THERE WAS NO SINGLE WORD for what Iris felt as she churned up the hill. She waited at the school gates for a beat, trying to calm down; wiping under her eyes, which would be grimy with mascara sweated off in her rush: indecorously, culpably. A decent mother wouldn’t have to run up the hill, a decent mother would arrive looking unsullied …
The school secretary recognised Iris from the previous Disappearing Billy episode. She smiled, unflappable, as if there were clear and logical procedures for everything, even frightened boys hiding in bushes.
‘Ah, Iris, yes. Head to the playing field. By the climbing frame. Where the wisteria is. See that line of flax and hebes? Poor wee Billy, he’s been in quite a state, but I wouldn’t fuss. Craig’s with him. They’re probably having a good old confab.’ She spun out of her seat and held the double glass door open. ‘When you’ve got him all sorted, we’ll let Elaine know. She’ll want a quick word. Righty-ho.’
Then she was back in her seat, hitting console buttons and trilling to a headset, ‘Good morning! Larnach Park School!’
Iris sprinted up the concrete steps from the netball courts and ran to the playing field’s far corner, where she could see four legs — two short, two long — stretched out from the foliage.
‘Hello!’ she called, well before she was near. ‘Billy?’
Mr Farmer and Billy both sat propped against a low, grey, concrete wall, partially concealed by bushes. As the man shuffled out from the greenery, he momentarily looked as if he wore a head-piece of flax and lavender hebe blossoms. Then he shook himself clear. After dusting himself off, he extended a handshake, somehow underlining the indignity of struggling over roots and leaf mulch. He introduced himself, though she knew who he was. ‘Craig Farmer, principal of Larnach Park.’
‘We met when I enrolled Billy.’ She crouched to the boy’s level, tried to find his face in the gloom and bristle of foliage. ‘Hey, Billy-boy?’ She put a hand on his knee. He scrambled out and clung to her.
Farmer coughed. ‘Ah. Of course. Haven’t seen you around school much.’
Iris’s skin prickled. ‘I’ve walked Billy here often. I suppose you must be very busy. So many people to remember, even at a small school.’
They seemed to be in an arms escalation. Maybe the man was still embarrassed at having been found in the bushes. He seemed anxious to appear authoritative. ‘Mrs Dunningham, may I ask — are there any developmental issues with Billy that you omitted to tell us when he enrolled?’
‘Ms.’
His expression altered as if to say, point to him, not her.
She feigned indifference. ‘No. None at all.’
‘No.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘I didn’t think so, but sometimes it’s best to check. You’d be surprised what parents don’t tell us.’
She alternately patted and teased up Billy’s hair: stroking, soothing. ‘Billy’s very bright.’ Scepticism darted across Farmer’s face. ‘He’s probably still unsettled, after the last six months.’
A bell sounded, and with shrill, tinkling cries, children in their bright hoodies and popsicle-coloured jeans ricocheted from doors everywhere.
‘Unsettled?’
Iris felt anger mount in a huge, glowing lizard-frill around her head. Surely at the very least the man would remember that Billy had started mid-term, if not …
‘Our family bereavement,’ she slung. ‘I would have thought that someone in the school might have had the sensitivity to …’ but she sputtered out of genuine reasons to be angry with Farmer in particular when she saw Billy’s teacher approach.
Elaine Hooper extended her hand, too: as if the strange, sideways day called for more formality, a resetting of boundaries and propriety. ‘Good morning, Ms Dunningham. You managed to get here, then.’
Iris masked her confusion by drawing Billy closer. ‘Come on, Billy, love. The teacher told me on the phone, the earthquake drill was just a practice. It’s all over now. I’m sure the other silly kids who scared you have been talked to by Miss Hooper.’ She felt her jaw thrust out: bullish, pugnacious.
You probably weren’t supposed to say silly kids. You were probably supposed to say something like the child peer who exhibited a brief instance of poor self-management that may negate targeted personal learning and community objectives and that failed — no — did not achieve our in-school and national standards for inter-individual relations. But Iris was shaking.
‘Let’s talk in the classroom while the other children are playing. Are you going to come along, Billy? You could show your mum your notebook.’
Billy cooed and chittered, slipping his hand into Iris’s.
‘A different boy,’ Elaine Hooper said to Craig Farmer.
