by Peter Wells
Yet, seeing me standing there stiffly in my long socks, shoes I normally wear to church, a boy amid all the girls, she calls out to me, to introduce me, to include me, ‘Come along, sweetheart, give your Aunty Gilda a hand tidying up all this paper,’ and small birds, as if in duplication, run out of her mouth. And the air all around me becomes lost in a vast flock of birds, thick with them, as if an entire race is shifting from continent to continent, and I am now caught in their mass migration.
AS ONE SHRILL beast we have moved from the golf club, on the eery privilege of a bus set aside purely for us, to the grand institution of the picture theatre. Hysterical with the amount of sugar surging through our nervous systems, we have stamped our feet and hurtled up and down the sticky carpeted stairs of the theatre, claiming every inch of space.
Inside us now nestle continents of jellies, seas of fizzy drink (passionfruit, raspberry, lime, lemonade), islands of brandy snaps, floating icebergs of meringues, lamingtons, plains of white bread and sweating butter sprinkled all over, like the stars of some highly coloured cosmos, with hundreds and thousands.
The sugar surges through our systems, changing us into one all-slithering hysterical monster.
But even in the dark of the picture theatre I cannot help looking at Ponky (at the rigor mortis of her smile which I alone diagnose as not being genuine), at the same time entering into a further and deeper confusion as to why Ponky is putting herself at such pains to maintain this strange unreal smile, one which indicates she no longer recognises me or knows me as myself (which is all the more disturbing as there are so few boys present). My brother had come late as had Ponky’s cousin Ben, and we had become the objects of brief intense inspections, as if the curved beaks of wonderfully terrifying tuis had come towards us unerringly and bent down and, savagely, luxuriantly, thrust their prows into the soft open heart of our flowers. This they ravaged intently, sucking into their interior all our pollen, before, distracted by the sight of another flower centre nearby, these extraordinary and enormous glittering birds had stretched their wings, momentarily cutting off the sun, plunging us into darkness, and moving on, excited, cawing to each other, to inspect a further flower, and, sitting, their claws attached to stems, sending out raucous victorious laughter echoing through the universe.
WHEN WE ARRIVED back at Uncle Ambrose and Aunty Gilda’s flat, Uncle Ambrose stood on the top doorstep and, barring our entrance to the interior of their house (which they must have sensed could not withstand such a small typhoon of destructive feminine energy), he called out, ‘Gwirls gwirls gwirls’ (in his slight even feminising stammer), and he stood motionless, his palms turning outwards, as if we had to read in them a stigmata, and, again as if he were directing traffic, he called us all to a halt. He announced that he was about to institute a game of hidenseek, with much hidden treasure.
Like mercury splitting apart, like a brittle pane of glass shattering in slow motion, then suddenly turning into fast speed, we fractured, screaming and shrieking, diving for cover.
I looked about me, feeling strange. I didn’t know who to run and hide with. Nobody had chosen me. And also, under the impact of so much sugar, so many sweets, so much attention, the little modoms had reverted to a savagery which was quite at odds with their virginal white dresses. Faces were flushed, hair undone, the white dresses were now marked with grass, stained with spilt drinks. One plump girl had become a bossy hysteric while another cowered, whimpering behind her, stammering and unpopular. Others made sounds which were exactly like the sounds any other local kid would make: barks of pleasure emitted from their guts; their pupils rolled in their eyes; faces flushed and glazed; and their hair, released from plaits and ribbons and hairbands, now fell over sweaty brows. Anxiously bitten nails drummed the wood. Pushing, shoving each other remorselessly, these daughters from the other side of town now seemed no different from … from …
… I saw on the other side of the road Tony and Myrtle.
They had come up to watch the birthday, much as you might watch a passing procession.
They were simply observers.
Silent, wordless. Shoeless.
Should I wave to them?
Would they wave back?
Would it lead to worse complications?
They might come over, hesitatingly, or even boldly, simply walk over the small concrete fence no higher than ten inches, stepping right over and walking inside Ponky’s place, just as they had done on many occasions before.
It was too risky.
Like everyone else, I pretend they aren’t there.
