At the Big Red Rooster Read online

  Maths was so silent that their breathing could be heard as they bent, intent, over compass and protractor; not that they knew how to use either.

  The siren sounded. They went, en masse, to play.

  ‘Funny. I’ve noticed of late that your class are sticking together like glue.’ Miss Hawke caught him before he went for his cup of tea. ‘Always together in the playground.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘A word, just before you get your cuppa.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re right and I’m wrong.’ She brought forth her discovery with a sound of triumph.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Call me old-fashioned if you like.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It struck me last night in bed. I always dwell on school affairs in bed. I find it by far the best place to see everything in its true perspective. You’re right about your plan. Keep it in your head. Goodness, when you were religiously committing everything to paper and I was checking it every week, your class weren’t working one tenth as effectively as they are now. I shall tell the inspectors so. Take it on my own shoulders to justify your actions so to speak; it’s what I’m paid for. I really must say, of late, you do seem to have discovered some gift, some knack; everything’s going so well.’

  He started. ‘Oh.’

  ‘So. No plan, no matter.’ She laughed a little at what she considered a witticism.

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes.’

  ‘Well then, off you go. I’m on duty.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at her. ‘Um, how would you like me to do your duty for you? It’s a windy day.’ A lame finish.

  ‘Good heavens no. You’ve your own to do. What a thought.’ She barked another short laugh. ‘What next? You young ones. When you’ve been at the game as long as me a bit of wind won’t bother you. You can send my cup of tea out though. Milk, no sugar. Get the girl to put the saucer on top of the cup; it keeps it warmer and it doesn’t slop. Hate slops. One biscuit.’

  ‘Yes, all right then, Miss Hawke.’ There was nothing else to say.

  He sent out her tea and then sat drinking his in a corner of the staffroom he had begun to regard as his own.

  The siren was overdue.

  A pounding on the door. Someone opened it and was pushed aside.

  ‘Miss Hawke! Miss Hawke!’

  Others forced in on top of the first.

  ‘Miss Hawke! Miss Hawke! Hawk… Mizork… ork… mizork… ork… mizorkmizorkmizork…’

  They went into the playground. A strange silence hung over the children. They were still for the most part. One or two murmured nervously, eyed each other.

  He saw his class. They stood, a fairly cohesive group, slightly apart from the rest, concentrated towards one end of the near netball court.

  Miss Hawke, face empurpled, eyes open and starting, neck awry, hung, moving gently in the wind, from the end of a school skipping-rope which had been looped and twined and secured over the circle of the netball goal-post.

  The Supper Waltz

  ‘I CAN’T UNDERSTAND why you’d want to come back here,’ said Richard to Annie, as they wandered the damp spring gardens of the old house.

  ‘I loved it here,’ she said. ‘When we left – and God knows we only lived here for two or three years – I promised myself that one day I’d come back if it proved possible. Just something about the place. Now, well, with Brian dead and the kids grown and flown… Why not?’

  ‘Cost you a fortune to do it up,’ said Richard. ‘Thought you said the agent would be here with the keys.’

  ‘We’re early,’ said Annie. ‘Look, the house is in good order. I’ve had it checked. A coat of paint…’ She looked at the old dwelling. ‘And I know you’ll help with the garden. Just look at the view,’ she pointed. ‘God, the old school. Still up there on the hill. And the hall, too, I bet. Memory or two up there. Did I tell you who I bumped into in Auckland a month ago?’

  ‘No,’ grumped Richard. ‘You’re always bumping into someone or other. Who?’

  ‘My very first boyfriend. Mike. Remember? I don’t suppose you do.’

  ‘Well, er, vaguely,’ Richard lied.

  * * *

  ‘I got you for the supper waltz. You’re mine!’ said Wilma Dorff to Richard, clapping him tighter, much tighter, to her ample bosom and spinning him wildly, before ejecting him off to his next dance partner. ‘And don’t you dare forget it!’ she called after him.

  Forget it? How could he? All of a sudden, the warm midsummer evening struck chill into the marrow of Richard’s every bone. Like a rabbit in a spotlight, he stared, transfixed, at the receding figure of Wilma Dorff over the shoulder of his new partner.

