Boy Overboard

by Peter Wells

  Artwork of figure on front

  and inside by Fear

  Brampton.

  Author photograph by

  Deborah Smith.

  Hungry Creek runs out over mudflats and curves round to a tidal beach. Hungry Creek is where everything is put that nobody wants: a dump; a zoo; a loony bin. It is also a magical place.

  ‘I’m two bits of mismatched bikini. M doesn’t seem to belong to E …’

  Jamie is eleven, on the threshold of discovery. But he can’t find the map that will explain where he fits in or who he is. His parents are away and he is staying with family friends. The sea is rising towards high tide and he is a boy overboard.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Book One

  DREAMS OF THE NIGHT SOIL PEOPLE

  Eel

  The City of the Night Soil

  Night

  Once Upon

  Ghost

  Silence

  Messenger

  Storm

  Love Letter

  Sleep

  Book Two

  LIES AND THEIR NECESSITY

  Dad

  Shame

  A Hard Word

  Book Three

  STRAIGHT IS THE GATE

  Girls

  Boys

  Prize

  Truth

  Book Four

  OPEN SESAME

  Wonderful City

  Escape

  Famous Inhabitants

  Disguise

  Flame

  Dark

  Vacant

  Crown

  Book Five

  THE MISSING WORD

  Discoveries

  Death

  Surprise

  Worm

  Underwater

  Changing Sheds

  The Secret History of the Beach

  An Event of No Consequence

  Padlock

  CODA

  Ball

  Home

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa, whose writing grant made the existence of this novel possible. I would also like to thank Harriet Allan, managing editor of Random House NZ and Ian MacNeill whose close reading was invaluable. Shonagh Koea, a writer with a curlicue pen and a sharp wit, was an inspiration.

  Sookysong

  cissyspeak

  hissing along

  deep dark leap.

  BOOK ONE

  DREAMS OF THE NIGHT SOIL PEOPLE

  Eel

  IT WAS CARROT who trapped the eel.

  ‘Look what we’ve caught!’ Carrot kept on yelling. He slid it into Keely’s hands, goon-grinning. ‘Hold it,’ he says. ‘Feel it. It wants to feel you.’

  That moment under the trees. The dump to our side, a mantle of periwinkles in the dark, glistering lights overhead. We are in a tropical jungle and it is that moment when, holding it, wriggling, mouth open, teeth bared, he, Keely, says to me:

  ‘Go on, take it take it take it.’

  And Carrot beside him starts up the murmur, like a wind in tree murmur, ‘Take it take it, Noddy, take it.’

  I am inside Keely’s brown bowl eyes, I am swimming inside them. There are small straws there, floating on lagoons of gold, I can feel the warm widdly water fluttering through my legs as I water-crawl. His lips, my life-raft. He nods now impatiently, all the world rocks to a stop (the whole world is still, as still as that time in the bathroom), and I reach forward, out, leaning towards him. As soon as I touch, my fingerpads skim the skin-slime and, inside, muscles rotate, bulge and its tail thrash-crashes towards me. Keely and Carrot jump back. Carrot is bent over double, pain in his stomach, letting out this strange punctured sound: eeeeeeeeeehhhhhhh!

  But I am blind. I am blinded by Keely as I have been all along. All my skin changes into scales, stiff as dead fish as its tail wipes over me. My blood runs ice as far away, in the distance, over the hill, across the plain, beyond the sea, I see the small figure of Keely waving to me: waving goodbye.

  ‘We tricked you, see.’

  It is Carrot now raising himself up to laugh into my face. He hates me, Carrot, because he knows. CarrotnKeely spend all their time together, dive-bombing each other’s pants, feeling for their stiffs, comparing them. Keely’s is like a sausage, a fat sausage. So Carrot tells me in a scientific moment, struck into truth.

  But …

  ‘We tricked you, see,’ Carrot whinnies to me now, opening wide his thin-lipped, rotten-banana-smelling mouth so I look inside and see his stunted baby snag teeth looking right back at me. Slumboy Carrot, with his little finger broken and wrapped in a dirty black bandage. In-turned finger, crouch-back digit.

