And Did Those Feet ... (10 page)

THERE was no way round it now, the new plan was for me to go to school with the cousins. To get the bus in the morning. To carry the school bag and the packed lunch. To start in at their local school, the five room job down the way. I can’t say I liked the idea but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I didn’t like my old school much either but at least there I knew everyone. I was used to it.

Here it was all different. For a start, in the country
everyone
travelled to school by bus. (Who knows why, everyone has cars in the country, but it is just something that they do.) The guy who drove the bus was called Mr Boyne. As it turned out he was our teacher too. Iain told me that there was this story that if any kids weren’t waiting at the gate on time he would go into their houses and drag them out.

I didn’t like the look of him. He was a big, hairy-legged guy. One of the hearty types. Shorts in winter. I bet he never wore more than a shirt no matter how cold it was. A scary guy actually. It was because of him they didn’t have a truancy problem. Kids were too scared to get sick in case he dragged
them from their sick bed and carried them off to school in pyjamas. I think even the adults were scared of him. It was like the wild west out in the country, the teachers could do what they liked.

There were a few kids who didn’t come by bus. They either walked or rode horses to school. There was a horse paddock next to the school. Can you imagine that? Riding a horse to school? Talk about cowboy land.

The only change to my morning routine was that when school was on we didn’t do the morning milk any more, on account of our needing to get ready. The bad part was we did the afternoon milking instead. It was hard yakka. Can you imagine what it was like after a day of school? You get home, get out of your school things, pull on those everlovin’ gumboots and get out into the cowshed for a few hours of milking. (Suck suck, moo moo, splat splat.) It sure took it out of me. After milking we had dinner and washed up. We were through by about 8.30 but by that stage everyone was so tired all we could do was crawl off to bed. We were too tired to even play cards. Too tired to moan. I was even too tired to plan what I was going to do to Dad when I got back to civilisation. Maybe that was all part of his plan. That wouldn’t surprise me.

The so-called school was different from what I was used to. For a start there were girls there too, just like the state schools I was driven past in Auckland. Second of all, there were a whole bunch of different ages and sizes in the
classroom
. Some of them were pipsqueaks; others, like Noel Cudby, looked like they probably shaved every morning.

The school work was really easy and, just as I suspected, a fair few of my classmates were thickos. This was quite good because it meant I could just cruise along, never under any pressure. The bad side was that it was really boring, and I was tempted to do a few “off-task” activities. One big
exception
to the thicko rule was Lara. Yes, my rival story-teller and fellow prisoner in the goat kennel was in the class. I could tell immediately that she didn’t have much time for me.

“Hi, Lara.”

“Oh, it’s Bolt, here to save the day.”

I didn’t know what to say at that point. Why is it that some people bear grudges like that? Refuse to drop
something
.

There was something else I didn’t like either. That was the attitude the other kids had to my cousins. They called them Culties. Doesn’t sound like much to you? Well that’s the thing with words, eh? They don’t sound like much if you are on the outside but if you are on the receiving end it’s like being called nigger or chink. Not nice. Because I was living with Uncle Frank’s mob everyone had the right to call me a Cultie too. The mysterious thing was that no one called Lara a Cultie. Maybe that was why she kept me and the cuzzies at arm’s length; she didn’t want to cop the flak. I don’t blame her for that I guess, but I didn’t admire her for it either.

The first time I heard this was at lunchtime and it took a while before I got the idea. Yes, it was me they were
referring
to, and it wasn’t meant to cheer me up.

“Cultie? Iain, what’s that about?”

He looked a bit embarrassed, like he’d been caught out.

“It’s about the League. People in this area don’t like it.”

“Why not? What’s wrong with it?”

“I dunno, just it’s not the local thing, eh? It’s not true blue.”

“Have you told Uncle Frank about it?”

He shook his head. “Not much point, he can’t do
anything
.”

“Mr Boyne?”

“Ha! As if.”

He had a point I guess. Mr Boyne was as local as you could get. He was like a farmer who had died and come back as a school teacher. The only thing missing was crap-
splattered
gumboots.

