Lessons from the Heart

by John Clanchy

  ‘I can’t leave her in a locked bus by herself,’ Dave says. ‘It’s dangerous, and it’s not allowed. It’s against company policy, I’d lose my job.’

  ‘Luisa?’ Mrs Harvey turns back to the girl again, and the way she sounds, it’s as if it was all suddenly Luisa’s fault where a minute ago it was her right. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Come on, Luisa,’ Sarah pleads. ‘I won’t be afraid if you come.’ The two of them are still holding hands.

  ‘I can’t,’ Luisa finally speaks.

  ‘Are you afraid?’ Sarah says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So am I,’ says Sarah, and again there’s a cry of ‘Chicken’ from some of the boys.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with being afraid,’ Mrs Harvey says, and I look quickly at her to see who it is she’s talking to.

  ‘My Dad’ll kill me,’ Sarah says, ‘if I don’t climb it.’

  ‘My Dad’ll kill me,’ Luisa says, ‘if I do.’

  ‘Christ,’ Mrs Harvey mutters under her breath. ‘Someone will just have to stay here with her.’

  ‘I’m easy,’ Mr Jasmyne says. ‘I’m a bit ambivalent about the Climb anyway.’

  ‘It can’t be one of the men,’ Mrs Harvey says. And looks at me, and I wonder what she’s seen in my face.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ I say.

  ‘Hurrah,’ the boys say. ‘Let’s go. Laura’s staying. Laura’s said she’ll stay.’

  ‘Laura?’ Mrs Harvey says. ‘Are you sure?’ But I can tell she’s so relieved, and has accepted already, and isn’t even going to argue with me.

  ‘Laur-ah!’ Toni says, pleading.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I say. ‘I’ll stay with Luisa.’

  ‘Thank you, Laura,’ Mrs Harvey says, ‘you’re a godsend. That’s settled, then. You’ll get another chance, I promise you. Now the rest of you –’

  Have had enough, it seems. Even Mr Prescott’s given way and is leading the charge up the first slope.

  ‘Stay together,’ Mrs Harvey calls after them. As they scatter.

  They pour like ants or insects up over the collar of the Rock, some of them still wearing their black and red beanies. Against the rock’s reddening surface, two pale ovals stand out – Toni’s and Sarah’s faces – pleading and regretful.

  ‘C’mon, Luisa,’ I say. ‘Let’s sit out in the sun, and watch them.’

  ‘What are you writing?’ Luisa wants to know.

  The sun’s hot now, and in this hard mid-morning light even the Rock becomes brown and boring, though the sky, where it meets the Rock, is the hardest blue I’ve ever seen.

  ‘I was trying to do a poem,’ I tell her, scratching out what I’ve already written. ‘For my journal.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘About all this.’ I wave my hand at the scene around us. ‘All these buses, the tourists, all those people on the Rock. On Uluru.’

  ‘How can you write a poem about that?’

  ‘You can write a poem about anything.’

  ‘Even if it’s boring?’ she says, and looks around, her feet swinging and scuffing in the dust below the wooden bench. She squints up into the sun. ‘I can’t even see Sarah now. They’ve all disappeared.’

  ‘They’re on the top by now.’

  ‘Is it about them? Your poem?’

  ‘No, I’ve told you. It’s about all these people, all the buses and trucks. You’ve got to try and find a different angle for a poem, so everything stays the same but you see it differently.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, I was trying to describe it like an invasion. You know, like an army invading the Rock.’

  Luisa looks at me. ‘I’m hot,’ she says.

  ‘Well, you’ve got your water-bottle.’

  ‘It’s the sun.’

  A steady trickle of climbers is coming back down now. Older tourists, sitting around us, burst into applause as the climbers step off the Rock onto level ground, some raising their hands or fists in salute. The climbers pass their camera back and forwards, taking turns to record one another’s moment of victory.

  ‘You’d think it was Everest,’ I say.

  ‘You sound jealous,’ Luisa says then. And it’s my turn to look at her.

  ‘Do you want to get in the shade?’ I ask her.

  ‘We could go back where we were. It was nice there.’

