Alex as Well (4 page)

IN ART METAL I’m drawing a picture of our house. Amina does general wood, so I’m on my own.

I told you that we should have done general wood, Alex says.

I have to draw because I haven’t got the right shoes on to bang bits of metal with a hammer. I’m supposed to have steel-capped boots in case I go into a frenzy and metal and hammers fly everywhere.

The other students are hitting bits of metal with hammers. A few of them stare at me every now and then. Mostly they ignore me.

You know when you arrive late to a thing, you’ve missed the instructions, and everybody has already started doing whatever they’re doing? They know each other’s names. They’ve already formed little groups. I’ve always felt like that, but this time it’s warranted.

There’s music playing. Sometimes everyone hits their
hammers in time with the beat. It sounds like Tapdogs.

The teacher’s name is Susannah. She has long blonde hair that falls in ringlets. She has a nose ring. She doesn’t wear tie-dye exactly, but she wears clothes in layers with beads hanging off them and she smells like sandalwood. Sounds all arty and casual, right? Sounds like she’s got rings on her fingers and bells on her toes and goes tinkling around the classroom sprinkling encouragement like a big nurturing teacher fairy.

You can imagine that Susannah is going to be all supportive and I am going to blossom under her tutelage. I will make an art-metal cage and find my inner spirit, and open the door to the cage and set my soul free. There will be butterflies, or white doves, or attractive people smiling and blowing bubbles, which will catch on the breeze and float away over some green grassy hillside with unicorns grazing on it.

The reason we don’t use her surname is because it’s Eastern European, so it’s about ten syllables entirely composed of consonants. She plays music loud because that way we don’t talk and we concentrate on our work instead. Susannah is actually an art-metal dictator.

At the beginning of class this guy threw his hammer in the air and caught it. Susannah dragged him over to the seat next to me by the ear. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. He has to draw too.

I am nonchalantly drawing my house and the guy next to me kicks my leg. He has one of those pencil cases
where you can slip the letters in that spell your name and his says ‘Ty’. That’s it. Two letters. He does a chopping action across his throat.

‘What?’ I mime.

He draws a square on the table and then he rubs it out with his thumb.

Ty glances furtively around. ‘Is this your house?’ he asks.

‘Yeah,’ I answer.

‘Can’t you do a different one? Something simple,’ he tells me.

I look around at other kids banging and crashing with Beyoncé.

(If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it.)

I turn the page over and chew on the end of my pencil.

Susannah jingles up and leans over our desk. She picks up Ty’s drawing and harrumphs. She drops it and picks up mine. She chuckles.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘You are going to make this,’ she tells me. She outlines how I am going to make an exact replica of our house and then put a hinge on the roof to make it a letterbox. ‘This part will be tricky,’ she says, pointing at the page.

I shake my fist. ‘
Damn you, turret!’

Ty laughs. He looks at me and there is genuine appreciation in his face. I think we might be friends, Ty and I. Imagine that.

I went to see a Sidney Nolan exhibition one time,
because…It sounds like I am arty and intellectual, but the truth was it was raining, I needed a slash, the art gallery was right there, and the Sidney Nolan paintings were on the way to the loos. It wasn’t the Ned Kellys, it was just rocks. Canvas after canvas of red rocks, and I was like, ‘meh,’ and then I looked up close at the tiny, little brushstrokes that looked like nothing, but then when I stood back they were rocks. It occurred to me that it would be really hard to do, and then my meh turned to wow.

Ty is looking at me like that.

It takes my breath away, because forever and ever people have looked at me like you’d look at a car crash. You pretend you’re not looking, but you can’t stop looking, and it’s like, ‘oh Jesus!’ That’s how people look at me.

‘You have the most amazing face I’ve ever seen,’ he says. He doesn’t see a car crash. He’s getting a crush on me.

AMINA TAKES ME through the quad to the canteen at recess. When we arrive there is an altercation between two boys.

‘What’s going on here?’ Amina asks.

‘Damen pushed in!’ exclaims one red-faced, little boy.

‘Did not! Morgan held my place when I went for a wazz!’ Damen protests.

‘Right, Damen, go to the back.’ Amina points to the end of the queue.

‘But Morgan—’ he begins to complain.

Amina interrupts him. ‘No brabble!’

Brabble! I just love that.

‘Morgan is not a bookmark,’ she continues. ‘If you go to the toilet you forfeit your place in the line. Go.’

‘Aw,’ Damen whines, but he goes.

I stare at Amina.

‘Three younger brothers,’ she explains. ‘You?’

‘Only child.’

‘How sad for you!’ she says, genuinely sympathetic. ‘Why is that? Is there something wrong with your mother?’

‘So many things, it’s hard to know where to begin.’

Amina nods solemnly. Beautiful, but not much of a sense of humour.

I buy a bag of soy chips and a juice and we head back across the playground.

Amina’s friends meet at a bench under a big fig tree. There is a girl called Julia, except she pronounces it ‘Whoolia’. She is an exchange student from Brazil. And Sierra. The mountain. She has green eyes like a cat. I am with the exotic chicks, so I guess I’m in the right place.

Sierra bumps me with her elbow. ‘My mum wanted to make sure we were buddies.’

‘The lady in the front office,’ I clarify, and Sierra nods.

They ask me where I am from and what school I used to go to, and I wish I had thought about what I was going to say, because I don’t know how much to lie.

I tell them we just moved here from South Australia. Then I remember I told Ty that my house was the only house I’ve ever lived in, and I blush.

