Lessons from the Heart

by John Clanchy

  ‘Laura? Couldn’t we at least talk about it?’ Philip said.

  When we’d been talking for an hour already, and I couldn’t think of anything further to say – anything that might help, I mean.

  ‘You could come down to Canberra this weekend, couldn’t you? Or I could come home?’

  And I had this crazy moment then where I almost said, ‘But what about Jenny, wouldn’t you have to bring her?’ And I had to admit then the only thing I felt about Philip was a sort of annoyance or disappointment because he was mucking things up just when I’d got everything safely arranged, with him and Jenny together, neatly framed, in my head.

  ‘What would you think,’ he said again, ‘if I came home for the weekend?’

  ‘I’ve got to study, Philip. I’m still miles behind after the trip.’

  ‘Please? I was in the wrong, I’ve told you that. I’m admitting it was my fault. What more can I do?’

  I try to picture Philip as he says all this. I imagine him in the half-light of a phone booth in his college, his face thinner than it was when I last saw him, and full of shadows. I imagine him standing in the booth, his head down as he speaks into the phone, his blond fringe hanging. I see him watching his foot as it kicks in the darkness against the thick, soundproof padding of the wall beside him. ‘Please -?’ I hear him say one last time, reaching out to someone who is already too far away to reach back.

  ‘You’re not still brooding over that?’ Mum says, and I catch a whiff of fresh baby powder, and wonder how long they’ve actually been gone while I’ve sat here, daydreaming.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I say. Though I don’t ask what her that is -whether it’s Philip and me breaking up, or Toni being in such trouble.

  ‘What then? Something’s obviously still worrying you.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’ My head has started to ache. I stand and pick up my bag.

  ‘Darling?’ Mum says. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say again. Because what can I say? I can hardly tell her that the thing that’s making my head ache isn’t anything to do with Philip, and isn’t even what’s going to happen to Toni and Mr Prescott, and it’s not whether teachers and students can fall in love, or, if they do, what they’re allowed and not allowed to do about it – it’s not any of that. What’s making my head ache, and has since that last moment in Mr Jackson’s room, is the single sheet of paper that I can still see on his desk when I stand up to leave his room. It’s a letter – the letter, the parent’s statement of complaint. And I recognize the handwriting immediately. Toni’s.

  14

  It’s still only May, but the leaves in the park at the end of our block are already piling up. I walk from one end of the park to the other and back again, not going anywhere, just pushing my feet through the layers of red and brown, dying leaves. Occasionally I pass other people, office workers rushing late for the train station, or mothers pushing their prams and smoking in the sun, or old men, on sticks, who smile and stop and even raise their hats and turn their bodies in slow, formal steps, as if they were dancing, as I pass them on the grass. I smile back, if someone manages to catch my eye, but I don’t stop.

  ‘Wagging it today?’ an old man calls out.

  ‘No, Mr Thompson,’ I say, still moving. ‘I’ve got first period off, that’s all.’

  I don’t really hear what he says back, only the words my day reach me. But that’s enough. ‘Never had periods off in my day,’ he’ll have said. Or something. ‘Uh-huh,’ I call back, and hope it won’t seem too rude.

  Normally of course I would be at school, free period or not.

  ‘Mind how you go, then,’ Mr Thompson, or someone, calls from behind me and I wave, without turning.

  This is my favourite park in all Sydney. It has been my favourite since we came here after Mum and Philip got married. The park’s full of old trees – old elms, and oaks, and shaded paths, and willows by the river ponds. It’s where I used to bring Philip sometimes when he came to the house and we needed to get out and be by ourselves, and just down there by the ponds is where Grandma Vera ran off with My Huoy, the Cambodian girl, and Mum thought she’d drowned her or done something equally awful, and knew after that she couldn’t cope and would have to put Grandma in a home. But Grandma died first.

