Boy Overboard

by Peter Wells

  Hence my duty to be always here, at the starting line, crouched over and waiting, tense, my legs shaking a little, waiting for the gun.

  Waiting for the gun.

  It is dark now, it is the beginning days of winter, and we the sons and daughters drawn out of the warm houses all over the district must show we can toughen up, and bear the cold, and watch the fiery dragons that fume from out of our mouths without so much as a cry, or murmur. This is, I know, the military camp for it. This is, I know, an internship in being turned into a man. We are all here, boys and girls, in a forced apprenticeship, one which will change us from being who we are, with still soft, unformed features, as if another creature is buried in our flesh, into people with faces in which are embedded the importance of breaking through the tape, of noting who comes second, of disregarding, in the silent swoon of victory, the rest, yet remembering always to have a kind word, a memorising glance for those who cannot win.

  But we must learn swiftly, we must learn hard. We must crash into gravity and when it wallops us in the face, we must raise our faces up and, our mouths full of dirt, (bleakly) smile. In this is our true learning, in this lies our victory.

  I am forever running my parents’ race.

  I am to win my father’s race.

  I am to win for my mother.

  I am to be my father as he wins the race.

  This time he shall win, and I will be merely a fleshy figment moving its shadowy shape over the sharp blades of grass.

  My feet will fleet over upturned blades.

  My toes will pass, without really touching, the swords of green which poke up to spike me if I so much as falter.

  When I run, I see nothing or no one.

  I simply release what is in me of my father and it runs, wild and powerful, towards the tape.

  If there was no tape I would simply keep on running until perhaps I had moved out of the known world, and into some foreign place I no longer knew — or it no longer knew me.

  ON THE LATE summer nights, when winter has not yet made its hasty invasion over the hills, leading its army into our midst with a roar and an apparition of overwhelming strength, sending us scurrying back into our houses, closing the doors, pulling shut the windows, sitting within as the wind blasts overhead, shaking the wood on the walls — on late summer nights a soft crease of peace opens itself like a hibiscus flower. We are like ants guzzling round the stamen, burying ourselves in the soft silken darkness. The tides lap in and fill up all space with their ululating lips, creating a lyrical song which sweeps us all into softness and laziness. On these nights I find Keely amongst the boys. He is a stranger to our district, he knows nobody here, and nobody knows him. He is dependent on me, and I am his king.

  We come together and wrestle. We cannot stop ourselves. Magnetically, we must clash and try to find in our flesh some token, some image we cannot yet define, so we leap on each other’s bodies and hungrily invade every space, every nook, every cranny.

  O, I am astride him and laughing down into his face, I hold his arms wide apart, pinning them down by my knees. He tries to raise himself up, and in doing so his face swerves like a firerocket past my shoulder. Cinders, sparks, illuminations blaze right through my eyes, into the soft moist dome of my skull. His flesh, his smell, the roar of his heart, of the blood coursing through him — how can it be contained in another covering of flesh? Why can’t we just create a small slit, like you do with a penknife, to swear eternal brotherhood? Why can’t the blood of my entire life flood into him and his into mine? What a joyful release this would be, what a divine levity would overcome me. Some eternal lightness would lift me up, freeing me from the deadweight of being forever and always who I am. Can I not be freed?

  He flips me over so the lights and the faces and his body swish past me in one violent slide, and now his legs are wrapped round mine and his hips lock onto mine and he grinds himself into me again and again and he tries to force himself, all his blood and his life into me. His face hangs over mine and together our mouths open wide, as wide as a crescent moon lighting up the whole sky, and into our mouths, from his mouth to my mouth, from his eyes to my eyes, flows every river and tide in the world and briefly the oceans move all over the planet and we have been flung far out from the gravity of the earth and for the sheer infinity of a second we exist, light, weightless, as we truly are, or might be.

  IT IS AT this second the loudspeaker sparks into life.

  This is so abrupt, heralded by some sharp splinters of sound, then a sudden shrieking scream so intense everyone stops what they are doing and throws their hands on their ears; and in this space, introduced into the gap of silence, in-between silences, I hear a name and realise that I must struggle back into the body and clothes and face and walk of that person.

