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you imagine five different schools in one room? There’s either going to be heaps of fights or the beginning of mixed relationships.”
    “I’m just glad St. Joan’s isn’t going to be there. We get stuck with them every time,” he complained. “We detest them.”
    “We detest St. Francis’s guys. We were invited to their formal in Year Ten. They grouped together and sang rah-rah songs all night. For their football team and cricket team and basketball team and God knows what else.”
    “All those guys know how to do is play sports,” he said. “The Marist Brothers are obsessed.”
    “Slaughtered by them, right?”
    “Embarrassing. The day after election day, actually. My father came to watch and said he was humiliated. The press were there, of course. I pointed out that academically the St. Francis guys were inept, but it still took me days to live it down.”
    We sat alongside each other without speaking for a while. He’s the type of person you can do that with. It wasn’t an embarrassing silence, just a comfortable one. As if we both respected each other’s private thoughts.
    “So what are you going to do next year?” he asked, offering me his last biscuit.
    “I want to be a barrister.”
    “If you couldn’t beat me back there with your clever conversation, you’ll never make it,” he teased.
    I hit him and shrugged.
    “Your father would have been humiliated if you’d lost the argument tonight so I allowed you to win.”
    He gave me a sidelong look and we laughed.
    “What about you?” I asked.
    He looked at me in mock horror.
    “Could you imagine me not going into law and then politics?”
    “Yeah. I reckon you’d make a great teacher. I watched the little debaters come up to you. You’re very patient with them.”
    “My father would have a stroke.”
    “You’re a snob.”
    He shook his head. “No, I’m a realist. My father is a politician, my grandfather was a politician and my great-grandfather was a backer of the first Liberal prime minister. My father believes that we have the breeding to one day give this country the best prime minister it has ever had. It was something his father told him and something his father’s father told him. On my birthday, every year, he stands on a soap-box.”
    John stood on the chair and pulled his fringe back, imitating his father’s receding hairline.
    “One of my sons,” he began in a droning voice, “will one day lead this country back into the path of glory and I feel it can easily be John. Forget the incidents of the past. He did his stint at FBA and is now on the road to recovery.”
    “FBA?”
    “Fairy Bread Anonymous. My parents even went to the organization that helped the family members of addicts.”
    “You’re crazy.”
    “I’ve slightly exaggerated the case, but how can you escape his type of thinking and tradition?”
    “Easy.” I shrugged. “My great-grandmother dressed the dead in Sicily, my grandmother worked on a farm in Queensland and my mother is a medical secretary in Leichhardt. I’m not going to follow in their footsteps and I know more than you about escaping tradition. You kind of just pave your own path.”
    “It’s different for you,” he sighed. “You haven’t got any pressures in life. I’ve always had to be the best because it’s been expected of me. Do you think they voted me school captain because they wanted me? Get real. They knew I was going to be school captain when I was in Year Seven because every other Barton has been one. It’s got nothing to do with popularity. The guys don’t even know me.”
    I was surprised at his bitterness and tried to cut the mood. “I haven’t got any pressures?” I asked, grabbing his sleeves dramatically. “I could write a book about them.”
    “You always seem so in control.”
    “And you don’t?”
    He laughed, but somehow not humorously. There was a darkness in his eyes that had nothing to do with color.
    “I’ll let you in on a secret. I’m not.