Lessons from the Heart (7 page)

It's a bit like one of those 3-D pictures where you can't see the figure hidden in the detail at all for a long time, but when you finally do, then every time you look at it afterwards it's the first thing you see and suddenly you can't actually see it any other way and you wonder why everyone else can't, it's just so obvious. Until the next poem you read, of course, and you think it's about a tiger in a forest, but it's not, it's about creativity as well, and divine energy in the world. So, when you get to the HSC, or Miss Temple's classes anyway, you don't just read any more, but you've got to keep guessing the real meaning as well. And, of course, Toni's always taking her off, and if we're going into the city, to a film or something, and I check the timetable and say, ‘We can get a train at 4.30,' Toni will always say, ‘Yes, but what time does it
really
leave?'

Miss Temple doesn't take any notice, though, if we complain about having to look for all the hidden meanings all the time.

‘If you're not stretched,' she says, ‘you're not fully alive.'

And she might be right, but some days you don't want to be stretched, or you wonder if you're even alive, let alone fully, and you're feeling a bit sad and sorry for yourself or injured or something, and you'd just like to curl up somewhere – like under the house or in a log or something where no one will find you – and read a favourite book, one you loved as a child, say, and feel safe, and read it like it was the real story and not one that was hidden and you had to guess. But Miss Temple never lets you get away that easily.

‘Have you made any journal entries yet?'

‘Not yet, Miss Temple.'

‘Well, don't leave it too long,' she says, ‘or you may never start. Bus trips can be mesmeric, I find. It's very easy just to drift.'

‘Yes, Miss Temple. As soon as I can think of something, I'll start. I was thinking of a poem just before.'

‘A poem'd be fine. But perhaps just do some free writing first. Just some notes to loosen up, get the ink flowing.'

‘You mean now?'

‘Anything will do, odd words, thoughts, things you see out the window,' she says, as if we're still in class. ‘Don't focus on the product,' she says to me now. ‘If you do that, you'll only freeze. Focus on the
process…'

She moves away then, lurching and swaying back down the aisle of the bus, back past the rows of kids listening in their sleep, past Billy Whitecross who's processing half the kangaroo population of New South Wales, past Luisa and Sarah whose hands, I know, will be locked in sleep, till she sinks into the back seat where only the top of her head – turned now towards the window, or towards Mr Jasmyne who sits between her and it – can be seen in the driver's mirror. Unless you've got eyes in the back of your head, that is.

The front of the bus is all glass and it nearly makes you giddy because you're racing along at a hundred kilometres an hour and the glass in these tourist buses goes down almost to the floor, so passengers can see more easily I suppose, but if you're in the front seat you get this funny feeling of the road rising up at you, and you feel it could nearly leap right through the glass.

‘Good morning, Miss Gorgeous.'

‘Good morning, Dave,' I say, and I've decided to call him Dave rather than Dimbo because I'd thought he was just a fat bus driver who only loved his bus when we first met him, and not a person at all, but I liked the way he didn't get upset when all the kids started singing and calling him Dimbo, and I especially liked the way he helped some of the smaller kids put up their tents last night when he didn't have to and had driven the bus all day and must have been tired and could have said he was just here to drive the bus, he wasn't Weary Dunlop or Mahatma Gandhi or something. And I really liked it when Luisa said, as politely as anything, ‘Sarah and me can't get our pole straight, can you help us, please, Mr Dimbo?', and he just smiled and said, ‘Just a second, luvvy, as soon as I finish here.'

‘What's wrong with you this morning?' he asks now.

‘Nothing.'

‘You sure? I've got a girl just your age.'

‘Don't you get giddy?'

‘Trying to figure her out, you mean?'

‘No, driving the bus and looking at the road all the time.'

‘You get used to it. Just like anything.'

‘I wouldn't,' I say. ‘Ever.' And then: ‘Oh, yuk, did you see that?'

‘Yeah,' Dave says. ‘Someone's got a sense of humour.'

A cheer goes up from the middle of the bus where the boys have just seen it – a dead roo propped up against a white road post as if it's waiting to hop on board, and it might just as well be alive, the way it's standing, except it's lost its head completely and all that's sticking out of the top part of its body is a white neck bone.

‘You never get away from it out here,' Dave says. ‘That's why I don't drive at dusk or dawn if I can help it. The roos are as thick as grasshoppers then, and you keep thinking they'll be leaping through the glass and into your lap next.'

And now I look properly, it's not just dead roos but foxes and birds – galahs and emus and hawks – and they're everywhere, every twenty yards, sometimes not even that, and on the road itself there are great red patches where the animals have been hit and their blood smeared and spread by the wheels. And some of the patches, I see, are still wet and swish under the bus's tyres.

‘Semis, roadtrains, buses, four-wheels …' Dave says. ‘That's mostly what you get out here. And they've all got the big roo bars on the front. Travelling like this, a hundred, hundred and ten k an hour, they just blow the animals apart. The fellow without the noggin back there, he must've just been clipped.'

‘It's awful,' I say.

‘It's life, luvvy.'

‘This road –'

‘Amazing, isn't it? It's one of the straightest bits of road in the whole country. Apart from the Nullarbor. Forty-eight kilometres flat before we hit the first sign of a bend.'

‘So, why don't they see them?'

‘Who?'

‘The kangaroos and foxes. Why don't they see the buses and four-wheel drives coming?'

‘I don't know, luv. At night they must see the lights from miles away and run straight towards them.'

