Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (21 page)

‘I said yes.'

‘Oh. That's good. That's great. You understand, I want nothing for myself. I know that once …'

Oh no no no, he'll never do. Why should I go backwards to this man, he's a wet. Did I ever like him? A neat and tidy partner, that was all. Presentable. And once or twice we went to bed for the fun of it. But it wasn't more than adequate as fun. Afterwards, my God, he always said, ‘Was that all right?'

She wouldn't, couldn't, go through it again, not even for the hope of being in close company a while.

Dinner though, dinner would be all right. He was a face.

‘I asked for a window table so we could see the sea.'

‘That's nice.'

‘And the alcove so …'

‘Dining out, you mean, when my father's scarcely in his grave?'

‘They love to pass judgement in this town.'

‘That isn't confined to Saxton, Tony.'

‘No, of course. Is the sun going to be in your eyes?'

It was but she wouldn't admit it. The thought of changing seats made her impatient, though the sun still shining in the sky would interfere with her appetite. Daylight-saving stepped away from nature. It caused a lag or misstep in the day. She disliked and disapproved of it. But all those yachties coming in, those windsurfers with plastic peep-holes in their sails, those families in rented dinghies and rowers in their shell and fishermen reeling up spotties from the piles, and fizz-boat drivers making feathers of spray, and skiers walking water – it was plainly just the thing for them, enlarged their lives. She must not be selfish and complain; must shield her eyes and eat her dinner.

‘I don't think the sunset will be anything special.'

He meant there were no burning towers or bloody scimitars. She smiled at his wish to provide the best for her. Gratitude wasn't in her tonight, or generosity, neutrality even, but for her own comfort she made responses designed to keep him from trying too hard.

The food was very good. She found her appetite. And the sun, when it finally went down, made nice pink blushes, apricot washes, in the sky, and then a teal-blue colour of startling purity.

‘That's good,' he said as though he had ordered it.

‘What have you been up to, Tony? Interesting cases?'

‘Well, I don't have cases actually. Property business.'

‘Making people's money multiply?'

‘Well, yes …'

‘Solemnizing the marriage between greed and legality?'

‘I don't mind if you make fun of me.'

‘You're in with Tom Round, aren't you? I suppose Tom is busy stuffing himself?'

‘I can't really talk –'

‘It's all right, Tony, I don't want you to. Weren't criminal cases more fun?'

‘They were instructive. One gets past them.'

‘Property is more grown-up than people, you mean?'

‘I'm sorry if it seems like that. Actually, dealing with violence and cruelty – I found it was making me uncertain of myself.'

She found that interesting. It was the first interesting thing he had said.

‘Do you mean you saw the possibility of those things in yourself?'

‘Oh no, good God. I mean I felt surrounded by threat – and civilized behaviour was a little island in a sea. With a kind of beastliness lapping round. This isn't the conversation I wanted to have.'

And less interesting than she had hoped. He really had no questions about himself.

‘You seem to believe in an elect.'

‘Not at all. There's nothing about my position I haven't made for myself.'

‘And the criminals, the failures, they're self-constructed too?'

‘Yes, I think so. Don't you?'

‘Is Tom Round one of your elect?'

‘That's not my word, Norma.'

‘Is he on your island? And that girl, the one who sent her boyfriend to rob my parents, is she part of your sea of beastliness?'

‘I don't know about her. The men are, certainly.'

‘Did you go to court? Did you see them?'

‘Norma, do we need to talk about this?'

‘I'd like to, Tony. Why were they charged the way they were? I thought there'd be manslaughter at least.'

‘No, your father – the medical position –'

‘They pleaded guilty right from the start.'

‘If they'd been my clients that's what I would have advised.'

‘So it will be straight back to prison for them. I can understand that as punishment. But what about when they come out? Are they better? Worse? The same?'

‘Who knows?'

‘Perhaps we should shoot them or lobotomize them. Why didn't Shelley Birtles plead?'

‘There's a dozen reasons. Come on, I'll take you home.'

‘I'd like some brandy, Tony. Tony, I knew her, she could run like the wind. She was beautiful and clean and innocent.'

