by Robin Klein
That was the only time she and Valjoy ever had nice quiet conversations, when they discussed clothes that hadn’t been bought yet.
Barringa East was a messy patchwork sort of place. The people who actually owned their houses had done them up nicely with sunblinds and gardens, and the ones who had moved out from high-rise flats usually went to a lot of trouble, too, because they were so glad to move into a place with a front and back yard. But a lot of no-hopers also lived in Barringa East, and it was depressing walking along some of those streets past houses that looked like decaying fruit. They had newspapers pasted up instead of curtains; waist-high weeds for a garden, and skinny bitzer dogs guarding nothing. And the driveways were full of old cars that had died.
Barringa East wasn’t very large. You could walk from one end of it to the other in twenty minutes, even allowing for detours to avoid Barry Hollis who was usually out hunting for someone to pick on. On all four sides of Barringa East there was a main road, as though it had been set on purpose into a frame. It was really peculiar. Outside the frame were the smart suburbs, with new brick houses and double garages holding shiny big cars and speedboats on trailers.
Those suburbs had their own schools and they weren’t a bit like Barringa East Primary. Sometimes, only not very often because we weren’t invited all that much, our netball and football teams played theirs. Their kids didn’t yell and swear at the umpire like the kids in our teams, or turn round and beat each other up for missing the ball.
Our local paper was always printing news items about those schools. There’d be photographs with captions underneath: ‘Gilland Primary School raised $200 for the Seeing Eye Dog Centre by making and selling pottery.’ ‘Edgeworth Primary had a most exciting day coming to school dressed as their favourite book characters.’ ‘Four students from Jacana Heights Primary have won scholarships to Bloggs Grammar School and Moggs Ladies College’.
The only time I remember our school being mentioned in that paper was when the classrooms burned down and the heading was ‘Arson Suspected at Barringa East Primary’.
But while I was in sixth grade, they built a new freeway – and one of the roads that was part of the framework for keeping Barringa East in its place was divided. This little section of Hedge End Road, only three or four houses long, suddenly found itself plonked officially onto the end of Barringa East, like a satin rosette stuck on a packet of fish and chips. And the school zoning system meant that anyone who lived in that cut-off bit of Hedge End Road had to send their kids to Barringa East Primary School.
However, there wasn’t a great rush of new enrolments to our school. Maybe the owners of those big houses became rich by not having kids, or maybe they felt so disgusted at being officially part of Barringa East that they moved.
But there was one kid, Alison Ashley, and she started at Barringa East Primary two weeks after the beginning of first term. Maybe it took her parents a whole fortnight to recover from the shock that she had to come to our crummy school. But when she did arrive, because no one was sitting next to me, Miss Belmont put Alison Ashley there.
And from the first day I hated her.
he was wearing this soft blue skirt, and a shirt the colour of cream, with not a crease nor a wrinkle nor a loose thread anywhere. Expensive-looking plaited leather sandals. Long, pale gold hair caught back with a filagree clasp, and tiny gold roses, the size of shirt buttons, in her ears. Her skin was tanned and each cheek had a deep, soft dimple. Huge navy-blue eyes, the colour of ink, fringed with dark curly lashes. She was the most beautiful, graceful, elegant thing you ever saw in your life.
A hush lapped right round our classroom when Mrs Orlando brought her in and introduced her to Miss Belmont. The hush didn’t last very long; Barry Hollis jammed his fingers in his mouth and made ape noises, and that set off all the boys in the back row. Miss Belmont just froze them into silence with her iceberg-that-sunk-the-Titanic look, and then she told Alison to sit next to me. ‘Erica will show you around the school and look after you till you settle in, Alison,’ she said.
Alison opened the lid of her side of the desk and began to put her things away. It seemed almost insulting to call them things. She had a gold biro with a short chain on the end, and on the end of the chain was a little gold A. She had a pencil case made of gold leather with her initials in one corner. Her work folder looked brand new. It was covered with beautiful grey and white marbled paper, and she opened it to a new page and ruled a perfect margin with her little gold biro. Then she rested her hands on the page and looked politely at Miss Belmont.
