Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The

by Gee, Maurice

  Out in the conservatory the dog is licking water from a leaf. It stops and rolls an eye at Tom and its blunt teeth grin. Tom sees: belly like a sack, dribbled line of urine on the tiles. He makes a growl. Tom howls. He stands up and runs across the room to the ferny tunnel. The dog cannot move fast enough. His kick strikes the soft full part of its underside and turns it somersaulting through the door. Tom follows and kicks again, striking the animal’s rib cage. It skids on its back across the tiles and tips over, rear end first, into the swimming pool.

  Tom has hurt his foot. It stabs him as he walks to the pool. He sees a pointed nose leaking blood and paws sliding, squeaking, on the tiles. Blood threads in the water. He limps onto the lawn and picks up the leaf scoop.

  Duncan walks up the drive from the road. His father’s car is still in the garage so he skirts the yard and goes round the outside of the wall. He sits in the grass with his back to the bricks, which are cool from the night although the sun’s been on them for an hour. As soon as the car goes he’ll telephone Mrs Sangster.

  He hears his father call out angrily and hears Sos yelp. Belted him, he thinks. Lucky Bel’s not home. There’s another yell and a kind of thud. Something heavy splashes in the pool. It makes him angry. His father’s gone in, probably testing his scuba gear. Now it will be hours before he leaves. Duncan feels the house belongs to him in the daytime. Other people should keep out of it.

  He stands up, puts his hands on the wall and pulls himself up. He hangs on crooked arms, looking over. Then he grins. Sos has fallen in and his father is fishing him out. Wait till Bel hears about this.

  Tom brings the leaf scoop down. Duncan feels his mind turn on an angle. Parts that lay together shift apart. It’s water flowing up from the ground again.

  Sos is under the mesh. Tom pushes with his forearms, submerging him.

  Duncan falls back. He lies against the foot of the wall. The yellow grass climbs up to the pines and the pines climb into the sky. Is that what Duncan sees? He speeds across vast plains, he bends and climbs and dips vertiginously. Huge emptiness, huge fields of light. And there, at the end, the wall is growing. There is his black wall again.

  He comes to the foot of it and his movement stops. He lies down and feels himself contract …

  Three

  * * *

  FIRE

  19

  The Saxton forest fire. It has a special meaning for us. Remember though, it’s not an exclusive event. Half of Saxton saw the tower of smoke rise in the hills and the flames come dipping at the suburbs. ‘Be ready to evacuate your houses,’ the Civil Defence spokesman said on the radio. He ran through a list of things people should take. Personal photographs and documents. That really seemed to underline the danger.

  Whole families stood on the streets and watched the fire burn into the forest all night long. They did not, in the end, have to leave their houses. (Only two houses were burned, Tom and Josie Round’s house and Lex Clearwater’s house, and only one person was killed.) They were frightened though, for an hour, and after that upset, awed, excited; felt important. This was the worst and biggest thing that had ever happened in Saxton.

  No one knows how it started. Conditions that day were extreme and ‘the forest was a bomb just waiting to go off.’ (Dennis Kennedy, assistant conservator.) The trees had been baked by months of sun and were full of combustible resin. In gullies nearer town, bracken, gorse and tea-tree made a crackling and dry hissing through the morning and afternoon. The wind, at gale force, from the north-west, was hot and dry and swept across the hills like a broom.

  Some say a Ministry of Works team tried to boil a billy and the flame got away; some that the high-tension power lines across Lunar Gully arced in the wind; some that a trail bike rider in a fire-break … that a broken bottle in the sun …

  The fire began at ten to three. In the hills on the eastern side of town smoke reared up. It grew into the sky like a huge round-headed tree.

  ‘I’m sliding down a slope and it’s rather frightening. Where am I, by the way?’

  ‘Lift your foot, Miss Freed. That’s right. You’re doing very well.’

  ‘What a small bosom you’ve got. I had a small bosom too.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Freed.’

  ‘Men attach so much importance …’

  ‘Lift your foot.’ Belinda works the stocking stirrup and round the lawn they go at Golden Hills.

