Don't Call Me Ishmael

by Michael Gerard Bauer

  For most of Sunday I wandered around looking for something to do. I tried watching TV in the lounge room. I tried listening to music in the rumpus room. I tried kicking a ball around the backyard. I tried reading on the veranda. I even tried doing some homework in my room. But everywhere I went seemed grey and stale–just one more place where Kelly Faulkner wasn’t. As a last resort I even tried talking to Prue, but she said she was halfway through War and Peace and wanted to finish it before the next day.

  At last I went to my room and flopped back on my bed. Surely Razza couldn’t be right after all, could he? It was impossible. It didn’t make sense. What would he know about love? Wasn’t he the one who was perving at all the girls yesterday and giving each of them a RBR? Then it dawned on me. Of course–the Four Steps of Effective Rebuttal! I would destroy Razza’s stupid ideas and give him back some of his own medicine.

  Let’s see. One: Razza says I’m in love with Kelly Faulkner. Two: This is totally false because … because … be … suddenly I found myself thinking about the shape of Kelly Faulkner’s blue jeans and the way her lips parted when she smiled and her cute white teeth.

  An awful pain ached in my chest. I lay there and waited for it to pass. There was nothing else I could do. I was on the receiving end of a mega download from the website of luuuuuurve.

  24.

  MY BROTHER, MY CAPTAIN, MY KING!

  I decided that my best course of action was to try not to think too much about Kelly Faulkner-what was the point in torturing myself, right? Instead I focused on debating. The way I figured it, the chances of me getting anywhere with Kelly Faulkner were infinitesimal, whereas the chances of us winning a debate were only microscopic. I decided to stay in the realm of exceedingly slim possibility.

  By Monday we had our first topic–That our leaders today rely more on image than actions–but from the start it didn’t look too promising.

  The problem was, despite Scobie’s best efforts, I don’t think we had quite grasped the idea of teamwork. While he desperately tried to keep everyone on task and I attempted to take down any relevant points, Ignatius tossed up chunks of useless information that exploded like fireworks, distracted everyone’s attention and then disappeared without a trace, Bill sat comatose as if he’d been deep frozen in some space pod which was at that very moment hurtling towards some distant outpost of the universe, and Orazio divided his time between complaining about the topic, cracking jokes, sharing his insights on ‘hot chicks’ and paying out on the rest of us.

  Here is just a small sample of what I mean.

  Orazio: What a stupid topic. What side are we on again?

  Scobie: Negative. We have to argue that our leaders don’t rely more on image than actions–that their actions are just as, if not more, important than image.

  Orazio: But that’s crap. Why do we get the crap side?

  Scobie: It doesn’t matter what you believe. You can make a case for both sides.

  Orazio: Can we ask the other team if they want to swap?

  Scobie: No.

  Orazio: Well, that sucks. First debate and we get stuck with the crap side.

  Scobie: Look, we can’t change, so let’s try to examine the topic. We need to look at who Our leaders’ are. For example, does the topic just refer to political leaders like the prime minister?

  Orazio: Him? Mum reckons he’s an idiot. They should give him the flick.

  Prindabel: Did you know that the shortest serving Australian prime minister was Francis Forde? He lasted only eight days in office.

  Orazio: Eight days? Kingsley took longer than that to finish his last Maths test.

  Scobie: Well, that’s interesting, Ignatius, but it doesn’t really help us with our side of the argument.

  Orazio: The crap side.

  Scobie: Bill, any ideas?

  Kingsley: About what?

  Scobie: Well, can you come up with any examples of leaders who have relied more on actions than image?

  Kingsley: There’s Aragorn, I guess.

  Orazio: Who?

  Kingsley: Aragorn, from the Lord of the Rings. You know, that bit in The Fellowship of the Ring where Boromir doesn’t want Aragorn as his leader but they fight the Urak–hai together and when Boromir is dying he changes his mind and says to Aragorn, ‘I will follow you, my brother, my captain, my king’.

