The Seven Year Itch

By far the greatest moment of my first week at Xavier was the moment I was given the keys to my office. This moment did not occur on the first day of my time here and in fact only occurred about four days in. It started with Father Martin’s entry into the faculty staff lounge. The faculty staff lounge, despite the term faculty staff lounge, is really just used by the American volunteers and us Australians. The Jesuits, bar one or two of the younger novices, rarely if ever make any appearances there. The Principal walking in meant that something big was about to happen.

At this stage, the occupants of the lounge were indulging in what seems to be the primary activity of the volunteers here, playing annoyingly simple games whilst waiting for the hideously slow internet to load. At the time, the game that was in vogue was called ‘Super Text Twist’, which involved forming as many words out of a certain sequence of letters as humanly possible. The fiery passion with which this was played had astounded me upon first arrival. Randy, my fellow Australian who hails from Riverview, had a particular aptness for the game and at the time of Martin’s arrival was furiously typing into the computer as the clock in the bottom right hand of the screen approached zero. When it did, Randy snapped back his head in disappointment and became immediately aware of Father Martin’s presence.
The priest held up a set of keys. Randy smiled, as if this entire conversation had progressed telepathically. He stood up immediately and looked at me. I had to come to. And wordlessly the three of us exited the lounge and began walking down the hall.

We walked into a section of the school that I had never entered before, where the walls seemed thicker and with no windows letting in any natural light. I later found out that when the power goes out (which is a daily occurrence) that this section of the school is pitch black, even in the middle of the day. The school is a converted Japanese signal station, and such quirks are rife throughout the building. It is, for interest’s sake, completely bombproof, a point highlighted as we walked through a metal door about as thick as I am. The priest stopped at an innocuous wooden door, turned to look at both of us, and inserted the oldest, brownest key into the doorknob. He smiled, and turned.

As he opened the door and watched our eyes widened, he simply said “Boys, your office.”

It was gigantic upon first sight, the white walls and green tiled floors seemed to extend into an absurd gargantuacity that reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. It was twice the size of any of the other volunteer’s offices, which we had envied while we had stuffed our work into the corners of the teacher’s lounge. It had a row of book cases, with one shelf full of missals but the rest empty for us to place our books that we had brought from home (between the two of us we have quite a considerable collection). There was a window overlooking the school’s lawn that bathed the whole office in beautiful natural light. And best of all, two antique desks in the far corner of the room. After a quick round of scissors, paper rock to decide who would get the larger one (Randy won) we sat back behind them and contemplated the satisfaction of calling this office ours.

We made plans immediately. There was a fridge, we would have drinks. There was enough room for dancing, we need a disco ball. If we could hook up a sound system... oh the possibilities. We told Sami, the chief partier of the faculty, about our new office.

“Ah yes, that was the party room.”

And with a strangely poetic look into the distance he followed up.

“The parties will return to that room.”



This was the high point of the week. The low point was what followed quite quickly as we returned to the faculty lounge to report back what we had seen. We described the size, the light, the parties, the location, everything. We were babbling almost incoherently. At this point Lydia, one of the Americans who taught literature (and had a passion for Sylvia Plath which gave TJ and I no end of pleasure) turned to us and broke our poor little hearts.

“Oh that room, I know that room, that’s the scabies room.”

Of all the things you don’t want your room to be called, the ‘scabies room’ must place around the bottom of that list.
“When a kid in the dorm had scabies we had to put him in isolation. And we put him in that room.
“Are scabies infectious?”
“Incredibly.”

This all seemed to convenient to be true. However, the Americans have a generally limited capacity in understanding straight-faced humour. Tom had reported to me that you have to go “Jokes” every time you employ sarcasm otherwise they just think you’re weird. I then asked Sam, a burly Math teacher who was also dorm moderator, about the room.

“Oh yeah, the scabies room. You should be alright though, Scabies is only infectious for up to four months.
“When was the kid in isolation?”
“December.”

After that, the room lost some of its shine. We worked there, but we didn’t move much stuff in.

I checked scabies on Wikipedia. It seems pretty nasty. The article told me that the symptoms of scabies (known as the seven year itch) take two to six weeks to show after infection. It then had a picture of a Norwegian AIDS patient with scabies that almost made me vomit.

So I guess I’ll just have to wait 2-6 weeks.

And I’ve switched to medicated soap.