Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Ninety-eight years and a hundred and twenty-two days.’

  He would have liked to know the hours as well but held his hand vertical and calculated the angle of the stone instead. ‘Twelve degrees.’ It had some way to go before it fell, although that depended on how much support was at the base. The woman in the coffin, if any of the coffin was left, would be dry bones, or damp perhaps, depending on the water-table here. Her flesh would be changed into earth. Hair would be left, and bits of whatever she had been buried in. It seemed a waste of clothes to bury them. Then he remembered ‘shroud’ for putting bodies in, and wondered if they used them in 1888, and exactly what they were. It sounded like a sheet, but maybe it was black. How many times would it wrap round, and were a person’s arms held by his sides or made into a cross on his chest? The cross was a Christian sign so it was probably that, but they might also choose it because it took less room and the coffin could be built narrower. Fat people must have fat coffins, and thin people thin or they would move, and babies must be buried in boxes half a metre long. How many pall-bearers would a baby need? One on each side would be enough, or a man could carry the coffin like a suitcase by his side. Babies who were born dead were stuck in cardboard boxes and put out with the rubbish at the hospital. Born dead? A contradiction. Born lucky, born liar, born victim, stillborn. Each phrase made a tick like a clock as he thought of it and he smiled with pleasure at the increase in himself.

  Ants came out of a hole between the headstone and the slab and went along a rusty iron bar and over the root of a tree, past some empty beer cans and a Kentucky Fried Chicken box. The scent trail must be strong to keep them in such an orderly line. He had read a book on ants and knew they used visual markers too. Would it confuse them if he moved the box? It would be like moving a skyscraper. But Duncan felt uneasy at that. Likenesses, supposing, made a tiny hot place in his mind and he had learned not to let one thing remind him too much of another. The colonel who had found the recipe had no real eyes to see the ants go by. He was not a giant looking down. Duncan made a shiver at the thought and felt a stronger burning in his head, and set himself the job of counting ants, using a worm-hole to fix his eye. When they came by too many to count he started again, refusing to cheat, and he was there a long time before he reached a hundred. Then he tore the lid off the chicken box and laid it on the trail. The ants did a lot of scurrying but found their way again. Duncan turned the lid a quarter round, making the scent lead at right angles. The confusion lasted only a moment. Ants weren’t dumb. They found their line and went on as though nothing had happened.

  If they had no memory, nothing had happened of course. And if they could not think or feel it was not even right to say now was the only time they had. They did not have that much. There wasn’t now. A huge gap between himself and ants opened up. He did not know how to look at it, and wondered if he did, and found out all the things there were to know, whether the space inside his head would fill, and if the black wall would reappear. Filling up the space was his occupation and finding the wall the end of it. He did not know when he would arrive or what he would do when he got there. The wall made him elated and afraid and was a thing he probably shouldn’t have seen. He kept it secret, and kept the space he filled up secret too. People were worried about his mind. He spent his time away from other people. Even when he was with them he had learned to be away.

  The Round children are Miranda, Stella, Duncan and Belinda. Tom Round chose the girls’ names and Josie, his wife, their mother, who defines herself in neither of these ways (‘Bugger it, I’m me first, Josie Duncan, those other things come after that’), chose the boy’s. They had agreed on it. If the numbers favour Tom that’s simply luck. She accuses him of choosing trendy names and sometimes sings ‘anda, ella, inda’ to annoy him. ‘Shut up, Josie Dunnycan,’ he replies. He still finds the girls’ names poetic, though they’re shortened now to Mandy, Stell and Bel. He’s happy to let the boy be Josie’s boy and now and then calls him Duncan Duncan. Having a son doesn’t interest him.

  Tom Round is an architect. A couple of his friends who don’t like him much refer to him as Home Beautiful. Some of his houses have won awards, and articles on them and him appear in magazines. Living in Saxton, being ‘unspoiled’, is part of his image and he won’t leave, although he’s been described too as ‘a national treasure’ and ‘totally unprovincial in his attitudes’. ‘I don’t have to hunt up work, work comes to me,’ Tom says. ‘I’ll make this town the architectural capital of the country.’ Saxton is proud of him. It won’t be long before the PR office starts running a tour of Tom Round houses.

