Fay

by Dulcie M. Stone

  ‘Last time it left her in a mess.’

  ‘Of course. That was the intention. You have to concede it secured the desired results. She stopped starving herself.’

  ‘I wish this present problem was as easy to manage.’

  She frowned. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Eating, yes. Your talk may have changed that. She didn’t want to face the doctor. But learning? You can lead a horse to water …’

  ‘This horse refuses to drink,’ she sighed. ‘Another interview, I think. A last chance. You understand? It’s just possible the plateau she’s reached is as far as she’s going. No matter what any of us do.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Outside, the bell was ringing.

  ‘You’d better get to class.’ Standing to signal their conference was at an end, she briskly slapped the scattered pages back into the stiff covers and turned to resettle the file into its place in the crammed cabinet. ‘I’ll make time again tomorrow. You agree?’

  He frowned.

  ‘Mr Withers?’ The clamour of the bell had re-established formality.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Ryan. I agree.’

  Hurrying across the quadrangle, he again made up his mind. He’d have to be firmer. Fay would not understand. She’d resent it. He’d have to do it. Her future was in the balance.

  When he returned, Ruth had just commenced the art session. Paints, paper, textas, brushes, easels and tables were set out. The students were already at work, some standing before the easels, some stretched full-length on the soft carpet, a couple sitting at their usual tables.

  ‘Mark!’ From her post at a tall easel on the far side of the room, Fay’s excited call summoned him. ‘Look at mine! I’m painting Robin!’

  ‘Sorry, Fay.’ Reinforced during the interview, his frustration unexpectedly surfaced. ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘She’s only trying to please you,’ Ruth gently chided.

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ he snapped. Damn it! He’d only been out of the room half an hour and just being back sent him off balance. Merely the sound of Fay’s voice!

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Everything’s all wrong.’ He led the aide away from the students. ‘Ryan’s on the war-path. Unless Fay improves, she has to go.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘I can see her argument. Fay’s at the legal school-leaving age.’

  ‘Not till January.’

  ‘Exactly. But she’s at a standstill. There’ll be every justification once she’s actually sixteen.’ He shook his head. ‘Until I saw that damned file, I hadn’t really comprehended. If anything, she’s going backwards.’

  ‘You didn’t need the file to tell you that!’

  ‘Perhaps I did. It’s such a mess. I find it hard to be objective about her. I’m getting dragged into something I don’t understand. I tell you this, it has to stop.’

  ‘She was so pleased about her painting. She couldn’t wait for you to see it.’

  He looked across the room. Fay had left the easel. Slumped dejectedly at her table, she was being consoled by Clem. The painting was on the floor in tatters. He started forward.

  ‘It’s too late, Mark. You can’t undo it.’ Ruth placed a detaining hand on his arm. ‘Pretend you don’t notice. She only tore it up to get your attention.’

  ‘It has to stop.’

  ***

  Again Fay came back from Mrs Ryan’s office in tears. Again the class sympathised and comforted. This time he’d been prepared. He’d had Ruth assigned to him for the full morning. He beckoned to her to take over, then left.

  As he’d feared, Fay’s reaction was swift. Again, she changed overnight. Unlike the younger Fay who’d been sullen and uncooperative, who’d hurt only herself, this teenager was fiery. Temper tantrums calculated to disrupt lessons, merciless teasing of her former friends for their inability to perform tasks she now found easy, even hitting them when she thought no one was watching, pugnacious refusal to participate in almost anything of a group nature – she ran the gamut. Daily, hourly, her behaviour teetered on a knife-edge of unpredictably that was compounded by acutely embarrassing intervals of grovelling flattery. All of it obviously aimed at forcing him to respond.

  He kept aloof. He left Ruth, or even Mrs Ryan, to cope with the outrageous behaviour. Their coping often took the form of punishment. The punishment took the form of withdrawal from lessons she liked, missing out on outdoor play and yet more lectures in the office.

  Punishment for disruptive behaviour. No reward for good behaviour. No reward for even trying to behave, for the times when she read the magazines she loved or became engrossed in a painting or clay modeling or a table game.

