by John Clanchy
LESSONS FROM THE HEART
John Clanchy was born in Melbourne but has lived in Canberra since 1975. For some years he was head of an academic advisory service for students and later Foundation Director of the Graduate Teaching Program in the Graduate School at the Australian National University. His short stories have won awards in Europe, the US and New Zealand as well as in Australia. Lessons from the Heart is a sequel to The Hard Word, published by UQP in 2002.
Other books by the author
Short stories and novellas
Lie of the Land
Homecoming
Novels
Breaking Glass
If God Sleeps
(with Mark Henshaw, under the pseudonym J. M. Calder)
The Hard Word
To David and Zsuzsa
Talking in Bed
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Philip Larkin, 1960
LOOKING BACK on it all now – now that the inquiry’s over and done with – I realize I always knew what the hardest moment was going to be …
‘That morning,’ Mr Jackson said, ‘when Mrs Harvey sent you to find them –’
‘Who, Mr Jackson?’ I said. But of course I knew who.
‘Antonia Darling and Mr Prescott, who else. For God’s sake, girl, try and concentrate. When you found them …’ he said again, and I was about to say, But they weren’t lost, except I knew it wouldn’t help. We were always going to come back to this point. ‘What exactly did you see? What was the first thing you saw?’
‘A flag,’ I said.
‘A flag?’ He sounded astonished.
‘A white one.’
‘On top of a sand dune?’ he said. ‘In the middle of the campground? What was a flag doing there?’
‘It was rising and falling.’
‘I mean, why was it there?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Jackson.’
‘Was it on a pole, or what?’
‘It looked like it was on the ground, or caught on a bush, or something. The sun was right in my eyes and I couldn’t –’
‘Now let me get this straight. Mrs Harvey asked you to go and find them – all of that’s in her report – and you did, and you brought them back?’
‘Yes, Mr Jackson.’
‘But when you did, all you saw was a white flag?’
‘I didn’t say it was all I saw.’
‘Well, what were they doing? After the flag business.’
‘Well, first I saw the flag, or the cloth thing, but I couldn’t be sure what it was because of the sun, so I went back down the slope a bit, and then I thought it might really be them after all, so I went back up.’
‘And?’
‘And it was them, and they were just standing there.’
‘On top of the dune?’ Mr Murchison cut in.
‘It’s where we all went on the first night, to see the sunset on the Rock.’
‘And was there anything …?’ Mr Jackson said.
Anything what, Mr Jackson?’
‘Anything … untoward? About their dress? Their behaviour?’
‘No, Mr Jackson. Toni was wearing her blue skirt and a pink top, and Mr Prescott …’
‘I wasn’t asking what they were wearing, for God’s sake. I was asking, was there anything untoward? In their dress or behaviour?’
‘No, Mr Jackson. Not that I could judge.’
‘Did they,’ Mr Murchison asked, ‘say anything unusual then? Did they, for example, tell you to go away? Or object to your being there?’
‘No, Mr Murchison.’
And I could see that they were both baffled then, and didn’t know what to say next. And I realized this was the one thing I was learning from this whole mess: how everything in the end, the whole meaning and outcome of everything, depends on the questions people ask you.
1
MUM MIGHT BE RIGHT, you see – that’s the thing – even though I argue and disagree and have dialectics with her all the time, and mostly I suspect I’m just arguing for the sake of it because, I’m upset about Philip and me breaking up and deep down, I need to take it out on someone.
But I’m also worried about Toni and Mr Prescott and what will happen to them, and I wish the whole thing hadn’t happened, but it has and there’s no point bashing your head against a brick wall about it all, you just have to accept it and get on with your own life.
Or that’s what everybody keeps saying.
Only it’s not quite so easy because you go over and over things in your own mind and try and work out who was right and who was wrong, and all you end up doing is getting more and more confused. And if your mother says to you, ‘But, darling, you can’t separate these things: the political is personal and the personal is political,’ as a way of trying to help you work things out, then just for a moment you think, ‘Oh well then, that’s pretty clear, if I can just hold onto that …’ But you can’t, of course, and even when you can, it seems clear one minute and clear as mud the next, and you end up just being a confused teenager who’s going through a stage and will grow out of it hopefully.
And, okay, it’s true, there are times when you think the whole thing’s trivial and just say Bleeaaaah and wave it away with your hand, but then the next minute you sit down at your desk to do some humungously absorbing Maths problem or something, and you find you’re thinking about it all over again from beginning to end like some old movie and your head’s a projector that won’t switch off.
And I mean, I like Mr Prescott and everything – for a teacher, that is – it’s not that. It’s just that I don’t think he should have done it – or Toni for that matter, it’s not all Mr Prescott’s fault. But he’s much older and a teacher and even if you’re aching to do it with someone and you’re thinking I’ll just die if I can’t do it with them, and right away, that’s still not an excuse. Though it is. That’s if he did do it in the first place, and if Toni’s telling the truth …
Anyway, this all happens early in Year 12 on the school trip for the Year 7s and 8s where Toni and I go as monitors with eighty-five screaming kids and five teachers and it’s to Alice Springs and Uluru and that. Mum said I should put my name down for a monitor because then I’d get to go free and we’ve never been there, and anyway just at the moment I need a break from study and personal maundering, and besides it’d be good experience and look impressive on my CV.
