Boy Overboard

by Peter Wells

  He stands there, poised, about to launch off down towards us.

  And crushing his cigarette out under his shoe, the lone spark gambols, frisking along the asphalt, glimmering up into light, one planet in the solar system which glows brilliantly, then sinks down into darkness.

  WE ARE WALKING, Ponky and Matthew and me.

  It is an afternoon so fine and still the sky has disappeared into the pure white of sun. The whole of heaven is a white aura dazzling down on us, sucking into itself all sound, apart from the strange suctioning sound of our feet as we seek to lift them out of the tidal mud. We are on the forbidden side of Hungry Creek, that narrow inlet which runs into a crinkle of mangroves, in which is hidden the creek: Hungry Creek.

  Beyond it lies the reef.

  This is forbidden territory for all of us because this thin vial of silver, which lies now so meekly and slim, threaded onto the glittering viscous mud like a phial of quicksilver, can grow into a fierce force which, having trapped your feet in the mud, flows over your face and forces itself down your throat, drowns you.

  This creek demands babies and toddlers attracted to its tameness. Each year it gobbles down the flesh of some innocent leaving behind a mother covered in shame and tears so terrible they must leave Hungry Creek and go and live in the bin where you see them hanging onto the wire as you ride along the road, calling out to you as if you are the child that they lost.

  We are walking out towards the reef, led along by Matthew, who has been there before, he tells us.

  He is leading us intrepidly.

  Ponky wants to go there, to prove that she has done it. Because all the local kids have walked over to the reef at low tide. Which means crossing the creek. They have found fabulous things there. For the reef is not merely an encrustation of rocks (not merely the bridge in which the ghosts of a thousand dead goblins lie, to reawaken each night) it is also the dump.

  Here is left the remains of what many thousand upon thousand of people think is no longer valuable. There is no end to what is no longer wanted. It is like a catalogue of lost souls, the detritus of the city, it is like the dandruff shaken out of the huge head of the living.

  It is treasure.

  Matthew tells us this.

  He changes what some people see as meaningless into objects of value, to be sought.

  A bank vault was discovered, its door blown open and mysteriously full of nothing. Matthew has already shown me the jewelled brooch he himself brought back as booty. It is intricate, a webbery of gilt on which are embedded a scattering of stones; pink stones, the palest of blue stones and stones which are a curious, yellow-green colour. The fastening on the back no longer works, but this only adds to its curiosity. Its uselessness becomes a glittering star of uniqueness.

  Matthew has told us all of this, as he leads us on.

  I don’t know whether to believe him, my brother, or disbelieve him.

  My feet are sinking now into the mud, which is warm on the surface, but cold, cold as death underneath. We know, hidden under the mud, are broken bottles, septic tins waiting to implant into our blood systems the serum of poisons, illness and lingering painful death.

  So each footstep, as you sink downwards, is a tentative sensing out to see if you come into contact with any hard object.

  The mud is now up to our calves.

  We can no longer walk. We have to struggle against the mud, forcefully.

  We grow tired.

  ‘What happens if we strike quicksand?’ asks Ponk in a small, yet concentrated voice.

  ‘Don’t fight it!’ Maddy says. ‘If you feel yourself sinking,’ he advises, ‘you have to stay still as possible, but put your arms out wide: like this.’

  And here, embedded in the mud, he stretches his arms wide apart, palms out flat.

  For one second, he looks strangely emblematic, and I see the creek behind him, the mud pillowing down smoothly. It has a sleek shininess as if all the bereaved mothers in the world have come there, to the banks, and polished the banks with their knees as they tried to wash away their tears.

  Is that what Hungry Creek is? A torrent of tears?

  Flowing out of the dark huddled landscape.

  We stand still, so still, just looking at it.

  I turn round and look back at all the houses, roofs, telephone poles.

  I can see washing on the line of Mrs Beveridge: white sheets hanging still. Surrender.

  Five sparrows in a line along the top of a tin roof. One hops along and replaces another. It is so far away and silent.

