The Ice Cream Girl by Maree Spratt
Maree Spratt is an educator by day, writer by night, and reader at all hours. In 2016 she was shortlisted for Seizure‘s Viva La Novella V, and has since expanded that piece into a novel. In 2018 she completed the Hardcopy Professional Development Program for Australian Writers. She writes to celebrate people.
The Ice Cream Girl
It’s Friday afternoon and I’m the last student left on the school grounds. All week it’s been 40 degrees, and the courtyard outside the staffroom feels like the inside of an oven. I’m sitting at an old desk Miss Waters has pushed up against the glass outer wall for me, just next to the locked door, so I’m easy to see but still not invading her exclusive, air-conditioned space. She looks pretty comfy sitting inside on the brown sofa, working her way through a stack of exam papers as she drinks cold water from a coffee mug.
Hardened balls of chewing gum cling to the wood beneath my desk like molluscs attached to the bottom of a ship. It’s gross, but sometimes I run my fingers over them, and in this heat they feel dewy. I can feel my butt sticking to my plastic seat, and I’m scared that when I finally stand up there will be a circle of sweat on my skirt. I can see it now: when I walk home later down Kelly Avenue, the grade 12 boys will already be sitting in their camper chairs on Jack Wood’s lawn, each of them onto their third or fourth tinny, and when they see me they’ll cat call and ask me why I’m wet.
Frustrated, I use my pencil to shade out the picture of a penis that someone has drawn on the desk, covering it in a shining layer of lead. From time to time I look up and stare longingly at the water cooler in the staffroom corner, watching the bubbles that float cheerfully to the surface whenever Miss gets up to pour herself another cup. They have a fridge in there, too. Back in grade eight, when I was a major try-hard, I used to collect ten rewards stamps a week and claim a free ice-block from the freezer every Friday. I’d usually go for a Cola flavoured Zooper Dooper, although one week I collected twenty stamps and Mr Moreton let me have a rainbow Billabong. The sight of that fridge makes my throat tighten. In primary school, our teacher read us a super depressing story called ‘The Little Match Girl’ in the last week of school. Right now, as I stare longingly through the glass, I reckon they could write an Australian version of that story about me.
I do my best to keep adding lines to the piece of A4 paper Miss Waters thrust at me when I arrived outside the staffroom for this, my after school detention. Miss hates me because she thinks I don’t respect her. She thinks I don’t respect her because I talk all through her lessons. What she doesn’t understand is that I talk because I can’t concentrate on what she’s got to say anyway. The staffroom has air-conditioning, sure, but this is Malooburah High: not some fancy school in the city. The majority of classrooms have this thing called an AirBreeze, and although it’s not great at cooling down the room, it’s excellent at creating what my Mum would call ‘an infernal racket.’ It’s a hungry, box-shaped monster affixed to the ceiling that noisily sucks hot air out of the room like it’s slurping a milkshake through a straw. I think everyone knows that it doesn’t really work, but at the start of every lesson we badger the teacher to use it, raising valid arguments about our human rights, until eventually – no doubt because the heat is driving them crazy too – they give up and turn it on. At that point the lesson may as well be over. I’m not going to sit and try to lip read in a noisy room that still reeks of BO, no matter how often Miss Waters wants to shriek my name and her catchphrase – show some respect! – over the asthmatic wheeze of the AirBreeze and the hum of twenty-seven other kids ignoring her too.
The detention is supposed to be about the fact I never bring my laptop to school, but she’s added a dig about me talking in class to the sentence that she wants me to copy out. She wrote it on the first line in blue ballpoint, with x100 circled in the top left hand corner of the page. This simply confirms that she hates me. I asked around at lunch to see who else has had an after-school with Waters, and pretty much everyone said that she only ever makes you write out sixty lines, max.
‘I must bring my laptop to class every lesson, and I must respectfully listen to my teacher when she is talking,’ I write for, if I’ve been counting correctly, the forty-third time.
What Miss Waters doesn’t realise is that in the last year, since the second round of lay-offs happened at Maloobarah Mine, things around my house have been going missing. My father was the first, and arguably the most notable, disappearance. He told us he’d gotten a new job as a FIFO – but instead of just flying out, he fucked off. Not long after that I noticed that Mum was no longer wearing her pearl earrings, and when I checked the bathroom they weren’t in her jewellery box either. The rug disappeared from the living room floor. The TV went missing, and the only explanation we got was that we should be doing our assignments instead of watching it anyway. But then my laptop vanished too, and I had nothing to do said assignments on. All that we’ve gained in the face of all this loss is a growing pile of empty wine bottles in the cardboard box underneath the sink. When I walk them to the recycling bin on a Friday night and lift the lid, I always grit my teeth before I drop them because I feel sure they will shatter. In actual fact they never do– but the thump they make when they hit the bottom always, to me, feels violent.
