Creative Differences and Other Stories, page 4
Then it stopped.
Perhaps Mrs Crick’s punishment had succeeded as a deterrent, or maybe his parents or parent had found the wherewithal to feed their son. Mrs Crick did not choose another target. Unlike the deputy headmaster, who carried the strap on his rounds, and would share his relish in its use with the privileged and exempted group that made up his own class, she seemed to have no interest in punishment for its own sake. Was her victimisation of the marginalised meant to prepare them for the unfairness they would find in the wider world? Did she see herself as doing a favour to the Maori and the Jew and the poor boy?
Then it happened again.
A prissy girl who did not usually have much to say put her hand up. ‘Mrs Crick, someone stole my lunch.’
‘Smithy, did you steal Raewyn’s lunch?’
‘No, Mrs Crick.’
‘If you lie to me, it will be six on both hands. Did you steal her lunch? Own up and it will only be one hand.’
‘No, Mrs Crick.’ It was surely the reflexive denial of a child trying to avoid punishment. In the past he had been caught red-handed. Maybe he thought he could get away with it this time.
‘Can anyone else tell me anything about what happened to Raewyn’s lunch?’
Silence. Tension. Relief. In the absence of evidence linking the crime to Smithy, and in the light of his recent good behaviour and the uncharacteristic not-guilty plea, it seemed that Mrs Crick was going to let it go.
Then: ‘I saw Smithy by the bags.’ The girl’s name was Pamela. She sat in front of me on the left side of the room and was one of a clique of girls who told tales. I think the rest of us would have protected Smithy. We didn’t like him, but watching him being punished was shocking, in the true sense of the word.
We kept our bags in a common area or beside our desks. At playtime and lunchtime they were there for the pillaging.
Miss Crick performed a creditable cross-examination. ‘Did you actually see him take anything?’
Pause. ‘No.’ In her role as barrister, Mrs Crick could not have been expecting any other answer; neither, as judge, could she have given it any credence. Pamela had said that she saw Smithy near the bags. If she had seen him in the act of stealing the lunch, she would surely have included that detail in the first place. But someone else had.
‘I saw him. I saw him stealing Raewyn’s lunch.’ Susan. Fat Susan. One of the clique.
‘What did you see?’
‘I saw him open Raewyn’s bag. He took her lunch.’
‘Are you sure, Susan?’
‘I’m sure, Mrs Crick.’
‘You know what will happen to Smithy?’
‘He stole Raewyn’s lunch.’
‘Can anyone else help?’
Ngaire could help. And she wasn’t one of the clique. ‘I saw Smithy eating a sandwich. At playtime.’
‘Smithy, I’m asking you again. Did you steal Raewyn’s lunch?’
‘No.’
‘Where did you get the sandwich?’
‘Home.’
‘Who made it for you, then?’
‘My auntie.’
‘Your auntie?’
‘Yes, Mrs Crick.’
Someone laughed and the class followed. Mothers made lunches, not aunties. Mrs Crick did not laugh.
‘I have to choose between two honest girls and Smithy. Who do you think is telling the truth?’
The question was rhetorical. We were not the jury, just the gallery. With Susan’s evidence and Smithy’s record, the verdict was inevitable.
‘Smithy, I’m giving you one last chance to own up and say you’re sorry. Otherwise I’m going to have to give you six more for lying.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Did you steal Raewyn’s lunch?’
Smithy was crying but he managed to get it out. ‘Yes, Mrs Crick.’
Guilty on both charges. Mrs Crick honoured the plea bargain and spared his right hand. If someone got six, they took them on their non-preferred hand. Not that Smithy was known as a writer or artist or sportsman. He wasn’t known for anything except his name and stealing lunches.
In my mind, this was the occasion that Smithy wet himself, but I would not swear to it.
Smithy returned to his place at the single desk in the back corner, crying as he always did. Mrs Crick put the strap away.
