Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (26 page)

‘What for?'

‘She wants to tell her she's not to blame for my father's death. I can stop her if you like.'

Ken Birtles picks up a branch of driftwood. He's going to hit me, Norma thinks, but knows it is impossible. He drags it in the sand, makes a trench, wipes it level with his foot; then whacks a shell sitting on a sand tee like a ball. It whirrs away and hits a log. She's reminded of the whirring of the softball he picked out of the air in front of her face.

‘She means well. She really doesn't blame Shelley at all.'

Ken Birtles throws the stick away. ‘OK. Tell her to go ahead. It's Arohata. Corrective training.'

‘Oh, she'd address it your place. You can send it on. If you want to read it –'

‘I wouldn't do that.'

‘If you think there's anything that might upset her … My mother thinks she should be put straight about the Chote boy.'

Ken Birtles sits down on his log. He wipes his hand over his face. It's as if he takes a skin off and Norma flinches for him.

‘Hayley wants to shoot him,' he says.

‘Who? Neil Chote?'

‘But Shelley can't get out of it by putting it all on him.'

‘Does she want to?'

‘No, she doesn't. Shelley knows,' he shrugs, ‘she's mucked things up herself. Still, if she hadn't met him …'

Norma waits. ‘I'm going this way, if you want to walk.'

His jandals go smack-smack on the soles of his feet.

‘How is Hayley taking it? Apart from shooting him?'

‘She's in Australia. I sent her to her auntie.'

‘And your wife?'

‘She's in hospital.'

‘I'm sorry. I hope it's nothing …'

‘It's in here.' He taps his head. ‘She's never got over Wayne. I feel a bit like Job in the Bible.' He laughs.

‘I saw in last night's paper where you lost your job coaching the softball team.'

‘Ha, that's nothing. That's chicken-feed.'

‘But you must have enjoyed it?'

‘Yeah, I did. There's other teams. They got some tough new sheilas at Deepsea and they didn't want a man for a coach. Suits me. They'll lose from now on.'

‘I hope they do.'

‘I hope they don't. They used to be a good team.'

She finds his accent hard to place. It doesn't seem Midlands after all. ‘What part of England did you come from, Mr Birtles?'

‘A town you've never heard of. Hartlepool. Fourth Division.'

‘That's on the coast south of Newcastle.'

‘Yeah,' he says, surprised. ‘You're the first New Zealander who's ever known that.'

‘I've got the sort of mind that retains trivial facts.'

‘Hartlepool is trivial all right.'

‘I didn't mean that. Oh dear.' She sees he doesn't like her ‘oh dear', but this time he looks at her and says, ‘Where do you come from?'

‘Here. Saxton. South of it actually. I was brought up on a farm in the Stebbing Valley.'

‘Where they have the floods. I guess you're used to rain, like me. In Hartlepool it never seemed to stop.'

He wants to talk but hasn't got the words and she wonders how to help him without his knowing it. Carefully she says, ‘Do you find Saxton very strange?'

‘I like Saxton. It's a good place.' They have walked along the side of the island. Across the inlet orchards bend and dip in the hills. Mudflats shine in the sun and the little Darwood wharf sags
on its mussel-crusted piles. ‘I like things like that.'

‘It's beautiful, isn't it?'

‘It's OK. It's a long way from the beach at Hartlepool, I'll tell you that.'

He went into the ironworks, he tells her, but after a year of that knew there had to be something better, so he quit; and worked as a labourer for a while, then, almost too late, got apprenticed to a plumber, learned a trade. Now he's a maintenance man at Deepsea.

‘There's going to be redundancies next year. I'll be gone.'

She does not know what to say. ‘You are like Job.'

‘I'm not religious. I got a fair dose of the Bible from my mum. She was pretty strong on Revelations. St John, you know? But heaven seemed so damn noisy to me. All those trumpets and choirs and beasts roaring and so on. You wouldn't go there for some peace and quiet.'

Norma laughs, though not sure he means it to be funny. Perhaps he means it to be sad.

‘I usually go inland here and walk in the trees. We can get back on the beach if we take one of the roads further along.'

‘Yeah, OK. I could do with some shade.'

