Tall Story - Candy Gourlay [45]
‘Is that the friend who calls himself Jabbar?’
‘Yes. Jabby. Short for Jabbar.’
‘Such a cool name,’ Andi said. And I could see that she meant it.
So I told her about Jabbar and the Arena and the Mountain Men and the Giant Killers.
25
Andi
When we emerged from the gym, my head was buzzing with Bernardo’s story.
How Jabby had tried to cash in on his friend by organizing a game with a team called the Giant Killers. Telling it, Bernardo went red, his eyes wet and his voice gruff, reliving the upset again.
He didn’t like being treated like a freak.
So, if he wouldn’t let his best friend exploit him, why was he letting Rocky do it?
I was suddenly aware that a bunch of kids were watching us from the brick arch to the primary school that adjoined Saint Sim’s.
They stayed carefully in their playground – primary kids weren’t allowed into the secondary playground and these guys looked about seven or eight.
They giggled as they eyed up Bernardo.
‘Hello!’ One little boy waved, a big grin on his face.
Bernardo smiled back and waved shyly.
The children sniggered and whispered amongst themselves and the boy quickly detached himself from the crowd.
Looking over his shoulder to make sure their playground supervisor didn’t see him, the boy crossed the primary boundary, ran up to Bernardo and kicked him on the shin.
Bernardo yelped and momentarily lost his balance. I steadied him with one hand and made a grab for the little monster with my other. But he’d already rejoined his cohorts at the arch and they were sniggering like hyenas and making faces at Bernardo and chanting.
‘SHREK! SHREK! SHREK!’
The nerve! I was just about to lunge at them when I became conscious of Bernardo’s hand on my shoulder.
He had a big smile on his face even though he was bent over, rubbing his leg.
‘No, no,’ he called to the children, his voice friendly. And he mimed a pair of horns on his head. ‘Not Shrek! Shrek is ogre. He have horns!’ Then he beat his chest like Hercules. ‘I am GIANT!’
The kids laughed their heads off.
I clenched my fists but Bernardo’s hand was firm on my shoulder, urging me away. He waved and they all cheered and waved back.
Then the lunch bell rang and Bernardo returned to Mrs Green and I went to my next class, my thoughts in turmoil.
While Bernardo had been talking, I had stared hard at his face. It’s funny how you could spend time with someone and not look closely at him. I mean, really closely.
With Bernardo you looked everywhere but his face.
Mostly because he was so tall, there was so much to take in.
But also because you were afraid of what you might see.
It’s like when Coach, from my old school, had an accident with his bicycle and came in with both eyes reduced to massive bruises and his nose in a fat bandage which came off later to reveal ugly swelling that turned his snout into lumpen blue rock. Suddenly none of us could look him in the face. We were afraid our eyes would linger on his deformities. We were afraid we would be disgusted by what we saw.
Anyway, this was the first time I’d had a proper look at Bernardo.
And what I saw was a boy.
Just a boy.
And something more.
His face was soft, not yet a man’s face or even something in between, like Rocky, whose cheeks plunged down in hard planes but without the broad jowly edges of an older man.
His eyes were soft too, beseeching puppy-dog eyes, searching, always searching. I could see Mum’s short snub in his nose and the tilt of the other Bernardo’s Chinesey eyes in his gaze.
But I realized with a start that our eyes were the same colour – hazelly, browny, with a sunburst of dark streaks and black pupils that magnified to deep black wells and shrank to tiny pinpoints with the changes in light.
Since he came, I had been conscious of Bernardo watching me when he thought I wasn’t looking. It was creepy and annoying, but looking at him now, I realized with a start that he was waiting for something.
From me.
What was it? What did he want?
I knew things about Bernardo that Mum had told me over the years. That he broke his