Smithy was still sobbing loudly, to Mrs Crick’s annoyance, when Raewyn’s mother arrived. She was holding a paper bag. ‘Raewyn forgot her lunch.’
Our world was turned on its head. I don’t think any of us had believed Smithy innocent. Even now, the memory of that moment shocks me, affects me viscerally, like no other from my childhood.
Mrs Crick waited until Raewyn’s mother had left.
‘Stand up, Susan.’ Fat Susan stood. She was blubbering. ‘Apologise to the class. And to me. And Smithy.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Crick.’
She sat down. That was it.
Or would have been. In what I would later realise was a life-defining decision, I put my hand up. No deliberation; just a clever pick-up without consideration of the consequences. Objection, Your Honour.
‘Mrs Crick, shouldn’t Susan get the strap?’
‘Don’t be cheeky.’
‘Cheeky’ was, in those days and in that world, a strong reprimand, a message that one had stepped out of line. There was no suggestion of cuteness. I persisted anyway. As much as I could be at that age, I was outraged. I was one of the smart kids in the class, and I also sensed I had the mob on my side.
‘She lied. You said Smithy would get six for lying.’
‘That’s enough.’
I had never before incurred Mrs Crick’s wrath, but I was in trouble now. I shut up. My suggestion was hardly sophisticated or Christian, and Mrs Crick may well have made the best of a bad situation. Susan was a first offender.
Memory is, of course, fallible, and, over time, we shape events into a narrative that reflects well on us. But there is a reason that I am sure my recollection of challenging Mrs Crick is real. Later that week, she left the room for a few minutes. On her return, Pamela presented her with a piece of paper.
‘Susan and I made a list of everybody who spoke while you were out of the room.’
Mrs Crick took the list, looked at it and called out a single name.
‘I’m disappointed. You used to be one of the best-behaved boys in the class. Come out the front.’
So, at seven years old, I was initiated into the tradition of corporal punishment with three strokes on my left hand. The second and third hurt quite a bit.
There you have it, Smithy, if you’re out there somewhere. I remember you being given your name, and being framed and then physically punished while the perjurer escaped with a reprimand. I want you to know that the injustice visited on you stayed with me and shaped my life more than anything I learned in lessons, more than any of my teachers, more than Beethoven.
There’s a Bruce Springsteen song: ‘Glory Days’. I first heard it driving in Europe in 1984. I had picked up an American hitchhiker in Paris for company, and he had a cassette of Born in the U.S.A. By the time we got to Rome, I knew every word of the album. A few years later, a woman I was dating played ‘I’m on Fire’ to set the mood that the song title suggested, and transported me straight back to the French Alps with Ed pulling at my arm to stop the car so he could throw up.
But, ‘Glory Days’: there’s a verse about the girl at school who turned all the boys’ heads. Out of reach to the singer, back then. But times change and now she’s a single mother, happy to share a drink with our man after she’s put the kids to bed.
When I was in high school, or, more precisely, intermediate school—a thousand pubescent New Zealandborn British subjects thrown together to sing Kipling’s ‘Recessional’ to the old soldiers, learn woodwork or home economics according to gender and, if they were lucky, make their first sexual forays—Maddie Perfect was the girl who turned all the boys’ heads. Now I’m sitting in a bar in Wellington waiting for her to join me for a drink.
It’s a date, in the sense that we are both hoping it might lead to something more. Whatever the emails said, neither of us believes I have flown from Melbourne to Wellington only because ‘we should catch up sometime’. She has booked dinner in the restaurant upstairs.
I found her on a website for connecting with schoolmates. More exactly, and flatteringly, she found me. I had hung out my shingle—Lawyer, Recently Single—and a week later, Maddie was in touch. Recently single too, if you count four years as ‘recently’. Doctor Madeleine Perfect. Employed by Healthcare NZ. Her profile photo looked as if it had been taken at a conference: she was at a lectern and it was hard to make out much beyond an impression of professionalism and elegance.
