Sheep on the Fourth Floor

by Leonie Thorpe

Anna had never felt nervous talking in front of the class before. Talking to twenty-five or thirty was not much different from talking to one or two. In fact, it was better because they didn’t talk back or interrupt her so much. And she quite liked the idea that everyone was watching her and listening to what she had to say. But now she could feel her heart thudding and there was an uncomfortable twitchiness in her fingers and legs, so that she couldn’t help bouncing her foot up and down under the desk and fiddling incessantly with her cards.

  A photo came onto the screen of the two horses inside the farm building, both held tightly at the reins.

  ‘Then Barnard’s Star jumped onto Whippet’s back,’ said Joshua, as Vicki flicked through more photos. ‘I don’t know how its legs didn’t collapse—that stallion must weigh a tonne! And see how he’s wearing a muzzle? That’s to stop him biting at the back of the mare’s neck.’

  ‘Mr Mitchell said he hopes the foal will be born with Barnard’s Star’s powerful legs and Whippet’s good manners,’ added Ruby. ‘And though both the horses are brown, the foal might be brown or black or chestnut.’

  ‘Ah, now you lot’ll probably know more about that than I do,’ said Mr Fox. ‘Mendelian genetics escaped my brain a long time ago.’

  ‘Well, that was slightly more interesting than the sewage ponds,’ said Charlotte, clapping politely as Joshua’s group returned to their seats.

  ‘Mmmm,’ Anna murmured absently.

  Anna knew it was supposed to be a group effort, but she had decided to write the report all by herself.

  ‘You just load up the photos and work the PowerPoint,’ she told Otis and Kurt. Otis seemed pleased to get out of the work. Kurt hadn’t protested either, though he seemed a bit distracted and Anna wasn’t sure he was even listening. It wasn’t a matter of lying, Anna told herself. It was just that there wasn’t time to fit in absolutely everything, and if the animal laboratory was simply overlooked, it would save her the trouble of explaining the whole complicated sheep experiment to the class. The report she had written was very boring but she no longer cared.

  ‘Well, breeding horses certainly pays more than teaching,’ said Mr Fox, ‘though so, too, it would seem, does the sewage-treatment industry. Now, Maria, let’s hear your report from the Prestige Funeral Home.’

  Anna’s heart beat a little faster. There was only Ishikawa’s House of Chocolate after that and then her group was on. She drummed her cue cards lightly on the back of her hand.

  ‘We saw the room where they take the dead bodies,’ said Maria Le Compte, whose father and uncle were partners in the business. ‘There weren’t any in there when we visited though.’

  A murmur of disappointment went around the class.

  Some uninteresting photos flicked onto the screen: several bunches of flowers, calming but bland rooms containing plain, non-threatening furniture, a large chapel room with a colourful stained glass window at one end.

  Charlotte held up a magazine. ‘This is the catalogue that you can choose the coffins out of. They range from a solid oak one with brass fittings, which costs thousands of dollars, to plain plywood, which only costs a few hundred. And there’s a biodegradable cardboard one if you’re worried about the environment.’

  ‘You can also get your coffin custom-painted,’ said Travis. ‘In the book it shows some with snowy mountains painted on, and some with motorbikes or racing cars. There’s even one with All Blacks stuff all over it!’

  ‘Cool, I’m gonna have that one,’ said someone at the back of the class.

  Anna sat silently through the subsequent discussion about the running of a funeral home and the very profitable business of burying people.

  ‘Well done,’ she managed to mumble to Charlotte as she sat down again.

  And though the chocolate shop was by far the most eagerly awaited, Anna barely heard the report. Damon Tainui was saying something about chocolate moulds and stainless steel pots and sacks of sugar, and there were lots of colourful photos of the inside of the shop, and pictures of Mr Ishikawa proudly holding up his framed Diploma in Sweet Making from a college in France.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind having to spend three years in France learning how to make chocolate,’ said Mr Fox.

  Anna thought Mr Fox sounded a bit despondent. Perhaps he was wondering how he had ended up in a teaching career, rather than doing any one of the interesting and very well paid jobs he was hearing about.

  But Anna was waiting for Mr Fox to say the dreaded words. And, all too soon, he did.

