Running Man

by Michael Gerard Bauer

  This particular lesson ended when one boy had the nerve to ask, ‘Sir, can we go outside and climb some trees so that we can be great artists?’ Mr De Groot opened his eyes wide, threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘Why not? Why not indeed? But you must take your pencils and pads with you. Come on. Let’s see if we can see any trees out there!’ And with that the class had spilled noisily into the playground.

  Joseph’s reminiscing was disturbed by a conversation that was increasing in heat and intensity. He could not make out all that was being said, but the fragments such as, ‘once was bad enough,’ and ‘sheer madness,’ were more than enough to fill the gaps.

  Mrs Mossop was obviously frustrated by not having her curiosity about Tom Leyton satisfied, and annoyed as well that her dire warnings were once again going unheeded. Sounds of movement followed – the scraping of chairs and the shuffle of feet – before Joseph heard a parting volley from Mrs Mossop. ‘People don’t hide themselves away for no reason, Laura. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, but you don’t want to see it.’

  Joseph heard Mrs Mossop clatter down the back steps and he twisted in his chair and craned his neck to just catch the top of her straw hat bobbing by as she marched briskly down the driveway. He turned back to the three remaining drawings. He pushed two aside and stared thoughtfully at the third portrait before picking up his pencil and changing the eyes so that rather than being turned down, they looked straight ahead. Then he shaded the pupils into two dark balls and went over the new work with heavy lines to hide the previous image. When he had finished he found a drawing pin and attached the sheet to the big cork noticeboard above his desk. He leant back on his chair and searched for Tom Leyton in the face before him, but it stared back at him as cold and unyielding as a mask.

  Joseph knew that he had not drawn Tom Leyton. He remained hidden somewhere, in a place deeper even than muscle or tendon, blood or bone, somewhere behind those dark eyes, somewhere deep within his tight cocoon of silence and solitude.

  CHAPTER SIX

  With the end of the school term only a fortnight away, and exams and assignments looming large on the horizon, it was another week before Joseph met again with Tom Leyton. Caroline could scarcely contain her joy at Joseph’s decision to return, and arranged for him to come over the following Sunday afternoon – the last free time he would have until the break.

  Caroline greeted Joseph cheerfully and seemed more relaxed than on his previous visit. ‘Come on in. Tom has something to show you. Oh, and I’m afraid you might have to make some adjustments to your drawings.’ She smiled apologetically.

  Joseph followed Caroline to the open door of her brother’s room.

  ‘Tom, Joseph’s here,’ she called gently.

  Tom Leyton was sitting at his desk exactly as he had been a week ago. It was as if nothing had changed, but as the man turned slowly in his chair Joseph realised that this certainly was not so.

  ‘What do you think? Can I give up my day job? No? Oh well, there goes my dream of being hairdresser to the stars.’

  Tom Leyton’s hair had been cut, brushed back and tied behind his head and his beard had been trimmed to a thick gingery-grey stubble. His full moustache curved neatly around his lips. It was the same face, hard and mysterious as a carved stone idol, but there was a newness as well that made Joseph think of a lizard shedding its skin.

  ‘I hope this doesn’t affect your drawing too much. I suppose it’s become a bit of a ritual over the years.’

  Joseph looked questioningly at Caroline and she added, ‘When they hatch … Tom always has a bit of a trim and tidy up when they come out.’

  All the time his sister had been referring to him, Tom Leyton had sat morosely staring at the floor as if the weight of attention was grinding him down. Now he turned to the cardboard box on the desk. Joseph stepped forward and looked inside. It was alive with hundreds of barely visible black shapes wriggling over half-eaten skeletons of mulberry leaves, and on the sides of the box Joseph could see the creamy, broken shells of empty egg cases.

  ‘I didn’t think they’d hatch. They looked dead,’ Joseph admitted.

  Tom Leyton remained unmoved and kept his attention on the tiny slivers of life inside the box.

