Ishmael and the Hoops of Steel (22 page)

‘Awwwwwwwwww, Prindabubbles! Snookems!' Razz said, spreading his arms wide. ‘Come here. What you need is a great – big – hug!'

Ignatius reeled back in horror.

‘OK,' Razz said, ‘maybe later. But dude, don't you see, you
are
being picked.
We're
picking you, man. And not
just
to make up the numbers or because we've got no hope in hell of getting anyone else – although that's totally, like, 99.9 per cent of the reason – but
also
because we actually
need
you, dude. We need your height. You and Billy can be our net guys, our main “go to” spikers.'

‘But I don't know anything about volleyball.'

‘Are you kidding me? You knew the net was high. That's a great start. I can teach you how to play. And I even promise not to laugh or yell. Well, maybe I'll laugh a bit – I'm only human. Come on, dude. It'll be great! And you'll get to do other exciting stuff as well, like help keep score, analyse the match statistics, double-check the dimensions of the court and calculate the optimum velocity and trajectory for serving the ball over the net.'

The worried look on Ignatius's face actually eased a little.

‘Look, we don't want just another guy on the team, Prindabuddy. We want
you
. We're the Fab Five, like Miss T says. It wouldn't be a proper team without the Pi Man.'

I could tell Prindabel was wavering as he rubbed a palm across his large expanse of forehead.

‘You don't have to do it if you really don't want to, Ignatius,' Scobie said, ‘but it would be great if you could.'

Prindabel took us all in with a sweep of his eagle eyes.

‘You do realise, don't you, that once I'm placed within the set parameters of a sporting arena, there is a very real possibility that it may result in a fatal fracture of the space-time continuum leading to the collapse of the universe and the imminent destruction of all life as we now know it.'

‘For you, Ignatius, it's a risk we're willing to take,' Scobie told him.

‘All right. If you really need me, I suppose I'm in,' Ignatius said as if he was volunteering himself for a full body wax.

‘Awesome!' Razz shouted. ‘The Pi Man delivers!' Then he thrust his hand high above his head and left it hanging. Ignatius stared at it for a moment before a flash of understanding swept across his face. Then he drew back his own hand, focused his eyes and carefully lined up Razza's open palm for a high five.

‘Well, Scobes,' Razz said, after just managing to avoid getting slapped in the head, ‘looks like you got your dream team. Now all you need is a coach.'

Scobie twisted his mouth about.

‘But you're going to coach us, aren't you?'

‘Sure. I can be your
actual
coach, but you have to have a teacher on board as well. Hardcastle's rules. No teacher, no team. Might be tricky too. The Hard Man has already bribed and threatened every teacher he could to get a coach for the Fourths. In the end he had to do it himself and he's already got the Firsts.'

‘What does the teacher have to do?'

‘Nothing much. For starters they don't have to know a thing about volleyball. We can take care of ourselves. They just sort of have to be there, you know, when we train and play. Hey, what about Miss Tarango?'

‘She'd do it,' Scobie said ‘but I don't think we should ask her. Not on top of her year coordinator role. It wouldn't be fair.'

‘What we really need is someone who's a soft touch,' Razz said. ‘Someone who'd do it even if they were way too busy. Someone who'd feel bad if they turned us down.'

Just then Mr Guthrie strolled into Homeroom and greeted everyone with a warm ‘Good morning, boys!' He dropped his canvas carry bag on the teacher's desk, pulled out a poster and began pinning it up on the noticeboard.

Scobie kept his eyes on Mr G but directed his next question at Razz.

‘Someone who wasn't afraid of taking on seemingly hopeless causes?'

Razz nodded solemnly. ‘Dude, have you seen our team? That would be the
minimum
requirement for the job.'

Mr Guthrie pushed a final pin into the bottom of the poster and stepped back.
End World Hunger Now!
shouted at us from the noticeboard.

Scobie performed one of his classic mouth twists then smiled.

‘Come the moment, come the man,' he said.

Even though he had his hands full trying to save the planet, Mr Guthrie came to our rescue as well and agreed to become our volleyball ‘coach'. I guess some superheroes get their tights and capes from op shops.

