For Everyone Concerned (12 page)

Not knowing where the emphasis would fall, some days she walked, some days she crawled.

The woodwork teacher at our intermediate school had a poster pinned to the inside of the medicine cabinet. It showed a chisel piercing a palm clean through. It was a warning: these tools are sharp, boys. This was about our safety, our future. Grisly impalement. He’d show us the picture by flashing open the medicine cabinet door. Look! Look upon it, you boys! The woodwork teacher, more or less, rewarded one of us from time to time with a peek. We longed to see it. And the woodwork teacher played with our longing, as all teachers do. The secret and not-secret display. The hide-and-seek.

The chisel stuck through the hand said something about us all, the woodwork boys, once we’d entered the woodwork room, where there were lots of hammers and saws and vices, and where of course,
most importantly,
there were no girls
. I don’t know what it said, maybe it said, ‘There are no girls around so we can be men, boys. And if you want, you can even stick a chisel in your hand.’ It was weirdly aspirational, that poster. The person who’d injured himself in this way—and we only got to see his arm—was not foolish but heroic.

You boys!

Down the corridor we sometimes heard the shrieking noises of the girls, doing their sewing. What were they doing in there?

Concentrate, you boys!

The other thing we aspired to in woodwork, that dangerous manly bloody trade, was to fashion wood into rather quaint and useless kitchen gifts for our mothers. Mum was what the woodwork teacher always said. Mum won’t like that mess. The favourite was a shopping list reminder board, with the names of common items such as milk and bread carefully burnt into the wood and little pegs to plug into holes if that item was required. If any Lower Hutt mother ever walked the supermarket aisles carrying this chunk of wood, I did not see her. The non-portable shopping list ‘accessory’ would perhaps hang for a while in the kitchen and then it would disappear but we’d learned our lessons. Woodwork was vicious, and it was almost solely about pleasing Mum.

We
had our chisel on the inside of the cabinet door but who knows what
the girls
had in their sewing room, with all those needles and that wonderfully comic invention, the pin cushion. Who can resist pressing his or her hand gently down on one of those?