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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742193960 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Spinifex Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2001 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 603 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
All That False Instruction
By Kerryn Higgs
Spinifex Press
Copyright © 2001 Kerryn Higgs,All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-876756-14-7
CHAPTER 1
In which Maureen comes into the world, her brother hot on her heels
The first thing I remember. I was running in the long summer grass above my grandmother's house with the red dog. The red dog was much bigger than I was; he leapt over me, rolled me, licked my face. Up through the paddocks I scrambled to say hello to my father perched on the scaffolding of our growing house. He was up there in his always khaki overalls, nails between his teeth and arm swinging the hammer through the blue. He smiled from way up there, brown eyes and reddish hair, his bare back hunched brown and an army hat cocked on his forehead. On the brown of his skin were freckles and darker blots arranged across his shoulders from arm to arm.
When I was just three years old I sat one evening in the dining alcove of the house my father had built. He was serving out custard, smooth yellow stuff more distinct in my memory than is his face. He sat under the window opposite me, and if I say I was glad that we were alone together, I'm probably not making it up. My mother had gone off to collect an extra child, something for which I saw no need at all. If I didn't understand why it took a week to bring Ken home, I did, on this peaceful custard-eating night, wonder whether his advent was any cause for rejoicing.
The sofa used to stand slantwise in one corner of the lounge; a puffy affair covered in large blue blooms which seem to have been faded from the beginning. They were fighting again. My mother had fled behind the sofa and now my father stood over it, gripping her wrist to drag her into the open. She clung to the webbing. I wondered if he wanted to kill her, and why. The noise was deafening. They screamed their insults so loud they couldn't hear each other; you just heard tangled anger. That day, fortunately, they weren't throwing things, though Father once hurled a bowl of peaches the length of the kitchen, covering the walls and floor with syrup and china-chips. Cornflakes were stuck to the ceiling above the alcove. When he dragged her out from hiding they stood flailing each other, the yelling now punctuated by my mother's sobs. She kicked his ankle suddenly and, breaking his hold, ran out into the road and down to my grandmother's house. My father let her go. Cursing under his breath he made coffee and sat down moodily.
Combat was constant. Later on I identified Saturday morning as chief row-day. Shopping occurred on Saturdays; with weekly regularity the wages were found to be inadequate. Mother would sit by the wood-stove warming her feet in the oven and complaining to the world at large of our poverty and my father's irresponsible purloining of two bob for tobacco.
I thought that it was all a matter of giving in and decided that when I grew up I would be willing to say I was wrong, able to give in and make peace quickly. To live at war struck me as incomprehensible — surely one could choose not to? It was strange that they never appeared to make a truce. Sometimes they laughed and even hugged each other but it didn't seem to make any difference once they got annoyed. Why were they so angry, I wondered. What was wrong with the world?
There were two photographs in the photo-box, perhaps so strongly memorable because they didn't seem to fit. In one my father looked buoyantly boyish, with his airforce cap at a rakish angle, a soft mischievous face with a grin. The photograph was torn and battered; my mother had carried it with her when she fled the big bushfire, the only possession she'd saved. She lost it in the frantic attempt to get through the boxthorn hedges, but found it again when they came back from the river. It was spiked in a tiny patch of surviving thorn; the fire hadn't touched it. Maybe she took it as a sign; maybe that's why she married him. The other was of her, leaning against a rustic post-and-rail fence in a drapish ankle-length dress. Her face too was soft, even calm, strikingly elegant. There was another picture of the four of us — baby Ken was in Mother's arms. The parents look worried, now, but have mustered abnormal smiles. The little girl in the overcoat, short and stocky, scowls under tight curls. Her whole face is sulks and distemper.
I disliked Ken from the beginning. He was a brown-eyed chubby boy with delicate tendrils of chestnut hair curling around his ears. Ken was placid and a winner of all hearts. His early talk consisted of pointing his thumb at his chest and lisping: Kennyboy, Curlyboy, bigboy and goodboy. To which stunned friends and relations responded with charmed laughter. To my mother I seem to have been the proverbial difficult child and Ken increased the difficulties a thousand times. As a child he knew his advantage. One evening at tea-time my mother called for one of us to run down the lane with Granny's meal. Ken went. After tea she discovered that the lid with which she covered my grandmother's food was missing.
