Mr Parle
(Geography) was chatting to Miss Verval (Maths) and Miss Hca (History) in the
staff room during morning break. Their seniority enabled them to perform this snatch
of a few moments of genuine peace while less experienced teachers had to scurry
around using their notional “breaks” to prepare for the next lesson.
The
term was now into its seventh week. And yet the intake still provided fresh
wonderment.
“You
do ask yourself what planet they come from, sometimes,” declared Miss Hca. Her
stringy arm hovered over the tea-table as she sought a space to put down her
cup.
“You
should have seen my lot,” said Mr Parle, rolling his eyes at the ceiling. His
bushy black brows arched in his large, pale face as he stretched back in his
chair. “You’d think,” he chuckled, “it would be simple enough to draw a road
map with arrows showing ‘My Route To School’, would you not?”
“And
they couldn’t manage it, uhuh?”
“Oh,
brother. Guess what – one of them actually lives almost in a straight line down
the road, but is his route direct? Not
on your life. If you can believe his chart, he seems to walk half way round the
town to get here.”
Miss
Verval piped up: “Which lad is that?” She was the youngest and trimmest of the
three teachers at the tea-table.
“His
name is Midax Rale,” said Mr Parle.
“He’s
not a bad little lad; I’ve got rather a soft spot for him,” said Miss Verval. “And
he gets here usually more or less on time, even if, from what you say, his
route is somewhat circuitous. He’s not too hopeless compared with some of
them.”
The
bell sounded.
Midax
Rale, meanwhile, had succeeded in arriving at the correct classroom with the
correct books for his next lesson, which was History. Having achieved this
degree of accuracy – right room, right books – he felt he had topped up his
credit for a while, and could afford to daydream. Thus he headed straight for a
seat by the window, where he could sit with one side of his face warmed by the
sunlight. Here he could allow his mind to rove in infinity while the plomping
and plunking of satchels, pencil-cases, textbooks and exercise-books filled the
air.
From
the neighbouring desk to his right, Stid Orpen turned to him and muttered,
“Hey, Midax – psst! Hey! In case she picks on me – what are we doing today?”
“The
Great Discoverers,” Midax hissed back.
“Like
- ?”
“Monto
deRoffa and all that.”
“Oh
flippineck,” said Stid.
Midax
felt touched that Stid should see fit to confide this sentiment – considering
that this same two-faced Stid had jeered at him in Games the day before, jeered
at him for missing a kick at a round plastic object which, for some reason,
urgently needed to be propelled in a certain direction on a grassy pitch.
Well,
any friendly overture ought to be reciprocated, Midax decided. He therefore
said:
“Wassa
matter, dontcha like history?”
Stid
thumped his desk-lid down, snorted and looked sideways at the teacher, Miss
Hca, who was still not quite ready to start, which meant he had time to reply. “Remember
what Jolld Tontrar said in Science the other day, when Beezer was going on
about Energy?” Stid grinned at the recollection. “‘I’m bored with this. I wanna practical.’”
Midax
got the idea and put on a Jolld voice. “I
wanna history practical. Please Miss, I wanna make history.”
Both
lads grinned, but by this time Miss Hca was asserting control. “Qui-ett!” she screeched, and achieved her
will, insofar as the general hum abated. But she did not hold the attention of
Midax, who once more was gazing wistfully out into the sunshine.
The
sunshine, streaming in, glossing the humdrum taste and smell of school, brewed
for him an indescribable mixture of boredom and happiness. In history lessons
above all, he felt happy, restless and impatient all at the same time.
Monto
deRoffa and the Age of Discovery? He knew plenty about it already. He had pored
through the textbook, plus other works on the same topic, several times
already. He probably knew more than the teacher, come to that, and he felt
greedy for more than Miss Hca could give him, for the theme of the Great
Discoverers had – for him – the most dissatisfying effect.
Perhaps
it was natural that in this great wide world with its millions of people one
felt impatient to get out and emulate (rather than just read about) the great
explorers of old.
