Lessons from the Heart

by John Clanchy

  ‘Though it’s not really age, it’s more having the same interests.’

  ‘Same interests? Lolly, what are you talking about? You know you sound just like your mother sometimes. Aren’t you angry, for Chrissake?’

  ‘At Philip, you mean?’

  ‘Who else, you idiot?’ she says. And Toni, I realize then, is the one who’s angry. And she can never stop herself from showing it when she is. She always has to do something. So now she jumps down off the concrete block she’s sitting on and takes me by both my hands and pulls me down off mine, and says ‘C’mon’ and stamps – she doesn’t just walk but she stamps – off across the black, crusted mud and salt, leaving these great indentations from her joggers behind her.

  ‘Angry at him,’ she says again. ‘At that gutless little prick, Philip Gardner. And I bet he has got a small prick. Well,’ she says, ‘hasn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You what? Lolly, what are you talking about, you’ve been bonking him for nearly a year.’

  ‘Yes, but Philip’s the only boy I’ve …’

  Toni stops and comes back towards me a few paces then. She looks at me and bursts out laughing. ‘Oh, Lolly, you’re so sweet.’

  ‘Why? What?’

  ‘I didn’t mean you had to do a personal inventory. I just meant – Oh, it doesn’t matter.’

  Her anger’s gone and she’s still laughing as she grabs me by the hand and pulls me after her, and we have this crazy, shrieking race over the flats, and I see all the kids turning their heads and then shouting and cheering us on, ‘Toni, Toni,’ they’re calling, ‘Laura, Go, Laurrra!’, their shouts ringing like the cries of gulls in the wind, and we run and run over the broken and loose ground, and it’s hard to get any firm footing at all, but for fifty metres we both really mean it and want to beat one another, but it’s so hard to run on this shifting ground that we’re soon gasping for breath, and I’m getting a stitch and a pain in the stomach with all the air I’m gulping, and I go to cry ‘Toni, that’s enough,’ but I see she’s already stumbling and falling, and we end up face down, gasping and howling with laughter like madwomen, our faces in the black salt while the gulls wheel and screech above us and the kids come running from all directions. And just before they reach us, Toni lifts her face from the ground and I’d expected her to be still laughing and panting. But she isn’t.

  ‘Did you let him fuck you?’ she says instead.

  ‘Ton-i,’ I say, in protest.

  ‘Did you? When he came to tell you to take a running jump, did you feel so sorry for the poor little bastard, at how upset he was, that you let him fuck you?’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  ‘You did, didn’t you?’ she says. And then the kids are here, and leaping and falling all over us.

  ‘The best thing that can happen for Toni,’ Mum said to me once, ‘is that she gets to finish her HSC, and then leaves school and home at the same time. I just hope she can hang on for that long.’

  This happens a few weeks before we go on the trip to Alice Springs. Mum and I are in the kitchen, preparing dinner, and we both love this time – even when we’re arguing – because it’s just the two of us together again, as it was when we came back from Greece and had no one else and shared everything then, and it’s quiet and Philip’s not home yet and acting the man of the house and hogging Mum’s attention, and Thomas is sleeping, and I don’t have any idea where Katie is. Probably watching TV.

  ‘I just hope she can last that long,’ Mum says. ‘And finish school, I mean.’

  ‘Toni’s all right. She’s just –’

  ‘No, she’s not all right. She does crazier things every time I see her or hear about her.’

  ‘Mum, it’s just Toni, her nature. It’s just her high spirits.’

  ‘Like the gin, you mean?’

  ‘That was only one night. And it was the school ball.’

  ‘Darling, I’m not being a wowser. I love gin myself, you know that. It’s just that I’m worried for her.’

  ‘Because she drinks too much one night at a dance and gets sick?’

  ‘She’s lucky if that’s all she got.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I say, and walk – Mum would say flounce – to the other end of the kitchen. But not out of it. I’m worried about Toni too.

