Chapter 8

Art Class

Friday went with Melanie to see the nurse during morning break. The nurse gave her an icepack and a plastic bucket to carry with her in case she was sick, then declared that Friday would be all right to continue with classes so long as they didn’t involve body-contact sports.

‘We’ve got art next,’ Melanie told her. ‘Friday will be fine. She never does much in art anyway, except look confused.’

‘Walk there slowly,’ advised the nurse. ‘And don’t let her breathe in too many paint fumes.’

‘That’s two head injuries now,’ Melanie said to Friday. ‘First the picnic table, and now the fan. You’d better watch out, these things happen in threes.’

‘I think that’s only for celebrity deaths, not head injuries,’ said Friday. ‘Come on, let’s get to class.’

Art had never been Friday’s favourite subject. She struggled with the concept of emotionally expressing herself at the best of times. But emotionally expressing yourself through two-dimensional pictorial representations was a concept that was beyond her.

Even when it came to realism, she struggled. She found it hard to be motivated to draw a bowl of fruit when a photograph would provide a much more accurate representation. Friday still had the same feeling she had as a preschooler when she was asked to finger paint. She felt like she was entirely missing the point of the exercise.

Mr Brecht was five minutes late for his first class. This surprised Friday. Usually the lateness of teachers could be gauged by how much damage thirty students could do with the contents of their classroom. As such, a history teacher rarely turned up in the first ten minutes because their classroom just contained chairs and tables. Whereas chemistry, woodwork and art teachers were always punctual because you could do a lot of damage with a storage room full of chemicals, lumber or paint. (In fact, if you combined all three you could even make a doomsday device.)

Melanie was starting to drift off to sleep by the time Mr Brecht bounded in through the front door carrying a large green duffel bag.

‘Year 7?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Mirabella Peterson.

Friday was impressed how much simpering she managed to inject into those two short words.

‘Good,’ said Mr Brecht, dumping his big bag on the floor. ‘I’ve got eight weeks to teach you how to be artists. What have you been working on so far this year?’

‘Plein-air impressionist paintings of the school grounds,’ said Peregrine.

‘Blah, how boring,’ said Mr Brecht, with disgust. He picked up the copy of the year 7 syllabus that had been laid out for him on the desk, glanced at it, then threw it in the wastepaper bin. ‘I’m sure we can come up with something more interesting than that. Let’s do some finger painting.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ said Friday.

Melanie kicked her under the table. ‘It is a social convention to not be outwardly rude to a person the first time you meet them.’

‘But you’re supposed to be the greatest artist in the country,’ continued Friday, ‘and finger painting is something we already covered in preschool.’

‘And preschool was probably the last time you did a good painting,’ said Mr Brecht, sitting down and putting his feet up on the desk. Friday noted that his shoes needed resoling. ‘Which is why we are going right back to square one to build you into proper artists from the ground up.’

BANG, BANG, BANG.

They all heard knocking.

‘What was that?’ asked Mr Brecht.

The door to the classroom was wide open and no one was there. The knocking sound came again.

BANG, BANG, BANG.

It was coming from the storage room. Mr Brecht swung his feet down, prowled over to the door and pressed his ear against it. ‘Is anybody in there?’

‘Please let me out!’ pleaded a voice from inside.

‘Where’s the key?’ Mr Brecht asked the class.

‘Didn’t they give you keys to the classroom when they gave you the job?’ asked Melanie.

‘I suppose so,’ said Mr Brecht. ‘But I don’t know where I left them.’

‘Normally Friday would pick the lock for you,’ said Melanie. ‘But I don’t know if she’s up to it, since the blow to her head.’

‘I’ll try,’ said Friday, standing up from her stool. She walked over to the closet door and bent down to have a look. She stared at it for several long moments before she slowly overbalanced and landed on her face. ‘Sorry, I can’t remember how to do it,’ she said confusedly from the floor.

‘Please let me out,’ pleaded the voice from the closet. ‘I’ve been in here for hours. I’m starving.’

‘Stand back,’ ordered Mr Brecht, yelling through the timber. ‘Get away from the door!’

There was the muffled sound of the boy shuffling out of the way. Mr Brecht took a step back, lifted his leg and powerfully slammed the ball of his foot into the door just below the lock. The door ripped out of the frame and flew back, hitting something just behind it.

‘Ow,’ said the voice.

Mr Brecht strode into the closet, and looked behind the door. He reached down and pulled up Travis, a short, curly haired year 8 boy. Blood was streaming from his nose.

‘I told you to get away from the door,’ said Mr Brecht.

‘I thought standing behind it would be the safest spot,’ said Travis.

‘Why were you in the closet in the first place?’ asked Mr Brecht.

‘I was locked in there by a bully,’ said Travis.

‘Who?’ asked Mr Brecht.

‘Ian Wainscott,’ said Travis.

‘What?!’ said Ian. ‘I’m standing right here.’

Travis looked alarmed to see Ian. He clearly hadn’t known that Ian was in the room.

‘I might have been wrong,’ said Travis. ‘I know it was a big boy. I assumed it was Ian, because it’s just the nasty sort of prank he’s always pulling.’

This clearly made Ian proud because he smiled smugly at the compliment.

Mr Brecht went back into the closet and looked about. He came back, looking cross. ‘You ate my snacks!’ he exclaimed. ‘I had a wheel of brie cheese and a whole packet of water crackers in there and now they’re gone! Or, rather, they’re mostly gone because you left a pile of crumbs.’

