The Deselected

by Van Badham Illustrations by Mel Stringer

The school still exists. I’ve checked the website. It retains its old, black iron fences, and a front gate crowned with iron spikes. By report, students are still forbidden to enter via this gate, or to take the cement path between the thorny rosebushes leading to the high stairs. They’re un-allowed, even now, to lay their hands on the brass knobs of the double front doors. Digital photographs display the storeys of brown brick I first shuddered before as an eleven year old, long before the invention of this photography, or the internet. Its walls remain a dark silhouette against any shade of sky, its white windows leer in judgment over the building’s domain of street and gate and rosebushes.

No doubt there were days of warm sunshine in the five years that I spent there, but the passage of decades has faded any brightness from my memory. Recalled, the school presents itself to me as a silent, shadowy monolith, underneath a sky that’s always — always — grey.

My mother, now seventy-five, refers to it solely as That School, with instinctive deference to those ancient practices that eschew all mention of the dead. She has a “natural unwillingness to revive past sorrows”, my mum, that she has almost managed to impart to me. That School is a state school, a girls’ school, a suburban school — the name of the place no doubt easily guessed by any parent who can match the above description with ambition for their daughter’s education — it is now, and was then, a “selective” school. The single word, “selective”, has always been enough to bait an ego, or a whole family’s, beckoning children into cold halls with Mephistophelean fingers.

This was how That School lured me; accumulation of status is what we’re told we want, and there’s no faster gain of status than selection. I was eleven, read well and often, and I was good enough at passing tests to spend Year Six in a primary school programme that grouped together “gifted” students. This meant little to my parents. When they were young, economic circumstance had wrenched from each the vocations calling to them; their sense of justice and redress was to ensure their own child was simply happy. I wanted to join that Year Six programme, so they supported it.

How strange their behaviour must have seemed to other parents, who saw in their own spawn’s triumphs family prestige and vicarious personal vindication. My mother, pointedly, would not reward my achievements with any ceremony. “If winning makes you happy, then I’m happy” and a warm smile was what I got. Mum’s was a deviation from a script that all the other “gifted” Year Sixers recited with their families and re-performed to me, in which prizes were rewarded with explicit praise and further prizes. There were cakes and toys for high marks. Not from my mother. “I just want you to be a good person,” was the other thing she’d say.

It was so confounding. In the context of competitive learning amongst the “gifted”, winning a place at the local selective high schools was the obsessive goal of both other children and their families. When all but one of our Year Six cohort received a selection letter, that one’s humiliation was public, peer-applied and total. It was whispered around Year Six that her mother would complain to the Department of Education. As that other child — of just eleven — was obliged to attend a high school with no status, the idea that I should follow the local outcast to one myself was beyond consideration — we, selected children, had all mocked her. When my mother asked “Which high school would you like to go to?” my response was furious. “That school! That school” I insisted, my hand brandishing a selection letter I valued because I knew how much at least one other family yearned to have it.

So my mother and I visited That School and despite the imposing bricks, the grey skies, the thorns of all roses and an instant, skin-felt chill, I suppressed my trepidation and enrolled. I was now twelve. I shoved myself into its white shirts that itched and a navy uniform that hung on me like a slack bag. I walked through a side entrance’s bleak mesh gate — past no roses at all — into long corridors, and five years of a colourless dream.

The first few months were spent in undecorated rooms with identical girls, and we were told it was an honour to be there. The egos of children and teens are easily trained by simple feeding, and the tasty message repeated was that presence alone was proof of our superiority. It was explicitly expected we’d perform to more rarefied standards of obedience than those we were told were our intellectual lessers in other, louder places. Convinced, we observed smug piety — between the mechanical bells that sounded the commencements and the ends of lessons, the corridors were silent.