  It was some sight. Clutched securely to Wilma’s bulk, Richard’s best mate, Joe, forced most of her gown into a spray of lolly-pink fabric and lime-green petticoats behind her. The arse-end of a giant duck with the shits! thought the shivering Richard. Two, four, six partners further on, indeed to the very end of the Gay Gordons, he was struck dumb, and the chill had spread from marrow to muscle.

  There was no escape, of that Richard was absolutely sure. After all, there were Wilma’s brothers, Dorfuss, Fred and Stan, fencepost arms folded, guarding the main door of the school hall. There was her mother, old Ma Dorff, arms folded and still as the Sphinx, guarding the way to the supper room. And there was lolly-pink and lime-green Wilma, whispering in the ear of the Sphinx, giggling, pointing, pointing again at him, Richard! The Sphinx allowed herself a tiny nod of grim approval.

  Freed of Wilma’s embrace, Joe hurried toward his mate.

  ‘Wilma got you, eh? Here. Have a smoke. Looks like you need one and it could be your last one.’

  ‘Needs more’n a smoke,’ said Richard’s other good mate, Barry. ‘Here,’ and he pulled a small flask from his pocket. ‘You’re dead, mate.’

  Richard choked on the fiery liquid. ‘Jesus! What is it?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Barry. ‘Think it’s gin and whisky mixed up. All I could nick.’

  ‘What am I gonna do?’ whimpered Richard, but his friends were no help. Any pity that they might have felt for their good mate was, quite naturally, tempered with the relief of having escaped from that fate.

  ‘Christ, mate. You’ll never get out of them petticoats,’ said Barry, making conversation.

  ‘She’ll tuck you away for ever and ever,’ said Joe. ‘Shit, you’re so small she might never find you again – that’s if you’re lucky,’ he giggled. ‘Richie and Wilma. Boy, what a couple!’ He lit himself a cigarette and blew a satisfying cloud of smoke directly at his good friend.

  The Dorffs’ descent from their mountain lair for the annual tennis club dance had not been anticipated. It was not often that the family partook of the social life of the district unless there was a good purpose. Ma Dorff was not noted for either beauty of form or nature. A square and solidly squat woman, she had a jowled, brooding face with darting beady blackcurrant eyes. The purple taffeta of her dancing dress strained, almost successfully, to cover the width and depth of her broad bosom and well muscled arms.

  Wilma Dorff looked like her ma in almost every way except that her moustache was not yet tinged with grey. The family resemblance was equally strong in Dorfuss, Fred and Stan. The locals referred to them as the three gorillas but not, of course, in their presence.

  Richard had once asked his mother if there was a Mr Dorff. ‘I think he died, love,’ she had told him. ‘Long before we came here.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense, Val,’ his father had butted in. ‘More to it than just died. Poor little weasely bugger, he was. One day, they ran out of sheep for Sunday dinner. Old Ma had the boys skin and gut their Pa. Roasted him up instead.’

  ‘Really, George,’ Val Brown had said. ‘Filling the boy’s head with such silliness.’

  None of which, in memory, was of any comfort to the hapless, helpless Richard. In the close confines of the small, stuffy, smoky, sweaty school hall the chill of bone and muscle n
ow turned to a feverish sweat. His head throbbed to the pounding beat of Vi Wells as she belted out a solid Maxina on the old piano a good half of whose keys were non-functioning – ably assisted by her daughter, Gladys, on drums.

  What, in all his sixteen short years, had he, Richard Brown, done to deserve this? He anxiously smoked his third cigarette in a row and contemplated the possibility of suicide. His friends had deserted him, powering away into the dance with all the joy of young men who had escaped a hangman’s noose and couldn’t quite believe their good luck.

  ‘Two more ’n’ it’s the supper waltz,’ yelled Wilma Dorff as she Maxina-ed by, partnering her brother Stan and thereby blocking the natural flow of all other traffic. ‘I got you, remember. Don’t you forget!’ Stan made a steely rat-trap sort of grimace in Richard’s direction.

  Richard gulped, blinked hard, lit a fourth cigarette and leaned back into the half-dead fronds of ponga fern that decorated the walls of the hall. Unfortunately, there was far too little greenery to absorb his slight form.

