Boy Overboard

by Peter Wells

  The sound of the key sliding into the padlock. It shivers up my spine and unlocks something in my head. Matthew’s warty hands, capable and febrile, finger the key, which is small, brass, intaglio. He has had one hidden all along. Under a brick, by the lemon tree. He has been using the hut, at secret moments. And now he has drawn me here.

  ‘We’ll work on your costume together,’ he tells me, almost sternly, yet casually too, so I do not take fright.

  I note he says your costume as though it already exists and I see it there, now, ahead of me, already existing, my fate. I hunger suddenly, acutely to know see touch and then get into this costume. It hovers before me, behind that door.

  The costume. Which costume? What will he make of me?

  ‘I doan wan nothin’ special,’ I groan blackly. ‘I doan wanna stick out,’ I say looking at him suspiciously.

  I pick at my scab intensely, frowning.

  ‘I got into terrible trouble because of that owl you drew for me,’ I say to him harshly.

  A blank look settles on his face. Impact of my explosion. Then, I see the bruise on his cheekbone swelling outwards. His collar is torn away from his shirt: I smell the particles of dust, all the powder of his fallen world, shaken and ground into his pants.

  He has been fighting again. That mysterious and horrible fight, where he is picked on. I see his glasses have been taped up the side. Where they are broken.

  As if he sees my eyewater has just rinsed them, he snatches his glasses off and holds them in his hand. He looks down, sad yet defiant. He gets out his old snotrag, and polishes clean the glass.

  ‘But you won though?’ he asks me slowly.

  I leave a long trail of silence. Then I say, in a voice which is not quite like my own:

  ‘Yeah. I won,’ I say, but I lost too. I lost everything, I doan say. Everything. Cause of you.

  I’ll make you the most beautiful costume on earth, he doan say. I’ll make you a costume which will carry you up into heaven. We will leave this dust behind. He doan say.

  I am still suspicious. He knows things wider and more different than anything we know in our world. He is a Quiz Kid after all and has dragged all the spangly and awkward intelligence of half the globe into his brainbox.

  ‘What is the circumference of the globe?’

  ‘How many days did Captain Scott survive?’

  ‘Name the state capital of Alaska.’

  He knows everything yet nothing. Nothing that KeelynCarrot know in the faintest brush of their most careless fingertips. They know everything here, which is what I want to know. Matthew may paint the best owl in the universe, the most owliest of owls but it doesn’t count.

  ‘We’ll decide on the costume together,’ he says then, key in hand. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he says, secret and darkly shining.

  ‘O,’ I follow into him.

  For, away from KeelynCarrotnPonk they fade into the tiniest dot on a pore on my finger. They count for nothing but a pair of watchful eyes and a down-sagging mouth.

  ‘What costume?’ I murmur then, restless as a wind through the apple tree, lifting each petal and letting it ruffle and fluff and then settle down again, grateful and graceful.

  ‘You have beautiful hips,’ he says to me then. Intently. Creating me in that instant.

  Who am I?

  I am beautiful hips.

  ‘Like a fashion model. Suzy Kendall,’ he says knowledgeably Nodding.

  I nod too.

  This is my brother. I am numb partially through gratitude, yet also because it is my face my body my mind that is this soft wax which his masterful fingers plunge into and swiftly pass over, moulding and pushing, melding and warming, changing the inert into what becomes the surprising incidents of meaning.

  And I ache to change.

  All around me I can sense the surprise of the garden that we have come back into existence again. The apple tree. Rhubarb, strawberry patch. Stealthily watches Achilles, the cat. Sentinel, he sees us, then decides we are so unspectacular he only galvanises open a yawn and out of it comes his boredom, his greeting to us. Pink flower mouth. Folds close its petals. Achilles slummocks down and rolls over, presenting his belly to us. He stares at us mesmerically, from upside-down.

  MY BROTHER NOW stands key pricked on lockeye.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask suspiciously. ‘I ain’t goin’ in there if you doan tell me.’