‘And
into
them once they get there.'

‘You make it sound like suicide.'

‘And all that blood on the road. Yu-k!'

‘Later,' he says, ‘you'll see some actual red roads.'

‘You mean dust?'

‘No, no, it's proper tarmac, it's just red, that's all. It's probably the sands, or something they mix in with the gravel. It comes up through the tar, and you'd swear the road was painted. I like it myself, it's easy on the eyes, and the white lines stand out so clear.'

‘They're so clear here,' I say. ‘They make you giddy.'

‘You'll get used to it,' Dave says again. ‘It's just sitting up front.'

‘They're like cords, don't you think? Or strings.'

‘Strings?' he says, puzzled. ‘I don't know. They're just lines to me, luv. Just things to stay inside.' He glances into the long side mirror outside his window. Then waves as a black and silver four-wheel-drive goes by. It must be doing a hundred and forty, or more. ‘They keep you tight, you know, so you don't wander all over the shop. And you need that. Especially out here.'

‘Everything's so –'

‘Yair.'

We both look out at it. At nothing. The red earth, a few trees, some scrubby bushes. And nothing as far as your eye can see on every side. And above it, like some huge curved lid on a cauldron, is the sky. And I've never seen anything like this before. I've always lived in a town or a city – or, in Greece, a village – and it takes my breath for a minute, just the space and the emptiness of all this, the redness of the earth, the cloudless blue bowl of the sky.

‘You can look forever at country like this,' Dave says, and I nod but don't ask him what he means. I sort of understand. And then I look at the road again and the way it just goes on and on till the sides of it meet in a point at the horizon, before it disappears, and I think of something and get out the pen Mum gave me at Christmas and a small notebook. Because there are things you can think and write about but you could never say to anyone, they'd sound so stupid.

‘You're not writing home already?' Dave says.

‘No.'

‘Your Mum's probably still celebrating she's got rid of you.'

‘I've got to do an assignment.'

‘Hard to write in a bus.'

‘It's only notes.'

‘Oh.'

‘I copy it out neatly,' I explain, ‘and put it in proper sentences in my journal later. For my assignment.'

‘And what are proper sentences when they're at home?'

‘Well, for a start, they've got to have a subject and a verb.'

‘We used to have those when I went to school.'

‘Well, you've still got to have them, for proper sentences. And you can't begin a sentence with
And
or
But,
or that.'

‘You can't?'

‘No, because they're conjunctions.'

‘And what's a conjunction when it's at home?'

‘It's a joining word,' I say. ‘It's not a starting word.'

‘But what if you're joining one sentence to another?'

‘Well, you can't, that's all. It's a rule.'

‘But none of my sentences would be proper then,' he says. ‘Especially if I'm just thinking.'

‘It's different if you're thinking, you can use them then. But in your assignments, you've got to write them properly without conjunctions at the beginning. Like in this assignment I'm doing for the trip.'

‘Homework on a bus trip? They take some beating, some of these teachers.'

‘Well, Miss Temple anyway. She's a bit of a slave-driver.'

‘Temple? Isn't she the – ?' Dave jerks a finger towards the back of the bus.

‘Yes, but I like her.'

‘Well, you write your notes, and I'll listen to some proper music.' He picks up a cassette from the dashboard in front of him. It's got a man and a guitar on the front in an outback Aussie bush hat, and I can tell straightaway it's Slim Dusty. ‘I can't stand the racket that lot are playing,' he says. ‘What have you got in there?' he asks, pointing at my Walkman.

‘It's classical.' I try not to sound posh. ‘It's my Mum's and she played it at my Gran's funeral, and I liked it so much she bought me a disc.'

‘What's it called?'

‘It's called the
Miserere.
It's by Allegri.'

He takes his eyes off the road then and looks at me full in the face for the first time as if he'd thought he knew me and now he's not so sure. ‘Oh,' he says.

‘It's sung by the Tallis Scholars. On this disc anyway.'

‘Is it?'

‘I'm sure you'd like it,' I say, but he's watching the road again and putting his cassette tape in the player on the dashboard. He turns the volume to low, so I can hardly hear the words, just the melody of the guitar, and an outback voice. Dave's lips move with the tape, and his eyes look straight ahead down the road. As I start to write:

The road was making her giddy now …

I haven't worked out who the
her
in this story is yet. Whether she's even got a name.

‘What – finished already?'

‘It's nothing. Just some thoughts.' I close the notebook quickly, though Dave could hardly read it from where he is.

‘Homework always took me ages. You seem to do it so quickly.'

‘It's only first impressions. Just things off the top of my head. I might make it up into a story later.'

‘What's it about?'

‘I don't know yet. Maybe someone on a bus trip.'

‘You?'

‘No, no, it's someone else. I haven't thought of a name yet. I'll write it in the third person.'

‘What's the third person when it's at home?'

Everything's always
at home
for Dave.

‘You know,' I say, ‘you use
she
instead of
I
and
her
for
me,
and that.'

‘But it could still be you, and you just put your feelings into someone else?'

‘It could.'

‘It must be wonderful to write.' He sounds as if he really means it.

‘That's what Mum says.'

And I think about Mum then, and how energetic and positive she always is, even about bad things like me and Philip breaking up, and I wonder if she would have liked to be a writer but had me instead, and now she'd like me to be one, and I'm her
she.
And maybe that's why she gave me the pen. But my mood's broken, and I just don't feel like writing any more at the moment, so I get out my Walkman and the disc Mum gave me.