  For I am, I am Jamie Caughey.

  Instantly, a form of dread, a drop of poison suspends itself over my head. It hangs there, a sword about to pierce my skull.

  I unlace myself from inside and around and through Keely, who rolls off and lies there on his back, panting. He stares up at the stars, as if his face is the earth and the light from the stars must irradiate his nothingness. I feel his body tremble as his breath flames backwards down into an even rhythm. I am already standing up, giddy.

  Without saying a word to each other, Keely and I have separated forever. He can no more protect me than he can accompany me as I follow my shadow as I move towards the lights. Around me everything is broken into the sharpest fragments, tears and rips, of a brilliant funereal whiteness. High above our heads, on long stalks, are the sports lights which award to each of us a deepened shadow so every human is made into a mask.

  I wish now I was standing behind the security of a line. Why am I not at the beginning of a race? I prefer that white nothingness, that state of suspension when I hang there, waiting for my inside to explode.

  Instead I thread my way towards the officials who stand near the bottom of one of the lights. Mr Carroll is the head official, I know his thinly whipped intensity, his rabid bad temper as he is surrounded by the brewling brouhaha of two hundred children. He is an old athlete. He wears his long skinny legs naked, unashamed of the thin daddy-long-legs which waver into nothing. He has a red cauliflower face, with lightning thrusts of purple, of congealed blood stopped in his veins. I know, under his towelling hat, his head is so bald it is painful to see. A chrome whistle dangles where his heart should be and restlessly, restlessly he paces the grass, flattening it down as he turns, revolves, spins on the ball of his feet like an animal caged and tied to the stake of the winter light. His whistle he blows, anxiously, forever.

  ‘Boys of the fourth grade line up!’

  ‘Girls of the fifth grade, prepare yourself for the one hundred yards!’

  By his side, married to him, is Mr Barnett who is loose like a bag, the string of which has snapped. He has slack flails of black hair covering the naked soft spot on the back of his head, and these hairs, escaped, sprout out the top of his shirt. He sweats and looks as though he wishes he could apologise for the hair which keeps on growing: out his ears, up his neck, behind his shoulders, along his arms.

  A gun goes off, splattering the air and I hear, behind me, the desperate thump of feet scampering across the crust of earth: burst of air within lungs as air is held in; the grunt of the loser as he lorries up the back-straight; the laughter of those on the sideline, identifying as always, carelessly and without any thought, with the winner.

  Who naturally must never speak.

  Mr Carroll cannot wait. He has raised the microphone to his mouth. I see he is a general now, staring into the dark-veined heavens of war. His eyes strobe the battlefield as the microphone comes closer to his mouth. His dreadful utterance is poised on the end of his dancing tongue, to be delivered into the dark like a hurtling cannonball which will drag all sound with it, whistling towards me so voluminously I must duck as it roars overhead. I feel myself: am I covered in cinders? Is that smell my eyelashes burnt down to my e
yes?

  As if separated from his mouth, which I see moving, the entire sky becomes lit up with his disembodied voice.

  ‘Jamie Caughey! Report to the official’s table. Your father is here for you.’

  Your father.

  My father. Who never comes to see me here. Here? Is he back from Australia? What special meaning is this? My eyes run ahead of my body, terriers scampering through the ankles of the crowd, side-dancing and lurching towards the podium.

  Dad? Here? Now?

  As if suddenly the straits between Australia and New Zealand have been turned into a billiard blanket which now is being furled up and rolled away before my eyes, I imagine my parents silently and swiftly coasting towards me, loaded down with wonderful things from Australia — electric frypans and pop-up toasters and transistor radios and new clothes with labels from exciting foreign places, cocktail coasters snitched from the plane — I see it all, I sense their imminence. Yet where I visualise my father, as if I can see cut into this scene all around me an exact shape into which he might fit (slightly stooping yet with broad shoulders, the thin athlete’s legs which had carried him peerlessly to victory after victory, the arrow-shape of his head, his long limber elegant fingertips, his bony toes clinging to the composted pressed-down soil of Hungry Creek) as if his body is the keyhole and my sight is the key I search for him so quickly and completely it is as if the entire globe has revolved round once, entirely, in one second, in a violent whirl on its axis bringing me back to this point when I realise: my father is not here.

