by John Clanchy
‘Laura, come on, come on.’ And she’s always doing this, telling you to get organized, and saying Cmon, cmon, cmon, like she’s running a perpetual chook raffle or something. ‘You haven’t even checked in your bag yet. The plane’s leaving in thirty minutes.’
So I don’t get to speak to Mr Prescott after all, and when I look for him later, as we’re getting on the plane, I can’t even see him at all. It’s like he’s become invisible.
‘You can sit next to us,’ Luisa says, when I check in my bag and get a seat allocation. They’re standing together, as always, near the counter, watching the bags being loaded and then trundling off along the conveyor belt until they disappear through a plasticribboned hole in the wall.
‘Anywhere will do,’ I tell the man behind the counter. ‘I don’t mind.’ And, if I can’t sit with Toni, I don’t. Mind, that is.
‘You don’t have to sit in the same seat,’ Sarah says, ‘once the plane takes off. The lady on our counter told us. You can move around later.’
‘Mrs Harvey may have other ideas about that. But thanks anyway.’ I drift off. Not really wanting to talk to anyone now, not even Luisa and Sarah, who have their own world. And really I only want to get back home, and to my own room and things now, and see Mum and Katie and Thomas. And even Philip, my step-dad, begins to look good alongside Mr Jasmyne and Mr Tremblings and Mr Prescott. Who I look for again but I can’t see, and I think maybe he’s gone to the toilet.
In the bookshop, I look through the stands but they’re mostly John Grisham and Stephen King and Tom Clancy, and books about men being one planet and women another, and I can’t find anything to read. Among all these books.
At one point I try to turn one of the circular stands but it won’t move. I push it again a bit harder, thinking it’s just caught on something, but it still won’t move. If anything it pushes back harder. So I let go altogether, and the stand goes whizzing in the opposite direction, spraying books all over the floor.
‘Miss Temple?’ I say, as her face appears around the corner of the stand. ‘I thought it was just stuck.’
‘So did I.’
A bookshop. I should have guessed it’d be her. We giggle together a bit as we start to pick up the books. The man at the register is frowning at us, but there’s no way we’d know exactly where each book should be slotted back. And Miss Temple who’s normally so serious about everything, and the WORLD and ISSUES and that, can drop her guard sometimes, just very very occasionally, and you can see a different person inside her -someone, though you can hardly believe it, about your own age. ‘Poker-arse,’ she says, and we have to go behind the stands with our arms full of books so the man at the register can’t see us giggling and putting half the books back in upside down, and it’s amazing but they never fit even though they must have come out of there in the first place.
‘So, you’ve finished the Tolkien,’ she says, when we’ve recovered and put everything back, and she’s become Miss Temple again.
‘No, I’ve just stopped. It seems so –’
‘What?’ She always wants to know. And I can’t just say You know, like you can with any normal human being, except Mum maybe, because she’ll say, No, what? and keep saying it till I find a word.
‘Unreal, or something. Out here.’
‘You mean false?’
‘No, not false so much. It just belongs to a different world.’
She looks at me, thinking about this. Till I get embarrassed.
‘So I just …’ I wave my hand at the book stands so she’ll stop looking at me.
‘Voss,’ she says.
‘I beg your pardon, Miss Temple?’
‘Voss, by Patrick White. Have you read that?’
‘No. Is it good?’
‘You read it and tell me. Here.’ She snatches a paperback from down low in another book case, away from the flashy books and best sellers. The book’s dusty and she bangs it against her leg, and the motes spin and float in the bright sunlight. ‘Amazing,’ she says, ‘an old Penguin. Look …’ she holds the book out, so we can both see it. ‘It must have been buried away here for ages.’ The cover, which is black, has a simple drawing, the white outline of a man, bearded, and in a bushman’s shirt, belt and hat. He has thick glasses, and is staring out past you – at nothing – as you look at him.
‘See the N ?’ Miss Temple says, pointing to a chalk-scratch at the bottom right corner of the drawing.
