by Greg Egan
It is intermission.
Everyone is soon downstairs, noisily discussing how terrible and how great everything has been. The FOS take a break in the fighting and come and join us for coffee. Miss Mulligan and Miss McDougall arrive.
—Not bad at all
concedes Miss Mulligan cautiously. Everyone beams.
Miss McDougall hiccups and nods in agreement.
Then they hand out plans for the battle. Modern weapons will be abandoned, and we will fight the Friends of Stratford on the stage with broadswords. It is all, of course, choreographed by an IBM computer. We can’t have any nasty accidents.
And then Seward arrives. I start to sweat profusely.
Cliché! (Not really, but it is used very often.)
I hide behind a row of costumes.
—Congratulations, everyone, it’s been really good so far, really smashing! You’ve managed to keep me really interested in the play, which, if I may say so, is
A Joke.
—pretty darn hard with dull stuff like Shakespeare! Well done! I’d just like to say one thing, though: try to speak up more, pro-ject your voices, use your lungs, put some visible effort
Constipated gestures.
—into those lines. See if you can wake the neighbourhood! I’ve been interested in Public Speaking for some time, and in my opinion
Someone casually drops a sack over his head. He ignores it and keeps on speaking. Miss Mulligan nods at a production assistant, who discreetly points Seward in the direction of the door and begins to walk him out of the dressing room.
For the next half of the play, we have abandoned the original plot (well, mainly) and decided on a new interpretation of the play’s theme … of all-out bloody slaughter. In deftly executed, perfectly practised strokes, the entire cast cavorts around the stage poking sharp, heavy bits of steel into each other, and into the Friends of Stratford, who do likewise to each other and to us. I am destined to get it through the ribs early in the scene, but the blade thuds harmlessly against a hard square of metal which materialises in just the right spot at just the right moment. To avoid mucking up the whole scene, I collapse and play dead (which means getting trodden on quite a bit, but one really can’t be squeamish about these things).
In the basement, the dead are revitalised with large shots of adrenalin and high-voltage electric shocks, ready for the next performance. I sneak away from the queue of cadavers and run home in the brisk midnight air.
Opening nights are always chaotic.
Of course tomorrow will be different … the experience of our first real performance, in front of an audience, will give us more confidence … Mulligan says we’ll probably be too cocky.
And after that there are two more …
It is the last night. Despite the repetitivity of doing the play for four nights running, it has not been boring, it has not been monotonous. It has been exciting and interesting every time. And at the celebration, as we present the Producers with large bottles of Scotch, we are all, despite the exhaustion, despite the little scratches, and despite the minor brain damage, sad that it is over.
Chapter 19
STANDING UP
It is very nearly the end of my fourth year here.
Four down and one to go.
Should I feel jubilant or triumphant or relieved or lucky or thankful that I have managed to survive here for so long?
No. Because I have not really survived.
True, I am basically physically intact, and I have not been ideologically altered (corrupted) to any great extent as far as I can tell, but the sheer enormity of the proportion of my time which I have spent (proportion even of my whole life which I have spent) at this accursed/cherished (cherished?) place over the last four years means that I have become irreversibly and frighteningly bonded to Fenkirk Vale Senior High School.
What a vile-sounding name that is! I hate even to think it aloud in my head. Just ‘Fenkirk Vale’, or even just ‘Fenkirk’ still makes me shudder with the ugliness of the sound. I write it on a piece of paper; it even looks ugly. Those two k’s have something to do with it, but it’s hard to say just what …
I am terrified of leaving and I am nauseated by being here. I am frightened by the prospect of never again attending a class here, never again eating lunch here, never again wandering around aimlessly recording irrelevant trivia.
There is nothing else I really know how to do.
Yet I loathe the place.
Or do I? I loathe Seward and I loathe McArnold, and I am disgusted in varying degrees by almost every teacher in the place. I hate the monotony and the repetition and the narrow-mindedness and absurdity and dishonesty that is school life.
But the place? After spending nearly half my waking life here for the past four years, despite the boredom and the inflexibility and the downright depressing ideas behind it all, it has become a part of me sunk in so deep that it cannot be cut out by simple surgery.
Which produces a hard-to-describe feeling.
There is no solution: I am here for a predetermined period of time that is simultaneously too long and too short. There is nothing to be gained by analysing the situation; there is everything to be gained by hiding from the situation: blissful unawareness of any problem.
Today is the last day of high school for the fifth years.
For eternity.
They are not sad, are they? No, they are ecstatic and drunk with freedom as I will be on that day! (Won’t I?)
But they are autographing each other’s shirts and photographing each other and the school and the teachers because eternity is a very long time
Trite crap clichéed emotional—
Oh, get stuffed.
and they don’t want to look back on five blank years; they want as many reference points as possible; they want to fill those years with multicoloured pictures of people and places and events.
