Lessons from the Heart (28 page)

‘That poor boy,' Mum says, and just for one second I imagine she's talking about Philip again. ‘Billy,' she says then, as if she's read my mind. ‘He'll miss all that.'

‘Everyone's promised to take photos for him.'

‘What about your things?' she says suddenly. ‘Your bag and things.'

‘Toni packed them for me. She brought them all on her bus.' ‘Toni can be such a pain,' Mum says, ‘but she's a sweetie, too.' ‘She was supposed to be there,' I say then, though I don't know why. And coming out like that, it sounds brutal, like an accusation, even in my ears. But Mum's got to know sometime. ‘Supposed to be where?'

‘When it happened. The accident. Toni was supposed to go with them on duty.'

‘But not you?'

‘No, I was on the night before, and I didn't go. I wanted to, I think. But I slept in.'

‘Still,' she says, ‘having climbed it once …'

‘Yes,' I say. Because it's too complicated.

‘But Toni … Is she in some sort of trouble over this? Who was the teacher in charge?'

‘Mrs Harvey.'

‘Poor woman, she must feel terrible.'

‘Yes.'

‘And Toni was supposed to be there, and the two of you slept in?'

‘Sort of.'

‘Still, one student … what do they call you …
monitors'?
One monitor, I can't see how that would have made such a difference.'

‘Some of the teachers slept in as well.'

‘Oh,' Mum says then.

‘And three mightn't have been enough to supervise the kids who went.'

‘I see.' I swear I can almost hear her thinking. ‘So, why didn't Mrs Harvey just wake them? When she realized she didn't have enough?'

‘She couldn't find all of them. And a few of them had been up late invigilating, and she didn't want to wake them.'

‘So who couldn't she find?'

‘I'm not sure of how many,' I say, and in the last couple of minutes while Mum and I have been talking, I've been watching through the perspex this old Aboriginal couple trying to cross the road. Every time they move out another car comes and they have to scramble back to the footpath. At last the old man walks slowly out into the centre of the road and raises his hand, and a white ute covered with red dust pulls up sharply. He beckons the old woman, and they move across the road like crabs or beetles, they're so slow. The ute doesn't move until they reach the opposite footpath, and there's a line of cars now pulling up behind it. One of them toots loudly. The Aboriginal man turns and waves vaguely towards the ute – his eyes are cloudy, and I'm not sure he can even see it properly. The boy who's driving the ute cocks his thumb at the Aboriginal man. ‘No worries, mate,' I hear him call as he speeds off. ‘But Mr Prescott,' I tell Mum, ‘was one.'

‘Oh,' she says, then. And the distance between us which a minute ago was as little as one room has suddenly stretched to half a continent.

‘There's not a problem, is there, darling?' she says. ‘A real one, I mean?'

Billy's on the top floor of the hospital, and normally he'd have been discharged by now because his leg's been set, and the doctor at Yulara was right – it was the fibula, and the break is clean and there's nothing else wrong with him. Physically. Even his blood pressure is nearly back to normal, but he's still very quiet and pale and gets the shakes sometimes, and there's nowhere for him to go except a campground until the plane leaves tomorrow, so Mrs Harvey has talked to the doctors and they've said he can stay till then – because the children's ward is nearly empty.

And this is strange, I think, because when you walk round the town, half the population, especially the Aborigines, seem to be on crutches or in plaster or in bandages or something. And it looks as though it should be in the
Guinness Book of Records
as the most accident-prone town in existence. But when I ask the nurse, Jindy, about this, she just laughs and says Aboriginal people don't like to go into the hospital, they just go to Outpatients or Emergency and their relatives come and pick them up. ‘Even to die,' she says and laughs, then puts her hand up to cover her mouth as if she shouldn't have. And I find I like her a lot.

‘So, Billy,' Mrs Harvey says, when we visit after breakfast, ‘you'll be on the plane with the rest of us tomorrow. Will you like that?' ‘Yes, Mrs Harvey.' He sounds almost polite.

‘And you talked to Mum and Dad again last night?' Mr Prescott asks him.

‘Yes, Mr Prescott.'

‘And what did they say?'

