Deep Fried: A Novel Read online

  ‘Peter, come in.’

  I sit on one of the very low seats designed especially for moments like these. He swivels in his chair, looks down at me, as if regarding a specimen in a zoo, the Latin name for me on the tip of his tongue. His eyebrows move together and a small bum of flesh creases between them. My guardian angel sits tight on my well-intentioned shoulder.

  ‘Now, this business down at the mall yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I look to the floor, shamefaced, ready to apologise. This can be over quickly.

  ‘I talked about this, last night, with the board.’

  ‘The board?’

  A turn for the worse. In the cold war of education, the board is the nuclear deterrent. Designated arse-kicker. Something has happened, off-stage. I am missing something important. I look into Mr Smythe’s eyes, try to send him calm, reasonable messages. You are the father of a friend of mine. There’s nothing to be seen here. You have other things to do. Let’s just move along.

  ‘It was important, that they be informed.’

  ‘Why? What has it got to do with them?’

  The wrong words. The wrong tone. Shit. ‘Sorry.’ Too late. This time the frown is real.

  ‘I don’t think it’s me you need to apologise to.’

  ‘I’ve already written a letter, to PBs. The police made me do it. And I have to clean their cars too, on the weekend. I’ve already been punished.’

  ‘Peter,’ he raises his hand, to stop any more words spilling out. I take the hint. Mr Smythe stands slowly. He is tall enough to tower over my ridiculous, mutant chair. My neck hurts.

  Behind him the screen of his computer flashes blue. Mr Smythe spends the best hours of the day here, juggling budgets and preparing the sort of propaganda the modern parent expects. I look at him and see things I have never seen before. The grimace not of impatience but of impotence. Lines of frustration etched into his face. The sadness behind the drying of the skin, at the point where the receding hairline marks his slow retreat from the world. And in his eyes a hint of the Pissed Off I know so well; the mute scream of fury, as layer upon layer of pointless moments pile down upon us.

  And I understand now the nature of my crime, perhaps the greatest crime of all. I have unsettled the load he was only just managing to balance.

  ‘You have no idea the damage you have done.’

  ‘I’ve cost you money haven’t I?’ I reply. Just a guess, but an educated one.

  ‘How could you do this to me, to the school, your school, if you knew?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I mumble.

  He looks at me again. The zoo has become an abattoir. He sits, lowers his voice.

  ‘Just this week,’ he tells me, making no attempt to hide the emotion, ‘our official roll numbers were confirmed. Down on last year, and there’s no reason to expect that to turn around any time soon. So, and this doesn’t leave the room, Peter, I had the task of telling a teacher here, a very good teacher, who has given her heart and soul to the education of this community for over ten years, that we no longer have a place for her. And maybe if you could have seen her sitting in that very chair, and if you could have heard her sobbing, maybe you would have thought twice about this whole little publicity stunt.’

  Maybe he is right. Maybe I would have, but I don’t get the connection, and squirm in my seat, knowing there is worse to come. He notes my discomfort.

  ‘Do you know how it feels, Peter, to give your life to education? Do you have even the simplest grasp of the soul-destroying battle we walk into every day? What do you think I do here, as a principal? What do you imagine my job is like?’

  He waits, but this is no time for the sort of answer my mouth is likely to form.

  ‘I balance books. I stare at computer screens. I collect stones and squeeze them in the futile hope that a few drops of blood may fall. And, in my spare time, I face the parade of complaints that have worn a groove in the carpet, all the way from the main foyer to my sorry door. Parents whose children’s needs are being overlooked. Teachers, good people Peter, who have been stretched past breaking so many times they are more join than substance. Students like yourself, who are too young to know any better, and having seen the problem clearly, believe I might have the answer. And you know the killer, the bit that really makes me wonder why I bother?’

  This is awful. This is worse than a beating, or community service. This man is hurting, this father of a friend, and I have to watch. I still don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it.

