I figured that I knew pretty much everything that was going on in Davey’s life because I was so involved at the school. When he met me at the gate one afternoon, in tears and sporting a black eye, I was completely bewildered.
‘What on earth happened?’ I gasped, and I took his shoulders into my hands and crouched before him to stare into his eyes. He avoided my gaze, so I caught his chin and turned him back towards me. His big blue eyes swam with tears and his chin had such a miserable wobble to it that I thought my heart was going to break.
‘One of the big kids hit me,’ he whispered, and a tear ran down his cheek. I wiped it away and pulled him hard up against me. ‘I was playing soccer but he took my ball, and when I asked for it back he hit me.’
‘What was his name, Davey?’ I whispered.
‘I can’t tell you, Mum. If I tell you, he’ll get in trouble, and then it’ll get worse.’
David was breaking down by then, and I felt a surge of anger run through my body. I clutched his shoulders again and said fiercely,
‘You will tell me, David. And you’ll tell me now.’
When he only shook his head, I rose and took his hand, and then I dragged him towards the school administration office. As we entered, the receptionist shot to her feet.
‘Hello, Mrs Gillespie,’ she said brightly, and then she glanced at Davey and gasped.
‘I need to speak to the principal, Clara, please. Now.’
The principal at that stage was Mr Jenkins. He was well into his sixties – probably past retirement – the kind of career teacher who lingers out of habit in the system rather than any genuine desire to be there. He had an old-fashioned approach to running the school – the children were encouraged to be seen and not heard. The school was not a fun place during that period, but I assumed that Principal Jenkins would clamp down hard on the bully who was picking on my son.
‘Someone has hit Davey, during the lunch hour,’ I said to Principal Jenkins, and he looked at Davey curiously
‘And what did you do to this boy?’ he asked David, and I snaked my arm around my son’s shoulders and pulled him close.
‘Davey didn’t do anything. He’s been bullied. I need you to intervene,’ I said tersely.
‘Davey, you need to tell me what happened. What did you do?’
I gasped. ‘Principal Jenkins – don’t you dare blame Davey for this.’
‘Your son is no angel, Mrs Gillespie. I regularly have to speak to him about his behaviour in the playground. This time I suspect he just happened to pick on someone his own size.’
‘How dare you!’ I gasped, and my arm contracted around him. ‘Are you going to do something about this situation, or not?’
‘It wasn’t my fault, honest,’ Davey said, and his eyes filled with tears again. He sniffed miserably, and looked up at me, pleading.
‘Davey,’ I whispered, ‘please tell Principal Jenkins who did this, and what he did to you. I know it wasn’t your fault.’
‘It was Tim Bryson,’ Davey muttered, and he looked at the principal. ‘But I really didn’t do anything this time, I promise. I was just playing soccer with my friends, and Tim wanted the soccer ball, and so he hit me and he took it.’
‘Well, if that really was the case, tell me; did you fight back?’ Principal Jenkins demanded, and I frowned at him as he continued to stare at Davey expectantly.
David shrugged uncomfortably and shuffled from foot to foot as he muttered,
‘I tried to… but he’s so much bigger than me. It’s just not fair… ’
Davey dissolved in a flood of tears, and I’d had enough.
‘You’ll do something about this, won’t you?’ I snapped at the principal, who sighed heavily and assured me he’d look into it. I took David home after that – and as we walked the short blocks to our house, I wished he was just a little smaller so I could scoop him up onto my hip as I’d done when he was little. Instead, he walked beside me, holding my hand and wiping his nose on his sleeve when the tears came in waves. I tucked him up on the couch with a blanket, and I sat next to him while he watched his cartoons. I gave him biscuits and milk, and I coddled him – because I could see that was what he needed.
But then Wyatt came home.
‘What’s going on here?’ he frowned. ‘Davey, did you let someone hit you?’
‘It was a big kid and I tried to stand up for myself —’
‘Well, David, you’re a big boy too now. You need to defend yourself. Haven’t I taught you better than this?’