  ‘Ah, me. Such a sweet face of innocence,’ his mother would often say to him as she ruffled his hair. Innocent? His mum might have been right at that. It could only have been innocence that had allowed him to get trapped like such easy game by Wilma Dorff. Poor poor Richard. So late to come to adolescence. So late, indeed, to come to life and now, that life was to be snuffed out.

  What a little, narrow sliver of life he had had. Fourteen, and still a boy soprano! Fourteen and a half before his balls had dropped almost overnight and at long long last he had felt like a man. Just a slight degree of confusion as to what a man should feel like. For instance, was there more to manhood than the constant worry of trying to hide an almost permanent hard-on? He’d chosen not to discuss these things with Joe and Barry, certainly not with his parents and definitely not with his big sister, Annie.

  In fact, it was the weird variety of experiences which made him erect that concerned him, rather than their frequency. Apart from Betty, the champion tennis player; apart from Rosalind, the much older woman of nineteen with whom he worked at the bank; apart from either of the two dummies, the very beautiful Merle and the equally lovely Veronica, there were at least two other erection inducers that worried Richard Brown.

  For one thing, what was it about the feel of the silky smooth stock and cold hard steel of his new .22 rifle that had such a powerful effect? And then, fully equal to Betty, Rosalind, Veronica, Merle and the gun, hard-on-wise, was the sight, smell and sound of Annie’s boyfriend, Mike!

  Mike – more like James Dean of film fame than James Dean himself! Richard had worked out that it might not be so much that he wanted Mike in the Biblical sense but that he wanted to be Mike, and that the prospect of being Mike was enough to bring on a hard-on. It wasn’t for the want of trying, either, this imitating of another’s life. Richard now walked the same as Mike, stood like Mike, talked like Mike, swore like Mike, smoked like Mike, negligently shouldered his rifle like Mike.

  Now, here in the school hall, as Vi and Gladys motored into the Gypsy Tap, Richard desperately tried to work out in his fevered mind just how Mike might extricate himself from the clutches of Wilma Dorff. Not that the real Mikes of this world, nor likely the James Deans, either, ever got near the Wilma Dorffs.

  ‘She’ll squash you flat, will Wilma,’ said Barry, taking time off from the Gypsy Tap. He held out his flask. ‘Need another swig?’

  ‘Mum says she’s been married once,’ said Joe. ‘Wilma Dorff, that is.’

  ‘She had a wedding already,’ corrected Barry. ‘Up in that little church in Anderson. But she didn’t get married. Was a couple of years back – she was only about sixteen then. He escaped.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Joe. ‘Just before you come to live here, Rich. They caught her this soldier back from Korea and fighting all them Commies. Quite crook, he was. Even had a wheelchair. Them Koreans didn’t finish him off, see. I reckon he wished they had when the Dorffs got him. Ma Dorff and Dorfuss and the others kept him tied up in the chook-house up their place right till the night before the wedding…’

  Barry took up the tale. ‘…then Dorfuss and Stan and the other one took him down the pub for his stag night. But the crook soldier still had one or two clues left and he slipped them all a mickey in their beers… Last thing anyone knew, that bloke was smokin’ down the road outa town in his wheelchair and they never saw him again. They had the wedding, but. Ma Dorff wasn’t gonna waste all the food. Pity you ain’t got a wheelchair, Rich. Like, you’re sure gonna need one.’

  ‘She won’t make the same mistake with you, Rich,’ said Joe. ‘No way. Reckon they won’t let you out for no stag night. Learnt their lesson first time round, see. I’m gonna get one of the dummies to dance now, I think. The blonde one. No. Reckon I’ll have a go at the other dummy, the dark one.’

  Barry stayed to keep Richard company. ‘You could just shut your eyes and pretend she’s someone else and not Wilma Dorff. Well, let’s say two someone elses.’ He looked across the hall at Wilma who was sitting out the three-step Polonaise in anticipation of the big one. ‘Yeah. I reckon, just shut yer eyes.’

  ‘She’d sure suit you then,’ said Richard, nastily. ‘You’re half bloody blind.’

  ‘Not that blind,’ said Barry, squinting at Richard through the thick pebbled lens of his glasses.

