by Gee, Maurice
Lex turned his eyes round, sad and slow. He swallowed a few times and ran his hand up and down his cheek, making a dry sound on the bristles. ‘Donna,’ he said, ‘don’t talk like that. Don’t ever say a thing like that again.’ He pressed the heel of his palm in his eyes, then wiped his hand dry on his shirt. ‘What you’re getting at, it isn’t true. That sort of thing doesn’t happen. All right?’
‘It wasn’t me that said it.’
‘Maybe not.’ He was gentle with her, a thing Hayley could not understand. Laughter came from the next room again and squeaky shoes – Pure Muir – moved down the corridor. Lex said, ‘I’ll give you back your folders. Then maybe we can have a talk. I’ve got to stay till the end of the period. But no lesson, eh?’
‘No, sir.’
‘OK. Come and get ’em.’ He read out names and girls came one by one and took their folders to their desks. Hayley did not look at him as she took hers. She had written something she was sorry about and did not want him saying anything. Back in her seat she looked at her mark, saw the usual corrections, and six crossed out and seven in its place. It was the best mark she had ever had and she looked at Lex, wondering what he had liked.
‘All right, girls. Any comments?’
‘You didn’t mark these, sir.’
‘It’s Miss Duff’s writing. She does her “ees” like this.’
‘And she does this cross mark on her sevens.’
‘You’ve found me out.’
‘That’s cheating, sir.’
‘I apologize. But I did read one or two of them. Yours Hayley, liked it very much. Now put ’em away. Let’s just have a chat, eh? I didn’t come here to play schoolteachers.’
Sir, they said, do you miss your wife? What’s it like getting divorced, sir? Do they make you say you hate each other? Do you miss your baby, sir? Were you there when he was born? What was it like? Do you watch Miami Vice? Do you like Pseudo Echo or Culture Club? Is this really a good school? Why can’t we wear our hair long? Why does Mrs Muir shout at us like we’re not people? Do you and Miss Duff go to bed?
As he answered he seemed to get further away and his words more bare. Hayley was frightened. It was unusual for anything at school to frighten her – but this was not a lesson and what he said came from somewhere teachers were not supposed to go. She wondered if he was sick, she wondered if he would kill himself. He reminded her of the gorilla in the Melbourne zoo, sitting in the back of his cage. His eyes had that hardness and dreaminess. No, he said, I don’t miss anything. I was there but I don’t remember. All the things she’s missed are killing her, that’s why she can’t see you, that’s why she shouts.
When Donna asked about Miss Duff he changed. He came back and turned into a teacher and seemed sad and dirty suddenly. ‘Have you heard of the fifth amendment? It’s something the Americans have and it lets them refuse to answer questions. So, about that, I take the fifth.’
‘Come on, sir.’
‘We won’t tell.’
‘Miss Duff and I are just good friends.’
It was pathetic, a waste of time. Hayley wanted the period to end so she could get down town and look in the shops for the bra her father had given her money for. She wondered if Lex could see that the girls were getting ready to be cruel. Donna would ask about the goats again. Hayley wanted Mrs Sangster to come and take him away.
The bell rang. She zipped her bag and stood up. Girls were rushing at the door. Others clustered about Lex at the table. She went around the back of them.
‘Just a minute, Hayley.’
‘What?’
‘I mean it, I like your essay. I think you really got on to something there.’
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘How’d you like to come up and see my goats?’
‘Ooh, Hayley.’
‘He fancies you, Hayley.’
‘Shut up,’ Lex said. ‘In fact the lot of you can clear out. Go on, buzz off. Not you, Hayley.’
‘Keep your legs crossed, Hayley.’
Lex got them out and closed the door. ‘Girls have changed since my day.’
‘What do you want, sir? I’ve got to get down the road and do some shopping.’
‘Have you ever looked in a goat’s eyes, Hayley?’
‘I’ve never seen a goat. I’ve seen them tied up at the side of the road.’
‘They’re interesting creatures. They’re a bit like your gorilla.’
‘Yeah? He chucked a whole branch of a tree at us. I didn’t put that in.’
‘Did you really cry like that?’
She had known she should not write it. ‘Nah, we laughed. Shelley and me showed him our knickers.’
