Her Voice Was Full of Money – And They Were Careless People

The Lisieux Convent. This was not situated as you might expect in rural France, but in Leafland, a 'comfortable, affluent' suburb of Melbourne, Australia. Such suburbs are often described as 'leafy,' and this one certainly was lined with lovely European trees as well as rows of flowering gums all of which mysteriously did not suffer badly from the drought that gripped the country in 200'7. Yes, the country was in the grip of drought. Rainbow lorikeets chattered, flittered and darted from the blossoms of the gums that bloomed forever in a kind of long long hot forever and ever. Summer, autumn, winter - the drought-affected gum trees sent out honeyed fluffy pink and creamy white puffs all across the leafy lanes. The aroma of the honey! Never had there been so many lorikeets living for so long among the flowers and insects of Leafland. They were luminously bright birds, all the colours of the rainbow in splashes and splats and stripes, if you looked at them up close. Some of the sisters at Lisieux were French, and the school was renowned for its success in teaching languages and music.

Olga Bongiorno was five when she went to school at Lisieux. She was educated there for the following twelve years – a dozen years from 1952 to 1964. She was from the beginning one of those girls whose broad linen collar was always starched white, perfect as a seagull. In 1965 Olga went to the university, and then she went to the teachers' college, and then she returned to Lisieux where she taught French and English until she retired at the age of sixty. She herself would say if you asked her that she walked in the valley of the shadow and that she feared no evil. This grandiose biblical conversation-stopper concealed the death of a fiance in a motorcycle accident when Olga was twenty-five. It wasn't as if Olga was a nun exactly, but it wasn't as if she wasn't one either, if you can follow that. She did one world trip with her sister and they went to London and Paris and Rome – and also Loreto where Olga was keen to visit the Holy House. She was interested in miracles. But Olga truly was happiest in her role as senior mistress of French and English at Lisieux, and she was mildly famous and widely celebrated among the families whose lives she touched through her years of teaching. As for what Olga did after retirement - those matters are not relevant to this story. For our purposes she is the Beloved MissBongiorno, sometimes known as Old Olga da Polga, named for the character of a guinea pig in a children's picture book. The guinea pig was a teller of tall tales, very tall tales, wild exaggerations. Nothing could be further from the character of Olga Bongiorno who resembled rather the aunt in a poem by Hilaire Belloc, an aunt 'who from her earliest youth had kept a strict regard for truth’, Olga was a woman of high moral principles and a virtuous Catholic morality. What she saw and what she heard in and around her classroom were frequently matters of severe distress to her. She worried so about her girls, and was known to be, as a result of her anxieties, a devoted lighter of votive candles in the Chapel of the Little Flower.

Some of these things I tell you for the purposes only of clarification and ornamentation, since my focus is in fact on the year of the drought, the year 2007, and on Olga and her class of final year students of English. I should add at this point that Loyola, the brother school, was situated just three leafy lanes away as the tram runs. Now that Loyola has entered the picture, things are becoming more promising, and you can begin to sense where they are moving.

In Olga’s English class in the year of the drought Marina Delaney was known to be sleeping with Caroline Herbert's boyfriend. The other girls in the group rallied behind and around Caro, and they turned on Marina in a pack. To the Loyola boy in the case (one Teddy Buchan) there attached, it appeared, no blame whatsoever for Marina's misdemeanours. Sometimes in the classroom it seemed to Olga that all nineteen cells vibrated and lit up in unison, as the news of the progress of the Marina-Teddy Affair travelled in thrilling bee-lines across the desks, down the leafy lanes, over tennis courts and football ovals, round and round the garden like a teddy bear.

Caroline wept. Marina wept. Juliette, Tiffany, Marie-Claire, Ching Ye and Veronica sighed and frowned and gurgled. Trinity and Pieta squirmed. Wanda the Giggler giggled.

