by John Clanchy
‘It’s all right, Laura. It’s all right, calm down.’ And she must understand how I’m feeling, and I wonder if she can actually see me with my hand holding my stomach down to stop it from coming up through my throat. ‘I only said they asked me for it. I didn’t say I’d given it to them. I wouldn’t do that, you know that.’
‘Yes, I know.’ But I say this so softly she doesn’t seem to hear me.
‘In fact,’ she says, ‘I suspect Mr Murchison didn’t want to see it. The others were much keener, but while I was there he wrote something on a pad and passed it across to them.’
‘What did it say?’ I ask her, remembering the desert circles and the dots on his pad.
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t read it. But they stopped asking after that. I really don’t think he wanted to see it at all.’
‘Because he thought there was nothing in it?’
‘Because he thought there was.’
And then, while I’m still trying to work this out, Miss Temple says: ‘In the end, he just wanted to know whether, in my judgement, as a professional, there was anything in the journal that was material.’
‘Material?’
‘To Mr Prescott and Toni. Anything incriminating.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘And I told him there wasn’t.’
We both wait then, listening to each other’s breathing.
‘And did he believe you?’ I say, when I can’t stand the silence any longer.
‘He accepted me at my word. But he did ask Mr Jackson to write down precisely what I’d said.’
‘Oh.’
‘I am right, aren’t I, Laura?’ Miss Temple says then, and her own voice is very careful. ‘If I’d looked at the pieces you hadn’t highlighted, the bits not for assessment …’
‘But you promised you wouldn’t.’
‘I’d just assumed you wouldn’t have given the thing to me in the first place. If there was anything incriminating.’
Down at the back of the house, I hear Thomas waking, crying, and then Mum’s heels on the polished floor, heading for his room.
‘Laura?’ this voice on the phone is saying.
‘I just knew you wouldn’t look at anything else.’
‘How? How could you possibly know that?’
‘Because I trusted you not to.’
Thomas’s crying stops, and I know then that Mum’s picked him up.
‘You can be an infuriating girl,’ Miss Temple says slowly. ‘You do know that?’
‘Yes, Miss Temple.’
13
‘Was it that bad?’ Mum wants to know. We’re out in the sitting room in Grandma Vera’s flat now, and we often come here – not just because of Grandma, who’s been dead for ages now, but mostly because of the sun in her big picture window. Mum’s just finished feeding Thomas, and he’s lying on his back on her lap and looking up at her, watching her face. And occasionally he becomes aware of me and rolls his head towards me and looks at me so enquiringly, so unblinkingly, and so silently, I have to say something, his gaze is that unnerving.
‘Yes.’ The sound of my voice startles him, and breaks his stare.
‘Would it have been better if I’d been there with you?’ Mum says.
‘Yes.’
Thomas curls the fingers of each hand round Mum’s index fingers. They play a game then, pulling back and forwards on each other’s fingers.
‘But you don’t want to talk about it?’
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ I say, and I hear how scratchy and cranky my voice sounds, and it’s not Mum’s fault, I realize, and I do wish she’d been there with me, or even Philip, just to take the smarmy look off their faces, but it was my decision, I was the one who told them not to come. But what’s worrying me right now is Toni, and what if she really has left school, because she’s been moody and withdrawn ever since we got back from the trip, and hasn’t done any work at all but just makes trouble in class and is away half the time pretending she’s sick, and when I have tried to talk to her, she’s just acted strange and depressed.
‘It’ll be all right, Toni,’ I’d said to her once after we’d been back for a week. ‘Nothing’s happening. Everyone’s forgotten about it.’
‘I know,’ is all she replied. ‘That’s the problem.’
‘Maybe I was wrong about Toni,’ Mum says, and she’s still playing this stupid pulling game with Thomas, and not looking at me at all. ‘Maybe Miss Temple was right all along, and it is sensible for Toni to leave school – for the moment anyway – if she’s so unhappy there. I mean, drifting through the year, failing her HSC – that’s not going to do anything for her confidence, is it?’