I glanced at her nails. They had white crescent moons at the base with all the cuticles pushed back, and every nail was a perfect shell-pink oval. Alison Ashley impressed me to such a degree that I wanted her to know immediately that there was at least one person at Barringa East Primary who was, like herself, a tall flower in a garden full of couch grass and weeds.
‘I just adore your earrings,’ I whispered. ‘I’d like to have my ears pierced, only I’m allergic to methylated spirits. So I guess I’ll have to go to a dermatologist and have him supervise the post-operative care. You can’t be too careful, even for a minor operation like ear piercing. My sister Valjoy offered to do it for nothing with a compass point, but I certainly don’t want to end up with blood poisoning. When I get my ears pierced, it’s going to be in a proper sterilised operating theatre by a qualified surgeon. I already have a very nice pair of earrings at home soaking in a bowl of antiseptic. I chose them myself. They’re little squirrels holding baskets of nuts.’
Alison Ashley didn’t say anything, but she raised her eyebrows slightly. Her eyebrows were like fine brush strokes in a Japanese print. I realised suddenly that there was a silence in the room, and Miss Belmont was standing by the blackboard with the chalk in her hand, and her eyebrows were raised, too, but they didn’t look like delicate Japanese brush strokes. They looked like fierce arrows.
I hastily copied down the notes she’d made on the blackboard about open-cut coal mining, which was not a topic I found interesting. It had no bearing whatever on a career in the theatre. My writing, which was very highly strung and filled with nervous energy, jerked all over the paper. My whole folder, to tell the truth, was a mess. I’d covered it with Superman gift-wrapping paper, which seemed now, next to Alison’s folder, extremely juvenile. All the spaces between the repeated motifs of Superman going Pow! and Zap! were scribbled on. I scribbled compulsively, and the result looked like some really repulsive, spreading fungus.
I peeped at Alison’s immaculate work, and began to feel a tiny bit inferior. It was a new and upsetting emotion for me, as ever since I set foot in Barringa East Primary way back in prep grade, I had always felt totally superior to every single person in the whole school, including the Principal, and also the District Inspector when he came around.
We finished the work about coal mines and Miss Belmont asked some brisk, sneaky questions around the room, to trap kids like Barry Hollis who hadn’t been paying attention. The questions were hard, so she received blank looks from everyone. But when she asked Alison, Alison answered correctly. And it was like that right up to lunch break. Alison Ashley knew all her tables and got all her maths right. She turned out to have a reading age of 14.6 years. She knew all the rivers of northern New South Wales in perfect order.
My feelings of inferiority swelled into dislike, and the dislike into absolute loathing. I was so sick with jealous resentment that I could hardly even bear to open my order from the tuckshop. Mum often let me buy my lunch because she hated cutting school lunches. She said it wrecked her nail varnish. I’d ordered a meat pie, an iced jam donut, and this lovely big yellow banana, just begging to be unzipped and eaten.
Miss Belmont wouldn’t let us talk while we ate our lunches. You could hear the fifth grade next door racketing around in their room and yelling, and every now and then their teacher (Mr Kennard, the one who said he’d resign if he was given our class) roared desperately, ‘QUIET! Stop carrying o
n like a zoo! Who poured tomato sauce into this box of paper clips?’
But Miss Belmont just sat tidily with a straight back and all she had to do was let her eye fall thoughtfully on anyone who belched or acted like a zoo, and they changed their minds.
I looked sideways at Alison Ashley’s lunch. She had it in a white plastic lunchbox with little compartments. In one compartment she had a chicken drumstick wrapped in foil. In another she had a stick of celery with the tips curled (I found out later how you do that, you slice it and stand it in iced water), a tiny perfect tomato like a ruby, a baby carrot and two cheese sticks, all cuddled up on a lettuce leaf so crisp you could have used it as a get-well card.
Alison Ashley had a slice of wholemeal bread with the butter spread evenly right up to every crust, and a smart white drink bottle with a gold lid, filled with orange juice. She also had a straw in a cellophane wrap. She ate so quietly and nicely that you couldn’t hear her chew, not even when she got to the celery. When she finished her lunch, she shook crumbs that didn’t exist onto the spread-out foil and put it into the bin. She replaced the lids on her white lunchbox and her white drink bottle and put them both away in her school bag.
