Boy Overboard

by Peter Wells

  I waited, uncertain about what to do. Then I grew bored, and slipped out the door. I went down the road. I went to the top of the steps which ran down to the beach. A faint smell off the sea, warm and almost fresh, told me the tide was coming in.

  I felt a strange lethargy.

  I stood there and breathed in the sea.

  With my eyes closed I began to walk down the steps.

  Vacant

  SILENCE AS WE sit there threading the crêpe streamers together.

  Miss Jaye, our art teacher, has taken the scissors and, raising them high to show us how they may cut, she then applies the sharpened edge to the soft dull tissue of crêpe paper.

  ‘This is how I want you to do it,’ she says. ‘Neatly, orderly and carefully.’

  We are sitting in the empty hall. Round us is crowded the enormity of the coming event, the possibilities, the mutations, the costumes, the secrets (of which I own just one).

  We are sitting inside the pattern of a window, replicated in sun on the dusty floor. Form One Accelerate sit on chairs and manufacture, as a special favour, a badge of our intelligence, streamers. Out of boxes they come, from out the end of our fingertips.

  In each of our mind’s eye are the shrunken remains of old streamers, still attached to their rusted drawing pins, too high up to be taken down. So they mourn past gatherings, accreting dust and forgotten laughter.

  What we are webbing will be new. The world always begins with us.

  Even its mistakes.

  ‘This is how I want it to go,’ and dexterously Miss Jaye takes several cut and slashed ribbons of coloured tissue paper and she interweaves them. She does this once, fast, so we are amazed at the cascade of Chinese lanterns that fall from out of the end of her fingertips. Then she, smiling serenely now as she floats over our heads, in her own celestial balloon, does it slowly, showing us each stopping point in her intricate manoeuvres.

  ‘Here, this way, then this,’ she lowers her head knowing for once we are following her. Now we tumble down sense and knowledge, following the dance of her fingertips. A smile plays upon her lips.

  ‘So and so and so,’ she murmurs low.

  Miss Jaye lifts up and announces in a soft tone she must now vacate the hall, but has the highest expectations.

  ‘What is the plural of ox?’ she fires out.

  ‘Ravens,’ answers Stumpy darkly.

  Miss Jaye sails away.

  We are left alone again re-forming inside ourselves our forever fixed manoeuvres inside the transit camp.

  My chair is slightly further away from the others, just cutting into shadow. Zeena and Angel sit together, boldly in the middle, proud and unspeaking. They do not deign to bless us with their words which, however, shuttle like termites, unseen, through the woody corridors of our minds.

  Stumpy sits on her own, threading a thin excuse of a streamer. Her mind is not on the job (she is dreaming of how she will come in a monk’s uniform — her father’s old dressing gown — not as a nun, but a monk. She is sitting there dreaming as she hears her own vespers echo through tunnels and snake through the catacombs as she carries along the essence of her own spirit, a small and sturdy flame that no storm shall quench, no draft of chill air).

  But glancing up swiftly, her eyes fall on me.

  She blushes, and partly scowls, as if I have crept right into her warm thought tunnel and made myself at home.

  ‘What you going as?’ she asks me quietly so no one else can hear.

  My fingers interweave pale mauve, radiant ink blue and a soft carnation pink. My head on one side.

  ‘Don’t know,’ I blandly say. ‘I forget.’

  Carrot sits there his legs splay wide apart, randomly snipping with the scissors pieces of crêpe paper. It is important he illustrate how useless this is. Like tears they fall. Zeena and Angel stir from their underwater depths and gaze at him.

  ‘Wha?’ says Zeena.

  ‘He makes rubbish,’ says Angel. ‘He’s nothing. A no account. What you coming as, Carrot?’ she asks drily. ‘A ghost?’

  ‘No,’ Carrot says simply, so caught out he forgets even to lie, ‘Keely’s coming as a ghost.’

  Serenely they ignore and look through me and don’t see me. A translucent or is it vacant window?

