The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie (27 page)

The Philosophical Musings of Bindy Mackenzie
7.10 am
Bindy, ignore your splitting headache, and embrace the thrill of the new term—a new era, a new Bindy Mackenzie!

Pay heed, FAD group, I am going to discover the
true and thrilling nature of your souls
!! I am going to find the nobility within you, and reveal that nobility to you!!

Affectionate Bindy has returned.

A Portrait of Toby Mazzerati
Here I sit in Assembly, the first Wednesday of the new term.

Mr Botherit is welcoming us back to school. He is so enthusiastic that one would think we had been gone for two months, not just two weeks.

His voice fades into a hazy distance, and I focus on Toby Mazzerati.

He must be here somewhere in this Assembly Hall but I cannot find him. So I will record my memory of him.

Toby Mazzerati is faintly freckled all over. You cannot tell that he is freckled unless you see him up close on a bright day or perhaps beneath a sunlamp.

Toby has reddish-blonde hair, thick and soft.

He has small eyes, the colour of red-brown rust, but rust is flat and dull, whereas Toby's eyes gleam.

He is short and plump.

There is something puffy and swollen about him—I often think of pastry, the lid of a pie, slowly ballooning in the oven.

Excuse me, Mr Botherit's voice is growing loud.

He is explaining that
anyone
can
change.

Well, that is good news! I myself plan to change this term. I am hoping—

Oh, Mr Botherit, hush.

He has gone too far.

He always does.

He is saying that people who have done poorly in school work before can pick themselves up in Year 11 and come first in the year! He is recommending tutors, study schedules, meetings with course advisers, etc, etc.

He is going to play havoc with the bell curve. He should leave it alone.

It is later.

I am in my room at home.

This afternoon, I attended my first session of FAD since the disastrous session last term. I will not lie. I was terrified.

But! I caught the bus with the others into Castle Hill. It was less crowded than usual, and we all found seats, most of us alongside strangers. I was near the front, and turned around to give each of the FAD group an affectionate smile. Sergio was the only one to return it properly. The others pretended not to see me, or widened their eyes, raised their eyebrows, curled their lips, or snorted like angry horses.

Finnegan Blonde offered a faint, inscrutable smile; the mildest creasing at the corners of his eyes, and then turned towards the bus window. He seemed then, as I watched, to have a private thought, and to smile, amused, at this thought, and he knocked against the window gently, with the knuckle of his right index finger.

I smiled warmly at Try, too, but I turned away at once, not wanting to see her reaction. My greatest fear was that she had read my Life and not liked it. I did not want to see disappointment in her eyes. But perhaps she had not yet had
the time. I only gave it to her two days ago! I assume she was grateful for the framed cartoon and has it hanging in her front hallway. (She hasn't mentioned it.)

They ordered their coffees (Astrid, I noted, had switched to herbal tea) and found their armchairs behind the curtain. Emily insisted she had post-traumatic stress disorder from a Legal Studies exam she had done that day. ‘Seriously,' she was saying, ‘what are the symptoms?' Toby and Finnegan mocked her. Astrid mentioned that she had a mild concussion, from running into a telegraph pole while being chased by the police after a party on Saturday night. Toby and Finnegan turned from Emily to mock Astrid instead. Briony was timid. Sergio and Elizabeth leaned close together to talk about Elizabeth's new rollerblades. His breath caressed her cheek. Her eyes sparkled like raindrops. He touched her elfin ears. She drew her legs up into the couch, and gathered her arms around those legs.

Aha!
I thought.
That's one thing that has changed. Sergio and Elizabeth: an item. It must have happened over the break.

But I had predicted that.

Try was as tiny as ever, and she perched on the same footstool. She explained that today we would talk about ‘fear'.

Blushing, she produced a bright purple ball, the size of a basketball, but made of soft cloth and containing a jingling bell.

‘We throw the ball,' she explained, ‘and whoever catches it must tell us the things they fear.'

Finnegan collected the coffee orders, as usual, and I turned to consider Toby—and found myself in shock.

