by Pip Smith
I knew Sister Katherine was behind me because all the insects in the playground were holding their breaths. Two cold fingers clamped my ear. I smelled talcum powder and old books and suddenly I was hauled onto my feet. Her flared nostrils were two trumpets sounding the start of a hunt. I will make an example of you, she said, and dragged me to see Father Kelly.
Show this child what happens to insolent children, she said, but Father Kelly told her to leave and shut the door. Then Father Kelly came up to where I was standing, squatted down and looked me in the eye.
You know, I’ve seen lots of insolent children in my time, he said. And there is a difference between an insolent child and a child who was not meant for the schoolroom. I do not think you can be taught. You are one for riding horses and running about getting scabby knees, aren’t you?
And I said, Yes, because it seemed like that’s what I was supposed to say.
But let me tell you this, he said. You might find school difficult now, but it will only get harder for you if you cannot read and write. Particularly for a … and then he talked a lot more. Out the window I could see the lizada hovering four feet off the ground. It wasn’t even properly healed from its operation and already the lizada was learning how to fly.
Father Kelly held my chin and turned my face up so I had to look at him, and said, Do you have a problem with your eyes, is that it?
Up close I could see he had little red wriggly lines all over his cheeks and nose. That’s why his face looked pink from a distance but up close it was lots of different colours—there was brown and some white splotches as well, and his moustache was yellow and white like the tail of a palomino horse.
You have to let me know, Nina. We might be able to help you, but you have to talk to me.
When I didn’t say anything he breathed in very deeply and said, Well then, if you won’t let yourself be helped, good luck to you. You better go back to the classroom holding your backside, or Sister Katherine will think I have gone soft.
At first I walked slowly in the direction of the classroom and then I looked over my shoulder and bolted towards the school gates. I cleared the fence in one leap and ran all the way up Adelaide Road and only stopped when I reached a high grassy hill. All I could do was grip my knees and pant, but it felt good to have that stale school air squeezed out of my lungs so nothing but life could flood back in.
When I looked up I saw that I’d made it all the way to the hill behind the public school in Newtown. I could hear groaning coming from behind a tree and my first thought was that it might be a wild pig, and my second thought was that it might be a man and a woman kissing, but then I saw it was a girl about my age, and smelled the vomit that was down her front. Her smock used to be white, but now she looked like a cake that had been dropped on the road in the rain.
Why did you vomit? I asked her, and she said, Because I ate too many cakes.
Why did you eat too many cakes? I asked, and she told me she got bored in arithmetic so she walked out and bought all the Wellington cakes the baker had in his shop and charged it to the head teacher. Then she sat up here and ate every single one because she couldn’t think of anything better to do.
Oh, I said. I hate cakes.
She burped a bit of vomit into her mouth and tried to cover it with her hand, and then we both looked down into the playground of Newtown School.
Compared to Sacred Heart, Newtown School was a paradise. It sat in the middle of a dusty block as big as a desert, except for when it rained. Then it sat in the middle of a swamp full of diseases and everyone got to go on holidays. Because of all the rain in Wellington, they got to go on holidays a lot. They also had a holiday when the HMS Nelson was in port and when New Zealand played Australia in the cricket and whenever the head teacher Mr Lillington needed to go to the bank. Even from up on the hill we could hear two girls say, Fuckit bumhole bugger shit, to a teacher in the playground. He didn’t say anything back, he stood in the mud as if he’d been struck by lightning, and the girls ran behind the building so they could throw scraps of rusted metal at him. Then he un-struck himself and kept walking around the playground with his hands behind his back as if he was thinking through a very hard bit of long division.
Is that your school? I asked the girl, and she said, Yes.
Do you like it? I asked, and she said, Not really, no, then pulled some grass out of the ground.
What’s your favourite colour? I asked her.
Grey, probably, she said, which was a pretty good answer for a girl.
What’s your name? I asked.
Amelia Grey, she said. What’s yours?
