Part Four Chapter 5
It’s late. The others are asleep I think. I can’t sleep.
I need to write.
It’s more than a week since I saw Zeph at the station. So much has happened.
Where to start?
Ten minutes ago I was outside looking at the night sky. It’s summer now and tonight is our first balmy night. They say it’s going to rain later, and you can almost smell it coming. The air is soft. There’s a full moon but it’s only fleetingly visible through the dark clouds rolling in from the west. The first of Grandpa’s roses are out and I could smell them in the night air. Grandpa says roses were Grandma’s favourite flower, and he makes me smell them often. It was very beautiful and very peaceful outside. If it does rain tomorrow, I have this feeling that it will be gentle soaking rain. Just what we’ve been hoping for. Grandpa will be pleased.
I can hear Zeph coughing in the room next to mine. He’s much better, but the cough comes back at night. We’ve told him he should see the doctor but he won’t go. He says he’ll be fine. He’s had worse, he says.
It’s been a week to the day since he knocked on my window at about three in the morning. I heard the knocking and the coughing and I knew it was him. He was shivering, even though it wasn’t especially cold, and when I opened the front door he staggered in and then collapsed. I called Grandpa. We wrapped him in blankets and put on the gas fire. He said he was hungry but he vomited up the soup I gave him. He drank water between coughing fits. He had a fever, throwing off the blankets and saying he was hot one minute and then shivering the next. I wanted to ring for an ambulance but Zeph shook his head and Grandpa said he thought we could manage.
And then he slept. We tucked him up in his old bed, and he slept for all the next day and into the night. I kept checking on him, especially when I heard him coughing again, but the coughing didn’t wake him. Sometimes, when I went into his room, the doona would be on the floor and he’d be shivery but still asleep. I’d tuck him up again, and stroke his forehead and that seemed to relax him; his breathing would become less shallow, his sleep even deeper.
He didn’t talk for almost three days. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. I skipped school on Monday and spent most of the day sitting by his bed. Zeph dozed most of the time. But I could see he was getting better. He drank a lot and started to eat a bit.
On Tuesday Grandpa made me go to school and when I got home Zeph was sitting up in bed. We talked a bit.
‘Why did you run off?’ I asked him.
‘I felt like such an idiot.’
‘What do you mean?’
Zeph told me the story of following the man back to his flats, how he thought he was going to unravel some mystery that would lead to the allegations against Ms McInness being the result of some dark conspiracy, and how stupid he felt when he realised it was all in his imagination. ‘I felt such a fool. Ridiculous. I couldn’t face you.’
‘You are an idiot,’ I said, smiling and stroking his hand.
He smiled too. I like his smile. I’m glad he’s back.
Ms McInness wasn’t at school on the Tuesday. There were rumours that she’d been sacked, that she’d been posted to some out of the way country town.
But on Tuesday night she turned up at our front door. Grandpa and I were doing the clearing up after dinner when we heard the door buzzer.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ she said. Then she heard the coughing from Zeph’s room and I told her about his return.
‘I’d like to show him too, if he’s up to it,’ she said. So we went into his room and the three of us sat on Zeph’s bed and Ms McInness took out a folded piece of paper. It was a printed copy of an email she had received. She handed it to Grandpa, who read it out loud.
It was from Gillian Aldridge, informing Ms McInness of the Teaching Institute’s decision regarding the allegations.
The Institute, the email explained, had received input from a number of sources, but it was the input from the Head of the English Department, Ms Rhonda Wellings, that had led the Institute to dismiss all the allegations and instead to advise the Department to move the Principal, Mr Elliot Sullivan, to another school. Ms Wellings, it seemed, had documented a number of occasions when the Principal had acted unprofessionally towards Ms McInness, ignoring her obvious dedication and strengths as an English teacher, putting undue pressure on her to favour the son of a local politician, and ignoring Ms Welling’s advice that, while in some ways Ms McInness was a raw and occasionally volatile young teacher, her classes were highly engaging, her lessons imaginatively and thoroughly prepared, and her standards consistently high and rigorous. The Institute had become aware, through conversations and written testimony not only from Ms Wellings but from other teachers and parents, that there was an unhealthy, even toxic, work environment, and that the best interests of the school would be served by giving it a fresh start under a different leader.
And so, tonight, we’ve been celebrating.
Ms McInness was here, Zeph and Grandpa made pizzas, god’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. For the time being. I know things don’t stay like this forever. All is change, Grandpa keeps telling me.
But outside tonight, looking at the starry sky, taking in the scents in the night air, the approaching clouds didn’t seem threatening at all. They were bringing rain, it seemed, and we need rain. Things have been too dry for too long. The roses are hanging out for it.
There was a lovely moment earlier tonight. We were standing around – Ms McInness and me – watching Grandpa supervising Zeph as he took the pizzas out of the oven.
‘Watch you don’t burn yourself,’ said Grandpa. Zeph didn’t say anything.
‘Over here on the bench. On the rack. You need to let air circulate under the crust for a bit, or else they’ll get soggy.’ Zeph’s done it before for Grandpa. He knows the drill. But Grandpa likes to be in charge. Zeph shot me a quick look.
Then Zeph noticed that Ms McInness had drifted away and was looking at the milk hatch. Zeph passed the pizza cutter to Grandpa and walked up behind Ms McInness.
‘Is this it?’ she said.
‘That’s the one.’
‘From Harriet’s story.’
‘Yep.’
‘Do you think if I opened it now, we might discover that the milko has been and left some milk?’
‘You never know,’ said Zeph. ‘Wouldn’t Harriet be pleased if we found ourselves back in the past.’
But would I? In some ways, I guess I would. This world is stuffed, I still think it’s stuffed. There’s no way now we can avoid the wrecking of a planet, what with the way populations are growing, environments are being destroyed, the ocean is being emptied of fish and polluted with plastic and the climate is changing. It’s stupid to think that we will avoid the kind of catastrophic conflicts that will be the result of these things.
But would I want to go back in time, back to the past? I don’t think I would.
Tonight, for so many different reasons, life feels good.