The song finished and Nella was a long way out, the Derwent no longer a river but the sea. And when I looked at her, she looked so happy heading out to open water. Going home. Going home and leaving us behind.
There were rafts of birds sitting on the water out there, shearwaters—brown-black masses of them—and when I turned back to the car, Mum was crying.
I waited for a while before I opened the door. My brother asked if we could go and get breakfast at a café. It was something we never did, something we had never done. I don’t know where he would have got the idea from. My brother could still surprise me sometimes.
But it made Mum smile.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll go to a café.”
We drove to a place in Sandy Bay, right near the beach. They had so many things on the menu, but mostly they had lots of different types of pancakes. Pancakes with blueberries, pancakes with bacon and eggs, pancakes with baked banana and maple syrup.
My brother’s serving had so much whipped cream on top that he had to dig a tunnel through the cream to get to the pancakes. He was full after about ten mouthfuls, and he seemed genuinely sad to leave so much behind. He’d tried his best but the pancakes had won.
We both knew that we would probably never go to that café again.
It would take six weeks for Bo to get home. He would have one month off, then go to his house, be on his island and walk along his beach. He would check his rowboat and he would paint it, orange and blue.
He would take it out on the water, go fishing. He would fall asleep in the sun on the long summer days when the light was always there. And why would he ever want to come back here?
THE PROPERTIES OF MATTER
Mr. Wilkins liked to use the blackboard. There was a brand-new whiteboard next to it on the long front wall of the science lab. It was much larger and cleaner, but Mr. Wilkins always used the blackboard.
He could write so fast in chalk, faster than any teacher I had ever seen. He was determined. It was a dance—his arm moving and his hair moving, chalk dust flying. Sometimes the piece of chalk would snap in half with his intensity, but he’d just keep on going as if he hadn’t noticed the chalk break.
When the piece got too small, he would chuck it behind him, not with any malice or force, just with enough energy to throw it over his head and get it to land where we were sitting. We would try to catch the chalk without getting off our stools, and if we did he would say, “Good catch,” without turning around, his arm still moving, his body blocking most of what he was writing.
A few words here and there at the edges.
Particles
An electric circuit
Ohm’s law
Testable hypothesis
Then he would finish, the piece of chalk motionless between his thumb and finger. He would stand and read what he had written, then slowly step aside.
The great unveiling.
Sometimes there were equations. Sometimes a lesson plan or a grand new topic like The Laws of Thermodynamics! Sometimes it was a story or a poem, something that seemed not to relate to physics at all. Once it was even a joke. Why is Osmium the greatest name for a heavy metal band? Because it is the heaviest and hardest metal on the periodic table.
No other teacher seemed to use the blackboard, so Mr. Wilkins’s words would often stay there for days. I would look at them in other classes. In biology and in chemistry. I would look at them and wonder if anyone else had noticed, if anyone else had read them or thought about them.
There was one that stayed for weeks, maybe even a month. It stayed and it haunted me and I don’t know why. But it hurt to read the words, to think about them and to see them, and yet I wanted them to be true and I wanted to know how to make them true. I looked at them every day until they were finally gone, finally wiped away.
In blue chalk, written in capital letters that took up the whole blackboard. Just a few sentences, screaming:
EVERYTHING IS ENERGY AND THAT’S ALL THERE IS TO IT. MATCH THE FREQUENCY OF THE REALITY YOU WANT AND YOU CANNOT HELP BUT GET THAT REALITY.
IT CAN BE NO OTHER WAY.
THIS IS NOT PHILOSOPHY.
THIS IS PHYSICS.
—Albert Einstein
WOODEN SPOON
Bo had asked me what I liked at school and I said woodwork and physics. That was all I liked.
“At least you like two things,” he’d said.
Woodwork. I chose woodwork as my art elective. There was the drama-art-music stream or the woodwork-technical drawing stream. I was the only girl in woodwork. It meant Mum had to buy me another lab coat, a gray one. They were expensive because they were made of a thick material for protection. Protection from flying chisels and burning-hot lathe tools. We had big clear eye goggles too, but we could borrow them.
I liked woodwork because it was something I could do. It was something I could understand and I didn’t feel so lost in that class. I could think about my grandpa and the things he had taught me about wood. About making things. I could think about watching him in his workshop down in the garage under their flat and how I used to help him by handing him tools one at a time. He made me a dollhouse when I was small. It even had a little toilet that he carved and the lid went up and down and everything. It was made out of scraps of wood, so they were all different colors, different types of wood—but he painted the whole thing and that brought it to life and then it looked like a real house. A big colorful family house. Every room was a different color and the kitchen was bright yellow.
Our woodwork teacher was Mr. Forrest and he had worked at the school for a very long time. I don’t think he really wanted to work there anymore. That’s what everyone said. I’m not sure why he stayed, but he seemed not to mind the woodwork class so much.
We started with simple things—simple box one. Then simple box two. It was to teach us measuring and cutting techniques, joining techniques. “Measure twice, cut once,” Mr. Forrest said, over and over.
