by Robin Klein
As there was an inter-school student photography competition coming up, Miss Lattimore said each of us could take a photo of something suitable in the playground.
‘I’ll show Alison Ashley, the new girl, how to work the camera,’ I said. I really enjoyed showing people new things. It was a very satisfying feeling if they didn’t catch on to instructions right away, and you could say, ‘There’s not much point in showing you. I’m sorry, but certain things are just beyond the scope of some people.’
But Alison put up her hand. She always put up her hand before she talked in class, and in Barringa East Primary it looked peculiar, this solitary, straight-as-a-flagpole hand up in the air, when everyone else was just calling out. Miss Lattimore nodded approvingly at her, and Alison said she already knew how to work an Olympus Trip camera, also a movie camera, and she’d already had some darkroom lessons at her last school. She didn’t sound as though she was actually showing off. She was pleasant and polite as always, but I felt extremely irritated. Up to then I’d been the only student at Barringa East who knew that the red light over the darkroom door wasn’t there just to teach the prep kids traffic drill.
‘Well then, having someone with experience will make our photography programme more interesting,’ said Miss Lattimore. ‘Especially for the members of this class who already think they know it all and can’t be taught any more by anyone.’ (Naturally she meant Barry Hollis, although she was looking in my direction. Perhaps the look was meant to include approval of me as well as Alison Ashley, as I helped supervise the school photography programme. I often turned up early and changed the corridor displays without waiting to be asked, to save Miss Lattimore the bother of doing it herself.)
Out in the playground, Barry Hollis suggested photographing the girls coming out of the boys’ toilets and the boys coming out of the girls’ toilets, but Miss Lattimore just looked at him witheringly. Margeart Collins had the first dithery turn with the camera. She tried to take a picture of a sparrow, but it flew off before she even worked out where the viewfinder was. ‘Never mind, Margaret,’ said Miss Lattimore. ‘Maybe it will turn out to be a very nice picture of Twisty crumbs on asphalt.’
Kevin Cossan took a corny shot of Lisa making out she was shooting a netball goal. The next six people had similar tired ideas. No one else in our grade except me had any imagination whatever. Then it was Alison’s turn with the camera.
She had her picture all worked out. She squinted through the viewfinder judging angles, only of course Alison Ashley didn’t really squint, she just peeped prettily. She climbed up the ladder of the suspended tunnel bridge made of old car tyres, and took a slow, careful photograph. Everyone jeered about how dumb it was, photographing a lot of old tyres. But I looked over her shoulder and saw that the tyres curved into a wonderful pattern of light and shade. I wished jealously that I had thought of it first.
‘That’s very good, Alison,’ Miss Lattimore said. ‘It’s nice to find someone who can keep her eyes open and find something out of the ordinary.’ Alison wound on the film and handed me the camera.
I went twice round the oval peeping prettily at various things through the viewfinder, and came back. ‘About time, too!’ kids snarled impatiently. ‘Come on, Yuk, hand it over.’
‘I haven’t taken my picture yet,’ I said.
‘Honestly,’ said Miss Lattimore. ‘You are . . .’
‘But I’ve thought of something very artistic,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a close-up picture of bark.’
The immature people in our grade sat up and dangled their paws and yapped. ‘Stop that silly yelping,’ Miss Lattimore said angrily. ‘And Barry Hollis, you stupid boy, untie Margaret from that goalpost at once. I’ve told you before not to take macrame string from the craft room.’
I went hunting for a tree with suitable artistic bark. It took a long time. There weren’t many trees in our playground on account of the Eastside Boys ripping up shrubs as quickly as the parents’ club put them in. But there was one eucalyptus tree near the fence. I enjoyed taking photographs; a camera always made me feel like a newspaper reporter, as though I had done a lot of slick dangerous living and worked in a skyscraper. I took pictures of the tree from every possible angle, and somehow used up all the film in the camera.
I didn’t really mean to, but Miss Lattimore turned very snitchy when she saw that the dial was at thirty-six. Everyone carried on about missing out, although it would have been a waste of good film, anyhow, letting them have a try. Their idea of taking pictures was to snap each other pulling down the red part of their eyelids.