‘Come on, Hayley. We’re not on different sides.’
‘My sister’s boyfriend shot a goat and gave us some meat. Tasted good. Shelley cooked it in a kind of stew.’
Lex leaned back and half sat on his table. He made a little laugh and said, ‘I thought you were a stupe, Hayley, but I can see you’re fairly bright.’
‘Thank you, sir. Can I go now?’
‘I’ll tell you a thing that happened. A couple of years ago I went around my fences to see if there were any holes and right up the top, place I hadn’t looked at for a while, there’s gorse growing right up in the corner – I found one of my goats. She was a doe and she’d gone in and reached under the wire for some grass on the other side, and she got her horns caught and couldn’t get loose and so she died there. When I found her she was just a skeleton, but her skin was still on, so she was a skeleton in a fur coat. That was pretty horrible, don’t you think? But what really got me, while she was stuck there she gave birth. So there was a little skeleton in a fur coat by her side. I suppose it got some milk for a while, and then when the mother died it died too.’
Big deal, Hayley thought. What did he expect, she’d start to cry? He wasn’t going to turn her on and off like a tap.
‘It’s getting late. I’ve got to buy a bra.’
‘Hayley, I’m not asking for anything. I’m just saying if you’d like to come and see me –’
‘You’re not supposed to see girls out of school.’
He stood up from the table, turned away; looked out of the window. ‘You could help me, Hayley.’
She did not know what he meant, but noticed he was contradicting himself – not wanting something, then wanting it. She guessed that ‘help’ meant he wanted to fuck her. All this because she wrote that stuff about the gorilla.
‘You’re going to be late for Mrs Sangster.’
‘She can wait.’
‘I’ll have to ask my father if I can come.’ She would not ask but wanted to see what Lex would say.
‘Fathers have got a way of saying no.’
‘Do you mean you want me to come sort of secret?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about Miss Duff? She’ll get jealous, eh?’
‘Hayley,’ his eyes blinked fast, kind of sad, ‘that isn’t what I want you for.’
‘What do you want, sir?’ She laughed. It was funny calling him sir in the middle of this.
‘Just someone to visit me.’
‘But I guess we’d still end up – you know.’
Lex leaned his back on the blackboard and put his head against it so words of chalk writing were smudged. He closed his eyes, and said after a moment, ‘All this looks like a mistake.’ He seemed to be talking to himself. It made her uncertain how to go on.
‘I gotta go, sir. I might come, I dunno. I’ve got a lot of jobs at home and I’ve got softball practice.’
‘Do what you want to, Hayley.’
‘Yeah. Bye, sir. I won’t tell Mrs Sangster or Miss Duff.’
She went down the corridor and saw Mrs Muir coming towards her, forward-sloping, skating her shoes along and opening and closing her mouth like a fish.
‘Where’s Mr Clearwater?’
‘In his room.’
‘What’s he been telling you girls?’
‘Nothing. W
e just been talking.’
‘What about? What’s he been asking you to do?’
‘He gave our essays back, that’s all. I gotta go, Mrs Muir, gotta buy a bra.’
‘Yes, go. Get out. Don’t run, girl.’
‘I’m walking fast, Mrs Muir. Looks like running but it’s not.’
‘I know running when I see –’
The end was cut off as Hayley went through the swing doors. She laughed aloud, hoping it would carry to Mrs Muir, and ran down the steps, across the quadrangle, through another wing, to the bike stands.
‘What’d he want, Hayley?’
‘Ah, nothing. Wanted me to go and look at his goats. I told him I had softball practice.’
She swung her leg over and rode away. (The bike had been Wayne’s and she liked riding a man’s bike, liked standing in the car park with her leg hooked over the bar, watching all the men perve at her knickers. The old men, the shopkeepers, were the funniest, sly lookers.) Halfway down the hill Lex passed her in his ute and gave a honk. He’d got rid of Muir pretty quick, and hadn’t gone to Mrs Sangster’s office like she’d told him. Good old Lex.