  ‘Who’s that big man standing over there?’

  ‘That’s not a man, that’s smoke, Miss Freed. There must be a fire in the hills. Shall we go round the front where we can see?’

  ‘Is it smoke? It looks like a man to me. Why is he angry?’

  The fire goes down the gullies at the speed of a running horse and up the hills and, with a greater roar, leaves the scrub and enters the pines. It runs down to the river and jumps the road, closing the valley by Monday Hole. All the people at the hole are safely away. The golfers on the course are safe. Most of them sit in the river but half a dozen stand outside the clubhouse drinking beer and watching the show, and one phlegmatic fellow keeps on playing.

  East again, the fire jumps Leppers Creek, climbs the ridge, runs into the young pines, no taller than Christmas trees, on Stovepipe Hill, and shoots a fireball four hundred metres across the valley into the mature trees, ready for milling, on the hills east of Lex Clearwater’s goat farm. They explode – whoomp, you can hear it in town – and there’s no hope any more of stopping the fire. The forestry teams must give away hundreds of hectares, and hold it, if they can, on the next line of hills above Copper Creek.

  The children in the Baptist camp are safe. The gully there is in native bush and the fire goes across the hill behind it and down the other side, neat and clean.

  Josie, at the road block, cries, ‘Duncan is in there. My son’s in there. And the Birtles girl.’

  ‘Sorry lady, no one can go in.’

  Three people from our story are in Coppermine Valley that afternoon: Duncan Round, Hayley Birtles, Lex Clearwater. It’s time to go back and take a narrow focus. We’ll start with Hayley.

  The softball tournament is over and Hayley is having trouble filling her days. She feels cut off from her friends and when she’s with them everything that happens seems a part of some bigger thing she cannot see. It doesn’t go anywhere for her and there’s a kind of sadness and emptiness all round. That’s because of Melbourne, she supposes. Melbourne is somehow where she is and she seems to look at Saxton through a window.

  The house is going on the market soon. Her father is back at work but has given notice. Her mother is home, and talks more now, but there’s a pause in front of what she says as though she has to work out the words. It’s good to have her though, cooking the meals and washing the dishes and saying things like, ‘Don’t be late home.’

  Shelley is back, but Shelley is like someone getting over being sick. She’s at half-speed most of the time and says only half what you expect. It drives Hayley wild. She goes out jogging with their father though, round and round the park in the dusk, and once when he couldn’t go Hayley went instead, and found it hard keeping up with Shell.

  Shelley won’t talk about Arohata. Hayley thinks her sister is up herself with this suffering stuff.

  After lunch on the day of the fire she tells her mother she’s going for a swim at the beach. But at the bottom of the street she turns right instead of left and rides past the Post Office and the swimming pool and up the riverside path into the valley. She wants to tell Lex Clearwater she’s leaving for Melbourne next week. She’s not going to visit him for anything but goodbye.

  The wind makes the poplar trees by Monday Hole whip back and forth. It pushes her up the valley like a hand on her back.

  The gate at the bottom of Lex’s drive is locked. Hayley has left her safety chain at home so she lifts her bike over and hides it in the scrub. The gorse and broom lunge at her as she walks up. A car would have a hard job getting through and Lex’s Land-Rover must have to break its way. It makes
her nervous. She remembers every bit of what she did with Lex but it doesn’t seem to work in properly with other things – as though you kept on pitching and pitching but all the balls kept bending away from the plate. She’s not sure she should come here again, it’s dangerous.

  She stops where the drive comes out of the scrub and curves round the lawn to the house and sheds. It’s so dry the ground is like pumice and white as chalk. That puts colour in everything else. Brown things seem red and grey things blue. The house has a shimmer in the heat and the Land-Rover, tipped halfway on its side as though someone hidden is lifting it, looks hot as a stove. Hayley goes round and sees a jack holding it up and a wheel on the hard-baked lawn with bits of spiky grass through the axle-hole. She nearly puts her foot in a turd. ‘Ooh, yuk.’ Hops aside. Goats don’t do turds like that, it’s a human one. It makes her feel sick, and more nervous still, and she looks at the house and calls out, ‘Lex.’