‘But, Dad—’ Davey was starting to cry again, and to my horror, Wyatt gave an incredulous snort.
‘Jesus, son – what are you: a girl? We are Gillespie men – we don’t let bullies pick on us, and we sure as hell don’t cry about it if they try to.’
I held David even closer to myself. ‘Wyatt, he’s upset, and fair enough. Show a little support!’
‘Ivy, let me handle this, all right? This is the kind of thing a boy needs to get through to toughen him up.’
‘Then you can “toughen him up” tomorrow,’ I said pointedly, ‘But today – he needs some comfort.’
‘Do you think they’re going to make you captain of the footy team if you cry every five minutes?’ Wyatt said, ignoring me altogether and directing his comment to David. ‘Tomorrow, you’ll go to school, and you’ll punch that kid right back. Got it?’
‘Sorry, Dad,’ David muttered, and I felt him stiffen as he sat away from me. He still had tears on his little cheeks, but he wiped them away with the back of his hand, and he straightened his spine. ‘I’ll do better, Dad.’
Once David had gone to bed, Wyatt took his usual place in the recliner in front of the television, but I flicked the set off with the remote. Wyatt frowned.
‘What’s wrong, love?’
‘David is only nine,’ I said pointedly. ‘You were too hard on him today. That kid is three grades above him. What did you expect him to do?’
‘He needs to learn to be a man, Ivy. I know you don’t understand, but trust me – I had a similar thing happen when I was that age, and my dad was tough on me too – it’s how I learned to stand up for myself.’
‘He was so upset. He needed us to support him today.’
‘And we did. You babied him, and I told him to man up. Perfect balance. He’s not going to be nine forever, love. He needs to grow some balls before he gets to high school or he’ll be in for a world of pain.’
I sat there and worried while Wyatt watched the news that night. I wanted to protect David, but Wyatt had a point – high school could be tough for boys who didn’t know how to stand up for themselves. This was the first time he’d come home from his school in tears, but we couldn’t really afford for it to be a regular event.
The next day at breakfast, I said quietly to David, ‘How about you stay away from that big kid today, huh?’
David looked at me. His eyes were clear, but hard. There was a little fear in him, but he hid it well – no one else might have been able to see it, but I was his mother – there was no hiding it from me.
‘Don’t worry about me, Mum. Dad and I had a talk this morning, and I’m going to handle this like a man.’
I got called to the school that afternoon. Clara the receptionist told me I needed to come right in, so I literally sprinted from the house to the school. When I got there, I was out of breath and shaking with fear – expecting to find David with another black eye, or worse.
Instead, he was sitting in the visitor’s chair opposite Principal Jenkins’s desk. The black eye was still visible from the previous day, but he was otherwise unharmed.
‘What happened?’ I gasped.
‘I was just sticking up for myself,’ David said, raising his chin. ‘From yesterday.’
‘What did you do?’
‘David kicked Tim,’ Principal Jenkins muttered. ‘Given this is obviously a retaliation for yesterday, David will go home today but he can return tomorrow. As long as this is the end of things, David, I won’t put you on detention. Do you understand?’
David nodded, but then he flicked a glance at me, and the corner of his lip twisted upwards into a smirk. I was relieved that David was unharmed – annoyed that Wyatt’s advice had potentially sent our son right back into a situation where he could have been in danger – but I was also confused by David’s smugness.
‘Your father should never have told you to do that,’ I said stiffly as we walked out of the office.
‘Well, Tim Bryson won’t bother me any more, will he?’ David said, and his arrogant, unaffected tone to his voice was suddenly a comfort, because finally, I could see Wyatt’s logic. That older child really wasn’t going to hassle my son in the future, not now that David had humiliated him.
‘I guess he won’t,’ I conceded.
As soon as he walked through the door that night, David greeted Wyatt with a proud announcement.
