The Beauty Is in the Walking (3 page)

‘See you guys Monday,' he called.

The Barina took a right and I began to count the streets on the left, knowing Bec's would be the fourth.

‘Mitch, why didn't you stop Dan from going too far tonight?' she asked from the back seat.

He answered with a shrug, or he tried to at least. Bec wasn't letting him get away with it. ‘You've been friends with Jake long enough to tell when he's serious. He called out to you twice. You must have known.'

‘That bad, was it?' He sounded sorry. Neither of us responded, but our silence answered his question clearly enough.

‘Dan can be a bit hard to stop when he's on a roll, eh? He was really into it – wouldn't have mattered what I said.'

We still didn't know if he'd even thought of trying. Sometimes I wondered whether Mitch gave up thinking for himself when he was with Dan.

The headlights caught the front of Bec's house and she was out the door as soon as the car stopped by the kerb. ‘See you Monday,' she called, echoing Dan.

Just the two of us now. ‘Hey, sorry if I gave you a scare about the car,' I said.

‘S'all right,' he answered quickly, almost cheerfully. ‘I'm sorry about . . . you know,' and for the rest of the ride to my place we were as easy with each other as we'd ever been.

Then it was my turn to call, ‘See you Monday. Last term ever,' I added for something different.

‘Yeah. Hard to believe, isn't it,' Mitch replied. ‘Two months and we're done with school forever.'

Near the Reception desk at school there's a black-and-white photo of Palmerston High School when it was a single building planted square onto a dirt road. Even Mum didn't remember that far back. By the time she arrived, it had grown to four classroom wings and now there are five, all painted a pale yellow beneath red tin roofs that thunder fabulously when it rains. The classrooms are raised up from the ground, some with rooms built in underneath and the rest with their skirts hitched up to welcome the breeze around their skinny legs.

I'm no fan of the stairs. Thanks to doctors and therapists and endless drives to Brisbane with my mother, I don't need crutches, but I do need a handrail. Going up isn't so bad, but coming down triples the fear of falling, especially when a hundred bodies pile down the stairwell behind me. At morning tea on the first Tuesday of term a few bodies bounded past in twos and threes, but the rest choked into the narrow gullet of the stairwell and then I held them up even more. Nothing I
could do about it and generally kids cut me a bit of slack. Not today, though.

‘Jesus, come on!'

I glanced over my shoulder and saw a face I didn't know; a new Year Nine or Ten, I guessed.

‘You're holding everyone up, bloody cripple,' he muttered, sounding disgusted now that he'd seen how I lowered one leg at a time.

I didn't answer him. We were almost at the bottom, anyway. The traffic eased, letting the boy get away at last. ‘Spastic,' he snarled as he passed.

A girl who'd heard him called out, ‘Dickhead!' She stopped on the last step beside me and seemed about to apologise for him.

Don't, I wanted to say and maybe she read my mind because she went off without a word. I'd copped much worse. Tripping me up was a favourite, but it hurt more when some clown mimicked the saliva at the corner of my mouth or the deliberate way of speaking I'd been taught to avoid. That was when I wanted to bury a fist into their smirking faces.
You're an idiot, your brain doesn't work fast enough
– that was what their mockery threw in my face and there'd been times I believed them. That was the sharpest pain.

My group met at the same place every day – a picnic table between C Block and the Technics wing – and the other four were already sitting around it when I arrived. Mitch began to shift closer to Amy, but I called, ‘No, stay there. Slip along a bit,' I said to Amy, instead.

Sitting down was another manoeuvre I had to be careful with. Normally I'd grab the table with both hands, but today I put one on Amy's shoulder. My touch drew a glance from her as I lowered myself into place and I wondered if this was the look I'd missed on Saturday night. I'd never played this game before and the thrill was new to me.

Year Eights were playing handball nearby and when a boy chased wildly after a stray ball, two girls were forced close to our table to avoid a collision. The white headscarf made one of them stand out and we stopped talking to watch her go by. I'd never spoken to her, but her name was Soraya Rais, something I knew because she'd joined my English class when her family arrived a few months back. There was a brother and a sister, too, and some cousins at the primary school. Our first Muslims. This girl had large eyes ringed with a kind of natural mascara and lashes that other girls would die for. Dan's eyes took her in like those medical scanners that capture an entire body in one sweep.

