Anyone who’s ever done high school art has painted the full moon dripping a sad candle of yellow wax-light back to a dark flat earth under the instruction of a sad art teacher who’d rather be in a lofty studio making art a big-name gallery exhibits regularly and pays generous coin for. I forget the name of my art teacher at boarding school but I remember his mop of soft brown curls, his droopy moustache hiding a thin upper lip. His thin leather jacket. Thin young legs. Pointy leather shoes. The naughty girls, the ones who snuck out at night on the back of locals’ motorbikes no doubt teased a smile out of him and A+ portfolios with buttons undone and flirty chat. Mr … let’s call him Jones, Mr Jones was a foreigner. What brought him and his wife to the Rangitikei I don’t know. It can’t have been exciting teaching one hundred and fifty girls on the Calico Line where the average age of your corduroy clad peers was five hundred and five. Was he happily married? Who knows. He and his wife might have been LSD dealers or a loved-up folk duo playing the local pubs by dark of night for all I knew about him in four years. Did he have secret fantasies about the pretty girls? Who knows. Did we learn how to draw and paint? Who knows. Maybe more of a mindfulness session to break up the boredom was intended in that long wooden room with its high sash windows and smell of turps, the two beat beat of drum lessons in the adjacent music room. Cymbals clash. Mr Jones ground his teeth when he gave instructions. You can still smile with your mouth shut but nope. Jane spends a lot of time staring out the window. I declared myself crap at art from some lip curl comment way before being tasked with dripping a big oily moon. Beyond the windows were bike sheds where we smoked cigarettes then deodorised our sins with gobs of Colgate and squirts of Anais Anais secreted in our knickers. Beyond the bike sheds the mown grass of the cricket field lay alongside a giant-sized macrocarpa plantation tunnel. On weekends after sport we smoked Menthols and sang along to Meat Loaf on portable cassette players only the girls whose parents holidayed overseas owned, losing ourselves in air guitar anthems like bats out of hell. Colditz was the fond name we gave our school where they attempted to make us permanent freaks of goodness by reducing all free time to a freedom of nothing. It didn’t work. But we turned out okay. Mr Jones is probably still there, his teeth yellowed, a long grey beard lifting his face into a smile, howling at the full moon.
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