by Peter Wells
All this is in his eyes, his face, his permanent flush. Yet this is what surprises me with Fainell. Nobody has whiter skin. His skin has an almost radiant whiteness, beyond clouds, beyond the snow which none of us have ever seen. He is whiter than a page, on which words are waiting to be written.
‘Hah fucken hah,’ says Fainell to Carrot who has crept up behind him and, placing himself behind Fainell’s creambun, begins to flail away, fluttering his eyelids and letting out his dying injun moan: ‘Ohhh … ahhhhhh,’ he mimics. ‘Ooooooh aaaaaaaaah.’
We boys all stand in a circle, listening.
Fainell says, ‘What d’we do? Who’s going to go first? Which girl?’
‘Where’s the girl?’ say Keely, who, beneath his tan, his beautiful brown skin which is so fine it is like the covering of a foreign landscape I wish to visit, Keely is a strange yellow. His lips dry.
‘Where’s the girl?’
We stop, prick-alert, and listen.
‘Ooooaaaaahhhhhhhh,’ snarls a tiger, pettishly, full of stalled fury. Inside her cage I hear the padded threat of her paw. I hear the hot gush of elephant piss. I hear overhead the clouds lock together, shut.
Where’s the girl?
THE TRANSIT CAMP is where the communists are stalled before they can enter our land of freedom. We throw stones on their roof, chanting. We call them commies and run away from their ghost faces. Faces in which are outlined, in a scrawl of wrinkles, concentration camps and horrors we cannot even imagine. But seeing them, we laugh. We throw stones and run.
It is good to be free.
‘HAH!’
We turn, startled.
There behind us, massive as a tower, laughing to herself, is Stumpy. Five foot nothing, kauri-stump legs planted apart.
She has a tight and straining bodice, too, but it bears no correlation to her face, which is stern as a ship prow bearing into storm.
Stumpy is famous for out-staring Mr Pollen, winning by continuously staring at him in one long unbroken stare so immensely heavy in its weight that Mr Pollen in the end staggered away from it, as though he was bearing the impact of a spume of water from a fireman’s hose. This is the power of Stumpy’s glance. Stumpy who can push over a boy, ram against a would-be man, with such brutal force all boyboys gush and part around her, an invincible rock: Stumpy, with her kinked hair and lard legs, and plain fat scone features.
She sometimes talks to me.
But today she just goes, ‘Hah!’
And the derision of her sound is such that all we boyboys turn to her, revealing in that second, opening out of ourselves as if being peeled.
‘Hah! Ugly fat cut,’ sneers Carrot low.
‘What’s that, littleboy?’ says Stumpy.
‘We’re looking for the girl,’ says Keely all aslant with curvaceous dimple-boy charm. I watch Keely being duplicitous. I have seen him use his charm on every living thing. He has even used it on me, once, when alone. But I have seen him charm and tame boys men girls women dogs cats telephones. Keely possesses this charm which lives inside him. I wish I wish I wish.
Stumpy turns behind her and creates a significant pause.
This pause grows so immense it overwhelms all we boyboys so we group together, innocent as a group of virgins being rounded up for ritual slaughter. We pass between ourselves many anxious flutters of glance: Winkie to me, me to Keely, Keely to Carrot and Carrot, forgetting he is always cool, falls ashen white.
Stumpy turns away and whistles low and luxurious: almost a bird love song.
From out of the grass, so close we had no idea they were nearby, stand the girls.
Zeena and Angel, haughty in their looks, and last of all Cora-Lee. They crowd the silence and we boyboys look at the girlgirls. This moment glows and grows and stretches across the bridge of silence. For long seconds it looks like none of us will dare to step a foot on there. Then Carrot, scratching himself down there urgently, like he’s got an itch, mumbles furiously:
‘Who’s gunna go first? Someone’s gotta.’
Zeena leans forward. She is like a flame which sucks towards her all the oxygen in that day. Around us trees, plants, clouds whistle. We boyboys are clinging on to rocks by fingertips, whistling in the wind.
Zeena’s bold eyes gimlet each of us. There is some blindness in her glance, some elemental force so strong it can differentiate between all of us, or none. It doesn’t seem to matter.
