Samson

Samson shared my desk in kindergarten. It was actually two desks pushed together in a square. I shared with my best buddy, Andrew Whitiken, who was American and taught me what the word buddy meant and Samson who was neither buddy nor mate. Andrew and I despised Samson, because Samson ate flies. He plucked them from the air, crushed them between thumb and forefinger and ate them at our desk.

He did not look like a kid with fast moving fingers, he reminded me more of a grub than a insectivore. His eyes were tiny and waterish. His hair was a pale fuzz cropped close to even paler skin. He wasn't exactly fat, but had the sort of squidgy, softness that might well have indicated emergence from a coccoon or beneath some tree bark. He had a loud and croaky voice and a constantly running nose - but I had no objection to that being a snot machine myself. I was unhappy about being sat next to a venus fly-trap in human shape.

Looking back, I suspect Mrs Peasley sat Samson with Andrew and I because we were the good boys, the quiet ones who were always obedient and didn't play rough games. She was trying to link him up with boys who would happily play games inside at lunchtime or read books in the library. Samson did not go outside to play.

I know I was obedient. I clearly remember the one and only time I was punished by Mrs Peasley and it burned the way only injustice can. Andrew and I were dutifully working with our cuisinaire rods, filling in our work-sheets as we went, when we heard a blowfly buzzing around the desk. We looked at each other. It was one of those fat blowies, the size of a European bumble bee, that would arrive early before the summer swarms of little, black bush flies. Samson noticed too. We held our collective breaths, a blowfly snack was surely too horrible even for Samson. Faster than my eye could follow, his fingers shot out. I could see a little squirt of yellow innards pinched out from the crushed insect. We stared at him, willing him not to eat it. He did.

I decided, good boy or not, that I was going to subject Samson to the full force of my disapproval. I wrinkled my nose up at him. It was a manoeuvre I'd been practicing at home and I let him have it both barrels. Just at that moment, Mrs Peasley walked by the desk, saw my wrinkled nose and did a double take that would have made Cary Grant proud. My face froze in place, hers was animated with surprise and anger. She clearly thought I had directed my nose wrinkling at her. Explanations were bootless, I was made to stand in the corner and with every hot, fat tear, I wished misery and destruction on Samson and all his insectivorous works.

A year or so later, Andrew and I were at the local hospital. I assume one of our mothers was dropping another baby, that was the standard reason for hospital. We were playing in the gardens outside when we saw Samson in his pyjamas and dressing gown sitting on a plastic lounge chair on the verandah. We asked where he was going to school. He wasn't. He hadn't been to school since those few months with us in kindy. He lived here in the hospital. He wore his pyjamas all day. 

Samson was as pale as ever. He didn't appear to have grown at all in a year and his softness was sort of slack and pouchy, like gravity was pulling him towards the earth.

I told my daughter this story when she started kindergarten. She immediately asked why Samson was at the hospital. I couldn't answer, because I hadn't found out at the time when someone might have known. Andrew and I discussed the fact that Samson was sick and would probably die and went back to rolling down the lawn of the hospital grounds. I told her that he must have had a long term disease. 

"Did he get it from eating flies?" She asked and I realised that I had always secretly hoped so.