New Boy

by Nick Earls

  ‘Herschelle Stefanus van der Merwe,’ I tell them.

  Someone laughs and says, ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Lachlan!’ Ms Vo sounds tough all of a sudden. ‘You could end up with a few very dull lunchtimes if you’re not careful.’

  I look around the room to work out who she’s saying it to. Maybe it’s the same Lachlan I saw playing handball, but I didn’t get a good look at him then.

  She’s moving on already. ‘Herschelle, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself?’

  I’m still hung up on the laugh and the issue with my name. No one’s explained why it’s funny. ‘Yes, hello, my name’s Herschelle.’ This time there’s a bigger laugh. I’ve just announced the one thing about me that they already know. How can they be laughing at that? ‘I’m from . . .’ I pull out just before saying South Africa. They know two things about me, and that’s the other. ‘A city called Cape Town. We’ve been in One Mile Creek a couple of weeks, my family and me. My father works in mines and he’s now got a job in Central Queensland.’

  It’s enough. I make myself stop. If I say any more it could go wrong again. I wait for Ms Vo to tell me where to sit. As I’m standing there looking out over the class, something doesn’t seem quite right. At first I can’t figure out what. Then I realise it’s that everyone is pretty much white. The websites I’ve been to – government websites included – all said Australia was ‘diverse’. A ‘melting pot’. There were lots of pictures of Aboriginal people. But there’s none here at One Mile Creek State School. There’s barely even anyone with black hair. Bergvliet was a pretty white area of Cape Town, but even it wasn’t like this. I look at Ms Vo. I wonder how it feels for her. I want to say to her, ‘Isn’t this just the whitest place you’ve ever seen?’ I don’t really know how to ask her about it, though. I don’t want to use the word Apartheid, but where are all the black and coloured people?

  Ms Vo is saying we’ll start with Maths, and pointing out a spare desk. The attention goes away from me, which is good. Questions are asked and people have to answer them, so they stop looking at me. And Maths is okay. For a while the morning makes almost complete sense. But then we move on to History.

  She takes us through some of the details of the Swan River colony and says, ‘So, Swan River was very different from Moreton Bay in some ways, wasn’t it? Colonies were set up to meet different needs and structured in different ways. You might all like to look into those sorts of things when you’re finishing off your presentations on the Moreton Bay colony.’

  I don’t have one to finish. Or, in fact, to start. I don’t know where Moreton Bay is, or Swan River. I haven’t seen colonies with those names on any of the Australian maps I’ve looked at.

  I thought I’d done all the preparation – the websites, the notes from the Australian government. It was supposed to make me fit right in. Around the room, everybody else is working but I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, or how I’d start it. Then I see that not everybody is finishing a presentation. One guy is flicking the hair of the girl in front of him with a ruler. Two of his friends are trying not to laugh. She swats the ruler away with her hand.

  ‘Lachlan!’ Ms Vo says sharply. ‘Concentrate. And leave Genevieve to do her work. You’d better have found out some amazing things about the Moreton Bay colony if you’ve got time to muck around.’

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ Lachlan says, trying not to smirk. He is the guy with the fierce handball drive, I’m sure of it. His feet scrape across the floor as he changes position and pretends to concentrate.

  Ms Vo catches me looking at him and says, ‘Oh, Herschelle, sorry. You’ve got nothing to work on, have you? I think it’s too late to expect you to start a presentation on the Moreton Bay colony. Why don’t you just move your chair over to Max’s desk and help him?’ She points towards Max, and he moves his chair to make room. ‘See if you can come up with any questions that he hasn’t answered yet. Do some peer editing.’

  Max turns his laptop around as I carry my chair to the corner of his desk. What is it with this school? I keep being sent to the nerd. Nerds. There’s one on either side of Max too. I bet they’re friends, the three of them. Which is fine – it’s just that I’m not. Or at least I wasn’t at home.

  Max is writing some text to go with an old sketch of a stone building. He has a pencil stuck in his hair above his right ear. He has the kind of hair that can hold pencils, and possibly lose them. One of his friends has a Transformers pencil case, with all his pencils neatly lined up and perfectly sharpened by a nearby Transformers sharpener. The other has his socks pulled up way too high. Ms Vo has got me all wrong and sent me to the nerd colony. This is going to give the cool people entirely the wrong idea.

