Lessons from the Heart (14 page)

‘We don't know that. He may even have thought better of it.'

‘He's been to the top,' another boy says resentfully. ‘He's the first back. It's easy, I bet we could have beaten him easy.'

‘Yeahh!'

‘I'm merely reading you the notice,' Mrs Harvey says. ‘It's perfectly safe, of course it is, but only if you're sensible and careful.'

‘What else does it say, Mrs Harvey?'

‘It says it prefers you did the walks rather than the Climb. The Mala walk, for instance.'

‘We've done that. You can't even go into half the caves.'

‘But that if you do do the Climb …' Mrs Harvey, I can tell from her voice, is giving up, ‘you have their permission. Now, Mr Prescott will go first, and nobody is to go ahead of him, at least until we're at the top. So, Dwayne, if you'll stand there by the gate …'

Mr Prescott smiles and raises his fist in victory, and the boys all cheer. Toni moves with him, in his shadow.

‘Antonia, you remain here with me,' Mrs Harvey says. ‘You can help with the last group of girls.'

Toni's lip goes down, but she moves back from the gate, pulling a sour face at me behind Mrs Harvey's back.

All right now, we'll move off in twos.'

There's a surge of at least threes and fours. Billy and Kirk and their friends elbow and push their way towards the gate. Some of the girls, I notice, have taken one another by the hand.

‘Wait!' Mrs Harvey screams, and that's all that holds them. ‘I nearly forgot,' she says. ‘Is there anyone who doesn't want to climb? Don't be afraid to say if you don't want to. No one will think badly of you if you don't. No one? You're all sure? Okay.'

‘Luisa's got her hand up,' someone says.

‘What?'

‘Luisa, Mrs Harvey. She's had her hand up all the time, she doesn't want to go.'

‘I can't see anyone – Oh, there you are, Luisa. Is that right? You don't want to go?'

‘Come on, come on,' the boys at the front are urging. Mr Prescott has his hands and arms spread on their chests, pushing them back. A Japanese man smiles, squeezes past.

‘Is that right?' Mrs Harvey is bending over Luisa now, trying to hear. ‘You don't want to go?'

Luisa doesn't speak, just shakes her head. She's still holding Sarah's hand.

‘Very well, you don't have to go. We all respect –'

‘Chicken,' a boy yells.

‘Shut up, you lot,' Mrs Harvey says. ‘Now,' she says to Miss Temple, ‘what do we do about this? I suppose we should have anticipated something like this.'

‘She mightn't have known,' Miss Temple says, ‘till she saw it. She'll just have to wait here till we come down, I suppose.'

‘She can't be by herself. The guidebook says it's two hours up and back, three if you want to explore everything. We can't just leave her by herself, with all these strangers around. Which bus is she in?'

‘She can't stay in the bus,' Dave says.

Listening to them, and knowing how this will finish, I feel my stomach already unclenching.

‘Whyever not?' Miss Temple says to Dave.

‘Put her in the bus, Dimbo,' Billy says, and everyone laughs. So he says it again. ‘Put her in the bus.' Only his nearest mates laugh the second time.

‘I can't leave her in a locked bus by herself,' Dave says. ‘It's dangerous, and it's not allowed. It's against company policy, I'd lose my job.'

‘Luisa?' Mrs Harvey turns back to the girl again, and the way she sounds, it's as if it was all suddenly Luisa's fault where a minute ago it was her right. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Come on, Luisa,' Sarah pleads. ‘I won't be afraid if you come.' The two of them are still holding hands.

‘I can't,' Luisa finally speaks.

‘Are you afraid?' Sarah says.

‘Yes.'

‘So am I,' says Sarah, and again there's a cry of ‘Chicken' from some of the boys.

‘There's nothing wrong with being afraid,' Mrs Harvey says, and I look quickly at her to see who it is she's talking to.

‘My Dad'll kill me,' Sarah says, ‘if I don't climb it.'

‘My Dad'll kill me,' Luisa says, ‘if I do.'

‘Christ,' Mrs Harvey mutters under her breath. ‘Someone will just have to stay here with her.'