  It was heart-breaking. It was the epitome of all he detested. It was no surprise that her outrageous behaviour was becoming much worse. Temper tantrums, teasing, hitting, aggression, crying – the unacceptable moods were intensifying, and swinging dangerously.

  Far from deepening his own anger with her, it profoundly moved him. She was like a starving child stranded in a famine. Could Fay have seen him as the rescuer who would feed her hunger for love? Her warped perception, which saw Jenny as a rival, was as desperate as a starving child fighting for a last crumb of bread. Could that be what was happening? Contrary to what everyone thought, could it be that Fay was not simply a teenager with a crush? Was she a starving child fighting for her life? If so, the situation was very grim. It was also potentially catastrophic.

  Whatever the truth, it could not continue. If it were true, there were other rescuers. There were more crumbs to feed her need. There was a whole world of care and concern if she could only learn to trust others too. Her mother deeply loved her. He’d seen it. But she was out of her depth. A busy woman with a large family, nothing in her experience would have prepared her for Fay. How could it? Nothing in his world had prepared him for her, and he was supposed to know what he was doing. Ruth cared. Despite being compelled to punish rather than reward, Ruth cared about Fay. Her father probably cared too. Her friends cared. Even though she was still seriously testing everyone’s goodwill.

  Meanwhile, here he was, standing by. Just waiting until the end of the year, when she’d leave and they could all get on with their work. Here he was, standing by, letting punishment take over his classroom. It was against everything he believed in. It was no different from Adele Turner’s abuse of Clem. It was worse. He was doing nothing because he was protecting his own future. Not true. It was more personally distressing than that. He was doing nothing because he didn’t know what else to do!

  What if Fay was not an infatuated teenager, but a starving child? Would he stand by while a starving child was being punished for fighting for its life? God forbid. His nights were uneasy, his days unbearable. He must do something.

  ***

  They’d been working on reading all morning. By building on anything in which each student was particularly interested, he’d turned learning to read or to comprehend vital survival words into individual lessons. Some were reading recipes, others TV programs, film magazines, football news, sporting events. For Fay, he’d brought pictures and news items of Julie Andrews, which she’d spent the morning compiling into her own book. He knew she was feeling content and happy. It would be a good time – if there was ever going to be a good time – for this discussion.

  When the lunch period was due, as the group was leaving the room, he called her back.

  ‘Fay! Wait!’

  She stopped, her eyes alight.

  ‘You’ll miss your lunch.’ Trixie pulled at her. ‘Come on….’

  ‘Don’t worry, Trixie,’ Mark promised. ‘Fay won’t be long. She and I are going to have a talk.’

  ‘I’ll save your place, Fay.’ Trixie left.

  Sitting at the desk in front of the room, he gestured Fay to one of the student’s tables, thus pointedly defining the essential distinction between teacher and pupil.

  The light in her eyes went out. She knew exactly what the messa
ge was. She made no attempt to open the conversation. As always, she was a surprise. Given her recent grossly undisciplined behaviour, her steadfast control and determination to outlast his uncertain silence was far more mature than he’d expected. Although he’d planned it and worried about it, he remained unsure where to start.

  Hands clasped on the scarred table top, tight face closed and eyes wary, she did not move.

  ‘Mrs Ryan is very upset about your naughtiness……’ Dammit, he even sounded

  like Mrs Ryan.

  He could not continue. He was echoing the thoughts of other people, not saying what he really thought. Yet how could he? The impression of stable maturity was false, misleading and illusory and probably the forerunner of yet another tantrum. She was a baby. She was dangerously fragile. She was incredibly vulnerable.

  ‘Dammit!’ He silently breathed. ‘I am vulnerable!’

  She made no effort to ease the awkwardness between them which had settled, almost visibly, on the confronting tables.

  ‘Fay…’ If only he could touch her, soothe her. He straightened. ‘Fay, why? Why are you behaving so badly?’

  Her gaze was fixed on her clasped hands.

  ‘You’re not going to talk to me?’

  She was motionless.