Today,
dissatisfaction spread further. As he was forced to concentrate on yet another
lesson centred around stuff he already knew – of how the heroic deRoffa five
centuries ago had crossed the Zard Ocean, coasted southward past Vevtis and
rounded the Cape of Gales at the southern tip of the Dark Continent, Sycronn,
to reach the fabled eastern wealth of Poidal – an odd sadness came upon him, as
if the light of the modern world were shrivelling the old sea epic.
His
mood picked up a bit as the lesson went on. Miss Hca did a competent job of
conveying the danger of that early voyage in primitive sailing ships crewed by
intrepid men. She told the class to picture the storms, the waves, the danger
of running low on food and water, the terror of the unknown, and the
impossibility of accurate navigation in an era without nautical chronometers. “Nowadays,
of course, the journey’s nothing much. It can be done by steam in safety and
comfort, in far less time. But, guess what, as a matter of fact…”
Dramatically
she paused, then announced:
“The
story is not yet over!”
Thirty
faces stared at her. Not over? The suspense was total.
Some
sort of joke must be coming up, and yet they couldn’t be sure. In a few seconds
they might groan or sneer, but just at this moment they enjoyed their morsel of
excitement, hoping that what their teacher had to say might, after all, be some
genuinely big thing.
“Class,”
announced Miss Hca, “in exactly twenty-six years it will be the five hundredth
anniversary of the great voyage of Monto deRoffa! And you know what plans are
already being made for that? Any guesses?”
No
one uttered a word, so she told them:
“A
re-enactment of the voyage.”
Davlr
Braze asked, “What, with the actual ships, Miss?”
“With
replicas,” she replied. “The actual ships in Dranl Maritime Museum are too
valuable (and too worm-eaten, I dare say) to be released for the Re-Enactment –
which just goes to show that the government’s intention is to do it properly! Yes,
that’s right – there’ll be no cheating! No auxiliary motors or anything like
that! All the dangers are going to be faced in the way they were faced by
deRoffa himself and his crew.”
“Who’s
going to do it?” asked Mezyf Tand.
“Who
knows? It might be one of you.”
“Lots
of time to prepare for it,” Jolld Tontrar remarked, a bit sullenly. “Twenty-six
years away.”
There
was some mild sneering laughter at this, as though twenty-six years were
forever. This undercurrent of contempt in certain sections of the class awoke
irritation in Midax. Twenty-six years is a long time but it is not forever. He
was becoming interested. Barring accidents, they would all live to see it
happen. He put his hand up.
“Miss, are
the re-enacters going to suffer from all the scurvy and so on?” he asked, with
all seriousness, and was put out when this got another laugh. It was an example
– he sensed too late – of how he could drift up into a cloud of his own, and
then be surprised when the real world snapped him back. The real world was the
classroom where what he said was bound to seem a joke.
Miss
Hca coughed. “Probably not scurvy, Midax,” she conceded. “But then the sailors
of deRoffa’s time need not have suffered from it either, if they had only had
the sense to bring some lemons along, which they easily could have done. Now
let’s get on to the founding of the First Dranlan Empire…”
Because
the digression about the Re-Enactment had used a lot of lesson time, Miss Hca accelerated
the rest of her presentation. Consequently she skimped her attempt to “bring to
life” the establishment of trade routes and the growth of Dranlan wealth and
overseas power. Midax approved. He did not mind one bit whether the topic was
“brought to life” (with slides, overhead projectors, etc) or not; to the extent
that he bothered to listen at all, he found the dry approach preferable, for he
considered that it was a waste of time to “tart up” History. History didn’t
need to be made exciting. It spoke
for itself, in the ricochet of themes across the ages. To hear some of his
classmates grumble about it, anyone would think that history was a thing of the
past…! Whereas, of course, in truth, everything that had ever happened, had
happened in some Now. Otherwise, if you called Today the “present” in the
stupid biased sense in which most people thought of it, as though it were more the “present” than deRoffa’s
“present” was to him, well – then you
were propounding a theory of Absolute Present Time, which sounded potty to
Midax. Maybe one day he’d ask Miss Hca what she
thought about that.
