We Fight Dragons (Volume 1, Chapter 2) 'Goosie-berries'
On the far side of the creek, Jam tensed and breathed heavily as he tested the creek’s embankment, looking for the best place to attempt a running jump.
On the far side Zach, Tobes, Rollo, and Oli were waiting.
‘Jump already!’ Rollo moaned for the hundredth time.
Jam tried to ignore him. ‘Don’t rush me. I can do it. You’ve done it before haven’t you, right Tobes?’ There was no quick reply. ‘Right! Tobes?’
Tobes was thirteen which made him older than all the others by several months, and he often pretended not to care about their games. ‘Sure. Used my Shirate training.’ Each afternoon the boys did Shirate at the community hall. The classes were run by Tobe’s dad, and Tobe’s never missed an opportunity to bring martial arts into a conversation.
‘Bullshit,’ said Oli.
‘What did you say!’ Tobes demanded.
‘I said bullshit. No way you’ve jumped the creek. It’s too far.’
Tobes stepped back into an aggressive Shirate pose. ‘Come on then! I’ll kick you all the way across!’
Rollo stepped between them. ‘Stop it. Don’t be stupid. This whole thing is stupid. Just give it up Jam, or we’re going to be late for school. Jump already.’
‘Yeah! This is getting boring,’ Zach added for emphasis.
‘Yeah, stop being such a wuss,’ Tobes joined in, forgetting about Oli.
Jam was nervous, but he could sense their frustration and knew they wouldn’t put up with any more delays. If he was going to jump the creek then it had to be now.
‘Arh! Okay, here goes!’ He ran at the highest point of the bank, careful not to overstep into the weeds, and jumped as far as he could.
He wasn’t confident that he could make it, but he felt the need to try.
Halfway across he realised he was coming down faster than expected, or hadn’t jumped as high as he thought.
The far side of the bank was tantalisingly close. He stretched out his right foot and to his surprise it touched the bank… but the rest of him landed short in the water, and he went in up to his left knee in his school trousers.
‘Damn!’ He cursed, struggling to stay balanced on his standing leg and avoiding getting any wetter. He felt like he was about to go over sideways, when Tobes reached out a hand. He took it and Tobes hauled him onto the bank.
‘Thanks, Tobes. That was close.’
Oli laughed, ‘Any closer and you’d be swimming to school!’
‘Maybe you should go home and get changed?’ Rollo considered.
Jam thought about going home, but it would take too long. He’d be late for school and then he’d have to explain why. ‘Nah! I’ll sneak in and sit down before Mr Kirk sees me. It’ll dry off.’
‘Next time,’ Zach encouraged him as they picked up their school bags and headed off. ‘You’ll get it.’
Blacken Green was a quiet town. You could see the city in the distance, but the only sound of modernity was the bypass that looped in from the east and around the north of the town, and the occasional two-carriage diesel train that stopped at the station every half-hour.
Unlike other old country towns, all of the original houses had been replaced by modern dwellings, and not even tourists from the city bothered to visit the place. The only historical thing of interest was a bunch of standing stones on the wooded hill to the south, and even they didn’t look very impressive.
In a word the town wasn’t ‘quaint’, it was ‘functional’.
The town had a grocer, a butcher, a post-office, a community hall, a church, a pub, and a station just like any other. The only unusual building was the Blacken Green Private School, which was the most modern building in any direction, two stories high, near the town centre. It had to be the smallest high-school in the whole country. Despite being a private school it was inexpensive to attend, and most of the support came from the parents of local students and its’ graduates. Because it was the only nearby high-school outside of the city it was highly sought after, but the class sizes were extremely small, and the locals took most of them.
The boys all knew their way to school without looking. The traffic was lite and their parents never worried about them getting into trouble, no matter how little attention they paid.
Jam’s wet leg was thoroughly chilled, and he would have been miserable if he hadn’t been thinking about one of the girls from school. Her name was Emma, and she was pretty, but she was from the city and was standoffish with the locals. She was still in the well-recognised phase of pretending that she hated going to a country school, which Jam had heard usually lasted six months.