  Orazio: Geez, thanks for that, Bill–bo. You’ve been such a big help. Now why don’t you toddle off back to the Shire and have a big sleep while the rest of us deal with reality, OK?

  Prindabel: New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote.

  Orazio: You haven’t got some nerd’s strain of Tourette’s syndrome, have you, Prindabel? What the hell has New Zealand giving women the vote got to do with anything?

  Prindabel: Well, Lord of the Rings was filmed in New Zealand and we were talking about prime ministers and government.

  Orazio: Have you been sleeping with your head in the microwave again?

  Me: Come on, Razz, let’s get back on the topic, hey?

  Orazio: Me? Me? Kingsley’s the one that’s going on like he’s been smoking too many hobbit pipes, and any minute now Prindabel will tell us that the seventh prime minister of Australia was Tolkien’s love child. And as for your gems of wisdom, Leseur–here, I’ve written them all down on this postage stamp–double-spaced in extra large font, and look-there’s still heaps of room for your photo.

  Scobie: Well, Orazio, perhaps you can give us the benefit of your understanding of the topic?

  Orazio: OK, Scobes, I’d love to. As a leader with the ladies I’d say that the really hot chicks like a bit of action but having a cool image is also important. Fortunately the Razz can provide both.

  Prindabel: Then how come I’ve never seen you with a ‘hot chick’, Orazio?

  Orazio: How come I’ve never seen you with a human being, Prindabel?

  Scobie: Look, we don’t have time for this. The bell will go soon and we need to come up with some strong arguments showing that our leaders today don’t rely on image more than actions. OK, let’s really concentrate, work together and focus on the task at hand.

  Kingsley: My sister says Aragorn’s a spunk.

  Prindabel: There was a French physicist in the seventeenth century called Dominique Arago. I think he worked on electromagnetism.

  Orazio: Why do we get the crap side?

  Yes, everything seemed to be coming together nicely.

  25.

  EVERYONE’S ENTITLED TO THEIR OPINION

  Somehow, thanks to Scobie, we managed to pull some kind of a case together and scramble to our first debate. Ignatius was first speaker, Orazio was second, Scobie was third and Bill Kingsley (when it was brought to his attention by a dig in the ribs from Razza) was chair. I was the cheer squad. The amazing thing was that we won.

  Prindabel knew his speech quite well but delivered it with all the passion of a chemical equation, while every now and then pulling out some obscure fact in a way that was every bit as unexpected and pointless as yanking a rabbit from a hat. Orazio was far less prepared, adlibbing most of his speech and trusting (wrongly, as it turned out) that his wit and natural charm would gloss over any weaknesses. To say we were ordinary would be generous–we aspired to ordinary. Fortunately for us, our opposition from Bugner High School made ordinary look stupendous. They reminded me of three guys who’d been dragged off the street and thrown into a police line-up. The only thing that stopped the audience from rising as one and demanding a halt to proceedings on the grounds of unnatural cruelty was the presence of James Scobie.

  When Scobie spoke, it was like someone turning on a light in a darkened room. Everything that up until then had been vague and confusing suddenly snapped into focus. You could almost see people rubbing their eyes with the surprise of it all. First Scobie explained the topic (I’m sure that most of the audience had no idea that all the speakers had, in fact, been discussing the same subject). Then he rebuilt the opposition’s case from the tangled wreckage
they had left in order to systematically and thoroughly dismantle it so that it could never possibly be reassembled. Finally he reviewed our case while at the same time making Prindabel and Razza seem like learned men. ‘My second speaker Orazio showed with indisputable logic how … ‘ By the time he had finished there was really no need for an adjudicator’s decision.

  After that first unexpected victory, the mood in our debating meetings changed. At last we started to get an inkling of what we were trying to do. In the next debate Bill Kingsley replaced Ignatius as first speaker. This was a tactical move by Scobie. We were affirmative for the second debate, and as first affirmative speaker Bill Kingsley wouldn’t have to rebut at all. This was crucial, since in our meetings we had discovered that Bill seemed incapable of coming up with a counterargument of any kind. His response to a possible opposition argument was invariably, ‘That’s quite a good point, actually’ or ‘Everyone’s entitled to their opinion’.

