First Day

I had the right idea from the start. I knew I had to make friends with people.

"Make friends with people", my mother said.

But first we had to learn. How do you learn? How can you learn all day? The teacher stood up and she talked and talked and talked.

"Beh beh beh," she said.

"Deh deh deh," she said.

That was the letters. A B C D and so on. My sister had taught them to me. I knew I was clever. I knew that the teacher said "Beh" and "Deh" to make it easier for us to learn the letters. I knew I had to wait in the cloakroom until most people had grabbed their coats so I would be able to find mine. The cloakroom was in the prefab, and a prefab is a small wooden building like a caravan.

We ran out onto the yard.

"What's your name?" I asked mophead #1.

"David," he said.

"What's your name?" I asked mophead #2.

"Patrick," he said.

"Why do you wear glasses?" I asked.

"'Cos I have to." He took them off and looked funny without them. He cleaned them with a piece of cloth. His mother tells him to clean them. I knew that. He didn't think of cleaning them himself. I grabbed them off him and danced with them back-to-front over my eyes.

"Givvus them back," he said. "Givvus them back."

He was not joking. He would cry in a moment, or say his mother told him not to let anyone take them. I didn't want that.

"Keeeeernrrng." We were airplanes and wheeled around on the concrete yard. There was no glass in the yard. But we had to keep off the patch of grass.

"Keep off the glass," I'd heard the head teacher say. "Play on the yard but keep off the glass."

That's what he'd said, but he must have meant grass. How could that be? Could he not hear himself speak? When he said 'grass' I heard 'glass'.

"These are units and these are groups of ten. 21 is two groups of ten and one unit."

She flipped over a page. There was a coil at the top and you could flip the paper over. Up and over it went, again and again.

I'd never thought of numbers like that. "What's a hundred and one?" my brother asked me. He was a year older than me.

A hundred and one? Who could fit numbers that big in their head? I was stumped. Five and two is seven. "Makes seven," is what the teacher said, but she meant the same thing. But a hundred and one?

"It's eeeeeasy," my brother said. "A hundred   and   one is a hundred'n'one!"

He was right by god. It was easy. But it was a bit of a cheat. Did I really know any better now what a hundred and one is? Does anyone ever know?

Mrs O'Connor told us about Spring Summer Autumn Winter. There were brown leaves in Autumn and then snow in winter. Of course there wasn't really snow in winter, nor had I any memory of buds in May. But teachers weren't there to tell you things you could see with your own two eyes. They were there to tell you things you had to learn. In Spring the buds come out. The trees turn green. There are flowers everywhere. In Autumn a squirrel collects nuts. In Winter little children ran around wearing funny things on their ears. That was what was on the picture.

"O'Reilly," that was my name now. One of the other kids had named me. Away from the teachers and parents I was now O'Reilly. But when they were around I was Aiden again.

One of the fathers came to collect a mophead on a motorbike.

"Dyewanna go on it?" he asked me. I gave no answer but was lifted up onto it. If a Daddy was doing it, it had to be safe.

"Hold on," he said. But there was nothing to hold on to. He tore off down the road. I clutched at the folds in his jacket. The ground whisked by underneath me. If I fell maybe I wouldn't be hurt. If a Daddy was doing it, it had to be safe.

He did a u-turn at the bottom of the road. I saw the pebbled tarmacadam swallowed under the tyre. My arms felt weak and I played with the idea of falling off. Would I really be hurt if I fell off? How could it be so easy to fall off if a Daddy was doing it?

He lifted me off and I staggered to the tubular child-barrier at the gates.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

The next day I was put sitting at the back of the class. I counted 7 mopheads in front of me. Which were my friends from yesterday? Seven mopheads and the other 30 or so were non-mopheads. At break I started talking to one of the mopheads not knowing if he was one from the day before. Did they all have thoughts in their heads like me?

That last question still bothers me. And I was never much good with faces. Apart from that he could be anyone.