The heaviness of keys - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Edwina Shaw
EVERYTHING GETS STIRRED UP when the Vietnamese boys come in. Asian boys are different. Refugees, they don't have proper papers and look so young they lie about their ages and do easy time with the boys, instead of hard yards in Long Bay.
We know the order of things has changed when, one morning as we cross the quadrangle ready for our weekly assembly, all hell breaks loose. Two Vietnamese boys dive on to Derek and Dylan, pull their shirts over their heads and punch neat and hard into their exposed torsos till the guards amble over and break it up. I wince with each blow to Dylan's body. The attackers are taken to the isolation cell but in one fast effective manoeuvre they've established themselves as the new law.
After that, Derek is more sullen and takes his anger out on the young ones. Dylan withdraws further into himself and is even quieter. But it's good for teachers when the Vietnamese are in charge. Asian students still have respect for teachers so they make sure all the boys are polite and do the work. They call me Miss and get the others to do the same. No one throws chairs anymore, no one even screams. Teaching is almost easy. Minh and Tran may be violent, gun-toting gang members on the outside, but inside they are excellent students.
There are rumours that the previous principal was once sprung fucking a Vietnamese tough guy with tattoos marking murders on his arms. That scares me. If she did it and got away with it, what's stopping me from losing a bit of loneliness with Dylan? My hand lingers on his back for minutes at a time. I lean so close over his maths book I feel the heat of his cheek.
ON THE DAY BEFORE HOLIDAYS start, we hold a special assembly. It must be the only school in the world where students are unhappy when holiday time comes around. The teachers are grinning, ready for Bali, the mountains, long weeks on the beach – anywhere to recover from the darkness of this place and soak themselves in sunshine. But the boys are grim; without school, their days will be empty and dangerously boring. Prison management will have them paint and repaint the quadrangle benches a different colour every week. They'll make them dig holes and fill them back up again. Anything to keep them busy.
After the speeches and awards, I circulate, handing out cream biscuits from a big plastic bag. When I come to Dylan he doesn't take any biscuits, and instead puts an orange he's already peeled into my bag. This makes me cross. His orange has crushed some of the biscuits and its juice is making the rest soggy. I take it out and search for a bin. Then I feel his eyes on me, telling me that I've got it wrong. The orange is his gift. He's peeled it for me, the only thing he has to give. I stop what I'm doing and sit down, eating the orange slowly, segment by segment, letting each tiny juice sac burst against my palate. Knowing he's watching me.
When I return from my holiday, Dylan is gone; transferred to another centre somewhere closer to his family. It happens all the time. Students just disappear from the classroom without notice: transferred, sentenced, freed. Most of the time we don't know why. You finally get a kid to understand multiplication or that a hundred centimetres equals a metre, get them trusting you, loving you, maybe you even loving them back – and then they're gone.
No warning. No goodbyes. ♦/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}