Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  ‘Joan,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t want this … in front of the children.’

  His voice was dull. It was the colour of old bricks, baked in the sun for years and years.

  ‘The children,’ she said.

  ‘Joan.’

  ‘Give me a life,’ she said. ‘You owe me a life.’ There was steam coming up from the sink behind her; grey steam rising like mist from the marshy sink.

  No, Dad was good to her. There was only once that it might have been otherwise. Shell was woken in the night. There were cries and sounds of struggling from inside the house. He got up, unafraid because only half-awake, and went down the passage on giddy feet. His father and mother had separate rooms; it was late; the noises were coming from his mother’s room. He knew this before he got there, before he saw. Peering through the crack of the open door, he witnessed a tussle unlike any other he had seen. His mother and father clobbered at each other like sacks of meat; savage; intent; a collision he could never ask them about. He looked for blood, but could see none. So he went back to his room. He lay in his bed and felt the blood dripping from these walls instead. It was a long time before he went back to sleep.

  They were normal again in the morning. He was reassured by the breakfast table, and by daylight. They all sat about and ate toast.

  He was hungry; he’d been afraid he never would be again.

  Breakfast table conversations were the ones he remembered best. Words lay on the table amongst the plates.

  ‘You’re messing on your shirt,’ his mother said. ‘Eat nicely, Shatsi.’

  ‘Don’t attack your food,’ Estelle said. She didn’t look at him.

  ‘Leave him, Estelle.’ Dad sometimes used with Estelle that same weary voice that he used with his mother.

  It was his mother speaking now. ‘Listen to your father, Estelle. You should respect your father. Your father, make no mistake, is a man worthy of respect.’

  ‘Joan.’

  They faced each other over the top of the table, which was littered like a battleground.

  ‘Have you packed your books, Shatsi?’

  ‘Yes,’ Shell said. ‘I did it last night.’

  ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full.’

  ‘Leave him, Estelle.’

  ‘No,’ his mother said. ‘Never be afraid to speak. Always speak out, Estelle. Speak out before it’s too late.’

  ‘It is never,’ said Dad, ‘too late.’

  ‘Listen to your father. Your father is a wise man. Your father,’ she announced, ‘has ruined my life.’

  ‘You have your life,’ he said.

  Shell drank his orange juice, tilting the fierce liquid down his throat, with the sound of glasses, knives, forks, chipping carefully away on all sides. It was a quarry, his home.

  His mother was laughing in her chair. She sat, a dab of marmalade on her sleeve, with yellow gobbets of laughter falling from her mouth. ‘I have my life,’ she said. ‘Children, do you hear? I have my life.’

  In the evenings the family would watch television. Shell liked to watch television; it meant that there was no need to speak. His family, finally and safely silent, sat about him in a half circle, their faces stupefied with concentration. They watched commercials, interviews, sit-coms, dramas.

  One night he sat eating popcorn and staring at a wildlife documentary. Creatures in the wild, the television informed, existed on their senses alone. Sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste – these were what allowed animals to explore their environment, to defend themselves against their enemies, to hunt their own prey. They used camouflage to outwit the senses of their foes and their food. Shell watched with increasing horror the movements of beasts and insects. He watched chameleons creeping down branches, shooting their tongues at flies. He watched eagles plummeting out of the sun. He was appalled. Abruptly, without warning, this square, contained vision spilled from its box; it spread in concentric rings that burst from the house and scythed away into the dark. The world was a forest of moving flesh that fed on other flesh; crawling and inching and loping closer or away. In terror he rose to his feet, knocking the bowl of popcorn from his lap. The white pellets sprayed.

  ‘Shell! Be careful, Shatsi.’

  ‘Jesus. Look at him.’

