Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Put them back, Belinda. You’re not going.’

  ‘I wasn’t sneaking, Mandy. I’ll ask him to let you come.’

  ‘No one’s going.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he’s drunk.’

  ‘Not very much. I can –’

  ‘No you can’t.’

  ‘He was going to teach me how to dive.’

  ‘Well he’s not. Scuba-diving’s dangerous, you can’t do it while you’re drunk. He’d have drowned you, Bel.’

  ‘I would’ve –’

  ‘It’s too late. Stella’s sent him away.’

  ‘It’s not fair.’ She bangs the sausages on the table.

  ‘No, it isn’t. Nothing’s fair.’

  They hear the boat start and it screams like a bird and goes straight out, with its wake in a ridge as high as the stern. They see Stella’s head coming though the lupins. She walks on the lawn. Her face is white. Stella does not see them. She turns aside and goes into a corner of the hedge, where bushes hide her.

  Mandy goes out and stands on the lawn. In a moment she hears Stella being sick.

  She said, ‘If we see you even looking at Belinda again we’re going to tell Mum. We’ll tell her what you did to us. You watch out then.’

  He points his boat straight out to sea.

  Tom does not remember what he did. He can’t, he can’t remember. He knows he did something with them both.

  She said, ‘You tried it with me, Dad, and you tried it with her. And I’ve got it written down and so has she. And if you do one thing, one thing more, we’ll give the whole lot to the police. And everyone else. Every one of your friends. Even if you don’t go to jail you’ll be ruined.’

  I’ll go to jail, he thinks, I’ll be ruined. He sees himself in a dirty room, behind a door, hiding there.

  She said, ‘I don’t know what you did to Mandy, she won’t say. But I know what you did to me, and it screwed me up, and I’m still screwed up. But by God I’m not staying that way, not for you. I’ll be all right.’

  ‘All I wanted was to love them properly.’ He can’t believe he’s done anything wrong. He can’t believe she spoke to him like that; and Mandy, whom he loves most, next to Bel. What are the bitches telling Bel?

  Tom turns his boat and aims it at the beach, but there’s a fog he runs into there, it grows thicker and thicker, forcing him back. He can’t come close to them, Stella and Mandy, and Belinda.

  He sends his boat darting here and there. Tom Round does not know where to go. In the afternoon he’s in a little bay by Kirby Creek. The boat drifts. His whisky is all gone and his mouth craves water. He looks down twenty feet through sea as clear as tap water and sees white shells on the sand and little fish with stippled backs swimming in a school.

  ‘Fish are bloody lucky. I wish I was a fish.’

  Then a shriek, a chisel stab, goes through his head. His boat jumps and throws him on his knees and water sprays on him and his captain’s hat falls into the sea. Round and round the yellow boat goes, throwing sheets of water and knocking him down when he stands up, and two men whoop and laugh and a girl bites at him with her white teeth. Tom does not know who they are.

  They speed away like a plane from a strafing run.

  Tom sits in his swamped cockpit and cries.

  ‘He wanted to take her diving and he was drunk. So we said no. At least Stella did. And he lost his temper and cleared out. And that’s all.’

  ‘I still say it would have been all right,’ Belinda complains.

  ‘No it wouldn’t.’

  ‘It certainly wouldn’t. I’ll skin Tom alive. You wait and see.’

  ‘I’ll never go diving now.’

  ‘Stella probably saved your life. So stop whingeing, Bel.’

  ‘I’ll skin Tom alive,’ Josie says. She goes to Stella’s bedroom and looks in at the door. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you. You did the right thing.’

  Stella, in the dark, says, ‘I think you should get a divorce, Mum. And get Bel and Duncan away from him.’

  ‘Oh, you do?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see.’ She tries to sound snooty but is thrilled that Stella should say this. She loves it when her daughters speak out and has wanted one of them to say divorce.

  ‘The problem is I want to keep the house.’

  ‘Forget the house, Mum. There are other houses.’

  Josie is not so pleased with that.

  The sound of his car wakes her. She looks at her clock and sees it’s a quarter to three so she doesn’t get up. There’ll be time for what she wants to say in the morning. Josie turns over and goes back to sleep.

