Free Benworden by Neal Davies Page B

from the papers and said, “You’re much cleverer than you pretend to be, Brian, and I think I’ll consult with you on further projects if you’ll let me. Oh, and by the way, you’re right. We may have needed an ambulance if I’d continued. As much as I hate to say it, thank you.”
    Brian agreed to go over Sean’s notes in the future and incidents like the one that had almost happened never did.
    These sorts of incidents had been a common thing in Sean’s past and he would never have qualified for induction at Benworden if his parents hadn’t called in some favours that were owed to them by some very influential board members at the school.
    He had almost been expelled on several occasions from a very elite private junior school for the intellectually gifted. This wasn’t because he had a “bad boy” reputation, but because of his quest for knowledge and how he went about pursuing it. He was always inventing new gadgets and dabbling in chemistry and he liked to note down the reaction when he mixed two or more chemicals together, sometimes without initially considering possible outcomes.
    Like his fellow year 7 club member he had a very high IQ. In fact, it was higher, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why once you knew his father was a highly noted scientist and his mother an astrophysicist. We all joked about the type of conversations we thought his family might hold around the dinner table of an evening; it’s hard to imagine it to be an average family’s banter.
    Mr Gowdy warned Sean’s parents that if there was the slightest sign of him blowing up the science room or burning holes in tables as he had done in the past, it would mean instantexpulsion, but we could see nothing but positives in enlisting Sean as a club member. With the other well-trained minds in the club he would get all the mentoring he required.
    The good always seemed to outweigh the bad at Benworden and most of the teachers there were very helpful and easy to get along with, especially Miss Cathie James and Mr David Neals. They were everyone’s favourites and whenever there was an issue they were always approachable and easy to talk to. More importantly, they would listen non-judgementally and although they didn’t know about the club they could see that Mr Gowdy had it in for all those who were members. I’m not sure if it was some kind of instinct that old Gowdy had for sniffing out our members or whether we unknowingly showed some sort of distaste for the way the man treated people. Either way the feeling was mutual.
    It was plain to see that Miss James and Mr Neals had feelings for each other but they were both too professional to allow this to interfere with their work.
    Miss James taught music and had the voice of an angel. She had thought of becoming a psychologist before she became a teacher and had completed a degree in that subject, but music was her real love and being a music teacher combined both of these talents harmoniously.
    Mr Neals was a science teacher and had been a mining engineer before accepting a teaching position. He was born in the mining town of Emerald in Queensland. His father had been a powder man working with explosives for a local mine site and the two generations before him were also miners. He had always hoped his son would follow in his footsteps.
    When Mr Neals was young, he attended a local boarding school in Rockhampton which was just under 300km fromwhere he lived, and then he went on to Sydney University to do his Masters in engineering. This was a turning point in his life. While in Sydney he had grown fond of the busyness of the city and when he returned to Emerald to work in the mines with his father he couldn’t adjust back to the isolation and slower country life and longed for the city again.
    His best friend Paul, whom he had met in university, had gone home to Ballarat and had opened up a drilling and machinery business. Mr