As soon as Mr G signed on, Scobie and Razz met with Mr Hardcastle and soon the St Daniel's Open Fifths volleyball team was officially alive and kicking. Well, alive anyway. As a sporting unit we weren't exactly a well-oiled machine. More like the remains of a rusty, broken-down tractor bogged in an overgrown paddock somewhere – with chickens roosting in us. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that we were the worst team in St Daniel's long and proud volleyball history. (We were, of course. But it's just that I'm not saying it. Not out loud anyway. I've got some pride.)

On the plus side we had two things going for us. One was Razz and the other was Mr Guthrie. As far as Razz was concerned, we all knew that he'd be a natural at volleyball and our best player, but what we didn't know was what a great coach he would be. But after just two sessions he'd transformed us from a totally hopeless, incompetent rabble into what could only be described as a well below average volleyball team. And he made training fun. It was a minor miracle.

Mr Guthrie was our second plus because for him, winning
wasn't
everything
. In fact sometimes I wondered if it even registered on his radar. This, of course, made Emerson Guthrie a perfect match for the mighty Fighting Fifths, because it was pretty obvious that we were never going to win
anything
.

So much for our pluses. On the minus side were … well … the rest of us, basically.

First up there was Bill and me. I'd say that on a very good day, if we reached the extreme outer limit of our abilities, we
almost
made it to OK. Bill was better than me. He actually had good ball control and not a bad serve. I think hooping helped, and Bill hooped heaps. On the other hand his mobility wasn't great because there was still plenty of him to move around. To his credit though, he was quite fast over about two steps.

Next there was Ignatius Prindabel. Seeing Ignatius on a sporting arena of any kind was as startling as seeing a flamingo on the polar ice caps. Seeing him in sports clothes bordered on the disturbing. Razz described him as a cross between a giraffe in fancy dress and a scarecrow minus the straw. And Ignatius was absolutely right when he said he was the natural enemy of sport, because the volleyball appeared to be on a mission to kill him.

No matter how Ignatius positioned his hands, the ball always found a way to avoid them and hit some part of his body. Often his groin. I had a theory that because Prindabel's arms were so long, it took more time than normal for messages to travel between his brain and his hands and by the time they did, it was too late. Razz had another theory involving Ignatius having ‘excessive levels of the extreme nerd hormone'.

Next in our stellar line-up was James Scobie. I've already described Scobie's prowess in various sporting arenas, so all you have to do is transfer most of that to a volleyball court. By far his biggest problem was receiving serve, and his decision not to wear his glasses for safety reasons didn't help. As the ball hurtled towards him, Scobie squinted on the baseline,
desperately trying to get it into some sort of focus. From what I could figure out, this didn't actually happen until just before the ball thudded into the floor for a winner or into James himself.

Last in our long list of negatives was Melvin Yip. At least Melvin looked the part. This was because he owned every item of brand-name sporting clothing and equipment ever made and he liked to have as many of those items on his body at the one time as humanly possible. His sport shoes were something else again.

As well as being all the colours of a fluorescent rainbow, Melvin's footwear featured every sort of pump, gel, stripe and brand-new-adjust-to-any-surface-straight-from-the-latest-space-program-ultra-modern-cutting-edge-technology that you could possibly imagine. One day as a joke Razz asked Yippy if he could check his emails with his shoes. Melvin just frowned a bit and said, ‘Not sure. I haven't read through all the instructions yet.' It would have been a good comeback if he wasn't being serious.

As well as having all the right gear, Yippy was short, wiry, keen and super-fit, with rock-hard calf muscles that bulged from his bandy legs. There was no doubt that on a volleyball court he looked like a million dollars. Sadly he played like loose change. This, however, didn't bother Melvin in the least. Not only did he firmly believe that he was the best volleyball player in the entire school, somehow he had managed to convince himself that he was descended from either a long line of Japanese samurai or some secret society of ninja. This was despite the fact that the Yips originally came from Malaysia, not Japan, and that Melvin himself was a second-generation Australian. Reality wasn't exactly Melvin Yip's strong suit.

