Don't Call Me Ishmael (17 page)

‘The Razzman, eh? Not bad. And what about you? What's your name?

‘Sidekicks don't get to have cool names.'

‘That doesn't seem fair.'

‘Comes with the territory.'

Kelly Faulkner gave me a knowing smile. As I looked at her I thought that there ought to be a law against anyone being that beautiful, especially around people like me. Perhaps it comes under cruelty to dumb animals.

‘Well, I really better go and let you guys get on with saving
the world. Thanks again for helping Marty out. Hey, you know, after what you did, maybe you should apply for a promotion from sidekick? I could write you a reference.' She held her hand up near her face and wiggled her fingers. ‘See ya.'

She didn't have time to leave, however, before Razza came bounding in and leapt on me like I had just scored the winning goal in the FA Cup Final. ‘How you doing?' he said to Kelly Faulkner at the same time as he was half-strangling me. ‘I'm the Razzman.'

‘I know,' she whispered, glancing around furtively, ‘but don't worry … your secret's safe with me.' Then she zipped her lips, locked them with an imaginary key and disappeared into the crowd.

I stared at the big empty space where, moments before, Kelly Faulkner had been standing. It matched the one inside my chest.

‘You rescued her little brother from Bagsley and his mob?'

Razza and I were waiting for Mrs Zorzotto and he was gawking at me like I had two heads.

‘I think “rescued” might be pushing it a bit.'

‘Mate, doesn't matter what
you
think. It's what
she
thinks, and I'm telling you, you're in. You
saved
her little brother,' he repeated, almost in disbelief. ‘You're a knight in shining armour. That's
gold
, mate–chick-winning gold! You are in, you are definitely
in
!'

‘Look, I didn't have a clue it was her brother, and anyway-they chucked our hats into the creek. Some rescue … some hero.'

‘Don't you get it? That's even better–that makes you a nice guy who goes around helping complete strangers, sacrificing himself for others. Chicks
love
that corny stuff.' Razza beamed at me like I'd just won Lotto. ‘Man, I'm telling you, you are 50 in! No wonder she was drooling all over you.'

‘Drooling? You're mad.'

‘It's true. You can't fool the Razz. I'm the King of Drool. It's what I do … and I recognise drool in others.'

‘O?, you can stop right there. I think I'm going to be sick.'

‘I'm just saying that on the outside she looked all
cool
, but on the inside she was all
drool.'

Another disturbing image flashed in my mind. It was time to put a stop to this before it got out of control. ‘Look, Razza, she just wanted to thank me, that's all. She's probably forgotten all about me already, so let's drop it, eh? And there was no
drooling
, all right? Kelly Faulkner doesn't
drool.
She was just being nice. She can't help but be nice. She
is
nice. She was born with an excess of the niceness gene. She probably just felt sorry for me. That's all. I'm
nothing
to her and nothing's going to happen. And you know why? Because she's perfect
and
she's got a
personality
, for god's sake. Compared to her, I'm a lump of wood. So I've got no chance with her, OK? Do you understand?
No
chance. Zero! Zilch! Can I make it any clearer to you than that?'

Razza stared at me seriously and slowly nodded, ‘Yeah … I reckon you're
definitely
in.'

My only hope was to change the subject, preferably to one that really interested him. ‘Anyway, what about you? You never told me what happened with you and that blonde girl.'

‘Oh her. It's over,' Razza said casually.

‘Over!'

‘Yeah, it was good while it lasted, but you know, I think it was time to pull the pin.'

‘Good while it lasted? You've only spoken to her twice. What happened?'

‘Well, there was a bit of a problem.'

‘What kind of a problem?'

‘Irreconcilable differences.'

‘What?'

‘Irreconcilable differences … you know, things that just can't get worked out … like with Mum and the old man,' Razza said, shuffling his feet and kicking at a stone.

‘But what irreconcilable differences could you
have
after only speaking to her for fifteen minutes?'