  Uncle Ambrose is waiting for me.

  ‘JAMIEBOY!’

  I walk towards him, past Mr Carroll who does not even notice what is occurring, his general’s eyes strobing through the battlelit darkness.

  This is my father?

  This is some mistake.

  But as I near him I know and fear what will happen. He comes to me, and crying out loud, ‘Jamieboy, you be my baby boy!’ he clutches down on me and kisses me and I am standing there thinking this is a mistake. I am not who I am. Nor is he. But in that second of hesitation, of prevarication, of uncertainty about what to do, I have left it too late. I have accepted his kisses. I have accepted the fact he is who he is not. He is my father now.

  And so he must kiss me.

  Shame

  ‘YOU HAD BETTER invite everyone,’ says Aunty Gilda. ‘It’s better than leaving anyone out.’

  Fair Aunty Gilda, fair and square Aunty Gilda, our hero.

  She is looking down, slightly doubtfully, wearying away, as if in her imagination the pivot of her high-heel, the tiny eye of the steel-cap, is boring into the ground, the rough scoria which coats the clay drive which passes up the side of their house. Their flat, they do not own their home. It is only rented. My mother says this.

  Aunty Gilda has already said, ‘Well, Ponky love, you can’t have more than thirty’.

  At her twelfth birthday.

  This is impressive. But I understand that is what is owed, almost as fealty, to going to a private girls’ school. Just as I know Ponky can no longer attend the local tennis club, or go to the local church. Everything that Ponky does from now on is going to be focused beyond Hungry Creek. I understand this, but feel a little of the wry perception of one left behind.

  Thirty guests to a birthday party!

  But.

  ‘I don’t think we can fit in Tony and Myrtle,’ Aunty Gilda is saying in that special voice which even I know presages an important announcement. (This voice has a raw nerve running through it, naked, like electricity running along, unsurrounded by flex.)

  ‘But Matthew and Jamie will be?’ Ponky says with a small quiver of fear in her voice. Yet sullen too, slightly.

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ says Aunty Gilda quickly. ‘That goes without saying.’

  They are sitting out in the kitchen at the table. I am lying on my bed, putting paper clothes onto Ponky’s cut-out dolls, the ones she has never touched. The contempt of her fingers isolates them. I dress them in going-away clothes, afternoon-tea clothes, a visit to the ball. And now my fingers hesitate … before party clothes.

  There is a small eddy of silence.

  I try not to listen.

  The voices take up again.

  ‘We can only have thirty guests at the very most,’ says Aunty Gilda then, her face lowered as she ticks off a list.

  ‘Are we sending out invitations? Carole Jennings did for her party.’

  ‘We need a present for everyone who attends. The golf club is hired. And the picture theatre.’

  This is so grand it is spell-binding. Booking a golf club. Hiring the entire picture theatre. I have never heard of such grandeur. In one bold move, Uncle Ambrose and Aunty Gilda aim to supplement their initial advance (sending Ponk to Richmond View) with taking over the main entertainment places of Hungry Creek. This single stroke of quasi-ownership shows such ambition that I understand instantly how far-reaching Uncle Ambrose’s and Aunty Gilda’s (and Ponky’s also) sight has become.

  ‘We’ll show …’ and here Aunty Gilda’s voice loosens its tenseness, that of the careful strategist, returning to the soft lagoons which we all know and love and bathe in ‘… We’ll run Around the World in 80 Days.’

  Ponky breathes out, ‘Neat-o!’

  I hear her throw something slight (a paper clip?) into the bin.

  ‘Gottcha!’ she murmurs lazily.

  ‘And then everyone can come back here. To play,’ Aunty Gilda says, completing the outline of her small Napoleonic campaign. I hear her stand up and the insistent beat of her high heels across the lino floor. She is busy, running out the back door, jingling her car keys as she runs.

