by Gee, Maurice
Hayley might solve a problem for Josie Round. She feels she should not leave Duncan alone but if the girl can stay for an hour, not watch him but, well, be with him, Josie can get things organized at the shop and then come back and take him to the doctor. Is Hayley the sort of girl she can trust? She’s Shelley Birtles’ sister, after all. Josie has a sidelong look at her. Big and sturdy – strapping would be the word if kinky sex hadn’t taken it over. And pretty enough in a bovine way. There was – wasn’t there? – some intelligence in her eye: the quickness of cunning, but a slower movement too, of knowledge was it? Knowledge of what? The girl gave the impression of having had experience of life; of, probably, the seamy side. That was not a disadvantage, necessarily. But did it mean she would rob the house? And would she even see poor scarred Duncan, see him as a fellow human being, as a young man?
Josie runs all this past herself in a second or two; decides yes, she will take the risk, the Rounds and the Birtleses are connected, after all.
‘Hayley, you could do me a favour.’
‘Yeah, what’s that?’
‘Duncan isn’t well and I’d like someone here, just for an hour. I’ve got to go to the shop you see …’
‘Sure,’ Hayley says.
‘All you need to do is just – amuse yourself, have a swim – you’ve got your togs? – be around.’
‘Sure.’
‘He’s no trouble. You can go into the house and make a drink.’
‘That’s OK.’
Josie goes through the archway to the pool and Hayley follows, wheeling her bike. Duncan is sitting in the rock garden.
‘Duncan, here’s Hayley Birtles. She’s come to have a swim.’
Better, Josie thinks, if someone from outside the family is the first one back in the pool. That will lift the tapu, so to speak. She isn’t keen to be first one herself.
Tears start in her eyes as she looks at the water, that innocent blue, and thinks of poor Sos floating there, with only his shoulders above the surface and the rest of him heavier than was natural somehow; hindquarters down; head down as though searching for something on the bottom. And his little legs – like a thalidomide baby. And Duncan in his room, in the dark, curtains closed. Sitting on his bed with his knees drawn up; and not a word from him ever since. And Tom gone, note on the table – ‘Business in Wellington. Will be in touch.’ That was better than she had hoped, though disturbing when she thought of it – too much on the neutral side, if neutral could be said to have a side. All in all a bloody twenty-four hours. (The girls though had been marvellous. No tears from Belinda. She helped dig the grave and bury Sos; practical and bravely held in. Stella and Mandy had done the lifting out.)
‘I’m going, Duncan. Hayley will be staying for a while.’
‘Hallo, Duncan,’ Hayley says.
He turns his head and looks at the girl. It’s his first sign of interest since yesterday afternoon, and Josie does not like it somehow. Perhaps the question should be, Is Hayley safe with Duncan? rather than the other way round. And there’s the question too, Did the dog fall in or was he pushed? And who was home to do it except …?
Josie says, No. It’s his face that makes her think like that, and it’s unfair. Duncan is gentle, she knows.
Whispers to the girl, ‘He’ll be all right. He just sits. I’ll try to be back by – half past three?’
‘No sweat, Mrs Round.’
‘Remember to get a drink. And there’s a cake in the tin. Duncan will show you, won’t you Duncan?’
Does he nod? Josie waits a moment to make sure. Then she smiles at Hayley and taps her arm: Thank you.
The car sprays shell chips. She’s away. Thinks of the shop …
Hayley props the bike up on the lawn. The stand might scratch the tiles and she’s watching everything she does, awed by the house. Through the glasshouse stuck on the back and full of ferns and flowers and plants with big fat leaves, you can see the rooms going on and on and down and down. It’s like being in the pictures or on TV, Dallas or The Love Boat or Falconcrest. How do people get that much money? She thought it was just in America.
Duncan is still sitting in the rocks. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt with something printed on it. Hayley moves further round the pool so she can read: ‘Hump your ass off.’ The way the Yanks spell arse makes it feeble. But what a laugh – except she doesn’t laugh – someone who looks like Duncan wearing it.
