Lessons from the Heart (4 page)

Though he didn't really have to, because I'd worked it out by then. I just showed him a poem by Philip Larkin who's my favourite poet and I partly liked him in the first place because Larkin's a
Philip
too and has a poem about everything – whatever you're feeling you can find a poem about it by Larkin, and sometimes you think, wow, that's really weird, it's so true about what's happening to you at that moment you think that he must know you or something even though he's not an Australian at all but an English poet and dead. Anyway I just showed this poem to Philip when he came up for the weekend when he wasn't supposed to but rang and said he had to, it was important, and the poem is called
Talking in Bed
and it's about a relationship between two lovers that's going wrong and they can't talk or even be honest with one another any more and it starts:

And when Philip read it, he just said, ‘Yes.' And I didn't cry then. I was so calm because I couldn't believe it was really happening. If anything I felt like laughing, it was so absurd, and I just said ‘Who?' and he swallowed and said, ‘Jenny,' and I found I knew that anyway.

And Jenny's pretty and that – because I met her a couple of times in Canberra – and she's sophisticated and doing English and Philosophy and can quote lots of people I've never even heard of, and I realize now that that frightened me as soon as I set eyes on her, and I must have worked out even then she was keen on Philip because I've been reading and reading all the books on the courses at Sydney Uni including existentialists like Camus and de Beauvoir and Beckett and even some postmodernists like Calvino and Handke and I liked them even though I found most of them hard and I hated Sartre, and I still like poems and proper stories best. Mr Jasmyne said I was falling behind in Physics because I was always gazing at books and I couldn't expect to do well at school if I did that and wanted the marks to get into Medicine, and even Mum some mornings asked had I been reading all night, I was getting dark rings and maybe I should even start on a tonic, HSC was too much pressure and she wished they'd get rid of the whole competitive nonsense altogether.

But it wasn't
that
competition that was worrying me at all -and I only begin to see it now – it must have been Jenny I was afraid of all along because I saw her and Philip talking together one night at a college ball, and someone took their photo with a flash as they were coming back to our table, and it sounds weird but
I saw the photo,
I mean I saw them as a photo even though, in reality, they were still walking back to the table. But in my mind – I don't know if I was just blinded by the flash or what – I was seeing them still frozen in the instant the flash went off, and it was like the kind of photo kids pore over twenty years later and say, ‘Is that the first time you and Dad went out together?', and I realized it was Jenny, not me, in the photo and they looked so perfect together, and were both blond and had blue eyes and were laughing and fitted together so perfectly, and I'm dark with black eyes and hair because of my father who's Greek and I didn't get any of Mum's colouring at all, just her bones sometimes if I look in the mirror in a certain way, and looking at Philip and Jenny that night I'd already started to feel smaller and I hated being so dark, as if I was a Greek myself when I'm not at all, even though I lived in Greece in a village for five years.

And that's where everything goes back to, maybe that night of the ball in Canberra, because all these people were nineteen and twenty, and they all welcomed me nicely and that, even Jenny, when I was a total stranger, but they were all talking about things like their twenty-firsts and what they were going to do and where they'd have them and who'd be flying to whose place –
flying!
just for a party – or driving their father's car and could call into someone else's place for champagne first, and saying that'd be
just awesome
about everything, and were so sophisticated and that, and I was sixteen and didn't even drink.

‘I thought you and Toni never kept secrets from one another,' Mum says.

‘We don't.'

‘Well, then.'

And I'm partly being difficult because I know what Mum's thinking – she's thinking it's better to talk than bottle things up, and all that blah. And sometimes, she's also thinking, peers are better than parents because parents are too anxious and it's easy for them to tell you you'll get over it because you're young, when you won't and you aren't – you're seventeen and you're never going to get any older than this because if you did, you'd be dead.

And the thing Mum doesn't know about Toni and me is, yes, she's right, we've always talked about everything, even the worst or meanest or dumbest things we've done, but since the time I started going out with Philip, and Toni started feeling left out -even though I always tried to include her and we went out in fours lots of times with a friend of Philip's or she brought along a boy herself, she didn't have to rely on Philip, there are always boys hanging around Toni – her
hareem
, she calls them, saying it like she was American – but in the last ten months – especially after Philip and I started sleeping together and wanted to be more private by ourselves – Toni and I haven't talked nearly as much, or not about boys and love and sex and that, and we find – it's mad – we've almost become shy with each other, if that makes any sense.

‘I'll tell her in a while,' I say to Mum. ‘In a few weeks when I don't feel so upset.'

‘Doesn't that defeat the purpose?'

What defeats the purpose, I think then, is mothers who are issued on the day you're born with answers to every statement you're ever likely to make, when you don't live in Iraq or China or somewhere but in a country that's supposed to have free speech.

‘After we come back from Alice Springs,' I say. ‘I'll tell her then.'

And that's one of the biggest mistakes I've made in my life so far.

But, of course, I didn't know that at the time. At the time – and even on the trip itself – I was still thinking the two biggest mistakes in my life were trusting Philip and sitting in the back seat of a bus with thirty kids all the way to Alice Springs, because next to the back seat is the toilet and as soon as the bus has left the school yard, the toilet door starts slamming and it doesn't stop until every kid has gone at least once, and some have gone two and three times in the first hour. And they don't only go one at a time, but get in there in twos and threes – the girls especially -and take ten minutes and seem to be doing more giggling than going and it's obvious none of them really wanted to go at all, they're just seeing what's there and trying all the buttons and inspecting all the drawers and the little silver receptacles that hold tissues and tiny soap tablets – or did, an hour ago – and re-doing their hair and swapping hair clips, till Dave-and-it's-my-bus-okay? goes totally spazzo and starts yelling over the microphone, ‘Can't you kids wait?', which doesn't help at all because after that the kids that
do
need to go have to run the gauntlet of Billy Whitecross and his mates who are blocking the aisle with their legs and growling, ‘Can't you kids wait?' at them. I've already had to rescue one little girl who's intimidated by them and is going back to her seat in tears, and I'm so angry by this stage that I'm ready just to break Billy Whitecross's leg if he leaves it out blocking the aisle, but he sees me coming and the look on my face and at the last second withdraws it.

