Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Duncan! Duncan!’ The cry is like the pecking of a bird. She comes back with a righting of herself, is back at the place she started from – but has turned over, travelled impossibly. She shivers, lets him go, stands up in the room, goes to the window. Belinda strides on the clover slope.

  ‘Belinda. In here. He’s here with me.’

  The girl looked at her, did not smile, but turned after a moment and yelled into the graveyard, ‘Stell, he’s in Mrs Sangster’s place.’

  Stella’s voice came clearly, ‘Bugger him.’

  ‘Can you tell him we’re waiting, Mrs Sangster?’ Belinda said.

  Animal heat seemed to radiate from the girl; probably her anger, Norma thought. All very honest and direct, and quite appealing; it made her smile. The other one, coming from the trees, was not so nice – had something of Tom Round’s foxy wolfishness. ‘How did he get in there?’ she asked Belinda.

  ‘I invited him,’ Norma cried.

  ‘I hope he hasn’t been a wretched nuisance, Mrs Sangster.’

  ‘Not a bit. Why should he? I met him in the cemetery and asked him for a glass of ginger ale. Why don’t you join us? You must be hot after tennis.’

  ‘I don’t want to go in there,’ Belinda whispered.

  ‘Sound travels very clearly on the hillside, Belinda. Go round by the hedge, you’ll find a gate.’

  She turned back to Duncan, not knowing what to expect, and saw him at her bookshelves, reading along the titles. ‘You don’t mind them coming?’

  ‘It’s OK with me.’

  She went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of ginger ale. ‘Come in, girls.’

  They left their rackets in the porch and came in smelling of sweat and rubber shoes and deodorant and exuding a hot sulkiness, on Belinda’s part, and social competence on Stella’s.

  ‘This is very kind of you, Mrs Sangster.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘I did. Belinda’s getting better though. I think she’ll beat me before long. Don’t get worked up, Bel, it’s only a game.’

  ‘There should be a rule against lobbing,’ Belinda said.

  ‘It’s a most effective shot.’

  ‘Well I think it’s cheating.’

  ‘Bring your drinks in here,’ Norma said. She went ahead of them into the sitting-room and saw Duncan lighting a stick of incense.

  ‘Who told you you could do that, Duncan?’ Stella said from the door.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Norma said. ‘What sort, Duncan?’

  ‘Sandalwood.’ He went back to the bookshelves.

  ‘Sit down, girls. I hope you like incense. And ginger ale.’

  ‘It’s beautiful and cold,’ Stella said. She sat down and crossed her legs and looked round the room. ‘I think it’s marvellous how you manage. Running a big school, with all that must entail, and having a house and garden and books and music’ – she looked at the record player. ‘You really must have a very busy life, Mrs Sangster. Very full.’

  She’s patronizing me, Norma thought, and was fascinated by the girl’s performance. ‘All that must entail’ – she had brought it out beautifully, with only the smallest suggestion of carelessness. And ‘Very full’ – the tiniest bit of cool surprise. She’s going to be a very formidable lady, and horribly unpleasant to know.

  ‘Would you like me to put a record on?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think we’ve got time for that, we’re expected home. Did you really not find him any bother?’

  ‘None at all. He’s good company. We’ve had a very interesting chat.’

  Duncan was still reading titles. Belinda had gone to his side and was reading them too. She offered her half-drunk glass of ginger ale without looking at him and he took it and sipped and kept it in his hand.

  ‘I can pour you some more,’ Norma said.

  Neither made a reply.

  ‘For heaven’s sake answer when you’re spoken to,’ Stella said.

  ‘They’re all right, leave them. Have you heard from Mandy? How’s she getting on?’

  ‘Brilliantly of course, you know Mandy. I just hope she doesn’t end up pushing pills. What she’d like to do is specialize in gynaecology and get it out of the hands of men.’

  ‘She’s got plenty of years before she needs to think of specializing. Is she having some fun?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. Having affairs, learning life.’

  ‘I hope she doesn’t overdo it.’

  ‘That’s the danger, I suppose. Life just blows up in your face.’