  He’s a good-looking man; tough good looks – wide face, Mongolian cheekbones, with a corbel of hard flesh propping them up, nose a little flattened, making him look as if he boxed in his youth (which he did: ‘won a few, lost a few,’ he says modestly), blue eyes, a burning look suggesting impatience, energy. His redness sits well with his pale-blond hair, which he has styled in a unisex shop. ‘Lots of older men do that now,’ Josie says.

  ‘He thinks he’s the centre of the universe.’ Once at a party friends found her alone in an empty room. ‘I can’t remember loving him,’ she wept, blocking tears with her hands and pushing them up her cheeks towards her eyes. She’s not a woman who needs to play second fiddle to a man. At thirty-three, when Belinda started school, she took a weaving course at the polytech and soon was turning out saleable work. At forty she opened a shop with a potting friend and a silversmith friend. They called it Three Wise Women, and now there are nine and the shop, Wimmins Werk, is twice as big and on the main street. North and South ran an article on them and Josie, in the photo, looked smart and hard and happy and beautiful. She confessed that ‘profitwise’ she and her partners were doing well. ‘We don’t need any males round here. If there’s a moral it’s got to be that.’ Tom Round has not been in North and South.

  He says he’s proud of her. ‘It’s a useful trade, making rugs. Some of her stuff doesn’t look too bad in my houses. But let’s keep it in perspective, all this shuttle-banging isn’t art.’ One of his jokes is that Josie has the new female disease, ‘Urcarrhea’. ‘It’s worse than the trots. It’s bloody incurable. But at least it stops her fixating on the boy.’

  That is how he thinks of Duncan – the boy. He withdraws from going further than that. He talks about ‘my girls’ and is pleased with them in a way that’s close to being sentimental – Mandy at medical school, Stella getting ready for the law, and Bel who’s ‘just a kid yet, but the smartest of the lot, and man has she got a spatial sense, you should see some of her designs’. Duncan is without qualities and has been so, in Tom’s eyes, from the moment of his birth. Tom Round did not want a son but girls, another one, he wanted no models of himself but creatures to point up his uniqueness, and Duncan would be no good for that. His maleness – fact not quality – made Tom feel anger and revulsion. He wouldn’t put it in those terms at all. He’d call his feelings disappointment and not examine the matter further than that. ‘Josie got her hooks in and turned him into Mummy’s boy. Now, the poor little sod, bloody burns. Jesus, I can’t bear to look at him.’ His eyes fill with tears. Tom has come to believe he loved Duncan once.

  Josie though is filled with love and pity, now and then. It pours into her and she pours it out, and when she’s empty, when she’s cold and free, goes back to her other life feeling great. She mustn’t be blamed for it. She believes she has done Duncan good and tells herself she must survive ‘as a functioning person’, survive in the world and in her ‘self’, if she’s to keep on helping him. She doesn’t pretend she’s staying whole only for Duncan. She cannot, in fact, feel any hope for him and finds herself thinking of him as her son who died, and this burned creature, for whom she has these floods of feeling, someone new; and someone not quite human, who’s had part of his humanness burned away. She asks herself if he’s her responsibility, and quickly answers yes, and loves him uncontrollably for a moment, and then is resentful of the job he’s give
n her. She despises Tom for pitying him, for she sees how this feeling is swallowed up in pity for himself.

  Duncan has known from early in his life that his mother loves him too much, and not properly or all the time, and his father doesn’t love him at all. Love is a thing he has little use for and he doesn’t prefer one parent to the other. Tom and Josie both seem foolish to him. He had a word he used on their approach: beware. He liked that sort of word for a year or two and has kept it in use, with an exclamation he makes silently when he’s been in his parents’ company a while: Ho hum! ‘Ho hum’ relieves him from ‘beware’. It’s safe to go away at that point for they don’t need him any more.