  Today, however, everything about the park feels restless and unhappy, and with all the trees half-stripped like this, and brown and yellow, and the willow branches just trailing in the water, it’s like the whole thing’s been an awful mistake. Like the park’s made an effort, and tried to be pretty and green and neat and everything, but it’s failed, because in the end it doesn’t belong, and it knows it. And, thinking this way, I realize I’m waiting for something else to happen – I’m waiting to turn a corner, say, and suddenly stumble across a tear in the skin of the earth, and through it catch a glimpse of orange and yellow rock, the sudden blaze of a ghost gum, its green hair curling.

  Alice Springs?’ Nala had said at Uluru, when we told her where we were heading next. ‘One cousin mine still there, eh.’

  ‘Is it a man?’ Luisa said, fitting her heel into the broken shell of an ant-nest.

  ‘Yairs,’ said Nala.

  ‘Does he live there?’

  ‘Yairs, he still live that country,’ Nala said. ‘He bilong Caterpillar Dreaming, that one.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Luisa, pressing down with her heel. And thinking nothing of it, just watching interestedly as the ants poured up out of the nest and over the naked foot of her sandal. ‘I see,’ she said, finally stamping.

  And apparently did. Where to me at the time it was all just bizarre, just crazy talk.

  ‘Here,’ Miss Temple says, when I do finally make it to school. ‘Here’s your journal. Now for Godsake put it somewhere safe. I was expecting to find you earlier.’

  ‘I didn’t come first period today.’

  ‘Oh?’ she says. Never letting anything pass.

  ‘There was no one to talk to.’

  ‘Have you seen her?’ she says. ‘Since?’

  ‘No, I rang her at home last night, but I only got her mother. She was really upset, she could hardly talk.’

  ‘It mightn’t have been upset that did that.’

  ‘She said Toni had already gone out and she didn’t know when she’d be back. And I couldn’t get any more sense out of her than that. She was really upset, so I left it. I should be able to catch Toni at work this evening.’

  ‘You don’t look as if you’ve had much sleep yourself,’ Miss Temple says. Though that hadn’t stopped her, I noticed, from asking me the normal five million questions in class.

  ‘I keep going over and over it.’

  ‘The Inquisition?’

  ‘Yes. And what I should have said. And what will happen to everyone.’

  ‘Well, you’ll find out soon enough. They want to see you.’

  ‘Again?’

  After morning break. But don’t worry, the whole thing’s over. Everything’s solved, they just want to tell you –’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘To keep your mouth shut, I expect. We’ll all be told the same.’

  ‘But Mr Prescott?’

  ‘No longer works here. He’s accepted a transfer to another school. He must have put in for it as soon as we got back. You’ll hear it all from them.’

  ‘But did he want to?’

  ‘I think so. It gives him a fresh start. I mean, it can’t be much fun for him here any more, can it?’

  For no reason, a picture comes to me then of Mr Prescott walking on the path in the Japanese Gardens at Cowra. There are kids jumping all around him, just happy to be off the bus and out in the air and the sun, and in his company. He’s playing some long-striding game with them, and Toni’s alternately dancing around him and taking his arm. Like a duchess. Like an old-fashioned lover.

  ‘Besides,’ Miss Temple says, ‘he had no choice. He’d left nobody any choice. And now that Toni’s gone, so has the problem in a sense. After all, she
’s not likely to have made any complaint against him.’

  My face must have shown something.

  ‘Is she?’ Miss Temple says.

  ‘No, Miss Temple.’ I thrust away the memory of the letter on Mr Jackson’s desk.

  ‘So,’ she says, ‘a few rumours apart, this whole thing will die. Mr Jackson’s covered his backside, he’s held his inquiry.’

  ‘He always said it wasn’t an inquiry.’

  ‘The evidence is inconclusive, the people involved have gone – of their own free will – there’s no criminal issue involved …’

  ‘Poor Mr Prescott.’

  ‘There’ll be a small notice in the next newsletter that he’s transferred. For family reasons. They’ve already got a replacement. Another Toni, would you credit it? A Tonia van Helde, she’s a gymnast or something. Pointless activity,’ says Miss Temple who thinks all athletes suffer from mental tinea anyway. She taps one of the books under my arm, dismissing all talk of gymnastics.

  ‘Voss,’ she says. ‘Did you finish it?’

