Buster

by Alan Burns

  Buster

  Alan Burns

  calder publications

  an imprint of

  alma books Ltd

  3 Castle Yard

  Richmond

  Surrey TW10 6TF

  United Kingdom

  www.calderpublications.com

  Buster first published by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1961

  This edition first published by Calder Publications in 2019

  Text © Alan Burns, 1961, 2019

  Cover design by Will Dady

  Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  isbn: 978-0-71454-920-0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Contents

  Buster

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Note on the Text

  Notes

  Buster

  BUSTER

  Buster:

  A small new loaf or large bun

  A thing of superior size or astounding nature

  A burglar

  A spree

  A dashing fellow

  A Southerly gale with sand or dust

  A piece of bread and butter

  A very successful day

  Hollow, utterly, low

  To fall or be thrown

  (Dictionaries)

  Chapter 1

  They stood over him.

  Grandma shrieked:

  “Let me look at you! What a big boy you’ve grown! Have a chocolate! Have a pear! Have some more seedcake, darling! You’re not eating anything! How can you be a big man without eating anything? What is he going to be when he grows up?”

  “Lord Chief Justice,” said his father.

  “Prime Minister,” said Grandma. “Danny, who do you like better – your mother or your father?”

  “Both the same,” he said.

  That night he wrapped the sheets round it, then a mountain of blankets, then the eiderdown tucked in. Small pig hot inside. Then wet.

  In the bath his mother had told him never play with that. Never. It’s dirty. It will make you go mad, like being bitten by a frothy dog. Told him again and again how his cousin had stood up to make himself soapy, but his heel felt the curve of the bath and his spine cracked the edge of the bath and the nerve was crushed and the bone splintered and the track for the nerve from the brain to the legs was ruined and he sits in a chair all day now. Dan had seen those legs in their grey flannel trousers, skinny knees poking through like pins.

  But this was so easy and lovely. He watched moonlit clouds slide evenly between him and the moon.

  His mother’s hand held his hand, pointed at the sheets. His face pushed into the smelly sheets.

  “You wait till your father comes home. You just wait.”

  She had locked the dining-room door. He walked slowly round the table, squeaking his fingers on the polished wood; he slid his penknife along the grooves, collected threads of dirt. He stood on the window sill, looked out over the hedge into the road. A soldier posted a letter. He jumped onto the couch; his feet sank in as he pranced about on it. He waited. He reached up for the sweet dish; it fell on the carpet. Liquorice allsorts. He crawled round picking them up: one for the dish, one for his mouth. He poked under the tails of the green monkeys climbing the vase; when they reached the top he’d get a Rolls Royce. He sat on the couch and waited.

  He saw the car through the window. Quickly he put his father’s slippers in front of the big chair. It was his job. He banged on the door.

  “Let me out!”

  He wanted to be first, to run down the path, be swung up onto the garden wall, given a piggyback. The door stayed shut. He heard them talking. He kicked the slippers across the room. They lay in the empty fireplace. They were black-and-red tartan wool.

  Upstairs to the spare room, his father treading behind. He pulled his trousers down; they wouldn’t come over his shoes.

  “That’s enough!”

  He hobbled to the bed, lay across it. The prickles of the hairbrush touched his bottom.

  “Get up and get dressed. You’ll go straight to bed without supper.”

  He heard them arguing. His mother brought him snap crackle pop with milk.

  He heard his brother coming up the stairs. He bounced up and down, making the bedsprings prink. Bryan came in, sat on the bed, smiled, waited.

  “I hate her,” Dan said.

  “You shouldn’t. She’s your mother.”

  “She’s got sticking-out eyes and frizzy hair.”

  “That’s only because she’s not got enough iodine.”

  There was an old brown photo of her kissing under an orange tree.

  “I’m a cruiser with six-inch guns,” Bryan said, “and father’s a battleship and mother’s the Ark Royal, stuffed with tuck instead of planes.”

  “What about me?”

  “Oh, you’re nothing. You don’t want to be in this fleet.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, you’re a brilliant destroyer – the fastest ship in the navy. And you’ve got torpedoes which can sink anything.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re steaming across the Bay of Biscay to fight for Spain.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “Tell you tomorrow. Go to sleep.”

  “Now.”

  “Tomorrow. Goodnight, sleep well.”

  “Goodnight. I don’t want to be Lord Chief Justice.”

  “You haven’t got to be.”

  “They all say I will.”

  “Never mind them. Goodnight, whippersnapper.”

  “Night.”

  Chapter 2

  Bryan was home all day, because he had finished school and not found a job yet. They played French cricket in the garden, and read a story in The Wizard about U-boats, and Dan made a speech in Parliament:

  “Why should the rich have pears and cake and the poor can’t even have bread?”

  Bryan said: “Hooray!”

  Boys came round, and they held Dan between them and raced him along the street, flying him into the air.

  “Let me down! Let me down!”

  But when they stopped, he cried: “Do it again!”

  “Come in and listen to the wireless. Sh! It’s important.”

