by Peter Wells
‘This?’ I said again, so that my voice came out strangled and uneven, running up and down the register improbably.
‘This?’ I said a third time, and turned my eyes wonderingly towards my brother, to see if he was really insane or, in fact, by a reverse process rendered into a sanity so intense it mimicked the lunacy of the insane. I knew this was dangerous.
‘This?’
He remained silent as the Sphinx printed on the page.
O, Keely, o, Carrot I moaned in my mind as I saw, even felt them grow fainter and fade away into total silence. Ponky, too, had become swiftly irrelevant. None of these people could deliver me to this state of rapture, this conceptualisation of the missing word.
Taking the book from me, Maddy held it behind him and took on the strangely deflective look of someone in whom all knowledge resided and who must impart it with due ceremony, and only at the right time.
He pursed his lips slightly and then said to me almost casually:
‘Oh, yes. We shall have to take measurements.’
Disguise
I RETURNED TO Ponky’s in a state of exhaustion. Aunty Gilda was sitting in the kitchen, reading the newspaper. This was so strange I glanced down at the page. It was the page in which court trials were written up. There was no sign of Ponk.
Aunty Gilda looked up from the newspaper surprised to see me.
In that instant I caught the last beam of a reflection on her face: it was a worried look, tense, which instantly disappeared before my presence and she assumed an almost unnatural sprightliness behind which she quickly hid whatever was worrying her.
‘How’s my Jamieboy, then? Been having a good time?’ she asked as if that was the only time possible or allowable to be mentioned. Then she saw something in my own face, and because she was a sensitive woman who loved me in her own way, she simply said in a softer voice, ‘Go and wash your hands, pet, we’ll soon be having tea. Just us two together.’
I left her in the gathering darkness of the kitchen; the seasons were swiftly changing and what was, only a few weeks before, a room wreathed in autumnal sunlight was now only getting the reflected heat off a single plaster wall. As I trudged into Ponk’s bedroom and threw myself down on my single bed — recognising in it the only home I had in the world — I heard the sound take up, slightly nervously and anxiously, like a tongue touching a hole in a tooth, again and again, repetitively: the sound of the ice-cream scoop Aunty Gilda used to place dollops of mashed potato on the plate.
AUNTY GILDA’S INVENTORY of my day had long since evaporated into silence. I had told her nothing about what happened in the hut (not out of dishonesty but because I could not comprehend what she would make of it, I wanted to protect the tender novelty of it, the fact the entire scenario was in its opening moments meant I wanted to shield the infinite possibilities, nurse all its futures in marvelling silence).
The only sound in the kitchen was the knock of our stainless-steel knives on the plates. We were having luncheon sausage, Watties tomato sauce, mashed potato and Birds Eye peas. That this was Ponk’s favourite meal on earth only emphasised, in a melancholy way, her absence.
I noticed also, but only dimly and even thankfully, that Uncle Ambrose was not so much not home but not even mentioned, as if he was the furthest person from Aunty Gilda’s thoughts. Yet looking into her face, as my eyes did simply by the dint of the fact of having to look at something — someone — I could see Aunty Gilda’s face was scrawled over with lines, and she looked old. I looked at her underslung jaw with the faint jowls of incipient middle-age, the bulbous nose, the thin, usually overpainted lips.
Now her lips were unpainted and there was a naked kind of vulnerability in her glance.
Suddenly, as if seeing my eyes were spying on her, her own eyes turned to me and there were a thousand oscillations of thought, almost as if Aunty Gilda was seeing me anew. She assessed me, her eyes taking on a distant look. At the same time, as if she could not hold it back, a deep sigh ran through her body, and some sediment of melancholy, of worry settled as ballast in her light and effervescent spirit.
Her hand reached out across the table and I, half involuntarily, put my hand out and we held on to each other, in complete silence.
I felt through her body some ebbing vibration, some tidal pull which flowed into me and was made neutral, or stiller by my sheer elemental blankness about what might be upsetting her.
