by John Clanchy
‘Facts,’ she says, ‘can get a bit stifling.’ And pants a bit herself then. And I think it’s the heat.
‘Do you want to stop, Miss Temple?’ I say.
‘It’s not facts that count,’ she says, ‘but the significance we give to them.’
‘But you can’t just get around them,’ I say, ‘or ignore them.’ And I probably get this from Philip, my step-father, who’s always saying things like, ‘Yes, but the facts, the facts of the case were incontrovertible,’ especially when Mum, who sounds just like Miss Temple sometimes, has said, ‘Facts, facts – what do they matter, it’s the context that matters, people’s intention,’ but then Philip just says, ‘Not before the law, it’s not,’ in his smarmy way – he’s such a lawyer sometimes – and it makes Mum so mad.
And I suppose I get it from science too, and school, and people like Mr Jasmyne who’re always on about science being the accumulation of knowledge and facts, and how in America they can’t even teach evolution in school and say it’s just a belief and someone’s point of view when it’s a scientific fact and has been proven over and over. ‘Some things are always facts,’ I tell Miss Temple now.
‘Like what?’ Miss Temple says, and at that moment two gorgeous ringed pigeons that I know are spinifex pigeons fly across our path and land about a metre away, and we have to stop and coo at them, and I’m glad because it gives me time to think.
‘Like the earth is round.’ I look at the Head in front of us and then down at the Valley floor. ‘Or it goes round the sun.’
‘Yes,’ Miss Temple concedes. ‘I expect that’s a fact. Now it is anyway. But if you were alive in, say, England in the sixth century, would you have accepted that?’
‘No, they thought the earth was flat, and the sun went round it.’
‘Well, was that a fact?’
‘For them, I suppose. Because that’s what they believed was true.’
‘So, does what is a fact depend on what you believe?’
‘No, because you could be wrong.’
‘Deluded?’
‘Yes.’
‘So,’ she says, pointing at an eagle that’s found a breeze high up and is lying across it, not moving a feather at about a hundred kilometres an hour, ‘who decides what a fact is?’
‘How do you mean?’ It’s a bit unfair because she’s distracted me, and I’m still looking at the eagle that’s nearly vanished already, and wondering why we can’t feel any of the breeze down here.
‘Well, Christ’s death and Resurrection – are they facts?’
‘It depends.’
‘Or Mother Teresa … ?’
This is the thing about Miss Temple. Once she starts an argument, she jumps about all over the place, and you’re no sooner thinking about Christ and the Jews and who rolled back the boulder, than you’re in India with the poor and lepers and washing in the Ganges or kissing their sores. But I know she’s just thinking aloud herself, and I don’t mind it, because in a funny way she almost makes you feel like an equal. And she treats you like that ninety per cent of the time when she’s not going all gooey and giving away her mother’s favourite scarf to Mr Jasmyne for a cravat. And that’s why I like her so much. The equality reason, I mean, not the cravat one.
‘Was Mother Teresa a saint?’ she asks. ‘Is that a fact? Or was she an oppressor of the poor? Refusing them contraception?’
And listening to this, I’d never thought Miss Temple was a mad Protestant or anything, she’s usually so moderate, and she’s always asking for tolerance and that, but I have to answer something, so I answer her first question – the one about Christ and the Resurrection, because I don’t know anything about Mother Teresa, except that she’s not a mother like most Indians.
‘It depends,’ I say, ‘I suppose if you’re a committed Christian.’
But it’s no use, Miss Temple’s off again. And this time she lands in Australia.
‘And what about the Mala walk, or the fight of the two serpents on the other side of the Climb? Are they facts?’
‘No,’ I can say then because that’s obvious. ‘They’re myths.’
‘But what if you were a committed believer? Do the Aborigines, for example, believe those things are real? Are facts?’
‘I suppose. But other people –’
‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘Other people don’t. So, who decides?’ ‘Are you saying it’s just power? It’s just who’s got most power who decides what’s a fact?’
