14. Girls
Michael’s run in the debate team was successful from the start. The team went on to impress everyone who saw them in action, and this Patrick – all of the team members for that part – were smart, articulate kids who Michael enjoyed collaborating with. There was a genuine sense of camaraderie and team work. Michael was edging towards contentment, and as close as he could get to happiness that seemed to last longer than an embrace from his mother, or the hormonal rush that came from what was becoming habitual, ritual exercises in self-gratification (the two were unrelated). His hormones were out of control, and he was enjoying the spectacle knowing fully well what was happening.
The team began winning inter-school events. Their arguments were well made and well structured. Michael’s performances were increasingly sought-after, as he had begun to accrue the reputation as the semi-celebrity and enfant terrible thanks to the media coverage from his skirmish with Sutton and the administration. The topics were sophomoric, well within their intellectual grasp, and the team captain Patrick was a talented, passionate debater.
As the weeks passed, they won debate after debate, and garnered a reputation among the other private schools for their stunning achievements, who, as they had no other recourse, attributed the success to the influence of their supervising teacher-coach. Mr Sutton took the accusation in his stride, and co-ordinated what was eventually called a ‘spot-debate’, between Wellings and the complainant school Everett College, wherein a third party adjudicator would provide the teams with a debate topic and then one hour to prepare in ante rooms of the local town hall building, all the while the teachers-coaches were remaining on the outer. His confidence and arrogance was palpable, and when the Welling team were given the affirmative side of the debate on whether Australia actually needed a new Parliament House, he availed himself of the nearest McDonalds, ate a hot apple pie, drank a chocolate shake and returned just in time to see first speaker Steven Holloway, followed by second speaker Patrick and then finally Michael lay waste to the Everett opposition.
While the major press stopped caring by and large about what a smarter-than-average kid was doing with his spare time, the community papers couldn’t seem to get enough of it. The Wahroonga Times would invariably run a piece every other week about the debaters, routinely re-writing the same article about the team and how Michael was well-known because of his academic run-in with faculty. Their photographer took all but the same photo each time, the boys striking similar poses around, on or near desks, holding one trophy or another or pretending to strike thoughtful, philosophic poses, illustrating through still image the deep, intrinsic weight of the intellectual heft they clearly possessed.
It was during these debates and the pubescent camaraderie that sprung from them that Michael felt his best. He felt at home, with purpose, and among friends. Although they were all in their late teens and he was at his very heart in his late 30s – even Mr Sutton was at that stage his junior – he felt like he was among peers. Occasionally a note of caution floated into his consciousness, warning him off accustoming to his surrounds, but a more vocal voice in his head dispatched the logic that perhaps being accustomed was exactly what the situation required.
It wasn’t as though he had much choice in the matter.
*
Things were smooth and pleasant at home as well. Michael’s perceived strange and frustrated disposition, which had been a source of concern for Clive and Sylvia earlier in the year, was much more pleasant ever since he managed to get himself some degree of notoriety in the local media and a sense of self and purpose from his comparative victory.
And yet all the while lay this nagging inquisition, this unanswerable question about the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of his predicament. Why him? How had it happened? Why 1987? Why at 38? The conceptual burden of it all was for Michael often loftier and more cumbersome than his previously unchallenged mind would have dared consider. But seeing the crisp, new pages of a women’s magazine lying about the house, all that large hair, unsubtle fashion, everything that was hip and now, and words like ‘trendy’ being bandied about without the faintest hint of irony or scorn. Platoon had just won big at the Oscars. Paul Hogan was a newly minted cinematic star. When the news was being read in the evenings with sharp new footage of the ‘current’ prime minister and ‘current’ leader of the opposition duking it out in the lead up to the 1987 Federal Election, it was very real, apparent, new. Michael didn’t have anything like an eidetic memory, and while it was possible he had seen all these news stories before, there is no way his mind could replicate them with such detail, should he be in some sort of breathtakingly vivid coma. The visages of people long dead, his mother included, were right in front of him; palpable, tangible, in literal flesh.
