The Whole Business with Kiffo and the Pitbull (2 page)

But Kiffo . . . mad, magnificent Kiffo . . . well, he saw matters differently. For him, a teacher, particularly a new teacher, had no rights at all. They weren't human, really. For Kiffo, it was nothing less than his solemn duty to give them a hard time.

So there he was, sitting at the back of the class, idly tossing a footy in the air. Feet up on the desk. No books out, of course. Miss Leanyer was trying to get us to read a short story about teenage love written by someone who was, quite clearly, 120 years old. To be fair to her, she knew enough not to ask Kiffo to read out loud. He didn't do that. Ever. And he had made it plain that no one should ever ask him to. Nonetheless, the footy was really distracting, which is just what Kiffo intended. After ten minutes, Miss Leanyer couldn't ignore it anymore.

‘Jaryd,' she said. The infinite patience in her voice made you want to poke her in the eye with a sharpened stick. ‘Put the ball away, please.'

‘In a minute, Miss,' replied Kiffo, throwing the ball from one hand to the other.

‘Not in a minute, Jaryd. Now, please.'

Kiffo's mouth twitched slightly. Not quite a smile, but I knew the signs. He had her hooked. It was just a question of reeling her in now, enjoying the battle. He tossed the ball into the air again. I looked from one to the other, like I was the ball girl in a tennis match. You know, when the ball is whipping across the net and you risk whiplash to keep it in vision. Kiffo seeded number one; Miss Leanyer a wild card. Outgunned. Wow, I'm mixing my metaphors, but you know what I mean. So there's this silence for about ten seconds. A challenge thrown down. It was much better than the short story we were reading. Miss Leanyer moved slightly, her eyes darting down to her desk. I knew what was going through her mind. She'd issued an order. Probably regretted it now, but it was too late. She had to see it through to its conclusion. She cleared her throat.

‘If you don't put the ball away now, Jaryd, I'll confiscate it.'

‘You can't do that, Miss. It's my property and you don't have no right to take what belongs to me.'

Standard stuff, so far. We all knew the ‘it's my property' routine. Not that we had any idea if it was true or not. But it seemed to work most times. That's the thing with people like Kiffo. He knew his rights. Or thought he did. Classroom lawyers, one and all. I looked again at Miss Leanyer. ‘Your move,' I thought.

‘Get your feet off the desk,' she said. ‘Now!'

No ‘please' this time. I love that about teachers. They all have this in-built politeness even when they are dealing with vermin. ‘I would like you to take that knife away from the Principal's throat and stop setting the school on fire, please.' Always the ‘please'. Maybe they think that it will somehow seep into the student's unconscious mind. Role models of politeness. But this was getting interesting. She had covered his bet and upped the ante by sticking another five hundred dollars on top. I could see them in an old Western, facing each other across a cheap table in the local saloon. There'd be a tired honky-tonk pianist in the background and a bartender, with rolled-up sleeves, skimming slugs of whisky across a polished surface to dusty cowboys.

‘I think you're bluffing, Mister, and I'm prepared to put my money on it.' The piano would pause and painted women would stop toying with their frilly garters.

I was riveted.

Kiffo slowly moved one foot off the table. He sat there, one hairy leg stuck on the side of the desk, tilting back in his chair. If you looked carefully, you could see up his shorts. Enough to make a girl gag. The ball spun slowly on Kiffo's hand.

‘Both feet off the desk and stop leaning back on your chair. This instant!'

What? Two things to do at the same time? Doesn't compute. Neurones burning out, smoke coming from the ears. Fantastic. I hadn't had such fun in ages. Miss Leanyer was really going for it. The whole class was absorbed, praying that the bell wouldn't go until this little drama had been played out to its conclusion. Comedy or tragedy? It could go either way.

‘Unless you do as you're told now, you will leave this classroom.'

As you have probably gathered, I'm something of an expert in these matters. An acute observer of classroom relationships. And you're probably wondering about my reaction to this last statement. Well, there's a couple of things to be said about it. Firstly, Miss Leanyer had done well by not threatening detention. Kiffo would have laughed in her face. He didn't do detention. He knew well enough that the school needed a parent's written permission to keep you behind after normal school hours. He also knew that his parent would never give permission. So detention was a completely idle threat. But the notion of sending him out of the room was fatally flawed as well. She'd left herself with no room to back out. No path of retreat. They should teach that in whatever places teach teachers how to be teachers. Sorry, bit clumsy. But you get my point. If Kiffo said, ‘Get stuffed', then how was she to force him? She couldn't touch him. We all knew
those
rights! Mind you, I doubt if she would have wanted to touch him.

Secondly, what kind of a threat was it? ‘I'll send you out.' Oh, horrors. Unthinkable. Do you really mean, Miss, that I'll have to forgo the rest of this really crappy short story? Enough to make the strongest man blanch. I don't think so.

Anyway, it turned out okay. In the short term, at least. Kiffo slowly swung his other foot off the desk. Of course, it wasn't really two orders after all. With both feet off the desk, he couldn't keep leaning back in his chair. And that's where it should have ended. I mean, Miss Leanyer had done better than anyone could have hoped. She had got him to obey an instruction. Flushed with success, however, she pushed it too far. Think of it this way. If you had just stuck both your feet into a crocodile-infested river and dangled them around for five minutes, you'd be happy to still have them attached to your legs, wouldn't you? You wouldn't think that it was a good idea to put your head in as an encore. But that's what Miss Leanyer did. I couldn't believe it.

‘Now get your books out and put that football away, Jaryd Kiffing.'

