The Year My Life Broke (2 page)

The Mafia kid from next door, the girl I'd heard a few times, dropped in a couple of weeks after we'd unpacked. When I say ‘dropped in', I mean she dropped in. I was in my room, on my bed reading, because I'd been kicked off the computer after Callan made up some bogus story about needing to do research for a school project. Callan doing homework? Couldn't my parents see through that? Callan doing homework was about as likely as a dog having kittens.

Anyway, I was on my bed reading and I don't know why but I looked up and through the window I saw a little streak of movement in the backyard. ‘Cat?' I thought, but then I got another view and realised ‘Kid.' It wasn't Callan because I'd just seen him on the computer, and it would have taken a four-wheel-drive and a winch to get him off that.

So I headed out the door, pretty fast, to see what was going on. Sure enough, there was a girl about my age down the end of the yard. I realised that the first movement I'd seen was her dropping off the top of the fence. She just stood there looking at me, like she owned the place.

‘What are you doing?' I said, suspicious, but not too aggressive. I didn't want her to send her Godfather and cousins and uncles after me but on the other hand I didn't want her thinking she could just trampoline over our fence any time she got bored digging graves in her own backyard.

‘Nothing very interesting,' she said. She didn't look too bothered but she didn't sound too tough either. ‘Just getting my ball. Sorry.' She laughed, so I don't think her apology was too sincere.

‘Oh well,' I said, not sure that I could do much with this. ‘If it's just your ball . . .'

But I had to be sure, in case she was planting drugs or burying bodies in our garden. ‘Where is it?' I asked, looking around.

‘Stuffed if I know,' she said. ‘It went a fair way I think.'

She looked to her left and I looked there too and before I knew it we were both searching through the forget-me-nots. We found the ball pretty soon. It was one of those hairy red ones that are like a cross between a cricket ball and a tennis ball.

‘Are you playing cricket?' I asked as she headed back towards the fence. That didn't seem like a very Mafia or drug-boss thing to do.

‘Yeah, just with my dad.' She got up to the top of the fence in one quick jump, like she'd done it plenty of times before. As she straddled the top she asked me: ‘Do you want to play? You can if you want.'

‘Nah, it's fine, thanks anyway.'

‘Whatever.' She shrugged and dropped down the other side, out of sight. Already I was wishing I'd said yes, but I was still worried about the cop cars parked outside their house, and I didn't want to get involved. I went inside, back to my book. But at dinnertime I asked my parents, ‘What is it with the people next door?'

‘What do you mean?' my father asked. I was a bit surprised, because he said it aggressively.

‘Well, how come the cops are there all the time?'

To my surprise he jumped up. ‘What do you mean?' he said again. He looked really fired up. ‘Are they there now?'

‘I don't know,' I said, worried and puzzled at the same time. How come he hadn't noticed the police cars there? And was it such a big deal? I'd been kind of kidding myself about the drug bosses and Godfathers, because I didn't imagine people like that hung out in Tarrawagga, but maybe it was true.

‘How often have you seen them?' he asked. ‘When was the last time?'

‘I don't know. Um, I saw them yesterday. They're there all the time.'

He marched off to have a look and I followed while everyone else sat at the table staring at us like we'd cracked. Only trouble was, when my father got to the back room he turned right instead of left. He headed for the window, but I said, ‘Not that way. Not that side. The other house.'

He looked at me like he agreed with the other three about my sanity. ‘What are you talking about?' he said.

I pointed back over my shoulder. ‘The house on that side. There's cops checking them out every other day.'

His shoulders sagged, and he walked back past me, laughing, relaxed. ‘You turkey. They live there.'

I followed him back to the table. ‘Who do?'

‘Two police officers. They're brothers. One's a sergeant and the other's a senior constable. They share the house.'

‘Oh.' I did feel like a turkey. ‘What about the girl?'

‘Harriet? Have you met her? She goes to your school and I think she's in Grade 6. She's Lenny's daughter, she lives there too, most of the time, when she's not with her mother. Lenny's the younger brother, the senior constable. He and his wife are divorced.'

‘Oh.'

He seemed to know a lot about them. I hoed into my lasagne. I needed to readjust my thinking. And I did as good a job on that as I could, but a long time after I'd finished I still had a question. How come my dad reacted that way when he thought I meant the other place? It was like I'd been suspecting the wrong house. Maybe there was something dodgy about the other one instead? The way my dad headed for the window, it was like he wouldn't have been surprised to find that empty-looking house swarming with the Drug Squad, the Homicide Squad, the CSI guys and a couple of SWAT teams. Maybe my dad was a cop keeping an eye on the place? Maybe my mum was? Their real jobs used to be financial adviser and property broker, both working for Antelope Investments. And look where that had got us. Into a scummy house in scummy Tarrawagga. Any job would have to be better than those. I would have settled for at least one parent as an undercover agent.

