When the Night Comes (18 page)

No other teacher seemed to use the blackboard, so Mr. Wilkins's words would often stay there for days. I would look at them in other classes. In biology and in chemistry. I would look at them and wonder if anyone else had noticed, if anyone else had read them or thought about them.

There was one that stayed for weeks, maybe even a month. It stayed and it haunted me and I don't know why. But it hurt to read the words, to think about them and to see them, and yet I wanted them to be true and I wanted to know how to make them true. I looked at them every day until they were finally gone, finally wiped away.

In blue chalk, written in capital letters that took up the whole blackboard. Just a few sentences, screaming:

EVERYTHING IS ENERGY AND THAT'S ALL THERE IS TO IT. MATCH THE FREQUENCY OF THE REALITY YOU WANT AND YOU CANNOT HELP BUT GET THAT REALITY.

IT CAN BE NO OTHER WAY.

THIS IS NOT PHILOSOPHY.

THIS IS PHYSICS.

—
Albert Einstein

B
o had asked me what I liked at school and I said woodwork and physics. That was all I liked.

“At least you like two things,” he'd said.

Woodwork. I chose woodwork as my art elective. There was the drama-art-music stream or the woodwork-technical drawing stream. I was the only girl in woodwork. It meant Mum had to buy me another lab coat, a gray one. They were expensive because they were made of a thick material for protection. Protection from flying chisels and burning-hot lathe tools. We had big clear eye goggles too, but we could borrow them.

I liked woodwork because it was something I could do. It was something I could understand and I didn't feel so lost in that class. I could think about my grandpa and the things he had taught me about wood. About making things. I could think about watching him in his workshop down in the garage under their flat and how I used to help him by handing him tools one at a time. He made me a dollhouse when I was small. It even had a little toilet that he carved and the lid went up and down and everything. It was made out of scraps of wood, so they were all different colors, different types of wood—but he painted the whole thing and that brought it to life and then it looked like a real house. A big
colorful family house. Every room was a different color and the kitchen was bright yellow.

Our woodwork teacher was Mr. Forrest and he had worked at the school for a very long time. I don't think he really wanted to work there anymore. That's what everyone said. I'm not sure why he stayed, but he seemed not to mind the woodwork class so much.

We started with simple things—
simple box one
. Then
simple box two
. It was to teach us measuring and cutting techniques, joining techniques. “Measure twice, cut once,” Mr. Forrest said, over and over.

“Measure twice!”

Once we passed the box components we could move on to more interesting things. Like a carved wooden salad spoon. First we had to choose the right wood and then we could make the curve of the spoon any way we wanted—as rounded or straight as we liked.

“Flat spoons are strong but boring, curved spoons are more interesting but can break. Find a medium.”

He told us to just draw freehand on the wood and then cut, to just feel the shape.

“Don't think about it,” he said.

I hesitated for ages, holding the pencil tight between my thumb and finger. I kept trying not to think about how a wooden spoon should look. I was frozen. Finally, when the tip of my soft pencil touched the wood, I just drew. I just made a shape, fluid like a wave. And it looked good, quite curved, but good.

It took a long time to cut and then to carve, especially the spoon bit. But it started to look like a real spoon, one that you might buy at a craft stall at Salamanca Market. The color of the red gum wood I had chosen was warm honey and orange, with thin lines of blond, clean and bright, and it smelt like the bush on a hot windy day.

I sanded down all the edges and made it smooth, made it soft. It really
had come out well and I was thinking about how Bo would really like it and maybe he could even use it in the galley when he came back. He could use it for soups or for salads, take it with him on
Nella Dan
.

But then Mr. Forrest broke it.

There was a bend test. Every spoon was tested by Mr. Forrest. The spoons flexed between his hands, one by one, and he snapped mine into two pieces.

“Not strong enough,” he said.

I looked at the two halves of my spoon. I knew he had used great force to break it. I had seen how his hands had strained.

I walked away with half my spoon in each hand and went back to my workbench. I tried very hard not to let anyone see my face because I had gone really red. Each piece felt solid and good in my hands. I was sure my spoon was good. But it was useless now. Even if I glued the spoon back together it could never be used.