  Moreton Bay colony, it turns out, was an early name for Brisbane. And the Swan River colony was in Perth. Where were those little nuggets among all the information sent to us by the Australian government before we came here? At least I’m a useful peer editor. Max has got a lot of content, but it turns out there’s a bit I can do to help him with structure. And since I don’t know anything I’m making sure he’s covered all the basics.

  When the siren goes for lunch, Max tells me he’s getting his from the tuckshop. I’ve got ten dollars to buy lunch so I join him in the queue. But as I get closer to the front, I realise that everyone seems to be picking up pre-ordered brown paper bags.

  Max notices the money in my hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘Someone will’ve got sick after ordering. You’ll be able to get something. There’s a system for ordering it online. In advance.’

  ‘Oh, good, yeah.’ It’s embarrassing not knowing the score. I roll up the ten-dollar note so that no one else can see it. ‘I just didn’t know what there was. Well, I wanted to see it first. See what was good.’

  ‘None of it’s good,’ he says. ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’

  We get to the front and a mother who recognises Max hands him his bag.

  ‘This is my friend Herschelle,’ he tells her. ‘He’s just arrived from South Africa. He hasn’t had the chance to put an order in, so have you got anything spare?’

  ‘No worries,’ she says, and suddenly it’s not a problem at all. ‘We’ve got a serve of pizza, if that’d work for you?’ There’s a cabinet keeping the food warm and she opens the door to check. ‘It’s Hawaiian.’

  ‘Sounds great.’ I’ve got my ten dollars ready when she lifts the pizza slice out and slides it into a bag. Grease spots appear right away. The pizza smells good.

  I thank Max as we step away from the counter and he says, ‘No problem. I knew they’d have something. So, for tomorrow, orders have to be in by 8am. You just go to the school website.’

  ‘My mom’s signing up for tuckshop,’ I tell him. ‘She was the boss of her tuckshop shift back home. She’s a great organiser. It’s what she does. She’ll be on all the committees here by the end of the week. Just watch.’

  When we left, Bergvliet Primary gave her four glasses with the school crest to thank her for all her work. I’d never admit it to her, but it’ll be good to have Mom behind the counter sometimes. I wonder how she went with Hansie.

  I stick with Max, since if I don’t, I’m sticking with no one. And I don’t want to look like that kind of new boy – the kind who doesn’t know how to buy lunch and doesn’t have anyone to eat it with. It could have been embarrassing at the tuckshop.

  We sit down at a table with Max’s two friends from class. Nerd colony. I knew it.

  ‘Herschelle, wasn’t it?’ one of them says. ‘I’m Harry Schulz.’

  Okay, yes, he has a Transformers pencil case, but he’s making me welcome, and he’s not laughing at my name. Harry has two big homemade sandwiches and a banana in an Iron Man lunch box. He looks like he’d be my height, which makes him quite a bit taller than Max. The other guy, Ben Delvecchio, is somewhere in between and has black spiky hair. His knee keeps jogging while we’re eating, and I can feel some of the vibration through the table. Unless cool works very differentl
y in Australia, the nerd status of this group is rapidly getting closer to confirmed.

  While we’re eating, I take a look around at everyone else. One girl near us is plaiting another’s hair, and that’s just the kind of thing I’d see at Bergvliet. Lachlan, the guy who flicked the girl with the ruler in class, is standing with two friends, throwing his hat in the air and trying to catch it on his head. He shouts something out to a girl who walks past, but I don’t hear it clearly. His friends laugh. No one else seems to stand out from the crowd.

  I ask the others about Lachlan. Harry glances in his direction and says, ‘Lachlan Parkes? Don’t stare.’

  Max looks down at the table and his knee starts jogging too. Ben kicks him and they both stop.

  ‘Why not? Not that I was staring.’ I can’t see what Harry’s problem is. ‘I just thought those guys might be, you know, the cool crowd.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Harry says, ‘they aren’t.’

