46: Mango

Rufus is really angry. The surfer-looking kid keeps sitting in his spot just next to the projector and Rufus likes to sit next to the projector, in case Mr Glaukson asks him to thread the reel. He’s written a message in orange science chalk along the side of his milk flask, petitioning you to join an embargo on all communications with the surfer. He’s bouncing the message in your face by rhythmically cranking the chalked side of the flask at you in rapid up-down strokes like the kind of impatient notification that would start manifesting on video screens some thirty years later. And through the dilation of his pupils and the swelling of the whites of his eyes and the spittle spraying in cascades over the rolling trunk of the flask and his shrill whisper like the violent hiss of a leaking piston in a steam ship (in a thunder storm), you know he’s serious about the boycott. Rufus is right to feel usurped. After all, he was the first boy in the infants to grow full pubic hair, a moustache and a thick bristling beard, and the first to start smoking cigars and wearing a Texan cowboy hat, snakeskin boots and a bolo tie with ornamental albatross clasp. And the other boys had started to revere and in some cases copy these bold masculine signifiers, to the extent that he’d prototyped a unique moustache wax, made from melted Crayola and goose fat, which he’d packed into old ink pots in order to sell to the other pupils once puberty had extended its visit to their bodies. But not only was his optimism regarding his peers’ development into manhood unrewarded by circumstance; now, with the arrival of the surfer-looking kid, the look has shifted to one of baby-faced exoticism, with cheeks lightly powdered with papaya scented talc and coconut oil manually lavished through unruly locks. On the wall behind Principle Blink’s desk there is a framed print depicting two children walking hand in hand down a leafy boulevard in some nameless European park. It’s a black and white photograph apart from the children’s raincoats which have been hand-coloured: greyish pink in one case and greyish blue in the other, and apart from a spec of crimson above a grey patch of trees, where a particularly spicy sriracha wing had one night caught Principle Blink off guard… Beside the print there is a small piece of parchment, mounted on a brass plate, upon which reads, in ornate calligraphic script: You are a pocket of excellence. Since the surfer-looking kid had badly drowned in the shallow end of the school swimming pool, after slipping on a mango skin and bashing his head, some of the children’s aesthetic sensibilities had drifted back to Texan Dandy, but Principle Blink’s dismissal from his post, lengthy tribunal, and eventual incarceration following conviction of negligent fruit consumption, had been too much for Rufus to bear. He let his style and his studies slip, and slowly vanished from the preoccupations of his peers. You’re holding a baby owl in your hands. It had fallen from one of the tall firs. You gently press your face to its beak to listen for breath, but when you get there, you just feel the warm dampness of your own palms pressing against your contorted brow and the wetness of your tears in the dark as you hear the call of several hundred hungry mother owls, ready or not, hear they come, and wrenching your hands from your head you see you are stuck in the forest ice rink, set ankle deep in the ice as all the mother owls come skating towards you, their faces all like this: [ ]. All you can do is screech at the sky. When I was a prison guard, I would work the visitors room, standing at the door in the corner, observing. And there was one visitor that just didn't know how to leave. When the buzzer went, indicating the hour was up, he would look panicked and push his chair back, get up, look confusedly around, press his hands on the glass screen, turn towards the corner of the room, where there was just a grilled window, and start shuffling towards it. And then, when I’d command and gesticulate towards door, he would look at me as if I was signalling some mysterious semaphore. He would look across, up and down my body, then down the length of my arm to my pointing hand and the tip of my finger, his gaze locking there and a low groan rising inside him until it became a shrill champagne flute-shattering screech, at which point he would usually need to be restrained. And sometimes it could take six of us to carry him out. Not that he was resisting or being in any way violent. And though not a large man, he was just heavy — his body seemed weighed down with the distress and disturbances coursing through his mind. That was 30 years ago. I didn’t understand back then what I don’t understand today, but in a totally different way. You see, the prisoner he came to visit had been released several years prior to these episodes, but through some recurring administrative error, he kept being allowed to the visitation sessions, where he would sit and stare at his reflection in the glass, the dead grey phone in his hand, until the buzzer went… The school is long demolished and old Rufus, suffering wild fluctuations of mental health, has taken to pan-frying battered whitebait at the kerbside and feeding it through the mesh fence at night time in an attempt to undermine the integrity of the concrete foundations of the new travel lodge … as the fence is positioned some 30 yards from the construction works … the accrued whitebait postings secretly slop down a festering ramp of compacted fishmeat and sodden carbohydrates, bothering nobody.