by Jane Jago
The teacher distributed small coloured baskets among the groups – orange, yellow, red, blue and green. Each basket contained lists of elementary equations for the students to work through. The more industrious raced through them, taking one list after another from the basket. The quieter, more reflective students plodded carefully through the equations until they finished each list. Danny took his time, completing a single strip throughout the entire exercise. He sniggered to himself as he noticed Graham scribble out and correct his answers on one list. Mrs Barnes wasn’t going to like that. Suddenly Graham began to scribble across the whole list. Then he took another from the basket and began to draw crude stick-men in all the answer boxes. Some were urinating in high arcs all over the questions. One figure defecated large missiles that fell from the top of the page. Danny laughed. Graham looked at him and smiled. A serious girl with long dark plaits eyed his efforts.
‘Danny Simpson, concentrate on your work and stop distracting Emily. Everybody, finish the list you’re working on and put them all back into the baskets. Make sure your names are on the top. We’ll mark them after lunch. Blue and orange groups go to the shelves and select a reader, if you haven’t already got one.’
Danny shuffled sullenly to the shelves and picked out a book. Graham pulled out Eerie Tales at random and returned to his desk. One by one the groups selected their books and settled down to read them.
Mrs Barnes circulated around the room, picking up the coloured baskets as she went. She stopped behind Graham and watched as he very slowly ran a finger along the text. Danny yawned loudly. Mrs Barnes looked coldly in his direction. His book was marked with an orange sticker and still he was having trouble making sense of it. He shielded his eyes with his hand and hunkered down in a show of concentration.
After fifteen minutes of silent torture the teacher instructed the blue group to read a page aloud from their books. Graham became immediately restless.
A girl stood up: ‘The old woman cried out for help, but no one heard her. It was cold and wet and . . .’
Graham fiddled with the tub of coloured pencils at his table. He pressed the palm of his hand down on the sharpened points.
‘When she was about to give up she heard the sound of –’
The pencils toppled over and cascaded to the floor. Graham knelt in front of his chair to pick them up.
‘Just leave them there for now, please,’ Mrs Barnes instructed.
Graham stood up. ‘I need to go to the toilet.’
‘You’ll have to wait until Jackie has finished reading.’
Graham sat down, then immediately stood up again. The teacher studied him curiously. ‘Go on then, but hurry back. Do you know where it is?’
Graham nodded and left the room. Danny watched him appear outside the window and slowly wander toward the toilet block. He looked back at Mrs Barnes.
As the remaining children in the blue group read aloud, she took the blue basket onto her lap and began flicking silently through the equations. She stopped, a disturbed expression on her haggard face. She drew out the offending sheet of paper and crumpled it into a small ball.
When Graham returned she asked him to read.
‘This is a story about a ghost who got killed and now he’s dead. It’s boring because ghosts are boring. They’re not real and they can’t talk.’
Several children began giggling.
‘Could you please read what’s actually on the page?’
Graham held up the book and started again. ‘This is a boring book about stupid people who believe in stupid ghosts –’
‘Sit down, please.’
After lunch Graham was moved to the yellow group, where he fell off his chair three times and threw an entire box of SRA reading cards onto the floor.
When Danny laughed loudly at Graham’s antics he was sent outside.
The headmaster stood on a raised platform and tapped the microphone in front of him; a couple of hundred restless children filled the internal quadrangle, standing in uneven rows. ‘Return to lessons with your class teachers, and be sure not to leave anything behind. Mr Prentiss is waiting on the oval for the athletics representatives. The bus leaves in ten minutes.’
The children began to shuffle forward behind their teachers. Graham marched impatiently on the spot in his line as the queue slowly concertinaed along. The boy behind him became impatient and shoved a stiff arm into his back, causing him to fall down hard, onto the unforgiving asphalt. The remaining students filed past. Graham scrambled to his feet, his face twisted with rage.
In the hallway outside the classroom he ran from the rear of the queue and rammed headlong into his attacker, kneeling over him as he pushed him to the ground. He put both his hands over the boy’s face and pressed down with manic strength. Mrs Barnes rushed towards them. She tore Graham off the other boy and pulled him up roughly by one arm.
