by Nick Earls
Ben and Harry are most of the way through their turn when a bell rings back at the house.
‘That’s lunch,’ Max says, and his father turns and waves. He signals to the others that they’re on their last lap.
As we walk to the house, I can smell braai smells, and something burning. It turns out to be Max’s mom’s first attempt at roosterkoek. She meets us with a basket of burnt rolls.
‘So, Herschelle,’ she says, ‘do I bin these, or . . .’
‘The insides’ll be okay,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve been at braais where they’ve ended up blacker.’
While we’re having lunch, Harry mentions Lachlan Parkes and Ben says, ‘I wonder what he’s doing these holidays. Practising his handball, maybe.’ He looks in Max’s direction. ‘Hey, Max?’
Max says nothing. He’s gazing back up the hill towards the quad-bike track.
‘Max?’ Ben says again.
Max twitches and shakes his head. ‘Sorry, I was . . .’ He searches for exactly the right word. ‘I was in a bit of a dwaal.’ He nods. ‘That’s South African.’
‘Dwaal,’ Ben says. ‘Does that mean staring like a zombie?’
Max throws a chunk of black roosterkoek crust at him. ‘Just the staring part.’
The others laugh, but it’s not at me, not at my language. I’m on the inside, or at least a step closer to it.
I don’t know how long it usually takes people to fit in, but the first step is not being shut out. I haven’t worked out how many steps there are after that, but I’ve taken a few of them this week.
Max’s dad drops me home, and in the car, talking to him, I start looking forward to seeing my dad. He should just be back from the mine, if his plane’s landed on time.
I run into the house to see if he’s there and he is. He’s still in his fluoro work jacket, standing in the almost-empty living room, looking around. I don’t know if he’s thinking through where the furniture might go, or remembering our living room in Cape Town, where the furniture seemed to fit perfectly and so did we.
‘Hersch,’ he says, grinning. ‘So good to see you. Mom tells me your diary’s filling up.’
‘I wouldn’t say filling up, but I’ve got a few things on.’
Down the hall, I hear the bathroom door open and Hansie’s feet running as the toilet flushes. He bursts into the living room and tackles Dad around one leg.
‘Hansie,’ Dad says, ‘if you don’t give me that leg back, how am I going to kick the ball?’ He twists around to face me. ‘We were about to muck around in the backyard if you want to join us. We’ll have a braai after.’
Mom walks in. I tell her Max’s mom tried roosterkoek and made something like coal instead.
She laughs. ‘It can take a few times to get it right. At least she tried.’
‘So we’re teaching them South African food, then?’ Dad says. ‘Some of them must be okay if they want to try that.’ He takes a step towards the back door, groaning as he heaves Hansie forward. Then he stops and looks over his shoulder, in my direction. ‘I want to hear about that presentation you did on Cape Town. It sounds like you did a very clever job with that.’
‘Ball,’ Hansie shouts. ‘Let’s go.’
Dad drags him to the backyard, with Hansie laughing all the way, standing on Dad’s foot and gripping his thigh.
We kick the ball around until the sun sets and Dad starts the braai. He stands there with a beer while Mom makes a salad and Hansie chases lizards in the garden. It’s a moment that would feel like home for me, no matter where we were. Beyond the fence, there are still adjustments for me to make, big and small, and our new world has its own adjustments to make to me, but right now I don’t care.
Straight after the braai, I have a Skype call to Richard. It’s raining in Cape Town. He turns the computer around to show me the grey sky.
‘It’s going to be like this all weekend, apparently,’ he says. ‘Hockey’s been cancelled already.’
Skype doesn’t do rain well, but the view looks pretty miserable.
He asks what I’ve been doing and I tell him all about the quad bikes.
He swivels the computer back around to face him. ‘You have a friend who has his own race track?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What kind of people are your friends there? Do any of them have planes or islands or anything? Did you race? Did you win?’
‘I did okay.’
I’d stopped thinking about racing early on. It wasn’t about beating other people. I couldn’t have beaten Max anyway – he’s really good. It was just about the four of us gunning those excellent quad bikes, churning up dirt and letting the engine rip. I won enough today, doing that, and doing it with them. I’ve been winning enough for a few days now.
‘How’s Hansie going?’ Richard picks up the mug that’s near him on the table and takes a drink.
‘Dad’s back from the mine, so he’s pretty happy today.’ That’s true enough. ‘Other than that, most of his problems seem to be solved by chocolate.’
Not solved, perhaps, but chocolate doesn’t seem to hurt. I don’t know how to explain how it works to Richard, all of this. Every day has steps forward and steps backward and sometimes leaps. I miss him. I miss the whole city, even the bad bits. But I know why we’re here.
As Mom parks the car outside school on the first day of the new term, kids I don’t know or can’t recognise under their big hats are laughing with each other as they walk in. I don’t quite own this place yet the way they do, but maybe I will. At Bergvliet I did. I think I can here too.
When I go to put my bag in the rack before finding the others, Ms Vo is there with Max.
‘Mr Browning has a job for the two of you,’ she says.