  Keely?

  I don’t say this. My eyes say it for me, because I am in electric shock. I can’t stop the surge and rush of electricity which the eel is sending into me: dark forks, dagger thrusts. I feel its thick tube head flick around to stare up at me. It eats my eyes, the eyes which look at Keely saying: Why Keely, why? Because your eyes look at me too much. I feel your eyes as I walk across the asphalt, the shock of your glance as it takes up afresh each morning when you first see me. I smell the fireworks, see them in your eyes. All this he doesn’t say to me as his smile slowly dies. His smile slowly dies.

  He can see me now, Keely, he can see me being eaten by the eel in front of his eyes. The thick snout has come towards me, drinking me into its opened mouth — two sharp needle fangs glitter on each point as the mouth opens wider, fits over my head. Save me, Keely. I am inside now, inside the chill darkness, covered in spit-slick, all thick as sick, slithering me into his tightness which coils roundround, squeezing me down.

  Keely. Save me.

  As I begin my journey into the chill black, I half-hear Keely call out to me, ‘Jamie, I didn’t mean to.’

  But I know he is lying.

  MY NAME IS Jamie Caughey. I am in a special class for underprivileged hyper-intelligent children. I’m meant to be a genius. I heard my parents talk about it. Better than this: I am highly strung. It is better to be highly strung than a genius. You get off more.

  Mr Pollen, assistant headmaster, is our teacher. ‘IA Accelerate is our name.’ We are so intelligent we can be trusted to use our own time ‘productively’. Sometimes we debate the uses of the United Nations. Other times, like now, we slope off down the creek, to the gullies which run like a moat surrounding our school. We conduct our own study of nature.

  In our class there are four girls (Zeena, Angel, Stumpy, and Cora-Lee). There are also four boys. There is Winkie, who doesn’t count, CarrotnKeely, and me. So short and brief those two letters, like two bits of mismatching bikini: me. M E. Just like my age. 11. Like a ladder with no rungs. How am I to climb up there? Up to where all the knowledge lies, the truth is —

  This is how Carrot tricks me, perhaps. Because the me doesn’t seem to be there some times. It is cellophane floating in the air. It’s like me doesn’t know itself, it is so busy knowing everybody else. Finding out —

  ‘HE HAS A Rolls Royce,’ I say offhandedly. ‘He has a chauffeur ‘Who does?’

  ‘My uncle in Australia.’

  CarrotnKeely, Winkie don’t know whether to believe in me. But my face is a shining mirror, flashing back at their disbelief. Winkie hovers on the edge.

  We are sitting, legs through the bridge, creek down below a broken thread falling through the trees. This is before. There is a warm rotten smell from the dump. Wind is blowing our way. Occasionally, from the zoo, comes a lion roar. This is where we live. A no-man’s-land where everything nobody wanted is put. The zoo the dump the bin. We don’t live in the eastern suburbs where the t
ide goes out and reveals, like a necklace of pearls, whitewhite sand.

  At our beach the tide goes out and then keeps on going, chasing itself forever, as if it wants to drain away, flee, hide, sink in the depths, leaving behind a huge empty battlefield where only the bodies and broken spears remain. Out into the mud threads the broken sewers: the mud and the smell mix together, warm, a crab heaven, a silent pock. This is our stain, our tribe. We are the bin people the tip people the mud people the dirt people. We do not have white sand. (But we have something else, our own secrets.)

  ‘Does he …?’ says Winkie. He lives nearest the beach. I know I am safe. Winkie’s face is like a mouse, all alive and twitching. His ears, you can see the veins through them, throb and rinse with pink veins of blood. Winkie has tiny hands, like pointed shoes, long as a piece of elegant Chinese carving. Winkie plays the piano with these hands.

  ‘What sort of car does your father have?’

  Carrot is catching me out. I look at his face in the light, his yellow-brown skin, grey eyes. He takes out a comb and swiftly runs its teeth (some broken) through his snot hair. He does this nervously. Trying to hide his broken finger, filthy bandage.

  But his eyes catch on something.

  Able Fainell is walking along. In contemptuous silence, we watch the grind of his tight shorts and skin like puff pastry. Fine scalloped hair.