  ‘The killer is this Peter. The killer is knowing that the problems could be made to go away so simply, that good people could go back to doing what they do best, that young lives could be turned around, if only we had the money. If only every desperate budget didn’t produce the same result. So you might think it was just a little joke, yesterday’s stunt, but our school is on a flight path, and our gymnasium roof is clearly visible from the air, to half the passengers of every plane that banks right in a nor ‘wester, and they were prepared to pay for that space, Peter. The Prince of Burgers had reached an agreement, a very lucrative agreement, and some of that money has already been spent, so I don’t know what your little statement was all about but by God it had better have been something big, something truly significant, because now we’re not seeing a cent of that money.’

  I can see it. He’s trying to hide it but I can see it clearly enough, and he knows I can. The beginning of a tear. A mantear. Some things don’t happen. Never. It’s not a rule, because rules can be broken. It’s not a fact, because facts can be proven. It’s a thing. A thing that doesn’t happen. A shared understanding that you never have to have explained to you, because as long as you’ve known anything, you’ve known it to be true. Changing your deodorant doesn’t make you more attractive. Technology won’t save the environment. ‘I love you’ doesn’t mean I love you. Principals don’t shed man-tears in front of their students.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  He doesn’t look like a man any more than a balloon still looks like a balloon when the air’s leaked out. There is an awkward prickly feeling as my guardian angel nervously shifts its feet upon my shoulder.

  ‘Next time, just don’t buy the goddamned burgers. No one forces anyone to go in there, Peter. Is that so difficult to understand?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Oh, it always is.’

  He stands again, straightens his tie, breathes in a little of his old disguise.

  ‘I want you to write another letter of apology Peter, to the board. I want you to say you’re sorry. Can you do that much?’ And what he means is: This never happened. It will never be spoken of.

  I nod, to show I understand. I am sorry. Sorry for him.

  More than that though, I am Pissed Off.

  I don’t go back to the class. I walk up the back, to the trees, where there’s a good view of the school, and I think these thoughts. Thoughts about my school. Thoughts that might help you understand my Pissed Off.

  My school is a large school set out in the hilly suburbs, where the city is just a rumour whispered through the mist and there’s land enough for some of it to have escaped developer molestation. A thousand students, they say, which would have to be on a good day, and you don’t get so many of them. It has a campus that sprawls, buildings that go out not up, but layered in the way the steep land demands; and fields bordered by thick stands of pine trees, the very trees that right now provide me with cover. Alcoves and cavities and courtyards and vegetation enough for any group, any individual, to find a place to stand, a way of being noticed, or remaining invisible.

  The school doesn’t have a uniform and to the outside world this speaks of drugs and rebellion and anything else they choose to fear. In fact we wear uniforms of our own, which any one with eyes not sticky with the mucus of nostalgia and personal disappointment could plainly see.

  The 13-year-old boys who are yet to be run down by puberty, who watch TV without understanding any of the ads, who take their in
ternet access straight, without twist or perversion. They come dressed in the uniform of the well-meaning mother; sensible shoes that will last, jeans and T-shirts that fit, that do not bunch or balloon or slip away in the careful, expensive manner fashion demands. Who eat their lunch from a lunchbox and spend their spare time on the concrete, inventing games with tennis balls that only they understand. Their special places are well hidden from the world, narrow strips of seal between classrooms and retaining walls, where the lank hair and high pitched laughter can settle unremarked upon. And if you weren’t looking carefully, you might think that they were happy there. But they know. I feel their slow burning anger, the Pissed Off we share, every last one of us.