Her hips thrust forward, legs apart, imaginatively she sucks on the long silent cigarette of cinema and blows the smoke into all our eyes.
We see her genie.
‘OK, boys,’ whispers Stumpy, swiftly becoming our umpire.
She is about to blow the whistle.
‘Who’s it gunna be? Who’s gunna step forward first?’
There is a long pause of silence here as Winkie turns to glance at me quickly, and I traipse my glance to Keely who ricochets it to Carrot who, coming awake, as if from a long trance, goes to make a sound, but the sound has died in his throat.
All that comes out is a pathetic whimper, the cry of a lost boy.
His features round his nose dissolve, and before our eyes he melts down to his winklepickers. We all of us see he is not there.
‘I wull.’
The words cut into the air, rearrange all the sound and sight and tastes of our lives around them. Heads spin on necks. All living things fleck past, lost in speed.
Who is this being who wull?
I see standing there, face drained of all blood, blindingly white, his fists rammed tight into his shorts so I can see, behind the serge, the pumping agitation of his knots — I see standing there, his legs splayed apart in answering dance to Zeena: Fainell.
Fainell!
‘If yous wanna root I’ll rootcha.’
At these words a low sounding whistle passes through all the girls. It is like the sound of a pyjama cord being whipped out of the top so the material falls with a whooshh downward.
‘Oaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh,’ goes the cry.
But its sound flecks back and smacks, hard, in a whiplash, into Zeena’s face. It digs its claws into the little black pin-pimples by her rounded nose. Her eyes widen and take in the boyboy who is offering to root her. Her eyes try and accommodate Fainell, who is now doing a dance in front of her, his legs wide apart, like she is the ball bouncing already up into the cup of his palm.
But she doesn’t move.
‘Where we gunna do it?’ asks Zeena in a thin voice, knowing that she must not hesitate.
Her eyes braise the surroundings.
‘I doan lie down on grass,’ she says plaintively. ‘Nor up against a rock. My shoes might get dirty,’ and with a small gesture her fingers fall open to disclose down below her pride and joy, the one moment of her immaculateness: her whitened shoes.
‘Nobody must touch Zeena’s shoes,’ says Angel firmly. She nods hard, bright, her eyes flamey. ‘OK?’
Handmaiden to Zeena, she stoops and wipes away an imaginative grass clipping off the shoecap.
Zeena’s lips move dryly.
‘I’m not gunna do it with all yous round.’
‘How we gunna know you did it?’ Cora-Lee raises a point of logic.
‘Yeah,’ says Winkie. ‘Yeah.’
‘We’ve got to see,’ says Cora-Lee professionally.
‘I’m not gunna do in front of all yous,’ says Zeena. ‘Not for all of yous.’
There is a pause.
Crescent of boyboy held by circle of girlgirl.
‘You dunno how to do it, does ya?’ says Fainell then through a slit in his mouth.
He lets out his laugh and empties it all over us.
‘I does so,’ says Zeena, backed up by Angel, who jumps forward and says hotly,
‘She does too. I know it.’
‘How you know? You done it too?’
This is Carrot, reeling the corpse of his courage back.
‘I don’t have to say,’ says Angel coolly. She blows the smoke of her own imaginary cigarette
into Carrot’s eyes. And smiles enigmatically.
‘You’ve not done it, bitchcut,’ Carrot says then suddenly exhausted.
For one instant boyboy might attack girlgirl; we all hang there ready to break.
Stumpy looks round at all of us, pale. She realises she does not control any of us.
A lion then roars, oh roars ancient and riotous and mellowly angry at being behind bars. The lion roars and roars and roars. But is content to be entrapped.
‘Hah!’ now Fainell yells. ‘Hah! Hah!’