We had PE at school once a week, with a teacher called Mr Surrey, and right from the start I didn't like him. The first five minutes of the very first class was a disaster. We started by playing dodgeball and I was one of the people he put on the outside, to be a thrower. I threw all right, hard and fast, right into Mr Surrey's face. It wasn't my fault! He was bending over picking up a ball and never saw it coming. It would have hurt though. He jumped up holding his face, then yelled, ‘Who did that?!'

Considering everyone was staring at me in horror it was pretty obvious. I put up my hand, he bawled me out, then sat me on the bench for the whole lesson while he walked around holding an icepack to his face and glaring at me.

Second PE lesson: I had a sprained ankle from jumping out of the biggest tree in our backyard at home. But when I told him that I couldn't run or do exercises he bawled me out again. ‘I saw you walking into school this morning,' he said. ‘You weren't limping then.'

Well, maybe he'd been looking at the wrong person, because I'd been limping all morning like an amputee, and PE's the last subject I'd be trying to skip. Anyway, he made me do all these runs, even though my ankle hurt like crazy, and he kept yelling at me to go faster.

The third lesson, he put me with a girl called Amanda, and we had to take it in turns to skip. While we were waiting for Mr Surrey to blow his whistle I held the rope by one end and started whizzing it around, getting faster and faster. Unfortunately, just as it reached terminal velocity I lost my grip and it flew out of my hand and hit Amanda. ‘Oh BEEP,' I yelled. I'd better not say what the word was but it started with S and ended with T and it wasn't shoot. Or shut or sheet, although it was pretty close to both of those. Mr Surrey went off for the third week in a row. He put me on the bench again, then at the end of the lesson called me over for a talk. Personally I'd rather be yelled at. ‘You are a disruptive influence,' he told me, while I stood there with my head down, trying to look ashamed. ‘You've been nothing but trouble since you came here. I expect everyone to follow the rules, blah blah look at me when I talk to you blah blah blah don't like your attitude blah blah blah get out of my sight.'

Now I have lots of faults, I'm sure; well OK, not that many, but I must admit if I do have one it would be that I'm stubborn and I've got a bit of a temper. After three lessons Mr Surrey-style I decided I wasn't going to make any effort in PE at Tarrawagga. He hadn't seen me in action during any of those classes and it was obvious that he thought I was a PE loser. OK then, I'd be a PE loser. It fitted with the way I'd been acting at recess and lunchtimes, not joining in any sports. So from then on, when we had cricket in PE I held the bat like it was a tennis racquet and popped up catches that a Grade 1 kid could take with his eyes shut. In basketball, every pass I made got intercepted, mainly because I signalled them ten seconds before I threw them. When we had softball I missed the ball by a metre and went out for three strikes every time. It didn't take long for other kids to start moving away from me on the bench. Mr Surrey looked my way less and less often and before long I was spending fifty minutes out of every fifty-five-minute lesson doing nothing.

I gradually became a bit of a smart alec, like, making sarcastic comments when Mr Surrey made a mistake, which was often. This helped him love me heaps. One day he started the lesson by saying, ‘Some of you need to have more self-confidence in your team mates,' and I said, ‘What about self-confidence in ourselves – should we have that too?' and he went red in the face and glared at me and told me to run four laps, which I thought was a bit of an overreaction. So when I got back from my four laps and he told me to fetch the bats I ignored the fact that he'd set the oval up for softball and came back with a bag of cricket bats.

Just stuff like that.

In a way I didn't mind that I wasn't getting anything from PE, even though it used to be my favourite subject. But the truth was, I hated that school more every day. I missed Abernathy so bad it hurt in my heart. I missed Joey who was so funny you couldn't eat lunch while he was talking in case you choked on your cheese sandwich. I missed Pho, who gave us boys advice about how to chat up girls and how to ask them to go with you . . . and how to drop them when things didn't work out. I missed Muzza, who could play every sport like a star and loved it as much as I did. Between us we'd taken Abernathy to the top, for both cricket and footy, which may sound like bragging but it's true.

Tarrawagga was so scummy and boring. The most exciting lesson of the week was doing a worksheet on commas and full stops. Maths was like, page 37, questions 1, 2 and 3. Homework: questions 4 and 5. Next day, page 38, questions 1, 2, 3 and 4. Homework: questions 5 and 6. Next day . . .

We had assembly once a week, in a big hall, and it was usually just teachers making announcements about lost property and behaviour at the bus stops and how there was too much rubbish around the school. But then one day this kid called Red O'Hearn got up and went out the front. People paid more attention straight away, because it wasn't often that kids spoke at assembly, but also because he was a good guy and everyone liked him. I actually didn't get why he wasn't school captain, but apparently he got in too much trouble with teachers.

