by Robin Klein
‘What competition?’ asked Wendy Millson.
‘What film?’ asked Col.
‘What photos?’ asked Lisa.
‘What’s developing and printing?’ asked Margeart Collins.
‘You know very well what I mean,’ said Miss Lattimore, and her voice took on a high-pitched brittle sound. ‘The photographs we took in the playground last week for the inter-school competition.’
‘Oh, those,’ said everyone, and went on throwing pellets of clay at each other.
‘The people who want to enter for the competition may go into the darkroom and make a print from their negative,’ said Miss Lattimore. ‘And after it’s washed and dried, mount it nicely on some cardboard, and make sure none of the glue seeps around the edges, and print your name, age, grade and school on the back, and . . .’
Most of the kids stopped listening at the first hint that the competition meant work. Barry Hollis hadn’t started to listen in the first place. He was doing what he always did in art and craft, and that was see how much school property he could pinch without being caught. His cheeks were bulging with cut-out copper enamelling shapes, ready to spit out into his hankie when Miss Lattimore was looking the other way. He sold them to kids after school for five cents each.
‘Barry Hollis, what’s the meaning of that insolent face?’ Miss Lattimore demanded angrily. ‘I’m just about fed up with you wasting time in this class. Mr Nicholson said to send you over to the office if I had any more trouble with you this week. Well, what have you got to say for yourself, young man?’
Barry Hollis couldn’t say anything without copper horseshoes and little copper butterflies skittering out of his mouth if he opened it. So he just stared at Miss Lattimore right between her two eyes with this sinister look he could put on that always terrified new teachers. But Miss Lattimore had been teaching at Barringa East Primary for nearly two years, and her tolerance level for Barry Hollis had slowly increased over that period. I guess teachers just had to increase their tolerance levels with Barry Hollis, or they would have ended up in prison for murder.
‘All right,’ said Miss Lattimore. ‘If you refuse to answer when I speak to you, you can just go over and tell Mr Nicholson you’ve been insolent again. No doubt he’ll bear that in mind when he’s finalising the list for the Grade-Six camp. Erica, you go with him to make sure he gets there.’
Someone always had to accompany Barry Hollis to the office, otherwise he just climbed over the fence and went home. Or he went down behind the sports shed and had a smoke, or caught the bus over to the shopping centre for a spot of shoplifting.
Barry Hollis tilted his sinister expression in my direction. I put up my hand – I was copying that from Alison Ashley – and told Miss Lattimore that I preferred not to escort him to the office all by myself. Last time I did, he tried to hang me up on one of the corridor pegs by the hood of my tracksuit.
‘Very well. Alison, you go, too,’ said Miss Lattimore. She gave Barry Hollis one last cold dismissing look, but while she was speaking to Alison, he’d managed to grab a stack of coloured paper and some sheets of Letraset and slide them under his shirt.
Outside in the corridor he spat out the copper shapes and put them in his pocket, where he already had some brand new tubes of epoxy resin. Then he pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Want a smoke?’ he asked Alison, showing off.
‘I’m not allowed to smoke,’ she said simply.
Now most kids would never come out with a statement like that. They’d rather say, ‘Oh, I gave up smoking last week.’ Or, ‘I don’t smoke that brand.’ Or, ‘I’ve got a sore throat.’ That was the first time I ever heard any kid at our school come right out and say they weren’t allowed.
Even Barry Hollis looked stunned.
‘Anyhow,’ said Alison. ‘Besides being a health hazard, cigarette smoke smells awful. I don’t like being close to people who smoke.’
Barry Hollis did a peculiar thing. He put the unlit cigarette back in his pocket. It was just as well he did, because Miss Belmont came out of the staffroom and wanted to know why he was being sent to the office under escort. Barry Hollis said what he always said to teachers who asked questions like that, which was, ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’
I took one look at Miss Belmont’s expression and grabbed Alison by the arm and whisked her back into the art-and-craft room. Only fools would choose to hang around when volcanoes are about to erupt.