When the bell rang for everyone to go outside and play, there was the usual stampede from Mr Kennard’s grade, and the sound of him dragging his feet along to the staffroom for his own lunch, whimpering softly to himself. But we all sat at our desks until Miss Belmont said, ‘All right, Grade Six, you may go out.’
Alison Ashley looked at me and waited.
‘I’m supposed to show you round the school,’ I said grittily. ‘So come on.’
First, I showed her the library, because it was the only modern room and had been designed by an architect. Probably by an architect who read our local paper, because whenever our school was broken into, which was just about every second weekend, the library was never touched on account of the complicated deadlocks on the doors and the electric alarm systems on every opening, even the air vents. In spite of it looking a bit like Fort Knox, it was really a very nice place.
It was filled with the usual crowd of refugees, kids who were too scared to go out into the playground in case Barry Hollis bashed them up. There were four monitors on duty at the desk, though one would have been plenty. All the library monitors at our school were a bit freaky, like Dennis Moyle who talked in a high little gossipy voice and hung round teachers asking if they needed any help or any messages run. You could always tell new teachers at our school. They were the ones still smiling at and still being polite to Dennis Moyle, but after a couple of weeks they found out what a crashing bore he was, though it took them the rest of the year to shake him off.
There was Margeart Collins who was so dim it took her a whole year to learn how to roll the library date stamp forward. Her name was really Margaret, but Margeart was how she always spelled it, even though she was in the sixth grade. There was Roa, who could hardly speak any English apart from the words Barry Hollis taught him on his first day at Barringa East Primary, and this weird hysterical girl named Leanne Jessop. Mrs Cheale, who was kind, felt sorry for them so let them all be library monitors.
They all turned and gawked at Alison when I introduced her to Mrs Cheale. ‘You’re the girl with the reading age of 14.6,’ Mrs Cheale said, which just shows you how fast news travelled in our school. The system worked like this. The lady who ran the tuckshop came over to boil eggs in the staffroom at 9.45 a.m. for egg-and-lettuce sandwich orders. While they were simmering she called in to Mrs Orlando’s office to hear the latest gossip, and then she popped into all the classrooms to collect the lunch baskets and pass the gossip on to the teachers.
Alison Ashley smiled modestly and told Mrs Cheale that she liked reading. Mrs Cheale took a real shine to her straight away. She showed Alison the new books that hadn’t been processed yet. Usually if anyone dared lay a finger on any uncovered books, she changed from a patient teacher into a monster with fangs and a black velvet cloak.
She showed Alison all these books with gold medals on the covers that had won the Book of the Year awards, and Alison, naturally, had read every one of them, and was telling Mrs Cheale that her aunt was a librarian. Librarians always seem fascinated if you know someone else who is a librarian. I suppose it’s because they are cooped up with books all the time, and forget there are other librarians.
Mrs Cheale gave a little cry of delight, like a bird-watcher spotting a Red-kneed Dotterel in unfamiliar territory, and just ignored me standing there. I felt jealous and miffed. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand, it was being ignored. I liked to have everyone’s attention all the time, and anyhow, I was supposed to be the one showing Alison around the school. So I took the wooden tray of little cards away from Dennis Moyle and plonked it down in front of Alison. I started explaining with a great deal of authority, about the borrowing system. I thought Mrs Cheale might say, ‘Erica is the most efficient person to show you how our library works, Alison. There’s no person I rely upon more.’ But what she said was, ‘Yuk, will you kindly stop crashing around and raising your voice in this library? That notice on the door isn’t there for decoration, you know.’
The notice said ‘Polite People Especially Welcome’, and had been designed and constructed in the art-and-craft room. By me. I’d made all the letters look like vertical books, and it had taken a lot of time and creative energy, as well as a whole packet of felt pens.
I was extremely indignant that Mrs Cheale seemed to have forgotten that I had made that notice. I thought of just leaving those two chatting about books and libraries and the Dewey Decimal System. I’d go and ask Mrs Orlando if I could have a soluble anti-irritant aspirin, though she said last year I would have to bring in a letter from my mother if I was going to be asking for strong medication every day.