‘What do you think?’ And this is why I say Miss Temple can be so frustrating, because she keeps answering a question with a question and isn’t at all like Mr Jasmyne who gives you the facts whenever you ask or will look it up if he doesn’t know – which is practically never – while Miss Temple just leaves you confused with more questions than when you started. ‘But don’t you prefer that?’ Mum asks when I complain to her about this sometimes. ‘To just hearing facts?’ And Mum’s just as bad, I decide, listening to her questions, and ‘No,’ I say, ‘I prefer Mr Jasmyne who gives you the facts.’ Or what he believes are the facts.
‘Just have the girl in the Park,’ Miss Temple says, and this startles me so much – I mean, I’m a million miles away at this moment – that I just say:
‘What?’
‘Don’t give any explanations for her being there. Just assume the reader will accept it, and they will. If you start explaining, and try to give it credibility, you’ll only draw attention to it, and people will start saying: Hang on …’
She moves ahead then, away from me, anxious to catch up to Mr Jasmyne. And Toni comes back. From an eagle’s perspective, all this movement back and forwards must look like we’re playing leap-frog, or something.
‘You just stick to the facts, Laura,’ Toni says in this deep voice. ‘You can never go wrong with a good cup of tea.’
And we laugh together and stop to drink from our water-bottles, and I love Toni, she always cheers me up, especially when I’m getting a headache thinking about how complicated everything is.
‘Do you know,’ she says, standing on a rock in the desert right in the Centre of Australia in four hundred degrees centigrade, ‘Thai men – or Thai fishermen – or some Thai fishermen anyway – they scar the heads of their things …’
‘You, what!’ I say, and even I’m breathless at this.
‘Their penises. They do it with a knife or a sharp shell, or glass or something.’
‘I thought that was circumcision.’
‘Or put beads under the skin.’
‘Yuk.’
‘So that when they get an erec–’ she says, and stops to let some of the younger girls pass. ‘The head becomes more swollen, and the scars rub and give women more pleasure.’
‘You’re joking,’ I say as though I don’t want to know, though of course I do.
‘Fact. I read it in Forum or Cleo or somewhere a few weeks ago.’
‘But what’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Nothing. It’s just so hot, it popped into my mind.’
We walk on, the sweat streaming on us now, and too preoccupied with our own thoughts for a while to even talk.
We walk along the floor of the Valley, and some of the kids have melted completely by now and might have to be poured into their water-bottles and carried home for burial, except their remains would have to be squirted not scattered, and we reach the last shelter that marks the start of the loop.
‘Look,’ says one of the boys who’s emptied his bottle ages ago. We look where he’s pointing. Under the pole and bark shelter there’s a metal tank with Emergency Water painted on its side.
‘That’s not for you,’ Mrs Harvey says. ‘That’s what it says, it’s for an emergency.’
‘This is an emergency, isn’t it?’ the boy gasps and drops to his feet in a mock faint.
‘Get up, Antony,’ Mrs Harvey says. ‘Borrow someone else’s water. It’s only five hundred metres through the gorge now, and we’ll be back at the buses.’
T
hey grumble but go along happily enough, thinking about the shortness of the distance and the shelter of the buses, and lunch. And it’s strange, but it’s the littlest girls, Sarah and Luisa and a couple of their friends, picking their way along carefully at the back and not stumbling every few feet and kicking rocks with their heavy boots and rushing ahead one minute and falling back the next, who are doing the best and proving as durable as anyone.
And again, I notice, it’s Dave who watches them most closely and points out the odd thing to them that the rest of us never see, so that every so often a voice calls out brightly to me or Toni: ‘Did you see that, Laura? Did you see that, Toni?’ ‘What?’ we say, having seen nothing. ‘That pigeon, and it was pouting,’ one of them will say, or the willy wagtail or the special dragon with its military coat on, or the skink or a desert bluebell or a dozen other species that the rest of us – the other ninety, even Mr Jasmyne – have just marched over the top of.
There’s still some shade in the gorge and the hint of a breeze, so we rest there and drink the last of our water and look down into the bowl of the Valley of the Winds which we’ve just climbed out of, and watch the kites and eagles circling at our own eye level. Though, even as we’re watching, clouds cover the sun again, and it’s even hotter still.
‘It must storm,’ Miss Temple says.
‘It will,’ Dave says. ‘In October.’
We reach the buses and the shelters by the carpark shortly before one o’clock, and have lunch there.