  Dad was staring. ‘What? Shell? What’s the matter?’ But he was already gone, running through the kitchen, through the outside door, into the clustering night. His skin prickled. He’d grazed his shin on the table as he passed. Motion left him slowly as the house and its lighted windows receded behind. But he only stopped running when he was halfway up the road. Now – it seemed for the first time ever – he was completely still, enclosed in the sighing blackness. Trees hung breathless over him. Through their branches he could see stars, remote and high. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, clutching at himself, a trembling form at the side of a deserted road. Fear continued to spread in rings from a core within him too deep for his hands. His body ached, as if already rent by teeth. They decided to send him away.

  ‘But why?’

  He stood with his hands behind his back. They faced him on the couch, side by side. They looked earnest, as though they were courting him, or each other.

  ‘It is for the best,’ his mother said.

  ‘We have given it a lot of thought. You must believe that.’ Light from the lamp made Dad’s glasses opaque. Shell could see nothing behind them.

  ‘But I don’t want to!’ He was already close to tears. ‘Why? Tell me why.’

  ‘It can’t be good,’ said Dad. ‘So far from the city …The new school will be good for you.’

  ‘You’re going into high-school now, Shatsi. It is the time to make a new start.’

  ‘But I don’t want to make a new start. You didn’t send Estelle away.’

  Dad stirred, a slow, scaly movement. A reptile on a rock. He licked his lips with a split tongue. ‘We’re not sending you away, Shell. Don’t twist our words. We feel … your mother and I … we feel it would be better for you to be in a boarding-house. We – ’

  ‘Why? Why will it be better?’ Shell was crying now, without attempting to conceal it. Tears so hot they put out his eyes. His nose was running too.

  ‘We’ve given it a lot of thought,’ his father said again. He was upset by this display of emotion. Any emotion upset him.

  With difficulty, his father conceded: ‘We feel … your mother and I … that you’re too introspective. You need to mix more with people, people of your own age, Shell.’

  There was a pause. His mother was crying now too. She was pummelling her nose with a pink tissue. ‘We went to speak to your teachers, Shell,’ Dad went on. ‘They say you don’t mix at all, that you don’t seem to have any friends.’

  ‘And Estelle, Shatsi. She says you stand around by yourself at break. She says –’

  Shell was amazed at the extent of their treachery. He no longer cried. Staring at them through tunnels of red, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. They looked at him in consternation.

  Dad tried again: ‘ … for your own good … your mother and I … only want the best. For you. You know that.’

  Turning to the window, Shell looked out into a congealing dark that reflected his own. They stared at him while he looked away.

  At last he accused: ‘It’s the ball. Isn’t it? It’s because I couldn’t catch the ball.’

  His father blinked, as though he truly could not understand. But Shell was not deceived.

  ‘I think I have a migraine coming on …’ His mother propped up her forehead with her fingers. Otherwise her head would have fallen from her neck, a heavy glass globe, and smashed on the floor. He willed it so.

  ‘You will understand,’ his father said, ‘if you give it a little thought.’

  He understood already. Words welled up to the surface of his tongue. But he doubted very much that he would ever speak to them again. His beloved parents.

  After his father had left the room, his mother grabbed at him. Her face was
guttering in a sudden wind. He didn’t resist this time as she clawed him, snapping his bones in her voracious embrace. She kissed his forehead. ‘Shell … Shell, darling …’ She let him go, or fell away.

  His last weeks at home were parched and endless. He continued to roam through the forests nearby. But now everything upon which his gaze fell became illuminated by a clear white light that had its origin in him. Trees, leaves, folds in the ground; all blazed in the pure pain of his sight. He walked upright, stiffly, careful not to spill what he was carrying.

  There was no earthquake. Home and mountains didn’t tremble, let alone shift in devastation. Yet silently, at the roots of his hair, this entire landscape was pouring and roaring with inexorable force.

  He packed his belongings. He could not conceive of how quietly the lock on the suitcase would close. It had barely taken an hour to fit his clothes into this allotted space. He had everything that he required. Underwear, socks, jeans; T-shirts. Two pairs of shoes. He had a little red sack that contained all his toiletries. His mother had put a tin of deodorant under his shirts. Neither of them mentioned it, because he hadn’t used it before. He had his own comb, with strands of his hair woven into the teeth. And his blue toothbrush, which he hardly ever used. He didn’t pack any books, for fear that he might be mocked.

