Extract 4

A Series of Unhappy Life Lessons: My First Painful Contact with the Merciless Fist of an Omnimalevolent God
My year 1 class was a composite class called K/1 S, where the S stood for Mrs Sims (yes, I had her again). I remember a fair bit more about this year than the one before.

One thing I remember is that year 1 marked the peak of my friendship with Oscar McKay. I recall going to his house extremely often in this year, perhaps as frequently as every second or third weekend. Fortunately, he was also in K/1 S and I seem to remember that we sat together and did all our work together in the classroom. We were really peas in a pod.  I remember also that we often finished our work substantially before anyone else in the class. I think this was likely not, for the most part, due to our outstanding brilliance, but just because we were always racing and expected to finish tasks first. One image that remains in my mind is of Oscar and I running, equipped with hastily finished paintings, towards the empty black, plastic rack intended for drying them out.  I seem to recall we were chuffed that we had reached the drying rack first, and possibly made some remark to each other about how good we were at finishing things before everyone else.

When we were in year 1, Oscar lived in Turramurra, in a quiet, secluded street somewhere near Duffy’s Avenue, where Harrison Wearne lived. In my mind’s eye, I see an impossible image of his house elevated very high above the ground, with the stairs to its front deck reaching up maybe fifty metres. Even though this image is false, I do remember that the entry to his house was elevated and that one needed to ascend some stairs to reach it. In front of the house lay a fairly big front yard, I seem to recall. Again, in my mind’s eye, I see this front yard as an implausibly large space, with gigantic hedge trees lining the neighbour’s abutting driveway, and a gigantic trampoline somewhere in the approximate centre of the space. I think they did have a trampoline but I’m beginning to think that the distortions of my image of the house, which are mainly alterations of magnitude, might have something to do with this dream about the house I remember having many years after I had stopped visiting it and probably after the McKays had moved out of it. I don’t know why I seem to remember my impression of the house in the dream better than my impression of the house from real life – I guess it’s just one of those quirks of memory (or quirks of my memory).

I only really have a few snapshots of what happened when I visited this house. I think I remember playing in the front yard, possibly on the trampoline; I remember being in the kitchen with Greg McKay (his dad) and looking at all of Oscar’s hundreds of Yowies[1] arrayed on the top of the fridge; I remember eating a delicious, moist chocolate cake on their elevated verandah; I remember having an egg and bacon sandwich prepared for me, and then eating this strange creation, replete with gooey barbecue sauce, and not finding it particularly tasty; I remember being aware of the presence of Oscar’s two younger sisters, Mia and Imogen, and how Oscar found them annoying; and I remember he got an Xbox at one stage and that we played this zombie-killing game on it that Oscar was really into but that I didn’t really enjoy that much. I have fairly vivid general impressions of his parents. I recall Greg was a tall, thin, bespectacled, serious, rather uptight fellow who possibly tried to engage me in boring conversations, and that his mum, called Gabriella Waters-McKay, was a very short, squat, dumpy woman who was possibly too compliant with Oscar’s perpetual wishes for yowies or dinosaur figurines. In fact, I remember one specific incident that attests to her pliancy in this regard. For some reason, Oscar, Gabriella and I were all at Westfield, and Oscar had implored that she stop and buy the two of us a chocolate. A perennial novelty-toy-fancier, Oscar, seeing that they had no Yowies, desired that she instead buy him the inferior substitute, a Kinder Surprise. I did not think a Kinder Surprise was a very good choice for a chocolate at all, because there was so little substance to actually eat, and the toy inside would undoubtedly be plastic and crap. I remember this divergence on chocolate preference confronted me with the thought that I was a different person from Oscar, and that his obsession with toys contained in chocolates was weird. Nevertheless, as a shy little boy anxious not to cause the slightest fuss or bother and thereby draw attention to myself, I told Gabriella that the same chocolate would be fine for me thanks too. And she went off and bought them!

That wasn’t a very interesting story, was it? Oh well. So that’s Oscar though.