‘What would you like to do now?’ Mrs Harvey wants to know. ‘It’s your free afternoon.’
‘What is there to do?’ one of the boys says.
Miss Temple looks at Dave, who shrugs.
‘There’s only the two places basically,’ he says.
‘Is that all?’ They’re unable to believe it.
‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ Mrs Harvey reminds them, ‘you’ll be in Alice Springs, and there’ll be lots for you to do there.’
‘Yeah, but we only have one and a half days there before the plane.’
‘You can see a lot in that time,’ she says, but even I can see she’s guessing.
‘Yeah, but what are we going to do this afternoon?’
‘It’s your free time. What would you like to do?’
‘Well, what is there?’ they say again.
And we’re going in a bigger circle, I realize, than the eagles.
‘The options,’ says Dave – and even the teachers who’ve run out of ideas themselves are happy to let him take charge – ‘are these. Spend the afternoon here …’
‘Too hot.’
‘Climb the Rock again …’
‘Too hot.’ And it’s Mrs Harvey who says it this time.
‘But you said we could.’
‘In the morning. Anyone who wants to get up at five-thirty and be back in time for the ride to Alice can climb it again. But not now. And that,’ she says, looking around for me, ‘will give Laura a chance too. She missed last time, remember?’
‘Laura’s pretending we shouldn’t do it,’ Billy Whitecross calls out. ‘But that’s only cos she’s scared. She wouldn’t even get to Chicken Rock.’
‘It’s nothing to do with being scared,’ Mrs Harvey says. ‘So mind your own business. It was so you could go up, loudmouth, while she looked after one of the girls.’
‘Loo-uisa. Custard.’
‘You really are hard to like sometimes, Billy Whitecross.’ Mrs Harvey says this with such force that even Billy has to back down.
‘It was just a jo-ke,’ he complains and sulks, having been misunderstood.
‘Laura deserves a chance like the rest of you,’ Mrs Harvey says. And a lot of them, I see, are nodding and glancing round at me.
‘Do you want to?’ Luisa asks quietly from behind me. And that’s the thing I haven’t decided at all, because when I came here, I intended to, just like everyone else, but then listening to Luisa and Nala, I thought I shouldn’t. But maybe, like Billy said, that was just because I was afraid – and if I don’t do it now, and it really was fear all along, then I’ll never know. But if I do, what does that mean about what I thought I’d learnt from Luisa and Nala? And, thinking about all this, I begin to realize I can’t have both – I can’t know whether I would be able to do it without fear, and also not do it, as I now want. And does that matter? There’s so much you can never know anyhow – even about yourself – when you’ve only got one life.
‘I don’t know,’ I say aloud. And Luisa, I see, takes it as an answer to her own question.
‘The other option,’ Dave says, ‘is to go and look around the Resort, the shops and hotels, or just sit in the campground and recover. Rest up for the trip tomorrow. There’s a pool there, don’t forget.’
‘Yeahh!’
‘Pool?’ one of the boys says. ‘It’s only twenty metres. It’s just for little kids.’
‘At least you’d be cool,’ Dave says.
And half of them settle for that, and half for the Resort.
‘What’ll you do?’ Toni asks.
‘I’d love a swim,’ I say, ‘but you’d never get a chance with all those boys. I might just –’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Toni says. ‘Write in my journal. What is it, an epic?’
‘No, it’s not even a story. I decided not to do a story. It’s just bits.’
‘Bits?’ The sound of it rattles at the back of her throat like broken biscuits. ‘You’ve spent all this time writing bits?’
‘Mood pieces, then. Like music. But I have to go over and over them because some of them aren’t very good, and they’re for assessment.’
‘Like about what? What was the bit you were writing yesterday?’
‘It was nothing much.’
‘You were scribbling so hard you barely knew I was in the tent. It must have been about something.’
‘It was just about a girl.’
‘Yes ? ’
‘Well, nothing. She was just out in this Park, at night, by herself.’
‘But hang on, that didn’t happen till later, till last night. You were writing this before. What are you, psychic or something?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Lolly, you’re not going back there tonight.’
‘You’ll be out somewhere.’
‘Lolly, you’re not going. I’ll go and tell him myself.’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘I’ll ring Miriam.’