  Barry’s somewhat limited vision in no way precluded a very full and active life, most particularly when he mounted the great love of his life – his motorbike. An elderly and erratic machine, brake-less and with only two speeds (dead slow and flat out), it frequently carried all three of them on rabbit-hunting safaris up in the rock-strewn hills of the district, or on cross-country forays into the town eight kilometres away. Cross-country was necessary because the rider was unlicensed, the machine unregistered and the local cop a bastard. Night riding was not impossible but it was difficult, given the bike’s lack of a headlight.

  ‘Jesus! This is one rough track,’ Barry had once yelled over his shoulder to Richard. ‘Bloody wet, too.’

  ‘It’s not a bloody track,’ had screamed Richard. ‘It’s the bloody stream and Joe came off a couple hundred metres back. You probably drowned the poor bugger!’

  The slivers of life faded from Richard’s mind as, morose, he stared into the fog of the Polonaise dancers and eventually focused on Joe, who was happily chatting away at Veronica, the dark dummy.

  At Veronica is perfectly correct. Veronica and her blonde sister, Merle, were deaf and mute. Deaf, mute and very very beautiful. Rose-red and Snow-white. Both were skilled seamstresses at the shirt factory and were completely unaffected by the hideous clatter of several dozen commercial sewing machines. They communicated easily enough with each other – some signing, some eye contact and, quite likely, much mental telepathy. But to all others, most particuarly boys, their handicap seemed a brick wall. At sixteen, seventeen or even eighteen, a full and meaningful relationship is not something one spontaneously considers with beauty so impedimented.

  The eyes of Wilma Dorff were on Richard Brown. She licked her lips, a great overblown cat-like lick. Richard shuddered and wished with all his heart he had brought his new rifle with him. Cats, after all, were his and Joe’s and Barry’s favourite target after rabbits. Still, not even in these less than sensitive parts was it quite the thing to tote your gun to a tennis club social evening.

  The eyes of Ma Dorff were on Richard Brown. Beadily, blackcurrant-ishly, they ran up his slim frame, his soft, sweet features, his sky-blue eyes and his floppy gold-brown hair. She whispered into the ear of her daughter and they both chuckled mightily.

  The eyes of Dorfuss, Stan and Fred Dorff were on Richard Brown. What the hell, they seemed to say – if this weed was what their little sister wanted, well, they’d hogtie the skinny little sod and serve him up to her with whatever dressing or undressing was necessary!

  The eyes of the blonde dummy, Merle, were on Richard Brown and they caught his frantic, terror-stricken stare. She smiled a
t him through the heat haze. A knowing smile. Richard gulped and tried to smile back at her.

  Barry shoved his hip-flask at Richard. ‘You better take the lot. It’s not the supper waltz Wilma wants you for – she wants you for bloody supper out in them bushes.’ He nodded at the jungle of overgrown shrubbery outside the nearest window. Barry shook his head. Once Richard was lost in the thickness of the underbrush, plus Wilma Dorff’s petticoats, the poor bloke would be unlikely to surface ever again. Definitely the end of a very good friendship. ‘Yeah, mate,’ he said, gently. ‘You take the lot.’

  The last thing Richard Brown needed in these final moments of life as he had known it was to have his sister and Mike the Magnificent stroll arm-in-arm into the hall, as if they owned golden god did nothing more than provide the merest flicker of interest between his legs. Why oh why did these two have to turn up to witness this, his ultimate humiliation?

  With a great drumroll from Gladys and a rumble of chords from Vi, the dreaded dance was properly announced. ‘Gentlemen! Take your partners for the supper waltz and no pushing or shoving or fighting to get to the tables spread so full and fine by our ladies and womenfolk…’ Another drumroll and then Vi and Gladys launched into ‘The Loveliest Night of the Year’.

  Richard, trapped, trembled. Barry, on one side, nudged him. Joe, on his other side, prodded none too gently. ‘Go on. You gotta go ask her like she’s not told you already. Go on or you’re a dead duck, man,’ and they both smiled sweetly as they directed their friend to the site of his execution.

  Stan and Fred Dorff, clearly considering the campaign over, took off early to the supper room to get a head start on the buffet.

  Dorfuss Dorff lumbered to his mother, heaved her to her feet and, in a sort of stately elephantine fashion, moved her into the waltz.

  Joe left Richard’s side to join Veronica on the dance floor.