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  • Published: 30 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9780143786986
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $35.00

A Sea-Chase

Extract

PART ONE

Last period Friday an acting inspector found a young teacher sobbing at her desk in the farthest demountable classroom of the lower secondaries of an outer suburban high school. She had made a wrong turn, she wailed. A wrong turn into teaching. A subject report spread in front of Judy Compton splashed with tears said she created a ‘zone of indifference’ in her classes. It meant she was a dud.

‘Dud is a word I never want to hear from you ever again,’ the inspector said, pulling up a chair that had been thrown to the ground after a rioting class fled for the day. Passing Judy a box of tissues, he leaned forward over her desk with a manner implying he had known her for longer than thirty seconds, which he hadn’t.

Ken Redlynch was involved that year in regional staffing, a roving commission aimed at teacher retention. It was vocational enforcement, low-level work in a hierarchy he longed to dismantle and would do so, come the revolution, make no mistake. Judy had heard of him. He drove a jungle-green Austin Healey sports car, the BJ8 with an exhaust note like a trumpet blast, had been married three times and was blind in one eye like a pirate. The Department had a few known names like him, men and women each with their own band of acolytes.

‘The bloke who wrote that report is the dud,’ he said.

Judy flicked aside a long braid of hair, peered up at Ken through tearful brown eyes, smiled weakly and said it was good of him to say so, but her wrong turn into teaching was her own fault. She could not believe how stupid she’d been for going in for something she hated.

‘Then why make the choice in the first place?’ said Ken, who believed a vocation – any vocation – was never a choice but a flowering and a quest. Look at his own path of duty. It was never a plod. It was often a dance diablo. Opposition and difficulty beefed it up.

Teaching had happened for Judy, she said, through sticking with a bunch of girls who did everything together when they left school. At twenty-one she was not much older than the teenagers she stood in front of yelling. After matriculation she had taken on teacher training without much thought. It was for the parties, the easy hours, the freedom after boarding school of coming in, as late as she liked, to a shared house in the inner city. Also, she confessed to Ken, there was her mother, the research scientist Dr Elizabeth Darke, who had higher hopes for her. Enrolling in the dullest, slackest course imaginable, Business Studies, Bookkeeping and Stenography, seemed like a good way to annoy her mother at seventeen but not so much now, four years later.

‘Dr Elizabeth Darke, the geneticist?’ Ken tipped back his chair and contemplated Judy afresh. The Darkes were an intellectual, freewheelingly arrogant sort of brainy family, including a professor of archaeology at Sydney University who made trouble for everyone who came up against him. Of course they were not left-wing political, the way Ken was, waving the red flag when he could, though Elizabeth Darke had, on the anti-nuclear side of protests, made speeches.

‘Interesting,’ said Ken, ‘that you’re a Darke.’

‘I’m not like them,’ said Judy. ‘I grew up in the bush, in Louth, Bourke and Byrock. I hardly even know the Darkes.’

‘The best in you’s got to be good,’ said Ken with conviction.

Judy was to remember those words. Engrave them on stone, you might say, when things came unstuck with Ken Redlynch.

The corridors went quiet as footsteps faded. School was emptied out. Flocks of galahs flew overhead with the sound of inland places. Public transport that end of Sydney was hopeless. ‘I’ll give you a lift back into the city,’ said Ken. ‘If you’d like one?’ The tone he used implied they were going to be friends. That he would make everything all right. That he was Judy’s saviour.

‘Can you get me out of my bond?’ said Judy as they walked to Ken’s car. She skipped keeping up with him, a young girl again with the teaching week behind her. ‘Please?’

‘No, I can’t do that. Don’t be ridiculous. But looking at that dismal report I can make a recommendation for a transfer. You need another chance, a fresh start, a changed perspective. Listen. Your feeling that everything’s wrong is not always a bad thing in this game.’

‘Not if I really have that vocation you talk about.’

‘Exactly,’ said Ken.

‘Well, I don’t have it,’ said Judy, stamping her foot like a spoiled kid.

Ken laughed, enchanted. First opportunity he had, he would like to talk to her mother, Dr Elizabeth Darke. Beth. Bright woman. Front-line researcher at AGS, the Agronomy Research Station in the Hunter Valley, a nursery for shy geniuses. Daughter must have capacity to do same or similar, in some way yet to find.

 


A Sea-Chase Roger McDonald

At sea can be a beautiful and ferocious place to find yourself – alone and together.

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