Boy Overboard

by Peter Wells

  She is not like my mother. Aunty Gilda has a waist so tiny and cinched in tight by a wide shining-black patent leather belt, and shellacked golden hair. She is smart not hard, brittle not strong. I like her. I think how terrifying it is, yet how interesting that each person in the world is different. The way they look at you, whether they see you or not, and what they see, and whether they like what they see.

  Aunty Gilda is good to me, she does not see me as different. I am something known to her, familiar as the buses running up and down the road, the coin embedded in concrete outside the back door, which Uncle Ambrose and the men made: a Coronation coin which Ponky and I have never given up trying to wrest out.

  Without Uncle Ambrose we relax. The back door stays open, onto the sunset, and something happens in the house — all the spaces become liquid and connected, as if you turn into fluid yourself and you might just slip out the door, into the light evening air, or wisp along the road to the shop to buy an extra tub of ice-cream; everything is light as air, light as hokey pokey, light as waffle, as hair-sprayed hair.

  I am setting the table. Standing thoughtfully looking into Uncle Ambrose’s refrigerator. Our fridge at home is white. Their fridge, as always, is smarter than ours. Newer, pastel green. And when you put your hand on the rocket handle, it opens wide. It does this with a kind of sigh, like a fat person stretching and yawning after a satisfactory meal. A slurp of happy rubber lips. The door, weighted down with its freight of goodies, swings back as you stand there, irradiated by the brilliant lights.

  This is their Hollywood Bowl, this radiance which greets me. There are the bottles of Waitemata beer, ready and chilled for Uncle Ambrose’s advent. These above all must always be lined up there, one replacing the other as it is drunk. It is my job, as serf, as slave who stays there, menial and skivvy, always to make the trek from fridge to wash-house where Uncle Ambrose’s wealth lies stacked, cooling on concrete.

  Ponk has her radio plugged into her ear and she looks out the window.

  What does she see?

  I don’t know.

  A SHADOW FALLS across the doorstep.

  It is Mavis Crickwood. I look at her slippers. She is a woman who marches across to the shop, led by a cigarette always burning on her lip. Her hair is dyed a shade so astringent it gives the feeling all her intelligence had grown into her hair, into a set of angry lips. She has a smudge of rouge on either cheek. Warpaint. No eyebrows. Plucked.

  ‘Gilda!?’

  ‘Mavis!?’

  The two women stare at each other across space.

  ‘Come on in, Mavis,’ Aunty Gilda says, inviting her across, and over, the backstep.

  We can see Mavis’s eyes are vehement with news, bulging almost in their sockets as her pupils strafe across the face, first of Ponky, then of me, then jumping back, cricketattack, to Ponky.

  Already water is thundering down the spout into the jug (not a kettle like at home). Gilda connects water to electricity.

  This is an emergency crisis summit.

  Khrushchev to Kennedy.

  Another look at us, the children.

  ‘I thought someone should tell you,’ Mavis Crickwood retracts a self-important breath: annunciate. ‘Last night. Round about six o’clock. Just when it was getting dark.’

  More looks. Gilda follows Mavis’s looks to us, which seek, hook to sheep, to corral us out of the room.

  We sit there, changed, every pore in our body turning into an ear. We are moist with interest. Nothing ever happens to us, we think. We are hungry for life, waiting for it.

  An old stale blush falls down Mavis’s face, a dropped scenic curtain. Aunty Gilda, we know, wants us treated as adults: Aunty Mavis (everyone around us is an aunt or an uncle, a monstrous entanglement of family-which-is-not-family), Aunty Mavis will have to speak.

  ‘A face,’ she says.

  ‘In the steam. Looking in the bathroom window. At Brenda. In the shower.’

  Idly, carelessly, Ponky’s and my eyes entwine.

  The intensity of our glance betrays us. Instantly, it is as though each of us has already looked, which perhaps we have. Daughters in their late teens occupy a strange zone, somewhere between the very old, whose age conceals great secrets, and people like ourselves — stateless persons, caught in an in-between world, hostages as much as emissaries — it is no wonder that someone has activated all our impulses, which is to stare into a bathroom window, frosty with steam, and, wiping away the translucency, looked long and hard.

