Good Reading dips into the first few paragraphs of The School Run by ALI LOWE to give you a taste of what’s to come.
A figure treads the winding pavement that hugs the rugged coastline between St Ignatius’ Boys’ Grammar School and the heart of Pacific Pines. The path itself is small, and next to it runs the main highway, abuzz in rush hour with black or blue or silver cars full of boys: one, two or sometimes three. Boys in straw boaters and smart woollen blazers with green lapels and a motif on the breast pocket featuring two lions, stately on their back legs and haloed by a Latin motto felix quia fortis (happiness through strength). Boys with angry red spots and braces and furry top lips, with squeaky voices, deep voices, quiet voices. Boys who are tall, short, chubby, lithe.
It is 10 o’clock at night and the road is shrouded in blackness, save for the sporadic bursts of dull orange lamplight. The School Run, the name given to this busy thoroughfare by the locals, is strangely quiet this evening. It will clutter later, this main passage into town, when St Ignatius’ – or Iggy’s, as they call it – closes its doors and ejects the throng of prospective parents who are inside the Great Hall with their 11-year-old sons quaffing cheese and wine, praying their blessed boy has done enough to get him over the line and inside Iggy’s hallowed inner sanctum! That a door will open for him, which in itself will open a lifetime of doors.
Most parents have already put in the groundwork: obtained referral letters from external sports coaches and piano teachers, written lengthy, platitude-laden letters
to the board of governors, made sizeable ‘donations’ to the school’s charitable foundation. Perhaps they’ve even joined the principal’s tennis club. The lengths these ‘perfect’ parents will go to in order to showboat their ‘perfect’ families on Gala Day is a joke. All of it is a joke – the ludicrously pricey uniforms, the shiny pews, the erect backs singing from dog-eared hymn sheets, the pristine white painted lines on the shamrock-green sports field with the sign that warns, Do not walk on the grass!
The walker presses an earbud deep into the canal of their ear and jabs at the lit-up screen of a phone. The noise drowns out the roar of the ocean as it smashes against the cliffs below, leaving behind pristine white spray that slides off the moss on the rocks. There is nothing special about the sea when you live beside it – it becomes as generic, as unremarkable, as stirring milk into tea or pulling on a rugby boot. The water is not afforded so much as a blink as it sucks back out, dramatically, building up its strength to smash the rocks again. Nor is the vague rumble of thunder out over the ocean, or the slow grumble of the approaching car. Why would it be? This is just a road after all, nothing new.
In fact, so tuned out is this human being to their sinister surrounds that there is barely a flinch at the screech of the brakes as the bonnet performs a scoop and a toss, throwing everything – the body, the phone and the earbuds – like papers in the wind, up, up into the air. It is a sliding-doors moment: a stroke of misfortune, made by choice. If only the earbuds had been left at home!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ali Lowe grew up in the UK, and studied ancient history at university, before completing a postgraduate degree in journalism and heading for the bright lights of London.
She spent seven years at OK! magazine, where I did a lot of fun stuff like following David Beckham around Elton John’s garden in a designer dress and flying on a private jet to the Isle of Man with Simon Cowell.
In 2006, she went to Sydney for a year (well, that’s what she told my mum), and ended up staying. After having three Aussie babies, she set her sights on writing a book, and that novel became The Trivia Night.
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