  ‘Darling, there’s no good getting upset with me. And who was that creep she had with her on the weekend?’

  ‘That was Derek.’

  ‘Well, Derek is on something. And it isn’t eau-de-Cologne. I don’t think he’s washed in a month.’

  ‘Do you know who you sound like?’

  ‘And he couldn’t keep his hands out of Toni’s pants for more than five minutes at a time. Even while she was introducing him to me.’

  ‘Grandma Vera.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s who you sound like. Miriam, you’re ruining those girls – they’ll grow up without a single shred of decency to clothe themselves with.’

  Mum looks at me, as if she’s about to snap back. But, after a second or two, while she searches my face and I have no idea what she’s thinking, she just says quietly:

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘No,’ I say. And then we can laugh.

  ‘Well, do you like Derek?’ she says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘But, Mum, Derek’s not serious.’

  ‘I know. No one ever is. Tell me, does Toni ever go out with the same boy twice?’

  ‘Now you’re being stupid,’ I say. ‘Of course she does.’

  ‘Okay.’ And then Mum does this thing she always does, which really gets on your nerves, and that is asks you for examples when you’re only trying to make a general point for God’s sake. ‘So who?’ she says. ‘Precisely?’

  ‘Lots of them.’

  ‘Name one.’

  ‘Paul Cosolimo.’

  ‘Paul Coso-limo?’ she says, and I hate the way she emphasizes certain things when she thinks she’s got you beaten in an argument. ‘Little Paul Cosolimo? When did Toni Darling ever – ?’

  ‘In Year 10,’ I say. ‘They were an item for ages.’

  ‘Oh yes, and what’s ages? Two weeks? A month? And Year 10?’ Mum just can’t stop this stupid emphasizing, and it really annoys you after a while. The only thing is, she’s right, and it’s a thing I’ve wondered about myself sometimes. Toni goes out with a boy once – I don’t hear about anybody else but this one boy for days – she’s mad for him and all that – and then the day after, the boy’s as keen as ever but Toni doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. ‘He’s just so immature,’ she says, ‘a kid,’ or not her type after all or something, and she’s got her eye on someone else. She must have gone out with half the boys in the suburb, not just our school, but Grammar, and boys who are working even. And not just boys, but men sometimes, and they can’t all be immature, or she’d be dating Mr Kovacs or hanging round the nursing homes, or something.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mum says, ‘Paul Cosolimo aside, I’m still worried about Toni. Don’t you see, all this messing about instead of studying – the drinking, the hot cars, a different boy every time I see her.’

  ‘You think she’s a bike?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. All I’m saying –’

  ‘I’m sure she doesn’t sleep with half the boys she pretends she does. She’s just partying and making a noise.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  ‘What, partying?’

  ‘No, the noise. She is making a noise, and to me it sounds like distress. And I just think something’s got to give, to happen soon.’

  ‘Do you think it’s me and Philip?’

  ‘You? ’

  ‘Cos we’re together all the time, and it always used to be me and Toni.’

  ‘No,’ Mum says. ‘Or yes and no. No, because I don’t really think you’re the cause at all – it was going to happen anyway. But yes, just now, if you weren’t with Philip, maybe …’

 
‘I think it is.’

  ‘But, darling, who knows? How can you ever tell?’

  ‘We don’t talk like we used to. Not about real things. If it’s about boys, it’s just about how this one’s a great spunk, or so-and-so’s a great kisser or he likes this music or that – you know. But actual –’

  ‘Feelings?’

  ‘Yes. We don’t –’

  ‘It would have to happen this year, wouldn’t it?’ Mum says, and she keeps coming back to this. ‘If only she’d been able to get through the year.’

  ‘She still might get through, it’s only the end of March. The year’s just started.’

  ‘Darling, you don’t believe that? She can’t be doing any work. Or nothing like you are.’

  ‘I don’t do that much.’

  ‘You work like crazy, and I’m very proud of you because you do it all of your own free will. And you fit in your music, and sport and Philip.’ She stops.

