Читать книгу The Paradise Stain - Nick Glade-Wright - Страница 14

At the same time that John Sturges had entered the Nerve Two reception area, hesitantly making his way to the young girl at the desk to check in for his interview with Kant, Melinda was leaving home to the sound of Yetta singing in the kitchen as she went about preparing the ingredients for her famous spiced biscuits.

‘Kosi kosi łapci … pojedziem do babci … Babcia da nam mleczka … a dziadzius pierniczka.’

Melinda had heard Yetta sing the Polish nursery rhyme many times to Rosie, who loved to clap, clap little hands like the young girl in the song, when heading off to grandma’s house to be fed on milk and gingerbread cookies.

Half an hour later, when Melinda opened the kiln room door, she was instantly wrapped in its womb like heat. The kiln had reached temperature overnight, an 1100 degree glaze firing turning silica into glass. It still wasn’t quite ready to open up. If she opened the door too early because of impatient student demands most of the pots would crack with the inrush of cold air onto hot clay bodies. She switched the buzzing extractor fan off and came back into the studio to prepare for the students’ arrival.

From the damp cupboards, lined with tin sheeting to extend the drying time of clay, she lifted out several works and began placing them around the room for the students when they arrived. Melinda felt it was important to have the works in place, particularly for the special needs students who were creatures of habit, always sitting in the same spot at the same table.

Mason’s piece was essentially a lump of clay on a craft wood board into which he would prod with his withered fingers, grunting and forcing subterranean sounds from his mouth. His head, neck and shoulders, twisting and contorting as his tongue moved in and out of a mouth that had minimal muscle control, writhed like an ancient creature from the depths of a sea cave. His cerebral palsy movements were involuntary and his noisy expulsions spasmodic and alarming, but his interaction with clay, in this room, with these other human beings, made his eyes shine with joy.

As it turned out Mason was away sick today. The merest cough would require regular massage and gentle thumping on his chest and back to break up the congestion. A lack of this constant attention could result in something far more serious or even death.

Pammy trundled in. Big lady, thirtyish; records of her birth had gone astray. She was intellectually impaired, and irrepressibly cheerful due to a complete lack of comprehension about negativity, an attribute Melinda wished would rub off onto some of the sixteen year old hoodied rabbits that had just burst in, in a flurry of chatter, ribbing and punching, girls and boys alike. And these were the so called normal ones.

Here’s my pack of primitives, Melinda mused as they jostled for a position around the same table. The smell of sour smoke infused in their hair and clothes made it almost as difficult to teach them close up as it was with the impoverished Jeremy Sedgebrook, whose trousers invariably ponged of week old, slow dribble urine.

‘Hello Miss Kant,’ Pammy said, with the muted voice of someone who didn’t want to be noticed this morning, but she adored Melinda so she often gambled with her safety. She sat in her place and waited for Melinda to say, ‘All right Pammy, we going to do some work now?’

‘Yes, Miss Kant. I’m going to do some … ’

‘Melinda!’ one of the shabby boys interrupted. ‘We git our fings from the kiln now?’

‘It’s not quite cool enough yet, Phillip. If I were to open it up now, the cold air would rush in and all your hard work would explode.’

‘Cool.’

‘If you get going with something new it’ll be okay in about half an hour. Maybe you could try something a little taller this time. What about a vase for your mum to put flowers in?’

‘Oaw,’ he tutted. ‘I ain’t a poof. I want me ash tray so I can ’ave a smoke arfter.’

‘You’re going to have to wait till you get home anyway. You know there’s a no smoking policy on campus.’

‘Oaw.’

Pammy giggled and whispered inaudibly to her table top, ‘Smoking’s not healthy for you.’ Almost inaudibly …

‘Fuck off Pammy, ya spaz.’ A runt of a rabbit sneered without looking up from his own table top.

Pammy giggled again.

‘Ya der brain.’

Pammy smiled, puffed with pride at her audacity in engaging a hostile enemy. Unlike the College campus, there would be no physical retaliation in the classroom with the teacher present an insignificant skirmish by all accounts but for Pammy a major military triumph.

‘Right, come on everyone, let’s get started. And for once let’s try to keep the language clean. There are new bags of stone ware clay, and I’ve mixed up a new cobalt under glaze in that bucket there, which will give you a strong blue for your designs. I’ve made up new white slip, since someone decided to mix the last lot with some iron oxide. The clean slip, and let’s keep it clean too, is now in this bucket here.’

Like constant radar Melinda scanned the room with her peripheral vision. ‘You two, Jenny, Maureen, stop your nattering. Your boxes need the galleries scraped a little more so the lids fit. Here Pammy, try this wooden tool; it won’t cut so deeply.’

