Things That Have Happened

Truancy

When I was thirteen years old, I truanted school for the first time.

By this time in my life, I was already living with my father, and had been doing so for I think maybe two or three months prior to me doing this. It was a day when he was on the day shift, which went from six in the morning until six in the evening, which is why I knew if I did it, I could probably get away with it.

At this point in time, I hadn't been living there for long enough to realise that when my father was at work, he would rarely if ever come home in the middle of the day for any reason. There have been times when he has done so, but these have largely been the exceptions that prove the rule; to the point where it might happen two or three times in a year at most, and usually for no longer than five or ten minutes.

This isn't something I was aware of at the time because my thirteen-year-old self didn't think that this would be the case, and didn't think to draw the correlation between what usually happened when he was on night shift, where I would be home the entire time, to what turned out to be the case when he was on day shift.

This is the reason why, when my thirteen-year-old self skipped school for the first time, I also chose to skip town for the day as well.

To be fair, the day itself was fairly mundane in every conceivable aspect except for the fact that I'd decided to skip town for the day. My original plan was that I was going to run away from home and go to Canberra with the purpose of shouting inflammatory remarks at then-Prime Minister John Howard, and in fact I went so far as to claim to a cab driver who drove me part of the way that I was a third or fourth cousin of Kevin Rudd.

However, that didn't pan out. When I was on the train station waiting for the train to Sydney, I got cold feet and backed out of the idea. So there I was, this thirteen-year-old truant who had temporarily styled himself as a sixteen-year-old high school dropout with a different name, with this bag of food and some stuff waiting for the train back to the town I'd initially gone to.

I got back there in time for the bus, but that still left me with a few hours, which I spent wandering around the streets. I eventually wandered into some furniture store and sat on one of the chairs there for an hour two while waiting.

At one point, one of the staff members of the store asked me to leave, and I essentially told them to fuck off. Nothing came of that, because the police were never called and there weren't any cops or teachers from the local school who came to question me for staying in an area where I'd been spending no money.

I guess that was my first hint to something I'd only be able to fully articulate later on: no matter how much of a nuisance you are, and no matter how much a shop attendant might personally despise your very existence, it's actually been very rare for them to ever call the police because of me. Even though I'd consistently spend no money, there would still be a part of them that hoped that I would give them a little bit of money if they let me stay there for long enough.

Anyway, skip forward a few hours, and I'm catching a cab back home--different driver this time. For a little while, I even thought it may be the case that I wouldn't get home in time to beat my dad there, who would have immediately seen the note I'd left on the dining room table as he walked in. However, that wasn't the case, because I beat him by about three quarters of an hour.

The cab driver himself was a nice enough guy. He was from Scotland originally, and had moved to Australia in his thirties or forties. By the point I met him, he'd worked in some of the factories in the area before eventually becoming a cab driver. He was probably about sixty or sixty-five, so as I write this I realise he might have actually retired soon after he drove me to my front door.

However as nice as he came off, I was a bit short on money for the cab driver. So I did something which at the time I knew to be immoral and I would later find out was illegal--I dodged part of the fare by asking him if he'd let me pay the rest at some later date. So, this guy being the kind guy he was, gave me his mobile number and told me to ring him when I had the $30 or so I owed him.

I never did ring him, and so far as I know, he's never come around here looking for the money I owed him either. In the seven and a half years interceding the day I did this and today, I haven't heard a single word from this guy--I haven't encountered him down the street, had him knocking on my door, or had the police knocking on my door in relation to this.

Nor has my father ever found out about this incident. I think this may be the only time I ever truanted and got away with it, because every other time he's been able to know because somebody dobbed me in, or because a few months later when he got my school report he'd see the high number of absences.

However, this first time? I got away with it. And as mundane as it was, as boring and dreary as it turned out to be, I got away with it, and for some reason a part of me even enjoyed it. I don't regret doing it, even though a part of me knows that, years after I did it and years after I finished school, I should do so.