‘No one's that. We're Fallen.'

‘Ah, so you get on to your island by being a Christian. And I thought it was just hard work. And learning how to hold your knife
and fork. Tony, you don't believe in Original Sin?'

‘It explains a lot.'

‘And God?'

‘Oh yes. We're in a hopeless case without Him.'

‘So it's need?' She lost interest in the argument. The blue light over the mountains drew her sight into immensities of distance. She saw Shelley Birtles running there, with her limbs shining and eyes bright. How could this girl become that one? Had she always been that one, and innocence and beauty a bit of wishing? That was almost certainly the case: a Shelley Birtles for our need, like Tony's God.

‘I think I'd like to go home now.'

‘Are you feeling all right?'

‘A little drunk. You can probably take advantage of me tonight.'

Did his fingers tremble while his expression cried no, no? Would man or gentleman come out on top? He was suddenly so rudimentary that she could not care. Does Tony in her bed cure loneliness? There's a morality in it, of what she owes herself that she must pay. Nevertheless she sinks into a kind of sullenness. Sees herself as snobbish, cowardly. Another drink will cure her doubts. A hand or mouth touching here and here. Wants the man, but wants Tony Hillman out of it. After their coupling he'll be there, naked and careful and – wrong. Self-dismay comes after that.

‘Tony, I'm sorry, I won't ask you in.'

He kisses her cheek and goes away, wrapped in his moist penumbra of desire. Coughs his car, drives into the night.

Norma has her cat on her knee again but drinks plain water instead of sherry. If Tom Round had brought her home she would have gone to bed with him, and been deeply sunk in self-dismay. She thinks of Tom a moment and turns her face from him. She thinks of John Toft; sees a falling in him towards an end. There are no others. She puts all men aside and considers living alone and knows she can carry on with it – not easily, but carry on. A large time exists for private life no matter how one fills the day with business, and she looks at the attractions of self-improvement, mental stretching, of travel, friendship, music, etc.; of placidity; of self-indulgence. Doesn't care for the Norma Sangster that she finds. Sees an evenness in her life brought about by a kind of settling.

Father dead. Mother with her brother – where she'll stay? Death
closed in its pearl – but other bits of grit that lacerate. Shelley Birtles. Neil Chote. The family Round. Settling still has a way to go.

She sips her water, strokes her cat. Regrets, for a moment, Tony Hillman, anodyne. Then is pleased to be rid of him. He'll eat no more dinners where reasonable expectation makes a side dish. She's sorry for Tony but not inclined at all to charity. Stroking will be reserved for cats. Norma laughs and shivers. How many cats will she outlive?

It's nearly midnight when she goes to the telephone. It burrs for a long while, then a voice, sleep-thickened, says, ‘Hallo … Anyone there? … Hallo, who's there?' She puts down the phone. That was a crazy idea. ‘Mr Birtles, I rang to ask … did she really … was it her … did she really send those men after my parents?'

I should ring and say I'm sorry for waking him.

And who is Shelley, Mr Birtles? What sort of world does she think she's in?

Dear Mrs Sangster,

My wife and me express our sympathy at the death of your father.

I'm sorry for what Shelley did. She was stupid but she didn't mean to be bad and she didn't mean for things to turn out the way they did. She didn't even mean for it to happen at all. But this is all on the side. We're sorry that's all.

Hayley had nothing to do with it. That's one thing you've got to believe.

Yours sincerely,
K. Birtles.

It was a curious note, and touching in its ill-concealed pain. As for the peremptory tone of its final sentence, that must hide – what? – desperation? One daughter down, only one to go. K. Birtles was right to feel desperate. Hayley had nothing to do with it because she had been somewhere else.

Am I justified in believing that? Norma thought. She's coarse-grained and sudden and physical, but people of that sort are often kind. They cry easily and kiss and stroke. But Norma had to admit she knew very little about Hayley Birtles, and nothing at all about
Shelley. As strange to her, after half a lifetime spent with girls, as creatures from the deep parts of the sea.

