Fish in the Sky (6 page)

But when I finally arrive at school, boiling hot all over from my fantasizing, I see her standing with all her friends, laughing, chatting, and so sure of herself in her unworldly beauty, and I fall apart. My temperature drops to zero. My fantasy is as far from reality as the east and west borders of the universe. I don’t exist in her eyes. I’m just an invisible shadow, passing by silently in the darkness of the morning and disappearing into the classroom and into my seat. And since she is sitting in the back of the middle row, I’m just like any other back and shoulders in her eyes.

It’s that idiot Thomas Magnus who has all her attention whenever he wants. Tom, the soccer and gym hero, has everything needed to get girls’ attention. It is unbearable how shameless and disgustingly free of low self-esteem he is. He can turn in his seat and look any girl in the class straight in the eye, do some rude gesture with his tongue when the teacher isn’t looking, and the girls just beam at him. He is so funny! Then the girls go crazy and giggle together while Tom just smiles a confident smile. At recess, he’s out on the soccer field and doesn’t give the girls a second look. They stand and stare at him playing, all hanging on a thread of excitement, waiting for him to give them an eye. But Tom has nothing to do with them at recess. They’re just an exciting pastime in the classroom when he’s bored. At recess it’s the serious stuff: soccer.

Nothing in the world is as meaningless to me as sports, soccer in particular. The only time I went to Tom’s house, he didn’t talk about anything but soccer, and his room was covered in posters of sweaty, muddy guys with their shorts on their heads, screaming for joy just because one of them had been able to kick the ball into the goal. Of course, these guys get loads of money for this, and that’s exactly what Tom dreams of doing. He’s going to be a professional. I can’t understand how anyone can be interested in games long gone by which this team or that team won at one time or the other. It’s a huge heap of meaningless garbage; everything revolves around a victory frenzy for a fraction of a second, and then the fighting starts all over again. All the running is for nothing in the end. It’s like a desperate attempt to kill time, just to have something to do, rather than doing nothing. Tom runs screaming over the field and jumps head over heels if he scores, but sinks into a heap of desperation like a flat tire, hiding his head in his hands, if he doesn’t, just as his idols do on TV. Tom’s fight for victory is as meaningless as the fly’s when it struggles up the windowpane. You could set the fly free by opening the window. But even though somebody would open the window for Tom and point out to him some other possibilities in life, he probably wouldn’t understand what that meant. And as long as he’s in my class, I have to accept that his masculinity, his attitude, and his fighting spirit will always win in the race for her attention, the one whom I love with all my heart.

I’ve got to hide my love away.

There’s only one person who hates gym more than I do, and that’s Ari Penapple, nicknamed the Pineapple. He stands like a ghost in the school yard every recess, and he never does anything or says anything. For as long as I can remember, he’s been teased because of his name and because he is so tall, but at the same time like a heap. But he never does anything or says anything — not even when Thomas Magnus, the jackass, ever the hero, is right in his face. Then Ari just turns around and walks away. His face never changes. I’ve never seen him laugh. If he’s forced to answer some questions from the teacher, it’s just a low mumble that nobody understands, so the teacher has to walk right up to him to hear. But what he says is almost always correct, and he is usually the one with the highest grades.

But gym is the worst for Ari because he can hardly run at all. And that’s bad. He’s big and heavy, with legs like an elephant and hips like a woman. And the gym teacher, Ray Axel, enjoys torturing him, ordering him to run faster, do more, jump higher. Once he made Ari try to jump the pommel horse five times while everyone else waited and watched. But Ari couldn’t jump the horse; Ari wouldn’t be able to jump a cat, and Raxel knows that very well. Ari landed on the horse with a heavy thud and sat there, stuck, five times in a row. But when Ari has had enough, which rarely happens, then he does what I find really admirable: he stops obeying, sits by the wall, and doesn’t move. Nobody else would dare. But Ari is just as tall as Raxel, and even though he’s the Pineapple, he can sit quite still under Raxel’s scolding and his face doesn’t move. It’s like he’s thinking,
Raxel wants me to jump, but I can’t jump. He knows it, I know it, and he knows that I know he knows it. Now, I’ll just sit here and wait till gym is over; I’ll shut my ears and turn myself off.
And then he shuts his ears and turns himself off. Sometimes Raxel kicks him out of class with degrading remarks. It’s the only time I’ve seen a change in Ari’s face; he smirks, and I know it is his greatest relief when he’s kicked out of gym.

I wish I had Ari’s courage, because I dread Raxel. His name alone sounds like a threat. He’s got a limp, and he walks with a cane. His face is made of stone and his voice is low, except when he’s angry; then he shouts. Then it’s best to lie low, but the trouble is, it doesn’t take much for him to lose his temper. He expresses himself mostly with his yellow training whistle, which he always holds between his teeth. And God help those who don’t understand the meaning of two short whistles and one long. Or three long and one short. I can never remember the meaning of his chirping. That’s why I’m too late to figure things out, too late to run — late, late, late. Then he picks me out of the row and makes me do thirty push-ups as a penance — that’s two long whistles.

But there’s another reason that makes me hate gym, that gives me a chill and fills me up with anxiety thinking of gym, that gives me nightmares the day before gym, and that’s Sandra the shower warden.

