4
A Portrait of Emily Thompson
It is Friday afternoon and here I am on my shadow seat outside the library.
Tonight: our first debate of the year. It will take place at St Mark’s Christian Brothers. (Their team, last year, was solid but lacking in vocabulary.)
Emily will debut as our second speaker. It is the time to consider the nobility within her.
She is average in height, broad-shouldered. She is always eating junk food, but she is slim enough. I believe she likes to ride horses.
It is hard to recall the colour of her eyes—I only see them flashing and sparking at me. I have also seen them brim with tears. I remember her crying when her friend, Cassie, sang at the Spring Concert last year.
I also remember her crying when the tuckshop discontinued stocking certain chocolates.
Like the boys at St Mark’s, Emily struggles with vocabulary.
Yet, she seems ignorant of her own ignorance. She is always astonished when she gets a bad mark, gasping loudly, the tears brimming again.
She has never liked me much, and despised me last year when I made a mistake about a name.
To my surprise, she did take notes on Wednesday, when I ran the Study Management course.
It’s much later—midnight.
What an extraordinary night!
The familiar flutter of the first debate of the year: my Ashbury uniform is freshly ironed, my hair neat in its coiled plaits. A St Mark’s boy greets us at the school building, polite and reserved. He points the way along empty corridors, where footsteps seem too loud. Fluorescent lighting in a staffroom, tables set with cakes and sandwiches, milling adults, boys standing silent, girls with high-pitched giggles.
Ernst von Schmerz and beside him, Emily. (I had thought she would be late.)
Mrs Lilydale approaches with sponge cake on a paper plate, and presses this into my hands. Emily holds a chocolate cupcake but makes no move to eat it. She looks pale.
As usual, the small talk is forced and nervous until we get our topic. That young people should be banned from participation in professional sports. We look at each other, intrigued. Ernst says a few words which confuse the opposition. There is a coin toss. We lose. The others choose Negative. We are led to an empty classroom, and given one hour to prepare.
And then the debate—Ernst and his superb opening. Emily’s surprise that Ernst can speak plain English. The first speaker from St Mark’s—no match for Ernst. Me scribbling rebuttals on blank cards. Emily, white as paper, stumbling a little as she stands in the centre of the room. Then startling the room with a blaze of words—a shifting in the audience, a straightening of the adjudicator’s shoulders.
Ernst and I turn to one another. It’s an understatement to say it, but Emily knows how to speak.
She returns to her seat, now her cheeks are flushed, eyes straight ahead. I take one of my blank cards and write: THAT WAS FANTASTIC. And slide it along the desk to her. She glances down and smiles.
And so it goes. The adjudicator stands to announce the results, and we have won our first debate. Mrs Lilydale rushes at us with excitement. We shrug, nonchalant. It is only the first round.
But now, later, it is not the debate that occupies my mind.
No, and nor is it our triumph.
What I recall most vividly is that hour of preparation time in the empty classroom.
It is Saturday. I wonder if Emily is a dog?
She is fiercely loyal to her two best friends. She bounces around playfully when excited, but growls and barks viciously when mad.
Would Emily like it if I told her that she is a dog? Perhaps not.
I’d better go. I need to be at Maureen’s Magic (that is, her bookshop) in ten minutes. I wonder if I should try to learn to drive again.
Perhaps not.
Sunday now, and I’m just home from my job at Eleanora’s place. Also dropped by Dad’s house on Gilbert Road and worked on the wallpaper.
But Eleanora’s place—such a strange job. To sit opposite someone while she plunges her hands into wet dough. (She has moved on from gnocchi to linguini, winding wide white strips through a pasta machine.) If only I could meet her baby just once, it might seem a little less bizarre.
The baby’s name is Calypso, you know. ‘Calypso!’ I said.
But Eleanora did not seem amused. ‘Yes, Bindy?’ she replied, presumably pointing out the strangeness of my name. But Bindy is a common abbreviation of Belinda! Nothing to do with the bindi-eyes on my lawn!
Mostly we sit quietly, and I answer her queries about school.
I told her about the first round of the debating competition.
