by Peter Wells
But something has happened.
What was kept inside our own world has now been breached and broken into. The end of a spear has been lent into our flesh, and now our innards, slippery and hot, viscid and smelling of shit, will plop out onto the floor. Now strangers called adults will feel their way through our insides, trying to find treasure but instead slowly killing us as they pull more and more from our bodies.
This intelligence I try to pass silently to Geoff.
But now, I comprehend the true limits of his lack of intelligence. He simply presents to me, as he has done at certain other intimate moments, the flat plate of his face. It echoes with emptiness. It is like the beach at the times of ultimate flat tide, when you never believe the tide shall come in.
THE SINGLE EYE of the bulb, without a shade, swung slightly in the garage which is the policeman’s office. Mr Webb stands there. Everything is stiff with importance. Papers are flicked through. The cap is taken off a pen. The slow calligraphy which forms along a line. Words extracted from Geoff who speaks in the voice of a husk, a shadow. He does not dare look at me.
Our fathers, like centurions sentenced to become executors, stand behind us in the shadows.
I am asked too.
I feel the creak of my father beside me willing me on.
The words I find are all incidental. ‘A man. He walked. Naked. Yes. Naked. No clothes on. He walked. We ran.’
That is all I can find inside me to say.
‘Did he …’
The adult men hesitate here and surrender between themselves the knowledge each of them must know, intimately, at some parallel point in their own lives.
‘Did he … come closer?’
‘Did he … touch you?’
‘Did he touch you … in private places?’
Geoff’s lips I can see are moving to form a word which will be so calamitous, so vastly repercussive in its explosive effects I find my own voice speaking out:
‘No. He walked. He walked back and forth. He had no clothes on. That man. He just walked.’
There is a secession here, of breath, of disappointment maybe, of relief, from the three old men, I can see them now as they were, three old men staring at their tender captives.
‘No touching? No private touching?’
I do not trust words here.
I nod. I shake my head. And hear the knock of the car as it hits the ocean floor.
Yes, this is what it is about. The water pouring in.
And waiting.
‘Geoff. Do you have anything to add?’
We all wait and then there is the sharp intake of a breath from Geoff.
Like a sob at the back of his throat.
He is crying.
The men all stand up immediately. Papers rustle. Cap put back on pen.
‘An upsetting incident. Overtired. Time to get some sleep.’
The men all bury the moment hastily.
Earth is piled on earth.
We ride back home in the importance of a car. Geoff’s father and my father talk about the score. That game which is being played forever in men’s eyes and minds and pockets, the one they plan to finally win and which will forever set their minds at rest.
I sense Geoff is looking towards me. But I do not look towards him.
He reaches out to touch me.
I do not look at him.
I hear him sigh, deeply. He has settled on the bottom of the ocean. He will not survive. He will stop breathing soon. This I know. He will remain there forever for me, a small skeleton locked in the metal shell of a car, moving softly and even sweetly with the ocean currents, seaweed flowing in and out of the sockets of his eyes and where his brain once was, that tender dim bulb, a single crab has made itself at home and dances across the mossy ivory of his skull, doing a victorious dance, claiming all his space — forever.
Padlock
EVERY AFTERNOON MR Webb cycles down to my parents’ house and I am ushered into the front room. This room is never used and I sit there, guilty, alarmed. Mr Webb brings books of photographs for me to look through. Photographs of faces. Men. Each afternoon I am invited to choose one. The one who looks nearest to the naked man on the beach.
I look at the faces frozen forever in the flashlight. A frightened face, an empty face, a face at the first moment of its dying.
Face after face.
I am aware of Mr Webb sitting so close to me, his kneecap straining the serge, creaking. He tells me to take my time.
My problem is I had no awareness of the man’s face. If it were his penis, yes, I might be able to reproduce it.
I had seen that in intense detail. But not his face.
Randomly, with an eery ease, I choose a face.
Any face.
Afternoon by afternoon.
This goes on for one week, two weeks.
Then, perhaps matching up the fact that none of the faces coalesce, the visits from Mr Webb cease.
Nothing is said.
BUT THE HUT is padlocked.
The back fence grows taller.
Our faces have to avert when we see Geoff and Dirk.
We become strangers.
My brother and I are watched.
We are spliced apart.
Brothers no more.
EVERYTHING IS FORGOTTEN, and like a pact broken, a truce ignored, we move apart never to come together again, except at certain moments, in a lingering, even calculating glance.
Accepting the illogic of this — the end of the pursuit of words, the incomplete conclusion of their search — we numbly and dumbly accept the edict.
AFTER ALL WE have no idea what it means.
CODA
Ball
THE SPOTLIGHT IS roving the floor. Like an eye it is, a wide open eye of white brilliance. It lights the darkness of curved head. Feathers briefly catch fire, implode on the dance of a sequin. We are all drunk on the music, on the immanence of the word. It will happen, we know it, all of us now, as we join in the dance.
