Boy Overboard

by Peter Wells

  Everything seemed a blur right now.

  Or was it the make-up, caught in my eyelash?

  ‘No,’ I say after a long time, long enough for the thought to lose the hidden barb within it, to appear, almost, just almost casual, but not really. ‘No.’ I murmur low, like Aunty Gilda or Uncle Ambrose might be just outside the door, listening. I reach out and play with strands of Maddy’s blackblack hair.

  He shifts his head emphatically, and shoots me a look of annoyance.

  ‘It just disappeared forever,’ I say then, to no one in particular. Into air. Into smoke. Into sky.

  I think then of how I asked PK and she said, ‘What car? It was never our Jaguar. We were just borrowing it. And now it’s gone back.’

  ‘Mutt the Dreamboat,’ she said, half-pie smiling. Walking off. Whistling. Down the rocks.

  Maddy does not think to answer he is so busy. All he does is nod just a little, to tell me he has heard, and he lets out, like the spill of water from the top of a saucepan filled to the brim — with the precious water which are ideas — a soft yet definite grunt.

  ‘Mmmm,’ he murmurs suggesting words cannot be trusted. ‘Don’t move.’

  I hold still. I hold quiet within me the strange thoughts which dwell, like luminescent eels which travel by night in a dark dimpling pool. The lights on their noses, by their eyes, which sprint down their tails, dimple and dash through the surface. On the far side of the silent creek a crinkle of water unwraps its sound, disclosing a smooth and liquid susurration. These eels have spawned during the sunny hours of daylight: and as the sun has sunk they have, instantaneously, burst — like fireworks, like streamers from a whistle — into one million forms of sentient life: eel breeding eel until the entire width of water, the creek, is one moving thickness of them.

  I am thinking of how perhaps I encouraged Uncle Ambrose to call himself my father, because, after all, I have said to KeelynCarrot my father has a Jaguar. Is this what happens with words? When you do not tell them true, they curve round and capture you, inside their own net?

  Is it not all my fault?

  Don’t tell on us and we won’t tell on you.

  ‘Maddy,’ I murmur.

  ‘No,’ he says to me then. ‘Be silent.’

  ‘Matthew!’ I said again in a note of alarm.

  But as if brandishing before me the poker of burning fire, Matthew now unfurled the bright scarlet lipstick which was to daub my lips, the lips of a king of Egypt, or was it queen?

  ‘Put your lips together and keep silent,’ he said to me in a peremptory kind of voice.

  I felt a kind of despair, as if I sensed how finite his discovery of me had proved to be, that he had found out everything there was of me to know, had voyaged round and through me, right into my interior, and returned there, now, the conquistador who was quint-essentially bored.

  ‘Pucker up,’ he said to me impatiently, and he held the lipstick scented so strangely, full of artificial scents to mask the very basic reality of unguent wax.

  It was right by my lips.

  So I pushed my lips together as, at the same time, all the muscles of my mouth fought to form the words: Matthew Uncle Ambrose is turning up at running pretending to be Dad. He asks me to take a bath in the nuddy with him. I don’t know what to do.

  But it was as if he himself had taken a strange drug which made him oblivious to what was passing through my mind, so I felt a kind of bleak disillusionment, even as I underwent the insecurity of leaving my old self behind and being changed and changing into this new creature, I felt all the disillusionment of a cast-off lover who must survive through the act of being made love to (he could not hear me, he could not hear the words above all in the world I wanted to tell someone).

  So I felt the heavy weight of the scarlet drag its way across my mouth, and each pustule of muscle became coated and drenched in a thick waxy falseness.

  ‘This is critical,’ he told me sternly. And he leant right into me.

  Imprisoned in this way I could see in extreme closeup his face. I saw the intensity of his glance, the grey-green pupils focused so intently they hardly moved, the fine black lashes, and I knew he loved me yet he could not help me. I felt a fundamental sense of aloneness.

  The lipstick left my lips.

  My brother leant back and surveyed me critically.

