Chapter 2.
Everyone wanted to be in a group with Sarah, so they could thump her, but Janice and Brian and Mike and me were chosen. Ms Cutter is very strong on equality of the sexes. The boys reckon she does kickboxing and wins tournaments and everything.
So there we were having a discussion. Sarah’s still hanging out for Shakespeare.
‘If you don’t want to do Hamlet then we could do something based on A Midsummer-night’s Dream,’ she suggested.
Yeah, right. There are fairies in that and guess who’d be the fairy queen? I’d get to wear the donkey head, if I was lucky, otherwise I’d be a good old tree again.
‘Let’s do a ghost play,’ was Mike’s suggestion.
‘Hey, yeah man. Like with slime and vomit and stuff. Cool.’
Mike and Brian started talking about some absolutely cretinous movie they had been to which had apparently been full of projectile vomiting and disemboweling.
‘I quite like the sound of A Midsummer-night’s Dream,’ Janice tentatively backed Sarah. She cherished dreams of being a fairy, even though her hair wasn’t long enough or blonde enough. She’d obviously end up joining me in the shrubbery.
‘I have an even better idea. I definitely think we should make it a Dance/Drama production,’ said Sarah firmly.
My goodness. Was she trying to earn Brownie points, or what? Dancing was also part of this new Arts Curriculum thing. Someone in the government had evidently decided that New Zealanders were growing up as a lot of uncultured thickos and we were all going to be taught to dance whether we liked it or not.
I used to like folk dancing. You knew where you were with it. Every year the baby class would do ‘The Wee Wee Woman and the Wee Wee Man’ while the older classes struggled through ‘Clap Dance’ and ‘Skip Annika’ with a few square dances thrown in. By the time we reached Year Eight, most of us could ‘do-si-do’ and ‘Toast King Gustav’ with the best of them, even though the boys threw sickies on folk dancing days if they could get away with it.
There were always a few girls who went to ‘proper’ dancing lessons, like ballet and tap-dancing. They would go off to concerts and competitions and wear amazing costumes with real, actual makeup on. Sometimes us humble mortals were allowed to spend a day with them;
‘There’s no ballet practise this weekend so you can come to my place if you like.’
There we would admire the frothy tutus that we would have sold our souls for. We begged to try them on and watched open mouthed as these visions of loveliness demonstrated a few steps for us. It was a very closed shop. The ‘ballet girls’ were a group unto themselves. They spent their playtimes and lunchtimes huddled in a small group discussing Pointe shoes, plies and whispering about their ballet teacher who they all adored. At parent’s evenings there were always a few of them to dazzle us with their virtuosity to classical or jazz music, and to fill our hearts with envy.
Sarah had been to ballet but had not persevered with it. I never dared to ask her if it was because she wasn’t any good at it or because they expected her to actually sweat. However she had the gear – legwarmers and ballet slippers tossed negligently over a chair by her bed and a selection of leotards in her chest of drawers. Pictures of ballet scenes showered the walls of her room, and in pride of place in the hallway was a photograph of Sarah in a white tutu performing an arabesque.
But ballet was far removed from the new Dance syllabus we studied at school. We were expected to ‘express’ our emotions through movement, although some of the boys got into a bit of trouble over this. We did actually learn some yoga, which was pretty amazing as we thought the teachers would have been far too pre-historic to try that. I quite liked the Latin American dancing but that was obviously deemed to be encouraging S.E.X. so we only did one lesson on that.
I said, ‘I can’t see that yoga or the Rumba would fit into a Dance/Drama,’ but that didn’t bother Sarah.
‘How about if we do excerpts from Shakespeare moving from his time through to the present day and link it all together with dance?’ she said.
Brian and Mike sat looking at her in horror; too astounded to protest.
‘Cool! Bags I be a dancer,’ Janice said enthusiastically.
She obviously didn’t want a speaking part, as that meant learning lines. None of us was keen on memorizing stuff after we suffered Mr Walker for English last year. He made us memorize, and recite to the class, screeds of stuff. We reckoned we learned every poem that had ever been written. Okay, so some of them were not too bad. I quite liked the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner where the dude starts by eating the cabin boy and works his way through the rest of the crew. Actually, most of us enjoyed that one and it’s bound to be handy to drop in as quotes in English essays in the future to impress teachers.
The worst were those awful things that people wrote that didn’t rhyme, and had long uneven lines, and quite frankly, most of us thought they were rubbish. Except Mr Walker. Mr Walker loved poetry. We cheered when we found we didn’t get him for English this year. That was before we found out what a cow Ms Cutter could be. Now we’d give anything to have him back.
‘We will need to have one central character to tie the whole thing together,’ continued Sarah. No prizes for guessing who this central character would be. Who else, but the perfect Sarah? We were going to argue but Ms Cutter called us all to order.
