A Rotten Day

By R.M. Hamilton

When I was a child, I wanted to be famous. Thankfully, we didn’t have a TV and Mum wouldn’t let a tabloid past the threshold of our house, so I had no desire to become a celebrity.

We did, however, have an extensive library in our attic. I liked history. History, I decided, was where things happened. It would have been so much easier to get famous a few hundred years ago, I thought sourly, as I munched on an apple and read with interest about Henry the Eighth’s sordid love life.

We also had a large collection of Victorian novels and a few volumes of poetry. I particularly liked The Beautiful Annabel Lee by Edgar Ellen Poe and the harrowing death scene of Jane Eyre’s little friend in the cruel, icy boarding school where Jane Eyre had been dumped by her mean old Aunt Reed.

Considering it was Mum who provided this grim literary fare, I do think her comments on my early attempts at writing are a little unjust.

“You wrote such awful stories as a child!” wailed Mum. “I don’t know where you got such horrible thoughts! We were so careful with what we put into your mind! We poured in scripture, and you still wrote the ghastliest things!”

When I was about thirteen Mum decided it was time for me to take music lessons. This was not because I had shown any musical inclination.

Quite the opposite, actually.

 I possessed a loud, tuneless voice with which I regularly and happily butchered hymns in the back yard.

I would have butchered them in the house too, but Mum wouldn’t let me sing in the house.

But a local organization known as Youth Music had a recorder band and it was doing a roaring trade among the large, homeschooling families of the region.

“They give you a discount for every kid you enrol.” Mum explained to Dad. “And you can get a recorder for ten dollars. It’s plastic so not even our kids should be able to break it. If they show promise on a ten-dollar plastic recorder, then maybe we’ll think about letting them pick something more expensive to learn.”

“As long as they don’t want violins.” said Dad coldly. “I don’t think I could handle living in a house with children learning the violin.”

I was pleased.

Youth Music held two concerts a year. We had missed the midyear concert, but there was still the end of year concert to look forward to. That seemed a pretty good start to my fame.

Doubtless I would dazzle.

But I didn’t. And in addition to not dazzling, I had a shrewd suspicion that the recorder teacher, Mrs. Barb, did not like me.

She seemed to think I was untalented and out to stir up trouble. That was unfair. Untalented I most certainly was, but I didn’t want to create problems.

I sincerely created chaos the way a large ship creates a wake. It was never intentional, even if it was utterly reliable.

The end of year concert came.

I was excited. I had not practiced diligently, and I did not know my piece and it didn’t matter. Although Mrs. Barb herself genuinely loved the recorder, she was under no illusions as to why our parents enrolled us in her class. She provided a cheap, useful product and part of that product included marching us out in uniform twice a year to prove that we had learnt something.

The uniform turned out to be a rude shock. Youth Music had a large collection of uniforms that were laid out in the back of the theatre each year according to rank and size.

The brass band and the orchestra were allowed to turn up in black bottoms and white tops of their choosing.

But the rest of us had to line up and accept whatever Mrs Luggage gave us.

Mostly, this involved a synthetic sateen waist coat with a bow tie over a white shirt.

To my young eye, it was the height of fashion.

But I was a recorder player and the recorder players had to wear nasty matching teal T-shirts adorned with large, ugly printed treble clefs.

It was so unfair.

Even Junior Strings, that abomination of beginner cellists and violinists got to wear the sateen waistcoats.

“A nice colour that flatters everyone.” said Mum brightly, as I sullenly stood before her bewailing my fate.

I scowled at her. That was just her tactful way of saying it suited no one.

Mrs. Barb appeared. “Come on Ruth.” she snapped. “You’re late for practice.” Mum melted away with the other mothers.

Capitaine Bougainville Theatre in Whangarei is a labyrinth of dressing rooms and twisting passages. Mrs. Barb oversaw three groups that year. Somehow, from the wreckage of the recorder orchestra, she had managed to pluck a few talented individuals to form a baroque group that was good.

I was not in that group.  

There was also a group below us. They had only started a few weeks ago but Mrs. Barb was a grimly just human. Their parents were intitled to a public showing of their children’s unsatisfactory progress as much as anyone.

She contented herself with keeping their appearance as short as possible.

