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Redheads
Anonymous
Activist Fighters
(RAAF)
he thought about the true value of ‘The Cause’. It would be
disgraceful to hide the hair, even if this meant revealing their
identities. But wouldn’t that surely be better for the history books in
years to come?
Further planning of the assault would begin, but now, it was time
to watch a film starring an inspirational ginger (this was as much
loved a tradition by members as Ed Sheeran karaoke nights). Today
they watched Moulin Rouge with Nicole Kidman, projected onto
the whiteboard after Wallace reluctantly wiped his quote off.
He took a seat amongst the crowd, for a true leader sat alongside
his people.
Then he started to think about things.
He thought about the boy he was long ago, who sat alone at lunch
and pressed sweaty palms into his eyes to stop the tears. He
wondered if schoolyard bullying followed the laws of biology. Was
the social hierarchy based on survival of the fittest? Would there
always be a runt of the litter that Mother Nature knew best to
abandon?
Were all asthmatic, redheaded kids doomed from the start?
He thought about the other kids who loomed over him and
laughed the way cruel little boys do at the hair only his mother could
describe as ‘unique’. He often thought about those boys, and he
would smile to himself, because they didn’t know justice like he did.
His paint guns would be aimed at
The Building
, but perhaps they
would also be pointed at some lesser known, sneering faces, all for
‘The Cause.’
But times had changed. The dark days of teen-hood were behind
him. He was in the role he was born to play, looking ahead to a future
road of power, money and pretty girls. Once the attack on The
Building commenced, he and his people would be celebrated as they
deserved to be, and the redheads of Australia could come out of
hiding. Julia Gillard would be proud.
Wallace was a proud and fierce leader who didn’t often think
about mortality, neither his own or of ‘The Cause’. He was not the
type of man who knew that one day he’d be forgotten, just the way
the cruel little boys, who grew up to be cruel men, would forget the
slurs they hurled at the redheaded asthmatic kid. And Wallace didn’t
know, or maybe he didn’t care, that he was a boy turned bitter who
went about retribution in all the wrong ways, and now he’d grown up
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