by Gee, Maurice
The girl, Hayley Birtles, runs to the archway and runs back. He sees her mouth with white teeth and red tongue and a black hole going down her throat. He smiles at her. Heat is on his skin, starting to hurt.
‘We’ll get in the pool,’ Hayley yells.
‘No good. There’ll be no air.’ They’ll come up and pull hot gas into their lungs. Already he can feel the membranes baking in his mouth.
‘Duncan,’ Hayley screams. She jumps in.
Then Duncan understands several things. Burning is all right, he doesn’t mind, but suffocating isn’t what he wants. Yesterday, seeing Sos get drowned, he had contracted, beat after beat. No counter-movement came to make him large. Soon he was tiny, lying like a balled-up hedgehog at the foot of the wall. He could uncurl and wriggle through. He knew there were cracks he could find. On the other side he would be dead.
He stayed where he was. Dying should just happen. He should not have to be the one to choose.
Now the counter-movement comes. He can go over and not die. There’s a voice calling ‘Gidday, Dunc.’ It sounds like him. Does that mean he’s already there, waiting for himself? He can put his hand on top and vault across and meet it. Him. Meet me.
There’s the wall. There’s the voice, ‘Come on.’
Over there he can do anything. Can he throw himself away from the fire? Can he be safe by saying, Go? He sees himself arcing across the river and bouncing on the green and taking one step back and sitting on the grass to watch the fire.
So why is he standing here and just thinking about it? He’ll never get a second chance.
He’s standing here because of Hayley Birtles.
He sees her come up in the pool and feel the heat and grab a breath through her open mouth and go back under. In a moment she will come up again; and find him gone. He sees her swing her head round in the water, screaming his name. He knows the pain and terror she will feel as she dies. ‘OK,’ he says; and steps back warily. The wall might punish him for saying no.
‘Sorry, can’t come.’
It seems to blink. The voice on the other side makes a wail. Suddenly both of them are gone.
‘So long,’ Duncan says. Then ‘Garage,’ he says; and he runs there. He grabs the scuba tanks from the boat and lugs them back, hearing the fire come pouring down, seeing tree crowns burst on the hill. He throws the tanks in; thinks, Why not? – grabs Hayley’s bike, runs it riderless at the pool and sees it tip in like an accident. Then he dives in and when the bubbles rattle away sees Hayley Birtles grabbing a tank. He swims to her, frog-kicking, pushes her away, turns a tap, making air bubble from the mouthpiece. He gets his arm round Hayley, holds her down, pushes the mouthpiece in her mouth, then makes her sit and pulls the tank into her lap to anchor her. He turns on his air and anchors himself.
They sit in the pool with arms locked and watch flames streaming over and the surface freckle with debris. Further along Hayley’s bike lies on its side.
Duncan is forgetting. He looks up and sees the pool moving like the sky.
I should have saved my telescope, he thinks.
Author’s Note
Saxton, in my novel, is the misshapen twin of a real town, and Saxton College for Girls of a real school. The people, though, staff and pupils, parents, lovers, enemies, friends, all the citizens of the town, are imaginary and have no existence outside these pages. I would like to thank the New Zealand Literary Fund for its Scholarship and Letters, 1987, and the Victoria University of Wellington for its Writing Fellowship, 1989. Without these awards I would not have been able to complete this novel.
Acknowledgement
Thanks are due to the Pegasus Press and Mrs J. Baxter
for permission to quote from
‘Prize-giving Speech’ by James K. Baxter.
THE BEGINNING
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First published in New Zealand in 1990 in association with Faber and Faber Limited
Copyright © Maurice Gee, 1990
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74-253955-3