I have a fairly vivid memory of the moment in year 1 when I suddenly figured out, in a rather epiphanic, light-shining-down-from-the-heavens kind of fashion, what ‘left’ and ‘right’ actually were, or at least how they worked.[2] I think the left-right binary was a fairly big theme in year 1 schooling, and that Mrs Sims often referred to the concepts and tried to help us understand them. One thing that complicated this mission, however, was that every time we journeyed to the computer lab on the ‘big-kids’, 3-6 side of the school, the teacher who led the computer classes would always swivel her whole body around when she mentioned ‘left’ and ‘right’, and I had no idea why. She would always say things like, “So you want the thing on your right, which is, of course, my left” and turn around and put her arm up as she did so. It was a ritual that I simply could not fathom. It was utterly inscrutable to me. I assumed that ‘left’ and ‘right’ had something to do with her turning around, or turning around in general, but the exact connection I could not deduce.  

Anyway, I did eventually work it out, and the story of how that happened is rather simple, despite how earthshatteringly momentous the discovery was in the overall scheme of my life. Basically, I was sitting down on the floor, surrounded by my classmates, as Mrs Sims, who was sitting on a chair above us, discoursed to us about ‘left’ and ‘right’. I remember we were right near the play area, and there were building blocks somewhere behind me. At some point, I recall she said something very simple about the concept that I’d undoubtedly heard before: “Think of it this way: ‘right’ is the side of your writing hand – except for you, X and Y (the left-handed abominations) – and ‘left’ is the other hand.” Even though I’d heard it before, I’d never understood its significance. But now I suddenly grasped it. ‘Yes’, I remember thinking (or something to that effect), ‘Yes! The right is the area of the classroom stretching out in front of my writing hand, and the left is the area of the classroom stretching out in front of my other hand. Yes, they’re my ‘right’ and ‘left’ hands! I get it! Even when I turn, I can still identify left and right! It’s a relative concept! I get it!’

Never have I had a profounder thought in my life.

I do remember wondering, though, why no teacher had ever been able to simply explain ‘left’ and ‘right’ to me before, because once I understood it, it did seem really easy. I kind of do blame my teachers for that. Mrs Sims wasn’t very hands-on, as far as I recall it. To be fair, she was a pretty good teacher, and I know I liked her. I liked her so much, in fact, that I even made that fatal primary school error of calling her “Mum” once. Fortunately, I think I might have been mumbling when I said it, and she thus probably wasn’t sure that I had called her that – but I certainly found it mortifying at the time. Anyhow, one piece of evidence that she didn’t have a very good understanding of who I was was the parent-teacher interview at the end of the year. This was one of those interviews which both the parents and the kid attended. The main thing I remember about it is that she seemed unaware of my accomplishments. She knew that I had done quite well in a spelling test – which, incidentally, I remember in part[3] -- but didn’t seem to know that I often finished things in class very quickly, and didn’t have a particular high view of my abilities generally. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how well I was doing academically in year 1, but I kind of get the impression that, with a whole composite class to look after, Mrs Sims overlooked a few of her students, and I was one of these. Certainly, the next year, when I missed out on a place in the so-called ‘Independent Class’ (a special class they dissolved the next year, I believe), I suddenly found myself dominating my class academically, and being in fact completely intellectually isolated. So I imagine that I was probably doing quite well in year 1; it’s just that Mrs Sims was too occupied to notice.    

Another specific memory I have of year 1 is the process of writing and then delivering a speech about my favourite animal. When Mrs Sims announced that we would all have to give a speech on our favourite animal and our reasons for the choice, I think I was probably pretty excited. No doubt I thought that I would be able to prove to everyone in my class why the cheetah is the greatest animal of all. Fast, strong, sleekly spotted, sharptoothed, deadly – could you imagine a more perfect creature? Back then, I used to tell my parents about my homework and school projects, and I remember getting a lot of assistance from my dad for this one. From memory, I did actually write the first draft myself, but my dad then made lots of emendations and embellishments, most notably adding some colour to my dry statistics. Indeed, I remember one specific amendment he made to my work that had to do with the diet of the animal. I had written that the cheetah has to eat 50 kilograms of meat a week (or whatever the stat was), and my dad said, “Your classmates won’t understand that. How about you put that statistic in perspective by saying how many sausages that is. Follow it with, “That’s 500 sausages per week!”” I remember asking him if that comparison was factually accurate, and he said “I don’t know”. This empirical laxity didn’t exactly impress me (to say the least). But I did keep this in the speech, and I was very much looking forward to wowing my class with my glittering new speech when the performances began. But then as I was sitting on the floor, listening happily to other people’s pathetic paeans to their stupid zoological favourites, Max Holiday-Smith got up and announced that his favourite animal was – that’s right – the Cheetah! NOT THE CHEETAH! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! WHAT WAS I GOING TO DO? WHAT ON EARTH COULD I DO?[4] When I found out that Max Holiday-Smith’s favourite animal was the cheetah and that he was going to be able to talk about it and I wasn’t, I was desolated. I think even at that time, I had known that any big cat was going to carry the taint of popularity, since few other animals delight little boys as much as the big cats, the most violent, bellicose and athletic land-dwelling creatures in the world. Nevertheless, I had hoped and prayed that nobody else would have picked my sacred animal, and God had betrayed me. He had fucked me over, as per usual (he keeps doing so up to the present day; he fucking despises me). When I came home to my dad that night and told him of my mutilated ambitions, I was probably on the verge of tears, or perhaps even well into the property (? surely a property of some sort is what you enter when you move past the verge). I remember that I was utterly devastated. I had been so fiercely and so ardently attached to the wonderful paragon of paragons that was the cheetah and was thus in such a state of distress that I was unwilling even to entertain the possibility of choosing another creature.