What are the chances of these girls talking to Ty about what houses I have ever lived in, really? Zero! Or maybe zero point zero, zero, zero one per cent. I hope.

I change the subject and ask Sierra what it’s like to have her mum at school.

‘It’s ok, I s’pose.’ She pulls a face. ‘She knows every single thing that is happening in my life every single second. She kind of stalks me.’

I ask Julia about Brazil and about her host family. She shrugs and answers, but then she asks about me again. I bite my lip, scuff my feet and mumble, which is what boys do when they don’t want to talk about stuff, but it just seems to make girls curiouser. I’m going to go home and write notes, to get it clear in my head, but right now I have to distract them.

You know what I did? I showed them my really fast clapping. At first they all looked at each other. My heart stopped for a moment, while it occurred to me that they must think I am a looney. It was a mistake. Now I will have to enrol again at a whole new school. But then Amina tries it. She’s not very good.

Sierra has a go. She’s got the action right, you need to do more brushing so that it’s all in the elbow instead of the wrist. Now they are all doing it, and then they start laughing.

‘Rihanna does it,’ Julia says. ‘In that film clip. Which one was it?’

Amina laughs so much tears are coming out, and she says, ‘Stop it, or I’ll pee!’

Even while I was clapping and laughing like I was possessed, I stored that away. Boys don’t say that.

(Please don’t stop the music.)

ON THE WAY home on the train I send a text to my mother.

I need steel cap boots 4 metalwork tmrw.

I’m not sure exactly how she will interpret this request as a personal attack, but I’m sure she has it in her. I’m so ready to just do my own thing without having to spectate some long opera with the wailing and the flailing. Can I just have new boots, do we think?

I’ll pick u up.

But she would mean from Joey’s, my old school, where I don’t go anymore, which she should know, since she saw me leave in a different uniform this morning, if she was paying attention.

No I will meet you @ bunnings in 15 mins.

She doesn’t answer, so I get off the train and walk down to the Bunnings warehouse. There is a bench out the front, between the lawnmowers and the wheelbarrows. I
sit there in the afternoon sun with my legs stretched out and close my eyes.

It was a good day. No, an awesome day. A new beginning. People
liked
me, and I got a sense of how it could have been from the beginning for me if I’d made a stand a long time ago, like when I was two. I’m never going to be happy, but I could get close now, I think. I could be almost normal. I could have a friend.

Of course, what I have is an opportunity to invent not just myself, but my whole circumstance. I rehearse it in my head.

We have a dairy farm in South Australia. My parents are boutique cheesemakers. We’re here because they’re selling to the fancy restaurants and delis in the city. We’re getting our own counter in the food section of DJs.

Yeah, I used to name the cows. Tiffany. Bianca. Simone. I didn’t milk them, though. It’s all done by machines. No, seriously, we’re not, like, farmers scuffing around in gumboots. It’s just the same as any business. We have staff to do all that. We live in a normal house. Now. It has a turret, though. Of course I mean a for-real turret! What did you think I meant—a chimney?

I open my eyes and there is a man standing in front of me with paint-splattered tracksuit pants, and stubble, and skewiff hair. He is staring at little rattling packets of bolts, or rivets in his hands. He’s done well to come out with
only a handful. Bunnings is an amusement park for old people.

It takes me a minute to recognise him. It’s
. He looks through me, and then frowns. He doesn’t remember me, just knows that he has seen my face before, so he’s waiting for me to remind him.

I am about to say something, but my mother stalks up. She has her game face on. Joy.

‘I rang Joey’s today. They said you weren’t there.’

‘I’m going to a new school now, Mum.’

She pokes me in the chest so hard it hurts. ‘You don’t get to make these decisions!’ she hisses. ‘If you have a problem, mister, you come to me, and we’ll talk about it.
I
make the decisions around here. Do you understand me?’

I look away. I am embarrassed, but Crockett remembers who I am now.

‘Do you understand?’ she insists.

‘Yes,’ I say. I do understand. That doesn’t mean I agree. They are totally different things.

Crockett steps forward, hesitates, steps back again.

‘Can I help you?’ My mother asks sarcastically.

He ignores her. He rattles his little metal hardware thingies. ‘For my daughter. Her vertical blinds are sticking. And I’m hoping these will fix it.’ He watches me for a moment. ‘That thing?’ he says to me. ‘I looked it up. It’s doable.’

Crockett has a daughter.

My mother puts her hands on her hips. ‘I beg your pardon?’

Crockett looks at my mother and back at me again.

‘You looked it up?’ I say.

He nods.

Crockett looked it up. A smile spreads across my face. I put my hand over it. He nods again, but this time it’s like a little salute. We’re having a moment, Crockett and I.

My mother waits until he is out of earshot.

‘What’s doable?’ she asks.

I’m trying to come up with a passable story.

‘What’s doable? You answer me, mister!’ her voice more shrill.

Irritation wells up in my belly. ‘Please don’t call me mister,’ I mumble through gritted teeth.

She blushes, and laughs. She’s trying to boss me around, but she’s weak and panicky and helpless. And even scared.

‘Can we just get some boots? Please?’

I don’t want her to be like that. She’s no good to me like this. She can be angry, but if she’s going to fight me, she’s got to be sure in her own self what she’s mad about. You know Lois, from
Malcolm in the Middle
? She hollers at her kids all day long, but I would have Lois for a mum any day. She’s yelling at those kids because she’s a hundred per cent sure they’re doing the wrong thing. When my mum yells it could be about anything. Half the time I’m pretty sure it’s not even about me.