Lessons from the Heart

by John Clanchy

  And that’s when the shaking begins, just a tiny movement at first in the earth under her belly, and then, as she presses down, the earth seems to answer, sending long waves rippling through her body, until she loses all sense of herself as separate, as a being apart, unless as a voice, singing, or crying out: Minyma ngana walanku pakala. Inma nyangatja wiru mulapa …

  ‘You just have to be very careful,’ Miss Temple says when I show it to her.

  ‘You don’t like it,’ I say.

  ‘It’s very rhetorical, that’s all.’ She turns the page and reads it again. She frowns as she does this, and I wonder if she really hates it and just doesn’t want to say, or if she’s just having trouble reading it because I wrote it on my knee in the tent, and the light’s bad now, and it’s only a half-hour to sunset. Normally, I’d have copied it out again, neatly, in my journal, instead of rushing it over to her like this – to read now. And I don’t know if I’ve done that because I think it’s really good, or I’m worried it’s really bad. ‘You just need to be careful,’ she says again.

  ‘When you say rhetorical …’

  ‘So much depends on who you’re writing for.’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t like it.’ Her voice sounds cranky, though I don’t think it’s actually me she’s upset with. It sounds more as if she’s arguing with herself about something. ‘I was just raising the issue of readership.’

  ‘But you’re the reader. You’re the one who’s going to assess it.’

  ‘I don’t mean a personal reader, I mean “The Reader”. I’m merely warning you. For an Australian reader you’d have to edit it down.’

  ‘Because it’s too emotional?’

  ‘Too rhetorical,’ she says again, when she still hasn’t told me what she means by that. ‘Everything is so exposed to the light here. People don’t like high notes.’

  ‘I’ll do it again, then. I’ll cut out all the –’

  ‘Laura,’ she says quickly. ‘I’m not saying it’s wrong, or bad. I don’t want you to think that. I’m just trying to warn you, that’s all.’

  And this just makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with Miss Temple, or she’s not feeling well or has had bad news, her voice is so low. When normally she’s the one so full of high notes they’re thinking of replacing all the school windows with plastic lenses.

  ‘So it doesn’t matter about the facts?’ I say. Because this is another question I’ve asked her, and she hasn’t answered that one either.

  ‘Facts?’ she says, and she’s really not taking anything in. ‘What facts?’

  ‘Well, like the girl being near the women’s ceremony when she’s not supposed to be there, or the fact that she’s in the Park at night when it’s shut after sunset, and even if she was, how would she ever find her way there from the Resort unless someone else was with her?’

  ‘Those sorts of facts …’ she says, ‘they never matter.’ Which is a weird thing for Miss Temple to say.

  ‘Even,’ I say, ‘if the reader knows they’re wrong?’

  And I realize then the reason I wanted her to see it now is not because I think my writing’s especially good or bad or to get advice, but more because I wanted her to know about tonight. About the Park and all that. To tell her without actually telling her. And this makes it somehow easier and less sneaky, as if we’ve discussed it, even though we haven’t.

  ‘Don’t you ever stop scribbling?’ Toni is annoyed because she’s been to see Mrs Harvey to ask if she can replace me on duty tonight, and Mrs Harvey’s said no, she’s not to go anywhere near the duty officers – which tonight is me and Jamie Turner and Miss Plummer and Mr Prescott – and now it’s worse than if she hadn’t asked in the first place, because Mrs Harvey will be watching.

  ‘I’m just re-writing something,’ I tell her. ‘Miss Temple didn’t like it.’

  ‘Boy, is she snitchy.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her? Do you know?’

  ‘I think she’s had an argument with Viney.’

  ‘Did you hear them?’

  ‘He was saying, “A fact is a fact,” or something, and “You can relativize it however you like, but you’ll never change that.” ’

  ‘We were talking about trees,’ I explain to her. ‘On the bus on the way back.’

