Book Title

If you want to know the truth, there is one thing that really drives me insane. Diaries. I hate them. Now, just before you start to think, ‘Hang on, has this person only got one oar in the water or what?’ I should explain that I don’t mean the physical diary itself. I have nothing against someone publishing a whole series of books with blank pages. That’s business. I don’t even object to people buying them. I mean, it’s not my money. In fact, for about sixty years my Aunt Gillian has bought me one every Christmas and I’ve always smiled, thanked her very much and stuck the damn thing in the bin the moment I’ve had the chance. But it’s not the sight, the touch or the smell of a diary that is liable to start me foaming at the mouth. Hey, I’m not unreasonable.

No. What I hate is the way teachers think that diaries are, in some mysterious fashion, the cutting edge of educational practice. What is it about diaries that excites them so? Do they really think that by setting a diary entry for homework they are somehow tapping into genuine adolescent interests? That we are all going to go, ‘Wow, that was one really dull lesson, but now I’ve got the chance to write a diary entry on it, the adrenaline is really pumping. This is fantastic, inspiring, brilliant . . . oops, I’ve wet myself with excitement!’? That’s only the girls, of course. The boys will, without exception, plan to write dairy entries, in which cows, milk and the churning of butter figure prominently. I’ve a theory about boys and spelling. I think that most of them are born with only half a brain!

And I know the answer to why we are subjected to the mind-numbing routine of diary entries. Laziness. That’s what it is. Sheer laziness. And that’s something else. ‘Use your imagination, class. I want fresh ideas and fresh expression. Now what can I give them to do? I know, I’ll trot out that old standby, the diary entry.’ Double standards. It makes my blood boil.

I’ll tell you another thing. Sometimes – no, probably most times – the diary entry is completely inappropriate. I remember last year our English teacher did Macbeth with us. Now I don’t know if you know the play but it has this woman, Lady Macbeth, and is she a real cow? This woman is completely evil. She pushes her husband into murdering the king just because she wants to be queen. Initially, he agrees, but later when he says he doesn’t think he can do it, she tells him that she would have plucked her own baby from her breast and beaten its brains out, if she had sworn to do it. You know, that nothing would stop her from getting what she wants, even if it means killing her own baby in cold blood. And you believe her! She is one cold, unfeeling woman. So, her husband murders the king and gets the crown and she becomes queen and all. And it’s very bloody. Our teacher told us to write a diary entry from the viewpoint of Lady Macbeth after the murder of the old king, who was called Duncan. Can you believe that? This is Shakespeare we are talking about here. High tragedy. And we are expected to imagine that in the middle of all the bloodshed, Lady Macbeth is getting out her K-Mart diary every night and jotting a few things down! So this is what I wrote.

It’s been a few nights since I’ve written to you. I hope I’m not getting lax, but I’ve been pretty busy recently, what with entertaining the King of Scotland and his three thousand hangers on. I was all for ordering takeaway, but Macbeth wouldn’t have it. He reckons the local Thai restaurant is over-priced and he’s been wary of the pizza place ever since he had the seafood thick crust and got crook with food poisoning. So I was up to my elbows in pie-floaters for everyone, while Macbeth and old Duncan were watching The Footy Show and getting a few VBs down them. Typical bloody men! Anyway, after all that, Macbeth tells me he doesn’t want to murder Duncan after all. He’s changed his mind! I tell you, I gave him heaps. I was ropeable. I said, ‘Listen here, matey, it’s just like when you were supposed to be putting up the shadecloth over the pool. That took five bloody months. No way, mate. Get in there and kill the old bastard right now or you can forget all about going to the V8 Supercars next week!’ ‘Aw, jeez, Lady Mac,’ he said. ‘Give me a break, will yer?’ To cut a long story short, he does it. Not without a lot of whingeing and whining, mind. And there is, like, loads of blood all over the good doona. Took me hours to get the stains out. Forget that old stuff about salt being the business for stains. Might work for wine, but gobs of blood is a different matter. By the time I finished, I was completely tuckered. So I’ll make this short. To be honest, after the day I’ve had, I just fancy a cup of hot Milo and a quick read of Woman’s Day. I’ll write again tomorrow, I swear.

I was expecting a detention for that. I wanted a detention! But do you know what happened? I got a big tick and a B grade. She hadn’t even read it. Sometimes teachers make me sick.

