OUT OF VOICE REACH

A life spent trying to belong

Chapter 2 – The Bus Ride In

There are some distances that do not seem much when you look back at them on a map, especially once life has taken you far enough away from them. Seven miles to the nearest settlement, a couple of miles to one bus point, six miles to another when the route changed, twenty miles later on to secondary school, they all become numbers eventually, the sort of thing you might toss into a conversation as a bit of colour, as though childhood was simply measured by gates, roads and paddocks.

At the time, though, distance had a way of getting into you. It was not just the miles themselves, but the waiting, the leaving, the being collected, the feeling that every day began with the knowledge that you were coming from somewhere other people did not quite understand. Before I ever learnt to compete in a classroom or on a sporting field, I learnt to travel towards people.

The bus ride to primary school was not just transport. It was the first daily reminder that I lived somewhere slightly beyond the edge of things, close enough to attend the same school as the others but not close enough to feel naturally part of their world. I was not walking down the street with a group of mates, not slipping out a front gate and wandering to school with cousins and neighbours, not part of that easy gathering that seems to happen when children live near enough to one another to turn friendship into habit.

My mornings began with movement. There was the farm, the road, the pickup point, and then the bus itself, which became a strange little country of its own, full of noise, bags, dust, lunch boxes and the sort of hierarchy children create without ever being taught how. You could learn a lot on a school bus if you were paying attention, and perhaps too much if you were the sort of child who was already inclined to notice where he sat in the order of things.

I do not remember every morning clearly, of course. Memory is not a filing cabinet, whatever we pretend later in life when we are trying to make sense of ourselves. It is more like an old shed full of useful things, broken things, things you thought were lost, and things you trip over when you are looking for something else entirely.

What I do remember is the feeling of being in between. I was in between the farm and the school, in between home and town, in between belonging by blood or connection and belonging by acceptance. I was part of the district, certainly, and there were related children around me, but being related to people does not automatically make you feel included by them.

That is one of those things families and communities can be slow to admit. They assume connection is the same as comfort, and that because names overlap on family trees or because people know your parents or your place, you must naturally feel settled among them. But a child can be surrounded by people he is linked to and still feel as though he is standing just outside the circle, watching the others speak a language that came to them before he arrived.

At primary school, I was not a stranger in the simple sense. I was not some new child dropped into the middle of a town where no one knew my name. In some ways that may have made it harder, because the expectation of belonging was there before the feeling itself had time to arrive.

The others seemed to have a rhythm together. They knew who sat with whom, who could tease whom, who belonged in which little arrangement of friendship, rivalry and mischief. I knew some of them through family lines, district ties and the simple fact that small places do not allow much anonymity, but knowing people is not the same as being known by them.

School brought the first version of a lesson I would keep learning in different forms for the rest of my life. You can be present every day and still feel temporary. You can be recognised and still feel unseen.

The bus route itself changed, as routes do when people with maps and timetables decide there is a more practical way to collect children from scattered places. At one stage there was a point a couple of miles from town, and later another arrangement that meant a longer distance of about six miles. To an adult, these were probably matters of efficiency, fuel, time and fairness, but to a child they became part of the geography of belonging.

Every adjustment reminded me that I was being fitted into a system that had not been built around me. That is not a complaint, because country life has never owed anyone convenience, and children on farms have always learnt early that roads do not bend simply because you would like them to. Still, the effect of those mornings was cumulative, and I think the boy I understood more than he could have explained.

He knew that other children began the day closer to the middle. He knew that he came in from the outside, carrying dust and distance with him whether anyone else noticed or not. He knew that by the time he reached school, some of the day had already happened inside him.

The bus was a place of noise, but not necessarily comfort. Children can be brutal in small ways, not always out of malice, but because they are trying to work out the rules themselves and are relieved when someone else can be placed lower, further out, or made into the object of a joke. I do not want to paint myself as some tragic little figure staring nobly out the window while everyone else lived happily around me, because that would be too neat and probably untrue.

I had my own pride, my own stubbornness, and no doubt my own capacity to be difficult. I was not simply acted upon by the world, and one of the hazards of writing about childhood from an older age is the temptation to make yourself either innocent or heroic. I was neither, but I was often lonely, and those are not the same thing.