The problem is, I get chosen as a monitor straightaway but Toni doesn’t because she isn’t responsible enough and she has bad speech and isn’t a good role model for the younger students and she’s an airhead like her mother and is likely to go off the rails – the teachers don’t say that last bit, it’s only my interpretation. What they do say is things like ‘dysfunctional familial behaviour patterns’, which means her Mum’s an airhead, but if you actually ask them, like Toni did, ‘Oh yeah,’ she says, ‘and what does that mean when it’s at home?’ then they just go, ‘Oh, nothing, we were just discussing general traits’, and then Toni has to go and wreck everything, as usual, by going, ‘Well, who’s General Trays anyway, and what’s he got to do with the price of fish in Alice Springs?’
Toni’s actually quite smart – jus
t a bit aggressive – but she knows she’ll never get a straight answer from the teachers so she stirs them. Some of them actually understand this and are sympathetic, and they can get her to do anything for them, and Mum’s the same, she says it’s not Toni who’s dysfunctional, it’s her parents. But Toni says it’s not really that, it’s just that her mother drinks gin all day and yells and rouses at her about everything and her father owns a franchise for selling people swampy land in Queensland even though he’s never been out of New South Wales himself since he came from England, and he makes a lot of money and everything but he spends one half of it on gambling and the other half chasing other women, and what’s dysfunctional about that?
Anyway I said I wasn’t going if Toni wasn’t allowed, and then the school had a problem because not enough senior students had put their names down because Easter was late this year and that made the first term school holidays even longer and everybody else wanted to get a job or go to the beach or just lie around at home and listen to music and have sex and things while their parents were out breaking their backs just to give them a decent education.
So it looks for a while as if the whole trip’s off. Then Mr Prescott and Miss Temple, who doesn’t like Toni but thinks I’m a good thing and gave me the top mark for her Communications Unit in Year 11 and seems to believe as long as I’m there I’ll have a good influence on Toni when everybody else, including Mum, says it’s usually the opposite way round – apparently Mr Prescott and Miss Temple speak up for Toni at a planning meeting and say that they’re prepared to have her and she’s not all bad, nobody is, just a bit brash and impertinent, and Mr Prescott said he’d be happy to take her under his wing, and you just wish that’d been the only place he’d taken her, and everything might have been all right.
But it wasn’t.
And the absolute worst thing of all is, the whole mess is probably my fault, because I didn’t tell Toni the truth about me and Philip when I should have.
2
There are three men in the room – Mr Jackson, Mr Kovacs, and Mr Mumble-Mumble – and me. And I’m starting to feel a bit nervous because this is the Principal’s room, right next to the Front Office, and you only get to go there when you’re in trouble or when you reach Year 12 and Mr Jackson invites you into his room to consult you about how the school’s going and what its tone’s like, and what you’re going to do in the future, like what sort of job you want, or whether you’re going to uni – he never even mentions the dole which lots of kids are more interested in anyway.
For those visits you always go along in fours, alphabetically, and because I’m a V – for Vassilopoulos – I end up going with Tony Vickers and Luscious Vile and a new boy we hardly know called Vanderhilst or something who’s just transferred from another school. You get served tea or coffee and a biscuit by Mrs Duggins who’s the school secretary – though she pretends she isn’t and calls herself an Executive Officer – and you sit there for about seven and a half hours saying, ‘Yes, Mr Jackson’ and ‘No, Mr Jackson’ and rattling your cup in your saucer because even though you’re not in trouble this time, it still feels like you are. And you listen to Mr Jackson explaining his views about the school and how bad it was when he first came here, and how much better it is now – joke! – and what he thinks The Young should do, like go into computers, that’s the future, the information revolution, even though he can’t type himself and keeps giving bits of paper to Mrs Duggins to type out and bring back to him every six minutes for signing. He does this even when he’s supposed to be still talking to us and discussing our whole futures, until he eventually gets bored just listening to himself and stands up and shakes our hands and wishes us all the best, even though it’s only March and there’s still eight months to the final exams and the end of school, but I suppose he’s just saying he’s done the best he can by us and hopes he’ll never have to set eyes on us again.
And the thing is, he’s not even looking at you when he shakes your hand. He’s too busy reading off the list on the edge of his desk and he says to this new boy Vanderhilst, ‘It was very kind of you to come in, Thompson’, and Vanderhilst is so surprised and stunned that he just shakes Mr Jackson’s hand and stands there gawping while Mr Jackson rabbits on about how good it is ‘to have the benefit of your views on how the whole school’s feeling’ and so forth when Vanderhilst has only been at the place about six days and hasn’t said a single thing the whole meeting except ‘Thank you’ to Mrs Duggins when she gave him his biscuit. But I go, ‘Vassilopoulos actually’ when Mr Jackson says, ‘You too, Miss, er … Talbot,’ cos I’ve only been at the school for the last twelve hundred years and that should be long enough even for Mr Jackson to know who I am. And when I say this, Mr Jackson goes, ‘I beg your pardon?’ and I go, ‘Laura Vassilopoulos, Mr Jackson. It’s my name.’ And he goes, ‘What?’ and looks at the list on his desk again and goes, ‘Oh, yes, of course. That was yesterday’s lot.’ And then he turns round to Vanderhilst, the new boy, who’s trying to sneak out the door, and says, ‘So, you must be Vanderhilst, Thompson,’ and Vanderhilst goes, ‘Yes, sir.’ And then we can leave.