I simply squeezed her hand back, once twice and my mouth fell open; I was about to vow eternal allegiance to her, spread out before her the carpet or cloak of my eternal admiration. But the words did not come, perhaps did not need to come.
‘Jamie,’ she said to me, and giving my hand one reciprocal squeeze back, she withdrew hers and went on slowly eating. But her eyes returned to me. ‘You’ve been enjoying it here, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said not allowing the smallest pause to enter into the equation which might open up any amount of uncertain emotions and complexities. ‘I miss my Mum,’ I said to her then in a naked husky voice. I hung my head, embarrassed to be expressing this.
‘Well, pet, she won’t be away too much longer,’ Aunty Gilda said. Then she added something which seemed to be a non-sequitur: ‘Everything turns out alright in the end.’
And she let out another deep sigh, which, in effect, acted as a cancelling out of her last statement.
I looked at her, wondering what she meant. I myself felt tired, exhausted, as if I had begun a long journey and had only reached the very first post.
As I got up I glanced down at the page Aunty Gilda had been reading. I did not so much read as receive, almost without thinking, a collection of words which went … receiving a stolen automobile … changed ownership papers … words which meant nothing to me.
The pepper shaker obscured the rest.
Aunty Gilda had got up and gone over to the taps. For a while she simply let the tap run and stood there, looking out the window. I could not tell what she was looking at and the room was filled with the silvery music, melancholic and rustling. Then she seemed to wake up.
‘Ponk’s been over playing tennis at the Benskys’ house,’ she said.
There was a strange thin note of pride in her voice.
She rinsed her own plate. She cut the water off. I drifted over to her with my plate.
Then, as I got to her, I upended the plate, and held it before me like a mirror; I returned to childhood by licking off all the smeared remains of the tomato sauce, as Ponky always did.
Having rendered the plate back to an immaculate whiteness, I handed it over to her.
I sensed her hand might come over and rest for a second, ruffling the hair on the top of my head.
Just at that moment, the back door opened and Ponk lumbered in. She was in a good mood, she was whistling to herself the theme music from Laramy. But instantly, on seeing her mother and me standing so closely together, her whistle cut off and with an abrupt, ‘Hi?’ to us both, in one word making it clear that she did not differentiate between us and we were both criminals in stealing away what had once been her own exclusively, she walked into her room and momentously closed the door behind her and locked it.
She stayed in there till eight o’clock, making sure I missed our favourite serial, which had become the sole basis of our communication. She was sick of having me round. I knew it. And I did not blame her. When I asked her what had happened in this week’s instalment she just looked at me and, after leaving a long pause in which I felt stupid and suddenly young to be even asking, she said blandly, ‘I forget.’
KEELY ASKED ME at school, ‘What you going as, Jamie?’
I looked at him and pretended not to hear. This was so strange for him that he stopped what he was doing — bouncing the ball back and forth into his hands, catching it then sending it spinning round and round on his fingertip — the ball fell down through the hole in his concentration and bounced away.
Instantly one of the bigger boys got hold of it and gave the ball
such an energised kick that it leapt away in a giant spurt, revolving through the air even as I heard a low moan, of pain, almost grief, ticking away in the back of Keely’s throat.
‘Ooahhh?’ he cried.
And as I looked at him I saw a flush of humiliation rise up over his features, rendering him no longer the most beautiful statue on earth, but rather something waxen, melting down, no longer having a strong centre but turning everywhere, all over the playground at once, appealing to everyone — anyone — even to someone as unimportant as myself.
I looked away.
‘What you goin’ as, Jamie?’ he whispered to me. ‘You gotta good idea?’
He left a brief pause in which I found my lips did not — would not — move. Now I had my own slightly miraculous secret. To speak in daylight would … endanger it. Secrets like this could only grow in darkness. Or behind curtains. In shade. Night was their secret hour, their appointment. Also, I knew Keely would be the first one to laugh at me. Then steal it. He would emerge on that most sacred of all nights, the night to which all our nerve-endings were feeling, possibly even dressed in my costume.