  Max swallows the last mouthful of his bread roll and pulls his old tennis ball from his pocket.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben says. ‘Let’s go. Doubles?’ He looks at me. ‘You play handball?’

  ‘Yes. Definitely.’ I might be hanging out with nerds, but finally I get to do something I was good at at home. Maybe today won’t be too bad after all.

  I line up with Max and start on the forehand side. Max is left-handed so it works pretty well unless they hit the ball hard right down the middle. As I’d thought, the rules aren’t quite the same as at home, but they’re close enough. Ben is quick on his feet but tends to just tap the ball back. Harry doesn’t move much and swings hard.

  The ball has lost most of its bounce. It keeps low, and that works well for me. They’re ahead early after a few drives from Harry down the middle, but Max and I soon work out a system for blocking those shots back and keeping the ball in play without taking each other out. Max hits hard – his version of hard – straight at Ben, which cramps him and makes him pop the ball up. That sets me up to take a swing at it. I fake a big one, then let the ball drop and slice across it low to the ground. It skids under Harry’s hand.

  Max reaches up and high-fives me, and says, ‘Do that again.’

  ‘Has to be a fluke,’ Harry says, grinning, daring me to repeat it. ‘Has to be.’

  Three points later, I repeat it almost exactly. Same result.

  Max shouts, ‘Yes!’ and punches the air.

  After a few times, Harry knows the shot’s coming but he still can’t stop most of them. I mis-hit a couple and Harry and Ben score points then, but, when I make it stick, the shot’s a killer. It was always my best at Bergvliet too.

  ‘Awesome,’ Max says when we win. ‘I don’t know how you do that. Are you like that with every sport?’

  ‘Wait till I try out for hockey.’ I was a centre forward in Cape Town, and a pretty good one.

  ‘Hockey?’ Max turns the ball over in his hand. ‘Where would you do that?’

  ‘Here. On the oval.’ I’ve said something weird again. ‘At school. For the school hockey team.’

  ‘Oh.’ He frowns. ‘We don’t do hockey.’

  ‘Ah, sies!’ Suddenly, my genius skidding handball shot is a lot less satisfying.

  ‘Sis? Cease? You want me to stop –’

  ‘I just wanted there to be hockey.’

  How could my parents bring me to a school that doesn’t have it? How could they not have checked that and found somewhere better?

  After lunch, Ms Vo talks about liquids, solids and gases.

  She shows some video of people working with lumps of pitch and says, ‘Can anyone tell me what state that pitch is in?’

  The person in the video clunks the pitch around on the table, then whacks it with a hammer and chunks break off. It looks like a kind of black rock.

  Max puts his hand up and says, ‘It’s solid, isn’t it? Or is this a trick question?’

  ‘Does anyone think anything different?’ She looks around the room. ‘Is it a trick question?’

  I put up my hand. I know the answer – we’ve already studied this at Bergvliet. It needs some emphasis, though. ‘Yes. It’s actually a liquid, Miss, but its rate of flow is bloody slow.’

  Ms Vo looks surprised and says, firmly, ‘The answer’s right – it has the highest viscosity of any liquid – but that’s not a word we use in the classroom, Herschelle. The “b” word.’

  ‘Sorry, Miss,’ I tell her. I want to fix the problem right away, whatever it is. ‘I got it from a website. Koalanet.com.au I think it was. It means “very”, that’s all. In Australia.’

  ‘I know what things mean in Australia,’ she says, and it feels as if I’ve made things worse rather than better. ‘I was born at the Mater.’

  ‘I just mean I looked it up. There’s a website. They gave examples like “b-word hard yakka”, except they used the actual word.’

  Around me, quite a few people laugh and Lachlan’s voice comes out with, ‘What does that even mean? Yekka . . .’

  Ms Vo glares at him.

  ‘It’s from a website.’ I’m still stuck in the explanation. ‘Hard yakka. Australian for hard work.’

  ‘Oh, well, if it’s from a website, it’s got to be true,’ Lachlan says. ‘Like all those websites about people who reckon they’ve had alien probes up their –’

  ‘Lachlan!’ Ms Vo says forcefully. ‘I wouldn’t go there if I were you.’