She tried on half a dozen bras in Boothams and the saleswoman kept on sticking her head in the cubicle, scared she would nick one. She’d nicked a blouse from there once, but it wasn’t an easy place – and anyway, since Shelley was busted, she’d given up shop-lifting, even rubbers and biros from Whitcoulls. Her mum and dad wouldn’t be able to stand any more trouble. So maybe she’d better not go to Lex’s. She’d read in her mother’s old diaries that ‘a girl should keep herself for one man’. ‘Kay told me that when a man does it to you he has to put his thing in and leave it there all night but if he pulls it out there won’t be a baby.’ Her mother had been sixteen when she wrote that. Totally unbelievable, it wiped Hayley out. But as she got closer to home and her mother – up the side of the creek in its concrete channel, past the car-yards and the wreckers’-yards and the paint factory with the colours on its rainbow faded to different shades of white, great ad – she started to feel the thing come down on her, and feel she was riding out of warm into cold and all her clothes had gone damp and snails were crawling on her chest. Forgetting was a trick she had learned – but turning past the coal-yard on the corner was where it didn’t work any more.
Their house was an old house with a hall straight down the middle, from the front veranda to the kitchen. Her father had made a great job of doing it up; put in concrete piles in place of the wood – she remembered that, remembered him sliding under on his back, with only an inch for his face, and coming out covered with grey old webs like dirty lace. She helped him pick them off his hair and face and rolled them into little balls with skeletons of spiders inside. Later on, when she was five or six, he let her and Wayne and Shelley have turns with the paint-brush, painting the walls. He took them up the ladder to the roof one by one and they stood by the chimney and looked along the streets and down the valley to a bit of sea with a yacht race on it – like standing on the top of a dangerous hill. Way down at the end of the garden her mother cried, ‘Be careful, Ken.’ Her father lifted her and she looked down the chimney. The bricks were warm on her hands, and on her bottom when he sat her there. ‘If I do poops will it land in the fireplace?’ ‘Cheeky,’ he said, lifting her down. He put his finger in and got some soot and smudged her nose.
Now she went home to her mother in the kitchen. She put her bike in the shed, carried in her bag, yelled, ‘Hi, Ma,’ to Mrs Birtles fogged in smoke at the table, went to her bedroom, shucked uniform and threw it on the bed. She put on jeans and hooked her bra on. ‘What do you reckon?’ standing hands on hips at the kitchen door.
‘Put something on dear, you’ll catch cold,’ her mother said.
‘My new bra. What do you think?’
Her mother puffed and let out pale grey smoke. ‘Is that new? It looks very nice.’ Everything she said was kind of not said. It wasn’t now but something she remembered from way back. Sometimes it made you want to scream or get a glass of water and tip it on her head. Other times it made you want to cry.
Hayley went back to her room and took off her bra. She put on a T-shirt, carried her mitt and box of balls out to the yard, made another trip for her Walkman and a tape.
‘Hi, Ma. Good day, Ma?’
‘Hallo, Hayley. Is that you, dear?’
‘Any visitors today? Any burglars? Any rapists?’
‘No dear, I’ve been alone all day. Make sure you’re warm enough out there.’
‘It’s a sunny day, Ma.’
‘Is it? I haven’t been out the house all day.’
‘That’s breakfast dishes in the sink. How about washing them?’
‘In a minute, dear. I’ll just have another cigarette.’
‘Do that, Ma.’
She drank a glass of milk from the fridge and took a handful of gingernuts and went out. Half an hour of practice before doing the dishes and tidying the house. Then more practice. She liked to be chucking balls when her father came home.
He had built a stand of netting on the side of the garage with a hole in the middle for the strike zone and a backstop made of hammered tin. If she missed she had to pick the ball out of the net but if she got a strike it rolled in a wooden chute back to her. Real cute. She had four balls and sometimes made it through practice without having to shift from her plate, although she might have only one ball left. If she wasn’t doing well she got mad and beaned some imaginary batter a few times – Muir or Stella Round or Neil Chote (what a bastard he was, with his tattoos and his zits and the way he looked at you, trying to make you think he didn’t ever have to blink his eyes, a weirdo, a dick), and sometimes Mrs Sangster. You could imagine her head smashing to bits like a glass bowl. Hayley liked Mrs Sangster OK, but sometimes she wanted to unravel her and see if she had a bum and tits like everyone else.
