15. Susan
The post-debate reception was held at Dr Rogers’ residence. Wellings won in what Mrs Kittredge described as a close contest, but which nobody in the hall actually believed was the case. Even though each of them had eaten well before hand, they were teenagers, and as Michael had noted, he seemed to be able to eat anything he got his hands on, in volumes he found staggering, and was never seemingly full. Nor did he seem to gain weight. It was something he had forgotten about being a hormonal, growing boy.
Dr Rogers made a short speech, basically paraphrasing his words from earlier in the afternoon, and congratulated all the students on a job well done. He seemed medicated, as if the sandwiches he’d been eating were made of smoked chicken and lithium. Michael didn’t really care, there were mini quiches and sausage rolls to be eaten.
Shortly after, with flaky pastry falling from the corners of his mouth and onto his blazer lapel, Susan approached him again.
‘I want to say congratulations to you. You were very good.’
‘Soff wun doo,’ Michael replied through the mound of hot mystery meat and pastry.
Susan looked at him quizzically. He swallowed the tasty mass and smiled.
‘So were you.’
Susan blushed and looked at her shoes.
‘I wasn’t. I sucked. I should have thought more, um, long-term than I did. Where did you get all that information about resources and China and everything?’
Michael didn’t know how to properly source something from the future, so just flat out lied.
‘A piece in The Bulletin from a few months back. A story about China is being more open to trade possibilities. Look, you want another drink?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, holding up a full paper cup of what was probably Fanta. ‘It’s good to get the afternoon off, not having to go to class,’ she said, making small talk.
‘What year are you in?’ he asked.
‘11,’ she replied. ‘I know you’re in Year 7.’
‘We call it First Year here,’ he said. ‘No idea why.’
‘I’ve read a few things about you in the papers. Weren’t you suspended at one point?’
‘Nah, just a misunderstanding between me and a teacher. Lack of communication. Miserable old bastard as he was.’
Susan laughed, shocked and amused at his language. Michael smiled, and looked over the Patrick, who was once again flexing his stocky arms, and the aforementioned blonde was in fact squeezing them.
‘There’s a turn up for the books,’ Michael said.
‘What’s that?’ Susan asked.
‘My team mate, Patrick, who is basically a walking hormone, was trying to impress your friend over there before the debate, and I told him it wasn’t going to work. I was apparently wrong.’
Susan looked and snorted.
‘Sarah Morris. She does that all the time.’
‘String of broken hearts in her wake?’
‘Yep. Bit of a tart, actually.’
‘Buh-zing.’
‘We’re friends and everything. But boy, she’s just so easy.’
‘Remind me to behave myself if you and I get to be friends,’ Michael said as he dipped a party frank in tomato sauce forced the thing into his sticky gob.
‘We’re going to be friends?’
Her eyebrows were raised as she looked at him. Michael felt a sense of expectation and anticipation from her. To his mind, he was in his late 30s, and despite the insatiable lust governing his 12 year old body, the though had barely registered in his mind. She was 16 or so, it just wasn’t his scene.
‘Iff jood lark,’ he said.
She smiled again, he swallowed his nitrates, wiped his mouth and repeated, ‘If you’d like.’
‘I would.’ She looked around, as if gripped by suspicion, guilt or both. On cue, her debate coach appeared next to them.
‘Susan,’ she said.
‘This is Miss Clarke, our coach. This is Michael. Third speaker for the negative.’
This woman was more Michael’s scene. She would have been in her late 20s, smartly dressed, tall, long, straight, peculiarly un-80s hair, minimal makeup and replete with ‘sexy librarian’ glasses.
‘You were very good today. Everyone was. I can understand why you’ve been getting the press attention you’ve gotten.’
‘Thank you,’ Michael said, extending his hand. She shook it, and was cool enough to not make a fuss over the sauce and grease that was now on her right palm.
‘Susan,’ she continued, turning to her young charge. ‘You said your mother was picking you up here?’
Susan nodded. ‘Yes, Miss. At the west gate.’
‘Good. I’ll gather up the other girls and we’ll head back on the minibus. Michael, would you show her the way?’