  ‘Fay, I have to ask - do you want to leave here?’

  The blue eyes widened. She looked up. ‘No!’

  ‘Then why do you behave so badly?’

  She sprang to her feet. ‘You don’t like me! You’re awful!’

  ‘Sit down.’ Keep calm… keep calm….

  ‘I don’t want to sit down.’ Though she lowered her voice, her body was stiff and her blue eyes were dark. ‘I don’t have to do what you say.’

  ‘So stand. But, please Fay - talk to me.’

  ‘You don’t want to talk to me.’ She scrubbed at tears that revealed it was not anger she was trying to control. ‘Nobody wants to talk to me. You all hate me.’

  ‘Hate you?’ He ached for her pain. ‘Fay, try to understand.’

  ‘You never even talk to me no more. I want to go home,’ she fell into the chair, sobbing. ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Fay!’ He moved. Despite warnings and misgivings and experience and all the tutorials drummed in over too many years, he moved. It was a very real risk. Its consequences could be dire. So who in the name of God was he? A teacher? A carer? Or a cowardly pragmatist with his eyes fixed on the goal of his own best interests?

  The move was premeditated. It was not the result of a sudden impulse prompted by emotion or pity or response to manipulation. The move was one Ruth, or any woman, could have made free from fear of censure. The move was one no man, regardless of age or experience or position, could make without fear of censure. For him, and for those like him, suspicion ruled and compassion was suspect – with justification! Where was his new world heading?

  But he was here. He was here, his student’s distress was acute and right now she would listen to no one else. If she was going to listen to anyone at all. Scorning its flimsy protection, he circled the barricade of tables. ‘Don’t cry.’ He stroked her fine hair. ‘Please don’t cry. We all want what’s best for you. We all care about you.’

  Gradually, she quietened. Gradually, the shaking shoulders stilled and the racking sobs stopped. One last sob, followed by an uneasy shifting of her body, signalled it was over.

  ‘There’s a tissue in the cupboard.’ He tried to regain the lost ground. ‘Go get it and dry your eyes.’

  For answer she tugged a handkerchief from her pocket, and noisily blew her nose.

  He retreated to his place behind the barrier. ‘So now we will have our talk. You will understand what I am going to say to you.’

  She replaced the handkerchief, again clasped her hands, raised swollen red-rimmed eyes to his, and smiled.

  She’d won. It really didn’t matter what he said now.

  Except it was not about winning and losing, it was about rescuing a child. It wasn’t even about his own safety, if that was the price to be paid. It was about saving Fay Margaret Clark – whoever she in fact was.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, Fay.’ He reached for his cigarettes, stopped. ‘I don’t see how I can continue to speak up for you to Mrs Ryan.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t want me to come to school.’

  ‘I do want you here, at school learning. I believe you can learn a lot more. You can do it. Here, in this group.’

  ‘I won’t learn if I don’t want to!’ The pitch of her voice was again on the rise.

  ‘So you don’t want to learn?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Which means you do want to?’ he countered.

  ‘I didn’t say that, neither.’

  ‘Tell me…’ He needed this to be spelt out, preferably by her, before he could deal with it. ‘What is it you do want, Fay?’

  ‘I want you to teach me. Like before.’

  He felt the colour rise in his face. Damn it. Why did she have this supreme capacity to unsettle him? Why was it that this teenager, as no other person he had ever met, knew just which button to push to rattle him?

  ‘Not Ruth,’ she announced. ‘Not Jenny. You. You are my teacher.’

  How to respond? She was boxing him into a corner. How the hell could he deal with this? For all the reasons he’d been through a thousand times, he could not back down on Jenny’s role in his room.

  ‘You teach me, I learn. That’s how it is.’

  Retarded? It popped into his mind, cruel and stinking of intolerance. Damn it, she knew how to use words like a bloody rapier. Quick and brutal and concise and lethal. And she was supposed to be backward? Why had his mind thrust up this belittling label?

  ‘You. Not Ruth. Not Jenny,’ she repeated.

  Startled, he realised he’d once again gone off into his own confused depths. Later… Think it through later….