‘PSSST,’ I HEAR from behind me. ‘Pssssst,’ again.
I turn on the balls of my feet. It is the princess of the eyelashes, of the laughing mouth.
‘Come over here,’ she whispers to me.
Her skin is so evenly brown it is like the most perfect tan in the world, in fact it is beyond a tan, it is the quintessential colour of all skin for which my own white and freckled skin is just a poor preparation, a layering which I might hope to scrape aside and reveal underneath this warmth of colour, which is so intense it aches inside my mouth to eat it or lick it or stick it inside me so it might come out, drench out of the pores of my skin, covering me with sunwarmth and brownness.
She is blacklashed and blindingwhite, strong teeth stuck into redgums. She is blackeyed so enormously that I can see inside her pupils, curved round the horizon’s global shape; the lawn and wooden house and in the distance little white flecks like fallen blossoms of all the girls.
I understand in that second she controls all the world in her eyes.
Younger than me she is wiser than me.
She smiles at me, she sees me, she does not look beyond me.
When I crawl closer she makes room for me.
‘My name is Sophie,’ she says seriously.
‘My name is Jamie,’ I half-quibble burying my voice back down inside me.
She looks all over me.
‘Lets escape,’ she says then. ‘Let’s escape.’
‘AHHH,’ SHE GOES, running onto the green pelt of the park. ‘Ohhhhh,’ she goes lying sideways as we go rolypoly down the bank flashing sky eye peer and peek inside our skulls and find our laugh we screeeeeeeeeam as we rollpollrollpoll smell of crushed grass sticky paspalum-juice and the hot rich dank murmur of earth.
She jumps up, Jillinthebox, her pink dress lopsided and now stained with the grass. She wants to break, to make the pink dress turn into another flower. All the time she is laughing and dancing and running ahead of me, saying, ‘Tell me, tell me.’
We are on the swings swinging the sky up and down inside our eyesockets, balancing the world on our tongues as we laugh …
‘Go higher!’ she says, ‘I can go higher than you.’
We swing with such vengeance the entire framework of the swings begins to shudder, the shriek of the unoiled sockets calling to us. Our vengeance is harsh and we beat the air with our blur, bluesky greengrass and beyond the fringe of black bark of pine tree the calling waving of wave upon wave upon wave.
‘Tell me,’ she says. ‘Tell me everything. I must know. I must. I must know everything of this world so I may conquer it.’
We are giddy and slow and simply sit on our swingseats, waiting for the wirrld to ungiddy itself from the centre of our storm.
‘I feel sick,’ she says.
And I say, ‘I feel sick.’
I say and she say and I say and together, then, we go and throw ourselves on the warm breast of the earth and drink down into our insides a long cool draught of sky.
We hear back there a shrill whistle and Uncle Ambrose goes, ‘Gwirlgwirlgwirl,’ in a high screel of stop!
‘Let’s not go back,’ she says, sitting up, feeling better. ‘Let’s explore.’
EXPLORE WHAT? My hand? The lines on it? This is what this world is. I have only to open my mouth and the words drop out, like bobbles of water on a powerline on a frosty morning. I do not even have to speak to describe because I have lived her
e so long and breathed here so long that there is not one mound of earth not one nodule on the bark of a pine, not one rubbish wire basket, not one faded TT2 wrapper shaking in the wind I have not been.
‘This is the pine forest,’ I say, ‘in which the souls of dead people play. This is the bridge the goblins hoped to build but …’
And I repeat everything my brother has told me, tulled me, sung me, tilled me: I am his field and now I am growing I am growing miraculous flowers and she is now settling into my heart.
‘Can we get there?’ she says, nodding to the goblin bridge. ‘To the treasure.’
‘Only when the tide flows out,’ I say, grave as a statue casting a deep shadow. Now my words turn into writing-in-bronze round the bottom of the war memorial. This statue was given by gracious permission of Councillor Waters, who sat on the Council 1921-35.
She smiles all across her horizon, lighting up the trees with her sun.
‘Eh?’ she says to me. ‘Eh?’
‘Good eh?’ I say back.
