Man of the World by Robert Gibson

20:  lower-school years

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.

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