  ‘But I got these anyway,’ Joseph said, and pushed his hand into the cotton bag that held his paper and drawing equipment and pulled out a fist full of large dark-veined leaves.

  Tom Leyton took his eyes off the silkworms and gazed at the mulberry leaves as if he had never seen such things before. Joseph’s hand hung awkwardly in space.

  ‘Well, they’ll certainly come in handy. They’re hungry little devils, and they look like they could do with some new feed.’ Caroline’s voice had surprised Joseph, and he hoped she hadn’t seen him jump slightly. He had almost forgotten that she was standing behind him. Next time before she spoke, she placed her hand gently on his shoulder and leant forward to address her brother. ‘Tom? Perhaps Joseph could help you change the leaves before you two go on with the drawing? As long as that’s all right with you, Joseph.’

  Joseph nodded without speaking.

  Caroline turned back to her brother and repeated a little nervously, ‘Tom?’

  The man raised his head sharply as if woken from a dream and met his sister’s eyes. Joseph tried to read the emotion that flared briefly on his face before it set hard and imposing like a rock cliff. Was it anger? Panic? Fear? Perhaps all three? Somehow it reminded Joseph of an animal trapped helplessly in the glare of headlights awaiting the inevitable thud. Slowly Tom Leyton held out his large loosely cupped hands and Joseph passed the mulberry leaves to him.

  ‘I’ll need to get some more boxes,’ he said flatly, then stood and walked silently from the room.

  As he had seen her do before, Caroline sprang back into life as if she had burst free from heavy chains. ‘Right, well … there’s a stool here you can use, Joseph. Let’s get a bit of light in here, shall we?’

  With that she drew back the heavy curtains that covered the double windows at the side of the room. As the light flooded in Joseph found himself looking out across Leytons’ large backyard to his own house and the long bank of windows of his bedroom. Arthur Street rose up to Leytons’ house and so Joseph could see over the fading red corrugated iron roof of his home to the wall of smoky green hills beyond. In between, streets and houses fought the lush and blossoming vegetation for space. Joseph tried to imagine what the view would be like if the barrier created by the mountains were taken away. Caroline’s voice pushed the thought from his mind.

  ‘That’s better. Now you make yourself comfortable and I’ll make some pikelets for us all. How does that sound? Great.’ She indicated across the corridor. ‘Now I’ll just be in the kitchen if you need me, all right?’

  Joseph could see through to the kitchen from where he was standing, and he knew Caroline was reassuring him that she wouldn’t really be leaving him alone.

  ‘Tom shouldn’t be long. Hope you’re hungry. My pikelets are known far and wide and only spoken of in tones of great reverence and awe.’

  The smile that Caroline Leyton gave Joseph before she turned and moved through the doorway said that everything was fine and perfectly normal and ordinary. It was a smile that Joseph would have willingly believed, had he not seen Caroline’s anxious glance down the hallway to where her brother had disappeared into the shadows.

  With Caroline gone, Joseph turned his attention to Tom Leyton’s room. With the curtains drawn on one side, it was now well lit. What had been merely shapes and shadows had taken on detail and texture. Joseph stood in the centre of the narrow rectangular space. An old, floral green carpet covered the floor. Down the middle of the room, the carpet had been rubbed away, exposing patches of brown underlay. The bare walls were a non-descript dull tan colour.

  Below the double windows that Joseph now faced was a padded storage box. Along the wall behind him was a neatly made bed, and at the foot of the bed was a large closet. In the corner to th
e right were two bookcases, empty apart from a few old newspapers.

  At the far end of the room opposite the door was Tom Leyton’s desk. Above the desk was a window with drawn curtains. The desk itself was bare except for the shoebox containing the newly hatched silkworms, a desk lamp, a small radio and a tray holding pens, pencils and other items of stationery. On the wall to the right of the window was a cork noticeboard.

  Joseph moved to the desk and pulled back the curtain. He looked out across Arthur Street to the row of box-like houses on the other side. There was Mrs Mossop’s house with its neat well-ordered garden. Further down, one-legged Mr Judd, as always, scowled from his top step and flicked ash off a cigarette.