I packed up my bench quickly, swept the floor and collected all the wood shavings in the dustpan, put them in the woodbin. The bell went. I took my lab coat off and rolled it up tightly, put it in my bag. I went to leave, but Mr. Forrest asked me to stay behind.

I waited near my bench with my schoolbag and watched everyone else leave. The woodwork lab was at the very bottom of the school, bottom of the hill, and it took ages to get to other classes. I had English next, which was in the old part of the school. Not as far as the science labs, but it would still take a few minutes to get there, even if I rushed.

Mr. Forrest eventually came over to where I was standing. He put his hands on the bench, looked down. He told me he was very sorry, that he had not meant to break my spoon and that he couldn't explain what had happened.

“It was a good spoon,” he said. “It was good. Sometimes I . . . it was a mistake.”

It was raining again. Steady. Unstoppable. I'd get saturated on the way to English.

“My washing's been on the line for five days,” he said.

I looked at him, his face tired and worn.

“I just keep waiting for the rain to stop.”

I stood there not knowing what to do. I looked at the clock on the wall and I was already late. I asked if I could go and he said, “Yes. You can go.”

At the end of the term Mr. Forrest gave me an A+ for woodwork. He wrote, “I hope you will continue, you have a strong feeling for wood.”

M
y brother and I were watching TV after school. I had a lot of homework to do—to get done—and it was worrying me like it always did, but I didn't want to start. Not yet. I just wanted some time to not do anything.

My brother turned to me and asked me where Lebanon was. I told him I didn't know.

“A man came to talk to us about peace,” he said. “He was from Lebanon.”

There were often talks about peace at our school. All I knew about being a Quaker was that there were minutes of silence when we were meant to think about peace, and there was gray. Gray uniforms and gray walls.

I got up off the couch and walked over to the small bookcase that was really just a shelf squeezed in between the chimney and the wall. We had a two-volume edition of the
World Book Encyclopedia
. They were brown and black, maybe they were leather, and
WORLD BOOK
was written in gold letters down the spine. Mum had won them in a raffle, which was lucky, because I often needed to use them for homework.

I took down the L–Z volume and carried it back to the couch. I opened it up to the beginning of L.

LEB.

Lebanon is a small independent republic at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. The name of the country comes from the snow-capped Lebanon Mountains. In the Arabic language it is called LUBNAN. Lebanon's capital and largest city is Beirut.

I read it out loud and my brother nodded like he knew, like he was being reminded of something that had just slipped his mind. There was a map of Lebanon—long and thin and by the sea. There were also a few black-and-white pictures. One of a giant cypress tree, and one of some ancient ruins with Roman-like columns standing tall without a roof. There was a photo of a clean-looking city, with lots of cars and people walking in the streets and bright white buildings against the sky. One building had a sign on the rooftop that said
RIVOLI
in huge curly writing.

The caption read,
Place des Canons, Beirut, 1969.

On the next page there was another picture of the city, only there were no cars and no people walking and the white buildings were gone or so altered that there was nothing there to recognize. Smoke rose from missing rooftops and everything was blackened or gray. Everything different. The city had been smashed to pieces.

The caption read,
Beirut 1982: Operation Peace for Galilee.

My eyes scanned down the page then, down all the columns about all the wars in Lebanon. The Civil War and the War with Israel and the War with the PLO. My brother had stopped looking at the pictures, he stopped looking at the book altogether and rested back against the couch.

“No one wins a war,” he said, and he breathed in heavily. “That's what the man said, what he had come to tell us. No one wins a war, we just all lose. He showed us some photos of his family and he passed them around and told us they were all gone.”

I closed the book and sat with it heavy on my lap. The TV was still on but we were not watching it. Eventually I got up and walked over to the bookcase. I stood there in the corner with the
World Book
in my hands and the room was very still.

“Is the man going to stay here now?” I asked, and I meant forever. I meant was the man going to stay here in Hobart forever.

My brother just shrugged. His eyes were back on the TV and he wasn't thinking about the man from Lebanon anymore.

Only I was.

The story was inside me now. I knew I would remember the man even though I had never even seen him or heard him speak. I didn't know if he was old or if he was young, but I would think about him, here, living on this island without any of the people he loved or even knew at all. Here, so far away from home, knowing that he could never return to the place he remembered because it was gone.