‘He asked for it.’ Graham’s face was slicked with snot and tears.
The bully was sent to the school nurse with a bloody nose. Graham spent the afternoon in the corridor outside the classroom copying out an apology line by line. Before long Danny Simpson was sent to join him.
Danny sat on a bench while Graham climbed onto one of the steel lockers, stood on tiptoe and looked through the high windows into the classroom below. Mrs Barnes scraped a stick of chalk across the dusty green board, trailing out a row of disconnected letters.
‘You’re a psycho,’ said Danny, looking up at him.
Graham stepped down from his lookout and tried the handle on one of the lockers. ‘This school’s crap,’ he replied.
‘What did you come here for?’
‘What d’ya mean?
‘Where’d you move from?’
‘Didn’t move from anywhere. I used to go to Alcott Street, had to change schools.’
‘Why?’
‘Threw a rock at a kid who kicked me.’
‘Got expelled?’
Graham shook his head. ‘Suspended, then I came here.’ He sat down on the bench and swung his legs repeatedly back and forth. Danny watched him sceptically, not sure whether to believe anything he said.
‘Stand up! You’re not out here to enjoy yourselves.’ Mrs Barnes glowered at them from the doorway of the classroom.
Sent out together on a daily basis, drawn to each other by some sort of toxic chemistry, the two boys formed a strange alliance. Danny developed the habit of meeting Graham on the corner near his house each morning, from where they would double back, past the brown-green lawns of Spinnaker Avenue, to Graham’s house and let themselves in. Inside the Harrises’ recently built brick-and-tile house, Danny always felt a strange mixture of contempt, envy and excitement. Compared to him Graham seemed to have it cushy, living in a real house, filled with real furniture and real parents who, even if they weren’t around much, had actual jobs.
Sometimes they stayed the whole day and watched the dirty videos Graham was always bragging about, the ones his father kept hidden in a beer carton at the back of the garage, behind the hot-water cylinder. They were nothing compared to the stuff that Danny’s brothers had shown him at home.
Graham slid the unmarked cartridge into the VCR and pressed the play button. The naked bodies on the television screen ground mechanically against each other. Danny pointed the remote and rewound the film to the start. It wasn’t very good porno, just one woman and one man screwing. Danny fast-forwarded any bits that showed the woman’s face or where the soundtrack recorded her hollow moans; soon he was fast-forwarding most of it.
If they didn’t go down to the river to smoke the cigarettes Danny had stolen from his mother, or go into town to prowl the shops, they were sometimes still at the Harris house when Graham’s parents came home, still hanging around in their school uniforms. One night Danny even stayed over.
Christine Harris didn’t warm to Danny. She hadn’t liked him from the moment she opened her front door to find him sprawled on her living-room carpet, playing Nintendo with Graham.
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br /> ‘Hello.’
Danny sat up and looked at her. Graham kept playing.
‘You must be Danny?’
Danny’s mouth smiled.
‘Well, Graham, maybe your friend would like to stay for tea.’
During a grim dinner of microwaved pasta and overcooked vegetables, Danny noticed how Christine Harris watched her son’s every move, as he pushed his food around the plate and slowly ate small mouthfuls. ‘Eat some of the peas, please.’
Graham speared the peas singly, scraping the plate noisily with his fork. His mother grew visibly irritated.
‘Come on, Graham, eat up.’ said his father, in a placatory tone.
Mrs Harris glared at her husband.
Graham’s sister Claire stared at Danny as he shovelled food into his mouth. She wore thick glasses, and over her left eye a flesh-coloured patch. Her good eye wandered and the lid twitched violently every few seconds. She occasionally dropped food down the front of her school uniform as she ate. Her older brother Joel motioned to his mother and she wiped the food away without comment.
No one had to tell Danny to clear his plate. He had already finished a second helping by the time Mrs Harris angrily took Graham’s meal away before he could spear the remaining thirty-odd peas.
