by John Clanchy
‘Louisa.’
‘L-u-i-s-a,’ she says again. ‘Without an o.’
‘Thank you, Luisa.’ I look at the second girl who’s also sweet and smiling and has identical clips in her hair, which tells me just how close the two of them are. This second girl is pretty too but she looks pale, a faded colour shot against the black and white brilliance of Luisa.
‘I’m Sarah,’ she says. Then adds: ‘Boys are awful, aren’t they? I just hate them, don’t you?’
* *
Philip Gardner was my first boyfriend, and he was the first boy I ever slept with. The only boy. I’m not a bike, or anything. Philip is two years older than me, and he was in Year 12 and the School Captain when we started going out and it was just before Grandma Vera died, and he came to the funeral in his father’s suit and was so sweet and understanding I nearly died myself.
‘Darling, don’t you see, it was inevitable,’ Mum said, when I told her about Philip and me breaking up. Or not breaking up but Philip dumping me for another girl.
‘Inevitable, why?’ I want to hear her answer at that moment, and I don’t. ‘Just because we’re different ages?’
‘No, it’s not that. Age doesn’t matter.’
‘You’re older than Philip,’ I tell her. And I’m talking about her Philip now. And she is older, but only by a year. Some people still think that’s strange when the woman’s older than the man and they want to discourse about it and what it means and use words like cradle-snatcher and toy-boy, or anyway the girls at school do, and I do too because I like the sound of it, because it’s sophisticated and smart and that, but I’m not absolutely sure what it means. Toy-boy. And when the girls at school found out that my step-dad was younger than my Mum, especially when she got pregnant and had Thomas – at her age and she was thirty-nine and even I was fifteen – they decided that that might be okay for now and it was even romantic and everything because he must love her a lot to get an older woman pregnant, but what would happen in ten years when she really was old and almost fifty and wasn’t pretty any more, like she is at the moment, and would he think he was crazy marrying someone who was too old to have sex any more – and they weren’t prejudiced or anything but they didn’t think they would risk it themselves.
‘Darling,’ Mum says. ‘I’ve just told you. It’s not age that’s the problem.’
‘What, then?’
‘Well, you and Philip are never really together, for a start.’
‘We are. We spend all our holidays together.’
‘Holidays,’ she says.
‘And I’ve been to Canberra twice. Three times, in fact.’
‘Three times in two years?’
This is Philip’s second year in Canberra. You can only do Forestry at ANU or Melbourne Uni, and he went to Canberra so we could be closer and he could come home sometimes at weekends. And he did for the first three months, nearly every weekend, then the work got harder and he had to play sport for his college, and they had drama and things where they could only practise on the weekends. And I understood all that, because I had things at school too, but still.
‘I only went three times,’ I told her, ‘because you wouldn’t let me go more often.’
‘What did you expect me to do? You were only just sixteen, you had your life here. Your school, your work, your family.’
‘Maybe if I’d gone more often, we wouldn’t have split up.’
‘That’s not true, Laura, and you know it. If people live apart and they’re surrounded by other people –’
‘Their own age, you mean?’
‘Yes, their own age.’
‘See!’
‘And their own interests,’ she says. ‘Especially when they’re living together in a college, day in day out.’
‘He was sleeping with her while he was still sleeping with me.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Mum says – and she doesn’t say it’s wrong or anything, as you’d expect. ‘I know how much it hurts,’ she says instead.
‘How could you?’
‘You think I never went through this?’
‘You ?’
‘It’s as if,’ she says, ‘your whole world has come to an end.’
Sometimes – with mothers – you don’t know whether to be more amazed or embarrassed. And you want to hear more, and you don’t. Or you do, but only in the way Katie wants to know. Katie’s my little sister and she’s eight, and at that age you want to hear about your parents’ marriage if, say, you’re looking at the photo album and can’t believe how stupid everyone looks, especially Philip who’s wearing the dorkiest suit and tie. And it’s okay then to ask, how did he propose and what did he say, and what did you, but not about love affairs with other boys, or even men – your own mother ! – especially when you get older and are seventeen, like I am now. The last thing you want to hear about then is your mother going out with someone when she was seventeen and breaking up with them and her whole world coming to an end, and yuk. It’s obscene, the whole thing.
‘Have you told Toni yet?’ Mum says.
‘Not yet.’
‘Shouldn’t you?’
‘It’s none of her business.’
‘It might help.’
‘It won’t. She’ll only be sympathetic, and things.’
‘Like me?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you don’t want that,’ she says. ‘You want to blame everyone and everything, and have them feel the same pain as you.’
‘That’s just stupid,’ I tell her.
And it is stupid, mothers can be so dumb sometimes, it’s amazing how they ever brought you up. And they’re so smug about it, and keep talking about how time heals and how you’ll see things differently and how you’ll even laugh about it in years to come, and that’s when I go totally hormonal because I know what Mum and Philip are doing, shaking their heads in their bedroom, and laughing and being sympathetic and that, and saying they’re feeling for me but actually playing Do you remember? and talking about themselves and their own stupid arguments and making up, and it’s all right for them because they’re old and hardly have any feelings left at all, but for someone like me who’s still young –
So I lock myself in my room for a whole day and won’t come out or unlock the door or talk to Mum, and instead just lie on my bed and decide to starve myself to death so then at least they’ll understand.
