A page torn from an exercise book lifted in the wind and was blown back and forth till it finally settled in a patch of cracked, curling whitewash on a flat stone roof. The ink on the page was smudged and faded. Sounds of chairs scraping on hard floor, of chalk tapping on the blackboard drifted up from the row of classrooms beneath, each one open to the verandah that ran alongside. In the third classroom along, Joshua brushed his hair out of his eyes and fidgeted. He put the point of his pencil into the wood of his desk, his mind only half on the lesson.
‘New tribes came up from the south in about 1800 …’
He dug the pencil in and drew it along the grain of the old wood. He pressed it harder and pulled the pencil down towards him, then up again until it formed a leg.
At his side, Robert nudged him and pointed at the blackboard where a nun was chalking lines and arrows on a map. Joshua copied them quickly into his exercise book, then returned his attention to the wood. He drew a line to the left, bumping over the grooves of an earlier carving of someone’s name.
Robert leaned across and continued the picture.
Joshua took over again, beginning to draw a robe. He sniggered quietly.
‘Joshua? Well?’ The nun was looking straight at Joshua, her eyebrows raised.
Joshua looked up uncertainly at his teacher. He put the pencil down very carefully. ‘Er, you asked … I mean …’ He was floundering.
‘How many … migrations … were,’ hissed the boy on the other side of the aisle.
Joshua looked helplessly at him. He’d only heard a few of the whispered words. He tried to answer the nun anyway. ‘Er, two, Sister.’
The boy shook his head and mouthed something.
‘Three,’ he said, changing his answer.
Sister Mary looked at him steadily. ‘If you’d been listening instead of defacing school property, you would have known the answer. Can anyone tell him?’ she appealed to the rest of the class.
‘Five, Sister,’ called out a few voices.
‘That’s right. Five, Joshua,’ she repeated to him. ‘There’s an empty desk up here at the front. Perhaps you would care to fill it? On your own, without Robert, so that you can attend to the lesson?’
Joshua sighed heavily and got up, gathering his books together.
‘And no more decorating desks, young man.’
Joshua drew up the chair at the desk she had indicated and nodded, chastened. He hadn’t thought she’d seen.
‘Now,’ Sister Mary announced, coming down from the teacher’s platform, ‘I’m going to give out the papers for today’s test.’ They always had a test on their first Friday back at school after the holidays
A sheet of questions fluttered on to his desk. He put out a hand to stop it and began to read.
‘You have half an hour to answer the questions. Do your best.’
Joshua knew the answers to the first two questions – they were easy. Quickly he wrote ‘green’ and ‘head, thorax and abdomen’. But he wasn’t sure about the next one: what is the definition of an isthmus? He chewed a bit off the end of his pencil and spat it out quickly, remembering. But in his hurry to get down the answer, he pressed too hard on the paper and broke what was left of the point.
He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Please may I sharpen my pencil?’
Sister Mary nodded.
Joshua crossed to the other side of the classroom. The folding doors that ran along the length of the classroom were opened back so that there was plenty of air. By the front pillar was an oil drum where they put their pencil sharpenings and other rubbish. He took one of the two razor blades from the shelf above, pressed it carefully into the wood of his pencil and began sharpening the tip with steady, outward strokes.
‘Psst!’ Robert appeared on the other side of the bin. He reached up for the other blade. They grinned at each other.
‘Do you know the answer to number eight?’ Robert whispered.
‘Number eight? Haven’t got there yet. What is it?’
A voice came from the teacher’s platform: ‘Joshua! Robert! No talking, please. I don’t want to have to tell you again.’
Joshua wrinkled his nose at Robert and they went back to their sharpening. But they weren’t concentrating. Robert jabbed his blade hard at the pencil. It came away at an angle and sliced into Joshua’s elbow.
It happened so fast that Joshua didn’t notice the blade going in. He felt no pain. Not until he saw Robert staring at him and saw the blood drip into the waste paper and shavings below.
‘Sister Mary!’
The nun looked up at Robert’s cry, realised what had happened, and pushed back her chair.
