Lessons from the Heart by John Clanchy Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€˜I thought you and Toni never kept secrets from one another,’ Mum says.
    â€˜We don’t.’
    â€˜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