HER MASTER’S VOICE

A paper dart wafted over and around his head like those black shapes that snatched across the corner of his eyes when under stress, before nosing up against the whiteboard and skirling down at his feet. In a swivel of surprise that almost cost him balance, Slater caught Jarod leaning out of the window to suspend Lenka’s bag, Lachlan throwing a crumpled note across to Dirty Harriet, Robbie pea-shooting balls of paper, and Lincoln dribbling a globule of spittle onto the end of his ruler readying . . . readying . . . ready to flick against the hail of staples launched by Travis Moriarty, wired on sugar, jumping half out of his desk in a frenzy of glee. The gum-chewing wags of the back row, elastic jaws yawing away with that cool American cockiness, were rocking their chairs against the wall, the soles of their Doc Martens sticking up like palisade butts on the desk-tops.

Take your hooves off the desk, he might’ve shouted, had his voice not carked it, hoarse as a rusty hawser. Twenty years ago he would’ve rejoindered, This is not a knobbly knees contest, or, if daring, I’ve seen better legs on a pantomime horse - you could get away with that in the seventies - but his sense of humour had withered on the vine to the laconic cynicism of the front line.

So Slater clenched his jaw, shook his head, wagged a finger, mechanical gestures for a tired body, but the barricade of boots begrudgingly came down with the grate of deliberation.

So many lines of babble twanged the air waves: school rules unreal, dets unfair, masses of homework, dad getting pissed off about grog at Friday night raves, English books really, really boring, specially that Mastering Words and oh not Shakespeare, even though they probably hadn’t read any. ‘Why can’t we read our own stuff? Why can’t we do Stephen King?’

Due to a partial hearing loss, not wholly attributable to 9G, Slater, in the manner of a leather-necked turtle, jerked his pinched-nerve neck in different directions to pick up signals for help from the handful of willing students sucking pens, regardless. Thank god, there were always a few gems among the ratbags.

‘The old bugger’s really lost it.’

What was that? Did he really hear what he thought he heard?

‘Yeah, he’s a loser right enough.’

From amongst the studious minority peered Rhys, with the resigned air of a faithful bloodhound whose jowls might collapse at any moment into a sneer of contempt. For whom exactly, Slater dared not consider. ‘Sir, I think you’ve lost control of your class,’ the boy said, with nerdy satisfaction, ensconced in the corner of the front row, half-turned to gawp at the accelerated socialization programme fast becoming Circus Oz. ‘Aren’t we supposed to be doing Writers’ Workshop?’

‘Thanks, Rhys, for your reminder,’ Slater croaked, a warm flush lapping at his forehead, a warm dampness cloying his armpits. ‘Just finish off your own story!’

And not provide a running commentary on mine, thanks very much.

Every few minutes, as imperceptibly as possible, he would hawk at the irritation at the back of his throat. Was it physical or psychological? Or potentially terminal? Either way it inhibited the deep breathing required for his jousts with 9G. This time, thoroughly frustrated by this tickling sensation, he strained to dislodge it, only to wheeze into a gale of spluttering that showered minute atoms over Rhys’ curly-cornered sheet of A4 inscribed simply with a heading of possibilities: A Venndetta baised on a story by Ghee der Mo . . .

Ah, yes, Slater fondly remembered the first time he had presented a Maupassant story, The Necklace, on a teaching round, before his supervisor in fact, when he developed the courage to adlib and speak the characters with different accents and shrugs of the shoulder – well, it was a French story – no notes but a tape recording of Offenbach’s ‘La Gaite Parisienne’ for when the students started writing where he left off, can-can and all, and two or three posters of Impressionist paintings for ambience leant up against the good old blackboard. My, how the occasional screech of chalk would draw a screwed-up wince . . . those were the best years, when teaching seemed like a crusade and a teacher was nothing if not innovative . . .

Slater thumped his rattly chest, out of sympathy for himself, but also to impress on the heathens closing in that he really was mortally wounded, like Richard the Third being stuck like a boar, yes, I am a bore – by one hundred pikes, too sick to bring them to order, though Helen Salvaris wondered if this strange tattoo was how King Henry the Fifth or Second, it wasn’t the Eighth, had whipped himself . . . flagel . . . flaleg . . . flagellation over that disgusting murder of . . .