But I did not mention the hour in the empty classroom. How the atmosphere changes at once when the door is closed. Plunging into a moment of relief—we are away from the opposition team and the formalities!—but even the relief is charged with tension. There is only an hour to prepare!
As usual, I rushed to the board and wrote up the topic, along with words and phrases to define: Young people! Young! People! Banned! Participation! Professional Sports! Professional! Sports! Frantically, I scribbled some ideas: young bones; muscle damage; school work!; pushy parents; eating disorders; is ballet a sport?
There was silence behind me.
I looked back.
Emily Thompson was sitting on a desk, legs swinging, tears sliding slowly down her face.
3.00 am now, Monday morning.
Feeling ill. Might just—
Just threw up in the bathroom. Feel a bit better now but can’t stop trembling. How strange, this numbness in my cheeks. I sense it often, you know, and sometimes in my arms and legs—it’s more than pins and needles—it seems to numb my mind.
I must keep working on my character. Eventually, that will cure me. As Dad always says, good health is nothing but good character.
I wonder if Emily might be a humpback whale.
That connection she has with her two best friends— I believe they could easily sing to one another, like whales, across hundreds of miles.
But, to my surprise, Emily’s friends were not at St Mark’s to watch the debate.
In the empty classroom at preparation time, I found out why.
Emily hiccoughed quietly when I turned from the board and looked at her. She blinked, turned away, and picked up a pen.
But it was too late.
I could not pretend I had not seen. I moved towards her, and hesitated. Ernst, who had been looking discreetly from Emily to me and back, took my cue and he himself moved closer. We both waited.
And Emily confounded us.
She apologised, in a whisper, for joining the team.
She said she was going to let us down.
She would try her best, she said, but knew we had always won before, with Kelly Simonds on the team. With her, she said, we would lose. And she had made Lydia and Cassie promise not to come tonight, because she didn’t want them to see her fail.
‘You guys are just so professional at this,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not even, like, an amateur.’
Well!
She felt inferior to Ernst and me!
It was a shock.
We assured her she could do it. She’d been a hit in mock trial with Legal Studies; she’d won the next stage of the oratory contest; she was famous for cross-examining Mrs Lilydale last year—how could she doubt herself?
‘But this is different,’ Emily insisted. ‘You guys are gonna be wishing the whole time that Kelly Simonds was here. Instead of wherever she is. Overseas or wherever.’
At this, Ernst surprised me.
‘Who really liked Kelly Simonds anyway?’ he said in a low voice.
‘What?!’ I cried.
But that was what he said.
Emily giggled, and I felt a weight, such a curious burden of weight, lifting slowly from my shoulders.
Who really liked Kelly Simonds anyway?
Not me.
And then, as I stood, as I floated on the spot, Emily Thompson rushed to the board and began to scribble ideas.
Now, much later, I am intrigued by a vision of a bank of elevators, one sliding down on its shafts, another shooting up towards the roof.
I had believed that Emily was slipping downward into the debating world. It turns out she had believed she was climbing—ascending to the echelons of intellect.
She had been terrified of looking up there, but, despite herself, she had tried.
Emily Thompson may be many things, but above all, she is loyal, determined and brave.
Imagine if she were my friend.
A Memo from Bindy Mackenzie
| To: | Emily Thompson |
| From: | Bindy Mackenzie |
| Subject: | YOU |
| Time: | Tuesday, 10.30 am |
Dear Emily,
Once, I left you a message in which I said you are a komodo dragon.
Today, I write to assure you that you are not. (Unless, of course, you would like to be.)
I admit, I said it because I wanted to scare you away from debating. I was completely mistaken. You won our first debate for us on Friday night. I am honoured to have you on the team.
You, Emily Thompson, are a northern hairy-nosed wombat.
A wombat is a strong, sturdy animal with short legs and short claws.
It likes to frolic when cheerful.
It will growl, snort and screech when angry.
It loves chocolate.
And it is so tough and so determined it can push its way through any fence and dig under any wall.
I hope you will forgive me for mistaking you for a komodo dragon, and I hope you will accept this small gift: complimentary personalised memo stationery.
Very Best Wishes,
Bindy Mackenzie
PS I chose a northern hairy-nosed wombat because these are more rare than the common wombat, and you, Emily, are unique.