‘But what will she do? If she’s not at school?’
‘What will she do?’ Mum says. ‘Or what will you do without her?’
I don’t answer this. But Mum’s right, if I’m honest about it. School without Toni just makes no sense in my head. Toni and I have been at school together for ever. I’d always assumed we’d go to uni together. She can’t just go off now.
‘I suppose she’ll get a job,’ Mum says, never taking her eyes from Thomas’s face. ‘Just like anyone else, when they leave school. Toni’ll never find it hard to get work.’
‘Yes, but what will she do?’
‘For a job, you mean?’ And this time it’s Mum who’s startled.
‘No, do,’ I say. ‘Who will she have as friends? What will she do – after work, or at night? If she doesn’t have school? Or homework and things?’
‘I expect she’ll adjust. Like anyone else. She’ll still have you. Her family, her friends.’
‘Her family? And what friends? There’s only me.’
‘There always seem to be lots of boys.’
‘What – that she goes out with once? There’s hardly anyone left as it is.’
‘She could always start at the beginning,’ Mum says, ‘and go round again.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Was that a smile?’ Mum says. And before I can complain or scowl, she’s bounced up off the couch where she’s been lying with Thomas. ‘Here, I’ll make us a coffee. You’ll look after Thomas for a moment for me, won’t you, darling?’
My mother is so cunning.
‘That’s it,’ she says to Thomas, unwrapping the pink stems of his fingers from around her own and wrapping them around mine. ‘You show Laura how strong you’re getting, Thomas,’ she says. And leaves us.
And Thomas’s face is so intense, and fat, and smooth and beautiful one second and screwed up and ugly the next, I can’t help but make faces back at him. And he does pull on my fingers. As if he’s testing his strength, or mine.
‘Yours is half-strength,’ Mum says, and she makes no effort to take Thomas back. ‘You drink far too much coffee as it is.’
I pull another face. At her this time. But I am feeling better, though of course I can’t let her know that.
‘I realize it’s hard to accept advice,’ Mum says then. And you’d swear, if you just came in and saw us, that I was the mother and she was visiting me, she looks so relaxed, sitting on the couch with one leg curled under her and her coffee mug in her hand, while I’m sunk in an armchair under Thomas’s weight, and my mug’s miles out of reach in case I spill any of it on him. ‘But Toni has chosen her own course now. And you’ve got yours. The rest of this year’s so important.’
And I know what she’s going to say, and before she can even mention your whole future, I interrupt her.
‘I’m not going to stop seeing Toni. Just because she’s stuffed up.’
‘Of course not, darling.’ And then she says something that really rocks me. ‘If that’s what Toni wants.’
And I wonder whether I must have been thinking this myself, but haven’t dared say it aloud. And whether Mum has known all along, because when I look at her, her own face is screwed up, as if she’s feeling the pain of this thought for me. But she also – her face is saying – had to tell me this, however much it hurt.
And I suppose I must be crying then, because I can feel my face is wet, and Thomas has stopped moving on my legs altogether, and is just watching me with this inquisitive look, and Mum too, I realize, hasn’t moved.
‘Use his bib,’ she just says. ‘It’s as big as a towel anyway. Besides, he hasn’t thrown up on it today. Yet, that is,’ she adds, as I push my head into Thomas’s stomach and wipe my eyes while he gurgles and pulls at my hair with his fingers.
And the image that comes to me as I’m pressing my face into the towel, and into Thomas’s stomach, and hearing him gurgle and burble in response, isn’t Mum’s or Toni’s at all, but Mr Prescott’s, whose face, since the end of the trip, has become longer and sadder than anyone’s because he’d always been so bright and friendly and outgoing, which is why all the kids like him so much. But since we’ve got back, he’s been going round the school like a ghost or something, and Toni, I know, hasn’t even spoken to him and cuts him dead, and goes out of her way to avoid him whenever she sees him coming, and he seems to have an invisible force-field around him that nobody wants to enter, teachers or students. And I still like him and that, but I don’t know what to say to him, not after that time in the ambulance, so I just say ‘Hello, Mr Prescott’ whenever he says, ‘Hello, Laura,’ but I know that’s not enough because he’s always still looking at me as though I have something that he wants. But I don’t.
