Lessons from the Heart (17 page)

‘I was searching for a friend, for Toni.'

‘Anyway,' he says. ‘I asked Dave.'

‘About me?'

‘But I didn't have to, really. I only got three words out. I just started saying: “What's the name –?” and Dave interrupted and said, “Laura”.'

I'm determined not to blush and make a fool of myself at this. ‘Is that all he said?'

‘No,' he says. And Jason does this all the time, I'm finding. Says something, and then waits and searches your face before he continues – if he's even going to. As he does now, eventually: ‘Dave said: “And you watch yourself.” '

We can both laugh then.

‘I saw you this morning,' he says. And I'm pleased when he says this, but a bit uneasy as well. Trying to think where someone might have seen you, but you haven't seen them. And normally people don't tell you this kind of thing. But Jason is quite happy to. ‘On the Mala walk, with the little girl. And Nala.'

And I'm easier then, because he
is
telling me, and with all the connections building up between us. Dave, Luisa, Nala.

‘She was preparing for some sort of ceremony. But it's secret, she couldn't tell us about it.'

‘Yes,' he says, and I realize how dumb I can be sometimes. Telling
him
about all this. But he doesn't seem to mind.

‘Would you like to go?' he says.

‘But you can't,' I inform him. And resolve to shut up.

‘You can't participate,' he concedes, ‘or even look – especially me. But you can sit a bit out of sight, like out on the dunes, and get the feeling of it, hear bits of the singing. That's what'd normally happen anyway. With people in a camp.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Oh, yeah, it's only
observing
that's forbidden.'

‘And when is it? It's at night, isn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘But I couldn't anyway. I'm on duty till eleven tonight and tomorrow night.'

‘It goes on long after that. We could go for a while. That's if you'd like to.'

‘I'd love to. But we couldn't get in. The Park will be shut.'

‘Officially it will. For tourists. But I live here, remember?'

‘I'm a tourist.'

‘Not when you're with me.' He grins. ‘I could pick you up at the campground. At the kiosk there, near where you go in, eh?'

‘Maybe,' I say, trying to slow things down, and think.

‘Just after eleven. On my bike.'

And I think of the Japanese girl, the white beam of her light spearing out through the darkness towards the Rock.

‘I'll wait there for you,' he says. ‘At eleven.'

And yes, part of me wants to say, and I think of Mum and her face saying,
But is this sensible, dear?,
and her not even letting me go out to the pictures with Philip unless I promised to bring him home and introduce him.

‘I don't know,' I say. ‘I could get into trouble.'

‘With the teachers? They'll never know. And even if they found out, what could they do?'

‘I just don't like –'

‘What?' he says, and I find it hard to know. Maybe it's being sneaky, and creeping about, like Toni. And I don't like to see her doing that, because normally she's so honest and courageous, and if she wants to do or say something, she just does it. ‘You're not worried about it?'

‘A bit.'

‘You'll be all right with me.' He laughs again: ‘If it's the dark you're worried about.'

‘It's not the
dark,'
I scoff, and my eyes rest on his ranger's jacket then, and the red and black Conservation Commission badge sewn onto the sleeve. ‘Okay,' I say then. ‘I'll be there at eleven. I might be a few minutes late, though, depending on …'

‘It's all right, Laura. I'll be there. Whatever time you come.'

I do get embarrassed then, and I say ‘Goodbye' quickly and we both say, ‘I'll see you.' I use his name for the first time, and I just get it out, ‘Jason,' with stammering, and run off to the shop and the café then, because Toni will have expected me ages ago and will have dozens of her questions and her special faces lined up, but –

‘Who's the quick worker?' is all she says, and watches
my
face. Toni's already got our coffee, so I don't have to stand in line. She's drinking hers, and mine has the saucer balanced on top of the cup to keep it warm. We'd both prefer milkshakes, but we aren't going to drink milkshakes when all the kids are drinking them, and slurping and blowing bubbles in them through their straws. I ignore her gaze and drink my coffee, which is half-cold, and look past her.

