Boy Overboard

by Peter Wells

  And through the opened cardoor we can see a waterfall, a flood of dress, a ballgown all afroth as the coolly smart lady prepares herself for the immolation of the moment. Drawing the silky whisper of her wrap round her shoulders, she leans out, nervously, like a plant to sunlight. In one second she will have made that marvellous transition.

  Under a thousand eyes, she will have been born.

  BALL SPLATTERS INTO a puddle.

  Wet gravelly slime travels over my face.

  A Cameo tribe boy leers into me, his stubby wart-fingers gathering into his palm the ball.

  Bald ball, branding ball.

  ‘Watch where you’re goin’, Noddy,’ he says, bashing his bag into my legs. Banging into me so his legs tangle with mine, and I get a closeup of his hungry eye. Everyone in the world hates getting up early and, for hours, for a long time into the day, everyone is still snatched back into dreamsleep, except now they are sleepwalking, awake, eyes not really turned round from the inside of their skulls.

  I know the territory of this world now. I know the points of danger. All narrow entrances and exit points are dangerous. Anywhere where precedence and order must be defined is to be avoided. The narrow path by the dental clinic. The long narrow track near the creek. A sudden converging of asphalt between two buildings.

  Better to keep to wide spaces or, even better, to wander haphazardly, dreaming and lost, through the girls’ playground.

  INSIDE ME, INSIDE a small glass bubble of memory, lodged in there for all time, a capsule which still releases its potency, bleeding into my system so that, startled by the flush of its power, force of its imperative, I remember the day I invaded the girls’ playground. I know yet I don’t understand these imperatives. What I do understand is the logic of their overwhelming power: the way I am driven, like an automaton, to realise its ‘quest’, to comprehend, to enter the world of skipping ropes, chants, rhythmic incantation, leave behind the world of knucklebones and marbles and fights; this is not difficult, but different, different laws and rules, a different form of cruelty. But the world is cruel. Cruel in its indifference to all of us, masked by deceit, smothered by concern. I know this as I move along, swinging my bag against my leg, in time to my movement as I edge round the building so I can get my first,

  yes,

  my breath flares up through me,

  yes,

  there they are,

  CarrotnKeely already in an energetic dance, feet caught off the ground, eyes alight, air whistling through their bodies —

  the ball bounces on gravel

  for one instant I conceive the wish that my body was that gravel and it felt the hotfall of that ball

  bounce

  bouncing off the ground.

  SLOWLY, I COME nearer. This is brazen of me, to even think of interrupting their dance, they are so intent, CarrotnKeely, joined together in the web of their breaths as they interlock, and dance apart, patting the ball between them, diving and lunging, turning and dancing, catching all the early morning energy of the world in their footsteps.

  Neither of them has time to notice me getting nearer.

  Already I have left behind on the wooden seat by the classroom Winkie, who wills me to sit down beside him, not leave him.

  But I am drawn, against my will, sleepwalking almost, towards Keely.

  As I get nearer, Carrot lets out a yell, and dances round a Murray Halberg victory lap. I watch him acknowledge the cheers of the crowd, his hand raised above his head, flag of false modesty, thin lips creaming. Keely goes hahaaaaa, but bounces the ball anxiously in his hand, eager to keep playing, to get back to playing, to win.

  I look at Keely, whose whole body is breathing an energy so swift it roars as it passes up through his body, from out of the earth, his earthbrown eyes shining, his cheeks reddened by the effort, his milkwhite teeth flashing against his brownbrown skin. His hair is neatly mother-tamed, then altered by the artistic flick of his own comb. He wants to be Fabian, he wants to be Jerry Lewis. He is neat, and treacherous, Keely.

  Like now.

  In slow motion Carrot has become aware I am standing there, held back by the white line painted on the asphalt.

  Across this I can’t cross. I stand right beside it, queuing.

  I have rehearsed these words for so long now that when I say them, hoping desperately they have a kind of careless casualness, I know they are imprinted, embedded, formed, shaped, sculptured by my desperation.