Tally Ho, I said, and it felt like the beginning of something, when I said it out loud like that.
I didn’t need to go to school anyway because I was going to be a butcher boy like Harry Crawford. All the butchers had boys who did deliveries for them and one of the best things was to watch them race through the streets. They’d hold the meat in one hand and whip their horse with the other, churning the street into a dust storm with their frenzied horses in the middle. It was like Arabia. And if the water cart had been through the street, patting the dirt down with the hose, that was even better. Everyone got splattered in mud, but no one cared. Shopkeepers would come out of their shops and stand on the side of the road to cheer them on. And if you got more than two butcher boys you’d get a real race, with bets going and everything. Old ladies flew off to either side of the road. Young ladies held their hats as if a Bible plague had come just to destroy all the hats. The butchers always pretended with the cops that they’d never asked their boys to ride like that through the streets, but if their boy won they couldn’t wipe the smile off their face for the rest of the day and you’d get more change back for a ham hock than you expected.
Harry had won the race more than once but he never bragged about it, and he never said he won the race more than he had. Harry didn’t need to brag or lie, because Harry knew that what he was and what he did was enough. He didn’t need to be anything more. On my first day of freedom I made as if I was going to school, but once I reached Adelaide Road I sunk back from the other Sacred Heart kids and went to Nonna and Nonno Buti’s house instead. Nonno Buti was there playing chess with himself.
I said, Nonno, why are you playing chess with no one? And he said, I AM NOT PLAYING CHESS WITH NO ONE, I AM PLAYING CHESS WITH MYSELF.
Nonno Buti always yelled like that because he lost his hearing standing too close to explosions fighting in the Italian wars when he was younger.
Nonno Buti said that when he was in solitary confinement he played chess in his head. He played both sides. He said he did this to stay sane.
He said, YOU MUST TRAIN YOURSELF TO IMAGINE CHESS MOVES INSTEAD OF TO THINK ABOUT THE FACT THAT YOUR CAPTORS DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU, OR THAT IT IS YOUR FAULT YOUR CAPTORS DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU, OR THAT YOU SHOULD BE MORE LIKE YOUR CAPTORS. QUESTO È MOLTO IMPORTANTE.
He said he focused so hard on chess moves that bad thoughts couldn’t get a leg in edgeways. And then, when he got out of prison and played grand masters at chess, he won, even though he hadn’t played actual chess in ages.
I said, But you aren’t in prison, Nonno—you could play with Nonna.
And he laughed and said, HER BRAINS ARE TOO SOFT, ONLY GOOD FOR COOKING, HA HA HA.
Brushing the horses in Nonno Buti’s stable, I tried to remember how Harry Crawford rode his horse. I remembered how far he leaned forward over the saddle, how tightly he held the reins, how he moved with the horse as if he was flying inches above the horse’s back. He was magnificent.
Nonno Buti let me practise jumping with his horse Geronimo. Only sitting in the saddle at first, then around the yard, then up and down the street. He was meant to call me Harry Crawford while I did it, but when he saw how I could jump the paling fence without that much of a run-up he blew on his hunting trumpet and shouted, TALLY HO!
But I could only ride like that if I was being Harry Crawford. Just like how Sister Katherine said
that in Africa men ate other men, but they had to wear the skin of a cheetah to be able to do it.
Nonno said that if I didn’t tell Nonna, I could take Geronimo out by myself.
I moved exactly like Harry Crawford on Geronimo as I slunk through the streets. No one could see us because there was nothing special to see—just a man and his horse, calling on a friend. The friend happened to be a ten-year-old girl playing hopscotch in the playground of Newtown School, but that was by the by. Amelia saw me tall and brave on Geronimo’s slippery-dip back and ran straight over to join me.
We were out and blazing under the midday sun—me holding the reins, Amelia holding my waist—and it felt right to be part of the day like this. So much time had been wasted reciting the saints and pretending to learn how to read and all the while there were trees aching to be climbed and rivers thirsty for us to fling ourselves in, yodelling into the splash.
