The ninth and final School Sketchbook records the final six weeks prior to the Jelish family's mysterious disappearance in early July 1991. The document has been badly afflicted by continual contact with damp and many of the pages have loosened from their bindings and have consequently become ragged and torn. For motives that remain unknown, the artist has removed two of the Schoolbook's pages.
The ninth School Sketchbook continues the by-now-almost-entirely perfunctory set of newborn studies also evident in the previous Schoolbook, the closing Extraneous Drawings (ED.75-97) and sundry pages of the Private Sketchbook (see PS.16-19, PS.35-38). Vanessa Jelish's affection for the baby Stuart is sharply captured in these portrayals: generously offered his mother's breast, carefully bathed in warm water, delicately bound in soft cotton - the maternal warmth granted to the youngest child divergent to the paternal hollow aching his elder sibling, thrust to the surface in these tender excavations.
Shoehorned betwixt the myriad assortment of babe renderings, each implemented either on a Tuesday or Thursday - the two days of the week when young Miss Jelish attended art lessons at school - lie peculiar conflations of compulsively collected magazine and newspaper clippings of the movie star Tom Selleck (a replica of the Jelish father if ever there was one) or similar such moustachioed 'entertainers'. These extend to the bindings of both the ninth Schoolbook and the Private Sketchbook (on both occasions battling with badges of Madonna for floor space). On second glance many of these countenances have bizarrely had their hirsute appendages tattooed on by our young artist. Again the revenant of her father still yields symbolic fruit. Oh, how she thanked me when I offered to chauffeur her to the local picture house to see her favourite star in the hit film Three Men and a Little Lady. How she cooed every time the handsome moustache twitched athwart the screen. Oh, how she missed her father.
The final page executed in the document is marked by the artist as the second of July. The remaining nine leaves of the ninth and final School Sketchbook remain empty, an emblem of pregnant absence aching to be caressed by the unflinching pencil of the young artist. Sadly, there rest no clues or ciphers on these final and/or any previous leaves to account for Naomi and her family's anonymous egress.