The first thing Jack saw when he opened his eyes was a fox walking past his window. It stopped, and the two stared at each other. When the fox broke its gaze and fleet-footed it, Jack sat up abruptly, with an abortive, almost guttural, cry.
Still heavy with sleep, his mind slid over scant snatches of dreams from the night before, but he couldn’t hold onto them for long. What he did know with concrete certainty was that he was feeling for the first time ever that joy of morning he’d heard in the Peer Gynt Suite, and in an odd, half-formed way, it scared him. Because what of that joy’s obverse?
Jack was helping Daniel load the paint tins he needed for the day’s job in the back of the Holden. Getting a ride with Daniel to the gate, then from there with Juliet and Mel to school, meant he wasn’t quite so rushed now in the mornings.
Simon had long since pedalled off.
Jean was leaning against the veranda post, peering through her binoculars at Juliet and Mel’s house up on the hill. Jack fervently hoped they weren’t looking back down, but somehow he knew they wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t think to. They were wrapped up cosily in their own lives—not so tightly no one else could get in, but snug enough they were unfazed if others disapproved.
Jean lowered the binoculars and caught Jack’s eye.
‘So she played records to you all night?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Jack, guarded, sharing a glance with his father as they lifted the last four-litre tin of paint into the back of the station wagon.
Jean slowly put her binoculars back in their leather case.
‘Like what?’
Jack pawed at the ground with his foot as Daniel shut the boot.
‘Chopin, Debussy, Greg…’
Jean issued a sharp snort of laughter. ‘Greg?’
Jack blushed. He knew he’d misheard the composer’s name.
‘Doesn’t she think she’s the cream!’
Daniel shook his head slightly. Jean grimaced. Why couldn’t she like Jack more…? Because she knew he would grow to be Daniel all over again.
‘Well, if she’s giving you a lift…’ she said, with as much equanimity as she could manage.
Jack began to walk away but stopped and took his bike instead. Something about what his mother had said, her derision of the music they had listened to, had decided him in a plan that he had only toyed with until that moment. Daniel walked over to Jean.
‘Jean, if he’s made a friend…’
Daniel reached for her but Jean shrugged and moved away. She stopped suddenly, seeing the household detritus stacked up against the shed, including the old fridge that must have been there ten years, no less!
She couldn’t help it. Her frustration welled up.
‘Well, we’re not going to make any friends with that pile of rubbish still sitting there. How can we have anyone round?’
Jean slammed the door behind her. Daniel surveyed the junk in question. It wasn’t junk to him. The fridge was one of the few possessions he had left of his father’s, the rest having been pawned to pay off the man’s drinking and gambling debts. The fridge was a fifties model, with chrome trimmings and handle. Daniel wanted one day to fix it. Put it in the shed, maybe. One day. One day till one day that day is your last.
He turned, surprised to see Jack had opted for his bike. As Jack disappeared from sight under the arch of trees, Daniel hoped with his whole being that his son would have his day. That day denied most of us.
Jack was at the front gate, watching Juliet and Mel’s Citroën come up their parallel driveway and exit their open gate. Pulling up alongside him, both Juliet and Mel gave Jack’s bike a questioning glance.
‘Gotta go somewhere after school,’ he explained cheerfully.
He was just hitching one leg over the seat, when Juliet pressed a button in the car and the boot flew open. Jack knew it would be impolite to refuse. She and Mel called out to see if he needed a hand. He quickly answered that he could manage. He lifted his bike and placed it in as carefully as possible, then found an Ockey strap to keep the boot down. He hopped in the car next to Mel and Juliet drove off.
Juliet was looking fashionable as ever, in a Hawaiian blouse and broomstick skirt. Jack had already heard people saying she put on airs. But maybe she liked to dress up? Maybe she didn’t care what others felt. He liked to dress up himself sometimes, as Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. But he knew you shouldn’t dress up in public except when dressing up was the point of the occasion. He then wondered how he knew that.
Mel was wearing some kind of overalls get-up that he’d never seen a girl wear before. She’d get a ribbing at school. But maybe she didn’t care either. Next time, he’d wear something odd himself, like a bandanna round his shoulders like he was a cowboy.
Why not!
As they overtook Simon on his bike, Mel wound down the window, leant across Jack and waved. At first Jack tried to stop her but then thought what the hell and stuck his head out with her. The two gawped at Simon vainly trying to keep pace, then spontaneously burst into peals of laughter.