Look, sorry about all this. I know I’m rambling. It’s just that I had a hard time after Rachael Smith had finished spreading the hot news about my supposed love affair with the Pitbull. Not content with telling the entire school within twenty-five minutes – not a bad effort when there are over eight hundred kids at the school – she then gave the full rundown to the parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, second cousins twice-removed, neighbours, casual acquaintances, newspaper-delivery kids and the bag lady who spends her time gibbering and drooling in the city centre. I’m surprised she didn’t take out a full page advertisement in the local paper. I couldn’t watch 60 Minutes for months afterwards without worrying that my face would appear accompanied by a breathy voiceover, ‘Pervert Student Stalks Kindly Teacher.’

[Rachael Smith – Virgo in conjunction with Uranus. There is a tendency today to speak without thinking, possibly because you have the brains of a brick. Beware of large-breasted, bespectacled females bearing two-metre lengths of plumbers’ piping. ]

I don’t know if you have ever been in a similar situation. Unlikely, I guess, unless you are, like me, gifted with a talent for inviting disaster. But it’s hell. Yeah, okay. I know what you are thinking. ‘It’ll pass. Worse things happen at sea. Bit of teasing never hurt anyone.’ Was that what you were thinking? If it was, please go at once and stick your head in a large bucket of pool acid. I know all about treating misfortune with dignity. In theory. But in practice, you wish you were dead. Everywhere I went, there was giggling and immature remarks. Girls would leave the toilets if I went in. I was pathetically grateful that Vanessa still sat next to me in class. She continued to wear boredom like a badge, but there was a subtle change in her attitude. Difficult to be specific. Little things, like the way her body was slightly more closed, as if she was desperate that our legs wouldn’t touch under the desk. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought that even the teachers looked at me slightly differently.

I went straight home from school that day. To be honest, I needed my mum. I wanted to talk things through with her, the way they do on soap operas. You know. All that stuff where the girl says, ‘Mum, I’m pregnant by the local heroin addict, my best friend’s topped herself and the police want to interview me in connection with the arson at the high school.’ And the mum strokes the girl’s hair and says, ‘It’s okay, Charlene, you know that I’ll always be here for you.’ I needed that kind of thing.

Of course, Mum wasn’t back from work and the fridge was, as always, strong, silent and dependable, but rather weak in the empathy stakes. So I kicked it a few times, leaving a couple of decent dents, and I felt a bit better. Then I ate the last of the ice-cream. I didn’t particularly feel like it, but it was Mum’s favourite and she often had a bowl between shifts, so I forced it down. Pathetic, I know, but someone had to pay.

Overdosed on raspberry ripple, I wandered off to Kiffo’s place. Funnily enough, I’d never actually been to his house before, but I knew where he lived. It was not the kind of neighbourhood that you tended to go into if you could avoid it. Particularly when it was getting dark. Particularly if you were a woman. Particularly if you were a woman with huge boobs. What the hell. I didn’t care. I think in my state of mind I’d have been more than a match for any roving gang of hoons.

I knocked on the door, and after a few moments Kiffo opened it. He looked at me with surprise and then nodded for me to come in. The front room was a disgrace. I’ve seen some messes in my time – hell, I’ve created my fair share – but this took the whole packet of biscuits. Crumpled beer cans were scattered around the carpet, if anything so threadbare and filthy could be dignified with such a name. Old pizza cartons, at least three of them, were also arranged artistically on the floor. Two still contained traces of pizza, though they were clearly so old that any positive identification would have taxed the expertise of the most distinguished forensic scientist. I guessed at thin crust mould with extra botulism topping. The place stank of old socks, sweat, tobacco and despair. Kiffo noticed my expression.

‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘It’s the cleaning lady’s day off. Come in and sit down.’

I looked around. There was nowhere really that I considered a safe place to sit. The couch would have been rejected by the local dump on the grounds that it would have brought down the ambience of the place. Not that I cared too much about the fact that it was held together with fishing wire, or that it sagged alarmingly in strange places, like a depressed storm cloud. But there were things living in it. I could see them moving. It created a strange effect, like those lava lamps. There was a never-ending rearrangement of the pattern. A microbiologist would have been enchanted, but I wasn’t sticking my bum anywhere near it. I found a broken bar stool in the corner. It wasn’t clean, but at least it wasn’t creating its own visible ecosystem. Kiffo slumped into the couch, which gave off a dense cloud of irritated bugs, some, undoubtedly, unknown to modern science.

‘Wassup, Calma?’ he said, fishing into his pocket and producing a rollie with a distinct dogleg to it.