The big problem for us was that Melvin liked to display his ninja and samurai moves on the volleyball court whenever possible. This meant that when the ball came his way, he would leap into the air, scream ‘Yeeee-aaaaaa!' thrash his arms at it
and then land back on the court, where he would pose for a few seconds, crouching ninja-like, before springing nimbly backwards into position. The rest of us, meanwhile, had to try to figure out where the ball had gone. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Melvin Yip was known in volleyball circles as the Psycho Samurai or the Nutcase Ninja. He wore both titles with great pride.

So that was our team. Just the six of us. But this was about to change. It was at the end of our second training session that Razz informed us of his awesome brainwave.

‘Hey, listen up, guys. I just had this awesome brainwave.'

Everyone glanced in Razz's direction, but no one stopped getting changed or shoving stuff into bags. Given his track record with ‘awesome brainwaves', our expectations weren't that high.

‘Look, we need to get at least one extra guy to join the team so we've got a reserve, right?'

We nodded.

‘Well, I've been thinking about who we could get. So here's my question. What does our team lack?'

There was quite a pause then as each of us tried to decide which of the countless possible answers he should choose. Fortunately Razz came to our rescue.

‘I'll tell you. The Intimidation Factor. Hardcastle's always going on about it. Personally, I like to call it ‘the Brown Undies Effect'.

‘Intimidation?' Scobie said. ‘This is volleyball, not football.'

‘Doesn't matter. It still works, Your Humungousness. We need some guy who can stand right up at the net and stare down the other team. Someone to put their blockers and servers off their games. Now, while I'd be the first to admit that Prindabel in his volleyball shorts is pretty terrifying, we need more than that. We need someone who can give the opposition … the Look.'

‘The Look?'

‘That's right, Scobes. The Look. The one that says, “If you win this point I'm gonna come over there and force-feed you the ball followed by a tasty side dish of your own joggers.”‘

‘I see,' Scobie said. ‘And who have you got in mind for such a
commendable
role?'

‘Well, just think about it for a minute. Who've we got in Year Twelve that could pull that off?'

It didn't take me long to come up with a name.

‘Not Bagsley?'

‘Yeah, I thought of him too. But he'd never play with us. Anyway, the dude I'm thinking of makes Bagsley look about as intimidating as a Teletubby with a balloon sword.'

What followed was a few seconds of group frowning followed by growing expressions of disbelief as each of us figured out exactly who Razz was talking about.

Scobie performed an extreme mouth twist.

Melvin Yip narrowed his eyes in a vain attempt to look inscrutable.

Ignatius gave a nervous laugh. ‘You can't be serious?'

Bill lost a little of the colour in his face. ‘You don't mean …'

All I managed to squeeze out was, ‘Not …'

Razz addressed each of us in turn. ‘I
am
serious, Prindabudster. I
do
mean, Bilbo. And yes, Ishmael, my man …
him
. If we're talking intimidation, we might as well set our sights on the Grand Poobah, right? What do you say, Scobes? This whole show is your baby.'

James Scobie slowly released his mouth from its twist and adjusted his glasses. His two beady eyes focused in on the question. Then he pushed out his bottom lip and nodded.

‘All right!' said Razz, picking up a volleyball and spinning it effortlessly into a twirling blur on the tip of his index finger.

‘Time to pay a call on the Mudman.'

The Mudman's real name was Theodore Bungalari. He had come to St Daniel's last year from Papua New Guinea. That wasn't such a big deal. We had plenty of boarders from overseas and quite a few of those were from PNG. But none of them were quite like Theodore Bungalari.

When Theodore was introduced to our Homeroom we learned that he was from Goroka in the Highlands. Mr Guthrie had been there on one of his trekking holidays, and he told us the region was famous for its spectacular festivals and ceremonies and especially for the Goroka Mudmen – locals who wore big headdresses and covered their bodies entirely in mud. Theodore got his nickname a couple of days later when a boy came around looking for him and saying, ‘Hey, if anyone sees that mudman guy, tell him he's wanted at the office.' A name like that couldn't really do anything else but stick.