  Or how about the bare smiles and midriffs of The-Girls-Who-Can’t-Be-Refused? They travel in packs, every moment a desperate pitch at the unrealisable dream. Investment in makeup, hairstyles, magazines, vomiting, shopping expeditions and breathless talk of the secrets of oral sex and smooth supple skin. They follow their proud breasts towards you, the dazzling white of A-Block a perfect music-video backdrop. Legs cross and eyes open in a choreographed pattern of engage and destroy. And we want them, we boys, as much as we despise them. We talk up our disdain while sober, and defend our lapse in taste all through the next morning’s hangover. And they hear it all, and it doesn’t matter how much they concentrate on cleansing, breathing exercises while lying on their sunbeds, it gets in, clogs up the pores of a life worth living. I saw one earlier, in the queue to the canteen, and she smiled, because she had seen me on the television, and that made me real to her.

  Or 15 other groups, each with their own unifrom. I’ve counted. The sports stars in baggy trousers. The white top/brown skin lunch time acrobats of the basketball court. They twist and turn and play games with gravity, and feel clever and important 55 minutes every day. The Skaties, who have set their goals and focused, just the way we’re told we should. Who have done the repetition, learned the magic, and for their trouble are assigned a cracked run of concrete up the back, beyond the public view, because skating doesn’t win prizes and publicity for the school, at Young Sportsperson of the Year dinners. Theirs is a special type of Pissed Off, the sort you can pin to your chest and wear with pride.

  The straight lines of the haircuts of the boys from the First Fifteen, the straight-laced head-down purposeful stride to the library of the school’s academics, flamboyant drama fags, the shadowy goths, the puffy Asian/American fashions of the exploited fee payers, the debating teamsters who have to have the last word on everything. The smokers, the ‘individuals’, the dope addicts … How can you say we have no uniform? How can you ignore the low rumble of Pissed Off that massages my feet and buzzes through my brain, refuses to let me go back to class?

  In the US, car companies got off to a flying start by buying railways and ripping up the tracks. It’s that sort of a world.

  The train is dying. Its pale blue paint is dull and flaking; rust bubbles beneath the surface. Inside the smell of last night’s vomit lingers. Sharp edges of cracked vinyl dig into my back. The grimy windows afford a poor view of expensive hilltop suburbs blurring by. Badly maintained tracks cause us to jump, and lurch, and rattle. All around me fellow students scream and shout their familiar challenge to anyone who cares to listen. Look at me. I am here too. I am someone. Look at me. The sound and vision bounce around inside my head and the Pissed Off sets, as concrete-hard as the chewing gum, that grows lichen-like in every shady corner.

  I wasn’t so surprised when the txt came through. It must be hard, being the principal’s son. I’ve seen it once before, when Sunny, who Jeremy was going out with at the time, was caught smoking dope. That was the fifth form. Sunny was Jeremy’s first proper girlfriend, although not everyone would use a word like proper on Sunny. Sunny was the sort who designed her own clothes. She never walked when she could dance, and at parties she drank harder than any girl I have ever met. She didn’t follow rules, nor break them deliberately. She just wasn’t aware of them. And she was gorgeous. Her eyes burned brighter even than her smile and her hair was like a bushfire. I was a little bit in love with her too. I think we all were. But Jeremy was the unlucky one. He was the one who got to deal with her.

  It was a big thing to Jeremy, when Sunny was snapped. He talked to me about it. There was a deal, he said, that his mother had made him and his father sign, before his father was allowed to take the job. Nothing that happened between them at school would ever come home. But there was Jeremy, 15 and in love and realistic enough to understand his time with Sunny was running out. Breaking that contract was the only reasonable thing to do. He would plead, he would protest, he would reason, he would tantrum, he would blackmail. Whatever it took to keep his promise to Sunny, which he made one night in the back seat of his father’s car. But it never came to that. Mr Smythe dealt with it before a word was spoken between them, found room in his heart for leniency, and Jeremy was left free to play the hero.

  The next week Sunny dumped him anyway, ran off to the Coromandel with a drummer she met at a street party. Jeremy tried to follow her, but became tired halfway and ran his father’s car off the road. It can’t be easy, being the principal’s son.