  All the girls start jobs that Monday morning. Belinda is going to Golden Hills and Stella to the court-house where she’s sitting in for the librarian. Josie has arranged a job for Mandy at Wimmins Werk. Only Duncan will be left at home but Josie doesn’t worry about him, he seems so contented with his astronomy.

  Stella and Belinda drive away in Stella’s car. Belinda in her kitchen-hand’s smock looks like any shopgirl or skivvy and Josie is relieved they let her do more than kitchen work – feed the old ladies and walk them in the garden. She wants Belinda to be a doctor.

  She puts aside five minutes for seeing Tom. He’s spread out on his back on the giant bed as though staked out to feed the ants, and with that half erection men get when they need to pee but can’t wake up. Josie twitches the duvet across his lower half. He’s got a good body for nearly fifty, no fat, and segmented on his chest like one of those line drawings of Greek heroes. His workouts at the gym are paying off. He’s nice and brown; and his face is brown but not very nice. Sleep makes it slack and fat and you can see the self in it. Josie can remember loving Tom; remembers now. It’s a possession she’s pleased to have and is proof to her that she was all right then and is all right now. She flicks his mussed hair off his brow and taps her finger on the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Tom.’

  His eyes come open at once, red and dry, with orbs concave. He pulls up the duvet and lifts his knees. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m off to work. But there’s two things I want to say. If you ever try that with Belinda again I’ll make you really sorry, Tom.’

  ‘Try what?’ His eyes go away and come back fast.

  ‘You know very well. Trying to take her diving while you’re drunk. I thought you knew better than that, Tom.’

  He looks away from her and licks his lips. ‘Jesus, I’m dry. Get us a drink of water, Jose.’

  ‘Get it yourself. You could have killed her.’

  ‘Balls. It was perfectly safe.’

  ‘No it wasn’t and you know it. I’m warning you, don’t do it again.’

  ‘Sure. OK. What’s the second thing?’ He tries to make it sharp and hard but there’s something sloppy in it, his mind is somewhere else.

  ‘The second thing’s quite easy. I want a divorce. And I want the house in my settlement.’

  ‘Like bloody hell you’re getting my house.’

  ‘We’ll see, Tom. I thought it was fair to give you warning. I’m going to see a lawyer today.’

  ‘No court would give you the house. I built it. It’s mine.’

  ‘And it’s also a joint family home. And the girls and Duncan stay with me. Sorry, Tom. Now you can go back to sleep.’

  He hears her car start in the garage and hears it crackle down the drive. He jumps off the bed and watches it vanish in the gums and come out on the road and speed away. She changes gears like a Grand Prix driver. That’s her way of trying to rub it in.

  He goes to the bathroom and has a piss and drinks water from his cupped hands, then goes back and sits on the bed. What she has said about the house puts everything else out of his mind. There’s an unease, a coiling and twisting, at the back of things but he doesn’t know what causes it and doesn’t care. He knows Josie will never get his house. Joint family home! That�
�s nothing against the sort of owning he knows.

  His head aches and he lies down again and tries to sleep but can only doze and jerk awake and doze again. Walls and floors and doors slide in and out of his dream. Everything is space and plane and angle, and level set in harmony with and tension against. He’s set to break through these shifts into perfect form – but he can’t, he can’t, dark countervailing formless liquid things are stopping him.

  He wakes with a cry and stares about. Looks at the clock. Only quarter to ten. But he’ll start to fester and stink if he lies here. He goes to the bathroom, showers hard, hot then cold, and shaves with a blade; then dresses in clean clothes, blue cotton shirt and white jeans and espadrilles.

  He goes to the kitchen and puts his porridge on. Every morning of his life Tom starts with porridge. Josie calls it his mash but he doesn’t care. Porridge, Tom would say, connects him with his roots, and the mixing of it works as a mnemonic and brings back, every morning, that kitchen in the house behind the brickworks in New Lynn, where he grew up. Never fails. He could not stop it if he wanted to. Then it was Creamoata, and that is pigswill, Tom agrees, but he has his own recipe now – two parts of rolled oats, one of bran, one of millet meal, one of kibbled wheat. It’s for the taste not for his health but all the same it keeps him regular.