  For long, drawn out seconds, we lose ourselves and each other, and each of us becomes a pattern of coloured crêpe paper interwoven in all its complexities to form a slight bridge. We can hear the soft winnowings of our own heartbeats. And this is the miracle, without us thinking of it or trying for it, our hearts all start to beat in a rhythm which our fingers duplicate so that around us and out of us stream the paper ribbons, inch upon foot upon yard upon chain upon mile, each one appearing another inch with the unified beat of our silent heart.

  How pretty we look from a distance.

  How lost.

  ‘OH, JAMIE!’

  It is Aunty Gilda catching hold of me in the corridor. It is afternoon, after school and I am sliding out the door, on my way to the hut. I glance now at the door.

  Shut.

  ‘Now listen, Jamie …’

  I am caught, ‘Yes,’ I say, she hesitates a little. I see, up by her eye, under the powder, a small vein throbbing. Almost like a snake uncoils.

  Her eyes search my face … for what? I don’t know.

  ‘I want you to make me a promise.’

  Yes Aunty Gilda my heart throbs. Yes. I will make any promise.

  She opens her mouth then and out comes a fiery flower, which opens in front of me and I stare into its heart.

  ‘We won’t tell on you …’ (About what, I think, staring up at her, then assuming, on an instant, yes, there is so much not to tell about me, how I don’t set the table right, cut the hedge straight.) ‘… If you don’t tell on us. We won’t tell on you. If you don’t tell on us.’

  I think about this seriously, in the dark of their hall. I realise the house is listening. The world stopped. And I am in the heart of her flower. It has grown to cover the entire world. Wall to wall. And everyone is listening. My parents’ movement in a distant street halts. Aunty Gilda’s face, high above me, my sky, is contorted, she too is strangled for breath.

  Waiting.

  But I am only trying to work out what this means.

  What this means.

  We won’t tell on you, if you don’t tell on us.

  I blink.

  ‘I want to know who did it!’

  I hear Mr Pollen’s voice, insistent.

  ‘You only have to tell the truth.’

  His eyes bore down the desks. I feel myself grow hot, then small.

  ‘I want to know who is so stupid as to put an eel in the class aquarium.’

  Everyone is still. They know it is me. Of course it is me. It is I who did it. But nobody will say I did.

  I will have to speak.

  I.

  That slim thin letter.

  It was me who did it.

  Me.

  But it was Carrot who trapped the eel.

  ‘Look what we’ve caught,’ he kept yelling. He slid it into Keely’s hands, ‘Hold it, feel it, it wants to feel you.’

  That moment under the trees.

  Keely starts to murmur to me, ‘Take it, Noddy, take it take it.’

  And I fall into his eyepond. So softly worn.

  But it is cold. Freezing cold. Underneath.

  This is their trick.

  To pay me back for winning the bank competition.

  They have lured me down to, down to the creek and there they have given me my prize.

  For you, Noddy. You.

  KeelynCarrot run off laughing.

  The eel is alive inside my hands.

  I can tell it is dying. Its small snagged teeth, greypus eyes on the back of its head staring at me, saying to me you hold me in your hands, but I control you. It slithers in my fingers, all oily and snot-slick — sends flicks and flashes of power through me as its boned back hooks round to snare me, gash me, rip me open so
it can throw me down on the asphalt, gush down my throat, rush inside me, eat its way through me, chewing into my innards and then growing into a million swarming maggots.

  Inside me, eating.

  I get up to the class. Nature Study. I see the aquarium. Water. Its natural element. It shall live. I walk towards the glass box, slide it in. I run off to find, to find CarrotnKeely who are naturally nowhere. The trees laugh in my face, slap me with silence.

  And when I come back into the class, the aquarium is empty. The class’s goldfish lie upon the floor. Mouths open. Dying. And inside the aquarium is the eel, its monstrous jaws open, its eye staring at me in accusation.

  ‘Jamie!’

  Aunty Gilda pulls me back and I look up at her, swallowing hard.

  ‘I never meant …’ I said to her huskily, hanging my head. ‘I didn’t mean …’ She gazes at me waiting. I hear the second hand on her watch jump and uncatch its latch as it hurries along. Now time is scurrying, racing along, carrying me with it, bewildered.