  ‘On the Mala walk, you mean?’

  ‘There were seats there, under the trees. You could write your poem.’

  ‘And what will you do?’ I say. And by this time we’re already moving onto the gravel path and into the shade of the gums. It’s the trees now that have all the colour, a fresh young green against the brown skin of the Rock. ‘You haven’t even brought a book.’

  ‘I can look at the birds and things. And the waterhole and the caves.’

  ‘Okay. I’m going to sit over there. You see where that bench is, near the black stains on the Rock?’

  ‘That’s where the waterfall comes down.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll be here, so just stay round here where I can see you. And don’t go in any of the places you’re not allowed. Where there’s notices, or wire up.’

  ‘What are they doing then?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Those people. Over there near the cave. They’re behind the wire.’

  ‘I can’t see anyone. And if they’re in there, they shouldn’t be.’

  ‘That’s cos they’re bending over. You’ll see them when they stand up. It’s three women, see?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There. Can’t you see?’

  And, finally, I can. It’s strange because you’d think their beanies would stand out straightaway, they’re so bright. Their beanies are black, with yellow and red bands. But they blend in somehow with the gums and the wattles, their black bark, and the Rock itself.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell her, ‘but they’re Aboriginal. They’re allowed. It’s their land.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think they’re collecting things. Maybe it’s firewood, or seeds or something, I don’t know. Maybe they’re just cleaning up.’

  ‘Can I go and see?’

  ‘Yes, but don’t annoy them, and don’t go in there. Luisa? You hear?’

  She goes down the path away from me, towards the women and the caves. I watch her stop by the wire fence and then stand looking in through the bushes and long grasses at them. One of the women looks up at her, and I see the white flash of her teeth before she bends again to do whatever she’s doing. Luisa stands, one hand gripping the top strand of wire. Lines of tourists, led by guides, file by on the path behind her. Even the birds have stopped singing now, it’s so hot.

  ‘Luisa,’ I call out, ‘don’t go any further.’ I can’t tell whether she hears me or not.

  In Year 11 Miss Temple made us do all these poems about Australia, and they were by Judith Wright – and I liked hers best, there was one about The Bull that made the hairs on my neck stand up – and other ones, I remember, were by Slessor and A D Hope, and Hope had a poem about how everyone lived on the coast because we’re afraid of the Centre, though the prophets, he said, don’t come from the coast at all, they come from the deserts. Or something like that.

  Anyway I was trying to do a poem like Larkin’s that had a pun on prophets and profits, but it was getting all mixed with other things, like the tourists being an army and invading the Rock, and I start to wonder now whether that’s the problem, and you should have only one main idea in a poem and not mix them up like I’m doing. So I uncrumple the pages and look at them again.

  Each morning

  As the sun strikes the Rock

  The battalions arrive

  The four-wheelers

  The armoured coaches

  The choppers

  Beating above our heads.

  The first troops pour out

  Banzai ! they cry, Banzai !

  Hauling themselves up

  Hand over hand


  While the drivers stand back,

  The guides, the guards,

  The prophets of the Rock …

  And I know this is not very good yet, even I can tell that, because the last bit’s just tacked on. It’s not like Larkin’s puns which you don’t see at all at first, they’re buried so deep in the poem itself.

  And it’s not true about the Japanese either because they wouldn’t say Banzai! like that, it’s a cliché, and I actually like them especially the Japanese girls. They’re supposed to be so conformist and behave like little dolls or robots or something, and they do, I suppose, because they’re always polite and courteous, where our kids run round and shout and swear and machine-gun Japanese civilians for just looking at the plants and things, but the girls are so pretty and sophisticated and smoke and have their hair dyed all sorts of colours. Not punk, though, because it’s always properly brushed and groomed and that, but greens and pinks and yellows as well as auburn and blonde, and their skirts – some of them – are so short, as short as Toni’s, and they wear these black fishnet stockings and Gucci leathers. I know it’s all yuppie fashion and just a cultural style, as Miss Temple called it, and a form of Asian-Occidental dialectic. Toni of course, had to go and say she thought it was deliberate. ‘There’s nothing occidental about it at all,’ she said. ‘They just like those clothes.’

