Whole Wild World (6 page)

Doubt. What do they know that I do not?

Among the older students there is a carnival atmosphere. Balls are flying around and girls are embracing like long lost friends after a six-week summer absence. A bell rings and the commotion subsides. Over a croaky loudspeaker a voice directs Miss So-and-So's class to gather at once. Then another summons, followed by another.

‘I'll see you at little lunch,' says Šime, slipping away.

Mothers in lively sundresses and sunglasses chatter like sisters over a fence. The kindy kids, in uniforms far too big, are corralled in one group. Over in front of the main school building Sister Dorothea, our principal, is speaking.

‘Welcome back, boys and girls. 1969 is going to be a big year, especially for our new kindies.'

Boys older than Å ime deliver metal crates of milk to the front of each line. Children move in single file to take a small bottle. I'd never opened one of these on my own or even held a glass bottle
this small, a size only for schools. I try to watch how others are doing it, but they do it quickly.

There's no single way. Okay, that's a relief. Some twist off the foil lid, fling it with a twist of the fingers; others peel it off messily, piece by piece. One boy pushes straight down on the top with his thumb, resulting in a splatter on his new blue school shirt. One or two kids turn over the lid and lick off the thick white cream (which I hated the first time I tried it). Still others shake their bottles, which I discover is how you mix in the cream.

My parents are behind the fence, waving happily as I walk up the steps to the classroom. I wonder what they'll get up to at home without me. The craziest criers have settled down; some mothers are in class, watching from a distance. Kindergarten is one big room on the bottom floor of the newest building, divided into two classes. We sit on the carpet, fidgeting, new shoes tight and squeaky. My brown cardboard suitcase, not a scratch, holds a lunch box, drink bottle, pencils. My TV English will only get me so far, so I want lots of books to make me smart. But in kindergarten we won't have textbooks or exercise books or pens; our pencils-only days will be measured out in pre-printed worksheets.

Šime and Mary are the only people I know at St Joseph's. Some of the other kids know each other, so I look out for boys and girls on their own. One curly-haired boy who speaks through his nose knows how things are playing out, so I follow him. He was in kinder the year before – even more reason to stick with a veteran. Before we got to the playground, Šime asked me to call him Sammy at school. Over time it will become Sam, which is the only thing I'll call him – except when lodging formal complaints with my parents over his misdeeds during games and property disputes.

Å ime isn't keen on speaking in Croatian at school. At little lunch, as we called morning tea, I ate my big lunch before Å ime
found me. I was still hungry and ate the morning snack as well. So I had a liquid lunch. Å ime bought me a soft drink for five cents. I was amazed by his composure. He went to the tuckshop with money and got them for us; I'd never bought anything, although I had a good sense of different coins and could add up a pile of them if nobody rushed me. We sat on a wooden bench against the tall brick wall of the old building. He sipped a green drink. I had a red one and wanted to make it last; after all, it was my lunch. That was the way we said flavours: red, green, pink and yellow. Lemonade was always lemonade; they didn't have Coke and Fanta at school, but we'd been brainwashed to call any cola and orange by those names.

Å ime, or rather Sammy, waited for me to finish, then took both bottles to throw into a big metal drum. I'm glad he did it because there were bees buzzing around the fence. The house next door to the school had white boxes filled with bees in the backyard.

Sammy showed me where the toilets were.

‘I'll see you after school,' he says, going off to play.

I go back to the bench, push my back against the warm wall, and watch the playground, trying to spot my brother amid the throng. I don't mind this at all. I like observing the chaos of play, of so many things going on in a small space, marked out with lines and semicircles at each end. There is motion and noise in every direction. Instead of bobbing my head about I learn to concentrate on one area and observe the action passing through it. I can see games of chasing, cricket, marbles and skipping ropes. Older girls are walking around in pairs with a stocking joining their ankles to become a double person with three legs. But it all seems ordered and contained, the kids bending and bowing to a natural set of rules, with a teacher only blowing a whistle when someone did the wrong thing. I know when I join in the play I would be better at knowing the games and what I wanted to do
most. I do this for a few days until one of the boys in my class grabs me by the arm, ‘Come and play, boy!'

Boy, am I slow at writing, constantly peering over the work of my desk mate Paula, who is efficient, neat and not as dreamy as me. I enjoy games and singing in class. Our teacher Mrs Brace even throws in
Romper Room
tunes. There goes Jupiter, here comes Mars. In the mornings we listen to the radio and sing along with the other class. There is only one TV for kindergarten, which means we swap classes every now and then. Our stuff goes missing. I remember being squashed in with several classes to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon that year. Space travel was the big talk of the time and kids wore
Apollo 11
mission T-shirts as their sport T-shirt that week. The TV picture quality was scratchy. I think I missed the moment.

On kindy afternoons, we sat on the carpet in groups to build palaces and towers with blocks; I always scrounged to find the smooth, wooden doorknob in the pile, even though it was almost impossible to incorporate it into anything we were making. It was a trophy.
My
trophy.

How did it get into our class set? Was there a door that no longer opened? After ‘blocks' there was a quiet time to nap or rest and if we were well-behaved Mrs Brace allowed us to do colouring in as a relaxation exercise. That was good preparation for the long walk home which, after six hours of school, felt like torture, no matter how many pink meringues you ate or how lovely it was holding your little girlfriend's hand.

During my second year at school I switched to thinking in English. It crept up slowly, like unexpected love, then became forever. For a while I was in language limbo. I spoke to my parents in Croatian, but ‘Sammy' and ‘Tommy' now only used
English with each other. Unfamiliar thoughts stumbled in via new paths; there were feelings and ideas I couldn't relay to my parents – hardly secrets – because the Croatian words I knew were inadequate to explain the world of school. How do you translate a ‘knock, knock' joke?

