The Origin of Me

by Bernard Gallate

  Despite having soaked Bert’s hanky overnight, it still had a rusty taint. I walked down to the junkyard and found him around the back, sitting on his blow-up ring on the armchair, drinking a longneck. Beside him was a metal plant stand holding two ceramic bowls, one containing walnuts and one full of shells.

  ‘Here’s the young lad that was trapped in the gents,’ he said to Percy, then turned to me. ‘What brings you to my neck of the woods, squire, or should that be squirrel if it’s nuts you’re gathering?’

  ‘I came to return your hanky.’

  ‘Ruby would be pleased. She sewed the monogram. A stitch in time saves nine in the event of losing your handkerchief – so thank you, chief.’

  ‘Was Ruby your wife?’

  ‘Thought we’d established that? Ruby was my wife but I drove her away. Carnival’s over well and good now.’

  ‘Is she not alive?’

  ‘What is this, an interrogation? No kid, she’s not alive. She’s singing with the angels.’

  ‘Sorry . . .’ I said, then, to dispel the awkwardness, ‘Um, I brought your hanky back.’

  ‘Where’d you find that, then?’

  ‘You tied it around my knee.’

  ‘’Course I did.’ He tossed me a walnut from the bowl and handed me a miniature silver dagger. I stuck it into the crack but couldn’t prise the shell apart.

  ‘Twist it,’ he said.

  I pressed so hard the knife slipped from the dimpled shell and jabbed my left palm. ‘Ow! Are you sure this was made for opening walnuts?’

  ‘Oysters,’ he said, snatching the knife. He stuck it into the walnut’s seam and flicked the top off, leaving the meat sitting neatly in its cup. He held it up to me. ‘What does that look like to you? Tell me, lad, what does it resemble? First thing that comes into your mind. That’s a clue, boy – a clue.’

  ‘A brain, I suppose?’

  ‘Once a girl called Sarah Bellum, wrote her will on fancy vellum, guillotined in February, lost her head but didn’t tell ’em.’

  ‘One of your own?’ I said.

  ‘Course not, duffer. Read this.’ He handed me the bowl of shells. The rhyme was written in fancy lettering around the rim. ‘Tip out the shrapnel,’ he said. I did as instructed, and saw on the base an image of a girl with rosy cheeks and blue-ribboned hair. She’d been decapitated.

  ‘Who was Sarah Bellum?’ I said.

  ‘What do they teach you young ones at that institution? Hold here for a minute. I’ve got something to show you.’

  In his absence I examined the oyster-shucking knife. The handle was engraved with tiny sea creatures and the word ‘Ionian’. Right away I recalled that Edwin Stroud’s father William had owned a Greek restaurant of that name. And he’d used a silver shucking knife to open the oyster shell that concealed the pink pearl.

  ‘Could this be the actual knife he used?’ I said to Percy. No response from the stuffed bird. Then, as if the coincidence of Bert owning the knife wasn’t enough to freak me right out, he reappeared carrying a white ceramic head.

  ‘Who were you talking to?’ he said.

  ‘Just the bird.’ I pointed at the head. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Something a phrenologist used to measure your noggin.’ He pointed to a region above the ear labelled ‘Destructiveness’. ‘For instance, that section of a hooligan’s bonce would be larger than your average Joe’s.’

  ‘Does it work?’

  ‘Mumbo jumbo. Brought it out to show you something else. The top bit, called the cerebrum – it’s made of four lobes.’ He turned the head around. ‘Tucked under there at the back is the cerebellum. Sarah Bellum. Do you get it now?’

  ‘Yeah, I get it.’ I inspected the back of the head more closely, remembering William and Esther’s visit to Dr Eisler. ‘It says “Amativeness” there. What does that mean?’

  ‘Don’t know everything.’ He touched the corresponding section of his own head just behind his ear and rubbed it. ‘Nothing there anymore. Now, stop asking me questions and get on your way.’

