Stuck in the Mud

by R. A. Spratt

  ‘I prefer to think of it as relentlessly honest,’ said April. ‘It’s not my fault if people can’t handle it.’

  ‘But the things you say and do are offensive,’ said Mr Lang.

  ‘He’s the one who tripped me on purpose,’ accused April.

  ‘He needs a cane!’ said Mr Lang. ‘He has no other way of getting about.’

  ‘Are you sure he’s even blind?’ asked April. ‘I mean has anyone in authority actually checked to see if he isn’t faking it as some sort of health fraud?’ April threw a couple of punches that stopped just short of Tom’s face to see if he would flinch.

  ‘Tom has never been to school before,’ said Mr Lang. ‘We are supposed to be doing everything possible to help his transition, not everything possible to make his life miserable.’

  ‘Oooooh,’ said April, catching on. ‘That’s why he’s so weird. He’s been homeschooled.’

  ‘I’m not weird,’ said Tom. ‘My mother did her best. The school didn’t have any resources for teaching braille.’

  ‘Tom has taken intensive courses at a special school in the city to help him learn to use a cane and work within a regular classroom setting,’ said Mr Lang. ‘We’ve all got to band together to help him.’

  ‘But if he’s supposed to be learning to be independent,’ said April, ‘surely the best thing we can do is not help him. He’ll learn faster that way.’

  ‘I have to punish you,’ said Mr Lang, rubbing his temples.

  ‘Haven’t I been punished enough?’ asked April. ‘I do have to live in this town.’

  ‘You have to write a letter of apology to Tom,’ said Mr Lang.

  ‘Well, that’s just stupid,’ said April. ‘He can’t read it, he’s blind.’

  ‘Vision-impaired,’ said Tom.

  ‘Brain-impaired,’ retorted April.

  ‘Personality-impaired,’ said Tom.

  ‘I’ll impair you with my fist in a minute,’ said April.

  ‘Right, that’s it. You’re suspended!’ yelled Mr Lang, leaping to his feet and pointing at the door.

  ‘What?’ said April.

  ‘I’m suspending you from school for three days,’ said Mr Lang. ‘I want you to go home and think about what you’ve done.’

  ‘Cool,’ said April, jumping up from her seat. ‘Although you should be ashamed of yourself. I thought guidance counsellors were supposed to stay calm and reasonable. But I know you’re only suspending me because I irritate you.’

  ‘I’m suspending you because you refuse to curtail your objectionable behaviour,’ said Mr Lang.

  ‘Oh puh-lease,’ said April. ‘That’s what the guidance counsellor at my old school used to say. But I know she only suspended me because she was lazy and she only wanted to deal with troubled kids who didn’t really have any troubles.’

  The Currawong High School reception area was always decorated in the theme of whatever festival was coming up next. On this day it was decorated with lumps of brown. It was meant to be mud. But the decorations looked like something much worse.

  Mrs Pilsbury, the school receptionist, was having an unpleasant lunch hour. Her nail polished fingernails tapped with irritation on her desk. Her beehive hairdo practically quivered with the inner rage welling within her.

  The lunch hour was the worst hour of her day because students would come and ask for things. She loathed students. Thirty-five years of being a school receptionist had had that effect on her. And right now, the student she loathed the most, April Peski, was sitting three metres away from her on the other side of the glass screen. Mrs Pilsbury kept the glass screen slid shut as much as possible. She wished she could have a bulletproof glass bandit screen like they have in banks so she would be totally physically separated from the school community at all times.

  But the thing that was making Mrs Pilsbury’s lunch hour particularly unpleasant on this day, was that she couldn’t get hold of the dreadful April Peski’s father. The phone rang and rang but he wasn’t answering it. Usually parents leapt on the phone when they saw the school’s number on the caller ID and she had to spend the first five minutes of the call assuring them that their precious angel hadn’t been struck by lightning or hit by a falling tree. But not Mr Peski. He didn’t even have a mobile. He just had a landline which he apparently never answered.

  ‘Your father’s not answering, is there something wrong with him?’ asked Mrs Pilsbury.