  ‘Miss Temple was saying he was always “three facts short of a good insight”, or something equally weird. Anyway, she was obviously in a bad mood, even before you showed her your writing. What did she say was wrong with it?’

  ‘It was too rhetorical.’

  ‘Oh.’ Toni looks at me, and I can tell she’s busting to ask but would have to admit she doesn’t know, and I’m busting for her not to because I don’t know. And in the end she doesn’t, she just goes back to her magazine, and I hear myself sighing and go back to my journal, which is getting more and more rhetorical every time I scratch out a line and write a new one. I look at the photo of Kate Moss on the front of Toni’s magazine and think how fabulous she looks and I’m looking at the headlines for the stories inside the magazine but I’m not actually reading them, I’m still thinking about the sentence I’m trying to write, and my eye’s just resting on one of the headlines, and then suddenly the words fall into a pattern and I am reading them, and I can’t believe the coincidence, and that gives me the reason to ask.

  ‘Toni?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Have you ever had an orgasm?’

  The magazine comes down very slowly, until Toni’s forehead and eyes appear over the top of it.

  ‘You, what!’ she says.

  ‘An orgasm?’ I say again, pointing at the cover.

  ‘Rude,’ is all she says, and goes to raise the magazine again.

  ‘No, I’m serious. Have you?’

  ‘Why do you want to know that?’ She pushes herself up on one elbow.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I sneak my pen between the pages of my journal. ‘I just wondered.’

  Toni narrows her eyes at me. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Whe-en? With Philip?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Who with? I thought –’

  ‘No one,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean with anyone.’

  ‘Rude. In fact that’s ruder still.’

  ‘Toni?’ I say, and she stops fooling.

  ‘Well, what was it like – when you thought it happened?’

  ‘It was like a wave. I think it started in my –’

  ‘I know where it probably started. What I want to know is what it felt like.’

  ‘Like a small wave at first, just a small ripple, like a muscle rippling …’

  ‘Rippling?’

  ‘Yes, and then it spread, it just kind of –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Spread, you know, like it’s running through your whole body, and there’s nothing you can do but let go, and it spreads and spreads.’

  Toni’s looking at me, and I can’t tell if she thinks I’m crazy or have got it all wrong or if I’m just making it up.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Well, you know. You can’t help yourself after that. Till you’re –’

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘You’re what?’

  ‘Aware again. You know, compos mentis,’ I say. Lamely, I suppose, but it’s the only way I can describe it.

  ‘And this happened when?’ Toni says. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I just wanted to know if it was one. Or something else.’

  Toni’s still gazing at me, her huge eyes swallowing my face. She shakes her head and picks up her magazine again. But I can see it’s a different page from the one she was reading.

  ‘Well?’ I say. Because I do want to know. For what I’m writing, apart from anything.

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Was it one? Or not?’

  ‘It certainly sounds like the real thing,’ she says, but almost angrily. As if I shouldn’t have asked h
er. She shakes out her magazine and looks for the article she was reading before. ‘Shouldn’t you be on duty now? It’s after nine.’

  ‘Shit.’ I leap up. The journal falls onto my sleeping mat, and I see Toni look at it. I slip a marker in it then, and put it under my pillow. While she watches me. ‘See you later.’ I pick up my torch.

  ‘See you,’ she says.

  The kids are really good by this stage – or most of them. Even Billy Whitecross and Kirk and their mates – whom you’d expect to be complaining about the heat and the food or the fact that there’s no TV – are just being normal snotty boys now and not total criminals, though their talk’s just as stupid as ever. A group of them is standing by one of the tents on the edge of the girls’ section where I’m patrolling.

  ‘That’s the Southern Cross,’ one of them says, and you can tell from the loudness with which he says it, that he’s guessing.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ two others chime together.

  ‘It’s got five stars. See, four big ones, and one not so bright.’

  ‘They’ve got to be in the pattern of a cross, dopey. You can’t just pick any five stars and say, “Ohhha, that’s the Southern Cross.” ’

  ‘Well,’ the first boy says, ‘it is a cross, if you look at it this way.’

