by Peter Carey
Freddo and I went up to the musty ceiling above the school and he took off my clothes and drew his finger down the middle of my chest and told me I was beautiful and I said I was going to take off all my clothes and roll in the dirt at Agrikem.
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with his secret glittery eyes and I felt a hot patch right above the bottom of my spine. He never tried to stop me. He knew I wouldn’t like him if he did. He kissed me all over, in all the crazy places like the back of my knees. We had an electrical connection. We were doing “pair programming” before we heard the term or learned it was uncool. Pair programming has a gripping immediacy: you live with your partner inches from your side. You feel his heat, his brain, and each half of you must understand the code, there, then, as it is being born. Pairing may be invasive, but so is sex.
No-one but us knew what we planned or what we thought. We annoyed people. We locked the others out. We got deeper and deeper into our own shit. The school had an old super 8 camera which no-one bothered with. A Canon 512XL. While our classmates were running round making arty videos, while Cosmic Cosmo was making a wine rack from plumbing parts, we took the Canon apart and put it back together like soldiers with a weapon.
We sneered at the new video cameras and called them “products.” We introduced the word agitprop to common parlance. Our “appropriate technology” could not record sound so our agitprop would be completely visual. We would destroy MetWat on the television news.
We would go further, play harder than anybody else. We would destroy my perfect skin. We paid for one roll of film which was exactly two minutes and fifty seconds of footage. We performed our action in rehearsal. We timed it to fit that single roll.
1. Three seconds of Agrikem sign.
2. Establishing shot of factory, zoom in to sewer.
3. Gaby walks into frame and strips to her undies.
4. Gaby rolls on the poisoned soil.
We planned this on paper and then we followed our own directions. This is how it has always been for me. Once it gets to the real-life action you are beyond fear. You are simply in the mechanism. First you do this, then you do that. It is no more scary than stripping down a gun. On the day of the action it happened to be cold. My naked skin was like a plucked chicken, smeared with mud and poison. I crouched and hugged my knees while Frederic ran across McBryde Street to find a house that had a telephone. He took ages. I hoped he might get a blanket to bring back but we hadn’t thought of that and so he came back empty-handed, waiting to execute the next part of the plan.
5. The ambulance arrives.
6. Paramedics run across paddock.
7. Paramedics carry Gaby to ambulance.
8. Ambulance drives away with Gaby inside.
9. Agrikem sign.
10. Title: 30 days later.
11. Gaby’s skin with chloracne bubbles and pustules.
Frederic took his shirt off so he would be as cold as me. That one was worthy of my dad. We waited for the ambulance together. He offered me his shirt which made me start to cry. He touched me and I pushed him away and thought things that surprised me. I thought, you carried a bloody tripod on your bike but not a blanket. I imagined I could feel the blisters starting on my back and tummy. I was less together than I would have expected. I cried because my father wouldn’t listen to me. I cried because Frederic would admire me for being brave but now he would not marry me, or would marry me and have affairs with women with unblemished skin. I thought, fat chance our film will ever be on television.
The bone-thin starving horses stood against the fence of the next paddock, their sad faces towards me, their backs to the wind.
The ambulance came. I was hysterical and the neighbours came to watch and Frederic had to cry as well, just so he could travel with me.
WHEN WE REFUSED to process our film, Crystal got unexpectedly shitty.
We said we weren’t ready to hand it in. We were waiting for something.
For what?
A scene. We can’t tell you.
Probably we displayed bad attitude. The class all thought we were wankers. Fair enough. But what could we reveal to them? That we were waiting for the vile sores to break out on my back and stomach. Then, only then, could we shoot the scene, finish the roll, process it, and get it on the Channel 9 news. The class could see it then. They had no idea of who we were.
We were waiting for the sores and lesions. Every time I came back from the loo he was looking at me, his eyebrows raised. He already had our press release, but jeez, back off, Freddo.