And this is a problem, I realize, because I don't really know what my role is here. I'm a monitor and I'm supposed to look after the kids and make sure they don't hurt themselves or get lost or homesick or anything – and I don't mind that because I've done it all with Katie often enough – but I'm not a prefect and I don't have any real power and I can't punish the kids if they misbehave – and if you can't punish someone for doing the wrong thing, then you don't have any authority over them and you either have to go complaining to a teacher all the time like some complete sook of a touch judge running to the referee, or just take the law into your own hands and break their leg yourself.

And I'm grumpy about all that and unhappy without Toni and miserable about Philip and I don't even feel like listening to music and if I read another Philip Larkin poem I'll vomit.

We're sitting at the lights in the main street of Bathurst by this time and I notice there's a strange double reflection of my face, not just from the bus window but from the shop window in the street behind it. There are two quite distinct me's but they've both got the same black, scowling, scratchy, sorry-for-myself expression on, and so I instinctively do what I do at home when I'm in a bad mood and catch sight in a mirror of just how ugly I am. I poke my tongue out at both these reflections, and I know this will make me feel better.

And it does – until I see the old lady in the pink raincoat who I hadn't seen before but is only three feet away in one of those transparent plastic rain hats while she waits for her bus, and as we move off and I pull my tongue back in,
her
mouth opens and I can't hear her because of the glass between us but I can read her lips easily and she's looking just so shocked and saying ‘We-ll!' and gazing after the bus as we pull away and I'm sure she's taking note of the bus company and will write to them as soon as she gets home and the company will pass it on to Mr Jackson and they'll all know who it was, all the lady has to say in her letter is the black girl with the ugly face in the last bus in Bathurst, and I realize then I'm no better than Billy Whitecross, and that just makes me maunder even more.

We detour to Cowra to see the Japanese Gardens and the old prisoner-of-war camp while Dimbo goes off to get petrol and discharge the waste tank of the bus.

‘I don't know what's wrong with these kids,' he says to Miss Temple.

‘They're merely excited.'

‘Is that what you call it?'

And Miss Temple's right, it is a bit like that, they're like dogs, especially puppies, sniffing out a new place and wanting to pee all round the edges of it if it's going to be their home for the next week or so, though even before we get to Cowra, they've got bored with racing round, and are sitting in their seats and playing music and quietly punching one another, and some of them have eaten their entire supply of sweets and chocolate for the whole trip and are searching through the pockets of the seats in front of them for the sick bags.

And the Japanese Gardens
are
interesting and that, and they could be peaceful the way they're laid out with bamboo groves and rocks and water features and raked gravel and stone garden beds and everything, and you could imagine people coming here and meditating or just walking on the gravel paths and maybe remembering the dead, but not eighty-five kids who have just spent two and a half hours on a bus and just want to bash the wooden pole against the giant bell at the entrance to let everyone in New South Wales know they've arrived and then race around the paths and shriek and hide in the bamboo and reeds and jump out at the Japanese tourist parties and pretend to mow them down with machine guns, or stretch their faces into hideous masks with their thumbs in the corners of their mouths and their fingers pulling at the corners of their eyes and yelling, ‘
Banzai!'
and
Ah so
,' while the Japanese can only look back at them, and hold their handbags against their stomachs and smile.

And all this, and not knowing what to do about it, and seeing Miss Temple standing off on a tiny curved bridge under a willow tree and gazing into Mr Jasmyne's glasses, only makes me more scratchy and unhappy than ever, and I go off then to find Toni and when I do I feel worse and even more alone, because I see her on the path by a flower bank and she's fooling about and playing up to Mr Prescott, as usual, only this time she has her arm through his and is pretending to walk in a stately way like she's a duchess or something out on a Sunday stroll. And all the kids walking with them just laugh and whistle and wave back as she passes giving them this royal wave, and everybody's enjoying themselves in the sun, and it is a holiday, and I don't want to spoil it just because I'm feeling ugly and unhappy, so I don't even catch up with them after all but take the next turn in the path and go and sit in one of the summer houses and watch the ducks on a tiny pond until Dimbo comes back with his empty bus.

The first night we sleep in a caravan park at Cobar and we're way out in the real bush now, and the bus company has these neat little two-person tents that you can put up – even the spazziest kids – in fifteen minutes. And after all the kids have eaten -everyone has hamburgers and chips and ice-cream brought in from a fast-food outlet in the town – and after they've run around and played games and uprooted half the tents by falling over the guy-ropes and been sick and that, and done toilet and toothbrush parade, and are still calling to one another and laughing excitedly but at least they're in their tents, Toni and I can talk together for the first time in the whole day. We're both lying on our mats, looking up beyond the light of our lamp into the peaked darkness of the tent roof.

‘Aren't some of these kids just a total pain?' I say.

‘Hmm?' she says. ‘I haven't noticed them too much.'

‘You're lucky,' I say, still trying to make contact with her. ‘There's one little snot in my bus called Billy Whitecross –'

‘That creep,' she says. As if she didn't care.

We lie together for a while saying nothing, and I find I'm thinking of Larkin's poem again. But about the two of
us
this time. I always used to know what Toni was thinking.