I learnt this when I began to wander them. I can’t pinpoint the moment my rebellion stirred, only that it did — and far too early in my secondary school career to bode well. I became aware one day that I was staring at my French book and not studying it, and another that I’d failed to mark my page in Maths. And more than once I drifted into torpor during English, or maybe History, and some days I couldn’t quite remember if I studied Geography or not. What kept me awake were the personalities of teachers, but not always. I was the child tortured by the sound of each tick in the clock, so I begged leave for visits to the bathroom, or volunteered to carry messages, or played up to win appointments with the counsellor — anything, anything to get me out of class. Often I was the only moving object in the noiseless halls. During lunch — which was barely less quiet — I sat on a metal bench with my back to a brick courtyard wall and stared across the asphalt. Beside me, friends chewed politely and made soft-spoken conversation.

Over the passage of months, my neat hair started to unwind itself from tidy ponytails into a wiry, unrestrained expression of frustration. As adolescence swelled and stretched me, I could no longer pretend to fit a uniform. At lunch, while others bubbled, I broiled. At home, I forsook homework for cartoons and crime shows and talk shows and sci-fi and explorations of the radio and then SBS’s late-night, sexy movies. Then came the discovery of dirty books — like ones by Nabokov and Sartre — and me sneaking them to class, yearning for the characters to thrust ghoulish hands from the physical pages and drag me into their worlds.

Maybe my parents never realised how miserable I was at school because of how much happier I was out of it. What they didn’t know — or didn’t press — was that I was at home far more often than I should have been, staying in with my books or watching movies, and away from That School and its vampiric force field that sapped and unraveled me daily. By the time I was sixteen, my hair was an angry, independent wind, my eyes wild, my senior shirts were popping buttons, my exercise books were largely empty and I’d progressed to picking fights with other students. Then, the teachers.

“I just want you to be a good person,” my mother would say after meetings with teachers complaining that I had no discipline, that I seemed very tired, that I was struggling to pay attention to my subjects, that I was falling behind, that I was talking back, impertinent, unpunctual, slatternly, disrespectful of a uniform that — through no fault of my own — clad me like a fetish costume. Inexplicably, Mum was told I should leave school and do hairdressing. She was told university was an impossible dream. But I could no more repress my restlessness as I could force myself to still believe the ongoing propaganda of selective school supremacy. My classmates reflected That School’s obsession with status, exhausting themselves for fractional-point victories over one another in every quiz and heat and test and race. I played out my obsession with their obsession as a misére hand, collecting fails, non-completes and last places, living a contradiction to supremacy as best I could in an environment that frustratingly denied me boys, drugs, booze, cars, crime and authentic trouble to get into.

There was a little comfort in the art room, where my frisson ebbed into slippery rivers of acrylic paint. The fuzzy plan became to leave That School at the end of Year 10 and study some fine arts at TAFE. One teacher amongst a small, kind handful held off on signing the exit forms, pleading with me to stick out one more year and consider the university experiences I’d be denied if I left That School too soon.

It was a fateful intervention. I returned for Year Eleven, but more surly than ever before. For eighteen months I’d had a best friend — she’d appeared in Year Nine as a talkative chaos of blonde frizz, plastic earrings and skirts as short as a straight boy’s prayer. She’d filled up my schooldays with coded notes and whispered snark and giggles, my school nights with endless gossipy phone calls and my weekends with inner-city markets and floppy velvet hats and real boys and parties and the magical landscapes teenagers can turn suburbs into when they ramble them under the moon. But she moved house, again, transferred, again. When school resumed after the summer I found myself bobbing around the grounds as a lone boat, battered and adrift in an ocean of navy and white uniforms, while she — lucky she — nightly phoned in stories of adventure on the high seas of “normal school” and her co-ed teenage life far away from the heavy clouds That School engendered.