  ‘Do you think Toni’s a bike?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know what to think. Things are so different. Everything’s changed so much in such a short time.’

  ‘A slut?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘It’s what you meant.’

  ‘I just meant it’s hard then to get back people’s respect. Once you’ve lost it.’

  ‘Even if she isn’t one?’

  ‘It can be even harder then. If she isn’t one, but people –’

  ‘Boys?’

  ‘If they think she is.’

  ‘Cos she’s just holding out on them in particular?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you didn’t mind when I started sleeping with Philip.’

  ‘Darling, that’s a completely different case, and you know it.’

  ‘If Toni’s Mum and Dad thought she was having sex, they’d beat her black and blue. But with me and Philip, you approved it.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You said we could, it was our decision – if we thought the time was right and we were ready for it.’

  ‘I said I wouldn’t stop you. You were the one who asked me if you should, remember. I didn’t come up to you and say, “Hey, isn’t it time you started sleeping with Philip Gardner?” So, be fair. Let’s discuss it if you want to, but be fair. Do you want to discuss it?’

  ‘No.’

  Toni, of course, had been appalled when I originally told her I’d asked Mum’s advice – about me and Philip, I mean. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ she shrieked. ‘I know Miriam’s modern and that, but she’s still your mother. You’re not telling me you discussed sex with your mother? Laura, it’s obscene.’ Which only shows Toni doesn’t really understand Mum and me, how we discuss everything. And how different we are, I suppose, from her and her own mother. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘what would mothers know about sex, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Darling?’ Mum says now and stops whatever else she’s doing. ‘Do you regret it – the decision you made? Are you regretting it?’

  ‘No,’ I say, and then think for a moment. ‘Or only for Toni.’

  ‘Laura, you can’t start feeling guilty about that now. And Toni can’t live her life through you. All you can do, all either of us can do, is help her. What’s that dreadful phrase everybody uses nowadays? – be there for her, when she needs us.’

  ‘I know. I worked that out.’

  I plump myself down on a stool next to the bench where Mum is working and watch her cut up the vegetables. I like watching her hands, seeing the shallots and capsicum and lemon and garlic part under her sharp knife, the freshness of the flesh inside, smelling the sharp scents that are released into the air. ‘And,’ I say to her, ‘you did the right thing.’

  ‘I did? That’s a change,’ she says. And then: ‘The right thing about what, precisely?’

  Precisely is one of Mum’s favourite words. She’s not like other people where you can get away with murder by vagueing things up. She always wants to know where you’ve been, why, with whom, till when. Precisely.

  ‘The right thing about me and Philip.’

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m glad.’

  * *

  ‘If you’re absolutely sure, darling,’ Mum had said. I think she’d agonized over the whole thing.

  ‘You don’t want me to.’

  ‘Is that what you want me to say – that I’m against it, I forbid it? So you can fight me over it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, what’s the problem? I’m agreeing with you. I’m saying if you and Philip feel you’re ready for it, and you’re not being pressured into it …’

  ‘Philip’s always been ready.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mum said. ‘That’s how it works.’

  ‘And I don’t want not to any more.’

  ‘That sounds a slightly negative way of putting it.’

  ‘All right,’ I said then. ‘Mum, I’m dying to do it with him. I love him and –’

  ‘Okay, okay, so what are we arguing about?’

  ‘You don’t want to hear about it.’

  ‘Darling, there is nothing I won’t discuss with you. Ever. We decided that a long time ago, remember?’

  ‘But I just feel –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Deep down you don’t really want it. You’re saying yes because I want it and you’ve always been modern and a feminist and that, but actually you don’t want me to. You keep saying “If you’re absolutely sure,” but how can you be absolutely sure about anything? And I get worried then, because that means you’re against it.’

