Don't Call Me Ishmael (2 page)

Of course there wouldn't even be any Ishmael Leseur's Syndrome if it weren't for Herman Melville. He's the real culprit.

That's right. The simple fact is, that if around one hundred and fifty years ago Herman Melville hadn't written his novel about Captain Ahab and his mad quest for the white whale Moby Dick, then Ron Leseur (my father) would never have studied it at university in American Literature A with Carol McCann (my mother). And if Herman Melville had never written
Moby Dick
and my parents hadn't studied it, then seven years later when they were married and expecting their first child (me), my father would never have dressed up as Captain Ahab just because my mother said she looked like a whale, since there wouldn't have been any Captain Ahab for him to dress up as, or any white whale for him to make a joke about, and therefore he would never have made Mum laugh so much that yours truly would be squeezed out screaming into the world before I was ready
and
(this is the
crucial
point) he
would never have uttered the name Ishmael in a million years because he wouldn't have known that Ishmael was the name of the narrator and hero of the novel
Moby Dick
because Herman Melville would never have written it for my father to have read it and found that out and my mother wouldn't have laughed at it even if for some bizarre reason my father
had
mentioned the name Ishmael, because it wouldn't have made any sense to her any more seeing as how she wouldn't have read the book because there would have been no book to read since Melville wouldn't have written it. And if it hadn't been my terrible fate to end up as Ishmael Leseur then none of the disasters of my life would have happened and today I would be a happy normal teenager like everyone else my age.

It's as simple as that.

Now if you don't believe this is
all
true you can check for yourself. Go ahead, get a copy of
Moby Dick.
You don't even have to read every word. In fact you don't have to read very much at all–not even a chapter, not even a page. All you have to do is read three words.
Three words
! Go on. Turn to Chapter One. It's called ‘Loomings'.

See, there it is on the very first page. Read the opening three words of
Moby Dick
by Herman Melville. They are the same words that my parents would have read at uni. The same words that were buried deep within my father's brain, lying there dormant until that awful day August the first, fourteen years ago, when they were germinated by the sight of my mother's swollen belly and watered by the tears of my parents' laughter.

Go on, read them. Read the first three words of
Moby Dick.
Here, I'll help you. ‘
Call me Ishmael.
'

Thanks a lot, Herman!

Now I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I haven't suffered from Ishmael Leseur's all my life. Far from it. In fact, for the first twelve years of my existence I showed no symptoms at all. Then I started secondary school at St Daniel's Boys College.

Before that I had spent seven uneventful years at Moorfield Primary among classmates who wouldn't have cared if my name were Slobo Bugslag (which, incidentally, was the name of the most popular kid in the school). However, things changed totally in Year Eight. With primary school over, our class moved on to a range of secondary schools throughout town. Only a handful of us went to St Daniel's.

There my world changed dramatically. At Moorfield Primary I was in a class of twelve. On the first day at St Daniel's I stood in an assembly area with over a hundred Year Eight boys waiting to be divided into four classes. When I checked the class lists, I found I had been separated from the only two boys I knew from primary school. In Homeroom
our teacher Mr Brownhill went through the roll to check that everyone was in the right place. Halfway through the list he said, ‘Ishmael Leseur'.

I answered, ‘Here, sir,' like everyone else before me.

‘Ishmael?' he repeated, pausing for the first time during the roll call. ‘That's an interesting name.'

Twenty-five sets of eyes turned to look at me. None of them seemed to find me the least bit interesting. One of those sets of eyes belonged to Barry Bagsley. Remember my second theory?

Well, Barry Bagsley was an extreme case in point. I picked up the first subtle hint of this in his opening line to me in the playground that first day.

‘Ishmael? What kind of a wussy–crap name is that?'

What could I say? Up to this point of my life I hadn't even known it was a wussy-crap name. No one had warned me that I had a wussy-crap name. Why would my parents give me a wussy-crap name in the first place? Was Herman Melville aware it was a wussy-crap name? All I could do was smile stupidly while Barry Bagsley and his friends laughed and pushed past me like I was a revolving door.

I stood there like a wuss.

I felt like crap.

That night I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. Somehow I didn't look the same. It was like the time one of
my friends said that he thought my left ear stuck out more than my right one. When I got home that day I measured them and they were exactly the same. But still every time I looked at my reflection I couldn't help thinking that one of my ears was giving a hand signal for a left turn. This felt the same. I was seeing myself in a different way. I looked different. But what could it be? Then it hit me.

I looked like a kid with a wussy-crap name. Not only that, I swear my left ear was jutting out like an open car door!

The next day when I walked into the classroom, Barry Bagsley was waiting.

