Them. The administration: Miss White, the deputy; Meadows, the principal. Nick didn’t seem to be one of them: the people who said we’ve decided to reschedule exams, or we’ve considered both positions. Maybe he was one of us, although what about the degree, teacher training, job interview, fear of disciplinary action (we’d heard stories)? ‘This place is so depressing,’ he said, having just described his last contract in the bush, and an art building he’d left covered in soup cans. ‘Every building’s beige, like someone got a good deal on it. It’s enough to churn the bowel.’

We all smiled. It was going to be a good year.

‘Curtis, isn’t it?’ he said.

Curtis looked up from his sketch: a bloated dragon with some sort of perm, an exploding head straight out of Feres Trabilsie’s Head Start to Beauty (Wednesday evenings: 7.30—7.35). ‘Yes, Mr Andrews … Nick?’

‘Tell me about White.’

Curtis smiled. ‘Well, every Friday morning she lines the girls up …’

One of the girls said, ‘She’s a bitch.’

We waited for Nick’s response, but he was busy with his own sketch.

‘… and inspects their fingernails. Says they gotta be short.’

‘Why?’

‘Typing.’

‘Cos she’s a moll,’ another girl said.

We waited again, watched our experimental teacher, but he said nothing.

Curtis was just getting started. ‘Inspects their dresses, doesn’t she, Kristen?’

‘Too right. She’s got a ruler, and measures from your dress to yer knee, and if it’s too long she sends you home.’

We saw it! Nick smiled. The only teacher, ever, who’d sided with us against Miss White. Then he noticed me and said, ‘Clem?’

I felt like a little kid.

‘Nice old name.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Let’s see.’

I held up my sketch: Mr Fantastic wrapped around a telegraph pole, hands around some villain’s neck, his string-o’-pearl teeth glowing in the night.

‘Nice work. Next thing, trace it onto an overhead.’

This was his plan: to turn his art room into some sort of multicoloured Taj Mahal in the asphalt waste of pebblecrete change rooms and glass-sided boxes, transportables, a few terminal gum trees and various sheds for the gardeners to sleep in and the dope heads to smoke behind. The designs were free choice. It was to be our first project for the year. Ten linear metres of baby-beige-shit walls. We’d be responsible for design, colour scheme, painting and sealing. And this mural (he claimed) would be a lasting testament to our creativity, still admired in decades to come by fresh-faced Year Eights in search of inspiration. ‘You asked Miss White?’ I said.

‘Don’t worry about Miss White.’

‘Or Mr Meadows?’

‘He seems reasonable.’

We laughed; he looked up. ‘Why’s that?’

‘School is a tide,’ I half-sang. ‘We ride it into shore, harness its energy, and it delivers us to the sands of fortune.’

Nick Andrews seemed amused. ‘They all have some crap like that.’