‘I'm easy,' Mr Jasmyne says. ‘I'm a bit ambivalent about the Climb anyway.'

‘It can't be one of the men,' Mrs Harvey says. And looks at me, and I wonder what she's seen in my face.

‘I'll stay,' I say.

‘Hurrah,' the boys say. ‘Let's go. Laura's staying. Laura's said she'll stay.'

‘Laura?' Mrs Harvey says. ‘Are you sure?' But I can tell she's so relieved, and has accepted already, and isn't even going to argue with me.

‘Laur-ah!' Toni says, pleading.

‘I don't mind,' I say. ‘I'll stay with Luisa.'

‘Thank you, Laura,' Mrs Harvey says, ‘you're a godsend. That's settled, then. You'll get another chance, I promise you. Now the rest of you –'

Have had enough, it seems. Even Mr Prescott's given way and is leading the charge up the first slope.

‘Stay together,' Mrs Harvey calls after them. As they scatter.

They pour like ants or insects up over the collar of the Rock, some of them still wearing their black and red beanies. Against the rock's reddening surface, two pale ovals stand out – Toni's and Sarah's faces – pleading and regretful.

‘C'mon, Luisa,' I say. ‘Let's sit out in the sun, and watch them.'

‘What are you writing?' Luisa wants to know.

The sun's hot now, and in this hard mid-morning light even the Rock becomes brown and boring, though the sky, where it meets the Rock, is the hardest blue I've ever seen.

‘I was trying to do a poem,' I tell her, scratching out what I've already written. ‘For my journal.'

‘What's it about?'

‘About all this.' I wave my hand at the scene around us. ‘All these buses, the tourists, all those people on the Rock. On Uluru.'

‘How can you write a poem about that?'

‘You can write a poem about anything.'

‘Even if it's boring?' she says, and looks around, her feet swinging and scuffing in the dust below the wooden bench. She squints up into the sun. ‘I can't even see Sarah now. They've all disappeared.'

‘They're on the top by now.'

‘Is it about them? Your poem?'

‘No, I've told you. It's about all these people, all the buses and trucks. You've got to try and find a different angle for a poem, so everything stays the same but you see it differently.'

‘Like what?'

‘Well, I was trying to describe it like an invasion. You know, like an army invading the Rock.'

Luisa looks at me. ‘I'm hot,' she says.

‘Well, you've got your water-bottle.'

‘It's the sun.'

A steady trickle of climbers is coming back down now. Older tourists, sitting around us, burst into applause as the climbers step off the Rock onto level ground, some raising their hands or fists in salute. The climbers pass their camera back and forwards, taking turns to record one another's moment of victory.

‘You'd think it was Everest,' I say.

‘You sound jealous,' Luisa says then. And it's my turn to look at her.

‘Do you want to get in the shade?' I ask her.

‘We could go back where we were. It was nice there.'

‘On the Mala walk, you mean?'

‘There were seats there, under the trees. You could write your poem.'

‘And what will you do?' I say. And by this time we're already moving onto the gravel path and into the shade of the gums. It's the trees now that have all the colour, a fresh young green against the brown skin of the Rock. ‘You haven't even brought a book.'

‘I can look at the birds and things. And the waterhole and the caves.'

‘Okay. I'm going to sit over there. You see where that bench is, near the black stains on the Rock?'

‘That's where the waterfall comes down.'

‘Yes. I'll be here, so just stay round here where I can see you. And don't go in any of the places you're not allowed. Where there's notices, or wire up.'

‘What are
they
doing then?'

‘Who?'

‘Those people. Over there near the cave. They're behind the wire.'

‘I can't see anyone. And if they're in there, they shouldn't be.'

‘That's cos they're bending over. You'll see them when they stand up. It's three women, see?'

‘Where?'

‘There. Can't you see?'

And, finally, I can. It's strange because you'd think their beanies would stand out straightaway, they're so bright. Their beanies are black, with yellow and red bands. But they blend in somehow with the gums and the wattles, their black bark, and the Rock itself.