Don’t get me wrong. We were in total agreement with each other. We had performed “a necessary action” but, honestly, now we had cooled off, I was not exactly thrilled by the prospect of being marked for life.
I went to the State Library, sans Freddo. I saw gross pics which freakerated me. Later I would get labelled ignorant and hysterical, which was more or less correct, although that was trumped by my mother who called me a masochist. If I had been a soldier I would have been a hero for putting my body at risk for the greater good. But I was just a girl and so I must be a masochist.
Crystal had been an ideal teacher but when we wouldn’t hand our project in she became a snub-nosed hard-arse. Why? We had school-based assessment so I could not see why she should get so stressed. Finally she flipped and “ordered” Frederic to bring his backpack to her desk. No-one ordered anyone at R. F. Mackenzie.
I called for a vote.
Crystal said shut up. Bring up the bag, like now.
I made a note. She saw me doing it.
The Canon was in Frederic’s bag, and in the Canon was the film. That was the point. Frederic did not move. He also made a note, and then gazed up at Crystal.
The room was frozen-still. Crystal did not threaten or repeat herself. Frederic remained at his desk. Then he made another note and laid his pen back down. It was sort of thrilling to see his defiance. Next he uncoiled himself and his eyes were narrow and his movements informed by some undeclared intention which made him glorious.
He threaded his way through the desks to the coat rack and I thought, shit, I love you, I love you, you are going to carry our film right out the bloody door, or maybe, just expose the film in front of everyone. I knew he was thinking what I was thinking, that’s the way we were.
As he delivered the bag to Crystal I was in the zone. He placed it on her desk. Right. He unzipped it. Right. He removed the camera and held it high, taunting.
Then he fucking gave it to her. I watched it in its full awfulness. Frederic held his head to one side, and if it was meant to be sarcastic, it was not. He stood in all his powerlessness and waited while she rewound the film.
Crystal removed the film and gave him back the camera.
The film is our property, he said.
Tough.
We paid for it with our money.
You’ll be reimbursed. Now, please take your place.
Please take your place. Who said that? I made a note, of course, but this was no longer our school. R. F. Mackenzie was not like this at all, and the whole home room were like POWs, shocked, and hating Crystal except—to be honest—maybe those who thought Frederic and I were too up ourselves, and of course they must have been the majority.
But even then it did not occur to me that the chunky spike-haired little band moll would actually process our film.
Later, on the due day when everyone presented their projects, nonstop, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., I watched her set up the projector and lace our processed film, and she was still hard-arsed, but when she saw the Agrikem sign her face softened and she glanced at me and I was pleased because I wanted her to like me after all. I knew I must be the most radical, the coolest student she ever had.
Frederic had shot the scenes in sequence so what was projected on the pitted wall was a kind of rough assembly of what we actually shot. Not quite the script, but close enough. Each take was short, three or five seconds, and Crystal’s face changed in sync with what she saw, as if s
he were entering the rhythm of the argument. 1. Agrikem sign. Good. 2. Wide shot of factory, good, zoom to sewer. Good. 3. Gaby takes her clothes off, OK. 4. Gaby rolls in the dirt. No, no. 5. Ambulance. 6. Gaby escorted through fence. 7. Ambulance leaves McBryde Street. 8. Royal Melbourne Hospital. Ambulance arrives. No, no, no. Crystal in total panic.
When Crystal ran from the room everybody stared at me. Freddo drew on his pad as if he had just had some really cool and urgent idea. Crystal came back with the temporary coordinator, a person not well suited to that role. When the temporary coordinator had seen the film she said she had a legal responsibility to show it to our parents.
We read Bleak House all afternoon. I hated it, that sweetie goodie Esther Summerson.
I asked Crystal did she like her.
Crystal said we were looking to go beyond “like.”