  Dad was held back at work with a GravyLog® executive, so I made us a vegetarian salad. An hour later, when he’d come home and we were eating in front of the television, he said, ‘Nice entrée, but what’s for the main course? My body needs protein and so does yours. You’ve been hobbling around like a cripple again. We need to build you up.’

  He went out and bought two Scotch fillets from Coles, fried them and served them bleeding on a plate with nothing but a slathering of horseradish cream. I gave silent thanks to the cow for giving me its flesh involuntarily, then contradicted my reverence by consuming it shamefully fast.

  At 11 pm, Isa messaged me.

  ISA

  Hey clawed neon!

  ME

  Hey dawn sparrowfart!

  ISA

  Sorry for disturbing you

  ME

  Not disturbed, sup?

  ISA

  Delilah was on the bench licking our dinner. Mum threw a birkenstock at her. Missed and smashed the plate, dinner on floor, cat ran outside hours ago hasn’t come back. Mum’s out looking distraught, thinks she’s been run over.

  ME

  She’ll come back

  ISA

  Hope so

  Why were you in sick bay today?

  ME

  Headache

  ISA

  Nothing else?

  ME

  No

  ISA

  . . . cross your heart?

  ME

  x heart

  ISA

  You’re lying. Cheyenne told me what happened

  ME

  Like you’d trust ANYTHING she said!

  ISA

  She showed me the video Starkey took

  ME

  @#$%!!!

  ISA

  Are you okay?

  ME

  Never better

  ISA

  You have to report them!

  ME

  NOT. A. BIG. DEAL.

  ISA

  YES! BIG! DEAL! Tell dashwood – there’s evidence!

  ME

  It won’t help. PLEASE don’t tell anybody! Have you told anybody?

  ISA

  Only Phoenix . . . sorry

  ME

  More effective than announcing it at assembly

  ISA

  The cat came back!

  ME

  My favourite song

  ISA

  I gotta go

  ME

  Wait! What was your idea for the project?

  ISA

  I stared at the message bubbles until they dropped off the screen.

  The communication with Isa reminded me of the graffiti about Pericles I’d seen during my fugitive experience in the automatic toilet yesterday. I found a packet of Chux® Magic Erasers® and sneaked out of the apartment to remove it. Vince, son of Frank, was on night watch again.

  ‘Run out of milk already?’ he said. ‘You should try UHT – lasts forever.’

  ‘Just getting some fresh air.’

  The ROBOloo was occupied, so I waited on a park bench. Eventually an old man in tattered flannelette pyjamas emerged, both feet swollen purple and barely wrapped in filthy bandages. His shoes were styrofoam platforms attached to his feet with callipers made of coathanger wire, string and masking tape. He was the living definition of resilience – but when I stepped into the metal box, I had a terrible feeling that he wouldn’t last as long as the smell he’d left behind. I pinched my nose and erased the graffiti with five Magic Erasers® without taking a second breath, then returned to T H E E Y R I E.

  ‘That was a lot of fresh air you got,’ Vince said. But no, it really wasn’t.

  On Thursday morning, Miss Moreau brought a box of macarons into French – sweet rewards for anybody scoring a perfect ten in a spot quiz. I was heading for glory as she read out the answer to the eighth question.

  ‘Numéro huit. Je n’aime pas les œufs. I don’t like eggs.’

&nbs
p; I do like eggs, though, and was counting mine before they’d hatched, imagining the macaron’s shell crumbling between my teeth, dissolving on my tongue. The sheer anticipation made my tailbone twitch. The twitch travelled up my spine, making me shudder.

  ‘Numéro neuf. Je n’ai pas peur des chats noirs. I’m not afraid of black cats.’

  Nine out of nine! I felt the twitch again, more forcefully, and it made me giggle.

  ‘Arrêtez de rire!’ Miss Moreau said. ‘Stop laughing.’

  I pinched my leg under the table.

  ‘Dernière question,’ she said, eyeballing me. ‘Numéro dix. Pas tous les singes ont des queues. Not all monkeys have tails.’