'Maureen, where's the lid?'
'What?'
'Where's the lid?'
'What lid?'
'The lid off Granny's tea.'
'I don't know. Ken went.'
Ken broke in. 'No I didn't. She did.'
'I didn't.'
'Yes she did, Mum.'
'Now I don't want any more of these bloody lies out of you again, Maureen, or I'll belt the bloody hide off you. Where did you leave the lid?'
Trapped. Granny was no valid witness even if she had bothered to investigate, for she recognised that the old woman's love was fixed on me. My voice became shrill with the knowledge of impending punishment and angry with the frustration of my helplessness. The more vehemently I accused Ken of lying to get me into trouble, the more sin was heaped up on the pile, the more expiation required. Not only had I lost the lid, but I'd lied about it and was now attacking poor little Ken.
The southern paddocks beyond my grandmother's house were covered with stark dead trees. In winter the fields were dazzling green with sheets of water in the hollows, in summer shrivelled brown, in spring vibrant with the luxuriant yellow daisy of the cape-weed. Old gravel pits were here and there, overgrown years back, full of the sweetness of summer blackberries. It was my grandmother who took me there. Every weekend I escaped to the open fields with the wiry old woman who still crawled through fences and trotted to keep up with my careering across the paddocks. She'd get a picnic together, sweet things forbidden down on the Home Front, orange-cream biscuits and little rocky cakes. On rainy days I'd sit in the kitchen while she built her fire wigwam-fashion, bending intensely over the smoke, blowing and blowing in the cinders. We took tea together like adults.
But the best time was summer. She sat on a mound shading her eyes from the glare, peering through her glasses. She was as interested as I to see the rings of brightness spread out from the stones I threw in the muddy pools; the delicate ripples from the pebbles growing imperceptibly calm however closely one gazed; the waves I could make with rocks. I'd line up my ammunition along the edge and hurl it into every corner of the water creating a multitude of warring backwashes, which always returned to stillness under the still sky. She laughed. We joined hands and danced in a circle over the stubble between the white skeletons of dead trees.
In her garden were strange flowers, bird-shaped orange blooms, morning glory struggling under the broom tree, the small blue flowers she called soldiers, purple statice with its white eye, growing wild and profuse, the orange fists of the red hot pokers. We cut the tiny round lawn with big scissors; or I chipped away at the weeds along the gravel while she painted her bricks out of a magical pot of yellow ochre and poured water onto the parched earth. In the old sleepout, covered in with flywire, she tended a jungle of ferns. I loved to go into the damp cool place among the mossy greenness, to hear her inside blowing at the fire or clattering the cups. Strawberries choked in the wiry couch-grass under the nectarine tree. At the end of the house stood the dowdy drooping peppercorn and the lucerne tree, a child-climber's dream, knotty and angular, with one long branch resting on the woodshed roof. Here, on a carpet of dry lucerne pods, I could lie down and chart the clouds through the branches. I was quite old before Ken got the size and courage to pursue me into my private retreat.
This place was my refuge from the Home Front when I took flight from the thick canvas belt with its brass buckles. I dreamed of running away, a change of singlets knotted up in a red polka-dot handkerchief at the end of a pole. I would see myself, momentarily, striding out across the daisy paddocks towards the Cockatoo Ranges. From Granny's front verandah we could see a road on one hill which seemed to run straight up at a great rate. That was my road. But somehow I realised that food doesn't always grow on trees and that I'd be in for the canvas thrashing of all time if they caught up with me. Better to wait until I'm grown up, I thought. I looked forward to that.
