Free They Told Me I Had to Write This by Kim Miller Page A

asking all these questions?’
    ‘Course not. You don’t ask questions, you don’t learn nothin’.’
    Well that was it for everyone but Mr Sykes tried to bust into everyone’s laughing and said, ‘OK you guys, let’s get some work done here, we’ve had enough jokes for today,’ and that is when Jacko put on this little English kid’s voice and said, ‘Please sir, don’t you want some more?’ which is from a DVD of Oliver Twist we did at the Shack and there is a Mr Bill Sykes Twist in there.
    And that fully finished high ropes coz we all got fully moxied laughing and even Brian the Brain and I had to lean on each other to stay up and there was too much stupidivity for anything off the ground that day.
    Mr Sykes could see that we would be flat out dangerous on the high ropes with all those jokes coming from us, and so he took us back to the paddock and we did blind running, only this time it was backwards and that is how Mr Sykes got his own class back from Jacko and Pete and me.
    I will tell you about blind running in a second but first I have to say something about measuring those ropes. No other group has ever said anything about knowing how high they are. Now I’m starting to wonder if we got to it first or last coz none of us are going to tell the other groups. They have to do that for themselves. That’s how it is.
    But what if Mr Sykes won’t have to carry that string any more coz we were the last? That would be fully obnoxified, being the last to get it I mean. And you know something? We will have to live with never knowing if we got to it first or last.
    There are probably heaps of things that we will only find if we go looking. I might leave here with lots of things that I haven’t learnt just because I didn’t think to go looking. My head hurts when I think like this.
    We started out walking the ropes pretty carefully and everyone was nervous but after a few times we were all getting fully fierce with how we ran the course at high speed and even backwards sometimes. Backwards is full-on mad coz you have to watch your feet and down there is the ground, and thirteen metres might be one thing when you lay a piece of string along the ground but when you are looking down from those ropes it is a very different piece of string I can tell you.
    Back to blind running, which is a trust-yourself thing like the ropes but it is in the paddock. We take the sheep out first coz they are so dumb and would get in the way. Everybody stands evenly around the paddock fence. Each boy in turn has to clamp his eyes shut and run as fast as he can, which can be very toxic on some people, and he runs until he reckons he has to open his eyes or die.
    Most boys can get about halfway across the paddock before they have to stop. If they start to run too close to the fence then the other boys around the edge yell, ‘Stop.’ But there is no shame in not running straight and I reckon some guys have one leg longer than the other coz they keep turning off in the same direction every time.
    Mr O’Neill says the ropes and the blind running teach us lots of things like depth perception and spatial imagination and several different kinds of trust and propriocentricity and other casual stuff like that. Ha ha. And you know what? I’m not even going to tell you what that fancy P word means. Some things you just have to find out for yourself.
    Love from Cryptic Clem.

    MONDAY, AUGUST 3
THE HAMISH MESSAGE
    Dear Gram
    We had English and Mr German gave us a few sentences and we had to write something with that as the beginning. The sentence Jacko and I had was, ‘He felt great anguish in his heart’. That was it. Not much to go on is it?
    Anyway, Jacko started up with Mr German and he was working up to something funny, but he never got to finish it coz the Rev came and called Mr German out of the room. They came back in again and it was pretty clear that something serious was going down.
    The Rev came to the front and said, ‘Boys, we