State Ward (7 page)

Oh,
Mum,
sometimes,
you
know,
my
heart
aches
for
you.
Yes
you.
That
’ll
surprise
you,
I
know.
But
it
does.
Cos you’re my mum even if we both know you ain’t
exactly
the
best
mum
ever
got
born.
But
there’s
times,
Mum,
when
I
wish
I
was
back
home
—
long
as
you
were
sober
—
sitting
down
with
you
and
talking.
And,
like
you
and
I
snuggled
up
beside
each
other,
you’d
like
that
wouldn’t
ya?
Even
though
you
say
your
kids,
except
Lilla
your
favourite,
drive
you
mad.
You’d
like
to
know
me,
wouldn’t
you?”

Charlie having a little weep. Then knocking on the wall to George next room, “Hey, George? Goodnight, mate.” Smiling teary-eyed at the three thumps of goodnight in return. “Boy, I’d die for George, I really would.”

The
staff
here
are
as
mixed
up
as
we
are.
Honest.
I’ve
figured
that
out.
Mr Dekka,
well,
he’s
the
worst.
He
says
he’
s
a
Christian;
every
time
after
the
film
evening,
(the
religious
film
not
the
Friday
night
movies,
which
are
good),
he
has
that
look
as
if
he
and
God
are
best
pals
and
us
kids
aren’t
even
in
the
running.
He’s
studying
religion,
in
his
spare
time,
and
he
carries
a
bible
in
his
back
pocket,
a
tiny
little
job.
Yet
I’d
say
he’s
got as
much
hate
in
him
as
you,
Dad.
And
least
you’ve
got
half
an
excuse
that
you’ve
never
made
a
secret
of
hating
the
world.
But
Mr Dekka?
He
claims
he
loves
the
world.
Loves,
he
says.
Is
that
why
he
hits
the
boys
—
because
he
loves
them?
That
why
he
looks
at
you
like
you’
re
worse
than
shit?
Love.
And
he
seems
to
have
something
over
George,
though
George
won’t
tell
even
me.
Just
changes
the
subject
or
tells
me
to
shut
up.

Then
there’
s
the
bossman,
Mr
Davis.
He’s
OK,
but
no
one
can
get
close
to
him.
He
says
he
has
to
keep
his
distance because of what he is. But you’d think it’ d be his
job to even sometimes talk to the boys. Yet he doesn’t. Oh,
he’ll
encourage
you
if
you
can
sing.
I
can
sing,
and
I
bet
you
never
knew
that.
Like
you,
Mum.
Must’
ve
got
it
from
you.
He’
s
taking
three
of
us
more
musical
kids
to
a
play,
can
you
believe?
On
the
outside.
Can’t
wait.
Sweeny Todd
I
think
it’s
called.
But
the
same
man
won’t
talk
to
you
even
when
you
try
and
get
him
talking.
I
—
oh,
I’ve
suddenly
got
tired.

Charlie rolling over to end the letter in his head.

Oh
Just
one
more
thing.
You
don’t
know
how
it
hurts
to
see
boys
get
a
visit
,
with
their
parents,
or
a
brother
or
sister,
or
someone,
bringing
them
nice
things
which
they’re
allowed
to
bring
back
to
their
rooms.
It
hurts,
Mum
and
D
ad.
It
hurts
more
not
really
knowing
why
you
couldn’t
love
me
enough
to
stop
drinking
for
a
few
days
so
to
visit
me.
It
hurts.
Then
I
hate.

So
no
goodnights
from
Charlie
boy.
Ya
don’t
deserve
it.

Two weeks he lasted. Two lousy weeks of being one of the Boys’ Home privileged chosen to attend Riverton Boys’ High School, and it was over. Two weeks.

It began the first day really; kids asking where Charlie was from, what Riverton intermediate had he attended before here, and why start so late in the year, the August holidays would be coming up soon? Telling them he was from Two Lakes, that his family had moved to Riverton — oh, yeah? Whereabouts? What’s the name of the street? As if they already knew what he was, that they wanted to trap him. For anyone could see Charlie arrived with Paul Kyle, and surely they’d know Paul was a state ward. So maybe, Charlie later thinking, it was all so inevitable.