‘What the hell is wrong with your sister?’ asked Danny, once they were in Graham’s bedroom.
‘I told you, she’s retarded.’
‘What’s wrong with her eyes?’
‘She’s got a spasmatism.’ Graham began rebounding a plastic basketball off the bedroom wall.
‘A what? Will she ever be normal?’
Graham shrugged.
‘Your brother seems weird.’
Graham headed the ball several times and fell onto the bed laughing. ‘He’s all right.’
‘I thought you didn’t like him.’
‘He goes to a special school for smart kids,’ said Graham, in a funny voice.
Danny didn’t know what to make of that. ‘What are we gonna do now?’ He felt suddenly stifled by the orderly bedroom, the pastel-blue and white colour scheme and matching quilt. Graham kicked the ball hard up into the ceiling.
‘Stop kicking that ball!’ shouted his mother.
‘It’s Tuesday. She’ll go out soon,’ said Graham.
An hour later, after his wife had left the house to attend the computer course she was taking at the local adult education centre, Denis Harris settled on the couch to watch a video. Claire was already in bed and Joel was busy doing his homework.
When Graham heard the familiar soundtrack he and Danny shot into the living room and sat on the floor. On the screen a small child of five or six, the Changeling, stared intently at a group of older children playing in a cornfield. A close-up of her ice-blue eyes showed flames beginning to ignite around black pupils. The camera plunged the viewer into a black tunnel of fire. One of the children in the cornfield suddenly took hold of the youngest boy’s throat and began to strangle him.
‘You know you’re not supposed to watch this,’ said Graham’s father, without taking his eyes off the screen.
‘I’ve seen it before,’ said Graham. The children onscreen stood stock still, mesmerized, as the strangled boy gasped for air.
‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’
‘It’s only seven thirty.’
‘Well, don’t go blabbing to your mum.’
The boy in the film stopped struggling as the last of his breath was squeezed from him. The faces of the children who circled around him were lit by strange half-smiles. Light from the screen was reflected in Graham’s eyes. The pupils flickered.
The sky above the cornfield erupted in lightning, and black clouds boiled furiously. Heavy torrents of rain poured down. The spell now broken, the children came to their senses and began to scream in terror at the broken body that lay before them. The Changeling, now a frightened child, ran through the rain to the nearest house to raise the alarm.
Over the next ninety-five minutes the Changeling killed, or orchestrated the deaths of, fifteen victims, slashing, burning, mutilating and dismembering as she travelled through the landscape of a fictitious American rural town.
Danny and Graham were riveted, their attention only wavering during the brief stretches of dialogue or plot development.
‘Awesome,’ declared Danny, as the Changeling charred the features of victim number thirteen’s face with a blowtorch. Victim number fifteen was impaled on a spiked fence. When Graham’s father went to the kitchen to get himself another beer and use the bathroom, Danny took the opportunity to replay the impaling several times.
Finally the Changeling, exposed by the town’s doctor, is surrounded by an angry mob of townspeople. Trapped at the top of a silage tower and spectacularly beheaded with a ceremonial sword, her haemorrhaging body is tossed to the ground while all the children cheer. The eyelids of the severed head quiver and blink open, a foretaste of the inevitable Return of the Changeling III.
Mathew, 2008
Vibrating jackhammers drowned the noise of the traffic. Another swarm of passengers radiated out from the steps of the subway. Mathew Allen tore a piece off his falafel roll and put it into his mouth. Then he swallowed some coffee and put the paper cup down on the stone wall beside him. Across the street, at 401 Chalmers Road, hemmed in among a row of sandstone townhouses, were the legal chambers of Cross and Beardsley. He kept his eyes fixed on the building as he ate. Several times the red-painted door opened. A woman in a black-and-white-striped suit emerged, slipped on a plush cream coat and briskly walked off. Clerks whose faces he recognized went in and out of the building clutching folios.
