by John Clanchy
And then, as she was leaving, she said, ‘And open your window.’
On the stair outside my room, I heard Katie, my little sister, say: ‘I bet she just watched TV all the time and didn’t do any homework at all.’ And Mum said, ‘Now I don’t think that’s quite fair, sweetheart. I don’t think the TV’s even been switched on since we left.’ And that’s when I was reminded how much I love her.
The wind off the water has cooled everything down. For dinner there’s a barbecue that Dave and the two other drivers and Toni and I and the rest of the monitors cook, and it’s actually quite fun, and some of the kids even say thank you and help clean up so that everybody has to go to their tent then and lie down and recover from the shock, and once they’re there they seem happy to stay and keep out of the cold. It’s not just me that’s missing the warmth and the open space and the red earth. Even Toni, after our mad race by the water, has gone all quiet and thoughtful. Which is something for her.
‘Laura?’
‘Hmm?’ I say, only half-listening because I’m writing in my journal. Toni’s lying on her sleeping bag, turning the pages of Who.
‘Why did you tell me now?’
‘Tell you what now?’ I’m listening hard all of a sudden.
‘About you and Philip Gardner.’
‘Because I was worried about you.’
‘You don’t have to be.’ She starts picking at a loose thread from her sleeping bag. She’s not even pretending to look at her magazine any more.
‘I know I don’t, but I am.’
‘Have you and Miriam been talking about me?’
‘Yes.’
She doesn’t explode, as I expect her to. Just thinks about it. And I’m glad I didn’t say anything but just yes.
‘Why did you think telling me about you and Philip would help?’ she asks eventually.
‘I don’t know. I just did. It doesn’t make sense, I suppose. Maybe it was just wanting to share again.’
‘Sharing Philip? Yuk, no thanks. That arsehole.’
‘I don’t hate Philip,’ I say, and something in my voice must register because she looks at me properly then.
‘Lolly, you’re not pining for him are you?’
‘A bit.’
‘Next time I see him, I’ll kick him in the balls. That’s if he’s got any.’ She half sits, in a pose of mock aggression. ‘Well, has he?’
‘Yes.’ I can’t help smiling.
‘Consider them crushed.’
We both fall back then and snort with laughter, and my journal falls from my hands onto the canvas floor between us. The flickering light of the lamp on the tent roof is restful, and I find I could look at it for hours.
‘What,’ I ask – and this is the first time I can think of this without panic or embarrassment – ‘am I going to do with all the poems and things in my journal?’
‘You don’t want to tear them out?’
‘No.’
‘Even now?’
‘No, I want to keep it like it is. Besides, it’s bound.’
‘Well, that’s easy then. You just write in another name for Philip’s.’
‘Another name? Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Dwayne would do, or Kurt – for Kurt Cobain – anything really. Just find one that doesn’t rhyme with pip or drip or dill.
‘Dill ? How does – ?’
‘Phil the –’
‘God, you’re stupid,’ I say. But laugh nonetheless.
‘Laura.’ She is serious all of a sudden. ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’ And then her mood switches back just as quickly, and she does this deep, TV-type voice-over: ‘She was a big girl, and she could look after herself.’
‘Well, I do worry.’
‘Yes, but that’s just your over-developed bourgeois anx.’
‘Angst.’
‘What?’
‘You pronounce it angst.’
‘Bourgeois,’ she says, stressing the wuh. ‘Whereas I, Miss Toni Darling, moi, I’m a free spirit.’
‘I hate hearing you say that. Even if you’re fooling.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re mocking yourself. And it makes me feel left out, like you’re cutting yourself off from me.’
And as soon as I’ve said that, I know how unfair it is and remember it’s actually me who’s done that to her, and the distance between us is enormous, even though it’s only two feet, and this, I suddenly realize, is what Larkin meant in his poem because he’s got this bit when the two lovers are lying on the bed side by side and he calls it this unique distance from isolation, and that makes me realize how, even here, up close like this, you still can’t find the right words to say, even though you love someone, and maybe all you can hope for is words that are not untrue and not unkind. And though Toni doesn’t know Larkin, especially by heart as I do, she understands all this, and that’s why she says nothing. Nothing relevant, I mean.
