Life is a Parallel Universe (2 page)

But, suddenly,
Richard’s mother enters the classroom’s open door. Mrs Plodd hardly
misses a beat; she pats Richard affectionately atop his head: soft
as an egg.

‘Richard is one
of my favourite students’ she says, smiling: baring teeth. Richard
looks resigned; he knows that the eye of the hurricane will return
with the going of his mother.

Eyes look upon
the same scenes and see differently. Some see nothing at all.

Beatrice
absorbs injustice like a sponge: you can see her eyes turning
yellow. Terry fears she soon will be the scapegoat and tries to
become smaller, hoping no one will notice her at all. Sometimes,
she just closes her eyes and tries to disappear. Lisa looks bored.
She is gazing out the window at nothing and thinking about going
roller skating on the weekend. Sue is thinking about the chocolate
biscuits in her morning tea today; she can offer them to Lisa. Lisa
will like me more than anyone else, she thinks. And, it is glee she
feels.

The school
playground is a huge field of soft, green grass, where butterflies
dance jigs, shaded by ghost gums. Look across the way and there are
yet more lush sports fields.

Turn you gaze
over that bucolic scene for a moment and I am sure you will think,
as do those folks driving by, what a lovely place to send your
children. But, such a place is populated by people and even small
people have their pecking orders and politics. Here, like most
places, the boys assume domination: the girls fit into the
peripheral bits; bits, where Lisa and other Queen Bees are the
hegemons. They flock together, immediately recognising each other.
What is it that they see? Can you see it? The others try to get a
foothold in some clan or find a friend of fellow feeling. This can
be a desperate business. Some eyes weep.

Not for Lisa
though. She is drowning in the smiles of others and overwhelmed by
courtiers who wish to be her special friend for the day. Virtually
overnight, almost every girl tries to buy or turn their school bag
into an imitation of Lisa’s pink, diamanted accoutrement. They’ll
never do it. She tells them often enough ‘Mum ordered mine from
America’. America: the modern day oracle and sage.

In the brick
veneer house on Madison Drive, the White Family sit down to dinner
under the Luxaflex gazebo; standing as self-important as the
Acropolis, next to the in-ground Sparkle Pool. Mr White, all chest
and skinny legs, handles the tongs with aplomb, as he cooks the
sausages on the outdoor Turbo BBQ. He surveys his domain; his rayon
button up shirt becomes that bit tighter. He strokes his scanty
moustache with one hand ‘I’ve done well’ he thinks to himself. ‘Not
bad for a boy who left school at 15 and took on a trade’. Years
later, Bob White could possibly be called a ‘cashed up bogan’, but
not yet. ‘I pulled myself up by me bootstraps’ he thinks
proudly.

Mr White has
undoubtedly made a success of his concreting business, but he is a
man whose thoughts are mostly cliché and aphorism. Still, he is
proud of himself and who he is. His eyes sweep about him thinking
‘I have all this: a good wife and beautiful daughter’ and his eyes
slide quickly away into the distance as he thinks about his pretty
young secretary: her puff of white hair, smelling of bubble gum and
Norsca deodorant. He even thinks ‘my little bit on the side’. And
he smiles secretly into the haze of sizzling sausage fumes as they
voyage out into space.

The Browns take
tea in front of the TV. Watching ‘Wheel of Fortune’. Plates are
carefully placed on special trays and plastic tumblers of green
cordial have bespoke holders. The Browns are proud of these TV
dinner holders, made by the ‘head of the family.’ the gormless Mr
Todd Brown. After watching ‘Cop Shop’, the family retires to bed
and one by one, pull chenille bedspreads, smelling of Rinso
detergent up to their chins. They dream of trips to Disneyland and
buying a caravan. For a skimpy moment, they can almost smell the
aroma of fish and chips next to the sea.

Sue thinks
about seeing Lisa the next day, hoping that one of Lisa’s friends
will be away sick. Maybe Lisa will let me sit next to her for once.
The family drift off to sleep; a slow side into the land of
suburban dreams.

They don’t
notice the whistle slicing through the night, signalling another
shift at BHP. They don’t know that, on the other side of the world,
John Lennon has been assassinated by a lone gunman who hears the
words in his head ‘Do it! Do it! Do it!’ Sue does think, however,
just before sleep claims her: my first year of school is almost
over.

Next to the
highway in the dilapidated timber house smelling of canned tuna and
mildew, Beatrice reads ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’ under
the musty fug of her bed covers. Small pieces of tissue are crammed
into her ears to drown out the sound of her father getting drunk
with the woman he picked up at the Belair Hotel. They are laughing
uproariously about something…. Or nothing. But Beatrice is
retreating from this world and being absorbed into a land of
dwarfs. She is seeing the magic eye of the lamppost and thinking of
the glorious power of the White Queen. Beatrice will never entirely
return to Earth again.

In December
1986, Lisa, Sue and Beatrice were preparing for their school
‘Farewell’. Their days of primary school would soon be over. Tables
would be set up on Thursday evening, in one of the demountable
classrooms. Paper plates would display sausage rolls, tiny meat
pies and bowls of chips: chicken and plain, and perhaps some spiced
chicken wings. Ethnic foods had recently begun to take off.

For some
months, all of the year six and year five students were herded down
to the quadrangle to practice dancing two times each week. Beatrice
hated this enforced dancing practice with a passion. As she had
hated it the year before. The year five students, by tradition,
were dragooned into attending the Farewell, to ensure that there
would be plenty of dancing partners.

Dancing
practice took place on Monday and Tuesday afternoons after lunch.
Generally, the boys had to select the girls. Things were pretty
fixed in those days.

