by William Boyd
“Cig’rette. Give me cig’rette,” Israel demanded, laughing in his high, wheezy way.
“Oh, all right,” Gavin grudgingly replied, handing over the packet he had stolen from his mother’s handbag the day before. Israel promptly lit one and confidently puffed smoke up into the washed-out blue of the African sky.
Gavin walked back up the garden to the house. He was a thin, dark boy with a slightly pinched face and unusually thick eyebrows that made his face seem older than it was. He went through the kitchen and into the cool, spacious living room, with its rugs and tiled floor, where two roof fans energetically beat the hot afternoon air into motion.
The room was empty and Gavin walked along the verandah past his bedroom and that of his older sister. His sister, Amanda, was at boarding school in England; Gavin was going to join her there next year. He used to like his sister but since her fifteenth birthday she had changed. When she had come out on holiday last Christmas she had hardly played with him at all. She was bored with him; she preferred going shopping with her mother. A conspiracy of sorts seemed to have sprung up between the women of the family from which Gavin and his father were excluded.
When he thought of his sister now, he felt that he hated her. Sometimes he wished the plane that was bringing her out to Africa would crash and she would be killed. Then there would be only Gavin; he would be the only child. As he passed her bedroom he was reminded of this fantasy and despite himself he paused, thinking about it again, trying to imagine what life would be like—how it would be different. As he did so, the other dream began to edge itself into his mind like an insistent hand signalling at the back of a classroom, drawing attention to itself. He had this dream quite a lot these days and it made him feel peculiar; he knew it was bad, a wrong thing to do, and sometimes he forced himself not to think about it. But it never worked, for it always came faltering back with its strange imaginative allure, and he would find himself lost in it, savouring its pleasures, indulging in its sweet, illicit sensations.
It was a variation on the theme of his sister’s death, but this time it also included his father. His father and sister had died in a car crash and Gavin had to break the news to his mother. As she sobbed with grief she clung to him for support. Gavin would soothe her, stroking her hair as he’d seen done on TV in England, whispering words of comfort.
In the dream Gavin’s mother never remarried, and she and Gavin returned to England to live. People would look at them in the street, the tall elegant widow in black, and her son, growing tall and more mature himself, being brave and good by her side. People around them seemed to whisper: “I don’t know what she would have done without him,” and, “Yes, he’s been a marvel,” and, “They’re so close now.”
Gavin shook his head, blushing guiltily. He didn’t hate his father—he just got angry with him sometimes—and it made him feel bad and upset that he kept on imagining him dead. But the dream insistently repeated itself, and it continued to expand; the narrative furnished itself with more and more precise details; the funeral scene was added, the cottage Gavin and his mother took near Canterbury, the plans they made for the school holidays. It grew steadily more real and credible—it was like discovering a new world—but as it did, so Gavin found himself more dissatisfied with the way things were.
Gavin slowly pushed open the door of his parents’ bedroom. Sometimes he knocked, but his mother had laughed and told him not to be silly. Still, he was cautious, as he had once been horribly embarrassed to find them both asleep, naked and sprawled on the rumpled double bed. But today he knew his father was at work in his chemistry lab. Only his mother would be having a siesta.
But Gavin’s mother was sitting in front of her dressing table brushing her short but thick reddish auburn hair. She was wearing only a black bra and pants that contrasted strongly with the pale freckly tan of her firm body. A cigarette burned in an ashtray. She brushed methodically and absent-mindedly, her shining hair crackling under the brush. She seemed quite unaware of Gavin standing behind her, looking on. Then he coughed.
“Yes, darling, what is it?” she said without looking round.
Gavin sensed rather than appreciated that his mother was a beautiful woman. He did not realise that she was prevented from achieving it fully by a sulky turn to her lips and a hardness in her pale eyes. She stood up and stretched languidly, walking barefooted over to the wardrobe, where she selected a cotton dress.
“Where are you going?” Gavin asked without thinking.
“Rehearsal, dear. For the play,” his mother replied.
