Lessons from the Heart (9 page)

9

‘But, Lolly, why didn't you tell me?'

‘I don't know. I was always going to.'

We're at Port Augusta, and we've come down through these funny, round, green, little hills which Mr Jasmyne has told us are part of the Flinders Ranges, and he's explained their geology and that, talking over Dave's microphone, and how they were formed and their age and structure – their
uplift,
he calls it, and I'm just glad Toni wasn't on the bus with us then – and it's sort of interesting if you're a rock nerd or something which most of the kids aren't, and you can tell that because most of them haven't taken their earplugs off or stopped making faces or throwing things. Some of them, I notice, have even turned their Walkmans up, which really upsets Miss Temple who's pacing up and down the aisle now and glaring at the kids and making them take their Walkmans off. ‘Pearls before swine,' she mutters once when she stands with her back to the toilet door and won't let anyone in or out until we're down from the hills and on the flat next to the water, which is Spencer Gulf, Mr Jasmyne explains. It turns out he's an expert on water and its salt content and tidal patterns as well as rocks, and in the end Miss Temple has no choice but to move, there are so many kids queued up waiting to go.

And now we're camped on the flats by the Gulf and the breeze off the water is cold, and the sun's gone in and it's cloudy and grey here and there's no sand, just grey marshy land and dried salt and a few wading birds – one type I know are ibises – and the place is all boats and bridges and factories and concrete and industrial and yuk, and I'm already missing the red earth and the open space and even the road and feel it's unfair and we've been robbed of something, and that's when I tell Toni about Philip and me.

‘But you should have told me,' Toni says.

‘I know.'

‘As soon as it happened.'

‘I wanted to.'

‘So why didn't you?'

‘I was too hurt, I suppose. And ashamed.'

‘Oh, Lolly, that's so –'

‘Stupid. I know.' And it's funny but I feel more ashamed now, telling her and not having told her before, than I did when I was keeping it a secret. And I can tell she's upset with me and she's upset
for
me as well, but just at the moment, while we're sitting here on these concrete blocks or stumps or whatever they are and looking out at the grey water and the dry salt and black sand and watching the kids running about and playing cricket and tossing stones in the water, she mostly just wants to know the story of what happened.

‘What did he
say
?' she nearly shouts.

‘Well, that's the thing. I'd already guessed, you see. He just phoned and said he had to talk to me and it was important and that.'

‘This was from Canberra?'

‘Yes, and he was coming up specially to see me. And I knew then and I'd sort of felt it before that but I didn't want to admit it to myself.'

‘But why? You were all over each other in the holidays. I hardly saw you.'

‘I know,' I pull a face of apology. ‘We just never seemed to have time.'

‘That's all right,' Toni says. ‘I didn't mind. I wasn't meaning that. I'd be the same.'

‘Would you? Really?'

‘Of course. But what did he say?'

‘Just that he was sorry but he'd met someone else. He said it wasn't me that was the problem, it was just him, he'd changed, being at uni and away from home. And I know the girl and that, and she's very smart and pretty …'

‘Lolly, he's crazy. She might be pretty but he's never going to find someone like you. Someone who looks like you.'

‘Dark, you mean? Like a Greek, you mean?' And I'm just saying this, I realize, because Toni's so sympathetic and this lets me feel sorry for myself. And it's weird because I'm sort of enjoying it where I thought I'd be so ashamed and upset telling even Toni. ‘Her name's Jenny.'

‘Jenny, Jenny, two a penny,' Toni says then. ‘But that's
all
? He just came home – all that way – and said: “Oh, sorry. I've met someone else and she's pretty, and why don't you jump off the Gap?” '

‘No, he was upset and everything.'

‘Oooww – was he, poor little Philip.'

‘No, he was really. He could hardly speak. But I had this poem I showed him.'

‘A
poem?
He's telling you to take a flying leap off a cliff, and you're showing him poems?'