  ‘Pet, get some steak out of the fridge for dinner.’

  I slip off the patio dress and put on the tea-dance frock. Smiling confidently, the paper doll looks back at me.

  Ready and prepared.

  ‘WHY CAN’T TONY and Myrtle be asked?’ I say casually. Not revealing I am a spy.

  Ponky doesn’t answer at first. Then she pulls a face like she would like to shrug the whole thing off. We are walking down the rocks. Ponk had come into the room and whistled to me. I dropped everything and followed.

  We are no longer frightened of going out.

  Horton was captured over by the swamp. In the toitoi over by the dump. Nobody gets away here. Everyone knows that. We are an island and nobody, no, nobody ever escapes. This blackness is in our blood flood. It is the moistness inside our bone. This is our marrow. Nobody escapes. This is the ghost laugh, the rictus inside the skull. Nobody ever escapes an island.

  So, for the time being anyway, we pretend we are free.

  Horton is captured.

  And nothing ever happens.

  Again and again with the dull reverberation of a weight pressing down metal.

  This is why PK’s birthday is such a major event.

  ‘Why?’ I ask, screwing up my eyes so the tide looks Chinese.

  PK’s face grows grave as she looks at me and I wonder what she is about to say. Disclose.

  Then I am surprised.

  ‘Sophie Bensky has said she will come.’

  She says this in a special tender tone. One she hardly ever uses. Almost a reverential whisper. She glances towards me quickly, perhaps to cover up what she has just revealed. A fresh pink flush, just as if she has been slapped, falls over her cheeks. PK seems to plead with me not to laugh. But I am silent.

  Bensky.

  I know the name just as everybody does in our town. I have seen it written, three storeys high, in letters on the side of a building. Neon burns it into our eyes. Trucks carry it down every street. Radios pour its name, over and over again, into the open funnel of our ears. Inside every kitchen it makes itself at home, sitting on the side of packets, tins, bags.

  I leave a space of silence as a form of a prayer mat.

  Then I whistle. Low.

  I look out at the sea.

  It is heading towards low tide. The wind has disturbed the
tidal drift so the sea is Karitane brown in a wide ring, out from the shore.

  There is a small figure in the distance, bent over, legs akimbo.

  Tony and Myrtle’s mother.

  Mrs Lamb. Digging for shellfish in the mud.

  She is the only woman in the whole of Hungry Creek who would do this.

  ‘… So?’ I leave the hook of my question mark hanging in the air.

  Sensing the huge differences in our world, between this place here, and the Eastern suburbs, where ladies lie down on sand made of mink, listening to transistors and laughing while speed boats draw silver threads back and forth across the horizon.

  I see in my eye a beach ball bounce.

  Then I wake up.

  There is a faint dank tang in the air of mangroves, or is it pooh?

  ‘You and Maddy wear shoes and socks,’ Ponky says heatedly, as if Tony and Myrtle’s mother can hear what she is saying, its treason. She leaves a long stretch of silence. We both look down at our feet. We are wearing jandals worn in so they have become soft and comfortable. On the pad of each jandal lies the imprint of the soles of our feet.

  I see Tony’s bare feet splayed out on the footpath, the undersides of his feet are going to hoover up any chuddy. His toes spread wide from grabbing at the surface of the world as its spins round and round on its axis.

  Tony and Myrtle never wear shoes. Not real shoes, bought to fit their feet.

  So.

  And.

  But.

  Tony and Myrtle’s mother stands up to ease her back. She is a big woman. Her thin dress ripples in the wind. It is wet all round the hem. She seems to sense us there, so far away from her. Tiny as a full stop.

  The Regina Hotel has never looked as closed and blank.

  Ponky has her penknife out. She is cutting her name into the clay, laying claim to the place.

  ‘I don’t believe there is an L,’ she murmurs then quietly.

  ‘Doan you?’ I draw all the letters out in a low groan of surprise. Because this means Ponk is giving up thinking we will win the Coca-Cola Contest and, best of all, the Prize.