Because if five years is empty it might just as well have been a tenth of a second while your mind was blank, a blink of the eye …
And this is the last day, their last chance to make lumps that they can associate with those five years. If there is a big, bright, clear reference point at the end of those five years, a kind of easy-to-see tag, then smaller lumps will be easier to find, by reference to its presence.
Or that’s the theory.
This morning I felt pessimistic about ever getting any spools out of my brain cavity, so I did something unusual. I bought a twenty-shot black-and-white film cartridge, and I brought my still camera to school. It is disgusting to use in comparison with my built-in equipment: it has a fixed focal length, aperture, shutter speed, and focussing distance. But it is outside my head. It used to give me security that all my film was stored in my brain, with me all the time so I could never lose it. I am beginning to prefer to have something that I can hold in my hand or put in a photo album, even if it is an amateur snapshot.
Traditionally, the fifth years are allowed incredible once-in-a-lifetime privileges on the last day. This year they have been ‘given’ the oval for the morning. There they will throw fruit and eggs and flour at each other and any teachers game enough to come within range.
I have arrived early but there is not much happening yet. I glimpse some preparations going on: groceries being assembled into convenient ballistic units, foul-smelling sticky concoctions being mixed. I take a few photographs of these but they are almost a waste of film.
The ‘agreement’ was to limit everything to the oval but it is not strictly honoured. As the siren approaches, an egg fight begins in the corner of the quadrangle near the English office.
I try to catch an egg leaving somebody’s hand but it is all happening too fast. I’m not used to this dreadful contraption. The best I can get is a splattered yoke on the ground. Not too exciting.
Ho hum.
And then a group armed with choice extra-large sixty-gram ovoids approach the English office, disappear inside. I wait by the door. There is a noise inside, and then they a
re running out. Miss Mulligan appears at the door, an egg in her hand. She brings her arm back. I click, wind as rapidly as my fumbling fingers will let me, then click again. I miss the egg in mid-air but I catch her arm in a position that leaves no doubt: the egg was thrown.
I also miss the egg splattering on Lady M.’s head.
You can’t have everything (with such low technology).
Then the siren goes and I have English in Room G.
I sit near the window and occasionally take snaps of the change rooms: they are being used as ‘bases’ for the skirmishes on the oval. I capture a few battle-scarred students but the distance is too great for really good pictures. Of course, with my eyes I use a much longer focal length for perfect close-ups, but who will ever see them but me?
At recess another good shot: A Maths teacher and a fifth year struggling with a tube of glue which squirts its sticky contents over bags and benches. I have only a few shots left.
After recess the fifth years have an assembly in the hall: a ‘final word’ from Seward. I would love to be there. Surely they will jeer at him and interrupt him and scream at him and do everything they have wanted to do since his reign began?
No.
They will not do anything, because habits are too hard to break.
I do not send a viewpoint to peek in through a window. I have no right, somehow. Or maybe I just lack the courage. I don’t really want to know everything. I don’t really want to know anything much at all. So few bits of the universe really please me.
It is nearly lunchtime, and it is all over. They will never return here, and they will have only memories of feelings which will fade with time.
I sit on the southern lawn eating lunch. I have done it five hundred times before but I will greatly regret it when I will eat here no more.
Ho hum.
The heat becomes just enough to be irritating and depressing. My skin seems dead, thick, dull; my mind also.
I hear a faint sound: singing. I look around but I cannot see the source. Then I recognise the direction. There is something approaching, down the street that runs along the side of the school. I jump up, run to the side of the road.
Coming towards me is a procession. Every fifth year is in it, and many of the fourth years who have done one-year courses. There are about one hundred people.
At the front, two people are holding an enormous banner, which reads: POWER TO THE STUDENTS.
They are half-singing, half-chanting, over and over and over:
We love Fenkirk!
Yes we do!
Fenkirk we love you!
Suddenly the name does not sound ugly any more.
It is not a violent demonstration, it is not a show of dissatisfaction with anything. It is exactly what they say it is: an act of love.
Not love for the education system or the curriculum or the building, but for the indescribable but tangible realness of five years of their lives with each other and the teachers and other students, and with the building and the curriculum and the education system.
I get directly in front of them and take a photo head on, then as they pass (to the wild cheering of everyone around) I take another one. I have one shot left.
Halfway down the school they turn into the entrance to the Western Quadrangle, and they march down past the canteen. The entire school congregates around them, clapping and whistling and cheering.
As they pass the canteen they try to turn right towards the administration offices, but the Principal Mistress stands like a statue in their path. They will not push past her: there must be no hint of violence. They walk straight on, out towards the car park, leaving her mouth flapping in the breeze.
And then they turn right, following the road which starts at the swimming pool and passes the hall to run along the full length of the north side of the main school building. I run after them. Something is going to happen.