  The reference was to Duncan, although Stella’s eyes made no move. Norma revised her judgement – the girl was ignorant in many ways, and egotistical to an unbearable degree, yet was no fool, and was not the finished thing she strove to be. Like all the rest of them, nine hundred girls, was simply at a point on her way, had not ‘ended up’ – that hideous phrase – but could move in any one of a number of ways. Norma felt tender and generous towards her. She said lightly, ‘Nothing’s final. Not when you’re young. Are you working hard, Stella? You take time off for tennis, I’m pleased to see.’

  ‘I jog in the forest every morning,’ Stella said.

  ‘A billy-goat charged her,’ Belinda said. ‘She had to climb a tree and Mr Clearwater had to get her down.’

  Stella was pink and angry; a quick girl in her feelings. Norma stifled her laugh. ‘Was it one of his? How many goats has he got now?’

  ‘He didn’t get me down,’ Stella said. ‘He simply came and took the goat away. And I carried on running.’

  ‘Good on you.’

  ‘You nearly wet your pants,’ Belinda said.

  ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know.’

  ‘A billy-goat can be pretty fierce,’ Norma said. ‘Had it broken out?’

  ‘His fences are almost non-existent. In some places they’re only bits of rusty wire-netting. If you’re going to farm goats you should do it properly.’

  ‘I don’t think Lex is really into farming, it’s a hobby. Anyway, you got out of it all right.’

  ‘She’ll dream about billy-goats,’ Belinda said.

  ‘He’s got twenty-seven goats,’ Duncan said. ‘I’ve heard him talking to them.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Norma said. She was anxious to get off the subject of Lex Clearwater.

  ‘What does he say? “Oh darling goats – ” ’

  ‘No Belinda, not in front of me. How far do you jog, Stella? Does Josie jog?’

  ‘She tried it once and nearly died. She thought she should be as good as me right from the start. Mum doesn’t believe in intermediate stages.’

  ‘Her exercise is sitting with her legs crossed meditating,’ Belinda said.

  ‘And what is yours, Belinda? Apart from tennis? I don’t think you’re in any of the school teams.’

  ‘I don’t go in for sport. Dad says it’s overdone anyway.’

  ‘In the school? Mens sana in corpore sano. Have you heard of that?’

  ‘A healthy mind in a healthy body,’ Stella said; and went pink for being obvious.

  ‘It’s all the stuff about winning I don’t like,’ Belinda said. ‘And doing it for the honour and glory of the school.’

  ‘Oh surely we don’t say that.’

  ‘Some of them do. Mrs Muir does.’ She moved impatiently. ‘I can smell my sweat, I need a swim.’

  ‘Isn’t it too cold?’

  ‘Dad’s rigged up a solar panel.’

  ‘It takes the chill off,’ Stella said. ‘I think we should go, Mrs Sangster. It’s been very nice.’

  ‘It’s been nice for me too. I don’t see enough of girls outside school. Duncan, do you see anything you’d like to borrow?’

  He turned from the books and shook his head. A bank of hair slid down and seemed to hiss on the slick skin above his ear – that melted ear without curl or lobe. Seeing his face suddenly was a shock. She smiled at him. ‘Remember what I said, you can come whenever you like. And borrow anything. You girls as well.’ Stella did not like being lumped in. Belinda, too,
would not come again. No success with them, but Norma did not mean to let Duncan go. ‘Here,’ she pulled a book from the shelf, ‘take this. It might help with some of those big words.’

  His hand closed unwillingly on it. He had retreated. She would not let him. ‘Stella, when you play tennis again you bring Duncan. And Duncan, you come here. I’ll expect you.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  Belinda looked at the book. ‘A Dictionary of Mathematics and Physics?’ she said, surprised.

  ‘Meanings are important. Stella, bring him.’

  ‘If you’re sure he won’t be a pest.’

  ‘I’ll ride my bike. I’ll come by myself,’ Duncan said.

  ‘You fall off your bike.’

  ‘Well, I’ll walk.’

  ‘We’ll bring you, Dunc. So shut up, Stell,’ Belinda said.