From the moment I entered the hall a widening wave and wall of sensation opened up around me.
I can only see the clumsiest of costumes: cloth unironed, taken quickly out of a dank smelling box; material unpinked from cellophane where it has lain, unbought through all the seasons, fading and losing its true colour. My brother has placed new eyes in my head and from beneath the weight of the papier mâché crown I can see there is not one costume in the room, the hall, the school (quickly it widens to become the universe) which is so intricate and arcanely perfect as mine.
Yet I understand I wear it only because of the perfect epiphany of all accidents.
More than this, it creates consternation.
Comprehending that surprise is the best form of attack, my brother has presented me as a source of astonishment:
who are you
what are you
what are you doing
what are you doing here?
I am Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile.
This is a costume ball, isn’t it?
I BECOME AWARE that for the first time in my life I am truly naked, that in fact I am not even wearing a costume but that I am parading, perhaps like that man of so long ago, amongst them.
Miss Jaye stares at me, suddenly struck by something which has only just occurred to her.
I wave. Regally.
Mr Pollen’s eyes cannot stop following me around. I await the ecstasy of surprise which will come when he recognises me.
There is some powder in my veins, some madness has leapt from my brother and set me alight, this night.
I am a fizzing firework, I recognise this as I follow behind the trail of myself as I dance across the floor. Girls queue to dance with me.
I nod graciously, picking out Stumpy as my favourite partner. Together we dance in a slow rhythm, outside time.
Keely comes past, dressed as a ghost.
He winks at me, conspiratorially.
More than this, he backs into me so I feel, all up
my body, through my cloak, the warm percussion of his flesh. He does this once twice … and the third time it happens I read on the curve of his eyelash he is hungering to dance with me, to be with me, together moving. But in the dance, in the sudden dark, it is a spot waltz, he is replaced in the queue by Carrot; I never recognised he was so short. I have to bend down, as if from a skyscraper to see him over the ledge. He is grateful that someone, at least, acknowledges he exists.
‘Go, Jamie!’ he calls to me, as we jostle together, arm to arm. I read in his eyes a burning sea of admiration, and I simply say to him, ‘Don’t you mean, Noddy?’
These words are so cruel they curve round into the flick of a whip which rips the mask from his face leaving behind drips of blood: his eternal sore. I conceive the power of words and dance away laughing.
Still the light is dancing.
And then the needle is lifted off the record.
We lurch to a halt.
A card is held up.
A Queen of Hearts.
Everyone on the right side of the hall has to walk off.
I am safe. But more than this I have become aware of a silence forming in me as powerfully present as if an ear or an eye has opened within my stomach. I am listening for that pause, I realise; at last I have come to comprehend it and it has in fact already occurred around me and I am moving, almost miraculously, inside its magic bell.
It protects me and sings about me, as if another and personal spotlight has come on round me.
Is this what I have been waiting for? For this movement, this motion towards being? Is this the climb which has silently been happening inside my blood? Flood? For one second I comprehend something: the M is joining to E, this is what is soundlessly happening during this dance, as the white light bounces round over our heads: yes, part is joined to part and a form of wholeness, hidden behind the choreography of costume, is happening.
Is this not how the whole of life should be? Ideally. In this revolving softly, lost dream, this slow awakening.
As I sink, I leave all the sounds of the world and I begin, in the concentrated spell of a sinking car, to listen.
Home
THE DOOR HAS swung open.
Inside I see Maddy crouched down, putting away the costume. He looks at it, worn. Somehow in the daylight it does not look so good, and I see and sense each grass blade is watching.
‘I bought you something. A present. Which hand?’ I say impressively.
He just looks at me. I look into his face.
What do I see there? The peeled-grape eyes, the white skin, but something more in this even grey light. He looks tired, as if he has been up late at night, at night forever, as if he is an elf, working by moonlight.
For one second I felt impatient.
Now I knew the words, they had ceased, miraculously, to have much meaning, much value to me. I felt light, almost tipsy with the sheer weightlessness of the knowledge I no longer had. Or sought.
The strain of looking into the light had made him squint, so for one second he appeared to be blind.
I saw how daylight had robbed him of his magic, like those goblins who had been caught building the rock bridge by the fiery light of dawn.
I felt a crude power, a dislike of magic and arcane methods.
He seemed unhappy.
I knew I would have to seduce him again into compliance, with softnesses and kindnesses (arts which I knew off by heart), so I could effortlessly anticipate what he might want and he, the starveling, would rise to my offer always, gratefully, and together again we could continue our strange journey.
‘Which hand?’ I said to him, standing before him. On the carpet so close I could smell his aniseedness. He struggled for his glasses, but I shook my head. He held still.
‘Which hand?’
I insisted he play the game.
He looked from one to the other, in that second, by accepting my game, slipping back into a comfortable world of childhood in which there were surprises as well as tricks.
‘You were queen of the ball last night,’ he said to me offhandedly as he uncrunched up and rose to his feet.