Primary school gave me a place to discover what I could do. Academically, much of it came easily enough, and that should have been a blessing without complication. In some ways it was, because there is comfort in being able to understand the work, answer the question, finish the task and know that at least one part of the day made sense.

But being good at schoolwork is not always a pathway to acceptance, particularly when you are already a bit outside the group. It can just as easily become another thing that marks you as different, another reason to be watched, judged or quietly resented. There is a peculiar loneliness in succeeding at something and realising the success does not bring you closer to others, but instead places you on a little rise where they can see you more clearly.

I learnt that early. The right answer did not necessarily win friends, and finishing first did not always mean you were admired. Sometimes it simply meant you had given others another reason to decide you thought you were better than them, even if all you were really trying to do was find one part of the world where the rules seemed fair.

That is where striving began to take shape. I do not think I set out, consciously, to prove anything grand. I was not sitting there as a small boy developing a philosophy of achievement, and if I had tried to explain myself at the time it probably would have come out as something much simpler, or not at all.

But underneath it, I suspect there was already a bargain being made. If I could not simply belong, perhaps I could earn a place. If I could not be naturally included, perhaps I could become useful, impressive, necessary or difficult to ignore.

That is a dangerous bargain for a child to make, because it can look from the outside like ambition, confidence or healthy competition. Adults tend to encourage it because the results are visible and convenient. They see the marks, the ribbons, the teams, the willingness to try, and they do not always see the quiet panic underneath.

Sport gave me something schoolwork could not quite provide. In a small school, the sporting field could temporarily flatten some of the differences that existed elsewhere. If you could run, catch, kick, hit, ride or compete, you had a kind of value that did not need much explaining.

There was relief in that. Sport had rules you could understand, even when the people around it were more complicated. You either got to the ball or you did not, crossed the line or you did not, made the catch or dropped it, and for a boy trying to find his way in from the edges, that sort of clarity had its attractions.

It also gave me a glimpse of belonging, though even then it came with conditions attached. I could belong when I was contributing, when I was helping the school win, when I was proving that the boy from out beyond the ordinary route was worth having on the side. That was better than nothing, and at times it probably felt like everything.

The trouble with conditional belonging is that you can never properly rest inside it. You are only as safe as your last performance, only as included as your next contribution, only as accepted as the next moment when you prove you deserve the jumper, the place, the seat or the applause. For a child, that is a lot to carry without knowing he is carrying it.

Looking back, I can see how easily competition became both comfort and armour. It gave me a way to turn the ache of being outside into effort, and effort into results. If I could not make myself one of the group by ordinary means, I could at least make myself hard to dismiss.

There is pride in that, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. I am not ashamed of having tried, or of being good at things, or of the stubborn little engine that kept me pushing forward when it might have been easier to withdraw altogether. There is something valuable in the child who decides he will not simply disappear.

Yet there is hurt in it too. No child should have to become exceptional just to feel temporarily acceptable. No child should have to turn every classroom, playground or sporting field into an audition for belonging.

The related children were part of the complication. They were near enough to make exclusion feel confusing, because this was not a world of complete strangers. There were ties, names, histories and district connections that should have made the place feel warmer than it sometimes did.

But families, like towns, have their own circles within circles. Some children grow up right in the middle of those circles and never have to think about them, while others spend years learning the edge by feel. I was close enough to know the circle existed, but not always close enough to feel the warmth of it.

Perhaps that is why the phrase “outside the circle” has stayed with me. It is not dramatic enough for some people, because they expect pain to arrive with shouting, cruelty or obvious injury. But much of the pain that shapes a person is quieter than that, and often more durable because no one else thinks to name it.

It is the space beside the group rather than inside it. It is the joke you are not part of, the invitation that seems to have been assumed unnecessary, the ease others have with one another while you are still working out where to stand. It is arriving every day and still feeling slightly as though you have come from somewhere else.

The school bus taught me that feeling before I had words for it. Every morning it collected me from the outer part of my life and carried me towards a place where I would try again. Every afternoon it took me back through the same landscape, returning me to the farm and the strange safety of distance.

There is a particular kind of silence at the end of a school day when you have held yourself together among others. It is not always sadness, and it is not always relief, but it is something like exhaustion. You have been performing, adjusting, measuring, defending, hoping, and then suddenly the paddocks open up again and the world stops asking quite so much of you.