“Oh. Well, I’m going out too.” He left it at that. Just to see if she’d say anything this time, but she seemed not to have heard. So he added, “I’m going with Laurence and David. To kill lizards.”
“Yes, darling,” his mother said, intently examining the dress she had chosen. “Do try not to touch the lizards. They’re nasty things. There’s a good boy.” She held the dress up in front of her and looked at her reflection critically in the mirror. She laid the dress on the bed, sat down again and began to apply some lipstick. Gavin looked at her rich red hair and the curve of her spine in her creamy back, broken by the dark strap of her bra, and the three moles on the curve of her haunch where it was tautened by the elastic of her pants. Gavin swallowed. His mother’s presence in his life loomed like a huge wall at whose foot his needs cowered like beggars at a city gate. He wished she bothered about him more, did things with him as she did with Amanda. He felt strange and uneasy about her, proud and uncomfortable. He had been pleased last Saturday when she took him to the pool in town, but then she had worn a small bikini and the Syrian men round the bar had stared at her. (David’s mother always wore a swimsuit of a prickly material with stiff bones in it.) When he went out of the room she was brushing her hair again and he didn’t bother to say goodbye.
Gavin walked down the road. He was wearing a striped T-shirt, white shorts and Clarks sandals without socks. The early afternoon sun beat down on his head and the heat vibrated up from the tarmac. On either side of him were the low senior-staff bungalows, shadowy beneath their wide eaves. They seemed to be pressed down into the earth, as if the blazing sun bore down with intolerable weight. The coruscating scarlet dazzle of flamboyant trees that lined the road danced spottily in his eyes.
The university campus was a large one but Gavin had come to know it intimately in the two years since his parents had moved to Africa. In Canterbury his father had been only a lecturer but here he was a professor in the Chemistry Department. Gavin loved to go down to the labs with their curious ammoniacal smells, brilliant fluids and mad-scientist constructions of phials, test-tubes and rubber pipes. He thought he might pay his father a surprise visit that afternoon, as their lizard hunt should take them in that direction.
Gavin and his two friends had been shooting lizards with their catapults for the three weeks of the Easter holidays and had so far accounted for 143. They killed mainly the male and female of one species that seemed to populate every group of boulders or area of concrete in the country. The lizards were large, sometimes growing to eighteen inches in length. The females were slightly smaller than the males and were a dirty speckled-khaki colour. The males were more resplendent, with brilliant orange-red heads, pale-grey bodies and black-barred feet and tails. They did no one any harm, just basked in the sun doing a curious bobbing press-up motion. At first they were ludicrously easy to kill. The boys could creep up to within three or four feet and with one well-placed stone reduce the basking, complacent lizard to a writhing knot, its feet clawing at a buckled spine or shattered head. A slight guilt had soon grown up among the boys and they accordingly convinced themselves that the lizards were pests and that, rather like rats, they spread diseases.
But the lizards, like any threatened species, grew wise to the hunters and now scurried off at the merest hint of approach, and the boys had to range wider and wider through the campus to find zones where the word had not spread and where the lizards still clung unconc
ernedly to walls, like dozing sunbathers unaware of the looming thunderclouds.
Gavin met his friends at the pre-arranged corner. Today they were heading for the university staff’s preparatory school at a far edge of the campus. There was an expansive outcrop of boulders there with a sizeable lizard community that they had been evaluating for some time, and this afternoon they planned a blitz.
They walked down the road firing stones at trees and clumps of bushes. Gavin teased Laurence about his bandy legs and then joined forces with him to mock David about his spots and his hugely fat sister until he threatened to go home. Gavin felt tense and malicious, and lied easily to them about how he had fashioned his own catapult, which was far superior to their clumsier home-made efforts. He was glad when they rounded a corner and came in sight of the long simple buildings of the chemistry labs.
“Let’s go and see my dad,” he suggested.
Gavin’s father was marking exam papers in an empty lab when the three boys arrived. He was tall and thin with sparse black hair brushed across his balding head. Gavin possessed his similar tentative smile. They chatted for a while; then Gavin’s father showed them some frozen nitrogen. He picked a red hibiscus bloom off a hedge outside and dipped it in the container of fuming liquid. Then he dropped the flower on the floor and it shattered to pieces like fine china.