‘On the lunch break, I walked right up to Tim Bryson and I kicked him in the nuts. He went down like a sack of potatoes and he cried like a girl.’
‘Well done, son,’ Wyatt beamed, and he patted David on the back. ‘You handled yourself like a man. I’m proud of you.’
There was an unexpected battle to be faced as I watched my son morph from boy to man. Life was a constant balancing act. I took so much joy in the ordinary comings and goings of our life together, but at the same time I was frequently conscious of moments of sheer terror that his tender years were passing, and with every new day, he slipped away from me a tiny bit more. The sweet little boy with the big blue eyes and thick black hair gradually shifted into a true-blue pre-teen. By the time he was finishing primary school, David had a mild case of acne, and I’d stopped hinting at him to use more deodorant and started sending him right back to his room for a second application before he left for school. He was still doing reasonably well academically, but it was an outright struggle for me to keep him at the top of the class. Left to his own devices, all David would have cared about was making sure he was the captain of the football team.
It’s Milton Falls tradition to hold a ‘formal’ for the students at the end of sixth grade, the year before the kids move from primary school into high school. I was chair of the organising committee, and David was the primary boy’s school captain, which meant that over several weeks he and I spent every Wednesday night at the school with the rest of the committee planning the dinner. It was as we drove home from one of these meetings that David told me with great solemnity that he’d been doing a lot of thinking and he’d decided to ask the girls’ school captain, Jennie Sobotta, if she would go to the formal with him.
When he came home from school the next day, he burst into the living room, leapt into the air for a fist pump and shouted, ‘Mum! She said yes!’
‘That’s great, darling!’
David threw his schoolbag onto the staircase and then nearly toppled me over as he embraced me in a hug.
The end-of-school formal was an event which dictated much more formality than the children had generally experienced before, and David decided that he wanted to buy Jennie a corsage for the night of the dance. He asked her what colour dress she was going to wear, and then he used his pocket money to buy her a pink and purple arrangement. There seemed to be general consensus among the other mothers that David was possibly the sweetest twelve-year-old in town, but later, he admitted to me that he’d just seen corsages exchanged on an American TV show, and he just didn’t realise it wasn’t a tradition Australian school children tended to follow.
Still, my David wasn’t the kind of kid to back away from an idea just because no one else was doing it, and so right after school that Friday night we went to the florists together to pick the flowers up. After David was dressed, I drove him to Jennie’s house. She was waiting out the front, and I left them a quiet moment alone together while he gave her the corsage. She wore a dress her grandmother had sewed – the off-the-shoulder neckline was already slipping around and driving her crazy before we’d even left the house. The dress was every twelve-year-old girl’s dream at the time – swirling purple and pink roses in the fabric, stiff boning at the waist and a skirt held artificially outwards by just a little too much tulle. Like most of the year six girls, Jennie had her hair curled and a dusting of make-up on her cheeks for the first time, and like most of the boys, David wore a white shirt and black trousers with his freshly polished school shoes. That was the first time he ever wore a tie, and when I was making the knot, I had to keep turning away so he didn’t see the tears in my eyes. He looked so much like Wyatt when I first fell in love with him – the same athletic build and thick dark hair.
I took a few of photos of David with his date as they stood together in front of her mother’s rose garden. At first, they stood stiffly side-by-side but for the last photo, David suddenly slipped his arm around Jennie’s waist. When I had the film developed, Wyatt and I were in stitches at the expression on his face. David seemed somehow startled to find himself touching a girl.
The world was a golden place the night of that formal dance, and not just for the kids, who were too young to know how fleeting those moments of innocent excitement would be. I chaperoned and supervised the ever-popular soft-drink stand, so I was there that night for every single minute. I saw the way that the kids danced and the way that they laughed together hysterically over the simplest things, and I delighted in watching them create their memories. I knew that they’d all look back at the formal once the inevitable adolescent angst of high school hit and wonder if life would ever be so simple or so beautiful again. There was something magical about the school hall that night, with the crepe paper pompoms hanging from the roof and the lighting that Evan Drysdale had borrowed from his cousin in the city, to give the room some ‘atmosphere’. I felt lucky that I got to be there, to see my son dance out the end of his last primary school year, and to witness his joy and exuberance as he celebrated with his friends… and those awkward first dances with Jennie.