‘God, Lolly,’ she says instead, and pulls the front of her tracksuit down so that her breasts, which are small and lovely – she has the best figure you’ve ever seen – are clearly outlined, and as soon as she does this I know she’s going to start fooling again, and I’ve lost her, for the moment at least: ‘I wish I had your tits.’
‘Swap you for your skin any time.’ And I would. I’m impossible to see after sunset, while Toni’s so white she could do Omo ads in the dark.
‘I wonder if he likes big tits,’ she says.
‘Who?’
‘Dwayne, of course.’
‘Don’t you know?’ There’s no point talking sense at the moment.
‘Almost,’ she says. And we both giggle, though I’m not sure at what exactly.
‘Toni,’ I say, making one last effort. ‘You have to be careful with Mr Prescott.’
‘Why?’ She pretends to be serious. ‘What have you heard?’
‘Everybody knows. They’re all watching.’
‘Voyeurs,’ she says airily. ‘Can I help it if the world’s full of under-age pervs?’
‘It’s not just the kids. It’s the other teachers. You should have seen Miss Plummer last night.’
‘You know what Miss Plummer needs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lolly, it’s just fooling, okay? It’s just fun, all right?’ But there’s a real edge to her voice. ‘I’m bored, and he’s such a spunk.’
‘I know. That’s the point. You’re bored and fooling, but what about him?’
‘How do you mean? He likes me. In fact –’
‘I know he likes you. We all like you.’
‘Florence Harvey too? God, I must be doing something wrong.’
‘But Toni, what about him?’
‘You keep saying that. What about him?’ she says, and she is at least listening.
‘Well, don’t you see? All right, he likes you and that, and he likes fooling and flirting, but what if it gets more serious? And he does something?’
‘Is that a promise?’
‘Toni, be serious. Please? Don’t you see, you could get him in total trouble.’
‘Trouble, how?’
‘Well, you’re a student.’
‘I’m seventeen, haven’t you noticed? I’m an adult. I’m over age.’
‘Just. And you’re still a student. And he’s a teacher. What if the other teachers complain when we get back?’
‘The Temple-Jasmyne combine harvester with throat attachment and goggles?’
‘Or the kids. If they talk to their parents.’
‘About what? Lolly, nothing’s happened. I swear to you, nothing’s happened.’
‘That’s not what matters. What matters is the appearance.’
‘Bourge-wuh!’
‘All right, I don’t mean the appearance, I mean the perception. And Mr Prescott’s not just a teacher, remember, he’s married. And he’s got two kids. You’ve met Mrs Prescott. How would she feel if people –’
I run out of words, hating the sound of my own voice. Lecturi
ng her like this, when I’m meant to be her best friend. Toni’s quiet for a full minute, longer, before she reaches for her magazine. I pick up my journal then and open it.
‘Laura?’ she says. Quietly. Seriously. For the first time tonight.
‘Yes?’
‘Why don’t you mind your own business.’
10
‘In Coober Pedy,’ Mr Jackson says, ‘you were accommodated underground. In some sort of dormitory. Is that correct?’
‘Yes, Mr Jackson. The day we got there it was as hot as anything, and dust and sand were blowing everywhere. And that’s why all the people there live underground, or not all the people but lots of lots of them anyway. To avoid the heat.’
‘Well, I didn’t imagine it was because they thought they were gophers.’