And I also keep wondering what he’s said to his wife. What he said that day when he rang her from Alice Springs, and what he said later when he got back. Because Mrs Prescott must know, or know something – you don’t have to be told some things. And I haven’t asked Toni whether Mrs Prescott’s come into the Mall, shopping, with her new baby, while Toni’s been working, how could I? And I could hardly go and look for myself, spying on Toni. But I can’t stop myself thinking about it, and what she and Toni would say to one another, if they met. And I wonder also why Toni’s so mad at Mr Prescott when she was the one who started it all in the first place, and if anyone’s life is wrecked, it’s his not hers, nobody’s forcing her to leave school.
‘Better?’ Mum says.
‘Yes.’
‘You will get through this, you know.’ Her voice is so calm now, and her face – when I look at it – isn’t screwed up at all but is clear and smiling, and I’m more grateful for this than anything, and I’d have hated it if she’d started crying as well, or wrapped herself all round me.
‘I know. I just –’
‘Just what?’
‘Don’t get it.’
We sit for a while then, drinking our coffee and not talking at all, simply looking at Thomas, whose hair is a gingery blond like Mum’s and Philip’s. And he does look like Philip and is so good looking. Even I have to admit that.
‘Do you think,’ I ask her at one point, ‘it was wrong? Toni and Mr Prescott.’
‘Yes.’
‘Even if – even if, at the time, they thought they loved one another?’
‘Yes.’
And she says this very deliberately – and it’s the third time I’ve asked her – and I still find this strange because normally she’s so full of understanding and ifs and buts and tries to see everyone’s point of view in a situation, and half her arguments with Philip aren’t arguments about themselves, about the two of them at all, but about Philip’s cases, and she’s always defending the people he’s attacking and saying, ‘Yes, but you have to take into account their perspective,’ and he gets so frustrated and yells, ‘No, I don’t, it’s the facts of the case that matter, the facts and the law, not the perspective and who can ever be certain about perspective or intention anyway,’ and it usually ends with with him saying, ‘But, Miriam, darling heart, it’s just not legal,’ and her saying, ‘No, Philip darling, but it is human.’ But she doesn’t do this with Toni and Mr Prescott. She just says they were wrong, and that’s it, and I wonder if she’s oversensitive or something because she’s a teacher herself.
‘Which isn’t to say,’ she says now, weakening just a fraction, ‘that I want to see them punished any further for it. I don’t. I suspect they’ve both been punished enough. And the best thing would have been if the whole thing had died and been forgotten – just faded away like the trip itself.’
‘But all the rumours …’ I say.
‘Rumours die, if there’s nothing to feed them. And from what you say, Toni hasn’t even spoken to him since they got back.’
‘She never does. After she’s been with someone.’
‘And it would have suited the school,’ Mum says. ‘This inquiry is the last thing Mr Jackson would have wanted. In fact if it hadn’t been for that blessed parent’s complaint –’
‘He didn’t say it was a parent.’
‘Meaning?’
‘He didn’t know who sent it. It was anonymous.’
‘Why would anyone bother doing that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did he show it to you?’
‘No. He had it on his desk, though. He just said he had no choice, now that someone had written a complaint.’
‘Well, he’s right, darling. You must see that. Once he got that letter, he had to investigate. What if he’d done nothing, and it all came out later? Try to see it from his perspective,’ Mum says. And at least she’s talking about perspectives now – even if they do turn out to be Mr Jackson’s.
‘Well, what about Toni’s perspective? And Mr Prescott’s?’
‘Of course.’ She’s so reasonable sometimes you want to throw things at her. ‘They’ve got to be taken into account too.’
‘But they’re still wrong?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mr Prescott as well?’
‘Especially Mr Prescott.’