‘What’s the matter? You got the bot or something?’
He shakes his head, moving it just once.
‘What’s wrong then?’
‘Nothing. I don’t feel well.’
‘Well try smiling, eh. Your teeth want to see what the weather’s like.’ It’s one of her father’s jokes and it makes her smile every time. ‘Did Belinda give you my message?’ That same shake of the head. ‘You can talk about Wayne. I don’t care.’ Now he looks at her, and after flicking her eyes away once she looks straight back, and sees – thinks she can see – he wouldn’t have been bad looking if it hadn’t been for his accident. The left side of his face shows you that.
‘Wayne’s dead.’
‘Well I know that, dumby.’ She feels herself blushing. A lot of people think he’s a loony. ‘We’re going to live in Aussie. In Melbourne.’
‘Yeah? Good.’ He turns his head away, not interested.
‘You going to have a swim?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I am.’ She goes back to her bike and gets her togs from the carrier. ‘Where can I change, eh?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘Thanks a lot.’ She goes into the glasshouse but the ferns have spooky places in behind them so she goes into the house and finds herself in a room as big as three or four rooms at home, all white and grey. There are red and orange mats on the floor, big round pools of colour that make her grin they’re so bright, and the pictures on the walls … ‘Jeez,’ she says. There’s one of a huge wood-pigeon flying very high over little hills and patches of bush and a beach and the sea. It looks fat and happy up there and the land is like jewels. And one of smooth white rocks and blue pools you can see right through and a floating string of seaweed like a string of yellow beads. And one, the biggest one, of an empty room, wooden floor, and a staircase and a window of coloured glass. The light comes through making different parts of the room shine with different colours, but there’s an open clear pane reflecting a tiny bit of the world outside – a tree with a child’s swing hanging from a branch. The child’s dead, you know that straight away. Hayley is delighted with the pictures, though they frighten her too. She takes off her clothes and puts them in a chair – what a chair! – and pulls on her togs. Then, with her towel round her neck, explores the house. Bedrooms and, Jeez! a water-bed. She looks back at the door and hops on quickly, tries it out. The waves are like someone rubbing her and it’s made for fucking, but how would you get on if all you wanted was to go to sleep?
She does not look in any more bedrooms but goes back to the room where she changed, then down half a level into another lounge and sees a wall of glass in front of her with the golf course out there, people walking on it like little dolls, and the river curving round two sides. The whole thing is laid out as if the Rounds own it. She looks far along the course and sees Lex’s house on the same level. The difference is more than Hayley can understand. She goes up two steps to the dining-room, where the table is bare wood without any paint and as big as a snooker table in Pot Black. The kitchen is joined on but not joined on. She has seen places like it in the model homes show, but this is bigger and has more things and looks as if it should be full of butlers and maids. Hayley is beginning to be angry. It’s all too much.
She crosses the lounge with the pictures again and goes up half a level into an open room beyond the bedrooms. A weaving loom with a rug half-finished stands in the middle with a couple of smaller looms and a spinning wheel. A bed with the duvet half slipped off is under the window. There are dirty clothes on the floor and a coffee cup with
dregs in it, a crust on a plate, an apple core going brown, on the bedside table. That’s better, Hayley thinks. She feels the Rounds are people after all.
She opens the door on the other side of the room and finds herself on a landing with half a dozen steps down to the garage. It’s empty except for a speedboat on a trailer. A speedboat is what you’d expect. It’s the flashest one she’s ever seen. She goes down for a look but stops at a mark on the concrete floor. It’s almost round, about the size of the orange mats in the house, and has the nicotine colour of her mother’s skin.
Hayley touches it with her toe. She goes outside, walks through the archway, and thinks Duncan must have gone away. Then she sees him sitting further back in the shade.
‘That mark in the garage, is that where Wayne got burned?’
He finds her with his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he says.
‘Why didn’t you scrub it off or something?’
‘Dad tried. It won’t come off.’