Melinda was never on her own teaching these composite classes. There was a ratio determined by the Education Department of the number of support aides per disabled students, like Mason, who needed to be wheeled to the toilets and ‘sorted out’, and Kevin Saunders, an autistic lad of twenty two, who had just arrived with his father, Jackson Saunders, an accountant with the Hobart City Council.

The two regular carers, David Wenderby and Carol Symmons, were both endlessly patient. Of course, it was easy for them to remain calm because the sole responsibility for discipline was Melinda’s. They were there to assist with technical problems like carrying heavy pots for their students, wheeling some of them to the toilet, wiping dribbles from faces and keeping a vigilant eye out for safety. Carol, who was studying autism as part of her Master’s degree, had applied for the job because of the inclusive programs that had been set up for special needs students at the Polytechnic.

‘Kevin doesn’t see the forest, only individual trees’, had been how Carol had explained Kevin’s condition to Melinda when she first joined the class. Her studies had equipped her with an armoury of theoretical descriptions encased neatly in nutshells, most of which seemed irrelevant once she found herself in the middle of the classroom theatre.

Kevin had been diagnosed as having a higher functioning autism. Research had shown similarities between this and Asperger’s Syndrome, where behavioural patterns could oscillate between ‘normal’ behaviour and severe autistic behaviour. It had been shown that high functioning autistic adults can meet the criteria for a diagnosis of autism yet show no cognitive delays, and can speak, read and write with an average to above average IQ.

With Kevin there were difficulties in communication, language and social interaction. His repetitive behaviour and narrow field of interest were usually deterrents for relationships with other students to develop, positive ones anyway. Abstract language concepts like irony, and even humour were often beyond his comprehension. Kevin could not ‘read’ people and was incapable of seeing or understanding manipulation, some thing the antagonistic rabbits quickly picked up on. In short, to them Kevin was fair game.

Kevin found it difficult to maintain eye contact when people spoke to him so the other students assumed he was always disinterested in them. So a cycle of indifference commenced, except when he was displaying his obsessiveness with cleanliness. The rabbits would wait with pent up anticipation when ever Kevin arrived. His first task was to go straight to the dirty, clay smeared sinks and taps to clean them. Then he would wipe clean the light switches, and state, without humour or joy, to no one in particular, ‘Spotless.’ Of course, being a pottery workshop the sinks and light switches provided Kevin with endless occupational activity.

The class caught on to his routine, and by the end of first semester they would watch the cleaning process and just as he finished they would all call out, ‘What do you call that, Kevin?’

He would look around and in a flat, matter of fact voice repeat, ‘Spotless.’ After a while something must have touched him deep inside because this ‘sport’ often resulted in the faintest smile.

Since Kevin had been attending these classes, his confidence and ability to engage in minimal conversation had improved out of sight as he developed an off beat fascination in numbers, quantities, percentages, and dates. His endlessly patient parents and Melinda were bemused by this fact, particularly as they were usually in relation to disasters, natural and man made. Kevin’s parents did not discourage Kevin from watching the news on the television; on the contrary they thought he should go through life like everyone else. His father had managed to teach Kevin how to use the internet by keying in salient words, only to become perplexed at his interest in words like Cyclone, War, and Catastrophe.

‘I suppose that’s the reality for all of us. Isn’t it?’ Jackson had tried to justify to Melinda several weeks ago after she’d told him Kevin had been entertaining the class that morning with the disturbing numbers of people that had been killed in various conflicts in the history of the world.

And this morning too, Melinda noticed Kevin seemed troubled again, too unsettled to play with his clay or even clean taps. Several times he’d got up from his stool, sat down, got up, walked around, and sat down again.

‘You okay, Kevin?’ Melinda asked.

‘Yes Melinda, I’m okay,’ he replied without the slightest inkling that anything about his behaviour was different. Then he began to speak, quite out of the blue, monotonously, ‘On May the eighteenth 1980 at 8.32 am, 52 people died because the Mt St Helen’s volcano erupted.’

‘Wow. I didn’t know that, Kevin. But I remember it was a huge eruption.’ ‘The summit was reduced by 1312 metres afterwards.’ And then, as if the two incidences were related, ‘In 2009 in the Victorian bushfires 208 people died.’

‘It was a terrible disaster, Kevin,’ Melinda replied as she scraped a lump of soggy clay up from the floor under his feet. She, unlike Kevin, whose comprehension was only fixed on the unemotive facts, understood the consequences of destructive bushfires, and had been moved by the suffering caused at the time.

As Melinda stood up, Kevin, who had sat on the stool next to her, began to ramble into his hands. His words, like a dooms day monologue, were not directed at anyone in particular, and had no correlation to the previous conversation. Melinda held back and allowed the words to flow a torrent.