  A delayed yet sharp intake of Aunty Gilda’s breath.

  Like a flare in the sky, her glance lights up over us.

  Protectively.

  But it is too late.

  We have heard.

  And now we see, through the mist of the bathroom glass, half turning as we dry ourselves, a featureless face, the intensity of a stare which itself is a form of robbery. It takes, does not ask. In fact it has already taken. Observing, it marks. Watching, it prepares. Within breathing distance of us, like a light wind running down your back.

  A leaf outside crinkles across the concrete.

  We jump.

  A soft slow shudder passes through all of us simultaneously. Our fingers splay back unconsciously on our hands. The hair on our heads becomes electrified and fibrillates, straining up into the air. In unison, our eyes meet and in them is the percussion of a single word, a single thought, the complete expression of horror, beyond which there is no other: he has come onto earth to express it.

  Mavis nods grimly.

  ‘Brenda couldn’t see who th’dirty bugger was … but …’

  Horton, she does not need to breathe it, the escaping air ventilating out of the puncture of her body does it.

  ‘Horrrrrrrrton,’ murmurs Mavis on a dying downward slide of breath.

  ‘I’ll kill the bastard if … I can only lay my hands on him …’

  And now, now Mavis Crickwood has breathed it, we all know, individually and alone, he has been sent out into the world again, to terrorise us, to make each night now into a slow journey through fear, the ultimate ghost train, and there, at the end of each day, like a punishing mother, an angry father, like a lover, he waits for us.

  ‘JUST THOUGHT I should tell you,’ Mavis says now, a ghastly accomplice’s smile on her face. Mavis the butcher from Buchenwald, blood dripping already, in congealed drops, on the lino.

  She looks again at Ponky and me.

  We feel ourselves go white.

  ‘Keep your eyes open, kids,’ her lips tell us.

  From now on I know I will be frightened to let my lashes drop black.

  My eyes are pinned open, bleeding.

  Scuff of her messenger-of-doom slippers back over the asphalt.

  ‘OK, kids,’ says Aunty Gilda all bright, having drawn in a brilliant scarf of a breath, which rotates in her chest, round roundand-round so fast soon it is as hard as a golfball, ‘OK kids,’ she says, after a brief pause. ‘You haven’t finished up your tucker, but you want some ice-cream?’

  We listen to her voice, half-diverted by a vision of a double-header, just dipped in molten chocolate, then sprinkled with hundreds, no hundreds and thousands of thousands. This is placed, in neat silhouette, against the shape of a head, looking through a misted-up window, staring.

  We are struck silent.

  Aunty Gilda’s hand hesitates by the doorknob for the slightest second. But seeing we are watching her, our eyes attached to the momentum of her hand, Aunty Gilda boldly leaves the door open, refusing to speak to us right at that second.

  It is when she is hurrying past to her purse — she, as if accidentally, with a sideswipe of her heels, pretending she is only at that second recognising what she is doing — boots the door delicately shut. And we sit there, in the sudden dark, sunset cut off from us, looking at each other, waiting.

  Soon Uncle Ambrose will be home to protect us.

  UNCLE AMBROSE IS talking. Uncle Ambrose is talking non-stop. He has come in the door, hat carelessly flung and
hooked on a doorknob (none of us would dare to do this, as we know we might not hook the hat correctly and what would we serfs do if the king’s crown fell, if the king’s crown rolled across the carpet?)

  ‘I bought, I sold, I said …’

  Uncle Ambrose is on another roll. He feels none of our fear, our heartjump as his hat soars across the room and connects, magically, hooks then swings, nonchalantly, off the chrome doorhandle.

  ‘Jamieboy, that’s my boy!’ is his carol, ‘Go and get me another beer, buddy, that’s my boy (my pet).’

  I go, goodboy/badboy/goodboy, over to the fridge and unseal the safe of their richness. Even the news, the burning news of Horton must wait for him to have finished the recital of his daily conquests, for we all know we are retainers in his court, dependent upon his charity and wealth, so we have to listen, nodding, agreeing, secretly moving in our own patterns round the room, dancing silently around him.

