Lessons from the Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

her job – when all the time she’s racing with excitement inside and thinking about secret kissing or even sex, and maybe even outside, on the grass, or on a path with the gravel biting into her back -with Mr Jasmyne! – because he can’t bear to be so close to her and not have her, and how she will fight him off for a while and not want to, then go back to her tent afterwards and listen to Mrs Harvey talk about some boy in Year 8 and how unmanageable he is, and if he doesn’t improve then he can jolly well sit in the bus all the time we’re at the Rock, and then she’ll go to bed, smiling in the dark and still wet between her legs and wondering with sudden shock if Mr Jasmyne’s smell will reach Mrs Harvey and what on earth she’d make of it if it did, and not be able to sleep for hours with the excitement and secrecy of it all.
    And the weird thing is, once you’ve seen a tiny little thing like that, it’s as though the world you’re looking at is suddenly quite different from anything you ever saw before. And you can even see backwards to things you never gave a second’s thought to at the time, like seeing Mr Jasmyne and Miss Temple on yard duty together or walking to the tea-room because they happened to bump into one another leaving their classrooms, or once when it was raining very hard after school and Miss Temple had given you and Toni a lift to the Mall and Mr Jasmyne happened to be standing at the bus stop, and Miss Temple had turned and said: ‘Shall we give him a lift?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I’d said. Because I liked him, and I was happy as he waved and stumbled forward, because I thought I was the one getting him a lift.
    â€˜Poor dear,’ Miss Temple said. ‘He looks so forlorn, don’t you think?’
    And Toni and I had laughed at this because he did look like a drowning cat, and forlorn was exactly the right word for him, and because this was a teacher inviting us to laugh at another teacher.
    And after he’d climbed in, Toni giggled all the way and asked him stupid questions like, ‘What tree is that, Mr Jasmyne?’ when it was just a stupid pine or something, or ‘What’s bitumen made of, Mr Jasmyne?’, and once she even said, ‘Did you get wet, poor dear?’ and I saw Miss Temple look sharply in the rear-vision mirror at us, but it was only fun on Toni’s part and she was doing it just to see him change colour, and neither of us thought anything further of it. Because you wouldn’t. Miss Temple and Mr Jasmyne – it was unthinkable.
    And after we’d got out at the Mall, and Miss Temple had turned to Mr Jasmyne and asked did he want to get out there as well and he’d said, No, he’d prefer the rail station if she could manage it, Toni and I just collapsed, of course, and made up stupid scenarios of them discussing dryland salinity or the shocking state of the Balkans all the way to the station and then Mr Jasmyne getting his feet caught on the lip of the car floor and falling out onto the road with all his papers spilling into the gutter when they finally got there, and the two of them making fools of themselves like that.
    But now we’re finally moving at last because the door’s hissed shut and the driver stands in the aisle with his stomach nearly filling it and looks at one row of kids, and then the next, and the next, and just says: ‘I’m Dave, and it’s my bus, okay?’, and looks again, till he’s looked at every row of kids on the bus, and then clambers slowly into his seat. There’s complete silence while he’s saying this, and for a few moments afterwards, and then one tiny, cheeky boy’s voice says, ‘I’m Dave, and it’s my bus, okay?’ and then another, ‘I’m Dave, and it’s my bus, okay?’ And then another voice, then a chorus: ‘I’m Dave, and it’s my bus, okay?’ Then they