“Where are you off to?” he asked as the boys made ready to leave.
“Down to the school to get lizards,” Gavin replied.
“There’s a monster one down there,” said David. “I’ve seen it.”
“I hope you don’t leave them lying around,” Gavin’s father said. “Things rot in this sun very quickly.”
“It’s okay,” Gavin affirmed brightly. “The hawks soon get them.”
Gavin’s father looked thoughtful. “What’s your mother doing?” he asked his son. “Left her on her own, have you?”
“Israel’s there,” Gavin replied sullenly. “But anyway she’s going to her play rehearsal or something. Drama, drama, you know.”
“Today? Are you sure?” his father asked, seemingly surprised.
“That’s what she said. Bye, Dad. See you tonight.”
The school lay on a small plateau overlooking a teak forest and the jungle that stretched away beyond it. The outcrop of rocks was poised on the edge of the plateau and it ran down in pale, pinkish slabs to the beginning of the teak trees.
The boys killed four female lizards almost at once but the others had rushed into crevices and stayed there. Gavin caught a glimpse of a large red head as it scuttied off, and the three of them pelted the deep niche it hid in and prodded at it with sticks, but it was just not coming out.
Then Gavin and Laurence thought they saw a fruit bat in a palm tree, but David couldn’t see it and soon lost interest. They patrolled the deserted school buildings for a while and then hung, bat-like themselves, on the jungle gym in the playground. David, who had perched on the top, heard the sound of a car as it negotiated a bumpy rutted track that led into the jungle and which ran for a while along the base of the plateau. He soon saw a Volkswagen van lurching along. A man was driving and a woman sat beside him.
“Hey, Gavin,” David said without thinking. “Isn’t that your mother?”
Gavin climbed quickly up beside him and looked.
“No,” he said. “Nope. Definitely.”
They resumed their play but the implication hung in the air like a threat, despite their suddenly earnest jocularity. In the unspoken way in which these things arrange themselves, David and Laurence soon announced that they had to go home. Gavin said that he would stay on a bit. He wanted to see if he could get that big lizard.
Laurence and David wandered off with many a backward-shouted message about where they would meet tomorrow and what they would do. Then Gavin clambered about half-heartedly on the jungle gym before he walked down the slope to the track, which he followed into the teak forest. There was still heat in the afternoon sun and the trees and bushes looked tired from a day’s exposure. The big soup-plate leaves of the teak trees hung limply in the damp, dusty atmosphere.
Gavin heard his mother’s laugh before he saw the van. He moved off the track and followed the curve of a bend until he saw the van through the leaves. It was pulled up on the other side of the mud road. The large sliding door was thrown back and Gavin could see that the bunk bed inside had been folded down. His mother was sitting on the edge of the bunk, laughing. A man without a shirt was struggling to zip up her dress. She laughed again, showing her teeth and throwing back her head, joyously shaking her thick red hair. Gavin knew the man: he was called Ian Swan and sometimes came to the house. He had a neat black beard and curling black hair all over his chest.
Gavin stood motionless behind the thick screen of leaves and watched his mother and the man. He knew at once what they had been doing. He watched them caper and kiss and laugh. Finally Gavin’s mother tugged herself free and scrambled round the van and into the front seat. Gavin saw a pair of sunglasses drop from her open handbag. She didn’t notice they had fallen. Swan put on his shirt and joined her in the front of the van.
As they backed and turned the van Gavin held his breath in an agony of tension in case they should run over the glasses. When they had gone he stood for a while before walking over and picking up the sunglasses. They were quite cheap; Gavin remembered she had bought them last leave in England. They were favourites. They had pale blue lenses and candy-pink frames. He held them carefully in the palm of his hand as if he were holding an injured bird.
MUMMY …
As he walked down the track to the school, the numbness, the blank camera stare that had descended on him the moment he had heard his mother’s high laugh, began to dissipate. A slow tingling charge of triumph and elation began to infuse his body.