  ‘I’m sorry, Fay.’ He fought the persistent impulse to reach for the comfort of a cigarette. ‘You have to accept the same conditions as your friends. Sometimes Ruth teaches. Sometimes I teach. And sometimes Jenny teaches.’

  She stood.

  ‘Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Mark.’ She started for the door, exited the room and disappeared without looking back.

  He watched in silence. He hadn’t concluded the interview. She had. He should have called her back. To what end? Whatever he did, she was determined to interpret his actions according to her own perverse view of them. Perverse? Unnaturally perverse? How on earth could an unhappy teenager with a seriously underrated problem be classified as unnaturally perverse? Unhappy teenagers with seriously underrated problems were more the norm than the exception. Was it merely that this teenager had problems that were different? Different? Yes. Abnormal? No.

  Sitting at the table, staring at the empty room, he tried to think it through. Why had his subterranean mind reverted to the increasingly unacceptable label - retarded? Times were changing. No longer were these kids thought of as retarded, not in places where enlightened minds were talking about children and adults with intellectual disability. Yet it had popped up with regard to Fay. It had popped up because his gut feeling was telling him that in no way was this one intellectually disabled. So why the word retarded?’

  Don’t ask, he decided. Leave well alone. Except - had he felt so threatened that he needed to belittle her? Don’t ask!

  ***

  Filled with self-loathing, sleep had not come quickly or restfully. The dreams had been nightmares and the sleepless hours had brought no answers. The following morning, frayed and exhausted and dreading the day ahead, he was discussing the morning’s lessons with Ruth when there was a knock on the open classroom door.

  Mrs Ryan, her figure shadowed by the sun at her back, stood in the doorway. Despite the inadequate light he could see that her eyes were unnaturally brilliant in a face without colour. Oddly for her, she remained silent.

  ‘Mrs Ryan! Are you all ….?
’

  ‘In my office.’ Wheeling from the doorway, she strode back across the quadrangle.

  He followed, only vaguely conscious of the few students playing in the early morning heat. His over-taxed mind juggled all the things it could be, so many things going wrong. Too many concerning Fay, too often concerning Fay. Had yesterday’s debacle already brought its feared consequences? Had he ever been naïve enough to think it wouldn’t? Whatever it was, it had to be very serious. Mrs Ryan was never lost for words. Passing the front entrance where the next bus load of students would soon disembark, he knocked on the open office door and went in.

  She sat, erect and stern and every inch The Principal, at her desk. Even the habitual blue suit seemed, this morning, as formidable as a military uniform.

  ‘Take a seat,’ she ordered.

  Taking care not to further antagonise her, he gingerly perched in the subordinate chair opposite her.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to tell her mother.’

  Fay, of course; it could be no one else. ‘What’s wrong now?’

  ‘It’s Fay again,’ her eyes were diamond hard. ‘She’s unconscious again. The bus driver’s just phoned from the hospital. This time he went straight there, with a bus load. Can you believe this!’

  ‘What…?’

  ‘It’s an overdose. An overdose! There seems to be no doubt.’

  ‘God!’

  ‘They’re pumping her stomach. She got her hands on some kind of tablets.’

  ‘Where from? Who supplied them? How…?’

  ‘You’ll excuse me if I cut this short.’ Hands on the desk, she levered herself up from the chair. ‘I have to go. You will be in temporary charge.’

  ***

  ‘This is not the place for emotionally disturbed teenagers.’

  They were in the office. Mrs Ryan had phoned through at mid-day. Fay was recovering. Tired, but as ruthlessly well-groomed as ever, the principal had just returned after a day full of drama and confrontation.

  His day had been little better. Different, not better. As acting principal, he’d spent most of the day hosing down spot fires. Fay’s dramas were unsettling even in her absence. The whole place rocked with uncertainty and speculation. Even the small children, as on the nervous days of searing north winds, had been infected by the prevailing atmosphere of distress. Expecting anyone to settle to lessons was not only impossible, it was illogical. The entertainment skills of the staff had been severely tested.