‘I’ll never speak to you again,’ I say, and mean it. For that moment. ‘Anyway, I never said I was going anywhere. With anyone.’
‘Neither did I.’
We don’t talk all the way back – even though she’s gone out of her way to persuade Mrs Harvey to let her ride in my bus, with me. But we rock against one another, our bodies are in touch, and we can feel each other’s hurt on our skins. And we’re closer by the time we get off than if we’d talked and apologized and made up.
And you only, I think, maybe get one friend like this in your life. And I think Toni must be thinking the same thing because she picks up my pack as well as her own without even asking and carries them both because she can see I’m exhausted from last night and no sleep and have to go on duty again tonight at nine. And that’s after we’ve had to help with the barbecue dinner and cleaning up, and if I see another hamburger and sausage and white plastic plate and knife and fork for the rest of my life I swear I’ll become an axe murderer. Of cows anyway.
‘Tell you what,’ Toni says, ‘have a shower and cool off, and we’ll go over to the Resort and see if we can sneak into one of the hotels and I can get a gin and you can have a lemonade.’
‘They’ll want to see our ID.’
‘Not here. They’ll think we’re tourists. You can make up for eighteen easily.’
‘I should have a sleep. I’m on duty at nine.’
‘Better you sleep tonight.’
But, in the end, we don’t do anything. We just lie there in the heat, looking up at the
ceiling of the tent, and thinking.
‘What’s bothering you?’ Toni says.
And I don’t say, Nothing or Who said anything is bothering me, or Mind your own business, or anything like that.
‘I’ll have to leave a message for Jason. Just tell him I’m not coming.’
‘I’ve already told you,’ she pushes herself up on her elbow, ‘I’ll do that.’
‘No, it’s no hassle. I want to do it myself.’
But at eleven o’clock, when the time does come, I find I don’t want to face Jason, or even see him at all. Trouble is, I don’t know where Toni’s got to either – she’s not in the tent when I get back from patrolling and lights out – and I wait and wait, hoping now she might come with me, but she doesn’t, and I sense he’ll be there already, waiting under the orange lamp at the entrance to the campground.
And the more I think of him waiting there, sitting on his bike, just waiting patiently, the more I can’t help myself and am drawn to go, just to see. Not to talk to him even, but just to see. And be certain. And if I don’t go now, I’ll scratch myself, or scream or do something stupid – everything’s so heavy and still – and wake the whole camp.
The tents are all in darkness now, and there are clouds over the face of the moon. I avoid the gravel paths and the road with its round lighted globes. He’ll be expecting me to come on the road, in the light, like I did last time. In the darkness, I hear the water sprays hissing on the unused tent sites, feel the wetness of the grass and the slipperiness of the sand turning to mud under my sandals. There are hedges all along the borders of the campground, clumps of bushes, wattles and tea-tree, and I make my way along the line of them, reaching out and feeling with my hands as I go, until, at one point, the darkness is so thick I can’t see at all and I have to cut back towards the road. Which I think is on my left now. I go left towards where I can see a light, and in three steps I’m almost on it, on him, in orange under the lamplight. And I stand there, unable to go back or forwards, or even to look down to check the colours I’m wearing, whether they’ll be seen.
Jason sits, straddling the bike, waiting patiently, just as he did last night. He’s looking up the road, over to my left, where I would be coming. If I were. He taps a short rhythm with his fingers on the helmet perched on the petrol tank of his bike. Another helmet hangs by its strap from the seat behind him. I breathe, and take one step back and find the sharp needles of some bush pressing into my back. Jason sits under the orange lamp, and taps. Another step, and my back is pushing into the bushes themselves and something breaks, a twig, small branch, with a crack, it might almost be glass, and ‘Shit!’ I breathe then, because it isn’t me, it’s something else, an animal, possum perhaps, something off to my right, a few metres behind me, but it’s me Jason has seen or something just near me, surely, because he stands, his legs up over the bike, his brow now furrowed and dark under the yellow-orange light. There’s no tapping, no sound, as he looks, stares, through the light, the darkness, at me. And I turn my head slowly to find the direction I’ve come, over the wet lawns, and think I know. Though even the sprinklers have stopped now.