OH, MUMMY, I THINK …
He looked again at the sunglasses in his palm. Things would change now. Nothing would be the same after this secret. It seemed to him now as if he were carrying a ticking bomb.
OH, MUMMY, I THINK I’VE FOUND YOUR SUNGLASSES.
The lowering sun was striking the flat rocks of the outcrop full on and Gavin could feel the heat through the soles of his sandals as he walked up the slope. Then, ahead, facing away from him, he saw the lizard. It was catching the last warmth of the day, red head methodically bobbing, sleek torso and long tail motionless. Carefully Gavin set down the glasses and took his catapult and a pebble from his pocket. Stupid lizard, he thought, sunbathing, head bobbing like that, you never know who’s around. He drew a bead on it, cautiously easing the thick rubber back to full stretch until his rigid left arm began to quiver from the tension.
He imagined the stone breaking the lizard’s back, a pink welling tear in the pale scaly skin. The curious slow-motion way the mortally wounded creatures keeled over, sometimes a single leg twitching crazily like a spinning rear wheel on an upended crashed car.
The lizard basked on, unaware.
Gavin eased off the tension. Holding his breath with the effort, heart thumping in his ears. He stood for a few seconds letting himself calm down. His mother would be home now; he should have enough time before his father returned. He picked up the sunglasses and backed softly away and around, leaving the lizard undisturbed. Then, with his eyes alight and gleaming beneath his oddly heavy brows, he set off steadily for home.
Bizarre Situations
Before we start, something from this book I’m reading called Truth, Falsehood and Philosophy: “It occasionally happens that a situation is so new and unusual that no speaker of the language is equipped to say what words are appropriate for it. We shall call such situations bizarre.”
That’s what the book says, and I think it’s quite interesting and fairly relevant. But, how to begin? Perhaps:
I shall never forget the sight of Joan’s crumpled body, her head clumsily de-topped, like a fractious child’s attempt to open a boiled egg; as if some giant’s teaspoon had levered and battered its way to Joan’
s decidedly average brain.
Or maybe:
I am here in Paris, Monday night, Bar Cercle, Rue Christine—well into my third Pernod—looking for Kramer. Kramer who came to stay and allowed his wife to suicide in my guest bedroom. Suicide? No chance. Kramer murdered her and I have the proof. I think.
Or possibly:
To cure some chronic cases of epilepsy, surgeons sometimes resort to a severance of the corpus callosum, the substance that holds together—and forms a crucial link between—the two hemispheres of the brain. The cure is radical, as is all brain surgery, but on the whole completely successful. Except, that is, for some very unusual side effects.
Into which we shall go later; my own epilepsy has been cured in this way. But, to return, the problem now is that all the beginnings are very apt, very apt indeed. Three of them though: three routes leading God knows where. And then, endings, too, are equally important, for—really—what I’m after is the truth. Or even TRUTH. A very elusive character. As elusive as bloody Kramer, sod him.
My preoccupation with truth arises from the division of my corpus callosum and explains why I am reading this book called Truth, Falsehood and Philosophy. I open at random. Chapter Two: Expressing Beliefs in Sentences. “Beliefs are hard to study directly and many sentences do not naturally state beliefs.…” My eyes dart impatiently down the page: “… although truth does not have degrees it does have many borderline cases.” At last something pertinent. For someone with my unique problems these donnish evasions and qualifications are incredibly frustrating. So, “truth has borderline cases.” Good. I’m glad to find the academics admit this much, especially as since my operation the whole world has become a borderline case for me.
Kramer was at school with me. To be candid I admired him greatly and he casually exploited my admiration. In fact you could say that I loved Kramer—in a brotherly sort of way—to such an extent that, had he bothered to ask, I would have laid down my life for him. It sounds absurd to admit this now, but there was something almost noble about Kramer’s disregard for everyone except himself. You know these selfish people whose selfishness seems quite reasonable—admirable, really, in its refusal to compromise. Kramer was like that: intelligent, mysterious and self-absorbed.