‘Eight million died in World War One. Nineteen million, five hundred and thirty six thousand wounded. In World War Two twenty million, eight hundred and fifty eight thousand, eight hundred soldiers died, and twenty seven million, three hundred and seventy two thousand, nine hundred civilians died. Three thousand, nine hundred and twelve kamikaze suicide pilots in the Japanese Air Force died in the Pacific region between 1944 and 1945 … ’

‘I wish you’d go an’ bloody join ’em,’ one of the rabbits grumbled, aggrieved by Kevin commanding so much attention.

Kevin continued as if he was sitting by himself in the room.

‘Eleven hundred people died in the floods in Pakistan, eighteen died in the Queensland floods this year, one died in Cyclone Yasi, seventy one died in Cyclone Tracy in 1974, four hundred died in 1899 in Cyclone Mahina in Cape York, one hundred were Aborigines.’

‘Okay, thanks, Kevin. That was most informative. But I think that’s probably enough facts for now.’

‘Yeah, why don’t you go and clean the bloody sinks, ya dick head?’ a greasy haired female rabbit finally sneered through a lip load of piercings.

‘All right, all right, thanks, Tracy. How about we take a break? Ten minutes. When you come back I’ll open the kiln and you can collect your masterpieces.’

‘’Ooray!’ The rabbit mob chanted, scuffing their stools back, having already forgotten Kevin’s recital.

‘’Bout bloody time,’ one mumbled as he barged past Pammy, rudely knocking her.

The cheers were a hollow expression of delight for Melinda, for she knew the practices of some these hooded, sneaky eyed delinquents and their real motivation. Behind a service area, on the southern end of the campus there was a tall brick wall, on the way to the rabbits’ backstreet warrens. Over the past few years there had accumulated a large pile of broken clay shards at the base of it. Brightly glazed bowls, quirky animals and masks, the occasional teapot, albeit with dribbly spouts, platters, carved boxes and sculptural forms constructed with fine white stoneware clay, and delicate crackle glazed Raku fired pots had been hurled at the brick wall with idiotic cheers. No ashtrays though. Red target rings had been sprayed about two metres off the ground. In the centre was a crudely painted penis and testicles with the words smash all poofs sprayed underneath.

Melinda could understand the desire to create an explosion. And the sort after adrenalin rush that followed. By all accounts, while they were under the teacher’s watchful eye, they had professed a primitive pride in something they had created themselves. Melinda could see it in their eyes as they took hold of their glazed works, still warm from the belly of the fire. So it was beyond her why these boys, and girls, would want to destroy their own work that they had given so much attention to, given birth to.

That was until a young student at the end of last year, David Such, a sensitive and unusually creative lad from a background almost completely devoid of nurture, made the most delicately carved figurine of a mother holding a child in her arms. It was a simple but profound representation of family love. It had been on display in the cabinet by the principal’s office for several weeks, admired and talked about by teachers, visiting parents and students alike. Knowing the boy’s home life Melinda was fascinated. It was so realistic and so evocative of a mother’s devotion to her child, it belied reason.

But a fortnight later, Charlene Peters, the only girl in Melinda’s pottery class then who was quite at ease working at the same tables as the spazes, had told Melinda that David had removed the figurine from the cabinet, and had taken it to The Wall. Charlene had retrieved the mother’s decapitated head amongst the rubble and handed it dolefully to Melinda.

‘Why David?’ she’d asked him later, her eyes beginning to glaze like the lustre on the little figurine’s face.

David had mumbled to the ground, ‘Me Dad reckons I’m gay if I do stuff like that.’ Then raising his heavy, sad puppy eyes to look at Melinda, the one person in his life who had given him a sense of his own worth, his potential, he’d added forlornly, ‘I’m not, ya know.’

Melinda had smiled sympathetically at the boy, but felt utterly defeated. Why the hell do I put myself through this? she screamed inside.

This year she would contact parents to try to encourage them to support their children’s creative efforts in pottery, but Melinda knew that the task of getting through to parents was often more daunting than classroom management. Home was usually the battleground where neglect and dissent festered.

The kiln firing was a success. By the time the students had returned to the studio Melinda had taken their work from the kiln and placed it on their tables. She’d let them fetch their own work directly from the kiln once. It had been a disaster. After the lower shelf props were dislodged in a shoving match the whole six layers came tumbling down.

A quiet pride existed over the next fifteen minutes as every one admired their own finished work placed carefully beside them.

‘Good job everyone. Now let’s spend the next ten minutes cleaning up before recess,’ Melinda called out to the chattering class.

She began replacing the lids on the glaze buckets. Tables were wiped. Unfinished works shelved in damp cupboards. Students and carers filed out.

As Melinda closed the studio door she noticed that Kevin had made a good job of the light switch.