Wildlife (8 page)

wednesday 17 october

I trudged back thinking, one down, two to go, one down, two to go. Overnight hikes. And promising myself I would never get stuck with Holly again.

I can’t decide if Sibylla is just so used to Holly’s needling that she can ignore it, or if Holly’s superpower is couching meanness in just enough humor that she gets away with it.

Stomping along for hours, one foot after another, puts you into a rhythm. A physical rhythm seems to call for a
thought rhythm, and my brain chose one of its favorite, well-worn tracks.

If we hadn’t been speaking about
pain au chocolat
with Dan and Estelle, Fred would not have been juggling two Les Bons Matins paper bags on his handlebars.

If he hadn’t had an extra clarinet lesson after school because his exam was coming up and he needed to rehearse with his accompanist, he would not have been running late.

If we hadn’t agreed to meet at my place.

If he hadn’t taken Brunswick Street.

If the truck driver hadn’t pulled in for a coffee right there at that moment.

If the impact had been to forehead, not temple.

If his helmet strap had been tighter.

If the parking meter hadn’t been in that position on the sidewalk.

If Dan had never come to my school.

If I had not liked Fred the first time I met him.

If he had not liked me.

If I had never met Fred.

If he had never met me.

If we had never…

Esther called this unproductive thinking. My mind, for reasons of its own, has chosen to ignore this sound observation. (It has to be what Fred’s mother and father and stepmother think, too: if he hadn’t been riding to Lou’s at that time on that day…)

If you take thinking like this to its logical conclusion you’d never get out of bed, according to Esther.

That would be fine with me.

For a while being dead felt like it would be fine with me, too, but…

But, as Dan said, we are the only ones who have certain memories of Fred.

The keepers.

When we get back, there’s talk of pranking in the air. A couple of small-scale forays have happened in our absence.

Pranking is a sign that people are settling into the new life. Warming to it. Over the years it must have come to symbolize some sort of “ownership” of the camp experience, because the teachers seem to expect it—and almost tolerate it.

We lead the house-on-house attack. Stupid target, as it turns out. Illawarra House has the biggest percentage of misfits and grudge-holders up here, but proximity is everything, and they happen to be our next-door neighbors.

We decide on a classic attack. The covert flour bomb. Elegant, simple, effective.

We get them on Thursday morning when the jobs roster
rotates and it’s their turn to wipe the swill and sluice the decks and risk contracting Slushy-induced hepatitis A–Z.

Eliza, Holly, and I go in armed with flour.

Annie keeps watch. Pippa stays in. Lou opts out. “I could not be less interested,” she says. It’s a shame. I thought she had warmed up just slightly on our hike. Apparently not. She seems glummer than ever.

As soon as they leave to set up breakfast, we are in. Pippa might not be actively participating, but it is thanks to her—to her older sisters, anyway—that we have the know-how.

Holly positions the three-step ladder we have borrowed from the drying room directly under the kitchen-area ceiling fan. She climbs up. I hand her the flour, which we’ve managed to stockpile during our week on Slushy, stealing a couple of handfuls a day in small freezer bags. She carefully spoons heaps of flour along the length of each fan blade and climbs down.

Ten minutes’ work on our part—surely at least two hours’ cleaning up required, if things go according to plan.

We have to wait until after classes this afternoon for our payoff. Fortunately the day has been warm, and shortly after they troop inside, someone switches on the fan.

We can’t see them, but we know they’ve done it from the screaming that ensues.

We should possibly play it cooler, but it is hard to resist the temptation to document what’s happening.

Holly and I sit outside, counting down their exit. Five from the first shriek.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

“Smile!” Holly says, as she takes photos of them bursting out of their front door, sneezy, shouting, flour-coated. Very angry. Which makes for some pretty good photos.

They do not smile.

thursday 18 october

When I see the girl still looking at the handsome boy with such buried longing…

When I read
Othello
…

Thinking how few of Shakespeare’s plays you got to know, and how much you loved the ones you’d studied and read and seen performed, is just one of the things that makes me bite the inside of my cheek hard. The little pain to stop the big pain. Doesn’t work. At least we got to see that fantastic production of
Hamlet
together, remember? (Duh, of course you don’t. You are no longer in a fit state
of consciousness to remember things. Sane me reminds myself that this is a one-way conversation.)

But if you could just see these jackanapes, Fred, the cream-faced loons that
Othello
is wasted on. I don’t even love this play. Things do not end well for Desdemona. And she has done nothing wrong. Nothing to deserve it. Nothing to motivate it. Nothing to precipitate it. Another pointless death. So I do relate to that extent. But she does not die at the hands of a soon-to-be-shattered truck driver. She dies at the hands of an irrationally jealous husband.