  Too much resonance for the nub to tolerate. No degree of mental resistance could stop the thing twitching to the point of fibrillation. I gripped the sides of my chair and pulled myself down hard, trying to smother the vibration. It fought back by shooting a surge of pure, almost agonising elation up my spine to the crown of my head.

  >FWOOSH!<

  A hundred billion neurons exploded simultaneously.

  My vision blurred, then sharpened and sparkled. The >ZING< travelled back down to my pelvis then divided and shot down each leg, making them judder, before shooting out my toes. The stunned expression on Pericles’ face made me LMHAO.

  ‘Quoi de si drôle?’ Miss Moreau said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said through tears. ‘Na-ha-ha-ha-nothing.’

  ‘Eh bien, that’s exactly what you’ll receive – nothing.’

  Miss Moreau gave everybody else a macaron regardless of their result.

  At lunchtime, charging along the catwalk to beat the café queue, I bumped into Dr Limberg exiting the stairwell. She dropped her folder, spilling papers over the ground.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, chasing the escapees.

  ‘We can’t have confidential notes blowing around the playground willy-nilly, can we?’ she said, sliding them into the folder. ‘Actually, I’m glad we ran into each other. I wanted to organise a follow-up session with you, Lincoln. Nothing serious – just a fifteen-minute chat. Tomorrow afternoon, perhaps?’

  ‘Mr Simmons won’t let me skip clinic. I missed training yesterday.’

  ‘I’ve already cleared it with him.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said reluctantly. Moreau must’ve logged my strange behaviour during French on The Owl.

  ‘I’ll see you in my office at three-thirty.’

  Later, in English, Mr Field returned our Dorian Gray essays. I got nineteen out of twenty, which was the equal-highest mark, so I was pretty stoked and forgot about missing out on a crappy macaron. He’d written on my paper, ‘Your proposition that someone who undergoes excessive cosmetic surgery is the modern-day equivalent of Dorian Gray is hardly original. But you’ve argued your point with rare insight and clarity. Keep up the good work!’

  On Friday we checked out each other’s collaborative works in the art studio. Some of the pieces had an element of provocative ingenuity that made our knitting seem lame in comparison. Ashleigh Robinson and Vanessa Andrews had shot paint from Super Soakers® onto ten double-sided canvases, then stencilled lettering on top that read on one side:

  MY KID COULD PAINT THAT

  and on the other:

  I AM YOUR KID

  Cain Seibold and Nathan Trammel were constructing a massive sculpture from scrap metal and calling it Scraposaurus. Mr Faber was helping them in the tech studio. I wish I’d thought of that. The only metal I got to use was my knitting needles, which Isa today replaced with a wooden pair, almost as thick as pool cues, to get the job done faster. She unfolded a sheet of graph paper covered in a pattern of dots and dashes and said, ‘Here’s the master plan for art-world domination. Tibor helped me chart my new idea in Design Mathematics.’

  ‘Great. But what is it?’

  ‘All will be revealed as you follow it stitch-by-stitch.’

  ‘Am I your guinea pig?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Oink!’

  ‘They don’t oink.’

  Ms Tarasek let us go outside to work, so we sat under the old fig tree and knitted in relative silence, Isa shushing me whenever I tried to ask a question. Ten minutes in, I caught her looking at me with a furrowed brow and asked what the matter was.

  ‘I bet you have sisters but no brother.’

  ‘Why, because I’m so skilled at handicrafts? I’ve got one sister.’ I told her about my parents’ separation and explained our living arrangements.

  ‘What’s your father like?’

  ‘Super smart, competitive, loves his work more than just about anything. Bossy at times but mega-generous. Argues a point more aggressively when he knows it’s wrong. Thinks he knows me better than I know myself.’

  ‘He probably does.’

  ‘How is that even possible?’