‘Good eh?’ She says back to me.
We run now screaming, escaping from the shapes left behind, the shadows of ourselves who are still standing at the final bus-stop in the world.
We run screaming till we stop.
‘Can we, let’s us, you and me,’ Sophie says, ‘go over to the reef?’
I LOOK AT her shoes. They are made of white kid, so dainty that they are made from the inside of an arum lily.
‘You’re not dressed right,’ I say sternly. For it is not easy to enter and become a member of our unique club — Ponky Maddy and me.
‘I’ve got,’ I say, boasting calmly, ‘I’ve got a record from the dump which plays advertisements from many different radio shows. Ponky and Maddy and me play radio announcers. We’ve got at least five records,’ I say airily, rich as Croesus. I’ve got, I’ve got, I’ve got …
‘O,’ she says turning her sun on me, full of admiration. ‘O, can we go there please? It sounds, it sounds …,’ then she says it, ‘heavenly. You will take me with you?’
We are standing on the cliff-edge.
‘That is where lovers jump,’ I say.
‘How many?’
‘Many,’ I say. ‘About two.’
She gazes down the cliff. A long way down we can smell the beach, tinny and strange. For this is the rubbish dump side. Where lies the treasure.
‘They were crushed,’ I say in an offhand way. ‘Their legs went into their stomach. Never walked again.’
‘O,’ she says. ‘Shall we jump? Kiss me,’ she says. ‘Come and stand close here.’
She walks out. To the cliff-edge.
I, who hate heights because I know the enticement of plunging, now feel no fear.
I walk towards her.
‘Come on,’ she says, and she laughs then a pure wild laugh, ‘Come on,’ she says ‘Come here and kiss me. Let’s be lovers who jump,’ she says.
She is looking out to sea; I realise in one instant I could push her down. I realise I cannot stop myself from murdering her and getting in her car, and then driving away, perhaps even becoming her, but instead, just as I get right up to her, halting my momentum forward, she turns, sensing me there right near her and the sea glittering all round her head, she turns and seeing me so nearby she simply smiles to me and says to me as she has learnt in the movies, in a low voice somehow right at the back of her throat, so I learn in that moment I must go to the back of her throat with my tongue to retrieve it, she says, ‘Kiss me, handsome, kiss me, handsome. Hard.’
And I do.
SILENCE NOW AND deep into shock of the impact of my tongue inside her, slithering on the cliff-edge, we hung we hang we in space the sun and air around us breaking apart into separate atoms exploding, and the bright hard sun dashing on each crashing miniature wave so the tide turns into one million little mirrors all pointed towards us. The shadows on everything stream away like long strands of hair in a river. The heartbeat of the earth attaches us to the ground, our toes curl round the nodule of pohutukawa root which clings to the side like a dragon half-way down, crouched to catch us if we fall.
As we unseal, her face comes away from mine and unlocks the shadow, so I am blinded, and, standing there, lost in vertigo, I waver back and forth over space. But her hands, her small birds, have picked me up by each piece of cloth on either side of me, and pulled me back from the brink.
‘Lie down,’ she says
I lie down
‘Do you love me?’
‘Always.’
‘Forever and ever?’
‘Ever.’
‘My real name is Lorna Doone and one day we shall marry. I love you forever, write to me under a nom de plume.’
We go back to kissing again, and gradually it is happening. I am both taking off and burying in, I am rising up and losing all weight. From inside the pith of my skull starts a pure burning wire of fire which flares down from the dome of my head, down my back, kickstarting my heart, and then, in one enormous roar like a plane across a sky drowning me out in its noise, this spurt comes out.
Shaken and wet, I look down.
‘Take me to the reef,’ she says. ‘There is more.’
Boys
‘I KNOW,’ I say to Keely as he stands there. I look into his face, which is half-turned towards me, caught there, like in a photo.
Without knowing why, without arranging it verbally, there we all are over at the transit camp, two sets of gangs, boyboys and girl-girls, ranging round each other.
Form One Accelerate.
Nobody organised this, nobody made a time and a place.
