In the living room, Daniel had to lean back to focus on the drawing, Jean held it so close to his face. She’d ripped it angrily from Jack’s exercise book.
‘Getting kids to draw this filth! Wait till I tell Marcia Jackson what kind of person is filling in for her.’
Daniel put down the boots he’d been polishing and peeked over the book at Jack, who was standing in his bedroom doorway.
‘Jack! Have you re-drawn it yet?’ asked Jean.
Jack nodded in the affirmative.
Jean clicked her fingers. ‘Let’s see it.’
Jack entered the room and showed her the new picture. This time, the charioteer’s genitals were concealed by the front of the chariot.
Jean scrutinized it a long moment before holding it before Daniel’s eyes a second and snapping the book shut.
‘Better. I think I’ll talk to Mr Higgins tomorrow.’
‘Oh, Jean, surely…’ Daniel started, but Jean spoke over him.
‘Tomorrow.’ She turned to Jack. ‘Now go to bed.’
Jack stretched out his arm. Jean handed over his exercise book and Jack slipped through his door and shut it solemnly behind him.
Daniel had only seen a glimpse of the redrawn picture but he was impressed. His son had clearly inherited what little talent he had, but what sort of gift was it if it brought wrath, guilt and joylessness? He hoped Jack would be one of the special few who reaped the rewards of their abilities in their own lifetimes…
Probably not.
The magpies were particularly noisy as Jack woke. But he loved all the morning calls the birds made. Mornings could be wondrous things, he decided, because the day can still be anything you want it to be. Late afternoons, it’s as set as the sun, as curtained as the world is at that revolution of the celestial clock.
When he got to the breakfast table, Daniel had already left for work—lately, he could only get jobs in the next town, fifty kilometres away. Simon was on the shag rug, doing his exercises.
‘Your friend rang,’ said Jean tersely. ‘They can’t give you a lift.’
Jack wondered what might be the matter as he rode his bike up the yellow road, the grass edging it just as yellow. Payback from Mel for not riding home with her yesterday? It didn’t seem her style. When he got to the gate, he was surprised to see Mel on a bike of her own; a glittering gold contraption with a banana seat.
She had the gate open for him so he had only to ride through and shut it. He felt silly and mean for thinking it was any reason but a logical and fun one.
Higgins had got to school early, and was sitting in his office, trying to get on top of his paperwork before the teachers and students marred the stillness of the place with their noise and activity.
He had almost finished adjusting the ins and outs register when Jean rang. He began the usual pleasantries but his voice soon petered out and he listened in silence. The implications of what she said threatened to dredge up an old incident in his own past he thought he’d successfully put out of his mind.
‘Yes, thank you, Mrs. Bennett,’ he muttered grimly. ‘I’ll look into it.’
Putting the phone down in its cradle, he turned to look out his casement window just as the dapper Rush strolled into view. What timing! Oblivious to the corollary in Higgins’ mind, Rush waved.
A big, clumsy man, with a shambling step, Higgins pressed his face to the glass in Rush’s classroom door as unobtrusively as he could. The glass reminded Higgins of the viewing portals he’d seen on TV in the doors to prison cells. Yes, they had their uses. Both examples.
He observed Rush stroll around the class, looking at the kids’ pictures of the ancient Olympics.
‘Good… Well done… Nice colouring.’
Rush stopped short at Jack’s desk and scrutinised the boy’s drawing with growing astonishment. He knew Jack had talent from the other day but this… He tried to make himself give Mel, sitting next to Jack, an encouraging smile, but while she evidently had preternatural gifts in nearly all subjects, drawing was the exception. Mel’s sardonic expression seemed to indicate she knew as much herself, and she gazed at Jack’s picture, thereby giving Rush the implicit freedom to solely focus on it too.
‘Oh my, Jack, that’s very good,’ he said at last.
The line, the colouring, perspective, composition…
‘All excellent,’ he declared. ‘Although… the legs are a little short!’
Jack huffed. They’d been the right proportion in his first rendition. The charioteer’s groin was now beneath the front of the chariot but it did make him appear an amputee below the knees.
