Another Fragment From A Confiscated Notebook

Acherontia Lachesis
Death’s Head Moth
‘The Bee Robber’
One specimen was on the wall of the second-floor toilet. Despite a gentle current created by the extractor fan near the sealed windows, the moth remained motionless, its black-winged shape in sharp contrast to the worn whitewash. It seemed to have been mounted on the wall. Natasha was reminded of ‘The Silence of The Lambs’ film poster, with the moth covering Jodie Foster’s mouth. Upon her sighting of the moth, the thick fog of ennui that hangs over rainy secondary school afternoons instantly dissipated.


In the early 1990s demarcation was clear between the various groups and sub-groups. Allegiances were communicated by an intricate system of signs and symbols so there was little need to draw up physical boundaries. All groups, placed together in the same room for the semblance of unity, however remained pluralised , interacting but never intermixing. Natasha and I occupied the demilitarized zone.
Our teacher on duty was oblivious to the subtle politics of the classroom of thirty-five uniformed girls. When the recess bell gave off its shrill sound, she retreated to the air-conditioned, student-free zone of the staff room.

The same stimulus was provided but I always noted the differing responses; the surly girls who were into grunge, the ones with band names like ‘Nirvana’ , ‘Soundgarden’ or, ‘Pearl Jam’ stencilled in black marker on the covers of their ring files and on the insides of their wrists, immediately pushed back their chairs and sulked out off the classroom towards the canteen. It is safe to surmise at this point in their lives, for some of them, that their petulance was an act.

In contrast to the grunge group, the Canto-Pop afficianados remained at their desks, memorising lyrics from magazines and trading phone-cards with the face of the latest idol embossed on them. These girls represented a quieter sort of demographic, who wished to evade the recess time rush hour. However , my subsequent observations have revealed that they only wanted to avoid queuing up with the grunge group, who specialized in the obnoxious tactic of shouting through someone in the queue, in order to communicate to a fellow fan two or three persons away, how much better the ‘Unplugged’ version of ‘Come As You Are’ is than the original album one. Loudly extolling the artistic merits of Kurt Cobain and company was just as effective as sneering at the latest floaty ballad by Jackie Cheung or Aaron Kwok.

The next group to leave the classroom headed for the toilet for a chance to gossip. This was one diversion from the daily slog of school, homework, parents and siblings, before the brief respite offered by the weekend. Such practices were also abhorred by the grunge crowd