‘Yes,' I tell her, ‘but they're Aboriginal. They're allowed. It's their land.'

‘What are they doing?'

‘I don't know. I think they're collecting things. Maybe it's firewood, or seeds or something, I don't know. Maybe they're just cleaning up.'

‘Can I go and see?'

‘Yes, but don't annoy them, and don't go in there. Luisa? You hear?'

She goes down the path away from me, towards the women and the caves. I watch her stop by the wire fence and then stand looking in through the bushes and long grasses at them. One of the women looks up at her, and I see the white flash of her teeth before she bends again to do whatever she's doing. Luisa stands, one hand gripping the top strand of wire. Lines of tourists, led by guides, file by on the path behind her. Even the birds have stopped singing now, it's so hot.

‘Luisa,' I call out, ‘don't go any further.' I can't tell whether she hears me or not.

In Year 11 Miss Temple made us do all these poems about Australia, and they were by Judith Wright – and I liked hers best, there was one about The Bull that made the hairs on my neck stand up – and other ones, I remember, were by Slessor and A D Hope, and Hope had a poem about how everyone lived on the coast because we're afraid of the Centre, though the prophets, he said, don't come from the coast at all, they come from the deserts. Or something like that.

Anyway I was trying to do a poem like Larkin's that had a pun on
prophets
and
profits,
but it was getting all mixed with other things, like the tourists being an army and invading the Rock, and I start to wonder now whether that's the problem, and you should have only one main idea in a poem and not mix them up like I'm doing. So I uncrumple the pages and look at them again.

And I know this is not very good yet, even I can tell that, because the last bit's just tacked on. It's not like Larkin's puns which you don't see at all at first, they're buried so deep in the poem itself.

And it's not true about the Japanese either because they wouldn't say
Banzai!
like that, it's a cliché, and I actually like them especially the Japanese girls. They're supposed to be so conformist and behave like little dolls or robots or something, and they do, I suppose, because they're always polite and courteous, where our kids run round and shout and swear and machine-gun Japanese civilians for just looking at the plants and things, but the girls are so pretty and sophisticated and smoke and have their hair dyed all sorts of colours. Not punk, though, because it's always properly brushed and groomed and that, but greens and pinks and yellows as well as auburn and blonde, and their skirts – some of them – are
so
short, as short as Toni's, and they wear these black fishnet stockings and Gucci leathers. I know it's all yuppie fashion and just a
cultural style
, as Miss Temple called it, and a form of
Asian-Occidental dialectic.
Toni of course, had to go and say she thought it was deliberate. ‘There's nothing occidental about it at all,' she said. ‘They just like those clothes.'

But I kind of know what Miss Temple's saying and the thing is,
they
know all that too, the Japanese girls, I'm sure, and they wear these outfits like they're sending themselves up and inviting people to laugh at them. Not at the Japanese exactly but at what Japanese are supposed to be in Westerners' eyes, if that makes any sense, so if you
do
laugh at them you end up laughing at yourself. But even in their high heels and short skirts and things – and this is what impresses me most – they still go up the Rock, up Uluru, without even thinking. They're so much tougher and less fragile and more durable than they look or behave.

In the campground this morning, right next to us, there was this Japanese girl tenting by herself – which is strange, because you always think of them as a crowd – and she doesn't look any older than I am, and while we're still getting up in the dark to come to the Rock, she's already dressed and has rolled up her tent by a lantern, and packed it away with all the rest of her equipment on the back of this huge trailbike that she can hardly push, it's so big, and she's got her backpack and water-bottles and plastic petrol containers and spares strapped to her bike, and it's all so precise and neat, which comes, I suppose, from living in a small space. I watch her wheeling her bike across the lawn and down the road towards the campground exit, and I wonder why she's doing that, instead of riding it, but then I realize – when she stops by the entrance and starts the bike – that it's so she doesn't annoy us with the noise, and then she steps – somehow – up over the saddle of the bike, but still so neatly, and settles her helmet and rides off in the direction of the Rock. And I just stand there, thinking about her and the red dust covering her bike, and watching the white, probing beam of her light until it disappears in the darkness.