“Measure twice!”
Once we passed the box components we could move on to more interesting things. Like a carved wooden salad spoon. First we had to choose the right wood and then we could make the curve of the spoon any way we wanted—as rounded or straight as we liked.
“Flat spoons are strong but boring, curved spoons are more interesting but can break. Find a medium.”
He told us to just draw freehand on the wood and then cut, to just feel the shape.
“Don’t think about it,” he said.
I hesitated for ages, holding the pencil tight between my thumb and finger. I kept trying not to think about how a wooden spoon should look. I was frozen. Finally, when the tip of my soft pencil touched the wood, I just drew. I just made a shape, fluid like a wave. And it looked good, quite curved, but good.
It took a long time to cut and then to carve, especially the spoon bit. But it started to look like a real spoon, one that you might buy at a craft stall at Salamanca Market. The color of the red gum wood I had chosen was warm honey and orange, with thin lines of blond, clean and bright, and it smelt like the bush on a hot windy day.
I sanded down all the edges and made it smooth, made it soft. It really had come out well and I was thinking about how Bo would really like it and maybe he could even use it in the galley when he came back. He could use it for soups or for salads, take it with him on Nella Dan.
But then Mr. Forrest broke it.
There was a bend test. Every spoon was tested by Mr. Forrest. The spoons flexed between his hands, one by one, and he snapped mine into two pieces.
“Not strong enough,” he said.
I looked at the two halves of my spoon. I knew he had used great force to break it. I had seen how his hands had strained.
I walked away with half my spoon in each hand and went back to my workbench. I tried very hard not to let anyone see my face because I had gone really red. Each piece felt solid and good in my hands. I was sure my spoon was good. But it was useless now. Even if I glued the spoon bac
k together it could never be used.
I packed up my bench quickly, swept the floor and collected all the wood shavings in the dustpan, put them in the woodbin. The bell went. I took my lab coat off and rolled it up tightly, put it in my bag. I went to leave, but Mr. Forrest asked me to stay behind.
I waited near my bench with my schoolbag and watched everyone else leave. The woodwork lab was at the very bottom of the school, bottom of the hill, and it took ages to get to other classes. I had English next, which was in the old part of the school. Not as far as the science labs, but it would still take a few minutes to get there, even if I rushed.
Mr. Forrest eventually came over to where I was standing. He put his hands on the bench, looked down. He told me he was very sorry, that he had not meant to break my spoon and that he couldn’t explain what had happened.
“It was a good spoon,” he said. “It was good. Sometimes I . . . it was a mistake.”
It was raining again. Steady. Unstoppable. I’d get saturated on the way to English.
“My washing’s been on the line for five days,” he said.
I looked at him, his face tired and worn.
“I just keep waiting for the rain to stop.”
I stood there not knowing what to do. I looked at the clock on the wall and I was already late. I asked if I could go and he said, “Yes. You can go.”
At the end of the term Mr. Forrest gave me an A+ for woodwork. He wrote, “I hope you will continue, you have a strong feeling for wood.”
LEBANON
My brother and I were watching TV after school. I had a lot of homework to do—to get done—and it was worrying me like it always did, but I didn’t want to start. Not yet. I just wanted some time to not do anything.
My brother turned to me and asked me where Lebanon was. I told him I didn’t know.
“A man came to talk to us about peace,” he said. “He was from Lebanon.”
There were often talks about peace at our school. All I knew about being a Quaker was that there were minutes of silence when we were meant to think about peace, and there was gray. Gray uniforms and gray walls.
I got up off the couch and walked over to the small bookcase that was really just a shelf squeezed in between the chimney and the wall. We had a two-volume edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. They were brown and black, maybe they were leather, and WORLD BOOK was written in gold letters down the spine. Mum had won them in a raffle, which was lucky, because I often needed to use them for homework.
I took down the L–Z volume and carried it back to the couch. I opened it up to the beginning of L.
LEB.
Lebanon is a small independent republic at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. The name of the country comes from the snow-capped Lebanon Mountains. In the Arabic language it is called LUBNAN. Lebanon’s capital and largest city is Beirut.
I read it out loud and my brother nodded like he knew, like he was being reminded of something that had just slipped his mind. There was a map of Lebanon—long and thin and by the sea. There were also a few black-and-white pictures. One of a giant cypress tree, and one of some ancient ruins with Roman-like columns standing tall without a roof. There was a photo of a clean-looking city, with lots of cars and people walking in the streets and bright white buildings against the sky. One building had a sign on the rooftop that said RIVOLI in huge curly writing.
The caption read, Place des Canons, Beirut, 1969.
On the next page there was another picture of the city, only there were no cars and no people walking and the white buildings were gone or so altered that there was nothing there to recognize. Smoke rose from missing rooftops and everything was blackened or gray. Everything different. The city had been smashed to pieces.
The caption read, Beirut 1982: Operation Peace for Galilee.
