Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Perhaps he just transfers the world into his head. Out there becomes in here. Then perhaps he will be citizen. Denizen, eh?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not like that. I wish it were. What scares me, John – feeling seems to hurt him. It hurts him in his head.’

  ‘Better then if he does not feel. It seems to me you should not interfere with this boy.’

  She did not like his word. Always the accusation of interference when it was help she offered, first aid for the psyche, a band-aid for feelings that were bruised. She knew when to step back and insist that people help themselves. It was careless of John not to understand. She saw that he was in retreat again; that she had made Duncan Round alive. John withdrew from a person too dressed-up and too bare.

  ‘I’m not going to let him get away,’ she told the cat. ‘If that’s interfering, well too bad.’

  She lay in bed watching the eastern sky – high thin cloud catching light from somewhere – and fist-shaped trees in the cemetery. She felt the weight and contour of her school, and the town and port further off. Night-time: everything was softened and eased, illusory connections became real. Shelley Birtles in the dark with brawling friends, and her brain muddled with alcohol. By now, almost certainly, it was sex on a mattress or a car seat. That, as edges softened in her brain, seemed less dreadful than enviable.

  Once there had been a man who hailed her at each meeting: ‘The lovely Norma, she who sleeps alone.’ To which she had replied, ‘I’m quite happy, thank you.’ Until someone said, ‘Only quite?’ Quite, almost, relatively. She recognized them as her words; on which, in the end, her feelings snagged and a counter-motion set in, unravelling her involvements until there was nothing left. She was airy, insubstantial, with qualifying habits and complicating of easy things. Yet she was contented. She did not find it hard to sleep alone; but missed that focused tenderness and close demand and hungry interest she had known – how many times? Counted on her fingers, one, two, three, four, five; and pictured them. Men as various as the solar planets – yet, like them, cooked up in the same batch.

  Norma snickered softly. She enjoyed getting them, her homunculi. She slept with her men under her pillow, laid out neatly in a row …

  But someone not of that band came looming at her window. She sprang out of sleep with a cry. And listened to her house creak, listened to the beating of her heart. A wind had come up, making curtains stir and trees moan and lifting clouds across the sky. She coughed to signal she was back in her normal state. Night fears troubled her now and then but she put them off in this way: moved noisily in her bed, flicked on the bedside lamp to see the time. Burglars, rapists, would have to smash windows to get in. As for ghosts, she had several times walked among the headstones at night, sat on graves enjoying a night breeze, to demonstrate she had a rational mind; or, at least, held that there was there and here here. The dead made no intrusion in our lives, none of the grave-lifting sort at least. That looming at the window was black cloud; skitter of bony feet a squall of rain on her iron roof.

  She lay awake thinking of John Toft’s storm – the march of icy rain down the valley, the division of his world into light and dark. Things often made themselves neat for John, but for that very reason were unnatural. Gulfs lay hidden in what he saw; huge deeps beneath a surface; monstrous distances to a source. She had a sudden frightening sense of him as a graveyard creature, and heard herself whisper, ‘Don’t let him get me.’ But later in the night she dreamed of standing by his side in his orchard with one hand locked in his and her feet in leather sandals he had made.

  Her other arm was holding tight on the burning shoulders of Duncan Round.

  6

  Lex Clearwater gave up farming goats when his wife left him. After that he kept them as his friends.

  He sits in a bracken nest on the hill above his house and watches golfers on the course half a mile away. Sunlight flashes off their steel clubs. Years ago he played that game but now he has little sense of what they are up to. Many things have receded in this way, the life of others takes place beyond his notice even when he passes close to it, and when circumstances force him to look he often fails to understand what he sees.

  He has a bird’s-eye view of his house; gutters, downpipes, backstep, sills, porch-railing. Once he would have laid on adjectives but now sees brown of rust and warp of wood and green of mould and is not provoked into description. His ute stands on the lawn, surrounded by patches of grass killed by oil. Cars run on the road, out of sight, coming down from the Baptist camp. The valley narrows in the east and turns into a gorge. Hills planted with pines reach up to the sky. Down valley, past the golf course, a window in the Round house flashes as a woman opens it. The river bisects the course and golfers pull their trundlers over the bridge where children have built a rock dam and made a pool fifty metres long. Hikers turn up a gully, heading for the saddle that will bring them to the walkway and the sea. And here on his hill Lex Clearwater warms his face in the sun and is contented. A doe looks into his bracken nest. ‘Gidday,’ he says and puts out his hand to touch her nose. She backs off and turns away. ‘Suit yourself.’ Whatever the goats do is all right with him.