‘Next art session the people with worthwhile negatives can prepare a really good print for the competition,’ Miss Lattimore said when she was through telling me off. ‘Barry Hollis, get off that rubbish-bin lid at once and let that person out. Don’t be so unhygienic.’
We went back to our room for lunch and Alison got out her smart white lunchbox. This time she had a wholemeal salad roll practically hopping out of its compartment with vitamins, an apple polished like a Christmas-tree ornament, a health bar made out of sesame seeds, wheatgerm and honey, and a drink bottle filled with tomato juice.
My lunch was weird, as it usually was on the days I brought it from home instead of buying it. I hadn’t been able to find any lunchwraps, so I’d put it all into a used waxed cornflakes bag. I had a thawed-out, pre-cooked frozen rissole, an Irish stew sandwich, and a grotty-looking pear, which looked dead on the outside, but was okay in the middle. Some cornflakes were stuck to its skin. I saw Alison Ashley look at it in disbelief and flinch.
Miss Belmont was putting notices up in the corridor, so it was possible to talk. ‘Are you going to the high school or the tech next year, Alison?’ I asked out of curiosity. Our local high school had even a worse name than Barringa East Primary. Everyone said they flushed the heads of new kids in the toilets as a welcoming ceremony on their first day. The tech was where my sister Valjoy went. They’d turned it into a co-ed school two years ago, and still had only a small enrolment of girls, which was why Valjoy chose it instead of the high school. Parents were a bit nervous about sending their girls to the tech, as it had even a worse name than Barringa East Primary and the high school put together. But Valjoy enjoyed being the only female in the metal-welding class. She liked being outnumbered by a vast horde of wild and daring boys.
‘I won’t be going to either,’ Alison said. ‘My mother put my name down for Kyle Grammar School. She tried to get them to take me earlier, when we found out about the new school zoning. But they didn’t have a vacancy till next year.’
A bit of cold Irish stew sandwich stuck in my throat. You could see Kyle Girls Grammar School from the train going into town. It was just like a school out of an English story book. The girls there wore beautiful pale-blue uniforms with little navy-blue bowler hats and gloves, and if they travelled on the train they always stood up for adults. Once when I was in the same carriage with a couple of them, they found this paper bag with a bottle of expensive skin-moisturising lotion on the seat, and they handed it in to the station attendant. I was so impressed by such honesty that I told Valjoy when I got home. But she went straight up to the station and asked if anyone had handed in a bottle of skin moisturiser because she’d bought some for her gran’s birthday and left it in a carriage, and they gave it to her.
Every time I looked out of the train and saw Kyle Grammar School I ached with jealousy. I would have adored to go to a school like that, and wear a Latin motto on my blazer pocket. And end up as a prefect, or better still, the head girl. At Barringa High School they’d given up trying to make the kids wear uniforms years ago, and I didn’t think they’d ever had prefects, because the kids there didn’t take notice of the teachers, let alone other kids. I was sure I’d fit into a school like Kyle without any difficulty at all. It wasn’t fair that I’d never be able to go there. Alison Ashley already had everything, and Kyle Girls Grammar School, too, to look forward to next year.
‘Oh, that
place,’ I said airily. ‘They don’t teach you anything there except how to cook for dinner parties and play tennis. I’ll be going to Barringa High. From choice. They’ve got a new science block, and a choice of five languages, and for sport they do scuba diving, and they have sit-in strikes and mass demonstrations and lots of other interesting things.’
So there, Alison Ashley, I thought. Swallow that along with your old vitamins.
‘You’re wrong about Kyle,’ Alison said. ‘It had the highest HSC results of any school in the state last year.’
So there, Erica Yurken, her blue eyes said. Eat that along with your disgusting old pear, you mouldy peasant.
‘Barringa High School has a computer room,’ I said. ‘And it also has a drama course. They give a big concert every year, and last year they did Arsenic and Old Lace.’ I didn’t tell her that the performance was cancelled because the Eastside Boys broke into the assembly hall beforehand and did something peculiar to the lighting.