  But I kind of know what Miss Temple’s saying and the thing is, they know all that too, the Japanese girls, I’m sure, and they wear these outfits like they’re sending themselves up and inviting people to laugh at them. Not at the Japanese exactly but at what Japanese are supposed to be in Westerners’ eyes, if that makes any sense, so if you do laugh at them you end up laughing at yourself. But even in their high heels and short skirts and things – and this is what impresses me most – they still go up the Rock, up Uluru, without even thinking. They’re so much tougher and less fragile and more durable than they look or behave.

  In the campground this morning, right next to us, there was this Japanese girl tenting by herself – which is strange, because you always think of them as a crowd – and she doesn’t look any older than I am, and while we’re still getting up in the dark to come to the Rock, she’s already dressed and has rolled up her tent by a lantern, and packed it away with all the rest of her equipment on the back of this huge trailbike that she can hardly push, it’s so big, and she’s got her backpack and water-bottles and plastic petrol containers and spares strapped to her bike, and it’s all so precise and neat, which comes, I suppose, from living in a small space. I watch her wheeling her bike across the lawn and down the road towards the campground exit, and I wonder why she’s doing that, instead of riding it, but then I realize – when she stops by the entrance and starts the bike – that it’s so she doesn’t annoy us with the noise, and then she steps – somehow – up over the saddle of the bike, but still so neatly, and settles her helmet and rides off in the direction of the Rock. And I just stand there, thinking about her and the red dust covering her bike, and watching the white, probing beam of her light until it disappears in the darkness.

  On the Rock, the climbers still look like ants, two steady streams passing one another now. I watch them for a while. There’s someone halfway down who’s wearing a bright pink top like Toni’s. Which brings me back. To Luisa.

  Who’s nowhere in sight.

  ‘Luisa?’

  It can’t be that long since I saw her.

  ‘Lui-sa!’

  There are people everywhere, sauntering this way and that on the path. She couldn’t have gone far. Where could she go to, out here?

  ‘Have you seen a little girl?’ I ask a man in a brown cotton jacket, who looks like a guide or a ranger. ‘She’s dark,’ I say, ‘an Indian. She was here with me. A little while ago.’

  ‘In a blue tracksuit?’ he says. ‘With a school badge?’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘It’s okay, slow down,’ he says, as calmly as anything. When I’m the one who’s responsible. ‘She’s back there, off the path a bit,’ he says. ‘I wondered when I saw her. She’s with you?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’m already running in the direction he’s pointing. ‘I’m supposed to be in charge of her.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he shouts again. ‘It’s too hot to run. She’s being looked after.’

  Looked after?

  ‘Luisa! Luisa, where are you?’

  ‘I’m here,’ a voice says. In the bushes by the second cave, Luisa’s standing with her arms stretched out before her. She’s loaded with what look like sticks and clumps of dead brush, but there are flowers – blue and bright purple – among them. The woman beside her is barefoot, her skirt threadbare, though she wears a heavy ski jacket and a coloured beanie on her head – still, in this heat. She has flies at the corners of her eyes, but makes no attempt to brush them away. ‘I’m helping,’ Luisa says.

  ‘I thought I told you …’ I start to yell at her. Then control myself. ‘I thought I said not to go away.’

  ‘You were doing your stupid poem.’

  The woman says something to her, takes the pile of brush and flowers from her, touches her on the shoulder.

  ‘You’re not allowed in there,’ I tell her.

  ‘She said I could,’ Luisa says back, looking up at the woman. And they’re both coming towards me now, the woman – whose legs are thin as stilts, though her hips and body seem heavy, swollen, in the thick blue jacket – stepping neatly between the circles of spinifex. Without looking. At one point she bends and lays down the bundle she’s taken from Luisa.

  ‘She helpin me all right, this one,’ the woman says, smiling, as she brings Luisa over to the fence. ‘She your sister?’ she asks. And I’m not sure if she’s talking to me or Luisa.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m supposed to be looking after her. All the others climbed the Rock, and we stayed down here.’