This is the pits, he thought. Thirty years a chalk-and-talk man. Now the talk had dried up, it was time to hang up the chalk. Hang up himself. He glimmered his final hour, no Mr Chips loyally loved but falling in the line of duty before a victory parade of leering fourteen year olds. Macbeth’s head on a pike, stretchered out to the sick bay cum morgue by two ninth-form pall-bearers. Appalling:

Principal: Whom have we here?

Travis Moriaty: 679, 435, Slater, sir. Bachelor of Arts, 3rd class. Gassed something shocking by the enemy – too many baked beans and fizzy cokes.

Lachlan Mackenzie: Battle of ’45. Room 45. Nerves shot through. Chappie couldn’t go over the top when the going got heavy.

Principal: Life’s a bastard. Carry on, chaps!

Perhaps he should bequeath his spleen to the reliquary in the School museum.

He remembered how Gough Burbridge, even with a hearing aid, had wangled workers comp, pleading acute deafness. When the boys frisked by in the quad and chimed, ‘G’day, Fuckwit,’ he’d reply, ‘G’day, boys. Work hard!’ in that monotonous mumble that lulled them to sleep in History of Revolutions.

He remembered old Jack Allinson, always kept a snort of whisky in his filing cabinet, who’d give the bard a right old going-over with his gravelly Stentorian and mis-quoted lines . . . the guy could scarcely see through his pebbled lenses, his eyes bugged out like skewered jelly eels, the back row stroking their flies and thighs with an abandon far from gay as he shuffled between rows, blind to their provocation.

Two boys leapt sideways out of their chairs, fingers covering their noses, faces bursting with maniacal laughter then feigned disgust. ‘Moriarty’s farted!’

Unfortunately, Slater still had his sense of smell.

‘Kick him out, sir!’

‘Give him an hour’s det!’

‘That’s a three-hour!’

‘Open all the windows, sir! I’m suffocating! You rat, Moriarty!’’

It was that wet-weather, stale-body odour that added to the nausea of impotence. What could he do but open a window and frown? Or throw himself out? He used to say, Any more cracks like that or I trust that you were not expressing a personal opinion, lad, and draw off the embarrassment that way. Nowadays boys were shameless; more shameless. And as for the girls . . .

He wondered how Mireille coped, splashing her wrist with Knowing, gulping lungfuls of green air from her sleeve before slicing through classroom fug. What made her a survivor, apart from that olfactory defence mechanism? And chocolate binges during exam marking, when she’d put on half a kilo.

Kids keep you young, she would say in upbeat moments, till the piles of correction and winter bugs made her crabby too.

Moon-faced Georgie was drawing up a list in her Record Book opposite class telephone numbers underneath SKOOL SUX:

                                                        my class

                          people i don’t like                i want to kill my friends

                             Helen Salvaris                  and befriend my enemies

                         Lachlan Mackenzie              and blow them up too

                                 Jarod

                               Sundhip

                                 Me

‘What are you writing, Georgie?

‘Charlie!’ she flashed, lips screwed tight, eyes spitting fire. ‘Why can’t you remember my name?’

Disgraceful, and he’d bitten his tongue at once. But his memory was fogging up in the currents of ripe air. Or decline and fall. He’d recommended Jane Eyre to Helen Salvaris, but was mortified that he couldn’t reel in the name of the Bronte sister. Of course, it was Charlotte, Georgie’s name, rather Charlie’s name. And he’d called Helen Garner, Alan. Or vice versa.

Godfathers! his mother would have said, biting her tongue; that was scary. The dear old lady had shrunk in five years to a wizened rag doll that he could’ve slung over his shoulder like a fireman, after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He would come across her rocking his old Teddy, much of the stuffing knocked out, blind and deaf and threadbare, the odd flake of straw on her pinny. Couldn’t even remember her only son’s name and would badger him with the same questions every five minutes. And now here he was, over twenty years younger than Mum, almost in the loop of dementia himself, notwithstanding all those cryptic crosswords he’d pore over. O the injustice of it!

