Lessons from the Heart

by John Clanchy

  ‘We’ll call back this evening, Billy,’ Mrs Harvey says. ‘To make sure you’re all ready for tomorrow.’

  ‘He’ll be waiting,’ Jindy says. ‘Billy’s not goin anywhere, he’s stayin right here with me, eh, Billy?’

  Mr Prescott trails out like a schoolboy after Mrs Harvey. And that’s another weird thing – I don’t think he and Toni have spoken two words together since it all happened. I’ve seen them pass one another in the campground, and you’d swear they never saw one another. The one time I did try to talk to her, she just said, ‘Dwayne?’ and looked puzzled as if I’d asked her about Derek, or Alistair, or any of the dozen boys she’d had a pash on and then dropped, and lost interest in totally, the day after she’d dated them.

  But this was different, this couldn’t just be brushed off, I knew, because of the accident, because of Billy and because everybody seemed to know, about her and Mr Prescott. ‘What were they doing,’ Luisa asked outright, ‘when you found them?’ And I remembered some of the kids had been watching when the three of us – Mr Prescott and Toni and I – came down the dune together. ‘I don’t know,’ I said off-handedly to Luisa. ‘They must have been doing something,’ she said. And Luisa’s like that, she can be so persistent. ‘Watching the sunrise, I suppose,’ I said to her, and expected her just to drop it. ‘They could have done that better from the Rock,’ she said, ‘where they were supposed to be.’ And I knew if she was thinking this, then it wasn’t just going to go away, simply because everyone wanted it to.

  ‘I’ll come back too, Billy,’ I say, and put the lollies I’ve brought on the cabinet beside his bed. ‘If you want.’

  ‘Course he wants,’ Jindy says. ‘Someone as pretty as you. She your girlfriend?’ she says to Billy, and he blushes. And nearly catches himself smiling.

  ‘Do you like it?’ I say to Jindy. ‘Nursing?’

  ‘Not night duty. No way.’

  ‘But the rest?’

  ‘Yes.’ The widest smile. ‘You thinking of becoming a nurse?’

  ‘I was,’ I say. And I find it odd hearing myself saying it this way. As if it was no longer true. And my mind has somehow changed itself without bothering to inform me. ‘Or Medicine at least.’

  ‘A doctor?’ Jindy says, her eyes widening. ‘Oooh –’ She flutters the fingers of one hand in mock astonishment or deference or something. ‘Country Practice, eh?’

  We both laugh.

  And I’d love to be a doctor here, if I was one, or a nurse,’ I find myself saying. ‘For a while anyway. It’s so –’

  ‘Yes,’ Jindy says. ‘This is good country, all right. Eh, Billy?’ she says. Including him, purposefully, in everything she does. And I wonder if she’s married, and if she was born here and has always lived here, but Mrs Harvey’s back, and annoyed, as if she’s lost something.

  ‘Laura? Come on, come on, girl. They’re waiting.’

  At Desert Park, at ten-thirty, there’s a live display of raptors feeding, and catching prey. A girl ranger whirls a lure on a long string and a hobby, which is a small hawk that can travel at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, swoops down above our heads and takes the lure from the air.

  ‘The hobby,’ another ranger explains, ‘thinks the lure’s another bird, a budgie. Watch it again,’ he cries. As the hobby comes in for another run.

  ‘Whoosh!’ the kids go, and are left gaping. It’s far too fast to photograph, even when they’re not watching the bird but are focused just on the lure. ‘Did you see that, Laura?’ Sarah, who’s next to me, asks.

  ‘Nearly,’ I say, and she looks at me. One seat beyond her, Luisa smiles, pulls a face.

  The display takes an hour – barn owls, black bustards that crack open emu eggs with rocks held in their beaks, falcons, fork-tailed kites, an eagle …

  ‘Now,’ says the ranger, ‘as you travel round the Alice, look out for these birds, and try and identify them. You’ll find them everywhere, but especially at the sides of roads where the dead animals are.’

  ‘So, what’s that?’ I say to Luisa, as we leave the nature theatre.

  ‘That one up there? That’s a kite,’ she says, as if she’s simply turning a page in a bird encyclopaedia, and the page is labelled. ‘A black kite.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I squint into the sun and wait for the bird to turn so I can get a look at its tail. ‘It looks like – what was the name of that other one? – a bustard to me.’