Michael nodded.
‘Happy to.’
As Ms Clarke gestured for the other two girls to accompany her out of the lion’s den, the look on Patrick’s face went from eager enthusiasm to crestfallen heartbreak. He’d learn to love again.
Michael gestured to the exit.
‘After you.’
*
Late afternoon spilled onto the leafy green, tree-lined pathways of the occasionally beautiful Wellings campus. Film makers, specifically cinematographers, speak of the ‘magic hour’, that time of the day when the natural sunlight is perfect for stunning photography. As Michael escorted Susan to the west gate of the campus, they found themselves amid a similar magic hour.
‘So, do you like music?’ Susan asked.
Michael did not want to have this conversation. He didn’t want to show interest in her, but at the same time did not like the idea of hurting her feelings by looking disinterested. It was the double edged sword of those cursed by empathy.
‘Lately I’ve been getting into INXS, I guess. My folks just got a CD player, and we have, like, three discs. One of them is Listen Like Thieves, which is the one that came out before the one that has ‘Need You Tonight’ on it. Still have a tape player.’
He was making small talk and he didn’t like it.
‘I like Mel & Kim.’
‘Right, yeah. See them on TV some time.’
‘You like them?’
‘My sister does.’
‘How old is your sister?’
He had to think about that.
‘15.’
‘Where does she go to school?’
‘Wollstonecraft.’
And there was silence. Thankfully, it was past final bell, so the place was all but empty. The west gate of the school was located adjacent to rear of the school gym.
‘What time is your mum getting here?’ Michael asked.
‘4.15, she said. She does run late all the time.’
‘Yeah. Mine’s like that too. Show up late for her own funeral,’ he said, instantly hating himself for saying it, considering it would be a painfully short number of years before he actually had to attend his mother’s funeral.
‘Did you…’ Susan began, haltering, ‘mean what you said?’
‘About what?’
‘About us being friends?’
‘Sure,’ he replied, assuming and hoping she meant it in the most literal sense of the word.
‘Good,’ she replied. ‘I’d like that.’
They stood about three metres inside from the gate as a steady stream of traffic passed them on the street nearby. Michael wasn’t making eye contact. Susan was doing nothing but. She saw his distance as nerves, inhaled and smiled, figuring it another cute arrow in his quiver of appeal. She took his hand and pulled him close to her. She took a step backwards, against the gym wall and leaned in to him.
Fuck it.
They kissed. Michael’s eyes closed and he felt it was sweet, and close, and nice. The first kiss usually is, and it had been a long, long time since he had experienced a first kiss that tasted sweet – of soft drink – rather than the sharp bite of champagne, a cocktail, or a cigarette.
Intellectually, it wasn’t that much more than the sum of its parts, but Michael’s young body was experiencing something for the first time, and his itchy grey shorts rapidly became very tight. Sensing this and not wanting the 16 year old attached to his lips to sense the same thing, he angled his pelvis backwards. Their lips parted. She looked at him, momentarily afraid she’d done something wrong, or that the fault was hers.
‘What’s wrong?’
Michael cleared his throat.
‘Nothing, nothing. All good. Just… pacing myself.’
She smiled.
‘I like that. You’re weird.’
Honey, you don’t know the half of it.
Holding each others’ hands, they kissed again. It was soft and innocent. There was a faint hint of tongue here and there, and as it experience continued, Michael’s mind departed. A swirling mass of crimson colour washed over his consciousness and he became immersed. He was a second away from wrapping his arms around her, when a car horn sounded.
‘That’s Mum, gotta go.’
It was as quickly over as it had begun, and as Susan trotted off to the front passenger door of her mother’s well-aged Mercedes, Michael was left with the look of a novelty singing fish on his face and a stonker under his shorts that felt like it have been viewable from space.
He quietly laughed to himself, and glanced at the less than inconspicuous bulge below his belt.
‘Calm down, son, or I’ll hit you with a cold spoon. We’re in a moral grey area here.’
