Lessons from the Heart (18 page)

Dave groans and raises his eyebrows at me.

‘And the grasses,' I say. ‘They weren't silver before, like this.'

‘It's the light,' Miss Temple says. ‘It's hitting them from a different angle. It's after five, remember.'

‘I remember,' grumbles Dave, and changes gear.

‘And things do change in the light,' she says. She glances at Mr Jasmyne as she says this, just daring him to start a lecture about how the colour isn't in the grasses at all but the atmosphere.

‘But that's my point,' is all he's game to say.

‘So the grasses
were
green or grey or whatever you saw this morning,' Miss Temple says to me, ‘and now they're silver. And both things are true.'

‘They're still desert oaks,' Mr Jasmyne says.

‘
Botanically,
Gerald, that's all.'

‘You can't make something into something else just by believing.' There's a note in his voice that's almost distress. ‘Facts are facts.'

‘You can be very dull sometimes, Gerald,' Miss Temple says in her controlled way and stares straight ahead. At the back of Dave's neck. Dave pulls a face in the mirror, for me, and then looks straight ahead himself, squinting into the slanting sun. And we drive into the campground that way, the kids tired and happy and lolling about all over the place behind us, and the four of us grown-ups up the front, sitting – rigid with complications – like stones or blocks of marble.

‘You just have to be very careful,' Miss Temple says when I show it to her.

‘You don't like it,' I say.

‘It's very rhetorical, that's all.' She turns the page and reads it again. She frowns as she does this, and I wonder if she really hates it and just doesn't want to say, or if she's just having trouble reading it because I wrote it on my knee in the tent, and the light's bad now, and it's only a half-hour to sunset. Normally, I'd have copied it out again, neatly, in my journal, instead of rushing it over to her like this – to read now. And I don't know if I've done that because I think it's really good, or I'm worried it's really bad. ‘You just need to be careful,' she says again.

‘When you say
rhetorical
…'

‘So much depends on who you're writing for.'

‘I knew you wouldn't like it.'

‘I didn't say I didn't like it.' Her voice sounds cranky, though I don't think it's actually me she's upset with. It sounds more as if she's arguing with herself about something. ‘I was just raising the issue of readership.'

‘But you're the reader. You're the one who's going to assess it.'

‘I don't mean a personal reader, I mean “The Reader”. I'm merely warning you. For an Australian reader you'd have to edit it down.'

‘Because it's too emotional?'

‘Too rhetorical,' she says again, when she still hasn't told me what she means by that. ‘Everything is so exposed to the light here. People don't like high notes.'

‘I'll do it again, then. I'll cut out all the –'

‘Laura,' she says quickly. ‘I'm not saying it's
wrong,
or bad. I don't want you to think that. I'm just trying to warn you, that's all.'

And this just makes me wonder if there's something wrong with Miss Temple, or she's not feeling well or has had bad news, her voice is so low. When normally
she's
the one so full of high notes they're thinking of replacing all the school windows with plastic lenses.

‘So it doesn't matter about the facts?' I say. Because this is another question I've asked her, and she hasn't answered that one either.

‘Facts?' she says, and she's really not taking anything in. ‘What facts?'

‘Well, like the girl being near the women's ceremony when she's not supposed to be there, or the fact that she's in the Park at night when it's shut after sunset, and even if she was, how would she ever find her way there from the Resort unless someone else was with her?'

‘Those sorts of facts …' she says, ‘they never matter.' Which is a weird thing for Miss Temple to say.

‘Even,' I say, ‘if the reader knows they're wrong?'

And I realize then the reason I wanted her to see it now is not because I think my writing's especially good or bad or to get advice, but more because I wanted her to know about tonight. About the Park and all that. To tell her without actually telling her. And this makes it somehow easier and less sneaky, as if we've discussed it, even though we haven't.

‘Don't you ever stop scribbling?' Toni is annoyed because she's been to see Mrs Harvey to ask if she can replace me on duty tonight, and Mrs Harvey's said no, she's not to go anywhere near the duty officers – which tonight is me and Jamie Turner and Miss Plummer and Mr Prescott – and now it's worse than if she hadn't asked in the first place, because Mrs Harvey will be watching.

‘I'm just re-writing something,' I tell her. ‘Miss Temple didn't like it.'

‘Boy, is she snitchy.'

‘What's wrong with her? Do you know?'

‘I think she's had an argument with Viney.'

‘Did you hear them?'

‘He was saying, “A fact is a fact,” or something, and “You can relativize it however you like, but you'll never change that.” '

‘We were talking about trees,' I explain to her. ‘On the bus on the way back.'

‘Miss Temple was saying he was always “three facts short of a good insight”, or something equally weird. Anyway, she was obviously in a bad mood, even before you showed her your writing. What did she say was wrong with it?'

‘It was too rhetorical.'

‘Oh.' Toni looks at me, and I can tell she's busting to ask but would have to admit she doesn't know, and I'm busting for her not to because I don't know. And in the end she doesn't, she just goes back to her magazine, and I hear myself sighing and go back to my journal, which is getting more and more rhetorical every time I scratch out a line and write a new one. I look at the photo of Kate Moss on the front of Toni's magazine and think how fabulous she looks and I'm looking at the headlines for the stories inside the magazine but I'm not actually reading them, I'm still thinking about the sentence I'm trying to write, and my eye's just resting on one of the headlines, and then suddenly the words fall into a pattern and I
am
reading them, and I can't believe the coincidence, and that gives me the reason to ask.