It would have been far too complicated to explain this set of circumstances to Miss Waters when she asked where my laptop was, so I settled with a safer excuse: I forgot to bring it. It’s still charging up at home on my desk. I used that same excuse for weeks, even after my desk had disappeared too. Eventually I swallowed my pride and put my name on the list at the library to borrow a school-issued device, though not before I’d earned this detention with Waters. Every school laptop has a numeric code written in yellow permanent marker on the back of the screen, in big, bright numerals so they don’t get lost or stolen. Mine is number 8-2-3, but it may as well say P-O-V. It takes about twenty minutes to load at the start of every lesson. Another reason why I talk in class.
My punishment for neglecting to bring technology to school is to sit and write with what I could have used instead: a pencil. I wonder if this is an example of an ironic situation. I’d know for certain if I’d listened to that lesson on ‘comic devices,’ in which Miss went through 57 Power Point slides on what it means to be funny without cracking a smile once – not even when the class erupted in laughter at the moment she realised that Dallas was stuck. Incredibly, he’d managed to crawl all the way to the other side of the room without her noticing and squeeze the first half of his body through the window in a botched effort to escape. I really hope that he got more than sixty lines.
The pencil she’s given me to write my lines with this afternoon is covered in bite marks. The rubber is missing and someone has crushed the thin metal casing that used to hold it with their teeth. Kids can be real feral sometimes. I get hungry, sure, especially lately – but I’m never going to start gnawing on my stationary. When I cross the T on teacher for the 52nd time, the lead breaks. Typical. I stand up and press my face against the glass. Waters looks like the star of some furniture commercial, relaxing on the sofa with a plumped-up pillow beside her, her perfect hair framing the sides of her face as she calmly writes feedback on another exam paper. I tap on the glass –I guess a bit aggressively. She looks up at me, although I feel like she’s looking through me. She puts her marking aside and walks over to the sliding door, wrenching the handle down to unlock it. She puts her head out but keeps her feet in. it’s enough for me to catch a gust of the air-conditioning.
‘I need a better pencil,’ I tell her.
‘Now. Could you say that in a politer way?’ she asks. I hate the way she speaks. It doesn’t matter what she says, what I hear is always the same: you’re an idiot.
‘Probably.’
‘I can’t address this problem for you until you ask me to do so in a politer, more respectful way. So what are you going to say to me instead?’
I know exactly what she wants me to say, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to say it. If I bat my eyelids and chime ‘may I have another pencil please, Miss Waters?’ I reckon I might vomit in my mouth. Which would be saying something, because I haven’t eaten anything yet today. There’s a withered brown leaf at me feet. I grind it into the concrete with the tip of my shoe.
‘The pencil you gave me is fucked,’ I say. ‘Reckon you could fix me up with one that actually works?’
I’m definitely not the first student at Maloobarah High to talk to a teacher like this. It’s a style of communicating with authority that I’ve only adopted in the last year or so, though. I look into her eyes defiantly. She stares back. A thin film of tears starts to cloud my vision. For a moment, I think I can see the same intensity of emotion in her eyes, too. Then she turns her back on me, takes her pencil case off the coffee table and withdraws a better, sharpened pencil. I sit back down at my desk, my skirt practically squelching, and drag the feet of my chair against the concrete as I move forward in the hope that the sound makes her flinch.
She doesn’t react.
‘I’m going to choose to ignore the fact that you swore,’ she says, placing the pencil on my desk without looking at me. ‘This one is brand new. When I hear from you again, I want it to be because you’ve finished all your lines.’
She slides the door closed and returns to her place on the sofa. I’m glad that I didn’t cry. A slow rage simmers in my chest as I pick up the new pencil and write for the fifty-third time that I should bring my laptop to school and respect my teacher. I think I’ve actually managed to upset her. She’s picked up her exam papers again but her pen remains poised over the top one, and her eyes are staring into the page instead of darting over it. She’s also forgotten to relock the door.
I remember feeling overcome with anger when our primary teacher read us that story called ‘The Little Match Girl.’ She lies outside the window of some rich family in the freezing cold, staring in longingly at their Christmas turkey and their fireplace, until she suffers hypothermia and dies. A few sooks in the class cried when they realised she was dead, but more than anything, I felt anger.