‘Serves me right,' he says. In the deadest of voices.

‘Oh, I'm sure they didn't say that,' Mrs Harvey says, though her voice says something else.

‘Wouldn't mean it anyway,' Jindy says, up close to him as she bends to tuck the fold of a sheet back in under him. Her lips brush his forehead as she does. ‘Just jokin. Like Billy and me jokin all the time, eh Billy?'

Billy nods, his eyes following her as she moves to the end of his bed and writes something on the clipboard hanging there. I look down from the window into the yard of the hospital, and I see something strange. Two Aboriginal men, and a woman and a child – it looks like a boy from up here – are crossing the yard from the gates, coming towards the main building from where I'm looking down, almost straight down above their heads. From a different side of the yard, two other men are also coming, talking together as they come, porters, or maybe even doctors, two men anyway in white coats. And the paths of the two groups, I can see, will cross. In fact as they get closer, with each group talking, engaged in itself, I find myself getting tenser and tenser because they're making directly for one another and, unless one of them slows, or changes direction, they must meet, collide, and I don't know what will happen then, and I almost want to open a window and shout down to them,
Look out. Cant you see?
', but I also want to see what will happen. And the two men in each group are maybe three metres away from one another and still neither has given way or even acknowledged the presence of the others, and they walk into one another – almost – the two men in white passing – it can't be more than a metre – in front of the black men, and the two lines then pass, and draw away to complete the sketch of a cross, without once seeming to be aware that the other existed.

And I realize I've seen this before, though never so clearly, in the town itself, around Todd Mall, where Aborigines meet and wander about, or just sit and wait for friends, and white people pass between them, and I've thought before, watching them, there'll be a collision, they pass so close, and they never seem to look at one another, but it never happens. Now, I realize, it's because – though they never look – they
do
know each other is there but just as a tree is there, or a bus, something you unconsciously time yourself to avoid on your way to something else.

And I'm still standing there, wondering what all this means, when I hear Billy say, ‘Yes, Mrs Harvey.' And he's so polite and passive, I almost miss the old Billy, and would prefer to see him poking his tongue out and saying, ‘Mind your own business, you old bag,' or machine-gunning Japanese tourists.

‘I don't want you feeling,' Mrs Harvey says, ‘that there's anything we could do for you, that we haven't done. So, you just let me know, won't you?'

‘Yes, Mrs Harvey.'

Mr Prescott has at least shaved and has a clean T-shirt and fresh pants on, and doesn't look as though he has to rush off to the executioner's in the next five minutes anyway. But he's almost as comatose, verbally, as Billy, and so Mrs Harvey has to do all the talking.

‘When we get back, Mr Jackson will want to know that we did everything we could for you.'

‘Yes, Mrs Harvey.'

And it's weird to think you can go away for a school camp for only nine days and you're only eleven or twelve years old, and something happens that changes you forever. But that's happened, I know, to Billy, and he knows it has too, but he doesn't, I'm sure, know what it is. And that's what frightens him. And everyone else will go back to being what they were before – the teachers, the monitors, the kids, the drivers – even if they've acted a bit strangely out here – even Toni and Mr Prescott – but Billy won't.

‘We'll call back this evening, Billy,' Mrs Harvey says. ‘To make sure you're all ready for tomorrow.'

‘He'll be waiting,' Jindy says. ‘Billy's not goin anywhere, he's stayin right here with me, eh, Billy?'

Mr Prescott trails out like a schoolboy after Mrs Harvey. And that's another weird thing – I don't think he and Toni have spoken two words together since it all happened. I've seen them pass one another in the campground, and you'd swear they never saw one another. The one time I did try to talk to her, she just said, ‘Dwayne?' and looked puzzled as if I'd asked her about Derek, or Alistair, or any of the dozen boys she'd had a pash on and then dropped, and lost interest in totally, the day after she'd dated them.