‘No, Mr Jackson. Though they might, because all the way into town, it looks like a moonscape, with no people anywhere, just these holes in the ground and little mounds of sand beside them. And even the churches,’ I tell him, ‘are underground …’
Toni and I had gone into the church opposite the tourist centre in the middle of town. The walls and the roof were pink and ribbed, and the light from the candles that people lit when they came in to pray made it feel cool but warm at the same time. ‘It’s like being back in the womb,’ Toni said. ‘It has the same colouring as the sands,’ Mr Jasmyne said, but ‘How would he know?’ Toni said, ‘cos he was at least four feet away from it and didn’t have his binoculars with him.’ ‘Nor is that altogether surprising,’ Mr Jas-myne went on. ‘Sand, after all, is only abraded rock.’ And nobody stayed to ask what abraded was, because he was already starting on his next geology lecture.
‘Technically,’ he said, ‘this rock is known as igneo-gobbledy-gob-bledy,’ but we didn’t really hear the technical bit because we were already outside and nearly had an incident and were almost crushed to death like an English soccer crowd getting out, the door was so narrow, and the irony is, if we had all been trampled and died, Mr Jasmyne would have been charged as the hooligan who started it all, and from the outside we could still hear his voice booming in the hollow space with only Miss Temple still in there to fill it and listen to him. And the church was Catholic and that, and Toni’s Mum was born a Catholic. ‘Does your Mum ever go to church?’ I asked her when we got outside, ‘cos you could send her a postcard with the church on it.’ ‘She used to,’ Toni said, ‘till she found out they couldn’t really change wine and water into gin …’
‘Yes, well that’s all very interesting,’ Mr Jackson says when I explain about the churches being underground. ‘Very interesting indeed.’ Which means it isn’t, not in the slightest. ‘But can we now please return to the point?’
‘What is the point, Mr Jackson?’
‘The point, Miss Vassilopoulos … the point is …’ He looks at Mr Kovacs who’s still resting his eyes and is no help at all.
‘Accommodation, Principal?’ Mr Murchison says. ‘The dormitory accommodation?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Mr Jackson says. ‘I was just coming back to that …’
Religion’s another thing Mum agonized over. Grandma Vera used to try and teach us prayers – Katie and me, I mean – but Mum told her to stop. She wasn’t going to have us indoctrinated. She wanted us to have free minds and not be cluttered up with superstitions or guilt like she’d been, and when we were old enough we could make our own decisions.
But later, when I was fifteen and Grandma Vera had died and Mum was just about to have Thomas, she told me she thought she’d been wrong because if we didn’t know anything about religion or the Bible even and Grandma Vera was right and we were little heathens, then how could we choose anyway, because to choose you’ve got to know the alternatives, and it was too late. And sometimes, even she began to think, guilt wasn’t such a bad thing, in small doses, and look at the Aborigines and what we’ve done to them. And if you didn’t have any religion at all, how could you be moral and make ethical choices – it was deeper than good manners – or decide about Reconciliation and sleeping with Philip, and that?
‘The point is,’ Mr Jackson is saying, ‘the point is …’
‘The arrangements,’ Mr Murchison says again. ‘The billeting at Coober Pedy.’
‘I know that, I know that,’ Mr Jackson is almost shouting, and he’s completely red in the face now. But it’s actually me he’s shouting at, he’s not even looking at Mr Murchison, and I haven’t said anything for ages except, ‘What is the point, Mr Jackson?’ But I feel I’ve got to say something now, or Mrs Duggins will have to bring in the first-aid box or something, he’s that close to a stroke.
‘The dormitory had these two wings,’ I tell him, ‘and it was made of the same rock as the opal centre and the church. And inside there were about a hundred wooden bunks.’
‘At last we’re getting somewhere. Now how was everybody sorted out?’
‘That was easy, Mr Jackson. It had two wings but it was joined at the top where the door was, so it was actually shaped like a U, and the boys all filled one wing and the girls were in the other.’
‘So you were with Miss Darling?’
‘Yes. I was right in the middle of the girls’ wing, and it was very hot and stuffy, and there didn’t seem to be any flow of air.’
‘I’m less interested in the flow of air than the flow of persons,’ Mr Jackson says. ‘You were telling me about Miss Darling.’
‘She was with me, and her kids were on one side of her, closer to the door, and then there was me, right next to her, and the girls from my bus on the other side of me.’