Every lunchtime he got more and more kids hanging around him, firing questions at him of where he was from, what did his father do, he’s a labourer, I bet. And what did you say the street was you live at? You mean you come all the way over from there to come to this school? What do you have in your lunch — poo-ha? Laughing at Charlie’s Maori half. Getting all of him madder and madder until one day he snapped.

A persistent every-day teaser put the question to
Charlie, did he know Paul Kyle or not? Yes, he knew Paul Kyle.

“So you’ve been lying, you’re a convict aren’t you?”

“No. Not a convict. Just a state ward.”

“Same thing isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Yes it is.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Yes it is, you are a criminal, that’s why you live in a Boys’ Home. You’re a Maori, too, and can’t you see we don’t have hardly any Maoris here, you don’t belong. This is a good school. How did you trick your way in? Are you an inmate? I hear they’ve got cells there, you been in one? I bet you have. You stink, too. Do you know that, Wilson: you pong. Do all Maoris have B.O? Or don’t you know what B.O. is?”

“No, I don’t actually.”

“Oh, he doesn’t know what his own body is producing, you hear him boys? Means you stink, Wilson. Means you’re a disgusting black Maori who we don’t want at our —” Charlie didn’t let the guy finish it. He hit him.

And hit him and hit until he had to be hauled off by a teacher who promptly marched Charlie to the headmaster’s office. Charlie offered his explanation, but was told it was a ridiculous excuse for unwarranted violence, that he’d wait for the medical report on the boy Charlie had assaulted before deciding on the next step of action. But, rest assured, this matter will be reported to the Home authorities. When it came back from the medical
room that the boy had to have seven stitches inserted inside his mouth, the headmaster went colder than Mr Davis can: as if a wall had suddenly come down between them.

The headmaster himself drove Charlie back to the Home. In total silence. He was made to wait outside Mr Davis’s office whilst the two conferred.

Maybe half an hour later Mr Davis emerged with Mr Lay, they shook hands, Mr Davis said he was terribly sorry about this most regrettable incident, and Mr Lay walked out of Charlie Wilson’s life as if Charlie had ceased to exist.

Never had a boy felt so alone. It was worse than when neither of his parents turned up at court when he was sentenced to here. For he had something — the hope of eventual freedom — to cling to. Now, he felt he had nothing. The world seemed to have opened up as a large hole and swallowed him.

In Mr Davis’s office the boss was coldly furious. Cold. Everyone in this nightmare of the same cold quality — when it suited them. Charlie trying to focus on the other Mr Davis he knew, and with it some hope. He took his mind back to when Mr Davis took him and two other boys to a musical play,
Sweeny
Todd.
How Mr Davis had seemed to spend half his night glancing at the boys to see the pleasure on their faces at this first-time experience. But the man droning on to him was not the same of that night. This was the distant Mr Davis, the one who had his “image” to maintain. This was a worse Mr Davis than that, for this one was even more removed. This wasn’t the same Mr Davis who first entered Charlie’s life when he
was in the cell, come in to say hello, and mention that Mr Dekka had told him of overhearing Charlie’s good singing voice. The same man who then put Charlie on the list of those boys he deemed to have musical potential, or were just good boys he saw some future in, the same man who gave a trio of boys an experience that would have them sleepless that same night with excitement, even astonishment at a world revealed to them they never knew existed. Mr Davis gave them this; and out of the goodness of his own heart. The same who was staring at Charlie and telling he had disgraced the Home, let everyone down who’d had faith in him, put his programme back to worse than square one.

“So Charlie Wilson you’d better have one hell of an explanation to dissuade me from punishing you to the limits of my authority.”

“But sir, I only had a fight. And it was because —”

“Only a fight? What is
only
about any fight, Wilson?”