  ‘Go, Keely,’ I copy him precisely, waiting for a miracle to happen.

  Wanta game?

  Wanta join us?

  Wanta join onto us, into us, become part of us?

  Yesplease.

  But time goes slow-coach when it wants to be and this is now.

  Keely’s head turns just slightly as he follows Carrot’s glance to me. His head is turning so slowly that I watch his eyeball swivel in a protracted arc, which circles round the earth, round the globe it travels so lingeringly so that, by the time it attaches its trapeze to me, I can feel I am turning into stone.

  Sticksandstones

  break my …

  Carrot’s eyes have travelled once, twice to Keely, and he pushes his hips out. I don’t know what this means exactly, but I know it is not good.

  I will Keely not to laugh.

  Inside the stone, willpower.

  He, Keely, feels all the magnetic force of this will, but he is also aware of Carrot’s power. We both realise Carrot is talking, he has let drop the basketball down towards the earth. Yes. Now we know that whatever will happen (and it will change how we will behave from now on), whatever is going to happen will have to occur before that ball, hurtling, meets its own shadow as it rushes down darkly to meet the earth.

  ‘Er, go,’ says Keely, fingering the words with all the exaggeration of my learnt text.

  ‘Er, go, Jamie.’

  Ball strikes the earth.

  In that second of impact, he makes me see how ridiculous the words are when you don’t possess them, when you don’t know the magic that lies behind them. Go where? Away from them? Into the earth? Sink beneath your feet, through the gravel into the dirt? Go where exactly?

  Carrot has heard the thin line of ridicule in Keely’s voice. In fact it is for Carrot, it is Keely being a housewife in a frilly apron, delivering him on a tray from the oven, still-warm, a full tray of biscuits. Now Carrot eats every one of them, ooze coming out of the corner of his mouth as he laughs up at me.

  The ball leaps back into his hand.

  He stands there, more beautiful than any statue on earth, possessing Keely.

  The ball balances there, on his palm.

  TODAY THEY WILL not ask me to join them.

  But tomorrow, or the day after, or even on the day I arrive at school on the back of a brilliant red Jaguar, which snarls at them like an MGM lion; yes, then they will relent, and casually, to hide their humiliation, the very scale of their defeat, they will come and ask me to join them, to go with them, and, casually (as if I knew it would happen all along), just like that lady as she slides out of the car, and, adjusting her wrap in that second as she raises her head, faintly smiling, walks into the flood of camera flash, with them I will go.

  A FILM IS running inside the school hall.

  A film?

  Not just any film.

  A film about sex.

  A sex education film.

  There, on the shadowy white square, smelling dank and of the creek. There, between the thin silk curtains which blow with any furtive gust of wind, silvering in through holes in the asbestos walls.

  There, in the hall which was, once, a resting station for wounded American servicemen, so we are told.

  There.

  THE SCREEN HAS been wound down, on its scroll, and now across its silvery surface plays knowledge so secret and hidden boys have to be separated from girls, and each of us, to enter, has had to provide a secret password: a note written in hand by one of the persons who gave us birth (or a guardian), saying th
ey agree to their child witnessing a film about sex.

  A film about sex.

  How simple this sounds, beside the silver calibrations which tintinnabulate up and down our spines as we wait all of us, a lineup of boys, a sausage file of boyboyboy, jointed into each other by the rushing flush of eager anticipation.

  What lies on the white? What is inside?

  Each of us can hardly wait to get inside the doors, to drink of the deep and forbidden knowledge.

  Now, sitting in the dark foisty moist of it, smelling of boy sock and the sweat under unwashed armpit, by Carrot’s hot bananaskin (he is entranced, Keely too has raised his face up to the white screen). On this we have seen many acres of boredom. Across this we have trekked through wastelands and Steppes of commentary: peas being tinned; milk spurting and splashing into glass bottles; how baking powder is made; ‘Look at the bother Dad gets into while Mother’s out visiting!’; we have observed process and, cheerily, with an aching boredom, learned nothing.

