Razza’s head began to shake and then he spread his hands wide as his face crumpled into total confusion. ‘But … Why?’
‘It’s not just a number,’ Ignatius said. ‘It’s everywhere-in mathematics, physics, architecture, nature, art, you name it.’ Then he hovered over Razza like a bird of prey about to swoop. ‘Did you know that a team from the University of Tokyo has just calculated pi to 1.24 trillion decimal places? One-point-two-four trillion places! And guess what – I found out the other day that now you can order a poster from the internet that has pi calculated to the first million decimal places on it. My parents are getting me one for Christmas.’
I don’t think Razza could have looked more stunned if Ignatius had admitted to eating his grandmother.
‘You’re not even pretending to be normal any more, are you, Prindabel? You’re nerd and proud.’
Ignatius ignored Razza and pulled a white T-shirt from the plastic bag and held it up. ‘What do you think?’
On the front of the shirt was a big circle with the symbol for pi inside and lots of little 3.14s floating around it. It looked like this:
Ignatius flipped it over. On the back the words I’m a Pi Man! were printed in large font above a drawing of a strange square-shaped pie with an ‘A’ baked on the crust and wisps of steam coming off it.
‘You can buy one if you want. We’re selling them to raise money to buy badges and coffee mugs for International Pi Day next year.’
‘International Pi Day?’ Razza said. ‘Now I know you’re making all this up.’
‘It’s true. The fourteenth of March – third month, fourteenth day-see, like 3.14, although it can be celebrated on the twenty-second of July because that’s 22/7. It just depends on whether you write the date with the month first or the day first. There are pi clubs all around the world.’
Razza swallowed hard. ‘You mean … there are others … out there … like you?’ He pointed a shaky finger at Ignatius. ‘Why have you come here? What do you want? This is our planet. Leave us alone. We-will-not-go-quietly-into-the-night!’
‘I take it that that means you won’t be purchasing a T-shirt.’
‘Prindabel, I’m telling you, man, there are nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners that don’t suck as much as that shirt. Perhaps you could try me again later … maybe sometime around Halloween or when I’m feeling more in the mood for committing fashion suicide, OK?’
A loud and deliberate clearing of a throat cut across the room. Bill, Ignatius, Razza and I looked at Scobie, who was sitting at the far end of the table.
‘Debating meeting? Remember?’
‘Sure, Scobes. No worries,’ Razza said. ‘I’ve just got one last question for our interplanetary visitor.’ Then he jabbed his finger at the bizarre drawing on the back of the shirt. ‘Prindabel, what exactly is that?’
‘An apple pie,’ he said, making a face to show that he thought the answer was obvious.
‘Aren’t pies supposed to be round?’
Ignatius leered at us all with a grin like a deranged barracuda. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Pie – are – squared!’
Razza immediately slumped back as if he’d been shot, tumbled from his chair and lay on the floor groaning. The only other noise in the room was the sound of air being sucked rapidly in and out between two rows of pointy teeth.
You could have been excused from mistaking it for a hyperventilating steam train, but it wasn’t. It was just the Prindabel version of laughter.
19.
A BIG PINK COMET
‘Hey, Ishmael. You’re an evil dude, man-you’ve made the overdue book list. From tomorrow you start paying fines and your borrowing privileges will be suspended. Hope my mum doesn’t find out that I’ve been mixing with such a bad influence.’
The debating meeting had just broken up and we were heading out of the library. I turned back and saw Razza reading from a sheet that was pinned near the check-out desk.
‘Really? What book?’
‘Ah … Pashing for Dummies,’ he shouted out as heads bobbed up from reading carrels and the Librarian Mr Fitler glared from the shelves. ‘No … wait on … I read the wrong line. It’s actually Great Rainforests of the World.’
‘Oh … right … The Geography assignment. I forgot about that. It’s up in Homeroom.’
I checked my watch. I had five minutes before the end of lunch.
‘Razz, I’m gonna shoot upstairs and get it now. I’ll catch you in Science.’