‘Well, when I say you don’t want to know, I mean that you probably do want to know. It’s kind of a rhetorical question – well, not a question, obviously, more of a rhetorical statement – but it produces a similar effect. You’re supposed to press me and then I reveal all. So not at all like a rhetorical statement, when it comes down to it.’

‘You’re talking like an English teacher,’ he said. ‘Don’t. It makes me want to throw up. If you’ve got something to say, then say it.’

Good advice, let’s be honest. So I told him all about what I had said to the Pitbull the night of the break-in and how she’d told the school counsellor –

[Mrs Mills – Gemini. Your normal sense of discretion will desert you today. Beware of unfortunate slips of the tongue caused by either a momentary lapse of concentration or an innate tendency towards verbal diarrhoea. ]

– who’d obviously said something to Rachael Spit-In-Her-Eye Smith who’d let her mouth off the leash and created havoc. As I was telling him, I could feel the tears welling. But I kept them back. Kiffo’s one of those guys who doesn’t like crying. It would embarrass him and he wouldn’t know what to do. So he’d have to get angry. Still, I tried to tell him how I felt as if my whole life had been ripped up and thrown away in the course of a single afternoon. I wanted him to know that this was important.

And he listened. When I had done with the tale, a little breathless with the effort of keeping emotion out of it, he threw his cigarette onto the carpet and ground it out with his heel. Then he leaned back and looked at me.

‘You did that for me? You told the Pitbull you loved her just to give me more time? I don’t know what to say. I really don’t. No one has never done nothing like that for me. Never.’

‘Listen. It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing, you know. It doesn’t mean we’re engaged or anything. Anyway, that’s all beside the point. My life has just been flushed down the toilet because of it and I don’t know what to do!’

‘Christ, Calma. You’re supposed to be the big brains of the class, but you’re a dumb shit at times. What can you do? Go around saying to everyone, “Listen, I’m not a lesbo, swear to God.” You think that’ll stop people talking?’

‘Stuff ’em. I’ve spent my whole life dealing with people who think I’m a step below a cockroach. Do I let that worry me? Hell, I am what I am. I don’t look for people’s approval and you shouldn’t neither. What you did for me was real good, a real nice thing to do.’

‘If it’s caused other people to think bad of you, well that’s their problem, not yours. At least two of us know the truth about you and the Pitbull. The rest can shove it.’ This was, by some considerable margin, the longest speech I had ever heard from Kiffo. I wasn’t used to being talked over by someone whose preferred mode of communication was an occasional grunt, normally accompanied by offensive body language. I felt touched that my predicament had moved him to that extent. What’s more, he was right. There wasn’t anything I could do, but just ignoring the situation didn’t seem too appealing either. For all that, what he said was important to me, particularly the bit about the two of us knowing the truth.

We sat for a while, lost in our own thoughts. Talking to Kiffo had done me good, just like always. It had taken my mind off my own problems a bit, which was ironic, really, since that was all we had been talking about. Maybe it was something to do with the surroundings, the evidence of Kiffo’s bleak existence. I mean, the room was disgusting. I’ll say that for the Fridge. She might be working every waking hour, but she still has the time and the energy to keep the house pretty tidy. But Kiffo and his dad? It was a different world they lived in, a world where normal standards didn’t apply – exactly, I suppose, the kind of world that the Fridge didn’t want for me. I mulled that over for a while. I could see what she wanted to achieve. I just couldn’t tell whether it was worth the price we were paying to achieve it. Gives you a headache, thinking about stuff like that, so I stopped.

Anyway, my eye had been caught by a framed photograph on the wall. It was of a young man in his late teens, leaning against a wall. He was smiling broadly, as if in response to something said as the shutter was clicking. Whatever that might have been was gone, the words long since evaporated, but the reaction was still there, frozen in that grin. He looked happy, full of life, energy radiating from the posture, the narrowed eyes, the red hair spiked into crazy angles. The glass of the photograph gleamed. There was not a mark on it, or on the frame, which had obviously been polished recently. It was a small oasis of cleanliness against the stained backdrop of the wall.

‘Time to go home, Calma,’ he interrupted. ‘We wouldn’t want you to catch anything life-threatening here, now would we? I’ll walk you back.’