  Isa laid down her knitting. ‘He’s known you for your entire life. You’ve only witnessed a third of his, and that’s been through a child’s eyes. The only thing you know about your mother and father before they became parents is what they’ve chosen to tell, which is highly selective.’

  ‘So what’s your family like? I know you have a cat called Delilah and your mother wears Birkenstocks. What about your dad?’

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  ‘Everybody has a father. Even if he was an anonymous sperm donor, you still have one.’

  Isa pointed her needles at me. ‘Don’t even go there.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  We resumed knitting in silence and soon I got the hang of it, hardly needing the chart. Then a pattern emerged that made the knitting curl in on itself. ‘I think I stuffed this up.’

  ‘Give me a look,’ Isa said.

  ‘Show me yours first.’ We counted to three and laid down our knitting. Isa’s was twice as long but otherwise almost the same as mine, which was gratifying.

  ‘It worked!’ she said. ‘Tibor is a genius and Phoenix will be blown away.’

  ‘Why Phoenix?’

  ‘She told me something disturbingly fascinating that inspired this design.’

  ‘What?’ I said, twisting my knitting between my fingers.

  ‘I’ll let her tell you herself. Meet us at International Velvet after school.’

  ‘Keeping me in suspense?’ I said with a smile. ‘I still have no idea what it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘They go together,’ she said, taking my knitting. ‘Watch.’ She held it up next to hers, and almost magically, the two lengths coiled around each other. ‘They’ll be connected by a series of small links in different colours.’

  ‘Like a spiralling ladder?’

  ‘Getting warm.’

  ‘A double helix?’

  ‘Boiling hot.’

  ‘A DNA molecule?’

  ‘Give the man a cigar!’

  Walking into Dr Limberg’s office later today, the first thing I noticed was a zingy citrus aroma, the second her lime-green dress. The third was the horse photo.

  ‘Please take a seat,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve changed the print on the wall. There were two horses before, a mare and her foal. Now there’s just the mare.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘I’m not sure about anything.’

  She wrote something in her folder. ‘Apparently you were being disruptive in French? Miss Moreau logged a Hoot, reporting that you guffawed for no reason. Were you trying to draw attention to yourself?’

  ‘I just started laughing and couldn’t stop.’

  ‘Miss Moreau specifically used the word “guffawed”.’

  ‘She’s French.’

  ‘Does that have any bearing on the matter?’

  ‘Okay. I specifically guffawed.’

  ‘Would it be reasonable to suggest you have an issue with maintaining self-control?’

  ‘My issue is a personal problem that I wish I had more control over. It’s affecting my self-confidence more than anything else. You could probably solve everything for me right now by
asking Coach Simmons to release me from squad.’

  ‘If you tell me your reason then we can talk about it. Would you be able to share it with me? Nobody else needs to know.’

  Besides Nicole Parker, Dr Finster was the only person who knew about the nub. He’d told me to report any growth and I hadn’t. Instead I’d tried to ignore it – pretend it wasn’t there. But sitting in Dr Limberg’s office, I realised how much the nub had come to affect my life. She poured me a glass of filtered water and I seriously considered telling her everything. As I tried to form my opening sentence in my head, the thought of communicating the location of my problem was enough to stump me.

  Homunculus said, ‘Just tell her it’s at the beginning of your anal cleft.’

  I was flushed with shame and the thing contracted, just as it had at my first meeting with Simmons, making me giggle with nerves. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But I just can’t get it out.’

  ‘That’s probably beneficial for everybody,’ Homunculus said.

  ‘Lincoln, three members of squad, Darvin Naylor, Evan Starkey and Sean Mulligan, were suspended last week. Is your problem connected with them in any way?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Perhaps it would be helpful spending some time processing your own thoughts in The Labyrinth? Maybe think of how you can resolve your reluctance to continue swimming? Walk along the path, contemplating the question with an open mind. On reaching the centre, remain still, breathing deeply, until you attain a sense of calm. When you feel ready to leave, return along the same path. I’ll call Mr Jespersen to let him know you’re coming.’