‘Yes, well…’ he mumbled.
Laughing, Rush put a hand on Jack’s shoulder.
Higgins, watching and straining his ears behind the glass in the door, stiffened at the sight of Rush’s touch.
‘Never mind. Perhaps he’s kneeling,’ quipped Rush.
Rush turned and strolled to the other half of the class where all the girls sat except Mel. He stopped at Michelle and Kate’s desk. They had each drawn rather crude pictures of discus throwers with enormous penises.
Rush rubbed his chin. ‘Hmm. Nice work, girls, but you need to learn a thing or two about proportion…’
Michelle and Kate giggled as Rush surveyed the remainder of the other girls’ work. He was relieved none of them had attempted to draw their figures naked. Perhaps it had been unwise to introduce the concept to their heads. Well, Mel had asked why only the men could attend the ancient Olympics and he wasn’t about to lie to a kid.
He hoped soon to answer that other question Mel didn’t yet know to ask.
Tomorrow evening they were going to tell her. Together. He and Juliet.
It was afternoon and Rush’s class was lying on the floor of the music room, in Higgins’ care. Higgins evaluated them, feeling put out. The usual teacher who took them for Music had called in sick again, the neurotic thing. Getting the kids to lie down with eyes closed was evidently how she began proceedings. Higgins spied the record player and walked over to it.
He cleared his voice; always a good idea to air the throat, even if only to address children.
‘Now, Mr Rush has been telling you that music can help you travel places,’ he intoned, then pinned one of the students with his grey eyes. ‘Is that so, Kate?’
Kate’s eyes flicked open. ‘Yes, Mr Higgins!’
Higgins screwed up his face.
‘Hmm… Well, in fact, music is a very precise science. Mathematics, if you will. Classical music makes one smarter.’
Having felt that with these few words he righted a dangerous misconception brewing in these impressionable minds, while at the same time not appearing to contradict another teacher, he turned and sorted through the small stack of records beside the piano, as he muttered half to himself.
‘Any Brahms? I find Brahms eminently sensible. Never mind, it will have to be Tchaikovsky. Somewhat overwrought, but…’
Higgins placed the needle down on the spinning record. ‘Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1,’ he announced.
Jack, who until then had been silently busy trying to name just what it was he was looking at with eyes closed—strange, continent-long, crustaceans in space was all he could manage; the infusoria of old imaginings—forgot these creatures in an instant and became immediately entranced with the opening, blazing few bars. Bleating horns, swooning strings, ascending piano chords and a theme immediately melodic, immediately arresting, frenetic but still somehow… that word his father introduced to him sprang to mind… melancholic.
Yes, whatever this sound was, it was deeply sad. He opened his eyes. Embarrassingly, he realised Mel was looking at his no doubt screwed-up face. It wasn’t an ‘I caught you out look’, though, but that one of understanding he had so quickly come to expect, to rely on for buoyancy. How had he ever coped with never being understood before? (Except by Daniel, perhaps.) She started moving her mouth like a fish in time with the music, and Jack could do nothing but laugh, his melancholy evaporating in an instant.
Higgins pulled the needle off the record, enacting a sudden violence on that magic.
‘Mel!’ he boomed.
Mel sat up and, with an innocent air and sugary voice, asked, ‘Yes, Mr Higgins?
Higgins exploded at the impudence. To not even pretend to feel shame for being caught out. Instead, to sarcastically mock him. A child!
‘You might think we’re in the sticks here, young girl, but courtesy is still important. I’ll see you in my office tomorrow morning.’
Jack sat up with Mel. Their classmates remained lying down, as if held there by the force of Higgins’ censure.
‘But, Mr Higgins,’ Mel pronounced, ‘tomorrow’s Saturday.’
Higgins’ raised eyebrows momentarily truncated the expanse of his forehead as his mind tabulated this fact. Tomorrow was indeed Saturday, but he couldn’t back down in front of an eleven-year-old girl.
‘Well, er, yes… exactly! Tomorrow’s Saturday—ha!’