Meanwhile, a cloud drew aside from the sun,
and sunlight slanted in to transfigure a spot on the wall, a spot on a tatty school timetable. From that point the golden glow laid a path of brightness
across some of the desks and his cliquey classmates. They weren’t taking any
notice of the blue sky, that wondrous sky that hinted that life might be better
than it seemed –
Another
cloud moved across the sun and the line of light disappeared. Midax shivered. He
had occasionally experienced it before, this weird sensation which briefly
gripped him, and he absolutely could not understand it. In vain he wondered
what it was really supposed to mean – he knew it only as a sense of closeness
to some narrowly-averted doom.
It
was a peculiarly powerful sense of having
escaped.
And
what had triggered the inexplicable “graze” this time?
His
question about the scurvy! Yes, that was it. Or rather – his acceptance of Miss
Hca’s answer: that’s when he had felt the brush with danger.
For
his contribution had got a laugh and he’d left the matter there, had not
pursued it further, and he somehow felt that that restraint had been fortunate.
Why, though? Why was it the case that, especially during the worst days of settling in,
when he’d been finding it hardest to get used to school, he had felt again and
again that he was being rescued, pulled back from some brink, saved from wrong
turnings repeatedly –
Was
he cleverer than he thought? Much as it would have gratified him to lay claim
to a wisdom beyond his years, he felt himself to be, on the contrary, during
these spooky “near-miss” moments, very much the bumpkin blundering about in a
high-grade super-reality: Midax the buffoon, watched over by a guardian angel.
For
example, there had been that moment a few weeks ago, when he had asked to join
in a lunch-hour ball-game being played by lads a year older than he, and had
been rudely sent packing by one of them. A nasty moment: yet, extraordinarily,
its nastiness, instead of festering, had immediately been swabbed clean of
humiliation by means of the following amazing thought: You never know what regrets the snubber may have later on; all through
your life you’ll never know how many times his memory recalls your retreating
back and he thinks with regret, “I’m sorry I snubbed that little lad”. For you
will have your regrets too. Everybody has. So you do well to forgive him.
This un-boyish tolerance had popped from nowhere into the forefront of his mind.
What’s
more, not only the way he was treated, but the inconsistent way in which the
lads treated each other, and ditto the way they regarded their lessons and
teachers, failed to confuse him as much as it ought to have done. The sudden
swerves from flippancy to seriousness in his schoolfellows’ conversation – one
moment they were sniggering at a topic as if they could never consider anything connected with lessons
seriously, the next moment one of them might actually say something
appreciative – all this did not bewilder him at all, though he noted it as a
peculiarity. Nor did the generally greater maturity of the girls in comparison
with the lads surprise him. Some wise inner eye, able to cheat chronology, gave
him poise as if he were some veteran expert on the traps of youth. And as part
of the package it also gave him the tact to disguise this power. He smoothly
accepted things as they were – and as a result, he not only kept up his morale,
he also attained a reasonable degree of popularity –
But
(he knew) quite easily he might not have
done.
This
persistent sense of narrow escape, this sense that things might have been
much worse, led to a suspicion that on some previous run-through they had been worse, and this in turn led to
a swarm of fantastic thoughts which he ended up by swatting aside. Let it
suffice, that he would get through school all right this time. He had won
enough respect to get by.
Except
with Jolld and his gang.
Jolld,
admittedly, was a problem.
After
that forty minutes of History with Miss Hca, the next lesson was Geography,
with Mr Parle, who likewise touched upon the Age of Discovery but from an
economic point of view – using it to lead into the subject of shipping lanes,
from which he zeroed in upon the quarterly Phluzt Trade Fleet, which had done
so much for the City of Dranl.
“Now,
class, it would be a good idea if we noted some exact figures. And we have
someone here who could confirm them – eh?”
And
he beamed directly at Jolld Tontrar.
Jolld
Tontrar whose father Haimb Tontrar happened to be Director of Phluzt Shipping
and a power in the land!
Jolld,
a large, lantern-jawed boy with mouth a-gape, squirmed in his seat, as always
uncomfortable when asked by a teacher to answer questions, even when the
questions were flatteringly concerned with his father’s successful business.
Of
course, Jolld was proud of his dad; yet Midax, watching, was quite aware
(though he might not have been, might
have missed the point – squash that thought) – quite aware that for a gang
leader to be associated in any way with a compliment from Teacher would be
embarrassing. Enragingly so.