And I don’t even blame Philip so much – my Philip, I mean -and I even still like him and that, but I think he should have been more honest and owned up and told me, and he said it was only because he couldn’t, because he knew how much it would hurt me but that’s fake because he already was – hurting me, I mean.
Deep down I knew something was wrong and I kept making excuses to myself and saying he was just too busy and that’s why he couldn’t write so much or didn’t have anything to tell me on the phone like about the college and his friends there that I’d met and who were so funny and exciting and always doing crazy things and falling in love and having arguments and splitting up all the first year and I couldn’t wait to get there and be at uni myself, but those last two months he’d just tell me silly things like who won the cricket cup and what the Master said at the Commencement Dinner and I didn’t want to hear any of that. I wanted to know who he went to the dinner with and who was at his table because they really dress up and have candles and wine and a dance afterwards, and I had to drag it out of him, and he said this one and that one, and I knew he was holding something back and I kept saying, ‘Who else?’ and when he finally said, ‘Jenny,’ he said it in a funny way like he was really reluctant to say her name to me and it almost stuck in his mouth coming out, and I knew there was something wrong then. But it wasn’t till two weeks ago that he told me.
Though he didn’t really have to, because I’d worked it out by then. I just showed him a poem by Philip Larkin who’s my favourite poet and I partly liked him in the first place because Larkin’s a Philip too and has a poem about everything –
whatever you’re feeling you can find a poem about it by Larkin, and sometimes you think, wow, that’s really weird, it’s so true about what’s happening to you at that moment you think that he must know you or something even though he’s not an Australian at all but an English poet and dead. Anyway I just showed this poem to Philip when he came up for the weekend when he wasn’t supposed to but rang and said he had to, it was important, and the poem is called Talking in Bed and it’s about a relationship between two lovers that’s going wrong and they can’t talk or even be honest with one another any more and it starts:
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far …
And when Philip read it, he just said, ‘Yes.’ And I didn’t cry then. I was so calm because I couldn’t believe it was really happening. If anything I felt like laughing, it was so absurd, and I just said ‘Who?’ and he swallowed and said, ‘Jenny,’ and I found I knew that anyway.
And Jenny’s pretty and that – because I met her a couple of times in Canberra – and she’s sophisticated and doing English and Philosophy and can quote lots of people I’ve never even heard of, and I realize now that that frightened me as soon as I set eyes on her, and I must have worked out even then she was keen on Philip because I’ve been reading and reading all the books on the courses at Sydney Uni including existentialists like Camus and de Beauvoir and Beckett and even some postmodernists like Calvino and Handke and I liked them even though I found most of them hard and I hated Sartre, and I still like poems and proper stories best. Mr Jasmyne said I was falling behind in Physics because I was always gazing at books and I couldn’t expect to do well at school if I did that and wanted the marks to get into Medicine, and even Mum some mornings asked had I been reading all night, I was getting dark rings and maybe I should even start on a tonic, HSC was too much pressure and she wished they’d get rid of the whole competitive nonsense altogether.
But it wasn’t that competition that was worrying me at all -and I only begin to see it now – it must have been Jenny I was afraid of all along because I saw her and Philip talking together one night at a college ball, and someone took their photo with a flash as they were coming back to our table, and it sounds weird but I saw the photo, I mean I saw them as a photo even though, in reality, they were still walking back to the table. But in my mind – I don’t know if I was just blinded by the flash or what – I was seeing them still frozen in the instant the flash went off, and it was like the kind of photo kids pore over twenty years later and say, ‘Is that the first time you and Dad went out together?’, and I realized it was Jenny, not me, in the photo and they looked so perfect together, and were both blond and had blue eyes and were laughing and fitted together so perfectly, and I’m dark with black eyes and hair because of my father who’s Greek and I didn’t get any of Mum’s colouring at all, just her bones sometimes if I look in the mirror in a certain way, and looking at Philip and Jenny that night I’d already started to feel smaller and I hated being so dark, as if I was a Greek myself when I’m not at all, even though I lived in Greece in a village for five years.
And that’s where everything goes back to, maybe that night of the ball in Canberra, because all these people were nineteen and twenty, and they all welcomed me nicely and that, even Jenny, when I was a total stranger, but they were all talking about things like their twenty-firsts and what they were going to do and where they’d have them and who’d be flying to whose place – flying! just for a party – or driving their father’s car and could call into someone else’s place for champagne first, and saying that’d be just awesome about everything, and were so sophisticated and that, and I was sixteen and didn’t even drink.
‘I thought you and Toni never kept secrets from one another,’ Mum says.
‘We don’t.’
‘Well, then.’
And I’m partly being difficult because I know what Mum’s thinking – she’s thinking it’s better to talk than bottle things up, and all that blah. And sometimes, she’s also thinking, peers are better than parents because parents are too anxious and it’s easy for them to tell you you’ll get over it because you’re young, when you won’t and you aren’t – you’re seventeen and you’re never going to get any older than this because if you did, you’d be dead.