  Joseph let the curtain fall back and turned his attention to the noticeboard. On it was pinned his rough sketch of Tom Leyton as well as a calendar, a half-obscured sheet of yellowed paper containing verses of some sort, a small piece of cardboard with a thin band of silk wrapped around it, and two black-and-white pictures that looked like photocopies from books.

  It was the pictures that attracted Joseph’s attention. The larger of the two Joseph recognised as a drawing by the artist Escher. He hadn’t seen this particular piece before, but he had seen others of the same style in his art classes. The drawing on Tom Leyton’s noticeboard was a sphere filled with black-and-white shapes arranged in a circular pattern. The shapes were smaller towards the edges, giving the feeling that they curved into the distance. At the centre the six largest shapes – three black and three white – were linked in a circle. The black shapes were bat-like devils with outstretched wings. The spaces in between formed the white shapes. These were angels, their hands clasped together in prayer and their feathery wings arching behind them.

  As Joseph studied the drawing, the intricate swirling worlds of devils and angels seemed to fight each other for his attention. If he focused on the angels, the devils hid in the background. When he moved his eyes from the white shapes to the dark shapes, devils were all he could see. Yet each one needed the other. The spaces between the angels created the devils and spaces formed by the devils allowed the angels to exist.

  The second picture looked like an illustration from a story. It was a drawing of a man lying on the ground, draped over a pool of water. He had one arm stretched forward, with his hand resting on a stone in the foreground. His body was large and muscular and the bones in his neck protruded as his head hung down to peer into the still water. Joseph admired the composition of the picture. The artist had drawn the figure from slightly above so that the man’s face was obscured. The water, however, held his reflection, and he was transfixed by it as if seeing it for the first time. Just like the figure in the drawing, Joseph found himself staring at the reflection, and when he did, the upside-down face in the inky pool stared back at him in wide-eyed horror.

  He stepped forward and leant closer so that the details of the drawing – the curve and shading of the muscles, the delicate lines on the surface of the water, and the ghostly skull-like reflection of the face – became clearer. The skill and power of the picture were impressive, but it also had a quality that Joseph found unsettling, and it made him wonder even more about the man who had pinned it there.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  Joseph jerked around quickly. Tom Leyton towered over him like a stone monolith. In his hands he held three shoeboxes.

  ‘Yes … I … it’s good,’ he stammered, fighting to regain his composure. ‘But who is he? Is it from a story?’

  ‘Frankenstein.’

  ‘Frankenstein?’ Joseph said incredulously, turning back to the drawing and frowning. ‘That’s supposed to be Frankenstein?’

  ‘It’s Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein was the name of the doctor who created him.’

  Joseph examined the figure in the drawing even more closely. It didn’t look like any Frankenstein he had ever seen. There were no scars or bolts, no bizarre robot-like posture, no mad, distorted, subhuman face.

  ‘He just looks like a normal man.’

  In the silence that followed, Joseph felt a looming presence behind him. When Tom Leyton eventually spoke, his words fell like heavy clods of soil into a grave.

  ‘Most monsters do.’

  With Tom Leyton’s words still echoing in his head, Joseph watched as the man placed the shoeboxes on the desk, pulled back the chair and sat down. Then he took the mulberry leaves that Joseph had brought and distributed a few of them in each box before opening a drawer and taking out a thin paintbrush.

  Joseph edged quietly forward as Tom Leyton carefully lifted one of the leaves from the original silkworm box, lowered it into a freshly prepared one and, using the paintbrush, gently nudged and caressed the tiny grubs on to the fresh leaves. As he watched those large hands painstakingly protecting each fragile silkworm, Joseph felt – for the first time – a degree of calmness in Tom Leyton’s presence. And Tom Leyton himself seemed momentarily unaware that he had company as he manipulated one silkworm after another into its new home.

