Eula knew that there was something significant behind his sullen look. It was not his usual adolescent pout.
“Reverend Mother suspended me, and I didn’t do nuthin’.”
School is full of ambiguities when you’re 15. Greg like the daily gathering with his mates, but apart for his practical classes and Prevo, from which he hoped to secure an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic, everything else about school was irrelevant.
“If you didn’t do anything, how come you got suspended?”
“The year 12s are getting ready for “Muck Up Day” next week. We wanted to join in a bit, and Matty had an idea. But I didn’t think he would bring some weed to school. Anyway, he got busted and we all got suspended.”
“I always thought Matty would come to no good one day. You have to be careful about who you have as friends.”
“Mum, Matty’s okay. He’s stupid sometimes, but he’s okay.”
“Except, now he’s in trouble with the cops, right?”
“Yeh, well …”
“So how long are you banned from school?”
“A week.”
“Well, there’s plenty of work for you to be doing at home. Don’t think you’re getting a holiday from school out of this.”
“Mum!? It wasn’t my fault.”
“I think I’ll trust Mother Superior’s judgement about that. Now you have a choice. You can help around here today or you can catch the bus home and get started in the garden.”
“I’ll catch the bus. Got some money for the fare?”
“If you’re going home, you can start working around the tomatoes. Tie up the sagging branches, refresh the mulch and pull of the dead leaves to put in the rubbish. That should keep you out of trouble for the rest of the day.”
Eula gave him $5. The dark cloud was almost visible over his head as he stormed off to the bus stop and waited. Life is not fair when you are 15. Grown ups expect you to do stuff on your own, and then when you do, you cop it.
When Greg got home it was 11.30, so he thought he would game for a while, then have some lunch and then do the work. The work wouldn’t take long, really.
His current obsession was Batman Arkham City. He bought the previous Batman game Arkham Asylum but he got this for his birthday.
What he liked about Arkham City was that he could go wherever he liked in the City, not just where the game wanted him to go. At every turn there seemed to be a challenge or a challenger. He especially liked the underground stuff – tunnels, sewers, all sorts of crazy places.
The combat in Batman Arkham City is addictive and a lot of fun. Greg could even provoke fights just to build up his combat score, even though they were not part of the mission. Greg loved the adrenalin rush of the game and when he was playing he lost all sense of time.
Not surprisingly, he emerged from his room at 3.30 realising he had not stopped for lunch and he still had the work to do in the garden.
He quickly cut what could only be described as a hunk of bread, plastered it with peanut butter and honey, and got a bottle of Coke. This was as good as any lunch a 15 year old could want – yet there was so much pressure to eat other things. He sat on the back verandah to eat this while he got his head out of the game and into a plan to make it look like he had been working all afternoon.
There were at least 50 tomato plants in a patch 15 metres square. They were grown in rows along fence-like trellises and his job was to tie them up so that the lower fruit would get the sun, and remove the dead leaves and put them away for burning. He had been doing this job since he started school. He could almost do it with his eyes close. But he would have less than 5 minutes per plant before Mum and Dad came home from the shop. And he had to tease up the mulch so make it look like had fixed it. He could do it!
It was actually a glorious day to be outdoors – clear skies and warm air, but not so much sting in the sun as to make it uncomfortable. By the time he was onto his third plant, Greg had taken off his tee shirt. Even though this was a punishment, something about working with his hands rather than his head was very satisfying for Greg. He decided that he would do each plant and the ground around it all in one go, rather than doing the tying up and stripping of old leaves and then do the mulch – he felt like he could just keep on moving that way.
By the time he heard his parent’s car crackle up the gravel driveway he had just five plants to go. He had become quite grubby from the work, his hair was sodden with sweat, and he gave all the impressions of having started as soon as he got home on the bus at 11.30. Despite his sense of satisfaction, Greg, maintained something of his hostility over the so called punishment. It could be valuable later.
Alfeo had only heard about the problem at school second hand so he wanted to get to the bottom of it. When Greg finished and came in to wash up, he was standing in the kitchen preparing the side dishes for dinner. “When you have cleaned up, come and help me finish this,” he said as Greg ambled by, snatching another Coke from the fridge.
Eula was making some small pizzas for primo tonight. Her favourite was Margherita – simple clean flavours and colour. Five years ago a local farmer had started a herd of water-buffalo with a view to providing the restaurant trade with genuine mozzarella cheese. These gave the whitest of white cheese for the Margherita. Homemade tomato sauce as the base and torn basil leaves completed this classic from their home town, Naples. For secondo there would be a rabbit alla cacciatora. The rabbit and its tomato sauce had been gently cooking in a crock all day.
By the time Greg returned, Alfeo had finished a salad of finely slice fennel and Spanish onion topped with balsamic and extra virgin olive oil. He had some yellow and green peppers. Greg could slice these while they talked. “What happened at school today, mate?”
It’s amazing how much a good workout in the garden can clear the head after the adrenalin had been pumped up so much by getting suspended from school – even when you’re fifteen. “It all started out okay, Dad, and if we had stuck to our first plans, none of this would have happened. But Matty really wanted to get Mr Walters. He reckoned he could plant something in his office that would really embarrass him – we thought he meant he would leave a note or something – but he brought some dope to school and said he could plant it in his desk.”
“It’s one thing to be nasty, but that was illegal. Didn’t he think of that?”
“When he showed us the stuff, we all thought it was pretty cool, but then Jarrod and me got pretty worried about if we got caught. So I guess we all looked pretty guilty when we were seen heading for Mr Walter’s office. Matty went in to plant the stuff and then Mr Walters came round the corner. We couldn’t warn him, and then it was obvious that we were all in it together.
“We all got hauled down to Mother Superior’s office. They took Matty in first, and we had to wait for ages. Next thing a copper came into reception and went into Mother Superior’s office. Then Matty’s Mum came and went in too.
“Then Mother Superior came out on her own and told us to go with Mrs Johnson who would talk to us one by one. I didn’t know what to say. I started to make stuff up, but it only made it worse in my head, trying to work it all out, so I told exactly what had happened. It didn’t help much. Matty got expelled and we all got suspended for a week.”
“Sounds to me like you had a lucky escape, mate. What if Matty had made you all take some of the dope? You’d have been in the lock-up till I came and got you.”
“I know Dad. I guess it was pretty stupid and I suppose a week is a fair cop.”
That seemed to be the end of it. Alfeo knew that Greg had learnt a big lesson. He didn’t need to drive it home. It was time to enjoy dinner together.
No comments:
Post a Comment