‘Hey, what stinks? Oh no! It's Fishtail Le Sewer!'

Yes, as I was saying, something about my name brought out the worst in Barry Bagsley. He ripped and tore at it like a mad dog mauling a shoe, until it became so mangled and twisted that even I had trouble remembering who I really was.

Ishmael was crunched into Fishtail. Fishtail was ground into Dishrail. Dishrail was mashed into Kisstail and Kisstail was slobbered into Piss-stale. And let's not forget all the various mutations and cross-pollinations like Fishstale, Stalefish, Stalepiss, Pisstrail, Email and Female.

Even my last name was not safe from mutilation. Leseur (actually pronounced Le-sir) became Le Sewer and then Le Spewer, Le Pooer and finally Manure. By the end of my first term of high school Barry Bagsley had miraculously transformed me from Ishmael Leseur to Stalepiss Manure.

And that summed up exactly how I felt.

It soon became obvious to every Year Eight that if you wanted to survive your stay at St Daniel's Boys College relatively unscathed, there were only two courses of action open to you: either avoid Barry Bagsley at all costs, which was what the majority chose to do, or risk the road less travelled and seek out the dangerous safety of Barry Bagsley's inner circle of ‘friends'.

For me, avoidance was the only option.

I quickly realised that as long as I stayed as far away from Barry Bagsley as possible and didn't do anything stupid like, say, asking or answering a question in class, making some kind of unusual noise like shouting, laughing or speaking, volunteering for something, putting my name on a list, trying out for a sport, leaving an item of mine where it could be moved, thrown or written on, looking anywhere near the direction of Barry and his friends, or merely doing anything whatsoever that might indicate that I actually existed, then I would be fine.

Essentially, the most important lesson I learnt last year was to
make myself as small a target as possible. I became an expert at this. I became virtually invisible to Barry Bagsley and his mates. Sometimes I could barely see myself. So that was basically how I spent my first year at high school–in hiding. On the occasions when I was reluctantly flushed out into the open, like when I couldn't avoid answering a teacher's question, I prepared myself for the inevitable comments of, ‘What's that pong?' or ‘Who stepped in manure?' or ‘Oh my god! It's the creature from Le Sewer!' But even these insults lost a little sting eventually. After all, maybe they were right. Maybe I did stink. Isn't that what my name said?

Anyway, I somehow made it through to the end of the year, escaped gratefully into the Christmas holidays and returned reluctantly this year to Year Nine fully expecting that school life for me would be much the same as before. I was wrong. This year would be different.

It would be the toughest, the weirdest, the most embarrassingly awful and the best year of my life.

It was “the first day of Year Nine. A brand new year. A brand new classroom. A brand new Homeroom teacher. A brand new start.

‘Hey, Le Spewer–chuck us a red pen, will ya? You'd be good at
chuckin'
, wouldn't ya, Le
Spewer
?'

Same old Barry Bagsley. I mean, you certainly had to hand it to him. In his own way he really had quite a creative touch with language. Naturally, I gave as good as I got by pretending to be busy arranging my books and hoping like hell that our teacher would arrive soon. She did. Miss Tarango.

It would be pretty fair to say that none of us had ever had a teacher like Miss Tarango before. She was young. She was beautiful. She actually seemed happy to be diere. I think Mum would have described her as ‘bubbly'. I liked her straightaway. She had short curly blond hair, eyes that actually did sparkle and dimples in her cheeks that appeared like magic whenever she smiled, which was often. She was also bright, friendly and enthusiastic. I couldn't see her surviving a term.

‘Good morning, boys. My name is Miss Tarango. I'm your new Homeroom and English teacher. This is my first year of teaching and
you
are my
very
first class.'

Make that a week. Already I could hear rumblings from the back corner, where Barry and his mates were holed up like the Kelly gang.

‘All right, let's quieten down so I can do the roll.'

‘I wouldn't mind doing a roll with her.' Stifled laughter broke out from behind me.

Miss Tarango fixed her smiling face on Barry Bagsley. ‘I'm sorry, I missed that,' she said pleasantly.

‘Nothing, Miss,' Barry Bagsley said with a smirk. ‘I was just saying that doing the roll would be good.'

The boys around him returned his smirk.

Miss Tarango held Barry Bagsley with her clear blue eyes and smiled. The rest of us waited. The rest of us waited some more. The rest of us wondered uneasily how much longer we were going to have to wait. The boys around Barry Bagsley lost their smirks. Miss Tarango remained silent and smiled like the cover shot of a glossy magazine. Barry Bagsley shifted a little in his seat.