Has every single person in Year 11 changed so dramatically?

I'd seen him sitting on the bus, and around the school,
but simply had not noticed. Toby had
stretched
like an elastic band.

What was I thinking when I said he was swollen and puffy?

His skin sits firm on his bones, a pleasant, pale brown. His arms are smooth as they reach for his coffee; he blinks once or twice and his thoughts ripple out across the well-defined structure of his face.

What was I thinking when I said he was short?
He has grown tall.
His head sits up above the top of the couch, and his feet stretch out to the floor.

(What is happening to the boys in Year 11? Some, I must say, remain short. Some have terrible acne; many have bristles of hair on their upper lips; but many! Many have grown smooth, bronzed skin, muscles, legs, and forearms!

I find it hard to look at these ‘men' without feeling something—

I feel like a passenger in an accelerating car, a hand on a gearstick that keeps changing, ever faster. But where does it end?)

I continued to watch Toby in quiet amazement as the FAD session went on. I saw him glance at me, a little uncomfortably, once or twice. I believe he sensed my gaze.

It was easier to stare when he was talking—and the ball seemed often to land in his hands. He leaned forward to talk. The conversation, as usual, strayed away from fears—their fears ranged from exams to careers to concern about the vulnerability of their little brothers and sisters to parents' marriages and parents' health to global warming to sharks to terrorist attacks. But somehow the conversation ended up at conspiracy theories.

Toby is fond of conspiracies. He believes that all
sunglasses have built-in hidden cameras, which see what you are seeing, while a central agency watches every frame. Similar, he said, with computers—there is a department recording every tap of your fingers on a keyboard.

He also believes that most robberies you read about in newspapers are fictional—planted there to make people buy insurance.

He threw the ball to Briony then, and she declared that electricity companies make it darker outside so we have to use more lights. It took us all a moment to realise she was joking, and to laugh

It is Thursday now.

I'm trying to find a positive animal for Toby to replace the cane toad. Some kind of chattering monkey? I googled ‘chattering monkey and it seems to be a metaphor for the taunting voices in the back of your head. The voices that insist you will fail.

I don't think that is what Toby's chatting intends.

11.53 pm on Thursday
Worked at Maureen's Magic tonight and remembered this.

Whenever Toby threw the ball at FAD yesterday, he threw it to Briony. He did this casually, glancing at others first as if considering them, and then tossing it, always, to her.

I remember thinking, almost crossly:
why throw the ball to Briony
?
She's too shy!

But Briony always caught the ball, held it tightly in both hands, and spoke. And each time her voice grew louder and her sentences became more complete. Sometimes she even made jokes.

I think that Toby knew what he was doing.

I think he was chipping away at her silence, constructing a place where she could speak.

Friday, 4.10 am
There is determination behind Toby's light-hearted chat. I have heard rumours that he is building a snooker table as his major work for Design and Technology. People are amazed at the ambition. But the message seems to be: if anyone can build a snooker table, Toby Mazzerati can.

I believe that Toby is a kind person.

I remember when he gave me a wooden jewellery box.

(Nobody threw the ball to me at FAD.)

A Memo from Bindy Mackenzie

 

Dear Toby,
Once, I left you a message in which I said that you are a cane toad.

Today, I write to assure you that you are not.

No, Toby, I was mistaken.

You are not a cane toad, but a woodpecker!

Woodpeckers enjoy working with wood. So do you!

Woodpeckers keep up a constant, tapping noise as they beat their little beaks against the bark. So do you! (If not ‘tapping', at least a sort of' chatting'.)

A woodpecker is beautiful, and you have grown into a dashing young man, far removed from the plump little boy I used to know in primary school.

Most importantly, a woodpecker's work is vital for other birds—the holes they make in trees become nests for smaller birds, such as bluebirds, wrens and chickadees.

I believe that you are just the same.

(I understand that woodpeckers also have extremely long tongues, shock-absorbers in their heads, and stiff tail feathers. Perhaps you do, too!)