But this was different, this couldn't just be brushed off, I knew, because of the accident, because of Billy and because everybody seemed to know, about her and Mr Prescott. ‘What were they doing,' Luisa asked outright, ‘when you found them?' And I remembered some of the kids had been watching when the three of us – Mr Prescott and Toni and I – came down the dune together. ‘I don't know,' I said off-handedly to Luisa. ‘They must have been doing something,' she said. And Luisa's like that, she can be so persistent. ‘Watching the sunrise, I suppose,' I said to her, and expected her just to drop it. ‘They could have done that better from the Rock,' she said, ‘where they were supposed to be.' And I knew if
she
was thinking this, then it wasn't just going to go away, simply because everyone wanted it to.

‘I'll come back too, Billy,' I say, and put the lollies I've brought on the cabinet beside his bed. ‘If you want.'

‘Course he wants,' Jindy says. ‘Someone as pretty as you. She your girlfriend?' she says to Billy, and he blushes. And nearly catches himself smiling.

‘Do you like it?' I say to Jindy. ‘Nursing?'

‘Not night duty. No way.'

‘But the rest?'

‘Yes.' The widest smile. ‘You thinking of becoming a nurse?'

‘I
was,'
I say. And I find it odd hearing myself saying it this way. As if it was no longer true. And my mind has somehow changed itself without bothering to inform me. ‘Or Medicine at least.'

‘A doctor?' Jindy says, her eyes widening. ‘Oooh –' She flutters the fingers of one hand in mock astonishment or deference or something.
‘Country Practice
, eh?'

We both laugh.

And I'd love to be a doctor here, if I was one, or a nurse,' I find myself saying. ‘For a while anyway. It's so –'

‘Yes,' Jindy says. ‘This is good country, all right. Eh, Billy?' she says. Including him, purposefully, in everything she does. And I wonder if she's married, and if she was born here and has always lived here, but Mrs Harvey's back, and annoyed, as if she's lost something.

‘Laura? Come on, come on, girl. They're waiting.'

At Desert Park, at ten-thirty, there's a live display of raptors feeding, and catching prey. A girl ranger whirls a lure on a long string and a hobby, which is a small hawk that can travel at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, swoops down above our heads and takes the lure from the air.

‘The hobby,' another ranger explains, ‘thinks the lure's another bird, a budgie. Watch it again,' he cries. As the hobby comes in for another run.

‘Whoosh!' the kids go, and are left gaping. It's far too fast to photograph, even when they're not watching the bird but are focused just on the lure. ‘Did you see that, Laura?' Sarah, who's next to me, asks.

‘Nearly,' I say, and she looks at me. One seat beyond her, Luisa smiles, pulls a face.

The display takes an hour – barn owls, black bustards that crack open emu eggs with rocks held in their beaks, falcons, fork-tailed kites, an eagle …

‘Now,' says the ranger, ‘as you travel round the Alice, look out for these birds, and try and identify them. You'll find them everywhere, but especially at the sides of roads where the dead animals are.'

‘So, what's that?' I say to Luisa, as we leave the nature theatre.

‘That one up there? That's a kite,' she says, as if she's simply turning a page in a bird encyclopaedia, and the page is labelled. ‘A black kite.'

‘Are you sure?' I squint into the sun and wait for the bird to turn so I can get a look at its tail. ‘It looks like – what was the name of that other one? – a
bustard
to me.'

‘No, Laura,' she says, moving on down the path with Sarah. A dozen kids have come in between us as I stand there still trying to identify the bird. Luisa's voice comes back to me over the noise of the other kids: ‘It's definitely a black kite.' And the authority with which she says it, in her clear piping voice, really annoys me for a second.

‘Little smart-arse,' I think, or maybe even say aloud. In fact I must say it aloud because Dave, who nearly runs into me where I've stopped on the path to look, says:

‘Who?'

‘Oh, Luisa. Little know-all.'

‘What are you so upset about?'

‘That bird up there – you see it?'

Dave squints into the sun then. ‘What about it?'

‘It's a bustard, isn't it?'

‘Could be. I'm not –'

‘Luisa says it's a black kite, a fork-tailed kite.'

‘Then it's a black kite,' he says.

And that makes me annoyed with
him
, then. ‘How can you tell?'

‘I can't really. At this distance. My long sight's no good, and I'm better on plants and animals anyway. But one thing I do know, never argue with a Koori about birds. They'll always be right.'