  A little bit of sugar, lots of milk. Tom eats at the kitchen table. A shuffle and breathing jerks him round and he sees Duncan’s face slide across the doorway like a bead on an abacus. Tom hears the boy go out of the house and click the door. He is pleased to have him gone. Now he’s alone; and that’s the way he wants it. Tom Round in his house.

  He makes coffee and eats an apple – early season Gravenstein, and that too takes him back. He’s there with a grin of pleasure, in the kitchen – kitchen with curling lino and match-lined walls (lovely stuff, tongue and groove, perfect fit and function) varnished to an amber glow, and the newly silvered stove with brass tap and moulded door – as his father walks in with a sack of apples from Henderson.

  I wish Dad could have seen my house.

  A good part of what’s essential he gets from his old man, Tom believes. Bill Round was a brickie and by God – Tom to botching tradesmen on his jobs – he’d pick up a brick in his left hand, flip it twice to find the better face, never dropped a single one in his life; spread the mortar on with a wipe of his trowel, spread it like butter, always the right amount, never had to get more or take any off; and if he had to cut a brick he’d do the bloody measurement with his eye, then one tap with his trowel and clean as a whistle a half or a quarter would drop off, and it was right, down to the last millimetre it was right. A tradesman. You don’t see them now. He could make you a fireplace like a cathedral porch and get the curve absolutely right with his eye.

  Tom gets his gift for putting things together from his old man. And that extra thing from his mother, whatever it is – synthesizing skill, that working towards a whole that exists as ideal form before you get there. Yeah, Tom says. And thinks of her, working-class girl, drain-layer’s daughter, reading, explaining, thinking, laughing, in the little kitchen, and a light shining out of her, love and ambition for him. And now her mind is all in bits. There’s no whole past but bits of past, and no coherent world inside or out, and sometimes when he visits her on his trips to Auckland she doesn’t even know who he is. It’s cruel, he thinks. And no one here gives him a word of sympathy.

  Well that’s all right, I’ll have them out, I’ll have the bloody lot of them out of my house. I can get by on my own. I’m best on my own, Tom Round thinks. There’s nothing I want from anyone.

  He goes outside and hoses down his boat and pulls it into place in the garage. He starts the pump and waters his lawns and checks the water temperature in the solar panels. It’s almost too hot to put your hand in. Then he walks down to the gate for the Dominion and reads it under a sun unbrella by the pool. Last night, he remembers, I went to see Sandra. She let him sleep on the couch for a couple of hours. He does not like that, sleeping on the couch when there’s a bed in the next room with a woman in it. But he’ll dump Sandra, she really is a dirty little bitch, some of the things she likes to do. He’ll get by without a woman for a while and live alone in his house. It seems to him empty already – he walks through it – and cool and clean and spacious, uncontaminated, whole.

  Family home? Family seems dirty to Tom.

  Stops at Belinda’s room. I wasn’t going to touch Bel. What do they think I am? I never did anything to Mandy and Stell. Just a bit of … Can’t remember what, but nothing bad, a bit of horseplay. Women get neurotic. I wish I’d had three sons instead.

  He goes down half a level and looks through the white vista, space folding on space, to the lawn and pool. (The dog walks by with its paws clicking on the tiles.) He sits in a chair and smiles at sunlight burning down but not touching him and the wind belting in the pines. No, he thinks, no sons either. He’s the point his parents worked towards, the final product, where it all came into shape. He’s shape and he’s shape-maker. He’s the last in a male line. And who needs daughters even, Mandy, Stell and Bel, whose futures are only points in time directing attention back at him? He needs no attention but his own.

  Tom smiles and spreads his legs and puts his arms on the fat, cold arms of the chair. He yawns and scratches his chest and thinks he’ll have an hour’s sleep; and then, by God, he’ll go into town and see Tony Hillman and show Josie Duncan where she gets off.

  He starts to drift into that easy sleep preceded by floating images of pillar, cornice, lintel, spire; but again the formless swallows shape. He wakes with a twist of his buttocks. Something sharp is digging into him. He feels for it and drags it out and thinks at first it’s a paperback novel of Josie’s; then turns it over and reads the back: ‘Beautiful, wealthy, and spoiled, Laurie Bennington is used to having things her way. So when Lars Olsen tells her their romance is finished …’ Belinda’s muck. He drops it on the floor.

