Lessons from the Heart

by John Clanchy

  And all the time he’s telling me this, I’m just concentrating on being surprised, and even shocked, and I wonder if this is all coming through on my face, but I don’t think Mr Jackson really cares enough to notice, he’s so busy congratulating himself and being relieved, and Mr Kovacs – well, it’s not my face Mr Kovacs is looking at – which only leaves Mr Murchison, and then I do get a shock, a real one this time because when I glance at him, I find he’s no longer drawing at all but just watching me, and he knows, I’m sure, that I’ve heard all this from Miss Temple already, and he smiles at me to let me know that he knows. And I think I prefer Mr Jackson, who’s at least honest. Sort of. Even if he isn’t smart. And again this makes me wonder if I’m not simple-minded or something, I seem to change my opinion so often. About people’s characters especially.

  ‘It’s now in everybody’s interest, Laura,’ Mr Jackson is saying, ‘Miss Darling’s interests and Mr Prescott’s certainly, but also the School’s, the other teachers’, even yours, that we put this whole unfortunate business behind us. I’m sure you’ll agree?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Jackson.’ And if it wasn’t for Toni and Mr Prescott, I’d be as relieved as he is because nobody now, I realize, is even going to mention the word journal. Besides, I’m hot and my mouth is dry from all the running and anxiety of the last hour, so when Mr Jackson says: ‘That’s good, we’re all agreed then?’ and Mr Kovacs and Mr Murchison have nodded and pushed their stomachs back from the table, and Mr Jackson says: ‘Well, I guess we can let Mrs Duggins back in now?’ I think for a moment I might be the only student in the history of the school to get a second biscuit and cup of tea in Mr Jackson’s room, even if it does make poor Mrs Duggins sound like a wild animal who’s had to be defanged before she can be let back into her own feeding range again. But just when I’m wondering whether I can ask for coffee instead of tea, Mr Jackson goes:

  ‘So, Miss Vassilopoulos’ – and he’s remembered my real name at last – ‘I don’t think we need delay you any longer. The school is in your debt.’

  Though not to the extent of a biscuit.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Jackson.’ I look carefully at his desk as I get up, but there’s no sign of any letter anywhere. Mr Murchison is still watching my face, and this, I begin to find, is giving me the creeps, and in the end I’m just glad to be getting out of the room.

  ‘Oh, Miss Vassilopoulos,’ Mr Jackson says, and he keeps saying my name like this, I think, to remind everyone that things are back to normal and he’s in charge again. ‘You’ll probably find Mr Prescott waiting in the corridor outside.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Why? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing, Mr Jackson.’

  ‘Just tell him we’ll be another ten minutes or so, if you’d be so kind?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Jackson,’ I say as I leave.

  ‘I’m sorry you got caught up in all this, Laura,’ Mr Prescott says. And at least he’s looking better – less bootpolish over milkshake – than he has for the past fortnight.

  ‘I seem to have mucked up everybody’s lives,’ he says. ‘Toni’s, mine, yours, Billy’s …’ He stops then, not mentioning his wife.

  ‘Billy’s all right,’ I tell him, picking the last and easiest person on the list. ‘He’s nearly back to normal. I saw him in the yard yesterday, tripping other kids up with his cast.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mr Prescott almost laughs – before he catches himself doing it. ‘It must be being back in the same environment.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, because I don’t know what else to say. Or whether I should stay to keep him company till he’s called. Or how to say goodbye. But it’s not quite right, what we’ve said about Billy -because his heart’s not in it. Even when he’s bullying and tripping kids, it isn’t the same old Billy. It looks like he feels he has to do it because that’s what the kids expect, but if anyone called his bluff, I get the feeling he’d be just as likely to burst into tears. It’s not his leg that’s broken, or not only, but something inside. And if I ever catch his eye, he can’t hold it, he has to look away, as if he’s afraid there’s nothing to prevent me looking right into him.

  ‘Laura,’ Mr Prescott says, and sounds strangled, and maybe he’s trying to say goodbye too and doesn’t know how. ‘That day,’ he begins.

