childhood

When I was in year one, my teacher was Miss Harris. I don’t remember her face but I remember she put in a transfer to and cried when she found out she was then placed at Blackbutt. The class laughed at the name when she told us, and so did she but I saw her cry regret to the principle; she wanted to go to a bigger town, not a smaller one. Rockhampton was a small town. There was a boy who sat in the desk 3 rows in front of me and he got the most stickers for doing good things. It was a token economy and he could always choose first which toys or games to play. One day he got bitten by a redback spider, that had made a home in the cut up tires that served as something to play on. The tires where painted in bright colours and where stuck in the sand and we would sit on them or jump over them or crawl under them, and that was fun then. He didn’t cry but went very pale and Miss Harris had to shout for the PE teacher Mr Harrison to carry him to the sickbay. Mr Harrison scooped him up in his hairy arms and jogged up the path to the nurse. It wasn’t a calm jog. It was a jog that suggested that Mr Harrison was worried and that he had to rush before the poison made the boy sicker. When Miss Harris collected the rest of us kids to settle back into class, she packed up his belongings on his desk and packed up his backpack. Because I was the second one in the class with the most stickers for the week, she sent me on the errand to take his backpack up to the sickbay, assumedly because he would be going to hospital. Doing errands for the teacher was a reward for getting stickers sometimes. I carried his backpack up to the building at the front of the school. This is where the sick room was, which was also where the principal’s office was, the teachers' cafeteria, and the administration lady. The principal smiled at me as I walked in and the administration lady ushered me into the sick room to see the boy. He was sitting on the sick room bed, with the Nurse making a phone call and Mr Harrison sitting next to him. Mr Harrison was drawing a watch on the boy’s arm in felt pen and the boy looked happy. The time on the watch was the time it was then. Mr Harrison thanked me and said I could get another sticker from Miss Harris when I returned to class. I went back to her and the class. I didn’t tell her about the extra sticker I could get. For the rest of the school day we learnt about spiders and had to make get well soon cards for the boy. Most of us drew redback spiders on the card. When my mum picked me up from school, I didn’t tell her about what happened to the boy. I thought about the watch all afternoon whilst playing in the backyard looking for spiders.

The next day at school when we were playing on the tires, out of nowhere, without planning it of preconceiving the idea I screamed out. “I got bitten by a redback!”. Miss Harris rushed over and asked me “Where did you get bitten?” and a crowd of kids circled around. I showed her my arm and she looked worried and confused. She walked me to the sick room and the nurse and principal and admin lady came out and asked what was wrong. I replied happily a second time “I got bitten by a redback!” In the nurses’ room they looked me over but couldn’t find any bite marks.

No one drew a watch on me. My mother was called. And it was a long time before I got another sticker. The boy died a short while after. Not because of the spider bite, but because apparently, he had some sort of cancer. Although I didn’t get punished and was not in trouble, I didn’t lie again until I was in year 6, when my friends Angela, Lauren and Tonya asked if I had kissed a boy. I told them I had, even though I hadn’t.