  I curl my toes round inside the worn imprint of my feet at the bottom of my sandals, for at this point when I might be bidding farewell to the person I had been, I want to cling, for one last time, to the imprint of who I have been.

  But the key, the golden key, has slid in as far as it can go. I hear the tiny pock of the knock as the key hits the metal. Now, as if inside me and I feel all its movements, the key turns and connects with secret and hidden combinations so that, in a second, the padlock springs ajar. The sound of this is so shockingly precise, so like Maddy; in that instant, over by the sailing club, the gulls mistake the moment for the sun falling off the edge of the earth. They rise up in one swoon and hail and frail over the sky, darkening it with their scream: the air turns into whirlwind, and the ladybird hesitates on the viscous glitter of a lemon; the insects nestling inside the sheeted folds of a blossom pause; the cat who has been licking his inside paw over and over again stops, rolls over, stands up groggily and looks about him, mystified.

  What new pattern is this?

  HE STANDS NOW inside the hut, its fecund smells reaches out to welcome me: the waxy smell of old linoleum which has been warmed and become soft in the heat of the sun; the grannysmith apples my mother stores there; the dry papery smell from the hundreds of books (for this is our library) — it is as if the papery fibres of a forest of trees, from which the pages come, have swollen in the silence and the heat and in some fundamental way returned to being trees and wood, and emit now all the highly scented earth-sourced smells of the forest, drawing up from the moist forest floor all the cries of the earth: the Amazon momentarily flows through our hut; plus a faint scent of staleness, which comes from the track of a human finger as it passes line by line down the page; I can smell swelling out to me all the pouring out of thought and dreams and idleness as the eyes pause before the words, transfiguring the little black serifs into entire worlds, into avenues and tunnels of escape; smell too of the earth under the hut scented with shade and unrealised promise, and the grass by the door where, each morning when we sleep there, my brother stands and pisses open a beautiful green carpet.

  HE STANDS INSIDE there and waits for me cautiously, opening and shutting books as he pretends he is not waiting for me. He does not need me but I read in the small vein pulsing, fluttering with excitement by his glasses, he is anxiously awaiting my single movement. He now lays his glasses aside, wounded bird, and turns his face to look at me.

  His eyes are sightless.

  Just as mine, soon, shall be.

  Soon we shall both be operating by other senses, as if we are mute unformed beings revolving still inside the womb, attached together.

  I do not pause, indeed time has taken on the strangeness of non-being and it is not a question of walking in there so much as shortening the space between us and realising its inevitability.

  ‘I gotta have a say,’ I say, furious, knowing that I will not.

  I walk inside and pull the curtains back along the severe wires and open up the sky to see what is inside.

  HE HOLDS THE magnifying glass there.

  ‘Hold out your hand. There,’ he says. ‘Now keep it still.’

  I look down and see a small petal of fallen light, a hidden rainbow quivering, a flower, an insect being born: then pain.

  ‘Ha!’ he cries vaunting. ‘Ha!’

  I rub it, tears in eyes.

  Saliva he puts on my hand.

  ‘That is the sun,’ he says. ‘The power of the sun.’

  ‘I won’t hurt you. Truly,’ he says to me.

  I stare at him and into him. I cannot understand this i
ntoxication, he who knows of the sun and can make glass turn into flowers … of pain.

  I doan trust you, I doan say as he licks my hand with his tongue rasping me like a cat.

  ‘This will heal it,’ he says lingeringly.

  NOW HE REACHES for a book I know off by heart.

  The Film Show Annual. The Wonderful City and its Famous Inhabitants.

  He inspects the cover intently, then blows off some imaginary dust very carefully.

  I let out a low expiration of air.

  ‘You take a look,’ he says to me then, pretending to be calm.

  ‘I’ve got an idea from it,’ he says very impressively.

  I am breathing slow now, for I have the book of all secrets in my hand.

  With a blunt finger, as if summoning up a talisman, I pass my fingerpad then lay my hand flat (as one would to open a secret door) on the cool surface of the dust-jacket.