So it was not always possible, as you might appreciate, to teach the girls very much. Not that Olga had ever really understood, in all her years of teaching English and French, quite how the process of teaching really worked. Somehow her students ended up as literate, fluent, engaged, informed young women, but the chemistry or the physics or the metaphysics of the thing remained a mystery. All Olga knew at this point was that the Buchan boy was a terrible nuisance to her, that he was getting in the wav of everything. He was the son of Buchan the leather-furnishing millionaire, and Olga knew his grandmother, Violet Fish, who had had her front teeth knocked out at the Lisieux-Good Counsel hockey final in 1961. But that's really just another irrelevant little factoid. No, Olga couldn't get very much into the heads of her girls who were a flurry and sizzle of pink and grey dresses with the same huge white detachable collars as Olga used to wear. Some of theirs resembled hers in seagull snowy starch, but most did not. Olga must proceed, and so the day arrived when the curriculum, like a tram on a track, brought them all to chapter one of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

And still the bee-lines hummed in the zipped or unzipped side pockets of the pink and grey dresses. If you half closed your eyes those dresses resembled a shimmering, spreading splat of young and healthy brain tissue. Would Teddy ever go back to poor darlingCaro? Would that slut Marina ever give him up? You can of course guess what happens here - on the tram Teddy Buchan meets the cute blonde mega-slut from New Hudson High, a tart in a short black skirt and tiny satin thong, and before you can say honey pot he's dropped Marina (serves her right),

long long way in cyberspace since Olga was a child in a great white collar. Wanda will in any case be Finished at a school in Switzerland where there are princesses of all descriptions and of every stripe, and where her down-under bloom will carry an exotic cache all its own.’Drizabone Wanda Lust’ they will call her, and they will wave a butter knife in her face gleefully crying 'This is a knife! But that is all in the future and does not concern us here.

‘They were careless people.’ Olga tells them to write that down. ‘They disappeared into theirmoney.’ Learn that quote. A few pens quietly scrawl the short quotations onto paper. A number of silent laptops register the words as well. It's rather nice, really, disappeared into their money. Pieta was editing her photos and had no time for quotations; Marina was composing an email to Teddy Buchan who was never going to reply.

Well, you can see how things were, and I am not exaggerating in the manner of the guinea pig in the story. If anything I am being restrained and conservative and playing things down in the interests of fiction as against fact. But you can sense how this story is making its own bee-line towards a sharp and gleaming hot dry night in early summer when these girls have all closed their books and jettisoned their collars and have graduated from school with honours and accolades and laurel wreaths and stacks of valedictory books and higher school certificates and not a few glossy new cars. Pieta backed her lovely little Mazda into the muddy gurgle of the Merri Creek, and it is truly a miracle that she got out of it alive. Pieta is a survivor. Wanda is now on holiday in Florida with an aunt, so she is out of the picture.

So who, you wonder, is driving the death car in our story? Who is this speeding down steep Kennedy Hill Drive at three in the morning after a party to celebrate Teddy Buchan’s eighteenth? It's Veronica Vale, deluxe dux of Lisieux, in her sleek green minty Volkswagon. And who should come tottering barefoot and unbelievably intoxicated and wickedly wasted from behind a leafy elm where lives a watchful owl? Look, it's Trinity Maxwell in a glittering slivery silvery slithery slice of a wisp of Armani silk and sequin which she bought on E-bay. Through drooping yellow fringes of sunny yellow hair, with large grey eyes that almost focus, Trinity sees Veronica coming and she calls and waves, imagining in what you might describe as a split second that Veronica will stop and give her a lift back toLeafland. But Veronica is on the bee-line of her cell, talking to Caro who is passing out in Teddy Buchan’s mother's ensuite and is about to get back in the pool with Teddy if he ever stops horsing around in the deep end with Charlie Beluga and a bottle of very expensive Bourbon.

So a teenager is killed on Kennedy Hill at three minutes past three, and the dogs in the vicinity howl as the sirens worry and wail their way to the accident, the fatality, the tragedy, the waste.

Choose Your Own Conclusion

a) The driver put her foot down and disappeared into her money.

b) She stopped. She rendered assistance. She called for help. Yes, she called for help.