*
The next day he returned to normal classes, having dreamed of Susan and woken up feeling quietly ashamed of himself. It was an odd feeling: the idea that he wasn’t breaking any laws by being 12 and kissing a 16-year-old; but that he had a kind of intellectual advantage over her; that within his mental recesses lay a disproportionate power balance. While he had physically and, by the strictest sense of the term, literally doing nothing wrong, morally he was in a quagmire, and one that only he could fully comprehend. There was nobody in the world with which he could share this dilemma.
He didn’t notice the extra eyes on him. Since his stoush with Mr Gunn and the role he had increasingly played in senior school life, he had assumed something of a celebrity’s status among the First Years. So he was getting used to being motioned towards, spoken about and referred to. It was a similar existence to that which he lived in Los Angeles – people noticed him, found it difficult to place where they knew him from, just that he was famous enough to be recognised. But that city being what it was, invariably there was someone else within arm’s reach who was more famous for one reason or another. It seldom had anything to do with talent. In his current state, he thought nothing of it, gathered his French text books and lever-arch file and headed to the first class of the day.
The room fell silent when he entered it. All eyes were on Michael, but with inquiring, almost admirable glances. His instinct would have been to check to see if he had snot coming out of his nose, or his fly was undone. But this was something else.
His gait reduced as he approached a vacant desk. The quiet was nigh-on deafening. He reached his desk, placed his note book and text book on it and motioned to sit. He was the sole focal point of the room, and it was unsettling.
‘What?’ he asked nobody in particular.
The eyes in the sockets of his 1S fellows darted about, looking for a spokesman to initiate their collective inquiry. James Burgess, one of the more alpha of the 1S boys, felt obligated to ask.
‘There’s a rumour going around, Curtin.’
Michael raised one eyebrow. ‘There is?’
‘Chris Sampson in 1C says that he saw you smutting some Archer chick.’
‘Smutting?’
‘You know, kissing. Making out. Behind the gym. Smutting.’
It had been a long time since he’d heard that term applied to the act of making out with someone.
‘OK.’
The boys looked back and forth at each other.
‘Well..?’ Burgess asked.
‘Well, what?’
‘Is it true? Did you smut her?’
Michael took a moment and digested the scene. Each one of the boys of 1S were fixated on him; their gaze trained on him with furious intent and purpose. This was a big moment. He figured he’d go with the adage about a gentleman never telling, but he didn’t care and he wanted this out of the way.
‘Well, yeah. Why?’
Collective gasps and exhaled breaths took over the silence. The boys looked to each other with astonishment and reassurance. One of their own had made it.
Burgess’ right-hand man, Blake Ford, piped in with his own enthusiastic, broken tones.
‘How’d you do it?’
The room was silent again.
Michael half-laughed, half-coughed his exasperation at the question.
‘There’s no ‘how’, mate. We just made out behind the gym after a debate.’
‘But,’ the frustrated lad exclaimed, ‘how’d you get her to do it? Why’d she let you? What did you say?’
Michael had all but redefined Pi, isolated the cancer causing gene and discovered perpetual motion in the eyes of these boys. Better than all that, he’d been close to feeling a girl’s norg. It was a milestone. Many of the boys had been at Wellings since junior school days, and knew very few girls outside their immediate families. None had spent any time with any of them, and approximately zero per cent of them had even come close to what Michael had done.
‘You’ve got it all wrong, Blake. It’s not like she ‘let’ me do anything. I didn’t trick her, it wasn’t a hustle or anything. We were just talking, we had a connection, we made out, she went home, end of story.’
There was an additional ruffling and huffing and puffing. He had all at once, a gripped, captured audience. The boys were fascinated. They had to know more. No detail would remain uncovered.
Burgess came back to the fold. ‘What were you talking about?’
It was beginning to make the transition from weird to amusing. At that moment, Mr Munroe poked his head around the doorway.
‘Boys!’ he yelled. They all snapped to attention.
‘Mr Birch has been detained temporarily. Keep yourselves occupied for the time being, but stay in this class.’
He was as quickly gone, and the attention Michael had momentarily lost was restored with lightning pace.
‘Go on,’ Burgess implored.
‘What are you so interested in this for?’
Burgess was beginning to get frustrated.