It was halfway through Spring term at school. Gardens hummed with bees, and the smell of fresh pollen filled the air. The birds were returning after winter, which meant the dogs were all going crazy with excitement and barking at everything that flew overhead. Jam picked up on the natural energy in the air. When his Mum had noticed his exuberance and asked about it, he had told her that it felt like everything, including himself, was bursting with energy.
Classes were starting when they made it to school, which meant that Jam was not going to see Emma until Break. Boys and Girls were taught by different teachers. All the boys had ‘Mr Kirk’, and all the girls had ‘Mrs Kirk’. The teachers were a married couple who used to teach at a city university, and had switched to life in the country about ten years ago. They had their own children, who according to gossip were all grown up and working either somewhere far away or overseas.
Over thirty-five boys of all ages packed into one classroom, to sit at large tables. Seating was staggered so that each table had a mix of ages with at least one year-eleven student on each table. The only exceptions were the year-twelves who all shared the same table and focused mostly on their projects and end-of-year entrance exams.
Jam sat at the same table as Tobes. They were the youngest, so they kept a careful eye on what the older kids did and said. The oldest kid at their table was Tomas. As well as doing his own work, Tomas would occasionally reprimand them if they lost focus or joked around too much.
In Jam’s opinion, Mr Kirk was an expert at grouping the tables. In the short time he’d been at high school, he had learned that not all the year-elevens were as conscientious as Tomas, but those who weren’t were put together with boys who were, and Mr Kirk knew to be stricter with them.
Jam hung up his backpack without comment, unloaded his homework and textbooks, and discretely carried them to his table while trying hard to avoid drawing attention to his wet trousers. The older kids had laptops, but the younger kids used books. As much as Jam would have enjoyed a laptop, he liked the weight of his books. They looked like they were full of things, in a way that a screen didn’t. That made them a known thing. He could visibly see how much he had to learn, in order to pass each term. In fact, he didn’t yet understand how the older kids managed with only laptops.
The morning-class was on ‘Angles’, which they’d been studying for over a week now, and Jam was really beginning to understand the subject. The first thing they always did was to take out their ‘subject book’, in this case titled ‘Angles’, and colour and shade their previous notes as they re-read them. They’d begun the subject by talking about ancient Greek columns, then taken a side-trip into how Greece had formed, then onto who was important in Greek geometry and where they had gotten their ideas from. In the last lesson Mr Kirk and the older kids had talked some of the important geometric rules. Jam and Tobes didn’t know them already, so they listened intently, trying to catch up.
Jam’s subject book was now starting to look more like an art project than a maths textbook, but it brought the subject to life. His early sketches of Doric and Ionic columns were now quite detailed, as was his picture of the greek mathematician Euclid surrounded by his symbols. It was proving hard for him to ‘draw’ nice looking mathematical equations, so he would sneak looks at how the older kids had done it when he needed inspiration.
After almost two hours of the Angle-related lesson, it was time for Break. Because the weather was good, the boys and girls mixed together in the small quadrangle behind the school, surrounded by the garden plots. Oli and Tobes started up a game of ‘tip’ but had to stop when they were told-off by some of the older students for running over the garden beds.
Jam saw Emma talking with some other year-seven girls and walked over to them.
‘Hey. We were doing Angles this morning. What did you study?’
‘We do the same thing, of course,’ said Emma. ‘What’s wrong with your leg? Why is it wet?’
‘I was jumping the creek.’ He tried to sound proud, but not too proud.
‘Why?’
‘Dunno. Guess I felt like it. What did you do over the weekend?’ he asked Emma directly. He knew that she lived closer to the city than most.
‘Well,’ she started, turning to address her friends, ‘I went into city, with my Mum, and we went to this store that sold these beautiful tops.’ Jam sighed inwardly. He’d hoped that she was going to say that she went to see a movie, because he had read about an action film that had come out recently and was keen to hear about it.
Jam could feel himself growing more bored by the second, so he was surprisingly glad when all the girls jumped on the conversation and he didn’t have to contribute. As it turned out, Emma’s weekend did not actually interest him, although he was polite enough to keep the fact to himself, but it did get him thinking about the city, which he saw every day, but rarely ever visited.