‘Well, it
appears.'
said Razza thoughtfully, as if he were a doctor diagnosing a rare condition, ‘that I like
me …
and she
doesn't.'

‘Oh … right. I can see how that could lead to problems in the relationship. Sorry.'

‘No worries. Probably for the best,' Razza said philosophically. ‘I was starting to feel trapped-you know, tied down? Our …
relationship …
was becoming … well,
predictable.
I need my freedom. You hear what I'm saying?'

I nodded and Razza continued grandly.

‘Sure, we had our good times-the laughter, the tears-but I think we both realised it was time to move on. Besides, it's not right to selfishly restrict myself to one chick and deny all those other gorgeous babes the pleasure of my company'

‘You're a real humanitarian, do you know that?'

‘No, please, don't embarrass me. I'm just one little person trying to make a difference.'

‘You're way too modest.'

‘Yes, I know,' Razza said, sighing and shaking his head regretfully, ‘ but it's my
only
failing.'

Just then Mrs Zorzotto pulled up across the street.

‘Look, Ishmael, I still think you should go after that Kelly chick,' Razza said as we headed towards the car. ‘Why don't you find out her number and give her a bell? What have you got to lose?'

‘Nah, forget it.'

‘I could help you, you know–give you the benefit of my vast experience.'

‘Geez, that's a tempting offer,' I said. ‘Imagine, the King of Drool in
my
corner. What an honour. Kelly Faulkner would be like putty in my hands.'

‘Exactly!' Razza shot back enthusiastically as we jumped into the back seat of his mother's car.

At home that night I made up my mind about a couple of things. Firstly, I decided, despite what Razza might think, it was time to put Kelly Faulkner back where she belonged, back where impossible things could happen–in my fantasies and daydreams. She really wasn't the kind of person who could exist in the real world … not in my real world, anyway. The second thing I decided to do was ask Dad if I could borrow his copy of
Moby Dick.

‘Aaarrrgh, me hearty,' he said, rolling his eyes crazily, ‘ye be seeking the white whale!'

I wasn't, though. I be seeking Ishmael.

Reading
Moby Pick
wasn't quite as straightforward as I thought it would be. For a start, when I asked Dad about borrowing a copy, he insisted that I had to read the ‘real deal', not the ‘kiddies' version', as he put it.

The real deal turned out to be a thousand pages of small print-six hundred pages of story,
plus
another
four hundred
pages of notes and commentary that, thankfully, my father said I could afford to skip. I'm here to tell you, if you want to know anything, and I mean
anything
, about whales and whaling, then check out
Moby Dick.
It is the whale heads' bible.

I started it that night after I got home from the debating finals. I held the book like a chunky brick in my hands. Somehow it made me feel like there was a connection between Kelly Faulkner and me. I turned to the first page.
Call me Ishmael
, it said, and I waded in like I was heading out to sea.

I have to confess that at times it was a pretty hard slog. I reckon Miss Tarango would have a thing or two to say to old
Herman about editing-there's only so much a person needs to know about the history and techniques of whaling or the workings of whaling boats or the bone structure and internal organs of whales themselves. Still, if I'm ever on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
and Eddie asks a question about the average weight of blubber found in a fully grown sperm whale, I'll be laughing, right?

Despite all that, I still got caught up with the story, and just like Ishmael, his strange friend Queequeg and the rest of the crew of the
Pequod
, I found myself drawn into Captain Ahab's mad quest for revenge against the white whale, which had reduced his personal leg stockpile by fifty per cent. By the time I was halfway through, one thing was obvious to me: I was nothing like this Ishmael. Sure, we both had pretty weird friends, but apart from that, as Dad would say, we were as different as ‘chalk and cheeseburger'.