  He didn’t say goodbye to Estelle. She was in her room, the door closed. He walked past without hesitation, his suitcase weighing down his right arm.

  His mother and father drove him down to the station. His mother was to accompany him on the first trip; she had a little overnight bag of her own. He didn’t recall that anybody spoke on the short drive downhill. The headlights of the car moved ahead, white and crazy. He sat on the back seat with his feet together.

  Shell stood at the window as the train jolted underneath. Metal squeaked as it tightened and dragged, beginning to move forward and away. His fingers reached up to touch the glass, but were in fact trying to reach further; to reach the sombre, mourning face of his father outside as he started to trot to keep pace with him, down the grimy concrete of the station. Although his mother sat behind him in the close compartment, it was an emptiness he sensed at his back, also gathering momentum on clicking wheels. Between these voids, he moved away into dark.

  Shell moved from class to class. He wrote in books. He was bored. During breaks he dashed back to the hostel to pack his books for the next three periods. His uniform was stiff and new. It was also uncomfortable; wet patches formed under his arms. He polished his shoes nightly, because that was the rule. He liked his reflection in the full-length mirror at the end of the dorm, and he learned to do his tie himself. He kept his blazer buttoned. Uniforms had always appealed to him, although he would not have been ready to admit it. In the library he found a book in which there was a photograph of Germans marching in the Second World War. They had tall black boots that shone. They had gloves. Their hair was as white as his, their eyes as blue. He longed to be marching with them to a glorious music.

  Instead he was shambling around these dusty grounds. Over weekends there was too much time. He threw stones at the trunks of trees. He stood at the gate and looked out at forbidden soil beyond. If you climbed onto the big rock there and stretched, you could see the buildings in the city. They were stacked together like the funnels of some insidious engine beneath. Light shone off their windows.

  Shell came to know the names of the other boys with whom he shared the dormitory, but learning their names only made them less strange; it did not make friends of them. In the shower at night he stood in a waxy thicket of flesh, trying not to tremble. The air was drumming with mist in which he could hear voices calling, but which, for all his roaming, kept him lost.

  The dormitory was a long room with windows set into the walls at regular intervals. There was a bed beneath each window, and a tall green locker beside each bed. The floor was tiled with neat red tiles; the walls were clean with paint. When Shell had first arrived he stood in the doorway, his suitcase against his knees, and looked. It took a moment before he saw the others – figures sitting on the beds, leaning against lockers. But they had no substance against the white paint; they wavered as he looked at them. And, as far as they were concerned, he was ghostly too. They barely glanced at him where he stood. They barely glanced up with their soft white faces.

  Shell took a bed at the end of the row, because he liked the wall on one side. He didn’t unpack his suitcase. He lay down on the bed and looked directly upward with his eyes. There were faint grey marks in the ceiling that might have been made by water once. In their foggy patterns there seemed to be the contours of a face that never quite became solid; whose face he didn’t know. Why it should be here, swirling just below the surface of the ceiling, he also didn’t know. But he lay and searched for its elusive features. As he lay and looked, he could hear a thin and distant sound. There was a courtyard outside the window behind him; in this courtyard were four steel racks used for drying clothes. Although they were bare now, these structures were turning and turning in the wind, with high perpetual screaming in his ears.

  ‘Like dyin’.’

  He heard the voice, but wouldn’t look. He didn’t want to talk.

  But the voice persisted. ‘Don’tcha think …?’

  There was a boy on the next bed. Their eyes met. Although Shell looked away, it was too late.

  ‘Hello.’

  He looked back again to find this other one reaching out a hand. It could be for no one other than himself. He sat up. Wanting to claw at it, Shell shook the hand.

  ‘Hello,’ Shell said.

  ‘I’m Rick.’

  He waited.

  ‘I’m Shell,’ he had to say. Blood was fierce in his eyes.

  ‘I’m also new here,’ said Rick. His voice was too keen; it carried in the quiet.