  ‘Do you say yes?’ she asks me, as always, fair and square, only trying to find out.

  I am not sure what I have done.

  What cannot be told.

  I feel my head not so much nod as sway slowly from side to side.

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Good boy.’

  And the moment rushes on.

  I am caught in its storm.

  The door slams shut.

  She is gone.

  I RUN ALL the way up to the hut. Maddy turns to me when I get there and nods.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Maddy.’

  ‘Sit down,’ he says, nodding to the small stool which is exiled from our kitchen.

  I sit. I am out of breath.

  ‘I got the rest,’ he says to me casually. ‘Everything.’

  ‘O,’ I answer him as casually. It is important that nothing, not the weatherboards of the houses nor the tape on the powerlines nor the lichen on the lamp-posts nor the tar which blooms in tongues hear what we are saying. We both understand that what we are passing between ourselves effectively re-orders the layerings of ordered meanings in the world: and for this to be made public is to threaten the waves with turning backwards and the sun, which has sailed into a cloud, with reversing itself and moving in a contrary, novel and yet perhaps more pleasurable direction.

  But it is only pretend. We see.

  This day he reveals his miracle: a tube of lipstick.

  Our mother’s lipstick.

  Now he unfurls the scarlet.

  I gasp at the sheer temerity of his invention.

  ‘It is … make-up,’ I murmur. My eyes move down and possess the propelling shape of the tube of lipstick.

  ‘It’s Mum’s,’ I say mutinously. I turn my eyes to his and a shade of flush falls down, slips down the bones of his cheek.

  ‘I sneaked it from inside.’

  ‘We not allowed back inside the house,’ I say sternly. ‘We promised.’

  He shrugs then.

  ‘It’s not important.’

  We stare at each other wondering what new mutiny is opening up.

  ‘I’m not allowed to wear …,’ and I leave a small pause here, a genuflection to the enormity of the gap which lies between realisation and actuality: promise and performance, ‘I’m not allowed to wear … make-up.’

  I whisper this low in case the weatherboards part and eat whole this secret.

  ‘O,’ Matthew says and here I hear the bored urbane tone of voice he uses to diminish Ponky and me with one of his Quiz Kid utterances (‘O, but in Paris they drink wine with every meal. Or in Utah they drive on a different side of the road.’)

  ‘O,’ he saunters his word path towards me, laying it down sedately so I can taste and experience every milli-quarter inch of it; how much further he has travelled than me, how far ahead.

  ‘O, but the kings of Egypt always wore make-up.’

  In one swift flash so powerful it is both like a hallucination and also a flash of multicoloured lightning (in which the colours green and purple feature vividly), an entire landscape opens up before my gaze. From side to side of it is the photo of Yul Brynner as the king of Egypt as seen in our Hollywood Album. This is overlaid by more current photos of Elizabeth Taylor, enchantress and seductress, taker of husbands and Queen of the Nile.

  These images are imprinted on my brain so intently and intensely I realise, in the aftermath (again as if one were recovering from an illness, the first instant you realise you are getting well) it will be perfectly alright to challenge all the rules of the everyday world we live in and by. If Yul and Liz can do it, I have a precedent which is so enormously powerful as to be ungainsayable.

  I sense a nascence of power so immense I know I will do and risk almost anything to appear before CarrotnKeely and Stumpy and all the others brazenly wearing make-up: for the simple fact is (a detail my brother has subtly introduced to me) it isn’t me myself wearing the make-up, it is actually Yul Brynner’s face, beneath which is my own, and I am only, as it were, wearing Yul’s face as a mask to cover my own unformed and naked features.

  But I know at the same time, I will be wearing eye make-up of a completely exaggerated sort, my lips will be thick with women’s lipstick, I will be wearing a small dress, I will for all intents and purposes be as much a queen as a king.

  This is in almost flagrant disregard of the rules of our universe: the laws of the power poles and the grid of the lines which run between them, of the tar which bleeds in the squares of concrete on the roads. This of itself, by a perverse logic which feels for the first time utterly true, persuades me that what my brother and I are doing (or rather I am doing at my brother’s behest) is absolutely and completely right.