‘Is it Nolan?’ I ask, and she nods.
‘Is it good?’ I say, doubting, as I turn the pages. The print is tiny and looks so old-fashioned.
‘Read it.’
‘Is it about out here?’
‘Read it.’
And as I’m paying, at the counter, and the man – who’s snatched it out of my hand and looked at it and sniffed – is ringing up the price, she says: ‘Oh, and there’s a Laura in it as well.’
‘A Laura?’
‘Another one,’ she says, handing a pile of books to poker-arse. ‘Just as intense, though.’
‘Intense?’
‘Read it,’ she says, for the third time and hands over her plastic card. ‘This,’ she laughs, patting the pile of books on the counter in front of her, ‘should keep me going to Sydney.’
The plane’s full. Normally, the flight attendant explains, they’d have given two seats to Billy, or even three, and put the arm-rests down so he could lie across, but the flight’s full, so they’ve built a small frame for him to rest his leg on.
And sitting there a few feet behind him, and seeing the white cast of his leg, tattooed and splotched now with biros and textas, but still white and artificial, and poking out into the aisle, I find myself getting more and more uneasy and unhappy, and I don’t know why. I glance at the flight magazine, but there’s nothing in it worth reading. I look again at Billy’s leg, and get more upset. I look around then, behind me, into the belly of the plane, anxious to find Toni, and I catch her eye almost immediately, and I know she’s been watching me. She looks away, talks animatedly to the dill beside her. Who looks more startled than he normally does, and I know then she’s hardly said a word to him since we took off.
‘Come down here, Laura,’ Luisa calls, from three or four seats in front of Billy. ‘Virginia will swap for a while, won’t you, Virginia?’ The red-headed girl in the aisle seat opposite Luisa nods at me.
I shake my head. ‘Later,’ I mouth, because I’ve just understood what’s upsetting me. It’s Billy’s leg, it’s broken, it’s in plaster, and I remember him, the awful little boy, the klunkhead, the big boy, the bully in the bus, on the first day of the trip, months ago now, and how he’d stuck his leg out into the aisle to stop other kids getting to the toilet, and I’d imagined jumping on it and breaking it … and now it’s happened. And there’s this tightness in my throat while I sit there and try and think about this, and what it means, and wonder whether it can ever possibly be true – that you can do this, injure someone very badly, just by wanting it to happen.
‘Well … ?’ says Miss Temple, passing my seat at one point. But I’m still thinking about Billy, and Toni and Mr Prescott, and everything that’s happened, and we must be halfway to Sydney already. And I’ve forgotten completely about the white man on the black cover of the book. And even its name, or his. Foss, was it?
‘How far have you got?’ Miss Temple wants to know.
‘I haven’t …’ I say. ‘Yet.’
‘Read it,’ she says. And passes.
And I sigh and pull the book out of the seat pocket in front of me. Because I don’t really want to read, I think. And the pages flip through my hands, and a word here and there catches my eye. And a line even sometimes. And, once, even part of a paragraph, and it is about someone called Laura:
… Then, when the wind had cut the last shred of flesh from the girl’s bones, and was whistling in the little cage that remained, she began even to experience a shrill happiness, to sing the wounds her flesh would never suffer. Yet, such was their weakne
ss, her bones continued to crave earthly love, to hold his skull against the hollow where her heart had been. It appeared that pure happiness must await the final crumbling, when love would enter into love, becoming an endlessness, blowing at last, indivisible, indistinguishable, over the brown earth.
And before I’m even finished the paragraph, I find myself turning back to the beginning and reading it again – and struggling just to contain it. And I’m breathless, I realize, because I’ve never read anything like this before. And the same pain is back in my chest again, the same panting I’d felt that first day in the bus, with the heat through the glass, the dead animals, the blood splashing the road. And it’s like it’s a new world, a whole continent. Breaking open. And the Rock is like this too, I think. Uluru. Like there are these small tears in the skin of the earth, and what you can see through them is somehow realer and more important than the real world you’re in.