  ‘Look how he walk,’ breathes Carrot, luxurious and slow.

  Fainell’s backside-bum waddle-sways from side to side, pertly. Juicily. In silence we watch. Then Carrot wakes up and breaks our trance. He picks up a stone and sends it scalding across the air. This breaks Fainell’s saunter. He turns round and feels in his pocket. His face, I notice, is redred. Turning carefully away from us he says fuckycunt icatchyoudie.

  I don’t hear this.

  CarrotnKeely lean in together, flesh rubrubbing as they laugh. Then Carrot, his hand sliding down Keely’s trunk, skimmeys down and mouses into under Keely’s pants. Keely’s pants. Bright blue, new, boxers made to airily encase his brown legs. Keely’s pants with the pocket always open, ready to receive. Keely is neat, Keely is neat.

  But Carrot won’t let go.

  ‘What sort of car does your father have?’

  I know this is the crunch, I must be careful how I lie. Or rather, how I make up the truth. I see their faces paused in front of me, pricked still and waiting and then my brain joins my mouth and my body goes loose and I feel a speed of warmth, red zigzag lightning course all up and down me until I am sitting inside, yes, inside a red poppy.

  I glance away from them, so that my eyes seem to glimpse a far horizon: one they will never see (but Keely’s father is a salesman, he can just see it).

  On Carrot’s face I see a blank refusal, a recognition he will never get there. He is working out how to hate, whether to kill me, but clouds have already choked his horizon, light falls from his face. He lowers his gaze till it hits his penknife. Blade is out, blade is gouging the wood, chips fleck the air. He is gouging into the wood KILL SHIT KILL.

  Winkie, timid mouse Winkie, his whiskers twitching, turns from each of us, to each of us, trying to learn; but I have seduced Keely, I can see it, his brown eyes open wide for me, and into him I swim.

  ‘O, me?’ I say all curved as a piece of wrought iron sitting by the side of the Richmond swimming pool. ‘My father has a … Jag,’ I murmur the word, drop of pollen, formed honey. ‘A Jag. Yes, we have a Jag.’

  The word echoes through the narrow tunnel of our world, forming its own echo on which I ride, amplifying myself until I am not just this thin me M E sitting there, untogether, two bits of mismatched bikini. Now I am M G M cinemascope curved screen with line after line of chairs facing towards me.

  But Keely is clever, he has followed me into the tunnel, I can feel his warm breath all over my face, he is right beside me now, he is fitting himself into me, he is trying my body to see how it fits into his: maybe soon we will wrestle? Yesplease. Fit your hips onto mine, your legs through mine, we will roll together over and over inside this tunnel, our faces close together, eyes into each other’s as we —

  But Keely has taken his glance away, dragged his glance away, he looks far way, to another horizon. And Keely, clever and casual, nifty and treacherous, all at the same time, says to me:

  ‘Two-door or four-door?’

  I am almost lost. The Jag. Two-door or four-door?

  ‘Four.’ I say all casual.

  Pass.

  ‘What year is it?’

  ‘1960.’ I breathe.

  ‘What colour is it?’

  And in the middle of our silent wrestle, Carrot and Winkie left at our side, I try and decide: the money or the bag?

  What colour is it?

  I look round me: everything here is black and white like an old worn-out film from Before-the-War. I look at all the worn-down scuffed and marked views. Everything is exhausted by the weight of so many people letting their eyes rest on what they see. Exhausted eyes, blank eyes which no longer even see the huts of the transit camp where refugees stay, the barbed wire on the top of the zoo walls to keep everybody out, the animals in. This isn’t the real world. It can’t be.

  ‘What colour is it?’

  ‘Red,’ I say. Poppy red. Like skiing inside a poppy. Like when you’ve been swimming all day long then you flop down half-dead on the sand and start licking a soft blackberry ice-cream. Like closing your eyes when you look into the sun. Red as Sabrina’s lips, as Technicolor is only an echo of it. That red. Redred. Not only red, merely red: scarlet.

  AND UNCLE AMBROSE is driving up our street in a bright red, no, a scarlet Jaguar.

