Company of Strangers

A semi-autobiographical tale of a new beginning at a new school

January 1993 – Cairns, Queensland
My mother and I were sitting in the hotel room a night before I was to leave to go back home from a quick detour in the north, and as the movie line goes “I had to go see about a girl”.
The phone rang. My mother picked up.
“Hi Marilyn…Yes, yes we did…thank you for recommending that little restaurant. The food was great.” My mother looked over at me “Wasn’t it nice, Robbie?” I nodded.
“Okay, hold on for me.” My mother motioned me to the phone “Petrina wants to talk to you” I smiled and took the receiver”
“Hello?”
“Hi Robbie. I want to thank you for coming up to visit me. It was so good to see you after all this time. I wanted to wish you a safe travel back home.”
“Thanks” before I had a chance to get into any small talk to keep the conversation going
Then it came…after a brief silence
“I heard that you don’t want to go back to school. Is that true?”
“Yeah. Something like that.” I shot a piercing glance at my mother
“As my friend, promise me you will go back to school.” Petrina implored, the girl-from-my-past with whom I had contacted on a whim at age 16, and as all young boys do, feel too much way too early. Her voice over the phone was soft, but firm. I shot my mother another glance. She appealed again.
“Robert, promise me you will finish school”
I didn’t want to budge. It was the first real major decision I was making for myself. I had held my ground from the month before and told my parents point blank there was no way I was going back to Lisarow, screw the consequences. I wasn’t doing another year of photography with a teacher where the feeling was a mutual dislike, or home science where the elite girls and I had a mutual dislike of each other, or whatever else the year advisor was saying I should take up. Besides, most of my friends had left after year 10. They had now started to worry and they begged for me to if not change my mind at least finish school. My father offered the first piece of life advice in all of my 16 years. “I wish I had worked harder in school, I would be further ahead today” he reflected one day when I stood firm and my parents tried to convince me about me not dropping out of school before graduating in the next twelve months.
“Promise me!”
“Okay. Fine” I sighed in resignation. Not what I wanted, but I was smitten. Where my parents couldn’t get through, she could. Mission accomplished.
When I had hung up the phone, I looked at my mother sitting at a small table near by watching me.
“I promised Petrina I would go back to school”
A look of relief fell over my mother’s face. She had used my affections for a girl and my emotional immaturity as leverage to try to get me to go back and finish high school. Well played mother, well played, and I fell for it. Making a promise to a girl thinking it may give some kind of advantage.
“Okay. So what you want to do?” She asked
I shrugged.
“Dunno. Go back to school I guess, but not Lisarow.”
I knew that I wasn’t going back to Lisarow. I had spent some of my most formative teen years there and that was more than enough between at that place, and my mother to come out socially malformed. I felt trapped. I couldn’t go back to where I had been, and I had one option left after making that promise.
“Robbie, My friend had a son that went to a nice boarding school out west if you don’t want to go back to Lisarow.” She had thrown that line out before, and I had dismissed it. She took a puff on her cigarette.
“You should at least consider it”
I still wasn’t sure that was my best option either. All I knew was that my time at my old high school was done….