Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (11 page)

‘Yeah, all right.'

‘An agreement?'

‘Sure. A deal. Do I have to say I'm sorry to Mrs Muir?'

Norma almost said yes. It would make things less difficult. But surely Phyllis should apologize too. Her shouting was assault and battery. ‘I'll handle that. You just take those leathers off now. And when you go stop in the lavatory and clean that stuff off your fingernails.'

‘It's just felt-tip. Comes off easy.'

‘Good. The leathers first.'

Hayley unpicked the knots. Several were too tight for one hand and Norma helped.

‘Hey Mrs Sangster, why doesn't Mrs Muir have her wart cut off?'

‘It's not a wart, it's a mole.'

‘Well, whatever. They do it with a little thing like a teaspoon, sort of scoop it out. Doesn't hurt.'

‘I don't think it's something we can very well suggest. I really don't think it bothers her.'

‘I bet it does. My aunty had a wart cut off and it was bigger than that. On a worse part of her face too. I reckon it would make her less bad tempered.'

Norma picked at the knots in silence. She could not work out whether Hayley was being malicious or compassionate and though the problem, the subject too, intrigued her, decided to get away from it. ‘I was talking to your father on Saturday. He says he's got to teach you to pitch slow.'

‘Yeah, the drop ball. I can do it. But it kinda seems like, I dunno, running scared.'

‘It's taking a bigger risk, I'd have thought.'

‘Getting belted, sure. It makes you feel good when you just kind of – drop one over the edge. Real sneaky. But you could get hit over the fence.'

‘So it's not really running scared.'

‘No, I don't s'pose so. Thanks, Mrs Sangster, that's real good. I would've got real mad if she'd cut them.'

‘Don't forget those fingernails.'

‘I won't. They're good colours, eh? Don't you reckon?'

‘Very nice. Good for out of school.'

Hayley stood up. ‘I don't suppose I can have my gum back?'

‘No Hayley, you can't.'

‘OK. Bye, Mrs Sangster. Thanks a lot.'

That skirt is still too short, Norma thought. But that could wait for another day. In fact the skirmishing would never stop, it was part of school life and although it was maddening, and ugly some of the time, you had to learn to live with it. Now and then you worked your way round the edge and came upon another person there – Hayley Birtles. But very likely Hayley would change back to her other self tomorrow. Norma did not expect good times every day.

Driving out at lunch-time, she stopped at the Amnesty cake stall by the oak tree.

‘Is there anything left? Oh, those look nice.' She bought three bran muffins, three rolled oats cookies – three of everything not sold: cup-cakes with shocking-pink icing, cup-cakes with green
icing and hundreds and thousands, and sticky squares made, it seemed, of puffed rice and icing sugar.

‘How much have you made?'

‘More than forty dollars, Mrs Sangster.'

‘It's a very good cause.'

‘They torture people, Mrs Sangster. They cut off their hands and hold their heads under water and drop them out of aeroplanes,' Belinda Round said.

‘We're very fortunate we live in New Zealand.'

Sometimes I'm too bland, she thought, driving out the gate. Her heart seemed to fill her breast and throat. Why didn't I just scream? She checked a spurt of vomit in her throat and drove through town and along the valley. There was no connection she could make between those sticky cakes on paper plates, riding beside her in the passenger seat, and torturers and victims and the bleeding stumps of arms. Her girls might be victims one day, it was possible, and did that mean torturers were among them too?

She stopped her car and stood by the roadside, holding her handkerchief to her mouth. Below her the river ran in glossy undulations over tan gravel and variegated stones. Green weed pointed downstream and made a fishy movement at the point. I suppose all this is beautiful, Norma thought; but could not respond. She felt soggy, malodorous, filled with heavy tissues and sticky blood. The air she breathed out seemed wet and bad and left a scum on her mouth.

It's a kind of hysteria, she thought; I don't want this, go away, I'm only me. She tried to call up all the good people she had known but they were shadows. Burning, tearing, gouging, filled her mind.

A car stopped behind hers and Josie Round appeared in front of her. A hand like a coloured insect settled on her arm.

‘Are you all right, Norma?'

‘Yes … I felt a little sick … that's all.'

‘It's no wonder if you've been eating those.'