  And here’s me, my clothes a little on the subdued side, definitely less arousing from behind, but a friend nevertheless, and word of my troubles must have reached him.

  SRRY BOUT TH SHT. IM @ HOME

  His stop is one before mine. I get off, the shadow of a slow-building crisis collecting on the horizon. To talk will be good. Jeremy’s a good man, when it comes to listening. Funny, that we should be able to say that about a person, that they listen well. Listen, as in shut the fuck up and look at the person who’s doing the talking. It doesn’t sound so hard. Everybody should be able to do that. We should all be good listeners. But Jeremy is unusual, which just goes to show how far down the road to screwed up we’ve travelled, and we’re not feeling even a little bit fatigued.

  His house is small. Jeremy’s the youngest of four, and they all grew up there, and I never quite got why a man on a principal’s salary, with a wife whose job gives her a new work car every two years, would want to live in such a little place, and I never quite got round to asking. There’s a high hedge along the street, and a narrow path of cracks in uneven concrete giving way to steps. The south side of the house is shadowed with mildew and at the back there’s a small lawn and a woodshed and a vegetable garden behind it. I walk down and tap on the double glass doors to the basement, where Jeremy plays pool and guitar and studies when his mother gets on his case (that’s in the contract too).

  ‘Oh, hi.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘You want to play some pool?’

  ‘Yeah, alright.’

  ‘Set it up then.’

  ‘Are you allowed to smoke in here?’

  ‘Yeah. Pisses them off, but I’m allowed. I think I’m meant to cave in to their disapproval but it’s sort of having the opposite effect. Can’t really afford it.’

  ‘You break.’

  ‘Unders.’

  ‘Lucky bastard.’

  Jeremy plays better pool than I do. But not Playstation. Jeremy sucks at any electronic game. I don’t know why.

  ‘I saw you on TV.’

  ‘Yeah. Nuts.’

  ‘Reckon.’

  ‘I guess your dad was sort of pissed.’

  ‘Just a tad.’

  ‘I saw him today.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’s alright.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I know you do. You going to stop sinking those?’

  ‘Can I tell you something?’

  ‘Finish your shots first.’

  He misses deliberately and stands leaning against the table, pool cue like a staff. For a moment he looks old.

  ‘If you ever tell anyone else this…’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You might, when you hear.’

  ‘So don’t tell me.’

  ‘I shouldn’t.’
>
  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Did he tell you, about the sponsorship thing?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  There is silence, made up of my knowing there’s a story coming, and his wondering how best to start it. That’s the good thing about friendship, it copes well with pauses.

  ‘Well, when he was at his last school, before he started here, he used to be better than he is. Honestly. I know people give him shit, but …’

  ‘He’s alright. People quite like him.’

  ‘No, but he used to be really good.’

  There’s a look on his face that you only see when people are discussing family, those strange people you love in ways no one else can understand.

  ‘You didn’t know him then. He was the youngest principal ever or some shit, you know, in Wellington, and this really rich school in England even head-hunted him once.’

  I think of the man I saw this morning, broken to the point of crying, and wonder if Jeremy has seen the same.

  ‘Anyway, this last school, it was sort of rough, and he had this idea that he’d get business sponsorship, for a computing suite, but it was so controversial, people protesting that education and business shouldn’t mix. But when Dad is certain he’s right, he doesn’t much give a shit what people think. I like that, you know. I’d like to be like that. You can take your shot if you like.’

  I miss. It isn’t deliberate.

  ‘I remember he’d come home and rant. Not everyone can afford their ideals, he’d say. Not everyone is lucky enough to have those choices. So he rode it out, all the shit people could throw at him, and then, just when it looked like it would all finally go ahead, the biggest sponsor got taken over and the new owner pulled out of the deal. So you know what he did? He remortgaged the house and just did it himself. Mum and him almost split over it. He can be so stubborn. He even kept the name of the original sponsor on the new classroom, so people wouldn’t know.’