She worked in her office that afternoon and there had a visit from Mr Stanley. Norma had forgotten Stella's warning. She liked to be calm when he called and well-prepared with disarming phrases. She was unready when he laid the poem on her desk.

‘That's a photocopy. I've got copies for the Board of Governors too and I'm sending one to the Minister.'

‘You're well prepared as usual, Mr Stanley.'

‘It wasn't easy to track that down. I had to phone a friend in Wellington, a librarian. It's lucky Julie made a note of the title.'

‘You've trained her well.'

‘Read before you sneer at us, Mrs Sangster. Go on, read it.'

‘These parts in highlighter –'

‘They're the worst.' He squashed words with his finger. ‘That. And that.'

He had ringed as well as coloured them – ‘fart' and ‘sodomy'. Norma thought, Oh you silly girl, you really are determined to get fired. ‘I'd like to read it all before we talk.' And found it, for a while, pedestrian; then gave a start of pleasure. ‘I know this poem. I must have read it twenty years ago.'

‘It should have been banned then.'

‘Shsh, let me read.' And there it was: Old ghosts and bags of wind, gourds of the Judas tree. She could not help grinning at Mr Stanley.

‘It didn't make me laugh, Mrs Sangster.'

‘I'm sorry. Well. It's a fairly tough poem, but for girls of seventeen … If you take these bits you've marked in context, and remember that the man is dying of a heart attack –'

‘Sodomy.' He squashed it again. Then seized the paper. ‘ “Happy I could be at the end of a black journey / If one of you, or two, even by borstal, larceny, sodomy, destruction and revolt –” In black and white.'

It was, she agreed, inescapable. She wished the poet had left sodomy out.

‘There's one or two quite beautiful lines. “Be reconciled to terror: the night is terrible / In which we move and live and find our being.” '

‘You find that beautiful?'

‘Our teaching could do with a bit of contrariness. And Miss Duff is gifted, no mistake. The girls respond – '

‘Sodomy. You think they should be taught about perversions?'

Norma had no energy for the fight.

‘What do you want me to do, Mr Stanley?'

‘Plain and simple. Fire the teacher who read that to the girls.'

‘I can't fire teachers.'

‘The Board of Governors can, with your support.'

‘I've had one girl already who liked the poem.'

‘Ah, so you do know about it.'

‘She found it amusing.' And heard moral laxity in the word. So there was nothing for it but to let him talk some more. He had dry, well-brushed hair and a beautifully shaven face and a nose with twin white pressure points at the tip. Hotness in the eye, not unattractive. Like Tony Hillman, presentable, but scoring lower on her ten-point scale – she couldn't give him more than five – because of the over-neat way his ears hugged his head. She had always been put off by ears of that sort – and was interested to find (again) that when she disliked someone strongly enough there was always a physical thing she could get them with. But this was more than just dislike. She realized she detested the man: his dryness, his neatness, his deadly cramped-up mind. If he did not go away she would throw her biro and spear his cheek. Then she would be accused of being a woman. A man could lift him by the collar (would his legs curl up?) and put him out the door and gain by it.

‘Mr Stanley, would you mind? I've heard enough.'

‘What?'

‘I'll consider it. But I can't give you any more time.' She went to the door and held it open. That was a way of putting out, though it seemed for a moment it might not work. Then he set his mouth and walked by her; and Norma sat trembling in her chair. Sudden tempers, sudden tiredness, sudden elation; strange desire. Was it, she wondered, a part of grief – part of something she could not feel in the normal way? (Was there a normal way for grief?) Or were there simply too many actors in her life? – though none with the closeness she would like. Too much importuning; too many supplicating hands?

She laid her palms on her desk. Waited. Heard. She was all alone in her school but was connected, still it purred. There would not be any change in that.

And out there, in the world, who would ask her next to act or care?

And would she step up close or step away?

Neil Chote. His leather jacket slid on him like hide on a starved animal. He looked light enough to pick up and carry. The blond hair Mrs Schwass had seen standing through a hole in his stocking was combed flat, bringing out the egg shape of his head and making it look breakable.