‘Just this one poem. It's by Philip Larkin.'

‘Not
another
Philip?'

‘No, it's a real poem, and Larkin's English and that. Anyway he's got this poem that's about two lovers – it's called
Lying in Bed
– and it's a pun on
lying
and it says how the feeling between them has gone dead, and when Philip didn't know what to say, I just showed him this poem, and it ends about how difficult it is to find words to say, and it goes,
Words at once true and kind/Or not untrue and not unkind.
And when he saw that, he just said
Yes
–'

‘Oh, Lolly, don't you see, you let him off. You just made it easy for him.'

‘And then he told me about Jenny and how they have this fabulous relationship.'

‘What an arsehole.'

‘And how they share all these similar interests even though she's doing English and he's doing Forestry, and he said he's even started to read some of her books like Camus and de Beauvoir and others, and that gives them so much to share, and he didn't even seem to remember …'

‘Lolly, I'm so sorry.'

‘And he kept going on about how it wasn't me, I was still the same person and he still loved me and that, but not quite in the same way, and how I wouldn't respect him if he wasn't honest.'

‘Did you kick him in the balls?'

‘And Jenny is so smart. Toni, you should see the clothes she wears.'

‘
You're
the one who was offered the modelling contract, not stupid Jenny.'

‘Plus they're the same age.'

‘And you wouldn't even take it. And why? Because it would interfere with your
study.
Yeech!'

‘Though it's not really age, it's more having the same interests.'

‘Same interests? Lolly, what are you talking about? You know you sound just like your mother sometimes. Aren't you
angry,
for Chrissake?'

‘At Philip, you mean?'

‘Who else, you idiot?' she says. And Toni, I realize then, is the one who's angry. And she can never stop herself from showing it when she is. She always has to
do
something. So now she jumps down off the concrete block she's sitting on and takes me by both my hands and pulls me down off mine, and says ‘C'mon' and stamps – she doesn't just walk but she
stamps
– off across the black, crusted mud and salt, leaving these great indentations from her joggers behind her.

‘Angry at
him
,' she says again. ‘At that gutless little prick, Philip Gardner. And I bet he
has
got a small prick. Well,' she says, ‘hasn't he?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You
what?
Lolly, what are you talking about, you've been bonking him for nearly a year.'

‘Yes, but Philip's the only boy I've …'

Toni stops and comes back towards me a few paces then. She looks at me and bursts out laughing. ‘Oh, Lolly, you're so sweet.'

‘Why? What?'

‘I didn't mean you had to do a personal inventory. I just meant – Oh, it doesn't matter.'

Her anger's gone and she's still laughing as she grabs me by the hand and pulls me after her, and we have this crazy, shrieking race over the flats, and I see all the kids turning their heads and then shouting and cheering us on, ‘Toni, Toni,' they're calling, ‘Laura, Go, Laurrra!', their shouts ringing like the cries of gulls in the wind, and we run and run over the broken and loose ground, and it's hard to get any firm footing at all, but for fifty metres we both really mean it and want to beat one another, but it's so hard to run on this shifting ground that we're soon gasping for breath, and I'm getting a stitch and a pain in the stomach with all the air I'm gulping, and I go to cry ‘Toni, that's enough,' but I see she's already stumbling and falling, and we end up face down, gasping and howling with laughter like madwomen, our faces in the black salt while the gulls wheel and screech above us and the kids come running from all directions. And just before they reach us, Toni lifts her face from the ground and I'd expected her to be still laughing and panting. But she isn't.

‘Did you let him fuck you?' she says instead.

‘
Ton-i
,' I say, in protest.

‘Did you? When he came to tell you to take a running jump, did you feel so sorry for the poor little bastard, at how upset he was, that you let him fuck you?'

‘Mind your own business.'

‘You did, didn't you?' she says. And then the kids are here, and leaping and falling all over us.