‘And the teachers?’
‘They were in the cross-section, or whatever you call it, the curve of the U, so they’d get the breeze from the doorway.’
‘But also between the two groups of students?’
‘Yes.’
‘So that anyone trying to pass from one wing to the other would have to pass the teachers?’
‘Yes.’
‘Unless,’ Mr Murchison says, ‘it was one of the teachers themselves.’
‘None of the teachers came into our wing, except for Miss Temple and Mrs Harvey to tell the girls to stop giggling and go to sleep.’
‘How do you know?’ Mr Jackson says.
‘Well, I saw them.’
‘Don’t be obtuse, Miss Vassilopoulos. How do you know no other teacher came in during the night or that none of the girls went out during the night?’
‘Well, if they’d gone out, they’d have to have passed all the teachers who seemed to be awake a lot of the time. If they wanted to go out to the toilets, say.’
‘And if someone had come in?’
‘Then I’d have seen them.’
‘Are you saying you didn’t sleep at all?’
‘Very little, it was so hot. And a lot of the girls were awake at different times, because of the heat and the blasting next door, and that always woke me.’
‘Blasting? You mean this dynamiting went on all night? Next to a dormitory?’
‘It wasn’t the miners, Mr Jackson. It was the boys in the other wing. They were holding a farting competition, and it’d be quiet for ten minutes, then there’d be an explosion, and because it was a hollow tunnel and everything echoed, it sounded like –’
‘Quite,’ says Mr Jackson.
‘And that set the girls giggling again, especially when the boys were yelling out scores.’
‘Scores? ’
‘Like: “It’s a ten,” or “It’s an eight,” and that. And then Miss Temple or Mrs Harvey would come in. And it was funny for a while, but then we remembered there was no flow of air …’
‘I think we’ll leave that,’ Mr Jackson says.
And for a minute or two, then, they forget me and get distracted again, and start rabbitting on among themselves about the Whitecrosses and what happened to Billy Whitecross at the Rock. Not whether he’d recovered and was all right again – they couldn’t care less about that – but about whether the parents were likely to sue.
To bring a case against the school and the Department. For negligence.
‘They couldn’t seriously think of going to a court of law,’ Mr Kovacs says. ‘Not with the boy still babbling all that nonsense.’ But Mr Jackson isn’t so sure about that: ‘The woman could. The mother. I wouldn’t put anything past that –’ He stops because he suddenly remembers there’s someone else in the room. Me, three feet in front of him, and he’s been cross-examining me for the last five days and even in Nazi Germany and Bosnia they might use meat hooks and piano wire but at least you get a drink of water, and my mouth’s so dry I might as well be back in the desert. And Mr Jackson must be drying up as well because when he does get round to asking a new question, it turns out it’s not a new one at all but one he’s asked me twice already.
‘But this time, Miss Vassilopoulos,’ he says, practising my name, ‘I want an absolutely truthful answer. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Mr Jackson.’
‘Did you, at any time you were in Coober Pedy, whether in the town itself, or in the dormitory, or at the mine you visited – you did visit an opal mine?’
‘Yes, Mr Jackson. It had –’
‘Did you, on any of those occasions, ever observe Mr Prescott and Miss Darling alone together?’
‘No, Mr Jackson.’
‘I give up.’ He slaps the palms of both hands on his desk. ‘I’d always taken you for an open and truthful girl,’ he says, where only a month ago, when we were in his office and he’d given us tea and a biscuit and told us all to go into computing even if we wanted to be an oboeist or something, he couldn’t even remember who I was and was calling me Miss Talbot and that. ‘I don’t think there’s any point at all in going on with this.’
And my heart jumps when I hear this, and I realize Mr Kovacs must have been listening after all because his eyes are open and he’s rubbing them to make sure they’ll be ready for when Toni comes in, and I’m just on the point of standing up to go when Mr Murchison says:
‘I wonder whether it mightn’t help Laura if we phrased the question in a slightly different way?’