‘Well?' she says in the end.

‘Well, what?'

‘Where did he ask you to go?'

‘How do you know he asked me anything?'

Toni hasn't got a straw, but when I say this, she pushes out her lips and makes this bubbling noise in her coffee anyway.

‘Well, you never tell me anything,' I say. ‘Now.'

Toni looks at me, and her face is very mobile like this – she can go from fooling to total seriousness without even a blink in between.

‘You know why I don't tell you,' she says. And we could be two women, of twenty-five or thirty, with problems. We could be sitting in a café in a big city, like Sydney, or even Paris or something, and both be married and having everything go wrong, or having an affair, and complicated lives and that, and needing to discuss it but only being able to say so much – it could even be the
same man
we're in love with, or something. ‘It's because, if you don't know, then you can't get into trouble.'

‘Trubble!' It's my turn to put out my tongue.

All right. You can't get hurt, then,' she says.

And I feel like crying.

In the shop after coffee, I look for something to take back for Mum and Katie and Philip. And it's amazing, all the stuff they've got – not just photos of Uluru and Kata Tjuta – I'm practising the proper names now because of Jason – but calendars and T-shirts with them on as well, and scarves that are dyed or painted silk with kangaroos and emus and koalas on them, and towels and mouse pads and toy animals and table mats and pottery and photo-holders and wildflowers and glazed wood-paintings and videos and badges and key rings and lockets, and bracelets and socks and ties and emu massage oils and acacia bowls and artefacts like spears, woomeras, shields, digging sticks, music sticks which are called
punu timpilypa,
and carrying bowls and car stickers and painted emu eggs and bone thimbles and embroidered patches and badges – and I decide to buy one of them for myself, a badge, because it's a replica of the one on Jason's jacket, a ranger's badge. Just having it in my pocket makes me feel as though I've got my own secret, and I'm trembling a bit inside, I realize, and happy at the same time, but still sad about Toni and what she's just said to me …

Still, once I've got the badge, I make decisions quickly. I buy a hand-painted scarf for Mum and a metal pin for Katie because she likes them and collects them and can take hers to school and none of the other kids will have one of Uluru, and a paperweight for Philip for his office, and then I'm free to help some of the other kids who can't make up their minds, and it lifts my spirits just doing this.

‘Dad will only say it's kitsch,' Luisa is saying to Sarah as she turns over a glazed wooden bowl with a blue koala in a tree in the centre of it. And I wonder how a girl who's only eleven or twelve is using a word like
kitsch.

‘Kitsch?' says Sarah, who obviously doesn't even know the word. ‘But it's for fruit, so it could be in the dining room instead.'

In the end we choose soap and an oil made out of native thyme for her mother, and a key ring for her father that's got an enamel overlay of the Rock on one side and the Aboriginal flag on the other.

‘He'll like that,' she says, pleased. ‘Thank you, Laura.'

The two of them go off talking happily together and carrying their gifts wrapped in white paper.

I don't have to search for Toni for once. She's behind me, at the fashion end of the shop.

‘Look,' she calls. ‘Isn't this a funky umbrella?'

The umbrella she's holding has bright red and yellow panels, with a carved, black snake's head for a handle. And Toni's not worried about bad luck or putting it up inside the shop and she's recovered her normal self and is posing like one of those 1930s beach poster girls, and is as vivid as anything.

‘Hey,' a big fat American man says, and fumbles with a big fat camera case on his chest. ‘Do you mind if I just take a snap of that?'

‘Sure,' Toni says. In American. And flutters her eyes. But the American man takes so long, and treads on everyone and knocks a stall of postcards over just getting the light and distance right so that Toni, I can see, is losing confidence. She almost fades while I look at her. But the American man doesn't seem to notice. He just keeps saying, ‘Great, great, hold it, that's great,' and moving backwards and forwards, and wrecking the shop, and I'm sure when he gets home and develops it, he'll get a great shock because he'll think he has this terrific spunk in a photo to show all his friends, and it'll turn out to be this girl who looks about fourteen and pale and almost frightened like she's faced with something she just can't recognize or decide about. With Toni, it's like an inner face lies just beyond her own. Most of the time she conceals it but, whenever something happens that's out of her control, this second face shows through, and she looks so sad, like she did in the café before. And I'll do anything for her then.