My eyes scanned down the page then, down all the columns about all the wars in Lebanon. The Civil War and the War with Israel and the War with the PLO. My brother had stopped looking at the pictures, he stopped looking at the book altogether and rested back against the couch.
“No one wins a war,” he said, and he breathed in heavily. “That’s what the man said, what he had come to tell us. No one wins a war, we just all lose. He showed us some photos of his family and he passed them around and told us they were all gone.”
I closed the book and sat with it heavy on my lap. The TV was still on but we were not watching it. Eventually I got up and walked over to the bookcase. I stood there in the corner with the World Book in my hands and the room was very still.
“Is the man going to stay here now?” I asked, and I meant forever. I meant was the man going to stay here in Hobart forever.
My brother just shrugged. His eyes were back on the TV and he wasn’t thinking about the man from Lebanon anymore.
Only I was.
The story was inside me now. I knew I would remember the man even though I had never even seen him or heard him speak. I didn’t know if he was old or if he was young, but I would think about him, here, living on this island without any of the people he loved or even knew at all. Here, so far away from home, knowing that he could never return to the place he remembered because it was gone.
HAVE A KIT KAT
Advanced math—my hardest class.
I tried hard to focus, to take the problems one at a time, but they ran at me and began to blur. I could feel the pressure, the clock ticking. There was never enough time. I wasn’t smart enough for advanced math and I didn’t know why I was in the class.
Halfway down the page.
There was a girl sitting behind me. I didn’t know her very well but she tapped me on the shoulder. She had something in her hand—a Kit Kat.
“Have a break, have a Kit Kat,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. When I looked over, Mr. Anderson was staring absentmindedly out the window, his fingers entwined in his well-groomed blond beard.
I heard the scrape of a chair. Books slapped down hard on the desk next to mine and the girl sat down in the empty seat. Mr. Anderson looked over but he didn’t move. He didn’t seem to care.
“My name is Charly,” she said. “Charly with a y because ie is stupid.”
She opened up the Kit Kat wrapper and the foil caught the sunlight coming through the window. I heard the snap of the Kit Kat fingers and she passed me half, still in the foil.
“Thanks,” I said. I went to say my name but she said, “I know who you are.”
Her hair was messy, light brown, and her eyes were the color of a soft sky.
“Ladies?” a voice said. Mr. Anderson was standing in front of us. “Finished already?”
“No,” Charly said, smiling, “but we have almost finished and we need a break. We need sustenance!”
She pronounced the word sustenance slowly, carefully, emphasizing the ance. It made me smile, almost laugh, but I held it in. I kept my mouth tightly closed. Mr. Anderson just stood there.
“Finish and hand in your work by the bell. Keep the noise down.”
“Yes, sir!” Charly said. She started to eat her Kit Kat fingers. I ate mine too.
“Kit Kats are the best,” she said and I nodded. I had never had one before. It tasted good. The milky chocolate and the wafers and the lightness in my mouth.
Charly finished her two fingers and rolled the foil up in a ball.
“Don’t you just get sick of it?” she said.
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t really sure what she meant.
“I just get sick of it. I’ve got to get out of French. I’m thinking of failing the exam on purpose and then they might let me do typing instead.”
“Typing is good,” I said. “And woodwork.”
“I wish I was in woodwork,” she said. “How did you wrangle that?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “They just let me.”
“I’m in the science-math stream—plus French.” She rolled her eyes then. “I’m just sick of math, nine hours of science a week, the early sta
rts and all of it. It’s all just a big production!”
I had never even thought about it. I had always just finished everything even when it meant I had to stay up until 2 AM trying to keep on top of it all at home.
“Mr. Anderson, he’s cool. But you know, what if, say, like Mrs. Crawford said finish this, and we said no. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? What could she do? Yell and scream and jump up and down, and tell us we don’t deserve to be here, but she couldn’t really do anything. You ever met the principals?”
I had once. They were Quakers, and when you went to their office they made you tea and gave you a biscuit.
“I’ve been sent there heaps and they always just tell me to try my best and try not to make the teachers mad.”
I liked the way she talked. The way she wasn’t scared.
“Sometimes I just get really tired of it,” she said again. And she looked tired like I did, had bags under her eyes like me. We were only in Year 7, we were only thirteen years old, and we were already tired of it.
I looked at the clock. There was only ten minutes left of class. Charly must have seen me look at the clock.
“I’ve finished,” she said. “Copy mine if you want.”
I didn’t know how she had finished all the problems so fast. Maybe she was some kind of genius, but I didn’t want to slip behind so I did the rest of the problems as fast as I could while Charly sat back, hands behind her head, beaming out revolution.
STONES IN THE SEA
Mr. Wilkins told us a story over forty-five minutes of the homeroom meeting because it was raining and freezing, and even though the open gym was covered by a concrete roof, the rain was coming in sideways at such an angle with the intense wind that it was no good. It was an inside day. It was a day where kids would try to find a place to eat their lunch under some kind of cover, under the awning of the library, or the covered stairwell leading up to the science labs, or the corridors that ran between the buildings.
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