The second girl was very different – pale-skinned and with shiny brown hair in a ponytail that flopped playfully between her shoulderblades as she strode by. They both moved with an elegance that would let them pass for twenty-somethings in any clothes but a uniform. Let's be honest – plenty of guys check out the sway of girls' hips as they cruise along, but for a cripple like me there's a beauty in the walking that no one else can see. Soraya was doing the catwalk thing a bit seriously,
looking steadfastly ahead, blank-faced and aloof in that way models have about them. Lots of luck there, Dan, I thought.

They swept by and immediately Bec leaned across the table. ‘Isn't she gorgeous,' she said to Amy. ‘That skin!'

‘The other one's been at school all year and hasn't said five words to me,' Dan complained.

‘You mean Chloe?' I asked, nodding towards the brunette girl.

‘Yeah, that's her name,' replied Dan. ‘Her father's an engineer with the gas people. I heard she wanted to board in Brisbane instead of coming here, but her parents wouldn't let her.'

‘Charming,' said Bec. ‘Did she think we all had two heads?'

‘Probably just wanted to stay with her friends. Can't blame her for that,' I replied, defending the girl for no reason I could put into words.

Dan picked up on my tone. ‘Bit of interest there, by the sound of it. You'd have to stand on a box to kiss her, Jacob.'

‘I don't want to kiss her.' It was Amy I wanted to kiss. ‘Chloe's in my English class, that's all.'

‘
Mr Svenson's
English class,' said Bec, putting the emphasis on the first two words. ‘I still can't work out how you ended up in Svenson's class when there was that thing between you last year.'

‘Oh God, yes,' said Amy, stretching her arms across the table as though she'd taken the baton from Bec's
hands. ‘I couldn't believe what your mother did, storming up to the school to make him apologise.'

What a day that had been. I'd wished I could crawl down a hole and stay there for a week. Svenson had called me lazy in front of the whole class, said I was coasting because teachers let me take the easy road. Someone told someone, who told my mother. I tried to warn her off and knew, even as I was doing it, I was just a pebble in front of a steamroller.

‘What was it like having a teacher stand in front of you like a naughty boy and say he was sorry?' Amy asked.

The scene still weighed in my stomach like a nausea I could call up on demand – because Svenson was right and he knew it, too, despite the words the Principal forced out of him. The challenge had been there in his eyes as he mouthed his apology.
Stop me any time you feel like, Jacob, and admit you can do better than a C plus
.

He'd snookered me in the end, too, the clever bastard. Made sure I was in his class for Year Twelve where I've worked hard all year to wash the cowardice of that day off my skin. If Bec and the others didn't know why, it was because I'd never told them that last part.

We'd had enough of Svenson and switched back to the girls as though their scent lingered in our nostrils.

‘They're new townies,' said Bec.

‘So what are we, old townies?' asked Dan. He'd been clenching his fist to make the muscles of his forearm stand out. I watched him at close range and thought of Tyke urging me to build up my arms and chest.

‘What about the Aboriginal kids? Are they old, old townies, then?' said Mitch

‘What matters is where you're from. If you were born in Palmerston then you're an old townie,' Amy explained.

‘What about Bec?' I asked. ‘She only came here in Year Nine.'

‘Yeah, but my dad's a vet for cattle and horses. That makes me old town. I was just thinking about it, that's all. New townies look out of place, like those two just now.'

There was something about the talk that narked me, maybe because I liked what I'd seen of Chloe, or
admired
might have been a better word. She stood out in Svenson's class without apologising for it and she had that walk, her hips working from side to side so freely. I was a connoisseur of walks.

Soraya was harder to work out, though. She didn't say anything in class unless Svenson called on her and when she did speak her voice was a whisper we all strained to hear, yet whenever Svenson was late arriving she'd have the girls around her laughing and leaning close to share stories with her like the queen bee in some TV sitcom.

Around the picnic table our townie debate was still going on. ‘Well, if Bec's an old townie because her dad works with cattle, why isn't the Muslim chick the same? Her father works with cattle, too, doesn't he?' said Dan and I wondered again if he really was taken with Soraya.

‘He kills them. Not the same thing,' Bec countered, trying to defend her line between new and old.

‘He doesn't kill them. He says a prayer and makes sure the bodies face Mecca or something,' said Mitch.

None of us was quite sure what Soraya's father did, but the meatworks had a contract to supply beef killed a special way and it could only get the right stamp if a Muslim was there to supervise.

‘New townie or old, she's a snooty bitch,' said Dan and immediately the girls were all over him, Bec especially, with a full-on slap across his shoulder to show she wasn't fooling.

‘Ow!' he howled, although there was as much laughter in it as pain. ‘I'm just saying I tried to say hello last week and she looked like I'd spat in her face.'