  ‘Yes, lots of things,’ said April matter-of-factly. ‘But in this instance, he doesn’t like answering the phone because he’s had too many unpleasant conversations that way. It’s a Pavlovian response thing. If you give someone really bad news over the phone, they’re likely to avoid answering the phone in future.’

  Mrs Pilsbury slammed down her handset. ‘Well, you’ll just have to sit there and wait then.’ Mrs Pilsbury turned back to her computer and pretended to type angrily, although really she was just playing solitaire angrily.

  April bristled. She never liked being told she ‘had to’ do anything, particularly if it was irrational. She leapt to her feet and started to walk out. ‘You’re the ones who suspended me and said I can’t go back to class. Well, I’m not sitting here in sick bay all day like a diseased outcast!’

  ‘You can’t just leave!’ said Mrs Pilsbury, leaning her whole beehive right out of her sliding window so she could yell after April as the girl waltzed over to the front door.

  ‘Well, you can’t hold me hostage,’ said April. ‘One of us has to do something wrong, and I’m volunteering for it to be me.’ She pushed open the front door of the reception area and stepped out into freedom.

  April found she quite liked the feeling of walking away from school in the middle of the day. There was something so profoundly wrong about it. It was exciting. It was a beautiful sunny day, warm but not too hot. Walking home would be quite nice. Five kilometres was admittedly further than she would normally choose to stroll. But it was better than sitting in maths being bored senseless. Pumpkin was delighted. Walkies were his third favourite thing after biting people and barking at small children until they cried.

  There was barely any traffic along the country road. The residents of Currawong were all diligently settled into their work, and there were no tourists in the middle of the week, so April could enjoy the birdsong and the buzz of insects all around her. Well, she could, but she preferred to enjoy using a long stick to whack things as she walked along. Grass, flower heads, letterboxes.

  She and Pumpkin had walked nearly five kilometres when April was startled by the sudden loud wail of a siren right behind her. April was so startled she tripped over Pumpkin, who had at that moment dived in front of her. She stumbled off the side of the road and landed headfirst in a boggy ditch.

  ‘Gross,’ said April as she fought to extricate herself from the sticky mud.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  April looked up to see that Constable Pike had pulled over and was leaning out the window of his car.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ April demanded. ‘Startling young girls so they fall off the road into ditches. I’ve a good mind to report you for police harassment.’

  ‘It’s not harassment. It’s my job,’ said Constable Pike. ‘The school reported that you’d run off.’

  ‘I didn’t run anywhere,’ said April. ‘This isn’t a PE lesson. I sauntered.’

  ‘You can’t leave school without the supervision of a responsible adult,’ said Constable Pike.

  ‘I don’t have a responsible adult,’ said April. ‘I’ve just got Dad.’

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ said Constable Pike. ‘Your father needs to understand the seriousness of the terms of your suspension.’

  ‘Oh please,’ said April. ‘There’s nothing serious about it. I don’t see how scaring Dad is going to help anyone.’

  ‘Just get in,’ said Constable Pike.

  ‘I don’t know that I should,’ said April, crossing her arms petulantly. ‘I’m not supposed to get
into cars with strange men.’

  ‘I’m not a stranger,’ said Constable Pike.

  ‘No, but you’re definitely strange,’ said April. ‘Come on, Pumpkin, the deluded man wants to give us a lift.’

  April and Constable Pike drove along together for a few moments before Constable Pike broke the silence. ‘You know, life would be easier for you here if you tried to get along with people.’

  ‘Why would I want life to be easier?’ said April. ‘Einstein had to flee Germany, Marie Curie had to work as a nanny for four years to pay her tuition to the Sorbonne, Queen Elizabeth the first had to murder her own sister. Great people never have easy lives.’

  ‘So you’re awful to everyone because you’re so great?’ asked Constable Pike.

  ‘No, I’m awful to everyone because they are all dreadful and I’m just pointing it out for them, in case they don’t know,’ said April. ‘Really, it’s a community service. I’m amazed more people aren’t grateful.’