The obvious question: if I wanted a date, why not use a conventional dating site, perhaps even one in the country that was now my home? The simple answer: shared memories. When Caroline left, she took all the photos. It was more symbolic than anything: I was not in the habit of thumbing through photo albums, and it was months before I realised they had gone. But when I did, I became acutely conscious that I had no physical souvenirs of half of my life. Better that she had followed tradition and scissored my suits.
More importantly, she took my friends. Our friends turned out to be primarily her friends. Or they chose to side with the innocent party. When Maddie emailed, it was more than a chance to revisit an unrequited desire, to let the adult man take the place of the clumsy adolescent: it was a chance to talk to someone who shared a past, however distant.
‘Can I get you a wee appetiser while you wait?’
My server has a Kiwi accent you could cut with a knife. Get comes out as git, appetiser as epputiser. I talked like that once.
I don’t have a chance to answer about the epputiser, because Maddie walks in, surveys the room and makes straight for me. She’s tall, taller than me, heels, pencil skirt and…
‘Don’t say it,’ she says.
I stand up. ‘Say what?’
‘I know what you’re thinking. You can’t believe how old I look.’
It’s exactly what I am thinking. At least her accent is not as thick as our server’s. And she has a huge smile.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You look—’
‘As soon as I saw you, I thought: God, he looks so old. So I guess you must be thinking the same about me.’ She laughs. ‘We’ll get used to it. It’s been forty-five years, for God’s sake. All at once.’ She is still laughing as we sit. ‘So, now we’re going to look at each other until we see the person we remember. How long were you married?’
‘Twenty-eight years.’
‘So your ex can’t have been much younger than me. You just had time to get used to it as it happened. Unless you didn’t. But, I figure if you were looking for a younger woman, you wouldn’t be here, right?’
My turn to laugh.
‘So, look at me.’
We look at each other for about ten seconds, until our server interprets the silence as her cue to return. Maddie orders a glass of pinot, then turns back to me. ‘Might as well get a bottle, if that works for you?’
‘I’m more of a shiraz drinker.’
‘Welcome home. We’ll have a bottle of Ata Rangi pinot.’
She was confident at school. In my memory, I had linked it to her looks. But she was in the top class—we both were. Strictly ranked into eight levels, and then seated in order of six-weekly exam results. I sat in the second row and spent much of the year looking at her ponytail. We had conversations, but she was always in control. Deja vu.
I’m doing better now. At least I’m not worried about turning red, and with any luck the ‘look at me’ exercise has worked as well for her as it has for me. But we are well into a platter of Bluff oysters—‘You have to have some of these but they won’t go with the pinot; I’ll order a couple of glasses of sav blanc’—and I have established that she is a clinical psychologist rather than a medico, before she gives me an opening to take centre stage.
‘What made you decide to become a lawyer?’
‘You remember Mrs Crick?’
‘Of course. In Standard One. She was probably the best teacher I had.’
‘You’re kidding me. I suppose it was different if you were a girl. You remember Smithy?’
‘No.’
‘The little kid. Always in trouble.’
‘Sorry. I don’t remember many of the boys. All I can remember about you is how you used to get picked on.’
I had forgotten about that. I’d had a minor speech impediment, which I eventually grew out of. Wound the wagged wocks, the wagged wascal wan. It was the reason I was relegated to second in the public-speaking competition, so it could not have entirely disappeared by the time I tried to make an impression on Maddie a couple of years later.
I have told the Smithy story many times, but never to someone who was there. Seven- or eight-year-old Maddie in the second row of the class, behind Fat Susan. It is probably better that she does not remember Smithy and, by implication, the incident, or we would be arguing about the minutiae.
Even so, I am conscious of the details, self-conscious that I will get some aspect of the setting wrong. But it is a moving story, and at the end I feel myself trembling. Sacco and Vanzetti. Rubin Carter. Lindy Chamberlain. Their stories leave me feeling the same way. The visceral response to injustice I felt for the first time as a seven-year-old is why I became a lawyer.