  Mr Chamberlain.* The war had started. The air-raid siren went. Dan got under the dining-room table. His mother was making tea; she bent down and looked in:

  “You all right down there?”

  He hugged the crosspiece between his legs. He was nine. They were talking about boarding school.

  His father said: “It’s too much for you, dear. Bryan can look after himself. But the other one…”

  His father stood at the foot of the bed:

  “I’m sorry, Dan. It’s the war. We didn’t know there was going to be a war, did we?”

  “Here’s a pound for spends,” his father was shouting as the train moved off.

  “What?”

  “Not ‘what’ – pardon. Look after your mother and write every
week.”

  Staring out of the train windows. Boring. Just fields. Reading Woman and Melody Maker with mother.

  Strange roads. Greygravel path. Grey walls. Eyesocket staring windows. Standing while mother mumbled with Headmaster. Unbroken tradition. Evacuated. Discipline. Horse-riding and Music extra. Tall boy walked slowly past the open door, twisting his head to stare. Matron. Cash’s name tapes. Down a corridor, clicking a radiator. Mother grabbed his arm. Corridors leading off. Hundreds of doors. He would never find his way around.

  “He will have to be inspected.”

  Trousers down round his ankles, getting creased. Hobbling, taking the fawn rug with him over the slidy floor. Mother getting up to help.

  Doctor roaring: “He’d better get used to undressing himself!”

  The carefully balanced timetable cut up the days. Mr Hoffman took Geography. Two sweets after lunch followed by compulsory rest period. Miss Lazarus took French. Desks in rows. Mr Hoffman walked up and down; sometimes he was in front, sometimes behind your back. Miss Lazarus had a special high desk she had bought herself in France. Diagrams on the walls. A woman cut through the middle; green kidneys, orange heart. A fat minim, black crotchets, quavers, semiquavers, demisemiquavers. The British Empire rolled down red, and on a dusty table in the corner a relief map of the neighbourhood with cardboard roads and bits of green sponge trees.

  He stood on the cold, bumpy football field, by the white goalposts. The others charged around. If only he could dribble right through them and smash the ball into the net… But he was glad he wasn’t one of those who just ran near the ball, shouting, pretending.

  Mr Beezley made Dan Sweeping Prefect, and in front of everybody showed him how to hold the broom so as not to sweep the dust onto his own shoes. Mr Beezley took Latin. O table. Smack smack smack smack. Dan’s eyes went flat on four walls.

  Anything could happen on Sunday. He walked through the garden at the back; looked into the greenhouse at the black grapes dangling in bubbled bunches from the green vine spreading out. Over the fence, scratched by rusty wire, down the middle of the road past the chestnut tree with the cobbled wall round it, into a wood he’d never been in before. He sensed the deep heat of autumn, saw it gobbling up the green, scraped thick moss onto his hand. Out into a new wide field, hunting for mushrooms. Hand down in wetness, fingers at the base of the stalk, gentle snap, then peel back a strip of skin to make sure it wasn’t a toadstool, nibble a bit. Puffball – puff, brown smoke. He pocketed hazelnuts. He wrenched a stick from the hedge and swiped the hedge with it. He struck the neck of a drooping flower; the dark head slipped off and down into damp dark grass. The split stalk shivered, showed sticky white blood. A tremble fixed his hand, held his stomach, legs, head. Stock-still unbelief. A hawk hovered. He pointed his stick straight at the one-pin dangerous eye. At school he was bumped awake. He told them about the fox he had seen close up.

  Harry Finegold made him go horse-riding. Such tough necks. Dan was too skinny. When the horse chewed grass, shoving his neck down, he couldn’t pull him up. Harry Finegold gripped with his knees, got the horse between his legs. Dan sat on top. He trotted, bumping. The horse saw home a half-mile down the road; his back hooves slipped as he jerked forwards in a sudden gallop. Dan sat straight as a Bengal Lancer. He could not believe he was galloping. Then slowly he slipped sideways.

  “Up you get!”

  Harry’s voice: “No.”

  “You’re going to be Prime Minister and you can’t even ride a pony!”

  He dreamt he was searching for someone among shopping crowds. He caught up with her; she changed; he saw her farther on. He held her sleeve; it came away; it was a German; black-clad Germans swung from parachutes; columns of Germans with rifles marched over him. He clung to a bomber’s wings, diving into trees, rocketing up, looping through the clouds. And at night he found easier, suppler ways – unobtrusive sexy ways. That lovely feel of between, squeezed between his slippery thighs, or under him. And in the garden lavatory, wooden bucket seat, stinking pail, he found old soft sweets, covered himself with them.

  He worked at the piano. He held his hands and wrists correctly, tapped each note separate and clear. All Sunday he practised the first page of his piece.

  “Quite good. A little wooden. Go on.”

  “That’s all I’ve done.”

  “Better play it right through, even badly.”

  “What’s the use of playing badly? I want to play it brilliantly, perfectly, better than anyone else has ever played it.”

  At half-term he gave up the piano.