‘The best thing that can happen for Toni,' Mum said to me once, ‘is that she gets to finish her HSC, and then leaves school and home at the same time. I just hope she can hang on for that long.'

This happens a few weeks before we go on the trip to Alice Springs. Mum and I are in the kitchen, preparing dinner, and we both love this time – even when we're arguing – because it's just the two of us together again, as it was when we came back from Greece and had no one else and shared everything then, and it's quiet and Philip's not home yet and acting the man of the house and hogging Mum's attention, and Thomas is sleeping, and I don't have any idea where Katie is. Probably watching TV.

‘I just hope she can last that long,' Mum says. ‘And finish school, I mean.'

‘Toni's all right. She's just –'

‘No, she's not all right. She does crazier things every time I see her or hear about her.'

‘Mum, it's just Toni, her nature. It's just her high spirits.'

‘Like the gin, you mean?'

‘That was only one night. And it
was
the school ball.'

‘Darling, I'm not being a wowser. I love gin myself, you know that. It's just that I'm worried for her.'

‘Because she drinks too much one night at a dance and gets sick?'

‘She's lucky if that's all she got.'

‘Jesus,' I say, and walk – Mum would say
flounce
– to the other end of the kitchen. But not out of it. I'm worried about Toni too.

‘Darling, there's no good getting upset with me. And who was that creep she had with her on the weekend?'

‘That was Derek.'

‘Well, Derek is on something. And it isn't eau-de-Cologne. I don't think he's washed in a month.'

‘Do you know who you sound like?'

‘
And
he couldn't keep his hands out of Toni's pants for more than five minutes at a time. Even while she was introducing him to me.'

‘Grandma Vera.'

‘What?'

‘That's who you sound like.
Miriam, you're ruining those girls – they'll grow up without a single shred of decency to clothe themselves with
.'

Mum looks at me, as if she's about to snap back. But, after a second or two, while she searches my face and I have no idea what she's thinking, she just says quietly:

‘Do I?'

‘No,' I say. And then we can laugh.

‘Well, do
you
like Derek?' she says.

‘No.'

‘Well, then.'

‘But, Mum, Derek's not serious.'

‘I know. No one ever is. Tell me, does Toni ever go out with the same boy twice?'

‘Now you're being stupid,' I say. ‘Of course she does.'

‘Okay.' And then Mum does this thing she always does, which really gets on your nerves, and that is asks you for examples when you're only trying to make a general point for God's sake. ‘So who?' she says. ‘Precisely?'

‘Lots of them.'

‘Name one.'

‘Paul Cosolimo.'

‘Paul Coso-
limo
?' she says, and I hate the way she emphasizes certain things when she thinks she's got you beaten in an argument. ‘Little Paul Cosolimo? When did Toni Darling ever – ?'

‘In Year 10,' I say. ‘They were an item for ages.'

‘Oh yes, and what's
ages?
Two weeks? A month? And Year
10?'
Mum just can't stop this stupid emphasizing, and it really annoys you after a while. The only thing is, she's right, and it's a thing I've wondered about myself sometimes. Toni goes out with a boy once – I don't hear about anybody else but this one boy for days – she's mad for him and all that – and then the day after, the boy's as keen as ever but Toni doesn't want to have anything to do with him. ‘He's just so immature,' she says, ‘a kid,' or not her type after all or something, and she's got her eye on someone else. She must have gone out with half the boys in the suburb, not just our school, but Grammar, and boys who are working even. And not just boys, but men sometimes, and they can't
all
be immature, or she'd be dating Mr Kovacs or hanging round the nursing homes, or something.

‘Anyway,' Mum says, ‘Paul Cosolimo aside, I'm still worried about Toni. Don't you see, all this messing about instead of studying – the drinking, the hot cars, a different boy every time I see her.'

‘You think she's a bike?'

‘I didn't say that. All I'm saying –'

‘I'm sure she doesn't sleep with half the boys she pretends she does. She's just partying and making a noise.'