The Paradise Stain. Nick Glade-Wright

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СКАЧАТЬ my pack of primitives, Melinda mused as they jostled for a position around the same table. The smell of sour smoke infused in their hair and clothes made it almost as difficult to teach them close up as it was with the impoverished Jeremy Sedgebrook, whose trousers invariably ponged of week old, slow dribble urine.

      ‘Hello Miss Kant,’ Pammy said, with the muted voice of someone who didn’t want to be noticed this morning, but she adored Melinda so she often gambled with her safety. She sat in her place and waited for Melinda to say, ‘All right Pammy, we going to do some work now?’

      ‘Yes, Miss Kant. I’m going to do some … ’

      ‘Melinda!’ one of the shabby boys interrupted. ‘We git our fings from the kiln now?’

      ‘It’s not quite cool enough yet, Phillip. If I were to open it up now, the cold air would rush in and all your hard work would explode.’

      ‘Cool.’

      ‘If you get going with something new it’ll be okay in about half an hour. Maybe you could try something a little taller this time. What about a vase for your mum to put flowers in?’

      ‘Oaw,’ he tutted. ‘I ain’t a poof. I want me ash tray so I can ’ave a smoke arfter.’

      ‘You’re going to have to wait till you get home anyway. You know there’s a no smoking policy on campus.’

      ‘Oaw.’

      Pammy giggled and whispered inaudibly to her table top, ‘Smoking’s not healthy for you.’ Almost inaudibly …

      ‘Fuck off Pammy, ya spaz.’ A runt of a rabbit sneered without looking up from his own table top.

      Pammy giggled again.

      ‘Ya der brain.’

      Pammy smiled, puffed with pride at her audacity in engaging a hostile enemy. Unlike the College campus, there would be no physical retaliation in the classroom with the teacher present an insignificant skirmish by all accounts but for Pammy a major military triumph.

      ‘Right, come on everyone, let’s get started. And for once let’s try to keep the language clean. There are new bags of stone ware clay, and I’ve mixed up a new cobalt under glaze in that bucket there, which will give you a strong blue for your designs. I’ve made up new white slip, since someone decided to mix the last lot with some iron oxide. The clean slip, and let’s keep it clean too, is now in this bucket here.’

      Like constant radar Melinda scanned the room with her peripheral vision. ‘You two, Jenny, Maureen, stop your nattering. Your boxes need the galleries scraped a little more so the lids fit. Here Pammy, try this wooden tool; it won’t cut so deeply.’

      Melinda was never on her own teaching these composite classes. There was a ratio determined by the Education Department of the number of support aides per disabled students, like Mason, who needed to be wheeled to the toilets and ‘sorted out’, and Kevin Saunders, an autistic lad of twenty two, who had just arrived with his father, Jackson Saunders, an accountant with the Hobart City Council.

      The two regular carers, David Wenderby and Carol Symmons, were both endlessly patient. Of course, it was easy for them to remain calm because the sole responsibility for discipline was Melinda’s. They were there to assist with technical problems like carrying heavy pots for their students, wheeling some of them to the toilet, wiping dribbles from faces and keeping a vigilant eye out for safety. Carol, who was studying autism as part of her Master’s degree, had applied for the job because of the inclusive programs that had been set up for special needs students at the Polytechnic.

      ‘Kevin doesn’t see the forest, only individual trees’, had been how Carol had explained Kevin’s condition to Melinda when she first joined the class. Her studies had equipped her with an armoury of theoretical descriptions encased neatly in nutshells, most of which seemed irrelevant once she found herself in the middle of the classroom theatre.

      Kevin had been diagnosed as having a higher functioning autism. Research had shown similarities between this and Asperger’s Syndrome, where behavioural patterns could oscillate between ‘normal’ behaviour and severe autistic behaviour. It had been shown that high functioning autistic adults can meet the criteria for a diagnosis of autism yet show no cognitive delays, and can speak, read and write with an average to above average IQ.

      With Kevin there were difficulties in communication, language and social interaction. His repetitive behaviour and narrow field of interest were usually deterrents for relationships with other students to develop, positive ones anyway. Abstract language concepts like irony, and even humour were often beyond his comprehension. Kevin could not ‘read’ people and was incapable of seeing or understanding manipulation, some thing the antagonistic rabbits quickly picked up on. In short, to them Kevin was fair game.

      Kevin found it difficult to maintain eye contact when people spoke to him so the other students assumed he was always disinterested in them. So a cycle of indifference commenced, except when he was displaying his obsessiveness with cleanliness. The rabbits would wait with pent up anticipation when ever Kevin arrived. His first task was to go straight to the dirty, clay smeared sinks and taps to clean them. Then he would wipe clean the light switches, and state, without humour or joy, to no one in particular, ‘Spotless.’ Of course, being a pottery workshop the sinks and light switches provided Kevin with endless occupational activity.

      The class caught on to his routine, and by the end of first semester they would watch the cleaning process and just as he finished they would all call out, ‘What do you call that, Kevin?’

      He would look around and in a flat, matter of fact voice repeat, ‘Spotless.’ After a while something must have touched him deep inside because this ‘sport’ often resulted in the faintest smile.

      Since Kevin had been attending these classes, his confidence and ability to engage in minimal conversation had improved out of sight as he developed an off beat fascination in numbers, quantities, percentages, and dates. His endlessly patient parents and Melinda were bemused by this fact, particularly as they were usually in relation to disasters, natural and man made. Kevin’s parents did not discourage Kevin from watching the news on the television; on the contrary they thought he should go through life like everyone else. His father had managed to teach Kevin how to use the internet by keying in salient words, only to become perplexed at his interest in words like Cyclone, War, and Catastrophe.

      ‘I suppose that’s the reality for all of us. Isn’t it?’ Jackson had tried to justify to Melinda several weeks ago after she’d told him Kevin had been entertaining the class that morning with the disturbing numbers of people that had been killed in various conflicts in the history of the world.

      And this morning too, Melinda noticed Kevin seemed troubled again, too unsettled to play with his clay or even clean taps. Several times he’d got up from his stool, sat down, got up, walked around, and sat down again.

      ‘You okay, Kevin?’ Melinda asked.

      ‘Yes Melinda, I’m okay,’ he replied without the slightest inkling that anything about his behaviour was different. Then he began to speak, quite out of the blue, monotonously, ‘On May the eighteenth 1980 at 8.32 am, 52 people died because the Mt St Helen’s volcano erupted.’

      ‘Wow. I didn’t know that, Kevin. But I remember it was a huge eruption.’ ‘The summit was reduced by 1312 metres afterwards.’ And then, as if the two incidences were related, ‘In СКАЧАТЬ