As they reach the end of the school, they turn right once more, taking them in front of the administration offices. I try to follow but it is too congested, I double back, go into the small concrete quadrangle, cross the width of the school, and arrive in time to see that they have made another right turn and they are sitting in the south-east entrance to the school, ten metres away from the offices.
And they are chanting joyously:
We love Fenkirk!
Yes we do!
Fenkirk we love you!
I am drowning in the enormity of it. And I can’t get over it: they mean what they say; this is not sarcasm or satire or irony but pure truth. And they have to get it across somehow!
And then the inevitable arrives. Seward explodes from out of his office, comes at them, screaming wordlessly, kicking at them blindly. Spilling his sour yellow light.
—Get out! Just get out!
In his rage he says nothing else. There is no logical argument, no witty discourse. Just blind, dumb, stupid, primal anger.
Motivated by fear.
Girls scream. Hysteria spreads. They have failed. They disperse. They run.
I snap Seward standing amongst them, planting his foot in someone’s kidneys. But the light is bad and it probably won’t come out.
My pupils expand perfectly and I have it all in my head but so what?
And then I run too, suddenly realising that I am afraid. I run back to the southern lawn where I meet some friends and explain what has happened. They tell me that somebody put a plank across the staff-room door to keep the teachers from interfering.
But I doubt that it was necessary. There must have been a dozen ‘free’ teachers when the marchers came into the school, but the only people who interfered at any time were the Principal and the Principal Mistress.
We walk back into the Western Quadrangle because the public-address system is screaming and for once we want to hear what it is saying.
Seward has the microphone:
—If there are still any students on the school grounds by half past twelve, then they will not be allowed to come here and sit for their final exams next week. That had better be perfectly clear. Any students still here by half past twelve will not sit for their tertiary admission examinations!
We Nazi-salute the speakers.
Of course he means all fifth-year students. Slip of the tongue. Minor omission of clarification. We should take him literally and evacuate.
But we haven’t got the guts.
Ho hum.
I am still overjoyed that it happened.
It is a Great Big Enormous Lump!
For those who witnessed as well as those who acted.
Deep breath.
Stand up! Sta-and up! For Fe-en-kirk!
The schoo-ool we all adore!
Stand up! Sta-and up! For Sew-ew-ard!
Who ru-ules for ever more!
Our name we will send for-or-orward!
Our banners we’ll unfurl!
Till everyone knows that Fenkirk is
The be-est school in the world!
Stand up! For our leader Seward! He’s
A tru-uly wondrous man!
A pa-aragon of virtue and
We’re a-all of us his fans!
This school just keeps impro-o-oving!
While he’s around the place!
So bow down and grovel when you see
That truly angelic face!
Stand up! For the Hou-ouse Sy-y-y-stem!
Which brea-eaks us into four!
This hea-ealthy competi-ition
Is wha-at we’ve come here for!
The path (to a) true ide-entity
Leads surely to this gate!
So fight for your House my bro-other
And you will be truly great!
Stand up! For the student councillors!
Our De-emocratic Right!
They are our true inspiration as
They lea-ead us in the fight!
They are the perfect pro-o-totypes
Of what we ought to be!
So vote at the next e
lection for
The one approved nominee!
Stand up! For the Great McAr-arnold!
He teaches us many things!
He teaches us how to handle balls
And ru-un around in rings!
Though some may say it’s pointle-ess he
Ignores his critics’ cries!
For he’s only doing what he does
To keep us salubrified!
Stand up! Sta-and up! For Fe-en-kirk!
Who teaches us right from wrong!
And gi-ives us moral fortitude!
That we may be truly strong!
Though we may face tempta-ation!
We know that we’ll not fall!
Our strength doe-oes come from Fe-en-kirk!
To who-om we owe our all!
Stand up! Sta-and up! For Fe-en-kirk!
Who rea-eadies us for life!
Without thi-is guiding influence
We’d soo-oon be lost to strife!
And when our deaths draw near-earer and
We see that we’ve gone far!
We will re-emember Fe-en-kirk!
Who ma-ade us what we are!
I would like to add a verse to commemorate this day, but it would not fit. It would be out of place. The song is so disillusioned and mocking, but today somehow feels different from every other day I’ve spent here. I don’t know how to fit it to the rest of my feelings.
Four down and one to go!
Chapter 20
RELEASE
I pick up the razor-sharp square and then I slice open my head. I begin to bleed. I cut a hole in my skull just above my eye. The pain is horrible.
Then with two fingers I reach into the hole and probe around. I am right; the cavity is crooked in a fourth spatial dimension, and it is very big, nearly as big as my entire head. I know intuitively where the release prints of my best works are kept. I grab them. They are, of course, 35 mm high, but the film is so thin that, although each print is a full three hours long, the spools are only a few millimetres in diameter. I drop the spools onto my desk, then withdraw my fingers.