As it turned out, I didn’t make it back to the library and I didn’t catch up with Razza in Science either. My day was about to take a dramatic turn. I was about to put Barry Bagsley out of action for two weeks with just one punch.
It happened like this.
As I swung into Homeroom, three heads bobbed up simultaneously to greet me. Fortunately they were each attached to a different body. Unfortunately those three bodies belonged to Doug Savage, Danny Wallace and Barry Bagsley. They stood huddled around an open desk.
Barry greeted me like a long-lost friend. ‘Le Sewer, we’re busy here, so rack off,’ he said, jutting his jaw towards the door as he spat out those last two words.
Danny Wallace lowered the desk lid with a sly grin.
‘I just gotta grab something.’ Without waiting for a reply I wrenched open the lid of my desk and dug out the missing book. It was then that I realised exactly what they were crowded around.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘None of your business, Manure. Now like I said, rack off.’
‘That’s Bill Kingsley’s desk.’
‘Well, so it is.’
‘What are you doing to it?’
‘Giving it a spring clean – adding some decoration.’
Barry Bagsley smiled and turned to Wallace and Savage, who laughed. ‘Go ahead. Let’s see what Le Spewer thinks of our masterpiece, boys. It would be good to have an unbiased opinion.’
Danny Wallace lifted the lid and all three of them grinned madly. Stuck on the underside was a blown-up picture of Bill Kingsley. It came from one of last year’s school newsletters when our debating team made the finals. Someone had obviously been at it with Photoshop. Bill Kingsley’s body had doubled in size and now he was holding a bloodied head in his hands. Above the image a large caption read, Dill Kingsize Wins Debate by Eating Opposition.
‘What d’ya reckon? Not bad eh, Le Spewer?’
All I could think of was the look of misery plastered on Bill’s face last year when Barry and the others had tormented him about his weight.
‘Take it down.’
Barry Bagsley looked as if he didn’t understand. ‘Now why would we want to do that?’
‘He’s never done anything to you. Take it down.’
‘Sorry, Piss-whale – not gonna happen. Unless you think you can make us.’
I moved closer to the desk. Danny and Doug were on the other side. Barry Bagsley was right in front of me. I had no idea what I was going to do.
‘Look, just take it down. It’s not funny.’
‘What d’ya mean, not funny? Where’s your sense of humour, Manure? It’s hilarious.’
‘Not for Bill.’
‘Well it’s staying, so I guess the thing is … what are you gonna do about it?’
Good question. I remembered what I’d promised myself last year. No more hiding. No more being invisible.
‘If you don’t take it down I’m going to Mr Barker.’
Barry Bagsley curled his lip into a sneer. ‘That’d be right, run to Barker. You know what I think? I think you’re a gutless wimp.’
‘I don’t care what you think. Take it down or I go to Mr Barker.’
Barry Bagsley looked me over. He didn’t seem that impressed with what he saw. ‘You’re sounding pretty brave all of a sudden, Piss-whale. Wouldn’t be because you think mutant-boy Scobie will save you, would it?’
‘Yeah,’ Danny Wallace weighed in, ‘are you gonna run to your big bwuvver for protection?’
Doug Savage grunte
d, ‘Little brother.’
Two connecting words. This was a breakthrough for Doug. We really should have done something special to mark the occasion. A cake, perhaps.
A hiss of air escaped through Barry Bagsley’s teeth. ‘Scobie? Who’d wanna be related to that freak?’
I looked at the sneering, arrogant face before me. My fingers began to close into a hard, angry ball.
‘I wouldn’t mind being related to Scobie,’ I said as my fingernails dug into my palms, ‘but if I was your brother, I’d want to kill myself.’
I watched Barry Bagsley’s eyes closely as they quivered then set hard.
Of course, in hindsight, what I should have been watching was his right fist, which at that very moment was hurtling towards my face like a big pink comet.
20.
GAME OVER, MAN!
The first indication that Barry Bagsley’s fist had crash-landed on my head was a hot spear of pain that shot up my nose and embedded itself somewhere deep behind my eyes.