Now that our days weren’t being marked by school bells and routines, time lurched forward, slowed down; everything happened at once, or nothing happened at all. Wise Geronimo knew that one thing had to come before the other, and he led us to the best climbing tree in Wellington. It was the best because there were hundreds of different ways you could climb it and the places where you put your feet were worn smooth like banister railings. Once you got to the top you could see into the back gardens of the biggest houses in Thorndon. They had statues and swings and podiums and mazes, not fishing nets spread out to dry that smelled like rotting sludge from the bottom of the ocean.
Me and Amelia could see into one garden that was full of ladies in white dresses. Their hats looked like lids. If you pulled them off there would be humbugs inside their heads. They moved across the grass like swans—but Amelia said it wasn’t grass, it was a lawn—so they moved across the lawn like swans. And when they laughed they didn’t snort or throw their heads back, they covered their mouths with their hands as if laughing was a sneeze that might give you typhoid.
Some of them were holding lace umbrellas even though it wasn’t raining and some of them were holding tiny teacups on tiny plates or were nibbling the corner of tiny white triangles but peeling their lips back first so that they didn’t get crumbs on their faces. Everything was tiny and breakable, because being a lady was about not breaking things, and the winner was the person who couldn’t break the tiniest thing.
There was a great climbing tree in the middle of the garden with the slow swan ladies in it, but no one was climbing it; they were too busy standing around, holding their tiny things.
Someone was playing a violin. It was a friend of Nonno Buti’s. He was in a black suit with a gold chain on his waistcoat. He had his hair oiled, and he’d twisted the ends of his moustache so that it went up at the sides. Amelia Grey said he was trying too hard to look rich, like most Italians.
I don’t try to look rich, I said.
No, she said, but you know what I mean.
Geronimo galloped us to the cricket and he cantered us to the wharf. Every day held a new adventure and word spread around Newtown School that we had started our own School of Life. We took on new recruits, but only the bravest survived.
We got a pig’s bladder from the butcher in Newtown and even though it was still covered in blood and smelled like wee, it was great. You blew it up and tied off the end and it was tough, not like a balloon. You could kick it and punch it and use it to play rugby or you could fill it with water and squirt it at people when they walked past and they would be covered in bits of pig wee mixed with blood and water.
That time it was me, Amelia, the girls who said fuckit to the teacher at Newtown School, and a boy called Horatio de Courcey Martelli, but everyone called him Horse. I called the fuckit girls Fuckit and Buckit. I called the tall one who looked like a foal Fuckit and the short one who looked like a donkey Buckit. They didn’t seem to mind. I think they got worse names at home.
We decided it was Amelia’s birthday. Every day we took turns at having a birthday and walking into a shop saying, Hi, mister, did you know it’s Amelia’s birthday? or Did you know it’s Buckit’s birthday? and one in every three birthdays you would get a treat, or maybe even a penny but sometimes they would say, Why aren’t you at school? and kick you out.
Because it was Amelia’s birthday she had to blow the bladder up and wear it under her dress as if she was going to have a baby. That was funny for a bit, but then it got boring, so we sat on the gutter waiting for the butcher boys. Amelia still had the bladder up her dress and it was getting warm and slimy like a real baby. I thought for a second that I would like to have a real baby with Amelia, and then Fuckit said, Watch this.
Fuckit undid a safety pin from the back of her pinafore and smashed it into Amelia’s baby. It was horrible. There was a wheezing sound and Amelia’s stomach started to shrivel. She looked down at it, stunned. There was a warm sweet rotten smell coming out of it. I pushed Fuckit so that she slipped on the blood and slumped in the gutter. Amelia looked down at the blood all over her dress as if she was about to swoon. I thought maybe Amelia needed to breathe, maybe I should undo the top of her smock so she could breathe. I went to rip open the top of her smock and she pushed me off, saying, What are you doing?
Her brain had gone soft. She couldn’t see that I was on her side, that I was saving her.