  ‘I’ve made your lips bigger than they naturally are. Though you have good lips,’ he told me in the impersonal voice of the professional beautician who must not spend too long with any one client, but hurry on to others.

  ‘Matthew?’ I said.

  ‘Try not to talk,’ he said to me. ‘Try to speak as little as possible. That is, until you get in the door.’

  I looked at him in silence.

  ‘It is terribly important you make a great entrance,’ Maddy said to me. In that moment, you will understand how I have changed your life. In that moment you will understand that at long last the limousine has arrived … and you are within it … and it is that final moment … before the car door opens … and you shall get out.

  PONK AND I were preparing for bed. There was only one day to the Costume Ball. As was our custom, I had changed into my pyjamas, re-opening the door which signalled I had changed. Ponk lumbered into the room (her room) taking up all the space, it seemed.

  She was wearing slacks, a jumper, and a frown.

  I was about to climb into bed when she surprised me by murmuring, as if she had only thought of it, at the last second, ‘Hey, Mutt?’

  Something about the level of her voice made me pause. In syncopation, she turned her radio on, and its sounds rose up the walls, filling her room with an ambient softness. Her face was curved into humour.

  ‘That was real funny, eh, how frightened Maddy was by Horton?’

  She slung out the line of her humour. I ate the bait. Ignored the hook. For I missed, like a long and persistent ache, the balm of her friendship. And at this moment now, for this moment, it looked like she missed it too.

  ‘He was really frightened, eh PK?’ I said obediently. I mimicked Maddy’s look, making glasses with my fingers. And we began, together, laughing.

  ‘But it could of been him,’ said Ponk, eager to defend Maddy’s honour.

  ‘He could of eaten us down to the bone,’ I said simply. ‘We might have been found, down the beach, under old Ma Kirk’s boat-shed, a little heap of thighbones.’

  PK grinned at the macabre image, appreciatively.

  We liked to cheer each other up with images of unspeakable horror and cruelty. In this way the real blows of life were somehow diminished and brought back into scale.

  ‘You need me to help you and Maddy take the costume up to school?’

  I knew instantly this was the real heart of why PK was speaking to me. I gazed all over her broad face, feeling an almost unspeakable lurch of love, of old and nearly lost fondness for her. I could see, as one sees under the tidal surface, the bottom of the sea — sand, the irrigations of rock, of pools, crabs, even the old crockery sewerage pipes with which we were familiar as people are with ancient ruins — I could see Ponk’s face as it was when she was more of a child, more as I was … or used to be.

  She even grinned at me her engaging, even sassy smile. I wondered instantly how she knew about the costume. What she knew. Had Maddy perhaps taken her up to the hut, as a special treat? Or boasted about it?

  ‘How you …?’ I murmured softly. I was crouching on my knees on the bed, looking up at her brightly. But I knew from the sudden shadow passing over her face (like shade on the water’s surface, caught from the sun), I should say no more. Ask no more. It was all part of the mesh, the web of secrets in which we lived. Which held us and made us. And unmade us, too.

  She simply breathed out that long low sound, which said many things. Don’t ask me how I know, she might say. I know everything. I know nothing. I know all. I am all. And yet I am nothing too. She might have said all these things.

  I lay back on my bed. Her bed. Uncl
e Ambrose and Aunty Gilda’s bed.

  ‘I won’t be here much longer,’ I murmured softly to PK, as a caress. Because in some way I knew how to caress her too: it was as you stroke a dog you love, by running the flat palm of your hand over the soft slide of dome between the dog’s ears, and you feel within all the liquid love of its intelligence.

  ‘Hey, but I can give you a hand,’ she said low. ‘I can double you up on my bike. It’s no trouble.’

  I thought about it for one moment. And I knew she could not come. Not on this ride. Just as I had not been able to go with her, when she went down the road with her fishing rod, to fish with the bigboys.

  A road opened up before us. Diverging.

  Not trusting myself to speak, I felt my head move slowly. Sway into a shake. She simply observed this, and said nothing.

  For one moment the radio played on, covering over all our embarrassments, melding over our wounds and placating the tidal roar of want, of hurt that beat so insistently in our hearts.