And it was for this short duration that she needed to park us, her largest group, somewhere safe. I don’t know what she thought we would get up to, left in a dressing room for ten minutes, but she made it clear she didn’t trust us one bit.

“Come with me!” ordered Mrs Barb sternly. We followed her down a narrow hall to a door. Mrs Barb unlocked and opened the door and shooed us through it. We were standing in a large, empty car park. At the side of the car park was a giant blue trig bin with a few garbage bags peaking over the edge.

Framed in the doorway with the horrible sound of Junior Strings assaulting He’s a Pirate, floating out about her, Mrs. Barb looked pleased.

She almost smiled.

 “You won’t be able to get up to anything out here.” She said smugly. Then she shut the door.

 This was meant to be the day my fame began spreading.

But here I was, wearing an outstandingly ugly outfit and locked out in a carpark by a horrible woman that didn’t even pretend to like me.

I was also bored.

My eye roved around the space in which Mrs. Barb was so sure we could do no harm. It lighted on the giant blue rubbish bin.

“Wonder what’s in that?” I mumbled to the little girl standing beside me.

“Rubbish I guess.” said the little girl.

“That’s what people want us to think.” I said, with my eyes gleaming. “They want us to think that, so we won’t investigate.”

“Well, why shouldn’t it be rubbish?” asked a little boy with glasses. “Why shouldn’t a rubbish bin be full of rubbish?”

Through the door, the last hideous note of He’s a Pirate died away.

“It might be full of treasure.” I said grandly.

“Why would someone throw treasure away?”

“Because they’re mad. Because they’re mad and insane and they don’t know what they’re doing. Like Mr. Rochester’s mad wife Bertha.  She almost burnt a whole house down. I bet she would have thrown treasures away in a rubbish bin.”

“What sort of treasures?”

“Err, Persian rugs and jewels and, and (with a confused memory of something from Deuteronomy), pomegranate gold candle sticks.”

My audience had grown. I had not noticed it grow and I was alarmed to see it now rushing towards the giant rubbish bin and scaling the sides. A writhing, wriggling mass of clean, tidy children arrayed in black dress pants and horrible teal t-shirts went swarming into the depths of the bin.

Then the door to the theatre opened and Mrs. Barb appeared.

Her mouth fell open.

Her eyes boggled.

She swung around on me, nowhere near the bin and shouted. “WHAT HAVE YOU TOLD THEM THIS TIME?”

So unfair! I hadn’t told them to get into that old bin. I hadn’t even known they were all listening, to be honest.

“GET OUT OF THE RUBBISH BIN NOW!” screamed Mrs. Barb. “You’re meant to be on stage in three minutes!”

We trailed behind Mrs. Barb as she stormed towards the wings. But she did not go quietly. Every blasted dressing room door had a blasted music teacher’s head sticking out of it and to every blasted head, Mrs. Barb poured out her tale of woe.

“I caught them in the GARBAGE!” She snarled, waving her silly little stick around with rage. “Five minutes I left them, out in the carpark where they couldn’t do any harm and they went and CLIMBED INTO THE RUBBISH BIN!”

More grinning heads began to poke out from the dressing room doors. Some of the heads were laughing.

“Thirty years of teaching music.” Went on the disgruntled conductor. “And this is the first time in my career that my WHOLE CLASS CLIMBED INTO A RUBBISH BIN!”

Offensive sniggering rattled down the corridor. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, Mrs. Barb swung around, pointed her stick straight at me and demanded. “WHY DID YOU TELL THEM TO DO IT?!”

Fame had come.

I scowled.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

A dark, deep gloom descended upon me. We piled up at the edge of the stage and listened to the MC introduce us.

What a rotten day.

Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw another large table. There weren’t any uniforms on this table. Just piles of chocolate eclairs and cream cakes and cookies.

Ha! All my favourite things.

“For the kids, when they come off the stage,” said one lady to another lady as she emptied a packet of chocolate biscuits into a bowl.

I brightened.

Mum would never step out of the theatre until the intermission. She was much too polite. And there were about six more groups until then. That would give me at least an hour and a half, utterly unsupervised, alone with this yummy, yummy table.

Mrs. Barb waved us on with her stick. I smiled at her.

Fame may have turned out to have a bitter taste.

But I was pretty sure seven donuts wouldn’t.  

 Writing belongs to R.M. Hamilton. Recorder picture graciously provided by Pixabay.