The hot lava of his scorn pours out and molten runs into every one of our stinging orifices converting us to rock — the basalt of shame, we stand there trapped in whatever position we found ourselves when the lava overcame us, so we may be found centuries later (in actual fact, only several moments), each one of us caught in a characteristic posture: Keely shimmering on a half-turn, raising his eyelashes to gaze into the mirror which is the world; Carrot slummocking down into his shoulders and gazing inwardly as if to extract from his fetid interior some glint of passing intelligence; Stumpy leaning forward as the sails of a ship blowing before a storm; Winkie blinking in an in-between state, neither seeing nor not seeing, his hands half sliding out of his pockets but not free; Cora-Lee positioning her face like a camera so she may get the best exposure; Zeena, her face splayed back, body arched prepared and ready to receive what is coming towards her — a blow, a caress, a bad word, a free ticket to the flicks; and Angel rising in a half-curtsy as she stands up from protecting Zeena’s white shoes with the forever wide-open fan of her dress.
We stand there, frozen, monuments to uncertainty.
Fainell alone is victoriously living.
He leans forward with a superb arc of disdain. He fingers and feels in the moist dark for something, some weapon, some pen with which he may do his celestial sky writing.
He withdraws from his bag, with a sigh, a bottle of ink.
Radiant blue.
Inside the glass its colour washes everything.
In our bleak-and-white world.
And as he raises his hand up, so we, each one of us, stand up out of our lava shells, not so much who we were, several minutes ago, but who we shall now go on being.
Fainell’s hand is raised as high as it can go and, seeing each of us staring at him, caught, trapped by the very speed of his momentum, he releases the bottle.
The bottle shatters.
We watch in silence as the blue heavens ripple across Zeena’s white shoes, then sink in, staining.
Zeena sobbing.
Broken, she collapses inward.
‘Yous stupid bugger!’ cries out Angel.
Zeena is shaking. Zeena is sobbing. Zeena, like the bottle of ink, is shattered.
Angel puts her arm round Zeena’s shoulder. Cora-Lee flocks in to comfort her as she is carried along by the outrage of the girls, who all look back over their shoulders saying, ‘Fainell, trust you to make a mess of everything. Trust you.’
Fainell happy unhappy proud depressed shrugs.
Last to turn and go is Stumpy, who, with a curiously enigmatic smile, looks over all we boys so that, in an instant, we become shorter and younger and more hopeless under the storm of her ironic glance.
She just says a single word now, a small drop which falls on the crown of each of our heads, right on the very centre where your hair radiates out from, in all its whirls: this drop falls, chill, precise, uncomfortable:
‘Huh!’ she says, reducing us to nothingness.
Prize
‘YOUS A DIRTY rotten little stinkin’ fart of a cheat!’
‘We knows you dunnit.’
‘I didn’t dunnit,’ I say staring round at the faces.
It is another day, always another day, an endless stream or train of them hurtling us along even when we want to cry stop! please slow! please let me sit awhile and think of what it means, how it fits together, but there is no time for slow, for sitting, for thinking now, days pour over each other, the other deleting.
Uncle Ambrose is a pinprick in my pupil, a freckle up inside my sleeve (one I hardly recognise — that is me?), my finger-domes feel for home, then, recognising the shape, the raised indentation of a wart I worry it as I turn round and look at the circle of faces which surround me.
We are outside the art class and I am rolling up, the scroll of my painting with which I have, I have (my brother has?) won.
This spurt of redred blood fountains away inside of me, gushing all scarlet, unknown to them all.
Winkie and CarrotnKeely and ZeenanAngel glare, and even Stumpy frowns as she looks at me, biting into and angrily eating the very last quick of her nail. She spits it out when my eyes catch hers, rub against their deep brown. But all of them, through my eyes, are lavishly painted, dripping wet, with red.
I cannot hide the faint trace of a smile, which lingers all over my face as if it is the original purpose or shape or impulse — the one that is made to tie my features all together, tie them down, nose to lips, eyes to mouth, ears to cheek — all of it briefly one map.
I have won.
I have one.
I am one.
My eyespray washes them but the crimson-dash splatters hard against their statue stillness. The liquid runnyruns down their folds and cleats and eddies out, in scary fingernails of scarlet, through their toes.
‘Didja paint that paintin’?’
Stumpy turns towards me on her pivot. Her face is terrible with implications, hung with them, garlanded and heavy.
‘Didja?’
‘Nah, we knows ya didn. Ya can’t paaaaaint like that.’