Now don't get me wrong. It's not like I expected us to be identical twins or anything. It did dawn on me that being a fourteen-year-old boy still at school and living in the twenty-first century might tend to make me
slightly
different from a grown man on a whaling boat in the eighteen-hundreds. I just thought that maybe there might have been some similarities between us. But was there a Barry Bagsley clone on board
Pequod
whose life's ambition was to make Melville's Ishmael feel like a loser with about as much backbone as a jellyfish? Uh-uh. Did the other Ishmael ever suffer anything remotely embarrassing like fainting when he came face to face with his first whale? Absolutely not. Did he ever have to deal with
something totally humiliating like, say, a stray harpoon dropping from his whaling britches just as he was about to perform a sea shanty for the crew? Not a chance. Did he ever find himself slipping on whale oil or tripping over loose rigging, and in trying to break his fall, discovering to his surprise that he had accidentally groped Captain Ahab in a way that could lead to charges of sexual harassment or, worse still, an audience with the plank? No way Jose!

You see, the plain truth was, unlike me, the Ishmael in
Moby Dick
wasn't a loser at all. He certainly wasn't cursed by Ishmael Leseur's Syndrome. He didn't even
have
a last name–I guess that's what saved him. No, the further I read into the book, the more I was convinced we had nothing in common whatsoever. But there was someone else on board the
Pequod
who I
could
relate to. Maybe I hadn't lost my leg to a great white whale like he had, but I understood what it was like to have a part of yourself torn away and I also knew how much you could grow to hate whoever or whatever it was that had taken that part from you. I knew all about that, because every time Barry Bagsley taunted me and ground my name into the dirt, and every time he paid out on Bill Kingsley and I did nothing, it felt like there was much more of me missing than just a limb. But was I really like Ahab? Did I crave revenge like him? Would I really like to hunt down Barry Bagsley and harpoon him and make him suffer for what he had done?

You bet.

And that feeling continued to spread inside me like a virus. Not that I'm blaming Herman Melville at all. It wasn't reading
about Captain Ahab that made me feel that way. It was because back at school, Barry Bagsley was increasing his attacks on Bill Kingsley. It seemed that every time Bill opened his desk or locker he would be confronted by some cruel image–a sumo wrestler, a blimp or the ‘before' shot from a weight loss ad–along with some scribbled insult. As fast as he tore them down and slung them in the bin, new, more outlandish ones would replace them. And it wasn't just the pictures and drawings. Bagsley and his friends now made pig-grunting noises whenever they passed within earshot.

What really stoked the fire for revenge that raged in my belly was that after every taunt, Barry Bagsley would smirk in my direction as if he was daring me to do something about it. I wanted to do something, I really did. I tried to convince Bill to let Mr Barker know what was going on, but there was no way he would be in it. ‘Great, then I'd get to be a dobber as well,' he replied miserably. ‘Look, Bagsley will get sick of it after a while. Forget it–I'm fine.'

He didn't look fine though, and Barry Bagsley's campaign showed no signs of relenting. As we crawled towards the end of the school year, Bill Kingsley began to wear the desperate look of a wounded beast hounded by a pack of wild dogs.

It was the second last week of Year Nine, and things weren't exactly going swimmingly. Besides the continuing disappointment of Barry Bagsley's name failing to turn up on the Ten Most Wanted List, I also found myself buried under an avalanche of exams and assignments. Then, just to add to my joy, Mr Barker informed the members of the Year Nine debating team that we would all be ‘volunteering' to be readers at the traditional end-of-year assembly/mass/prize-giving/speech night/extravaganza thingy. Wonderful. Now I could be embarrassed and humiliated on a grand scale.

The end-of-year assembly/mass/prize-giving/speech night/extravaganza thingy was always held on the Thursday night of the last week of school–with Friday being the first day of the Christmas holidays. Naturally everyone was expected to attend, and in a remarkable display of school spirit, nearly everyone always did. (Of course, the fact that those who failed to attend had to come to school the next day or face two weeks of
afternoon detentions the following year might have had something to do with it as well.)