‘I don’t see why you’re so down on him. Toni was the one, she was the one who was so mad keen on him.’
‘Yes, I know that, but lots of students have crushes, and that’s what this looked like, remember? Just another one of Toni’s crushes. And that’s how it should have been treated. A schoolgirl crush.’
‘But –’
‘Darling, you can’t rationalize it away.’
‘But why is it so different? If she loved him, or thought she did, and he –’
‘He is a teacher,’ she says. ‘And that makes the world of difference. Because he has power, and she doesn’t.’
‘But she’s the one who started it,’ I keep saying. And I wonder why I’m doing this because it sounds, even to me, as if I’m attacking Toni. And I’m not, it’s just Mum, she’s so down on Mr Prescott and it’s so unfair. Because it takes two.
‘I’m not talking specifically about seductive power. Sexual power. Of course Toni has that. I’m talking about the power that comes out of their relationship, as teacher and student. You can’t walk away from that fact. It makes the relationship so unequal, so open to exploitation.’
‘But Toni exploited him, and now she won’t even talk to him.’
‘As long,’ Mum starts again, ‘as they are teacher and student …’
‘Does that mean a teacher and a student can’t ever fall in love?’
‘No, it doesn’t. It probably happens quite a lot. It’s acting on it, while they’re still teacher and student, that’s the problem. And Mr Prescott should have known that. Even if Toni didn’t.’
‘No matter what he felt?’
‘No matter what he felt.’
‘But later, after she’s not a student any longer …’
‘That’s different. That,’ she says, standing and snatching Thomas up clean out of my lap, and raising him above her head so the halo of his hair gleams in the sunlight, ‘that, young man is just part of the age-old game, isn’t it?’
She kisses me on the forehead as she takes Thomas out to change him. ‘And nobody,’ she says as she goes, ‘ever promised that would be smooth. Or painless …’
And she’s probing, I know, about whether I’m still hurting over Philip, still pining for him. I think she be
lieves I am. Whereas in fact that all happened a million light-years ago.
‘I must have been off my head,’ Philip had said, when one of his phone calls finally caught me at home, and I couldn’t put it off any longer. ‘It was all my fault, the whole thing.’
‘No, it wasn’t. It was mine as well.’
Until then, though, I hadn’t thought that at all. Until then I’d thought it was all his fault – even though Mum had tried to make me see it from his perspective as well. ‘You,’ she said to me once, ‘pushed Philip away.’ ‘Me? I pushed him?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘As soon as you saw this other girl, this Jenny, you did everything you could to test Philip.’ ‘Like what?’ I said. ‘Like dressing the way you did.’ ‘But if he really loved me,’ I said, ‘he wouldn’t have cared the way I dressed, whether I dressed down or not.’ ‘There’s a difference, darling,’ she said, ‘between dressing down and dressing dossy, especially in front of his friends – and you know it. And, she said, ‘you stopped using any make-up at all, wearing any jewellery.’ ‘But you’ve always said I didn’t need make-up.’ ‘You don’t,’ she said, ‘but the point is, you had been using it and you stopped – and you started talking like Paul Hogan and ending every sentence with and that, it used to drive me insane sometimes just listening to you. Don’t you see,’ she said, ‘you were testing him to the limit, making yourself as opposite to Jenny as you possibly could.’
I thought about this for a moment.
‘What about all the reading I was doing? All those French writers and thinkers and post-moderns and everything?’ ‘Oh I see,’ she said then, ‘so you were in fact competing, after all, you just wanted to do it on your terms?’ ‘You twist everything I say,’ I told her. ‘I don’t,’ she said, ‘I’m merely saying, okay, Philip may have behaved like a prick, lots of men do, but he wasn’t only a prick, and you didn’t help – either him or yourself. You tested him to the point where he couldn’t cope. You said to him: “See this, I can be as difficult as this. Now do you still love me?” ’ ‘Well, you always wanted me to be a difficult young woman,’ I said. ‘Difficult, darling,’ she said back. ‘Not impossible …’