The Teacher's Secret (6 page)

Today, Jade is first cab off the rank. Unfazed by the stopwatch, she spends the first ten seconds fiddling with her hem, which, in Terry's view, should come down a couple of centimetres. More than that. What she really needs is a new school uniform. One that isn't so tight across her chest. Puberty has come to her in a rush and, as she lets go of her hem to face the class properly, it's clear she's pleased about it. He's never seen her stand up so straight: so straight that her newly grown breasts press hard against the blue-and-white gingham of her tunic. He opens his mouth to say something, but what's he going to say? Stop standing so tall; stop being so provocative?

‘We stayed at a caravan park down the coast,' she tells the class, ‘and one night my sister didn't come back until one in the morning so now she's grounded for two weeks and she can't even go to her best friend's birthday party. And we hung around with a whole lot of high school kids and we pretended I was in Year 8 and they all believed us.'

She stops and Terry counts down the remaining seconds: fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty. ‘Thank you, Jade.'

Bridie has a new uniform but really, he thinks, she and Jade should just swap. Poor little Bridie's tunic is two sizes too big for her and hangs off her tiny frame. What was Vonnie thinking? Not a flying chance in hell Bridie's going to grow into it this year.

She pushes her glasses up before she starts, her eyes on the stopwatch as nerves and the time limit make her gabble. ‘My dad made me a pencil case and it's got my name on it.' She holds up a glazed wooden box that has the word BRIDIE burnt into the top, the writing sloping and shaky. She slides the top panel open to reveal a rubber, a sharpener and two pencils so new they haven't yet been sharpened to a point. Terry makes an encouraging sound so she'll
keep going and she does, her words tumbling together. ‘And my dad and me, we went on a holiday and we went to this fun park and we went on every ride.' She looks down as she speaks, and only when the time is up does she give Terry a cautious look. He taps his fingers against his leg, swallows, then gives the girl a nod. Still wary, she colours as she makes her way back to the rug.

Kurt swaggers his way to the front of the classroom. He's turned brown-red with too much sun, the skin across his nose peeled back to a baby-doll pink. Standing with one leg bent, he gives his hair a scratch before he starts. ‘We went overseas with me dad and we stayed in these hut things that have got poles on them so they aren't on the ground, they're, like, on poles. And we went to the jungle and that and then, my brother and me, we caught the plane back by ourselves and there was this snack bar at the end of the plane and you can go there whenever you want, and whenever you want a hot chocolate, you just press this button and they bring it to you.'

Terry holds up a finger to give him the fifteen-second warning. This makes Kurt stop still for a second before he gets the rest of his story out in a rush. ‘And they've got this Xbox thing on the plane, and we played it the whole time. And you could even play it while you eat your meal because the screen's stuck to the back of the chair in front of you.' He looks over to Terry to check how he's done, giving himself the victory sign as Terry mouths fifty-eight then fifty-nine before he draws an imaginary line across his neck.

‘So why did you and Jordan catch the plane home without your dad?' Terry asks the question lightly.

‘'Cause me dad, he's moved there now. 'Cause his fiancée, that's where she lives. So we get to go there on the holidays.' Kurt scratches
his head again. ‘Not the next holidays—'cause it's really expensive to go there—but probably after that.'

When Terry nods, Kurt gives him a smile that's half proud and half like he wants to say something else before he squashes himself back down between Cody and Ethan, and Cody gives a yell because Kurt's sitting on his ankle and Cody reckons it's twisted.

Terry surveys his brood with a satisfied smile. It's good to be back, he thinks. It's really good to be back.

Sid

Sid doesn't need an alarm clock. Like a bird, he wakes as soon as it's daylight. He doesn't get up straightaway, though; he just lies in bed for a bit and lets the day catch up with him.

It's promising to be a hot one, already he can feel it in the air. He doesn't mind the heat. He's not a fan of humid, sticky days, but a bit of heat, that's another thing. Now he throws the sheet off, pulls himself up and swivels around until his feet are on the ground.