  Now strands of deep green speckle the jade. Clouds overhead rearrange their shapes, shuffle their strands all over the harbour surface.

  It is then we realise what has happened.

  The mangroves are sinking beneath the harbour.

  The tide is racing in.

  The creek grows thicker.

  The mud settles round our legs, turning to concrete.

  The tide now runs towards us, with soft and surreptitiously gleeful slurping sounds.

  What will we do?

  The creek licks its lips.

  I wake up.

  It is Uncle Ambrose with the first electric shaver in the district.

  He is singing to himself under his breath, he comes into our room.

  ‘Out of bed out of bed, you kiddies. The early bird catches the storm.’

  I feel today I will be lucky.

  AND SO IT happens. I have no control over this, and this is the magical process by which life instantly changes, trips over itself, invents its own despair and hallelujahs afresh.

  I have no control over this except: I am there. Magically I am there, as I knew I always would be, in my dreams — waiting.

  I have not been delivered to school in the scarlet chariot. But still, this does not matter so much because it is about to happen. As I dreamt it would.

  But not how.

  Carrot has come to school early and there is no Keely. No Keely to be attached to his Carrot, so he, insufficient, feeling he is lacking his full half, mooches about, his hands buried deep, deep in balls of agony inside his pockets.

  He kick-kicks his winklepickers along, as if, in tumbling the gravelstone, he is trying to find Keely. His grey sky is lowered, he scowls a little loosely, till the gravelstone, of its own accord, leads him towards me.

  He is now, with his left hand, as if this hand had no other connection with his body, bouncing the foursquare ball.

  The ball bounds down to earth, repercusses up back into his hand. This is his heartbeat calling out to Keely.

  Keely’s disappearance covers all of us, is the air we breathe.

  Carrot’s snot-yellow eyes glance over at me.

  In one instant I sense he is alone, as shy as me. As curved and carved into strangeness as I am. I am made stronger, some part in me relaxes, opens wide.

  Yet everyone else in the playground, in this instant, is made invisible, soundless.

  I can hear the gulls over in the tip biting into the rubbish, beaks plying plastic. I can hear ants eating. I can hear the underground sound of worms moving through the soil.

  O, Carrot, I don’t say, for I understand I must appear indifferent, so he cannot hear my heartbash. Or perhaps more precisely, so no one else in this playground may sense my milkshake of excitement. All must happen silently, and furtively, in the severe patternings of a set dance.

  So the gravel magically untumbles towards me, revealing, at once, a path which was eternal, pre-existent, simply awaiting this instant to be discovered. (Yet the real mystery is that it is equally possible this path might never have been revealed.)

  Feigning surprise, Carrot’s eyes dart towards me, the object to which he is being driven.

  The ball leaps and falls from his hand, taking on its own life.

  At this second, though Winkie is talking, I sever our conversation, turning into stone beside him.

  My eyes flick-flicker towards Carrot’s, entwine and ensnare his eyes out of his head, so his bod
y is drawn, mute, following on behind my ventriloquist’s stare towards me.

  Ah, now we are situated exactly opposite each other, though Carrot, to show he is not impressed, stands with his hips slightly to the side, ball bounce-bouncing into his palm where, for one oscillating second, fraught with enormous implications, he scowls down to me and murmurs:

  ‘Keely’s not here, you wanna play with me, fuckycunt.’

  Winkie beside me changes into a Christmas tree, his lights flashing.

  ‘I do, I can, I will,’ he cries out fast.

  But I am walking, I am beside Carrot, instantly we have married.

  To the improbability of our encounter, to its frank impossibility, we have pledged a wager.

  Of course, I understand neither of us must show any feeling.

  It is his job to get me into the foursquare box before anyone notices that, in that second, the whole fragile infrastructure of game-playing, inside the playground, has altered. With one swift twist, a new dynamic is being introduced.

  I comprehend I am strictly on offer. Winkie has got up and trails after us. He is waiting for my downfall.