  We’re out of the classroom and walking in the corridor by this time, and I see Mr Jasmyne come out of the Physics lab, as if on cue, and make his way across the quadrangle. His path and Miss Temple’s, at their present pace – though they give no sign of having seen one another – will intersect at the door to the staff tea-room.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I finished it last night when I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I thought it was wonderful. It took me back out there. To all that –’

  ‘Of course, that was the point. But the important thing …’ she says, pulling up sharp in the middle of the corridor. And I’m the one who’s anxious then, that I’ll have made the two of them miss their appointment. Until I notice Mr Jasmyne has shortened his steps and almost dawdled to a stop himself. ‘The important thing is that you liked it.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ Though I don’t really know if she just means the book.

  ‘Better than Tolkien?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Camus?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And de Beauvoir and Sartre and all the other European stuff you’ve been reading?’

  We’re almost at the tea-room, and any second now she must acknowledge Mr Jasmyne, or she’ll walk straight over him.

  ‘Yes,’ is all I can say, as I prepare to step back.

  ‘Good,’ she says, and stops again. And looks at me, not at him, and if this goes on much longer, I think, I’ll have to introduce the two of them or something, because Mr Jasmyne’s actually standing next to me now. ‘Your taste’s maturing,’ she says. And then notices. ‘Ah, Gerald, are you coming in for tea as well?’

  ‘I thought I might.’ Mr Jasmyne is, as usual, nearly as red as a Post Office mailbox. ‘That’s if you don’t …’

  And nobody knows how he’s going to finish this sentence -even him perhaps. But he doesn’t have to because Miss Temple has turned her back on him again, and is whispering at me.

  ‘And that,’ she says, tapping with her index finger on my journal. ‘Get rid of that. Whatever you do, don’t take it with you when they call for you.’

  ‘No, Miss Temple. But where -?’

  ‘That’s up to you. Just don’t give them any new ideas. It’s all over, you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Temple,’ I say, distracted now by the sight of Mr Jasmyne swaying and moving to and fro from foot to foot beside us and I think if he does that much longer the kids going past will start feeding him hay or something.

  ‘Good,’ she says, and turns so quickly she catches Mr Jasmyne right at the end of a fro and nearly knocks him off his feet.

  ‘Gerald! Watch where you’re going.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Mr Jasmyne says, and opens the door to the tea-room for her.

  ‘Was it all right?’ I call after her. I can’t help wanting to know.

  All right?’ She re-emerges from the tea-room just at the moment when Mr Jasmyne’s trying to follow her in. ‘Was what all right?’

  ‘The journal,’ I say. ‘The writing?’

  ‘Do Medicine, if that’s what you want.’ Miss Temple takes your breath sometimes, the way she searches your face, so close up and direct, when she speaks. ‘But only as a hobby.’

  I don’t trust the lockers. Kids break into them all the time. And besides, what will I say if Mr Jackson asks if I have my journal, if it’s at school with me? Whereas if it’s not here at all, if it’s somewhere else, at home, for instance, I can just look them in the eye and say, ‘I don’t have it.’

  ‘Hello, Mr Thompson,’ I call, as I jog past.

  He’s still there in the park, except now he’s on a bench, his hands folded on his stick, his head perched on his hands, as if he’s been posed there by someone as a model. I’d love, I think as I run by, to draw him, or at least write a poem. Something still, or minimal. A haiku maybe. The only movement he makes is to lift his head a few inches off the backs of his hands so he can read the watch on his wrist.

  ‘How long are these periods?’ he calls after me. In my day … he’s about to say.

  Mum hears me as soon as I come in.

  ‘Laura?’ she yells. ‘I’m out in Grandma’s flat.’

  The flat’s all set up, a whiteboard, chairs and tables in a semicircle, coffee already on and bubbling for her migrant class. Fourteen women. They come here just to make a noise and laugh and swap recipes and pull people’s arms out, as far as I can see. Today I’m in luck, none of them’s arrived yet.

  ‘What are you doing back now?’