‘I was starving,’ protested Travis. ‘I’ve been in there since first thing this morning. I missed out on pancakes for breakfast.’

‘Ooh, they were good,’ said Melanie. ‘Mrs Marigold’s surprise pancakes are my favourite! This crime is far more serious than I first imagined. It’s one thing to lock an annoying boy in a closet – we’ve all wanted to do that – but to lock him in on one of the rare mornings when Mrs Marigold is cooking pancakes? That’s just plain cruel.’

‘He’s lying,’ said Friday.

Everyone turned to look at her. They had forgotten about Friday in all the excitement. Friday was sitting on the floor. She still seemed confused and was rubbing her head.

‘Friday, perhaps you’d better lie down,’ said Melanie. ‘You look like my dog Bertie after Daddy accidentally hit him with his electric golf cart.’

‘No, let her speak,’ said Ian. ‘I want her to clear my name.’

‘Travis can’t have been waylaid on the way to breakfast,’ said Friday, ‘because the pancakes were a surprise. No one knew about them until we arrived at the dining hall.’

‘I guessed,’ said Travis.

‘No, we always have muesli on Wednesdays,’ said Friday. ‘If you had guessed, you would have guessed that.’

‘Then someone must have told me as I was walking to the dining hall,’ said Travis.

‘Then how did you come to be locked in the closet?’ said Friday ‘Even Mr Brecht doesn’t have a key.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Travis. ‘Perhaps the bully had a copy.’

‘Turn out your pockets,’ said Friday.

Travis emptied out his pockets. They were empty. ‘See!’ he declared. ‘It’s not fair, sir. I’ve suffered a trauma and she’s blaming me, the victim.’

‘Well, you are annoying,’ said Melanie. ‘It would be anyone’s natural instinct.’

Friday gingerly got to her feet and walked over to the closet. She looked inside. There were long, deep shelves stacked with heavy paint bottles, buckets of acrylic primer, reams of paper and glue by the gallon. On the floor in front of the art reference books was a scattered pile of biscuit crumbs.

‘And here we have the motive,’ said Friday, pointing towards the reference books.

‘Books?’ said Mr Brecht. ‘How are they a motive?’

‘This is a school,’ said Friday. ‘Travis is a hormonal teenager. And those books would have the only pictures in the school featuring naked ladies.’

‘It’s not true!’ protested Travis.

Friday picked up a book on European portraiture that was lying on the ground. ‘If you pick up a book and open it quickly so that each side of the cover is lying on the horizontal palm of your hand,’ said Friday, ‘the book will naturally fall open to where it was read last. It’s got to do with the stretching and bending of the paper and cardboard in the spine. Like this …’ Friday opened the book so that the covers were against her palms and the pages fanned out in an arch. They slowly flicked to their final resting place. ‘Ah, just as I suspected: the Renaissance. Rembrandt and Rubens. Really, I have to congratulate Travis on going against the contemporary objectification of women and showing interest in classical beauty values.’

‘Maybe I just like art,’ said Travis, snatching the book away from Friday.

‘I’m sure you do,’ said Friday. ‘But this art was specifically created because men like looking at naked ladies. Really you were enjoying art appreciation in its truest sense.’

‘Then where’s the key?’ asked Mr Brecht in frustration. ‘Clearly, I have to be able to lock this closet if I’m going to enjoy my own cheese.’

Friday looked about. ‘We have to think like Travis. He’s in here eating cheese, looking at pictures, when he hears the other students arrive. He realises it’s too late to sneak out, so he decides to pretend he’s been locked in. So he has to hide the key. The problem for us is there are so many possibilities. He could drop it into a bottle of glue or paint and the only way we’d find it is by emptying all the paint out in the closet.’

‘We can’t do that. There are thousands of dollars’ worth of paint in here,’ said Mr Brecht.

Friday turned to Travis. ‘Show me your fingernails.’

Travis dug his hands in his pocket. ‘No, you can’t search me without a search warrant.’

‘Really?’ said Friday. ‘That means you know your fingernails would give you away.’ She looked across at the shelf directly opposite the reference books. There sat one big block of clay, wrapped in plastic. She peeled back the wrapping from the top. The clay was perfectly smooth.

‘The surface is undisturbed,’ said Mr Brecht.

‘It’s clay,’ said Friday. ‘It would be easy enough to smooth down.’ She reached into her pocket and took out her own dorm room key, then started to gouge a long line through the top of the clay.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Mr Brecht. ‘I need to use that clay for this afternoon’s year 8 class.’

‘It’s in here somewhere,’ said Friday. ‘Aha!’ Her key had struck something. Friday dug her finger in and gouged out another key. ‘The key to the art closet.’

‘But anyone could have put that there,’ protested Travis, pointing at the key. Ian reached over and grabbed him by the wrist. ‘Let’s have a look at your fingers,’ he said.

Travis’s fingers were covered in dried clay.

‘Young man,’ said Mr Brecht quietly, which only made what he said more menacing, ‘if you want to look at the art reference books, you can do so at any time. But a more serious crime has been committed here. You owe me a cheese. I expect that cheese to be replaced by the end of the week, and not with some locally made rubbish. A proper brie imported from France using dangerously unhealthy unpasteurised milk. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Travis.

‘Now, come on, let’s get to work,’ snapped Mr Brecht.