  ‘Yes, Mr Prescott,’ I whisper, and can’t look at him.

  ‘What I said to you,’ he says, ‘in the ambulance – about Toni. About not knowing. It was true.’

  ‘What do you want, Mr Prescott,’ I blurt then, ‘from me?’

  ‘I want you to believe me. I want you to understand.’

  ‘I do,’ I say. When I only half do.

  And then, because I’m so confused, I almost say – I swear I’m on the point of saying: ‘And what about Mrs Prescott?’ I almost say it, because I’ve got to say something, and the next thing I’m running down the corridor away from him. And maybe because I am running and the blood’s reaching my head again, I do find something at last that I am able to say:

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Prescott.’

  The coffee lounge in the Mall where Toni works is huge, but I know immediately she isn’t there. I walk from one end to the other, looking in all the booths and corners, just to make sure. Then I ask Tanya, who often works the same shifts as Toni, but Tanya’s just come back from holidays herself and hasn’t seen her. In ages. Not since Toni left for Alice Springs.

  ‘You’d better ask Mrs Steinway,’ Tanya says.

  ‘Le grand piano? I say.

  ‘She’s the only one who’ll know for sure.’

  I’d seen Mrs Steinway at the back near the kitchen on my way in, but I’m always a bit reluctant to approach her because I used her once in an essay for school, and I’ve felt shy about her ever since. As if I’d pried into something personal, something she wouldn’t want anyone else to know – even stolen it from her. I’ve always been afraid, since then, that if I looked at her normally, she’d know, she’d read the essay in my face. But just now I don’t have any choice.

  ‘You’re after Toni, sweetheart?’ Mrs Steinway says when I ask her. ‘Toni’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘She stopped five weeks back. Six maybe.’

  ‘But she can’t have, Mrs Steinway. We just went away. For a school trip.’

  ‘Ah, no, love, she knew she was leaving before that. She handed in her notice a fortnight before you even went away. She said she was finishing, she said she’d be looking for something else. Fulltime even. She was getting sick of school, I think, just between you and me.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘And we only take part-timers and casuals here, as you know. You’re not looking for a job yourself, are you, sweetheart?’

  ‘No, Mrs Steinway.’ I force myself to smile back. Mrs Stein-way’s so sweet herself, and this must be the fourth or fifth time she’s offered me a job when kids are normally queueing up. ‘I’d like to,’ I tell her, ‘but I can’t do everything I’m supposed to do now.’

  And I would like a job, and I would like to work there, I’m not just saying it. It’d be such a change from home and school, and the other girls all love it and Mrs Steinway and working for her because she’s so bright and clever. And this is where her nickname comes from, Le grand piano, it’s not just from her name or her teeth which are large and white and always on display, or even her manager’s uniform which is stark black and white like a keyboard, but it’s her voice which you can always hear tinkling away in an unbroken stream.

  She’s got this way of projecting her voice somehow, of pushing it out under all the other noise into all the corners of the coffee lounge, without once shouting or even seeming to raise her voice: ‘Table four is waiting to order, Maria, Joanna could you pop out to the kitchen and see what’s holding up the foccacias for Table six, Maureen make sure you wipe the tables with a damp cloth don’t just brush at them like that, that’s a dear …’

  And Toni even tells about once when this drug addict in an army greatcoat came in and de
manded money and pointed a syringe at her filled with blood, Mrs Steinway just said, ‘If you don’t mind sitting down at a table, sir, one of the girls will come in a minute and take your order,’ and the guy actually went and sat at one of the tables until he must have realized what he was doing, and then he jumped up and ran out of the restaurant.

  And I wonder sometimes if I’m not just spoiled and privileged because I don’t have a job and I get all my money – still, and I’m almost seventeen – from Mum and Philip, and I’ve talked with Mum and she understands why I’d like to have a job, but, she says, I’d have to give up something else in return, like my French or the piano, I can’t simply do everything, and I don’t want to do that, and so I’ve promised myself I’ll get a job over the summer before I start uni. I don’t mind what it is, even dishwashing or cleaning would do, the dirtier the better – to make up to Toni somehow for all the times I’ve come in just to sit and drink coffee while she’s had to work. If that makes any sense.