  ‘I’m just leaving my journal. Miss Temple didn’t want to keep it.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  ‘If anyone asks …’

  ‘I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, and put it on the table beside her. And kiss her, because no one would ever get it from her. ‘I’m late already.’

  ‘Take some fruit,’ she yells as I pull the front door shut behind me. Sometimes I think my mother was a chimpanzee or a baboon in another life.

  I run to the end of the block, to the entrance to the park, and stop. ‘Shit,’ I say. And run back.

  She’s still in the flat. The journal is still on the table beside her, just where I left it. She looks between me and it.

  ‘You haven’t looked at it?’ I say.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I’ll put it up in my room then. Under my pillow, where it’ll be safe.’

  ‘What makes you think I won’t look at it there?’

  ‘Because I trust you not to.’

  ‘You know, Laura,’ she says, in that voice, ‘you can be –’

  ‘Yes,’ I say as I go. ‘Miss Temple told me.’

  I don’t go through the middle of the park this time. I run in a wide arc across the top of the slope, twenty metres behind Mr Thompson’s back. At one point, I notice, he lifts his head off the back of his hands, perhaps hearing something, my feet scuffling through the leaves maybe, but he’s too old and stiff to turn. Or perhaps he knows. I wish I’d used the path then, and not gone sneaking past like this.

  And then it happens. I’m halfway across the creek, on the yellow stepping stones, just where the creek goes swirling away into the bottom ponds, and I look down into the water and almost lose my balance and tumble in. Because of what I see. Not the water of this creek, and not the line of red leaves bobbing between the yellow stones, but another stream altogether. In a different place. With Toni, standing in front of this huge silver tub, holding up her skirt. The blue one. And I have no idea why I’m seeing this now, weeks later, a million miles away. She’s holding the skirt out, away from her body, and what I’m seeing is the thin stream of red and brown that is trickling down from the hem of her skirt and into the tub. And in that instant, I know. I understand. What that red is. What it means. And I think of all those boys, Alex, Paul, Franco, Alisdair, Derek … that cloud of boys constantly swirling and buzzing around her, and what conclusions I’d jumped to, we
’d all jumped to. And I know then that I must find her, and tell her that I understand. But already I’m wondering how she’ll respond – given the lengths she’s gone to already, to mislead us, to cover up. I stand there, stranded on the stones, I don’t know how long, just gazing into the water …

  When I eventually get back to school, a day monitor – a snotty-nosed Year 9 – is waiting for me, scuffing her shoes on the concrete, outside the Physics lab.

  ‘Laura,’ she says, so full of herself. ‘Mr Jackson said you’re to come right away. Up to the Office.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, but motioning with my hands towards the lab. ‘I’ll just have to let Mr Jasmyne know.’

  ‘I’ve already given him the note.’ She makes it sound like a hand grenade she’s just lobbed through the window of the lab. ‘You’re fifteen minutes late as it is.’

  Though, when I do get there, it doesn’t actually seem to matter. Ah, Laura. Come in, Laura, come in,’ Mr Jackson says, his voice bubbling away like Mum’s coffee percolator. For the moment he seems to have forgotten my name’s Miss Vassilopoulos. ‘Now I believe you know everyone.’

  When it’s only the same three executioners as before.

  ‘Thank you for coming along,’ he says, which is such a joke when he’s just had to bomb his own Physics lab and send a ground assault team out to drag me here. ‘We seem to have worked our way clear of the little difficulty we’ve all been facing …’

  Mr Murchison, I see, is doodling again. This time it’s a waterfall, with a man standing under it with his umbrella up, but still drowning. Or that’s what it looks like. I can’t be entirely sure -because I’m looking from the other side of the desk – but the man standing upside down inside the curved cloth of the umbrella looks very like Mr Jackson.

  Who’s busy explaining to me all the things I know already from Miss Temple – about the inconclusiveness of the evidence, and all that blah – though explainings not right, he’s really congratulating himself when he tells me that Toni’s seventeen and she’s an adult and can make her own choices, and how we should never underestimate the young, and how useful it’s been – that’s what he says, useful, without actually saying he’s killed two birds with one stone – that Mr Prescott has applied for and received a transfer. For family reasons.