I don’t think I saw stars. It was more like a massive solar flare, then everything went blurry. Suddenly my nose felt about as big as Tasmania and my left eye began to throb and water. Then a warm dampness oozed over my lips and chin. I cupped my hand lightly over my mouth, and it came away dripping with blood. I looked down. Big blotches of bright red were splattering the floor like an aerial bombing raid.
That’s when I blanked out.
Apparently Mr Guthrie, who just happened to be passing by, was the first on the scene. Barry, Danny and Doug were sent immediately to Mr Barker’s office and when I came round Mr Guthrie took me straight to sick bay and later to the boarders’ infirmary where the nurse checked me over. My nose wasn’t broken, just badly bruised. Over the next few days the area around my left eye changed from a lovely shade of purply-black to sickly yellow.
Of course Mr Barker conducted a very thorough investigation into the whole affair, which resulted in Barry, Danny and Doug owning up to making the picture of Bill. Barry also admitted to punching me, but wouldn’t say why, except that he ‘felt like it’. As you can imagine, Mum and Dad were pretty upset, but after a meeting with Mr Barker and the Bagsleys they seemed calmer about the whole thing. I’m not sure what was said there. Mum just told me everyone agreed that what Barry did was wrong. (Der-really?) Then she added that the Bagsleys were ‘nice people’ and that there are ‘two sides to every story’. Two sides to every story? The only two sides I could see were my nose and Bagsley’s fist.
Anyway, the wash-up of it all was that Danny and Doug each copped three afternoon detentions and Barry got a two-week in-school suspension. This meant that he spent all his lessons either outside Mr Barker’s office or with the school counsellor Mr Devlin. Also, in order to avoid all contact with other students, he was scheduled on for different lunchtimes.
‘Suspension’s not too bad,’ Marco Armbruster informed us in Homeroom on the first day of Barry Bagsley’s absence. ‘I got a week the time I flattened that Parkville jerk at rugby. Jerome reckoned I brought the school into destitute or something, which was crap. That clown deserved it. You should have heard the sicko stuff he said about my sister when we packed a scrum … ‘Course it was all true, but that’s beside the point, eh?’
Razza and I looked up at the solid ball of muscle that was Marco Armbruster. It wasn’t quite nine a.m. and already a five o’clock shadow was darkening on his chin.
‘Just boring, mainly-doing school stuff all day. Worse part is Devlin. Wants to talk all the time. Then he makes you write down ya feelings. Once he said I should write a poem. A poem! Supposed to help me get in touch with my emotions so that I could understand why I did what I did. Well, that Parkville prick was asking for a bashing-so I bashed him. How do you make a frigging poem out of that?’
Razza and I shook our heads in sympathy. Yes, even Shakespeare might have struggled with that one.
‘Hey Marco,’ Razza said as he twirled his biro with dizzying speed through his fingers, ‘… just as a point of interest … how old’s your sister, then?’
Marco Armbruster trained his ink-spot eyes on Razza.
‘Zorzotto, my sister would eat you alive for breakfast and still have room for her Weet-Bix,’ he said, before turning and ploughing through the crowded classroom like a slow-moving wrecking ball.
‘Marco! Wait!’ Razza shouted after him. ‘I’m cool with that-bring a photo! Or a video would be good! Is she on Web Cam by any chance?’
Marco made no attempt to respond except by making a sign with his hand over his shoulder as he walked away, so Razza swivelled back around and started drumming an intricate rhythm on the desk. ‘Man,’ he said as he maintained the beat, ‘that eye of yours is something else. I can’t believe he hit you – at school. You sure you didn’t take a swing at him first?’
‘Do I look like a crazy person to you? I told you, all I said was, if he was my brother I’d kill myself – then wham!’
‘That’s all? Doesn’t make sense, man.’ Suddenly Razza stopped drumming. ‘Hey, you know what you oughta do? You oughta let Kelly see that eye.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Dude, chicks dig that sort of stuff. Makes you look all macho-bet Brad baby is covered in cuts and bruises all the time from footy. You reckon Kelly doesn’t get off on that?’
‘Razz, have you ever thought of consulting one of our highly trained mental health experts?’