By a strange coincidence, The Kink’s ‘Autumn Almanac’ came on the radio. Jack looked at Mel to discover she was also entranced by it.
Once at school, Jack and Mel got out of the car, and ran off happily to class. It was the first time Jack had ever run to class. Simon arrived on his bike just in time to see them disappearing into their homeroom portable.
He felt a pang of something he’d never felt before, or ever expected to, in relation to his younger brother, but couldn’t quite yet name the emotion. All he knew was that it had a garish green hue to it he didn’t like at all. Grunting, he chained up his swish red bike next to Jack’s bent green one. Even noting the difference in quality couldn’t quite eradicate that irksome feeling of…
Rubbish! He, jealous of Jack? But why?
Jack and Mel bounded into class, still laughing and jesting. Abruptly they stopped, trying at once to assume serious expressions. The class was deathly quiet. Up front, Mr Rush, in a wide-collared, tie-dye shirt, was mid-sentence, five rings in five different colours drawn on the blackboard.
‘…which is why the Greeks were a very clever lot,’ he finished, eying the two speculatively.
The errant pair kept their faces solemn as the class watched them find seats. This time, they sat together at the front.
‘Now,’ resumed Rush, ‘did everyone know that the Greeks started the Olympic Games? Yes? Nowadays, everyone can go. Back then, it was just the men.’
Rush was about to start speaking again when he looked at Jack and Mel. Not for the first time, he noted that they were the only two people of the opposite sex who sat together.
‘You know, the rest of you don’t have to sit boys down one side, girls down the other. We’ve come a long way since the Greeks.’
‘Miss Jackson made us,’ piped up Michael.
Rush smiled. ‘You make yourselves.’
Mel’s hand shot up.
‘Yes, Mel?’
‘Why?’
‘Why what, young scholar?’ asked Rush.
‘Why could only the men go to the Olympic Games?’
‘Well,’ said Rush, ‘their society was even more patriarchal than the one we have today.’
Jack noted that Mel didn’t even baulk at that strange ‘p’ word Rush had used—she must have known it!
‘Could they at least watch?’ she persisted.
‘Well, no, my inquisitive friend,’ said Rush slowly. ‘The men competed naked.’
The class tittered.
‘Okay, that’s enough,’ he responded. ‘Now, get out your books. As much as I hate to, I’ve got notes to dictate.’
The class groaned. They would never have groaned in Higgins’ class, and definitely not in Miss Jackson’s. Jack watched to see what Rush would do.
Nothing.
In his own way, he seemed every bit as contained, as self-assured—yet not in an arrogant or prideful or defensive fashion—as Juliet and Mel.
Smiling, he simply turned to the blackboard, picked a piece of chalk from the shelf below and began to write, either from memory or making it up as he went, for he wasn’t holding notes.
Automatically, Jack snuck out his drawing book, and opened it to a picture he’d started of a crab man. Picking up a black biro, he was about to shade it in when he found his hand hovering over the page. He glanced up at Rush writing on the blackboard, and instead put his lined book on top of his blank one and ruled a margin down the side of the fresh page. From the desk parallel, Michael regarded Jack in astonishment to see him applying himself. Jack shrugged at him good-naturedly.
Mel was keeping good pace with Rush. She had a thick biro containing four nibs you could alternately press down: blue, black, green and red. She kept changing nibs for headings, to make a particular word stand out, or to put in asterisks, and so on.
Jack wanted to laugh. Her page gradually became its own strange, colourful artwork. When the green ink refused to flow, and Mel got annoyed with it, first licking the nib then squiggling on the inside back cover of her book, he nearly laughed. She took notice of him for the first time since class had begun, stared down at her squiggle (actually a colourless indentation) and giggled with him.
They went to their various classes during the day, their last class being with Rush again.
The final school bell rang. The class began to move.
‘Uh!’ said Rush.
The class sat down again.
‘Homework.’
Groaning.
Rush mimicked them. ‘It’s not that bad! I just want you to do an illustration to the notes we made this morning. Remember, history is something to be valued, so make sure your drawings are factual.’
Glen shot up a hand. ‘Can we trace the pictures, Mr Rush?’
Rush adopted the pose and treble of a troll. ‘No-o-o!’
