New Boy (2 page)

Max Kennedy has large amounts of brown curly hair, a battered blue school sun hat and a matching blue backpack as big as a fridge. He's spinning an old tennis ball in his hands.

‘Max,' Ms Vo calls out as he reaches the top of the steps. ‘Are you ready to give Herschelle his guided tour?'

‘Sure am, Ms Vo.' Max looks at me, and then at Mom and Hansie, who is back to grabbing Mom's leg. He turns towards me again. ‘Hi.'

‘Howzit.'

‘It's . . .' He looks like he's actually thinking about it. ‘It's good.'

Someone should have told Max that howzit doesn't have an answer.

‘So, twenty minutes, boys,' Ms Vo says. ‘I'll see you at the classroom. Actually, maybe you should start the tour there, so you can both put your bags down.'

Or maybe Max's bag could put its nerd down and let him run free until school starts. It's at least twice as big as him. What could he be carrying in there?

My mother puts her hand on my shoulder and says, ‘You have a great first day now. I'll be back at three, eh? In the spot where we're parked now. And isn't it good to have a friend already?'

Friend? Wasn't she paying attention at Bergvliet Primary? Didn't she see who I spent time with? I would have been school hockey captain one day, if we'd stayed. I was the guy you picked first for any team, the guy everyone wanted to be friends with, and who got to be selective. I didn't have teachers lining me up with friends. I suppose I'll find the cool people here when I need to. Or they'll find me.

Max and I turn to leave, and Ms Vo goes to talk to Mom just as Mom tries to peel Hansie from her leg.

‘Don't worry,' she tells him in her most patient voice. ‘I'll have a chat with Herschelle's new teacher and then we'll go somewhere with lots of toys and fun and other kids.'

Plus screaming and snot when he realises she's leaving, but she doesn't say that bit. He might even vomit if he gets worked up enough.

‘So, Herschelle,' Max says on the way to our classroom block, ‘my dad said there was a South African cricketer once who was called Herschelle.'

‘Yeah, Herschelle Gibbs. Scored a few runs against you Aussies.' Why would it take his dad to tell him that? How would he not know? Herschelle Gibbs is famous. ‘My mom and dad saw him score one of the fastest double centuries ever in a test in Cape Town. That's where we're from. It's partly how I got the name.'

‘And “van duh murway”? Is that right?'

At first I think he's joking, but then I realise his face is totally serious. He has no idea how to say my last name. I say it for him, and he gets me to repeat it before trying again himself.

‘Fon de mer fuh?'

‘That's good.' It's not, but it's close. ‘Don't you have many van der Merwes around here?'

‘In One Mile Creek?' Max laughs. ‘I think you guys'd be it. My dad said it's an African name. I thought you'd look different.'

It takes a second or two to work out what he means. ‘Oh,
black
. You thought I'd be black because your dad said I was African.' It's hard not to laugh. And at the same time I wonder if he has any idea of South Africa beyond Herschelle Gibbs. ‘Sorry, chana. There's white Africans too.' As soon as I've said it, I realise it's a joke he doesn't get. Can't get. ‘Chana' is from a black South African language – Zulu, I think – and means ‘friend'. ‘Maybe your dad said my name was
Afrikaner
. That'd be right. Afrikaner people came from Holland to South Africa hundreds of years ago.'

‘African people came from Holland?' He sounds even more confused. ‘Didn't human life begin in Africa? And how come you don't speak Dutch?'

‘I do. I speak Afrikaans, which is like Dutch, so I can understand Dutch. But luckily I also speak this language called “English”. You've probably heard of it.'

‘All right then.' I'm being sarcastic, but he smiles anyway. ‘We have that language here. This'll be okay.'

‘So, what made you come here?' Max asks. ‘Why are you in Australia?'

It's a fair question, but I don't know how to answer it. Does he mean why did we leave? Or why did we come here?

I don't think I can tell him why we left. I don't really want to talk about it.