Mother hit on the idea that Granny was spoiling me and made her house out-of-bounds. Naturally I wasn't permitted to go to the paddocks alone. She kept the order in force for countless miserable months. I invented excuses to visit the old woman — she thrust them aside. One afternoon, while she was safely out of the way 'lying down', I slipped out with the nominal justification of a new puzzle-book to show my grandmother. I was just crawling through the wire fence when I heard her screaming from the window. No amount of tiptoe quiet was enough to elude her detective instincts.
'Maureen,' she yelled. 'What are you up to?'
'Nothing,' I screamed back, struggling with the fence and getting hopelessly hooked by the barbed-wire in my panic. She had sprinted out and seized me round the neck before I could free myself and escape. Another unforgettable thrashing.
At first I thought it grand when Mother was accepted as craft-mistress in the little State School up the hill. A cut above the ordinary. I was about six and proud of her. The children I disliked without exception. No-one wanted to play with me. Being crafty and small I was often the last left at hide-and-seek; they ignored me and started a new round. When the kids were led to suppose that it's all one big competition, it's not surprising that they detested little Maureen who took out the spelling-prize for the entire school at the age of seven. I hovered on the edges of their games.
Mother might have become a respected teacher if she'd been born male or to richer parents. As it was she had left school early, convinced, despite her own good record, that there was no point in her getting an education. So she had no qualifications and this meant no promotion, of course. She even had to pretend that she'd got Leaving.
She made a good fist of craft-instruction anyway, and Mr Crackhard had her hired as temporary infant mistress a few years later when the school got bigger. She must have been a remarkable find for Crackhard — the District Inspectors usually awarded her the rare distinction of an 'A', complimenting her on imaginative teaching. She'd glow with pride, and we thought it was pretty good to have a mother classed 'A' when even Crackhard had his share of 'B's. By this time, though, pride was alloyed with something else. The arrangement was a double-edged blade. Kids always got nastier with the teacher's children. Crackhard himself set the example of steel impartiality by strapping his own children for the most trifling offences and my mother, anxious to show no favouritism, ended by blaming me for other kids' chattering and giggling.
There were sixty of us in the school, all in one long draughty room, each column of desks comprising a class. The building must have threatened to collapse at some stage because it was supported all along the east side with monstrous flying-buttresses in weatherboard. In front was the gravel courtyard where we were encouraged to folk-dance and forced, each day, to assemble military-fashion and 'march in' to Mr Crackhard's massed bands records. On Mondays, Anzac Day, Queen's Birthday, Empire Day and Coral Sea Day the assembly was longer.
'Right hand over your hearts!'
'Together NOW.'
An earnest young chorus.
'I love God and my Country
I will honour the Flag
Serve the Queen
And cheerfully obey my Parents, Teachers and the Law.'
'Maureen Craig! Will you join in next time.'
'Yes sir!' But I had to skip the cheerfully bit — that was asking too much.
'TEN-SHUN!'
Everybody sprang to attention, chests out, hands rigid at their sides. The oldest most trusted boy stood by the flagpole where the flag had been hoisted.
'SAL-UTE THE FLAG!'
Crackhard and the boys came to a swift vibrating salute, froze an instant and slapped their stiff hands back to their sides, the boys delighting in the flurry of smacks as their hands came down. The girls watched mutely.
Once in a while the headmaster went off on school business, leaving Mother in charge of the lot of us. We fourth-graders were doing free painting to ease her vast teaching task. She already had an imposing list of big unruly boys chalked on the blackboard — transgressors earmarked for the strap, a peculiarly solid band of greasy black leather. When his nibs returned they'd cop it. Diddy Schmuckel, a runt-girl, freckled and mean, jabbed me slyly in the ribs from across the aisle and resumed angelic scribbling as I let out a yowl of pain and fury. As I rose righteously to my tiny feet, arm pumping the air for the teacher's attention, relishing the while the idea of Diddy Schmuckel's name added to the chalk-list, Iron Mother came storming up the floorboards, scowled, and wrote up Maureen Craig.
'Mum!' I yelled. 'It wasn't me.' Forgetting that I was supposed to call her Mrs Craig in school.