“Why didn’t anyone help her?” I asked my teacher.
“I think that’s the question the author wants you to ask,” she replied, without actually answering it for me.
“Why didn’t she break into the house?” I asked.
I remember my teacher laughing at that. “I guess because she was a good girl.”
Back then I saw myself as a good girl too, but I still thought that if I were in her situation, I would have tossed a rock through the window. Right now I’m fairly sure that I’m not going to die of heat exhaustion, so my situation is not as desperate as hers, but I still feel almost as pathetic. I’m thirsty. I’m hungry. My head feels light. The lines seem to blur and shift as I write. I’m not going to throw a rock through the glass, but I decide that if the chance arises, I will do something to help myself. I’m not going to let Waters, of all people, make me feel this small.
I’m finishing off my eighty-sixth line when the opportunity presents itself. She puts her glasses down on the coffee table, stands up and smooths the edges of her dark grey pencil skirt. She turns on her heel without acknowledging me and walks down the short hallway, disappearing into the toilet for female teachers. I know I have to act right away. If I’m lucky she’s gone to do a shit, but Waters strikes me as the uptight sort of bitch who would only ever want to crap at home. She’s had so much to drink from the cooler that I reckon she definitely needs to piss, and although I should factor in time for her to wash her hands and primp her hair in the mirror, that still only gives me three or four minutes at the most. I stand, slide the door open properly, and walk in. The cold air envelopes me instantly. It feels as good as jumping into the town swimming pool on the first day of the holidays. I walk swiftly but softly across the carpet to the water cooler, collect a plastic cup and fill it up to the brim. I skull it. Much like the air-con, it feels glorious. I crush the cup with my hand and toss it in the wastepaper bin. Then I make my way to the fridge. The plan is to grab a Billabong and hide it in my backpack. Finish my lines quickly and then eat it on the way home, even if it is half-melted. My hand is on the freezer when I’m suddenly distracted. There is a photograph pinned to the bulletin board nearby that commands all of my attention.
It’s me.
There is a photograph of me on the wall.
I know that time is running out, but this is too weird to ignore. It’s sitting there beside four other school portraits, lined up in a row like a series of mug shots from an old-school Western movie. And based on the other photos, I am in the company of outlaws. There’s Ethan, who deals drugs in the toilets. Sarah, who threw a chair at Mr Oberton last year. Tia, who I haven’t actually seen at school since week one, but who I did see drinking with some older guy down by the creek on Saturday. Roger, who is suspended for smoking behind the industrial bins. And then, right next to Roger, there’s me. Of all people, me. I walk over and run my finger down the laminated edge of my photo. It’s the first time I’ve seen my school portrait this year – Mum hasn’t bought one since year two– and although I look kind of pale, and the small community of pimples that lives on my forehead is very visible, overall I reckon I don’t look half bad. The deep blue background they make you pose in front of actually brings out my eyes. There’s a heading above the mugshots: YEAR 10 STUDENTS AT RISK, it says. I don’t get it. This is supposed to be an English staffroom, but that is surely not a complete sentence.
At risk of what?
What do they think I’m at risk of?
Is it something they think I’m going to do, or something that will happen to me?
Is it so bad they can’t bring themselves to say it?
I hear the unmistakable gurgle of a toilet flushing, and I know I should hurry back outside, but it might already be too late now, and the anger is surging in my chest again. If you ask me my picture belongs to me, so I remove it from the bulletin board and stuff it in my pocket, the thumb tack still in place. The ice-creams I know I have no claim to, but I’m angry, and I want one. I can hear the tap running in the toilet as Ms Waters washes her hands. I throw the freezer door open and my eyes fall on a packet of Zooper Doopers, a few loose Billabongs, and – praise God – a box of Magnums. I grab the Magnums and make a run for it. I don’t even bother to close the freezer door. There also isn’t time to pack the box into my backpack, which is slouched against the leg of the desk. As I scoop it up off the floor and toss it over my shoulder her new pencil falls and lands on the concrete. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lead breaks.
When Miss exits the bathroom I’ve already blitzed half-way across the courtyard with the box of Magnums held tightly against my chest. She doesn’t bother to chase after me. Over the sound of my own laboured breathing I hear her shout something about phoning my parents. Well, I think, good luck to her. Mum doesn’t answer the phone when she’s drunk, and Dad – I’d actually love it if she managed to get in touch with Dad. He doesn’t pick up when I call.