  It took Constable Pike’s brain a while to wrap itself around April’s reasoning and logic. He was fairly sure there was none, but they had arrived at her house before he could push on with the discussion. ‘Here we are,’ he said, turning into her driveway. ‘Is your dad away, or is he here and not answering the phone?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said April. ‘Dad is a complicated guy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got a secret bunker and he’s watching our arrival on a CCTV screen right now.’

  Constable Pike was alarmed by this prospect. He glanced at the azalea bushes he was driving past suspiciously.

  When they got to the top of the driveway, Loretta’s stallion, Vladimir, was tied up to the balustrade of the front deck and munching on one of Dad’s more beautiful rose bushes.

  ‘Why is that horse in your front garden?’ asked Constable Pike.

  ‘It’s Loretta’s,’ said April. ‘Maybe she ran out of hay, so she brought her horse over to eat Dad’s flowers.’

  ‘Is she up to something?’ asked Constable Pike.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked April.

  ‘That’s the horse she used to cheat with in the mud run last year,’ said Constable Pike. ‘The organisers didn’t want to give her the prize. But her parents hired a big city lawyer and they wouldn’t let Brad Peddler wiggle out of it.’

  April let herself in through the front door. Ironically, for a man who was supremely security conscience, Dad never locked the front door. The people he feared wouldn’t let a piece of timber and a hardware store lock stop them from entering.

  ‘Hellooo,’ April called to the apparently empty house. ‘I’m home four hours early and I’ve brought Constable Nitwit!’

  Constable Pike moved to step into the house after April, but Dad appeared at the far end of the verandah.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, a quaver in his voice.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ said Constable Pike, regressing into the comfort of his formal mode. He liked to speak how he thought a cop should speak because it made him feel more important. ‘I was alerted to the unauthorised absence of your daughter from her school. They requested that I locate her and ensure her safe delivery to your guardianship.’

  Dad looked very confused. ‘You left school?’ he asked April. ‘But you’re too young. Don’t you have to be seventeen? You’re not seventeen, are you?’

  ‘Relax, I’m twelve, Dad,’ said April. ‘The school just suspended me because they’re not as open-minded about the disabled as I am.’

  ‘You’re suspended?’ asked Dad, growing quite alarmed. Usually Joe handled April. He didn’t know if he was up to the challenge of parenting her all on his own during the day.

  ‘Shall we go inside to discuss this?’ asked Constable Pike.

  ‘Well, er …’ began Dad.

  ‘No,’ said Ingrid firmly, as she strode through the house to the doorway. ‘It is foolish to allow a law enforcement official into your home, unless they have a warrant.’

  ‘It’s just a friendly chat,’ said Constable Pike, confused by the sudden hostility and Ingrid’s Nordic beauty.

  ‘I do not believe in friends or chats,’ said Ingrid. ‘In this country people talk too much.’

  ‘I like her,’ said April, pushing past Ingrid and heading towards the kitchen. ‘I like her attitude.’

  ‘You’d better go,’ Dad said to Constable Pike, following his daughter into the house. ‘I find it’s best not to antagonise females. It’s true of aphids, bees and many other garden insects, but it’s true of humans as well. Not that I’m sexist. I try not to antagonise males either. Not that gender identity is important. Well, obviously it is to the person whose gender it is, but it’s none of my business. I like it when things are none of my business. It’s so much easier.’

  ‘But sir …’ began the constable.

  Dad turned back and whispered to Constable Pike, ‘The female praying mantis bites the male’s head off. Never underestimate a woman, never.’

  Dad disappeared into the house, shutting the door in Constable Pike’s face. Constable Pike was left with the distinct impression that the Peski family were a bunch of weirdos.

  April and Ingrid stood on opposite sides of the kitchen glaring at each other. To be fair, Ingrid could have been smiling warmly or glowering with rage. It’s hard to tell with Scandinavian people.

  ‘What’s she doing here?’ demanded April.

  ‘Ingrid has moved in here tempora …’ Dad trailed off. Ingrid was shaking her head. ‘Er … permanently?’

  Ingrid nodded.

  ‘It’s important that we’re a convincing couple, so that she isn’t deported,’ explained Dad.