  ‘Anna? Let’s hear from your group now; the medical research lab.’

  While Otis and Kurt fussed around the computer, Anna faced the class and cleared her throat.

  ‘The South Pacific Health Research Laboratory at St Sebastian’s Hospital is a world leader in scientific research. The laboratory was founded in 1954 and it is housed on the fourth floor of St Sebastian’s Hospital.’

  Her eyes glanced towards the screen. A photo showed the outside of the building through the back passenger’s window of Jeff’s old Volkswagen Beetle. Kurt had obviously taken it as they were being driven back to school.

  ‘There are one hundred and seven staff employed by the laboratory, ranging from cleaners and clerical workers to doctors and professors of medicine.’

  Anna could feel the atmosphere in the classroom become thick with boredom. People chewed their pens, shuffled their feet, gazed at the clock and let out long sighs. Otis was now clicking his way through photos of long corridors, each very similar to the last. Anna frowned, wondering if he had actually sorted them or if he was just going to show every one of the dozens of photos Kurt had taken.

  She carried on in a loud and confident voice.

  ‘The laboratory is funded primarily by the government, but pharmaceutical companies also provide grants to test their own products. The laboratory has an annual budget of twenty-five million dollars.’

  Even the mention of such a huge sum of money didn’t get any response from the near-comatose students. Anna noticed that even Mr Fox was staring off into the distance as though he was carefully considering what to have for dinner that night.

  There was a muffled giggle amongst the class. Anna looked up at a photo of herself putting on the lab coat. He tongue was half sticking out and the photo had caught her looking slightly to the right. She looked like a lunatic.

  Anna glared at Otis—he could have culled that one at least.

  She carried on. ‘One of the important research topics currently being undertaken is a study of the antibiotic sensitivity of a bacterium called Streptococcus pneumoniae.’ Anna smiled to herself. She had been practising saying that name for a few days, checking with her mother that the pronunciation was just right. If the talk was going to be boring, she might as well try to impress a few people.

  The class laughed out loud.

  Anna frowned and looked up. It was a photo of Jeff swabbing Kurt’s tongue.

  Anna ignored the photo and continued with her report. Perhaps she could slip that impressive word in again.

  ‘Ahem. The bacterium, as I said, is called Streptococcus pneumoniae and it is a cause of…’

  ‘We looked at Kurt’s spit!’ interrupted Otis. He grabbed an infrared pointer and waved it at Kurt’s photo on the screen. ‘The lab guy, Jeff, put Kurt’s spit under a microscope, magnifying it by four hundred times. We saw all these different types of bacteria zipping around.’ He looked gleefully at the class. ‘Millions…billions of them!’

  The class erupted into a chorus of groans and ‘yuck’s and ‘ugh’s. Otis grinned with delight.

  Kurt grimaced slightly and elbowed Otis in the ribs.

  ‘Everybody’s got bacteria in their mouths, Otis,’ said Anna, glaring at him severely. She glanced back at her cue cards. ‘Jeff showed us the room where they extract DNA…’

  ‘That was boring, just a load of machines,’ interrupted Otis again. ‘This is a photo of the staff room. Jeff got us a hot chocolate and a biscuit. They’re only supposed
to have fifteen minutes at morning-tea time but Jeff said they sometimes sit around for nearly an hour.’

  Anna knew that tea rooms were not what Mr Fox was looking for in a good report. Also, Otis was implying that the lab workers, which would include her mother, were lazy or unproductive. She tried to steer the talk back to more important issues. ‘In the media room there’s a machine which makes—’

  ‘We saw all these animals!’ It was Kurt interrupting this time.

  Anna’s heart leapt and she cursed under her breath.

  ‘Kurt!’ she hissed, feeling her face redden. ‘We haven’t got time to…’

  ‘There were rats and rabbits in these cages that they use for experiments,’ Kurt continued, blatantly ignoring Anna.

  ‘And there was even a sheep!’ Otis added, waving his arms around.

  ‘Yeah, a real live sheep up there on the fourth floor!’ Kurt confirmed. ‘He had a tube sticking out of his stomach where they did an operation on him and one out of his leg. He stays in the lab and doesn’t ever get let out into a paddock.’ Kurt’s eyes flicked to Anna’s and he quickly looked away, but he didn’t stop talking. ‘They give him drugs and stuff. He looked really sad.’

