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The alarm woke me at five am. After six weeks at St. Agnes’s, I’d learnt that getting an early start was the only way for a fledgling teacher to cope. I got to school at 7.30am and didn’t leave until 6:00pm. After dinner, I worked for hours preparing the next day’s lessons. Weekends were spent marking. I’m not complaining. In fact I was thankful for the heavy workload. It helped to numb my grief over my poor mother’s premature death and the heart-wrenching pain of losing Karim.
As for Annie, my stoic little sister took to school like a duck to water. I admired how rapidly she’d adjusted. I’d put up an awful fuss when my parents wanted to send me to boarding school. Looking back I was such a drip! Having studied psychology as part of my teaching studies, I’d never use the term in relation to a student, but it perfectly fitted my angst-ridden teenage self.
Shorter at sixteen than my twelve-year old sister, Fanny and undeveloped when she was already flaunting a pair of perky breasts, I was the only one of my siblings to inherit my father’s red hair.
In those soppy romances to which I was addicted back then, red-headed heroines invariably had a tangled mass of fiery, flame-coloured locks and creamy skin. Not me! My ginger frizz was accompanied by pale and freckle-prone skin. But worst of all, I suffer from heterochromia iridium. It’s a rare condition and simply means that each of my eyes is a different colour. It never bothered me when I was a kid. I was home-schooled and had never been teased about my looks. But when one of Doug’s delinquent station-hands called me a freak, it hit me — I wasn’t just plain, I was a grotesque monster.
I’m ashamed to say I acted the part. Mother complained that she didn’t know what had got into me. At the time, she was pregnant with Annie and with three home-schooled daughters, a chauvinistic husband and a large household to run; she was rushed off her feet. When she got a spare hour her head was stuck in a book — invariably a Jane Austen. Engrossed in the lives of exquisite eighteenth century heroines, she didn’t notice how deeply troubled I was. To rub salt into my wounded self-esteem, she’d named me Elizabeth after Austen’s beautiful heroine — Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.
These days, though I’m no knockout in the looks department, I don’t groan when I look in the mirror—thanks largely to Mo. Brought up with fashion conscious sisters, he’d clued me up about ways to improve my appearance, starting with coloured contact lenses.
Funny I should think of Mo. At the time, my feelings for him were so intense. On the day I left to start boarding school, I told him I’d love him forever. But like a fire deprived of oxygen our romance smoldered feebly and finally the fire went out. And so did I!
Thanks to bleach, hair straightener and coloured contact lenses I got asked out a lot. But none of the boys I dated made my heart sing. After Mo, I thought none would again.
Snap! I winced and rubbed my wrist. The skin was red raw ... I was snapping the wrist band too often. I wore it to remind me to think of something else — anything other than Karim. Such as food.
I got the makings for a smoothie out of the fridge. Zapped spinach, banana and pineapple in my Nutribullet, and checked out the emails on the shiny new laptop supplied to teachers by the Education Department. There was only one message in my inbox — a work request from the parent of a student convalescing after a lengthy period in hospital. It took but moments to attach assignment outlines and worksheets. Then I wrote a letter to the sick girl. I tried to make it chatty, but as it was the start of the school year there wasn’t much going on. When I was satisfied, I clicked send.
The walk to St. Agnes’s takes all of five minutes and it was only a quarter to seven. I decided it was too early to leave, even for an eager-beaver like me. I rinsed my glass under the tap and wandered through to the spare bedroom I’d set up as a study. I’d bought a secondhand blonde wood desk with a return, and two drawers. The top was standard. The bottom, three times as deep, was fitted with filing cabinet runners. It was ideal to keep my paper overload in some semblance of order. But though the desk that measured 220 x 90 centimeters was large, it was crammed with the paraphernalia that came with my outdated PC: monitor, keyboard, tower, speakers, modem and printer. I had trouble finding space for my teaching requisites: binder files, one for each of my five classes, two trays one for marking and the other for worksheets. And then there was the laptop supplied to me by the Education Department.
There was no ban on the personal use of laptops. I could have streamlined my work-space by getting rid of the cumbersome computer. But I prefer to keep my private and public personas separate. I’m careful never to write anything that might be construed as controversial on the laptop. Chiefly, because I have strong opinions on some of the ethical issues that have arisen in relation to Australia’s military intervention in the Middle East; and teachers aren’t encouraged to voice their opinions in public, least of all at St. Agnes’s.
I dragged my mind back to the present and turned on my PC. When my screensaver with a pic of the family homestead appeared, I clicked on my Gmail account. My hands trembled as I waited for the site to load. Nothing from Karim. I’ve got to stop this ... I’m just torturing myself. Again I snapped my wrist band, then reached for the mouse and clicked the internet explorer icon.
It took ages for Google to open. I made a mental note to check the service directory in the local paper for an IT technician in case my PC had contacted a virus. Something I thought quite likely because I’m researching bio-warfare for my blog and also for a novel I’m writing, as a consequence I’ve opened up some pretty dodgy sites. The novel is still at the planning stage but my blog is up and running.
I started writing biocide.com after receiving an email from a former colleague who is now volunteering in Turkey. According to what she heard from the latest batch of Syrian refugees, rockets containing the chemical agent sarin, exploded in Aleppo. The refugees maintained that 1,400 civilians died horrible lingering deaths. But though that atrocity was the catalyst; the roots of what I think of as my crusade began ten years ago when Mo and I discovered the International Space Station had been used to manufacture a bacteriological weapon. Though I’m barred from writing about the International Space Station; there’s nothing to stop me blogging about other breaches of the Biological Weapons Convention by nations I formerly thought of as decent and honourable. Nevertheless, I use a pen name.
To be honest, I’m kind of ashamed of using a false name. For in spite of mixing at Hagadery with idealistic young people from different countries and cultures, all of whom have strong opinions about free speech — when it comes to being counted, I don’t have the courage of my convictions. I hate thinking of myself as a coward but based on how Julian Assange and Edwin Snowden have ended up, I’m not taking any chances.
I dragged my mind back to the present when the familiar blue, red, yellow and green logo appeared on the screen and typed http://www.biocide.com into the search box and waited impatiently. After a long wait, the familiar blue screen emerged with its revolving satellites and the banner:
Don’t wait for the last judgment, judge for yourself
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Elizabeth Bennet’s blog on the Ethics of Germ Warfare
First off, I checked my blog’s stats. Page views this month were 1,127, slightly up on last month’s, but not earth-shattering. Still, I’d stumbled on a site about experiments on prisoners-of-war committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII at a secret biological and chemical research unit. I thought it would make a mind-blowing article.
More than 250,000 men, women and children mainly Chinese, were subjected to lethal experimentation at the facility. According to the website, the researchers were given immunity from prosecution in exchange for data on the effects of bacteriological and chemical agents on human beings. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a con, but I knew firsthand, what the countries, I no longer thought of as the good guys, were capable of.
Before I came upon the site, I hadn’t heard about that atrocity. I guessed others hadn’t either. I clicked on new post and typed: The Horror of Unit 731.