  ‘What, with your head on an angle like a total freak? You have to have your head straight and look at it that way.’

  ‘Who says what’s straight and what isn’t?’

  ‘Everyone knows what straight is.’

  ‘Not everyone. What if you had a crooked neck, if you’d had an accident, or something?’

  ‘You’ve had an accident with your head like that.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That one,’ a boy on the edge of the group says, ‘looks like a camel.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘That one.’

  ‘That’s not a camel, that’s a bear …’

  ‘It’s time,’ I say, ‘you guys were in your tents. It’s half-past nine.’

  ‘Is that the Southern Cross, Laura?’ Billy Whitecross says my name and doesn’t say Lorr-ah.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, shocked. ‘I don’t know the stars.’ Billy looks genuinely disappointed. Maybe he’s normal after all, I think, just a boy who happens to be bigger and therefore everyone expects him to be a boofhead and a bully. So he is. But it’s too dark to really tell. ‘Maybe you’d better ask Mr Jasmyne in the morning.’

  They groan, and start to drift towards their tents.

  ‘That’s,’ Billy says, ‘if you want to know about the whole Universe.’

  ‘Yes, and how it was born.’

  ‘The Big Bang!’

  They laugh together and look back at me, but head for their tents without more complaint.

  I walk along the girls’ lines then, and they’re all inside and reading or talking or playing games, and I love this, I realize, being out in the open with the air – still warm – on my skin and a million stars just twenty feet above my head, and the tents all lighted up and the girls’ voices talking and chatting happily, or softly, exchanging secrets. And I wish –

  ‘Hello, Laura. Everything okay your end?’

  ‘Mr Prescott, yes.’ He’d startled me because I hadn’t even seen him standing there, at the end of the line of tents, not patrolling but just standing, as if he was waiting. But maybe he was just looking at the stars too, and I was the one who startled him.

  ‘The stars,’ he says, and I think then maybe my guess was right. ‘Aren’t they …’ He stops. And I know what he means, it is hard to find a word.

  ‘Do you know which one’s the Southern Cross?’ I ask.

  ‘No, I don’t know much about the stars.’ And in the dark he sounds even less certain than any of the boys. ‘It could be that one,’ he says, but I can’t even be sure where he’s pointing. ‘Or maybe that. You could always ask Gerald, he’d know.’

  ‘Yes, but then I’d have to hear about the birth of the Universe as well.’

  We giggle together like two kids. ‘Gerald can be a bit –’

  This is one of the things about Mr Prescott, he never seems to finish a sentence, and it’s as if all his brains and thought go into being an athlete and a spunk and that, and he hasn’t got enough energy or concentration left over for less important things like expression. Though, when he talks about sport, which is mostly all I’ve ever talked to him about really, and running, and strength through the hips, he’s always got quite a wide vocabulary then.

  ‘Laura –’ he says then, and I know immediately from his tone of voice that he wasn’t just standing there in the dark, he was waiting for me. ‘Does Toni ever talk to you?’

  Toni talk? is all I can think. Miss Blabber-Lips?

  ‘About …’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I say. And we stand there, and suddenly I’m as dumb as he is and my mouth’s dry and you could hand me a dictionary, and I still wouldn’t be able to find a single speakable work in it. Because what would you say if a teacher’s having an affair, or isn’t having one but would like to, with a student, and you’re the student’s best friend and everyone knows it and you’re tenting with her, and the teacher, who’s married and has a nice wife and two kids and one who’s just a baby as young as Thomas, comes up to you and asks you whether the girl who he – who he … likes, I suppose – whether she talks, for Chrissake? About it. ‘Not really,’ I say.

