Pre-Reading Questions CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Dad had been furious when he’d seen the word ‘inattentive’. He’d got out of piece of paper and done some maths himself; he’d divided the sum of Luke’s school fees by the number of classes. Every lesson Luke wasted daydreaming, he’d told him, was fifty dollars down the drain. Dad was in hock for Luke’s private education – he’d wanted the best for his son and he’s taken out a bank loan; they hadn’t been able to afford a holiday for years. Right – so he’d started paying attention; he’d paid attention till his ears rang and his eyes burned, but the tangle of maths grew deeper; a jungle so thick and dark he couldn’t see a thing. Dad had found him a tutor more money down the drain but it hadn’t helped. The guy would explain a problem and then he’d ask, ‘Do you see?’ And Luke would have to tell him that he didn’t see, and then the guy would explain it all over again, slower, and still Luke couldn’t understand. The tutor could have been taking in Dutch, or Swahili, because he couldn’t understand it third time round, either. He’d stopped going to the tutor because he was embarrassed about seeming so thick, and it had been impossible to explain to Mum and Dad; they’d just thought he couldn’t be stuffed to go. You couldn’t blame them, really, because that was what it looked like. And the blindness, the locked-up feeling, had crossed over into Physics and Chemistry and then spread further, like a creeping sickness, into subjects you wouldn’t think it would ever reach, subjects that had once been easy, like Biology and Geography and 58 Legal Studies. In Year 10 at St Crispin’s the coordinator had told Mum and Dad he thought Luke might have trouble coping with Year 11. Luke had been there too, because St Crispin’s prided itself on including the students in such discussions, but the coordinator hadn’t asked for his opinion, he’d only talked to Mum and Dad. And when he’d said that thing about ‘having trouble coping with Year 11’, the way he’d said it, and the expression on his face – as if it wasn’t a question of ‘might’ but of absolute certainty – Luke had felt afraid. You got the feeling you couldn’t do it and the feeling became part of you, as if that was how you were. That was you. You were the kind of kid who couldn’t cope, who would fail things. Even English now. English had always been his best subject; he’d taken to it easily, like a person who doesn’t have to learn to swim because the water it his home. But English for the HSC, exam English, was different; like a vast and shining ocean drained into a muddy puddle full of traps. You had to answer the questions in a certain way, you had to give the examiners the answers they were looking for; almost all the teachers said that. And then you started thinking how your answer, even if it felt right, might just be wrong. Even a poem might be wrong. Poetry had been his favourite thing, but now, when writing a few poems was just about the most important thing in his life, he couldn’t seem to do it, his lines wilted like the little plants Mum brought home from the nursery sometimes; healthy and fresh at the start, shriveling to nothing in the ground. Passing English was so important it made you scared. Six poems for the Writing Folder. Six, by 59