I mean, hats off to Shakespeare, he certainly lays it on the line, talk about life lessons in the odd, unhappy ending. It felt so theoretical with
Romeo and Juliet
, though, didn’t it? And a bit silly. Kind of avoidable. Too coincidental. So much swings on shitty timing.

But, silly us, so much does swing on shitty timing.

If you’d left a bit earlier.

If you’d left a bit later.

Stop it. Bite down. Stop biting.

They are not all stupid.

Sibylla, for instance, is smart, but she is being pulled right out of shape up here. It’s because of the billboard.

Holly put a big photo of the “old” Sibylla up in our house bathroom. On the mirror. It is very unflattering. In it, Sibylla is pimply, and her skin is dry and red, perhaps symptoms of the pimple treatment, and she looks to have her mouth full. It’s nasty. Sibylla laughed, of course. It’s
important to be a good sport, not to show if your feelings are hurt. What is the alternative? Especially if it’s your best friend having the laugh.

So just before class today some of the hoonish, boorish boys… shall we call them jocks? That is what they are, I suppose. Anyway, these boys started singing the theme song to
Australia’s Next Top Model
to, or “at,” Sibylla. At first she didn’t notice. But when she did, she looked, I thought, in appeal to Ben, the brand-new going-out person, as if to say, your jock friends, can you get them to shut up? But Ben is Mr. Easygoing, Mr. Hailfellowwellmet, Mr. Friendofthewholeworld, so he seemed not to notice, or maybe he chose carelessly, or coldly, not to notice. The teacher had not yet arrived and the boys got louder and more insistent. And so Sibylla with very pink cheeks, and not looking at all happy, dropped them an awkward curtsy, which I am pretty sure she intended as ironic. But it wasn’t received that way. At least it shut them up. They had been baying for attention, and she satisfied that hunger. Or maybe what shut them up was the teacher coming in and saying,
right, good morning, okay now, have we all read and enjoyed
Othello
?
The round of groans that elicited was depressing.

Sibylla, sitting behind a tight smile, took a while to settle down, surrounded by such unwelcome attention. Holly basks in any reflected “kudos.” She does not mind Sibylla’s discomfort at all. The odd wolf-whistle and snicker was still filtering out.

Michael, from my math group, was watching Sibylla carefully; he was anxious, not sure what he could or should do.

The limelight was soon taken off Sibylla when the teacher, it’s Ms. McInerney, asked for our first impressions, overview comments. Michael threw her a curveball. He speculated that Iago was impotent in his relationship with Emilia and had sublimated homoerotic feelings for Othello. Surely, he said, only such extreme passion could motivate Iago to manipulate Othello to the point where he actually murders Desdemona.

This caused an uproar. Ms. McInerney, who doesn’t know any of us yet, wasn’t sure whether to take the comment seriously, or consider it to be an intentional distraction. She’s young and new, and was nodding her neat blond bob up and down with the surprised look of someone who thought she was going paddling but found herself in the squad lanes. Annie yelled out, Thanks for nothing, why should I read it now that I know she dies!

The more loathsome jocks were in ecstasies of gay put-downs: You faggot, Cassidy, only a gay like you would think Iago is gay, etc. Sibylla looked concerned for Michael, but I was starting to think he had concocted this just to take the heat off her. Michael defended his position by citing specifics from the text, which increased the jeers hurled in his direction. Ms. McInerney was staying afloat, trying to shush everyone and put Michael off without putting him down.

She ended up threatening all of us with withdrawal of the week’s house Milo rations. This created an instant
silence; Milo is like gold around here, a tradable commodity. Once everyone had simmered down, she told Michael we would be going through a more orthodox reading of characters and text in the first instance. Iago is bitter because he is overlooked for promotion to lieutenant in favor of Cassio, and so decides to trick and trap, to punish his general, Othello.

She adds that she would be more than happy to explore further themes or interpretations in which any one of us was interested as we progress with our study of the play.

Noted: Michael checking on Sibylla. It was a deliberate distraction.

Noted: Ben’s failure to stand up for Sibylla.

Noted: Holly’s constant, preening need for attention.

Yes, I am smally interested in spite of myself. Is this an early symptom of
Testing New Reality
, Fred? I know that wouldn’t bother you. But it feels wrong to me. It feels like I’m cheating on you.

There is a mystery smell in Bennett House. Like someone’s not showering. How can that be? Everyone does time in the bathroom. So, is someone just running water
and standing next to the shower fully dressed and still stinky? Or has Illawarra House learned how to bottle body odor and sprayed it around to get back at us for the flour-bombing?

Smells are constantly on the agenda up here.

Good smells: lemon-scented gums and peppermint eucalypts with which the grounds are artfully “natively” landscaped.