And then only last week, on his exercise walk, a young street kid, with attitude embossed on his shoulders, who was bashing the trunk of a tree with the end of his skateboard, suddenly came at him with one leg dragging, a stuffed-up mouth of garbled whimperings and one hand quivering up by his face, as if he were suffering from cerebral palsy. So accustomed to repressing anger at school till he slumped down at home in a slough of depression, Slater didn’t realize at first that the screwball was taking him off, as if Slater himself was ancient turned gaga, who should have been shuffling along behind a Zimmer frame. The anger surged up so powerfully within that the back of his trembling hand became his voice, just as it had been for his father with his robotic arm, but luckily he held back.

‘Sorry, Charlie, can you climb back into your story,’ he whispered with a squeaky fluting. ‘You do have a special way with words, you know.’

‘No, I don’t. Do you like my poem?’

                                                           The Charlie Song

                                                             being fat is fun

                                                     that’s why I weigh a ton

                                                          always bouncing

                                                             always fowl

                                                         lose some weight

                                                           you ugly cow

‘Well, it’s . . . er . . . got a strong rhythm.’

‘It’s grunge.’

‘Okay, well let’s put that aside for the moment and finish your version of A Vendetta before the bell.’

‘It’s boring vegie stuff and I’ve read the original story anyhow, so I know what really, really happened.’

‘Make sure you hand it in at the end of the period, please.’

‘Get real!’

‘Do we have oral work tomorrow, sir?’ Toby yelled from the back row barricade.

‘You do,’ he nodded. ‘Thursdays.’

‘One-minute talks, no hesitation, no repetition, no relevance?’

‘Irrelevance,’ he rasped.

‘Orals suck, sir.’

Someone sniggered, setting off a chain of slurps and swampy suckings.

‘That’s disgusting!’ grinned Rhys, looking round admiringly.

Bewildered, helpless, as if devoid of all energy, strategy, synergy, Slater could do nothing these days about the break-out of spot fires.

Gyrating her upper body, Charlie was singing, ‘You and me ‘round about midnight . . .’

‘Is that you, Charlie, yapping out that rap number?’

‘I don’t yap! Teachers do. Anyway, it’s not rap, it’s Meat Loaf.’

‘Meet who . . . er, whom?’

‘Meat Loaf! The Hard Rock muso! You know, Bat Out Of Hell! … Oh, Jeez!’

Of course, he didn’t know, couldn’t begin to understand these strange adololescents or ‘dorks’, as they called one another. Time was when his own teachers made reference to Rabelais or Handel and you’d scoot off to the library and look them up. You somehow sensed that this was the cultural tradition to which you belonged and ought to know something about, even if you didn’t enjoy or understand its import. Whereas now . . .

‘Someone’s got to draw first blood . . . ‘

‘Excuse me?’

‘Ooh I got to draw first love . . . ‘

‘Eh! Excuse me!’ he repeated loudly enough to betray his irritation.

A look of indignation swept Charlie’s face for one second, before she disarmed him again: ‘Don’t you think Travis M’s spunky with his dunny-brush haircut?’

‘No, I don’t. Now let’s see that note you’re writing.’

She thrust it over brazenly. ‘Don’t you teachers have any fun? My tutor’s always telling us at house, “Have a fun day!”’

‘What’s this doodling?’ he said: ‘Sherbet yum . . . being rude is cool, it’s a great way to be cruel.’

‘That’s private.’

‘Put it in the bin, thank you.’

‘Aw, come on, get over it! . . . Sir, what’s the most awesome car sex song ever?’

Seven Little Girls Sitting In The Backseat rushed into the vacuum, quick as a flash. Wasn’t it Paul Evans? In those pre-paedophiliac days before political correctness.

I wonder what the deconstuctionists would make of that.

Pretending not to hear the curses behind, Slater gravitated towards the calming aura of Helen, though she too had shocked him in year 8 by bringing in Stendhal for private reading. Thank goodness for rare exceptions. ‘How are you going, Helen?’

‘Cool,’ replied a tall, hunched-over girl with an urgency bordering on desperation, her pale complexion accentuating large black-olive eyes. ‘I miss your voice.’