  I smile.

  Please take me with you. I want to escape.

  RED SATIN, THE table is covered in red satin. I love to run the pads of my fingers over its smoothness, while I’m waiting. It is chill, this satin, quilted and laid flat — picture-theatre curtains ironed and placed behind glass, kept forever perfect. Improved, made better. You can wipe this red satin clean. EZY-cleen. This is because it is Formica, a wonderful word.

  This is how different my life is at Uncle Ambrose’s. At home our kitchen table is wood, lovingly painted and repainted by my father till you almost lose the brushstroke: we place a cloth on it each morning, each evening. To eat a meal on the bare wood would make my mother grow angry with despair, as she lowers her head, then raises it, screaming up to the flypapers dangling from the ceiling overhead: Why are we living here? Staring at my father.

  But here, at Ponky’s, Don’t call her that (Uncle Ambrose), her name is Priscilla, the table is so beautiful we do not need a cloth. We revel in the fact it is EZY-cleen. The Casements are modern. Uncle Ambrose Casement is going places. He sells refrigerator after refrigerator, he has his own store. Uncle Ambrose, Aunty Gilda and Ponky live in their little rented flat, ready to, at any moment, take off. That is why, now, Ponky goes to a private school. She is on the starting blocks, about to take off. This is her first year at Richmond View, School for Young Ladies.

  ‘WHY CAN’T I go to Ponky’s boarding school, Mum?’ I say. ‘Why? Ponky and me are always together. That’s what it’s like.’

  Mum looks down at me like she’s wondering what she’s purchased. Then I remember something. ‘Didn’t you have boys at your school, Mum, your private school?’

  Crafty logic.

  ‘Yes, we did,’ says Mum, ‘but that was different. It was the Depression, and the boys were the sons of the headmistress. It was the middle of the country. There was nowhere else for them to go.’

  ‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter,’ I say, ‘to me. I want to go. I want to be with Ponky.’

  ‘But you don’t always get what you want,’ my mother says slowly and sadly, raising her eyebeam to flash into the future. Her hand reaches down and ruffles through my hair. I feel her finger-pads warm and solvent, melting me down, like a caramel, until I have almost lost my hard centre. But it doesn’t go. It won’t ever go. I know this. This is me, this hard irr
econcilable centre.

  ‘But Mum,’ I say. ‘It’s Ponky and me. We’re always together. Butmum.’

  I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care.

  LATER, MUCH LATER, she says to me (sharpening her spearpoint: it leans in-between us, holding us apart; if I move closer, it pierces through the skin): ‘But isn’t it what you wanted? You said,’ she says, ‘You said you always wanted to be with Ponky.’

  ‘But,’ I say, looking at her, my eyes inside her eyes, don’t send me away.

  ‘It’s for your father.’

  Better than this.

  ‘It is a golden opportunity.’

  I know gold. I am going to be a gold-digger when I grow up. I know this. I have seen it at the pictures. Gold-diggers are fun. They are crafty and plot and plan never to do any work. Gold as in her wedding ring on her finger, gold as in sunset.

  This is what happened.

  THE GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY.

  My father had his teeth out and the dentist’s needle made him sick forever. He turned into an old man, lying in bed. His brother, his richrichrich brother across the Tasman sent him a first-class ticket to come and stay. It would be a break. He could get better. My mother could come along too. Most welcome. Thank you.

  A golden opportunity.

  But what about the kids? My brother, Matthew and me.

  ‘We can’t go,’ says my mother who wants people to know. ‘So kind of them really, most considerate but of course we …’

  … into the small dots leap Aunty Gilda (no real relation) and Aunty Birdie (ditto). They live down the road. ‘The kids can stay at our places. One each.’

  ‘This is the kind of place we live in,’ my mother says, fierce pride singing through her veins. ‘Not good enough,’ says your Aunty Margaret-Rose in Richmond, and here my mother makes Richmond sound like a windy tunnel of snuff blowing down her nose which grows longer and more aristocratic by the second, more dismissive of Hungry Creek with its dump up the road, and the loony bin, and mangroves.