Charlie puzzled at this. “Sir, it happens round here every day. No big deal —”

“No big what?” Mr Davis came up off his chair, making him the giant he really was. “Did my ears hear me right?”

“Sir, I only said a fight wasn’t, you know …” Charlie dropping to the most conciliatory voice he could find.

Bang! Mr Davis’s fist came down on the desk. “Violence! That’s what’s wrong with you boys, violence.”

And immediately Charlie thinking: but it isn’t. Even I know that. I’ve watched every boy in this place as
closely as I’ve observed anyone or anything, and it’s not violence.

Mr Davis bellowed on, “… your background. You understand? You are violent like your backgrounds, and it is background we here at the Home wish to change.”

Background? How’s that gonna be done? It’s already happened. “Sir, could I just say something — please?” Charlie daring to cut in.

Mr Davis looking — though it just could not be — confused for the moment, as if Charlie interrupting him to ask if he could have his say was outside Mr Davis’s understanding.

So Charlie shot in on the gap of Mr Davis momentarily stunned into silence.

“Sir, I honestly think the boys here need, like …” hearing his own voice, as almost adult-like, suddenly frightened Charlie. He’d been sure what he was going to say and now he wasn’t. (Love. It’s love they — we — need more’n anything. And after that it’s life being cleared up, getting the haze, the muck wiped off it, like a dirty window, that’s what we need.) “I — I, uhh —. Well, you see, sir, I think some of the kids — I mean the ones I know —. Well, I think —.” No good. It’d gone. But then he heard a little voice in his head telling him he must speak up.

So Charlie drew himself to full height, still surprised that Mr Davis was yet giving him speaking space. “Sir, I’m not saying this place is bad cos it isn’t. Not really. And the staff, some of them are really neat. Miss Eccles, well she’s — she’s — she’s really really nice. And I think she understands what the boys need — oh, not saying you don’t, sir. But she’s a, you know, she’s sorta like a mother.
Some of the boys, hahaha, call her Grannie behind her back,” hearing himself talking, giggling nervously, unable to control himself even when he wanted nothing more than an ability to control.

“But Mr Dekka, sir, well I think you’d know —”

“Mr Dekka? What have you to say about Mr Dekka?”

“I, uh — well, sir, he’s — sir, you must kind of know what he’s like. Not just me saying it, you ask any boy, he’ll tell you the same thi—”

“What, are my staff supposed to be here so you boys will like them? Do you think it’s a popularity contest? And don’t give me that confused look, Wilson, you know damn well what I’m saying. You would not have been chosen for Riverton Boys’ High if you were as thick as you’re now trying to make out. And, might I remind you, there have only been a handful of boys in the history of this place who have gained places at Riverton Boys’. But you have to mess up. Background, you see now, Wilson? It’s your bloody backgrounds that we are up against at every turn. We —”

“Excuse me for interrupting, Mr Davis. I do know it’s background, like you say it is. And I’m not trying to be clever. I — it’s — you know I’m scared of you. Every boy here is. You know we’re not happy, though. None of us. Why we’re here — sir. No disrespect, sir. Because we’re, you know, because we’re not, like, happy, sir. But we didn’t make ourselves like that sir …” Hearing himself run off at the mouth, this surge of verbal recklessness that yet felt so right it couldn’t stop itself. And more, because he’d seen in this moment of having his eyes opened that Mr Davis didn’t
know, not really, much and any more than the kids he was in charge of. Or why weren’t they all, or just some, turning out for the better?

Even when Mr Davis stepped swiftly around from behind his desk and backhanded Charlie across the face, Charlie didn’t feel so much fear, as it was, somehow, a confirmation of the truth of what he was saying.

Charlie wiped at his mouth. Blood. He looked at the blood, then up and into the eyes of Mr Davis. They were brown circles inside a perfectly white surround, wide with anger though. Charlie looked at the blood smear on his hand again, thinking — or feeling — in that flash of concept the mind embraces in a milli-second: I been bleeding my whole life. Hasn’t every boy here? So what’s a few more drops?