No
doubt Parle was going to go on about the very latest navigational equipment
used on the modern Phluzt fleet which currently plied the Zard between Larmonn
and Vevtis and held the record ocean-crossing time of nineteen days. The
wealth, the status and the prestige that stemmed from this achievement
reflected upon young Jolld, who at Ganeshan Secondary School was cock of the
walk. He had money to throw around, and he threw plenty of it at his
hangers-on. Gaining influence from this, he acquired the habit of reinforcing
his commands to his gang with a finger-rippling gesture uniquely his own,
understood to mean, “follow me suavely, obey me thoroughly, and exclude outside
interference”. Nothing aroused such wrath in Jolld as sneaking, especially if the “sneak” threatened to expose his
bullying.
To
such a leader of gang-fashion, the worst possible fate was to be patronised by
a teacher. As had just happened – Parle virtually patting him on the head for
being Haimb Tontrar’s son.
Therefore,
his insides knotting, Jolld vowed revenge against somebody – but against whom? Teachers
were out of reach.
So
the next fellow-pupil who annoyed him was going to be the smashee.
Mr
Parle meanwhile droned on:
“I
have mentioned how important is the volume of traffic along this trade-route;
and how great a percentage of our city’s population is dependent upon
employment in the merchant marine. But a geographer is not content with making
qualitative statements of this sort. A geographer wants to quantify these data.”
Midax
Rale saw here a chance to make a contribution, which would show the teacher
that he was awake. It was always a good idea to do this when possible, to build
up a kind of insurance-credit against the times when his attention wandered. He
put his hand up.
“Mr
Parle, some of these statements are based on population figures, aren’t they?”
“Yes.
And so?”
“Well,
I have my doubts about the figures used.”
“Oh
indeed?” Damn the lad, thought Parle.
“Ah – interesting,” he added, fatalistically remembering instructions from
teacher training college, that pupils ought to be encouraged to think for
themselves about the use of historical evidence.
“Yes,”
continued Midax, and now a reckless sense of fun took him over. As he spoke he
raised his hands and parodied the finger-rippling gesture (of one who plays an
invisible piano) which had hitherto been Jolld’s exclusive sign – at which
there sounded some hisses of indrawn breath. “I’ll bet, that if we examine the
methods they used in the Shipping Survey, sir, we’d find that the cargoes could
have been counted twice, thrice… so inflating the statistics. I mean, sir, I’ve
seen that sort of thing done, when our form teacher takes the register.” A roar
of wind, in his ears only, made Midax shake his head and stop his voice. What
had he done? What had he said? A snicker, then another, sounded at the back of
the class.
Mr
Parle gathered his wits.
“You
prove that and you can have my job,
Midax,” he said dryly, getting that general laugh which is the only way to
clear the air with a snap.
The
lesson was back on course.
Later,
during the lunch hour, as the others dispersed into the playground, Midax
belatedly realized the full stickiness of his position. He had thought to spark
off a fun discussion, but it had been a dreadful mistake. To suggest that the
statistics were wrong – that there weren’t so many people working for Jolld’s
dad as had been supposed – amounted to high treason against the pecking order. Retaliation
must be expected. Goodness only knew why he had taken this risk. Anyhow, better
take care not to run into Jolld and his gang in that stretch of yard between
the main building and the canteen annexe… He went by a circuitous route to get
his dinner. Thus he avoided a detachment of Jolldian Guard craning their necks
for him.
Afternoon
registration, in the security of the classroom, offered him a few minutes when
quiet conversation was allowed. This could have been an opportunity to mend his
fences with the gang. But he was not scared enough – yet – to be bothered to
try. Peculiar, but there it was. As often, he wondered at himself.
“Um,
Rale!” said a girl’s voice. A new girl, tall and with long brown hair, leaned
across the aisle between the desks. “You’ve got the artistic touch!”
Startled,
he turned to look at her. Spellbound, he watched her move her hands – there and
then she imitated the finger-ripple. Innocently enough, no doubt – she could
hardly know its origin, for she had only joined the school last week, Midax now
remembered. Her name was Pjerl Lhared.