Maddie looks up from her glass. She has been hiding her reaction and is not giving anything away now. I suspect she has slipped into her professional persona, and the last thing I want to do is play the role of patient. So I wait too.
She sips her wine, then breaks the silence. ‘It’s a compelling story. You’re a good storyteller.’
‘Goes with the territory. You don’t remember it, then?’
‘Not at all. My memory’s not that good for things that didn’t change my life. You really think it changed yours?’
‘I think you just made the argument yourself. If it wasn’t important, why would I have remembered it? Don’t we all have these moments, these turning points, where our lives take a new direction?’
She laughs. ‘In films. I think you were on the road to being a lawyer before you spoke out for Smithy.’
‘Before? I thought you were going to say it came later.’
‘You’re proud about speaking up for him. That’s what lawyers do. But you didn’t like Smithy as a person, did you?’
‘I didn’t have a problem with him.’
‘But no arm around the shoulder—Are you okay, mate; Come round to my place?’
‘I should have bought him lunch, right?’
Maddie laughs at my feeble joke.
‘Lawyers can’t choose their clients. I guess it’s the same for you. I’d have thought that going in to bat for someone I didn’t like was more creditable than doing it because he was my mate.’
‘And getting strapped for it. Unfairly. Gross miscarriage of justice.’
‘Exactly.’
Maddie sits back, smiling. ‘You want to know what I think?’
‘Of course.’
‘I think your getting punished yourself was a much bigger deal than anything that happened to some kid you didn’t like.’
I have told the story so many times, never looking at it with adult eyes. Maddie is almost certainly right. No doubt plenty of people have reached the same conclusion without pointing it out to me.
I smile, communicating, I hope, a wry self-awareness. ‘I guess advocacy for the downtrodden is a more attractive motivation than unfocused anger.’
‘I’m sure your clients don’t care which it is, as long as you’re there for them now. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think a seven-year-old’s anger would have been enough.’
‘I thought we’d already decided that it wasn’t why I became a lawyer.’
‘I mean enough for you to have held on to this story.’
‘So why do you think I’ve remembered it?’
‘I get paid for doing this, you know. Maybe after a few months of therapy, I could help you work it out.’
‘Take a shot at it. You’ve been doing well so far.’
She shakes her head. ‘You drink dessert wine?’
‘Love it.’
‘Me too. I’m going to shout you something that’ll knock your socks off. Assuming you’d like me to knock your socks off.’
‘Do your worst.’
‘But seven-year-olds aren’t allowed to drink.’
The server comes with dessert menus and Maddie asks for the wine list. I have eaten the main course without paying attention to it, absorbed in a fifty-year-old story that my companion cannot recall and that, on reflection, probably has nothing to do with who I am now. Time to sum up and move on.
‘Sorry. For whatever reason, this story has hung around. I thought it’d be interesting to see if you remembered it the way I did, but you’ve done something more useful than that. Unless you want the equivalent in legal advice, the socks-off wine is on me.’
Maddie smiles and leans back. ‘I do some work with people who’ve been abused as children. Every psychologist does. And almost always, when you explore the abuse, there’s an element of guilt, of shame. Seldom justified, but unresolved. I think that’s one of the things that makes memories persist.’
A half-bottle of sticky arrives and I have some thinking time while Maddie goes through the tasting routine.
‘Maybe I didn’t speak up as courageously as I remember. Maybe I let him down. Making up for that, learning to do it properly, might be my real motivation.’
‘Maybe. But it’s not about the facts of what happened when we were seven. It’s the stories we tell ourselves in the present that matter.’
‘Except we can’t change the past. What happened, happened.’
‘It’s how you chose to remember it.’
‘True, but it happened. I might be wrong on some details, and maybe I’ve embellished a bit, but not the basic facts.’
‘You think your memory is that reliable?’
‘For this, yes.’
She sips her wine. I know a dramatic pause when I see it.