  I close my eyes and await the magic slide as I move into a trance.

  For I am travelling now.

  Escape

  I KNOW EVERY page in this book. I know the order in which the pictures happen, just as I have read and absorbed into my system every single word. The minute I finish the book I usually return to the front page — or back — and begin all over again.

  I loved the way everyone seemed to lead lives of such careful artificiality, with human beings, or rather film stars, posed in luxurious and somehow unreal sitting-rooms, pool-side gardens, or even sets imitating throne-rooms, log-cabins, gambling-dens. It was a world as strange as the circus, as wonderfully unlike the world we lived in, so at one and the same time my brother and I received the welcome intelligence: here was a world other than the one in which we were embedded, imprisoned and forced to exist.

  We ate into the words and pictures — we did not differentiate — like hungry borer in dry heat.

  I turned as I always did to the page which was my favourite. This was a photo-essay on a young actor called John Saxon.

  I looked as if for the first time at the photo of him running through curiously shallow water (one of the studio backlot lakes), then I slowed down to gaze at his body, erotically wreathed with muscles, his togs so white and tight against his dark hairy legs. I always found myself gazing at the togs as if within them or behind them lay a key to understanding the moods and feelings which had plunged me deep into a trance. Blundering after understanding and elucidation I turned to the words — words which I knew almost off by heart like a prayer or a mantra.

  JUST AS I began to read I glanced uncertainly at my brother, to work out where he was standing, what he was doing. I saw his lowered face cloud and momentarily sad as his finger ran up over his bruise, and I reached out and took his hand away, ‘Doan do that Matthew,’ I whispered almost low and painfully, ‘It don’t help,’ and joined together in that point of tender misery I smiled at him. He looked away.

  Now I began to read:

  It took me some time to realise fully what was happening to me after that day a man tapped me on the shoulder as I was walking along a New York street.

  ‘I am a photographer,’ he said. ‘How would you like a job as a model?’

  The casual tap on the shoulder …

  Only a short time passed before I was answering a long distance call from Hollywood.

  How …

  ‘How,’ I took my eyes off the page, unleashed them from the mesh of the words which held me, every time trapped, entranced, ‘… How … you going to …?’

  I was breathless, I realised. Now I raised my face up, which I felt was burningly hot for some reason (I was excited by what I had read, or shamed by the disclosures I was making by choosing John Saxon as my favourite star), my mouth was dry and my lids forced back over my eyes which I felt were bulging (yet lazy at the same time, languorous) … how?

  The great mystery of the world was being presented to me, and I in turn presented it back to my brother.

  Without bothering to answer me, or as if answering me was not necessary, Matthew simply reached forward to the book, took it out of my inert fingers. In silent concentration, he ruffled through the pages. There was an eddy of silence. He looked down at the pages which I could not see. This powerlessness, and anticipation were so delicious to me that I wished for it to go on longer. He was so silent I seemed to hear, outside the door, an apple blossom detach itself from its stem and I heard its movement through air as it swayed and whirled down and landed with the softest bruise on impact, on an upright blade of grass: then behind me (for he was standing just slightly behind me, so he looked over my shoulder inducting the words at the same time I was) — as I turned slowly to look at him, and gazed right into his face — at that second I felt a strange discovery overtake me: he had become John Saxon. He had taken on all the dark firm beauty of the young man, and in that second I became, not delirious which was how in one way I felt, but actually powerfully sane, as if I was seeing my brother for the very first time.

  Yet now John Saxon was leaning towards me, and coming so close that I fell into a state of nulled fascination. I could neither move nor speak, I was ashamed at my silence; I had taken on the mute, almost pitiful, stance of the adoring fan before a film star. I simply made a small gasp, as if my incomplete knowledge of the world was being punctured, as the real fleshly face of this small demi-god from Hollywood came closer (with real lips clearly visible). This glance passed over me, then, receding as swiftly as if I had been subject to a seizure, he returned to being my brother who now simply handed the book back to me open at a page, and tapped the image lightly.

