Days Like This.

On Day One of my side hustle marking English exams for the HSC, I learned that the marking centre doubles as the horse pavilion when the Easter Show is on. It’s also a music venue, among other things. I felt somewhat slighted to discover a loose covering of hay over the concrete floors. Not to mention the salt lick hanging from my desk. I wondered if the prized horses felt jilted when their time of year rolls around and they come across one of our paper clips or the lid of a biro in their stables.

There’s nothing like teachers working beyond their usual finishing time of 3pm. If you’re ever still at school as late as 4:15, someone will start rolling out camp beds. By 6 o’clock, supper is served and we’re wrapped in sleeping bags, dipping a biscuit into a cup of milo.

The marking day starts when the school day ends and runs till 9pm, plus all day Saturday. People with normal jobs can work like this all the time. They take a long lunch. Then they eat dinner at their desks and get a cab-charge home, sending emails at midnight. 

But teachers are not normal people with normal jobs. We are sick from canteen food, traumatised by the bell and broke from the price of flights in the school holidays.

To get to the stables, you have to walk from the carpark. It’s called P5 and everyone will call it this for the remainder of the job. At first, it felt like a 40 minute hike over rough terrain. In reality it’s a flat 7 minutes but we whined about it regardless. 

“I had to walk to E-Block twice today. And now this.”

Initially, I didn’t know how to get from P5 to the stables and I had stupidly printed the directions back-to-back with the carpark pass that needed to be displayed on the dashboard. One woman had sticky taped her pass to the inside of her windscreen and had to crane her neck to see around it. I tried to separate my map from the pass, as if paper had layers. Like puff pastry. When this didn’t work, I took off like a mole in a snow storm, trying to sniff my way there. Luckily, I saw an adult carrying a cooler bag lunchbox covered in polka dots. She was wearing sneakers with a dress. I know a fellow teacher when I see one.

When I arrived, I learned that another woman, Bronwyn, was to be my desk buddy for the next few weeks. About 30 seconds after I met Bronwyn, she called my voice sexy. About 30 seconds after that, she told me to shut up. While it was a mixed message, I was intrigued by the danger of it all. Maybe she wanted me to shut up because my voice was too sexy.

While I marked the students’ short stories, I made lists of my favourite phrases. 

My mum always wanted me to overwork myself to the bone.

On Day Two, Bronwyn wore shoes that gave the impression she had little goblin feet. Though I don’t imagine she does because she’s not the shape or size of a goblin and has no other obvious goblin features. She looks at you with kindness. She makes nice and appropriate amounts of eye contact. She laughs- a lot. Her grey hair falls into her eyes and she swishes and flicks it with the expertise of someone who’s cool enough to have had hair falling into their eyes for a long time. She doesn’t wear a cardigan or anything- she’s better than that- but she looks huggable somehow.

 It smelt of shoes and cultural difference.

I was marker 65/29 which I guess made Bronwyn 65/30. In front of us sat the lunch bag lady. She looked young, about 28, but she acted old, about 108.

On Day Three, she took out several small containers from her lunch bag. One had a sandwich. One had yoghurt. Another had three almonds. On the Fourth Day, she took out an even smaller container, possibly the same used previously for the almond-trio, only this time inside it was an individually wrapped triangle of Laughing Cow cheese. She ate it in four bites.

The “SOM”- who runs the place- was a lady whose heels sat just over the back of her wedges. She walks up tall, has a great big bust and enjoys moving her glasses from her head to her face with great regularity. Personally, I would consider bifocals. But to each her own. She wears patterned dresses (dots, spots, ‘abstract’, philodendrons) and takes her work very seriously. That’s not to say she isn’t up for a laugh, though. She wasted no time making that clear.

“Each night,” she said into the microphone, “I’ll end us off with a little movie quote.”

I desperately looked around. Trying to get the attention of markers 65/28, 65/31… 65/anyone. No one seemed as excited as me. 

“Bronwyn,” I whispered, “what do you think the movie quote will be?”

“How should I know?” she said, smirking behind her fringe.

On Day Five, the movie quote was “Hasta La Vista, baby.”

Lots of people spend their working year looking forward to their Christmas Bonus, or at least a half decent Christmas Party. If I meet my KPAs as a teacher (that is, no children are dead) I’m lucky to get a box of shell chocolates and a thank you card with my name spelled incorrectly. For Christmas lunch we eat BBQ chicken with our hands in the school hall. 

I started this extra job for the cash. And for the inspirational writing:

He stood there- like a pole.

But the perk I liked the best was the people. There was Rachel, who used celery like chopsticks to wrangle carbonara. Ange, whose drink bottle was an old pancake shaker. Natalie, whose body shook beneath her table in silent joy as she read a lengthy story about a child doing a poo. And the boss of Group 65, Jo, who looked like she had so much to say about the world but mostly didn’t feel the need to say it. 

On Day Six, I learned that Bronwyn likes Miles Davis. And building sheds. For her 21st, her mum gave her a Mr. Potato Head. With her marking money, she plans to buy a new mouthpiece for her saxophone.

“I’m gunna buy heroin,” I said.

Letter to future self:  I’ve traveled through time. Run Gordon! It’s the policeman!

My sister makes fun of me for calling people my “friend” too soon. But my heart wants what it wants. And what it wants is to collect friends like books on a shelf. Some I read every day, pouring over my favourite lines. Some I take to bed and keep under my pillow. Some are barely creased, with hundreds of pages just waiting. But I like them all.

