Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  They bent in turn to drink, cupping the water and slurping. Shell stood afterwards with a trickle going down his chin. He laughed suddenly, for no reason clear to himself. Perhaps it was just the day, fading so gently. The sound of a train carried from over the road. He felt moved to mutter: ‘I thought I was gonna hate it here. I thought it was gonna be horrible.’

  Rick glared. ‘It is. It is horrible here. Y’don’t like it – the boarding-house?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Shell said.

  ‘Don’t you miss home?’

  ‘I don’t think about home.’ He rubbed at the water on his chin.

  ‘Your mother and father …’

  ‘My mother and father were killed.’ Shell wasn’t looking at Rick; he was staring out over the cricket field to the grandstands. So was surprised to turn back to this horrified face, mouthing on mumbles. Rick could hardly speak. Shell smiled in alarm and reassured: ‘I’m only joking. Not really. They’re alive.’ He started to walk up the tar in the direction of the hostel.

  They ran together every day. Shell didn’t have breath to talk, but it was pleasant to have Rick gasping alongside.

  There were often times, even when he wasn’t running, that there was nothing to say. They walked in the school together. Or sat on the steps out front drinking coffee.

  ‘What do you want to do when you leave school?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The question didn’t penetrate Shell. He sucked on a piece of grass. ‘It’s far away.’

  ‘Not so far. Only four years.’

  ‘Then army.’

  ‘My brother’s in the army,’ Rick said. ‘He’s at Upington.’

  He sounded proud. Shell said: ‘So?’

  ‘I was just saying.’

  Rick could be irritating.

  They went walking up on the hill, throwing pine-cones between the trees. Their hands became sticky.

  ‘I haven’t ever had a friend before, Shell,’ said Rick. ‘You’re the first friend I’ve ever had.’

  Shell was touched and scornful. He swung at a cone with a broken branch. Their collision sent the cone in a long spinning arc. It crashed into bushes.

  Rick persisted. ‘We must of known each other in another lifetime. My mother believes in things like that. We must of been friends before.’ He groaned with happiness at the thought. ‘You mustn’t tell anybody, Shell, but I’ve got an undescended tes-tikkel. That’s a secret.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Look.’ And Rick, after glancing around carefully, pulled open the front of his pants to show him. Shell was amazed.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Yes.’ After a moment, he conceded: ‘No. Not really.’ He closed his pants. ‘I told you a secret. Now you tell me one.’

  But Shell was throwing pine-cones again, as if he couldn’t have cared. ‘I don’t have secrets,’ he said. Even his voice was careless.

  ‘I don’t know anybody like you, Shell.’ Rick was moaning. ‘You stare at people. You frighten people.’

  Shell had an urge to hit at the head of this miserable boy who was his friend. He would have liked that too; to see Rick’s head flying between the trees.

  ‘Shell? I get so lonely sometimes. I don’t like to be with people, they don’t feel like they’re really there … I don’t like people. They can do things to you, people can.’ He was grabbing at Shell, although his hands were at his sides. His voice was keen and thin. ‘We’re two of a kind, Shell,’ he said. ‘You and me. Two of a kind.’

  Shell was likely to agree, but never aloud. He looked at the other, standing under the trees with his eyes blinking. It was a pitiable creature, this skinny, lisping Rick. ‘You’re silly,’ Shell said. ‘You say silly things.’

  Rick was hurt. ‘I only meant …’ he said. He was about to bawl.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ Shell said, before he could. ‘Let’s go back to the house. It’s getting late.’

  It was a slow and easy time, after all. Shell didn’t mind the roads and trees as much as he thought. When eight weeks had passed, they were allowed to take their first weekend off. But it was a long way home and Shell wasn’t sure that he wanted to go. His mother and father were expecting him; they’d written to say how much they looked forward: … We miss you most at night, Shatsi, when we’re all together here … Perhaps for this reason, Shell was compelled to write:

  Dear Mom and Dad

  You were right after all, this place is good for me. I hate it here but I am enjoying it. There’s always something happening here. The things we do. You wouldn’t believe. But I’m sorry, I won’t be coming home on the fifteenth after all. I have a friend, Rick, he is in the dorm with me. I am going home with him on the fifteenth. He lives in Pretoria, only an hour away. I am looking forward to it.

  Rick and me are two of a kind. He is nice, but he can make you angry. He says he doesn’t believe in angels, but he believes in devils. You wanted me to have a friend.

  Rick’s mother was old. She was as shrunken as a grandmother, it seemed to Shell. She was thin, with the kind of thinness that revealed her skeleton under skin and clothes. She had grey hair in which you could see the last traces of a splendid black. When she fetched them at the bus-stop in Brooklyn, she wore a white garment that could have been a robe. Her fingers carried rings as bright as scabs.

  It was a strange weekend. Rick lived in an outlying suburb, in a house that belonged to no suburb at all. The garden was dense and overgrown and appeared not to have been touched by a gardener’s hands. Inside, the rooms were crowded with bizarre items of spiritual significance.