Finally, I believe I have begun to understand this great country, which we have been presumptuous enough to call ours, and with which I shall be content to grow since the day we buried Rose. For part of me has now gone into it. Do you know that a country does not develop through the prosperity of a few landowners and merchants, but out of the suffering of the humble? I could now lay my head on the ugliest rock in the land and feel at rest.
And next moment, someone’s touching my shoulder, and saying:
‘Your seat belt, please. You must do your belt up, dear.’ And it’s the flight attendant. And she’s saying: ‘We’re landing now.’
‘Landing?’
‘You’re home,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you know?’
12
TIME ISN’T A CONSTANT. We only think it is. But it isn’t, time expands and contracts. Or at least that’s what Mr Jasmyne is always telling us in Physics. We assume time’s constant, Mr Jasmyne says. We have to. Otherwise none of the experiments we do would ever work.
‘Does that mean,’ I ask him, ‘that all our results are wrong?’
‘Not wrong, just partial, simplified. I mean, what would happen, if we tried to apply real-world forces in the classroom?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Jasmyne.’
‘Chaos,’ he says then, ‘uncontrollable complexity.’
‘So we have to simplify everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like time?’
‘Like time.’
And I’m sorry I’m not quick enough then to switch the conversation to something else, even Space or Energy or something, because Mr Jasmyne’s always going on about Time and the Speed of Light and how we should all read Einstein and Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies and how he can even lend us his own books if we like, we only have to ask – though nobody ever does of course – and this, I know, disappoints him and I’m almost tempted or guilty enough to do it myself sometimes because I’m supposed to be the top Physics student in my stream and so I feel kind of responsible for him.
‘You can incorporate time in an equation,’ he says. ‘You can assign it a value, and all the calculations you do will fall out neatly enough. But you’re always assuming. You mustn’t forget that. You’re always just assuming.’
‘That t is constant?’
‘Yes.’
‘When it isn’t?’
‘No.’
And he says all this as if he’s letting you in on the Secret of the Universe, when anybody who’s ever been involved in an atrocity or fallen in love – which Toni says is the same thing – knows it already. How time can expand until it seems like an ocean or a river just flowing on and on without beginning or end, and how it can contract as well into a single excruciating beat, or pulse. Like your heart. You don’t have to read Einstein or Paul Davies to know that.
I no sooner get back home from the Inquisition in Mr Jackson’s office than the phone starts ringing. I’ve just come in the front door of our house – literally – I mean I’ve still got my schoolbag on my shoulder, and the phone’s already ringing, and I know it’ll have something to do with me. And it.
When I get to the living room, I find Mum there, pressing the mouthpiece of the phone into her shoulder while she looks at me and whispers, ‘It’s Miss Temple,’ though actually she says the words as a question, ‘It’s Miss Tem-ple?’, which means: Do you want to take it? You don’t have to talk to her right now, you know, not if you don’t want. I can easily tell her you’re not back from school yet. And would you like something, say a hamburger and a plate of pancakes and a milkshake to get your carbohydrates and blood-sugar levels up, you’re looking pale. And somehow she can manage to say all this without actually uttering a word, simply by raising her voice the tiniest fraction on the ‘-ple of Tem-ple.
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s all right. I’ll talk to her.’ And I drop my schoolbag on the table and look at Mum with the phone against my shoulder now, and I have this weird thought about whether Miss Temple can hear the difference – between shoulders, I mean – though actually I’m just waiting till Mum gets the message and goes.
‘Fruit?’ she says over her shoulder, when she reaches the doorway. ‘You should eat something.’
I poke my tongue out at her back, and it’s only when I hear the fridge door in the kitchen open, that I say anything.
‘Miss Temple?’
‘Laura,’ she says. ‘What are you doing at home? Why aren’t you at school?’
‘I didn’t want to stay this afternoon.’