My hair was black when that year began. With the passage of months it was also knotted, and my fingers were gnarled with pewter rings, and my legs were black sticks in opaque tights, and my eyes were the colour of the storm brewing within. “I just want you to be happy,” my mother continued to urge — but I didn’t hear her. I heard the voices of my classmates and teachers, other parents and newspapers, politicians and “thought-leaders” — and I still hear them now, praising selection and school league tables and NAPLAN and ranking and testing… and the clamour of praise and regalia that goes with status and prestige. I hated myself because I could not understand why I didn’t want the things everyone else did — like the tin badges pinned on lapels at assemblies, the medals, the speech day awards.

… Like becoming a prefect. My god, I didn’t get it. A year of volunteer labour, awkward brunches with the principal, an extra bloody badge for the lapel. And yet, there was an election and people campaigned for new, unpaid obligations. Campaigned. The electoral process was to write ten names on a piece of paper and hand it in. Somewhere, votes would be counted by the principal — to me, this seemed a spurious claim. But I had a friend who really longed to be a prefect, so I voted ’cause I liked her, and then I added others who I liked — and I voted for myself, in a symbolic stand for the self-government of my own outsider empire. Only when my ballot was dropped in the box did I realise there was another friend I had pledged to remember, and forgotten. I appealed to the nearest weary prefect who oversaw proceedings — she fished someone else’s uncompleted ballot from the papers, winked, and let me add another name.

Then, I tottled off to class. I sat with four girls in Ancient History who were my fellows in snark. They were solid social democrats who’d critique classroom authority from the corner without quite rising up against it, but they were kind allies to a rebel and good company whether I was up or down. The Prefect Election Morning, I was up, bustling into our corner of the room to denounce the vulnerability of the ballots, and the electoral fragility exposed to me by a prefect’s wink. It was teenage chatter, and it incited riffs of further speculation — how, coordinated, we could have interfered with every ballot, adding names and striking others, and affected the result. It was bitchy and funny and unserious.

And it was overheard.

The first thunderclap of trouble sounded at the end of the next school day, when I noticed on my slow trot out of the mesh gate that two of the Social Democrats from Ancient History were waiting for me. They were standing still, and they weren’t smiling.

“Hey, the school is coming after you,” one said.

I stopped. “What for?”

“The prefect stuff.”

What prefect stuff. “What?”

“They called us in. Took us each out of class. And asked a bunch of questions.”

My blank face. Their stern faces.

“They want to know if you altered ballot papers,” said the other. “Like you said.”

“Like we said,” I said. “The stuff that we made up?”

“They think it’s serious.”

“Jesus. How?”

A pause. “The Brick told her mum. Her mum told a friend. The friend called the principal, ’cause she knows her.”

“The Brick said what to her mum?” The Brick was a tall girl, with a wide face, a deliberate tan and a thick head. I didn’t like her, so I didn’t talk to her. Again, my face was blank. Again: “What?”

“The Brick was listening in. Yesterday, in class. And she’s told a bunch of other people that you’d been changing ballots. She said you scribbled out their names.”

“But I was joking.”

“They’re telling all their parents, to make their parents call the school.”

My head was in an electric cloud. I grunted.

One of my friends said: “I guess a lot of people want to be a prefect.”

“How many?” I asked, as if it mattered.

“The teachers wouldn’t say. They had a prefect in the office, too. The one who you said winked. They made us all sign forms.”

“Saying what?”

“That we knew you hadn’t done it.”

A part of me was tender for their friendship. “Thanks,” I said. “Who was asking questions?”

“The Principal, Deputy and Brown.”

It made sense: Brown was our year coordinator, and hated me. As I took a second to contemplate her hate, I realised something else. “Why didn’t they just call me in, and get this sorted? Why go and round up all my friends?”

One of them leant in. “Because the school is coming after you,” she said.

A second thunderclap.

I mentioned it to Mum and Dad when I got home. “You’ve got to clear your name,” was Dad’s suggestion. “Go start with Brown.”

“She hates my guts.”

He rolled his eyes. “And why?”

My mind saw Brown, wearing a shapeless pastel sundress, and flat shoes, with her blunt grey fringe and her bead-black eyes.