So we put up with it. Had to. What choice did we have? What this meant was that we hardly got to play with any other kids except for the few losers who had no other mates. At lunchtime it was just me and the cousins plus a couple of misfits from time to time. I accepted it, but I didn’t like it.

What made it worse was that we were smarter than the others. We knew stuff. We showed them up in class.
Everyone
else had made this agreement I reckon. Take it slow. Stay as dumb as you can.

OF course school’s not all that straightforward. Never is. One thing I’ve learned about life is that something always comes along when you are getting on top of things, just in time to knock you on your arse again.

For me, right then, this thing took the form of Noel Cudby.

This guy Cudby looked too big to be at school. He looked like he should be at college. Except that he’s too dumb. That’s a given. The other thing that’s a given is that he hated me the moment he saw me.

Here’s how it happened.

It was a couple of weeks after I first started. I had finished my work early and I was just sitting there looking at him and thinking how he looked like a small kid held under a magnifying glass. He’s like a huge little kid, if you can work out what I mean. He’s got this real round baby face and a ski slope nose. His buck teeth make him look like he’s got a smile on his face so I smile at him, just to show I’m not a stuck up city type. Wrong move.

He chose his moment and then wandered over to where I was sitting.

“You being smart?”

“Nope.”

“You wanna go, mate?”

“Nope.”

“You wanna step outside and see who’s smiling then eh?”

“Nope.”

In these situations it is best to keep your answers very simple and to the point. But it didn’t work. I thought he was just horsing around so I gave him a serve. I have to admit, thinking about it now, that I did mimic him a bit too, but only to show him I was a good sort. “No mate. I don’t wanna go. Too soon after breakfast, and besides I’ve been outside and it’s no good.”

He shut up and went back to practising his writing (baby words, eh). I was sure that would be the end of it. His face was low to the page and his mouth was hanging open with the concentration.

But I was wrong, as I often am.

At playtime there he was, waiting for me just outside the cloak bay. Just leaning against the wall looking sort of casual, in an un-casual way.

As I walked past he grabbed my shoulder and said, “Hold it right there, Cultie.”

I was just thinking, “My god, what a corny line,” when he swung on me. I didn’t expect it and just turned my face in time. His fist hit the side of my head and I saw all these little sparks snapping off and on when I closed my eyes. It
was just like in the cartoons. When I came to, I was sitting on the concrete and he was a few feet away doubled up over his fist like he’d broken it or something.

My brain wasn’t working too well at that stage so I had to replay the incident to try to work out what had happened. A sort of reconstruction of the crime. From that point I knew exactly what to do. I got up and ran over and kicked him as hard as I could, right up the bum.

It was a kick that I’ll remember for a thousand years. No other kick will ever feel so good, I don’t care who does it. It could be an All Black slotting the winning penalty, right on full time, but it still won’t feel as good as that kick felt. The timing, the placement, the foot speed: I reckon I almost got both of his feet clear of the ground.

Cudby sort of grunted and flew forward, sprawling out on the concrete. I stood over him waiting for him to get up so I could give him another one, but he stayed down. He may have been a thicko but he knew when to stay down. I grabbed a handful of hair to get his head up. I needed to repay him the punch. I would have left it there, honest, just a punch for a punch. Tit for tat. That’s fair. But I never got that punch in.

There was a frantic banging on the window behind me. In the classroom were Mr Boyne and Mr Carson the
headmaster
.

They had seen my kick but not his punch.

Typical.

The day went downhill from then on. I was marched off to the school office and ushered into the sick bay by an older lady who wore glasses hanging from a string around her neck.
When I say “ushered” I mean Boyne and Carson had an arm each and they sort of dragged me. Later they claimed that I was kicking at them during this march but I don’t recall that little detail. Surely I would have remembered kicking the headmaster? I mean it’s not every day that you do that, is it?