  ‘No, Laura,’ she says, moving on down the path with Sarah. A dozen kids have come in between us as I stand there still trying to identify the bird. Luisa’s voice comes back to me over the noise of the other kids: ‘It’s definitely a black kite.’ And the authority with which she says it, in her clear piping voice, really annoys me for a second.

  ‘Little smart-arse,’ I think, or maybe even say aloud. In fact I must say it aloud because Dave, who nearly runs into me where I’ve stopped on the path to look, says:

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh, Luisa. Little know-all.’

  ‘What are you so upset about?’

  ‘That bird up there – you see it?’

  Dave squints into the sun then. ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s a bustard, isn’t it?’

  ‘Could be. I’m not –’

  ‘Luisa says it’s a black kite, a fork-tailed kite.’

  ‘Then it’s a black kite,’ he says.

  And that makes me annoyed with him, then. ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘I can’t really. At this distance. My long sight’s no good, and I’m better on plants and animals anyway. But one thing I do know, never argue with a Koori about birds. They’ll always be right.’

  ‘A Koori?’ I say, and I wonder if there’s something gone totally wrong with my eyesight. ‘Luisa – a Koori?’

  ‘Well, what did you think she was?’ he says, and waits by the side of the path. More kids stream through between us.

  ‘I don’t know.’ The bird has disappeared from view now. ‘I thought she was maybe Indian, or Malaysian or something.’ And I must look really stupid or flustered or something, because Dave says:

  ‘Don’t take it to heart, luv. It’s an easy enough mistake.’

  ‘But she’s so –’

  ‘What?’ He waits again, his head on one side.

  ‘Black,’ I hear myself say.

  ‘Black?’ He laughs. And I can’t believe I’ve said this. But Dave just says, ‘Yes, she is, isn’t she? Most of the Kooris round Sydney are much lighter. Maybe she comes from up North somewhere.’

  ‘Her father – Luisa said he came from Lismore.’

  ‘Or further than that,’ Dave says. And I’m grateful for that, as I follow him down the path. And this is something I’m learning, this is the thing, people can actually turn out to be anything …

  In the afternoon we go out to the McDonnell Ranges, to Ormis-ton Gorge. The ghost gums are so white against the redness of the gorge, so intense in the three o’clock sun, that you just know the light emerges from them.

  ‘Do you think anything’ll happen?’ I say to Miss Temple, as we leave the waterhole and climb up into the gorge. ‘To Toni?’

  ‘It has,’ she says.

  And I know why Miss Temple’s so angry and doesn’t want to discuss it. It’s because she was the one who supported Toni, who went out on a limb for her – along with Mr Prescott – when none of the other teachers wanted Toni to come. Because they thought she was as big an airhead as her mother. And now, not only has Toni let Miss Temple down, she’s made her judgement look bad. To say nothing of Mr Prescott.

  ‘The best thing Toni can do,’ Miss Temple says, ‘is leave school.’

  ‘You mean, change schools?’

  ‘No, leave school. Altogether. She’s smart enough.’ Miss Temple’s puffing and I can’t tell if it’s the climb up the gorge or just anger that’s doing it. ‘But Toni’s no longer capable of getting anything out of school. She should get out into the world, and sort herself out. And then maybe later on …’
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  Which is the opposite of what Mum thinks. She thinks if Toni can just hang on and finish the HSC, then she can drop out for a while – do something else altogether – but still keep her options open. But I don’t know enough about all that to argue with Miss Temple. And besides Mr Jasmyne has caught up with us and has something urgent to say.

  ‘That tor on the left there,’ he says pointing, when I don’t even know what a tor is, whether it’s a plant or a bird, or what. All I can see are rocks. ‘See how the water’s worked the face of it?’

  And I look, but it’s Miss Temple’s face that’s doing most of the working, and I hear her say: ‘Yes, that’s very interesting, Gerald. Now why don’t you do something useful and help me across some of these boulders?’

  And I drop back then and let them go ahead, with Miss Temple’s voice sounding cranky and grumbling against the walls of the gorge. The tors. And it is hot, and I wonder if it’s that, or if they’ve quarrelled again. And whether it’s about facts, or something important.

  * *

  It’s nearly dark, and we’re melted and exhausted again as Dave drives us back into Alice Springs. To the campground, and our last barbecue.