‘Maybe she's shy.'

‘She's heard about your reputation, more like,' said Amy.

When music began over the PA we headed off in different directions, each taking our opinions into class.

Toilets were another place I had to be careful of crowds and I found it best to hang back until the rush was over. That morning, I reached the trough just as another boy was finishing. A straggler stepped up between us.

‘Are spastics as slow at peeing as they are on stairs?' asked the new arrival.

I knew what face I'd see and didn't bother to turn around.

‘Aren't you going to answer me?'

‘Ask a better question,' I said.

‘“Ask a better question”,' said the boy, only he put on the stock voice of a moron.

I wished I was one of those kids who could shoot back something funny or cutting. ‘Just leave it, eh?' was the best I could do.

‘You're having a little whine now, are you?' the boy taunted. ‘“I'm a poor little spastic”,' he added in the high pitch of a girl. ‘You'll cry in a minute.'

His arm flashed towards me like a snake, making me react. I almost went into the trough.

‘Hey! Leave him alone,' said the third boy, who'd moved to the basin by this time. It was Luke Keating, the brother of one of Tyke's mates.

‘Just a jerk of my arm,' said the new boy. ‘Happens like that sometimes, you know, like a twitch.' The grip he'd taken on my shirt meant he could yank me off balance with the flex of a muscle.

Luke was gone now. The boy smiled with more menace, and searched my face for fear. I'd met this guy before, not in the same body perhaps, but he was as familiar as the stench that rose from the trough. People reacted to me in different ways – overreacted, really – to my awkwardness, my disabilities. Some patronised me with offers of help, like I couldn't wipe my own nose, and others went the other way, slipping into a cruelty they didn't really mean.

This boy meant it, though.

I fought to keep the fear out of my eyes even when the bastard rocked me, precariously, back and forth. I knew
he wasn't going to push me into the trough, but that didn't mean I could get the picture out of my mind. That was what I hated him for – my own powerlessness.

Others had left their visit even later and my tormentor disappeared, leaving me to head for class, furious with the new boy, with Tyke for not being round when I needed him, with my legs that just wouldn't do what they were supposed to. Bloody stairs!

The class was English. There'd been days earlier in the year when Svenson had spent a whole period messing with language, like it was play dough. He was a stickler for that one word which could conjure up a feeling or the sense of a place so perfectly no others were needed. ‘Finding clarity of meaning', he called it. I didn't see the point at first, until I got the hang of it and now I played the game on my own sometimes. Refuge, I thought, as I took my books inside.

No word games today; we were studying
The Crucible
, about the witches in Salem. Svenson was a short guy, a barrel, with a square fleshy face that he worked like an actor as he read important scenes to us. He was good, too. Now he was digging deeper, using the class as his soil.

‘Let's talk about conformity,' he announced. ‘What role does it play in the Salem community?'

I could have answered if he'd called on me and I pretty much agreed with the comments from the eager beavers.

‘But aren't Americans always on about freedom?' Svenson asked, as though he was confused himself.
‘Didn't the pilgrims come from England to get away from persecution? Yet Salem's like a police state.'

He spread his hands wide, inviting comment and Chloe jumped right in.

‘The pilgrims didn't want freedom for everyone, just themselves. They went to America so they could live by their own rules and persecute anyone who didn't fit in.'

What grabbed me about Chloe was the way she spoke with such confidence that she was right. I couldn't do that and yet the urge to match her was there inside me and not for the first time, either.

While I was daydreaming, the discussion of conformity had somehow come round to vegetarians. Chloe was one, apparently.

‘It shouldn't be such a big deal,' she was saying. ‘I don't want to stop anyone else eating meat, I just don't want to eat meat myself. I mean, it's my choice, isn't it?'

She'd picked an awkward analogy for Palmerston.

‘Why don't you like meat?' asked one of the guys.

His question was the tip of an iceberg and underneath lay how much Palmerston relied on our meatworks. To say you didn't eat meat was like saying you didn't care about the town. Chloe had sensed the hostility by this time, making her answer sound apologetic. ‘I just don't want to eat anything with a brain,' she said meekly.

‘You'd get by as a cannibal in Palmerston then,' I said and everyone joined in the laughter, especially Svenson. On a roll, I started a list of all the brainless characters around town who could be herded into the meatworks
and soon others joined in, complete with suggested menus. Each new suggestion drew hoots of agreement and by the time Svenson guided us back to the play Chloe was no longer the centre of attention.