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The White Noise
It was just a normal boring day in New Tully when the White Noise hit. Like most small towns in the Far North, normal was everything. The days kind of sweated into each other, each more predictable than the next.
Up the front there was a freakishly tall guy with a hairy caterpillar perched under his nose. Mr Robson, our headmaster and lucky us, mainroom teacher.
He was droning on about volcanic silt or something equally enthralling. You had to pretend to listen when Robson spoke, or he’d peg chalk at you. He can do it with his back turned. He has freakish powers of chalk-pegging accuracy, and can take a kid’s eye out at a hundred paces. Feels like it, anyway. So we were all sitting there with fish eyes and expressions frozen into variations on “totally fascinated by molten magma story.”
Expect for Johl, surprisingly really. He’d let his attention drift out the window to watch Daisy, the school’s Holy Cow, hatching her usual escape plot from the Ag Block. She’d opened the gate with her horn once and we’d all got to rush outside and make like we cared. But they’d changed the lock, so she was stuck now. Like us.
I was watching Johl out of the corner of my eye, as I did. Johl was an old man of fifteen, though he didn’t look it. He was a touch older than me when all this happened – the accident had set him back, so he had to sit with us. Not that he minded. He was my best mate. You know the story. One of us was crushing big time on the other and guess what? It wasn’t Johl. He was too busy being broody and tortured, still water and all that. Whatever. I usually managed to be cool about it.
My Mum reckons girls grow up faster than boys, but I think Johl has a head start on all of us since the accident. Poor Johl. The polished handle of his stick hung off the back of the chair.
Bilal, the big symmetrical-but-dopey-looking guy behind us poked me with a ruler. Very grade three. He poked me again. Some kind of gorilla mating ritual, I think. I accidentally looked back at him, and he mimicked my scowl like the big dufus he is. I put my nose in the air and ignored him, but I heard the scrape as he leaned back onto two legs of his chair. I could just picture his expression. Bilal's balancing-on-the-chair trick was his way of saying “I have won this round, and am satisfied.”
Happily, that was why Bilal was the first to hit the floor when the noise hit us.
Up the front there was a freakishly tall guy with a hairy caterpillar perched under his nose. Mr Robson, our headmaster and lucky us, mainroom teacher.
He was droning on about volcanic silt or something equally enthralling. You had to pretend to listen when Robson spoke, or he’d peg chalk at you. He can do it with his back turned. He has freakish powers of chalk-pegging accuracy, and can take a kid’s eye out at a hundred paces. Feels like it, anyway. So we were all sitting there with fish eyes and expressions frozen into variations on “totally fascinated by molten magma story.”
Expect for Johl, surprisingly really. He’d let his attention drift out the window to watch Daisy, the school’s Holy Cow, hatching her usual escape plot from the Ag Block. She’d opened the gate with her horn once and we’d all got to rush outside and make like we cared. But they’d changed the lock, so she was stuck now. Like us.
I was watching Johl out of the corner of my eye, as I did. Johl was an old man of fifteen, though he didn’t look it. He was a touch older than me when all this happened – the accident had set him back, so he had to sit with us. Not that he minded. He was my best mate. You know the story. One of us was crushing big time on the other and guess what? It wasn’t Johl. He was too busy being broody and tortured, still water and all that. Whatever. I usually managed to be cool about it.
My Mum reckons girls grow up faster than boys, but I think Johl has a head start on all of us since the accident. Poor Johl. The polished handle of his stick hung off the back of the chair.
Bilal, the big symmetrical-but-dopey-looking guy behind us poked me with a ruler. Very grade three. He poked me again. Some kind of gorilla mating ritual, I think. I accidentally looked back at him, and he mimicked my scowl like the big dufus he is. I put my nose in the air and ignored him, but I heard the scrape as he leaned back onto two legs of his chair. I could just picture his expression. Bilal's balancing-on-the-chair trick was his way of saying “I have won this round, and am satisfied.”
Happily, that was why Bilal was the first to hit the floor when the noise hit us.