The Freckled Gang
Alice had to wear them. There wasn’t any other choice. Just like her brother’s bike, everything she got was secondhand. Now Jimmy’s boots. And it was her first day at high school. Plus there was a hole the size of a two-shilling piece under the right foot where mother had glued a tiny piece of cardboard. The left one had worn thin, but she could still feel the road through her socks. She had to wait six weeks for a new pair, when dad returned from Gunnedah with his wages. How embarrassing! Alice knew there were only two good things that would happen today at Gosford High School. Wendy Ballantine and Bronwyn Hobbs. The old Ettalong gang would help her get over the sulks.
At Manning’s bus stop her dreaming begins. She thinks she sees Heather at the Rundel’s gate, but it’s Margaret, her sister, getting the mail. Miss Parker plods slowly up Ridge Street. Alice notices her hair has been chopped back since her father died. Standing there waiting, no one greets Betty. About five people are engrossed in their thoughts. Alice’s mind is on the day her Gosford High School letter came, everyone holding hands in ring-a-rosy. Since then her face had a happy groove. She didn’t dare show too much excitement in front of Heather. Heather only ever liked music, and was at the bottom of sixth class. With all her yellow jaundice and hepatitis sick days from school, it was inevitable that she got the rowdies at Woy Woy High. Alice was relieved she wasn’t going there, especially with the Ozone’s bodgies and widgies. She couldn’t stand them in the Café, always bumping into her snooker cue, or turning the jukebox key over to Elvis just when you’ve paid for Peggy Sue and Chantilly Lace; Charlene knocking her elbow, spilling her milkshake. Then there was the blocking at the skating rink; the half-dozen Brando look-alikes circling leather jackets over their shoulders like they were scratching some sort of itch. Toughies! Chew their nails like it was their grandmother. Alice knew Skinner had ended up at the Kariong Boys’ Home, some of his mates too, for stealing and arson. Now she wouldn’t have them blowing farts on the bus, nor hear the noisy collapse of numb-chucker chain, or the deliberate thud of knuckle-dusters on counter tops. It was no use sinking into silence; she could still see Heather on the weekend, Judith during boarding school holidays. Gosford High was going to be a brownstone building with plenty of English and History. She thought she might be quiet and hardworking, resisting pimply boys who nicked things from Woolworths and acted half their age.
But she couldn’t pretend to miss the shoulder height of her friend. Since childhood, Alice depended on Heather. She would say goodbye every afternoon at her gate feeling like the pink layer in a licorice allsort, while Heather was the whole lolly bag. Heather’s musical house was where Alice learnt everything, even to fall in love with Fizz. Most of the time he was never there, but his smell was. And when he did walk in, catching them at the pianola, his telepathic eyes sent a violent pain between her legs, so much so she couldn’t push the pedals anymore. Heather would flap her tongue and say things like, ‘are you two going into bat?’ Then Alice would turn and tell Heather to ‘dry up!’
On the Woy Woy platform there’s some segregation, but for the most part the boys hang around Bronwyn Hobbs. Since moving from Bankstown last year, you have only known her for six months. Someone shouts her name. Now she catches you coming down the bridge steps. Limbering up for a run, with her mouth in the shape of a scream, she hugs you and Wendy Ballantine in a gale forced head wind. You know why the boys are hovering. She has these huge raisings on her chest that lift her box pleats and front hemline.
You follow Bronwyn and Wendy into the Ladies. They flutter out their hair and hoist up their shiny black shoes on the bench. They got them in Sydney, both the same, mum did too, in Anthony Hordens. You keep yours wedged into the floor tiles. The train toots down the track and everyone scatters. Most of the boys still mad-eyed and high on holiday camping, quickly sink tickets into pockets. You follow a jealous path to the front of the platform. Just a little bit annoyed. Then more peeved in the carriage when Dennis Lester dribbles diamonds of spit on your half-read Tom and Jerry. Everyone laughs in spasms. It was a mimicking free-for-all. A Hanna Barbera.
After the boys turn seats into tables, they’re ready for a smoke. Alice knows they’re on a mission, anything other than going to school. Marlboro cigarettes and matches glow. But Alice in her unflattering shoes heads for the end seat, with Wendy joining her after an asthma attack. She tells the girls she has to prove herself at school. She’s on trial. She doesn’t want to let down the family or Jimmy. It was thanks to his top school report that she got there. ‘Is he some sort of brain,’ asks Bronwyn. ‘Yeah, but I want to show mum and dad I’m just as clever. He’s only in the B Class, and I’m doing French and Latin. Don’t know how I’m going to go with Geometry and Algebra though, I hate Maths.’
Interwoven in a melee of commuters, the whole shebang in crinkled shirts and slung blazers, like a future classroom of sorts, alights the train. They leave fingerprints, ash and smoke in the carriage, orange pulp on poster walls, and join a single queue through the Gosford ticket gate among a company of briefcases and papers. Then there’s a quiet meander up the hill.
Halfway up Mann Street, Alice feels the cardboard doing a double-shake inside her shoe. She stops at the end of the straggling bunch, sits on the edge of the concrete path, removes the offending piece and throws it into the bush. Later in the day, after a blistered walk to the train she practises telling her mother over and over that there was one thing about school that was absolutely necessary. She wasn’t going to go back until they shopped either in Gosford or Anthony Hordens, she didn’t care where, but she needed to have a new pair of shiny black, lace-up Batas. |