When we arrived back to her house, David offered to walk Jennie to the front door. I was impressed with my son’s sense of chivalry. I waited in the car, and I tried not to look – it seemed appropriate that I give them some privacy. For a while, I stared down at my lap, but the minutes stretched until curiosity got the better of me. I looked up just in time to see David place a very tentative, chaste kiss on his date’s mouth as Jennie pulled away, protesting furiously. As he straightened, she muttered something at him from beneath a frown. I frowned too – what game was she playing, exactly? David had been such a considerate, attentive date – and she’d led him on all night – how dare she get annoyed with him when he offered her a kiss! I was going to tell him so, too – to point out how unfair she’d been to react that way, but then Jennie went inside and David turned back towards the car. He was positively strutting, apparently totally unfazed by Jennie’s reaction, and I relaxed. All he said on the way home was that it had been a great night, and he didn’t take the grin off his face for days.
A few weeks later, David told me that he and Jennie were now ‘officially’ boyfriend and girlfriend. I liked Jennie for the most part; she was a nice girl: positive, bubbly, and, of course – most important of all, apparently – quite athletic. Soon she was at our place after school every spare afternoon the kids had, and my weekends were spent ferrying David to his sporting activities, and then racing across town so we could watch Jennie play netball or hockey. They were a sweet couple, and at first, I thought the whole thing was adorable.
When the high school years came, they were so different for me – David now walked to and from school by himself, and he really didn’t want me to work in the canteen, or be involved in the Parents & Friends Committee. In fact, by the end of his first year of high school, he didn’t want me at the school at all – and if he did see me there, instead of my usual hug when he greeted me, he would put his head down and mumble something as he walked past. I knew this was all ordinary teenage behaviour, but of course, it stung. And then when the time came to refill his winter wardrobe, he asked if he could take Jennie shopping instead of me.
‘But, Jennie isn’t going to pay for your clothes, is she?’ I said pointedly. David rolled his eyes at me and said, ‘Jennie knows what’s cool, Mum. You don’t. So, I’m going to go with her on Saturday morning.’
Later David came home with an empty wallet and a completely impractical wardrobe – one expensive jacket, two pairs of shorts, and a singlet. The following weekend, I quietly took him back to the shops, and bought him clothes that would actually see him through the winter.
‘Sorry, Mum,’ David said to me, as we drove home. I looked at him in surprise.
‘That’s okay, love. But I guess you might need to remember for a little bit longer yet, Mum really does know best. Okay?’
David’s relationship with Jennie was another little reminder to me that parenting is investing everything you have into another human being, and then gradually releasing your grip on them. You need to let them make their own mistakes right there in front of you while you’re still around to pick up the pieces afterwards, and trust them to find their way eventually. But as David’s mother and until then, the only real female presence in his life – it was much harder than I’d anticipated to make way for another woman in his world, even when the ‘other woman’ was actually a thirteen-year-old girl. Over their first year of high school, David and Jennie were inseparable and I gradually became concerned about how attached he was getting.
‘Davey,’ I cautioned him. ‘Take things slowly with Jennie, won’t you? Girls tend to have big feelings for handsome boys like yourself, but you want to make sure you don’t limit yourself.’
‘Limit myself?’ he repeated blankly.
‘Well,’ I shrugged and I distracted myself with my cross stitch. ‘I mean, she’s not the prettiest girl in year seven, is she? Part of the fun of being your age is getting to know lots of girls… and there really are some beautiful girls at your school… girls worthy of your attention. Just something to think about.’