  INSIDE THE BOX, inside the white lines, possessing the space which is set aside for CarrotnKeely, Carrot — as if to show everyone I am not Keely and therefore he owes nothing to me — Carrot sneers slightly, and for one second his face falls into cowboy indifference. He taunts me with my own unimportance, my reduction to nothingness — just when I might be given the chance to leave it, I must recognise the full weight of my insignificance. Accept it.

  He lifts his hand up, and with a powerful thrust he sends the ball whistling towards me, hoping it will strike me in the face and this nightmarish moment will be over. The moment in which it looks like every game in the school might halt, at some subliminal alarm, all other children crowding around us, yelling and screaming for Carrot to eclipse me.

  But just as the ball grows larger, as it lacerates the air around it, some electric and secret energy flows from the asphalt under the soles of my shoes and I enter into the magic dance.

  THE BALL IS sent back to him sooner than he hit it to me. This is as much a shock to him as it is to me, and I gasp. I open my mouth and from out of it flow a hundred thousand coloured streamers.

  This is suicide.

  Inside Carrot’s eye clouds a storm. Yet his return and my attack are so swift that he instantly realises he cannot afford even the luxuriance of thought. He must engage simply to stay alive. Winkie, Winkie beside me is whistling, ‘Go, Jamie,’ he sings, ‘Go, Jamie, kill Carrot.’

  I, who can barely understand what is happening to me, give myself up to the strict energy of our dance.

  Each attack, I defend. Each return, I attack. So we dive, and swoop, and circle through the air, our eyes catching on each other, as our limbs answer the stroke of the other. All the energy of my waiting to be asked is expressed in that game which I quickly and almost superbly win.

  Carrot does not stop to ask me if I want another game. He simply starts again, furious. So we begin again, and fight again, and make love to each other through our opposing movements.

  This goes on for so long the hundred thousand coloured streamers have enwrapped themselves round every ligament of Carrot’s limbs and I can feel him, and smell him, as if he is already changed into being me. And effortlessly, though he himself is only just sweating to realise it, I control him. I begin to open my mouth, to let out my very first laugh. With surprise, we hear the bell go.

  And when the bell has finished its last peal, echo dying across the most distant perimeter of the playground, and everyone is draining indoors, it is at this second, we notice Keely is standing beside us, has been standing beside us for a long shadow of time.

  His face is white, beneath the pale suntan he always has, his natural half-Maori glory.

  His mouth is dry as his eyes flick-flicker back and forth from Carrot to me.

  As Carrot catches the ball on its final bounce, breathless and pale himself, under his skin of silvery sweat, his eyes turn to Keely and Keely does one of his Fabian-cool film-star motions of attractiveness. He takes out his slim comb and runs it through his hair. Effortlessly he draws our eyes to his beauty, his summation, his control of niftiness.

  But now his timing is all wrong and the managed flick of the comb as it mounts up the font of his hair hesitates.

  ‘G-Go, Carrot,’ Keely murmurs the password to Carrot, and Carrot murmurs back, breathless, after two solid heavy heartbeats (ones so immense he can hear them, inside the dark shaft of his consciousness, like a Big Ben gong strike, one after the other which intimates from now on he will have to acknowledge me), ‘G-G-Go, Keely,’ he murmurs. Then in one swerve so expressionless it cannot survive language, he bounces the ball towards me so I have to catch it, and without me saying a word, risking a word, risking them seeing I do not yet possess their language (dare to), I simply return the ball to Keely who gathers it into his captain’s clasp, and then, understanding graciously that to maintain his power he must appear to lose it, he bounces it back to me, and I, understanding the elaborate yet wordless rhythm of our ballet, return it to Carrot.

  Carrot, wordlessly, examining in his exhaustion his own sublime defeat, returns the ball to Keely, who simply takes the ball away from gravity and the eternal victor, the beautiful youth, the all-time captain leads us, his team, behind him, penitential and blissfully exhausted, into darkness.

  THEY DO NOT talk to me for the rest of the day.

  Love Letter

  AFTER SCHOOL MATTHEW is waiting for me. He is standing there before me. Proud.