‘Oh. I bought them. At a stall.'

‘You're sure you're all right? You're pale as anything.'

‘I don't know, Josie.' She wiped her eyes. ‘Sometimes I just can't stand being alive.'

‘Man trouble?'

‘No, no. Oh Josie.' Norma laughed. ‘I'm all right. Really I am.
These things pass. I was just driving up to see Lex Clearwater.'

‘With half a ton of cakes it looks like. I seem to recognize some of those.'

‘They're from Belinda's Amnesty stall.'

‘Yes, I thought so. Puffed rice nothings, that's Belinda. She gets all concerned but five-minute monstrosities are all she can stretch herself to. Are you sure? Sure it's not a man? I'll organize a squad and we'll de-bollock him.'

Norma laughed and closed her yes. De-hand, de-bollock. Josie was a good person, she supposed. ‘I'd better get on, Josie. I've got to see Lex.'

A car swept by. ‘Someone's beaten you to it. You know all about them, I suppose?'

‘Sandra Duff? Lex and Sandra?'

‘Oh, you don't. Well, no harm done, they're over sixteen. They play games on the lawn, according to Stella. A wee bit careless, if you ask me. I've got to go, if you're all right. Good grief, it isn't Lex? No, of course not. One thing you've got, Norma, is standards.'

One felt this edge of malice in Josie. It seemed quite undifferentiated so the best thing was not to take it personally. Norma was more concerned about Lex and Sandra – and not pleased. Wanted, she understood, to have her staff something less than human in that quarter. They had been discreet though, she admitted. And Stella Round had been discreet. Or was it common knowledge among the girls? Norma felt in less than full control. Her hands, she noticed, putting them on the car door, trembled a little. Now she could not be sure of the cause.

‘Life isn't all affairs,' she said to Josie.

‘I know that. The best part's got nothing to do with men. Oh Norma, thanks for being nice to Duncan. He came home all lit up the other day. Jesus, Jesus, don't I choose my words. I can't get used to it. I can't get used to seeing him like that.' She beat a tattoo on Norma's car roof. ‘You're a teacher, tell me what to do.'

‘Norma could not find anything to say. Treat him the way you treat the girls.'

‘Oh how easy. Thank you very much.'

‘I enjoyed seeing him the other day. He's a very interesting boy. Do you know –' She was about to describe his mind but stopped. Duncan unveiled what he chose, to whom he chose, she was sure
of it; and Josie might have been shown something else.

‘I think he's got a great ability for learning things. I think he should be taught properly.'

‘I saw the book you gave him. It's a bit of a funny book to lend a boy.'

‘Oh, that was really just to try him out. The accident changed him, I don't have to tell you that. But it didn't, well, put a stop to him.'

‘Tom thinks so.'

‘Well Tom doesn't get a vote. I told Duncan to come and see me again. Is that all right?'

‘Of course. If you can do something … anything. You've no idea how grateful … Sometimes I think I'm going mad. Sometimes I think there is God and he's having fun with Duncan and me. How's that for an old card-carrying atheist?'

‘Considering what happened I think you're doing well.'

‘Ta very much. Well, I'd better go and feed him or he'll fill himself up with water biscuits. See you, Norma. Don't let the bastards get you down.' She banged the car roof and ran back to her little brand-new Japanese bug and zipped past, tooting goodbye, before Norma had her car in gear.

Norma drove slowly, feeling the camber of the road. Way ahead the bright metallic lid covering Josie sped like a ground-hopping aeroplane. It flashed blue to silver, butterfly wing, and made a cruel right-angle turn on to the pink-shell road leading up the hill to Tom Round's house on its terraced lawn. It was hard, Norma thought, to imagine Josie and Tom, with their bank accounts, investments, careers, their waterfall house, suffering as other people suffered. Yet without the accumulated worries and defeats that weighed on others – on the Birtleses – how huge and bare their tragedy must seem. One would have expected it to give them dignity. But instead Tom squealed and hid himself and Josie started in a dozen ways and followed none. The only ones with dignity, she thought, were Duncan himself and Belinda.