  ‘We’ll have to have a trial run,’ I say intently, with the small hard voice of a peasant hugging his single gold coin, already having made up his mind to make a purchase. ‘I doan wanna look no fool,’ I say lightly.

  ‘O no,’ says Matthew airily then. ‘You certainly won’t look a fool. That is the last thing you will look.’

  I stare back at him, dumbfounded by the sheer enormity of his gift.

  We look at each other in the resonance of shock which follows the seemingly simultaneous understanding of this single fact: for if I am not a fool, does it not instantly make everyone around me into precisely that?

  Smiles trapeze from our lips.

  We begin laughing then until all the hurt from the world empties out.

  ‘YOU KNOW UNCLE Ambrose,’ I say to Maddy.

  Maddy’s face is so close to mine and I glance at his face. It is intent. Trance-like as the eyebrow pencil traces its tribal hieroglyphics across my face. He pauses and pulls the pencil away.

  ‘… Maddy?’

  He does not answer.

  I smell his breath and how comfortably I am inside its zone: faint tang of aniseed, and that other warm, living breath, as if flowers and plants could grow and effloresce in his presence.

  His seriousness, his distance though, make me aware I am part of a ritual. He is withdrawn from me, a small scimitar of concern embedded in his brow, he is drawing the curved marvel of a line.

  He pauses and glances, quickly, like the dip of a beak of a kingfisher into the pool of the paper on which I see the brazen beauty of Yul. Another one of Liz.

  Again the eyebrow pencil takes up. Its weight leans into me, like an older brother.

  ‘Doan move,’ he says, serious as a jeweller cracking a diamond.

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Yes, I know Uncle Ambrose,’ he says heavily.

  I see Maddy’s lips are formed in a strange shape as he concentrates.

  ‘I doan like him,’ I say simply. as if the words coming out of my mouth are formed, invent their own discovery.

  He looks at me seriously.

  As if at a new idea. Or one which needs be looked at from different angles.

  Or is it simply my painted-on eyebrow he is looking at?

  ‘Why?’ he says in a flat voice.r />
  ‘Why.’ I say. Thinking.

  ‘Why not?’ Maddy says.

  Why not, I think. I look at Maddy. I am robbed into silence. It rises up and coats me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I murmur. ‘Why. I just. Do. Don’t. Like. Him.’

  He says nothing.

  ‘They’ll be back soon,’ he says then.

  I sigh. ‘I doan think they ever come back. They sick of us, Maddy. We two orphans, eh? Maybe we’ll run away together.’

  ‘Where to?’ Maddy answers in a level, unconvinced voice. ‘We tried that once. It didn’t work.’

  The truth of this is so heavy it returns me to silence.

  ‘Uncle Ambrose,’ I say, Maddy’s face moves in front of my own, like my eyes are planes and below me is his landscape. ‘Uncle Ambrose,’ I say again.

  But there is a long silence.

  You like me, Matthew, don’t you? I am your Jamie, aren’t I? Tell me you love me. I like to hear it. Please.

  But this is all said by silence.

  ‘Maddy,’ I say, ‘I just want to tell you something important.’

  Maddy looks at me now, for one shaved splinter of a second.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Jaguar has disappeared.’

  He was silent a long pause, considering. Eyebrow pencil poised.

  ‘Has it been stolen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What does Aunty Gilda say?’

  I shrugged, not trusting words but trusting that my brother’s glance would pierce through my skin and drag out the words I would need.

  His eyes stayed on me, pensive. Then his fingers, as if his fingers had their own tempo, their own demand, and must keep working to soothe some savage pain in his own heart (his own hurt), his fingers went back to tracing the eyebrow carefully.

  ‘He probably just sold it,’ Maddy said then, a little absently, as if the thought hardly merited being followed through to a conclusion. ‘For a big fat profit. You know Uncle Ambrose. He’s got gold dancing in the end of his fingertips.’

  I looked ahead at the PanAm photos of Brazilia and Hong Kong By Night I had cut out and glued to the wall: they were blurred.