‘Good lad.’ The principal picked leaves out of Billy’s hair with a carefulness that made Iris’s outburst seem churlish. Farmer stood with arms crossed now, shoulders hunched a little against the Antarctic wind the hilltop school seemed always to suffer from, even on a sunny day. ‘I’ll leave it with you, then, Elaine. Happy to chat about things any time, Ms Dunningham.’ She nodded, avoiding his eyes. Maybe his odd questions were well-intentioned, though uncomfortably artificial, standard procedure. Like the way one of her Auckland friends, Lata, was always asked in a blithe sing-song by her Plunket nurse, at the end of every visit with her new baby, ‘And no change to family violence there?’ — as if it were equivalent to, ‘Would you like fries with that?’ Oh, officialdom was all too easy to satirise, when at least someone, somewhere, was trying to mend a dislocated world.
They headed towards the classroom. As they walked across the netball courts, Iris’s hackles were still up, waiting to deflect any slights or stares from other children; but a small cluster of boys shadowed them, and called out, ‘Billy, Billy! Hi, Billy!’ He had acquired sudden celebrity status. One said, ‘Billy, your mum’s here!’ as if he genuinely thought he were first with the news, even though Billy’s hand interwove tightly with hers.
‘Thank you, Wilhelm,’ said Miss Hooper, in a thin-lipped way that sent a force-field around their little trio. The cloud of boys drifted off.
In the classroom, the teacher took Iris to Billy’s desk. ‘Bring out your Triple T notebook, Billy.’
‘Triple T?’
‘Targeting the Task,’ Elaine explained. ‘Billy has a tendency to … zone out, don’t you, Billy?’ She turned to Iris. ‘Did you get my email about this?’
Iris’s heart dropped. ‘About Billy? No, nothing. Just the weekly newsletter.’
Elaine Hooper went to her desktop, saying, ‘I’m sure I sent you a message a couple of days ago, asking if you could make a time to drop in after school.’ She tapped and peered into her screen, then sat back, pink rising all the way to her hairline. ‘Oh. Actually, sorry. It’s still in my drafts.’ She tsked to herself. ‘I was wondering — but it’s been so busy here, with the reading-level tests, athletics …’
‘Never mind,’ said Iris, reassured she wasn’t the only one to have let something slide.
‘I wanted to sound you out about how things are at home. How you’ve been handling the whole bird persona.’
Nervousness made Iris gauche. ‘Can it be a persona if it’s a bird?’
Elaine’s lips shaped a delicate, sour knot. ‘So he does act this way at home, too?’
Iris glanced at Billy who, sure enough, was stroking his arm with his nose: preening feathers. But then he pulled back, waiting, the way he might lift a bandage to show a graze was still there.
‘Yes,’ said Iris, voice strained.
‘When does it come up, particularly? I mean, has it been problematic?’
‘I —’ All of her debates with Liam jostled for air. ‘I’m not that sure,’ she said. ‘I haven’t kept records.’ Another weak joke: it echoed like a self-indictment. Why hadn’t she been keeping better track, if she was truly concerned? She’d let maternal anxiety become such a wallowing pit that she actually had a poor grip of the facts.
The women looked at each other in mutual interrogation.
‘I think,’ said Iris, ‘as I said to the principal, Billy’s been through an awful lot this year. I’ve been hoping the bird … mania was just a stage.’
Elaine Hooper nodded. ‘I’ve been trying to keep mental notes, but I’m no psychologist. It seems pretty erratic, actually.’ The lines in her forehead rumpled into a sweetly stricken horseshoe: upside down, like bad luck. It made Iris realise how seriously Miss Hooper took her responsibilities. She chewed her lip, came back to Billy’s desk and took the small 3B notebook from him, passing it to Iris. ‘What I have been doing is getting Billy to record the times he keeps to task. Whenever he works without distracting the class, he gets a sticker. Ten stickers on a page earns a reward.’
Iris flipped through the pages of the book. Her skin coursed with embarrassment. Quietly, she tried to say the most constructive thing. ‘Look, Billy, eleven stickers already. That’s great. What was your first prize?’
Elaine Hooper pressed a hand to the back of her own neck. ‘Well, he hasn’t actually received one yet. He has to ask for something sensible.’
The bell for the end of playtime cut in to their conversation, and soon door bang after door bang brought in more children, like bursts from an ever-changing jack-in-the-box.
Iris set the notebook down on a desk, while Elaine Hooper carried on valiantly going into more detail about her Triple T scheme, and the past few weeks with Billy. She tried to reassure Iris that yes, Billy was a smart kid, a likeable boy, when he settled to things. Yes, she’d been cutting him quite a bit of slack given he was still new here. Maybe they should have talked sooner, as the bird act really had become disruptive, but on the other hand, she was sure it was something that was like, oh, biting his nails. She’d once had a boy in her class who couldn’t help pulling down his bottom lip as far as he could with both hands whenever he finished speaking: just an annoying habit, but it drove other kids away. It took time to wean him off it, but with reward systems … Anyway, she was sure it would be fine, if they could work on it at school and home: channel it into something positive.