  There were drapes that were full of moons and wands and shapes. A crystal ball – it truly was – stood on a table in the lounge. A thick, cloying scent hung everywhere like fog.

  ‘My mother,’ Rick explained, ‘is a spiritualist.’

  His father lived elsewhere, alone. Perhaps he drifted somewhere in the house, but he seemed an unnecessary presence in the process that had produced Rick and his home. Only Rick’s mother, with her heavy robes and flat shoes, was everywhere. She found Shell on Saturday night on the back lawn.

  Abruptly, she said, ‘Rick – you must treat him well. He’s weaker than you are.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shell said.

  ‘Good,’ she said. She walked away towards the house, with her white robes following. He could hear her footsteps after all.

  He and Rick did very little that weekend that was of significance to a mutual dependence. They sat about and read comics. They drank sour cooldrink from glasses. But it was enough to be there; to lie in separate beds across the room from each other. The wind could be heard outside. Rick had trusted Shell with knowledge; of his barmy mother, of their house full of occult crap. So that in a way those two days were a resolution. Not of their friendship, which was only a reason at best; but of the cruelty for which Rick hoped. They did in fact need each other.

  On Sunday night they returned to the hostel. While they waited in the dorm before chapel, Rick just out the shower, a towel around his waist, Shell turned where he lay on the bed, turned, to the others where they sat or stood, in those same attitudes of perpetual waiting he recalled from his first arrival. He pointed at Rick an accusing finger.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. He had their attention. ‘He’s only got one ball,’ he said.

  Rick was white. He stared at Shell. ‘You said you wouldn’t say…’

  They were laughing, the others. ‘Really?’ they wanted to know. ‘Show us. Is it true?’ They crowded him.

  Rick held onto his towel.

  They laughed then and Shell laughed too, with bitterness. He laughed as he betrayed the mad old woman, and himself.

  It was the others that took pity when they saw tears in Rick’s eyes. They left him alone and went back to their vigil. In their boredom they hardly glanced as Rick had to take off the towel to dress.

  Shell watched, though. He refused to look away from blushing Rick with his undescended tes-tikkel.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Shell sa
id. He was. ‘I didn’t know you were so soft.’

  There were no limits to Shell’s hatred of the friend he also – surely – loved. From time to time, at unexpected moments (as they sat down at the swimming pool, or down at the cricket pavilion, watching a game), he would strike out at Rick with delight, hitting him in the stomach, making him double over. Or he’d grab his hair and pull till he snivelled. Mostly, though, it was the mortal blows he dealt when nobody else was near: ‘I wish I’d never met you.’

  ‘You don’t!’

  ‘I do. You’re boring, Rick. You make me bored.’

  Rick was abject, humble. ‘I know I’m not good enough for you, Shell –’

  ‘Yes, you are.’ Shell crushed him ‘You’re good enough for me, Rick. Nothing special about me.’

  They were inseparable. They walked to and from class together. They sat beside each other in prep, in morning assembly, at the supper table. Once a week on Wednesday afternoons the boarders were allowed to go into town. Rick and Shell went to movies. They saw Endless Love. They saw First Blood. They went to bookshops together. They bought ice-creams at shopping centres and wandered around, gazing into windows.

  Shell never returned to Rick’s home for another weekend. He feared the revenge of those grasping fingers, coated in rings. He might be smothered in those white robes.

  Rick did ask once. ‘Is it my mother?’ he wanted to know. ‘Does she frighten you?’

  ‘I like your mother,’ Shell said. ‘If you must know, Rick, if you really have to know – it’s you. I can’t bear you. For too long at a time,’ he added kindly.

  Rick lowered his eyes.

  ‘And nobody could blame me for that,’ Shell said.

  He understood so much. Rick thought he had never met anybody who understood so much. He would stare at Shell when he was looking elsewhere. It seemed to Rick that any amount of activity was pointless when there was Shell Fynn doing something elsewhere. He would wake up in the night and look at him. He would follow him anywhere.

  Even into that dark hollow under the trees at the edge of the rugby fields. Light came down like a grey pollen. Rick squatted there, obliging, turned to look out through the hanging leaves toward the far field, where boys were running. Only to feel it hit his back. Only to feel Shell Fynn pissing on his back. He knew before he saw what was happening to him; he had himself conspired for this moment. For the hot, salty, contemptuous stream on his shoulders.

  ‘Hey,’ Rick cried. ‘Hey, hey!’ He was trying to get away. But not too hard.

  Rick whimpered. Shell was also whimpering. Or perhaps he was laughing, it was hard to tell.

  When he was finished, he just stood. By this time Rick was sobbing. He was tearing at the ground. ‘No,’ he cried. ‘No, no!’ He threw sand. Urine stank in his hair. It stuck his shirt to his back.