Then I became aware that I was actually touching Alison Ashley, the Snow Queen, and you don’t touch people who are your enemy, and who sneakily come round to your house to spy on you. So I quickly took my hand away and wiped it on my skirt.
Miss Lattimore already had the darkroom set up. ‘Alison and Yuk, you two can get started on your prints,’ she said.
I picked up the strip of negatives and placed it in the enlarger. Shane Corbert had produced his usual blurry failure. Margeart, as well as scaring away the sparrow, had also managed to get a blobby image of her thumb. Someone else, Barry Hollis probably, had taken a picture of a bottom bending over in tight jeans. I moved the strip of negatives along and came to the one Alison had taken of the tyres.
‘You can go first and get your funny little picture done,’ I said. ‘I like to spend a lot of time without any distractions when I work. Now, this machine is called an enlarger, and this knob here is the focuser, and this little switch is what you use to turn the red shutter on and off . . .’
‘I know all that already,’ said Alison Ashley. ‘You’re not the only person in the world who knows about photography.’
She fiddled around making test strips on different grades of paper. Then she made one large print, developed it and put it in the tray of fixer, doing all the correct things, such as handling only the corners with the tongs, and not getting one splash of chemicals out of the trays.
‘It’s been in long enough to have a look at it under white light,’ she said.
White light, indeed! Nobody else except Miss Lattimore called it that. I switched on the overhead light and looked over her shoulder stealthily, because I certainly didn’t want to give her the impression of being interested in anything that she did.
The picture was marvellous.
Everything was perfect, the shadows crisp and dark, every little detail sharp. It didn’t look a bit like a snapshot of old playground equipment. It looked just like a picture you would pay a lot for if it was poster-sized in a newsagency.
Miss Lattimore came in and raved about it, practically with tears of pride running down her suntan. ‘It’s really wonderful, Alison,’ she cried ecstatically. (I’d noticed before that art-and-craft teachers at our school always carried on like that if anyone ever produced something that looked even vaguely artistic.) ‘It’s really excellent work for someone your age,’ Miss Lattimore burbled. ‘When it’s been washed and dried, you must take it over and show Mr Nicholson.’
In fact, all the teachers at Barringa East Primary carried on like that. Every time any kid produced something that was tidy, clean, completed or even recognisable as work, they’d be sent over to show it to Mr Nicholson. Maybe the teachers felt sorry for him, having to go along to seminars with all the other principals from schools like Gilland, Edgeworth and Jacana Heights.
I felt jealous. All through my years at Barringa East Primary, from prep grade up, I’d always been the one sent to show work to Mr Nicholson. ‘Right,’ I thought, when they both went out to wash Alison’s marvellous print. ‘This is where I show Alison Ashley what real photography is all about.’
I found my negatives of bark, and projected the first one to the largest possible size. If I’d known how to project it right down on to the floor to make it poster size, even if I had to use the photo paper stuck together with sticky tape, I would have, but we weren’t allowed to fiddle round too much with the enlarger.
I moved the focusing knob to get a sharp image but nothing much happened. The negative just wouldn’t come into focus. I tri
ed all the others I’d taken, then realised with humiliation that it was because I hadn’t got the distances right in the first place when I took the photos.
‘Very well, then,’ I thought. ‘It will be an artistically blurry photograph. Anyone can take an ordinary, focused picture. Mine will be original and different.’
I used up quite a lot of paper making prints, but they didn’t really look artistically blurred. They just looked like close ups of tree bark that hadn’t been properly focused. However, I examined the biggest print under white light, and convinced myself that it was just like one of those big misty greeting cards you buy in shops. (Inside they have messages written in silver ink saying, ‘Serenity is footprints along a solitary shore’ and they cost five weeks’ pocket money.)
Several people were kicking down the door and yelling it was their turn and what was I taking so long over. I hid all the wasted pieces of paper so nobody would suspect I’d run into slight technical difficulties. Then I took the print out on a paper towel to show Miss Lattimore and Alison Ashley a thing or two. All the kids came crowding round to see if they were in it. They stared at my tree bark.
