The Invisible Hero (8 page)

Well my diary is my social calendar. I have my friends' birthdays marked out, dates for shopping and meeting up with friends. That sort of thing. It's private. Luckily I have a foolproof system when it comes to that diary. If a teacher asks for it, I say it's at home. If Mum asks for it, I say it's at school. Easy as that. But tonight Mum looked suss.

We were standing in the front hall where I'd just come in
from school. ‘Get it!' she said, pointing at my school bag which was lying on the floor near the door.

‘Get it yourself!' I shouted and then I shoved Mum aside and went to open the door, but the stupid cow had fallen over and I couldn't get the door open. While she was trying to get herself up, I just pushed her a bit with my foot – enough to get to the door – and then made my escape to Tiffany's place for a while.

But everything's okay now. When I got home about 11pm, Mum was sitting up waiting for me. She was all puffy eyed. She wrapped her arms around me and said, ‘It's just because I love you and want you to do better than I did for myself, and it's so hard without a husband to help me bring you up.' And I let her hug me and then I said, ‘It's almost the end of Year 9, Mum. I'll be in Year 10 soon. I have to take responsibility for my own work.' And Mum said, ‘Sorry, love.' And I said, ‘I forgive you, Mum, but just give me a bit of space and a bit of respect.'

I refus to writ a hol page. Mista Kwale has given me an afta scol for walking of last week and two lunchtime detenshons for not doing this. Stif.

More entertainment today. Old Blue Eyes Dugan is still on strike. He's refusing to write a full page in his journal. Quayle is getting really frustrated because no threats seem to get a reaction out of Dugan – not a flicker of an eyelid. Quayle is in danger of losing his cool. He bends down to Dugan's eye level and orders him to pick up his pen. Dugan looks right through him. Quayle pounds Dugan's desk with his fist and Dugan's pen flips onto the floor. Quayle orders Dugan to pick up his biro. Dugan doesn't move. Dugan gets a second lunchtime detention. That's three detentions so far. Look forward to giving tomorrow's instalment.

It must be in the stars as that wimp Romeo would believe it. The weak are rising up. Quayle needs some lessons from Machiavelli. Contempt from those under you means you are doing it wrong. I've got to say that a school curriculum is pretty useless for stretching the mind, but it's the extra curricula stuff that does the educating. Our school motto is ‘Learning for Life'. And it sure delivers.

Here I sit watching all the power games, the wars, the defeats, the victories, the plots – and I am having a taste of the big wide world. I'm also thinking that I need to show Quayle how to handle Dugan. We can't have that moron becoming a martyr – the Martin Luther King of the Retards. ‘We shall overcome', flower power and love-ins. Sickening.

Back to my hero, Machiavelli. He reckoned that a prince who was in charge of an army should use cruelty to maintain complete
order and respect. Good to have your troops both love and fear you, but if you have to have one of these, then choose fear.

A meeting with my henchmen, de Grekh and Cheung, is in order. I'm feeling pumped. I've an idea that will tame our little hero, Dugan. But it needs refinement. I mean, I'm a born leader. I know who to pick to give me smart advice. In the meantime, I have good works to perform. At the next SRC meeting I'm going to propose a tree planting programme for our school grounds.

I don cair if I hav a liftime of scool detenshons streching to domsday. I hav a rite to privcee. Jus now Mis Canmaw cam to se me in the ofec. I tol her what I'm feeling. She sed, ‘You sertinly do hav a rite to privsee. I hurd abowt wot hapent thru the grapvin and I tol Mr Kwale its not to happen agen.'

Onle trubel is itl be sumthing difrent nex tim.

Then she sed, ‘wel I hop this hellps' an she put a papa bag on the tabel an in it wos a crunchee apel, a choclat bar an a big sald sanich an this mesage on a card. ‘A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships. Helen Keller.' So I'm writng this cos I lik Mis Canmaw, but I'm not writing a werd mor.

Have to say, school's been unusually interesting. Some challenges to overcome though. Macca and I (with a little help from Cheung) had serious business to attend to since we got the lowdown on Raph and her dobbing.

Mind you, this journal has been a tinsy-winsy bit neglected. But all in a good cause. My mate Macca has been needing encouragement and ideas. I'm finding I'm even better with ideas than he is. Better things to do and achieve.

Yeah, so where was I with my murdering buddies, Burke and Hare? That's it. They've just made a nice little bonus with that old soldier's body. Well then they started choosing people who wouldn't be missed. Like the first murder was another sick boarder.