“Because she’s frightened of anything that isn’t boring,” I replied.

I fronted to her office before school the next morning. I knocked on the door. Brown opened it. She was wearing a pastel sundress. She was wearing flat shoes. She didn’t even say hello. She just stared, black eyes through a grey fringe.

I probably sneered. “Is there something you want to talk to me about?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Something about the prefect ballot? I hear you dragged in some of my friends, who told you whatever you think I did wasn’t a thing that I’d done.”

I’d been sparring with Brown for five years. I had long stopped pretending to be polite.

She blinked. Black eyes. “No,” she said, “I have nothing to say to you at this time.”

Did she hesitate, or was she still? Did I detect a ripple in her sundress linen? Did her lips purse?

“You’re sure?” I asked. Again: “Are you sure?”

“There’s no time for this,” she said, her grey fringe blunt behind a closing door.

I went to class. I didn’t listen. I scoffed a secret muffin. I might have stared at the wall. I forgot Brown, the sentinels at the school gate yesterday, prefects, ballots and elections. There was a bell, and I changed rooms. There was a bell, and I was in an exam.

Except, the exam was interrupted. The pale-faced teacher rose his hand palm-out, and beckoned we take notice. They’d sent a girl. He held a paper message. “Year Eleven meeting,” he announced. Pens were slapped on desks, there were whines and groans. We exited the room and assembled on a grassy lawn, within visible distance of rosebush; oh, this would be a haughty gathering!

180 girls in my year, and all their interrupted teachers, gathered into a crowd on the grass. Girls were told to sit, and did. Then entered the procession of the principal, deputy and Brown.

My gut clenched. Was someone missing? Had there been a student death? As she began to speak, the principal’s tones were somber enough, the deputy’s gaze was dour, Brown — as always — blank. But while the principal’s speech began with expressed “sadness and regret”, it turned out we had gathered not to mourn a dead girl, but “the integrity of the prefect election.”

Friends, I shit you not. And on she went, referring to “self-appointed agents of chaos” — who were unnamed — “the school’s commitment to tradition, and transparency”. Decades later and my body remembers the spasm that beset it when I realised the provocation of her elegy was me telling jokes to the girls in Ancient History.

I laughed.

It was a stunned chuckle at first — though I’m sure it was easy enough to hear, the girls in my year sitting silent, the principal mourning in a low tone. Then, a fuller clack of gut and shudder, and a rack — and into my brain came streaming images of other worlds with other, bigger problems. Of the death that I had guessed at, of overdoses, suicides, self-harm, sexualisation, exploitation, crime and violence — all the problems of young people that deserved speeches and mass meetings, the volume of this crowd, the soberness expressed by the principal’s bony face, her lipless mouth, her clenched fists. The mental juxtaposition of this theatrical scene — its props of doughy, concerned girls, brick walls and grass, the pinched faces of authority — to subjects of real seriousness was hilarious. My laugh ballooned into a howl, and I fell forward on the grass, eyes so wet and streaming with amusement that I did not see the principal fall both silent and purple with humiliation, the deputy frown and glower or Brown’s black eyes bristling for a yearned-for kill. My guffaws petered out in splutters. I coughed, and was wiping my eyes when I noticed the principal’s troop had marched away. And the other girls may have been muttering at me as they stood and brushed grass from their knees, but the only gesture I absorbed was an English teacher that I liked, short and squat and silver-haired, meeting my gaze, pointing her finger at her neck, and pretending to slice.

We returned to class. The other girls seemed cold and resentful that I had caused an exam to lie unfinished. But soon enough there was another mechanical bell. In the roll-call room, unusually, we heard the principal’s voice arrive with a crackle across the PA. She did not read the sports results, or times of choir practice, or canteen reminders, as we were used to from the deputy. “Vanessa Badham, get to my office — now,” she barked. And that was it. Recess for everyone but me.