‘Not half as much as I do,’ he mumbled lamely, with the faintest of sad smiles.

‘It was so . . . real, like when you acted out The Necklace. I’ll never forget that moment when Mathilde gets home from the ball in that dingy horse-cab and she doesn’t want to take off her gown. Then when she looks at herself in the mirror and sees the necklace missing . . . it took my breath away when you acted that bit when she touches her neck, not believing, her jaw dropping open in horror. It upset me that she became so wretched.’

At least, someone was capable of feeling. Wasn’t that what his metaphysics tutor used to remind him when he doubted his own worth as a teacher, that maybe just once in this lifetime you make a significant difference to someone’s life . . . it might be only a single word, one phrase . . . one gesture or action . . . you might not even be aware of your influence . . . but in the larger scheme of things, you will have created a turning-point. Yes, all well and good, but in those days I was more sympathetic to the notion of reincarnation. Time was on my side then.

Someone was touching his sleeve. ‘What does your doctor say?’ Helen could be so earnest, he was moved.

‘Oh, just some bronchial complication.’ He coaxed a little flurry of coughs to support the diagnosis, but his locked-up throat, Mireille had said, was really about his fear of hanging loose, a split between his inner and outer world, that he was a choker symbolically as well as literally.

Which he tried not to be right now, though there was another tightening in his throat, partly brought about by Helen’s tut-tutting, the shaking of her straight, black hair and matronly concern.

I should have taken monastic vows, he mused, listening to the winds of silence rather than constipated bowels, poring over illuminated manuscripts instead of illiterate sludge, leading a chaste life instead of bearing witness to hormones jumping out of every eyeball; perhaps a friar gathering sheaves of herbal medicines from the water-meadows . . . catmint . . . marigold . . . evening primrose . . .

Thud! Lenka’s bag bombed from the window ledge onto the concourse outside, bursting into brays of laughter.

‘Would you like to try a warhead?’ What was Jarod up to now? Surely not acting out of the kindness of his heart with this bag of sticky stuff. ‘Sour cherry.’

‘Go on, sir! It’ll only burn your throat for thirty seconds.’

‘Hey, sir!’ wailed Charlie. ‘Shall I stay at my mum’s place tonight, or my dad’s? Or Felix the cat’s?’

‘Charlie’s a whore,’ muttered Travis, as if bending low over a fuse to avoid burning by fall-out.

‘No, I’m not, gay boy. Just you wait!’

‘Here, I’ve finished.’ Rhys was standing slightly behind Slater, looking back at the class with an amused expression on his face, partly smugness that he’d finished first and partly amusement at their antics.

‘But you’ve only written half a page. And most of that is a gory description of Frisky’s fangs ripping Ravolati’s throat to shreds. Did the widow really lick her lips in triumph? Didn’t she feel just a twinge of regret? Or guilt?’

‘Nuh.’

‘Well, I’d like another paragraph, thanks.’

‘Oh, shoot! I’ve finished,’ Rhys whined.

‘Sir, can I show you my story now?’ Helen was waving her paper under his nose. A Vendetta based on a story by Guy de Maupassant.

‘Of course. I’m looking forward to reading it.’ Already he was turning with curiosity to the closing lines.

‘I can take criticism.’

‘Then Frisky leapt up at Nicolas Ravolati, knocked him to the ground and began tearing at his throat. ‘Help! Help!’ he cried. ‘Mercy!’ The widow Saverini had a softer side in her nature and felt sorry to have let Frisky off of the leash. She cried, ‘Heel, Frisky!’ Immediately, the mangy dog, even though it was starving hungry, obeyed the old woman.

‘The widow Saverini also had a guilty conscious. So she stayed at Raviolati’s cottage on Longosardo to dress his hurt. Every day she bathed his scared throat, straining low over his body to hear his voice once again. And every day she mixed up a secret potion of marrygolds and other magical herbs to make him better.’


Michael Small

May 31-June 3, 1993

read on 5UV Radio, Adelaide, April, 1994

pub.  Tales from the Blackboard, ed. Amanda Tattam, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, October, 1998

[HSC English text, NSW, 2001]