  ‘Give a job to the people who’ve already got too much to do,’ Mrs Steinway says. ‘That’s the best way I’ve found to get anything done.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Steinway. But what about Toni?’

  ‘I don’t know, love.’ She smiles past me and takes a bill from a man who says nothing, just appears at the counter, pays and leaves. ‘She hasn’t been happy for a while, you must know that?’

  ‘Yes, but she didn’t say –’

  ‘People don’t always.’ Mrs Steinway looks at me, and I suddenly wonder if she can read my face, because my essay was about her and how I’d seen her one day, not here in the restaurant, where everyone adores her and she’s so competent and never has a hair out of place and even the owner, Mr Damo, won’t come in when it’s really busy, he’s that terrified of getting in the way or making a fool of himself, but in a supermarket in a different shopping centre altogether, and at first I couldn’t believe it was her, because I was so used to seeing her in her uniform, but this day she was in a gray tracksuit that was baggy and made her look as if she’d put on kilos overnight, and her hair was tangled and hardly brushed and she had two kids with her, two boys, and they were dragging on her trolley and sending it skittering this way and that and banging into the shelves, and Mrs Steinway looked so much smaller and even lost – and she was, because as I passed her (and she showed no sign of knowing me) – she was muttering, ‘Pineapple pieces, Christ where can they put them’ – and I thought, from the tension and lostness on her face, she was just on the point of bursting into tears or something.

  We had this essay to do for Miss Temple at the time, which said Individuals are no more than the sum of their roles. Do you agree? I was going to write about Mum and how she was a teacher and a mother and a wife and a consumer and all that, but she was a person as well who was much larger than any or all of these things, but that day in the store when I looked back and saw that Mrs Steinway was doubled up over the handle of her trolley and the two boys had stopped quarrelling and were looking up at her with startled faces, I knew then that she was crying, and in that instant I decided to do my essay about her instead. ‘Do you work at this place, this restaurant?’ Miss Temple said, when she handed the essay back. ‘No,’ I said, ‘why?’ ‘You seem to know her very well,’ she said. ‘I just like her,’ I said. ‘Everyone does.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ Mrs Steinway says now. ‘I promised Toni I wouldn’t. But I know how close the two of you are.’

  ‘Where is she, Mrs Steinway?’

  ‘I don’t actually know, love. All I know is she asked if I’d be a referee for her – for jobs like. And she must be close to getting one, because they don’t bother ringing to check if they’re not serious.’

  ‘And someone’s rung you? About a job for Toni?’

  ‘I’ve had two calls in the last day, and one lady – it was a clothes shop, you know, Sportsgirl? – well, she was virtually saying if there was nothing bad from me she’d take her on immediately.’

  ‘But where, Mrs Steinway?’

  ‘I didn’t ask, love. I didn’t think to. You’ll have to ask her that yourself.’

  ‘I haven’t been able to contact her for two days. The phone just rings. Or I get her mother.’

  ‘You might just have to go round there,’ Mrs Steinway says. ‘And talk to her mother.’

  My face must show something to her then.

  ‘You may just have to, love. If you want to find her.’

  ‘Laura,’ Mrs Darling says, after taking an age with the door, and I know immediately I shouldn’t have come, or not at this time. It’s five-thirty already – and she’d have started drinking at lunch. At the latest.

  ‘Laura,’ she says again, and drags me by the arm straight – well, not straight – through the house and into the kitchen. There are bottles on the shelves and in the sink and on the chopping bench in the centre of the room, but the place is spotlessly clean, as it always is – in fact the whole kitchen gleams with glass. Toni had said her Mum was always in the kitchen these days, washing glasses and bottles. Over and over. ‘Like Lady Macbeth,’ Toni said, but not laughing as she said it. I listen but there’s no sound from the rest of the house, and I wonder if Mr Darling’s away, and how long it is since he’s been here.

  ‘I blame the school,’ Mrs Darling says, pouring. I wonder what she’s been doing in here, in the silence, without even a radio on for company. She couldn’t just have been drinking? ‘I blame this Pisscot.’