Beatrice would
feel the pressure in her guts begin building from early in the
morning and by lunchtime, she would be hiding out in the green
carpeted library, hoping that she would be forgotten or that magic
really existed in the world, which could carry her away from this
place. She would stare into the pages of a Tolkien book; she would
draw the fragrance of the paper into her lungs and will her body to
travel to another place. But all she would ever see in her mind was
the Eye of Sauron.

Gaze down if
you will, upon these almost adolescents, doing the ‘Hokey Pokey’
and other corny, gyrating moves. Can you see Lisa pointing at one
lucky young buck from the gaggle of boys who rush toward her? Can
you see Sue? Dancing again with Scott Smith. Beatrice is close to
the shady area, trying not to be seen and Terry has had to team up
with that boy who has seizures and funny eyes; supposedly, his
father shook him when he was a baby. As usual, another left behind
person will be shoved in Beatrice’s direction and she will be
forced to dance. She will hate every moment of it. Later, she will
lose herself in a pinball machine which lives outside the shopping
centre. Until she is roughly shoved aside by some high school kids.
She goes home to a silent, empty house.

Awards and
trophies would be given out sometime during the week at a ‘Special
Assembly’. Our heroines can have no expectations on this front and
so we shall not bother to recount this glorious day. Some years
later, however, awards will be given out at many schools for
outstanding achievements in mundane mediocrity. But that time has
not yet come.

The evening of
the Farewell arrives. Lisa is not at school that day: the beauty
parlour was where she was at, surrounded by chemical smells and
promises of alchemy. Later, she slips into her soft dress of white,
splashed with pink and purple roses. With hair frizzed and teased
and face painted.

Later, the
photographer arrives at her home and Lisa poses in front of a
mobile background of Monte Carlo, surrounded by the chlorine
fragrance of the Sparkle pool and the fresh fertilizer plonked on
the azaleas. Those photos are still in the lounge room at Madison
Drive, all these years later. If you look carefully at some of the
photos, you will notice the Luxaflex gazebo chopping a Monte Carlo
yacht in half.

The Brown
family were on a budget. Money was tight. So out came the Butterick
patterns to make Sue a suitable dress; something that she could
wear again to a family wedding in the following month and church on
Sunday.

A length of
fabric was found in the remnant pile at David Jones and two pretty
flower shaped buttons were bought to fasten the frock at the back.
Mrs Brown always called her dresses ‘frocks’. Dad takes the photo
of Sue on the front, thoroughly weeded lawn. You will notice the
luxurious Aspidistra in a white concrete pot next to Sue in the
photo. Have a look sometime: it’s still in the same place
today.

Where was
Beatrice going to find a dress? She didn’t really want to go to
this Farewell, but part of her, also, felt almost hopeful. She was
still of an age when thoughts of Cinderella being magically saved
from ignominy seemed possible. But where to find a dress?

Dad was staying
away longer these days: probably with a new woman. So Beatrice drew
back the curtain encircling his sagging double bed and odd shaped
Laminex wardrobe. She turned away from the grubby sheets and unmade
bed, like an animal’s lair and pulled the wardrobe slowly open and
the mobile mirror flashed its reflection about the narrow room
lending it a momentary glamour.

Inside, she
could see a couple of her mother’s old dresses from the late 70s.
They were tiny, as her mother was a brown sparrow of a woman. But,
even though Sue concentrated hard, her mother’s face and eyes were
withering in her memory.

She sneaked the
stale smelling dress from the hanger and dumped it over her head.
She had no shoes other than her school shoes though. They would
have to do. She left the dank house, walked through drifts of
petrol fumes and rowdy traffic and continued on her way. The sweat
slowly gathering at the base of her neck.

Of course, the
predictable posse of girls looked at Beatrice with their dagger
eyes; laughed behind their chopping hands and made loud and pointed
comments just within her hearing. Lisa didn’t say anything:
Beatrice was beneath her notice.

But, come, take
a look for yourself. See how well they dance. Memories are being
manufactured tonight here. Myths are being woven into the quilt of
one’s life. Lisa will forever see herself as that belle of the
ball; Sue will always remember how Lisa shared the mirror with her,
as she reapplied strawberry lip gloss. And, Beatrice, will observe
the evening from the sidelines, an object of scorn: On the
periphery. But do you see her stacked plate? She did manage a good
feed didn’t she? Our Beatrice is a survivor. But what of Terry you
ask? She wasn’t there.

Heat builds
over Newcastle like a huge plate, pressing downward, as the long
summer holiday arrives like a coal train. The White family enjoy
Christmas day next to the Sparkle pool, with shiny wrapping paper
discarded like fallen angels all about. Piles of presents already
forgotten.

Turkey roll,
cooked by Maria is eaten under the Luxaflex gazebo, but it is the
smell of Aerogard that is most memorable. Flies those pesky
intruders.

Maria arrives
home late and exhausted, but ready to cook again for her own
family. She will have a break for ten days, as the White family
holiday in Fiji. Maria won’t spare them a thought, as they roast on
the white beaches like prawns on a grill and order ice-creams and
drinks from smiling, dark haired waiters.

Every summer
holidays the Browns travel to the same caravan park, located on the
Central Coast of New South Wales. This ritual continues for many
years. However, they never knew nor cared that the Darkinjung
people had lived in this beautiful locale for thousands of years.
And, they were also unaware that this place of beauty was ‘found’
by the white man when the Governor of Tasmania, Colonel David
Collins was looking for Mary Morgan, an escaped convict. History
didn’t matter to the Brown’s. Maybe because they knew so
little.