  In mid-afternoon he goes down to the house and eats some bread and Marmite and makes himself a cup of instant coffee. He turns on the radio and hears a voice say, ‘Last week’s Heylen poll must have been a shock to them’, and turns it off. He has forgotten Heylen polls and governments; and forgets electricity bills and rates demands and vehicle licensing until officials knock on his door. Forgets to buy food until he finds the refrigerator empty, and has not bought new trousers and shirts for several years. People are worried about Lex. His parents, who live in Auckland, are worried. He does not write to them any more and his ex-wife tells them Lex has gone bananas. Norma Sangster is worried, and the school board wants to know if he’s competent to teach young girls now he’s not married any more. Competent is a word that’s usefully vague. Soon they’ll want to be more precise. But they need not worry. Lex is giving notice. Sandra Duff is the only one who knows. Sandra is worried too, she’s frightened for him – wants to pull him back from the place he’s in and set him on a safer path. She does not love him – won’t love any man – but is fond of him and visits him for friendship and for sex now and then. She sees the goats as a symptom of something in his mind gone badly wrong. They’re entertaining creatures but she’d like to bring a gun and shoot them all. ‘Then maybe Lex can face himself and see what he wants to do.’

  Sandra is way off the mark.

  She arrives late on Sunday afternoon and finds him in the lean-to off the shed making yokes from plastic water-pipe. He snips off lengths and wires them into triangles. They won’t last as long as wooden ones but don’t rub the skin raw on the goats’ necks. He would like to do without yokes altogether but that would mean doing without fences and he’s had a warning from Forestry that animals in the forest will be shot. I’ll shoot anyone who shoots my goats, Lex tells himself. But patches the holes in his boundary fence and puts in timber stoppers where the goats burrow under.

  Sandra parks her car beside the ute and crosses the lawn to the shed, carrying a cask of dry white wine and a smoked chicken. She’ll get nothing eatable or drinkable from Lex. In her bag, slung over her shoulder, are two letters from his box at the valley mouth and thirty English folders she’s marked for him. She helps him out of friendship, not because she goes to bed with him. Bed is lots of fun and the feelings nicely uncomplicated. There’s easy agreement in bed (or on the lawn, where they sometimes spread a blanket although she feels under the eye of goats), and nothing of wife or little woman in Sandra’s sexual behaviour. She hopes that when Lex is finished with teaching he’ll sell his land – ten hectares of steep hillside in bracken and scrub, eroding where the goats make shelters and tracks – and get a job he can handle and come back into discourse with human beings. She’ll find him pretty boring then, she knows – he’s thick already – but better boring than lunatic, bett
er for him. Their sex thing will peter out, but c’est la vie, one has to keep on moving or the brain starts to die. So Sandra tries to do her best for Lex.

  He turns and slips a yoke over her head. ‘Suits you,’ he grins.

  Sandra puts down the wine and chicken and takes the yoke off and flings it into the long grass by the drive. ‘Bugger you, Lex, I’m not one of your herd.’

  ‘Joke,’ he says, and retrieves the yoke. ‘What have you got? Château Cardboard, eh? And a chicken? Feeding me up.’

  ‘I just want a bit more than bread and Marmite. And Nescafé with bloody tadpoles in it.’

  Lex grins again, though Sandra reminds him of his wife. Sometimes he’s not sure which one is speaking.

