Then on a loop: Morning … morning … morning … morning … morning …
He sped it up to about twice the speed, inserted a chorus effect, then added an octave below. Paul picked up his drum sticks and began to play along. Kick bass in time with the words, high hat on the offbeat, sticks playing counter beats with the snare and toms and cowbell. Sammy shoved the last two mouthfuls of pizza into his mouth and began hitting two large metal pipes with a lump of wood, the doleful ecclesiastical tones befitting an elegy in some country churchyard.
Mungo adjusted the key to suit the pipes and began improvising a melody with his other keyboard, on top of what was happening. They seemed to play as if their lives depended on it, for a while not even looking at each other, simply imbibing the sounds, the rhythm, feeling and reacting to each other. After about ten minutes they began to give each other know ing glances, their actions getting more radical and the melodies more complex. It was the point where the synthesis of the sounds found a groove, fusing as one. They were all append ages of the same musical body, their minds tuned into hearing and predicting the others’ moves.
Mungo suddenly flicked his keys off, Paul ceased drumming and Sammy burst into laughter.
‘John Cage, eat your heart out!’
And so the young musical revolutionaries’ day had begun.
Chapter Eight
At the same time that John Sturges had entered the Nerve Two reception area, hesitantly making his way to the young girl at the desk to check in for his interview with Kant, Melinda was leaving home to the sound of Yetta singing in the kitchen as she went about preparing the ingredients for her famous spiced biscuits.
‘Kosi kosi łapci … pojedziem do babci … Babcia da nam mleczka … a dziadzius pierniczka.’
Melinda had heard Yetta sing the Polish nursery rhyme many times to Rosie, who loved to clap, clap little hands like the young girl in the song, when heading off to grandma’s house to be fed on milk and gingerbread cookies.
Half an hour later, when Melinda opened the kiln room door, she was instantly wrapped in its womb like heat. The kiln had reached temperature overnight, an 1100 degree glaze firing turning silica into glass. It still wasn’t quite ready to open up. If she opened the door too early because of impatient student demands most of the pots would crack with the inrush of cold air onto hot clay bodies. She switched the buzzing extractor fan off and came back into the studio to prepare for the students’ arrival.
From the damp cupboards, lined with tin sheeting to extend the drying time of clay, she lifted out several works and began placing them around the room for the students when they arrived. Melinda felt it was important to have the works in place, particularly for the special needs students who were creatures of habit, always sitting in the same spot at the same table.
Mason’s piece was essentially a lump of clay on a craft wood board into which he would prod with his withered fingers, grunting and forcing subterranean sounds from his mouth. His head, neck and shoulders, twisting and contorting as his tongue moved in and out of a mouth that had minimal muscle control, writhed like an ancient creature from the depths of a sea cave. His cerebral palsy movements were involuntary and his noisy expulsions spasmodic and alarming, but his interaction with clay, in this room, with these other human beings, made his eyes shine with joy.
As it turned out Mason was away sick today. The merest cough would require regular massage and gentle thumping on his chest and back to break up the congestion. A lack of this constant attention could result in something far more serious or even death.
Pammy trundled in. Big lady, thirtyish; records of her birth had gone astray. She was intellectually impaired, and irrepressibly cheerful due to a complete lack of comprehension about negativity, an attribute Melinda wished would rub off onto some of the sixteen year old hoodied rabbits that had just burst in, in a flurry of chatter, ribbing and punching, girls and boys alike. And these were the so called normal ones.
Here’s my pack of primitives, Melinda mused as they jostled for a position around the same table. The smell of sour smoke infused in their hair and clothes made it almost as difficult to teach them close up as it was with the impoverished Jeremy Sedgebrook, whose trousers invariably ponged of week old, slow dribble urine.
‘Hello Miss Kant,’ Pammy said, with the muted voice of someone who didn’t want to be noticed this morning, but she adored Melinda so she often gambled with her safety. She sat in her place and waited for Melinda to say, ‘All right Pammy, we going to do some work now?’
‘Yes, Miss Kant. I’m going to do some … ’
‘Melinda!’ one of the shabby boys interrupted. ‘We git our fings from the kiln now?’
‘It’s not quite cool enough yet, Phillip. If I were to open it up now, the cold air would rush in and all your hard work would explode.’
‘Cool.’
‘If you get going with something new it’ll be okay in about half an hour. Maybe you could try something a little taller this time. What about a vase for your mum to put flowers in?’
‘Oaw,’ he tutted. ‘I ain’t a poof. I want me ash tray so I can ’ave a smoke arfter.’
‘You’re going to have to wait till you get home anyway. You know there’s a no smoking policy on campus.’
‘Oaw.’
Pammy giggled and whispered inaudibly to her table top, ‘Smoking’s not healthy for you.’ Almost inaudibly …
‘Fuck off Pammy, ya spaz.’ A runt of a rabbit sneered without looking up from his own table top.
Pammy giggled again.
‘Ya der brain.’
Pammy smiled, puffed with pride at her audacity in engaging a hostile enemy. Unlike the College campus, there would be no physical retaliation in the classroom with the teacher present an insignificant skirmish by all accounts but for Pammy a major military triumph.
‘Right, come on everyone, let’s get started. And for once let’s try to keep the language clean. There are new bags of stone ware clay, and I’ve mixed up a new cobalt under glaze in that bucket there, which will give you a strong blue for your designs. I’ve made up new white slip, since someone decided to mix the last lot with some iron oxide. The clean slip, and let’s keep it clean too, is now in this bucket here.’
Like constant radar Melinda scanned the room with her peripheral vision. ‘You two, Jenny, Maureen, stop your nattering. Your boxes need the galleries scraped a little more so the lids fit. Here Pammy, try this wooden tool; it won’t cut so deeply.’
Melinda was never on her own teaching these composite classes. There was a ratio determined by the Education Department of the number of support aides per disabled students, like Mason, who needed to be wheeled to the toilets and ‘sorted out’, and Kevin Saunders, an autistic lad of twenty two, who had just arrived with his father, Jackson Saunders, an accountant with the Hobart City Council.
The two regular carers, David Wenderby and Carol Symmons, were both endlessly patient. Of course, it was easy for them to remain calm because the sole responsibility for discipline was Melinda’s. They were there to assist with technical problems like carrying heavy pots for their students, wheeling some of them to the toilet, wiping dribbles from faces and keeping a vigilant eye out for safety. Carol, who was studying autism as part of her Master’s degree, had applied for the job because of the inclusive programs that had been set up for special needs students at the Polytechnic.
‘Kevin doesn’t see the forest, only individual trees’, had been how Carol had explained Kevin’s condition to Melinda when she first joined the class. Her studies had equipped her with