  A goat coughs by the road. She turns but cannot see it, and shades her eyes and looks up the hill but can’t see any goats up there. The pines send waves of shimmer into the sky and have a loud humming like insects inside them.

  Hayley goes onto the porch and looks inside. At first she thinks someone has wrecked the house, then sees that nothing is broken or overturned, things have just been dropped and left – cutlery and plastic bags and bits of food and dishrags and socks and shirts. Hayley goes in two or three steps. Blowflies and house-flies are everywhere. The stink is horrible and seems to come from the fridge. She goes across and gives the door a push but it swings back open. She can’t see what is bad – maybe some meat in the freezer underneath. But what’s the matter with Lex, can’t he smell it? She looks at the table. There’s a packet of cut bread with the slices growing mould. One slice is torn in half and a bite taken out. There’s a pumpkin split in half and going bad. A tomahawk lies beside it with dry seeds where the handle meets the blade. There’s a tea towel stained with brown that looks like blood. Hayley lifts it with a finger and thumb and finds a can of baked beans underneath. Someone has tried to chop it open. Jagged bits of tin poke out. There’s more blood on the table.

  Hayley tries to call Lex’s name but it won’t come. She wants to get away from the house and back on the road but thinks perhaps he’s lying hurt somewhere and bleeding to death. He might be dead already because the blood is old. Hayley does not want to find his body.

  She looks down the hall, then walks quickly down and looks in the bedroom. The mattress on the double bed is bare. Bedclothes lie tangled on the floor. There’s a bad smell in this room too, as though someone has pissed, and she doesn’t want to go in, but gets down on her knees and looks under the bed to see if he’s lying in the space by the wall. She looks in the bathroom and sees blood in the basin, where it has congealed and turned black.

  She goes outside and runs across the lawn and looks in the sheds, expecting to find him in a corner, crumpled up. She stands on the drive and calls, ‘Lex, are you up there? Are you all right?’ but her voice gets lost on the hill. If he’s in the pines he will not hear.

  Hayley decides that Lex has gone for help, or bandaged up himself and gone to town – or gone away perhaps, gone for good. He could have walked out and left his house, that would explain why everything’s a mess and going bad. It’s the crazy sort of thing Lex would do. He’s not here anyway. And Hayley does not like being alone. It’s spooky, like a movie. Something seems just out of sight all the time. There’s a feeling of something turned the wrong way round, and everything, even the grass and trees, being dangerous.

  Hayley runs down the drive. She lifts her bike over the gate and rides away.

  Lex Clearwater watches her go. Is it Lex? He doesn’t have a name anymore.

  He squats in his nest in the bracken up the hill and rocks back and forth and makes a singing moan in time with the pain in his hand. There’s a ball of rag in his palm, damp on the bottom but dry on top. His fingers are closed on it and he can’t open them.

  Lex has gone to ground in the bracken. There’s nothing down the hill, in the house. The girl moves, makes sounds, goes away, and when she’s gone does not exist any more. He lifts his hand to his mouth and licks the cut where it extends across the base of his thumb, but it has a taste he does not like, and it hurts. He puts the hand back in his lap and rocks and moans.

  He has a blanket in his nest. He brought it up the hill with him before he forgot what blankets were. He has a plastic sack of potatoes. After a while he needs to eat and he takes a potato and bites a piece off and chews and swallows. He eats the potato, then eats another. A longer while. He needs to drink. The water is in a trough by the fence at the back of the house. He has not drunk since early in the morning. (But Lex does not see things aligned in time, while space extends no further than the distance between his eye and the thing he must have to satisfy himself. Lex lives in his goat mind now.)

  He steps down the hill. He must not fall. The water is low in the trough. He leans in, stretching his neck, but his hand knocks the edge of the trough and he cries out. He squats and moans.

  After a while Lex tries another way. He reaches into the trough with his good hand and makes a cup and lifts it to his mouth.

  Is Lex Clearwater starting to come back?

  He is drinking when the fire starts.