‘Curtin, none of us have ever gotten that close to a girl before. None of us.’
‘So that girl from the Hunter Valley? I heard you blathering on about her once.’
‘Bullshit. All of it. Just spinning shit to make myself look more of a man.’
He was being admirably and uncharacteristically honest.
‘Well, how do you know I’m not spinning shit too?’
‘Sampson saw you. And he hates you.’
‘He hates me? I don’t even know him. How’s it that he hates me all of a sudden?’
‘Well,’ Burgess sat on the chair in front of Michael’s desk. ‘The way he put it, he was leaving detention and he saw this thing between you and the Archer chick and it hit him so hard he had to go to the toilets and have a wank over it.’
There were collective guffaws from the 1S boys gathered closer around.
‘That’s really, just… seriously. That’s disgusting.’
‘What?’ Burgess asked incredulously. ‘You don’t pull yours?’
‘I don’t use teenagers making out as fodder for it. Seriously. That thought’s going to replace the shark in my nightmares.’
The boys around him laughed. He had an audience.
‘So, what we all want to know,’ Burgess began, correctly assuming the collective line of inquiry, ‘is how you did it.’
It was baffling. It was as if they’d never watched TV or seen a movie, or had friends or relatives kiss in front of them.
‘I opened my mouth and she opened hers and then there were tongues and lips and movement, and that’s it.’
‘Tongues?’ Blake asked.
‘Is that what this is all about? You want to know the … what … physical mechanics of it all?’
‘Yeah!’ he responded.
Burgess was getting flustered.
‘Shut up, Blake, we want to know how you got to that point with her. We want to know how to pick up chicks like that.’
Michael looked around at the faces that surrounded him. Wide-eyed and appreciative of whatever wisdom was about to come from his lips, they were showing the most interest in anything that had been said in a Wellings classroom in decades.
‘OK,’ Michael said. ‘I can tell you a few things. But everyone needs to sit down, you’re all freaking me out.’
All the boys sat down, either on chairs, on desks or even on the floor. All wide eyed and eager to hear this tale of adorable ribaldry, they looked upon Michael who had only this morning adopted sage-like qualities.
For a second, he was amused. And then he realised what an opportunity he had. He could impart practical wisdom upon these lads in a way that had never been imparted on him. For the longest time he had not the first clue how to relate to or converse with women, for the longest time it was a challenge and a struggle. He’d have been infinitely happier had someone with the insight and experience sat him down and explained a few simple truths to him – a chance to have the kind of information presented to him that he himself was about to be able to provide for these two dozen sexual neophytes.
And then, as if on cue, Mr Birch arrived and conducted one of the least productive French lessons in the history of French or lessons. There was not one boy among them, other than Michael, who got the first thing out of it.
L’amour conquiert tout.
The class ended and the 1S boys were sent swiftly to Music. On the way, Burgess pressed Michael for the full details, the skills he himself so sorely lacked.
‘The thing is, Curtin, there’s a whole bunch of boys who want to hear about this too. It’s spread throughout the school like wildfire.’
Michael stopped him in his tracks.
‘So, you think I should conduct a seminar?’
‘Would you?’
Michael was more than amused.
‘Sure. You organise a room, get some boys in there, I’ll tell you all I know. Even open up the floor to questions. Good?’
Burgess was impressed. He all but sprinted from Michael’s side. He missed the Music lesson, and subsequently was less informed about the structure and meaning behind David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’. Mr Wilson was a groovy cat, and like many music teachers, keen to impose his taste on his students.
The last of his cheese and Vegemite sandwich swallowed, the last of the room-temperature ‘fruit drink’ squeezed from his juice box, Michael reached into his bag for an apple, and was practically set upon by Blake.
‘You coming? You said you would!’ he exclaimed.
‘Coming where?’
‘Burgess got a room. There’s, like, 50 boys up there.’
‘You’re shitting me.’
‘Nup. They’re all waiting.’
It was more intrigue he wasn’t expecting that day, and in days and weeks that had passed with matters of routine and tedium, the unexpected was more than a little welcome in Michael’s world.