In The Worst Possible Taste: Hot for teacher

I think of all the education that I've missed
But then my homework was never quite like this...
- Van Halen, 1984

So here I was. Early thirties. Respectable job. Owned my own home (just). Driving a seven-year-old Mitsubishi Magna (the far more credible all wheel drive VR-X model, I kept reminding everyone, including myself.) Getting married to a lovely Christian girl, who just happened to be a Pilates instructor and as flexible as all get out. (OK, so right now she was a little pissed off with me, but it’d pass.) Quality result, but how the hell did I get here? It wasn’t usually something which kept me up at night, but tonight it was.

Lena had eventually flaked out on the spare bed, while I was in the shabby throes of trying to get to sleep myself. I blamed it on the lack of dodgy kebabs available in my neighbourhood, which as everyone knows are essential stomach-lining fodder once you’re as drunk as I currently was. Lena, in her capacity as amateur anthropologist and pop psychoanalyst (prior to her capacity as passed-out snoring girl on spare bed), had posed an interesting theory. Drunken and poorly thought through, but interesting nonetheless.

“No offence,” she began - always a worrying beginning - “but has it ever occurred to you that everything you have here is as a direct result of running away as far from your previous life as possible? And if I know you well, it’s not the first time you’ve done that. For as long as I’ve known you, you always ride the road through to its end, then you burn all the bridges which led you to that point, and fuck off in a completely different direction.”

It was a fair assessment. A bit troubling, but fair. I’d done it before, a few times - quite a few times, in fact. I hated reaching the end of things. I hated conclusions. So I’d basically run away, ride off into the sunset in a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-Ho Silver’. That’s not to say I was a quitter. I’ve been accused of a lot of things, like a lack of dedication and commitment - want to see my school report cards? - but I’d always see things through to the end. Then, when it came, I’d burn down the shopfront and set my stall up somewhere else.

Let’s go back to the line of argument I’d explored with Nerissa at the school reunion in 2003, in between fighting the overwhelming urge to take her out the back and fuck her brains out. The theory being that most of your fundamental, defining personality traits are determined young in life, during your formative childhood and adolescent years. In my case, let’s go back to those school reports as they’re probably as good a reference point as any. Paraphrasing, mine always said ‘lots of ability, needs to work on application, should try harder’. Which was code for ‘could probably achieve a fair bit if he actually seemed to give a shit about anything’. McCarthy was all about achievement, there was no ‘off’ position on the McCarthy switch - he always wanted to compete well, to be up there with the arch-nerds when it came to academic results, almost like it was his sport of choice. He needed to know everything and be expert in every field which was of interest or importance. And above all, he loved to whup them nerds. Basically to show that he could beat them without joining them, in theory at least.

But as for me, as the old Frenzal song goes, I failed to give a fuck. (Get Fucked You Fucken Fuckwit, You Can't Move Into My House, since you asked.) I was there or thereabouts, usually in the same classes up the pointy end of the grading system, eventually doing the same subjects for the HSC - your advanced Maths and English (three unit back in them days, arrr begorrah bollocks) plus Physics and Chemistry, supposedly the most difficult and credible of the sciences - supposedly to give more options for first year uni prerequisites - as well as Music, just to round out our maximum twelve units.

Looking back, given that neither of us had much idea about what we were actually going to do at uni, it was the height of vainglorious fucking ambition to take on such a difficult complement of subjects. Basically, I did it because it sounded like a good idea; my old buddy McCarthy seemed to have good reasons for doing these subjects, so I went along with it as well. Which is to say, like everything, I cruised into it. I didn’t cruise through it, as we will discuss, but I did cruise into it.

To be honest, having McCarthy in my subjects was a godsend. Coming from a family of teachers - his dad had been one, his mum still was - he was a believer in the concept that to really understand something you have to be able to teach it to someone else. So voila, your correspondent had a full-time tutor for all his HSC subjects.

