Caravan Story Read online

  We watch Chinatown all morning, the teacher sometimes pushing the pause button and pointing out a story feature to us. I take notes, so does my neighbour—so, as far as I can see, do the rest of the class—and we make no more contact with each other until the bell goes for morning recess. Then, as the teacher rewinds the tape and people start putting down their pens I see my neighbour tearing off the bottom corner of the piece of paper he has been writing on. He pushes it across towards me. The writing is minuscule, spidery thin. The axe for the frozen sea, it says. He stands up, still not looking at me, and makes his way to the door. I push the tiny piece of paper into my folder, close it, and stand up too.

  Out in the playground, the first thing I notice is how incredibly hungry I am. I’ve had no breakfast, I’ve not eaten since yesterday at lunch. People are standing around, alone or in little groups, but I can’t see my neighbour anywhere. I make my way over to a group with a drift of blue-grey smoke above it and ask one of them can I borrow a cigarette? I have not smoked for months, have strangely felt no desire to do so (perhaps if I’d gone with the actors I would?) but the first drag on this begged cigarette is a wonderful thing. I’m starving, and the rush of nicotine both stills the gnawing in my belly and makes me feel all light in the head. I move away from the group—I feel, not antisocial, just a bit tired and confused—and find a sunny spot by the wall of the building. I put my back against the pebble slab and feel its warmth seep into me. I drag on my cigarette, blowing the smoke upward, watching the play of light as it drifts away from me. So this is it, I think, I’m back at school, I’m going to do my lessons all over again. This time, they tell me, it won’t be wasted; I won’t end up spending long uneventful days in cheap falling-down houses, butting my cigarettes out on the concrete, watching the blossom buds form on the plum tree, the planes flying in overhead; I won’t go off in my caravan and toast marshmallows on a fork; I will learn everything I have to learn, to do better, to get on. This is my chance, I think, it’s all been put on a plate for me: I’m special, I’m one of the privileged few. If I listen carefully, try harder, put an end to this wasteful cynicism, this facetiousness, this irony, if I can just get serious for a change (it’s only seriousness that gets taken seriously), put my head down, stop fucking around, then perhaps now, soon, finally, things might start working for me.

  The bell rings; recess is over. People start filing back into class. I butt my cigarette out on the wall behind me, twisting and turning it into the small concrete hollow where one of the pebbles has fallen out. Back in the classroom the seat beside me is empty—my neighbour, the gawky man with the glasses, has been moved to the front of the class. He sits on his own at a table directly in front of the teacher’s, who is just now opening the flaps of the second box. From it he takes a pile of shrink-wrapped packets of 8 x 10 white filing cards and starts placing a packet each in front of us on our desks. We are to use them, he is saying, to identify the principal units of action in our story. Let’s write these units of action down in note form on our cards, he says, then place them in order on our desks and see what sort of ‘story pattern’ emerges. For the next two hours until lunchtime I sit at my desk and shuffle my cards, looking out the window, looking up at the whiteboard, looking at the teacher, who too many times then looks up at me. After about half an hour I write on the filing card on the top of my pile the words Horse and dray arrives in clearing and then some time in the following hour Ernest Fairweather is chopping a tree. Then about half an hour before the lunch bell rings the teacher tells us all to stop what we are doing. He points to a woman near the front of the class and asks her to read aloud from her cards. As she reads them out one by one—she’s got fifteen, I’ve got two—the teacher recreates them diagrammatically on the whiteboard by drawing rough rectangles, writing what the woman says in them and then connecting each ‘card’ with a short line from it to its immediate neighbour. It’s like a flow chart. Above this flow chart the teacher writes, again in big capital letters: DRAMATIC STRUCTURE. Many people quickly write this down. I look at the rectangles and from what I can make of the woman’s story it is one of a young girl from the wrong side of the tracks who stumbles helplessly through a world of drugs, crime, prostitution and damaged relationships until her final, if ambiguous, redemption. The teacher is now dashing back and forth around the whiteboard, pointing here, pointing there. He’ll suddenly rub out the contents of one rectangle, transfer the contents of another into it and then the contents of the original into the one he’s just emptied. He’s rearranging the pieces. He underlines the word STRUCTURE at the top of the whiteboard and now, taking suggestions openly from the class, continues to move the contents of his rectangles around.