  The headmaster took General Knowledge. He explained about clocks, Parliament, motor cars, the armed forces, icebergs, telephones, pollination, traffic lights, Mount Everest expeditions, orchestras, railway engines. It was Dan’s best subject. For his task he gave a talk on the Russian Revolution, and made a coloured map to show the dispositions of the Interventionist armies. At home, when his report came, his father was proud of the second in General Knowledge, and told Grandma and Uncle George. That his position in form was twelfth out of fifteen was only because he hadn’t settled down yet.

  At home Dan missed the countryside, and he walked often in the park. He would whistle ‘The Trumpet Voluntary’ or ‘The Blue Danube’ as loudly and perfectly as he could. Perhaps a composer or a violinist would come up and say: “You whistle very beautifully, young man. You have an exceptionally sensitive ear. You must take up music – one day you will be great.” Or he sang ‘The Marseillaise’, hoping that a Frenchman would recognize it and reward him for loyalty to the Republic.*

  Bryan one morning marched off to the park to help dig trenches and fill sandbags. He held a garden spade rifle-wise and did a “P-r-e-s-e-n-t arms!” Dan went to watch. At lunchtime they sat together on a park seat. Bryan tried to rub the clay off his flannels.

  “You’re the first to know, Dan. I’m joining the army.”

  “God! Dad won’t let you.”

  “I must—”

  “But Dad says you’re doing war work.”

  “As his secretary! Any woman could do the job. I’m nothing. I didn’t even go to Spain.”

  “You weren’t old enough.”

  “It’s the same war, and I’m old enough now.”

  “I’m going too.”

  “You stay at school and work like mad. You’re the clever one. You’ve got a big chance.”

  Dan wandered round the park, and arrived back at the trenches to go home with his brother. They walked along without speaking. Dan was annoyed: “Why don’t you say anything?”

  “I’m thinking. And I’m tired.”

  “But I love having proper conversations with you.”

  “You can’t order ‘one conversation’ like a pound of apples.”

  “You talk with Philip all the time.”

  “We exchange ideas.”

  Dan was silent. Then, near home, he said:

  “Plato did all the talking, and the others just said ‘Oh yes’ or ‘I don’t agree’ to set him off again. I could do that with you.”

  Bryan said: “Okay. You win. But it’s a bit late now.”

  “Yes. But after the war.”

  “Of course.”

  Bryan spoke quietly, coolly, explaining. His mother sobbed: “You mustn’t go – you’ll get killed; don’t go, please, for my sake.” His father said: “Why didn’t you discuss it with me first? But we understand how you feel. You must do what you think is right.” Dan listened.

  Bryan’s training camp was “somewhere in Scotland”. Dan watched him go on the nameless express. The thread linking their eyes pulled and pulled and snapped. Dan sat with his arms folded. An iron shovel shovelled bricks behind a planked wall of advertisements. Above, dirty panes of tough glass backed by steel netting shut off the sky. On the wide platform people walked in various directions, away from each other, unconnected, yet tog
ether making a pattern. Clip clink tread pad in time with tinned music from loudspeakers. Fat pigeons walked among them, heads bobbing out of time with their feet. An unprepared roar and shriek of steam frightened the young ones, made them jump and fly a few yards. The people took no notice. A little boy was dragged along by his mother as she hurried off somewhere; his spare hand wiped his runny nose. Three young soldiers, sweating in thick uniform, drifted by, grinning. Whippersnappers raced in and out of telephone boxes, pressing button B. Nuns looked funny and young in light blue, their big white hats turned up like paper gliders. They chatted and nodded. An Irish voice: “It was a wedding present. He picked it out with a pin.” Two girls in sky-blue shorts were glared at. I Speak Your Weight spoke a lady’s Fourteen Stone Four Pounds to everyone as she giggled. Sticks dropped and bounced on the platform. Porters shoved trolleys loaded with cartons of kippers Deposit Four Shillings. A girl from India stood blinding in orange. The fruit stall was a box on the platform, a spare bit in the train set. A pound of apples, paid for, was left on the counter. A face looked out, then a hand took the bag inside. Men wandered into the Gents’ Hairdressing & Brush-Up, emerged unchanged. A tramp searched for fag ends; his head was twisted so that his cheek was forced permanently against his shoulder. Ticket collector touched the hands of girls and watched them onto the train. Yorkshireman talked extra loud in London. A kid swung on his father’s hand: Father smiled wide and lovely. People walked in various directions, away from each other – unconnected, yet together making a pattern.

  He took the war map from Bryan’s room to his own. He replaced the little flags on pins which marked the positions of the armies: union jacks, tricolours, swastikas. He stretched coloured cotton across the pins to mark the Maginot and Siegfried lines. He cut out a big flag, marked it with a red “B” and stuck it in Scotland.

  Bryan sent letters to his brother at school, and in the holidays enclosed a separate note for him in the family letter. Once he mentioned that on his first leave he would “sell a lot of old junk, including my bicycle”. Dan hauled the bicycle out of the garage, mended the punctures, cleaned the chromium. He looked through the “wanted” columns of the local newspapers, cycled miles around reading cards in newsagents’ windows, and in the end sold it for six pounds, which he kept in his brother’s room. Another letter advised Dan to: