My Life As an Alphabet Page 2

  He frowned.

  ‘I do not, Pumpkin. I most emphatically do not.’ He reached over the table and tickled me in the ribs. I think it was the same hand he used for coin-jingling. I pointed out to him that coins are the worst carriers of disease since they have so many owners in their lifetime and I did not relish being poked with a disease-carrying hand. He appeared slightly puzzled, but stopped. ‘It was the most wonderful experience of my life,’ he continued. ‘You sailed into this world on a sea of love. You cruised through calm waters and berthed, with scarcely a ripple, into our hearts.’ He made to reach over again, but thought better of it. ‘And there, my sweet mariner, you remain. Docked in love.’

  At one time Rich Uncle Brian was just Uncle Brian. But then he became rich and bought a yacht. Since then he occasionally uses nautical imagery, some would say to excess. I’m surprised he doesn’t call me his sea cucumber. I finished my beef burger and digested his remarks. They were easier than the beef burger.

  ‘Dad?’ I said. ‘Mum says I came into this world accompanied by pain, blood and tears, yet Rich Uncle Brian says I cruised through calm waters and berthed in everyone’s hearts. Who is right?’

  I’d had to tap Dad on the shoulder and get him to take off his headphones. He was sitting in his office in the shed. Dad spends a lot of time in the shed. He leaves for work at seven-thirty and doesn’t come home until five at the earliest. Dad is self-employed. He has a white van with ‘Home Bytes’ custom-painted on the sides. Underneath there is a picture of an electronic gizmo and smaller letters: ‘COMPUTER UPGRADES AND REPAIRS. I COME TO YOU.’ He sometimes does work for local government, but mostly he visits people’s homes and fixes their computers.

  When Dad gets home he heats up his dinner in the microwave [Mum is usually in bed by this time] and then sometimes he takes his remote-controlled aeroplane out to our local park. He likes his remote-controlled plane. Dad says he enjoys the way he can control everything that it does. He says it is a welcome contrast to the rest of his life, but when I ask him to explain further he never says anything. Occasionally I go with him and watch the plane as it ducks and weaves around the branches of the trees. It is relaxing. Most of the time, though, I don’t watch the plane. I watch Dad. His head arches back as he follows the flight pattern and his hands move quickly and with assurance over the control pad. He never talks and his eyes are always towards the sky.

  Normally, Dad’s muscles are tight and his eyes are sad, like those pictures of abused puppy dogs you sometimes see in advertisements for the RSPCA. They look resigned to the harshness of life, as if ill-treatment is an inescapable fact. But when he flies . . . when he flies, his muscles unknot and his eyes soften. He has the appearance of someone entirely at peace.

  Most evenings, however, he heads out to his office in the shed. It is a cosy office, even though every surface is littered with machine bits. There is a bar fridge in a corner and he often has a beer while he types away on one of the computers. He has two huge screens on his desk. I don’t know why he needs two. To be honest I don’t really know what he does in there all the time. But sometimes I like to watch while he works. The computers don’t have the same effect on him as the plane. His shoulders are hunched and one foot taps away on the concrete floor. So I don’t really watch him.

  One of his machines has a clear plastic case with lights that flash on and off, and I fix on that. The colours are red, blue, orange and green, and they make patterns that don’t repeat. They are beautiful and much better than television.

  Dad looked at me. His headphones hung around his neck like strange jewellery.

  ‘Your Uncle Brian . . .’ he said. If I was being particularly literary, then I suppose I should write ‘he spat’. But I couldn’t see any phlegm, so I think I will err on the side of precision. Dad took a deep breath and started again. ‘Your uncle is not the most reliable person in the world.’ Dad never refers to Rich Uncle Brian as his brother, or Brian or even Rich. It’s always ‘your uncle.’ They have a history.

  ‘Yes, but what’s your view, Dad?’ I asked.

  His eyes flicked to the side and his foot tapped even harder.

  ‘I wasn’t there when you were born, Candice,’ he said finally. ‘I was too late.’

  Then he put his headphones back on and returned to his typing. I thought I heard him mutter the story of my life under his breath, but I might have been mistaken. I am sometimes.

  Dad is something of a mystery to me, but at least he doesn’t call me any kind of vegetable, which is a welcome change.

  So I still don’t know much about the manner of my birth. Probably the only thing I learned was that people can view the same events in radically different ways. For Rich Uncle Brian, it was peaceful. For Mum it was traumatic. For Dad it was a reminder of something missed.

  So B is for Birth. I was born. That’s it.

  C

  IS FOR CHAOS

  Classrooms are battlegrounds.

  Students resist work. Generally. That is their job. Teachers encourage work. Generally. That is their job. I respect both sides. It makes the class a safe battleground when everyone knows their roles and tries to perform them. Of course, there are exceptions. Like the time Darren Mitford swallowed his pencil sharpener and nearly died. Our Maths teacher thought for a moment that Darren was being an idiot. Darren is an excellent idiot, so it was an understandable mistake. It takes a surprisingly short time for someone to turn from pink to purple to the colour normally associated with corpses. Darren didn’t even have the breath to gurgle. He sat in his chair, mouth open, changing colour like a chameleon. When the teacher finally realised the seriousness of the situation, he jolted into action and performed a Heimlich manoeuvre. The sharpener shot from Darren’s throat in an impressive blur of speed, ricocheted off a wall and pinged Susan Morris over the right eye. Stunned for a moment, she raised a hand to her brow, and when it came away red, she shrieked and fell to the floor. Darren meanwhile went from dark purple to light purple and finally pink again.

  He still sucks pencil sharpeners. And almost everything else.

  But generally at school there was a routine.

  Douglas Benson broke it.

  I sat in Miss Bamford’s English class working on a comprehension exercise when the door opened and Miss Coolidge, the Assistant Principal in charge of curriculum, walked in. A boy shuffled at her side. She went through the ritual of introducing the boy [Douglas Benson] to the class and asked that everyone treat him with kindness and consideration. She said he was new to the area and didn’t know anyone. He gazed at our sea of faces, wearing the haunted look of one who has just been publicly identified as being new to the area and not knowing anyone. He might as well have had a big bulls–eye painted on his forehead. Finally, he was allowed to sit down and Miss Coolidge disappeared to get on with the business of being in charge of curriculum.

  Douglas Benson sat next to me.

  He had to. It was the only unoccupied seat. No one ever willingly sat next to me. That was also part of the routine and I respected that. I picked up my pen and continued the comprehension task. A few minutes passed before I felt a tap on my arm. I looked up.

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’ whispered Douglas Benson.

  ‘No,’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh.’

  I went back to the comprehension. A minute later there was another tap.

  ‘Not even a little bit?’ whispered Douglas Benson.

  ‘No,’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh.’

  There was a third tap.

  ‘Do you want to hear my secret anyway?’ he whispered.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The bell went. It was lunchtime. Douglas Benson was in luck. He’d only been in class for ten minutes and he was getting a break. I packed my pens and pencils very carefully in my case. I was very careful because I hate it if my pens come into contact with my pencils. It’s upsetting. There is a divider in my case [Dad made it for me] to make it easier for me to kee
p my pens and pencils separated. Douglas Benson watched me as I lined them all up so the pointy ends were facing the same way.

  ‘Why do you do that?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ I replied.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘It’s lunchtime,’ I said.

  ‘Is that your answer?’ he said.

  ‘To what?’ I replied.

  ‘To why you do that. Lining up your pens.’

  This was getting too complicated, so I unpacked one of my pens and tore a sheet out of a notepad I keep just for these circumstances. This is what I wrote:

  No. I told you not to ask me. It was simply an observation that it’s lunchtime. How could ‘it’s lunchtime’ be an answer to why I line my pens up?

  He read this with a screwed-up forehead. Well, he actually read it with his eyes, but his forehead was screwed up.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Lunchtime.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. The conversation wasn’t very exciting, but I so rarely have conversations at school that I was enjoying it. Maybe that was why I asked him what he was doing at lunchtime. I wouldn’t normally dream of asking something like that, so I must have been stimulated by all our talk.

  ‘What are you doing at lunchtime?’ I said.

  ‘I am working on a way of getting out of here,’ he said.

  I found this mysterious. ‘That’s mysterious,’ I said.

  ‘Is it?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Because it doesn’t take much working out,’ I replied. This was a long sentence and I was too tired to add another, so I wrote another note: You just go out the front door and there’s a big gate. I added a little drawing just to be helpful. I even put YOU ARE HERE on the here where we were.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s to do with my secret,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ I replied. It is my experience that ‘Oh’ is a very useful word and much underrated.

  I tore another sheet from my pad. I couldn’t remember the last time I had used so many sheets in one day, let alone a couple of minutes. This is what I wrote:

  If you like, you could come with me to the library. The librarians keep a chair reserved for me, but they wouldn’t have one for you. They let me eat sandwiches in there sometimes, but I don’t think you would be allowed. It is against the rules. And I don’t even know if you have a sandwich. But you could come if you want, despite the chair and sandwich thing.

  I handed him the sheet.

  ‘You’re weird, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Certainly.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Douglas. ‘I’m weird, too. Maybe it’s a good idea to stick together. We could be friends. Weird friends.’

  I had plenty of friends already. Well . . . that depends on perspective. As far as I was concerned I had heaps of friends. As far as everyone else was concerned I didn’t have a friend in the world. Does that make a difference? I’m not sure. Anyway, it would make a pleasant change to have a friend who also thought that I was a friend, so even though Douglas was always going to be a friend [according to my view of the world], he might actually be a special friend. That felt good.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Good.’

  I re-packed my pen and swung my backpack onto my back. It is called a backpack because that is where it belongs. Douglas trailed me through the corridors and up the library steps.

  ‘Who is your best friend?’ he asked.

  I gave this some thought.

  ‘You,’ I said. I wasn’t sure if this was strictly true. There was always penpal Denille, but she might be arrogant and deficient in terms of basic geography. The jury is still out.

  I suppose it might not be obvious why I have called this chapter ‘C Is For Chaos’ [while Darren Mitford caused some, albeit temporarily, Douglas Benson From Another Dimension doesn’t fit neatly into this category]. Hopefully, all will become clear . . .

  My family. Mum, Dad and Rich Uncle Brian. It’s clearly a complicated story, and I don’t know all the fine details. In fact, I don’t know many of the coarse details. Everyone has tried very hard to keep me in ignorance. I think that they think they are protecting me. But I would have to be living in a lead-lined coffin not to realise that everyone is miserable. I asked Mum and she said it was all water under the bridge. For a while I pondered scenarios involving buckets and cantilevers [I mean I know it’s a saying, but sometimes I can’t help myself]. Dad mutters darkly under his breath but refuses to be more specific. Rich Uncle Brian says we are weathering a storm.

  Water flowing under bridges in a storm, while people mutter. Darkly.

  It’s not helpful.

  Luckily, I have picked up information over the years, simply by pretending to be invisible. Adults always fall for this. They will talk freely if you just hang back and blend in with the wallpaper. If you have wallpaper. If not you have to blend in with the paint. What follows is part of the story. I believe there is more water that has yet to hit a bridge.

  Dad and Rich Uncle Brian were once partners in a business, back when Rich Uncle Brian was just Uncle Brian. In fact, I think it started before I was born, so Uncle Brian wasn’t even an uncle. Just Brian. It was a business involving computers. I know nothing about computers and don’t care to learn. Which is strange since I hail from a genetic line of people who love the things. However, though I don’t know much, I do know a little.

  Dad – present-day Dad – builds computers and takes them apart. The original business didn’t do that. Brian and Dad . . . Actually, Dad wasn’t Dad then either. So Brian and James [who became my uncle and father respectively] devised software, the thing [I don’t know exactly; don’t ask me] that makes the machines run whatever the machines run. Word processing programs and such-like. They didn’t pick up a screwdriver. They picked up pens and wrote code.

