New Boy (9 page)

When Mr Browning brings the others to the classroom, he takes Ms Vo outside for several minutes. After she comes back in, the rest of the morning seems normal enough. Then the siren goes for lunch, and she tells all five of us to stay behind.

Mr Browning appears at the door with my mother, Max's mother and four other parents. Mr Browning leads them through the door, and they stand just inside it, looking awkward. I want that. I want them to feel bad, even if I have no idea if it'll do any good. Will anything change at all once there are no parents or teachers around?

Mom makes a move towards me. At first I think she's got something to say about me starting a fight, but as her arms start to lift I realise she's coming in for a hug. I raise one hand just enough for her to see me do it, and I shake my head. She stops, mouths, ‘You okay?' and I give her a small nod before looking away. I can't be hugged by Mom in front of Lachlan Parkes. How does she not know that?

A man in a suit, who looks like he must be Lachlan's father, checks his phone when it pings with a message. He takes a step back towards the verandah before Mr Browning says, politely but clearly, ‘I think that can wait.'

‘It's just a –' Lachlan's father starts to say.

‘Would it be easier if I looked after your phone while you're in this meeting?' Mr Browning holds his hand out.

Lachlan's father stops. ‘Ah, no.' He holds his phone down by his side and then slips it into his pocket.

‘Good.' Mr Browning turns to the other parents. ‘Is everyone else's phone off?'

Max's mother nods quickly, as if she's in trouble herself.

Mr Browning talks through what happened. When he mentions racism, Josh's mom and Ethan's parents look shocked. Lachlan's father's shoulders slump.

Lachlan is apparently already on something called a behaviour contract, which will now be reviewed. He's referred to as ‘the ringleader' more than once. The first time he smirks, but his father glares at him. I think Lachlan needs to work out that being called the leader isn't always a good thing.

Again, Max and I are set free first, this time with our mothers.

‘Why didn't you tell me?' mine says, whispering as though we still have to be quiet.

‘It only happened this morning.' I talk normally. I've decided I don't mind who hears. Everyone's going to find out anyway. And I'm not the racist in this story. Down below, I see quite a few faces turned up towards the verandah, watching to see what's going on.

‘Ya, but there were things along the way. He's been getting at you since the first day or close to it.' She looks worried.

Her worry's more than that, though. I can tell. It's fear. She's got a hint of the look she had when she burst into my room the night of the skollie. The night we become afraid of black boys with knives. The night Mom decided we had to leave.

‘It's not like home,' I tell her. ‘Look how they're dealing with it. You should be glad. A few punches and it's a massive deal here.' This is not Cape Town. ‘No knives, no sjamboks, just a punch or two and look how it shocks them. That's what you want. That's why we're here. They call that violence and you know and I know that it was nothing.'

It wasn't nothing, but she nods.

And what good would it have done to tell her earlier? We already had Hansie and the snot and the screaming and the tantrums about not going to child care. If two of us had been lying on our backs kicking at the carpet with our heels, the past week or so wouldn't have been any better. One of us just had to suck it up, and that always has to be the big brother's job.

‘Excuse me,' Max's mother says. She's standing behind him with her hands on his shoulders and she pushes him forward. ‘Max has something to say.'

She catches Mom's eye and they both step away, with Max's mom talking to mine in a whisper that I can't quite hear. Lachlan Parkes is mentioned.

‘I'm sorry,' Max says. ‘I should've . . .' He shrugs and looks at his feet. ‘I don't know. I'm sorry.' He looks back at me again. ‘Mum wants to know if you want to come to our place on the weekend for lunch, or something. We could ride the quad bikes.'

I want to go. I want us to be friends and I want to ride one of his quad bikes. But in that second all I can see is him saying, ‘Hershey Hershey Fondee Murphy', siding with Lachlan and making me feel like the most alone person in the world.

‘Your mom and dad probably don't know how to cook poo sausage,' I tell him. ‘I think I'll skip it.'

‘Sies!' my father says on that night's Skype call. The picture of him twitches on screen, an angry-looking face shuddering a few centimetres to the left. ‘I thought we'd left all that kak about our name behind in South Africa.'

He hasn't got it yet. It's not about our name. If a South African joke is about someone being stupid, that person's always called van der Merwe. Just about nothing gets to Dad more than a van der Merwe joke. But they're all the work of South Africans, all insiders.

‘This was different,' Mom says. ‘They don't know about those jokes. They were picking on him for being different, for his accent, and about the shape of boerewors.'

‘Well, you don't go listening to mompies like that.' Dad's hand appears and points forcefully at the screen. ‘What a bonehead that Lachlan boy is. I wish I'd been there to straighten him out. I'm glad you stood up for yourself. Did you beat them in the fight?'

Mom goes to speak again, but I get there first. ‘There were at least four of them. I got him, though. I got Lachlan. A teacher turned up pretty quickly.'