  But Tom is too late. Belinda’s there. He has no place to run to. Tom can’t put knowledge off any more.

  He knows what he meant to do with Belinda. He sees Mandy and Stella on the beach (that lovely round of shoulder, superb articulation of bone and joint) – and Stella alone (blade and edge and point, and the hilt and handle of her mouth). He hears every sharp, cold word again, cutting him. There’s no place where he can turn and hide.

  He draws up his legs. He tries to be tiny in the chair.

  Duncan’s morning has not satisfied him. When his mother and Mandy leave he telephones Mrs Sangster. She should be back from her holiday, most people are back. The phone rings on and on. (Norma is in her office at school, getting ready for Maule and Whiting and Mrs Alexander.) He goes to his room and reads but cannot understand the ideas:

  Bohm’s starting point is the notion of ‘unbroken wholeness’, and his aim is to explore the order he believes to be inherent in the cosmic web of relations at a deeper ‘non manifest’ level. He calls this order ‘implicate’, or ‘enfolded’ …

  The words hide things Duncan wants to know. He looks in his dictionary but it doesn’t help. Most of the meaning gets away. He feels the excitement of it move out of his reach. There, there, is where he wants to be. Will the correspondence courses help? He knows that for a long time they won’t. He’ll have to go right to the beginning and fill things in bit by bit – start where the fourth-formers start. He feels better when he understands that. The idea of work makes him happy. The trouble is he wants to start now.

  At ten o’clock he decides to telephone Mrs Sangster again. ‘Damn,’ he says, when he opens his door. The noise of distant water means his father is in the shower. He might come out and pick up another phone and overhear. Duncan reads a page more of his book then puts it aside and opens Belinda’s maths book. He can understand that. Later, when his father is eating breakfast – some breakfast, half past ten – he goes for a walk along the edge of the golf course. He watches from a clump of silver birch trees as a woman gets re
ady to hit a ball on a plastic tee. He knows about the swing from the golf books Tom brings home (and decides he doesn’t need to read). It depends on balance and timing and movements joined together in a whole, and he breaks the woman’s swing into its parts – sees her like a series of still photographs, right through to the time when the ball goes popping up in a spray of dirt and lands twenty metres away. Duncan knows what she did wrong.

  ‘You brought your right shoulder down too hard,’ he yells.

  She looks for him and the women in her foursome fan out and peer into the trees, but he scrambles up the needle slope and all they see is the flash of legs. Duncan sits and pants. The phantom golf pro, he exults.

  At the end of the course he crosses the river and climbs a track to the top of the hill over Clearwater’s house. The iron roof makes a chequered pattern, red and silver and rusty-brown, and the Land-Rover on the lawn is jacked up on one side and has a wheel off but it looks as if it’s been that way for weeks. He’s not sure, but he thinks he can see grass growing through the tyre on the lawn. Clearwater is sitting on his porch. All he’s wearing – Duncan’s not sure again – is underpants. The goats are by the road fence, in the bracken, except for one tied to a peg at the far side of the house by the tea-tree patch.

  Duncan walks along the track towards home. When he looks back Clearwater has come to the tank behind the house and is letting water from the tap run into his mouth. When he walks away he forgets to turn it off. Duncan watches the water. It falls in a silver line but light reverses it and makes it come out of the ground and flow into the tap. It’s a kind of magic, a turning round of laws. He watches for a moment until it becomes just interesting – scientific. He supposes he should call out and tell Clearwater he’s wasting water. But the man is hunkered down on the lawn with his arms wrapped round his knees and he looks as if he’s set to stay for hours. So Duncan does nothing.

  He feels sorry for Clearwater. It’s probably true what people say, living with goats has sent him mad.

  Tom remembers. With Mandy in her bedroom, no one home. And Stella in the bush at Oyster Bay. Nothing much. But it’s no use. He can’t deny. ‘Jesus, no.’ His degradation almost knocks him out of the chair. He slides out and sits on the floor, and pushes, pushes, tries to empty knowledge from himself. It won’t go. And there’s the dreadful thing that follows it. Tom’s work is making order and order is something he will never find again. There’s a flying about of fragments and he’ll never draw them in and make a shape. He does not have the fitness any more and there will be no way to get it back.