‘Say, that's just great,' the man is saying.

‘Pleasure.' Toni folds the umbrella and tosses it back into the umbrella stand.

‘You know,' the man's still shouting, ‘you're –'

‘Vivid,' Toni says, ‘I know.' And joins arms with me and drags me towards the door. ‘Creep,' she says, as the door hushes shut behind us.

* *

On the bus on the way back to the Resort, I'm still thinking about Toni, and Jason, and also about Luisa and Sarah, and how they share everything and how inseparable they are, and one minute I'm feeling happy and looking forward to tonight, and the next thing, I want to burst out in tears. The only good thing, I say to myself at one point, is that I haven't thought about Philip for hours at a time. But apart from that I still don't know what I think about anything, and part of me just wants the world to leave me alone and not be so complicated about everything, and right at that moment the bus turns a corner about halfway back to the campground and suddenly –

‘Jesus!' I normally never say that, but I can't help myself because this is something I've never seen before even though this is the fourth time we've been on this road today. All along I've been thinking we were in Central Australia, in the desert, when we aren't at all, we're in Greece. There's just this open … field, I suppose, or paddock – not fenced or anything, but just part of the plain – and it's covered with long grasses that aren't brown or green at all but white, and their heads are bending in the wind, and in among them there are all these stones, standing up and, everywhere you look, these cypresses, and they're
Greek.
It was dark this morning when we came out here, even later – when it was broad daylight – I never noticed then either. I thought the grasses were all brown or green, but they aren't, they're white, or, when the breeze really bends them, even silver. And the trees –

‘What are the trees?' I ask Dave, but he just shrugs and says he's no botanist, and he's moody because we were all so late getting back on the bus.

‘They're cypresses,' I say. ‘I've seen them.'

On a plain, in Greece, near the village. And there was an old temple there – or the wreck of it – and lots of stones lying around, though Yiayia Irini said most of the stones had been stolen and taken away by people who'd built houses and even goat shelters out of them. But on certain days Yiayia Irini would take me out walking and tell Mum or Dad – whoever was there – that we were just going to visit a neighbour or Aunt Eleftheria, but once we got outside the village, she'd look around and, if no one was in sight, cut across one of the farms towards the old temple. And all around, I remember, were these long silver grasses and fallen stones and these green and black cypresses dotted everywhere.

When we got there, Yiayia Irini would take some twisted grasses and herbs that she had hidden inside her skirt – the grasses were shaped in a broken cross and tied with a string – and she put it in a special place behind one of the white stones, and sometimes there were other ones there, and she threw them away. Then she started speaking or singing very fast, and I never knew what it was, only I knew she wasn't speaking to me, it was more like a spell or something and I couldn't recognize any of the words and it didn't sound like Greek at all or not the way you speak it when you're talking normally, but I could hear some words were being repeated like in a love song or a nursery rhyme. And, remembering all that, I wish I was there now, sitting on a stone in the sun on a plain in Greece, listening to Yiayia Irini singing and chanting and moving her hands like fans. ‘Remember,' she'd always say to me on the way back, ‘tell no one, not even Mama. It's our secret, just you and me.'

‘Not cypresses,' Mr Jasmyne says then in his dry voice. ‘They're desert oaks actually.'

‘Oaks?' I say. ‘But I thought oaks were the big, spreading ones.'

‘You're thinking of the mature trees.' Mr Jasmyne and Miss Temple are sitting opposite me, in the seats immediately behind Dave. ‘These are young ones, and their limbs are very pliable, they fold in around the trunk of the tree at this stage. They do look a bit like cypresses,' he concedes, ‘now you mention it. But botanically …'