There was laughter as Rush walked to the door. He was the only teacher Jack had known who beat his students out the door at home time.
‘The Greeks were great artists,’ he threw over his shoulder, ‘and I expect no less from you lot.’
He reappeared in the doorway a second later.
‘No giving up now,’ he winked.
Jack stared unblinking as the other students piled out behind him. ‘Don’t give up’ was what Mel had said to him only the night before.
An insistent tugging on his shirt broke the spell. Mel was trying to get him out of his seat, so the two of them could get home as well.
Jack unlocked his bike and they walked to the gate, Mel taking the other handle of the bike like it was a toddler walking between them. Juliet’s Citroën was parked down the street, its engine puttering idly, as the other cars backed away from the curb filled with their cargos of kids.
‘Are you going to help me with my drawing, Jack?
He got on his bike. ‘No, sorry, Mel, gotta go.’
‘Where?’
‘Just somewhere,’ he threw over his shoulder, copying Rush’s gesture and lightness.
She stepped after him as he cycled the opposite direction to home, towards the main drag.
‘Somewhere?’ Mel shouted.
She stepped after him, unable to mask the petulance in her voice.
‘Jack? JACK!’
Her mood changing to thoughtfulness, Mel watched him disappear round a corner before heading over to her mother’s car. She could see there was a certain independence in Jack’s owning a bike. She made a promise to herself.
The record shop was his father’s favourite store in town. It was housed in an old, dim building with bottle green tiles and leadlight windows.
Jack leaned his bike against a green-painted wood seat on the kerb, and walked in cautiously.
The owner was finishing serving a teenage customer, Glen’s older brother. Mr Sloane was very pale for country folk, but this was not surprising given his shadowy workplace. He wore a tweed jacket, and had thin, dry hair and a wispy moustache that touched his bottom lip and reminded Jack of Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout. Mr Sloane was holding the record on a slant to catch what little coloured light came in from outside.
‘Welcome To My Nightmare,’ Mr Sloane read slowly. His assistant, Anna, who was in her mid twenties, took the record from Mr Sloane, smiled at Glen’s brother and put it in a bag for him. Wearing her typical ensemble of skin-tight T-shirt and short skirt, she inspired much discussion among Simon’s friends.
‘Alice Cooper,’ mumbled Mr Sloane, looking at the zombie-man on the record cover. ‘He doesn’t look like an Alice. The things I have to order in.’
Glen’s brother hurried out, already pulling the record out of its bag as though he had some way to play it on the street.
Jack walked up to the counter and shyly pulled out the piece of paper he had scribbled on in the Cubby House.
George took the crumpled paper like it might contain something nasty.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, smoothing out its creases and titling his head back so he could peer under his glasses. ‘Greg…? Morning Seat…? That doesn’t make sense.’
Jack felt a surge of anger. ‘Morning Mood. From the Peer Gynt Suite.’
Anna stopped affixing yellow price tags to the latest records, and walked over, gently taking the slip of paper off Mr Sloane.
‘Really, Mr Sloane,’ she sighed, her pretty forehead crinkling slightly. ‘You know that’s Grieg.’
‘Yes, that was it!’ pounced Jack, then quickly shut his mouth from Mr Sloane’s look.
Anna walked to the classical section. ‘We should have that one,’ she said airily.
She had to search right down the back in a little disused pile.
‘Like classical music, do you, handsome?’
Jack shuffled on the spot. ‘Yes,’ he said defensively. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
Anna laughed pleasantly. ‘Nothing!’
She then gave him a funny look. ‘So, who do you like?’
Jack eyes searched the walls, as if the answer were there, before nonchalantly answering, ‘Oh, Borodin.’
Anna gave him a fetching grin. ‘Borodin?’
Jack, still a little tight-lipped and defiant, said shortly, ‘Yes.’
‘Who else?’ she asked encouragingly.
Jack rattled off a list of the composers he’d been introduced to over the past few days. ‘Chopin… Debussy… Tchaikovsky…’
Anna sighed with a depth of feeling that, to Jack, seemed out of all proportion, and moved to another stack of records.
‘Ah, all the Romantics,’ she swooned.
He blushed a deep red. Anna put her hand on his.
‘The quality of males round here—why can’t you be ten years older?’ she winked. She then had another thought. ‘Or your dad was fifteen years younger.’
Mr Sloane looked up from the till and shook his head like he couldn’t believe his ears.
