Lessons from the Heart Read Free Page B

hurt.’
    â€˜We don’t know that, Laura,’ Mr Mumble-Mumble says. ‘We don’t know, for example, whether any coercion was involved.’
    â€˜But it’s all stupid,’ I say. ‘And I’m not even sure anything happened at all.’
    â€˜I’m afraid,’ Mr Mumble-Mumble says, ‘you’re going to have to leave us to decide that.’
    â€˜But I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t have anything to do with it.’ I hear the whine in my voice and despise myself for wanting to crawl out of things like this. And I think of how alone Toni is.
    â€˜I know you didn’t have anything to do with it,’ he says. ‘Or I believe you didn’t. But you do know a great deal.’
    â€˜Not a great deal.’ And I feel much calmer saying this because I’m speaking directly to him now and not just to a table with three heads.
    â€˜Perhaps,’ he says. ‘But still a lot more than any of us, don’t you think?’
    And what I do start to think is that he’s not so bad, after all, and he’s trying to do the right thing and be fair to everyone, and actually he’s got very kind blue-grey eyes in a smiley face, and might even have been handsome once. It’s funny how that can happen, how you can turn someone from a faceless bureaucrat which everyone on the radio’s always saying public servants are, into real people just by looking at them in a different way. And it can be something quite small, like a calm voice when everyone else is squawking and tense, that does it.
    â€˜I suppose so,’ I say. And then I see his name on a box file on the desk near his elbow, and it’s Murchison , and not even Mr , but Greg – Greg Murchison and not Mr Mumble-Mumble at all.
    â€˜I suppose so, Mr Murchison,’ I say again, because he’s the only one being friendly and I want him to like me and think I’m mature and can remember people’s names even when they’re introduced by someone as hopeless as Mr Jackson.
    â€˜Well, the point is, Laura,’ he says, ‘we now have to get to the bottom of this, for Mr Prescott’s sake, and for Toni’s.’
    And I like him even more, then, for using Toni’s real name, instead of just going Miss Darling or Miss Vassilopoulos and police matter and alleged misconduct and all that jargon like Mr Jackson. But he frightens me a bit as well when he looks at me and says in a very quiet voice:
    â€˜And be sure about this, Laura. One way or the other, we will get at the truth.’
    And I wonder how he can be so sure about that. Even I’m not sure, and I was the one who was there after all.

3
    The first shock of the trip comes even before we leave the school yard. It happens so quickly I almost miss it, and a moment later – when everything’s normal again – I begin to wonder whether it happened at all. But I know it did, and it changes everything that happens later on.
    Three buses have been organized for the trip, three huge Greyhound coaches with deep recliner seats – so deep that some of the tiny Year 7 girls already look lost in them – plus toilets and air-conditioning and overhead monitors for films. ‘Better than home,’ Toni says.
    â€˜Yes,’ I say, ‘but what if we get Forrest Gump or Little House on the Prairie all the way there and back?’
    â€˜God yes,’ she says. ‘Who did you get on your bus?’
    â€˜Miss Temple. And Mr Jasmyne.’
    â€˜Sucks you.’
    â€˜I don’t mind them,’ I tell her. ‘You’re with Dreamboat, I suppose?’
    â€˜Ye-es,’ she says, and rolls her eyes and drapes herself over the back of one of the seats to stop from swooning in the aisle. Dreamboat lover / Wont you be mi-ine…' she sings. The children in the seats around her look on bug-eyed, then start to clap along with her. They love Toni.
    â€˜Who else?’ I