My mousy-brown hair had more pins in it than an angry woman’s voodoo doll. One wrong move and I’d either scalp myself or pull my brain out through the back of my Nordic braid. But, combined with my very favourite navy wrap dress and heels, I was ready to take on the day.
School was a twenty-minute walk from home, thirty minutes if we went via the café. The first trickle of nervous sweat made its way down my back as we traipsed through the rippling bitumen of the car park. It had seen better days; shrubs had grown from weeds and created tectonic rifts in the surface, and the once vivid white lines were nothing more than faded rubble.
A time capsule to my youth presented itself in a carving on the trunk of a pinkish-grey eucalypt by the main quadrangle. What were the odds Josie Smith still loved Trevor Reeve, the kid who told everyone Superman was his uncle?
‘That would be a negative,’ Penny explained. ‘Last Christmas was the season for cheating, or so it seems. Trevor took off with a barmaid and is currently living in Warrnambool.’
So much for “tru luv”.
The winds of time had taken a barren school oval and replaced it with a football field, used by the local team on weekends and training nights. An ochre running track encircled the field, and newly upgraded demountables were dotted around the main building – the Pentagon, as Dad used to call it.
It was neither five-sided, nor did it hold huge secrets. It was a giant red-brick square. A library, staffroom, and admin block sat at the heart of it all, and nests of classrooms branched out at each corner, creating bricked-in walkways that were perfectly cool on hot summer days.
‘You ready?’ Penny stopped, hand on the front door.
‘Nope,’ I squeaked. ‘Not in the slightest.’
She laughed. ‘Yes, you are. You’ve got this.’
After a hall lined with current class photos, we walked into the teachers’ lounge. The early Nineties décor remained, white tiles with crumbling grout and stucco walls, and a café bar that was miraculously still bolted to the wall. It was already feeling the effects of providing cheap coffee grinds for a horde of perpetually exhausted teachers, and brown grains littered the bench like ants across a picnic blanket. I made a mental note to bring my own coffee tomorrow.
A heavy grey door swung open to my left. Phillip Vine, the same jovial white-haired principal I’d had, and had come up against in several scrapes, stood before me with arms outstretched. ‘Eleanor Manning.’
‘Ellie, please.’ I leaned into his hug. He was still an Old Spice man. ‘It’s so good to see you again.’
‘And it’s nice to see you didn’t skip the country before the start of term,’ he teased. ‘Welcome to the team. Officially, anyway.’
‘Thank you so much.’ I wrung my hands and tried to take in as much of my surroundings as possible which, despite my history, was likely going to be very little today.
‘Or, should that be: welcome back?’ He fixed me with a curious gaze before laughing at his own joke. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure which one to run with.’
While Phillip launched into an explanation of what was going to happen over the course of the day, Penny disappeared towards reception, chirping excited greetings to anyone she ran into. Her bright infectious laughter could be heard through walls and doors and, when she returned, she was jangling a set of keys in my direction.
‘Let’s go check out your office.’
‘Please do.’ Phillip squeezed my shoulder. ‘Just make sure you’re back for the staff meeting in here in ten minutes?’
‘Sure.’ I wiped sweating hands against my sides. I angled myself towards Penny. ‘Lead the way.’
Like that, I was whisked out of the staffroom via the swinging door, and into the adjoining library.
Growing up, I’d always wondered what it would be like working in this library. I’d sit in class and daydream about having students of my own, stacking shelves and stamping the return cards in the front pocket of each book. I didn’t have to imagine any longer. Did this mean I was living the dream? I guess it did, except for the fact that return cards were now obsolete. Thanks a lot, technology.
After wading through an information technology degree at university, I shuffled into a teaching diploma and took up a position in the library of a central Melbourne primary school. Oversized classes, under available resources, and a handful of firebugs, who’d found joy in old books and magnifying glasses, gave new meaning to the term burned out. No matter how many times they tried, I couldn’t buy the excuse they were simply trying to rid the room of ants.
After that, the public library became my refuge. I worked in the repairs room, spent my days fixing broken spines and wrapping books in protective wrap. Solitude stopped being satisfying when I began feeling like I was wasting my brain. After all, I had a qualification and I knew I was a good teacher. What good was my university tuition debt when I was spending my days gluing books back together instead of teaching? I soon yearned to get back into a classroom, and this role popped up at the perfect time. Getting that phone call from Phillip had been one of the rare fist-pumping moments in the last twelve months.
Tucked away in the belly of the not-quite-Pentagon, with a door that linked to the staffroom, my new library smelled of tannins, vanilla, and dry-cleaned carpet. A small courtyard at the rear of the space still looked like an upscaled terrarium. Wisps of rubbish and overgrown weeds spun about in the warm wind like a bite-sized tornado.
Stacks I used to hide between stood solid like tin soldiers, now with a comforting beanbag at the end of each aisle. I not so silently wished we’d had them during my time; they would have made lunchtimes in the library much more fun.
Penny nattered excitedly as she unlocked the door to my office, a glass-fronted room tucked in the front corner of the library. It looked like the aftermath of an evacuation. Books were strewn across benches, blue and yellow streamers hung from the roof, and random football-themed drawings were tacked to the windows. My attention kept floating back to a caricature of a dark-haired footballer holding a trophy aloft.
‘I guess someone was in a hurry,’ I mumbled.
‘You’ve got no idea.’ The right corner of Penny’s mouth twitched into a smile.
I ran my finger along the spines of DVDs, in numbers heavy enough to cause sagging in the shelves against the wall. An empty table with a large roll of book covering held in place on a dispenser sat under the window. The old workbench brought back memories of lunchtime chats with Mrs Coates. Often, our debates descended into discourse over which Roald Dahl book was the best.
I never did understand her adoration of Royal Jelly until I was an adult. Sick, sick woman. I tossed my handbag under the bench, thrust my hands against my hips, and tried to take in this adult version of a childhood memory.
‘What do you think?’ Penny asked.
‘It’s a little surreal, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘We couldn’t wait to get out of here as kids.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she chuckled. ‘And for someone who was so desperate to get out of here, you spent a lot of time in detention.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘That’s the best you can do?’
It wasn’t my fault I kept scoring higher than Jarrod Sims on maths tests. For so long, he’d been ego-stroked into believing he was some sort of Pythagorean prodigy. When we ended up in the same class, it was a constant tussle every time he took offence. It made my last year of primary school interesting. It became even more tangled when he developed a crush on me in high school.
‘Anyway, time for me to play fairy godmother.’ Penny tapped