It doesn’t do to argue with Kiffo. I got up from the stool and checked myself for alien life-forms while Kiffo rolled another cigarette and opened the door for me. We walked for a while in silence. The street lights around his place were all out, probably smashed by those in his area who preferred darkness as a business environment. In other circumstances, I would have found it frightening, but Kiffo’s presence was reassuring. I looked up at the sky. The stars were hammered into its blackness like small, bright nails. I wanted to talk about the photograph, but didn’t know how to start. I guess I didn’t have the courage.

‘No.’ I stopped. This was important and I wanted an answer. ‘You’re not. And you know it. All that stuff you were telling me back at your place, about looking for people’s approval. That’s not the kind of thing a dumb person would be saying. So why pretend?’

‘I’m not pretending to be anything, Calma. I’m me, that’s all. Like I was saying earlier. Other people think it’s dumb, what I am. Who cares?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It does. But then, you don’t think I’m dumb, do you? So no worries.’

‘But it is important what other people think about you, Kiffo. It is important if they think you are stupid when you’re not!’

‘What we do about the Pitbull. That’s important. Where do we go from here?’

‘Are you crazy?’ I said. ‘We do nothing about the Pitbull. I’ve already had enough trouble with that woman. I’m going to keep my head down, do the assignments she sets and hope that she’ll either leave soon or get run over by a very large road train. Preferably the latter.’

‘Yeah. You’re right,’ he said, scratching behind his ear. ‘It’s too dangerous. Keep your head down. That’s the way to go. You’re right.’

‘Now, hang on a moment, Kiffo,’ I said. I think I even put my hands on my hips. ‘Just because I’m right, doesn’t mean I’m right, you know.’

‘Cut it out, Kiffo. Don’t think, not even for one minute, that you are going to do anything about the Pitbull without me. Okay?’

I meant it too. It hit me, right then, with all the force of a genuine revelation, that I only took chances verbally. Quick at shooting from the lip, but a bit of a sook when it came to anything else. Maybe old Kiffo, all action and adrenaline, would make a good partner, a Clyde to my Bonnie, a Butch Cassidy to my Sundance. I decided not to share this with Kiffo. I don’t think he would have liked it if I’d called him ‘Butch’. But what the hell? I’d come this far and like old Macbeth said: ‘I am stepped in blood so far that to go back is as tedious as to go o’er.’ Or something like that. And anyway, I was going to find out about the connection between the Pitbull and Kiffo, regardless of what he might think.

‘Thanks, but I’d better get back,’ he said. ‘Dad’ll be home soon, full of grog and wanting dinner. If it’s not ready for him, there’ll be trouble.’

I watched as he walked off into the dark, a slight, bandy-legged figure, hunched and curiously vulnerable. I had little first-hand knowledge of the kind of life he led, but I knew that it was loveless and full of casual cruelty. I felt even closer to him then than normal. Not the sort of closeness you feel for the underprivileged, when your own comfortable existence is held up to theirs. Not the sort that is tinged with guilt. I just felt – and I know this sounds really obvious and almost childish – that we were both here and human. That for all our differences, we were still, like the rest of humanity, ninety-nine per cent indistinguishable from each other.

The Fridge was in bed when I went in. I had a hot shower and snuggled under the doona, the aircon blasting above my head. It felt great, the contrast between the artificial chill in the air and the sense of womb-like security in bed. I dozed a little and thought about the day. Curiously, I didn’t feel half so bad now. What had seemed a nightmare was only a bad dream and fading with every passing moment. I thought about Kiffo’s back as he walked off into the night, and the sense of security that gave. Most of all, I curled myself around an image of someone, carefully, lovingly, cleaning a photograph of a grinning young man.

Yes, it had been a strange day. As I slipped under the surface of sleep, I was bothered by just one thought. I felt somehow that it was important to write down everything I was feeling, to record my thoughts in case they appeared stupid in the morning. Or, even worse, cloudy and insubstantial.

Sometimes diaries are a really good idea, you know. It was a shame I’d thrown so many away.

MARCH: Primary School, Year 6.

You are pinned up against the school fence. You’re scared, but try not to show it. As you look up into the boy’s face, your eyes blink nervously behind large, multicoloured glasses. He is taller than you and a lot heavier. He has a stupid face, leaden and cruel. As he leans towards you, he prods you painfully in the shoulder with a blunt, dirty finger.

‘You need to watch your mouth,’ he says. ‘You think you can say what you like about me, is that it? You think I won’t hit a girl?’

He pushes his face further into yours and you can smell stale tobacco. His face buckles into anger as you say nothing. His right hand, cocked behind his shoulder, clenches into a fist. You close your eyes and wait.