‘Toni?'

‘Mm?'

‘Have you ever had an orgasm?'

The magazine comes down very slowly, until Toni's forehead and eyes appear over the top of it.

‘You, what!' she says.

‘An orgasm?' I say again, pointing at the cover.

‘Rude,' is all she says, and goes to raise the magazine again.

‘No, I'm serious. Have you?'

‘Why do you want to know that?' She pushes herself up on one elbow.

‘Oh, I don't know.' I sneak my pen between the pages of my journal. ‘I just wondered.'

Toni narrows her eyes at me. ‘Have you?'

‘I might.'

‘Whe-en? With Philip?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Who with? I thought –'

‘No one,' I say. ‘I didn't mean
with
anyone.'

‘Rude. In fact that's ruder still.'

‘Toni?' I say, and she stops fooling.

‘Well, what was it like – when you thought it happened?'

‘It was like a wave. I think it started in my –'

‘I know where it probably started. What I want to know is what it felt like.'

‘Like a small wave at first, just a small ripple, like a muscle rippling …'

‘Rippling?'

‘Yes, and then it spread, it just kind of –'

‘What?'

‘Spread, you know, like it's running through your whole body, and there's nothing you can do but let go, and it spreads and spreads.'

Toni's looking at me, and I can't tell if she thinks I'm crazy or have got it all wrong or if I'm just making it up.

‘And then what?'

‘Well, you know. You can't help yourself after that. Till you're –'

‘What?' she says. ‘You're what?'

‘Aware again. You know,
compos mentis
,' I say. Lamely, I suppose, but it's the only way I can describe it.

‘And this happened when?' Toni says. ‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘I just wanted to know if it was one. Or something else.'

Toni's still gazing at me, her huge eyes swallowing my face. She shakes her head and picks up her magazine again. But I can see it's a different page from the one she was reading.

‘Well?' I say. Because I do want to know. For what I'm writing, apart from anything.

‘Well, what?'

‘Was it one? Or not?'

‘It certainly sounds like the real thing,' she says, but almost angrily. As if I shouldn't have asked her. She shakes out her magazine and looks for the article she was reading before. ‘Shouldn't you be on duty now? It's after nine.'

‘Shit.' I leap up. The journal falls onto my sleeping mat, and I see Toni look at it. I slip a marker in it then, and put it under my pillow. While she watches me. ‘See you later.' I pick up my torch.

‘See you,' she says.

The kids are really good by this stage – or most of them. Even Billy Whitecross and Kirk and their mates – whom you'd expect to be complaining about the heat and the food or the fact that there's no TV – are just being normal snotty boys now and not total criminals, though their talk's just as stupid as ever. A group of them is standing by one of the tents on the edge of the girls' section where I'm patrolling.

‘That's the Southern Cross,' one of them says, and you can tell from the loudness with which he says it, that he's guessing.

‘No, it's not,' two others chime together.

‘It's got five stars. See, four big ones, and one not so bright.'

‘They've got to be in the pattern of a cross, dopey. You can't just pick any five stars and say, “Ohhha, that's the Southern Cross.” '

‘Well,' the first boy says, ‘it
is
a cross, if you look at it this way.'

‘What, with your head on an angle like a total freak? You have to have your head straight and look at it that way.'

‘Who says what's straight and what isn't?'

‘Everyone knows what straight is.'

‘Not everyone. What if you had a crooked neck, if you'd had an accident, or something?'

‘
You've
had an accident with your head like that.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Yeah.'

‘That one,' a boy on the edge of the group says, ‘looks like a camel.'

‘Which one?'

‘That one.'

‘That's not a camel, that's a bear …'

‘It's time,' I say, ‘you guys were in your tents. It's half-past nine.'

‘Is that the Southern Cross, Laura?' Billy Whitecross says my name and doesn't say
Lorr-ah.

‘I don't know,' I say, shocked. ‘I don't know the stars.' Billy looks genuinely disappointed. Maybe he's normal after all, I think, just a boy who happens to be bigger and therefore everyone expects him to be a boofhead and a bully. So he is. But it's too dark to really tell. ‘Maybe you'd better ask Mr Jasmyne in the morning.'

They groan, and start to drift towards their tents.

‘That's,' Billy says, ‘if you want to know about the whole Universe.'

‘Yes, and how it was born.'

‘The Big Bang!'

They laugh together and look back at me, but head for their tents without more complaint.

I walk along the girls' lines then, and they're all inside and reading or talking or playing games, and I love this, I realize, being out in the open with the air – still warm – on my skin and a million stars just twenty feet above my head, and the tents all lighted up and the girls' voices talking and chatting happily, or softly, exchanging secrets. And I wish –

‘Hello, Laura. Everything okay your end?'

‘Mr Prescott, yes.' He'd startled me because I hadn't even seen him standing there, at the end of the line of tents, not patrolling but just standing, as if he was waiting. But maybe he was just looking at the stars too, and I was the one who startled him.

‘The stars,' he says, and I think then maybe my guess was right. ‘Aren't they …' He stops. And I know what he means, it is hard to find a word.