‘Good opportunities,' I tell him, even though it sounds totally like what it is – a line borrowed from Mom and Dad. ‘My dad works in the mines. He's an expert in some areas, so they paid for us to come here.'

There's nothing untrue about that, even if it's nowhere near the whole truth. ‘It's complicated,' my father has said, the two times I've heard people ask more questions.

Max just nods, so I don't have to go there.

Outside our classroom are wooden racks loaded with bags, both schoolbags and bags with sports clothes hanging out. Max tells me it's PE today, and then he says, ‘Sport,' in case I don't understand ‘PE'. No one told me it was PE today. My sports uniform is at home.

‘Your sandshoes have to be all white or close to it,' he tells me.

‘Sandshoes?'

What are sandshoes? Are they like snow shoes? I picture a class of thirty kids with tennis racquets on their feet as sandshoes, trekking across a dune. I'm sure there are no dunes in One Mile Creek. There's bushland, a few farms and land being cleared for houses, none of it sand. All of the northern bit of Brisbane is between One Mile Creek and the water. I've seen the map. Maybe they're just special takkies for sand.

‘Is it beach volleyball today?' As soon as I say it, I remember beach volleyball is barefoot. I feel like a total idiot.

‘No, sand
shoes
,' Max says. He points to his feet, as if it's the ‘shoe' part that I'm struggling with. ‘Trainers. Runners.'

‘Ah, just takkies.'

‘My dad's a trekkie.' He's got his confused look back again. ‘I'm more into
Doctor Who
 . . .'

‘No, I said . . .' But it doesn't matter what I said. Where was ‘sandshoes' in the online Australian dictionaries? Sandshoes, trainers or runners – those seem to be the three acceptable options. Not takkies. I'm going to have to start writing this stuff down.

‘I'm just saying, 'cause one new kid turned up in thongs once,' he tells me. ‘He thought we'd be doing swimming, but still . . .'

‘Thongs?'

I must look blank because he points to his feet again. ‘It's rubber. It's got a rubber sole and then a bit that comes up between your toes.'

‘Oh, flip-flops.'

‘That'd be them.' He points to me now, as if I've given a correct answer to a quiz question.

I push my bag into a space on the rack and decide just to nod at everything Max says from now on. He leads me downstairs and shows me the nearest toilets, and a long row of steel sinks outside with taps, drinking fountains and hand-wash gel.

He points between two yellow buildings to show me where the oval is, and tells me there's a ‘no hat, no play' rule. We walk up a ramp to a newer building, the library, and he tells me he'll bring me here at lunchtime to introduce me to the librarian and show me what I need to know.

Behind the library is the newest and biggest building of all. It's made of brick and blue steel sheeting. The door is open, and Max leads me in.

‘This is our school hall,' he says. There's a stage at one end and seats piled up at the other, with the floor marked for basketball and other games. There's a huge steel ceiling fan with at least eight blades. ‘The fan's cactus already, and the hall's only a few years old.'

I look around. There's no cactus. I wonder if it's the brand, but there's no visible logo.

‘The fan's carked it,' he says. ‘It's gone bung.'

I'm now working on a ‘three strikes and I'm out' policy. I pretend to understand, just to make it stop. I get my phone out and type the words into notes. Three words to describe a fan, and what help have those slang websites been? Nothing to say about fans at all.

A siren sounds.

‘Five minutes,' Max says, and it's a relief that the tour's almost over.

I'm standing beside Ms Vo when she starts to introduce me to the class. She gets as far as, ‘Everyone, we have a new student joining us today, all the way from South Africa, and his name's Herschelle . . .' She turns to me. ‘I might get you to say the rest of your name so they hear it exactly right the first time.'

‘Herschelle Stefanus van der Merwe,' I tell them.

Someone laughs and says, ‘Excuse me?'

‘Lachlan!' Ms Vo sounds tough all of a sudden. ‘You could end up with a few very dull lunchtimes if you're not careful.'