  ‘Does it really feel like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, and wandered about with her hair in her hands. Her hair was longer then, but she’s swimming again now, after having Thomas, and it’s short and spunky, like Toni’s, only without the fringe. But back then it was a birdsnest, and it was like she was trying to pull owls or something out of it.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said, at the end of all this pacing while I just sat on my bed and watched her. And I found I didn’t care about me or Philip or whether she agreed or not – because I’d decided to do it anyway – I was just anxious for her, and hadn’t meant to worry her like this. And I hadn’t expected her to be like this, I suppose. It just wasn’t that big a deal – for me anyway. I mean, it was a big deal but I loved Philip and I believed he loved me. So for me it all felt right, it was simple. World War III or something wasn’t going to break out just because I couldn’t play Mary in the school play any more.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘it’s not you I’m really thinking about, it’s myself, or it’s myself in you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I said, but she wasn’t listening.

  ‘Who knows,’ is what she said. ‘Maybe I’m even a little jealous.’

  ‘Of me?’

  ‘I’ve watched you for so long.’

  ‘I’m only sixteen.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. And you can’t know at sixteen.’

  ‘Just because you were nineteen or twenty and an old maid,’ I said, and she smiled at that because we’d had this discussion before, ‘by the time you and Dad …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and she literally shook herself. ‘It was a different age, and of course for us, there was religion as well.’ She said religion like it was a disease or something.

  ‘Grandma Vera was religious,’ I said.

  ‘All that guilt and worrying about sin and punishment. Christ, I hate to think about it now. But it was such a big issue for us.’

  ‘Sex?’

  ‘The last thing I want is to see you go through any of that.’

  ‘But you still think I’m wrong, and I’m not ready?’

  ‘Darling, I trust you and I trust your judgement. When is a person ready, and how would you ever know? Besides, I’m sure sixteen today is at least equal to twenty when … Isn’t that stupid,’ she interrupted herself, ‘I was going to say “when I was your age”. You see how confused you’ve got me.’


  ‘Are you upset? Really upset?’

  ‘No, sweetheart.’ She came and plonked herself on the bed beside me, and sometimes – not always, because she’s still my mother – we can lie around and talk as freely as me and Toni. Nearly. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘I want everything to be right and perfect for you. But that is about me and not about you, isn’t it? And the only person who can tell what’s right for you is you.’

  ‘So, you do approve?’

  ‘Does it matter to you if I approve?’

  ‘Yes. It does.’

  ‘Then,’ she sat up and kissed me briskly on the forehead, ‘I approve.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, I approve.’

  Though it still sounded to me as if she was convincing herself.

  ‘Just so long as …’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘So long as what?’

  ‘It’s safe, you’re safe. Just so long as you know how to be safe?’

  ‘M-um,’ I said then. ‘C’mon. This is the twenty-first century, remember?’

  ‘Yes.’ She sighed, and it was weird but something in her voice made me feel sad for her. But then, just as she was leaving my room, as if it was a total after-thought or something, she turned and said: ‘Philip and I are taking Katie and Thomas away for the weekend. So the house,’ she said – and, just for one second, it might have been Toni talking, the way she flicked up her brows and weighted each word – ‘will be entirely yours.’

  And by the time they got back on Sunday evening, Philip and I – after the first couple of tries which were painful and over in seconds and I was beginning to think I might become a nun if only I could figure out how to become a virgin again – had started to get it and it was lovely and exciting and everything, and we did it I don’t know how many times after that, not just in my room but in the lounge room, the shower, the kitchen, and had breakfast in bed for the whole of Sunday and only stopped because I was getting too sore.

  And when they got here Mum had to come and find me because I didn’t know how to face her or what I should look like, if I should be smiling and happy, like I felt, or just be normal and pretend nothing had happened and complain about the cat coming in and out all night so I didn’t get any sleep and that’s probably why I looked so slack and worn out. Anyhow, Mum just said, ‘Well?’ And I couldn’t help it, but I couldn’t look at her, I just blushed and got shy – with my own mother – and looked at the floor like a four-year-old, or something. But somehow she must have known what I was feeling because she just kissed me and said, ‘Good, I’m glad.’