So when Mr Davis slapped him again, and Charlie fell against a wall, and something came crashing down behind him sounding like broken glass, he was neither alarmed nor afraid. Not now. (Boy, I been getting slapped and punched, and I been hearing breaking glass my whole damned life.) He just felt like grinning. Though he didn’t dare. Though when he heard the words of the man towering over him after he’d felled Charlie with a punch, not a slap, Charlie was smiling inwardly, without really knowing why, as he heard Mr Davis as if in need of justifying his assault, saying over him,

“How dare you! How dare you speak to me — ME — like that!”

A knowing coming over Charlie then. A knowing.

Back confined to the Home whilst the school headmaster and a committee considered Charlie’s suspension. Two
days of being separated from the other at-home boys on cleaning duties, Charlie with the worst jobs: clearing out the grease traps back of the kitchen. Down inside the concrete hole up to his waist in stinking grease and slime, feeling with his unshod toes for the plug hole, then prodding it for ages with a special steel rod till it suddenly cleared with a galuuuuuump as a bubble shot to the surface and burst at his navel. And he watched as the grease-line fast disappeared down to his bare feet, left a boy as if he’d been dipped into a sewer. One down two to go. With the toilets to follow. And then every outside drainage sump. To remind a boy, so Mr Dekka kept reminding him, of who he was so he wouldn’t think he was something else.

The decision came back from Riverton Boys’ High in a written report giving the reasons why Charles Wilson’s suspension was now an expulsion. Not that Mr Davis showed the report to Charlie, he just had him summoned to his office, addressed him as if not only a stranger but an enemy, that he was to continue home confinement until further notice, and that “after considerable thought, to save other boys taking the wrong signals from your inexcusable behaviour, I’ve decided you are to be confined to the cellblock for a period of seven days. Furthermore, you shall be on reduced food rations, to be decided once you have been inspected by our visiting doctor, and upon his recommendations …” blah-blah-blah, Charlie just thinking of it, focusing it in his mind as: just a few more drops of blood. What matter.

The cell again. Hello cell. Walking straight up to the first
etching of the name
GEORGE
he could see and smiling at it. Hello, George. As he pondered next on what sharp object he could use to add his name to his best friend’s.

The end of a shoelace. He tried it on the paint, it made no impression. So he went under the bed, lay on his back and carved his name right beside yet another of George’s trademarks:
AND CHARLIE. 26.
10.6
— The end splayed out uselessly before Charlie could add the 7. He did that with his other shoelace. So now he and George were, he felt, like blood brothers. Soul mates.

Pacing. Sitting on the bed edge. Pacing again. Trying to keep down the bitterness as more and more the pictures swarmed his mind; of being two lousy weeks at a school after the psychologist had told him his I.Q. test marks were remarkable and he could be proud of them, and he was, and Mr Davis next telling him he could be proud of himself for being only the second boy to be chosen for the highly regarded Riverton Boys’ High School, and so a boy hardly sleeping a wink for excitement — and pride — that night, as he dared to think he might just have some hope in this life after all. Trying to hold off the swarming of pictures, to shut down the pictures in his head, sounding as they looked, like angrily buzzing insects trying to invade him.

And then sweat broke out all over him, it fell in heavy drops on his knees where he was slumped, looking at the concrete floor, sat on his bed. A certain collapse coming as though right at the door in his mind, when he heard a key turning. So he jolted his head up. The door opened. It was Tommy with his food tray, and Charlie could see there wasn’t much. But he gained the tiniest of
hopes at Tommy winking at him. And Miss Eccles, too, giving him the saddest of smiles, her eyes filmy. Then they left. And he took up his plate about to eat when he saw the scrap of paper on the brown plastic tray. He took it up. It read:

Be
OK
soon.

Your
best
friend,
George.

And Charlie smiled. Then he laughed. Then he wept. And the stripes of light on the ceiling, of steel-barred window, snuffed out like a light.