Come
to think of it, he remembered that in a recent Art lesson he had stepped aside
for her, to allow her to go first through a gap between desks, and for that
very minor courtesy she had given him a little glance of surprised gratitude. What
small things came to mind!
Artistic
touch, eh? “Oh,” he grinned back, “then maybe I ought to start a Movement. That’s
what artists have.”
A
smile flickered on her face as she withdrew, and the balanced perfect little
exchange was over, a treasure of rightness. As one who has leaned into a strong
wind which suddenly stops, Midax tottered – so stupefying was the mental lurch, the
amazement when things go right. Righter than they have ever gone before. It was
new and amazing, the graciousness of this girl, who had given him a
sign of friendship for free.
A
voice within him now awoke, a voice that might have waited silently all his
life for this emergency.
Don’t get carried away. She is a
human being like yourself. Not a goddess. Shove aside that goddess idea. It
won’t do you or her any good. Don’t burden her with that status of perfection. So spoke the wise man somewhere
inside him, or the guardian angel, or whatever it was –
Obeying
the inner instructor, Midax spent some seconds shaking himself free of that
urge to worship. He found he was soon rewarded. He could think about her and
appreciate her in a sane manner, with elation rather than with a lot of useless
emotional torture. Unborn agonies churned in vain in the vestibule of reality,
worth a passing shiver for the upset that might have been. Escape – again! – as
he coasted past the might-have-beens flashing that wrong turning which would
have spelled death to his peace of mind.
There
remained the problem of Jolld and his gang.
Midax
expected trouble after school that day. Quite likely he would be waylaid during
his walk home and beaten up. Unless they decided that his ideas were so
laughable that they weren’t worth a reprimand – was that possible? If he kept
his mouth shut about Phluzt statistics from now on, might they leave him alone
out of sheer contempt? Unlikely. They weren’t that subtle, and besides, come
the next opportunity, he wasn’t going to give up scoring the point, the next chance for which would come this afternoon in the second period
of today’s double Geography – the write-up period. He lacked sufficient fear to quash the urge to finish what he had begun.
So,
close to the beginning of the lesson, to make sure he obtained a hearing, Midax
raised his hand.
“Sir,
I’ve got the proof you asked for.”
“Yes,
Midax?” sighed Mr Parle.
“Yessir.
I found the page. About the population figures, I mean; but it’s all right,
sir, I don’t want your job.” Some of the class made bursting noises.
“You
sure about that?” asked Parle with a further sigh, and muttered, “Not sure I
want it either… Anyway,” he continued aloud, “let’s hear your data.” Those
precepts learned at training college, of the duty of encouraging ideas,
sustained him now.
Midax
sat bolt upright and faced the class sideways from his desk by the window.
“This
won’t take long,” he declared. “If you look on Page 136, where the book quotes
from an official Phluzt Sealanes pamphlet… the bar graph in particular… you see
the x-axis is labelled ‘purchase of bales’? Now look a bit further down. Second
paragraph from the bottom. Where it goes on about the conclusions to be drawn
from the pamphlet data. See: ‘purchases’ has become ‘purchasers’ – get it? You end up by concluding
– from that single misprint – that there are as many retailers as there are
bales! Talk about double-counting!” And he made the finger-rippling gesture
again, and sank back to a normal slouch.
Mr
Parle and the class laughed - for different reasons. Midax joined in both ways:
for alongside Mr Parle he appreciated the ambiguity of evidence, while alongside
his classmates he saw Jolld’s dad’s firm cut down to size. Either was funny, in
that expensive moment, the cost not counted, the penalty obscured in the haze
of merriment and vague release.
Mr
Parle then restored gravity to the scene:
“Geography,”
he reminded them, “is not rigorous and theoretical like physics. Geography’s more flexible, more descriptive. If
you find a contradiction, note it, but don’t worry if you can’t analyse it far. Common sense will tell us that there must be many anomalies in
data-gathering because it’s so unlikely that we could know enough to arrange
the collection in perfectly designed terms and with perfect assumptions and
under perfect conditions… we’d have to know so much already, to be able to do that,
that – er, well, if we were that good, we wouldn’t need to do the work anyway!”