  ‘Jamieboy,’ he says, having drained the last froth, the last dribble of gold into him, he bangs the crystal glass down on the tabletop, misjudging the distance between the table and him so Aunty Gilda jumps a little bit — My nerves, she doesn’t say, she is too busy not listening.

  Thinking of, thinking of.

  Ponky has stumped off to her room where she stuffs the transistor plug into her earhole, but she leaves all the doors open, I notice, even turning the lights on behind her as she trails into her bedroom. She does not want to be disconnected now.

  I go to the fridge and unseal the banksafe, their food vault, and I stand there, surrounded by the whispers of dry ice as I stare into their cavern: here is their richness, reproduced in the mirror of my eye, in the sheen of my glance so that, in neat reproduction, on the surface of my eyebulb, I share these possessions, simply by looking.

  ‘What’s holding you up, Jamieboy?’

  Behind me I hear the question.

  ‘What’s the hold up, sport, don’t you know you have to run with something when it’s hot …’

  My hand swings forward, to grapple his nectar, grab his joy-juice, to obtain the bubbles which will froth up and foam out, down the crystal tube, then, aerating his fantasy, blowing him up a little wider, he will induce them into himself and infuse himself into being a magician who however briefly lifts up off the ground and defies gravity.

  Like a little pasha to his sultan, I deliver the goods.

  LATER THAT NIGHT it comes.

  The sound of footsteps.

  A door cranes open.

  The sound of two breaths.

  A knife whistles through the air.

  A naked blade.

  A scream fills the night.

  ‘O turn it down,’ I moan softly. ‘Ponky?’

  She tweezers the sound away from me. But I realise I must hear the ending or I will not live. It will live inside my head always, waiting like a flower to bud and burst.

  ‘No please,’ I say then, ‘I must hear the end.’

  A lazy spurt of blue spray across our night. A saxophone drone then swing and sway all the nerve endings of the night. The power-lines outside weep. Black tears. And night falls all about us in its sequinned want.

  ‘Ponky,’ I whisper, ‘you asleep yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, annoyed.

  ‘Ponky,’ I say after a while. Because I know when her adenoidal breathing connects up. ‘Ponky,’ I say, ‘You think he get inside?’

  I glance at the window which lies in-between us, separating us from each other. He could easily break the glass, and reach in.

  But instead of an answer there is something worse: the slight groan of her outward breath has met the inward suck of air into her lungs; matted, fretted, frayed and straining, the air moves into her body. She is sinking down under the compressed weight of night. Her fingers, with their bitten nails, fall slack around the transistor. Softly the radio tilts and leans against her pillow. I hear the slight pock of a bubble of saliva as one balloon of spit opens and closes by the very corner of Ponky’s mouth. Then her trap falls open, her lips do a quick lick, she grunts once, turns like a happy whale and whooshes off to explore the limitless ocean depths of sleep.

  Storm

  ‘NO!’ SAYS UNCLE Ambrose, ‘No! No! No!’

  He is never a man to spend one word when he can spend twenty, so he goes on, banging the end of his stainless-steel steak knife on the tabletop, ‘No! no! no! no!’ Ponky does not smile, her face takes on a Mongoloid quiet. She hides her glance, does not even sit at the same table. I understand she is used to this, which is almost a new production for me.

  ‘You haven’t clipped the hedge closely enough. It needs … Uurgh!’ Uncle Ambrose’s moist lips let out a splutter of exasperation.

  A dull purple flush begins to bleed into the veins which trace another mask over his face.

  I have never seen this face before.

  It is ugly.

  I see the big holes at the bottom of his nose, opening and closing like a dangerous fish. He is swelling and undulating, his scales opening and closing quickly, with agitation. I feel the weight of his eyeball, cool and slippery, as it drags down my flesh.

  ‘When I was a boy I …’

  The clippers feel awkward and heavy in my hands. I push and pull them open and shut. The hedge is an eternally growing beast so that no sooner have I clipped it all along to one end, where I stop, exhausted and hot, to look at what I have done, achieved, than at the other end it has started growing again.