  Anna closed her eyes and took a deep breath while the class muttered their mixed reactions of puzzlement and outrage.

  ‘Yuck.’

  ‘Cruel.’

  ‘Wicked!’

  ‘Weird.’

  Even Mr Fox was surprised. ‘Caged animals? At the hospital? I wouldn’t have thought they would allow it.’

  Anna opened her eyes. She stared boldly at the class.

  ‘It’s not that big a deal,’ she said with confidence, though her face felt hot. ‘The sheep is what is called a “large animal model”. They need it for their research, to see how the drugs will affect real people. The rats and rabbits are too small. Anyway, they’re all well looked after by specially trained animal technicians.’

  ‘It would be like a prison though, wouldn’t it?’ said Lloyd Porter, sitting near the front.

  ‘They’re all well looked after,’ Anna repeated.

  ‘But they’re stuck in tiny cages,’ said someone else. ‘And then they get experiments done on them. I used to have a rabbit and I wouldn’t do that to it. I think it’s really cruel.’

  ‘I’m glad I didn’t go to Anna’s mum’s lab. I would have felt sick to see that,’ someone else declared.

  Anna shuffled desperately through her cue cards, looking for a distraction; something to end the report on a more positive note. The class grumbled amongst themselves and then, disturbingly, they all fell silent.

  Anna looked up. They were all staring with open mouths at the overhead screen. She glanced at Kurt and Otis, who were looking slightly guilty, and then her gaze was drawn up to the screen. She swore out loud. Somehow, when nobody was looking, Kurt had broken the rule about taking photos in the animal lab. Lying down in its bed of straw, looking worryingly lifeless, was a lone, caged sheep. It was Rom.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Anna ambled past the science block towards the school gates. It was twenty minutes until the Peraki bus left and she’d forgotten to bring a book to read. The battery on her iPod was flat, which was irritating because she could sense the phantom voice preparing itself for a little chitchat. A couple of boys darted past her, their backpacks swinging left and right as they dodged through the dawdling foot traffic. Anna stared at the ground in front of her while her mind relived the class talk. Bloody Otis! Bloody Kurt! She could have mangled them both for showing that photo to the class. So much for impressing everyone with her mother’s highly regarded research; now they probably thought Penelope was some kind of animal torturer. If only she’d remembered to pass on what her parents had said about saving lots of young, innocent children from terrible diseases.

  Mr Fox was so pleased at the healthy debate that had been stirred up that he had given them an A for their presentation. But even this didn’t cheer Anna up. Through the gloomy fog of her thoughts, Anna became aware of someone behind her yelling insistently. It was a while before she realized it was her own name she could hear.

  ‘Anna! Anna! Hang on, wait!’

  She stopped and turned around. Kurt Osmond was making his way through a group of senior girls who were pushing their bikes towards the school gate. Kurt waved out to her.

  ‘Wait!’ he yelled again.

  Anna stepped out of the crowd onto the grass verge near the gate, wondering what he wanted.

  Kurt gave her a small grin as he caught up with her. ‘That went all right today, didn’t it?’ he said, joining her on the grass verge. ‘Can’t complain about an A.’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? The talk was a mess!’ Anna replied angrily. ‘You and bloody Otis should have left me to do the talking, like we agreed. And you broke Jeff’s rule about taking photos in the lab—we could get in serious trouble for that.’ She doubted anyone would really care, but still, he shouldn’t have done it.

  Kurt grimaced and stared at his shoes. ‘Ah, sorry about that. I took the photo when I first saw him, before you lot all came in. I told Otis to take it out of the slideshow but he must have forgotten.’

  Anna stared at him. ‘Well, it’s bloody irresponsible!’ she barked. She was mad that the whole report had gone wrong, leaving her mother looking less than honourable. Kurt was a perfect target for her frustration.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m really sorry,’ Kurt repeated. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you so much.’ He put his hand through his hair and sighed. ‘I couldn’t help taking the photo. I thought the whole situation was so sad and freaky. And anyway, it’s what you’re supposed to do in journalism, isn’t it? Tell the truth and let other people make up their minds.’

  ‘But Jeff said not to!’ Anna repeated with a scowl.