Eventually, Elaine had to turn to the crowd. She held up her palm as if pushing away the noise, and the children melted away obediently to their seats.
‘Thank you, Turoa, Shania, Julie-Anne, Hinemoana. And Kyle, well done, sitting quietly. You can see I have a visitor so you need to wait. Wait.’ Like puppies, some of them trembled and strained on the leash of her commands; surely one small boy even whimpered. Was he really Billy’s age?
Quietly, Elaine Hooper said to Iris, ‘I’m sorry, Iris, we haven’t even discussed whether you think Billy should take the afternoon off — but I think it could help. I want to talk to the others about their behaviour. Give Billy a fresh start tomorrow. If he feels comfortable with it, he can have his say about the drill then, too. Does that sound all right? We’ll use it as a lesson in relating to others,’ she said, mouth an ironic moue, as if at last she understood Iris’s attempts at joking. Belatedly appreciating what she was doing for her mysterious nervy-bird Billy, Iris warmed to her.
Elaine Hooper picked up the Triple T notebook and passed it to the boy. ‘You can start taking this home each day, Billy. Mum and Dad will keep an eye on how things are going with our plan.’
Taciturn, he slipped it into his bag. Iris shepherded him out, hand on the thin ridge of his shoulder. Yet being preoccupied by the very problem of Billy himself — and having him home unexpectedly (what would Liam say, after the way she’d pulled him out of class the other day?) — made her irritable outside school.
‘Weren’t you told there was going to be an earthquake drill today?’
Shrug.
‘Billy, you were, or you weren’t?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘If you’d listened more closely, you wouldn’t have got such a fright. You have to listen.’
He sprinted ahead, but soon used up the energy burst. He started grasping fistfuls of the ferns, poroporo and hawthorn that reached in a tangle over the fence rail beside the steep footpath. Bruised leaves and snapped twigs lay scattered behind him. ‘Billy! Cut it out!’
He echoed her: high-pitched, hips sassing, one hand giving a theatrically feminine flaunt on the air as he conducted: ‘Neh neh! Neh neh neh!’
She burned in silence, thinking, Okay, so his only problem is he’s a little shit. Eventually he slowed down, and his wing-arms folded to his sides. He let her catch up. There it was: the Dunningham jaw, thrust out — like a front-end loader trying to ram the world away. She saw it and thought it a wonder Elaine Hooper hadn’t slapped her when she’d shown it herself.
‘Billy. Sorry I snapped. I’m really worried about you, okay? It came out wrong.’
He half-scuffed his steps, pushing out his hips with each move, to make his school bag bounce in the small of his back: it signalled Don’t mess with me.
‘Adults don’t always get everything right, Billy.’
He gave her a withering duh look, then trod on, bag thudding it too: duh, duh duh.
‘I get that the drill was frightening. Especially with — what was his name? — acting the prat. With the desks and so on.’
‘Callum. Callum Longley. He’s a total dork. And Yuri Petrovich. Ditto dork.’
She waited for a rusty Toyota Corolla groaning up the hill to pass.
‘Did you think it was a real quake?’
He bumped his hand along the pedestrian barrier. Slap, slap, slap. ‘A bit. I guess.’
She put an arm around his shoulder, half-expecting him to shrug her off. He let it rest there for a couple of beats. But just when she’d decided that the more she pushed for information the more he clammed up, he folded into her, arm around her waist, sniffing back tears. He mumbled, ‘Don’t even remember how I got outside. When Miss Hooper first came, I thought maybe it was so big I got chucked out there.’
‘That must have been scary.’
His fringe slipped over his eyes. His school bag bumped into her hip, so she took it, slung it over her own shoulder. ‘But you’re safe now, eh? It wasn’t real.’
Topping her words so quickly he can’t have been listening, he said, ‘I thought if it was like that here then Dad would be dead in Christchurch. Most probably, everybody in Christchurch would be dead. Why does Dad hate me?’
‘What?’
He went mute again. Jaw out.
‘Billy—’ She looked up. Pale and stretched, the sky was ungiving. She found a tissue in her handbag — handed it to Billy. ‘He doesn’t hate you. He could never hate you. It’s just — if he seems grumpy sometimes, there’s a lot on his plate. With work, and settling in here, and you know, all the other things. He—’
Billy slipped away, flung his arms up, started to run downhill again, screeching as if scalded. She watched him spin away, a kite that had slipped its moorings in a gale.