'Sit down and keep working.' Her voice colder than ever.
'Mum!' I yelled louder. 'It was Diddy.'
'Sit down and be quiet.' Each word said separately and distinctly through tightly-pursed lips.
'I will not. It was her.'
She wheeled and, was this possible? was this real? chalked up the number two beside my name. I could feel the whimpering coming on. I wanted to strangle Schmuckface. The hatred of it was black enough to gloom the face of the earth.
And I sat down.
Mr Crackhard arrived beaming just as school ended and inquired genially of my mother how had they been? She smiled charmingly and told him good enough, though she'd had to keep a steady eye on them and there were one or two who needed to be shown who was boss. He smiled back his acquiescence, strolled up the room, examined the list. Lips thrust out, he nodded his cumbrous head with a wisdom intended to convey that he'd expected as much from this lot. Sorry lads, he seemed to be smiling, but this is an educational institution, not a free-for-all — a frequent contention of his.
On with his stern face and out with the strap. 'RONNY JONES!' he rasps at the top of his voice. 'Four of the best' Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. And Ronny takes it quietly and sourly. Down the list. 'EDDY COOK!' rasps Crackhard. Eddy's a smart little bastard who once whipped my ankles with a plastic skipping-rope. Eddy's got a bit of fight in him. As the strap comes down there's no crack. Eddy's drawn in his hand at the last instant and left Crackhard flailing the air. But the amiable headmaster sees the joke apparently and only chortles gently as he recovers his balance. He raises his affable eyebrows and, taking Eddy's dirty fingertips so gently my stomach turns over, he steadies the boy's extended arm.
'You'd better not do that again, had you? You wouldn't want double now, would you?' Eddy submits.
My name is next. MAUREEN CRAIG. Must be somebody else. I won't be able to stand this. Bad enough when she belts me. Bad enough with canvas. Bad enough when I can just dimly make out why she's doing it. But this?
'Come on, Maureen. Out here.'
I'm terrified and aflame with resentment.
'Please Mr Crackhard, Sir, I didn't do anything. It was Diddy.' I turn to her — hoping for corroboration? She's smirking.
'Maureen!'
'My mother wouldn't listen to me. Please, Sir, I didn't do it.' What it was that either of us had done has by this time entirely evaded me.
'Are you coming, girl? Or will I have to drag you out?'
I stagger up. What a cowed child. Not a split-thought of running. Only hope — to argue them out of it — a vain one. In a flash he's dabbling at my fingertips, straightening my arm. Nausea. Eyes tight shut. The whistle of leather in the hushed air. A report like a rifle. Searing pain from hand to arm to body. I let out a kind of animal groan.
'Quiet!' he orders. I slit my eyes to look at my hand, purple; the welt already swelling.
'Again,' he says. So bloody quiet, this voice of his can be.
'No. Please. No.' Great lumps of water are gathering in my eyes. But he has my fingertips again, a feel like stroking, like gentleness. I am still holding the same breath. Down comes the leather. The crack sounds duller — it's no longer hard flat flesh it connects with, but a purple jelly, thinly held in by transparent skin.
'Back to your desk.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from All That False Instruction by Kerryn Higgs. Copyright © 2001 Kerryn Higgs,. Excerpted by permission of Spinifex Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction by Harriet Malinowitz,ALL THAT FALSE INSTRUCTION,
PART ONE,
In which Maureen comes into the world, her brother hot on her heels,
In which Maureen attends a school for young ladies,
PART TWO,
In which the landscape acquires a population,
Maureen at bay,
As easy as opening a door to the air,
Maureen against the wall,
Cripple Craig,
In which Maureen begins to see,
PART THREE,
Ladies don't move,
The geometry of innocence,
The masters make the rules,
PART FOUR,
In which Inga returns for a week and Maureen thinks of going for good,
In which Maureen reflects on Cleo's limitations and her own,
A beginner's approach to normality,
Seems to be how we're made,
There must be some way out of here,
Afterword,