Max tells me what he knows on the way there. There’s a new boy, and for some reason we’re sharing the job of being his buddy. Mr Browning is waiting outside his door when we arrive.
‘Come in, boys,’ he says. ‘Thanks for doing this, Herschelle. I think it could be good to have your African perspective.’
He pushes the door open and, inside, the new student stands up from a chair. He’s thin and as tall as Mr Browning, and he has very black skin.
‘This is Roy Wek,’ Mr Browning tells us. ‘He’s from South Sudan.’
‘And also Kenya on the way here,’ Roy says, smiling. He sticks out his hand for us to shake.
Mr Browning tells Roy that Max has lived in the area all his life, but that I’ve recently arrived from South Africa. ‘We thought they’d be a good team to help you fit in.’
‘I would like that. Thank you,’ Roy says, in an accent that’s mostly Kenyan, but not completely.
He looks more like a visiting dignitary in a school uniform than a student. I’m sure he’s older than us.
Step one on the Max school tour is taking the new arrival’s bag to the classroom, and we’re halfway there when Roy says, ‘I heard something from an Australian boy last week. Can you confirm it for me? Is my name an old man’s name here?’ He talks slowly, putting the words together before each sentence. In his head, he must still be translating into English.
‘Pretty much,’ Max tells him, since he knows I’ve got no idea. ‘I’ve got a great uncle called Roy. He’s got to be seventy at least. But, you know, old names come back. Maybe you’ll be the one to bring “Roy” back.’
Roy smiles. ‘This boy said, “You’ve got an old man’s name.” I thought he meant “Wek”. I don’t know why.’
I want to say, ‘Because it’s part of being new.’ You’re so new, you don’t even think the right things and there’s nothing you can do about it. The kid says, ‘your name,’ assuming you’ll know he means the ‘Roy’ part, but you don’t. Every guess is a shot in the dark. Eventually it gets less dark.
‘I’ve got an old cricketer’s name,’ I tell him. ‘An old South African cricketer’s name. Herschelle’s not a first name here at all.’
Roy takes the steps up to our classroom two at a time, as if it’s the
only way to take them.
Max asks him how old he is and Roy says, ‘I don’t know for sure. We forgot that. When you are out on the tambarare . . .’ We must look confused. I can tell Roy’s trying to think of a word that will work here. ‘Tambarare – it’s flat land that goes on and on.’ He shows us with one of his hands, holding it up flat. ‘You can forget how old you are when you are out there for a long time, or in a camp. It rained a lot when I was born and it rains a lot in May at home in South Sudan, so we say I will be twelve in May.’
‘What made you come here?’ Max asks him.
Roy pushes his bag into a space on the top rack. I know he’s thinking about how to answer the question, and whether it’s about the leaving or about the coming. Max doesn’t realise that they’re two different things.
‘To Brisbane?’ Roy says. ‘To Australia? Your government said we could come. We escaped from home to Kenya. We were in Kakuma camp, on a waiting list. Then countries choose you. Then you wait more. Then you come on a plane.’
He smiles. I don’t think Max has any idea what Roy’s talking about. But I know that he’s talking about being a refugee. Helping Roy Wek fit in will take a lot more than just showing him where the toilets and library are.
Roy takes the steps two at a time on the way down. The toilets are next on the Max Kennedy buddy tour, so we turn right at the bottom.
‘My parents work in a plastic bottle factory. They clean up, I think. At home my mother was a teacher and my father was the mayor.’ He shrugs. ‘But there was a war. They say it is over now, but it is not safe for us.’ I can tell his head is full of details. He looks at the ground, at the playground lines marking out the boundaries for games.
I wonder if he’ll ever talk to us about it. ‘It’s complicated,’ I say to Max.
‘I didn’t know you’d speak English there,’ Max says. ‘But I’m learning that about Africa. More bits speak English than I realised.’
Roy smiles again. The whole secret history of his country is in his head and there’s not one thought in there that Max should already know some of it. That he should know some of the world beyond One Mile Creek – that he shouldn’t be so ignorant. It’s a patient smile. Roy must have had a lot of practice being patient.
‘I didn’t before,’ he tells Max. ‘At home I could speak Dinka and some Swahili. I learned English at Kakuma camp. Now I speak and read and write. There were books from England – books for English children. I had to ask an aid worker, “What is a jam sandwich?” Now I have eaten one. We didn’t have much paper. You don’t get paper until you can write the whole alphabet and nought to nine in sand. In my schoolbag today I have my own paper. That’s good, eh?’
‘Wow,’ Max says, and his mouth hangs open for a while.
I don’t know what to say either. Bergvliet Primary is a lot more like One Mile Creek State School after all. I could make a list of differences – in my mind I already have, plenty of times – but I didn’t have to learn to write in sand. I didn’t have to make up my own birthday. I’ve gone around the place looking for differences and Roy seems ready to take it all in one of his giant strides.
‘Was the camp like camping?’ Max asks him.
‘Camping?’ Roy looks uncertain. ‘It was a camp. I don’t know camp-ing.’