‘Time’s up,’ she said. Now I’d like each group to tell me in turn what they have come up with. Hamish, what has your group decided?’
‘We’d like to do something with ghosts,’ said Hamish. This got a cheer from all the boys. Ms Cutter frowned.
‘We want witches,’ Ruby called out.
‘You won’t need any make-up for that,’ put in Ty. Ruby scowled at him and Ms Cutter said, ‘That’s enough. Settle down, children.’
‘We want something with fighting or war,’ Ty said firmly, although judging by the black looks from the girls in his group, they hadn’t agreed to any such thing. Ms Cutter looked unimpressed and turned to Gemma.
‘I think, I mean, we think it should be a puppet show,’ Gemma said confidently. She went on to explain that she and her other ballet friends would dance as puppets. In fact, I think it was actually a real ballet of some sort, but derisive laughter greeted their attempts to explain it. Ms Cutter got narky and shut everyone up and asked, ‘Sarah what has your group decided?’
Her group! I ask you? Groups are groups and I didn’t notice anyone calling for nominations for group leader here. Not that anyone would have opposed Sarah. She would have been elected leader anyway, but still!
Sarah said diplomatically, ‘I think we can use all these ideas, Ms Cutter. Except the puppet show.’
Sarah doesn’t like the ballet girls much either. Sarah went on to tell the class about the idea of a Shakespeare Dance/Drama with music and costumes ranging from old-fashioned to contemporary blah, blah. Even I had to admit she made it sound pretty impressive. We could see that Ms Cutter was impressed. She made ‘oh, yes,’ and ‘you are so right,’ noises and got more and more excited about it. Finally she announced,
‘We will go with Sarah’s idea. Who would you want to help organize it?’ Sarah smiled and said,
‘Chelsea can write it and I think Brian would be a great stage manager.’
I felt like I’d been kicked by one of our calves. All I could do was gasp like some sort of dying goldfish. I could see Brian looking as shocked as I was and we were both too amazed to do more than stammer some sort of acceptance.
‘Fine,’ said Ms Cutter. ‘Let me have an outline by the end of the week please, Chelsea. That will leave seven weeks for rehearsals. I will arrange with Mr Murdoch for you to use the media suite to rehearse in at lunchtimes.’
You’ll notice she said ‘rehearse at lunchtimes.’ Not, ‘what time would be convenient?’ or ‘you can rehearse in class time.’ The cow. And ‘an outline by the end of the week!’ I spent the last few minutes of the lesson, when we were supposed to be copy
ing the homework off the board, thinking of all the ways I could kill Sarah. It had to be painful. Perhaps tying her down and rubbing her with cheese and letting rats nibble her. Or poisoning her with something slow and agonizing. Dangling her from a tall building before letting her go sounded pretty good too. Unfortunately, due to the lack of rats, poison and tall buildings, unless you count the Balcony Café downtown, Sarah looked unlikely to meet with a fatal accident. Pity.
‘What did you do that for? Why did you suggest me?’ I screamed at her when we went off to wait for the school bus. It was going to be a long wait as we had missed the usual bus because of my detention. It could have been worse. At least I had Sarah for company.
Sarah shrugged.
‘But you’re a good writer, Chelsea. You used to get 8/10 for your stories every week.’
‘That was when I was ten years old,’ I howled.
‘But they were really good. I used to like it when you wrote about being a princess.’
‘That’s because I thought I really was one,’ I said wryly, as I flopped on the grass beside the school gate to wait for the bus.
‘You didn’t, did you?’ Sarah started giggling as she sat down beside me and I had to join in. ‘Why?’
‘Because my life was so boring,’ I said defensively. ‘I mean, look at me. I’m ordinary. Average ordinary brown hair, average height, average freckled face and not particularly outstanding in anything. I used to think that I must be a princess in disguise.’ I sighed as I remembered. ‘One day my Fairy Godmother would appear when I was tidying my room or washing the dishes and wave a magic wand.
‘Your true parents, the King and Queen, want you to come to them,’ she’d say. ‘They gave you to these poor peasants to bring up for your own safety.’’
‘What was unsafe about your childhood?’ Sarah asked, spluttering with laughter.
‘Well, I was always a bit hazy about that,’ I admitted, ‘ but the main thing was that the whole dream was such a great one. My fairy godmother would say.
‘Your carriage awaits you, O Princess.’
I’d look out the kitchen window to see a large golden carriage drawn by four coal black horses.’
‘I’ve always wondered about that,’ Sarah interrupted. ‘ Have you noticed that in fairy tales the horses are always coal black or pure white? Never that ordinary shade of brown that most horses are.’
‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ I agreed. ‘ I guess you get the odd dappled grey one, too.’
‘I’ve never seen one of those, have you?’ asked Sarah.