  ‘Prescott, Mrs Darling. It’s Mr Prescott.’

  ‘She’d never have got in this trouble by herself.’

  ‘Do you know where she is, Mrs Darling?’

  ‘She could at least have –’ Her lips start trembling, and I know this person is Toni’s Mum and I should do something to comfort her, but I don’t know what. Or how.

  ‘Do you mind if I look in her room, Mrs Darling? Mrs Darling –?’ I have to say it again, because I think she’s forgotten I’m there, or she’s looking at me but seeing someone else and not me. ‘Can I look in Toni’s room?’

  ‘She’s not there,’ Mrs Darling – Elaine – nearly shouts at me. ‘I’ve told you, I’ve told you already.’

  ‘I know she’s not there. I just thought …’

  ‘She could at least have –’ she says again. And her face is a watery mess, and she’s drinking through it.

  ‘I’ll just look,’ I say, and the last thing I expect is her to follow me, bumping against the walls of her own house. She fills the corridor to Toni’s room behind me, and the smell of her unhappiness fills the space between us and nearly suffocates me.

  ‘I won’t …’ I say, as I reach the door. ‘I won’t take anything.’

  And I realize how weird this sounds, as if Toni’s dead or something, and I’m here collecting trophies or keepsakes for a memorial.

  ‘Take what you like. She won’t be back for it.’

  ‘Don’t you have any idea?’ I say, as I open her cupboard.

  ‘Glebe is all I know.’

  ‘Glebe? Why Glebe?’

  ‘She told the taxi, the driver, I heard her.’

  ‘But Glebe’s miles. And she’s hardly taken anything.’

  ‘She could at least have –’ Mrs Darling says for the third time. But still can’t finish her thought.

  ‘Does Mr Darling know?’ I say. And she kind of slumps then, as if his name itself is a blow. She turns her head from side to side and I don’t know if she’s saying no, or just moving her lips on the rim of the glass. At one point I see her teeth bared against the glass and I’m terrified she’ll bite the rim clean off it.

  ‘Mrs Darling, is there anyone I can get?’

  But she doesn’t hear. Just stands slumped there in the doorway, somehow not falling, until something finally registers and she holds up her empty glass and squeezes her eyes up in a sort of apology. ‘I’ll just …’ she says, and goes.

  And I can look properly then. I don’t bother with the cupboard, the pockets of clothes, t
he drawers in the dresser, the bedside cabinet. I find it quickly, without effort, as I’m meant to, a folded square of notepaper pushed down between the bedhead and the wall. Lolly, it says in round, looping letters on one side. I stuff it in the pocket of my tunic, without reading. And leave. Or attempt to.

  Mrs Darling fills the corridor again. Brimming, in the darkness.

  ‘I have to go now,’ I say. A thief.

  ‘She could at least –’ Mrs Darling’s still muttering as she struggles to unlock the front door with one hand.

  ‘What, Mrs Darling?’

  ‘If she was going to leave home …’ she says, and the door flings itself open in her hands.

  ‘What?’ I say, nearly crazy myself with this pointless, broken record. ‘She could at least have – what?’

  ‘Taken me with her.’

  Lolly, the note says, and it’s only three lines, and I can see she’s scribbled it at the last moment, maybe with the taxi already waiting in the driveway, its engine running and the driver tooting impatiently. Don’t look for me, it says. I’m okay. When I’m ready I’ll get in touch. Don’t look, Lolly. Please? Till I’m ready. And at the bottom, there’s a row of Xs, and Toni’s signature, a T with two dots for eyes drawn in beneath the crossbar.

  It’s dark, but I walk home the long way from Toni’s, back through the park, kicking the dead leaves. Don’t look, Lolly. Please? Till I’m ready.

  Are you ready?

  No.

  Are you ready now, then?

  No. And you’re looking.

  I’m not.

  You are. You have to start counting all over again.

  One two three four five six seven eight nine ten – coming, ready or not!

  And I find I’m running then, and skipping, and have a pain in my chest, and it’s weird because I can’t stop myself laughing at the same time.