Doug the Organic Mechanic arrived to announce that he “very much doubted” you would even get a zit from a single exposure to the dirt at Agrikem. Melissa and Nada tittered. Doug ordered me to pull up my T-shirt and I said he was a perve. I said it was “inappropriate” and so he left the room. Then Crystal made me show my unmarked fat.
It was the worst day of my life.
My father made a big impact at the parents’ screening. He said what a relief it was, and what a happy occasion that no-one had been hurt, that no harm had been done and the best thing, he said to everyone, was that we had learned about the importance of doing homework. They all pissed themselves with laughter and I felt a fool. My father wore an open-neck shirt and a daggy unravelling sweater—pitch perfect for R. F. Mackenzie—and he looked so bright, and handsome and in charge. The Premier had just increased funding to suburban libraries. One of which was just across the street, Sando said, and his daughter could have learned everything she needed to know about dioxin’s side effects without getting herself muddy.
This was just so psychologically wrong.
He put his hand on Frederic’s mother’s shoulder and she stared at him like a cocker spaniel. Stoned. He tousled Frederic’s hair (which Frederic really didn’t like) and he hugged me and Celine to him in a monstrous family fake. I had never seen him so energised. He bullshitted and bulldozed the temporary coordinator and made a speech about Crystal’s amazing dedication. He thought the government’s negotiation with her union on pay scales would make her very happy.
Did Frederic understand what had happened? Of course. Exactly. But he led his dazed mum away without speaking to me. I had my bike so was excused the parental car. The Volvo was at home when I finally arrived, its radiator pinging as it cooled, and I wheeled my bike down the side and came in through the laundry. Once inside I discovered Act II was over and this was now Act III. All dark and comfortless.
Sando had clearly stewed on everything since leaving school and by the time I came into his presence he was triumphant. He could not wait to point it out: I had failed to prove my point. He had been right. I should have believed him, not Mervyn Aisen and his sloppy graduate student friend. He would be a minister by next year. Would I believe him then?
He became reflective, speculative. What, he asked me, what if I had succeeded in my film, what then? Academically speaking, he said. What if my skin had erupted? Did it occur to me how I would have hurt all of us, not only myself, but him? What would it have done for his future in the government?
I did not recognise the person who I had sided with against my mother.
How could you do this to me? he demanded. Why do you believe everyone outside the house but not your father?
You abused your beauty, he said. I told him he was pathetic and went to bed and locked the door so he had to apologise from the other side.
Then Celine tried to be the peacemaker. She must have been seeing Lionel Patrick (who was old enough to be a pensioner) but she sided with my father. He loves you, more than life itself, she said.
He’s a baby, I said.
All men are babies when they love you, she said, so vain.
AT FIRST, when Frederic surrendered our film to Crystal, I did not understand how much I had been betrayed. Frederic saw it, though. That was one of his amazing talents, to always see the contrail of my thoughts.
To the home room, we must have seemed unchanged: the up-themselves pair with matching eye shadow, and army boots. Freddo stroked my neck and blew in my ear in public. No-one had a clue, but he was asking me to forgive him when I wouldn’t admit that there was anything to forgive. He told me with his eyes that he needed me and I really couldn’t bear his need. It was so completely unappealing. No-one knew what was happening. I just went off him, in public. I wondered had I ever loved him anyway.
Then, quite soon, in days not weeks, without this ever being discussed, he was switching from Apple to PC. (What the fuck was this about?) He morphed into Freddo Version 3, all brisk and definite. PCs were just more serious, he decided. He was “polite.” He noticeably did not stroke my neck.
He was not going to say sorry for making a complete fool of me on film, showing my fat to the class without any bigger social benefit. Instead he produced Effective C++ by Scott Meyers, and read it as if it were a newspaper.
Was it really that easy for him, or was it: you punish me, I punish you, that sort of thing?