‘You could have put a mat over it, anyhow.’ She takes off her towel and stands on the edge of the pool. There are pine needles and gum leaves and dead insects on the water. A few live insects too. She sees a pool scoop lying on the lawn and fetches it and rescues them, then scoops out the dead ones and the leaves.
‘Are you coming in?’
‘No.’
‘Suit yourself.’ She goes to the deep end and stands there hands on hips, posing a bit. She knows how good she looks in her new Melbourne togs and feels that she fits in here all right. Then she dives in and swims underwater as far as the wall in the shallow end. She comes up and stands wiping her face.
‘It’s a bit too warm for me.’
Duncan walks to the pool and looks in. He squats and feels the water with his finger. She swims along and holds on to the gutter.
‘Why don’t you put a mat on it?’
‘What’s the use?’
She swims away and does half a dozen lengths of the pool. He’s sitting with his legs dangling in when she stops, and she rests by him, with her arms on the rim. She touches one of the scars on his leg and is startled at the hardness of the ridge where it joins the skin that isn’t burned. ‘Do these still hurt?’
‘No.’
‘Will they ever look any better? The ones on your face?’
He shakes his head. ‘I can have some more plastic surgery. But I’m not going to.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You could get a girlfriend if you did.’ She touches his leg again. ‘Do these go right up under your clothes?’
‘Yes. Round my back.’ He touches himself in the crotch. ‘It burned me here. I can’t have kids or anything.’
‘Who says?’
‘No one. I just know.’
Hayley feels herself starting to cry. ‘Duncan.’ She puts her cheek against his thigh.
Duncan says, ‘I think I’m supposed to be dead.’
And Lex, on his side of the valley? Lex knows danger. He stands to see where the smoke is coming from but the house blocks his view. He scrambles up the hill, using his good hand, and stops at the edge of the bracken and looks back. Flames as high as trees are moving across the scrub on the saddle between Stovepipe Hill and Beacon Hill. They bend and leap, bend and leap, and throw smoke in the air. The smoke is as high as he can see and streaming towards him, flattened out and bending down. Lex coughs. There’s a shifting in his mind; a part of him leaps into human mode.
Where has Lex been? Me, here, now. Hallucinating on the single point. But Stovepipe Hill and Beacon Hill: he knows the names. He knows what the wind and fire will do; will jump the road. The safe place is the golf course, the safe place is the river. Lex and his goats will go there. But he does not know how fast the fire will move. No one knows. No one has seen a fire like this. He watches the flames climb Stovepipe Hill. Their licking up and plunging up become a liquid rush. It’s as though Lex is tilted on his side.
He whimpers. He slides down the hill and falls on his hand. He screams with pain and sits hunched up on a tiny ledge. The ball of rag is loosened in his palm and he twitches it, then jerks it free and looks with bewilderment at the festering cut running from the base of his index finger across his palm. He remembers tin and axe and twisting the lid to get it free … Thinks, Get the doctor; but looks up and sees the smoke and flames.
He slides and jumps, comes to the broken fence and scrambles through. Wire scrapes his leg and blood wells on his thigh. He goes past his house, running hunched to protect his hand. He runs down the drive and feels hot wind pouring in the funnel of the scrub. He reaches the gate; and it’s locked. He grabs the padlock, jerks and jerks, then lifts the gate, trying to spring it from its hinges. The goats are bleating further along the fence. He leaves the gate and breaks into the gorse, worming and leaping. He does not remember his cut hand. The booming in the sky flattens him. He has to keep gulping air and pulling it, hot, into his lungs.
The goats are in the corner. They can see the river and they butt and heave and throw themselves against the hurricane wire. He grabs the nearest one and throws it over. It lands on its side and falls down a bank and runs free. He throws another, untangles horns from the wire, throws again. He chases a billy up the fence and heaves it free. Then back to the corner for the last one. It makes a twisting arc over the wire and leaps out of sight down the bank.
Lex can climb the fence now and get to the river in time. But he turns and goes the other way. There’s still the goat chained by the tea-tree patch beyond the house.
He can’t breathe. There’s no air. He reaches the goat, strangling in its collar, and kneels on it and works at the buckle with both hands.