  Any idiot who can manipulate Lego can put a computer together [I quote my Dad], but it takes talent to program [I quote Rich Uncle Brian]. Many people were doing it. The brothers’ business was performing quite well, but it wasn’t performing completely and utterly well. No one was buying yachts or fast cars with only two seats. Then Brian [aka Rich Uncle Brian] patented a piece of software that he designed. Here is where things get tricky and one person’s truth apparently doesn’t coincide with another person’s truth. Dad doesn’t believe Brian did all the designing. He thinks Brian used some of his ideas. Rich Uncle Brian, it seems, disagrees. Mum thinks that even if Rich Uncle Brian did invent the software, it was unfair to have patented it in just his name, since the brothers were in business together and should have shared.

  It is easy to guess what happened. The software was a huge success [it has something to do with social networking – that’s it, don’t ask me any more] and money flowed in like stormwater under a bridge. But all the money flowed into Uncle Brian’s pockets, making him Rich Uncle Brian. There was a court case. Nasty things, unforgivable things, were said. The business was sold to pay legal costs.

  But, when it was all done and dusted, Uncle Brian was Rich Uncle Brian and Dad was broken and broke. Rich Uncle Brian bought a yacht. Dad bought a small white van and a remote-controlled aeroplane.

  My family. Chaos. They’re almost synonyms.

  D

  IS FOR DIMENSIONS

  I want to tell you how I met Earth-Pig Fish.

  About six months ago, Rich Uncle Brian took me to a fair. It wasn’t one of those fairs with craft stalls, people in cowboy hats wrestling steers and woodchoppers turning logs into matchsticks. This was a fair in Brisbane and it had joyrides and dodgems and big dippers and fairy floss stalls. I like these sorts of fairs. I never go on the rides because I am afraid of heights, but that doesn’t stop me enjoying myself. It’s the lights and the smells and the bustle of people. There is something magic about it. I’ve only been to two in my life.

  So I was happy to watch Rich Uncle Brian go on all the
rides. I held his coat and waved at him as he slid past me on the Pirate Ship. Then he went on the Ghost Train. Twice. I wondered if that was what it was like to be a parent, smiling and waving as a shrieking person flashed past you with a wide grin and frightened eyes. I suspect there’s a bit more to it than that.

  When RUB had finished the rides we bought hot dogs and wandered along the rows of stalls. There were lucky dip stalls and a place where you had to throw a small ring around the neck of any one of dozens of bottles lined up. I had a go, but the ring kept bouncing off the bottles. It looked easy, but no one managed to do it, at least while I was there. Rich Uncle Brian was cynical.

  ‘They design these things so you can’t win, Pumpkin,’ he said.

  I thought he was probably right, but I also thought it wasn’t worth mentioning. People were having fun. They were bathed in lights and clutching prizes or toffee apples or clouds of fairy floss on a stick. The fair was no place for cynicism.

  We passed a shooting range. Metal ducks ran along three rows. They were battered and dented by experience, but kept on going. No one was shooting at them, so the man behind the counter was doing his best to get custom.

  ‘C’mon, sir,’ he yelled at Rich Uncle Brian. ‘Try your skill. Win a prize. Ten dollars a pop and every gun has sights.’

  Rich Uncle Brian stopped.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sights set to miss.’

  The man was obviously offended. He put a hand over his heart.

  ‘Not here, mate. Try for yourself. Five shots for free. If you miss, you walk away. If you hit, then give it a go. Whaddaya say?’

  Rich Uncle Brian looked down at me. I shrugged and held out my hands for his jacket.

  He hit ducks with four out of his five shots.

  ‘Okay,’ he said to the man behind the counter. ‘Provided I use this gun.’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  Rich Uncle Brian spent eighty dollars trying to win a prize. Well, he won a prize every time, but the prize was a pencil with a fluffy thing stuck to its end. It was probably worth twenty cents. He had his eye on the major prize – a huge stuffed animal that might have been a gnu or a camel with severe disabilities. And Rich Uncle Brian wasn’t giving up until he had it. I might have pointed out that it was probably worth about forty dollars, but I suspected that wasn’t the point. This was about proving himself. Mum says that men are just little boys deep down. Sometimes not so deep down. Sometimes not deep at all, but right on the surface. He could’ve bought a whole Toys R Us shop, being Rich Uncle Brian, but this wasn’t about money. I held his jacket and watched the ducks fall.