Boy Overboard

by Peter Wells

  I know this game.

  ‘Let’s pretend,’ he says. ‘Let’s pretend … you’re a girl.’

  ‘But,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Let’s pretend.’

  ‘But I …’

  ‘It’s only let’s pretend,’ he says impatiently, taking my clothes off.

  ‘But I’ll have my turn,’ I’d say suspiciously. ‘When it’s over. Won’t I?’

  ‘Of course,’ he’d say laughing. ‘Of course.’

  I turn round, feeling all the cool air circulating over my body. Delicately it lifts up each minute silvery hair and plaits them in a soft, febrile dance of nervousness. Each pore in my body is opening and closing, the hair on my head fires with a kind of dull metallic brilliance. I no longer have eyes. Sight has been replaced, or changed, into an accompaniment to tactile sensation, a keen feelingness, the rawness of all new inventions.

  I know this game.

  His hands have travelled all over my body, discovering it, sculpting it, making it exist so that, invisible up until this moment, I stare down with surprise and find I have toes, knees, a waist, hips, a dalk.

  He has invented me, explored me then exhausted every part of me.

  It was at this point I discovered the two boys, Dirk and Geoff.

  All this happened last summer.

  They lived over the back fence, separated from us by an old plank wall. Like Matthew and me, they were brothers. This was perfect, as if we were the only form of twinning in the world, as written in the Bible: Cain and Abel; the two animals who walked into the ark.

  So I brought him my captives.

  Secretly, I had recognised them from athletics, where their father was a trainer. Already their tender bodies were being shaped into an apprenticeship of men’s bodies, so they could grow into broad chests, strong arms and supple legs.

  Now it was our turn to reinvent them.

  IN A CIRCLE we stood and, silently, in awe, stared at these engorged tubes whose crests rose thick to flesh-lips, neatly wedged flanges. We were amazed at how similar, yet how different, was each of our dalks.

  Their tensile apprehension was a miracle we all shared, in an almost mystical silence.

  My brother pulled his away and let it thwack hard! against his belly. This sound, of itself, sent a shake, a shimmer through all of us.

  Obediently, each of us did likewise.

  Then we turned our eyes to Matthew.

  What do we do now?

  He had a flushed intent shine on his cheeks. Beads of sweat dimpled his upper lip. His eyes had a steely miasmic look. Or was it the reflection of my own eyes in his?

  ‘Lie down on the bunk,’ Matthew said.

  He pointed the bunk out to Geoff, who had silently been picked.

  He had been chosen.

  Geoff’s speckled lashes quivered but, as if he had no will of his own, he simply raised his pale green eyes up to Dirk, his brother, to see if this was what he should be doing. Receiving back an order so severe and simple, Geoff laid himself face downward on the mattress ticking, only at the last second thinking to turn his head slightly sideways, so his nose wasn’t lying right into the pillow.

  He turned his head towards the three of us.

  Seeing us staring down at him from a height so colossal as to make him feel he was lying at the very bottom of a chasm, Geoff simply let out a slow long breath, of exhaustion, of defeat, of acceptance for whatever was to come next, then he rearranged his face to the wall, and turned his head from us.

  ‘Rope.’

  Matthew spoke curtly to me.

  I handed him the coil. He bound the rope quickly and efficiently round and round Geoff’s wrists.

  Dirk and I, by a slow groaning movement forward, as if a door had been suddenly opened and we two, like flames, had fluttered and torn in one direction, Dirk and I glanced at each other, uncertain about whether we should admit this excitement to the other. Dirk answered me with a single, dazzling smile, the smile of a boy who was discovering new tricks.

  His front tooth was chipped, I saw, in a bold sabre-like shape.

  Dirk shot a triumphant look over at me, as he grabbed his brother’s ankles. Geoff’s ankles were scarred and white from being knocked against the chain of his bike. They were hard with callouses. Yet beside them was a tracery of veins, purple it seemed, against his olive skin. A delicate fannery of line. I wanted to blow on them.

