Or, Should I Say

“Listen,” the old man said again. “They are talking to you.”

Both boys could see the smug expressions on the two specifically pointed out faces easily. It wasn’t hard. They were less than a metre away from the glass cabinet that housed the ancient photographs of dead-stared students all in their pressed uniforms and the ubiquitous side part. ‘Seeing’ wasn’t the issue. Relevance was.

The old man looming behind them like some Tolkensian giant was the principal of Hegley High. Apart from his ridiculous height he was the most unremarkable man most pupils - and their well-to-do parents - had known. He was new, youngish and tended to project a less than auspicious introduction. Like anything new, he brought with him a jarringly nuanced change that seemed to creep like ivy over the campus. Nothing was the same, yet everything remained. 

Adorning the full length of the corridor that led to the principal’s office were the relics of generations past: tarnished trophies, uniform paraphernalia, photos of young men lined up and captured then as they were now. The photos had been placed behind glass after several of the more rambunctious lads decided to add moustaches and other appendages to the photographs causing the archivist no end of suffering. Aspersions had been cast but the culprit was never found. 

Inside the office with its tastefully Edwardian panelling was a veritable library of leather bound books. The writing on the spine had worn away through use, the middle sections of the titles handling much of the treatment, but the settled dust that edged the collection suggested the perusal of this collection had been replaced by a few mouse clicks on a device. 

For floppy-haired James Wright it was a near enough replica of his father’s study at home. The smell caused him to bristle and fidget. It always did. The son of a lawyer, a good one by account of their three homes: one local, one by the beach, and a third in Rosignano Solvay about an hour and a half outside of Florence in Italy. Two hours in traffic.

Hewitt, on the other hand, was a different story. No one had called him by his first name - Marcus - since he started school. Variations were often used in preference, Hewie, Hews, Hewly (but only if they were drinking), Witty, Witz, and on and on it went, grand pomposity of private schooling at its bantering best. Hewitt had been awarded a scholarship to play first fifteen rugby after scouts saw him play full back in the year 8 competition. Off the back of the scrum he could position the ball anywhere inside the opposition’s 22 off his left foot. Or his right for that matter. Despite his family living less than 10 minutes from the school, he boarded on site. It suited him. They never attended his games, nor the cocktail functions - although they were more a strategic corporate opportunity for the fathers to network and the mothers to gossip more than for the game to be discussed. 

It had to be said that Hewitt wasn’t too shabby with the new ball for the first XI either. Batting wasn’t his strong suit, but with his bowling figures no one minded. The new principal, at his first post match speech, had made the comment that Marcus Hewitt “had enough maidens to fill a harem”. Despite the guffawing of the rich which was more a showing of capped teeth than of laughter, the board had subsequently informed him (rather discreetly) that such jokes were in poor taste for such occasions. Rumours erupted that the principal was placed ‘on warning’, after little more than a week and a bit.

James and Hewitt stared at the photo as instructed by Principal Dunlop. They listened, as they were instructed to do, to the photos. Neither could think why anyone believed that the photos of students who were at best 100, at worst dead for about 40 years. Dunlop’s breath carried a slight whistle on each inhalation which distracted the boys to the point where Hewitt’s shoulders twitched with barely concealed laughter. 

“Look closer, gentlemen”, Dunlop tapped the glass with the ring on his left finger adopting a stance akin to a sword fighter nudging between the two shoulders of the rugby boys. As if monitoring their attention his head bounced back and forth in an almost cartoonish style. The forced smile never wavered. The whistle never ceased.

“These fine gents were you, once”. He left space before adding the ‘once’ as if for dramatic effect. A symptom of all headmasters it seemed. They seemed to adore the power of the pause. Moments like these were made for pausing to full effect. Discipline was more about what is felt than what is said. Pausing, for indiscriminate lengths of time, created that feeling. Hewitt had decided long ago that they either get training or they practise. Either way it was pathetic. He loathed the lives of these people. He truly had never and would never fit in to their ways. Even the language they spoke with words like ‘hearty’, ‘quite’ and ‘gents’ irked him.  

It was not the first time they had been lectured at. Not even the first time this week. It seemed whenever anything went wrong he and James were lugged in front of whatever old guy they thought they could talk sense into them. On the roster were the guidance council (dull), the vice principal (massive mole in that indent next to one’s nose), the other vice principal (old woman with more facial hair than the first XV combined), and this geezer, Dunlop. Over and over. The same stories were told. The same values were lauded. The same ‘moral fibre’ discussed. It was draining.

Hewitt didn’t even care what he was hauled in for anymore. There had been a time - early in those year nine days, where he did genuinely worry about what he had done. Now, he couldn’t think of any reason why he had been summoned. James guessed it was probably Hewitt. It usually was. They couldn’t give the captain of the firsts to either of them, but both were equally placed to be the J.C. Garrison Sportsman-of-the-year. And that meant they was generally given a wider berth. 

“The school holidays are just around the corner”, Dunlop clearly had given the subtext to just hold it together until the term ended in a couple of weeks. Stale coffee exhalations clouded around them as he spoke. “Can you boys remember that important rule from Martin Luther King?”

“Who’s that, sir?” Hewitt asked.