  ‘Well, like I said, I didn’t think Otis was going to show it,’ said Kurt. ‘And it’s not like we put the sheep there ourselves, is it? It’s not like, even if we didn’t like the sheep being in there, even if we wished we could set it free, it’s not like we could do anything about it. Taking a photo doesn’t make any difference to anything.’

  ‘Taking that photo was dishonest,’ said Anna, not yet willing to forgive Kurt’s brazen disregard for the rules.

  Kurt kicked at the concrete guttering, looking uncomfortable. ‘Actually, I didn’t stop you to discuss the class talk. There’s something else I need to confess.’ Kurt sighed and reached into his pocket; he seized something in his hand and presented it to Anna.

  ‘My watch!’ she said, taking it from his outstretched hand. Her face lit up with sudden delight. ‘You found my watch! Thank God for that. I wasn’t looking forward to telling Mum I’d lost it. Where was it?’

  ‘Er…’ Kurt kicked the guttering again. ‘I didn’t find it,’ he said, ‘I, ah, stole it. But see, now I’m giving it back.’

  Anna looked from her watch to Kurt and back again. ‘What do you mean, stole it?’ she said.

  Kurt closed his eyes and sighed. It seemed like the only thing he’d done all week was explain and apologize, over and over. He opened his eyes again and looked carefully at Anna.

  ‘I stole your watch and now I’m giving it back,’ he said in a tired voice. ‘It’s a complicated story but I took your watch and a bunch of other stuff and I’m sorry and…ah, I’m very sorry.’

  A snort of laughter escaped from Anna’s mouth. ‘You’re joking with me, aren’t you?’

  Kurt shook his head slowly. ‘No, I’m not joking.’

  Anna knew he was telling the truth. Not even a very good actor could look so pitifully ashamed.

  ‘So you break the rules by taking photos in the lab and then you steal stuff?’ She looked at Kurt with renewed wonder. ‘That’s a bit…stupid, isn’t it?’

  Kurt bit his lip and nodded slowly. ‘It’s okay if you don’t forgive me right away,’ he said. ‘I know I have to earn your respect again first.’

  ‘Do you know how much this watch cost?’ Anna deman
ded.

  ‘Well, it’s just a replica Ziegler,’ said Kurt with a shrug. ‘You can get them for twenty bucks at the mall.’

  ‘It’s not a bloody replica!’ said Anna. ‘Can’t you tell real gold plating when you see it? It’s a real Ziegler, all the way from Vienna. Mum got it for me when she was there for a conference. It’s worth over a thousand dollars.’ She scowled again at him.

  Kurt shook his head and cursed his idiocy. Obviously he couldn’t recognize an outrageously expensive watch any more than he could recognize an outrageously expensive mountain bike. He put his hands in the air and sighed again. ‘Yeah, well, like I said, I’m really sorry.’ He looked towards the school gate. ‘I’m sorry about the photo of the sheep and I’m sorry about your watch.’ He paused, waiting for her to say something, but she seemed to have run out of words. ‘Okay? So, bye then.’

  Anna stayed on the grass verge, stroking her thumb over the smooth face of her watch. She looked up and watched Kurt jogging towards the bus stop. She’d known Kurt since kindergarten but she would never have guessed that he harboured criminal tendencies. And to steal a watch only to give it back? Now that was just plain weird. She vowed to stay away from him from now on; the boy was clearly unhinged.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Rom felt the pressure build up in the front of his head, inside his nose. He braced himself and let out another sneeze, wincing at the pain in his chest. If he hadn’t already been lying down, the effort of the sneeze would have bowled him over. He felt very thirsty but was too exhausted to haul himself up to get to his water bowl. Beside the water bowl, his food pellets remained untouched.

  ‘You’ll have to up his antibiotic dosage,’ said the woman with the clicky heels. She stood beside his cage looking carefully at a medical chart. Rom didn’t like the strange odour that always accompanied her; it was too intense and made his head ache. ‘Maybe even double it. He’s not looking too good, is he?’

  ‘Hasn’t eaten anything in days, Doc,’ said the man with the funny red hair, ‘and his heart rate is elevated too. I’m going to get him fed through a gastric tube, so his blood sugars don’t drop any more.’