I look around the room to work out who she's saying it to. Maybe it's the same Lachlan I saw playing handball, but I didn't get a good look at him then.

She's moving on already. ‘Herschelle, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself?'

I'm still hung up on the laugh and the issue with my name. No one's explained why it's funny. ‘Yes, hello, my name's Herschelle.' This time there's a bigger laugh. I've just announced the one thing about me that they already know. How can they be laughing at that? ‘I'm from . . .' I pull out just before saying South Africa. They know two things about me, and that's the other. ‘A city called Cape Town. We've been in One Mile Creek a couple of weeks, my family and me. My father works in mines and he's now got a job in Central Queensland.'

It's enough. I make myself stop. If I say any more it could go wrong again. I wait for Ms Vo to tell me where to sit. As I'm standing there looking out over the class, something doesn't seem quite right. At first I can't figure out what. Then I realise it's that everyone is pretty much white. The websites I've been to – government websites included – all said Australia was ‘diverse'. A ‘melting pot'. There were lots of pictures of Aboriginal people. But there's none here at One Mile Creek State School. There's barely even anyone with black hair. Bergvliet was a pretty white area of Cape Town, but even it wasn't like this. I look at Ms Vo. I wonder how it feels for her. I want to say to her, ‘Isn't this just the whitest place you've ever seen?' I don't really know how to ask her about it, though. I don't want to use the word Apartheid, but where are all the black and coloured people?

Ms Vo is saying we'll start with Maths, and pointing out a spare desk. The attention goes away from me, which is good. Questions are asked and people have to answer them, so they stop looking at me. And Maths is okay. For a while the morning makes almost complete sense. But then we move on to History.

She takes us through some of the details of the Swan River colony and says, ‘So, Swan River was very different from Moreton Bay in some ways, wasn't it? Colonies were set up to meet different needs and structured in different ways. You might all like to look into those sorts of things when you're finishing off your presentations on the Moreton Bay colony.'

I don't have one to finish. Or, in fact, to start. I don't know where Moreton Bay is, or Swan River. I haven't seen colonies with those names on any of the Australian maps I've looked at.

I thought I'd done all the preparation – the websites, the notes from the Australian government. It was supposed to make me fit right in. Around the room, everybody else is working but I don't know what we're supposed to do, or how I'd start it. Then I see that not everybody is finishing a presentation. One guy is flicking the hair of the girl in front of him with a ruler. Two of his friends are trying not to laugh. She swats the ruler away with her hand.

‘Lachlan!' Ms Vo says sharply. ‘Concentrate. And leave Genevieve to do her work. You'd better have found out some amazing things about the Moreton Bay colony if you've got time to muck around.'

‘Yes, Miss,' Lachlan says, trying not to smirk. He
is
the guy with the fierce handball drive, I'm sure of it. His feet scrape across the floor as he changes position and pretends to concentrate.

Ms Vo catches me looking at him and says, ‘Oh, Herschelle, sorry. You've got nothing to work on, have you? I think it's too late to expect you to start a presentation on the Moreton Bay colony. Why don't you just move your chair over to Max's desk and help him?' She points towards Max, and he moves his chair to make room. ‘See if you can come up with any questions that he hasn't answered yet. Do some peer editing.'

Max turns his laptop around as I carry my chair to the corner of his desk. What is it with this school? I keep being sent to the nerd. Nerds. There's one on either side of Max too. I bet they're friends, the three of them. Which is fine – it's just that I'm not. Or at least I wasn't at home.

Max is writing some text to go with an old sketch of a stone building. He has a pencil stuck in his hair above his right ear. He has the kind of hair that can hold pencils, and possibly lose them. One of his friends has a Transformers pencil case, with all his pencils neatly lined up and perfectly sharpened by a nearby Transformers sharpener. The other has his socks pulled up way too high. Ms Vo has got me all wrong and sent me to the nerd colony. This is going to give the cool people entirely the wrong idea.