Actually, I had two. Sophie, the girl from the farm along the road from ours also happened to be doing pretty much the same subjects, though her musical weapon of choice was piano, courtesy about ten years of expensive lessons; McCarthy and I had just spent ages tooling around on old guitars. And she was not only very cool, but very, very intelligent, odds-on to end up as dux of the seriously exclusive (and even more seriously expensive) Christian private school which she attended in Ballina.

The interesting thing from my perspective was seeing all the resources and study aids which the private school kids had access to, compared to the rank poverty which we gummit school attendees existed in. Case in point: the Chemistry syllabus had changed over the past year and a new textbook had been set; the science department at our school couldn’t afford to buy copies for everyone in our class, so our teacher photocopied the entire thing, chapter by chapter, as handouts. He’d wander into the classroom of a morning with a cheery grin and the refrain, “Anyone for more trees?” Sophie’s class, of course, had shiny new textbooks each - hardback, laminated covers, the works - as well as the additional 'Study Notes And Model Questions For The 1993 2 Unit Chemistry Syllabus' from the same publishers. Given that the course had been redeveloped heavily, the previous years’ HSC exam papers, which were all us public school peons had access to, were all well out-of-date and completely irrelevant. Much like the teaching staff themselves. And similar stories could be told for pretty much all the other subjects we were doing. As such, having both Sophie and McCarthy around was very useful.

Until, that was, I had to pick between them. In a roundabout odd sort of way.

You see, there was this HSC study camp planned for the study vacation (an oxymoron, just like ‘military intelligence’ or ‘press release’) before the exam period proper began. It was to take place at Lake Ainsworth near Lennox Head, where there’s a NSW Department of Sport and Recreation camp which hosts a lot of school and sporting camps - Broadwater Public School had sent us up there in Year 6. It actually sounded quite useful, particularly for me, who still couldn’t get his head around half of Chemistry, most of three unit Maths, large swathes of Physics, the deeper meaning of W.B. Yeats and John Donne or the overblown hysterics of the Bronte sisters (our set works for two and three unit English that year) - and only wanted to do ‘practical’ in music, bollocks to theory. What’s the point of music theory? It’s like sex theory - who the fuck wants to talk about it if we can just get on and do it, for fuck’s sake?

So the idea of a swot-vac study camp sounded good, and most of us were planning to go. Even Sophie, who wasn’t from our school of course, had provisionally signed up (as had a bunch of others from the flash private schools, their parents always keen to throw money at the problem) and was intending to score a lift up to Lennox with McCarthy and me in the Atomic Mandarin. Until a few days out she called me up (she could have just walked over I guess but it was at least a couple of hundred metres’ walk from hers to mine, and it was raining) and said she couldn’t go. Her old man reckoned it was just an excuse to muck around, drink and/or smoke illicit contraband, and fraternise with BOYS. Her old man, I should point out, was a reasonable enough fella, but strongly religious, and the main driving force behind Sophie’s God-bothering private school education.

“Didn’t you tell him I’d be there to look after you?”

“I think that was his main concern,” she sighed.

Goddamn it, my reputation precedes me, and I haven’t even done anything to earn it yet!

Actually Sophie was pretty unhappy and bitter about it all; she was also from the ‘learn by teaching’ school of HSC study and had been looking forward to the camp (and not at all because she could show off how much she already knew and how brilliant she was etc.) So I volunteered the following suggestion: I’d skip the Lake Ainsworth camp and Sophie and I would study together for the pre-exam week instead. No mucking around, no drinking or smoking, and the only boy hanging around had been hanging around for a lot of years to date already; if I was going to attempt something inappropriate on Sophie’s honour, surely I would have done so by now. Right? Right. She put this logic to the powers that were and received surprising approval. So much so that her parents moved out of the house and up to Lismore for the week, though I suspect that had more to do with her grandmother becoming ill and going into hospital than any confidence in my moral incorruptiblity.