  Matthew meticulously showed off all his boyscout knots, which Dirk and I followed with scientific curiosity: the curiosity of all true learners.

  Geoff’s flesh was white where the rope cut into the fleshly mounds of his bumcheeks. At the same time I could see, almost as if in a hologram from all the summers past, the sharp white outline of his swimming togs.

  It was part of the allure of his and Dirk’s masculinism, of their being conscripts of the world of sport that their hair was astronaut-short, even shaven so that to the fingertips it felt a wry prickle (running your fingers up it the wrong way sent shivers down the small of your back, running in soft fans over your buttocks till the sensation concentrated, in intense contractions, fibrillating away in quivers right into your moist excited hole).

  But an added enticement was that their togs were the latest American models, cut off in straight lines across their thighs, boxer shorts whose looseness made the exact definition of their dalks more of a game, more of a search-and-find expedition. My brother’s and my togs were old-fashioned ones, tight-fitting, metallic in sheen …

  I had made friends with these brothers who accepted me almost without question. Yet with what pity I received the intelligence that the most exciting advancement Dirk and his older brother could offer me was to crawl under their house on hands and knees till we reached the dimmest part, by a chimney, where the light of a bright sunny day filtered through skirting boards in hairs of heat, lighting up a small lunar world of old shoes, bottles with spiders in them, broken bricks.

  I had had to undergo serious and searching questions before I was allowed into Dirk and Geoff’s secret world. I had had to swear eternal silence but so intent was I on adhering myself to these acolytes of the sport world that I would have sworn anything, lied about anything, given anything away.

  Finally, when I was allowed to crawl through the odd powdery clay under their house, over-heated and palpable as the world of secrets, this was the great climax of Dirk and Geoff’s mutual discoveries — an infantile one which made me pity them as much as I understood, almost with cruelty, how easy it was going to be to make them mine (or my brother’s and mine, if necessary) — for Dirk orchestrated his brother, as if his older brother was his plaything and minion so that, at a prearranged signal, Geoff crawled upright into a squatting position, reached round covertly with his left hand and yanked his pants down over his shining, ovoid rump.

  I gazed at this palely brown piece of flesh (the colouring of his skin was what I found most intoxicating about Geoff— the faint tawniness, its opaque waxiness, the way its range of colour was so different from my own skin which, once having burnt, now broke apart into freckles: his skin had all the beauty of the shell of a brown egg).

  But having arrived at this great moment, Dirk, Geoff and I had to wait for several long seconds of anti-climax until, small shudders of delight running through Geoff not unmixed with terror (since Dirk had in his hands a switch of narrow bamboo which he used as a branding whip), Dirk reached rudely forward and pushed his brother over by his shoulder so that we could see more clearly the dilation of his hole, and we witnessed the production, moment by moment, of a phial, an elongated globule of shit.

  This movement was done in grave silence, profound as it was gleeful.

  I watched the distension of Geoff’s hole as it grew in size, forming small lips round the excrement. Dirk reached over and laced a companionable, even brotherly arm over Geoff’s shoulders, as if to illustrate how proud he was of his brother.

  Now, exhausted by this production — out of nothing, of something �
� Geoff turned a face over his shoulder to me, displaying all the wonderful gift of passivity which he was offering, wrapped in wonder, seeking to read in my eyes an affirmation of the marvellousness, even uniqueness, of this strange rite.

  The shit detached itself from his hole and fell, in a soft, plump curve into the dust.

  Dirk and I stared gravely at Geoff’s behind, noticing how his hole had sealed shut, into a furled suddenly exhausted bud.

  The soft filtering smell of his ordure began to fall back and scent the dust under the house, fanning out and entering our nostrils so that we knew we would have to leave the underside of their house.

  Dirk promptly began to use his switch as a whip, forcing his brother (whose abjectness struck me as intriguing) to spider along on his hands and knees, his pants caught around his thighs.

  Dirk simply laughed at his brother.

  After this I knew that I had to deliver these ripe and willing captives to my brother as soon as possible.

