I smiled at him in sympathy. He stared right through me.
After his gruesome talk he said he was not there to encourage us to break the law but he himself was going to pay a personal visit to the sewer on the map we had made. He had not known about it previously, but he would confirm or deny the analysis on the spot. Me and Undertoad went on our bikes. When we arrived we could see Crystal’s beat-up van and some figures in the smudgy gloom beyond the barbed-wire fence. It was damp and cold on McBryde Street and the wind was blowing from the east and we squeezed under the bottom strand and found our teacher and our class all huddled at the stink hole. Our expert was still wearing his red-coloured dark glasses. He lifted the plate without any iron bar, just with thumb and forefingers. He did not even set it on the ground.
OK, he said. What do you smell?
Chemicals.
Like what?
Like manure, like cow shit.
Yes. Nitrogen-rich. What else?
Like plastic?
Like plastic yes. Does anyone know what silicone caulking smells like?
No-one did.
It smells like manure and plastic and silicone caulking. There is no smell like it. Whose eyes are running?
Everyone’s.
So, said Crystal, what would you say if MetWat swore there was no dioxin?
Stay away from here.
What can we do?
Nothing. Stay away.
We crossed the sodden overgrazed grass and slipped through the chained front gate. It was all so ordinary. The streets, the little houses, the bad smell, a plumber’s van reversing from a driveway. Crystal gave me a sort of hug and said, Promise you will stay away now. She did not know me very well. I hardly knew myself.
Freddo and I went up to the musty ceiling above the school and he took off my clothes and drew his finger down the middle of my chest and told me I was beautiful and I said I was going to take off all my clothes and roll in the dirt at Agrikem.
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with his secret glittery eyes and I felt a hot patch right above the bottom of my spine. He never tried to stop me. He knew I wouldn’t like him if he did. He kissed me all over, in all the crazy places like the back of my knees. We had an electrical connection. We were doing “pair programming” before we heard the term or learned it was uncool. Pair programming has a gripping immediacy: you live with your partner inches from your side. You feel his heat, his brain, and each half of you must understand the code, there, then, as it is being born. Pairing may be invasive, but so is sex.
No-one but us knew what we planned or what we thought. We annoyed people. We locked the others out. We got deeper and deeper into our own shit. The school had an old super 8 camera which no-one bothered with. A Canon 512XL. While our classmates were running round making arty videos, while Cosmic Cosmo was making a wine rack from plumbing parts, we took the Canon apart and put it back together like soldiers with a weapon.
We sneered at the new video cameras and called them “products.” We introduced the word agitprop to common parlance. Our “appropriate technology” could not record sound so our agitprop would be completely visual. We would destroy MetWat on the television news.
We would go further, play harder than anybody else. We would destroy my perfect skin. We paid for one roll of film which was exactly two minutes and fifty seconds of footage. We performed our action in rehearsal. We timed it to fit that single roll.
1. Three seconds of Agrikem sign.
2. Establishing shot of factory, zoom in to sewer.
3. Gaby walks into frame and strips to her undies.
4. Gaby rolls on the poisoned soil.
We planned this on paper and then we followed our own directions. This is how it has always been for me. Once it gets to the real-life action you are beyond fear. You are simply in the mechanism. First you do this, then you do that. It is no more scary than stripping down a gun. On the day of the action it happened to be cold. My naked skin was like a plucked chicken, smeared with mud and poison. I crouched and hugged my knees while Frederic ran across McBryde Street to find a house that had a telephone. He took ages. I hoped he might get a blanket to bring back but we hadn’t thought of that and so he came back empty-handed, waiting to execute the next part of the plan.
5. The ambulance arrives.
6. Paramedics run across paddock.
7. Paramedics carry Gaby to ambulance.
8. Ambulance drives away with Gaby inside.
9. Agrikem sign.
10. Title: 30 days later.
11. Gaby’s skin with chloracne bubbles and pustules.
Frederic took his shirt off so he would be as cold as me. That one was worthy of my dad. We waited for the ambulance together. He offered me his shirt which made me start to cry. He touched me and I pushed him away and thought things that surprised me. I thought, you carried a bloody tripod on your bike but not a blanket. I imagined I could feel the blisters starting on my back and tummy. I was less together than I would have expected. I cried because my father wouldn’t listen to me. I cried because Frederic would admire me for being brave but now he would not marry me, or would marry me and have affairs with women with unblemished skin. I thought, fat chance our film will ever be on television.
The bone-thin starving horses stood against the fence of the next paddock, their sad faces towards me, their backs to the wind.
The ambulance came. I was hysterical and the neighbours came to watch and Frederic had to cry as well, just so he could travel with me.
32
WHEN WE REFUSED to process our film, Crystal got unexpectedly shitty.
We said we weren’t ready to hand it in. We were waiting for something.
For what?
A scene. We can’t tell you.
Probably we displayed bad attitude. The class all thought we were wankers. Fair enough. But what could we reveal to them? That we were waiting for the vile sores to break out on my back and stomach. Then, only then, could we shoot the scene, finish the roll, process it, and get it on the Channel 9 news. The class could see it then. They had no idea of who we were.
We were waiting for the sores and lesions. Every time I came back from the loo he was looking at me, his eyebrows raised. He already had our press release, but jeez, back off, Freddo.
Don’t get me wrong. We were in total agreement with each other. We had performed “a necessary action” but, honestly, now we had cooled off, I was not exactly thrilled by the prospect of being marked for life.
I went to the State Library, sans Freddo. I saw gross pics which freakerated me. Later I would get labelled ignorant and hysterical, which was more or less correct, although that was trumped by my mother who called me a masochist. If I had been a soldier I would have been a hero for putting my body at risk for the greater good. But I was just a girl and so I must be a masochist.
Crystal had been an ideal teacher but when we wouldn’t hand our project in she became a snub-nosed hard-arse. Why? We had school-based assessment so I could not see why she should get so stressed. Finally she flipped and “ordered” Frederic to bring his backpack to her desk. No-one ordered anyone at R. F. Mackenzie.
I called for a vote.
Crystal said shut up. Bring up the bag, like now.
I made a note. She saw me doing it.
The Canon was in Frederic’s bag, and in the Canon was the film. That was the point. Frederic did not move. He also made a note, and then gazed up at Crystal.
The room was frozen-still. Crystal did not threaten or repeat herself. Frederic remained at his desk. Then he made another note and laid his pen back down. It was sort of thrilling to see his defiance. Next he uncoiled himself and his eyes were narrow and his movements informed by some undeclared intention which made him glorious.