But not this morning.
This morning there’s just me and the three men, and there’s no tea or coffee and when Mrs Duggins comes in at one point with a paper for signing, Mr Jackson just looks at her as if he’s never seen her before in his life and says he thought he’d told her he didn’t want to be disturbed and that included her. And I haven’t been really worried up till then, just a bit nervous, but the look on Mrs Duggins’s face as she scuttles out and the careful way she closes the door with a soft click behind her suddenly make me realize how serious this is, and what trouble Toni and Mr Prescott are in. And I think maybe I should have taken up Mum’s offer and let her come with me, because she’s a teacher herself and runs her own English school for foreigners and she’s so smart and quick and won’t let anyone bully her, or – if not Mum – then maybe Philip, my step-dad, who’s a lawyer.
But then I remember Toni sitting by herself in a chair outside the Office, and I know her parents won’t come – that’s if she’s even told them about all this yet – or, if they did, Mrs Darling would be screaming at Toni and calling her a little slut and whispering, ‘Yes, Mr Jackson, no, Mr Jackson,’ and starting to weep and looking around to see if there was any glass cabinet in the room that might hold a little something for the shock, like a gallon of gin and two glasses. And Toni’s Dad would be asking if anyone wanted to buy a sandy block with unrivalled views of Paradise or some other swamp. And so I tell myself not to be such a sook and promise myself to do whatever I can, without complete lying, to help Toni.
So I sit up straight and get ready to answer their questions, and I look them directly in the eye – the way Mum looks at people -and they start to cough and glance away and shuffle their papers, and I realize then that they’re as nervous as I am. Except for Mr Kovacs who I know already because he’s the Chair of the School Council and a total sleaze.
Mr Kovacs is always hanging around the school instead of working – he’s probably been kicked out of his own job for misconduct, and I bet his secretary doesn’t look like Mrs Duggins – and he’s always in the playground at lunchtime trying to engage The Young in discourse, except The Young turn out every time to be the girls in Year 12 because their discourse is better developed.
This morning as they came down the corridor where Toni and I were sitting, waiting for the meeting to start, Mr Kovacs was nearly marching behind Mr Jackson, the legs of his trousers and the white papers under his arms flapping like a chook trying to take off into the wind. ‘If he gets any further up Mr Jackson’s arse,’ Toni whispered, ‘he’ll be walking in front of him.’ All the parents think Mr Kovacs is just a toady who’s only there to suck up to Mr Jackson at meetings and go, ‘Would you welcome that in the form of a motion, Principal?’ even if Mr Jackson’s only asking the time or something, and they don’t know now why they elected him to the position in the first place, they mig
ht as well have voted for a Swiss clock, Mum says.
‘Very well, let’s get started,’ Mr Jackson says. ‘Thank you for coming this morning, Miss, er … Vassilopoulos.’
At least he’s got the right list this time and doesn’t think I’m Talbot who’s a boy anyway and a basketball head who’s about twelve feet tall and has sinuses and bad knees. And I suppose Mr Jackson’s just being polite and that, but his Thank you for coming is so smarmy when I didn’t have the slightest choice and just got this message over the loudspeaker – ‘Laura Vassilopoulos and Antonia Darling, report to the Principal’s Office immediately’. Everyone knows what it’s about, and the whole school – nearly forty classrooms – they all hear it, of course, and they go ‘Ooo-ah’ and suck in their breaths so hard it’s lucky there’s a pencil or a stapler left on anyone’s desk and half the school doesn’t end up in hospital.
‘We’ll try and keep this as informal as we can,’ Mr Jackson says. Which is a joke as well, because they’ve all got their best suits on and white shirts and ties and have pencils and pads and papers and things, and probably wish they had judges’ wigs to put on.
‘I agree,’ says Mr Kovacs. ‘The last thing we want is to frighten either of these charming young women.’
And that’s where I whip around – like my sister Katie and I do at home when anyone says something vomit-making like this -and I stare at the door behind me as if I’m expecting Nicole Kidman or Penelope Cruz to walk through it any minute.
‘No, no,’ Mr Kovacs says. ‘Don’t be so modest, Laura. I was meaning you. And the young lady I noticed sitting outside, of course.’
Noticed sitting outside. Huh. Mum says Toni’s got the sexiest legs she’s ever seen. And they’re not hard to see, the skirts she wears. And it’s obvious that’s just what’s on Mr Kovacs’ mind because the next thing he says to me is:
‘That’s a nice outfit you’re wearing this morning, Laura.’