‘Or, yes, if that new teacher was ten years -’
‘Ah hem!’ coughed George loudly.
Anna smiled to herself. She finally found the record in the first spot she looked, making Jack wonder if she were stalling to have someone else other than Mr Sloane to talk to.
‘Ah, knew we had it,’ she announced, lifting the record out of the rack.
She walked back to the counter. Following, Jack excavated his pockets.
‘How much, please?’
Anna tried to gauge the money he had scrunched up in his hands. ‘How much have you got?’
Jack put the notes and coins on the counter. He and Anna counted them.
‘Seven dollars and ten cents,’ said Jack, dispirited.
Mr Sloane piped in. ‘Sorry, young man, those records are—’
Anna cut him off. ‘Half price, aren’t they, Mr Sloane? Especially since Jack is the son of your best customer.’
She raised an eyebrow at him. Mr Sloane grunted.
‘Thought so,’ said Anna, slipping the record into a paper bag. ‘Well, my young Romantic, it’s yours.’
Smiling, Jack pushed his way through the door, the bell still chiming long after it banged shut. Mr Sloane walked over to Anna at the till.
‘Young Miss, are we running a business or a charity?’
Anna gave him a severe glance. ‘A service, Mr Sloane.’
‘Well, do me a service and make up the difference.’
Mr Sloane returned self-importantly to his present task as Anna reached with inexplicable weariness, for one so young, into her purse.
Jack threw open the front door. Jean, Daniel and Simon looked up from the dinner table.
‘Where have you been?’ asked Jean. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘Just out, Mum,’ said Jack, heading to his room to dispense with his prize cargo.
‘Your dinner’s cold,’ she called after him.
Jack emerged from his room, snatched up plate and utensils, and headed to the front door.
‘Where are you off to now?’ she asked.
‘Homework. I’ll do it in the shed.’
‘You, doing homework?’ Daniel asked, jokingly.
As Jack kicked the front door shut behind him, he just had time to hear Jean ask Simon, ‘What’s this new teacher like?’ and Simon’s response: ‘Dunno, Smithy says he’s a bit of a…’
Jack was sitting at Daniel’s red work desk with its white drawers and red handles, wrapt in his task, his coloured pencils fanned out before him, and a blank piece of paper beneath his hands which he rapidly filled with a vibrant, whirling vision. Beside him, sat the books he’d borrowed from the school library, their pages laid open to pictures of Greek Attic Vases, marble statues, ancient stone friezes and contemporary renditions of their sport and war; all the source material to make his picture as vivid and bold as time and inexperience allowed.
It was a new direction for Jack; still fantastical in bent, but wonderment allied to reality and research.
He’d never before been so engaged by a school assignment. It was as if it directly called on his skills. Not even art class engaged him, where he was forced along with the other kids to adhere to set projects. Just today, they had been made to halve potatoes, dip the resulting flat faces in white paint, and stamp these on large sheets of yellow cardboard to make oddly oval clouds. He was then compelled along with his classmates to empty clag glue along the bottom of the paper and then pour sand on this to represent the beach. The sort of technique that Jack had mastered, under his father’s watchful eye, at the age of four. Oh, and the odd way the other kids would draw a rectangle of blue along the tops of their pages even though they’d drawn ground way below. As if the sky stopped in the clouds!
Oddly, Daniel never drew himself; he only offered guidance. ‘It hurts,’ was his excuse. Jack did not know Daniel to have anything wrong with his hands and wondered if he was pained in a more obscure, abstract fashion.
The only interruption to Jack’s progress on the picture came each time he got up to put the needle back to the beginning of ‘Powerman’ by the Kinks. The song had just the right kind of throbbing intensity necessary to get the assignment finished. If only record players had a button where you could loop certain tracks.
So absorbed was he in his task, he didn’t know Jean was leaning over his shoulder, the expression on her face acquiring the sickly glean of shock.
‘Jack!’
Jack literally started from his seat. ‘What?’ he quavered, now standing.
Jean thrust a finger at the drawing. ‘What’s this… filth?’
Her finger hovered over the exposed genitals of the naked charioteer.
‘It’s homework, Mum.’
Jean’s expression tautened.
‘Homework? Naked men…? You’d better explain yourself, boy.’
Jack peered up at his mother timidly, wondering what he’d done wrong.
Toco Productions 