  The fact was, until this was achieved, everything about the boys’ house acted as an aphrodisiac to me. I could not keep away, breathing in its extreme cleanliness, the absence of carpets, the jet-fighters on the wallpaper in the boys’ room which were as a vacated temple of their bodies, the solemnity of the bread-and-butter pudding placed on a tabletop by their pious mother, the bowing of our heads for grace: the very simplicity of the rituals of their household became a forerunner to that moment when Geoff could be bent over and Dirk, my brother and I could take turns in experimenting, with branches, pencils, ballpoints and fingers with the dilation and expansion of Geoff’s pliant and supplicant hole.

  After all this, exhausted by the sheer energy of our invention, we would untie the curtains, unlock the door (secrecy was a necessary part of this cult, of these rites), and leaving the door open we would lie back on the bunks, Dirk and his brother relegated to worn linoleum at our feet, and we would begin to talk about our favourite movie stars.

  Death

  PART OF GEOFF and Dirk’s attractiveness lay in a strange fact. This was that their uncle and aunt had been drowned when their car plummeted off the ramp as it boarded the North Shore car ferry.

  All of us were familiar with the grave and important world of men which allowed them, with such indifference, to fling down the steel ramp that momentarily, and even magically, formed a bridge between earth and vessel, allowing cars to pass across a wide gap of air, down below which lay the sea.

  As children, gripped by a dark apprehension — that apprehension which brooks no logic — we knew that it was an unreal supposition that a weighty piece of metal like a car could successfully pass through space over such a thin piece of metal. We knew as if within our clenched innards that the real destiny of all this testing of weights and space (accomplished by men with laconic yells, strange signals, even a dense exchange of enigmatic movements suitable for the ultimate ferrymen) was a very simple one: that, at that climactic moment when your car mounts the first slight incline of the ramp, then enters onto that narrow strip of metal which is a bridge between shore and vessel, at that precise moment, the full illogic of the sea (its hidden demons which we know so well as children who grow up in the sea) will suddenly rock the boat.

  In a swift movement, the boat slides out to sea, the metal ramp slips along the concrete with a hideous rasping shriek, sending a shower of sparks up into the air.

  Now all is happening too swiftly for decision. The ramp pauses briefly in mid-air, as if in disbelief at the situation, then it crashes into the water which greedily slurps the car downward, accepting it gratefully like a bite out of a particularly fresh doughnut it has been eyeing hungrily all the time.

  There is a stunned silence as onlookers rush to the wharf’s edge.

  They can see the maroon top of Geoff and Dirk’s uncle’s car (a 1954 Vauxhall) as it sinks. They stare down at it, feeling a terrible impotence; no matter that a man dives in fully dressed, no matter what anyone does, the faint maroon imprint of an object sinking through dense water begins at once to darken, like a bruise which will be left in someone’s consciousness forever and at the same time growing fainter, until it is clear in the complete silence of the scene in which everyone waits, for two figures to break through the surface, gasping air into their lungs as other figures, now in twos and threes, dive into the tide to retrieve them, that the silence only grows deeper, more profound.

  The bubbles on the surface of the water no longer fume.

  The heroic diver has grown tired from trying to gain access to that hidden depth.

  From a far part of the city a siren may be heard.

  And in the calm surface of the water every on-looker reads the fact that a tragedy has occurred and they have become an accomplice by the fact they have been there: as a witness.

  THIS TRAGIC DIMENSION added immeasurably to Geoff and Dirk’s stature. When my brother’s and my eyes turned to glance at them, even covertly, we saw, even felt, the last minutes of their uncle and aunt, witnessing for ourselves that moment when one turned to the other and, their hair flowing out in tendrils as if they were being changed into sea beings and ceased to be humans, they cried to each other, and began clawing at the car doors, only to find the doors would not budge.

  Surprise

  ONE DAY NOT long after we started our games, things didn’t go as we expected. Or rather our games had reached the limits of our invention and we had all collapsed onto the lino, happily enjoying our companionship with the dirt and dust, laughing at nothing, at anything. At nothing.

  When I looked at Geoff’s face, he was crying. Quietly.