She slid her gingernuts into her pocket. They cracked and broke in bits as she pitched and she took pieces out and put them in her mouth and let them get soft and swallowed them – liked the hot taste better than fags, which she did not touch. Three would last her half an hour. She did some stretches, hearing biscuits crack, feeling her muscles and tendons ‘organize themselves’ as her dad said, then put her Walkman on and started the tape (Midnight Oil). She pulled on her glove and took a ball. She was going to do fast curves and work them down from armpit strikes to knee, but first she put a dozen straight ones in to get her arm loose. She had to go up twice for the ball. Maybe she’d better get Lex out of her head. That was still giving her a buzz, but like her dad said, you had to make like nothing else existed except that ball and strike-zone and bat you had to beat. He’d be real mad if he found her practising with her Walkman on. She took it off. The silence was real good. She took her grip, shielding the ball inside her glove: thumb and little finger curled and middle fingers on the loop. Had her stance; got her eye on target; drove up and back, shifted her weight, moved out in that easy step, with hand coming through by her hip; snapped her wrist, rolled it inside; and the ball was away, curving like a chalk line on a board, and – ‘Fuck,’ she said – into the net. No bloody good. She wasn’t concentrating properly. Stuff Lex Clearwater. Stuff Muir. Water gurgled in the bathroom sump. And stuff her mother!
Hayley kept on. She got her mind in gear, got in a groove. She threw pitch after pitch, sucked triangles of gingernut, watched the ball zip away and clang in the hole and wobble down the chute back to her. Sweat greased her armpit and burned along her elbow crease. She loved the feel of grease made inside her and bits of her sliding on other bits. She grunted as she pitched, and laughed at the fart she made now and then. Some of the best pitchers in the world were always farting on the mound, her father said.
At half past four she went inside and had a quick look round the house but nothing much needed doing. She made her parents’ bed and folded her father’s pyjamas and straightened the top of the dressing table. When she started the dishes her mother said, ‘Leave those, She
lley, I’ll do them.’
‘I’m Hayley, Ma.’
‘I’ll come and dry for you in a minute.’ Instead she lit another cigarette. Hayley supposed that one day she’d die of lung cancer and wondered if that would happen before she turned yellow all over from nicotine. Her fingers were yellow; the little hairs on her upper lip, her right eyebrow where the smoke went up, a streak in her hair, were yellow white. Her nostrils inside were almost black. But smoking was not her trouble, Wayne was her trouble; Shelley too. Ken Birtles put it differently. ‘Life’s her trouble.’ He had never wanted to blame anyone.
Mrs Birtles left her cigarette burning on the ashtray and fetched her box of curlers from the bedroom, She started rolling them into her hair.
‘It’s a bit late for that, Ma.’
‘I like to make myself nice for Ken.’ She forgot about it after getting the front three in. Hayley stood her up by the shoulders and guided her into the lounge and sat her down. ‘Television, Ma.’ She switched on the set and went back to the kitchen and laid the table. She peeled some potatoes and put them ready on the stove to cook. There were frozen peas in the fridge and her father and Shelley would bring home fish. Hayley hoped it would be flounder. Her father cooked those in the electric pan. He made a kind of party out of flounder.
Back in the yard she threw risers, then moved on to drops to rest her wrist. Her gingernuts all finished, she chewed gum. She did not think she would be able to pitch if she didn’t have something in her mouth.
Her father and Shelley drove into the garage at half past five. They stood on the back path and watched her and she sneaked three pitches in a row into the bottom right of the zone.
‘She’s trying to make like Debbie Mygind,’ Shelley said.
‘She’s doing OK. Got your fingers far enough on the seam?’
‘Yep,’ Hayley said, and threw another.
‘Good stuff. I’ve got some flounder, Hayley, so I’ll cook.’
Shelley had a shower – trying to wash the smell of fish out of her skin. Their father had got her a job on the packing chain and Shelley seemed to be trying hard, but hated the stink. She stood her tape-deck on the windowsill and played an old Bruce Springsteen real loud so she could hear it above the water. Steam rolled out the window. It couldn’t be doing the deck much good, Hayley thought. She threw another dozen, and beaned Neil Chote to finish off.