I want to sound tough, even though Mom won't like that. They trapped me there. That's how it felt. I was trying to get away. But it feels stupid to say that to Dad, so I don't. Dad's always talked about people standing up for themselves. Anyway, it wasn't much of a push. Lachlan Parkes would have stayed standing if he hadn't tripped over his own feet. And he threw the first punch. But no one's needed me to explain all that. He was way too in the wrong already.

‘The principal was good, Piet,' Mom says. ‘He called it racism, pure and simple.'

My father nods. ‘Okay. Well, if you're sure it's under control for now . . . I can go in and talk to him when I'm home. I can give him a bell tomorrow if you need me to. Whatever it takes, Herschelle. We're going to make this work.'

The picture starts to break up, with his safety jacket turning into chunky fluoro orange pixels. There's a shudder and the pixels come together again. The ceiling light's right above him and his messy hard-hat hair is casting a shadow down his face. He's listening, peering at us on his screen. Maybe we're pixellated too.

‘Thanks, Dad,' I tell him. ‘I think it'll be okay.' I have no idea if it'll be okay. I don't know what bullies do next in this country, or what it takes to make them back off. And now I know that sometimes, whatever you do to fit in, it won't work if other people want you to be an outsider.

‘Your pa was just angry, that's all,' Mom says to me afterwards. ‘He doesn't really want you to go hitting people. You know that, don't you?'

‘I'm not going to go hitting people.'

‘If there's any more of this rubbish, you tell someone, eh?' Mom says. ‘That's the way to go about it in an Australian school, and it'd be a good way to go about it anywhere.'

But she can tell me that all she likes. I still don't want to face them in the morning. Not Lachlan. Not Max. Not anyone at One Mile Creek State School.

‘I hate them all,' I tell her, because it feels good to say it.

‘Hate's a strong word. Just stick with the right people. Max seems like a good guy. Sometimes good people get it wrong, Hersch. They make mistakes. Particularly when they're afraid.'

‘But I thought Max was my friend.' It's him I'm most angry with. ‘And he was part of it.'

Mom's about to say something, but then she pauses and takes a breath.

‘He's been a target of Lachlan's too,' she says. ‘His mother told me. It's not public at school, so you have to keep it to yourself. That's partly why Lachlan's on that program to manage his behaviour. He's been bullying Max.'

It's not public, but I bet Harry and Ben know. It's only now I realise that, ever since I started at the school, the four of us have been avoiding Lachlan. But why couldn't Max have told me? Why didn't I tell him? Because you don't. Because you just hope it'll stop, even when that doesn't fix anything.

So maybe Max felt trapped as well, afraid of what would happen if he didn't go along with it.

‘You weren't there,' I tell her. ‘No one understands me when I talk. I have to keep repeating myself. And I don't understand them a lot of the time. And when they do hear me properly, I use too many words they've never heard of.'

She nods. ‘I know. Sometimes it feels like we've got to work this country out one word at a time, but it'll get easier. In the meantime, if brains were dynamite, Lachlan wouldn't have enough to blow the wax out of his ears.' She smiles. ‘That's an Australian expression. I heard it on TV. Now, I think the school is doing well with this, don't you? Mr Browning calling it racism takes it to a level that means it can't be ignored.'

‘But is it?' I check to see what Hansie's doing. He's at the far end of the living room, building something out of Lego, not listening. ‘Is it racism, really?'

‘Well . . .' She stops to think about it. ‘Well, of course it is. You were chosen as a victim because of how you speak and because you're foreign. I know it's not racism like we see at home. Racism is so complicated in South Africa. You know the history. If it's part of the system, you can't fix it in one go. But what happened to you is racism too, in its own way.'

I'm white and I'm the victim of racism. My whole life has failed to get me ready for that. Racism has been there, all around, talked about often enough – far more than here, probably – but it hasn't meant this. It hasn't come my way, our way, not like this.

Long ago, our family owned a farm. We have a black-and-white picture of it. My great grandfather is in the centre, in a pale suit, seated in a chair made from dark wood and with a back high enough to be like a throne. For the photograph, the chair has been placed on the verandah, at the top of the front steps. He's holding a rifle in his hand – holding the barrel of it and resting the butt on the ground next to the chair. On either side of him, behind the verandah railing, stand his family. Beyond them, also on the verandah, are the white managers and overseers.

In two rows going down the wide staircase, one on either side, the black indoor servants are standing in their uniforms. Seated on the dirt, legs crossed, are the black farm workers, some in rough handmade European clothes, some in traditional clothing, some shirtless, with goatskin bags on their laps.

Our farm fed all those families, black and white, but some ate at a grand table and others at campfires. Whenever I hear the word racism, I see that picture. I can't help it. Dad says my great grandfather wasn't a bad man – just a man of his time. Apartheid has come and gone since then, but its going hasn't given everyone the same opportunities. Some people got rich. Some people got chances they didn't deserve. Some people still live in shacks made from rubbish and don't have toilets.

It's complicated. So we're here.