  ‘Oh,’ he says. And I can see his head and shoulders silhouetted against the sky now, and he’s got them pressed back and is looking up at the stars again, as if the answer’s written there. When he doesn’t even know which one’s the Southern Cross. ‘Oh,’ he says again, and he sounds about sixteen himself and so worried I feel sorry for him and want to help him and say I’m sure it’ll be all right, whatever it is, but I can’t because I don’t think it’s right, I think it’s wrong. And so, in the end, I don’t say anything, and it’s Mr Prescott who has to speak. Because you can’t just stand there. And –

  ‘Oh,’ is what he says. Again.

  So we both stand there and look at the stars and the ones around the edges of the horizon are single and hard and brilliant, but in the middle, right above us, about a billion miles away, there’s this really cloudy stream of silver, and at first you think it’s maybe not as important as the single stars because they’re so much brighter and clearer, and then you realize that what you’re looking at is billions of stars but all clustered so densely together their light can’t be separated.

  ‘That’s the Milky Way,’ I say to Mr Prescott, and I’m amazed at how loud and surprised my voice sounds.

  ‘Yes.’ Mr Prescott looks again for a bit. Then coughs and says, ‘Well …’

  And I know he’s going to say he’d better be getting back to the boys’ tents, and I feel – because he’s asked – I have to offer him something. And I rack my brains, but what can I say.

  ‘Laura,’ he says instead. ‘You know –’

  ‘What, Mr Prescott?’ I nearly shriek. And I don’t want him to say anything. About it. And I’m glad it’s dark, and we can’t see each other’s face properly.

  ‘I’d never –’

  And I just wait.

  ‘I’d never just use Toni.’ And use sounds so vague and hopeless I think I can start to relax. Until he says: ‘I’d never do anything to hurt her.’

  And I wish he hadn’t said that. Because I know then how serious it is – even for him, and he isn’t just fooling and messing around and getting his ego inflated or blown-up – but he’s upset about something, and it could be that everything’s so complicated when he hadn’t expected it to be, and I wonder if it’s that and they’re really fucking and maybe have fallen for one another instead of just having a relationship and that, and everything on this trip’s so cockeyed and mixed up and so different from home, and I just say:

  ‘No, I know you wouldn’t.’ Which sounds wet and pretending to be grown-up when I’m actually just filli
ng up with all the pain of me and Philip again, and I just want to go and hide and don’t want to go anywhere near the Rock with anyone.

  ‘Well, I’d better be getting back,’ he says.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Just a half-hour more …’ He tries to sound jolly, and in charge. Though in the dark, he could just as well be Billy Whitecross or any one of the other boys. ‘And then we can …’

  ‘Yes.’

  But he’s already disappeared.

  On my last round, just before eleven, I poke my head in Luisa’s and Sarah’s tent, because just the sight of them, I find, always cheers me up.

  ‘Can I come in?’ I say from outside.

  ‘Laura!’ they both call, and my heart lifts, hearing them so pleased to see me.

  ‘Are you nearly ready?’ I ask them, kneeling in the entrance to the tent. ‘Lights out in five minutes.’

  ‘Nala will be having her ceremony now,’ Luisa says. ‘I’ve been telling Sarah. I wish we could go.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and the word catches in my throat. ‘But we can’t. I’ll try and find out if it was anything special, and let you know.’

  ‘You could ask Jason. You know, the ranger?’

  I look at her, but her face is total innocence in the lamplight.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I say. ‘What are they?’

  Luisa has pulled one of the clips from her hair and – ranged alongside it – there are four miniature cloth dolls in brightly coloured blouses and skirts.

  ‘They’re my worry dolls,’ she says.

  ‘Worry dolls?’

  ‘Don’t you know them? They’re from South America. They’re Guatemalan.’ And she says the word with such authority that I wonder if I haven’t made a terrible mistake, and just assumed she was Indian Indian when all along she was indian indian.

  ‘What are they for?’

  ‘Well, each one,’ she starts, and lines them up across her pillow, ‘you tell a different worry to. Like things that are worrying you. And then you put it under your pillow. And in the morning when you wake up –’