This is Carrot, who, with his crouchback digit, achingly, runs the crayon over paper, racked with disbelief that anything might come, amount to anything under the switching intuition of his fingertips. And where may it lead? To a plumber’s apprenticeship? He scowls as he screws up the paper. Useless bloody useless.
‘Jamie is good at art,’ says Winkie, squeaks Winkie. I feel a frown grow down my face, cut into it, two sharp slashes by my brow. Winkie, please don’t speak please don’t say a word you cannot defend me. Not you. You not.
‘He’s a cheat,’ breathes out Angel, luxuriating in all the words which at last, at last are spoken.
A breath passes through this group who tighten round me.
The word is said. Why does this change things? Can I not change things again by saying:
‘I am not a cheat!’ Hot and furious and angry.
Yet what can they read inside my eyes? They march their army into my arena, bivouac down and prepare for a long and bitter siege.
Cora-Lee is angry, trembling, for it is she who feels the barb of my victory above all, with her pretty little swerves and soft pastel fadings and gatherings of glitter (all copied from the Australian Woman’s Weekly from the coffee table at her mother’s hair salon — Diannes for Hair, Appointments Not Necessary — written in curvy black Italian-style lettering faintly peeling off the glass under the impact of sun).
Cora-Lee is trembling with indignation at the prize she has not won.
Zeena is more furious than she should be, knowing each of us is looking down all the time and seeing her shoes sprayed all over with bluejuice, broken there by Fainell.
He stands outside the group, watching me, smiling.
What does that smile mean? Why is it so strange, so enticing? What does he know here? I feel his smile like it is a gull above me, circling in the air, feeling the wind under its wings, drifting.
‘Come on, Caughey, tell us the truth.’ It is Stumpy. She has pushed past Keely, turning him on his edge as she comes towards me.
‘Ya didn’t paint that pitcha coz you couldn’t a,’ Carrot speaks up now bitterly. ‘Who done it for ya?’ he asks suspicious.
Stumpy holds out her ham-fist.
‘Give us it,’ she says.
Prison warder.
I put the roll behind me. Of a sudden I sense how desperate this is. If I unroll the painting they will turn from looki
ng into it, being blinded by the passing flash of Matthew’s sun and, eyes no longer in their heads even seeing me, they will come towards me, from all sides and, finding no one in the middle, finding nothing there, they will turn on whatever is left of me, and chase me.
Bash me.
My fingers calliper about the roll. I feel its smooth chill cardboard shine enter into the bones of my fingers, making them porcelain. My eyes are marble. It is I who am a statue now.
They will never get my fingers to unwrap.
‘Give us it,’ says Stumpy again, each word weighed down like stones tied to my legs. They are taking me to the creek, I know, they are taking me to the creek into which glass hardness they will throw, weighting me down with stones so that, sinking I will go: met and eaten by the eel which waits for me, its mouth craned open so I will slide in. Then its snag teeth shall grind shut … too late. I am inside.
This circle of angry eye and dry throat and fist all gather together into a pummel.
‘But,’ I whine, holding the painting behind me. ‘Why should I give it to vous? It isn’t yours. It’s mine. I don’t have to hand it over.’
‘Hand it over, Noddy,’ says Zeena.
‘Cissygirl,’ hisses Carrot. ‘Give us it. Or we’ll all give it to you.’
He tries to dive towards me but I turn. I kick out with my shoes.
There is a moment here, a precipice of shock.
Ugggghhhhhhh goes the air through this little laced circle, tightening round my throat, trying to strangle all the air out of me.
‘Let’s drag ’im down the creek,’ says Carrot then through dry, thin lips. His eyes yellowy-snot green as they glint at me.
It is at that second I see inside him, inside his eyes flow and have flowed all that time the waters of the creek. That is what is inside him. Not blood, not tears, not hot and indecipherable yearnings. No, inside him are the waters of the creek, speckled with frenchies, laced with entangling clouds of seaweed, which flutter and smile at you through the glass, invitingly. Jump me, cross me, it isn’t far. You can get from one side to the other, he says, always down there, in the dappled dark.