‘Well, at Kyle you can study ballet,’ she said. ‘Oh, I meant to tell you. You made the shoes look funny, on those ballet girls you drew for your assignment. They don’t have a whole lot of criss-crosses. Ballet-shoe ribbons just cross over once and wrap around the ankle.’
‘Not always,’ I said, ‘I went to a ballet last year, a proper one, not just Peter and the Wolf. It was a famous Russian ballet company doing Swan Lake, and they had their ribbons crossing over and over right up to their knees. Pale blue ribbons to match their dresses.’
Alison didn’t say anything in her usual annoying way, but she raised her eyebrows.
‘I went backstage after the performance,’ I said. ‘I know a lot of people in the theatre. And I was allowed to help those ballerinas take off their ballet slippers and pack them away ready to go back to Russia.’
‘It must have been a very peculiar Swan Lake,’ said Alison. ‘They always wear white in Swan Lake. As far as I know swans aren’t ever blue. And they certainly wouldn’t have had their ballet-slipper ribbons going right up to their knees.’
I bit savagely into my pear, which collapsed messily. I didn’t have anything to clean it off the desk with except my half-eaten Irish stew sandwich. ‘You just think you’re great, Alison Ashley!’ I said, exploding like my pear. ‘You think you know everything! You think you’re great just because you live over on Hedge End Road!’
‘I’ve got to live somewhere, haven’t I?’ she said snappily. ‘And do you mind wiping your lunch off my folder cover, if it’s not too much trouble?’
Dianne and Leanne and Bev and everyone looked at us with interest. You can’t mistake a fight shaping up promisingly in a classroom.
‘You think you’re so fantastic!’ I said. ‘You look down your nose at everyone and everything in this school! You snob!’
‘Good on yer, Yuk,’ said Barry Hollis.
‘You mind your own business, Barry Hollis, and stay out of private conversations,’ I said coldly.
‘I am not a snob!’ Alison said. ‘What about you, anyhow, showing off all the time! You’ve done nothing except show off ever since I came to this school!’
‘Yeah,’ said Barry Hollis. ‘Good on yer, Alison Ashley!’
‘You mind your own business and keep out of private conversations,’ Alison said, and her voice wasn’t polite and quiet anymore, it was all over the place and high up, like mine.
Miss Belmont came in and stared at us. Alison busily fitted the lids on her lunchbox and drink bottle. I dumped my pear-flavoured Irish stew wettex into the waxed cornflake bag, and twisted it up viciously.
‘Grade Six, you may go out to play, now,’ Miss Belmont said.
I went along to the sick bay instead and asked Mrs Orlando if I could have some of the new brand of ear drops and an antacid tablet. She told me to put a bit of cottonwool in my ear if it was hurting, and not to gobble my lunch and I wouldn’t get indigestion. ‘Go outside and play in the fresh air, Yuk,’ she said, not even looking up from her Gestetner machine.
Mrs Orlando was a lousy sick-bay attendant.
e didn’t speak to each other for a whole week.
Every day she wore something new to school and every day her work folder collected A’s and flattering comments from Miss Belmont. All the teachers doted on her in a very sickening manner. At assembly they’d be hectoring their classes into what passed for straight lines at Barringa East Primary, and they’d turn and look at Alison Ashley standing there as polite and nicely brought-up as a nativity angel, and their eyes would glimmer with faint hope for the human race. Maybe they thought Alison’s excellent qualities would spread around the whole school and infect everyone, like gastroenteritis.
But it was peculiar, because none of the other kids took to her at all. She was just so private and never started conversations or yakked on about herself. So everyone sort of skated warily around her, not stirring her, because kids who were that pretty and that well dressed didn’t get stirred. But they acted as though she didn’t really belong to our school at all, as though she was just a visitor.
The same way they treated me.
The tension between Alison Ashley and myself caused us to sit as far apart as possible from each other in class. If her work slid over to my side of the desk, I shoved it right back, and if any of my lunch crumbs got over on her side, she’d shovel them back with her ruler, as though they’d been sprayed with poisonous toxins.