What they made immediately clear was that I was going to be kept away from everyone else for the rest of the day. I sat on the bed looking at a diagram of all the bones in the human body. I remember thinking that the body sure was an ugly beast without flesh and skin to cover it. There were other posters about the dangers of hydatids. You get that disease from dogs who get it from eating animal guts. Then there was one about what not to do with detonators should you come across them. One of the things you shouldn’t do is hit them with hammers. You would have to be pretty thick to do that … but then again this was the country. I measured my eyesight against the eye charts and then read these
brochures
they had on a little stand. There was an interesting one about STDs. Then I heard voices outside that I knew. It was Iain and Jamie, here to rescue me.

“…can we just talk to him through the door?”

“No off you go and play, this doesn’t concern you.”

“He’s our cousin, he lives at our house…”

“I said off you go or I’ll get Mr Carson to have a word with you.”

“Can we ring Mum and Dad?” That was Iain.

“They have been rung so don’t you worry about that, now off you go. Back to class. Now!”

I knew that they were the sort of boys who did what adults
told them, even if it was wrong, so I went out to see them but found there was something holding the door closed. It wasn’t locked, it was just that there was something heavy placed against it.

I yelled out. “Iain, Jamie, get me out of here!”

Then I heard men’s voices, loud ones getting Iain and Jamie out of the foyer, so I started to kick. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I had this “here we go again” feeling. I mean, no one likes being locked up so I thought it best to thump and kick hell out of the door. They needed to be reminded that I was still there.

The door was a heavy one, probably designed in a special workshop where they design kid-proof doors for schools. I knew I couldn’t break it, but I could sure make a lot of noise so I went hard out. I kicked for all I was worth, and then, slowly I could hear something being moved on the other side.

The door opened and Boyne and Carson were standing there, their hands out, all ready for me like I was some sort of escaped gorilla. I could see that they hadn’t had to deal with someone like me before, that they were a bit nervous, a bit out of their depth.

“You stop kicking that door or by golly I will give you a jolly good hiding!”

It’s Boyne who says that. “By golly” and “jolly good”. The last time I came across that sort of stuff was when I read
Noddy in Toyland.
I looked at them. I think Noddy. I think PC Plod. I couldn’t help it, I began to snigger.

“You think it’s funny do you? Kicking doors, kicking
people
, that’s okay where you come from is it?” It’s Carson. “We
don’t put up with that sort of nonsense around here, Sonny Jim.”

“
Sonny Jim
?” I thought, where do they get this from?

For a while these two big dudes just stood there,
wondering
what to do. Guard me or get on the blower to Uncle Frank? Tough call. In the end Boyne stays and Carson goes off to call home.

Boyne was really angry. I could tell this because he began to stutter. The words just wouldn’t come for him.

“I..I..I..I..I..I’m jolly well n..n..n..n..n..not going to take this s..s..s..s..sort of behaviour. That stuff m..m..m..m..maybe okay in Auckland but here in T..T..T..Taranaki w..w..w..we have s..s..standards.”

This took a fair bit of eye bulging and spit spraying but he got there in the end.

Then he calmed down and got onto the real stuff. I could tell it was the stuff he’d been longing to say since I first
arrived
. He could see why they had kicked me out of my last school. His school would not become a dumping ground for city trash. One bad apple can spoil the barrel. I should have been given a good kick up the bum when I first started to get out of line – that would have sorted me out.

What did I have to say to that one?

Well, I had to agree with that last statement. So I said, “Yeah. A kick up the bum does sort things out. You could ask Noel Cudby about that one. He’ll be riding home side saddle for a few days.”

Boyne wasn’t impressed. “You’re not worth talking to,” he blurted, and stormed out, banging the door.

ABOUT half an hour or so later Aunty Lorna and Wee Jock showed up in the Landrover to collect me. We were both taken into Carson's office so that he could “read the riot act,” he said. As it happened he didn't read anything. He just gave his version of the fight and made the point that he couldn't take the risk of allowing me to go home on the bus with other normal boys and girls because no one had any idea what I was going to do next. What would happen now was that the school board would decide how long I was to be off school and meanwhile treatment would be organised for my “violence disorder”.