  The woman goes on looking at me.

  ‘You not Koori,’ she says.

  ‘No,’ I laugh, in shock. Me – Koori? I think to myself. Is she blind? But then I realize she isn’t asking me, she’s just stating it. ‘I’m sorry about Luisa,’ I say. ‘I hope she didn’t bother you. I’ll take her back now.’

  ‘Nala’s preparing for a ceremony,’ Luisa says. ‘Aren’t you, Nala? I was helping her with the sticks for the fire – and there are seeds and all this fruit – you never know it’s fruit if you just see it.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I tell her. ‘But you shouldn’t be in there.’

  ‘It’s tonight, in one of the caves, and it’s only the women, and they’ll have singing and there’ll be a fire, won’t there, Nala?’

  The woman just smiles and nods. She smiles whenever she looks at Luisa, but she frowns at me, and I wonder if it’s because I let Luisa wander around, when they’re probably so careful with their own children, especially when people keep stealing them. She’s looking at me now and twisting a piece of white string or cord through her fingers. I’m thinking about this, about the whiteness of the cord against the brown of her hand, but then I find she’s speaking to me directly. At last.

  ‘What one you bilong?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘All this pepil …’ She gestures with her head at a group of tourists going past. They’re Italians, I think, by their accents, though there are some Germans as well.

  ‘What country you bilong?’ the woman says.

  ‘My father’s Greek,’ I tell her. ‘He lives there, in Greece.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But I’m an Australian.’

  ‘You bilong this country?’

  ‘I suppose. I’ve never thought.’

  ‘I bilong this country,’ she says. And her gesture, with her hand circling lazily, then falling by her side, could mean anything. ‘Much better you bilong one country.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Everyone happier that way.’ She looks at the ground. She stands in a funny way, one hip pushed out in one direction, and her legs and the t
op of her body pointing forty-five degrees in the other so that you wonder she doesn’t topple over. I feel like balancing something, a box or something, on her hip, just to keep her upright. And then I wonder if she’s just recently been carrying something, or someone. I look round for a child, but there’s only Luisa.

  ‘So you live here?’ I say to the woman, stupidly. For something to say. ‘At the Resort?’ Knowing there’s nothing else on the maps out here.

  ‘Not Resort,’ she laughs. ‘This one better camp.’ She points with her lips.

  I look behind me. And this time it’s me that nearly topples over. ‘God. What’s that?’

  Cos plumb in the middle of the horizon behind me there’s a mountain range that I swear wasn’t there a moment before, or not a mountain range so much as these giant melons or pumpkins or gourds or something. Which are mauve, and alive, and which move, even as I look at them. The air out away from the Rock is shimmering now, and I have to shield my eyes to look properly.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask again.

  ‘That one Kata Tjuta,’ the woman says.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ is all I can say for a moment. And then when I’ve recovered. ‘You don’t mean you live there?’

  ‘No,’ the woman laughs. ‘That one.’ She points again.

  And then, on the other side of the road, through the trees I see a cluster of low roofs, and hear a mad barking of dogs, and wonder how I could have failed to see that, either, till now.

  ‘I wish we could come,’ Luisa says. ‘To the ceremony. But Nala says we can’t.’

  ‘You too liddle,’ the woman says. ‘When you grown a bit. Then you come.’

  ‘What about Laura, then? She’s not too young.’

  ‘Not Koori that one,’ the woman laughs. ‘If she Koori – even if she not Anangu – then she can come.’

  Which makes no sense at all.

  ‘But you can come,’ the woman says. ‘Nex year maybe. Cos you Koori one all right.’

  And I look at Luisa. But she doesn’t appear at all embarrassed or shocked by the woman’s mistake. She just says: ‘What’s the string for, Nala?’

  ‘That one?’ the woman says, holding up the wrist to which the cord is attached. One end of it is knotted and the knot lies firmly under two loops of the cord. As we watch, she takes the loose end of the string and strains it, until the material bites into her skin. The knotted end, though not tied, doesn’t move. ‘That one for ceremony,’ she says.