‘Your journal …’ she begins. And this is one thing about Miss Temple, she doesn’t waste time like most people do when they ring you, saying, ‘How are you?’ and ‘Is it raining over there, it’s sunny here,’ even if they’re ringing from three blocks away, when all the time the only thing they’ve rung you for is to say, ‘Your journal …’ and should start there. All the rest is called phatic communication and is like clearing your throat or exchanging cultural tokens.
Miss Temple’s not like that at all, she’s straight to the point, especially now we’ve been back from the desert for two weeks and she’s stopped behaving crazily and is nearly normal again or as normal as anyone can be who spends half her time praying for rain even though she’s an atheist, just so she can pick Mr Jasmyne up at a bus stop without anyone making a federal kidnapping case out of it.
‘I just wanted to clarify something,’ she says, and I can’t hear Mum in the kitchen any more, which means she is still there but listening very hard and trying to guess from my answers what Miss Temple’s saying at the other end. ‘Something about your journal.’
‘What about it, Miss Temple?’ And I’m careful to say it, and not my journal, so Mum won’t know, and the it could be about anything – even the weather or something equally phatic – for all she knows.
‘They’ve asked me about your journal,’ Miss Temple says.
‘Who has?’
‘The Nobel Literature Committee, who do you think? Mr Jackson and Mr Kovacs, of course. And that hatchet-man from the Department.’
‘Mr Murchison.’
‘He’s a cold fish, if ever I saw one. I don’t know whose scalp he wants most, Dwayne’s or Mr Jackson’s.’
‘Mr Jackson’s?’ I say, and then I remember Mum’s listening and wonder what she can be making of all this, with me just saying Who? and Mr Murchison and Mr Jackson? like that, and it must sound to her like I’m picking the staff soccer team or something.
‘They interrogated me … about your journal,’ Miss Temple says. And of course I’m going, Interrogated her? Miss Temple? Joke! But I don’t say anything or even laugh, I just listen. ‘Did you tell them about the journal?’ she says.
‘Yes, Miss Temple. I wasn’t thinking. It just –’
‘It’s all right,’ she says quickly. ‘You did nothing wrong. You just need to be cautious with people like them. You need to learn that.’
And the way she says this, she does make them sound like headhunters or scalpers, or something. But there’s something else I’ve just thought of.
‘How come the
y’ve talked to you already? You were supposed to go in after Toni.’
‘I did.’
‘But –’
‘Toni’s interview took all of five minutes. She wouldn’t answer any of their questions. In fact she wouldn’t let them ask any – so I was called in before lunch.’
‘But Toni -?’
‘Toni just said what she wanted to say and walked out on them. She’d already decided to commit suicide, you see. And given the circumstances, I think she did the sensible thing.’
‘Suicide? I say, and I hear a plate fall on the wooden table in the kitchen. ‘Toni? ’
‘Educationally speaking,’ Miss Temple says. ‘She apparently just told them she was seventeen, an adult, they could mind their own business about what she did in her private life, and she was leaving school anyway, she was sick of it. I think she only went there to see the look on their faces when she said it.’
‘But she never told me,’ I say, and I see Mum in the doorway and she’s pale, and I realize she’s still listening to the echo of that one word inside her head, so I just shake my head and wave it’s okay at her. It’s okay, I wave, I’ll explain later.
And in the meantime, Miss Temple is saying: ‘Oh yes? And how much has Toni Darling told you about anything – recently, anyway?’
And I’m still thinking about this – the truth of this – when Miss Temple says: ‘But Toni’s not the reason I rang you. It’s about your journal. They asked me to hand it over.’
‘Miss Temple.’ I feel instantly sick. ‘Miss Temple,’ I say again, ‘you couldn’t, it’s private.’ And I think for a moment I am going to be sick, just imagining them – Mr Kovacs and Mr Jackson especially – with their hands and their fingers on it, their fat men’s fingers all over it, turning the pages, and reading. Because it is private, and there are things in it … Not just about Toni, but about me, and about me and Philip.