What about another big cat? No. Not the leopard? No. But it’s so similar to the cheetah. Yeah, but I don’t like it as much and it’s not as fast. Not the panther? No. The eagle? No. The eagle’s a predator, you know, with a big wingspan and sharp claws. But it’s not cool enough. A shark? No.

Eventually, I think my dad was a little tired of trying to pull me out of my catatonia. I imagine he probably ended up saying something like, “I know you’re really upset that someone took your favourite animal, but you’ve got to make a choice. It doesn’t have to become your new favourite animal – it’s just an animal you’re making a speech on.” And then, at some point, I know that either he or I had a brainwave, resulting in the suggestion of a more interesting animal that still shared many of the admirable attributes of the cheetah: the snow leopard. I wasn’t immediately sold on the snow leopard, but I remember looking it up on Google and seeing its colour and possibly thinking about an ancient ancestor of the snow leopard I had seen in Walking with Beasts, and I eventually decided that it was good enough for me – that I was content with calling it my “favourite”. One of the facts about the snow leopard that helped persuade me was the similarity of the colour of its fur to my own snowwhite hair. Being superstitious, like all children, I think I suspected that I might have some deep affinity or connection with it on account of this isomorphism, that it might even be my “spirit animal” in some transcendent sense (even though I didn’t think in that Tumblrish vocabulary when I was six). Eventually, when the speech was done, I even questioned whether I should permanently change my favourite animal. I’m not sure I ever made a firm decision either way, but at least that shows you that I had accepted the terrible disruption.

I don’t really remember how the speech went, but it was probably alright, I imagine. I was always a better-than-average speaker, despite being a worse-than-average socialiser.

Here is another memory, already documented (like so many others) in a third-person Potrait-of-the-Artist-style form.  The Oscar mentioned in it is Oscar McKay. The Daniel is Daniel van den Bovenkamp, a boy who’ll get closer scrutiny later.

“Tom was sprinting along the patchily grassed field, in pursuit of Oscar, who was running ahead, now just behind the big brown tree. Tom was gaining on him, ever-so-slightly gaining on him as Oscar approached the artificial grass playground. But no! Tom felt something connect with his right foot, he was falling, his head was falling towards the big fat root, OW! He was lying on the ground and his mouth felt wet. He quickly felt it with his right hand: blood. He was bleeding. And gum, he could only feel gum where his teeth were. He had no front teeth! He was missing his front two teeth. Oscar was coming back towards him now. Tom looked down: his uniform was covered in pine needles. Now Daniel was coming back too. Daniel had run miles away when they were playing tip but now he was back. Where were his teeth? He looked back down at the root-riddled, pine-needle-covered ground; he could see no fleck of white. Now Ms Terville, that grumpy woman – or was it a man? because they always called her Mr Ville, maybe she had a sex change – who had long, creepy fake fingernails and who looked after the Special Needs kids, was coming over to help him too.

“Are you alright?” she said, a slightly concerned expression on her face.

“I fell on this tree root and – I think my front two teeth have been knocked out.”

“Ok. We’ll, uh, get you to the nurse.”

