When I was small, I went to school. Glen Osmond Primary. A good school full of well to do families. I didn’t like it. By year one I had already exhausted my parents good will with “sick days” and my teachers learnt to stop sending me home by year two. They’d make me lie in the sick bay with a weird L shaped pillow and sit there as some poor and underpaid student support officer watched me with annoyance. I liked it in the sick room, it was cosy. Then they stopped sending me away and made me sit by the teacher’s desk, as she attempted to explain the concept of lying to me.
I didn’t think I was lying. I was saying a combination of words that resulted in the outcome I wanted. Which was to be at home, in my room with my things, continuing my grand narrative of a bunch of talking dinosaurs that got sucked up into a space ship together and now had to find their way back home. I didn’t want to tesselate plastic shapes, or glue tinsel numbers to a cardboard Christmas tree. I had priorities and they didn’t concern the fat billy goat woman, with hair like Immortan Joe. She was nice but I didn’t like her. She stopped sending me to the sick room.
Occasionally though, school would surprise me. Tony Offord was a man who could teach. In year three his strange monologues about space and planets were captivating. He loved science but he wore a Christian cross. Even then I found that perplexing. He was a slight man, in his late 40’s, with a balding head and stubble, but a soft almost Christ-like face. He said one thing though, mid lesson, just a throw away comment, that stuck with me like a shadow.
“Duncan McFetridge, stop acting like you’re the centre of the universe… have you heard that saying before, centre of the universe? Well, it’s meant to be used to say you think you’re better that someone else or only focused on yourself. Like the whole universe revolves around you. But… It’s not a very good saying because… It’s actually true. You are the centre of the universe, every single one of you is the centre of the universe… Never mind. You’ll only understand this when you’re older.”
I was very confused. What do you mean when I’m older. What the hell was Mr Offord talking about. Does he not think I could handle trying to comprehend this concept now? Why is he treating me like a child? To use a pejorative of the time this was really gay of Mr Offord. I got grumpy. I kept thinking about it. I tried to solve it, I didn’t want any help with it, but I just couldn’t figure it out. How could the universe have multiple centres.
The answers I kept tossing between were incorrect but existentially unnerving. Was Mr Offord trying to tell me that everyone I know, everyone I can see, or pass by on the street is living in their own unique universe different to mine. Or maybe that they are not living at all, and I am the only mind in this fucking place. They are husks lacking autonomy, brainless characters to populate my world like a stage. This was a hefty concept for an 8-year-old. I remember going home and looking at my parents with suspicion. I remember thinking that if I go into a different room and I can’t hear or see them, then, maybe, they are simply just not there anymore. I didn’t like that idea, but a teacher said it might be right. Unbeknownst to Tony Offord he’d planted a very strange seed that would continue to grow all throughout my life.
This is what he meant, but I was off on a psychotic little tangent, unintentionally dipping my toes in the multiverse and holographic universe theory. It was so weird to me it made my little space dinosaur narrative seem somewhat plausible. This started a fascination with space that continues to this day as well as the notion that things might not be as they seem.
I moved classes the next year and was taught by Paul Dixon a PE teacher and massive prick. For some reason he thought I was an imbecile. To his credit I did spend most of my time in his classroom looking out the window and thinking about supernovas and UFO’s. We had to pick a class theme for an individual project we were doing and I submitted black holes. I thought they were fascinating. Unfortunately, I had absolutely no charisma, and my pitch to the cohort to win them over to my black hole project was received poorly by the boys and with derision and odium by the girls. Alistair Howie won with his dragon project which I fucking hated. Alistair was very smart I don’t know why he wanted to focus on fucking dragons. We spent a whole semester on dragons, something that isn’t real and is far less terrifying and beautiful than a black hole and all of a sudden, I hated school again.
I stopped going. My parents moved me, and I started at Parkside primary a place I detested even more. While I hated it here, I was able to do something I could not at glen Osmond. My favourite thing I ever did in primary school, the most fun I ever had, was throwing figs at this fat kid called Brendan during the great fig war. Effectively a factionalised gang war, this spiralled lunchtimes completely out of control. A multiyear-level initiative, class rooms split sometimes directly down the middle. As soon as that lunch bell rang dozens would sprint to the base of the large Morten Bay fig tree in the centre of the school, desperately snatching at the ground to score some fresh good ones and run them, cupped in their school windcheater, back to base.
You’d count your ammunition and grab a fistful, always careful the teachers didn’t see. They didn’t like this fig thing at all. You’d keep some people at base but then you’d send some out. You’d walk around the school and you would know exactly who you were looking for. Those other fig fuckers with their base down the southern end. Soon as the teacher on yard duty had their back turned you’d just light each other up with a barrage of figs and bolt back to base. But ammo was always a problem. Especially for this warthog boy Brendan, he had a bad arm but was built like a tank. They’d pressure him, his people, to do a suicide run. Storm our base and steal our figs. It never worked but they would always make him do it. He would squeal and swear when hit. The bloodlust was unreal. This was better than black holes. This was better than everything disappearing when I’m not looking at it.
The side eyes in the classroom were extreme, teachers looked concerned, people had bruises. Notes were passed, “you’re fucking dead tomorrow” with a picture of a fig on it. Some kid had a black eye. The thing that made it all the more exhilarating were the little meetings you had. The hierarchy. Being the arm, or the collector. Defender of the stash, or forward operating sortie. Everyone had a role, and after you get hit in the face by a few figs the rivalry felt tangible. It all ended when someone poor reception kid got caught in the crossfire. Teachers finally had the evidence they needed and the fun was over. No more figs. It was soon after this I began to realise, I didn’t need to fake sick to get out of school, and a blatant truancy started, culminating in my dropping out the day I turned 17.
It hurts to admit, but the violence was more fun than the black holes. I could dedicate my time learning about the mysteries of the universe, the very edge of science, evolving frameworks of reality, but deep-down dropping Brendan like a charging bull with a well-placed fig to the jugular takes the cake. That’s human nature. I don’t think I’m weird in this. Violence seems more immediate and makes more sense than universes inside universes. Violence can be understood with clarity, unlike god or time. I wish it wasn’t that way, and people wanted to do the black hole project instead of the fire breathing dragons.
Time is a line until we spend an evening thinking about the things we thought we forgot. Then it becomes a knot. Something you can pull at and float back to, or see how certain parts of the string overlap.
I did a day recently helping out on a music video for a drill-rap group. They sung about murder and stealing cocaine. They brandished guns and had little meetings off to the side, sending texts, talking about rivalries. It was raining and we were down by the docks, the clouds were thick and there were no stars. They smiled and chatted simple banter with the crew as they boarded a boat to shoot a staged weapons deal. Despite the theatrics something real leaked through, I could tell their lifestyle was not an act. This shoot was all a part of the postcode wars, a vicious gang conflict playing out in Sydney’s western suburbs. It made me think of men, and how we’re built. How we love or need to compete. How much fun I had during those two weeks in primary school, and how stressed and serious these men look now.
Things change, I guess, and some things stay the same.
When men grow up, sometimes figs become bullets, or stories don’t finish and dinosaurs get lost in space. I stopped being sick at school, I just disappeared from it when no one was looking. If I had more time I’d go back and finish the story and help them get home, it wouldn’t be too hard, the centre of the universe stays the same.