Lessons from the Heart by John Clanchy Page B

clear.’
    â€˜They’re so clear here,’ I say. ‘They make you giddy.’
    â€˜You’ll get used to it,’ Dave says again. ‘It’s just sitting up front.’
    â€˜They’re like cords, don’t you think? Or strings.’
    â€˜Strings?’ he says, puzzled. ‘I don’t know. They’re just lines to me, luv. Just things to stay inside.’ He glances into the long side mirror outside his window. Then waves as a black and silver four-wheel-drive goes by. It must be doing a hundred and forty, or more. ‘They keep you tight, you know, so you don’t wander all over the shop. And you need that. Especially out here.’
    â€˜Everything’s so –’
    â€˜Yair.’
    We both look out at it. At nothing. The red earth, a few trees, some scrubby bushes. And nothing as far as your eye can see on every side. And above it, like some huge curved lid on a cauldron, is the sky. And I’ve never seen anything like this before. I’ve always lived in a town or a city – or, in Greece, a village – and it takes my breath for a minute, just the space and the emptiness of all this, the redness of the earth, the cloudless blue bowl of the sky.
    â€˜You can look forever at country like this,’ Dave says, and I nod but don’t ask him what he means. I sort of understand. And then I look at the road again and the way it just goes on and on till the sides of it meet in a point at the horizon, before it disappears, and I think of something and get out the pen Mum gave me at Christmas and a small notebook. Because there are things you can think and write about but you could never say to anyone, they’d sound so stupid.
    â€˜You’re not writing home already?’ Dave says.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Your Mum’s probably still celebrating she’s got rid of you.’
    â€˜I’ve got to do an assignment.’
    â€˜Hard to write in a bus.’
    â€˜It’s only notes.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    â€˜I copy it out neatly,’ I explain, ‘and put it in proper sentences in my journal later. For my assignment.’
    â€˜And what are proper sentences when they’re at home?’
    â€˜Well, for a start, they’ve got to have a subject and a verb.’
    â€˜We used to have those when I went to school.’
    â€˜Well, you’ve still got to have them, for proper sentences. And you can’t begin a sentence with And or But, or that.’
    â€˜You can’t?’
    â€˜No, because they’re conjunctions.’
    â€˜And what’s a conjunction when it’s at home?’
    â€˜It’s a joining word,’ I say. ‘It’s not a starting word.’
    â€˜But what if you’re joining one sentence to another?’
    â€˜Well, you can’t, that’s all. It’s a rule.’
    â€˜But none of my sentences would be proper then,’ he says. ‘Especially if I’m just thinking.’
    â€˜It’s different if you’re thinking, you can use them then. But in your assignments, you’ve got to write them properly without conjunctions at the beginning. Like in this assignment I’m doing for the trip.’
    â€˜Homework on a bus trip? They take some beating, some of these teachers.’
    â€˜Well, Miss Temple anyway. She’s a bit of a slave-driver.’
    â€˜Temple? Isn’t she the – ?’ Dave jerks a finger towards the back of the bus.
    â€˜Yes, but I like her.’
    â€˜Well, you write your notes, and I’ll listen to some proper music.’ He picks up a cassette from the dashboard in front of him. It’s got a man and a guitar on the front in an outback Aussie bush hat, and I can tell straightaway it’s Slim Dusty. ‘I can’t stand the racket that lot are playing,’ he says. ‘What have you got in there?’ he asks, pointing at my Walkman.
    â€˜It’s classical.’ I try not to sound