Anything was possible.
‘O, Keely,’ I moaned for it was horrible, in one way, to see him so nakedly before me, and realise he was almost, in most particulars, the same as me: just different in his own way, which up until then had been so enticing I had always been willing to lose myself, abandon myself gladly, as if I could climb into being him. But now the faint image of the costume, seeming to cast a residual glow, began to make him less attractive, less, curiously, as if he was there.
‘Hey, Noddy,’ he murmured to me, but low and sweet, like he was pouring something honeyed down inside my ear. ‘You get the ball for me? Then you play with me. Just us two together. Eh, Nod? Then you tell me your secret.’
I continued looking at him for such an intense length of silence that he went a deeper red. He took refuge in pulling a Jerry Lewis face, crossing his eyes and making himself appear buck-toothed.
I was still seeing the costume, or rather the ghostly and luminous afterglow of the photo of Yul Brynner.
When it became apparent I was not answering, he looked at me again, more intensely. Almost not believing I could not be seduced by the flint of his charm, he walked off. He did this doing his locally famous imitation of Jerry Lewis being a paraplegic. His legs splayed out, arms jerking like a spastic windmill, mumbling and gibbering. Normally this would garner for him attention and applause. He was used to being loved, Keely; he had become an addict to it. So much so he did not notice when it was withdrawn. And at this point, to further deepen his humiliation, Fainell, who happened to be loitering down the far end of the football field, saw the ball coming towards him. Nonchalantly, he paused. He saw Keely advancing towards him. He watched Keely’s display unmoved. He walked right round the ball, so he faced towards the tip. Keely now abandoned his Jerry Lewis imitation and began running straight towards Fainell, calling out, ‘Hey don’t, don’t, don’t.’
Just when Keely got within several yards of him, Fainell raised his leg back and with one enormous kick (a kick saved up through all the hours of his humiliations, a kick which emerged through one of his dreams), he sent the ball arching high and twirling through the air.
For one moment everyone in the playground halted, realising some fundamental change was occurring, its shadow fleeting over us, darkling and deeping our knowledge of how things were (how the anarchy was patterned within us) until the ball began to sink, sink ever deeper until we saw it become lost in the overgrown trees which masked the creek.
Nobody said a word.
THAT NIGHT AT running Uncle Ambrose did not appear.
When I got home, he barely noticed me. The fact it was Wednesday had totally escaped his memory. I was not sorry. In fact, I was tiptoeing past him, as he stood, looking out the front window, slightly concealed by the curtain when he turned sharply, saw me and asked in a subdued, almost human, voice, ‘How are you, Jamieboy?’
Should I hesitate, should I answer? Should I simply go to him and bury my face in his flank, or chest, as I would have done with my mother when I sensed she was sad, or uncertain? This nudge always said: Remember, you have me. Instead, something made me pause, some uncertainty about what might follow (he might try to kiss me, for example, something I didn’t particularly enjoy, though in another way I only minded it in the way I disliked a plate of khaki silverbeet on my plate in wintertime). It was all relative.
So this evening we stood apart from each other, just looking almost shyly at one another. I sensed he wanted me to walk towards him but instead I found myself saying, ‘I’m back from running, Uncle Ambrose.’
At this a wavering flush ran up over his face. I caught, I thought, the glitter of a tear in his eye. Was it humiliation? That he had never come to give me a ride home in the scarlet Jaguar? Did he recognise this? Or some other adult emotion I could not readily name? I understood that adults had emotions which were different to those of children, or at least ones which were more difficult to read. I also understood, from my mother, it was a form of impoliteness to look too deep.
‘How-how’d you run?’ he asked in a curiously lowered voice. He glanced towards the bedroom where I knew Aunty Gilda was. ‘You … win?’ he asked me in a voice with no liquidity in it.