‘What is it?’ asked Margeart.
‘Skin problems,’ said Sharlene.
‘Leprosy,’ said Colin.
‘Acne and blackheads,’ said Bill.
‘Skin peeling off after a sunburn,’ said Lisa.
‘Skin on a drowned corpse that’s been in the water three months,’ said everyone.
‘Don’t be so disgusting,’ said Miss Lattimore. ‘At least Erica produced an entry for the competition, which is more than can be said for various other people in this grade. It’s very nice, Yuk. A very nice print of . . . What exactly is it, Erica?’
Barry Hollis, back from being sorted out by Miss Belmont and Mr Nicholson, shoved his face up to my print and peered. ‘It’s got a dirty word written on it,’ he said. ‘She’s taken a picture of a dirty word.’
‘Barry Hollis, I have just about had enough of you,’ said Miss Lattimore sternly. ‘You spoil every class. You never want to learn. You’re the rudest boy I ever met. You think you’re being so smart, but you are just boring and tedious.’
Barry Hollis had been hearing similar observations from every adult in his life, probably since the day he was born, so he wasn’t offended or anything. He turned my photograph upside down and traced across it with his finger. ‘Take a look at that,’ he said.
I could have died.
There, carved in large scribbled letters deep into the bark of that tree, right on the section I’d photographed, was an obscene word. Everyone began to cheer and clap and stamp their feet.
‘Fancy a tree knowing that word,’ said Margeart Collins dopily when Miss Lattimore quietened everyone down and was reaching in her handbag for a throat lozenge.
‘I didn’t notice it when I took that photo, or when I was doing the enlarging,’ I said. ‘I guess I had the negative in upside down. I didn’t take a photo of a rude word on purpose, Miss Lattimore.’
She gave me a very disappointed, suspicious look and didn’t say anything.
‘I can still enter this print in the competition upside down, can’t I?’ I asked.
‘Certainly not,’ said Miss Lattimore when the Strepsil had worked enough for her voice to come back. ‘It would give this school a bad name, a worse one than it has already, if any of the judges noticed. Alison’s print can represent this grade from our school. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it won a prize in its section.’
Alison Ashley, I thought, I wish something terrible would happen to you! The elastic in your pants would bust, and you’d lose them somewhere really embarrassing and public, like Monday-morning assembly. Or you’d get into a busy lift, and somehow press a whole bunch of buttons at the same time, and make the lift get stuck for about six hours with a crowd of managing directors all on their way to important meetings, and they’d know you were responsible.
I went out the front to put my rude photo in the wastepaper bin.
She came right out behind me to sharpen a pencil. I searched her navy-blue eyes for emotions, but as usual you couldn’t tell what Alison Ashley was thinking. I figured she must have been feeling what I would have, if I’d been in her position. Triumph.
‘Pity about your photo,’ she said. ‘It certainly was original. It’s a shame it has to end up in the bin after all your hard work.’
Standing there batting her innocent, blue, kitten eyes and purring like a cat full of mouse. Gloating through every triumphant minute.
There is a limit to what a person can endure.
‘You think you’re better than anyone else in Barringa East Primary, Alison Ashley,’ I said furiously. ‘Stop acting so snobby and stuck-up. And quit picking on people, too. You’ve got to be careful whom you pick on at this school.’
‘Who said I was picking on anyone?’
‘Let me tell you, Alison Ashley,’ I said. ‘I have some very powerful friends in this school who don’t like me being picked on. In school hours, or out of school hours.’
‘Congratulations,’ she said, and tapped the pencil shavings into the bin. Then she began to sharpen the pencil at the other end. (Which just showed what a mean, ungenerous nature she had.)
‘So I’m just warning you, Alison Ashley,’ I said. ‘If you go on showing me up all the time in school and at barbecues and everywhere, then I’ll have no other alternative.’
‘Than what?’
‘Than to ask my best friend Barry Hollis to bash you up.’