As Mr Barker informed us, our job on the night was to read out the Prayers of Petition–you know, where you ask for all those really important things that will probably never happen, like world peace, the elimination of poverty and hunger from around the globe, freedom for all people and a premiership for the St Daniel's First Fifteen. For days, the awful thought of speaking in front of well over a thousand students, teachers and parents kept exploding into my mind like an airbag in a Mini. That was, until the day Bill Kingsley presented his Study of Society oral. After that there wasn't much room left in my mind for anything else but revenge.

The Study of Society orals had been going all week, and Mr Barker's limited patience and good humour seemed to be shrivelling up with each presentation. Our task was to
Examine the Liveability of Your Suburb
, and I had to admit that the standard wasn't exactly world-class.

Razza reckoned Prindabel's talk was so boring it could have put coffee to sleep. Razza's own talk, however, seemed based on the assumption that the liveability of a suburb was in direct proportion to the number of ‘hot chick schools' that were within a one-kilometre radius.

Danny Wallace's talk was so short, Mr Barker said that his suburb ‘would appear to have the liveability of a morgue'. The highlight of Doug Savage's presentation was his conclusion that his suburb was extremely liveable because ‘everyone living there was alive', while Barry Bagsley expressed the
bewildering opinion that ‘no one would be seen dead living in my hole of a suburb'.

By the time it was Bill Kingsley's turn to speak, Mr Barker was well and truly wired and ticking.

It's not that Bill Kingsley hadn't done any work. In fact, he had probably done more work than anyone else in the class. He had been determined to show that his success in the debating finals wasn't a fluke. I knew for a fact that every day of the previous two weeks he had spent lunchtimes and after school working in the library doing research and putting together a PowerPoint presentation. A couple of times Bill had even practised his talk on me. Now I'm no teacher, but I reckon it was definitely ‘A' material.

Bill started off well. He introduced his report and clicked up the first slide showing
Criteria for Assessing Liveability.
‘First I will examine in detail the recreation and entertainment facilities that contribute to the liveability of my suburb of Carrington.'

Then things went pear-shaped. When Bill clicked to the next slide, a photo leapt on to the screen of an enormous woman whose body was swallowing her bikini. Underneath was the caption,
When the whale-watching season begins this summer, make sure they're not watching
you.
Join Flab-Busters
now
!

Those in the class who hadn't yet gone into coma sputtered with laughter.

‘Quiet!' Mr Barker growled.

Bill quickly clicked to the next slide and a list of bus and train services appeared.

‘Kingsley, what exactly are you doing? Is this some kind of joke?'

‘No, no sir … I, I must have got the slides mixed up or something …'

‘Well, son, just get on with it, will you? Put us all out of our misery.'

I looked to the back corner of the room. Barry Bagsley's face was split in a smug grin while Danny Wallace and Doug Savage were sprawled on the desk behind him, stifling their laughter.

Bill tried to continue his speech but now his slides were out of sequence and you could tell that his confidence was shaken. He pointed the remote control at the laptop in front of him.
Click.
An ad for Weight Watchers.
Click
again. An upside-down graph tided
Population Growth for Carrington.
Bill was flustered. He shuffled through his palm cards, and in the process spilled half on the floor. As he disappeared behind a desk to retrieve them, a mixture of groans and laughter poured down on him.

Mr Barker held his head in his hands.

Bill struggled to his feet and grabbed the remote again.
Click.
An ad for Jenny Craig.
Click.
A picture of the backside of a hippopotamus.
Click.
A giant bloated pig.
Click.
I'm not sure but …
Click.
Was that a …?
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
And
Click. Criteria for Assessing Liveability.

‘Mr Kingsley, were you on some kind of hallucinogenic drug when you put this presentation together?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Well, son, you've had weeks to get this sorted out, but
you've obviously wasted your time daydreaming as usual. Now if you want any sort of grade at all, I suggest you start immediately or I will have to fail you for being unprepared. Do I make myself clear?'

Bill turned off the computer and continued his talk, but his voice was just a droning mumble and he made no effort to sort out his palm cards as he drifted from one unrelated point to another. Finally, when he was less than halfway through, he flipped through the remaining cards and shook his head hopelessly. ‘That's about it, I guess,' he said, and sat down.