I wondered what type of book I was going to be. And to who.

I dodge as if playing dodgeball.

There seemed to be thousands of teachers in these stables. I saw new ones every day. Most sat with their feet flat on the ground and their arms rested on the desktop. I sat with my legs crossed. Then with my chair sideways. I tucked my legs up. I sat backwards. Then with one knee up. Then with one leg behind my head and the other retracted inside my body. At one point, I seem to remember being suspended from the roof like a bat. My pen still worked.

In between my shuffling, I kept looking around the desks. No one moved. I wasn’t sure if they were dead or just transfixed by their task. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had come in and connected our teats to a milking machine. No one would have flinched. 

I started calling Bronwyn ‘Bron’. Even ‘Bronny’ if the mood took me. I was hoping she’d find it annoying. We whispered about poetry. And Braveheart. And the names of dogs.

On Day Seven, she told me that she didn’t miss her husband, or her house that much.

“But I miss my dog,” she laughed.

When you’re little, making friends can be as easy as finding out that your last names start with the same letter. Bus buddies! After 30, making a new friend is the stuff of fables. If you so much as make the claim, someone will say, “I’ve heard this story before, was this an episode of The X-Files?” 

Witch dream… or my dream?

On Day Eight, Bron and I discovered we both loved Van Morrison. Luckily for me, my taste in music is similar to my taste in friends- the older the better.

When Bron’s dog was just a puppy, he was scared of men. Her dad sat with him, patting his head and feeding him treats, showing him how to be brave.

“Are they still the best of friends?” I asked.

“My dad,” she told me gently, “is no longer with us. Mum’s moved in.”

My heart began to move, trying to be free from my chest.

That weekend (the one free day we got), I listened to Van Morrison. I was so weak from the extra hours that only my brain still worked. And it had a project of its own. It wondered if Bron was still upset about the passing of her father- which is a stupid thing to wonder. It wondered if she had a connection to him that she’d never have with anyone else. It wondered if she went home and listened to Van to be sad. Maybe her dad liked him too- like mine does. Maybe her records were his- like mine are. Passed down.

A friend, on the outside, compared my heart to Phar Lap’s - too big.

On Day Nine, people started to talk like we’d been conscripted.

“Who put us up to this?”

So- it’s been 5 years since he last passed away.

By Day 10, I’d stopped reading the news. Stopped contacting old friends. Only new ones existed. Rachel rode a scooter. Ange wore a hair piece. I passed them notes. It almost felt like we were all away on camp together. Or in prison.

We were an army of English teachers, with biros for bayonets and synonyms for snipers. 

We were off the grid. 

After dedicating our lives to getting teenagers to stay quiet, we were faced with the one thing we had always dreamed of: silence. 

I couldn’t stand it.

We burgled conversations. We snuck in whispers between papercuts. We were like the Handmaids, who mouth their names to each other across the darkness. Except, of course, we were being paid. But in terms of free time for chats, our lives were almost identical.

The sound of a pin could be heard if someone dropped it. 

At dinner, we sat on trestle tables in a different corner of the stables. People bored Bron to death with photos of their children. Except she wasn’t bored, because she’s nice. I wanted to keep talking about how sexy she finds her husband in his Big Lebowski T-Shirt. Or whether or not Ange was planning on completing any of my dares. I was waiting for a moment to interrupt so I could wrangle the conversation into something vaguely inspiring.

“You’re so needy,” someone said to me, as if they were reading my thoughts. 

On Day 11, the stables were freezing. A woman came in a moonboot. How did she find the time to break her leg? I was shivering and Bron leant me her jacket. At lunch, she schlepped all the way to P5 and brought me a blanket from her car.

“You have to take care of yourself,” she said. The blanket was a snuggy. It had arms. And a hood. 

(Like a Handmaid.)

On Day 12, the SOM’s dress was the pattern and colour-scheme of a fancy-dress poncho. Her film quote was, “I’ll be back!”

We kept marking. 

On Day 13, it became clear that Bron was a Ravenclaw. She used the word “transcendentalism.”

“Stop analysing me,” she said.

By Day 14, I had forgotten the sun. I was part of a montage in a casino movie.

The walk home was slumpish. 

On Day 15, Bron and I talked on and on about music. That’s the best thing about a new friend. A friend who’s just yours. They haven’t fallen into any of the traps you’ve carefully laid out over the years. The traps that say: I don’t like this, I don’t love that.

To a new friend, you’re not a caricature yet. They paint you as they see you. And they can paint back parts of you that somehow got erased.

Have you ever considered of being an artist- of arts?

On the final day, we were told that Janet Jackson’s world tour was about to descend upon the venue. We were definitely not the main earner for this complex. There had been BMX Events, a colour run, and now this.

I saw Janet’s pink hummer. She would later be warming up in the stables next to ours- perhaps the pig, the goat or cow- I couldn’t be sure. While the roadies did their thing, they played music. It ripped through our silent stables.

As the first song stretched back and put its feet up on our tables, we both took note of what it was: Van Morrison.

“Serendipity!” I cried, to my friend.

She flicked that fringe.

“There’s a reason we were meant to meet.”

But what will become of friendship beyond these stables?

Run along, little heart, you were never much use to me anyway.