  The wind is against her riding down the valley. She puts the bike in a lower gear, although she feels silly pedalling fast but going slow. Dust devils race across the golf course. The river shivers as they cross. Lolly papers, pie bags, jump and twist and drop in the car park. Hayley narrows her eyes against the grit and pedals hard, wishing she’d gone to the beach. The waves out there would be great for body surfing. She does not think of Lex any more.

  The gums in front of the Rounds’ house rattle like tinfoil. The wind seems to come in lumps and knee her. She scarcely hears the car until it’s by her side. Tuck and Legs stick their long arms out. She feels their fingernails scrape her arm. Gary Baxter is braking hard but the Escort runs twenty metres and Hayley has time to turn and pedal back the way she came. Tuck and Legs jump out but she’s away, the wind behind her, and they lose time scrambling back in. Gary has to do a three-point turn on the narrow road. He grates his gears and Hayley laughs. She knows where she will go and she has time, and she does not give them the satisfaction of making her pedal hard. She hears the car coming with a whine and she grins back and makes a left hand signal, exaggerated, cheeky, and turns into the Rounds’ drive, crosses the one way bridge, rides halfway up the shell drive and dismounts. The car pulls up across the entrance. Gary Baxter gets out and stands looking over the roof.

  ‘We’ll get you, Hayley. Wait and see.’

  ‘How’s your arm, Gary? Did you get your plaster off? You should have asked me to autograph it.’

  ‘Are you going up to screw the loony?’ Tuck yells.

  She makes the fingers at them and turns away. She doesn’t have to bother with Tuck and Legs and Gary any more. They won’t follow up the drive. Neil Chote maybe would have but not Gary. She looks at the house and it makes her nervous, it’s so big. But she can say she came to see Belinda. At least she knows Belinda after swimming at Freaks’ Hole. She pushes her bike up the drive and goes around the back, where brick walls fold in and lead to gardens and a yard big enough for a netball court. A woman in white trousers and a purple smock stands in the garage doorway, looking at her.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I came to see Belinda.’

  ‘She’s not home. Haven’t I seen you?’

  ‘I’m Hayley Birtles, Mrs Round.’ She supposes it’s Mrs Round, she looks like Stella Round and talks the same.

  ‘Wayne’s sister?’ Mrs Round goes pink when she says the name. Hayley is pleased to see it, it makes her feel less like a trespasser.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Round says. She puts down the potted fern she’s holding and wipes her hands on her smock. ‘Who was shouting down there?’

  ‘Just some guys who were h
assling me. That’s why I came up.’

  ‘Hassling?’

  ‘It’s a guy I used to go round with. He tried to knock me off my bike.’

  Mrs Round strides past her. She goes along the drive between the walls and looks down at the road. Hayley leans her bike on a wall and follows her. Gary’s car is still parked across the entrance and the boys are sitting inside.

  ‘You get out of here,’ Mrs Round shrieks. It’s a real shriek, it hurts Hayley’s ears. Gary gets out of the car and puts his hands on the bonnet.

  ‘We can park where we like.’ His voice is almost lost in the crackle of gum trees.

  ‘Not in my drive. Get out.’

  ‘You send her down, eh? We’ve got to talk to her,’ Gary yells forlornly. Hayley is almost sorry for him, little dumb Gary down there, and doesn’t like Mrs Round, yelling like someone English from her fancy house.

  ‘I know what you did to her, she told me. If you’re not gone in two minutes I’ll call the police. In fact,’ she cries, ‘I’m calling them now.’ She marches back along the drive. Hayley blows Gary a kiss. She runs after Mrs Round.

  ‘Don’t call the police, eh.’

  ‘I’m not going to. That was to scare them.’

  ‘I broke Gary’s arm. That’s why he’s mad.’

  ‘Well, good for you Hayley Birtles. I didn’t know you and Belinda were friends.’

  ‘We’re not. I know her though.’ She hears a car. ‘That’s them going. Thanks, eh.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ And she does look pleased. ‘Do you want to wait here a while, Hayley? You can have a swim if you like. Duncan’s in there, by the pool.’