I could have argued the point but I couldn't be bothered. Once adults have made up their minds it takes more than a kid to change them. It made no difference that I had just been on the receiving end of a king hit. The sort of punch that would have dropped a bullock. They didn't see that one. Noel Cudby's bruised knuckles were said to be a result of the fall from my unprovoked attack. I had nothing more to say so I stared at Carson's face and focussed my mind on the
bowl of sheep guts that I had seen on the hydatids poster. It must have worked because his talk tailed off quickly and the next thing I knew I was carrying Wee Jock out to the
Landrover
with Aunty Lorna.

Halfway home I got this funny feeling in my gut. It came from nowhere. I hadn't even eaten my lunch but I knew that if we drove any further I was going to be sick everywhere. Aunty Lorna took one look at me and pulled over quickly. We came to rest in front of the gates to a country
graveyard
.

I burst out of the Landrover and went into the cemetery looking for somewhere to sit down. I put my head in my hands and had this heaving feeling deep in my gut. It was like car sickness but it wasn't. I felt sweat break out on my forehead and kept very still trying to hold it all together. After a while I knew it was passing. I had this huge feeling of relief, like something had flown from my body. I looked up and Aunty Lorna was there a few steps away, holding Wee Jock. She was smiling at me encouragingly but keeping her distance. I stood up, all shaky and light headed.

“Feel better?”

I nodded.

“What happened?”

I shrugged. She walked over and touched me on the head. “Your head is very hot.”

It was, and my hair was full of sweat.

“Come for a walk, Sandy.”

So we did. It was a small cemetery but very old. Some of the graves were so weathered and covered in green stuff
that you couldn't read the names. Others were little graves belonging to babies.

“Just think,” said Aunty Lorna pointing at a small stone cross. “This baby, Bartholomew, was younger than Wee Jock when he died, and he's been gone a hundred years.”

I just walked; for once I didn't feel the need to say
anything
. It was nice to be in sunshine, in this graveyard with just Aunty Lorna and Wee Jock. It made me feel calm. Down near the back were a few newer graves. They were still twenty or thirty years old but the concrete looked
fresher
. On one grave there were the footprints of a bird that had walked across while it was still wet.

“Look at that,” said Aunty Lorna. “Two memorials. One to …” she squinted at the grave stone “… Helen Barrett. There are lots of Barretts around these parts. And the other to a blackbird, out taking its morning walk.”

With her finger she traced out how it had done a series of hops and then stopped to swish its beak on the cement, and then hopped on to the other end, where the trail
disappeared
.

“Is that all we are, Sandy? All this cemetery is? Just tiny scratchings, the footprints of brief lives?”

I thought about it, the bird foot prints, the woman's grave. “I don't know, I like to think that my mum is still with me somehow. But I don't know how. I guess it doesn't make sense.”

Aunty Lorna picked a dandelion and put it in Wee Jock's hand.

“I have this theory, Sandy, that all we are is vessels for
love. That all the world's problems are caused by imperfect love. World wars, playground fights.”

“Is that William Blake?”

She shook her head. “Frank's the Blake specialist, I get my ideas from all over the place.”

I was a bit surprised.

“You and Noel Cudby. Your fight. The Vietnam War. The endless fighting in the Middle East. They are all the same. Indivisible. Microcosms and macrocosms.”

She spoke on like this for a while and managed to lose me in the process. There were big words and small words but what they had in common was that I couldn't
understand
a lot of them. Went over my head. Girls' stuff really, I thought. Still I knew she meant well. Was worried about me. Unlike the two men back at the school who just saw me as a problem, something sent to irritate them. To them I was, what my dad would have called, “a bird crap on the windscreen of life”.

What Aunty Lorna did tell me, something which I can remember now, was that she never regretted anything and that I shouldn't either. In the long run everything serves a purpose and our life's challenge was to recognise what that purpose was.

Here's an example.

Her accident. One moment she's in a crowd of people in Sydney, partying away, not a care in the world. Next
moment
she's stuck under a runaway Mercedes, losing her hair and a good amount of skin and flesh. All broken and
mangled
. Clinging to life by a thread.

