In the busy classroom, buzzing with student voices, the telephone was ringing. It was an internal connection only, from Alex’s office to the classroom.
I answered it. Alex said, ‘I’ve just received a telegram for you over the two-way, Bill.’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Nana passed away last night love Mum.’
The students were all silent and looking at me; except Francis of course, who had taken the opportunity to return to his drawings of dark, muscular heroes threatening to take others, to take life, by the nape of the neck.
Oh yeah, well done Alex. Billy has a classroom full of adolescents. He looks out the window out out out. He doesn’t want to be there. He wants it to be a time when he finally spoke to his grandmother, when she wasn’t ten years sick and she could answer his questions about her young days, her life. How come she doesn’t want people to know she’s Aboriginal and how did she get taken away from her family and does she know of many of them still and where is she from really and why did they send Billy’s dad away and and and ... and Alex stays in his office and forgets what he has just said over the phone and he doesn’t know anything of this and he doesn’t want to.
Mum says later that Nana was in pain and they had her on strong drugs. She went right back says Mum. She asked for one son, for Dad, no one said that he was fifteen years dead. We let her go. She started to talk in a funny language and she went through all these names and, in the voice of a small child, she started to cry.
But they took her away. And now she is proper gone. And Billy stands in a noisy classroom and knows that all those things he was building up to asking her now will never have answers. And he’s doing with Fatima, Sebastian, Samson what he should have with her, and even with his father but that was too long ago and he didn’t think then.
So Billy is doing it with us now, and Gabriella too. We might be all writing together, really.