The warden – what’s his name? – Mr Marsden? He’s done this before. This pause for effect after saying, “And lastly, just before you go to your dormitories and unpack your katunda, there’s one thing I must warn you about. All of you. That includes your teachers. A serious warning.”
We all know. Whether he knows we know or not I can’t say, but we do. I’ve been wondering when he’ll come up with it and I won’t be the only one. He was losing us at one point with his agenda for the week. I’m sure all these lessons will be interesting enough when we get to them, but we’ve had a long journey. Even Mr Barrie was gazing out across the lake and Mrs King was picking at something under one of her fingernails.
Here he goes.
“We have a hippo in this part of the dam.”
Pause. We all react suitably by coming alive again. He goes on.
“She’s quite young and she wanders up onto the shore at night to graze so I want you all to be extremely cautious. She’s never caused any trouble, but hippo can react very aggressively if disturbed. If you want to visit the loos at night, take a good look around before you go across. There are torches in all the dormitories. If you see her, wait for her to move away and whatever you do, don’t get between her and the water because that will make her very nervous and a nervous hippo is a dangerous one. Do you all understand? Don’t be frightened. Just be sensible and treat any wild animal with the greatest respect.”
The hippo – Nathan’s hippo. He’s learned these things. He wrote a caption under his photos of her, “Never, EVER get between a hippo and the water!”
“Oh, and by the way… Don’t be tempted to swim in the lake just here. There are a few crocs.”
I can’t recall Nathan mentioning the crocs.
The dormitory’s a simple building, long and narrow, just a single large room with a smaller staff bedroom and its own shower room and WC at the end. Mrs King’s moved in there and I’m pretty certain it’s the same room where the hairy baboon spider was found in Nathan’s year.
The long sides of the dormitory are lined with beds and white wooden chests of drawers. Halfway down each side is a pair of French doors, the north facing set opening towards the washroom blocks and the south facing ones giving access to a grassy slope that leads to the dam’s edge.
Jess and I choose adjacent beds against the north wall. I’ve never slept in a dormitory with sixteen other girls before.
“It’s like being a boarder, isn’t it? At school, from a farm out somewhere in the bush.”
Jess is stuffing garments into every last measure of space in the drawers.
“God, why did Mother insist that I bring all this? I took some of it out, you know. She must have put it back in again.”
She shakes out a silver and black glittery halter-neck top.
“I’m hardly going to wear this out roughing it in the bundu, now am I? And I can’t believe there’s going to be a disco anywhere around here.”
“Perhaps your mum thinks you might find a boyfriend if you wear your pretty party clothes.”
I can’t help eyeing the top with some envy. My mother would never’ve bought me something as daring as that. I don’t think you can wear a bra with it. Jess snorts.
“What? One of those creeps in our class? You’ve got to be joking. Maybe that younger warden though…”
“So stop telling me to show an interest in Timothy then! Speaking of Timothy – look, there he is with his muckers. They’re going down to the lake.”
Jess drops her top onto her bed. “We can do this later. Let’s go exploring.”
The shore of the lake is rocky and forms a shallow arc around the bush school complex. The surface of the water beyond the haphazardly piled rocks is a deep blue, almost indigo in colour. Tiny waves lap against the jumbled boulders and leave faint traces of foam before retreating. A narrow arm of the dam reaches out to the west beyond the school and the opposite bank is only a few hundred metres away, rising to form a series of low hills. Broader away to the east, the lake waters heave with a lazy swell and across here the far shore is only a hazy purple line. The sun is nearly at the top of the hills to the west, the shadows are long and the temperature’s dropping quite rapidly. We’re not quite out of winter yet.
“Nathan told me he wished he could have brought High Time – his pony,” I tell Jess just as we reach the others. Timothy’s leading, of course, and there’s about ten of us in tow. “It sounds like there’s fantastic places to ride out here.”
She gives me a funny look. “Ride? I sincerely hope not. We can do canoeing, though. On the lake. Who’s Nathan?”
I’d wanted to tell him my turn to do Mushandike Week had come at last, but I haven’t seen him in at least a month.
I think Dad was quite relieved to drop me off at school this morning. He told me to go and get Mushandike out of my system. To be fair, I’ve probably been a pain in the neck recently. I even drove Rosie to the point where she wouldn’t speak to me. She was huddled in a corner of the back seat when we got there, as far away from me as possible and wearing the mother of all sulks. The coach was waiting and I must have had my nose pressed against the window because Dad said, “Don’t you make my glass smeary. I only polished it yesterday.”
I was just thinking how cool it was that I was going to get to ride in that huge coach, all shiny black and white and silver, when Mum squeaked, “Doesn’t it look splendid, Tessa?”
I impressed myself no end by managing to be both scornful and unconcerned at the same time.
“Splendid? What a silly word to use. It’s only a coach, Mum.”
Actually, it reminded me a bit of a queen termite, surrounded by swarms of ant-kids. There were piles of luggage on the paved car park surround next to it; a haphazard assortment of suitcases, duffel bags, rucksacks, sleeping bag rolls, wicker baskets and supermarket carrier bags.
Dad took just forever to unload my stuff and gave me another lesson on how to set the light meter on the camera while I was hopping up and down. Rosie still wouldn’t speak to me, even when I said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get to go in a couple of years.” She alternately pouted and looked bored and then bolted when she spotted a few of her classmates with a transistor radio blasting out one of those songs from Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat on the square of winter browned turf near the flagpole.
Jess wanted us to get the front seats, but Mr Barrie wasn’t having any of that. Turns out Jess and I weren’t the only ones making a bid for them.
“The front seats are for Mrs King and me,” he told us, while ticking our names off his list.
Someone in the crowd whined, “But there are four front seats!” but he just said, “Well we’ve got two each then. Aren’t we lucky?”
I’ll bet they wished they were sitting on the roof when we started singing “Wo! We’re going to Barbados!” as we left the car park, but none of us knew all the words so it petered out pretty quick.
I’m brought out of the past by Alan. He’s highly worked up about something.
“There! What’s that? In the water!”
The little wavelets are lapping the edge of the flat boulder we’re standing on. About five metres out, between two rocks, I can see a long dark shape just under the water. It’s completely still and unidentifiable.
“It’s another rock, idiot,” says Timothy.
It might be a log or something. It’s not moving.
Then it does. It surfaces. It’s flat and there are two protruding lumps on each end.
We gasp collectively.
“It’s a croc!” Jess snatches at my sleeve. She’s right. Two of the lumps are eyes for sure, and the other two will be nostrils.
Before any of us can react, Timothy’s stooped, picked up a fist-sized stone and has pitched it at the head, shouting, “Ya! Flat dog!”
Not one of us waits to see what the crocodile is going to do or even whether the stone has landed anywhere near its mark. We take flight as one, and so swiftly that I’m sure the faint ghost images of ten children are left behind on the rock for several seconds. Timothy runs only halfway back to the dormitories with us before slowing to a walk and calling after us, “What a load of yellow bellied cowards you lot are!”
*
The six of us link arms and jostle together to keep on the paved path. Penny has the torch.
“Don’t just shine it on the path,” Elizabeth hisses. “Move it from side to side so we can see if there’s anything around. No, not just down there. Out! Outwards!”
I wander around in our garden at night without a torch often and I’ve never felt this heart-pumping, hair-prickling, leg-twitching urge to sprint like I have now. Never felt this urge to dive through a doorway into the light. It’s Mr Marsden’s fault. It was all very well telling us after-dinner stories but he should’ve left out the one about how crocodiles drown, dismember and then store their prey underwater to rot and get nice and soft enough to eat. Ugh.