She said the hardest part was not the dozens of
operations
, the hardest part was understanding what had
happened
. What the accident was trying to tell her. During her year in hospital she realised that she had been wasting her life looking for happiness in the material world. It had been hovering above her on angels' wings all the time. She
realised
that happiness and contentment could never be bought in a shop or found in a new dress: it had to be courted. You had to lay out the right conditions and it would visit you. If you did it really well, then it stayed a long time. That's what she and Frank had done and now they had lives that wanted for nothing.

She turned to me and said, “Even the hardest and most painful things that have happened to you will one day be precious jewels. You will give thanks for them. We are like the oyster and the pearl. Sharp bits of experience embed themselves in our soft flesh. We have to keep covering them with the nacre of love and wisdom, and then one day these sharp things will be beautiful, glossy pearls. They will no longer hurt us but will be a source of pride and joy. They will transform us.”

She didn't say anything about my mother but I knew that's what she was really talking about. Maybe that's what lay behind my kicking Noel Cudby, behind the punching of that kid at the other school. But how can you be sure? Who knows why you really do things?

When I got back home, Uncle Frank was nowhere to be found. Aunty Lorna said he wanted to see me so I felt all that tightness come back into my stomach. I couldn't help it.
When he did show up I realised that I was wrong. He never even asked what I was doing at home. He wanted to show me a bird's nest that he had found in the hedge. We talked about how it was made and we both wondered how the bird could have learned to be such a clever builder.

At 4 p.m. the rest of the boys got back from school. By that stage I was out helping with the milking and no one said anything about the fight. That was fine by me.

The following day after the older boys had gone off to school, Uncle Frank took me out fencing with him, way down the back, near where the farm turned into bush. We dropped off all these posts and battens and then dug a series of holes. Uncle Frank had invented a clever little device for making sure the line was straight. Bit like a telescope, a bit like gun sights. When I asked him about it he just laughed.

“Been around in some form ever since the Egyptians were building the pyramids. It's all out there boy, all you need is to be in the right head space to see it.”

I held the battens while he belted them in with a big
hammer
. I was a bit scared because I was sure he was going to miss and smash my hands. He knew this and let me have a shot while he held the batten. The sledge hammer was so heavy I could lift it but I couldn't swing it.

“It's no good,” I said. “I'm just not strong enough.”

Uncle Frank points to my heart and my head and says, “Strength is in here and here. All the rest is just muscles.”

I say, “I'm too small … it can't be done.”

Uncle Frank wouldn't have a bar of it. “If you can lift it, you can swing it. If you can swing it you can hit it. What's
holding
you
back is your mental chains.”

“My what?”

“Your limitations. Mental chains, William Blake used to call them, because that's all they are. Our potential is
without
limit.”

I was thinking, “Oh yeah, that's easy for you to say.”

“Try again.”

I shook my head.

He looked at me fiercely. “I know you can, now hit it!”

He was staring at me and holding the batten about an inch from the top. I knew I could swing it, that much was true, but I was also sure that I would miss even slightly and break his wrist. My stomach felt weak and squelchy.

“Swing!”

His words were exploding in my head; I swung the
hammer
down with every atom of my strength. I felt the sweet shudder of a direct hit. Saw the post move half a foot into the ground. Uncle Frank never took his eyes off mine. I felt like crying. I also felt older, like I had grown up in one swing. He never asked me to do it again. And he didn't rub it in either. None of that, “See, I knew you could do it.” It just sat between us like our own little secret. It's still there, his steady eye, his fierce stare, the mighty swing, then the enormous relief of a direct hit to the middle of the batten. It is hard to think of any other single action in my life that was so risky and so satisfying.

In the afternoons I would sometimes leave the milking and go down to the gate to wait for the boys to come home. It had been a while now and I was keen to get back to school.
It is quiet in the country and I could hear the whine of the old bus's diff ages before it rose over that last dip in the road. They all piled out of the bus and gathered around me telling me the news of the day. Just dumb school stuff I guess but I missed it, I guess no one likes feeling that they have been missing out on something.

One day, Uncle Frank made a trip into school and some sort of deal was worked out. A guarantee given I guess. I was afraid I would have to apologise to Noel Cudby, say how sorry I was, or make promises I wouldn't be able to keep, but it never came to that.