  This time our opposition was St Phoebe’s Girls College, and another amazing thing happened–we won again. This was despite Bill Kingsley reading his speech from beginning to end and Razza as chair introducing one of the girls a little too enthusiastically with, ‘It is my pleasure–and I do mean pleasure–to call on the second speaker from St Phoebe’s.’

  Even though we had improved from last time, the difference again was Scobie. It was like having Ian Thorpe swimming the final leg for you in the under sevens floaties relay. As long as we could keep the opposition vaguely in sight, we knew that Scobie would reel them in and eat them up.

  Just as he did in the third debate, when, even more amazingly, we defeated Harrison Grammar.

  Three wins from three debates automatically put us into the semi-finals. We couldn’t believe it. Miss Tarango was ecstatic. We could even afford to lose the next debate and still make it through. We were cruisin’. It was a case of no stress, no pressure, no problems and no worries.

  Stay that way?

  No chance.

  26.

  THE BAT CONTROLLER

  For a while there I almost felt like I was a normal person. I even started to think that maybe Ishmael Leseur’s Syndrome was just a figment of my imagination or that somehow, miraculously, I had been cured. And why wouldn’t I? I was a part of the most successful debating team in recent St Daniel’s history; James Scobie, school celebrity and personal mascot of the St Daniel’s First Fifteen rugby team, was my friend; and Barry Bagsley, my former tormentor, was reduced to a skulking figure in the background. As for Kelly Faulkner … hey, well, who could tell? If I could survive a chronic case of Ishmael Leseur’s, anything was possible, right?

  Even at home they noticed a change in me. Mum said that I looked like ‘the cat that had swallowed the cream’. Dad, on the other hand, said he was worried that too much happiness wasn’t character building and suggested that I should think about getting married. This resulted in Mum thumping Dad’s shoulder with what he described as ‘the punch that killed Bruce Lee’.

  And can you believe this-even Prue was impressed. She called me the brains behind the debating team. That really got me, that one–my little sister Prudence Leseur, official near-genius, saying that I was the brains. Talk about the kettle calling the pot an excellent heater of water. Normally it was Prue who stole the limelight. Not that she meant to, or anything like that–she was just being herself. Here, I’ll give you a classic example: The Clash of the Peg People.

  It all started when I was in Year One at Moorfield Primary and our teacher Miss Sorrensen brought along a box of chunky wooden clothes pegs and said we were going to make some peg people. It was a lot of fun. We drew on faces, gave them cotton wool hair, painted them and made clothes for them.

  I made Batman.

  I remember spending hours wrapping black tape around the peg to give it muscles, using black crepe paper for the cape and moulding a headpiece out of black plasticine. When he was finished, I was so proud that I took him out in front to show the whole class. Miss Sorrensen held up my peg Batman and asked, ‘Who knows who this is?’ Nearly every hand shot up straightaway. I grinned triumphantly.

  ‘Philip, can you tell us who Ishmael has made?’

  ‘That’s easy-the Fat Controller from Thomas the Tank Engine!’ Philip said confidently, while the rest of the class nodded enthusiastically around him.

  Now that would have been bad enough, but the real point of the story is that two years later, when Prue was in Year One, Miss Sorrensen trotted out the peg people idea again. But do you think my little sister Prudence made Batman or Ronald McDonald or even one of the Wiggles? Oh no, she got out Dad’s old Time magazines, found a series on ‘the most influential people of the century’, researched around a hundred scientists, thinkers, leaders, artists and entertainers from the past hundred years, and then settled on a top ten consisting of Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Sigmund Freud, the Wright Brothers, John Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill, Picasso and the Beatles. Then she recreated each of them in peg form with uncanny accuracy and detail. Of course they made my pathetic effort, which Dad had thoughtfully christened the Bat Controller, look like a black blob in comparison.