It was when the concepts of time travel and his investigations of the impossibilities of it, the mechanics and theoretical physics required to make it so weighed so heavily on him that Michael began to suffer through piercing, blinding headaches to the point where he did what he could to consign his inquisitive thoughts about it to some other realm in his brain. It was, all too frequently, all too much.
*
The first time the team met their opponents from a girls’ school, Archer Ladies’ College, the hesitancy and nervous tension in the room was palpable and almost hilarious to him. Wellings was hosting, and the debate was taking part during an extended lunch break in front of a full audience. A rare event. The winner would go on to the regional final.
In an ante room before the debate started, Patrick and Steven were losing their shit. All Michael saw was a trio of mid-teen girls in maroon uniforms. But his classmates were acting as if they were in the presence of lingerie models; initially clueless and speechless, gradually building towards ham-fisted flattery and ill-judged attempts at impressing them.
The girls were, quite rightly, having none of it.
Michael didn’t feel any of it, he just wanted to get to the meat and potatoes of the debate. There was a pre-debate reception, some mingling and finger sandwiches with liberal doses of high fructose cordial. As was his want, he struck up a conversation with one of the girls, who seemed relieved to just talk to him and not have him try to impress her.
‘Michael,’ he said, extending his hand.
‘Susan,’ she replied. She had braces on the bottom row of her teeth only. Her hair was brown and curly and fell down to her shoulders, it held back by a deep purple ribbon. She was your average teenage girl, and since Michael had the body of a 12 year old but the desires of a man 25 years older, Susan was nowhere near an object of desire for him.
Quite the opposite. She, like most teenagers, smelled bad.
Their conversation was polite, casual, small talk-y. Susan confessed to slight nervousness; Michael feigned the same. One of the organisers informed them of a 10 minute start before the competition.
Susan used it as an excuse to flip through her palm cards. She was arguing third for the affirmative, that higher education is more important now than ever. Concurrently, Michael was third for the negative.
‘You seem a little young to be on the senior team,’ she noted, looking down at him – the three inches in height difference meaning more at that age than they would in future.
‘Well, I get that a lot, but I’m here today, so I’ve obviously been on the ball so far.’
‘Well, good luck. Nice talking to you.’
She wandered off and spoke quietly and nervously with her teammates. Michael’s approached him.
‘Did you ask her out?’ Patrick asked.
‘What?’
‘We saw you talking to her. She seemed in to you.’
‘No, Patrick. We just talked.’
‘Why didn’t you ask her out?’
‘What am I going to do? Ride to her house on my bike and then race her to McDonald’s? C’mon, dude. Get over it.’
‘I don’t know, Mike. She seemed keen.’
‘I think you’re looking through rose tinted lenses. We chatted. There’s a difference. What stunt were you pulling?’
Holloway punched Patrick in the arm.
‘He was trying to get that girl to feel his muscle.’
‘Which one?’ Michael asked.
‘The blonde.’
‘Nah, which muscle?’
‘His bicep.’
‘And she wasn’t interested? There’s a shocker.’
Patrick was defensive in his laughter.
‘You never know until you ask.’
‘I’d disagree with that one, Pat. I could have told you that going in, she’s not going to want to feel your bicep the minute you meet her.’
‘We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.’
It was a new retort in Patrick’s arsenal.
‘After this, you and I are going to have a talk about boundaries.’
*
The Evans Hall, named after one of Wellings’ former headmasters, was packed with senior students from both schools – segregated for the sake of sanity and general order, as well as staff from both. Michael presumed as much, given that he didn’t recognise half of them. One adult in the corner, a beared older man in a tweed blazer, eyed him suspiciously and jotted down notes as the two teams entered the ‘arena’ and took their places on the stage.
There was a smattering of polite if marginally enthusiastic applause.
Wellings’ headmaster, Dr Rogers, who Michael had barely seen since he made the time leap, introduced the debate and welcomed their esteemed adjudicator, a representative from the New South Wales Debating Union – apparently that was a thing. Everyone there was, according to Dr Rogers, honoured to be with Mrs Kittredge from the NSWDU, and they were promised a vibrant and exciting afternoon of competitive thinking and debating, enhancing the broader idea of competition from just that which is reserved for the playing fields. Debating was sport, but for nerds, is what he was implying.