At first, some things I wanted to say to friends, especially funny stories I'd heard at a family gathering, existed only in a Croatian context, through Croatian eyes. I was stuck. After a deal of frustration, I learned to get around obstacles by trying to manipulate an idea in different ways until it sounded right: variations on a theme. I found you could come to the same point in a number of ways. The words you knew shaped your thoughts.

More words = more ideas.

Sam and I already spoke better English than Mama ever would. When we were around other people I didn't necessarily want to speak to her in Croatian. I wanted us all to fit in. Fitting in was what foreigners were supposed to do. Even I knew that.

‘Why don't you go to school and learn English with us?' I'd ask her, as if there were a place for her in my class.

‘Because I have too many things to do at home. Who's going to do the washing, ironing, cooking? I'm too old for all that.'

I wanted Mama to be able to speak to the school mothers properly, to get to know more people than Teta and Croatian ladies. Plus I knew she was smarter than she sounded in English. Teta's English was also poor, even though she had a job. She had come to Australia aged forty-five. Despite trying to learn she'd found that no matter how hard she tried it just wouldn't ‘go' for her. Just talking about it made her face sour up, like next door's cat licking salt.

When Mama and Teta said English was difficult I didn't quite believe them. Croatian is a much harder language. And if someone little like me could pick up English, they should be able to as well. I wished they'd just try. Teta worked in factories
with Croatian, Greek, Italian, Turkish and Lebanese women; all the bosses were Australian-born or English. A new language was an optional extra Teta thought she could do without in the migrant world of process work.

But there was a domain where these two excelled: shopping. Experts at consumer arithmetic, they knew what they wanted and, importantly, the cost of everything. Money broke down barriers, especially when they held a purse. Mama did not usually exude confidence but she ruled supreme in retail. She stood up to the butcher, refusing to take inferior cuts of meat.

‘No tanks,' she'd say, scrunching up her nose and shaking her head as if the butcher were foisting dog meat at her. ‘Scuse me! Gimme better one pleez.'

To pay, she'd lick her fingers for better purchase on the paper banknotes, peeling off the required amount, checking the change to the cent. At the fish shop her eyes darted about the display window, she picked her own produce at the fruit shop, Tanks very march. Except for the butcher's, cake shop, newsagent, supermarket, menswear, chemist and post office, Belmore's businesses were run by Greek, Italian and Lebanese migrants and Mama could easily communicate with all of them through hand gestures and shop English.

Teta's expertise was haberdashery. I knew this because I tagged along with the sisters on Saturday-morning expeditions to Campsie, the adjoining suburb whose shopping strip was three times as long as Belmore's. The payoff was hot chips, cakes, lollies or a toy – if a cheap one could be found and the case to purchase made deftly. I was meant not to pester them while they were engaged in the serious business of buttons, fabrics, zippers and design patterns. Unlike me, busting to be out, Sam was happy to ‘mind the house' and watch the cartoon shows on his own; nothing could lure him away from the TV but he'd invariably share in the booty I paid for in the blood of interminable boredom.

There were several frock and fabric shops along Beamish Street but one place near the theatre stood out. It was a semi-underground warehouse for do-it-yourself dressmaking – a women's only club, save for greedy boys like me, or those under control orders, stuck in prams or straining on a leash. I found it impossible to stay still in the joint, especially when Mama and Teta started looking through pattern catalogues or rolls of fabric. Whenever they seemed on the point of purchase, one of them would say something, and they'd abort the transaction. Like Sam and me, they were couture twins, dressed in the same style of outfits, with only slight variations for size and age. Even the colours were almost identical. One of my cousins thought I had two mums – something I considered not only preposterous, but a gloomy prospect, to have mean, old Teta as my mother.

If the sewing sisters bumped into someone from the neigh-bourhood or Croatian church you could scrub an hour off your afternoon playtime, right there. They were oblivious to my presence. So I'd slink away and wander around, checking out the girls (never as pretty as Ineska) and hoping the hope of the desperate and damned that a toy display or something not ‘ladies' business' would materialise in a nook of this vast emporium.

Without fail I'd become lost on these excursions. You'd think I could find one of them, but no. Like intercontinental ballistic missiles, once those two were set on a target – a bra, girdle, gloves or fabric – nothing could shake them off their ultimate mission.

The trick when lost is to keep panic at bay. Give it no attention, no air. Sing a song in your head or hum a happy tune. I'd start with the last place I saw them and then go in ever increasing circles until I found them. That's the sort of plan leaders like Professor John Robinson in
Lost in Space
or the calm dad in
My Three Sons
would come up with. I keep telling myself they'd never leave without me. That works for a few orbits of the floor. But dizziness creeps in. Once deliberate footsteps turn into a trot.
Then the crazy breathing starts. The head jerks about, eyes disoriented, the crowd becomes a blur. Sound is muted, now distorted, as if someone is playing with the volume control. The bazaar is a swirling mass of fabric colour and texture, of people, curtains and clothes, but all I can feel is the throbbing of my own heart. Where are they?

Finding them was an anti-climax but it required an immediate makeover. I'd try to look composed, even though I was angry with them, just in case they tried to revoke my freedom. Once, most likely the last time I ventured out of the force field – danger Will Robinson! – I was in a full mental panic. It seemed like a whole hour had passed since I'd lost them – it had – when I saw Mama and Teta walking into the shop.