‘No, not unless you count that old wooden rocking horse my Aunt Gillian has on her porch for all the little kids who come to visit to play on. And I think that‘s really a white one that’s gone grey from age.’ We sat there for a while and watched the cars going past. A few kids were still straggling past on bikes or walking, and some of them waved at us, but mostly the bus kids were left by then.
‘Tell me more about being a princess,’ urged Sarah.
‘Oh, you’ve heard it before.’
‘I know, but you do it really well. Besides, it’s ages until the bus comes and there’s nothing else to do.’
‘Oh, okay then.’ I didn’t need much encouragement. ‘ My Fairy Godmother would point at the golden carriage and wave her wand. By magic, my faded jeans and grubby T-shirt would be replaced by a shimmering turquoise dress. I would have a golden crown on my head, set with rubies and emeralds, and my sandals would be golden as well. My feet would have magically grown smaller and daintier - actually all of me would become smaller and daintier - and my hair would cascade in ringlets down my back.
The handsome coachman (naturally) would hand me into the carriage while my parents and two little brothers would stand weeping to see me go. I would wave lightly with one golden gloved hand before reclining on the silken cushions for the rest of the journey to meet my tall and good looking parents. They would be beautifully dressed and living in a turreted castle. My room would be at the top of the tallest turret and I would have doves flying in to land on my outstretched hands to coo at me. I would not be expected to do any work except toss a few coins at passing peasants and I would eat whatever I wanted to.’
‘Sounds wonderful,’ sighed Sarah.
‘I know,’ I agreed.
‘I wonder what your life would be like if it really happened like that?’
‘It’s not likely too, unfortunately. I have the worst family out.’
‘Your family is nice,’ said Sarah indignantly.
‘That’s because you don’t live with them. They are totally unreasonable I mentioned that I might be a princess in disguise, quite casually once. Big mistake!’
‘What did they say?’
‘My mother was immediately miffed that I would consider her badly dressed. Well, I mean, her clothes are terrible. She wears a dress, for heaven’s sake, when all the other mothers wear jeans. It is so embarrassing. I’ve told her what I expect her to wear when she comes to school events like Sports Days, but will she listen? Anyway, she snapped that this imaginary mother wasn’t much use if all she did was stand around in beautiful clothes. She obviously didn’t have to cook meals or wash clothes or go shopping or any of the things that she had to do. For no thanks. Because we were all ungrateful and she was giving us the best years of her life and she could sit around all day in fancy clothes if we were millionaires, which we weren’t and…you get the picture!’
‘Mm,’ murmured Sarah, trying not to laugh.
‘My father wasn’t much better. He just laughed and said that he didn’t care what he wore as long as it was comfortable and functional, but basically it was whatever was within reach when he first got out of bed in the morning. Unless Mum got up first and put everything in the wash. He said he would be very suspicious of a man who spent all day sitting around in beautiful clothes. He didn’t think it would be very ‘manly’ and he hoped that neither Billy nor Malcolm grew up to be like that. He said they certainly weren’t getting that sort of example set by him. He’s right there. He wears terrible clothes.’
‘So does my Dad,’ agreed Sarah. ‘You think they’d make an effort sometimes, wouldn’t you?’
We sat there for a while and looked critically at the clothes of all the guys we could see. Most of them were in school uniform, which hardly counted, and the only teachers we saw looked fairly ordinary. None of them was wearing anything that could be remotely considered trendy. I guess a school is hardly at the forefront of the fashion stakes.
‘But that wasn’t the worst of it,’ I added indignantly. ‘Dad also said that if I sat around each day doing no exercise, and eating whatever I wanted to, I would get fat. Then Malcolm said that doves are the same as pigeons and told me that his friend Peter had pigeons. Or rather, Peter’s father had pigeons, but Peter got to help by cleaning out the coop every weekend. Malcolm said that pigeons shit everywhere so I wouldn’t want them flying into my bedroom unless I liked sleeping in pigeon shit. He said they make an awful racket with their cooing and Mrs Knight who lives next door to Peter’s family was always complaining about the noise and also about the mess they made on her clean washing.’
Sarah started giggling again then but she begged me to keep going.
‘I can’t think of any more, it’s too cold.’ We shuffled over into a patch of watery sunshine.
‘Go on,’ urged Sarah.
‘ I did say to Mum and Dad once that maybe if I wasn’t a princess then I could have been swapped at birth with a millionaire’s child by mistake. They didn’t even think it was possible. In fact my father started talking about how I was the ugliest baby in the hospital, and yelled so loud every night for the first six months that they would have gladly given me away to anyone who would have taken me.’
I stood up and reached for my bag as the bus cruised to a stop beside us.
‘That’s why I suggested you write the production, Chelsea,’ said Sarah in admiration. ‘You have such a wonderful imagination.’
If It Wasn't For Sarah Page 2