Mel turned her swan-like neck with the choreography of a ballerina and fixed her eyes on Jack, both only managing not to laugh through biting their lips.
When Jack got home, he noticed something moving by the water trough. Jumping the fence, he found a sheep on its own, lying on the ground, panting. He looked down the valley to see his Dad pulling up in the station wagon.
The sheep’s eyes were sticking out. Grimly, Daniel leant down and parted its wool to find hundreds of wriggling maggots.
‘I told John they needed shearing again,’ he cursed.
He immediately set off for John Harrow’s property, Jack tailing after him.
John turned off his tractor engine and led them inside his house, asking Daniel why he didn’t just keep a gun himself. At the mention of guns, Jack winced, knowing what that meant.
‘I don’t find them congenial company,’ grumbled Daniel.
At that, John’s expression hardened. He took them to his living room where his daughter Michelle and her friend Kate were playing with makeup. They looked at Jack and made faces. John got on a stool and took down the rifle hanging over the fireplace.
He showed them outside via a different route, going through his rumpus room where there was a wall of medals and photos of John in military garb.
Taking two bullets from a box, John handed them to Daniel. Before he let go, he pinned Daniel with his stare. ‘I, for one, am not ashamed of what we did over there.’
Daniel would not explain to Jack what that meant. He was keen to get back and put the sheep out of its misery. Once home, he told Jack to go inside and, quaking in his limbs, turned in the direction of the sheep. As Jack hurried away, he heard his father mutter, ‘I don’t get this world… I’ll never get it.’
The poor sheep, thought Jack. The troubling notion occurred to him that it wasn’t just humans who could be cruel, with their stupid Saturday detentions and things. The whole world could, from nature up, be far more malevolent.
He worried he would never understand life either. That he would never be… good at it.
That night, in the shed, with Daniel sharpening the blades on the lawn mower and Jack drawing, he asked his father which was his favourite Kinks song.
‘Days’, said Daniel unhesitatingly.
Jack found the song on one of Daniel’s records and listened to it.
Thank you for the days,
Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me
It was sport tomorrow afternoon. Jack was never good at sport but he and Daniel would be expected by Jean to attend Simon’s game. Yet there was only one place Jack wanted to be tomorrow, even if it was a locale he usually despised, and would never normally think about attending on a weekend.
He tuned back into the song and wondered if in time it might become his favourite Kinks masterpiece, too.
Days I’ll remember all my life,
Days when you can’t see wrong from right.
But then that equivocation which seemed always to come with a Kinks song:
But then I knew that very soon you’d leave me.
Jack balled up his fist, and pounded his knee with it, his father giving him a funny look. No, that part was wrong. If they were sacred days, endless days, how could they cease? Jack sensed his first disagreement brewing with his father: the Kinks weren’t flawless after all.
The morning sun burnished the grounds of Miller’s Creek School with a blazing copper.
Higgins responsibly arrived at the detention he’d set Mel a good twenty minutes early, and then sat in doleful silence. Why so conscientious on his part? She would turn up either on the dot or late. A horrid feeling came over him that had reared itself of late like another voice inside him. Or an old voice he thought he’d forgotten: his dead, younger self. It had the one, pressing question: is this the best of life, teaching children punctuality?
Half an hour later, he looked up from his desk to see that Mel had moved to her usual seat at the back of the empty class and was busily moving her hands. He watched as she weaved a cat’s cradle between her fingers from red wool.
Exasperated, he was about to ask her to come to the front of class, and to continue with the assignment he’d given her, when he noticed it was sitting in front of him: a full page’s worth, in her inimitably sensible script.
Picking up the paper, he began reading with little doubt his chosen topic of ‘Paying Respect to Teachers’ had been subverted.
He’d only scanned the first preposterous but disturbingly brilliant sentence when he heard footsteps and a creaking sound. He turned to the opened door.
‘Jack!’ Mel cried.
Higgins flicked his gaze to her. She’d called Jack’s name in a way no one had ever called his.
‘Mr Higgins, I…’ Jack stumbled.