Leave me alone! I didn’t want the gross thing up my dress in the first place, she said, and pushed me away from her so I slipped on the bladder and landed in the gutter as well.
The road was grumbling, and I wondered if an earthquake was about to split the city in two. Fuckit and Buckit ran across the street with Amelia, stepping on my hair and my hand as they did. Only Horse was still there, helping me up.
The butcher boys are here, Tally Ho, come on, get up!
In the distance we could see Raines with a pig’s head under his arm and Harry Crawford with two hams tied up by the trotters hanging around his neck. Their horses were really going for it—dipping their heads down and rearing them back up like waves crashing on a beach and rising up and crashing again. Harry Crawford was winning as usual, but then he stopped. Right in the middle of the race. I saw him catch the eye of a woman standing on the side of the road. She was laughing and waving and was wearing a hat covered in daisies. Her hair was a mess underneath. It looked like something birds made their nests out of. I suppose she looked pretty, in the way weeds buzzing with flies are sometimes pretty, but just because she was smiling and waving Harry Crawford pulled out of the race.
No! What are you doing? I shouted at him. Keep going, you were winning! He was drunk on this woman with the bird’s-nest hair. He pulled the horse up so that it swerved as it moved towards her and she plucked a flower out of her hat, reached up and put it in the string netted around his ham. Then he clutched his heart like someone had stabbed it with a javelin. It was all wrong. Harry Crawford had never put a woman before a race.
Without Harry being Harry, I wasn’t sure how to be me. I felt naked riding around on Geronimo’s back, and preferred to take my gang into tunnels and caves: dark underground places, where cicadas buried themselves until their shells were hard as steel.
We found a pipe. It was huge. You could stand up in it and not even bang your head. You could shout into it and then hear yourself shout back, like there was another you standing at the other end of the pipe. It smelled a bit, but you got used to it. It had green slime growing around its mouth where it emptied into the harbour, which made the rocks beneath it slippery and dangerous and so much more exciting than school.
You had to see who could get across the rocks the fastest without falling into what came out of the pipe. It was usually me. If you fell in you had to sing ‘Ave Maria’ while gargling the water that dribbled out of the pipe.
In summer after lots of rain the pipe got so full that water bubbled out the manholes in Te Aro and all the people had to go from house to house in boats. I wished that happened in Newtown. Then Papà could fish in bed and the sheets could be sails and
the pasta hanging up could be seaweed and we could all float around the house by lying on our backs blowing water up into the air, pretending to be whales.
Once I saw a dead cat come out the pipe. It had a worm growing in its eye. You would think the cat would be soft but I hugged it and it was stiff.
After that I got sick, and Fuckit got cholera and almost died, so no one was allowed down there anymore.
Buckit said it was my fault Fuckit almost died because I made her drink the pipe water after she fell off the rocks, but it was her own stupid fault for falling when she knew the rules, and none of us could see the disease in the water anyway. They never did come back to the pipe after that.
Fear seeped into our gang. Fuckit and Buckit went back to the boring safety of the schoolroom. Me and Amelia thought we could make our new headquarters the rocks under the Taranaki wharf, but Horse was scared of drowning. He could climb right up to the top of a mast whenever we played the ship game, but he couldn’t swim. He was also scared of going to the toilet anywhere that wasn’t at his house. He was happy to run through Newtown School with his willy out shouting, I’VE GOT MY WILLY OUT! but if he needed to go to the toilet he held it in until he got home. You could tell when he was holding it because he jiggled around and if you said, Do you need to go to the toilet? he’d say, No, and then you’d say, Yes you do, you’re squirming, and he’d say, No I’m not, I’m dancing, and move his hands around to make it look more like he was dancing. Then when he was anywhere near home he’d run faster than a witch with her hair on fire and as soon as he was behind the front gate he would piss right into the flowerbed, letting out a massive sigh. That’s why their camellia bush was dead on one side and their front gate always smelled like wee.