  But now, now is the moment we have all, unknowingly, been waiting for and the suck of the air all around us is soundful as we bloom towards the screen, each of our faces an open flower, waiting for the rain.

  Rain on me, I pray, playing at knowledge.

  Boomvoice, as always.

  Diagrams.

  Charts.

  Little corpuscles.

  And then the miracle happens.

  A naked male body, presented side on to the camera. The row-upon-row of boy draws in its breath — sucks in, vertiginously, almost like a dog-growl. A howl emerges down the front, wave after wave of laughter flecks back, the tidal wave surges through the dark.

  But my eyes are trapped.

  This body has no head, this is what is so disturbingly fascinating. It is as if, so long as you have this thick hose thing, nestled in a strange black whirl of hair, a posy of springstreak, you no longer need a head, a body without a head, but possessing this thing — a penis, as the voice devoids it — you are complete.

  The torso, entrancingly, begins to revolve towards us. The hall is awash with boyjuice, plashing and crashing all up the walls. We are drowning in its stifling struggled-for breath, in its longed-for groans; all around me boy is grabbing boy, hands rifling up backs and running down thighs, stroking members, grabbing crotches to certify that this thing does exist. The secret is out. The hall goes abandoned.

  But I am struck dumb by all this — untouched.

  For in one electrifying flash I have understood.

  I have understood the power and energy of malehood. Under all their clothes every man carries this secret. This is one of the secrets of the world, so enormous and accepted that everywhere you go, wherever you go in the world, in every travelogue, men are cloaked to hide it.

  This electrifying secret.

  And in one moment, with a similarly inevitable swivel of the head (parallel, yet in opposite motion to the body), my head turns to gaze at Mr Pollen.

  By the light of the projector he is stooped, an arrow of concern running down his face. He is watching the feed of film into projector, the bite of sprocket into sharp wedge. He is drugged on the drone of the machine, the heat which radiates off this metal object. In one second I understand why I have been brought into this dark temple of malehood. I comprehend that the body on the screen is actually Mr Pollen’s body, in another image. I have now seen him, miraculously unclothed and, even better, not even possessing a head. Freedom whistles up and down my veins like buckets of gold being hurtled along a speeded-up mechanism within a deep mine. Yes, I comprehend. I have seen Mr Pollen naked, and I will always see him now, his body perfectly white, with that perfection of white which only black-and-white film can possess.

  He is revolving towards me, then halts.

  My eyes lay their tracks towards him. It is as if I have never seen him in my life before, but having seen him now, I will never forget him. More than this, he has a miraculous power over me, a magnetism, the desire to know more.

  And Mr Pollen sits, ignorant of this fountainfall of love plashing all over him, squatting down by the projector light, irradiating his face as he stares, first downwards, then his gaze opens up, like a flower in slow motion, as his eyes travel to the screen. And then, unseen by anyone else, I watch a magic moment … he feels down and, one arm outstretched, he begins to wind back a shirt-sleeve.

  I do not watch so much as my body becomes invisible and I turn into an organ of sight.

  The whole world becomes the revelation of his forearm, taut, muscular, wrapped round with ropes of veins, laced over by a field-flow of hair. I can hardly draw a breath so suspended am I by this on-going spectacle. He continues rolling his sleeves up, over his elbow joint, revealing finally a view of the bulging muscle of his upper arm.

  This act, brazenly non-sexual in his view, is for me so rhapsodically drenched in everything I have seen that I understand immediately that those muscles which wrap round his arms, and bulge, so satisfyingly rigid as he casually flexes his forearm, are simply poetic equivalents, hints and mere shadows, of that other miraculous secret, the one which is so extraordinary that nowhere in the world can it be seen.

  PONKY IS NOT home again when I return. This is a statement, an interruption to our silently agreed-upon rituals. It is removal, withdrawal. Dismissal. I cannot understand this, just as I cannot understand the arbitrary arrangements of the world, why things have to change. If we are together, why should we be apart?