It was at this point I made a discovery. In the five weeks my parents had been away I had overtaken him — he my older brother — in height. This strange coming together, yet finding ourselves apart, caused a momentary concussion of silence between us. We both looked at each other wordlessly.
I looked down into his face, and the quick whip of a laugh escaped me.
‘I taller than you!’ I cried out, as much to the world of statistics as the measured quotas of love and affection.
He leaned forward and, cradling himself into my body, tried to reach behind me for his gift. Without blinking or altering the mirror of my face which was right in front of his, our breath intermingled, I placed the chocolate bar in my left hand.
I laughed into his face.
‘It for you, for you, for you,’ I kept on keening as he struggled to get my hand to leave my back.
I saw his face darken, and fracture, and a spool of unhappiness leak out of him. Immediately, I saw how my action, which was only meant to make my giving of the chocolate more of a game, was touching some vulnerable part within him. In fact, he seemed this day more vulnerable than he had been for a long time — moody as if I had done something to him, or not done something.
I sensed he was about to cry.
As if he was seeking to blot out the undeniable fact that now I was taller than him, he threw himself against me.
We were falling.
We were falling sideways so our world became unbalanced.
We landed with a hard jump on the floor.
He was on top of me instantly, raining down blows on my face. Yet as soon as he began this I began fighting him back. Furiously, we attacked each other, rolling over and over each other as he fought to get hold of the chocolate.
‘Maddy Maddy, stop, stop, Maddy!’ I cried and I tried to hold him and clasp him still.
He seemed to see me after a time. He softened.
We were both crying.
‘Drop it,’ he said. ‘Go on, drop it.’
His face was so closed, so unhappy, my fingers loosened.
Instantly he was off me. He ripped the silver paper back, and, as if he was a starving man and this was the first food he had seen in days, he began cramming it inside his mouth. Only towards the last, did his eyes — greedy and hostile — flicker towards me. He did not stop chewing.
There was only a single piece of chocolate left.
I watched his eyes move from the chocolate to me, then back to the chocolate. His jaws began to slow down. I watched his Adam’s apple swallow.
‘It’s for you,’ I said to him slowly. ‘I brought it for you. A gift, Maddy. To thank you. It’s all for you.’
‘… Me?’ he asked me. I saw inside his mouth a runny brown wetness.
I nodded.
His hand, already almost up to his mouth, hesitated and his eyes new to my face. I felt he was seeing me for the first time that day. His hand slowly placed the last piece of chocolate on the edge of the bookshelf.
He went on chewing, swallowed, then we both sat there in silence.
It was as if there was nothing more to say to each other.
We both looked out the door: at the ragged tufts of unmown lawn, speckled with paspalum and daisy; the washing line staked to its own shadow; the cat, reclining against the weatherboards of the house, half in the sun, half out, gazing regally into nothingness.
For one long moment we both gazed out at the world which contained us, the sound of gulls’ wings overhead.
It was as if, down on the beach, we could hear the turn of the waves: as if the tide had gone out as far as it could and was now beginning that tidal flow by which water all over the globe rearranges itself.
A warm salty smell began to filter through the air.
Maddy began putting away the helmet, placing it back on the hat block.
‘You don’t own m
e, Maddy,’ I said to him. ‘Eh?’
‘I got a letter,’ he said to me as though I had not spoken.
‘Oh,’ I said, heart quickening, then turning over in a sudden dump.
‘A letter? From …?’
He gave the smallest inclination of a nod.
‘They coming home,’ he said.
As if hearing us, the cat stood up and, head down low but eyes concentrating on us, began making his way towards us. His tail made one or two leisurely flicks, almost strokes of recognition. Achilles entered the hut and sat down a small distance away from us.
‘You don’t own me, Maddy?’ I said.
Maddy leant forward with the last bit of chocolate and he held it out to me.
I took it and, broke it into two, handed the smallest bit back to Maddy. Simultaneously, we both placed the chocolate on our tongues.
He smiled at me.
‘You don’t own me, eh, Maddy?’ I said again.
The cat was staring, serenely, into the future: enigmatic eyes blazing with content, fur fluffed out and not exactly looking at anything but absorbing the whole room through its skin, each stamen of fur faintly vibrating — his large glittering orbs — miniature globes, reflecting the room, the bars on the windows, the sky — the universe — and as if in sympathy with his union with all things — Achilles broke out into a ragged theme of a purr, which took up its own momentum and now grew louder, more regular, more of a hymn to peace, to silence, to ease and —
‘They come home now,’ he said. ‘They come home.’
About the Author
Peter Wells’ first book Dangerous Desires won the 1992 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and the 1992 PEN Best First Book in Prose Award. He has published a second collection of short stories, The Duration of a Kiss, and co-edited New Zealand’s first anthology of gay fiction, Best Mates. He is also an acclaimed film writer and director of such productions as Desperate Remedies and A Death in the Family. This is his first novel.