And the thing Mum doesn’t know about Toni and me is, yes, she’s right, we’ve always talked about everything, even the worst or meanest or dumbest things we’ve done, but since the time I started going out with Philip, and Toni started feeling left out -even though I always tried to include her and we went out in fours lots of times with a friend of Philip’s or she brought along a boy herself, she didn’t have to rely on Philip, there are always boys hanging around Toni – her hareem, she calls them, saying it like she was American – but in the last ten months – especially after Philip and I started sleeping together and wanted to be more private by ourselves – Toni and I haven’t talked nearly as much, or not about boys and love and sex and that, and we find – it’s mad – we’ve almost become shy with each other, if that makes any sense.
‘I’ll tell her in a while,’ I say to Mum. ‘In a few weeks when I don’t feel so upset.’
‘Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?’
What defeats the purpose, I think then, is mothers who are issued on the day you’re born with answers to every statement you’re ever likely to make, when you don’t live in Iraq or China or somewhere but in a country that’s supposed to have free speech.
‘After we come back from Alice Springs,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell her then.’
And that’s one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my life so far.
But, of course, I didn’t know that at the time. At the time – and even on the trip itself – I was still thinking the two biggest mistakes in my life were trusting Philip and sitting in the back seat of a bus with thirty kids all the way to Alice Springs, because next to the back seat is the toilet and as soon as the bus has left the school yard, the toilet door starts slamming and it doesn’t stop until every kid has gone at least once, and some have gone two and three times in the first hour. And they don’t only go one at a time, but get in there in twos and threes – the girls especially -and take ten minutes and seem to be doing more giggling than going and it’s obvious none of them really wanted to go at all, they’re just seeing what’s there and trying all the buttons and inspecting all the drawers and the little silver receptacles that hold tissues and tiny soap tablets – or did, an hour ago – and re-doing their hair and swapping hair clips, till Dave-and-it’s-my-bus-okay? goes totally spazzo and starts yelling over the microphone, ‘Can’t you kids wait?’, which doesn’t help at all because after that the kids that do need to go have to run the gauntlet of Billy Whitecross and his mates who are blocking the aisle with their legs and growling, ‘Can’t you kids wait?’ at them. I’ve already had to rescue one little girl who’s intimidated by them and is going back to her seat in tears, and I’m so angry by this stage that I’m ready just to break Billy Whitecross’s leg if he leaves it out blocking the aisle, but he sees me coming and the look on my face and at the last second withdraws it.
And this is a problem, I realize, because I don’t really know what my role is here. I’m a monitor and I’m supposed to look after the kids and make sure they don’t hurt themselves or get lost or homesick or anything – and I don’t mind that because I’ve done it all with Katie often enough – but I’m not a prefect and I don’t have any real power and I can’t punish the kids if they misbehave – and if you can’t punish someone for doing the wrong thing, then you don’t have any authority over them and you either have to go complaining to a teacher all the time like some complete sook of a touch judge running to the referee, or just take the law into your own hands and break their leg yourself.
And I’m grumpy about all that and unhappy without Toni and miserable about Philip and I don’t even feel like listening to music and if I read another Philip Larkin poem I’ll vomit.<
br />
We’re sitting at the lights in the main street of Bathurst by this time and I notice there’s a strange double reflection of my face, not just from the bus window but from the shop window in the street behind it. There are two quite distinct me’s but they’ve both got the same black, scowling, scratchy, sorry-for-myself expression on, and so I instinctively do what I do at home when I’m in a bad mood and catch sight in a mirror of just how ugly I am. I poke my tongue out at both these reflections, and I know this will make me feel better.
And it does – until I see the old lady in the pink raincoat who I hadn’t seen before but is only three feet away in one of those transparent plastic rain hats while she waits for her bus, and as we move off and I pull my tongue back in, her mouth opens and I can’t hear her because of the glass between us but I can read her lips easily and she’s looking just so shocked and saying ‘We-ll!’ and gazing after the bus as we pull away and I’m sure she’s taking note of the bus company and will write to them as soon as she gets home and the company will pass it on to Mr Jackson and they’ll all know who it was, all the lady has to say in her letter is the black girl with the ugly face in the last bus in Bathurst, and I realize then I’m no better than Billy Whitecross, and that just makes me maunder even more.
We detour to Cowra to see the Japanese Gardens and the old prisoner-of-war camp while Dimbo goes off to get petrol and discharge the waste tank of the bus.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids,’ he says to Miss Temple.
‘They’re merely excited.’
‘Is that what you call it?’
And Miss Temple’s right, it is a bit like that, they’re like dogs, especially puppies, sniffing out a new place and wanting to pee all round the edges of it if it’s going to be their home for the next week or so, though even before we get to Cowra, they’ve got bored with racing round, and are sitting in their seats and playing music and quietly punching one another, and some of them have eaten their entire supply of sweets and chocolate for the whole trip and are searching through the pockets of the seats in front of them for the sick bags.