tribulation

I reach across the front seat for my heavy briefcase—I only carry a briefcase to official-type meetings—and bang goes the back. I’ve been expecting it for weeks, might have predicted that after rising at five and driving two and a half hours in a hire car to Shepparton for a community ‘what-are-we-going-to-do-about-youth-suicide’ meeting, my back would plunge off a tall building.

I can scarcely walk into the motel dining-room, where the punters are piling their plates with hash browns, en route to reception. My forehead almost hits the counter: I’m titled forward at 45 degrees from the waist. The board room is a long walk down the back of the motel. The briefcase feels like an elephant on the end of my arm.

Being 15 minutes late for an eight o’clock breakfast meeting means I have to enter a packed room, bent double and shambling, on full view to the muffin-stuffers. Dumping my briefcase behind a chair, I’m gasping with pain but suck it in and take my seat. The chairwoman stops prattling, asks if I’d like to introduce myself to the gathering. Absolutely not … but I do anyway.

The meeting is sponsored and run by a government department, best left untitled; they don’t impress in any way. The non-school, non-department people say useful things but the prins—that’s education jargon for principals—and the officials from the department are dead weight. Oh, spare me!

The meeting ends just after nine. I stop to talk to the department person I’m likely to keep contact with. I’m holding onto the table to stay upright, bowels adding to the tension. The toilet is close and it’s as well it is. It then takes me several minutes to cover the hundred metres back to the car.

The pain is even more acute by the time I pull up at a secondary college on the outskirts of Shep. The well-being co-ordinator I’m meeting props me up in her swivel chair, finds me a hot water bottle to cram behind my back. I have a productive meeting with her and two APs—that would be assistant prins.

Somehow I manage to drive all the way home. I even enjoy an alternative route through Strath Creek and Flowerdale. There’s no evidence that a bushfire ravaged this beautiful place three years ago, razing everything, charring thirty human beings.

Getting in or out of the car is a nightmare. I almost crawl to my front door. The cat leaps out of a bush, reckons I’m fair game. First task is to cancel tomorrow’s trip to Traralgon for a Mental Health Week expo. Enough already.

Rock on.