For his part, McCarthy was fairly pissed off that I’d bailed so late in proceedings, but that was mostly because he’d lost his lift up to Lennox in the mighty Torana GTR and had to get his mum to drop him off in their bowls-lady-spec powder-blue Camry wagon, losing credibility points by the bucketful and making his chances of Getting Any on this mission just that little bit flimsier.

So for the alleged ‘study vacation’, we’d study over at her place, then return to Young Farm for meals, given that Sophie’s usual catering staff were out of town. Excellent plan. Logistically sound, domestically viable, ideal for furthering our academic successes. Sophie, the patient, empathetic, talented tutor, yours truly the keen student.

The problem was, we didn’t seem to get a lot of study done.

Sophie seemed distracted. Originally I figured it was the stress of her grandmother being in hospital, but I soon recognised it ran deeper than that. Sophie was scared. Shitscared, in fact. And not in an amusing, Rob-Sitch-as-bogus-stuntman-on-The-Late-Show kind of way. She had a lot of pressure on her - largely from well-meaning people, like parents, friends, family and teachers, but serious pressure nonetheless. As I say, she was dux-elect of her year - everyone knew it, everyone expected it. She just had to show up on exam day and fill in the blanks, didn’t she. Didn’t she?

And, of course, there was the small matter of what followed afterwards. With the stratospheric HSC score which she was a shoe-in for, she could do whatever she wanted. Medicine, law, economics, astrophysics, anything. Except that she didn’t really want to do medicine, or law, or astrophysics, or anything. Sophie, just like the rest of us mere mortals, had no fucking idea what she wanted to do with her life. And that realisation absolutely petrified her. So she procrastinated endlessly, grazed the fridge, watched TV, put CDs on, leafed through trashy mags, talked shit with me, did anything and/or everything other that burying her pretty little face in her expensively-provided textbooks.

(For final-year high school students, as a phenomenon, it’s very common; years later, as an occasional year 12 teacher (irony of fucking ironies!) on Straddie, I was seeing it all the time. Parental units, if you see this kind of thing going on, you now know what causes it. Listen to the advice of a trained educational professional: back the fuck down and give your kid some space to figure things out and get their shit together, goddammit.)

Realising early what was eating away at Sophie, I could have, probably should have, done something about it. But I didn’t, largely because when it came to the future, our lives beyond the secure, uniformed corral of high school, I was just as terrified as Sophie, in my own way. I had less riding on my success or otherwise - not so many demanding hangers-on, not the huge expectations of consistant brilliance - but I had equally little idea as to what the hell I was supposed to do with my life. Brother Matt had ended up in Sydney doing exactly what he’d seemed to have always wanted, a film course (technically 'multimedia studies') at UNSW's College of Fine Arts in Paddington - his home-made surf movies from his high school days were polished little gems of wit, style, clever scripting and technical whizz-bangedness, and I’m not just saying that because I was in them. However, it didn’t seem to be working out for him; when I’d seen him in the mid-year uni break, his pretentious clothes, poncy affectations and stupid hair made me seriously wonder whether he’d actually been turned by the gayest city in the southern hemisphere, particularly since he’d disowned his old Torana in favour of a suitably aspirational Euro conveyance (an early-80s Saab 900 for Christ’s sake - no, not even the Turbo version). Despite all that, or maybe because of it, he appeared morose, inward, seemingly quite depressed and not enjoying himself. Though I figured that it was probably very trendy and socially desirable to appear morose, inward, seemingly quite depressed and not enjoying yourself, in the arty student circles which Matt moved in these days.

Rather than studying, Sophie and I seemed to spend a lot of time talking rubbish, play-fighting, and reading back-issues of Cleo and Cosmo, answering the incredibly silly sex quizzes (like “Are you a lesbian?” - apparently so, according to my results) and giggling through the highly stylised ‘erotic fiction’ articles that always seemed to find their way into the magazine. The ‘boy’ equivalent would be the Forum letters in an issue of Penthouse, but material of that ilk is considered pornographic and is stigmatised by society, yet off-the-shelf girls’ mags seem to come with this stuff as standard. It was completely hypocritical, I argued.