  It should be interesting, I know it should, it should have me on the edge of my seat. It’s the new beginning, it’s why I’m here, but I can barely keep my eyes open; my mind keeps drifting, my eyes keep drooping; I keep thinking about dim sims, it’s absurd, but I can’t help it; I see in my mind’s eye a bright-lit bain-marie with soft steam rising from the edges of the steel tray. There are pies in it, potato cakes, some chips, but as in my mind’s eye I stand there looking in through the steam-shrouded glass, what my mind’s eye is drawn to inexorably are the two fried dim sims sitting in a compartment on their own. I point to them with my finger and can feel the heat coming off the glass. The lady picks them up one by one with her tongs and places them in a small brown paper bag. She asks do I want sauce, the bottle already in her hand, and then at my signal puts the nozzle inside the bag and shakes it a few times up and down. She hands me the bag, I hand her the money; as she steps sideways to the register to ring up the transaction and get my change I bring the bag up a little towards my nose. The bell rings. It’s lunchtime. I can taste the cold saliva sliding down the insides of my cheeks. People are packing up their folders, the teacher is speaking—I hear the word ‘canteen’ and then very little after that; my stomach literally heaves involuntarily inside me, stirred to an uncontrollable pitch of excitement by the sudden conjunction of my food fantasy and the many possibilities the word ‘canteen’ has stirred in my imagination. The rest of the class too, though retaining their decorum, have responded spontaneously to this word ‘canteen’. They are all up, mentally recalling the teacher’s earlier directions to it. As his concluding words trail off behind them many are already pushing their way to the door.

  I end up near the end of the canteen queue, which means I have some time to piece together with my own mental filing cards a story to go with the picture I now see before me. There are probably about eighteen people in front of me, corralled between the two steel-pipe rails, worn smooth over the years by thousands of young hands. The person at the front of the queue walks away with a small brown paper bag in their hand. It is then, just before the queue shuffles forwards again, that I am able to get a glimpse of Judd, behind the counter, serving the food. (Judd, I think, Polly’s lapdog?) I step forward, moving the filing cards around in my head. So he left the bus, I think, he must have, sometime in the night, probably when I was asleep, probably at some far-off country petrol station where he picked up the waiting station wagon. (I see it very clearly, this station wagon, this is what the teacher meant by visualising: a late-model green Subaru Outback with two T’s in the registration number.) Then, following a brief sleep in the front seat, he drove this green Subaru to the big town nearby where at the twenty-four-hour supermarket he bought (with the petty cash Polly had given him), from the frozen foods section, two or three jumbosized packs of dim sims. He then loaded this shopping into the station wagon and drove out to the school. He gave the canteen a quick spring clean (presumably while we were having our morning lessons) then stocked the fridge and plugged the fryer in.

  I reach the front of the queue: Judd looks up at me, then looks away again. It’s sausage rolls, he says. I keep looking at him. (Sausage rolls?) He blurts a bit of tomato sauce into a small brown paper bag and hands it out to me. I grip the edge but suddenly he is leaning over ver
y close to my face, a handsome young man with piercing blue eyes. The actors are coming tonight, he whispers, to workshop your scenes tomorrow. Listen, it’s not right, but I might be able to get you some time with your partner. He looks me in the eye, holds eye contact for a moment—a disturbing, frightened look—then releases his grip on the bag.