‘It’s like when you take a tent into the bush.’
Roy looks even less certain about that. ‘Why would you take it into the bush? Why not next to it?’
‘“Bush” is Australian for veld,’ I tell him. ‘Tambarare. Plain land. Maybe with a few more trees.’
‘Ah,’ Roy says. ‘It was not that kind of camp. Not tents. Kakuma camp is now twenty years there. There are one hundred thousand people sometimes. The buildings are made of tin and mud and . . . rith – a kind of grass for the roof.’
I can picture Kakuma, or think I can. I can picture something like it.
‘Kakuma sounds a bit like a township,’ I tell Roy, ‘in South Africa.’
‘Yes.’ He nods. ‘It might look like a township, yes. But it is not home for anyone.’
I try to give Max some kind of explanation. ‘In townships in South Africa, people build with what they’ve got. The houses are all packed in and there’s often not proper toilets or running water or electricity. They share a pump.’
‘Wow,’ Max says. ‘We don’t have places like that here. You should do a presentation, Roy. On the camp. I bet Ms Vo gets you to do a talk.’
Roy smiles again. ‘I could do that.’ He glances at me. ‘So, two Africans. I’m glad it is not just me. It’s good to know the library and the oval and the toilets, but what do I need to know, my fellow African, to make my life here work in tip-top fashion?’
I want to tell him how it felt on my first day, my first week, when I thought I was ready and I wasn’t. I want to tell him how different it all felt and how not much made it better and how no one knows how things are working in your head – no one knows what you’ve seen and done and left behind. I want to get him ready for how alone it makes you feel. But I think that Roy might know that already.
‘Just be yourself,’ I tell him. ‘That won’t make you fit in here right away, but who else can you be, eh? You’ll say the wrong thing a thousand times, and they’ll say things that make no sense to you. But they’ll get to know you. And you’ll get to know them and their crazy Australian ways. I reckon you’ll be okay.’
Max pulls a tennis ball from his pocket. ‘We’ve got five minutes. What are you like at handball?’
Roy looks at the players on the covered play area. He glances down at his hands and laughs. ‘These hands are too far from the ground, I think, but I will try.’
We step back onto the concrete and I start to take him through the rules. Roy has no chance against Max’s new skidder, but I figure he’s big enough to take it.
came about because, a long time ago, I was one. Most of us end up being the new boy or girl a few times, but this was my big one – the one time in my life that, like Herschelle, I felt so different that I pushed the boundary between ‘new boy’ and ‘new alien’.
I was nearly nine years old when my family moved from Northern Ireland to Brisbane. Like Herschelle, I looked like most people I saw in my new life and I spoke English, so the adults I met seemed to think I’d be fine with the move. Also like Herschelle, it was nothing like that straightforward in practice. No one could understand my accent, and I couldn’t understand them a lot of the time. And Northern Irish English – or my local dialect of it – and Australian English used words differently. When I wanted to answer in the affirmative, I knew about ‘yes’, but I tended to say ‘aye’. In Australia that made me seem like the child of pirates. If something was good, I might call it ‘wick’ and that made no sense here at all. It makes me go red even to type it, thinking back to the times when I used it in front of the whole class at Ascot State School and everybody either laughed or seemed baffled. Or both. It’s possible to do both at the same time – my new boy experience taught me that. And the ‘bring a plate’ debacle? Yep, that might have happened to a certain parent of mine who shall remain nameless.
On top of that, we were leaving conflict behind in Northern Ireland. The army was on the streets there, and Brisbane didn’t feel too safe to me early on because I couldn’t see the army anywhere. When we went into shops, stopped inside the doorway and lifted our arms out to the sides, no one searched us at all! What kind of crazy risky place was this?
Like Herschelle, I arrived late in a term. But on the first day of the next term, a newer new boy arrived from the Cook Islands. I was chosen to take him on the tour of the school. I wasn’t the newest boy any more, and that felt like a big step forward.
This book was my chance to tell a story like that, but in this century. That meant thinking about who might arrive here now and face the same sort of challenges I did. A South African seemed like a likely contender. I’ve met quite a few South Africans, and now have some in my family, so I knew a bit about the ways in w
hich Australia seemed weird to them. I even wrote the whole story with a South African accent in my head. I might not have got everything right, but I hope it works well enough for any South Africans who read it. I’m very grateful to one in particular, Neve Singh, who read it for me to check that I hadn’t gone too wide of the mark.
So who would be the newer new boy today? Who, at One Mile Creek, would seem even more different than Herschelle? I wanted someone who had gone through more, but had a connection with Africa, so that Herschelle would feel that he could be a bridge between the newest arrival and the people of One Mile Creek. I’ve had some involvement with refugee communities in Queensland, including refugees from African countries, and from that came Roy.
Of course, New Boy isn’t written only for South Africans or South Sudanese. I hope it’ll mean something to anyone who has ever had that not-fitting-in feeling that comes with being the new person in the room. And I hope it will help anyone in any classroom to welcome the next newbie who walks in.
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2015
Text copyright © Nick Earls, 2015
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