She grabbed his arm and helped him up just as Oscar and Daniel arrived.

“What happened?” Daniel said.

“I knocked my teeth out when I tripped on the root.”

“Ooh” Daniel said, as he and Oscar winced.

Ms Terville held Tom by the arm with her creepy fingernails and they left the playground together. Tom was worried about having no front teeth and kept touching his mouth.

Later, when he was in the Nurse’s office, Daniel and Oscar brought in his teeth and he thanked them.

After that, he got picked up by his grandpa and grandma because his parents were at work and they couldn’t do it. At their house in Lindfield grandpa made him a banana smoothie which was nice.

The day wasn’t so bad after all. But he didn’t have front teeth for another two years.”

All of that is true. Yes, I really did get my two front teeth knocked out on a tree root. It was a pretty traumatic moment. And I really did have my teeth brought in by Daniel and Oscar, who had to search for them among the pine needles. And I really did get a banana smoothie made for me by Poppa, which was pretty surprising and very nice. I remember that I was quite sad about having to go to Beama and Poppa’s house rather than my own, with my own parents, but it ended up being alright.

What is the stupidest thing you have ever done? Whatever it is, I bet what I did during a school assembly some time during year 1 trumps it. And there’s something very strange about my memory of it. I don’t remember what the teachers were talking about at the school assembly where this moment of unutterable idiocy occurred. I don’t remember who won the “Student of the Week”, and I certainly don’t remember how vigorous the rendition of the school song and national anthem were. But I remember what I did. And I shudder to recall it.

I know that I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by my peers. I recall that there had been a big fad going on at the time involving tying people’s shoes to each other, as a kind of prank. This was terribly fun because it either caused the victim to trip over (if they weren’t aware of the knavish escapade) or waddle around in an amusing fashion (if they were). As per usual, I remember feeling on the periphery of this new, exciting craze, and I wanted to be in the centre. As I recall it, however, I wasn’t exactly clear on how to tie the laces to each other. But as I sat there during the dreary sermon that one, average assembly, I decided that I would attempt the act on my own shoes, just to see if I could do it.
I first took one lace – I imagine the left lace of my right shoe – and looped it around the right lace of my left shoe. Thereupon, I realised, with a surge of joy, that I could pull it through to make a weak knot. I did so. I then decided to strengthen this knot by repeating the action a couple more times. I was pretty proud of myself. Next it was the other pair of laces. These would be harder since they were farther away from each other.[5] But soon they were done, too, and the self-pranking was complete. I was very pleased. What a genius I am, I thought. Maybe I can try this out on some unsuspecting wretch. Mwahahaha!  

And then something dreadful happened. From the front of the hall, I heard the words “Stand up for the school song”, and immediately saw that the assembly was ending, and that I wouldn’t have time to untie the dense knottage. As I tried desperately to pick at the big tumid clumps of shoelace, I suddenly cognised, with an almighty ventral thud, that I had somehow cemented each shoe to the other with a bond that wasn't just strong, but was unbreakable. My knot was more sturdy than the the lattice of carbon atoms in diamond, more adhesive than the most super of glue, more involute than the most advanced computer chip of the day.
       What infernal creation had I wrought? How had my own works turned against me? 
       What had I done to earn the starring role in this real-life parable?
       After more failed scrabbling to try to unpick one of the black, cancerous clots, I ratcheted myself up with great difficulty. The circumambient glares perforated my soul. However, as the opening notes of the school song sounded on the piano, I realised that I had no other choice but to sing along with the rest of the children. I betrayed as little as I could in my euphonious, cherubic voice:

“Red and black, our colours shine,

This is our school, yours and mine,

Here is where we spend our days,

To learn and sing our fifths with praise,

Warrawee School [Warrawee School]”[6]

The anxiety was only building inside me as the song lilted along. Soon, I would have to attempt to exit the assembly hall with welded feet. As the song meandered through its insipid middle verses, I was beginning to internally castigate myself. Tying laces isn’t such a bad thing to do, but you’re meant to do it with other people’s laces, as a joke, I thought. I hadn’t even gotten a laugh out of it, and nobody else had either! Nobody knew! And that was only going to further imperil the act of trying to waddle and totter out of the assembly hall in a huge, jostling throng. Teachers would get angry and demand an explanation; my peers would mock me when they found out that I had enfettered myself. It would all be one colossal catastrophe!