  The rest were staring at them. Even if he didn’t look, Shell knew they were staring. As now –

  ‘You mustn’t be scared,’ Rick was telling him. His eyes were rolling. ‘It’s not a bad place. I’ll help you if you … if you need help. I will,’ he finished desperately.

  Rick’s lips, perhaps, carried a trace of foam. Anyway, Shell was able to lie back on his bed with a quite definite sneer. The absurd, anguished boy on the next bed was forced to do the same. His breath still sounded, though, quick and shrill.

  It comforted Shell to have the friend he required. And so soon. Certainly he was no longer afraid. Grief is stronger than fear, maybe; and he had good cause for grief. He was, of course, an orphan. By the time a stern figure appeared in the doorway with a list of names in his hand, Shell Fynn had ceased to be daunted by this strange room and these strange boys. His skin had mottled to the gentle shade of the blanket upon which he lay. He was no longer visible to the naked eye.

  In time, he wrote:

  Dear Mom and Dad

  I am in a dorm with twelve other boys. I don’t know all their names yet, but one of them is – Rick. He sleeps in the next bed to me. The beds are hard. Also the seniors push us round. I am a skiv, that means I have to work for one of the form fives. I have to make his bed and polish his shoes. But I don’t mind really.

  He is quite nice to me.

  I am lonely here, I wish I wasn’t here. I cried last night. Please write soon. The teachers are okay, mine are anyway. I will write again next week.

  In fact he hadn’t cried the night before. In fact it was Rick in the next bed whom Shell had woken to find sobbing into his pillow. He got up and padded across the cold floor.

  ‘Rick,’ he said. ‘Rick. What’s the matter?’

  But he was snorting and snuffling. Shell could see his shoulders heaving. He sat on the bed and touched at him. He put a hand on his back.

  ‘Rick,’ he said. ‘What? Rick?’

  Rick rolled suddenly over and stared. Shell withdrew his hand.

  After a moment, Rick said, ‘I hate it here. I don’t wanna be here.’

  But he’d stopped crying. His face in the near-dark wa
s wizened and wrinkled. He was about to crumble.

  There was a silence. Then Shell, amazed at how easily this came to him, gathered Rick up in his arms. For a very short moment there was an awkwardness between them, then Rick went slack, as though instantly and completely asleep. He brought up his hand and with a curved thumb plugged up the circular hole of his mouth. Shell held this head against his chest, the rough hair like grass against his palms. He rocked. ‘Quiet,’ he said, speaking on a low electric hum that soothed them both. ‘Shhh … quiet now … quiet …’ They rocked together in the fine blue moonlight that came drifting in like spray. Nobody else was awake, but it was a sight that would have alarmed them if they were: the swaying pair on the bed, bound together in this bizarre embrace.

  As he rocked, Shell too felt a kind of sleepy calm closing over his sight. He was holding in his hands all that was weakest and most despicable in himself. He could conceivably expiate himself, it seemed.

  The boarders were required to participate in at least one sport a term. Shell signed up for cross-country running in the afternoons. Every afternoon at four a little group would assemble on the athletics track. Golden light came from the sky at this time. The fields and trees were washed in it, becoming foreign, English. Shell felt serene.

  They ran six kilometres each day. Sometimes, accompanied by a master, they would leave the school grounds and jog through the surrounding suburbs. By the time they returned to school, the day was beginning to taper. The forms of objects – fences, poles, walls – were dark on the air. Shell put on his tracksuit and walked towards the tap, the smell of grass in his nose. Rick fell in beside him. ‘Good run,’ he said.

  ‘Ja. Okay. You’re quite fit.’

  ‘Naah. I got cramps. I got a cramp here.’ He pinched at his thigh. ‘I hate running,’ he said.

  ‘So why d’you do it?’ Shell looked sideways at this skinny boy with short dark hair. Rick had a slight lisp. His head was shaped like a lantern, and looked like it might break as easily.

  ‘I have to,’ Rick said.