‘Hey, just remember what happened when she found out about you sticking up for her little brother? Well, I’m telling you, dude, if Kelly got a load of that eye of yours and heard about how you were creamed by three guys just because you were trying to help out a mate-man, you know what’d happen? She’d go weak at the knees and then she’d get that dopey, dreamy look chicks get on their faces like they’re about to throw up, and then … that’d be it.’
‘That’d be what, exactly?’
‘That’d be Game Over, man!’ he said and went back to his mad drumming.
It took a few days for the swelling and pain to go out of my eye – the bruise hung around for quite a bit longer. It was almost worth it, though. That punch earned me (and everyone else) two glorious, fun-filled weeks in a Barry Bagsley-free zone.
What I didn’t know was this. I was about to have two more close encounters with Barry, and both of them would send me reeling and leave a deeper, more lasting impression than any black eye.
21.
MOVED TO VOMIT
The first of the two encounters occurred at lunch on the last day of the semester. I was called to a classroom where Mr Barker was supervising Barry Bagsley for the final time before he was to be tagged and released back into the wild.
When I walked into the room Barry was sitting up the back, writing. Mr Barker was behind the teacher’s desk. He looked up and called me over. ‘Mr Leseur, come in. Mr Bagsley, would you care to join us?’
Barry moved slowly to the front. He looked about as happy as a Hell’s Angel at a craft show. We both stood there as Mr Barker explained a few things we needed to be ‘absolutely clear about’. Things like: that there was no place for physical violence or bullying at St Daniel’s; that any problems or disagreement we had should be settled like reasonable, intelligent human beings, not cavemen; that he and Mr Devlin and all the other teachers were there to help; that this whole ‘unsavoury’ incident was now over; and that there would be no repeat performances otherwise the consequences would be ‘swift and severe’.
I nodded my head in agreement with everything Mr Barker said. Barry Bagsley stood motionless with a face like a death mask. I tried to convince myself that he was nodding on the inside.
When he’d finished his spiel, Mr Barker told Barry he was free to go and he returned to his desk, grabbed his pens, shoved some sheets of paper roughly into a manila folder, slung his bag over his back, and left without a word. Mr Barker kept me there a while longer. I guess he wanted to put a bit of distance between Barry and me. I wasn’t about to complain.
?
??I sincerely hope, Mr Leseur, that you are not considering pursuing your pugilistic ambitions.’
‘Sir?’
‘Boxing, Mr Leseur-you’re not thinking of taking it up as a career, are you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘A wise decision. Nonetheless, if there is even the slightest possibility of a rematch or trouble of any kind, I expect to be informed immediately.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Mr Barker jotted a few words into his diary and slapped it shut. When he looked up at me I can’t say he smiled exactly – it was more like a less intense scowl. ‘You and Mr Kingsley are friends?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He waited a moment, then clicked the top of his pen and slotted it into his shirt pocket. ‘Then he is indeed a fortunate man. You may go, Mr Leseur.’
I closed the door behind me and headed towards the steps. I wanted to get outside. I wanted to find Razza and Scobie and forget all about Barry Bagsley. But halfway along the corridor, a sheet of paper on the floor caught my attention. I recognised it as paper from the counsellor’s office. Mr Devlin’s name and contact details were at the top. I picked it up for a closer look. Most of the page was filled with scribbles and doodles except for a patch at the bottom where someone had been practising their signature.
I flipped the sheet over. On the back were six or so lines of writing. A hard pen stroke had been slashed across them but the words were still clear. I had only begun to read them when a hand flashed over my shoulder and snatched the page away.
‘What have we got here, Leseur? Haven’t been passing notes in class, have you? Or maybe it’s a love letter to little Scobie-Wobie, eh?’
It was Danny Wallace, and beside him gazing dumbly like a reject from the Stone Age was Doug Savage.
‘Oh, lookie here, Dougy. Leseur’s written a poem, and it’s called “Why?”. Awwwwwwww.’ Danny placed his hand over his heart, fluttered his eyes and began to read.
Why-couldn’t it have been me, not you?
Why-couldn’t you stay strong?
Why-won’t you ever come back?