‘Softball seems unusual for an Englishman. I thought all Englishmen played was cricket.'

‘I used to bowl.' He picks up a pine-cone and bowls it at a tree. ‘But I don't know, I got here and I went along to a softball match with a mate of mine and it was right. Lots of noise, lots of things happening all quick, and the whole thing over in an hour, it was right. Like I really was in a new country. No three-day games and everyone taking their time. Anyhow, I was good at it. I was a Saxton rep before I got married.'

‘Now Hayley will be.'

‘Yeah, she will.' He seems uncertain. ‘She'll be good.' He underarms a pine-cone at a tree and hits it square. He is, she thinks, a man who needs to put his body at things, with skill or force, and line things up and calculate and do. She sees him squint and knows he's getting trees in a row. Then he gives a nudge and makes them knock each other down like dominoes. Yet he's not a violent man. He just needs to put himself in touch, and if not with his body, then his mind, in a practical way. He is, in fact, quite a gentle man. See the way he sets a toadstool upright.

‘Seven of them, for the seven dwarfs.'

They come to a block recently milled. It looks as if a tank battle has been fought. Norma is shocked. ‘There used to be a clearing over there. It was a nesting place for black-backed gulls.'

‘Not any more. There's a rabbit, eh.' He sights an imaginary rifle but does not shoot. Leads her through the wasteland, climbs a log, gives her his hand to help her down. ‘Pines grow quick. In a couple of years there'll be a new crop as high as your head.'

We touched, she thinks. Is he as unaware of it as he seems?

They come to a pond with most of the water gone. Fat black tadpoles rise and sink in an amber soup. A decoy duck with flaking paint rests in a bay of rushes. Ken Birtles leans out and floats it with a stick. It makes a lop-sided voyage to the centre, watching them with its faded eye. He twists a cone off a cut branch and lobs it like a hand grenade at the duck, which bobs on the ripples and noses back into the reeds.

‘Seems bloody cruel doesn't it, luring them down with wooden ducks then blasting the tripes out of them?'

But all right playing hand grenades, she thinks. Men need reconstructing. His cone very likely killed a tadpole, but he wouldn't think of that. All the same she does not like him less. The print of his hand is still on hers and she does not know whether it is pleasant or not. And he's made a print, more delicate than large, on her mind. Am I so hard up any man will do? But she's found him gentle, found him active in a strange way in his mind, and found him hurt. That makes him more than just any man.

In the trees again, he walks in front. These are big old trees, due for milling, and five finger and whitey wood have grown underneath. Ferns lean down and touch the path. He goes more slowly, bends his head. He has forgotten her, and dare she say, is it too intimate, ‘What are you thinking about?'

‘Me? Nothing. I was just …'

Remembering my kids. A day in the waterworks reserve, and trees as big as this, natives though, black beech and matai and rimu, and a path with ferns bending down from a bank and touching the ground. The Birtleses have been up to the forks and paddled in the river, and eaten boiled eggs and sausage-rolls, have drunk Coca-Cola and river-water; and Joanie and Wayne and Shelley walk
ahead, and he comes on slowly, droning a song to Hayley, two years old, in his arms. The others go round a corner, out of sight. He walks with the ferns brushing his legs. The river flashes white through the trees and lies in glass-green pools under the bank. Hayley sleeps.

That was the happiest I've been, Ken Birtles thinks. He sees Joanie walking ahead. He sees Wayne and Shelley hiding underneath the curve of the ferns. The gleam of Shelley's glasses and Wayne's white fists are four little giveaways in the foliage. He goes by humming Hayley's tune, with his face turned to the river, and hears them rustle out and pad behind him, whisper, squeak.

‘Where's Wayne and Shell?' he asks his wife.

‘I don't know, they must have gone ahead,' looking at them.

‘I hope they don't get lost.' So they walk along, until Wayne and Shelley burst with glee, and Hayley wakes …

‘Do you remember Shelley when she ran?'

‘Yes, I do. She was marvellous.'

‘The thing I remember most is the way she put her head back at the tape and her glasses went all different colours in the sun.'