His voice wandered as he found that he was arguing with himself. “So if you
take the process too seriously, you actually impede all research… you are in
danger of making it ridiculous. You could even ‘prove’ that the world is
rectangular instead of round.”
And
so the teacher got his laugh too.
But
now Midax came to himself and knew that he was in for it. He had gone so far,
that no way was he going to be able to avoid being cornered, soon, by the gang.
Indeed
they worked fast, surrounding him that afternoon as he was leaving school,
while he tried to cross the yard by the bike sheds and the grey-barked tree. It
was a piece of ground he had to get through to reach the main road. The gang
emerged expertly from the shadows.
Pride
prevented him from fleeing or shouting for help while potential helpers
remained in sight. The gang allowed everybody except Midax to go on past,
before they made any obvious move to cut off his retreat. But he knew that if
he were to try to mingle and slip off amongst the others, they’d close in
straightaway and get him by weight of their numbers.
Oddly,
at this crisis, his vision seemed to split, to flash onto two levels, sizing up
his enemies in two distinct ways.
In
one assessment he saw the fellows who were shoving him against a wall as crude. Their mouths, their fists, their
blank-eyed loathsomeness, made them terrible.
Yet in another corner of his brain a tipster informed him, their physical attack is not an end in itself; what they really want is
to pull down your mind, to humiliate you, and you know too much for that to
work, eh?
Somehow
that was true. Somehow, he did know – something – that prevented him from being
scared.
Boys have to jeer. Have
to hurt. It’s too much of a burden to them not to hurt and jeer. They
should like to possess social skills, but they do not and so they fill their
void with cruelty. The poor inadequate saps. Even the cruelty is only skin-deep
– which is why bullying can be neutralised by steadfast good humour and
self-possession.
A
bit late now, of course, for good humour.
His
enemies were gloating. Jolld was waving the rolled-up pamphlet that had
occasioned the trouble – waving it under Midax’s nose. “You don’t like my dad’s
trade figures, Midax? I can help you swallow them. (Hold him, Tain, Happ – hold
his head. That’s right, we’ve got him now.) You don’t like the figures, eh,
Midax? Taste wrong, do they? Well, sometimes medicine does taste bad. Here’s
yours.” And he pushed the pamphlet, harder and harder, against Midax’s lips,
while other members of the gang reached from either side to squeeze the
victim’s neck.
Happ
croaked, “Thassit, Jolld, stuff it down ’is throat.”
“Graaaaa,” gurgled Midax through clenched
teeth, violently shaking his head in an effort to avoid opening his mouth. Then
he made his only possible move.
He
abruptly stopped struggling and went completely limp, so suddenly that Tain and
Happ dropped him.
He
sprawled on the ground – and Jolld loomed over him, sucking saliva.
Midax
croaked, grinning with meaning as well as with pain: “Better save your spit,
Jolld. I found out something else –”
Jolld
did not save his spit; he gobbed it onto Midax’s face – but did not follow up
the action.
The
gang dumbly waited, yet no further cue came from their leader, whose attention
had in some way been captured by the intolerable sneak, Midax Rale.
“Ever
heard of a kaleidoscope, Jolld? Know how the light keeps bouncing, and the
shapes glide?”
“So?”
his antagonist jeered, but his eyes skidded in their sockets.
Wiping his face, the
triumphant wretch on the ground gasped on:
“Lots more cases, Jolld. People being
counted again and again. More in this than meets the eye, I reckon –” Midax was having to wipe off the spit but even more than that, a puzzled vision made his gesture bleary. “Wouldn’t surprise me if there weren’t any more than a
coupla thousand people in the whole world. Want me to release those figures, Jolld? What would your
dad say then?”
It
was just a notion he had, as he lay on the ground: a step in the psychological
warfare he needed to wage against a pack of school bullies, nothing more. Play
upon the superstitious nature of boys. Nothing real in it, of course; but
still, why shouldn’t he deploy his disturbing dreams as a weapon? Wow, he
thought, they’re retreating, they’re really falling for it – the tallest story
ever told.
It
had been quite a day.
>>>next chapter>>>