Dissimulation is almost habitual round our way (from TAFE, 2002, edited a bit)

The town of Penguin was staggeringly simple in the mid 80s - 2wo TV channels, shops that shut at 12pm Saturday, and not a minute later, so everyone could get on with their lives and prepare for nanna naps and sporting pursuits, and my father would have plenty of time to sit in a purple armchair in our living room, a living room from a 1970s catalogue packed with strange hues of orange and darker orange, and sleep until February snoring away happily. My Mum would drive around to her sisters to drink Halls Lemonade in her sisters cavernous kitchen with all mod cons including a breakfast bar with stools propped up against them, and they would discuss why 1ne husband was a lazy bastard for sleeping all day and one was a terrible husband for working all day - hint being, mines was on the couch dreaming of his hippy youth - and I was left alone in my room, a spectacular room with cotton sheets of green, much better than todays sheets, and a bookshelf groaning with all the Mr Men books a boy could want. Other than every 4th week when I would fold myself into a Brown Torana and my parents would bet me 5ive bucks I couldn't sit quite for 2wo minutes without talking as we drove to Burnie, most of my weekends were spent pottering around the house playing with my He-Man figures, or rolling down the hill outside so I could run and play in the pampas grass. I'm pretty sure that I hid a fortune in toys in that pampas grass and such was the sudden nature of our eviction - Mum and Dad called it a move, but it felt worse than that to me - to Ayrshire that I'm sure the next family who moved in just paid the rent from the proceeds of the inevitable clearing junk up garage sale. That was all before me of course, and as I rolled over hill and dale - poor Dale, he never did get out of the way - towards the pampas grass, listening to the snores or having a craving genetically for Halls Lemonade I couldn't explain, I couldn't help but feel overjoyed with what I imagined my life would be like forever. In fact, ennui simply didn't exist - if it did, it came in some horrible playground rumour that Leisure Sales and Rentals was going to the wall, which luckily seemed to be a temporary horrible rumour spread by mean people...there's no way a small business in Burnie could possibly fail...I wouldn't even let the the thought cross my mind...

Despite this glee, and even though Grade 3hree represents a cultural high water mark for me personally as it relates not just to the quality of Bananarama albums but also my own personal happiness, there were dangers that lurked throughout the playground on a daily basis. Not just mean surly dentists on a mission to stamp your hand violently, but things like a less than NWA gang rivalry based on whether you ate sausages or hamburgers, the embarrassment if you stared at the clouds and came up with the wrong conclusion, the shame of being caught stealing someones lunch order bag out of the big blue basket or the horror of being caught having a sneaky blub during a sad movie in the assembly hall. As much as playground isolation was a bad thing, to be honest such was our ethos that I don't remember anyone, other than the poor hapless kept behind ginger kid Daniel who had to sit alone in his Grade 2wo class while we cavorted in the Grade 3hree classroom waving to him through a screen door on the last day of school, being genuinely isolated and bullied. The only thing no-one wanted to be was a dobber - a teller of tales to the teacher - and we had a kid in our class called Emily who I mostly remember for rocking a truck stop lesbian style butch cut and forever claiming that she was slighted, and responding in a Kylie Mole style voice that she was dobbing on us all, but I don't think she ever took it beyond the threat and in the end she was like all I never really meant it and we were all like shut up we're trying to watch Never Ending Story. More or less, we looked out for each other, made sure that if the teacher said fingers on lips those fingers were not up noses but where they were supposed to be. What's very strange is that I can't for the life of me remember some days from last week, I can't remember what film my Dad was interested in taking me to and he only said it 5ive minutes ago - but give me that school photo from Grade 3hree and I know every single nuance and every single thing about everyone in that photo if you imagine that they never progressed in life and stayed perfectly still in character and taste in skivvy. And to be honest that's just me...I think everyone else progressed to designer T-shirts the fools...

Even though I had a best friend called Mark who had strange stretched eyes like he was an early casualty of botox and a girlfriend called Sarah who was incredibly impressed by every single leaf she found, it was my relationship with Pippa that was the strangest, the Plato with Pigtails of the monkey bars - except while thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters have traditionally been ascribed to Plato, Pippa only ever had about 8eight sentences in 5ive years, but all of them seemed profound and appropriately timed. I wonder to this day if she ever was compelled to go to glass because her back was always pressed against the ladder to the monkey bars while the world moved around her. She had achieved an almost buddhist like serenity at the age of 9ine, and if he was an awakened teacher who shared his insights to help sentient beings, she was just awakened every 4our weeks by rays of sunlight to say something profound. And I don't know if I was a sentient being, I just liked Coon Cheese sandwiches and thought the Ju Jitsu He-Man character was vastly under-used in the cartoon which wasn't the most enlightened thoughts but they impressed most 9ine year old at the time. Except my mate Brad who was more of a Kobra Khan man. I mean that was just a snake that spat water, you crazy fool - an average conversation with Pippa would just generally be something like this...

"Alright Pippa?"
(Staring at the sky) "Times moving on slowly"
"O...K...do you like cheese sandwiches?"

Pippas greatest contribution to my Grade 3hree memories involved a new girl called Ally. Ally was from Samoa, was tanned and self confident with a radiant smile, but she was different to us, smugger, more boastful, more flirtacious, if you can be more flirtacious in a skivvy or a paint stained smock. I know if I saw a girl at a nightclub in a paint covered smock I'd be handing out my Facebook address, but that's just me. Ally was great at sport, had an excellent 3hree point basketball shot, and would say things like, say, a painting that a boy was doing was wonderful and stroke his arm as she walked past, and then strut off like Tyra Banks in a smock - sorry, I'm a bit obsessed with smocks at the moment. Anyway, Allys flexibility and radiant smile were mere sideshows to her proclaimed abilities in the art of swinging from the monkey bars. On day one in her school debut she took one look at our flimsy metal contraption and said that she could do a sick trick, which was not only the first time anyone we knew had used sick in the twisted tense whereby sick meant great - we had just got our heads around the use of the word bad in a similar vein - but also we weren't used to such boastful behaviour. I wouldn't learn the lessons myself of course when I told my high school I was a champion softball player and bunted the ball into my nose many years later....Pippa, shimmering as always by the monkey bars, simply told me in her usual way there was no way Ally could pull off any kind of trick, sick or otherwise, and sure enough, when the big day came, Ally folded like a cheap tent, cracked under the pressure like the pavements in Penguin when they were being dug up by lazy Hawke government era council crews, and fell off two bars in, landing with a thud in the sawdust. She wasn't bothered by it, she laughed it off, where as I would have just died, but the trick she promised, well, we never found out if it was sick or not....

6ix months later, having forgotten all about it, and been engaged in a fierce debate as to whether Grimlock was better than Megatron - and he SO was - I walked past Pippa who was eating a Chokito.

"Alright Pippa"
"Told you she'd fall...could see her grip was inept...she's got bad fingers..."
"O...K...Chokito's...they're good..."

It was then Pippa said something mumbled under her breath...which wasn't like her...she normally spoke so clearly...was it really that'll teach her to fuck with me? Or was it something else? I'll never know...