I sometimes wonder whether that daily movement trained me for the life that followed. Much later, in work and business and community roles, I would keep travelling in from the edges, trying to be good enough, useful enough, reliable enough and competent enough to justify my place. I would learn to read rooms, carry responsibility, produce results and hide uncertainty behind productivity.

The pattern did not begin in boardrooms or offices. It began much earlier, on roads between farm and school, with a boy who thought that doing well might close the gap. It began in the classroom where the right answer gave him standing but not necessarily friendship, and on the sporting field where effort could buy a temporary kind of inclusion.

That is not to say primary school was all misery, because life is rarely so tidy. There would have been laughter, games, ordinary days, small victories and moments of childish delight that do not deserve to be erased just because the larger emotional truth was complicated. I am wary of memory when it starts behaving like a prosecution brief, selecting only the evidence that proves the case.

Still, when I search for the thread that runs through those years, I keep coming back to the same feeling. I was there, but not quite of it. I was known, but not entirely understood.

Perhaps some of that came from the farm itself. A grazing property gives a child room, responsibility and a certain kind of competence, but it can also give him solitude before he knows what solitude is. You learn the scale of things early, and you learn that people are not always within calling distance.

That phrase, out of voice reach, has become more important to me with age than it ever could have been when I was young. Back then it was simply a fact of where we lived, a practical description of distance between properties. You could call out all you liked, but unless someone happened to be nearby, your voice would fall into the paddocks and stop there.

Primary school was the first place where I began to understand that voice reach was not only about sound. You could speak and still not be heard in the way you meant. You could answer, perform, compete, laugh along and keep going, yet still feel that the real part of you had not quite carried across the distance.

That feeling became one of the quiet engines of my life. I did not want to be pitied, and I certainly did not want to look weak. Country boys of that time were not exactly encouraged to sit around discussing their emotional landscapes, and even now the phrase makes me want to go and find a fence to fix just to balance things out.

So I competed. I tried harder, pushed further, aimed higher and treated recognition as though it might eventually become belonging if only I collected enough of it. The tragedy, or perhaps just the weary joke of it, is that achievement is a poor substitute for being known.

It can keep you moving, and at times it can keep you alive. It can build a career, earn respect, open doors, create opportunities and give others the impression that you are handling things better than you are. But it cannot, by itself, put a child fully inside the circle he once watched from the edge.

I see that child more kindly now than I did for many years. For a long time I probably judged him by the same standards he used on himself, asking whether he was strong enough, good enough, tough enough or successful enough. Age has softened that a little, or perhaps retirement has simply removed enough noise for me to hear him properly.

He was not weak. He was not ungrateful. He was not imagining the ache just because he could not explain it.

He was a boy on a bus, travelling in from a farm seven miles from the nearest settlement, carrying more distance than his schoolbag could show. He was related to some, known by others, praised at times, resented at others, and already learning the hard arithmetic of being noticed without necessarily being included.

The bus ride in was ordinary, which is why it mattered. It was not one grand event, not a tragedy that can be circled in red and blamed for everything that followed. It was repetition, and repetition is how many of the deepest lessons are taught.

Every morning the road told me where I came from. Every school day taught me that arrival was not the same as belonging. Every small competition offered the possibility that, for a moment at least, I might be allowed a little further inside.

I do not know whether I would change that boy’s life if I could, because changing one part of a life has a way of unravelling the rest. The striving that cost me also carried me, and the loneliness that hurt me also taught me to observe, remember, work and endure. That is the uncomfortable truth of it, and memoir becomes dishonest when it pretends our wounds did not also shape our strengths.

But I would like to sit beside him on that bus for a while. I would like to tell him that being good at things is not the same as being loved, and that he should not have to win every small contest to earn his place. I doubt he would believe me, because children rarely believe what adults tell them when the evidence of the day points elsewhere.

Still, I would tell him. I would tell him that the circle he is trying to enter is not the only measure of his worth, even if it feels that way from the vinyl seat of a school bus rattling in towards town. I would tell him that one day he will understand the road differently, though understanding will not erase it.

For now, in the memory, he is still travelling. The farm is behind him, the school is ahead, and the dust of the road is rising in the morning light. He does not yet know the word belonging, but he already knows the shape of its absence.