I knew what it felt like to settle. I knew the frustration and resentment that came from tying myself down to someone who was beneath me – although in my case, my mismatch with Wyatt was intellectual. But in any case, there was no way I’d ever stand by and let my son get himself wrapped up in a girl who wasn’t a worthy partner for him, not even in junior high school.
But it didn’t seem to matter what I said, David still only had eyes for Jennie, and towards the end of year seven, there was a distinct shift in their relationship. A subtle intensity arose and lingered. I could never really put my finger on it; but there was a gentle fading to Jennie’s easy grin. She was still at our house often, but every now and again, there’d be an afternoon where it was clear that she didn’t actually want to be there. I’d think back to that awkward first kiss on her porch, and wonder if my initial concerns about Jennie leading him on were right.
‘David, I just want to go with my friends. It’s just a milkshake.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No! Sometimes, I just want to hang out with the girls. You’re always at training or games with your friends – this is just the same.’
‘It’s not the same. I go to training because the team needs me, you’re just going for a milkshake. Why are you trying to avoid me? Don’t you love me any more?’
I was standing in the new kitchen while the kids sat in the lounge room. I paused in the kitchen, waiting to hear where the conversation went, but their discussion dissolved into hisses and whispers and then Jennie left in a huff.
‘Is everything okay with you and Jennie?’ I asked David, later that day.
‘Of course it is.’
‘Things can get a bit intense, sometimes… with teenage romances, I mean. You’re both young. Remember you’ve got a lot of life ahead of you – you’re just having fun for now, right?’
‘Yeah… ’
‘If Jennie was a good girlfriend, she’d be more supportive of you. I’ve heard you two arguing, David. You shouldn’t have to beg her to spend time with you.’
‘I know!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s what I said.’
‘Just you remember that she’s lucky to have you. And if she doesn’t realise that then… ’ I trailed off, then shrugged, leaving the unspoken suggestion to ferment in the silence that lingered. David glanced at me, uncertainty.
‘But I really like her, Mum. A lot. I think I love her.’
‘You’ll love plenty of girls. That doesn’t mean you have to let them treat you badly. You’re better than that,’ I said, and when he hesitated, I flashed him a gentle smile. ‘You are, David. Don’t let her make an idiot of you, okay?’
‘Okay, Mum,’ he said, and I thought maybe that was the end of it – maybe I’d said just enough that he’d end this silly dalliance once and for all. I was relieved when, over the next few weeks, things between David and Jennie became very rocky indeed. There were plenty more arguments to be overheard from the kitchen, and it became something of a habit for David to call her at night only to wind up slamming the phone down after an argument. I kept wondering when the day would come when he would walk through the front door and tell me that they had broken up. I had a moment of hope at a football game one weekend when I overheard David talking to his friends about Jennie.
‘I think I’m going to dump her,’ he said, and then he shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Have you seen the size of the arse on her these days?’
I wasn’t concerned about the coarseness of his comment – I was sure he’d said worse when he thought no adult was listening – he was a teenage boy, after all. No, when I heard David make that statement I felt only relief that David’s oddly discordant relationship with Jennie might be coming to a close. I was disappointed though when still more weeks passed, and the relationship lingered and the arguments continued. I wanted her gone – out of our lives, the sooner the better. I decided that since Wyatt and David were always telling me that there were some ‘men things’ I couldn’t understand; this might be something his father needed to address.
‘I think we need to talk to David about Jennie.’
‘Is there something wrong?’
‘They just don’t seem very happy at the moment… She’s becoming quite high maintenance. Maybe she’s even cheating on him, I mean… I’ve overheard some of their arguments and she certainly seems to be hiding something. But you know how loyal Davey is, I think we need to tell him it’s okay to let her go if he’s not happy.’
‘Okay,’ Wyatt exhaled. ‘Aren’t you glad we had a son? Imagine having a teenage girl in the house. It’s constant drama, isn’t it?’
I shrugged.
‘Maybe he just picked a bad egg.’