hen holidays came, it would be okay. But for now Philip just had the long waiting days. The sun deceives us, he thought, into believing it’s holidays before it is. Last weekend he had made the mistake of sitting out on the verandah with his book, like he used to do with his sister in that first glorious week of holidays at home, and nice as it had been for those hours of warmth loosening his tautened face, once over it only made more agonising that gap between now and the time when holidays properly began. Now he was stuck in that odd limbo period in which teachers pretended that the work they were doing now still mattered but when things like reports and awards had not yet arrived to make the year’s struggle seem somehow worthwhile. They were too old for colouring-in (and he probably would have found it babyish to do now, though he remembered with a certain fondness the focus that shading carefully within the lines had brought him), yet they were too young for work experience or introductions to VCE, too young for anything that was truly important.
What was this now? An odd form of torture designed to keep parents from having to pay for extra child care before Christmas? The days were flusteringly hot and the rooms not air-conditioned. Today he had come in from lunchtime sweaty and irritable. His hair, he knew for a fact, was sticking up all over the place because of the ridiculous hats they had to wear in the summer months. And now he was seated at a large square of tables at the centre of the music room where everyone could see everyone else and there was no hiding while he tried to flatten his hair with his hand so he didn’t look like some strange antennaed alien while they did their listening journal for the afternoon – this one a recording of a highly inappropriate carol, “In the Bleak Midwinter”. If only it was the bleak widwinter, he thought. My hair wouldn’t stick up like this in winter.
Wha-at can I bri-ing him, poor as I aaaam?
“The singer,” he wrote, “sounds like a strangled cat, and the words are about as appropriate for Australia as the American national anthem.”
He was quite proud of that. He hoped his teacher would find it funny.
Across the table, Laura was looking over at him. He smiled at her, and pressed his hair down in case it was standing up again. Laura seemed to be laughing. Perhaps she found the song funny too. He could share with her what he’d written after class. It might make her laugh more. But Laura wasn’t looking at him now. She was writing in her listening diary.
I-if I were a she-epherd, I would bring a laaamb…
His feet felt fidgety and his pants were sweaty. The room stank a bit, and he was starting to have that feeling he sometimes did, that dislocated feeling, like he was watching himself, not participating in his own body. He had asked his dad once if he had ever felt like he didn’t really exist. Dad had said, “Yes,” and he’d felt that instant rush of relief that comes from being understood, only then Dad had continued by saying, “That was how we used to talk in the 70s,” and Philip had suddenly fallen from a state of being known to one of total disconnection. His father’s words had fallen flat on him. Was he talking about nothing more than what was trendy back when everyone was on LSD? He’d read about those days in a book once. He was fairly sure his dad had never taken LSD but the words had no other meaning to him than that. No, there was no understanding after all.
I-if I were a wi-ise ma-an, I would do my paaart…
He held his hair down some more. Laura looked at him again and smiled.
Inspired by the smile, he wrote, “The writer has no idea how to rhyme. He’s obviously only just learnt how to write poetry in primary school. My little brother could write better poetry than that.”
Why had he written that? He didn’t have a little brother. Still, it was effective writing. He kept it in.
But what I ca-an I gi-ive hi-im…
Behind him some boys were laughing. Mark’s voice he recognised, Mark who had taken a specky on his back at the gym last week and feigned repentance and concern for him while the teachers were around only to mock him for his distress when the boys were alone in the change rooms at lunch.
“That’s gay,” someone said – probably Mark. It was the kind of thing he said.
“It’s talking about Jesus,” Laura called back.
Miss Brown said sshh and the lesson regained some barely-maintained control. Philip didn’t write anything more about the song. He didn’t want to sound like Mark. He gave the song three stars, closed his exercise book, and rested his head on his hand to press down his hair more. He hoped no-one could see.
As class finished and they left the room, he slowed down so that he walked through the door at the same time as Laura.
“Did you have fun playing with your hair?” she asked.
He said nothing. His hands felt clammy.
“Good song, hey, Savage?” said Mark behind him. “You loved it, didn’t you?”
Philip slowed and slowed until he sank into the exiting mass coming through the door. The holidays could not come a moment too soon. More and more outside of himself, he watched as a small and insignificant child hid inside a mind that no-one could penetrate if they tried. The day, at least, was over.
The Consolations of Writing 