When we did all begin to shuffle out, I remember being still really anxious. I didn’t want anyone to know what I had done to myself, but I couldn’t help attracting glares: my gait was severely handicapped and my speed was dramatically reduced. As I slowly toddled out of the hall, I remember being asked by one of my classmates what the matter was, and being too embarrassed to truthfully reply. I think I went red. But my classmates didn’t care that much, and were soon gone from sight, already on the way back to class. It had become one of those moments of total despair when you really don’t know what to do and everything seems utterly lost. I saw no way out of the situation, and as I approached the assembly stairs the full, horrifying gravity of the situation hit me. What if I couldn’t even get down the stairs? What would I do then? Cry for help? You must remember that I was so shy back then that the thought of just telling Mrs Sims what I had done to myself was basically unthinkable. Well, I think I did countenance the thought (so it wasn’t literally unthinkable), but I could not bring myself to follow through with it.

So what ended up happening was that I slowly tried to kind of pivot myself down the stairs, very gradually, one at a time, all the while hundreds of other kids glided past me effortlessly, without a care in the world (oh to be one of those joyous, innocent little things!), most not stopping to glance at the strange child who seemed to have become suddenly crippled. Eventually, I remember being one of the last kids left on the stairs. Mrs Sims was now looking up at me, enjoining me to come down in a pretty terse and unsympathetic tone (not realising my situation). I prayed that she would notice that I had my shoes tied together, but she did not. I was still completely mortified, and I don’t think I could get any words out. I was stupefied. It was too awful.

And I don’t really remember how I got out of the bind (as it were), but somehow I did.

Nevertheless, the trauma lingers. It haunts my every waking hour.

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[1] That is something I haven’t mentioned: Oscar liked to collect Yowies, and got me onto the habit, too. Yowies are, of course, a type of ovoid chocolate with a small, plastic, disassembled animal toy inside, a bit like a Kinder’s Delight but better.  Sadly, I think they might have gone off the market. I certainly haven’t seen them in a lolly shop since – well, probably since 2003. Anyhow, Oscar had the lot. He had all the Yowies – fucking hundreds of them. 

[2] Whether there’s a difference between those things sounds like the sort of deep, philosophical problem I don’t want to get into.

[3] In particular, I have this one memory of having to spell the word ”Said” and realising that it wasn’t spelt phonetically and thinking back to a book (the Cookie monster book, in fact) in which it was written in order to get it right. Once I had written down the correct spelling, I remember looking over at Oscar’s sheet to see if he had got it right, and he hadn’t: instead, he had written “Sed”. I recall feeling rather superior and a little disdainful of Oscar. An elementary error, I thought!

[4] I should inform you that I’m having my doubts about whether this story I’m telling is historically accurate. I think, in fact, that I might have found out that Max Holiday-Smith was going to do his speech on the cheetah before we actually began doing the speeches, and that – since Mrs Sims had prohibited duplication – she had to decide which of us would do our speech on the cheetah and arbitrarily chose Max. If this is true, then what probably happened is that my dad and I only started writing the speech after I had been forced to pick another animal. But I’ll continue to ignore that possibility as I recount the memory.

[5] Or maybe I tied the left lace of my right shoe to the left lace of my left shoe, and vice versa. Can’t remember (unsurprisingly).

[6] Ad absurdum, in increasingly quaint and fusty verse. Can’t quite remember all the lyrics – I’m getting them in fragments. I’m sure the whole thing’s in my brain somewhere; I would just need to hear it once for all the lyrics to reassemble themselves. And at this age, I might actually understand them. At the time, I didn’t really know what most of the school song meant. Incidentally, it was the same with our equally quaint national anthem. “Australians all let us rejoice”, Wealth for toil”, “Girt by sea”, “Land abounds in nature’s gifts”, “Beauty rich and rare”, “In history’s page let every stage”, “Advance Australia fair”, “In joyful strains then let us sing” – what? As a kid, I think I was typical in actually not knowing what half of what I was singing meant, and always doubting whether I was pronouncing the words correctly. And I’m sure I did get some of the words wrong. I think I always (confusedly) sang “Our land abouts in nature’s gifts”, for example, not being familiar with the grammatically unusual and fairly obscure verb “Abound”.