  This afternoon is a cool grey one, still, depressing. Outside there is no one but the bus passing and repassing up and down the road like the ticktick tock of a clock. I look at Ponky’s empty bed, pick up her comics, let them fall. I stand there and try to stop breathing for a while, to see if this will change things. I burst out into breath, decide to go down the park to see what is happening.

  Outside I don’t even have a shadow. My toes whisper over the gravel, onto the grass. My toes know every mound and indentation of the footpath, the way it mounds slightly as it nears the roots of the pine trees, where puddles glisten darkly when it rains, where the ragged edge of asphalt breaks apart, like stale cake, into clay and then the grass.

  But no Ponky now, Ponky is hidden from me, just as she now has to wear gloves and hats and stockings and blouses and a smock-like dress to hide the fact she was once a tomboy. Once.

  I walk into the park, looking round me, vaguely and distantly, as if I don’t actually expect to see any threepences.

  The seasons have changed, from summer into that indeterminate time when it is too cold to swim, and the next summer seems so impossibly distant as to have fallen off the edge of the globe — will never return. I feel the forlornness of this, it bleeds into me. Looking for threepences provides my reason, my only reason, as I wander off down the green gully of grass, towards the swings.

  I swing back and forth so hard and high, small stars bleach into my sky.

  I see in the distance Mr Lamb picking up rubbish under the pine trees. They slish-slash wildly across my horizon: distant harbour rises falls in earthquake; pine tree colossi wipe across my pupils. But it doesn’t work. I am alone. I hear above everything the arid screech of the swing in its socket. Now it is no longer summer Mr Lamb doesn’t oil the swings any more because the rain and wind and frost simply sluice the oil away So, in an empty socket, screeching, oil-less and dry, I try to fly, but my hopes die.

  Wander off, in a wild loose loop, knowing every part of the park, like a map of my hand. That tree there, the small kauri, is Matthew’s tree (we have chosen one tree each). It is, typically for him, difficult to climb, its flesh smooth and viscous. When you reach its first branches, there is nowhere to rest: you must balance there, on the balls of your feet, challenging vertigo. You cannot really hide up there. You can only be daring, and dangerous, and unusual, all of which is Matthew. As well as, I suppose, the fact that nobody else even knows it is a native tree: he would always choose the special, the extraordinary, the one which holds history and its secrets.
>
  (My tree is a wide blooming macrocarpa with a girth so enormous it appears to be elephants’ legs all bunched together. It is not too high to climb into and, best of all, if you ever fall, you plump down soft on to a nestling bed of pine needles on which you almost bounce. You can spy from this tree, lying up there, unobserved. Or simply drink in all the sky. Through the hole in your eye.)

  Maddy and I hide up this tree when we run away from home. But then time is so long we get defeated and return home, anxious that we had not been missed. Ponky’s favourite tree is the giant pine tree which keeled over during a storm. The following day every child in the area was down there. It was claimed, and clambered on, and scored with initials, becoming overnight a source of wonderment.

  It projected out into the tide. It became a bridge.

  Her tree offered drama, crowds, money-making potential. Just as Maddy always wants the unusual so Ponky is so tuned in to what most people like that she always wants what Matthew calls the obvious.

  Or the lucrative.

  But no Ponky today. No Maddy.

  I don’t even go near our bunker.

  It no longer exists.

  I abandon the park and go over into the bus-shelter.

  I WANDER INTO the trickly chill of the men’s toilets, where words of savage want are scored into the wood. A wry sad piss smell coats everything and the light comes in the trellised window, like a condemned cell, a nun’s room, a cell before the executioner’s block.

  Now it is empty I can investigate this site of so much mystery. Here on the wall, in the smallest cell, is a chart engraved into the wall, hardworked in pencil: Saul 7 inches; Dirk 8 inches; Geoff 15 inches.

  I am not sure what this means, though I know, precisely, what it is about. It is part of a large almost unknowable mystery, a dark map, a world which we children have invented, and which adults know nothing about.