  He has unrolled for me a drawing he has done for the Savings Bank Competition. I can’t help looking at it.

  It is a fine drawing on the requisite strong blue-white card, one foot by one foot.

  I gaze at the way it is unsmudged, the figures and words clearly and cleverly drawn.

  A wise owl prepares for the rainy day.

  Done in brown pencils.

  It is far beyond my own ability to draw.

  He holds this here, as a love token.

  ‘For you,’ he says. ‘What you think of it?’

  I think of how it is cheating, how he has done it for me. I think of how my brother is so good at drawing and painting and doing everything which is clever with his hands. He simply has to look and observe, his head oddly on the side, holding into himself a strange mute stillness. No wonder he needs glasses, he looks so much, and so intensely.

  It is only at these moments he keeps still, for most of the other time, all of the other time, he is jittery and stuttery, as if the words are stuck down inside his throat and can’t quite burst out. But I know this is because he has so much to say. He knows so much, my brother, he has read book after book from the library, consuming knowledge, absorbing facts and figures: this is how he has become a Quiz Kid.

  My brother who all the other boys at school aim to trip up, then let him fall in the dust, and laugh at him. My brother who gets bashed up, and comes home with his knees bloody and his glasses broken. Tense, shaking like a bomb about to go off, smelling of aniseed on which he lives, his snotty fingers covered in warts, working out mysteries.

  I know this, I know all of this history which trembles through his fingers as he looks down from the picture he has drawn for me and then up to me, expectantly.

  I do not know what to say, as I look over at him. He has ridden here as fast as his legs can go, as fast as he can get to me, the second his pencil finally left the drawing. He has held the drawing, rolled up into a bundle loosely enough, on the bars of his bike. There is a faint imprint of sweat, the pores on his thumb still marking the outerside of the cardboard.

  ‘But they’ll know I didn’t do it,’ I say, trying to buy time.

  ‘No they won’t,’ he says. ‘They don’t even know you.’

  Everyone knows the assessor is an art teacher from another school.

  ‘But,’ I say, my fingers itching. ‘I didn’t really do it.’
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br />   ‘Don’t you want to win the prize?’ he says then.

  ‘Yes but,’ I say. ‘Yes but.’

  He pauses and looks at me. He begins, very very slowly to roll the scroll back up. He does this so slowly my eyes have a chance to catch on his and I put out a hand, ‘Oh, don’t put it away just yet, I haven’t finished looking at it.’

  His fingers stop, and he holds the picture in front of himself. Where his head and chest are is the picture.

  I look at it and dream, not so much of what I might do with the money if I win it, but of what it might mean to win. I dream of how KeelynCarrot and others will be forced to admire me and …

  I dream of this for a long breath of silence, absorbing into me the fact that Matthew is standing there, awaiting my verdict.

  But already it seems my decision has been made for me. He has made my decision, by doing such a beautiful drawing. I know I could never do a drawing like that. And he, knowing it, has done it for me.

  Now he reaches across and gives it to me.

  Silently.

  Yet the moment it is in my hands, its weight changes and it becomes heavy. I am trapped by it, I sense, as I look back at Matthew who is looking at me intently, as if he expects something, by not expecting anything.

  ‘Be careful,’ he says now, fussily, ‘not to get your fingers on it. Where are you going to keep it? Have you got a roll to put it in? How are you going to carry it to school?’

  ‘I’m only going to keep it for a while,’ I say defensively, pushing his hand away. ‘Till I decide. I haven’t decided yet. I haven’t made up my mind.’

  He looks at me, and is hurt. I think: good, I have hurt him, he will keep away now.

  I walk off, carrying his drawing.

  ‘Jamie,’ he calls out to me.

  I turn behind me and see him standing there, with his bike.

  ‘Can’t you say thank you?’ he asks, a strange look on his face. His eyes, I can see his eyes very clearly, as though we are very close. His eyes are the very palest grey turning at points into green. They are like the tide his eyes, the way they change colour, and sometimes they are grey and warm and soupy and othertimes they are cold, so hard to get in.