  But the peg people saga didn’t stop there. They became an obsession for Prue. Why stop at ten? Why limit them to people from the last one hundred years? What about Shakespeare? Da Vinci? Michelangelo? Newton? Didn’t they deserve their own pegs too? Then Mum got into the act. Where are the women? Joan of Arc? Madame Curie? Audrey Hepburn? And what about the writers? Austen? Hemingway? Joyce? Steinbeck? Eliot? Blake? The Brontës? Then Dad hopped on board. Where’s Dylan? And Gough. How could you not have Gough?

  At last count the peg people numbered over a hundred, and since Prue insisted that they should be practical as well as educational, I am confronted by them every time it’s my turn to peg out the washing. I guess having a little sister who’s a near-genius can be a little daunting at times, but it does have its up side. How many people get to choose which of history’s most influential, creative and brilliant people will hold up their underpants to dry?

  27.

  THE OLD BRER RABBIT TRICK

  So, like I was saying, for a moment there I almost felt like a normal person. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I had dropped my guard and left myself open. Whatever the reason, I was about to feel the full effects of Ishmael Leseur’s Syndrome.

  It all happened on the night of the final preliminary debate. Dad says that one day it will make a good story and that I’ll be able to laugh about it. But I’ve got a feeling that by the time that day arrives I’ll be so old I’ll probably be laughing every time my teeth fall into my porridge, anyway. Believe me, if there was any way I could avoid writing about this I would, but how else can I explain to you the horror of Ishmael Leseur’s?

  It all started with a phone call.

  ‘Ishmael? It’s Scobie. We’ve got a bit of a problem.’

  It was a Wednesday night, about seven o’clock. The debate was on at seven-thirty, and we were up against Lourdes Girls College. Prindabel was unavailable because he was in the school band and they were involved in some competition. (Not surprisingly, Ignatius played the triangle.) Our team, therefore, was Kingsley, Razza and Scobie. I was timekeeper, so I didn’t need to get there as early as the others.

  ‘Bill Kingsley has laryngitis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kingsley has laryngitis. He can’t speak–not a word.’

  I thought back to the meeting we had at lunchtime. Bill hadn’t said much, but then again, he never did. There was something he said about his throat …

  ‘Ishmael, you still there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Look, I know I said … well … the thing is … we might need you to fill in … to take Kingsley’s place.’

  I felt like someone had jabbed a hypodermic needle through my chest and pumped a syringe full of liquid nitrogen into my heart. ‘Why? We’re already into the finals. We can just forfeit. It doesn�
��t matter if we lose.’

  ‘That would be fine, except there’s a “no forfeit” rule.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A “no forfeit” rule–rule twenty-three of the debating regulations. Any team that forfeits a debate in the preliminary rounds is ineligible to compete in the finals.’

  I could feel the tone of my voice beginning to slip towards panic. ‘What sort of a stupid rule is that?’

  ‘It’s there to stop teams just not turning up if they qualify early like we did. It’s quite reasonable, I think.’

  Reasonable? I didn’t care about what was reasonable. I wanted an escape route. It was time for some frantic straw-clutching. ‘But what about someone else? There must be someone else who can do it? What about one of the Year Eights? They’re on tonight, as well. We could get one of their reserves. Be a great experience for them. One of them could do it. I can’t do it … I’m hopeless … I’m not prepared. Anyway, I’ve got to do the timekeeping.’

  ‘Ishmael, listen. Calm down. Anyone can do the timekeeping. Kingsley’s here, he can do it–he doesn’t need to speak. We can even ask one of the audience if we have to. But we can’t ask one of the Year Eights to take Kingsley’s place because they’re ineligible. There are only five names on the registration form … and the last one is yours.’

  ‘But I’m only the researcher–that’s what you said.’

  ‘Yes, I know I did.’ For a moment the line was silent. ‘Look, Ishmael. I said I’d never make you debate and I won’t. It’s your call entirely. But this is the situation. We are one man down. If we can’t get a replacement, we have to forfeit. If we forfeit, we are out of the finals. The simple fact is that you are the only one who can take Bill Kingsley’s place. There is no one else.’