  Alien probes. The only alien in this room is Herschelle S van der Merwe, and he’s not interested in probing anything. He’s not even going to ask any more questions. Me, the swearing alien, who can’t even pronounce Australian words in a way Australians understand. The new boy from Planet Hersch, population one. The stupid weird new boy who says ‘bloody’ in class.

  I can tell people are looking at me, so I look straight ahead, at the whiteboard. I decide to wait for Maths before talking again. Maths is safer. I’m going to try to speak only in numbers from now on. I can tell I’ve somehow insulted Ms Vo. ‘Born at the Mater’ – I don’t even know what that means.

  We finish the day with PE, and Ms Vo organises for me to borrow clothes from lost property. One of the admin staff sorts through what’s available, but by the time we’ve found things that fit and I’ve run down to the oval, the tunnel ball teams have already been chosen.

  It feels weird being in other people’s clothes, as if anyone at any second might come up to me and say, ‘Hey, that’s my shirt,’ and I’ll look like I stole it. It’s only made worse by turning up to the oval with my school uniform in a plastic bag with ‘Suzanne Grae’ on it. I drop the embarrassing bag on the sideline. Everyone else has an official sports bag, in the official place, the change room nearby.

  A spot has been kept for me on Max’s team, with Ben and Harry. There are three teams of eight, and ours looks the dorkiest. Seven dorks and one alien in charity clothes.

  Lachlan Parkes is bouncing a ball as if it’s a basketball and his friends, Josh and Ethan, are shouldering him and pushing in to tackle him.

  He pushes back, breaks through between them and jumps in the air, commentating while he fakes a shot. ‘He shoots! He scores!’

  I pick up our ball from the ground and bounce it once. I can’t keep silent in PE. I’m about to challenge the others on my team to try to take it from me when Ms Vo claps her hands and says, ‘Okay, everybody. Time to focus. Start forming your lines please.’

  We’re even dorky at forming our line. I have to do a lot to get it straight. How do they not know that a bent line is death in tunnel ball?

  Ms Vo blows the whistle to start. Next to us, Lachlan’s team works smoothly. He gets the ball moving and then turns to the others, clapping and shouting, ‘Go! Go! Go!’

  They’re already comfortably ahead when Max’s elbow bumps his knee and he drops the ball. It rolls out to the side and, when he tries to pick it up, he stumbles and kicks it further away. That’s all it takes to make us a dismal third.

  That’s the worst it gets, but it doesn’t get much bet
ter. I’m on the team that doesn’t win and doesn’t expect to. I keep telling myself it’s only tunnel ball. It’s only PE. And next time I can bring my own clothes in my own sports bag, change in the right place and stand in a different spot when teams are picked.

  On the way to the change rooms, Ben nudges Max in the arm and says, ‘So, how’s your dad going with the new quad bike? When do we get to start racing?’

  ‘Racing?’ I want to hear more. Away from the miserable failure of tunnel ball, things are sounding a lot less dorky all of a sudden. ‘You’ve got quad bikes?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Max says. ‘Dad likes to fix stuff, so he got a couple second hand, one of them just last week. It still needs a bit of work. He borrowed a bulldozer and made a track in the bush out the back of our place. It’ll be good when we have two though, not just one.’

  ‘I think one’d still be pretty good.’ I’ve never been on a quad bike. Maybe cool does work differently in Australia. ‘How fast do you get to go?’

  ‘Pretty fast.’ He smiles. ‘Depends who’s driving. Pretty fast if it’s me.’

  ‘Sounds like a challenge,’ Ben says.

  ‘Yeah.’ Max pulls his hat off as we walk into the change room. ‘Maybe it will be.’

  ‘Hey, Herschelle,’ Harry says, just as I’m about to push Max for some more details. ‘My dad said people in South Africa have flamethrowers fitted under their cars. You know, to fire up if there’s a carjacking. Did you get to do that? He said they can give a warning blast, or a serious burn or fatal incineration.’

  I shake my head. There’s no way that’s real.

  I’m about to tell them it’s not true when Ben says, ‘Hey, I’ve got my phone in my sports bag. I’ll google it.’

  ‘It’s called the Blaster.’ Harry sounds pretty confident.