my pocket, I surreptitiously took out my iPhone. Unlocked it. Tapped on the Fake-A-Call app. A second later my iPhone rang. I answered it, pretended to listen for a while.

  ‘Yes, Mom,’ I said, injecting a note of urgency into my voice. ‘I’ll be home straightaway.’

  ‘Great to see you, Tristan!’ I said. ‘But I have to go.’

  I removed my hand from his and walked quickly out of the room.

  TUESDAY

  THE EXCURSION THING

  Mr Ryan, our Civics teacher, liked to do the high-five thing. Liked to tell you about the gigs he’d been to on the weekend. Liked to look you bang in the eye and talk to you as if you were his equal.

  Mr Ryan was also a runner. The eight-kilometre cross-country record he set when he was fifteen, and a student at this school, is still standing.

  You’d probably think that cross-country running and track running would stick together, make a united front against cricket, football, swimming, those glamour sports that demanded all the funds.

  Wrong.

  Basically we hated each other. They called us the Track Rats, because we ran around and around in a circle, like rats on a treadmill. Supposedly. We called them the Mud Skippers, the Muddies for short, because they liked to run through filthy, leech-infested creeks.

  And they were always trying to poach our runners.

  I knocked on the door to his office.

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  He was sitting at his desk, plugged into his iPod, a pile of papers in front of him.

  ‘Hi, Mr Ryan,’ I said, making sure I didn’t get close enough for him to do the high-five thing.

  ‘Dom,’ he said, removing the iPod buds from his ears. ‘You heard the new Dire Straits album?’

  ‘I thought they were dead,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, so you’re more of a Guns N’ Roses man, are you?’

  ‘I thought they were dead, too,’ I said, though this wasn’t strictly true because I’d seen Slash, or Slush, or whatever he called himself, on television the other night, plugging hair product.

  ‘So tell me, what’s bopping your pod these days?’

  ‘Can we talk about the Civics project?’ I said. ‘Charles and I have decided what we want to do.’

  ‘You have?’ he said, not even bothering to disguise the surprise in his voice.

  ‘We have,’ I said, doing a bit of the look-you-bang-in-the-eye thing myself.

  ‘So which one?’ he said as he consulted a piece of paper that listed all the topics.

  ‘Actually, I’ve come up with my own. I’d like to do the production and distribution of electricity.’

  ‘Electricity?’

  I wasn’t surprised that he was surprised: I wasn’t exactly famous for the originality of my Civics project topics. Usually I’d leave it to the last minute, until the only thing remaining was ‘The History of the Roundabout in the Gold Coast Municipality’, or something equally scintillating.

  ‘Did you know that all electrical generators work the same way?’ I said. ‘Basically it’s just a piece of metal moving between magnetic poles.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Mr Ryan.

  ‘Did you know that the Diablo Bay Nuclear Power Station generates all the electricity for the Gold Coast?’ I said.

  ‘I’m well aware of that,’ he said.

  My intuition told me that here was the time to stop. That no teacher wanted a student telling him stuff, especially a dud student like me. And, more importantly, no Mud Skipper wanted a Track Rat telling him stuff. But I couldn’t help myself: I was seriously excited by electricity, charged by electricity.

  ‘But do you know how it works?’

  ‘Of course I do – there’s a nuclear fission reaction that produces electricity.’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘The nuclear power is actually used to heat water which produces steam that turns the turbine that drives the generator that makes the electricity.’

  Mr Ryan glared at me, a teacher–student glare, a Muddie–Rat glare, and waved the piece of paper in front of my face.

  ‘Unfortunately, these are the topics that are stipulated by the curriculum,’ he said. ‘And there’s not much I can do about that.’

  It was the old my-hands-are-tied, I’d-love-to-help-you-but-I-can’t, and once a teacher goes into that mode, there’s usually no shifting them.

  Except for one thing: Seb.

  I’d been thinking about my running partner quite a lot since Sunday, and every time I had I’d arrived at the same unsavoury conclusion: Seb had set me up, he’d lured me to Preacher’s. Right now, though, I needed him.

  ‘Seb looked pretty amazing in that trial,’ I said, remembering how Seb had told me that Mr Ryan had approached him after and told him he’d have more chance of a scholarship with the Cross Country team.

  At the mention of Seb’s name, Mr Ryan’s nostrils twitched. A predator with the sniff of prey.

  ‘So you and Seb spend some time together?’ he said.

  ‘I run with him every morning,’ I said, which was pretty much the truth.

  ‘We’ve b
ecome very good friends,’ I said, which was sort of the truth.

  ‘For some reason, he always listens to what I have to say,’ I said, which wasn’t the truth at all, but it worked.

  ‘Electricity,’ said Mr Ryan, putting the piece of paper away. ‘It really is a fascinating topic, isn’t it?’

  ‘It sure is,’ I said. ‘Especially with an excursion tomorrow.’

  ‘Excursion?’ said Mr Ryan, alarm in his voice.

  All teachers hate excursions. Hate having to get the permission notes, collect the money. And then the excursion itself. The endless headcounts. All the things that can go wrong.

  ‘It’s okay, my dad is going to send a bus with a driver. So you don’t need to collect any money.’

  ‘I don’t?’ said Mr Ryan.

  ‘And I’ve already got the permissions,’ I said, taking out a sheath of notes from my pocket and putting them on his desk. ‘These are the kids in Civics who’d like to go.’

  ‘They are?’ he said.

  ‘And I’ve already spoken to Mrs Curie, the PR person at Diablo Bay. All she needs is an official request from the school for a tour of the facility. Here’s her email address.’ I handed Mr Ryan a piece of paper.

  ‘She does?’ said Mr Ryan, looking at the piece of paper.

  I could see that he still wasn’t convinced, however.

  ‘And Seb is coming along,’ I said.

  ‘But he doesn’t go to our school,’ said Mr Ryan.

  ‘I know, but I talked to Mr Cranbrook. He thought it was good idea to give a potential scholarship kid a taste of what we have to offer at Grammar.’

  ‘Dom,’ said Mr Ryan. ‘You really have covered all bases, haven’t you?’

  He held up his hand, and – why the hell not? – we did the high-five thing.

  WEDNESDAY

  ZE TRANSFORMER

  I was pretty sure the eight students who were waiting with me and Charles and Mr Ryan for the bus to arrive weren’t as interested in electricity, or nuclear power plants, as I was.

  They just liked buses (Brent Fowler) or excursions (Chris Montgomery) or hated schoolwork so much they would take any opportunity to get out of class (the other six).