Under his toes, the carpet is thin. And no wonder; it's done its time. He was a kid when they laid it and now he's sixty-seven.

Although he takes his pyjamas off, he leaves his singlet on. From the wardrobe, he chooses a short-sleeved shirt. He's never been a man for a T-shirt. In a T-shirt he feels half dressed. He needs a collar to feel right.

His swimmers are hanging up in the bathroom. He pulls them on, then backtracks into the bedroom for yesterday's walk shorts. All he needs is a towel, his sandals, a pair of underpants to put in his pocket, and he's set.

He never locks the door. He doesn't see the point in it. There's nothing much worth stealing inside and, from what he sees on the telly, locks don't seem to deter anyone much anyway. If they want to get in, they'll get in all right.

Ahead of him, the laneway is quiet. Four doors down, there's a passionfruit vine that, as best as Sid can tell, is the only thing keeping the back fence up. A hammer and a couple of nails would do the trick, but the owners are new and he's not sure they'd appreciate him just getting in and fixing it up. Still, his hands itch to do it each time he passes by.

He turns left at the end of the street and walks down until he hits the bay. It doesn't matter how often he sees it, every time it makes him go quiet, just looking at it. It's so beautiful.

The pool—Brindle Rock Pool, according to the new council sign—is just past the boat ramp. Every morning, Sid is down at the pool by 7.45 am. A lot of the regulars are earlier than that. Six am, even, some of them. Not him. He can't see the point of it. Especially as he doesn't need to be at the school until just before nine.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Ray motors down to meet him at the pool. Ever since he got the ride-on buggy, he's had a new lease of life. It's an electric thing, the buggy, something of a cross between a motorbike and a golf cart. Ray plugs it in at night, and by the morning he's ready to go. And it's a sight, all right, to see Ray heading past the golf club then careering down the footpath until he reaches the pool itself.

They've always got on well, he and Ray, even when they were kids. When they were little, they'd get mistaken for twins. Which was fair enough, from Sid's perspective at least, given that there's only eighteen months between them. But Ray hated being mistaken for his little brother's twin. Not that it would happen now. Now
people would give Ray an extra ten years over him. Sometimes, you've got to be careful what you wish for.

Sid doesn't wish for much. He's more inclined to let life deal out its cards and get on with it. There are worse places to find yourself than Brindle. And here he is, still living in the house he was born in. Unlike Ray, who took off as soon as he could. But someone had to stay—especially after their father dropped dead. So Sid stayed to keep their mother company, and then, as time went on, there was never a good enough reason to move out. If he'd had a family, things would have been different—he wouldn't have expected them all to bunk in with his mother—but, somehow the family thing never happened. That's the truth of it. It just never happened.

And since his mother's been gone, it's just him at the house now.

Today, the first touch of water on him is cold. Climbing backwards down the metal ladder, he lowers himself into the water until he is covered to his neck. Most of the young ones wear goggles and a cap—even the men—but he's never done either. He just closes his eyes for the first couple of seconds then keeps them open for the rest of the time. A bit of salt water never hurt anyone.

He mostly swims overarm, two strokes to a breath. As a nipper, he'd keep his face right out of the water, but they don't do it like that anymore. Now, they keep the face in. Left side or right side—it used to be you got a choice—but he's noticed that it's gone and changed again among the young ones. Now it's one side three breaths, the other side three breaths and on you go. He'd got used to breathing on the left, but the whole swapping sides thing is a bridge too far.

The first lap is a bit nippy, but by the second lap, it's perfect. Today, the pool's an aquarium and as he makes his way back up the length of the pool, he's following a blackfish. He's a big one, bigger
than others Sid has seen, and he thinks of him as the chief. Chief blackfish, trailing a school of smaller fish, tiny blue and yellow ones that disappear in a clap of colour when Sid gets too close.