The fireball comes across the valley. It flies in an arc and ignites the hill. As Lex looks into the blinding whiteness, looks and falls on his side, with his hair burning, the house explodes, the tea-tree clump explodes.
Lex Clearwater dies. If he had survived he might have stayed back from being a goat and made some sense of his time there. He narrowed down by sympathetic and intellectual choice and was in control of his movement for a while. Then it got away and Lex went rushing to that minimal I. He felt his mind come folding back at him, like a blanket folding – GOOD, good, good – into the fact, Me, Here, Now. He rested in that stillness. Nothing disturbed him but his needs. Perhaps there’s no safe way back from there. Perhaps the fire was his only way.
Goat or man, Lex dies on the hill.
Along the valley, Duncan and Hayley survive.
Hayley lifts her cheek from his thigh. She cannot find anything to say but his name.
He leans back on his arms. He lies down with his legs dangling in the pool. For a moment it seems he’s lying down to die. His feet, under the water, are white and dead.
She pushes herself away from the wall and swims to the deep end. When she looks back he hasn’t moved – and Hayley begins to be impatient. He’s making too much of it; like Shelley does. But when she thinks of being burned down there – touches her own genitals – how can you make too much of that? It does make you dead in a sort of way.
‘What’s the time, Duncan?’ Her watch is in the house with her clothes. ‘Hey, did you hear me, what’s the time?’
He lifts his arm to show her he doesn’t wear a watch. Hayley climbs out of the pool. She wishes Mrs Round would come back. She doesn’t like the way her heart thumps with this feeling of sorrow. Yet it’s so posh at the Rounds’ house she wants to stay. He spoils it, like a body, over there.
She dries some of the water off her legs and goes into the house to find a drink. There’s Just Juice in the fridge along with all sorts of cheese and bottles of wine. She pours a glass and goes to the window to ask Duncan if he’d like some too. Smoke stands like a wall beyond the hill, with big puffy lumps on top of it. Hayley can’t believe it, there’s so much.
‘Hey Dunc, look at that.’
She leaves her drink and runs outside. ‘Look at the smoke.’ She can hear the fire coming up th
e hill on the other side. It makes a sound like rapids in a creek.
‘There’s a fire, Duncan.’
He lifts himself on his elbow and looks at the sky. ‘Yeah,’ he says.
‘Is it coming this way?’
He stands up and brushes dust off his shorts. ‘I suppose so. The wind’s blowing this way.’
‘Listen to it.’
‘Yeah.’
‘We better get out.’
‘No, we’re all right.’
‘It’s a bush fire, Duncan. It’s a big one.’
‘It won’t come here.’
Hayley runs back into the house and climbs half a level to the sundeck. Smoke covers the sun. A red-gold colour comes on her skin and the valley goes darker. She sees Duncan walking on the lawn. He sits in a canvas chair and looks at the long wall of smoke on the hill.
‘I’m getting out,’ Hayley says. Then she sees flames – one, two, three places at once. They come down the valley on the town side of the house, bouncing along the scrub like a ball and sending puffs of smoke up where they touch. They reach over the hill, holding on like fingers, above the house. And up the valley they slide on Stovepipe Hill. A ball of fire with a long red tail shoots from behind another hill and hits the hillside by Lex Clearwater’s house. She sees the house and sheds burst into flames.
Hayley runs along the deck and looks downriver towards town. Fire is down there too, by Monday Hole. The gully scrub boils up red like liquid in a pot.
Hayley runs back through the house.
‘Duncan, we’ve got to get down to the river.’
Duncan has climbed into the garden to see better. He turns with his hands on his hips and smiles at her.
‘It’s too late. We’re trapped.’
‘When it gets in those gum trees it’ll be like a bomb.’ The slope will be a chimney and will suck flames down the hill. They’ll leap from the gum trees to the pines, right over the house and roof it in. It’s like a sun-flare, Duncan thinks, picturing that huge leap and curve. Everything underneath will shrivel up and turn to ashes. He doesn’t mind.