Red was another of the kids who played sport regularly and I wouldn't say he was a natural but he gave everything about 146 per cent. Didn't matter what the sport was, he went for it. Mr Surrey loved him. Anyway, he made a pretty radical speech. It went something like this: ‘Listen, I know this school doesn't exactly have the greatest rep around the district . . .'

Right away Ms Krishnananthan, the principal, looked like she was going to jump up and cut him off, but she couldn't really do that, so she made a face like someone who's swallowed a cockroach. A live one. But Red was facing us, with his back to her, so he couldn't see that. He just kept on going.

‘Not many of us have been here all the way through, for seven years, but I have, and so has Nirvana, and so have Amanda and Shelley and Rolf. And you know what? Every year we've been beaten by every other school at everything. And I'm sick of it. So we want to change that. We've got these big cricket and netball games coming up soon, and we want to piss on the . . . sorry, sorry, I mean . . .'

Too late. Ms Krishnananthan was on her feet and most of the teachers looked like they'd all suddenly swallowed cockroaches. On the other hand the kids were pissing themselves . . . sorry, I mean, laughing a lot, especially some of the little ones, who were probably having real bladder control problems they were so hysterical. It took at least a full minute to calm everyone down and the whole of that time Red was talking to Ms Krishnananthan, except she was doing the talking. He just stood there, and his face matched his name. Now I knew why he hadn't been chosen for school captain.

At last Ms Krishnananthan came to the microphone. ‘That was a most unfortunate moment,' she said. ‘I don't find it at all amusing that one of our students would use such language, especially in front of the younger children. And I'm sorry that some of you apparently thought it was funny. However, Redmond has apologised profusely and I am going to allow him to finish his remarks, on the condition that he chooses his words with much more discretion.'

She gave Red the microphone. It took him a while to find his rhythm again but he eventually got back on track. ‘Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry about that, I'm really sorry, Ms Krishnananthan, and teachers, I'm just not used to this talking in front of everyone and I'm not too good at it. Anyway, the thing is, what I wanted to say, I'm proud of this school, I reckon it's all right, we've built it up from just a couple of demountables and look at it now, we've got the new oval opening in a few weeks and it's a beauty, and we're gunna play the kids from Maxwell on it, in front of pretty much everyone from the district, the mayor and the members of parliament, and you know what's gunna happen, we're gunna get thrashed like we always do, and so what I reckon is we should get off our bums, sorry, our behinds, and work our butts off and make sure we don't get thrashed. So we're gunna have training every day, before school and at lunchtime, and even after school if we can do it, and I'm gunna take the cricket team with Mr Surrey, and Amanda's gunna take the netball team with Ms Robbins, and between us we're gunna see if we can make the kids from Maxwell go home with their tails between their legs, so that's all I've gotta say except everyone should have a go, because a team's only as good as its weakest player, so we need to make our weakest players as good as we can get 'em.'

Then he sat down, as everyone clapped and clapped. It was a good speech and I sat there feeling a bit ashamed of the way I'd pretended to be so hopeless at sport. Coming from Abernathy I couldn't see Tarrawagga the way Red saw it, but I could imagine how he'd feel, watching it grow, even if in my opinion it had just grown from a little hole to a big one.

I thought, ‘Stuff it, maybe I should give up being stupid about sport. Maybe I should have a go.'

At lunchtime they were sorting out all the kids who volunteered for the cricket and netball teams. Quite a few turned up, inspired by Red's speech. I saw the girl who lived next door to us, the cop's daughter, Harriet. She was in Grade 6, same as me, but the other class.

Red and Rolf and Mr Surrey were organising the cricketers and I walked up to them, feeling pretty nervous to tell the truth, because it wasn't going to be easy to explain how I'd turned from hopeless to pretty handy in one morning. I had the feeling that Mr Surrey, for one, wasn't going to be impressed. But I needn't have worried. He took one look at me and said, ‘Thanks for coming, Josh, but we're not that desperate.'

Red shot me a look like even he thought that was harsh, but he wasn't going to stick up for me to Mr Surrey. Who would? Why should anyone bother? I just walked straight away, but then Mr Surrey called my name again and I stopped and turned around to see what he wanted. Maybe he realised he'd gone too far and wanted to apologise. Instead he said, ‘We might want someone to go around in a chicken suit selling raffle tickets, Josh. I'll let you know.'

A couple of kids laughed and I turned around and kept walking. I knew my face was burning. I'd scored four centuries for Abernathy last season, and one for Southern Districts, and I'd taken 5 for 11 against Northern Suburbs in a rep game. Now the best offer I could get was to wear a chicken costume. Even if it was my own stupid fault, it still hurt.