After his third lap, he stops to have a break. Leaning his elbows up on the concrete edge of the pool, his eyes follow the waterline across the narrow bay that stretches out in front of him and across to Sandy Rock. For the locals, it's the best fishing spot around. Sid used to do some fishing there himself, though he hasn't done it in a while. Tom, who lives five doors down, he still gets around there. And every week or so, there'll be a knock on Sid's door, and it'll be Tom with a couple of fish in a bag for him. Sometimes he'll stay while Sid cooks them up and they'll have dinner together. Other times, Tom will just hand him the fish and be off. Either way, it's okay by Sid; he likes Tom's company, but he likes his own company, too.

For his fourth lap, he floats on his back and looks up at the sky. It's a clear sky. Clear and sunny. A good way to start the school year. Yes, he repeats to himself. A good way to start the school year.

He floats his way back to the shallow end, his head full of nothing much, so much so that he misjudges the length of the pool and bumps his head against the end. It doesn't hurt so much as knock him out of his reverie. With a bit of a start, he straightens up.

From over near the pool shower, he hears Ray calling out to him. ‘Bump yer head, did you, mate?'

When Sid looks up, Ray is speeding down the pathway on his buggy, walking stick poking out of the back. As always, he's in a pair of board shorts, his calves red and tight from the infection that's already put paid to movement in his feet. Not that it's stopped him smoking.
Might make me cut down a bit
, he says,
but buggered if it's going to make me stop
. He's a rollies man and he rolls them
up tightly so they're as thin as a straw; so thin the filter bulges. That's another concession to the leg problem: the cigarette filter. Something to keep the doctors off his back.

‘The pool take you by surprise, did it, mate?' he yells. He's always been louder than Sid.

Sid puts his hands up on the top edge of the pool and laughs. ‘Lost in me thoughts,' he calls back.

Ray parks the buggy in the usual spot: just beside one of the bench seats that's been concreted into the sandstone that surrounds the pool.

Getting off the buggy should be a simple enough manoeuvre, but for Ray it's a bit of a business and he needs more than a minute to manage it. Now, a minute's not a lot of a time unless you're watching your big brother do something that should take a couple of seconds, his face screwed up in concentration and in something that isn't quite pain but looks pretty close to it. That's when, as always, Sid wants to shout out to him to check he's okay, to check if he needs any help. But, as always, he stays quiet and carries on like nothing's wrong. That's what he's learnt to do.

Once he's off, Ray pulls his walking stick from the back of the buggy and leans on it. He can handle some weight on his feet, but not a lot.
Because of the flamin' gangrene
. That's how Ray tells it. Sid's pretty sure it's not actually gangrene, but it's still not much chop. Still means that his feet won't work the way they should. Except in the water. They flip along okay in the water. That's why he likes coming to the pool, no matter what the water temperature is.

‘You coming in, mate?' It's an offhand question, but Sid times it carefully, waiting until he can see that Ray has got his balance and will be able to get over to the pool without too much drama.

Ray's got the script going too. ‘Hold your bloody horses.'

Standing still in the water is making him cold, but Sid stays put as he waits for his brother to get over to the pool's edge. It upsets him to watch it—the winch-drag of Ray's steps—and sometimes he looks away, pretending to check out the headland instead.

When he's at the edge of the pool, Ray holds on to the ladder to lower himself down to a sitting position. At the same time, he throws his walking stick aside, so that it clatters on the ground behind him.

Once he's finally in, it's like he's been reborn. He's a breaststroke man, not an overarm man, and he never puts his face in the water; he just keeps his head up the whole time, even if there's a school of sparkling fish swimming right under him.

Sometimes, they stop at the end of the pool—the far end, not the ladder end—and look across the bay, across Sandy Rock and up onto the headland. It's a low rise of bush scrub covering loose sandy soil that, at its point, turns to hard sandstone shale. When they were nippers, he and Ray would scour the place for bullet shells left by the shooters after a day on the rifle range. It's still there now, the rifle range—smack bang in the middle of the headland—and the shooters still come of a weekend, but it's been a while since he and Ray were up there. No chance for Ray now, but Sid could still do it; have a wander, even take the path all the way over to Raleigh Beach. If he had a mind to, that is.

And as if he can hear what his brother is thinking, Ray uses his chin to point up to the headland. ‘You been up there lately?'