‘Oh, Joshua! How could you be so careless, that’s what comes of talking at the bin. You know you shouldn’t …’ She was bustling down from the dais, talking all the while. ‘We’ll have to take you to have it cleaned and stitched. Maybe they’ll give you an injection; you might get lockjaw or blood poisoning or something. Come along, we have to bring you to the hospital.’
At the word hospital, Joshua dropped the pencil and blade in the bin and was out of the classroom before anyone could stop him, running for dear life, down the steps and across the yard. Sister Mary in her long habit had no chance of catching him. He was terrified. He didn’t want to die. He ran out on to the path and headed for home.
‘Whoa!’ his father said as he rushed by him. ‘What’s up with you? Why aren’t you at school?’ Then he caught sight of the blood crusting Joshua’s elbow. ‘Oh, Josh, what have you done?’ He turned away from the old oil drum where he’d been smoking fish and took Joshua’s arm to examine it.
‘Ow.’ Joshua began to cry. Now that he was standing still, the wound had begun to throb.
‘That’s a nasty cut. How did you get it?’
‘Robert cut me. By accident. We were sharpening our pencils.’
‘Couldn’t they bandage it up for you at school?’
Joshua shook his head. He didn’t want to tell his father about the threat of hospital.
‘Well, we’d better clean it up, hadn’t we?’ He put a sacking cover over the drum and went to wash his hands at the standpipe. ‘Come on.’ When Joshua hesitated, he added, ‘We need to go to the sea.’
‘Not to Mama Siska?’ Old Mama Siska often took care of the villagers. ‘Or to –’ he avoided the word.
‘I don’t think so. Good, clean salt water will be enough. Almost.’ He went inside and brought out the small box of salve that he made himself and they went to the beach, Joshua still sniffing.
Joshua flinched as the salt stung the wound. ‘Hold still, it won’t take much longer.’ His father dipped his hand in the water again and the shoal of tiny fish that darted in the shallows divided and then regrouped as if the giant interruption hadn’t happened. ‘Now, bend your arm so I can see into the cut.’
Joshua did so.
‘It’s very deep.’ His father smeared salve around the wound, then took a handkerchief from his pocket, worn but clean, and tied it tightly around the elbow. ‘There. That’ll do.’ He cupped water in his hands and pressed it to Joshua’s face. ‘Better now?’ he asked, stepping back.
Joshua managed a smile.
‘Come on, then.’ His father put an arm round him and led him home. ‘Here.’ He gave Joshua half a mango and brought Pig outside. ‘Sit quietly with Pig for a while and eat this.’
Joshua rested his arm on Pig’s back as he slowly chewed the juicy mango.
His father went over to the oil drum to see how the fish were coming along. He lifted the poles that lay across the top. Fish hung down from the poles by string threaded through their gills. The first two rows looked ready. Satisfied, he slid the fish on to a metal tray. ‘Put these inside, would you,’ he asked Joshua.
Joshua got up and took the tray inside, laid the fish out under the counter and brought back the tray.
‘Now, would you –’ His father broke off, laughing. ‘I forgot, you should be back in school. Go on now.’
Sister Mary was waiting for him on the verandah outside the classroom, looking worried. ‘There you are at last. We have to get that cut seen to properly,’ she said, eyeing the bloodstained handkerchief around his elbow. ‘You didn’t think I’d forget, did you? Robert was using the rustier blade, so I’m going to take you to the hospital, just to be safe.’
Robert appeared at her side in time to catch her last words.
‘No.’ This time Joshua didn’t run. ‘Dad’s cleaned it for me. He says it’s okay.’
‘His Dad won’t like it if you take him to hospital,’ Robert chimed in.
Sister Mary wavered.
‘He treats things himself,’ Robert added. ‘He uses his own medicine.’ He turned to Joshua. ‘Come on, Josh, or we’ll miss Sister Martha’s arithmetic lesson.’
Sister Mary’s eyebrows shot up comically at this unusual sign of enthusiasm.
‘He’ll be all right, Sister. Really.’
Robert pulled him back into the classroom. ‘Come on, Josh.’
Joshua went back to sit at his usual place, next to Robert.