She crossed the bridge over the tributary creek that gave Tom his private water supply and kept his lawns green in summer droughts, and drove in willow shade, with golfers across the swimming holes on her right – a woman in a red hat putting, and a man in twenties clobber, knickerbockers and pudding-bag cap, holding
himself in fractured stance as though for a photograph.

Lex's house came into view. It stood on a narrow ledge on the hillside, with patches of bracken like quilted place-mats all about, and tea-tree, broom, gorse, a froth of green and yellow, tumbling to the road. The plane of the ledge was tipped towards her and she saw Lex's ute standing there; and Sandra's car pull into place beside it. She felt an irritation that this affair, if it was affair, should be taking place in school time; wondered if she would find Lex and Sandra ‘playing games'. It did not stop her, made her grim, and she turned into his drive, ground up in low gear with the car rocking in clay ruts and foliage scraping its sides. On one corner a tethered goat watched her go by with a nose-in-air look. It would not have been out of place at a royal garden party. An old bath quarter full of scummy water stood on the next bend, with a plastic duck, lopsided and green with slime, but jaunty still, sitting in it. It must have belonged to – she could not remember the child's name and was not even sure of its sex.

There was no place for her car on the lawn. She stopped in front of the shed and climbed out and smoothed down her skirt. The house seemed crumbling to its elements, as dry and fractured as the hill above, with bits sliding off and others suffering breakdown or decay. A broken window had a piece of hardboard nailed across it. Knives of glass gleamed in the weeds. She went across and gathered them up and slid them under the porch. Sandra came out of the house and watched.

‘Waste of time,' she said.

‘Is Lex at home?'

‘He's not inside. He's probably up the hill. I only came to see he hadn't broken his neck or something.'

‘Has he been sick do you know?'

‘Not yesterday. Unless you count sick in the head.' She shook herself, trying to shake her hardness off, and her bells made a sweet tinny tinkle. ‘Listen Mrs Sangster, I don't know how much you care about Lex. I guess you're just worried about him doing his job. But I'm not sure he can any more. He's not in touch with real things, that's what I think. You might as well know he's giving notice. But if you ask me he should stop now and see a doctor. Because he needs someone to grab hold. Before he gets too far away.'

‘When's he giving notice?'

‘At the end of the year.' She saw a movement high on the hill and jumped down from the porch to the lawn. ‘Lex,' she yelled; and turned to Norma again. ‘Stop worrying about your school. You can get a replacement. I'm trying to tell you about Lex.'

‘What do you think's the matter with him?'

‘I don't know. He's in some fantasy world with his goats. They're like some kind of lost tribe and he wants to lead them to the promised land.

‘Lex, come down,' she shouted. ‘We can see you.'

Norma could not see him. She saw goats in the bracken, all with their heads pointing down the hill, but no sign of Lex. Huge white slung-belly clouds sat above the pine-row and the world seemed tilted over and the ground beneath her feet on a slant instead of flat.

‘Come on, Lex. We haven't got all day. The boss is here.'

‘Where is he?'

Sandra pointed. ‘Over by the fence.'

She saw him then, with just his head poking from the bracken. He looked like a grub in a hole. She knew, with certainty, that Sandra was right, Lex was sick, and felt at once she must protect her girls. School was not a world without sin, but large sins, large sicknesses, must be kept out. She realized she had never seen Lex clearly, that a cloud of darkness hung about him and she had tried to dissipate it by laughing at him and pitying him, and lost sight of the damage he might do. She was filled with a retrospective fear and felt her eyes glitter like swords as she prepared to cut him down.

Lex unfolded, stood in the bracken waist deep. He held a small goat in his arms and turned to lay it down out of sight.

Sandra made a hard sound of amusement. ‘Enkidu before the harlot got him. Well, I'm off. Tell him I'll come up tonight. Or maybe not. Flesh and blood can only stand so much.'

She got into her car, reversed in an arc, drove swishing through the grass round Norma's car, and set off down the drive with thin dust smoking behind her.

Lex slid and leaped down the hill. He too left a trail, as though he scorched the ground in passing. He braked by grabbing handfuls of tea-tree. She thought he would run through the fence, but he pushed out his sole against a post, making it give a loud crack. His
other foot skidded through shale and sent a spray of stones against the stile. ‘Gidday,' he said, climbing over.