This arrived by snail mail in Darlington Grove and I went to Sydney Road and paid for photocopies.
This was when I would bridge the gap between my father and Mervyn. Maybe Mervyn was a stirrer and a ratbag but corporate crime was right up Sando’s alley. This was the best gift you could give him: a polluter, caught red-handed, and shamed with solid proof, printed out in rows of numbers from the Batman Institute of Technology. I said nothing about Mervyn yet. It was the numbers that were the point and when my father had finished reading he dragged me into his chair and there, with me all bruised and tangled, he kissed my head. We’ve got the bastards, he said. I was not going to screw this up. I said nothing about Mervyn. I cooked him tuna casserole instead. We washed up together and then he took me through the BIT report which he clearly understood.
He said that this student had found 1.4 parts per billion of the furan 2,3,7,8-TCDF. This level was equivalent to 143 parts per trillion of dioxin 2,3,7,8-TCDD. Don’t worry what it means. Just understand that 0.038 parts per trillion in water is enough to start killing fish. Agrikem’s effluent also contained chlorophenols, the precursors for the manufacture of 2,4-D. Several different types of these chemicals were found, including dichlorophenol and trichlorophenol. The samples contained one hundred times Agrikem’s allowed limit of their Trade Waste Agreement.
My dad called the minister on his private line, at night. We were not nervous or intimidated. He said, Goodso, we got the bastards, and then he faxed the report straight to him. This was Sando at his best. It was worth living in a creepy house to see him shine like this.
So the minister would table the report, no wucking furries, but he could not possibly do it until it had been officially signed by BIT. He was not in the business of defaming a manufacturer. BIT said this would be routine, and then the analysis was misplaced, then found, and then there was a letter from their legal counsel stating that the institute would not support “unsupervised work” performed outside the department.
But you can read it out in parliament yourself.
In my dreams.
But you do have that privilege?
Sweetie, no. I can’t.
Yes you can. If you want to you can. (I suppose I was obnoxious.) You have to, I said.
For Christ’s sake, Sando cried. Shut up.
That’s where it turned, in a nanosecond, Gaby said. I told him he should apologise. We were standing in the kitchen. He had a jar of peanut butter in his hand and he threw it at the window. Glass sprayed around the room. There were shards in my hair. I was afraid and angry all at once. He tried to hug me and say that he was sorry. I told him he was a failure to his whole electorate. I asked him how many birth defects had been reported in Fawkner. I just made that up, based on nothing.
He laughed at me. Who ever made you think you could talk to me like that?
Don’t you laugh. Stop it.
But he wouldn’t or couldn’t. He crunched across the glass. I told him he was drunk, although he wasn’t. I said he was abusive. I stuffed clothes in my schoolbag and bicycled around Brunswick and Royal Parade looking for Frederic’s mother’s van.
31
I HURT my father and so he changed. After that I was always innocent or stupid. If I learned or questioned something, it was because of someone else. If I criticised him, I had been influenced. This way he could keep on loving me no matter what I did.
He discovered the floppy disk “Find Gaby’s Pussy.”
He would have had no clue about how to access it. He just blamed the school for what he feared it was and he visited my home-room teacher. He didn’t like that she was a “girl” with torn jeans and spiked-up hair. Her boyfriend was in Cosmic Psychos or The Hairballs, one of those. Crystal was a punk revival feminist. She dealt with my father and calmed him down. When he left she played the game. Of course she got the joke, that Frederic was my pussycat. Then she went through the code afterwards, learning from us, line by line.
There were teachers who were always stressed by the lack of structure. They thought they were radicals because they walked off the job when an Education Department inspector arrived. But not all of them were suited to real life in a democracy. Crystal was born to be our teacher. She encouraged us to take votes. She smoked with us in the “man hole.” She taught us by learning alongside us. I had become obsessed with the Merri Creek, so that was very cool with her. She had known nothing about the soil, the history, the politics, the birds and trees, so we all started to do the work together.
When my dad chickened out on presenting the dioxin numbers in parliament it was just natural that I took the BIT analysis to Crystal. This was what she was on earth to do. She added Agrikem to my Merri Creek map. She got us studying herbicides, which led us to dioxin, which led us to Agent Orange, to Australia’s part in the Vietnam War which had finished before we were born.
She went to MetWat’s head office in Flinders Lane, down near Spencer Street station, and returned with an annual report. We were righteous and outraged by what we found in it, pictures of the men to whom we had given custody of the most precious commodity on earth, our water. They were “corporate advisors specialising in debt, performance improvement.” They were on the boards of Genteck, BankWest, National Australia Bank and Bank of New Zealand, CSIRO. They were Civil Engineering, M. Engineering, FAIM, FIE (Aust.), B. Science and Engineering. They had backgrounds in the manufacturing industry. They had worked for mining companies and multinational accountants. We were not persuaded they could be trusted with the common good.
Am I ranting? Alone in a room. Talking to the wall. Will anybody ever hear me?
In class Freddo and I wrote a very buggy “Active Agent Puppet” game in BASIC. Dioxin was the active agent and the puppets were the shiny-faced men on the MetWat board. Crystal was a published writer. She helped us to imagine individual characters, pathetic, fretful, boastful, or falsely innocent like the amoral Harold Skimpole in Bleak House (which we had to read). Skimpole said he was innocent as a child. So we put him on the board as well. Not even Frederic could resolve the code issues, but our fire spread throughout the school.
The mad beaky-nosed art teacher projected images of the board members on wet cartridge paper and we painted over them, making bleeding, fuzzy portraits of men with shadow eyes, and vast gold buttons on their creepy suits. The shop guy was Doug the Organic Mechanic. He taught mitre cuts in fifth-year shop. Then his class made real frames so we could have an art show and an opening. Our portraits hung round the edge of the upstairs gallery where mad Methodists had once studied scripture in compartments shaped like segments of a pie.
Are there schools like this today? Probably not. We all thought we were inventing the future which we imagined would be better than the past.
We had a class visitor I recognised from Lygon Street: a punkish older guy with thin red hair and rings and screws and safety pins like medals on his face. He used to set up a folding table some Saturdays. He displayed awful pictures of deformities and bubbling flesh. He had red sunglasses. I had always thought he must be nuts.
In our home room, Eddy Margolis asked him what band he was in. He said shut up, don’t be a smart-arse. He had been a sergeant in the Australian army handling herbicides. They had made him ill.