  This surprised us, so we all felt a thrall of shame overtake us, shame on behalf of him, that he, a boy, should allow us, other boys, so private an entrance into his inner being. The hut fell into a silence so total that it seemed we could hear the flow of the hairs on our arms moving in time with each of his sobs.

  We were at a loss to know how to deal with this situation.

  Dirk stepped over his brother’s body then snaked up his underpants. He said nothing. He stood there looking down at his brother. Then with his foot he placed the flat weight of his sole against his brother’s pelvis and rolled his brother over so Geoff lay there, looking upwards. We all looked into his tear-streaked face, it was like the face of an idiot, no longer handsome, all beauty stolen from it. His mouth, which only minutes ago had seemed so greedy as if he could not pack and slobber into it any more pleasures, sweets, laughter, now seemed a loose gash, like an old paper bag so fingered it had frayed and was on the point of falling apart.

  But Dirk, standing up so high above him, wearing only his white jockey underpants (which I could see had a small stain of shit in the fold between his legs, at the back), smiled down at his brother in consolation.

  ‘Don’t worry, Geoff,’ he murmured to him softly. ‘You can do me next time,’ and his foot now travelled up to his brother’s face, and he held his brother’s face there, just as we had seen cowboys do in the movies.

  Geoff slumped his face sideways and Dirk then rested his foot, lightly, like a conqueror, on his brother’s head.

  This was their brand of tenderness.

  ‘I -I -I,’ Geoff was hiccuping by now, but a strange dim smile was also playing over his features. ‘N-n-next time,’ he said.

  At this point Dirk did something strange: a whole luxuriant yawn overcame him so he stretched every part of his body in slow motion, it was as if I was seeing all the bones in his body glutinously change their position inside the sack of his flesh, to find a more comfortable relationship, and then he took his foot away and began humming to himself as he went on dressing. He got to the third bar of ‘Broke My Dentures’ when he stopped, and slipping his shorts up over his thighs he said, ‘Yumyumyumyumyum.’

  He spoke in an off-hand kind of way perhaps to cover up how much he was excited by our games. But his attempted nonchalance was broken by him firing a glance first at my brother, then more lingeringly at me. I saw him upside-down at t
his point. I hardly knew how to interpret this glance.

  ‘Come on, Geoff,’ he said to his brother then, ‘We’re late for footie practice,’ he said. ‘Dad’ll be angry.’

  Geoff said nothing, he got up on all fours, then began, silently, to gather his clothes up.

  ‘We weren’t laughing at you,’ I thought to say to Geoff as he paused before going out the door.

  He had brushed away his tears. His face had a naked, fleshly look about it. His eyes, which had servilely never left the lino during the whole time after he began crying, now raised slowly to look into mine. I seemed to feel inside me the lever of his glance, as if I held a levitating machine which was, of its own accord, raising his glance quarter inch by quarter inch. Finally, his eyes looked into my own, and I felt a flood of almost bewitching power because I knew he would come back to the hut, to take part in our games, that he had accepted everything as it was, and that he would soon by lying there again, face downward, a blank page for us to write our futures on.

  Before going out the door, and as if to recoup some lost prestige, he grabbed hold of me — but in such a loose, fond way as not to startle me — and, gathering my head in a rugby hold, he ran his fingers through my hair, letting the pad of his fingers send a primitive kind of energy into my scalp.

  He caressed me secretly.

  My brother and I watched him walk off through our back garden, recognising in his body that attractive imitation which he already had off pat, which all the boys who played league affected from an early age on, this was the rolling gait of the older boys.

  But just as Geoff seemed to find his proper footfall, he walked directly into the whiplash of the apple tree.

  It drew its fingernails of pain right across his face.

  He yelped, reduced to the pliancy of a puppy, the source of all his attractiveness.

  At the same time he turned round, darting a reprimanding look to my brother and me. We saw him reduced to being not a tough youth, a footie player but a soft and unformed baby who wanted anyone (my brother, me, his mother, his own brother) to quickly kiss him better.