The air in general—out hiking or running—is crystal clean. It makes me realize how happily complacent I have been with breathing in toxic city air. I can’t wait to get back to it. I’ve adapted. It’s my natural habitat. But the clean air is certainly a pleasant place to visit. I just wouldn’t want to live here.

Foulest smell around is the boy deodorant smell, which is super intensified up here for some reason. Perhaps because of the shorter time between shower and classroom? Wafting stink from boy houses? Why do they put the yuck smell into all the boy products? It’s abusive to those who have to wear it, and worse for those who have to sit in class with those who have to wear it.

Misleadingly nice but secretly evil smell is the morning pastry run, Elevensies, which is when the cake shop from Hartsfield brings fresh cakes and slices each day for us to fall upon (at eleven o’clock) as though we haven’t eaten huge breakfasts a few short hours ago. It smells cakey fresh, but makes you feel all sugared and larded up and sleepy.

Very ferment-y smell—the compost heap. This smell contains a secret ingredient: fear of seeing rats, mice, snakes.

Sharp unpleasant smell—when they put fee-fi-fo-fum blood and bone on the vegetable garden, we all want to escape and barf.

Oddly pleasant but sort of poo-y smell—the chicken cages. We have our own free-range eggs. Fancy schmancy. But the chookies sleep overnight in big cages because of possible fox attacks.

Girl perfumes. You can have too much of a good thing. All the perfumes of Arabia come together in our house. Along with the mystery BO. I used to love Dior J’Adore, but Pippa squirts it around with such abandon that I can’t stand it anymore.

We’ll need to have a house meeting about smells soon.

The laundry/drying room smell—delicious: clean, dry sheets and towels. And toasties.

“So, what are you doing back?” Holly asks me as we lift out our grilled Swiss cheese and ham.

And expanding—in response to my blank look: “He put flowers on your pillow!” Ben did somehow get into Bennett House, and put a handful of banksia roses on my pillow; they had a few ants in them, not that I want to nitpick.

“Nothing?”

“Are you crazy? Has it even registered that you—
you
—have the best-looking boyfriend for ten thousand square miles? Don’t you want to shower him with affection? And let the whole world see that you care?”

I really would prefer the whole world not to notice, and I had not considered any affection-showering.

“I guess I could make him a thank-you card.”

“You’re not in kindergarten, Sib.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

Holly produces a bag of Clinkers. “Ta-da! I happen to know they’re his favorite sweet thing. Apart from you, I guess.”

“They are? And I am not his—”

“Can’t you just hop on board the girlfriend train? Ask him some questions. Get to know him.”

“Looks like I can just ask you,” I say, hoping I don’t sound as petty as I feel. Holly hands them over. “Your crazy friend can let you into their house. They’re on Maintenance this week. You can go after breakfast tomorrow morning.”

“So—you think I should leave these on his pillow?” I’m looking at the plastic packaging—it’s not exactly shaping up as a lotsacutefun love token.

“No, you idiot, have some
fun
—hide them in his pillowcase, his boots, his boxers… use your imagination!”

“What if he thinks it’s stupid?”

“As if.”

“I’d better not risk it…” I remember with a surge of relief. “We agreed that we’d keep the whole going-out thing on the down low.”

Holly looks a little uncomfortable. “You could have made that clearer.”

“I told you! Have you told someone?”

“One, maybe two people.” She thinks. “Three, four tops.”

“So—great—everyone knows.”

“You should be pleased. Ride the wave, hun.”

“We’re not supposed to be ‘in a relationship’ up here.”

“So, deny it if a teacher asks. Jeez, it’s really not that hard.”

I consider the Clinkers. “What if I accidentally offend him because he thinks my gesture is just a hollow, unmotivated reaction to his?”

Holly snorts. “Only your fucked-up family thinks shit like that.”

What would I do without my teenage-behavior touchstone?

“Do you want another sandwich?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” I want another one. But I don’t want to seem too piggy.

“I’m sure. I’ll have a larger arse than I want if I keep stuffing these down.”

“Isn’t that what our sweats are for: easy storage of the larger arse?”

“You know what the Gorgon would say: Don’t let yourselves go, girls. This is an opportunity to get fit, not to get fat.” We both laugh: it is so exactly what she would say.

“That does it; I’m going again,” I say. I slap some more ham and Swiss between two slices of bread.

The Gorgon is Holly’s mother. Glamorous, skinny, tan, and mean. Mothers are generally either starvers or feeders;
she is definitely a starver: “Would you like some extra lemon juice on your salad leaves, girls?” Whereas my mother is a feeder (thank god): “More gnocchi, girls?”

Maybe that’s why they let us go into the wild this year: this is the age at which we have perfectly internalized our parent-messages, and so are considered to be safe alone.