“What?” The principal looked amazed at the blank faces of. The boys, “Are you…? Don’t you…? Never mind. He was a Civil Rights leader in the 1960s. He said - and I’m paraphrasing here, we are not makers of history, we are made by history. Do you know what that means?” He tapped the glass loudly so that the metallic sound echoed along the length of the hallway.

James knew that by nodding enthusiastically he could extract himself from the situation faster. He still had no idea why he was there. But sure enough, the two were dismissed without ceremony directly after they acknowledged the meaning of the quote and were sent back to class.

“What the f- was that?” James asked, he looked furtively around to make sure no one heard him almost swear. “The guy’s a nutter.” Hewitt shrugged his shoulders twice and told James he’d see him after school at practise. 

Deftly navigating the labyrinthine cloisters that threaded and weaved the buildings together in a matrix of interconnected networks, Hewitt skipped the remainder of class and located his nook he has used for smoking since that first week of year nine - nearly five years ago. He had shifted to vaping a year ago and that had made the cloaking of the smell much more manageable. He felt the vapour fill from the base of his lungs just as he had been trained to do with air in rugby. The coaches loved that sort of shit. Anything thanks gave them an ‘advantage’. It was just last week that breathing properly was the latest in a long line of advantages. It was a team joke that if the coaches read somewhere that headstands for 3 minutes before a game would help some brain function or some crap like that they’d be all in. 

Moments later, Dunlop appeared at the entrance way to his nook. He nodded up at an installed security camera dome that Hewitt hadn’t noticed. 

“Installed it last weekend”, Dunlop said as he turned and perched on the edge of a waist height brick wall - a half standing half leaning all awkward looking posture. He folded his arms in what looked like an attempt to be nonchalant.

“Marcus”, he spoke gently after a pause so long the vape pen beeped off. He turned the top half of his torso towards the teenager, “do you know why I showed you those photos and mentioned Martin Luther King?” 

Hewitt shook his head. 

Dunlop swung back to an upright position and let out a sigh and said more to himself “didn’t think so”. He took off his glasses, hunched his back and put his stretched left hand across both eyes then pinching it back in a smooth repetitive action to the bridge of his nose.

Hewitt thought of the practiced silence again.

“You’ve nearly finished here at Hegley, haven’t you.” 

Hewitt nodded, followed by an equally long pause.

“And what happens next for you young man? Have you thought about your career?”

The first words  after the silence required a short clearing of Hewitt’s throat before he spoke: “Not sure yet, sir.” 

“Marcus, those boys in the photo were the 1951 first fifteen. They were unbeaten. Those two I pointed out to you were Jeremy Schmit and Charles Dawsey. Sound familiar?”

The names were, of course, known to Hewitt. Both went on to be great All Blacks. Schmidt went on to be the longest service captain of the team while Dawsey still held the record of tries locally and  internationally. “Yes, sir,” he answered. 

“Do you know what happened to them after they finished playing?” Hewitt knew the answer to this, Schmidt became a politician and Dawsey hit the booze and died in some weird circumstances that were never really explained in the media.

“That’s right!”, Dunlop said in a surprised but enthusiastic tone, “Did you notice who was sitting next to them?” The principal looked intently at Hewitt now. He already knew Hewitt wouldn’t have noticed. Hewitt shook his head but didn’t say anything.

He took out his phone and opened the photos app displaying the same image the boys had been made to stare at for those long minutes. Hewitt rolled his eyes without much attempt to hide it.

Dunlop squinted and kept manoeuvring his hand to shade the phone at varying angles. “There”, Dunlop said the image with a practiced but peculiar flick of his thumb and ring finger. The first two fingers stuck up awkwardly while he performed the action. “That’s George Swanson”, he said, nearly beaming.

The name registered neither recognition, nor interest in Hewitt. This Swanson fella looked like all the others lined up with a side part. But that was it.

“He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry”, Dunlop continued. 

“And there”, he carried on, “that’s George Durnsley, he was called ‘George the second’ within the team. His art is on display in the Louvre in Paris. He married a Bond girl.” Hewitt had no idea what a Bond girl was but by the look on Dunlop’s face it was a feat worth noting.

He went through the entire cohort of faces attributing each name with remarkable feats of industry, culture and business. He was putting the phone away when Hewitt asked, “what about him?” he pointed at a boy at the end of the back row.

“Ah, that’s Roger Steele”, he said. “Hardest working Lock in the country.” Hewitt couldn’t help himself and asked what happened to him. “He ended up in prison. He stole a ton of money from his company. Tax evasion. You name the type of fraud and he did it”.

“Oh”, Hewitt replied, not sure why Dunlop showed him the photo again. “Sir, why did you show me these?”

“Only two of those boys made it in rugby. Two.” He added an extra long pause for that dramatic emphasis again. He even held up two fingers to reinforce his point.

“You’re sixteen, son”, he had taken on a paternal tone that was disconcerting for Hewitt. “Which of those boys are you going to be?

“You’re in this nook which has had cigarette butts left strewn around for years. You’ve wagged class and mucked around in the boarding house so much that Ms Stevenson put the disciplinary form through to me again.”

Hewitt cursed her in his head. She had a thing against him since day one. No matter what he did he got stung. 

“So, again”, he looked intently at him now, “listen to me carefully now, which are you going to be?”