  I make my way across the playground, the brown paper bag in my hand. She is coming? Here? But how will I look her in the eye? She with her wild and spontaneous ways, her work structured to no paradigm; free, fluid, formless; immersed utterly in the present tense, the now? How will I explain to her the diagram on the blackboard, the school bell each day dividing those days into three, me going over all my old lessons again? I’ve now reached the tree on the far side of the playground with a bench seat beneath it. There’s a big brick building behind me. I sit on my own—most of the others are gathered near the canteen, standing in groups, sitting on the seats, some sitting cross-legged on the asphalt in the sun. But the most unsettling thing of all, I think, as I bite into my sausage roll, is the fact that, if Judd is just a lowly canteen hand, as he certainly appears to be, then he’s clearly been given no special privileges for his pleasuring of Polly—and, if that is the case, I think, pursuing things logically, then perhaps nor have I? I bite the sausage roll again. Perhaps I was not put on that last bus for the pleasure (or otherwise) I had given her, perhaps I was not chosen for my cunt-licking but for my talent and integrity? Perhaps, just perhaps, my Laburnum story is good. Of all the trash that was produced back there and which for the most part ended up in the big blue wheelie bin, perhaps my work had something in it? And if I were to apply myself to my lessons, I think, use the paradigm and listen carefully to what my teacher says, well, very possibly—it is possible—I might create work worthy of the support given to me. I bite again into the sausage roll and chew it, going over this last thought. A story, I think, a real story, with a beginning, middle and end…?

  I spend the rest of lunchtime like this: contemplating the meaning of Judd’s appearance, eating my sausage roll, letting my eye rove over my fellow students in the playground. Someone has found an old tennis ball and two people are playing a game of handball up against the canteen wall. I still can’t see my gawky neighbour and when we go back into class after lunch I see that his seat—his new seat, the one in front of the teacher—is empty. The teacher has meanwhile cleaned the whiteboard and begun to write a new lesson up on it. Everyone starts taking their seats—there’s a low murmur of conversation, a shuffling of papers—and I can see the teacher glancing over his shoulder, mentally ticking off the numbers as they dribble back into class. On the whiteboard, in capital letters, he has written the words SET-UP and beneath it a diagram of a starter shooting his pistol. He steps back from the whiteboard, does a quick silent head count, then crosses to the door and slides it shut. He points back across the room to the whiteboard—all the students look at it—then from his position at the door he points the remote control at the VCR. He’s skipped the piracy warning this time; we come straight in on the black and white photograph and the groan. The first ten pages, says the teacher loudly, crossing back to his desk: the first ten pages, that’s all you’ve got—let’s look now at our first ten pages.

  Dense scrub. Hammering rain. The shapes of bushes spectral in the moonlight. In the distance we see the light of a lamp approaching, moving in and out between the trees. As the light approaches, we see its source in clearer detail. It’s a Tilley lamp, held high by one of two figures on the seat of a dray. We see the dark shapes of the figures, one with a wide-brimmed hat, one wearing a blanket like a cowl, and the broad back and flanks of the horse. The driver pulls on the reins. The dray halts. The lamp rocks backwards and forwards, revealing in flashes a scrubby clearing. The figure in the hat ties off the reins and gets down from the dray. The other figure stands up, and holds the lamp high above her head. We see her face: young, dark, mysterious, beautiful.

  I work like this all afternoon, I have never tried so hard in all my life. I cross out one beginning and start another, then another one after that. I pull my sentences apart into such small pieces that they are hardly sentences at all any more, they are like kindergarten building blocks, with letters and pictures of animals on them. I put up my hand and call the teacher over and suffer his breath as he leans over and helps me more clearly identify my underlying dramatic premise. I am writing a film, I am doing what I’m told, I am pouring my story into my structure. I’ve convinced myself—I’ve had to—that my Laburnum story is good (that’s why I’m here) and that with proper management it can become the product the teacher reassures me it will. I just have to learn my lessons—I’ve never listened to my lessons, that was my trouble, they were around me everywhere, chattering away, but I never listened to them. And when she arrives—today? tomorrow?—and sees me in my grey shorts, white knee-length socks and black patent leather shoes, my short back and sides, my pimple-face, and thinks me childish, a dunce, and says with a bitter-sweet voice: Look at you, you still haven’t learned your lessons—I will show her my set-up, my heroic characters, vividly sketched, the dark rain-swept clearing, the first story clues, and everything will change. I cannot think about the hundreds back at H——: the pies, the vomiting, the shuddering limbs, the bodies piled into ute trays, the farmer’s tractor digging a hole way out over there where no-one will see. I cannot think about my gawky neighbour, gone. It is a ruthless business, this is the chief lesson I have had to learn: do not listen to your inner voice, do not strike out on paths untrod, do not believe in higher things, don’t make your sentences too long—look at the paradigm, listen to your teachers, learn your lessons. Don’t waste sympathy on those not chosen. They are already in the ditch, the tractor is already covering them over, soon they’ll be sown with seeds and a herd of cows will graze on their memory. Farmer, butcher, chef: vomiting, shuddering, all in the hole. You can’t help it if you’re special, if you’ve been picked out like this—it’s not because of what you did with Polly, that much is clear—look at Judd, where did it get him? It’s because you have something to work with and because you’re prepared to learn. This is what no-one, with the exception of the handpicked members of this class, was actually prepared to do. They were all on holidays, and they thought this holiday would last forever.