From then on I lived in the middle of a thunderstorm. I dreaded school each day. I obsessed about the wrong things, like my weight, like how did he get money for expensive books. Finally, one warm evening, after school, I walked the wrong way up Sydney Road. That is, not the way we had always walked together. He let me go. I did it to myself. By the time I got to Cornwall’s Hardware, I knew we had broken up.
Next day I returned to the home room. Let it be the same, I thought. I sat where I normally sat. I waited passively, already dead. When Frederic took his usual place, I thought, thank God, but when he turned to me his eyes were leaking, black and murderous.
I said, I don’t know what’s happening.
He said, I have to help Cosmo.
Cosmo, who later became the notorious Paypal, was the biggest dork in a home room totally full of misfits and dorks and refugees from all sorts of marital, pedagogic and political disasters. His father had Palermo Plumbing and Gas Fitting out the back of the Coburg mall. Cosmo was at R. F. Mackenzie because he was thought unteachable. His father had four other sons, and no room for the youngest in the business. But Cosmo was like a dog that won’t leave your door. All he did was make models and machines from plumbing parts. He was already six foot tall but he had no sense of personal space and it was a nightmare to even walk down Sydney Road with him because he was always bumping into people plus he had a loud hysterical laugh. Plus he was a PC gamer which was, of course, the point.
Cosmo needs help, Frederic said, rubbing his eye, smearing black across his wrist.
OK.
So I’ll just help him for a bit, OK?
I looked back at Cosmo. He winked at me, which was not his privilege.
OK, I said.
I was slow to appreciate that my gentle polite Frederic was about to permanently sit beside the nerd and they would now spend days whispering to each other about all the games available for PC.
When Cosmo lent Ultima VI to Frederic everybody knew I had been dumped. No-one in the home room was sorry for me. No-one came to save my pride which would have been so easy. Beyond R. F. Mackenzie was outer space, no life on any other planets. I had pissed off Troy. To the Samoans I was dead meat. I had been so fucking superior with the Keppel Street Quartet that they had long ago stopped trying to phone me. My father had become distant, and Celine arrived drunk at night expecting what she called “girl’s talk.” Yuck.
But Christmas was nearly here, ditto summer, so I could hide from myself at the creek where the council mowed down our saplings because, of course, there could be no life between the tractor wheels, and we should have known to plant our trees at one-metre intervals. Someone somewhere was having meetings with the three councils and MetWat, but I was just replant
ing. I hung out with wrinkly old people. I worked hard and tried not to feel too much. I volunteered at the plant nursery and did my best to get along with my father who could not get over himself. Night after night I stayed at home eating takeaway until I was brave enough to call Katie, who had been my alibi when I was sleeping with Frederic at his place.
I deserved nothing from her, but she was going to the Mechanics Club in Brunswick that night, where her boyfriend’s band was playing. He was a drummer in a punk revival band called Snot, something like that. He had the early gig and they would meet me out in front, OK.
Really?
Are you joking? I miss you.
I had spent so much time being Gaby-and-Frederic I no longer knew what I should wear to listen to a bloody band. I knew those girls, they would arrive so cool and cute and I made myself totally vomitous attempting to “get a look together.” Finally I smoked a joint and dressed in all the second-hand stuff I normally wore. When I arrived at the club my old friends were all waiting, hooing and cheering that they loved my look, they loved me. I was original to them. There was no-one like me, although of course they would have rather died than look like me. Their clothes were all clearly expensive (not to boys, but to girls it was completely obvious).
The Mechanics Club was a ratfuck, the band itself was crap. The boyfriend was handsome but too pleased with himself. WTF. I jumped around and had some drinks. Katie shared a bump of coke with me. There was what they called an “after party” and the drummer boyfriend put my bike in the van and I was so pleased to be included in the normal world. Katie sat in the front seat next to her drummer. He drove with his arm around her shoulder, serpent scales in blue ink from his sleeveless top down to his fingernails. Katie kept on flopping her hand over the back of the seat. Then: duh: she had a condom. My friends had become babies while I had been gone.