To which Sophie suggested I was a wanker. Literally. Otherwise I wouldn’t know of what I spoke. A reasonable enough point, well made.

“So how often?” she wanted to know. “Daily?”

She didn't really want to know that.I took the Fifth. “I refuse to answer that question on the basis that it may incriminate me.”

“That’s the answer it says to expect,” she nodded, showing me the article which currently was more interesting than integral calculus. Evidently it was all about the ancient art of masturbation, focusing on how often members of either sex indulge in self-love, as distinct from how often they’re prepared to admit doing so. Sophie read on. “Apparently many guys do it even when they’re in a long-term relationship with someone… even if they’re getting heaps of sex as well? Surely that can’t be right, can it?” Her furrowed brow sought my expert clarification (ha!)

“Couldn’t tell you,” I replied. “My longest-term relationship lasted three-quarters of an hour.”

“Hey, what about us?” she wanted to know. “We’re getting married as soon as we leave school, remember. We agreed on this.”

“When we were six,” I replied. ”And you tricked me into signing that dodgy contract you wrote up. In crayon.”

“I think you signed it Peter Brock anyway, so I guess it’s not legally binding…” She returned to her reference work. “Anyway, back to masturbation…”

“You sure you want to go there?”

“You’re getting embarrassed, Andrew James Young?”

“Not at all, Sophie Miriam Townsend…”

I always won Middle Name Russian Roulette; she cringed much more at the sound of hers than I did at mine. Anyway, she kept on with the leading questions until I was cajoled into giving an answer. To be honest, it was something of an under-estimate.

“That often?”

Hmmm, should have gone slightly more conservative, methinks.

“Well, what can I say. I got a lot of loving in me, baby. And it’s not getting to its destination at the moment…” I grinned as she pulled a face. “Now you’re regretting asking, aren’t you!”

Sophie regained her composure. “Not at all,” she emphasised.

“So what about you?” I advanced. And kept advancing.

When she was embarrassed, Sophie used to bow her head and run her fingers through her hair, which was long and chestnut-brown. However, she’d recently had her hair cut into a dramatically shorter style, which looked very different, and to be honest, disturbingly sexy. The upshot of this was that she didn’t have enough fringe to hide behind anymore. Though she tried valiantly.

“You’re right,” she laughed, “we don’t need to go there.”

Obviously I wasn’t prepared to accept that as an answer. Not with the rather agreeable mental image of Sophie pleasuring herself, possibly in the shower, beginning to form in my mind’s eye. I pursued relentlessly. Finally, she conceded. From behind the remnants of her fringe.

“Let’s just say it’s probably more than the average girl should, okay?”

“Seriously?”

“Uh huh.” The average, according to her ‘research article’, was a couple of times a week.

“Always knew you were an above-average student, Sophie,” I offered.

“Let’s move on, shall we?” she suggested. And flipped over a few pages, searching for something less, erm, confronting. “Sealed section. Twenty advanced positions to blow his mind and make him ask Baby, where’d you learn that…”

“I think they saw you coming, yeah?”

To which Sophie considered, “I could say something, but I won’t.”

“Something about seeing you come?” I ventured.

“That was pretty much it,” she concurred with a wicked smile. Sparks seemed to crackle in the air. The realisation began to form that this was serious. My favourite girl-next-door and I might just be on the verge of getting funky together. And knowing what I did about what a deeply sexual being she was, at least psychologically, the mind boggled delightfully with the possibilities.

Actually that’s far too cute a way to put it. I really, really, wanted to have sex with her. Hot, sweaty, sticky, pulsating sex. More than once. More than often. I wanted to explore every dirty little fantasy she had, as well as the less-than-clean thought processes which lurked in the darker recesses of my conscious. I wanted to be in the shower with her when she was being self-indulgent. I wanted to cover her in chocolate Ice Magic and devour her for dessert. I wanted to fuck her body, I wanted to fuck her mind. I wanted her in all kinds of filthy, depraved ways. And always had.