  When about a third of the silkworms had been moved, Tom Leyton replaced the first box with another of the newly prepared ones. He stopped for a moment as if he had suddenly forgotten what he was doing, and then sat back in his chair and held the paintbrush up to Joseph.

  After they had swapped places, Joseph nervously began to shift the silkworms just as he had seen Tom Leyton do. At first he felt awkward and self-conscious, terrified that his unsteady hand would kill one of the small creatures, but as more and more of the silkworms found the safety of the fresh green leaves, he relaxed and became absorbed in the task. Only once did Joseph look up to see if Tom Leyton approved of what he was doing. When he did, he found that the man was not looking at his handling of the silkworms, but at his face, as if he had been studying it the whole time.

  ‘Is this all right?’ Joseph asked, as the uneasy feeling seeped back into the pit of his stomach.

  ‘Yes,’ came the reply in a dry whisper. Tom Leyton then removed the box that Joseph was filling and replaced it with the last of the new ones.

  The uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched started to make Joseph anxious. When he had moved the last of the silkworms from the limp half-eaten leaves, he placed the box with the other two. Tom Leyton made one last check through the old shoebox and then took it from the room. Shortly afterwards, Joseph heard voices from the kitchen, and when Tom Leyton returned, Caroline was with him.

  ‘All the new accommodation sorted out? Well done. You’ll become an expert silkworm handler in no time, Joseph. Just be careful not to turn your back on them,’ she said, pausing for effect. ‘That’s when they strike.’

  As usual Caroline elicited little or no response from the other two and so continued on regardless. ‘I thought you might be just as comfortable doing your drawing in here now that you’re settled. What do you think? That OK? Maybe if you sat on the window bench, Joseph, with the light behind you and Tom sat on the bed? How does that sound?’

  The man and the boy indicated their agreement in silence – Joseph by nodding and Tom Leyton by moving to the bed.

  ‘Right, you two. Now I want you to stop all this idle chit-chat and get down to work, all right?’

  Tom Leyton looked darkly at his sister and Joseph felt a red flush of embarrassment cover his face.

  ‘Well … I’ll be in the kitchen,’ Caroline said with a fading smile. She glanced from her brother to Joseph and back. ‘The pikelets shouldn’t be too long,’ she said, without enthusiasm.

  When she left the room the tension that gripped the first drawing session returned even stronger. Although Caroline was not far away, Joseph felt oppressed by the almost overwhelming closeness of himself and Tom Leyton and the suffocating silence that encased them. It would have been bearable if he was engrossed in his work and could become lost in the joy of creation, but Joseph felt no connection to the stark image that struggled on to the page. It was all surface – just shapes and angles – and with every uninspired stroke of th
e pencil, he became more convinced that, apart from a name, he really had no idea who or what he was drawing.

  After twenty minutes, the whisper and murmur of pencil on paper ceased and Joseph looked at the image on his drawing pad. It was flat and lifeless. One thing was clear to him: it was pointless trying to draw Tom Leyton unless he could go beyond the surface and actually see the man himself. But what would he find hidden inside? He wondered if there might be some questions better left unanswered and some mysteries that should never be solved.

  It was strange in a way. In the past it had always been other people trying to get him to speak, trying to bring him out of himself – ‘Out of his shell’ was Mrs Mossop’s favourite expression. Now he was the one who was looking for a way through the shell of silence that enclosed Tom Leyton, and there was only one thread he could think of to follow.

  ‘How often do you have to change the leaves?’

  Joseph’s voice sounded thin and unnatural in the heavy silence.

  Tom Leyton raised his eyes and hesitated before answering. ‘Once a day. More, later.’

  ‘How long before they’re fully grown – before they make cocoons?’

  ‘Six weeks. Maybe seven.’

  ‘How long before the moths come out?’

  ‘Another week or so.’

  ‘How did you know when the eggs were going to hatch?

  ‘They take two weeks.’

  ‘But you said you had them since last year.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Joseph screwed up his face in confusion. ‘But how could you have had them since last year if they only take two weeks to hatch?’