  The man reaches up with his hand and helps the woman step down from the dray. While the woman holds the lamp high above her head, the man takes a tent from under the seat and heaves it onto his shoulder. The horse snorts and bucks its head. In the circle of yellow lamplight we watch the man kick some fallen branches aside and throw the tent roll to the ground.

  It is very pleasant at my desk, the sun streaming in through the windows from outside, the classroom quiet, each student bent over their work. The teacher moves among us, sometimes stopping to give advice in a soft, soothing tone of voice. I watch the shadows changing, in the playground, on the windowsill beside me; the afternoon drifts by. It is almost home-time when I look out the window and see the Transit van pulling up outside. The driver’s door opens and Andrew gets out. He looks shorter than before. There’s someone sitting in the passenger seat but I can’t tell yet if it’s her—at this distance, with the sun on the other side of the car, all I can make out is a dark human shape. I glance back inside the classroom, some of the other students have seen the Transit van and are looking out the window too. The teacher still has his head down, he is leaning over a desk near the front of the class, looking carefully at a student’s work. I look out the window again. Now I can see Judd approaching quickly across the playground. He takes exceptionally long strides, he almost looks like Groucho Marx. More students are looking out the window; the teacher looks up too. Excuse me? he says, in a patronising tone. Everyone hunches back over their work. From under my eyebrows, though, my head lowered just enough for my eyes not to be seen, I watch the teacher move over to the window and study for a while the goings-on outside. By a slight, very subtle rotation of my head and b
y pushing my pupils as far across to the left in their sockets as they will go, I am then able to see Judd arriving at the Transit van. Andrew is leaning on the bonnet, waiting for him. Judd gestures, first to somewhere behind him, indicating, I imagine, the place where Andrew was supposed to park, then towards the classroom, indicating why it was best they didn’t park there. Andrew looks directly towards us; with my face almost in my folder I watch him out of the corner of my eye. Does he see me? Is that toss of the head him laughing at the very idea? Her former boyfriend, back at school, trying to get some qualifications! Judd finishes his instructions and begins striding back the way he came. The passenger door opens—it’s her, she gets out, asks a question; Andrew points, first towards Judd, then towards the classroom. She looks in my direction; yes, she’s looking at me. I hold my gaze, I feel all faint, across this unbridgeable distance I feel the most intense love go out. I’m just a schoolboy, and she with her hair and her curves is my unattainable fantasy. Andrew gets back into his side of the Transit van, she gets back into hers. Like a couple, I think. She’s telling the kids in the back to be quiet. Her husband doesn’t love her, not in the way she could be loved: here, over here in this classroom, this schoolboy here, he’s the one to give you a love both pure and rare.

  The Transit van starts up and moves back across the playground. All finished now? the teacher asks. He’s looking down across a row of heads at me. Without realising it, I have been subtly moving my head in the direction of the Transit van and it is this small but telling movement that the teacher has seen. I look up at him. Back to work, he says. I lower my head again but not without one quick glance out at the now-deserted playground. So Judd was not lying, I think, she really has come. Tomorrow I will see her, if not tonight. Will we still know each other? Can we pick up from where we left off?