‘Well then, why don’t you ask him now, Yuk?’ she said pleasantly. ‘He’s standing right behind you.’
Eavesdropping, with his ears sticking out like lilies, he was just in the process of reacting to what I’d said about him being my best friend. His mouth was ajar with fury, and his fist bunching up into an almighty punch.
Luckily the bell rang for afternoon recess. As I didn’t feel like spending it in the playground with Barry Hollis looking so dangerous, I headed for the sick bay. But Mrs Orlando wouldn’t let me in, as the bed was already occupied by a kid from Grade Four having a very inferior migraine. So I retreated into the library and got out the copies of the two plays last year’s Grade Six did at the annual camp.
The Grade-Six camp was considered the highlight of the year. It was supposed to foster high ideals such as character building and team work. Every time a grade six went off to that camp, there would be a serious assembly with Mr Nicholson delivering a special annual speech. The grade sixers stood clutching their rolled-up sleeping-bags and listened with respectful, obedient faces positively glowing with high ideals. Maybe because they didn’t want to get left behind at the last minute.
Every year at the camp they had a drama night, and each group put on a play, and parents drove up to the camp to watch. I’d been secretly learning the star roles in those plays for weeks. It was going to be my brilliant debut into the theatre, though neither of the plays was worthy enough. They were the same tired plays Barringa East Grade Six Camp had been putting on for years. One was about King Arthur, the other about pirates, and the scripts were scribbled over with terse stage directions by desperate teachers who’d been in charge of drama at those camps. You could trace where parts had been snatched away from kids and given to others, and finally scrubbed out of the final production altogether. One year they’d apparently ended up with only two pirates on stage for the whole show, and King Arthur was killed off in Scene One, Act One.
Drama hadn’t ever been a very successful subject at Barringa East Primary, but I was going to change all that.
After recess Miss Belmont handed out secret ballot forms. You had to write down the names of three people you would most like to share a room with at the camp. That was so Miss Belmont would know not to put kids who really hated each other in the same room. Everyone made a big thing out of filling in their forms, even writing on them under their desk lids, though practically everyone had already fixed up whom they were going to
share rooms with months back.
I sat and stared at my ballot form. I realised that no one would write my name on their forms, and there wasn’t one kid in our grade I wanted to share a room with for a whole week, either. So I put up my hand.
‘Miss Belmont,’ I said. ‘Could I please have a single room to myself at this camp? It’s this chronic insomnia I suffer from. Maybe I could stay at the camp manager’s house and just come over to the camp for meals and drama rehearsals.’
‘Erica Yurken,’ Miss Belmont said. ‘You have an exaggerated sense of your own importance. Everyone experiences insomnia at some time or another, and it’s something we all have to learn to deal with. There are no single rooms available at this camp, as you’d have seen for yourself if you’d bothered to read the form properly. So kindly write down three names in the spaces, and stop being so neurotic.’
I considered all the kids in our grade without much enthusiasm. Finally I wrote down Margeart Collins’s name in the first space. Although she was so dense, I guessed I could stand her for a week if I tried. I wrote Leanne Jessop’s name in the second space, because it was a safe bet that she’d be overcome by homesickness the first evening, and one of the teachers would have to drive her back to Barringa East. Then I looked at the last space.
And crazily, without me doing anything at all to stop it, my hand all by itself wrote ‘Alison Ashley’.
n Saturday Mum and Lennie went to the races. They took Jedda, who had a newspaper clipping with the names of the horses she was going to bet on underlined in red. I thought it was disgraceful, an innocent child allowed to bet her pocket money on horses.
‘Erk, don’t be daft. She doesn’t place the bets herself,’ Mum said indignantly. ‘That’s illegal. Len puts something on for her, though mind you, she can pick a winner better than Lennie and me put together. What’s going to romp home in race five, love?’
‘Guinea Gold,’ said Jedda. ‘He always wins on a heavy track. And the distance is okay for him. He’s a stayer.’
‘Oh, isn’t she cute?’ Mum cried. ‘Len, did you hear what Jedda said?’