  ‘Want to come and help me put them on?’ He threads the yokes on his arm.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  She watches him climb the fence and go sure-footed up the sliding shale above the house. The goats browse at the top of the hill, underneath a beetling row of pines. She looks at the trees and curls her lip. Sandra is an enemy of pines and she scowls harder as she looks up and down the valley and sees that foreign tree ranked on the hills. The goats are foreign too, land-killers too, but she has to admit they look at home. Their white and black and tan backs move in the bracken. And Lex is at home, he fits in. She hasn’t seen it so clearly before and she grows confused and feels she does not know him at all. She goes into the house, finds a glass, pours wine, and puts the cask and chicken in the fridge – where there’s nothing except a bottle of milk and a slice of luncheon sausage curling on a plate. The message from Lex’s wife, written with felt-tipped pen on the door: ‘Close the fridge door please. Please!’ has its usual effect of making her cross. No woman should have to plead like that. The one on the lavatory cistern: ‘Lift the seat before you pee!’ pleases her more. It has a tone she approves of. But she knows it’s invisible to Lex. Invisible wife, invisible message.

  She takes her glass of wine outside and sits in the sun, watching him catch goats and strip the old yokes off and put new ones on. He pats and strokes them, sits in the bracken with one like a friend, holds another, picking something off, and Sandra guesses that he’s catching lice. ‘Jesus,’ she says, and goes inside and refills her glass. People say his nanny-goats fill in for his wife and she wonders for a moment if it’s true. (It isn’t true, it hasn’t crossed his mind and never will, but we shouldn’t blame Sandra for thinking it. There’s a relationship he has with goats.)

  He comes leaping down the hill, skidding in the shale, raising dust. The bottom fence leans as he runs into it and he lies on it a moment before struggling off and pulling it upright. Sandra, hot with sun and flushed with wine, wants him now. But when he touches her she recoils. ‘God, you stink. Go and have a shower.’ He smells of sweat and goats. Goats is too much.

  ‘Sure,’ he says, and turns away, stripping off his singlet. ‘Inside or out here?’

  ‘Inside.’ There are goat eyes watching from the bracken. She puts a clean sheet on his bed. The sheets only get changed when Sandra visits. He comes in with wet hair, smelling of soap – Sunlight, but a better smell than goat – and stops in the middle of the room because he knows she likes to look at him. Lex is a man with a big square chest and heavy shoulders and muscular arms. He narrows at the hips and has what Sandra calls a mingy bum but his legs are in proportion with chest and shoulders and the ‘big beast’ aspect of him excites her every time. She makes him stand up hard by looking at him, then they fuck on the wooden bed, whose headboard leans away from the wall more each weekend and threatens to close on them like the cover of a book. Fuck is a word Sandra insists on, she’s contemptuous of make love and of slang and scientific terms. Fuck and cunt and cock are honest and exact, they neither dress up nor debase. (Lex finds this old-fashioned. He thinks of Sandra as a sixties girl, and rather sad.) They fuck three times, into the evening. His virility delights her and she’s not too disappointed that he does very little with hands or mouth. With her hands and mouth she touches and caresses him all over, has her usual Sunday obsession with Lex, but is not clinging when it’s over. Other women can’t have him but that’s a matter of hygiene more than possessiveness.

  She showers in his grotty bathroom – mould on the ceiling, damp balls of dust by the skirting-boards – and cuts the chicken up and they sit eating and drinking at the kitchen table. Sandra takes out the English folders and explains her marking. ‘That’s a dumb essay subject. “A Moving Experience”. Only three of them wrote about moving house.’

  ‘Do you want me to look at any?’

  ‘You’re a lazy bugger, Lex. You should look at the lot.’

  ‘Choose a couple, eh. Any good ones?’

  ‘From that bunch of meatheads? Hold on, what do you think of this?’ She takes a sheet of paper from a folder and reads in her sharp-edged voice:

  ‘A Moving Experience. Me and Mum and Dad and my sister went to Aussie last year to see my aunty. One day we went to the Melbourne zoo. We were walking along for a while and then we came to the gorilla cage. A big gorilla was sitting up the back. He was so big I sort of couldn’t breathe watching him. He sat and looked at us and we looked at him. He didn’t blink his eyes and his eyes were so little. He looked as if he hated us. There was a kind of concrete wall down the side of his cage. A wooden door was stuck in it and then there was a knocking at the door like someone was trying to get in. He came down and put his head by the door and listened. Then he bent down and put his mouth at the bottom of the door and kind of sniffed and stuck his finger under. We went along a bit and looked in the next cage and there was the female – “f-e-e” – gorilla. She was bending down at the bottom of the door and she had her finger stuck in too touching his. We watched for a long time. Tears were running down Dad’s face and me and my sister were crying too, it was so sad. That is my moving experience.’