With this cold war going on between us, you wouldn’t have supposed for one minute that she’d turn up uninvited at my house and get herself asked for tea.
This was how it happened.
It was late Friday afternoon. Lennie was at the kitchen table, back from Wollongong, or wherever he’d been with his old truck, and he was not only sitting at our table, but Mum was sitting on his knee. I found that extremely embarrassing. She was much too old in my opinion to have a boyfriend, anyhow. Not that Lennie was my idea of anyone’s boyfriend, with his bald patch and his feeble jokes that were about a million years old. (Such as, if Valjoy asked Mum for money for the pictures and Mum said, ‘Try and get in for half, love’, Lennie would be bound to say, ‘Which half of you wants to go?’)
‘I thought I told you not to wear my silver slave bangles to school?’ Valjoy said when I came in. (Every time Valjoy and I met, she began conversations with that phrase: I thought I told you.)
‘Erk can be my slave girl any old tick of the clock,’ said Lennie. ‘Come on, Erk, do us a belly dance. What’s the good of wanting to go on the stage if you can’t do a spot of belly dancing?’ (That shows you the level of his conversation.)
‘We’re having a barbecue tonight, Erk,’ Mum said. ‘And Len’s shouting us to the drive-in after.’
‘Are we supposed to be going in Lennie’s truck? If so, I’m not coming. What if I saw anyone I knew there?’
‘So what if you did?’ demanded Mum. ‘Honest, Erk, you’re getting that sour and critical lately. You never have a nice word to say to anyone in this house. It’ll do you good, madam, starting at Barringa High next year and having your head flushed in the toilet.’
‘That’s a complete myth,’ I said. ‘Anyhow, I’d kill anyone who tried to flush my head in a toilet.’
‘That’s the goods,’ Lennie said. ‘I like a slave girl with a bit of spirit.’
I didn’t answer him, because if there was one thing Lennie didn’t need, it was encouragement. I cleared a space on the kitchen table to mix up some lemon cordial. This is what I had to clear away: a library book about astral projection; a pair of fake eyelashes; three empty beer cans; a black lace bra; a million horse swapcards; the Turf Guide; a plastic tub of shop-made potato salad that had been left out of the fridge and now sprouted a topping of penicillin; a bottle of shoe dye; and the cat. Our cat was a black tom called Norm with a horrible nature, and he swivelled around and bit me on the wrist.
There wasn’t a scrap of gracious living at our house.
The doorbell rang. I didn’t bother to get up and answer it,
because the last four times when I did, it was to see the back view of Barry Hollis nicking off down the street.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Valjoy. ‘I’m expecting Spider and Blonk and Poison. We’re going round to Macker’s house to see his Suzuki.’
‘If Spider’s the one with the head like a hard-boiled egg sliced off at the top, and the python tattoo, and the safety pin through his ear, I don’t want you asking him in, Valjoy,’ Mum said strictly. ‘Last time he was here, he washed his leather jacket in the sink without even asking first.’
I sipped moodily at my lemon cordial through a straw. At least using a straw can give you a feeling of refined living, although it can’t be compared to drinking champagne out of a crystal glass with a stem.
Valjoy yelled from the hall, ‘Mum, tell Blonk and Poison when they come that we’ve gone round to Macker’s anyway. And Erk, here’s a kid from your school wants to see you, can’t think why.’
I looked up, and there was Alison Ashley in our kitchen.
I would, from humiliation, have trickled down under the table and stayed there for ever, but the area under our table was pretty crowded. As well as people’s legs, there was this huge stockpile of ironing, and the vacuum cleaner, and a half-built stable complex belonging to Jedda.
‘Hullo, love,’ said Mum to Alison Ashley. ‘You in the same class as Erk?’
‘I took home Erica’s pencil case by mistake, Mrs Yurken,’ Alison said, so politely. ‘I thought I’d better return it because of all the homework we’ve got to do over the weekend. I’m sorry, I guess I must have picked it up accidentally with my things.’ She put my pencil case down on the table next to Valjoy’s black lace bra and the false eyelashes.