  ‘I dreamt this up for you,’ he said.

  Famous Inhabitants

  SCREEN TOPNOTCHER YUL Brynner plays Herod, sultry King of Egypt in Cecil B. De Mille’s spectacular THE TEN COMMANDMENTS …

  I stared in silence at the picture.

  I took in not only the out-of-focus backdrop of the Sphinx and the perfect Hollywood sky, but my eye became fastened, even shocked, by the sheer drama of the man who occupied the central vortex of the photo: the explosion of a beautiful man.

  I glimpsed in that instant the body of Mr Pollen and his shadow up on the screen in the school hall (the body without a head), but here, in this photo, the man had not only a head but a savagely beautiful face. He was powerful and masculine. I looked silently at his hard midriff, his columnar forearms, the perfect circlet of his thick neck. I saw they were encircled with gold, studded with jewels, and given such a heightened curvaceous form that you became aware as much of his nakedness as you did of his costume.

  His head was shaved — in itself strangely disturbing — and he was wearing a weird kind of crown, formed smooth like a hood of what even I could read, and felt, as if it was forming inside me, as the flange of a hard penis.

  I gazed down at Yul Brynner, marvelling.

  He looked so fierce, so proud. He was the epitome of all that was manly.

  Yet I could see he was wearing a short skirt, what appeared to be a metal brassière, jewellery and make-up.

  Suddenly, I understood everything. Cleopatra was the film of the hour, the pre-publicity was drenching our town like a tidal wave. And my brother, with his sensational sense of what was current, what would be on everybody’s lips, had gone to the very heart of the matter. He had divined the invisible current which moved the insensate surface of all matter. And he had chosen for me a costume which was so clever as to be bewitching in its ambiguous choice. For though the costume was that of a man, as authenticated by the centre of all fantasy in our lives — Hollywood — it was so like a woman’s as to reach out into a strange middle ground, one which did not exist in our daily lives, but only existed in such a magic place: a book. Or in Hollywood.

  He was undercutting everybody. And he was doubling the outrageousness by offering to dress me as Cleopatra, or rather a sort of slim gilded ephebe; for clearly in this world of Egypt, or was it Hollywood? men dressed as lavishly as women. Yet the sheer fact this came from a book (and from our favourite bo
ok, with all its surreptitious pleasures) meant this choice was authenticated, even — like everything Maddy did— studiously worthy, esoteric and seemingly sanctioned by secret powers.

  I knew I was looking at some quality Maddy possessed — it was diffuse and even faintly frightening, rare and foreign, something like individuality, or genius.

  I stared down at the page silently, weighing up the danger. Yet some excitement, some sense of the imminence of escape, pouring and plashing through the veins in my body, coloured and heated charging through me as the knowledge overtook me: I could be wearing this costume, this dress, with make-up and jewels. I felt a strange lightness overcome me.

  ‘O, Maddy,’ I murmured.

  I looked down at the picture losing focus. But as I did so a strange thing happened. Because on the facing page was a large closeup of Kim Novak. She was directing a smouldering glance over her shoulder, her pullover suggestively pulled down so her shoulder shone. Her lips were parted and her eyes glazed with come-hither. The odd thing was, as I gazed down intently, the photo of Kim slid across the page and hovered, in superimposition, over Yul the king.

  I became lost in reverie, and it was as if Yul had opened up the hard vault of his chest and revealed inside it the hot invitations of a soft and yielding Kim, a vixen with sharpened fingernails behind whose gleaming eyes lay, in turn, a metal hardness, a double-edged ambiguity, both masculine and feminine webbed together, inseparable and never to be apart. Was this what everyone and everything was?

  Something itself and yet within it something else again?

  And then within that, something else again and again?

  Was this the secret?

  ‘This?’ my dry mouth formed the word which yet would not come out. There was no force of air in my diaphragm. It was as if all the air of imagination had been taken up by what I was looking at (as if I was in the desert and a hundred thousand men in glittering chariots had raced through me, leaving me dazzled and exhausted).