  Sandra looks at Lex. ‘Hard to imagine with that one, eh?’

  ‘Hayley Birtles?’

  ‘It’s the dumb ones who surprise you.’ Sandra turns away. She does not want Lex to see her sympathy with the girl. She feels a hotness in her eyes and is afraid she will cry. She has a sense of something lost from her life and cannot find what it is.

  Lex too is disturbed. Hayley Birtles is not a person, she’s part of that sisterhood he calls the Blobs. He faces them four times a week and then forgets them and he does not like her coming forward to present herself. He shivers at her singleness. Once – when he was a schoolteacher long ago – he had loved it, the crashing of a new person into the foreground would keep him satisfied all year; keep him fizzing with her, and working to keep her single in ways so cunning and delicate he felt circuits open and new banks of neurons light up in his brain. They surprised themselves, these girls, with what they found, and were so ready to run, get out of there, where it was set up on display, back to their gum-chewing foul-mouthed sisterhood. He knew the relief of that retreat from the naked place they found themselves in, and worked hard to hold them; yet they got away, were so elusive; and fierce, rough, determined in escaping. He lost more than he kept; and now that he has given up being a teacher Lex does not want to try again.

  ‘What did you give her?’

  ‘Six out of ten. The grammar’s not bad but it’s full of spelling mistakes.’

  ‘Give her seven.’ The extra mark absolves him. He fills his glass at the winecask and wonders if Sandra will come back to bed before she goes. Knowing there’s no obstacle, he puts it off a while, and finds himself thinking of the gorilla; sees black unblinking eyes fixed on him, and sees the huge beast pad four-footed down to the door in the wall and listen there. He makes a grunt of sympathy – sees Hayley Birtles’s face wet with tears. ‘Good girl,’ he whispers, and stands by her side watching the gorilla in the cage.

  Lex Clearwater was a suburban boy but asphalt streets and close-packed houses made little part of his growing up. Auckland was a ferry ride away. The beach was at his back door and he was by turns paddler of a c
anoe, P-class yachtie, surfboard rider, and crewman on an eighteen footer in world championship races. He hung out on a trapeze with the sharp waves grazing his back and watched the Sydney fliers up ahead. Learned to be not good enough – no hard lesson, it suited his abstracting, evaluating mind. Already, at nineteen, he was able to put things in an order of importance and not grieve over losses that seemed to knock great holes in other people.

  For a while he thought his mind was very sharp, but came to see, at the university, that he lacked powers of analysis and argument. There were places where he simply could not get his mind to go, ideas receded from him down paths that remained dark and words would not overlap their objects with the exactness he desired. The universe is a single atom and every atom is a universe – he loved to consider that sort of thing, but excitement never grew into understanding or simple thought into a chain. He gave up intellectual ambition and kept the disappointment from souring him by finding value in openness to experience, in feelings that broadened and enlightened. He thought for a while that he might lead and people follow and was not impatient to discover where. But this ambition broke on the otherness of his friends. They were, he discovered, impenetrable, and he came to see that his desire to love might fling him in an opposite direction, into hatred and contempt. He overreached himself and might suffer damage; might divorce himself from usefulness. He was a modest young man; but all the same was soured by coming to his limits a second time.

  Teaching gave him boundaries and a discipline. He became narrow and exact, but seemed at times to glimpse a large adventurous self by finding forty pairs of eyes focused on him. It shocked him then to find he was not liked. ‘Bilgewater’, spoken with contempt, struck him like a blow in the face. He had always been sure of being popular. He shifted schools, working his way south, worked at finding a self he could be happy with; and managed some steps on that way by being noisy, being rough and rude – drinking too much, saying what he thought (even when he had not thought at all), and bending rules to suit himself. He won some popularity with his pupils and did not mind his nickname any more. Disapproval from parents and fellow teachers were winnings too.