  ‘Can’t we just get fish and chips?’ a boy near the front asks.

  ‘Fish? In Alice Springs?’ Miss Temple says.

  ‘You get great fish here,’ Dave says. ‘Barra from the Roper, from Kakadu.’

  ‘See?’ the boy says. ‘Can’t we?’

  ‘It says barbecue on the program,’ Miss Temple tells everyone, as we pull up at the lights next to the KFC. ‘And so barbecue it’ll be.’ And she’ll never go to another one in her life, her voice says.

  ‘What about chicken, then?’ one of the girls wants to know. Gazing at the huge red and white sign. ‘K-F-C,’ she reads, with maximum intonation. ‘Like that man over there.’

  We all look, and an Aboriginal man comes out of the restaurant and pulls a drumstick out of a roll of grease-proof paper. And begins to eat it, letting the paper fall to the concrete driveway behind him.

  ‘How come …’ Kirk Joliffe says, ‘Aboriginal people just litter like that and leave such a mess?’ Though it’s really the drumstick Kirk’s whining about, as the man bites into it. ‘If they think the Earth’s so sacred?’

  ‘You deal with that, Gerald,’ Miss Temple says in a voice that says she, and her feet, have had more than enough.

  ‘Well …’ says Mr Jasmyne, who never seems to get tired or ruffled or sick of explaining. In fact he’s an explaining machine. If he wasn’t so skinny, he could be a CD-ROM all by himself. ‘If you’re nomadic,’ he says, ‘if you’re a hunter-gatherer society …’ And the kids all groan, but the lights have changed and Dave puts the bus into gear and it grinds its way, sounding tired itself, across the intersection. ‘Then,’ Mr Jasmyne says, ‘you use what the environment provides, and you dispose of it, you give it back to the environment, and move on.’

  ‘How come …’ Kirk’s voice says again, and the interior of the bus is quite dark now. ‘How come, if you’re a hunter-gatherer society, you eat at KFC?’

  ‘Yeah,’ a group of kids say, and the crankiness spreads, and even Mr Jasmyne gives up.

  It’s only when we get to the airport and unpack our bags from the bus that it actually sinks in that Dave’s not coming with us.

  ‘But won’t you be lonely?’ Luisa asks him. ‘Driving your empty bus back by yourself?’

  ‘Lonely?’ Dave jokes. ‘Without you lot?’

  It’s even caught me by surprise, and I’m the one who’s arranged a thankyou card for him and got all the kids on our bus to sign it. Plus Miss Temple and Mr Jasmyme. Most of the kids have just written a couple of words like Thanks, Dimbo or Great trip and signed their names, though some have put Jumbo or even Dumbo to show how much they’ve really liked him, and someone’s drawn a picture of him with a fat belly in a stripey blue and white apron standing next to his barbecue trolley, and a little girl in front of it saying Make mine fish! But none of it’s meant nastily, and Dave knows that, and mostly the kids are just excited about getting on the plane and going home and being with their mothers and fathers and their families again, though mostly their TVs.

  ‘At least,’ Dave says, ‘I’ll be able to turn my player up and listen to some decent music for a change.’

  ‘Oh, Slim Dusty,’ the kids cry, and hold their noses.

  ‘Don’t you find it lonely, though?’ I ask him, as he gets my pack out from the luggage space under the bus. ‘Driving all that way by yourself?’

  ‘Ah, but that’s the secret, I’m not. Or not yet anyways.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m driving to Adelaide first, not Sydney. Have bus,’ he slaps the steel door of the empty luggage vault shut, ‘will travel. I’m owned by the company, you see. I go where they send me.’

  ‘But who decides that?’

  ‘A little man in Sydney with a map and a ruler and a petrol pricing list and a calculator.’

  ‘So, you don’t see your family for weeks, then?’

  ‘Twelve days, or so. I’ll do two runs from Adelaide to Alice and back, then take a coachload from Adelaide to Sydney.’

  ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘It’s modern business, luv. It’s how it works. But don’t start feeling sorry for me. I like driving, I like this country, and the other drivers and I’ll play some cards on the stops down and back up. And the passengers will be tourists,’ he says, waving as the last of the kids enters the airport lounge. ‘Not twelve-year-olds.’

  ‘Were we that bad?’