  Our eyes could not look at each other for a long time. Neither of us could risk ruining whatever it was that lay still between us.

  Then PK turned, grabbed her pyjamas and loped out of the room.

  WHEN SHE CAME back in, she had a kind of fierce brightness.

  ‘Hey, Mutt!’ she called to me. I looked up over the top of the historical romance I was reading. She was standing there in the clean and ironed pyjamas of late childhood. Already she had outgrown them so the bottom of the pyjamas reached down to her calves.

  She was holding the baseball bat.

  Secure in the knowledge that my eyes were on her, she threw up into the air — high and wide — an invisible baseball, and as it zoomed down to strike the bat, she brought the bat towards it with all her new and adult strength and together we watched this ball, which existed only in our children’s imagination, hurtle away with such savage and yet serene confidence that we watched it actually become small — a tiny dot — then finally disappear altogether.

  ‘Yeah, Ponk,’ I murmured to her softly, our old prayer, ‘We win every time, eh, Ponk? We win.’

  Crown

  ‘CLOSE YOUR EYES,’ Maddy said.

  It was the day of the ball and I was standing in the hut.

  I closed my eyes. I closed them obediently. I wanted, I wanted to go back, to go back inside, to go black, to lose consciousness. As I did so I swayed backwards, in a swift fall into unconsciousness and felt his body, warm, confident, behind me.

  There was a slight knock, of concussion, some current of electricity passed between us, then I lifted my body away from his.

  I kept my eyes closed.

  In this darkness, I felt something being placed on my hair, on my head. It was stiff, damp. It smelt of glue.

  It was the crown. I knew.

  ‘Open your eyes, Maddy breathed from behind me.’

  I looked in the mirror.

  THE CROWN WAS made of papier mâché. Maddy had glued on plastic pearls and the small baubles which usually hung on the Christmas tree. The rest he had painted gold. Like me, Maddy had a natural propensity for all things gold and glittering. But the only gold paint he could afford was a small pot of paint, full of impurities of green and grey. We both imagined something like goldleaf — the effulgent even falshy goldness which leapt out of Technicolor films of the Queen’s Coronation coach. This paint, however, was thin, as if in defiance of the obstinacy of the liquid to live up to all the brilliant associations which go with ‘gold’, Maddy had piled on as much paint to the ridge of the crown as it could sustain: yet the sheer weight had turned the papier mâché a little lumpy and soggy in parts. It had sunk under the mass of paintwork.

  And I saw suddenly, under the gold, the leftover cardboard from my owl drawing. I carefully said nothing as I observed this imaginative failure. I knew by blurring my eyes the effect would be better. Besides, I could see he had generously layered on as much gold paint as he could afford.

  The tiny tin stood empty: symbol of the expanse of his heart.

  ‘Maddy, it very good.’

  He was standing a little to the side of me, caught in an indecisive moment, somewhere between disgust at his failure to create a better crown, and appreciation for the facility of my compliments.

  ‘You very clever.’ I added. ‘Very very clever.’

  The crown scratched against the back of my neck. I could smell the piquancy of glue — wallpaper glue — which was not even dry. As always with Maddy, he had been running behind in his plans which had obviously grown more and more ornate as he had visualised the costume in greater and more expansive detail.

  Inside the crown it was damp and warm, even soft, so I moved round in a spheric embrace, the perfume of wallpaper glue. But it was unchivalrous to look at the materials Maddy had made the costume from — canvas, paper, cardboard, Plasticine and oven-wrap silver foil — these momentary detractions were like learning a new language: I positively embraced the rasp of the helmet against the soft tissue of my neck I was so eager to pass from those slightly embarrassing moments, when you first put a costume on, to when you become the costume — you simply become the spirit which animates its outer surface: I suddenly felt drunk on the powerful essence, the purity of this spirit, as if it were alcohol passing my lips for the first time.