At first I wondered how you'd get away with bumping off your clients. But this boarding house wasn't the Hilton or some fancy B and B with breakfast on a tray with a frilly tablecloth. This boarding house was full of losers who wouldn't be missed.

I've looked at some of the drawings of the houses in this street in Edinburgh. A narrow, windy, muddy laneway. Higgledypiggledy, half-falling apart houses, squashed together and leaning this way and that. Real slum stuff. No health and safety regulations back then. This boarding house was just a house with spare rooms that they stuffed with people who were too poor and homeless to afford to live anywhere else. So Burke, Hare and Co chose another sick, old man, gave him a nice lot of whisky (I keep
thinking that must have cost them something; in business talk, you'd call that an ‘outlay') and then suffocated him. The whisky then suffocation method became a bit of a routine.

Like I said, Burke and Hare (now helped by their girlfriends) chose poor people – beggars; prostitutes; a woman Burke knew who the police were arresting because she was drunk (Burke talked the police into freeing her, then took her away and bumped her off); an old lady and her grandson; an Irish woman who'd come all the way to Scotland to search for a missing son; homeless people (like an old lady who asked to sleep in the stable of the boarding house); a relative of one of the girlfriends; even an 18-year-old mentally disabled boy called ‘Daft Jamie'.

I get a pretty clear picture of that boarding house. Always full of visitors just calling by or looking for somewhere to stay short-term, or somewhere a bit warmer than the gutter. Lots of drinking going on. Probably more than just drinking going on between some of the males and females. Like my place when I get home from school sometimes. The dishes all piled up, especially with coffee cups. And more coffee cups on the floor with cigarette butts in them. And tinnies all over the place, like down the back of the lounge and on the floor. The room so full of smoke, it's like a stinky fog. And the grown-ups laughing about stupid stuff, or not laughing and getting angry with each other.

There's a couple of Mum and Dad's friends I totally can't stand. There's Scott who never, ever seems to have a job. He has this creepy way of speaking, like a cat purring. He lies back on the lounge and gives me advice about Life. And there's Sharleen who one minute is Mum's best ever friend, and then they fight
about something stupid and don't speak for days. Sharleen has to paint her black eyebrows on because she waxed them too much when she was young and now they won't grow back. And there's Mum. I wish she'd buy bigger sized clothes because she bulges all over the place, especially up top. You can see her sunburnt, freckly boobs ready to spill out of her blouse. And Dad. If he's in a good mood he's alright, but you run for cover when he isn't. Dad likes to talk business with the people who come by. Dad says he's an entrepreneur. The other day, one of his ‘business' colleagues called Dad something a bit different – he screamed out, ‘you're as shifty as a shit-house snake!' Dad's full of clever schemes, but judging from all the threatening letters about unpaid bills that we get, we seem to mostly just scrape by. Dad's never spent much time with me. I used to want him to play cricket with me or kick a footie, but last time I asked he said he'd have to check his diary. What a load of! So, I'll never again ask Dad to spend time with me.

Unlike Dad's brilliant business plans, Burke and Hare must have been making a pile. What's seven times seventeen? Off the top of my head, that's roughly one hundred and nineteen pounds in one year. I've got my sums wrong. They scored even more than that. After the dead soldier, Dr Knox paid eight pounds for ‘subjects' (what a great word for a dead body) in summer, and for some reason they paid more in winter – ten pounds a subject. Colder, harder work, maybe – that's if you were digging up a grave. But murder's different.

Holy crap. Macca's just sent me a photo of Genelle in her
bra. You can see right through. The stupid slut sent it to him. I've saved it to the photo folder on my phone. Could come in handy for a bit of bargaining some time in the future.

Macca wants me to phone him. Bet he'll be asking me for ideas to do with Daft Dill.

Tonight is Friday. Shabbat. The beginning of the Sabbath. My favourite night of the week. From sundown, we always make sure we're together as a family. Friends are welcome to join us, but we stay home. Imogen came over. She loves eating with us on a Friday night.

Mum makes the table lovely – a white tablecloth, flowers, candles, best china, the challah loaf, wine and a fish dinner. While Mum lights the candles she says a prayer. And she does that over the bread and wine, too.

When my grandparents were alive, Grandfather would say the prayer over the bread and wine. But what I loved most was the way my Grandma (she liked to be called Babcia, which is Polish) and Grandpa would come and stand behind Hannah and me; they would place their hands over our heads and give us a blessing–

‘May God bless you and watch over you and may God shine His face toward you and give you peace. May you be strong for the truth, kind in your words, just and loving in your deeds.'