The rest of school rolled by as usual. After the morning-lesson they swapped to a regular classes and more discrete subjects. Today was Maths, English, History, and Art.
When Lunch arrived Jam ate his regular ‘farmer’s lunch’, as Mum called it, of cold roast beef with tomato-sauce, a pickle, soft cheese, cut fruit, and a carton of milk.
Afterwards he tried to talk to Emma again, offering her some fresh strawberries and gooseberries that he had stolen from Mum’s kitchen garden behind the house. Emma called all her friends around, and the girls ate all the strawberries, and then started talking about things they’d seen on social media, which Jam was unable to relate to because he didn’t have a mobile phone or a laptop. Jam gave up and went back to his friends.
‘I can’t believe you keep trying to talk to her!’ Zach goaded him. ‘You’ve got to play it cool, don’t you Tobes?’
‘Believe it,’ replied Tobes with as little care and effort as he could muster.
Jam offered around the gooseberries, which hadn’t been touched by the girls. He didn’t mind missing out on the strawberries, because he preferred the tart, sour taste of gooseberries anyway. The boys talked about the increase in the number of birds around town, about Shirate, and about what was the best configuration for a BMX or mountain bike. The discussion was so animate that Jam didn’t notice that Emma had joined them until she was leaning right over him.
‘Goosie-berries! I love Goosie-berries. Can I have some?’
Jam thought she sounded unrealistically excited about the sour berries, but he took her at face value. ‘Sure. If you like.’
‘Thanks. Can I sit next to you?’
Jam immediately flushed and stammered ‘Yeah. Okay.’ He had no idea what he was expected to do or say.
Emma sat next to him, her knee touching his wet trousers for the briefest second before she leapt up exclaiming, ‘Ooow! Wet leg! You’re gross!’ She dashed back to her friends who were all laughing. ‘Can you believe he fell in the creek and didn’t get changed!’ They laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
Jam’s heart sank. That was not only unfair, it was cruel. His opinion of Emma had just plummeted from where it was five minutes ago. Maybe she was just not a nice person?
‘What was that about?’ asked Zach.
‘I think she is bored,’ suggested Rollo. ‘Ignore her.’
Jam sighed. He found that easier said than done. ‘Yeah. Who cares if she goes to the city every weekend.’ It seemed unfair. ‘Hey! I’ve got an idea! Why don’t we go to the city on the weekend? Or… or this afternoon!’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know, Rollo. Your parents have a big car, do you reckon they would drive us?’
‘Hmm… I don’t think they would. They don’t like the city.’
‘Yeah, mine neither. I wonder why?’
The 10-minute bell rang, signally that Lunch was coming to an end.
‘What’s next?’
‘History.’
Zach moaned. ‘Noooo… History is sodding boring.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said a deep voice from behind them. It was Mr Kirk. ‘For example, I’d be interested to learn the story of how one of you turned up to class half soaked.’
Jam knew that Mr Kirk was talking about him. ‘I fell in the creek sir.’
‘How did you fall in the creek? Were you trying to jump it?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Good lad. You’ll make it one day.’
Jam was confused. Weren’t teachers supposed to be down on things like that? There had to be a catch!
Mr Kirk continued. ‘What should you have done?’
‘Not jumped the creek?’
‘No, I meant after you fell in?’
‘Um, I should have gone home and changed?’
‘Correct. But you’re here now. This is what I want you to do… Usually everyone gets their own History books, but today I want you to carry all of the History texts from the library area, upstairs to the classroom. Do it now, before the class starts. Get going!’
‘Yes sir.’
There were over thirty boys in the class, and the books were big. It took Jam four trips up and down the stairs, with heavy loads, and in the end he was huffing as he raced to deliver the last books, just as the others were returning to class.
‘Thank you, Jamie,’ Mr Kirk said. ‘That will save everyone from having to get their own book. Please sit down now.’
Jam had worked up a sweat. It took ten minutes to cool down again, which is when he noticed that his trousers had dried out.
.