I slung my school sack on my back, held my folder to my chest like a breastplate and I strolled to the office. I heard oohs and ahhs from younger girls as they streamed out of rooms and I walked past them — their wide eyes anxious, if uncaring, for my fate. I am a short girl myself but somehow I was the tallest in the hall that day — my spine was straight, my jaw was high. By the time I reached the office, the corridors had been abandoned. I decided to let myself into the Principal’s room without a knock. I will not lie, my heart was beating like a wasp’s, and the door’s brass handle did sting on my hand.

There they were. The triptych of principal and deputy and Brown. The principal stiff and sitting at the desk, the other two standing at her guard. The bony face was still a shade of violet, her voice rage-deep. “Never…” began the liquid curdling of a bellow, “never in all my years of teaching has a student — “

My heart may have been a wasp’s but I was still the tallest I had ever been. I cut her off.

“ — What?” I said.

The triptych buckled with the shock. I slapped a hand on the desk edge, leant in and pointed at Brown. “Did she tell you I went to see her this morning? Did she mention that I had no case to answer, just like all my friends had said?”

“Enough of that, Vanessa,” mumbled Brown.

“How dare you …” boiled the principal, arcing in her seat.

“No, how dare you,” I spat. Shaking, my face was fat with blood. “When this started, all you had to do was speak to me -”

Now her knuckles were white, seizing for the invisible pages of her script. “Never in all my years of teaching,” she repeated “has a student had the effrontery to laugh, in my face — !”

But I was blazing with adrenaline and anger. “Never has a student had a better reason!” I hollered. “This is a setup and a show trial and — “

A loud and purple roar from her: “If that is your attitude, you can expect to leave this school!”

A louder one from me: “If that is yours, then fuck yourself.”

Then somehow, I was not in the office, but wheeling on a heel. Then somehow, I was out in the hall. Then somehow, with a distant sound of adults bellowing behind me, I was out through the doors to the courtyard, looking for my friends.

Others girls stared, stopped speaking. I was looking for my friends. I marched across the courtyard, heading nowhere. I was looking for my friends. My face was wet. And the faces of my friends — wet and pale and anxious — found me. “What did she say?” burbled the gang of three who ran towards me.

“What happened in the office?”

I wasn’t sure I even knew. “I have to leave,” I blundered, feeling faint.

“That’s what she said?!”

“Are you expelled?”

I guessed I was. “Fuck yourself” was kind of unretractable.

“I have to go,” I said, careening in the rough direction of the distant gate, stumbling forward, lurching as I dropped my folder. My friends followed me, staggering as I did, wordless in shock as I was. I tried to march toward some stairs. But I found my path obstructed.

It was The Brick.

She cast a shadow on a lightless day — tall, brown and wide, her square face grinning at me like a flat wall. Her exposed teeth shining. She stood near a full foot taller over me and leered. “How was your meeting with the principal, Vanessa?” she sneered.

Then, the shoulder strap of my sack fell into my hand. I saw her thick head, between me and the sky. I didn’t speak. I gripped. And — with an elegant, furious force — I swung.

The can of deodorant in my bag, I think, is what caused such a satisfying clang. The sack smacked into contact with her skull, and then she crumpled. The strap stayed in my hand, she hit the ground. The clang echoed in the memory of the air, and, for a moment, all were frozen. The Brick was soundless. And, unconscious.

“Jesus Christ!” blurted an ally, finally. I stepped past the broken Brick and for the stairs.

Now, I knew I had to go. Wet, furious, high, both tiny and tall, violent and terrified, I fought the flailing, grasping hands of friends who blathered “if you leave, they’ll expel you! Then you’re finished! Then they’ve won!” They tore at my shirtsleeves. “If you walk, then it’s over! You’ve no future! There’s no uni!” One of the girls was crying. So was I. We clambered like a conjoined set of crabs, down the stairs, through a breezeway, past walls and sheds and for the gate.

