Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (35 page)

He slides and jumps, comes to the broken fence and scrambles through. Wire scrapes his leg and blood wells on his thigh. He goes past his house, running hunched to protect his hand. He runs down the drive and feels hot wind pouring in the funnel of the scrub. He reaches the gate; and it's locked. He grabs the padlock,
jerks and jerks, then lifts the gate, trying to spring it from its hinges. The goats are bleating further along the fence. He leaves the gate and breaks into the gorse, worming and leaping. He does not remember his cut hand. The booming in the sky flattens him. He has to keep gulping air and pulling it, hot, into his lungs.

The goats are in the corner. They can see the river and they butt and heave and throw themselves against the hurricane wire. He grabs the nearest one and throws it over. It lands on its side and falls down a bank and runs free. He throws another, untangles horns from the wire, throws again. He chases a billy up the fence and heaves it free. Then back to the corner for the last one. It makes a twisting arc over the wire and leaps out of sight down the bank.

Lex can climb the fence now and get to the river in time. But he turns and goes the other way. There's still the goat chained by the tea-tree patch beyond the house.

He can't breathe. There's no air. He reaches the goat, strangling in its collar, and kneels on it and works at the buckle with both hands.

The fireball comes across the valley. It flies in an arc and ignites the hill. As Lex looks into the blinding whiteness, looks and falls on his side, with his hair burning, the house explodes, the tea-tree clump explodes.

Lex Clearwater dies. If he had survived he might have stayed back from being a goat and made some sense of his time there. He narrowed down by sympathetic and intellectual choice and was in control of his movement for a while. Then it got away and Lex went rushing to that minimal I. He felt his mind come folding back at him, like a blanket folding – GOOD, good, good – into the fact, Me, Here, Now. He rested in that stillness. Nothing disturbed him but his needs. Perhaps there's no safe way back from there. Perhaps the fire was his only way.

Goat or man, Lex dies on the hill.

Along the valley, Duncan and Hayley survive.

Hayley lifts her cheek from his thigh. She cannot find anything to say but his name.

He leans back on his arms. He lies down with his legs dangling in
the pool. For a moment it seems he's lying down to die. His feet, under the water, are white and dead.

She pushes herself away from the wall and swims to the deep end. When she looks back he hasn't moved – and Hayley begins to be impatient. He's making too much of it; like Shelley does. But when she thinks of being burned down there – touches her own genitals – how can you make too much of that? It does make you dead in a sort of way.

‘What's the time, Duncan?' Her watch is in the house with her clothes. ‘Hey, did you hear me, what's the time?'

He lifts his arm to show her he doesn't wear a watch. Hayley climbs out of the pool. She wishes Mrs Round would come back. She doesn't like the way her heart thumps with this feeling of sorrow. Yet it's so posh at the Rounds' house she wants to stay. He spoils it, like a body, over there.

She dries some of the water off her legs and goes into the house to find a drink. There's Just Juice in the fridge along with all sorts of cheese and bottles of wine. She pours a glass and goes to the window to ask Duncan if he'd like some too. Smoke stands like a wall beyond the hill, with big puffy lumps on top of it. Hayley can't believe it, there's so much.

‘Hey Dunc, look at that.'

She leaves her drink and runs outside. ‘Look at the smoke.' She can hear the fire coming up the hill on the other side. It makes a sound like rapids in a creek.

‘There's a fire, Duncan.'

He lifts himself on his elbow and looks at the sky. ‘Yeah,' he says.

‘Is it coming this way?'

He stands up and brushes dust off his shorts. ‘I suppose so. The wind's blowing this way.'

‘Listen to it.'

‘Yeah.'

‘We better get out.'

‘No, we're all right.'

‘It's a bush fire, Duncan. It's a big one.'

‘It won't come here.'

Hayley runs back into the house and climbs half a level to the sundeck. Smoke covers the sun. A red-gold colour comes on her skin and the valley goes darker. She sees Duncan walking on the
lawn. He sits in a canvas chair and looks at the long wall of smoke on the hill.

‘I'm getting out,' Hayley says. Then she sees flames – one, two, three places at once. They come down the valley on the town side of the house, bouncing along the scrub like a ball and sending puffs of smoke up where they touch. They reach over the hill, holding on like fingers, above the house. And up the valley they slide on Stovepipe Hill. A ball of fire with a long red tail shoots from behind another hill and hits the hillside by Lex Clearwater's house. She sees the house and sheds burst into flames.

Hayley runs along the deck and looks downriver towards town. Fire is down there too, by Monday Hole. The gully scrub boils up red like liquid in a pot.

Hayley runs back through the house.

‘Duncan, we've got to get down to the river.'

Duncan has climbed into the garden to see better. He turns with his hands on his hips and smiles at her.

‘It's too late. We're trapped.'

‘When it gets in those gum trees it'll be like a bomb.' The slope will be a chimney and will suck flames down the hill. They'll leap from the gum trees to the pines, right over the house and roof it in. It's like a sun-flare, Duncan thinks, picturing that huge leap and curve. Everything underneath will shrivel up and turn to ashes. He doesn't mind.

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.

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.

Thanks are due to the Pegasus Press and Mrs J. Baxter
for permission to quote from
‘Prize-giving Speech' by James K. Baxter.

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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