The flap-flap-flap of a traffic helicopter sounded above him, momentarily silencing even the din of the persistent jackhammers. He could just make out the struts of the machine’s landing-skids as it lifted, crab-like, tilting across the outline of the tallest buildings. When he returned his attention to the offices, a round-shouldered, twenty-something man was walking towards the red door. Allen grabbed at the compact camera, hanging from his neck inside his open coat, and leapt up. Hot coffee splashed down the side of his khakis and the falafel roll landed in front of him. He trod on it as he crossed to the side of the open bus shelter and began to shoot continuous frames of the ingoing figure.
He moved quickly along the street and walked up the steps of a public building. As he sat and waited he could see the upstairs windows of the lawyers’ rooms. His mind mapped the various vantage-points around the block. He knew there was a rear exit that turned back onto the same street a few doors up – he had a clear view across to it.
Forty minutes ticked by. Time meant nothing to him. He could wait all day if he had to. Finally the door opened and the man emerged. Mathew took a closer look at him through the viewfinder. He was in the right age range, but nothing stood out about him. He took a couple more shots anyway, descending the steps two at a time as he pressed the shutter.
As he did so Tony Cross emerged from the building and saw him. Mathew began to move away.
‘Hey!’ shouted the barrister across the busy road. ‘Give it up, Mathew.’ He threaded his way through the traffic and caught up with him. ‘Stay away from here and leave my clients alone. What are you hoping to achieve?’
‘I know you still work on their behalf. It’s because of you that they’re out on parole.’
Tony Cross stared at him, and the anger in his face drained away. ‘I’m not the enemy, Mathew. They have the right to representation, you have the right to representation. That’s how it works. Do you really think I’d meet with them here? You’re wasting your time. I’m warning you, just stay away.’
Graham and Danny, 1993
‘Get up, Graham! You’re already late.’
Danny awoke from a sleepover at Graham’s to Christine Harris’s shrill demands. He rolled over in his sleeping-bag and looked up at the radio clock: it was barely seven. He pulled the hood over his face. Graham hadn’t moved.
‘I said up!’ Ch
ristine flew into the room and tore the quilt from the bed. The boy in the bed curled into a ball and hugged his knees. ‘Shower now! You’re not the only cab on the rank – get up.’
Accustomed as he was to the violent outbursts within his family, Danny had been surprised to find that Graham was subject to a different, almost constant, form of tyranny. It set his nerves on edge. While his mother was rarely out of bed before lunch time, leaving him and his brothers to get themselves off to school, or not, Graham’s mother badgered him at every turn.
‘Put your sandwiches in your lunchbox.’ Graham fumbled through his bag for it.
‘Where’s your lunchbox?’
‘At school.’
‘You’ve lost it?’ Christine Harris looked like she might explode. ‘For God’s sake, Graham. Get a Tupperware!’
Graham fumbled through the open dishwasher tray and pulled out a melamine bowl.
‘Not that!’ She slapped it from his hand. The bowl skittered across the tiles. Graham laughed in defiance. ‘A Tupperware!’ she shouted, wrenching a drawer open and slamming a plastic box onto the counter. Graham put the sandwiches into the container, looked at Danny and sniggered. His mother observed them coldly. ‘Hurry up.’
‘You come straight home after school today. I don’t want you hanging around in town,’ she called, reversing the red Falcon out of the driveway and heading off to deliver Joel and Claire to their respective schools.
When Danny and Graham reached the school turn-off they stashed their backpacks between the brittle branches of a thick hedge and walked in the opposite direction. They were heading for the Regency Arcade Shopping Centre, where they could steal candy from the bulk food dispensers at the supermarket and eat it brazenly as they moved about the store.
To cover his increasing truanting, Danny’s brother Adam had forged him several notes citing migraine, a throat infection and ‘sprained feet’. Inevitably, after several weeks, a letter had arrived from the school.
‘What the hell is this?’ shouted Debbie Simpson, slapping him around the ears with an envelope that bore the school’s preposterous motto, ‘Success with Honour’. ‘What have you been doing every day when you’re not at school? Five unexplained absences! They say you’ve been forging notes. Well? Where do you go? You certainly don’t hang around here. Truanting, Danny,’ she concluded, as if no child of hers had ever stooped so low.
