Lessons from the Heart by John Clanchy Page A

glass.
    â€˜Good morning, Miss Gorgeous.’
    â€˜Good morning, Dave,’ I say, and I’ve decided to call him Dave rather than Dimbo because I’d thought he was just a fat bus driver who only loved his bus when we first met him, and not a person at all, but I liked the way he didn’t get upset when all the kids started singing and calling him Dimbo, and I especially liked the way he helped some of the smaller kids put up their tents last night when he didn’t have to and had driven the bus all day and must have been tired and could have said he was just here to drive the bus, he wasn’t Weary Dunlop or Mahatma Gandhi or something. And I really liked it when Luisa said, as politely as anything, ‘Sarah and me can’t get our pole straight, can you help us, please, Mr Dimbo?’, and he just smiled and said, ‘Just a second, luvvy, as soon as I finish here.’
    â€˜What’s wrong with you this morning?’ he asks now.
    â€˜Nothing.’
    â€˜You sure? I’ve got a girl just your age.’
    â€˜Don’t you get giddy?’
    â€˜Trying to figure her out, you mean?’
    â€˜No, driving the bus and looking at the road all the time.’
    â€˜You get used to it. Just like anything.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t,’ I say. ‘Ever.’ And then: ‘Oh, yuk, did you see that?’
    â€˜Yeah,’ Dave says. ‘Someone’s got a sense of humour.’
    A cheer goes up from the middle of the bus where the boys have just seen it – a dead roo propped up against a white road post as if it’s waiting to hop on board, and it might just as well be alive, the way it’s standing, except it’s lost its head completely and all that’s sticking out of the top part of its body is a white neck bone.
    â€˜You never get away from it out here,’ Dave says. ‘That’s why I don’t drive at dusk or dawn if I can help it. The roos are as thick as grasshoppers then, and you keep thinking they’ll be leaping through the glass and into your lap next.’
    And now I look properly, it’s not just dead roos but foxes and birds – galahs and emus and hawks – and they’re everywhere, every twenty yards, sometimes not even that, and on the road itself there are great red patches where the animals have been hit and their blood smeared and spread by the wheels. And some of the patches, I see, are still wet and swish under the bus’s tyres.
    â€˜Semis, roadtrains, buses, four-wheels …’ Dave says. ‘That’s mostly what you get out here. And they’ve all got the big roo bars on the front. Travelling like this, a hundred, hundred and ten k an hour, they just blow the animals apart. The fellow without the noggin back there, he must’ve just been clipped.’
    â€˜It’s awful,’ I say.
    â€˜It’s life, luvvy.’
    â€˜This road –’
    â€˜Amazing, isn’t it? It’s one of the straightest bits of road in the whole country. Apart from the Nullarbor. Forty-eight kilometres flat before we hit the first sign of a bend.’
    â€˜So, why don’t they see them?’
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜The kangaroos and foxes. Why don’t they see the buses and four-wheel drives coming?’
    â€˜I don’t know, luv. At night they must see the lights from miles away and run straight towards them.’
    â€˜And into them once they get there.’
    â€˜You make it sound like suicide.’
    â€˜And all that blood on the road. Yu-k!’
    â€˜Later,’ he says, ‘you’ll see some actual red roads.’
    â€˜You mean dust?’
    â€˜No, no, it’s proper tarmac, it’s just red, that’s all. It’s probably the sands, or something they mix in with the gravel. It comes up through the tar, and you’d swear the road was painted. I like it myself, it’s easy on the eyes, and the white lines stand out so