  Maliciously a sharp twig leaps out and snaps at me.

  Tony Lamb walks by, airy on his flat dirty feet, his blackblack eyes sparkling an insult to me. You thought you was a fairy princess, he does not say, adjusting himself inside his serge pants which I know do not have underpants, I have seen his thing, dangling down there, looking at me.

  He laughs at me, as he wanders by, licking with his tongue all over a fast melting ice-cream which leaks over his hands, his fingers. Then, standing still, his legs planted wide apart, his horny flat feet feeling the distant thud of the heart at the centre of the earth rinse of its blood as it runs up into his crack, he begins to slowly lick, one after the other, so slowly I feel his tongue travelling all over my face. He begins to lick his dirty fingers, which I know have been up inside his pants, feeling for himself and then down round the back where he has been playing intensely and moistly, fiddling and riddling a tune he plays constantly, a smile coming and going on his face.

  He cheekily laughs up at me.

  The straight line of the hedge breaks apart, and continues growing.

  ‘… and I never once!’ says Uncle Ambrose banging his knife against the table again, so the peanut butter glasses with the FLOWERS OF NEW ZEALAND on them jump up into apostrophes of fear.

  ‘I never once!’ he says to me, ‘ever had the money to ride a bus to school. I didn’t have a bike. I never so much as expected a ride. No one had a car. No! I walked three miles to school barefoot. Through the frost without so much as a shoe on my …’

  I sense Ponky’s lips moving along in time with his breviary, though she knows to keep her face without expression. I feel, without seeing, Aunty Gilda’s eyes sending to me a chocolate log train which whispers to me: don’t answer back to him. Listen to him in silence and he will run out of s-t-e-a-m.

  So now we all sit there and listen to him, and I feel a break of bleakness rinse all through me. I look down at the jigsaw puzzle and see all these pieces, some of which are parts of Ponky’s face, her smile as it used to be, Aunty Gilda’s false eyelash, Matthew’s tongue all purple from the aniseed balls, an airline letter, imprinted with a plane, and I see in the sky my parents’ plane lifting off and disappearing in the sky.

  I call to it.

  I watch this for a long time, until there is nothing left.

  A fly spot on the green ceiling.

  ‘What you got to say?’ Uncle Ambrose is asking me, insistent.

  ‘You listening to me, Jamieboy? You better. You better listen to your Uncle Ambrose when he tal
ks to you. Otherwise. No more Coke. No more sweets. No more halfcrown falling heavy and flat in the palm of your hand so you can go off and sit in the flicks. No more flicks. No more nothing.’

  No more, I know, I want to say to him. I know this already, as the last plane sound dies in the room.

  I know this. No more no more. I know this.

  But as he waits for me to speak, I wonder if I do.

  ‘Right,’ Uncle Ambrose snaps. ‘Tomorrow. That hedge. Cut again. Straight. Neat. Shortbackandsides. You hear me? You hear me?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle Ambrose,’ I murmur, looking down at the scarlet silk curtains which seem so far away, trapped behind glass, I can no longer really touch them.

  Yes I hear, I do not say.

  THAT NIGHT PONK and I make sure the window is fastened shut, that is, open on a slit so small only air can come in. We do this with a kind of manic nonchalance, with an intensity which fails to disguise our fear, our anticipation. As I sink into the black, slink in the back, I keep eyeing the slit, feeling for my gun, sinking forever downwards as we wait for him.

  By nightfall he moves and wanders round our streets, quietly testing window fastenings, pulling on stormdoors, looking inside letterboxes, the eye inside the keyhole.

  He is everywhere, because he is nowhere, and even if he were caught, and placed in the deepest cell, inside the furthest prison, behind the highest wall, he would float out through the keyhole, shimmy round the chill iron bars, he would join himself, in a miasma, onto the air, blow on the breeze till he finds himself invisible, at which point he can manifest himself as he stands there, laughing to himself diabolically, just down the road from the picture theatre, in whose dark he has changed back into himself. Now he stands at the top of our street, throwing his glance down the long street of my nightmares, the one which allows no crooks, no beds, no dips.