To begin with, I can’t figure out why on earth a woman is a shower warden in a gym for boys. Surely no other school in the world has a female shower warden in the boys’ showers. Would anyone hire a man to be a shower warden in the girls’ class? I doubt it. And it has to be this woman. Why her? She doesn’t even look like a woman. Maybe that’s why. Not that she looks like a man, no way. She looks more like a ghost or a monster or an alien or all three at once. And I’m scared to death of her. For some reason, no one else seems to experience this the same way I do, at least nobody talks about it, and that’s understandable — because this is something that you can’t talk about with anybody.

She’s not old and not young either, not thin nor fat. And there’s absolutely nothing she does or says that is terrible or horrifying; she just herds us into the showers, turns the water on with a long iron pole, and orders us to wash thoroughly. That’s all.

But there’s something about her, how she moves, how she looks, even the way she does her hair, that makes me terrified of her.

And her face is the worst. It is pale blue, and her hair is white and thick, cut at the jawbone, and her jawbone is broad and strong. She always wears pink lipstick, screaming pink, and her lips are really thin, so she puts the lipstick on the skin around her lips, probably to make them look bigger.

And her mouth is so wide, it fills me with disgust just to think about it; the corners of her mouth reach far into her cheeks and turn downward, so you can imagine it opening up forever, like inside there are no teeth, just a bottomless black pit. Her eyes are large and round, protruding far out of her skull, so when she blinks, it takes the eyelids forever to slide over these glassy water bags that barely hang in her face. And it doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself that no human being has orange eyes, still it’s a fact that hers are.

This is a face that stares at you in your worst nightmares, a face that never looks away but just keeps on staring, not cruel or threatening but completely empty of all emotions, cold and unmoving. That’s why you fear that a face like that hides all the worst things you can imagine, and maybe something even worse than that.

We are running, sweating, and short of breath and cram into the locker room, and I hurry to undress and get into the shower before Sandra appears. Tom starts to fool around, stripped naked, waving his willy, standing on his hands, snatching somebody’s underwear and throwing them in the showers to the applause of others who are in with him at the moment and therefore get to keep their underwear.

“Hey!” he suddenly shouts, throwing his leader’s glance over the locker room. “Hands up who’s done it!”

Everybody who wants to be in with him throws an arm up. The others fetch their wet underwear from the showers.

“Naaah!” somebody says. “Who do you think you’ve done it with?”

But Tom smirks for a long time and moves his eyes from one to another while they’re all waiting eagerly for the answer, ready to laugh and shout.

“With Clara cute-ass, of course,” he says finally, and the shouts and screams echo in the room with whistling and laughter. I, on the other hand, feel a cold sting in my heart under the boiling-hot shower.

“At least like this,” Tom says, laughing and grabbing his willy with his right hand.

And the boys laugh. “Yeah, Tommy, really Tommy, crazy Tommy.”

I’ve started to dry myself when Tom’s attention suddenly moves over into the corner where Ari is turning his back to us, trying to dress hurriedly, the sweat glistening on his broad shoulders.

“Ari! The showers!” Tom orders, giving us a wink and flashing his big white teeth in a wicked smile.

But Ari is not going to take a shower; Ari is dressing fast with trembling hands; Ari is in a hurry; he wants to get out of here as quickly as he can. But Tom is on the move, and nobody stops Tom the Tough Guy when he’s on the move, least of all the Pineapple.

Tom jumps up on the bench and places himself in front of Ari and is going to order him to take a shower, but something makes him suddenly silent and dumbstruck. He raises his head and gives the rest of us a wide-eyed look.

“Take a look at that!” he shouts. “Ari has pubes!”

The whistling and shouting is overwhelming when Tom jumps to the floor, grasps Ari’s shoulders, and tries to turn him to show us. But Ari is immovable. So Tom grabs Ari’s underwear, which Ari is desperately trying to jerk up his sweaty legs, and pulls them down. Tom points at him, giggling and squeaking, and everyone joins in, bending backward laughing, pointing at Ari. But Ari doesn’t want to turn around and fights with Tom, trying to pull his pants up as his milky-white buttocks tremble and shake, but Tom pulls even harder. Then finally the mountain moves and Ari turns, rosy-pink with tits like a girl and hips like a woman, utterly defenseless at the mercy of the mob. And it’s true: he has pubic hair already. And a bit more than that — he’s really furry. He’s like a mammoth between his legs. He snatches a sneaker and tries to hit Tom, who moves quickly to the side, light and swift, and Ari’s awkward defense tactic, with his pants around his ankles, mammoth fur between his legs, and one sneaker in his hand, is just extra fuel for the screams of laughter. It’s so good when somebody else is exposed. You feel so safe. Then you’re one of the group, not outside it. Still, I can’t laugh. I’m trying to get dressed before Sandra arrives.

Then the door is thrown open and she bursts in, shouting.

“What the hell is going on in here?” And in an instant all the boys grab their insignificant little bald peckers and run screaming like girls into the showers, but I close my eyes so I don’t have to see Sandra’s face.

She turns to Ari, who is crying now. “Leave me alone,” he growls, and then he dresses, whimpering and sniffling. Then Sandra goes into the showers with her iron pole, orders the boys to wash properly, and asks who was teasing Ari.

I throw all my gym things into my bag and run out, relieved to have avoided seeing her face, and I don’t slow down until I’m on my street. How did Ari manage to hide this for such a long time? It hardly grows overnight! He must have been avoiding the showers since this started. And now I understand why he’s been smirking every time Raxel throws him out in the middle of gym! So he could dress without fearing exposure. Poor Ari. Not only is he ridiculed for being silent and shy and unable to move and his family having a stupid name, but he is also the first one in our class to have pubic hair. And a dense jungle as well.

I wonder if it itches.