  April snorted. ‘Yeah, like anyone would believe that a good-looking, athletic, blonde twenty-something would settle for you.’

  ‘Your father is a respectable man,’ said Ingrid sternly.

  April looked at her dad. He had changed out of his dressing-gown, but he was wearing his gardening trousers, a filthy shirt and a flannel hat. The type of hat that had only been fashionable for five minutes in the mid-seventies.

  ‘Yeah, women don’t usually find that attractive,’ said April, waving her hand in her father’s general direction.

  ‘People have all sorts of strange peccadillos,’ said Loretta as she glided elegantly into the room and helped herself to an apple. ‘Some women are attracted to men with beards. I’ve never understood that, personally. Every time you kissed it would be like rubbing your face on a carpet.’

  ‘Dad’s got a beard,’ April pointed out.

  ‘True,’ conceded Loretta. ‘But that’s easily fixed.’

  Dad clutched his beard. ‘I like my beard. Please don’t shave it off.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Peski,’ said Loretta, patting his hand. ‘If I do decide to shave it off, I’ll convince you it’s your idea first.’ She picked up a knife and started peeling her apple, demonstrating that she was unnervingly adept with an extremely sharp knife.

  ‘And what’s she doing here?’ demanded April. ‘Shouldn’t she be in school?’

  ‘My school has given me the day off on compassionate grounds,’ said Loretta.

  ‘Why should anyone show you compassion?’ asked April. ‘You are a malevolent sociopath.’

  ‘I wanted the day off so I could move my stuff into our room,’ explained Loretta. ‘And the principal at St Anthony’s always gives me what I want. She learned years ago that her life would be easier if she did things that way, ever since that time I put the snapping turtle in her bathtub.’

  ‘She’s not really moving in here too, is she?’ asked April, turning on Dad.

  ‘We can’t abandon her,’ said Dad. ‘She’s a child.’

  April scoffed. There was not much that was childish about Loretta. She was taller than most adults and she had the mind of a hardened con artist.

  ‘It’s not abandonment when you are leaving her in her own mansion with both her parents,’ said April.

  ‘I’m going to have a lovely time her
e,’ said Loretta happily. ‘It’s so quaintly retro. You’ve only got three bathrooms! It’s almost like camping.’

  ‘I’m moving my stuff up to the attic,’ grumbled April.

  ‘There’s no need,’ said Loretta. ‘I’d love to share.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t want you shaving my head in the middle of the night, then convincing me that it was my idea,’ said April.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Loretta, slipping the first perfectly sliced piece of apple into her mouth. ‘But you’d have to go farther than the attic to get away from me. I’ve already rearranged your side of the room to improve the feng shui.’

  ‘You touched my stuff?!’ demanded April, leaping to her feet. Pumpkin leapt to his paws too. He loved conflict.

  ‘Yes,’ said Loretta. ‘But only to make marvellous improvements.’

  ‘How dare you!’ bellowed April.

  ‘You don’t actually have much stuff,’ said Loretta. ‘A couple of changes of clothes and a seldom used hairbrush. It only took the removalists a few seconds to move them. Although they were surprised when they discovered the books you had hidden under your bed. I never knew you enjoyed Regency romance novels.’

  ‘No!’ cried April. She took off running to check her room.

  When April got to her room, it wasn’t her room anymore. It had been totally transformed. Well, not totally. Her bed and her small dresser was exactly the same, but they had been shoved into the far corner. The rest of the room looked like it had been decorated by an evil genius who liked flying unicorns. There was pink everywhere, and taffeta, but also an astonishing amount of technology. Computers, TVs and stereo equipment, as well as all Loretta’s climate-controlled aquariums that contained things much more disturbing than goldfish.

  ‘What did you do?!’ wailed April.

  ‘I renovated,’ said Loretta happily. She had followed April into the room. ‘Don’t you just love it?’

  ‘I hate it,’ said April in disgust.

  ‘That’s just the cognitive dissonance talking,’ said Loretta. ‘Once you’re over the shock, you’ll grow to love it.’