Pluto Belt

Seb (Part 2)

Shortly after 7:00, David House, the Cubs leader, opened the hall. 

Parents saw their kids inside and then rushed home to enjoy a spell of peace and quiet. Seb's dad left with Oscar, who had to wait until next year before he could join - something Oscar was much more excited about than Seb. This was not because Seb didn't like to be around his little brother, but because the idea of Oscar being exposed to the bigger, meaner kids was a prospect he found surprisingly upsetting. 

The meetings seldom lasted more than ninety minutes. Inside the hall, once the parents left, everyone gathered at one of the cabin's four corners. The kids – eighteen in total – were organised into four year-long groups, referred to as "dens", in which just about everything they did was done together. 

At the beginning of each year, everyone voted on the system by which their dens were named. This year, the popular vote was "Transformers characters". There was Optimus (naturally, Kael's group), Megatron (where Timmy was), Cyclonus (containing both Toddy and Lucas), and Seb's own Bumblebee. Kael and his friends always laughed and said Bumblebee was "gay-sounding", but Seb thought it was nice. All the others just sounded like they were trying too hard to be cool.

When everyone was gathered in their dens, the opening ritual commenced: a peculiar ceremony where everyone formed a circle in line with a taped-out demarcation on the floor. All recited the words: "Ar-key-lah, we'll do our best". 

Then Kael, always with loud and defiant aggression mistaken by Baloo and Bagheera as zeal, shouted: "DYB! DYB! DYB!" 

And the response: "We'll dob, dob, dob". 

Until recently, Seb hadn't realised "dyb" and "dob" were acronyms. Having merely scanned his handbook when he started in 2012, he'd figured they were all pledging to dob wrongdoers in or something. Such an idea was hardly inconsistent with the "goody-two-shoes" vibe their uniforms and the stiffly conservative rituals exuded.

Following this standard pomp, which infused the night with a gravitas otherwise absent, the kids participated in various games. Half the time, these took place in or directly outside the hall. Inside, bull-rush was particularly popular - as was dodgeball, only Seb hated playing that because Kael and his friends usually got away with being as vicious as possible. 

Seb's favourite game was one introduced by a helper who joined them for a while the previous year. He was in his twenties, tall and strapping like a soldier, so everyone called him Action Man (his real name was never a relevant question). The game Action Man introduced was called "Shoe-Hop": he lay in the middle of the hall, within the ceremonial circle, and swung a rope with a soccer-boot tied to the end round the perimeter line. Everyone would stand at the edge and jump as the shoe whizzed over their position. They were eliminated if they didn't make the jump in time.  

Directly outside the hall, they did other things. There was a little mound for bonfires just behind the hall: a scene of skit performances, sing-alongs, storytelling and such things. Other times, the commencement ritual inside would be followed by a drive out somewhere else. On these occasions, parents would carpool the kids elsewhere – the local police or fire station, one of several farms upon the western plain, the putt-putt golf course down in Pennyville or, much to the disgust of certain kids, the Guradaramu Indigenous Arts Museum.

They visited all sorts of places, did all kinds of fun or educational things (to most children, the two warranted mutual distinction), some of which were weird or boring, others were the kind to leave an impression, however short the experience, for years to come. Seb always remembered one time when they visited an observatory, somewhere quite far out, and how inside the building it was dark and cold, with black-felt walls and glowing planets projected onto massive screens; interactive terminals where you could pore through the Milky Way, separating stars and vibrantly coloured bodies with your hands, as if you were breast-stroking through space. Soft background music, atmospheric, slow but hauntingly beautiful drifted out of unseen speakers. The place had felt so distant from reality, almost as though they had been transported into a space station orbiting the universe and outside time itself. For some reason, it reminded Seb of that Simpsons Halloween episode when Homer finds a portal in his living-room wall and enters another dimension.