Mr Barker squeezed the skin on his forehead, scribbled a letter on the bottom of Bill Kingsley's mark sheet and circled it with a flourish. Even from the other side of the room I could tell it was a ‘D'.

After the lesson, as everyone escaped to lunch, I stayed at my desk.

‘Hey, Ishmael. Whatta you doing? Having a party with all your friends?' It was Razza. ‘Earth to Ishmael. Can you read me?'

‘Bill
was
prepared. He had that speech perfect–Bagsley stuffed it up on him.'

‘Then Kingsley should tell someone–tell Barker.'

‘You know he wouldn't do that.'

‘Then we'll tell him.'

‘What good would that do? Bagsley would get in trouble, get some more detentions, and then they'd find other ways to make Bill's life hell. And the teachers won't have a clue what's going on.'

‘Then what do you want to do?'

‘I want to get him–I want to make him pay big time,' I said through clenched teeth.

‘Sure, but how? I mean, you're not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you?'

‘What? Like putting a contract out on him? Slipping a horse's head into his bed?'

‘Yeah, well, I was just joking about that stuff. You know me, right, always kidding. Look, Ishmael, I think you're letting this get to you too much. Why don't you just forget about all this crap? Bagsley's just not worth it.'

‘No, you're right, he's not … but Bill is. There's gotta be something we can do to help him.'

Razza looked at me and for the first time I could remember his face seemed serious. ‘Leave it with me.'

‘But what can you do?'

‘Haven't got a clue–yet. But you know what they say, the Razzman works in mysterious ways.'

Actually, I had no idea that they said that (or for that matter, who ‘they' were) and I was about to point this out when Barry Bagsley bounded through the door, wrenched open the lid of his desk and scooped up a football. It wasn't until he turned to leave that he even noticed there was someone else in the room.

‘Well, well, if it isn't Le Spewer and Zit-arse. What are you girls up to?'

Neither of us replied.

‘What's the matter, Or
-arse-
i
-hole
? You've always got plenty
to say. You look a bit upset. Don't tell me you wet your bed again last night?'

‘No way!' Razza said, looking genuinely horrified. ‘I haven't done that for weeks. I'm cured. I have total control of my bladder. Now I only wet the bed when
I
want to,' he said proudly.

Barry Bagsley stared at Razza like he was from outer space. ‘You're an idiot, Zorzotto, you know that.'

Razza smiled. ‘You think so?' he replied pleasantly, while holding Barry Bagsley's stare. ‘It's hard for me to know. I've heard that the individual is not the most reliable judge of their own sanity.'

They remained locked together for a few seconds, then Barry Bagsley shifted his eyes to me. ‘And what's your problem, Manure? You're not crying about Billy Kingsize and his piss-weak presentation, are you? It's his own fault. You heard Barker, he just wasn't prepared. Shocking.'

‘He
was
prepared,' I spat back, ‘but
someone
got at his work.'

‘Really? Well, I'll tell you what you should do, Manure. You should find that
someone
and have a word with them.'

‘I
am.'

Suddenly it felt like some line had been crossed, some step taken that couldn't be taken back.

‘Is that right?' Barry Bagsley said, moving closer and tossing the football from hand to hand. ‘And what exactly are you saying then?'

‘Leave Bill Kingsley alone.'

‘Well that's a beautiful thought, Manure, but the tricky question is, how are you going to make me?'

Barry Bagsley stood a metre from me, his face hard and cold like concrete. Then his hands shot forward as if he was going to throw the football into my face. ‘Boo!' he shouted at the same time. I grimaced and jerked my hands up. He laughed and spun the football on one finger. ‘You haven't got a prayer, Manure,' he said cheerfully before underlining his claim by poking my chest in time to each word. ‘Have–not-got–a-prayer.'

I watched as he strutted from the room. My hands were cramped into tight fists. My fingernails stabbed into my palms.

‘I doubt if he'll mess with us again,' Razza said knowingly.