But just then Mr Kennard led Barry Hollis in by the ear. Mr Kennard had found him in the playground defacing one of the library books with rude slogans. I would have liked to stay and watch Barry getting told off by Mrs Cheale, but Alison had already gone tactfully to the door and was waiting for me to show her some more things.
‘Our library is architect designed,’ I said ingratiatingly. (Although I was so jealous of her, at that stage I still wanted her to choose me for her best friend.)
‘It’s a nice little library,’ she said. ‘But at the school where I was last year, the library was about three times that size.’
I showed her where the toilets were, but she said she already knew because Mrs Orlando told her when she arrived that morning. I showed her where the bubblers were, and she said she usually didn’t drink water from them because there was a danger of catching germs from kids putting their mouths right down on the spout. All the time while she was looking around inspecting everything, her smooth face didn’t show any expression at all. I realised suddenly it was a mask. I knew that behind that mask she was thinking Barringa East Primary School was not much better than a council tip.
I showed her the sandpit and the little kids’ part of the playground. I felt sorry for the prep-grade teacher, who never seemed to get any peace from her class. There was always some little kid with sand in its eyes bleating outside the staffroom for Mrs Wentworth. So she usually took her lunch and cup of tea and her knitting and sat by the sandpit, even when it wasn’t her turn for playground duty. She was so calm she didn’t get excited, even when kids broke their collarbones. Mrs Wentworth would murmur, ‘There’s no need to cry, dear, we’ll soon have it all better.’ But first she would roll up her knitting and mark the place in her pattern book and put it back in her bag. She had four children of her own, but they didn’t go to our school. (It was funny, but none of the teachers’ kids was enrolled at our school. You’d have thought it would be more convenient for them.)
One of the little Tonkin kids came charging by, and I whispered to Alison, ‘Don’t get too close. Those Tonkins always have nits, even though the nurse comes round and leaves free lotion. I’ve heard that lice can jump. Did
you know that? They can jump from one kid’s head to another kid’s head.’
Now I personally thought that was a very interesting piece of medical information, but Alison Ashley went all peculiar. She turned pale under her tan and clamped both hands over her long swinging gold hair and kept them there.
‘If you don’t like looking at the little kids’ playground, I’ll show you the other things we have at this school,’ I said. ‘Except there’s not all that much else. There’s the tuckshop.’
‘I always bring lunch from home,’ Alison said.
‘They have beaut iced donuts at the tuckshop.’
‘I’m not allowed to eat junk food.’
‘I can show you the sick bay,’ I said.
‘No, thanks,’ said Alison. ‘I don’t like looking at grazed knees or anything like that. I don’t like illness.’
Well! I knew then that it would be quite impossible for Alison Ashley and me ever to be best friends. I’d had a whole lot of various fascinating ailments ever since I was born in the back seat of Aunty Val’s Mini. (Mum had left it too late to get to hospital, since she was in the middle of putting a henna rinse in her hair.) Best of all, I liked being sick enough to have antibiotic capsules with my name typed on the label by the chemist.
I looked at beautiful healthy Alison Ashley. She was staring around at Barringa East Primary with no expression at all on her soft pretty face. But I knew very well that inside her mind she was thinking that Barringa East Primary belonged to a late-night horror movie. And I got this tight feeling in my throat glands, like you do when you’re coming down with a virus, only mine was caused by indignation.
Suddenly I thought of a whole lot of things we had going for us at Barringa East Primary. It wasn’t fair that we were never mentioned in the local paper unless the school was burned down or busted into.
The nice things were ones the editor wouldn’t think interesting enough for his rotten old paper. Such as Mr Nicholson, the Principal, who never acted stuck up just because he was a headmaster. If there was a dog fight going on in the playground, he always dived out and locked them up in the sports-equipment shed until the dog catcher’s van arrived, so kids wouldn’t get bitten. And what’s more, he knew the name of every kid in the school. When he got out of his car in the morning he always said, ‘Hi there, Marty, or Diane, or Greg (or whoever the kid was), how are things going?’ And at Easter he always bought a bag of chocolate eggs and hid them around the sandpit for the preps to find.