Babcia's face was round and soft. It would beam with love
for us, so it's always been easy to picture God with a shining face. When I was really little, I thought God must be a woman.

I have only two clear memories of my grandparents. One is their Shabbat blessings. The other is watching them hold hands when they went for their afternoon walk.

We always talk about good things on Shabbat. No upsetting talk. No gossip. Tonight Imogen told us lots about her Antarctic hero, Shackleton. Mum loved the bit about Shackleton choosing his team of men by whether they could sing and had a sense of humour. Imogen said there was incredible courage and cheerfulness shown by the men. Like the day Shackleton and his tiny crew set sail in their open boat and left the twenty-two men behind on Elephant Island. Everyone knew that if Shackleton didn't reach South Georgia, then the twenty-two men would never be found – or at least, not alive. But despite that, the leader of the Elephant Island group led his men in giving three hearty cheers for the boat crew. Imogen showed us a photo of the men waving goodbye. ‘Shackleton's job interview method must have worked,' said Mum.

Hannah then asked me which hero I had chosen for this school project. I still didn't know.

‘How about Nelson Mandela as your hero?' suggested Mum. ‘He defeated the Apartheid government in South Africa.'

I didn't know what Apartheid meant, so Mum explained that twenty years ago anyone in South Africa who wasn't white had to live and work separately. You couldn't even catch the same bus as a white person. And some province I've forgotten the name of, if
you were Asian and passing through, you had to travel through in one day. You couldn't even stay overnight.

Anyway, this Mandela was gaoled for absolutely ages for fighting the regime. He used passive resistance when the prison officers tried to bully him. Like if they told him to run, he'd just walk – no matter how much they punished him. Guts. That's sort of what Phil is doing at the moment by refusing to write his journal. But I don't like his chances of getting away with it.

Nelson Mandela sounds amazing, but I somehow think I'd like to find myself a female hero. They say everything in this country is equal rights for men and women. But my history book sort of doesn't say that. It's mostly full of the stories of what men have done. When I said that to Mum, she patted my hand and reminded me that just because you don't make it into a history book doesn't mean there haven't been lots of female heroes around. And then she said, ‘And, anyway, why do we let the historians decide that it's stories about money, power, politics, wars, defeats and bloodshed that should use up all that paper?'

And I said, ‘What do you suppose a history book would be about if we mostly looked at women?'

Everyone laughed.

‘Well, there've always been plenty of nasty women around,' said Mum.

‘Like a certain person at school whose name starts with a “G”', said Imogen under her breath.

‘And they make for some hair-raising reading,' said Mum, ‘but mostly, women have got active about things that matter.'

‘Like?' asked Hannah.

‘Family and community. They've been quiet heroes, like your namesake, Ruth.'

Of course, Mum means two different Ruths. There's my great-grandmother (grandma's mother) who was called Ruth. She gave up her life to save her daughter (grandma) from the Nazis. Then there's Ruth from the Hebrew Bible. My name means ‘mercy'. The opposite is ruthless. Mum likes word meanings.

Ruth's story is all about being loyal and loving to the point of putting your life on the line. And it's also about being a refugee. And refugees are Mum's main interest with Amnesty because of Grandma. My Grandad, Asher, emigrated to Australia before the war, but my Grandmother, Rachel, came out after the war as a 16-year-old Polish refugee. She had no family left and no photos of them. Just a tiny button. It had come off her father's shirt the last time she had seen him – the day he was sent on the train to the death camp, Auschwitz. I remember she carried that button everywhere. She wouldn't leave the house without it.

The best plans are so simple. Mine is genius. But first we need to have Phil the Dill's journal. That should be the easy part – we're used to sniffing around his locker, but he's keeping his journal close by him. I can wait.

There are distractions in the meantime. My little group is running a charity donation drive. We fine kids in the class for a
range of broken rules. It's all in good fun and for a good cause. Here are some examples, although we can make up others on the spot like Dad does at Rotary.

Messy locker – $1. Rudeness to a teacher – $1. Littering school grounds – $1. Absence from school – $2 for no excuse. Illness – 50c. Failing any test – $2.

De Grekh fined Waterworks fifty cents for getting late to the bus after school. Genelle fined Raph one dollar for lacking class spirit and hiding out in the library too much. And I'm looking forward to fining Phil the Dill a small fortune for not writing enough in his journal – insubordination to a teacher I'll call it.