  ‘You, luvvy, were the pleasantest passenger I’ve ever had.’

  And I look at him quickly, because he often jokes like this. But he’s not. And I don’t know what to say, because it’s the sort of thing Mum’s always saying and I expect it from her, but not someone like Dave, who’s a man for a start and a fat bus driver, but he says this in the most easy and graceful way, and I realize I’m not really grown-up because what I want to say is, ‘And you’re the nicest bus driver I’ve ever met,’ but I can’t, how could you, it’d sound yuk -. So, all I say is, ‘Thanks, Dave,’ and smile and take my pack and head towards the glass doors, but I’m feeling suddenly much better and even light-headed, and go to look for Toni.

  Toni’s hardly said anything to me since we got to the Alice -and even I call it that now instead of Alice Springs and it’s not just being one-up on account of that’s what the locals call it and if you do, everyone will think you’re local too – especially the tourists, which is actually what you are yourself but you’d rather everybody thought you weren’t – but it’s also making what Miss Temple calls a statement of attachment. Because I feel more attached here than even in Sydney, and this is a real shock because only twenty-four hours ago, talking to Mum, I was thinking Sydney was the only place I wanted to be.

  And Sydney is pretty and has the harbour and I like it and that, but I’ve never felt it was really home after Greece, and the village. But here, I do feel at home, which is weird, because I’ve only just got here, and it isn’t Greece. And it’s the light, I think, especially in the morning, shining on the rocks of the Gap, the sand in the river bed, and all the young gums which are so green. And I can see that green’s not a colour now, it’s a category, and there must be as many greens as there are plants, whereas before, in Sydney, I’d always thought green was just green and all the rest were just shades of the same thing, like light green or dark green. And I’d tried, once, to explain this to Toni, but she just looked at me as if I’d had a mental spazz.

  And it’s not that she’s angry with me so much – I always know that because she yells and spits and swears and gets it off her chest and I never worry then, because I know in two minutes or five she’ll be laughing and hugging me, or throwing something over me, or doing something equally stupid. This time it’s more that she’s withdrawn, gone off into part of herself, and pulled up the drawbridge behind her. She’s even polite and careful in what she says, which w
orries me, because she’s never been careful about anything in her life. And I don’t know if she’s doing this because she’s injured inside or something, or if she’s made up her mind about something, and just doesn’t want me to know. But it hurts, especially now when she does things like getting her seat booking without even waiting for me, and I’d just assumed we’d be together, like we always are. But when I ask her, she’s already booked next to Jamie Turner, who’s a dill anyway and she normally can’t stand him, but now she’s talking and making up to him and he can’t believe what he’s hearing, and if this goes on for the whole plane trip, then there won’t be an empty sick bag left by the time we arrive and Jamie will get off the plane thinking he’s not a dill after all when he actually is.

  And all the lightness I’d felt after Dave has evaporated now, and it gets worse when I look across the airport lounge and I see Mr Prescott standing by himself and looking lost and glancing occasionally in the direction of Toni and Jamie, who are laughing and talking louder than anyone else in the place. And with nearly ninety kids screaming and the boys running around through the plants with their arms out and making plane noises and machine-gunning Japanese again, that’s saying something.

  And seeing Mr Prescott’s face and how forlorn and downcast he is, and then seeing Toni and how – vivid – she is, and even vivacious, it occurs to me for the first time in my life that Toni isn’t a nice person. But as soon as I think this, I don’t, because I know she is. She’s just flipped. Or something. Or the sun’s got into her head and frizzled her brains, or the Rock has, or something.

  Which makes me look for Billy. And I see him seated among a cluster of other kids, his leg in plaster and stuck out in the aisle, and I wonder how he’s going to manage that on the plane. He looks better here, among all his mates again, but he’s still quiet, and pale, and he just sits there, not reacting, while the kids sign his cast and draw faces and rude words on it.

  But I still can’t get over the look on Mr Prescott’s face, and no one’s going near him, not just Toni, but not even the other teachers, where – before the trip – he was the most popular teacher in the school, especially with the girls. But now it looks like there’s an invisible wall around him, holding everyone off, and it’s like he’s an army going home defeated. And has committed atrocities. And I’m just about to go over and talk to him, because there’s no use talking to Toni at the moment – she’d probably ask who I was – when Mrs Harvey calls me.