That's what I was missing, Norma thinks. She sees the girl running down the straight, miles ahead. Her glasses flash and gleam and make blind ovals on her face. I saw her all clean and innocent, but I left her glasses out.

‘We didn't know her eyes were crook until she was three. Then one day she said to her mum, “Why have I got two plates of porridge?” '

‘Double vision?'

He nods. ‘We took her to a doc and she had one of those operations, you know, where they turn the eyeball over and cut the muscles at the back. It still makes me sick when I think about it.'

‘It's just as well they can though. You don't see cross-eyed children any more.'

‘She had to wear specs after that. Sometimes she had to have one of the lenses covered up.'

‘It didn't stop her being a champion runner.' He is not looking for comfort, he's remembering aloud.

‘She got contact lenses last year. She didn't seem the same any more.'

‘Girls like to try themselves without spectacles. They're very conscious of how they look at seventeen … Shall we go down on the beach again?'

‘Neil Chote knocked one of her contact lenses out when he punched her.'

That's terrible? That's sad? She does not know what to say. That's the way it turns out, you take a step, follow an inclination, or you just make a mistake, and find you've crossed into a place where civilized rules don't apply, and things like contact lenses get punched out of your eye. And how do you find your way back, if you want to come? The easy step can't just be reversed. There are labyrinths to find your way through.

They follow a track in spiky grass and walk in sand above the high water mark. He kicks a beer can. ‘Japanese beer, you get all sorts of stuff.'

‘I found a message in a bottle once. But it was a class of children from Darwood School. They'd only written it the day before.'

He laughs. He kicks the can again and sends it arcing over a log. She finds his need to use himself all the time alarming. But the skill of it, the fine calculation. He'd managed a cushion of sand between his foot and the can so he would not hurt his toe.

‘Crab shell,' he says, picking it up. ‘Nice one, eh?' He gives it to her.

‘Do you think you'll be able to get Shelley running again?' She hears the ambiguity, regrets it; but he does not seem to hear.

‘I'll give it a try. She reckons she wants to.' He looks along the beach, sees people there, and does not want to talk about Shelley any more. ‘Dead fish.' Pointing at a group of gulls by the water. They walk down.

‘Barracuda.'

‘Wicked teeth.' He's back to not liking the way she speaks – doesn't like ‘wicked'. I'll talk the way I want to, she thinks. ‘He's really not much more than a machine for killing.'

‘He just does what he's got to do.' He lifts the barracuda by its tail and swings it round his head and hurls it into the sea. Wipes his hand on his shorts. He's used to the smell of fish, she supposes. Walkers, passing, look back over their shoulders. Yes, here I am, headmistress of the college, paddling at the beach with the maintenance man from the fish factory. Take a good look.

‘Once,' she says, ‘there were millions of krill washed up here. This whole end of the beach was pink with them. Tiny little things like baby lobsters. It's funny to think of them being the food for some of the biggest creatures in the sea.'

‘Must have looked funny,' he says.

‘And there's a season, if you come out here, when you can see millions of tiny shellfish. They wash up with each wave. They're no bigger than your little fingernail. The water leaves them stranded and then they start to burrow in like mad. Before the next wave comes they're gone.'

‘It's easy to see you're a teacher.'

Norma is hurt by that.

Norma is angry.

‘I'm just conversing with you, not giving lessons. But if it offends you, I'll stop.'

He's startled, but manages a grin and won't back down. He dabs his forefinger in the air. ‘You got a way of talking from up here.'

‘From on high?'

‘Yeah, just like that.'

‘Well I'm not aware of it. Words are just words. I try to make them say what they mean.'

He seems to lose interest suddenly. His troubles have come back. Well, she thinks, I'm not a doctor, I can't cure him. ‘Yeah,' he says. They walk a hundred yards while small waves wash their feet. Wish-wash, they say; but Norma thinks she'd better not repeat it. In spite of their argument she feels easy.

‘My car's up here,' pointing at the pines.

‘Mine's along there.'

‘I'm glad we had a walk. And talk.'

‘Sure. OK.'

‘Even if I talk like a schoolteacher.'

‘It must be a tough job.' Lifts his arm, goodbye. And he enjoys, she notices, even that; exact movement, just the way it should be.