She turned back to the blackboard without waiting for a response. Maybe that was her big mistake. I'm not sure. All I know is that Kiffo twirled the ball on his index finger and, with a quick sidelong glance at the rest of the class, launched it into the air. I watched in fascination as the ball left Kiffo's hand. It arced slowly over the desks. I knew, I swear to God I knew, that his aim was perfect. Think of all those films where the real action happens in slow motion. Miss Leanyer, her head turned away from the class, moving slowly, oh so slowly towards the board. A piece of chalk resting leisurely in her hand. The ball reaching the highest point of its flight, turning gradually in the tension-ridden air. Students swivelling their heads to watch. It took ages. It was as if the ball was attached to the back of Miss Leanyer's head by a piece of strong, invisible elastic. I'm even prepared to swear that at one stage she moved her head upwards
and the ball adjusted its flight path
, like one of those heat-seeking missiles.

It hit her smack on the back of the head.

That would have been bad enough, but her face was so close to the blackboard that the force shoved her head forward so that she head-butted the board. It was a hell of a whack. I nearly wet myself with excitement. I mean, I'm not a sadist or anything. I still think it was really sad, what Kiffo did to her. But you had to be there to appreciate it. It was . . . thrilling.

Miss Leanyer turned towards the class. I might have been the first to see it – that mad look in her eyes, like someone who has been really close to an edge and then suddenly gets a shove that puts them right over. I can't swear to it, obviously. Maybe even then she would have kept control. Difficult to say. But if you want my opinion, it was Kiffo's smirk and his comment – ‘Sorry, Miss, it slipped' – that really did the damage. What happened next was all a bit confusing. Before we knew it, Miss Leanyer – that small, quiet, timid teacher – had turned into a raving lunatic. She jumped across the desks, clearing students' heads by a good margin, and fell on Kiffo like an avenging harpy. Face twisted into a mad grimace, she had him by the throat and was banging his head against the wall.

It was the look on Kiffo's face that was the best of all. He was completely taken by surprise. I mean, who wouldn't be? And his look was saying, ‘This can't be happening to me', as Miss Leanyer's fingers tightened around his throat. She was growling, like an enraged animal. Spit flecked her face. I believe that she would have killed him if someone hadn't intervened. We didn't, of course. Stunned, I guess. But the door crashed open and Mr Brewer, the teacher from next door, flew into the room. I imagine he was coming in to complain about some kid banging on the partition wall while he was trying to teach. But he took one look at the situation and leaped into action.

The last we ever saw of Miss Leanyer, she was being dragged by Mr Brewer out of the classroom door, her eyes mad with rage, fingers clawing the air for Kiffo's throat. A pity really. I reckon she would have had our attention and respect for the rest of the semester. Even Kiffo might have got his books out for her. He wouldn't have written in them, of course. I'm not that much of a romantic.

So that was that. We never found out what happened to Miss Leanyer. There were rumours, naturally. Some said that she had given up teaching and had taken to mud wrestling down south for a living. If her attack on Kiffo was anything to go by, she would have been good at it too. Others said that she was a stripper in Kings Cross. The story I liked best was the one that had her in a lunatic asylum stabbing scissors into footballs, drooling and screaming, ‘Are you Jaryd Kiffing?' at all the visitors. That was my favourite, but as I made it up myself, you could say I was biased.

Naturally, Kiffo took all the credit for getting rid of her. For a while he was the envy of the school. Even Year 12 students looked on him with respect. As if he'd attacked a heavily fortified enemy encampment with only a rusty tin-opener and wiped out an entire battalion. He was a legend. He told me later that his dad tried to sue the Education Department for a million dollars. When he found out that this was going to be a little difficult, his dad offered to forget the whole matter for a slab of beer and two hundred smokes. A bit difficult after that climb down to remain a credible plaintiff.

Yeah, he had a good few weeks did Kiffo. But then Miss Payne appeared. And Jaryd Kiffing was a marked man. You see, Miss Payne was a different type of teacher entirely. If Miss Leanyer was the Snow White of the educational world, Miss Payne was the slash 'em up homicidal maniac. And Kiffo was home alone, and the phone lines had been cut.

Chapter 2
So just how many friends
has John Marsden got?

‘Creeping hell!' said Vanessa. ‘What in the name of God is that?'

I was bent over my exercise book, putting the final touches to a character star sign entry, when her hoarse whisper caught my attention. I looked up at her face. Her eyes were glazed with horror and her mouth turned down in an expression that seemed to indicate that something exceptionally smelly had just been thrust under her nose. Naturally, I twisted my head to follow her line of sight. And when I saw what she had seen, my jaw hit the desk . . .

Whoa! Hang on a moment. Let's take a break here. To be honest, I'm a complete beginner when it comes to story-telling and I need to take a time-out. Collect my thoughts. Sorry.

Tell me something. Have you ever read John Marsden's
Everything I Know About Writing
? Rhetorical question! Of course, I could sit here until you answer, though I suspect that might take a long time. Sudden image of me sitting in the library for years waiting for the reply. I'm a skeleton in the corner, crumbling into dust, with a little sign on my rib cage saying, ‘still waiting for a reply'.

New students come to the school: ‘What's with the skeleton?'

Librarian: ‘She was writing a book. Asked a rhetorical question. Still waiting for a reply.'

Anyway, the reason I mention old John's book is that there was a bit in there that went something along the lines of, ‘Just tell the story as if you were telling it to a friend.' I'm not sure if they were the exact words, but frankly I can't be bothered to look it up. You can, if you're interested. I thought at the time that this was good advice. It sounds easy enough. Now I've started, though, it seems trickier than I thought. I mean, I don't know you at all. I wouldn't recognise you from a hole in the ground. If I was telling this story to some friends, then they would already know Jaryd Kiffing and they would know me and they would know the school and everything. I'd just be able to get straight into what happened with Miss Payne. But you don't know anything. No offence. And that means I'll have to tell you about things that I wouldn't have to tell a friend.