The boy had, on his part, looked at Mel in a way Higgins had, likewise, never looked at another. Certainly, in a way no one had ever looked at him.
‘Jack, it’s not necessary,’ Higgins said quickly, wanting, perversely, to sever the connection between these young things. ‘Run along.’
Jack remained in the doorway, defiant. Higgins examined the boy, and felt oddly beyond his depth.
Jack held up his chin. ‘I did it too, Mr Higgins.’
That voice of youth in Higgins called out. Stifling it, he pushed Mel’s essay away. He knew he’d never get back to it now.
He softened his tone. ‘Well, at least you’re man enough to say so. Now go on, Jack.’
When Jack again did not budge, Higgins made a shooing motion with his hand, and felt a stab of absurdity.
Jack’s next word made the feeling more acute. ‘No.’
‘No?’ queried Higgins, feeling his quiet anger returning; the one emotion he could rely on to sustain him.
‘No,’ said Jack, with all the authority one should ever need. ‘I’m staying.’
What a gulf of years there was separating them, thought Higgins, as he stared at Jack and Jack at he. And yet it had once been he, Higgins, standing on the other side of that age divide, in front of a teacher he had no doubt thought ridiculous in his ignorance. His hand flew to his forehead, swabbing his damp brow with a taupe handkerchief.
No, he’d never been a Jack. Or a Mel either, for that matter.
‘Very well,’ he said, cornered. ‘You can join your accomplice.’
Jack felt a sense of pride no homework assignment had given him. Until Rush’s, that is, before it had been soured.
No, thought Higgins, reading the triumph in the boy’s face. Damn him, a mere child, for making a fifty-five-year-old feel small!
Higgins adopted a tone of profound displeasure. ‘Your mother will be very disappointed in you, Jack.’
Jack sat down, the light going out in him, but Mel smiled in such a matter-of-fact way, as if none of this mattered in the least, that it was immediately reignited.
Daniel was home alone. For the first time in his adult life, he was worried about being alone. But at least it was better than being in company. Because he never knew when ‘it’ might happen. ‘It’ was his growing panic that if ever anyone showed him any sympathy, he might break down and cry.
The prospect of crying when he thought he had left behind tears along with other childish things, especially in front of an audience, was of a magnitude of horror he could not even bear contemplating.
Don’t show me any kindness. Don’t anyone ever show me any… and, most likely to completely floor me… sympathy, had become his desperate prayer.
Yes, better he was alone. Jean was in town with Simon, getting new studs for his boots before the big off-season game, and Jack had gone off on a long bike ride. He hadn’t said where to; he hadn’t needed to. Daniel knew he should accomplish some task before they all got home and they went to the match. He looked at Jean’s long-standing ‘To do’ list pinned to the fridge before heading to the shed and grabbing tools appropriate to the task he’d chosen. As he stepped on a paint tin to reach up to a high sill to collect his tape measure, his eye caught a blanket hanging in the furthest recess of the shed. He tried to get back to the task ahead, but hopped down, and walked over to the blanket and pulled it away instead.
All his long-forgotten, half-finished canvasses stood before him, slightly resentful. Flicking through them like he might flick through an oversized stack of records, he found the one above all others he had to look at just now.
Wiping the surface gently with a clean, damp rag, he rested it on his workbench and stood back. It depicted a boy and a girl, standing several metres apart beside a pond in a walled garden, watching each other with infinite patience and understanding and… care.
It was of him and Juliet at Jack and Mel’s ages now. He’d painted them in the suit and dress they’d worn to Juliet’s mother’s funeral.
He noted his painter’s box with used oil brushes in it. Picking one out, he flicked the bristles through his fingers thoughtfully. But should he revisit a scene of the past? Could he?
And besides, the painting was finished.
He nearly jumped when Jean walked past the open door carrying a load of washing.
‘Daniel, that rubbish won’t move by itself. You’ve still got time.’
How had he not heard her and Simon pulling up in the turning circle? He put down the brush, picking up a pair of work gloves instead. He knew the job she had in mind for him and it wasn’t the one he had chosen.
Toco Productions 