“I’ve got to go!” I kept repeating. I didn’t know where, I couldn’t think how. I staggered, my friends clung, the gate waited — the visibility of its mesh on the immediate horizon was an invitation and a warning: Here be monsters. And freedom. And monsters. Tears. Clinging. Staggering forward.

And Brown.

A shout as timbreless as linen. “Vanessa Badham!” She was behind us, standing still, her feet in flats. “And anyone with Vanessa Badham! If you go beyond that gate,” — the enraging unoriginality of it — “you can expect to leave this school!”

Brown’s black eyes stared. The small and bustling crowd became a statue. For seconds, we were one stillness — then a single part broke free.

I took a step. I took another. There was a new and sudden cold air on my face — and it felt fresh. I turned my head from Brown, I slung my sack onto my shoulder, and to the sole sound of my school shoes scraping on the pavement, I walked through the metal gate, and from the school.

Walked, then marched, then cantered for the main road, peering over my shoulder to see if I was being followed, but I wasn’t. I reached the train station, and could have journeyed home, but I clocked a pay phone, and started fumbling in the corners of my bag for change. I had none.

A woman in a blue dress proffered a coin. “You look a bit distressed,” she said.

“I’ve just… been expelled from school,” I said, not reaching for the coin, unsure if I deserved it.

She pressed it at me. “Call your mum,” she said.

I took it and nodded. “That’s what I thought I should do,” I said, coin in the slot, trembling finger on the buttons.

Who knows what happened on my train into the city? Not me. My brain was a cinema of these past events, played and replayed and flickering as the unremembered travel took place. The train pulled in, I disembarked and snaked through city crowds up to the surface, wound through streets and lights and corners, caught a lift up to my mother, her cubicle in a tower.

She was waiting for me. I was silent. She hugged me, and she smiled, and her eyes then went to water. It struck me her expression resembled something more like relief than disappointment.

“You want some tea or water?” asked my mother, leading me towards a chair.

I sat, and was short again — a child in an adult room, awkward in my uniform, sweaty and hot.

“The school called me,” she said. “They’re looking for you. I told them you were here.”

“I’m not going back,” I croaked.

“I guessed,” she said. Then: “Your father and I never could understand why you went there in the first place. We didn’t think you’d like it. But you had to make your own decision. Did you hit someone today? They said you did.”

“I can’t talk about that now.”

“You’ll have to, later on, y’know. Your father’s not impressed.”

I blushed with shame. I stammered: “Mum, I can’t go back.”

My mother almost laughed. “Of course you can’t, not now.” She added half-a-smile. “I mean, you did tell the principal to ‘fuck herself’.”

“She told you that?”

“Yes. And I said she’d provoked you to it.” A pause. “Because she did.”

There was silence between us. My mother fetched some tea. Fluorescent lights above me were a calm hum. The grey office walls were cooling. My heart, I noticed, had slowed to its normal thrum.

“It will be all right, whatever happens now. Whatever school you choose, or don’t, or what you want to do,” Mum said.

And then I let myself imagine those schools somewhere with different corridors, skies of different colours, noise and maybe anarchy, deviated uniforms, boys — maybe boys — no thorns or spikes, no badges, no prefect ballots or untouchable rosebushes. Glorious, voluntary deselection. My remaining teenage days in shared pursuit of zero status.

“We just want you to be happy,” my mother said.

And I smiled. Because I was.

Van Badham is a Melbourne-based writer, critic, trade unionist, feminist, activist and occasional broadcaster, an internationally award-winning theatre-maker and one of Australia’s most controversial social commentators. She tweets via @vanbadham

Van is part of the panel discussion, “Nasty Women” at All About Women on March 5 at the Sydney Opera House. She will be speaking about why women with opinions, or aspirations to power, often bring out the worst in our culture. For more information and tickets: http://aaw.sydneyoperahouse.com/