‘Well, thank you for your support. It's good to know we are of one mind. Now, let's get started, shall we? Let's see who we have here. Tom Appleby?'

‘Here, Miss.'

‘Ryan Babic?'

‘Here, Miss.'

‘Barry Bagsley?'

‘Yo!'

Miss Tarango smiled pleasandy once more, but a little of the sparkle seemed missing from her eyes. ‘Barry, I think a simple “Here” or “Present” would be more appropriate and polite in future thank you.'

The roll call continued again without incident until, ‘Ishmael … Now, is your surname pronounced Le-
sir
, Ishmael?'

‘Yes, Miss.'

‘He's lying, Miss. It's Le-sewer. Fishtail Le-sewer!'

More laughter from behind me.

Miss Tarango placed the roll on the desk in front of her. She spoke calmly and deliberately. ‘Barry, I always try very hard to learn people's names and to pronounce them correctly. I expect the same from you and from everyone else in this class. Each one of us deserves to be treated with respect. I won't tolerate anything less. Please remember that in future. OK?'

Barry Bagsley sat silently. Miss Tarango returned to her list of names.

‘Where was I? Yes … Ishmael.'

Then she stopped, looked up from the sheet and smiled at me. ‘You know, in fact Ishmael is quite a famous name in English literature.'

What? Oh no. No, don't say it. Please don't say it. Just read the next name on the roll. Just forget about it and go on. Please.

‘Did you know that Ishmael was the name of the hero of a very famous novel?' Miss Tarango's face beamed enthusiastically at the class.

The class stared back blankly like stunned rabbits caught in
a blazing floodlight. I tried frantically to think of some way I could strangle Miss Tarango in front of twenty-five witnesses and make it look like an accident.

‘Does anyone know the name of the famous novel with the main character of Ishmael in it?'

No, nobody knows, and what's more they don't care, so let's just move on and finish that roll call.

‘No one? Well, what if I give you a clue? It's not set in the present day … and one of the other main characters is the captain of a ship.'

Silence. Then a hand inched upwards. ‘Yes?'

‘Star Trek
, Miss?'

The class immediately erupted into laughter, but also secretly checked Miss Tarango's reaction on the off chance that the answer might just be correct. Miss Tarango laughed as if she appreciated the joke, but when she looked at Bill Kingsley, the author of the response, she knew that, sadly, there was no humour intended.

‘It's Bill, isn't it? Well, not a bad effort, Bill. Well done for having a go. Maybe I should have said it was set on a sailing ship as opposed to a starship.' Miss Tarango looked once more around the class. ‘Any other offers? No? Well, who's heard of
Moby Dick
?

‘Moby
what
, Miss?'

Muffled sniggers. It was Barry Bagsley again. There was no way he could pass up an opportunity like this.

‘Moby Dick
by Herman Melville, Barry,' Miss Tarango said casually. ‘How many of you have heard of the story of Captain
Ahab and his quest for revenge against Moby Dick, the white whale that took off his leg?'

Most of the class raised a hand with varying degrees of certainty and enthusiasm. Bill Kingsley stared into the distance as if he were already somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.

‘But why was the whale called Moby
Dick
, Miss?

More sniggers–somewhat less muffled this time. Barry Bagsley was not going to be put off that easily.

Miss Tarango appeared deep in thought, then replied deliberately. ‘To be honest, I really don't know, Barry. Names can be important or symbolic in books, so they often have a deeper meaning, but I'm just not sure if that's the case with the name Moby Dick. Perhaps Melville based it on an actual whale's name from historical records or perhaps it just seemed right to him. You know, just like your parents might have called you Barry just because they thought you looked like a Barry.' She paused, then added as an afterthought, ‘In the same way, I guess, they could just as easily have thought you looked like a Dick.'

A stunned silence hit the room. What? What was that? What did she say? If Miss Tarango had intended to insult Barry Bagsley, she showed no sign of it and seemed blissfully unaware of the effect of her words.

Before the class could react, she had continued on her cheery, smiling way. ‘Still, it's an interesting question, Barry. Maybe you could do some research for homework or try reading the novel and see if you could find the answer there, and then maybe you might like to report back to us in a class
presentation. But for the moment we'd better finish the roll and go through the morning bulletin before we run out of time completely.'

There aren't many things that can shut Barry Bagsley up, but being bombarded by words like ‘research', ‘homework', ‘reading', ‘report' and ‘class presentation' certainly seemed to do the trick. After that, the rest of Homeroom continued without disruption as Miss Tarango bustled energetically about completing various administration tasks and greeting everything and everyone with equal enthusiasm. All the while the class watched and wondered.

But no one watched and wondered more intently than Barry Bagsley.