  Maddy would not allow me to look at the rest of the costume. He told me to stay still and keep standing in the same spot. I had buried my feelings about Aunty Gilda, Uncle Ambrose, in the mounting excitement I felt at being so changed myself — it was as if I were parting from all the dilemmas which surrounded me — as if I were sliding away into an entirely new world — simply via a change in costume. But my metamorphosis was taking too long.

  I changed feet in impatience and let out a long bored sigh.

  My brother was so powerfully near to me, his forehead creased in a frown as he tried to tie on the breastplate: all I could smell was Plasticine.

  ‘Maddy!’ I sighed like a bored child, which in essence I still was — it was the cocoon which I was soon leaving — ‘Maddy, hurry up,’ I said, ‘I got to go weewee.’

  ‘Wait!’ he said. ‘Hold on. Won’t be long.’

  I looked down at the breastplate.

  Skilfully, with hours of careful mechanical work, Maddy had laboured to create small lozenges of gold and silver. Only by staring at them more intently did I recognise they were old paint tins cut almost roughly, even dangerously, into flame shapes. These were attached to a canvas backing. There was the power of engineering in this, an ocean’s width of work and careful thought.

  But all this was to recognise the ordinary fabric of the world — and I recognised I was leaving that soil, embracing that foil.

  He tied the back on firmly — the metallic wings of my breastplate clattered unevenly: he put the dress on me, old curtains from the living room, I felt afresh not only the wonderful alcohol of the wickedness of a boy wearing a dress but, less abstractly, the insecurity entailed in wearing a dress: the strange freedom of having nothing containing my thighs and that vulnerable and tender ridge which ran between my legs exposed, right up to the moist centre of my being.

  My stamen fell against the soft green velvet drowsily, and shifted, instantly, in a jerk.

  I could feel the air fingering all over me.

  Maddy held the cloak out behind me — a gaudy Egyptian tablecloth my father had brought back as a spoil of war. This had already doubled as the cloak for one of the three kings in the nativity scene at the local church, where Maddy had served his apprenticeship in terms of costuming effects, decor and historicity.

  Now I was more or less complete.

  ‘I’m still holding on,’ I said to him faintly.

  He held the mirror up for me, so I looked into it and for the first time saw the person I had — or would — become. The change was so electrifying that I gazed at myself for a long time in complete silence.

  A veneer of sophistication had been placed over me, a kind of pouting beauty,
hard and entirely self-contained — so different from anything I natively was that I opened my mouth and let out a great laugh of joy which seemed to force itself up from my insides and then crush up through my gullet dragging my insides out with its sheer force so it was only in that moment, as my laugh died away, that my transformation — of my inside becoming my outside — became complete.

  Maddy stood there, holding the silver mirror.

  HE HAS DELIVERED me into the mirror.

  As in a dream it slides down the ceiling, capturing a window, the books — all the worlds I have known are shaken free and then delivered back to me.

  I am struck dumb. Plunged into silence.

  He looks into my face, his breathing is close and he … now his eyelids flutter a little and a strange white look, powerful and entrancing, comes over his face, yes lets pretend lets pretend we are far away from here his fingers sing, let us hop upon a barge and be slung through the slow and heavy gold, the sun a sequin in a copper silk sky, he sings and a shiver walks up my back, a delicious taste opens inside my mouth and I feel my left leg, the upper flank, shake of its own accord again and again.

  Impersonal, his eyes brush against mine.

  ‘Let’s pretend,’ he murmurs quietly. ‘Let’s pretend.’

  And I hear on my lips the word the song the plea in my heart I answer him back as he holds still the mirror.

  ‘Yes, Maddy,’ I murmur, ‘let’s pretend, eh, let’s pretend.’

  MY BROTHER THROWS open the hut door. He lets out a cry of victory so profound, so elated it would have been recognised by anyone as the cry of the successful inventor.

  BOOK FIVE

  THE MISSING WORD

  Discoveries

  MATTHEW HAS ALREADY exhausted every avenue of discovery in my body. I realise this as I stand, bored and naked, in front of him. We are in our hut, standing close by the bunks. It is mid-afternoon, the summer before last.

  ‘Turn round, Jamie,’ Matthew says to me, not unkindly.