At that moment a car passed down the road. He turned quickly and looked out. He jumped back behind the curtain. Catching me looking at him, just the very last of my glance which instantly faded away as I sought to deflect his glance, he smiled at me, a little ruefully, a little embarrassed, and placed his finger to his lips.
‘It’s a game,’ he whispered to me. ‘We’re in hiding,’ he said. And with this he leant across and turned away the shade of the lamp which lit the wall behind him.
I liked this game. I lingered there for one second longer. He looked at me in silence and both of us listened to the car pause outside the house. This went on for a long time. He smiled at me. I smiled back. Then I became bored. I walked quietly across the carpet and reached up and kissed Uncle Ambrose on his brow. I always chose a particular, safe spot, between his wiry eyebrows. He lowered his head towards me, and as I drew away I heard a faint sound come out of him, out of his entire body, it was like a sigh, not so dissimilar to the one Aunty Gilda had issued. I diagnosed, almost subliminally, he was in some form of pain, not physical, but I knew enough now that adults (humans) may feel a psychological pain as acutely as anything physical. His arms came round to gather me into him; this was what I feared, I did not want that, so like a silvern shadow I slipped out of his clasp saying, ‘I awfully tired, Uncle Ambrose,’ and he said nothing to me, just nodded and I knew his eyes were following me as I tranced off, with the lethargy of a growing boy to find rest in my bed.
Flame
I WATCHED MADDY take the slim stem and stamen out of the matchbox. He was anxious and angry as if he could not wait for the starting up of the magic. He was hungry and starved for it, and I shrank inside myself thinking: it may not go well.
IT NEVER GOES well when he is like this.
But now he holds in the cup of his broad spatulate hand the flame which, dancing and slim, outlines all his flesh with warm scarlet: and by magic I see the frail bones within his flesh, the web and barb of them, a flail of ligature holding together and supporting the worn cushions of his meat. The lines, too, on the sandhills of his hands enchant me momentarily.
I hold my breath because I know he holds in his hand my death.
The flame.
We have been forbidden to play round with matches in the hut, told to use them sparingly and always to a purpose.
He is priest-like as he turns, flame webbing in his hand.
He bends down before me and opens up the heart of the small black heater.
He holds the match, nudging it against the wick.
‘Turn the wick up higher,’ he barely says to me. Knowing that words, and language, can be sparingly parsed between us, since at all
times there is always a moving sentence, a golden link, a chain, a silken web, an invisible line moving between us.
‘Not too much,’ he says to me then harshly, so, feeling the brand of his contempt hot on my flesh, I moan.
‘It isn’t too much.’
And at this point a swift crease of gasoline, raw and indolent, fills the air: we breathe it in intently and the small flames eddy round the darkened quiff of wick, and dancingly, in an absurd little procession, the flames leap round in a circle, and upwards and outwards flower.
Black fumes and flames stream upwards.
Across the sloping hut roof beautiful moths’ wings quiver, grow, take their shape.
Veins.
Maddy’s grey eyes stare into mine as his lips form an enigmatic smile.
I know he is asking me: shall we burn ourselves to death? Shall we make a suttee fire for ourselves like the maharajah’s wife in Around the World in 80 Days?
Further than this, he is asking me: will I burn along with him in the flames?
Leisurely, he kicks the door shut.
Now the room takes on a warm fetid darkness. The strange shadows from the heater re-form our faces: bring them into a startling closeness.
‘Maddeeeeeeeey,’ I moan and let out a punctured, stifled cry. ‘You trying to kill me,’ I say softly. ‘Not before the school ball. Please.’
He laughs then, for I know he has been showing me again the magic of the magnifying glass: it both causes pain and creates beauty even as it explains and elucidates all mystery. Or rather the mysteriousness of all living and inanimate things are invested with their right and proper spirit.
He laughs. Powerful and possessive. And more than a little mad.
‘No,’ he says to me then. ‘Not today. Not at this moment. But at some moment. In the future. You will not escape.’
A frill, a thrill of fear pierces through me. It opens in my veins, and flowers through each pore in my body.