It is as if this place, this time was already within us, formed from the instant of our births. It is simply as if a clock has gone off, an alarm clock, and each one of us has awoken to find himself, herself here inside the transit camp.
Across the road from the dump.
It has been raining forever. Hanging clouds like wet washing.
There is no sound but the grader over at the tip. It grates the air into sharp scallops.
Is that a zebra I can hear running?
Or the shoes of Cora-Lee? We are all here, keeping our secret, mute, yet rebellious appointment.
The girlgang is led by Zeena, whose dress at the top is already swelling and tight, straining against the fabric.
Zeena’s face is dirty-bright alight, and her slack lips, which are pastel-painted, always loll open. Is she squinting up at the picture screen? Or laughing? Or buried deep within her scowl? She wears brown shoes, whitened by tennis-white.
They are her pride.
Zeena is the girl who knows everything, is the repository of all knowledge. She is sullied by this knowledge, she, who must be the container of it all, and carry it, not on her head, which is where we all, anyway, see it, but secretly within herself: sullied, soiled, a used stamp which can no longer stick.
Angel is her deputy in knowingness.
Zeena and her best-friend Angel are always curved round each other’s ears down which they pour hot exciting spurts of words.
I catch some of them, ‘Frenchie, feel, pantie, root.’
I run the magic terms over my tongue trying, willing to make them feel at home.
Please know me kindly. Frenchie, feel, pantie, root.
I will know you.
CARROT HAS LED we boys along on his low-swinging hips, which he jerks back and forth in an undulant dance, flickering his eyelids as if he is undergoing a heart attack and letting out bleat groans which make him sound like he is a cowboy shot down, writhing in death throes.
Keely goes: ‘HaaaaaCarrot haaaaaaaCarrot,’ but watches attentively.
Carrot says to me, between hard-bitten lips, ‘I seen Keely in the backrow of the Cameo and he has his hands round Zeena’s tits. I seen this,’ he says to me, serious and professional, a bearer of hard truth.
I look into his doubting.
‘So?’ I say, hard and wild. I have learned this language, this tongue, which is all mocking disbel
ief and sharp not-knowing.
Not knowing who to trust and what is true, I trust to knowing nothing.
‘So?’ I say, meaning: impress me.
Carrot has lured along Winkie, which is no wonder, Winkie only wants to be included, wants to find out, he doesn’t want to miss out. He is different from me in some profound way. This I know. I can hear this in the difference of our heartbeats, as if his heartbeat bangs to a different music than mine. Whereas Keely? I am always listening for it, just as I listened and watched for the ballfall during foursquare. I am always listening for it and trying to learn it, and match it and copy it. Copy it bright copy it light, make it mine all through the night.
‘I know,’ I say. I know.
‘O?’ Keely doesn’t say. I can feel the relaxation of his body right through my own. I wish now I had brushed my hair like his, so it fell, in a wide awake wave all across the top of my skull. I wish I had hair like his, combed back along the sides then glittering with Brylcream so its black darkness winks in the light. I wish I was inside his mouth, or even his eyes, which turn to me and look at me, all over my skin and clothes and body and face. I wish his eyes could go inside.
‘… Whaaaaaa?’ goes Keely who is so cool he chews gum slowly even when he has none in his mouth.
‘What the fucken hell,’ breaks in Fainell who in this crisis has come along with us, boy with boy.
Fainell sometimes leans his eyes against my face, and I find myself looking at his hard blue eyes, and all the scurf of pimples which ruffle round his jaws. His face permanently red, as if ringing in his ears all the time are words boys scream out at him.
Often I see him turn taut and give the fingers and scream back other words. This I hear and do not quite understand. This language is mute.
I see him pushed face down in the earth, rubbed. But he rises up and is curiously strong. He does nothing back, he stands aside, he does not fight, he does not even look at them. He walks away. And when he is a long distance away he turns and screams. They chase him then hotly. I do not know what happens. I do not know what happens. When they catch him by the bridge. I see him being carried away by the boys, he is upside-down, being dragged, his head hitting the stones, jerking as it hits. The boys all gloating and groaning over him as they drag him down round into creek-darkness.