  ‘Nobody needs me,’ he once cried happily. ‘I do, Duncan,’ Belinda said. He had not known she was behind his door, lifting things with a Lego crane. ‘You’re a kid,’ he said, ‘you don’t count.’ But he was pleased with her because he did not have to take her seriously, and because she was there to grin at when he needed. He could see she was pretty and knew she was clever because everyone said so all the time, but this did not make him like her less. His older sisters were clever and pretty too but unlike them, Belinda wasn’t ‘up herself’. That was a phrase he liked especially and he chanted in his head, up yourself, up yourself, when Mandy and Stella were displaying. The mechanics of it, explained by Wayne Birtles, delighted him.

  Duncan was not the dull boy people thought him. They formed that opinion because he would not learn things that did not interest him, and his method of refusal was to lock himself away inside his head. He was interested in the fitting of one thing with another, in the force one exerted on another, in joints and locks and levers, knots and gears, sockets, spines, bearings, in what pressed down or raised up or bored in. A thing as simple as a mattress-spring delighted him. The off-set teeth on saws made him grin and a screw going into timber was a marvel. He slept once with a carpenter’s bit on his bedside table and dreamed of crushed wood turning in a groove. None of this was any help at school. He did not even do well at woodwork. The perfect motions, forces, in his head would not make their way into his hands. He botched things up, he cut himself and dropped tools on his feet. There were teachers who enjoyed the thickheadedness of this son of a famous father. ‘Has no interest in anything,’ one of them wrote on a report; but Duncan had been interested all year in the pressure of the man’s belly on his belt. He wondered if there were some way of measuring it and working out when the leather would snap.

  No one saw that Duncan Round was a happy boy.

  That was all a couple of years ago. Things are different now. His happiness still rests on the private workings of his mind, but not on discovery any longer, and the weight and pull and pressure of things. He remembers that time, can call up every moment of his life, but rarely bothers – leaves it there, a tiny piece of him shaded in. The rest lies spread in front, a plain of light; and Duncan’s job is to occupy it, every inch, fill it up with seconds, hours, days, with smells and sights and movements, fill the huge emptiness he saw in the burning moment; and so he must stay alert and see, must work at it, for some things fill better than others. He grows tired of the job, yet is not unhappy. It’s a task he can manage, and at the end of it some huge revolution will occur, some moving of thing through thing, atom through atom. His life will turn over on itself and he’ll understand what it’s all about. Until then he’s not curious.

  Not long ago he came on a book by an artist who made large, intricate drawings by filling up his paper with tiny dots of a mapping pen. There were centipedes on a rotten log, with leaves as a frame. There was beach and sea, there were trees with twisted roots, pebbles, ferns, lichen, ants, sand. There were waterfalls with each bit of spray marked by a dot. He looked at the book and did not find the drawings beautiful or ugly or anything, but added them to what he possessed; then came on the artist’s description of an experiment he’d made to count the number of dots in a picture. There were eight or nine thousand in one square inch (which took twelve or thirteen minutes to fill) and two and a half million to a normal sized picture. ‘Hey,’ Duncan said, ‘that’s what I do,’ and he looked back over his days like pictures, but instead of being in a book they were edge to edge and each one was a dot in a larger picture. At times he was frightened by what he had to do and it helped him to know there was a man who worked at the same sort of thing.

  Duncan read the books that lay about. He read Mandy’s university texts and Stella’s seventh-form texts and the books his mother brought home on arts and crafts and monasteries and mythology and travel and diet and feminine consciousness and female hygiene. He sometimes looked up words, though understanding and information were not what he was after. He did not want knowledge but accumulated sentences, filled moments. He would sooner watch a fly on a window-pane than read a book. He once spent half an hour watching a fly, then let it out, and spent another useful time retracing its route on the pane with his fingertip. He does not do this sort of thing on a plan, just watches, sees, does, where he happens to be, using what he finds, but takes more pleasure in some things than in others. Birds please him, small birds especially, and often he will close his eyes and create exactly the arrival, feeding, departure of a tribe of wax-eyes in a plum tree, or the bathing of sparrows in the dust. These are not things he imagines but remembers. Remembering is his relaxation.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ his mother asks.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You can’t think about nothing.’