  Shell felt obliged to hold him. He knelt beside him and cradled him, rocking. They swayed together under the grey trees. They clung to each other. Rick saw that Shell was, actually, crying.

  ‘I hate you. I hate you.’ Rick could hardly talk.

  But Shell, whose vindication was finally complete, felt only compassion.

  At the end of the first term, Shell returned home for three weeks of holiday. It was with a dull reluctance that he boarded the evening train, wearing his school uniform and carrying the same suitcase with which he’d left. Only as the swaying carriage took him beyond the northern limits of the city did he begin to feel at ease. (Rick had left for Pretoria earlier that same day; he’d held onto Shell’s sleeve. ‘I wish I could go with you,’ he said. ‘You can’t,’ Shell said. ‘I wish you’d come with me then,’ he said. ‘No, thank you,’ Shell said. He had never felt such indifference. Rick had become an absence). Shell settled back into his seat and rolled his white sleeves up to his elbows. There were neat moles on the backs of his arms. A round wart had begun to form on his right hand, at the bottom of his thumb. He picked at it and thought. He thought of his mother who would be there to fetch him the next morning.

  She was waiting on the platform. He saw her as the train moved in.

  He saw her before her searching eyes saw him. She was a small woman, her skirt pulled sideways by the wind. For a moment he could not bring himself to recognise her. She was unknown, slight and odourless, not worthy of his resentment. He would have found it possible to walk past her without a second glance.

  But she seized him as he stepped from the train, his suitcase in hand. She sucked his cheek with her dry lips. ‘Shell,’ she gurgled. ‘Shell, darling.’

  They drove to the house in the same white Triumph she’d owned since his memory began. The landscape passing at the windows – near and far, the signposts and trees, the views down the valley – was the same that he recalled from countless such drives into town and back. And coming down the rutted dirt road, the tyres buffeted below, he saw at the same bend the same glimpse of the roof below, between the trees.

  He stepped out into the garage. He took his suitcase from the back seat. His mother walked ahead of him into the cool kitchen. He followed unwillingly.

  ‘Your room, Shatsi. The very same.’

  He climbed the stairs. His room was, indeed, unchanged; he glanced at the walls to see the tiny smudges he recalled. On his desk stood the tubular blue vase, holding its fistful of dry stems. He unpacked his clothes. He changed into shorts and T-shirt. He went back downstairs. His mother brought a tray of tea to him on the back stoep where he sat for the rest of the afternoon, watching the light burn away like a slow fuse. He barely moved on the chair. Above the mountains there was a smeary disc rolling, that people called the moon.

  As always, it was the table that united them. Called by the round note of the bell, they congregated there while the night began outside. The knives and forks lay shining with sharp points and edges. He took his place.

  His father sat opposite in his usual seat. Perhaps his hair was cut a little differently, or had begun to thin. Otherwise it was the very man that Shell could have conjured in his head; large, ponderous, the light gleaming off his glasses. He sawed at the chicken so that white chunks of meat fell away. His hands were just as white.

  Estelle greeted Shell with hesitation. He answered gladly. She’d cut her hair and it curled over her ears and collar. She’d had an ear pierced. He sensed her on his left as a faint heat; his arm brushed hers once as he brought the fork up to his mouth.

  ‘We’re very pleased to have you home,’ Dad said. There was a trickle of gravy from his mouth. It ran out like blood.

  ‘So pleased, Shatsi,’ his mother echoed, and raised her glass.

  Estelle said nothing, but looked coyly down at her plate. With her fluttering eyelids she was wooing him, her conquering brother who had returned.

  Afterwards he went back out to the stoep. An autumnal chill made the air stiff against his face. He leaned against a pole, wound with creeper. Without turning, he heard his father walk out behind and stand. Silent, they both looked down the dark valley, above which that moon had now become harsh and cold.

  ‘We are, you know,’ his father said. ‘Very glad. To have you back.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You are always in our thoughts.’

  He said nothing. He shifted against the pole and heard the fragile creeper tearing under his shoulder.

  They stood, not speaking. The bald moon was pasted to the sky, as round and white as a cigarette burn. Shell had read that there were footprints marked indelibly on its surface. But down here in the lonely garden, he could not imagine those distant tracks. Here the trees were roaring in an unfelt wind. The same high stars were burning.

  Shell left again two days before school started. The trip down to the station was a repetition of the last: the quiet car, headlights, dark. But he was absolutely without sadness as he took his leave. Fumbling with his suitcase, he kissed his mother on a charred cheek. He shook his father’s hand with a perfunctory grip. He climbed aboard as the train began to clunk and crash in pre
paration. Looking out through the compartment window, he saw again this couple who had conspired to bring him about. He saw them for the first or last time. They stood, slung against each other as though they’d toppled that way, hands clasping, shoulders pressed, waiting for erosion to complete their collapse. As he watched, a small blizzard of leaves blew across them, so that they became fragmented and faded – as if already only remembered.