Michael flipped through his notes and steeled his resolve, employing the same breathing and relaxation techniques he used to get into the right mindset and space when acting. He hadn’t done much stage work since well before he moved to Los Angeles, since his role on Clues was hot off the heels of the mini-series he did in Melbourne. His argument was solid, if a little presumptive, but he felt good about it. No, ladies and gentlemen, higher education is most certainly not something all students should aim for.
The debate began, Michael smiled at the right times, notes at others and simply enjoyed the moment. There was little pressure. His team mates were strong speakers, decent kids, if perhaps imbued with a heightened sense of importance and entitlement. Word had gotten around about this First Year well beyond his assumed abilities, so it was with some fascination and more than a few camera snaps that Michael approached the podium. The older chap in the back row, bespoke in tweed and academic authority and beardedness, leaned forward. Michael saw it, but thought little of it.
*
‘Perhaps,’ Michael speculated, rounding the turn to land his epic conclusion, ‘we could be emerging in this new century as a country whose great financial achievers are not from the halls of academia. Our own federal Treasurer is someone who has not a single day’s tertiary education under his belt, and his is a reputation so great that among treasurers, he is regarded as the world’s greatest.’
The crowd were responding well. Mostly, Michael suspected, out of the novelty value of a preppy kid in shorts speaking in such a mature, articulate and confident manner. Few ideas were separated by the word ‘like’; he did not inflect at the end of every sentence. He was calm, assured, and intelligent beyond his years. The boys who were jealous of him had to be impressed in spite of their prejudices; the girls who weren’t just impressed took their own individual moments to guard their confusing, conflicting feelings towards this kid – he was a kid after all. Five years or more their junior, and everybody knew that it just wasn’t done.
‘Might I suggest we look into the future,’ Michael continued, cheekily enhancing his foresight borne of retrospection. ‘Australia is a nation rich in resources. Economies in developing nations moving away from pastoral and closed industrial status, those nations which could possibly open their doors to greater manufacturing capabilities will be in serious need of the kind of mineral resources that we in this country have in abundance. Should there be greater opportunities for Australia’s resources and minerals industries to expand their markets to, say, China, then there would be a boom unlike any we have experienced in our comparatively short history. The need for a skilled labour force in the north west of Western Australia, or the mining regions of Queensland would require less the kind of academic ideas and skills generated in higher education institutions like Sydney, or UNSW and more the kind of brute force we all see in those commercials for industrial clothing and work gear played between overs during the cricket.
‘Operating giant mining equipment requires skills and attributes that are seldom developed in tutorials devoted to structural semiotics, or corporate torts.
‘Should we, Madame adjudicator, look to the future and see on our collective horizon an economy borne of a burgeoning and under-utilised minerals sector, the great wealth and fortunes guaranteed solely by tertiary degrees in law, medicine and engineering as speculated by my learned friends in the opposing team … they may very well be coming from a more ‘grass roots’ source. Noble pursuits as they are, they are but for the few and the comparatively privileged. Our leaders on the political left have for more than a generation strove for a more equitable distribution of wealth, and it is something that is, to my mind, within our foreseeable future. My friends in Sixth Year have told me on more than a few occasions that the advice they’re being given is that without a high-level HSC score, they are destined solely for the hottest and noisiest and lowest-paid work. This may be the case, but in years to come it’s not out of the question that the hottest and noisiest jobs will not be the lowest paid ones. We may be looking at a future that a truck driver in the Pilbara will out earn an urban teacher by a factor of two or three.’
Mrs Kittredge hit the bell on the adjudicator’s desk, signalling Michael had one minute remaining.
‘And should that be the case, ladies and gentlemen, it will say conclusively as I and my team mates do now, that higher education is most certainly NOT important for all students in Australia.’
He hit the ‘not’ well enough that the audience knew his conclusion was delivered then. He walked back to his desk and chair on the stage to rapturous applause. Patrick slapped him on the back with encouragement. Michael smiled and nodded his thanks, looking out to the crowd. The Wellings boys were in full voice. The Archer girls were less enthusiastic, but were still very appreciative of his apparent gifts.
The tweed-clad gent took a final note in his book, stood up and quietly exited the hall.