  ‘OK. Birds.’

  She buys him books on birds. He reads them with no interest. At the library, on those afternoons when Stella drops him off on her way back to school, he reads whatever is lying on the table. Sometimes he wanders off and walks in the town. He plays the machines in the game parlours now and then, but would just as soon walk by the river watching water running on the stones.

  Duncan makes some people jumpy. Others try to talk to him and he answers yes or no. There are those who think he should be in an institution, and kept out of children’s sight with his burns. Others say he’s bound to do something violent one day because the pain has probably warped his mind. He’s not interested in what people think of him. He watches when they move in useful ways and will follow a postman up a street or stand by a hole in the footpath watching P and T men solder wires. He’s getting to be a well-known figure in the town.

  There has been plastic surgery and more is planned when the time is right. He does not mind but Josie is against it. She can’t believe anything can improve him. ‘Cutting and pasting’ is her name for it and ‘tinkering’ describes the psychological treatment Duncan has. Tinkering is a defensive term. She simply wants to forget what the psychologist has said: one day Duncan will have to scream. ‘Then perhaps we can move ahead.’

  Duncan feigns indifference with this man. He plays at being three-quarters dead. He pretends that feeling and consciousness are burned out, while knowing that the truth is different: feeling is gone, most of it, but consciousness is the huge bright land up ahead. He sees it stretching off into the haze.

  Duncan has enough to keep him busy.

  The accident happened on a summer afternoon when Duncan had just turned fourteen. He and his friend Wayne Birtles had ridden to the beach on their ten-speeds and eaten fried chicken for lunch and spent the rest of their money on the hydroslide. They were making the most of their holidays. On Monday it was form four – teachers who speak with forked tongue, seniors who were up themselves, Wayne said. He was a sharp-tongued boy, given to mimicry and extravagant statement and Duncan found the tension between what Wayne liked and what he liked of great interest. It was the first time he’d understood that other people’s ideas and behaviour might affect his own by sympathetic leverage. (Compulsive leverage was the sort he was used to.) He was grateful for Wayne’s company although he knew he had it by default as Wayne’s better friends were away on holiday.

  They rode back from the beach and stopped at the Birtles’s house. No one was home so
they shared a can of beer from the washhouse then rode to the Round house for a swim in the pool. They went by the river road and down by the footbridge saw the gang of street kids who had come to Saxton at Christmas and been in the newspaper ever since sniffing glue from plastic bags.

  ‘Killing off their brain cells,’ Duncan said. He imagined huge panels like the control board in a generator house and red lights winking out one by one.

  ‘Who told you that?’ Being on the bag gave you a buzz, Wayne said. You didn’t give a stuff about anything.

  ‘Have you done it?’

  Wayne had: sniffed paint and petrol and glue and fingernail polish. Lots of things could turn you on he said.

  The Round house was two kilometres up the river, on a hillside overlooking the golf course, with the city council’s pine plantation coming down the slope and the state forest going into the distance, hill after hill. (It’s a Tom Round house and a show place – one of those that’s won a prize and been in magazines. It looks like a series of white pill-boxes dropping down the hillside, or, if you half close your eyes, a waterfall in the pines. It has pantiles on its slopes of roof and solar heating panels, and inside are slate-covered concrete floors to store the heat. They warm up in the sun and radiate in the night and even in midwinter the house is toasty warm, Josie tells the interviewer.)

  Duncan and Wayne rode up and left their bikes leaning on the brick garden wall. ‘It’s like the town shithouse,’ Wayne complained.

  They climbed the wall and dropped into a rock garden and stepped down among prickly plants. The swimming pool was shaped like an egg and its blue tiles made it look icy cold. Striped canvas chairs stood on the lawn with cane tables beside them and folded sun umbrellas on the grass. The house was through a glass room filled with plants. Wayne could not work out if it was meant to be inside or out.

  ‘Hey Mandy, put your togs on,’ Duncan said.