  ‘It’s settled then.’ Norma felt herself relax as though a great danger had been passed. She smiled at Duncan, touched his arm. ‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you. Tell Josie where you’ve been. Give her my love.’

  ‘How about Dad?’

  ‘Oh, leave him out.’

  The girls were looking suspicious. She played the schoolteacher and shooed them out. They picked up their rackets in the porch and walked down the garden path with Duncan between them into the park.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Norma called. She went back to the sitting-room and watched them cross the clover slope to the graveyard; saw him like a prisoner between guards. She had seen a man marched into the bush in that way once. A documentary, on TV? Unnecessary person, taken off to be clubbed to death. The close-up showed his Adam’s apple bouncing in his throat.

  Oh no, Duncan, no, Norma cried. I’m not going to let that happen to you.

  5

  I’m inclined to get rid of the man I’ve called Clive Schwass; and Daphne, his wife. It’s established that he owns a berry farm. Norma has pictured him out in his vines letting hailstones strike him on the face. I can’t see much more than a sour expression. He’s Norma’s older brother, a man well-off in money and property but with a meanness in his nature that leads him to negative judgements on most things, including himself. He works hard, getting a sour pleasure from the monotony of his life. He thinks that Norma holds herself superior to him – and Norma, in fact, believes he has mental talents he’s never used, or had them once, but it’s too late now. His habit of denigration angers her. More than once she’s snatched up her coat and bag and slammed out of his house; but knows that this behaviour satisfies him. Daphne is the one who patches things up.

  Their children have grown up and gone. Francine is a secretary and Deborah a nurse. The boy, Mark, did not want to work with his father. He’s in Australia driving an earth-moving machine. In the photograph he sent home last Christmas he stands only half the height of the giant wheel. Daphne worries about him getting killed or meeting a girl and marrying and not coming back to Saxton. Clive won’t believe his story that he’s saving lots of money. He’s heard about the brothels in Australian work-towns and thinks his son will come home broke one day, with a disease.

  Norma is fond of Mark. Don’t stop at Australia, she writes, the whole world’s there in front of you, keep on going. You shouldn’t live too close to your father, she really means.

  It would be easy to show Clive Schwass’s coloration. But I don’t need him yet and may not need him at all. He can wait on his berry farm.

  Clive would be satisfied, in his way, with this offhand treatment.

  There are parents too, that man and woman who farmed the flood-prone property in the valley. Age and illness and suburbia change configurations in these two. There’s more open feeling in them now, though no clear grasp of what is going on. Mrs Schwass, once so sharp and ungenerous, has turned into a happy old woman. She slides lightly over the difficulties of her life. After forty years of mud and milking and hosing-out there’s nothing, not even ill-health, that can trouble her. She loves her warm rooms and thick-pile carpets and concrete paths. Mr Schwass, buttoned-up so long, now lets go. Mostly he’s exactly where he is. His memories, when they come, are inside out and back to front.

  They live in a townhouse. Expensive place in a cul-de-sac. There are nine white stucco units with red tile roofs, each set a little skewed from the next for privacy. Tom Round designed them. They suggest toy town only to those who don’t understand space-saving architecture. Mr and Mrs Schwass are happy there. Their tiny back-yard is sunny and private. (Clive drives ten miles in to mow the lawn.) Mrs Schwass can walk down a right-of-way and sit under trees in a park. (Mr Schwass does not go out.) The kitchen is beautiful, with every device, and Norma would love to have it in her house. All the same she worries about her parents in the unit. Tom Round took advantage of the rising ground to give the owners a glimpse of the sea. Stairs lead half a storey up from the entrance hall to the living-room and kitchen and bedroom. Norma worries her parents will fall down. She wants to see them in more sensible place. But Mrs Schwass loves her view of the mudflats and the sea and passing yachts that slide along the edge of the soccer fields and will not move.

  ‘The carpet’s very soft, dear,’ she says.

  Norma called to see them after meeting Duncan Round. ‘I can only stay a minute, Mum.’ She was on her way to visit her orchardist friend. (‘That I-surrender Eyetie’ Mr Schwass calls him. His own name has never seemed foreign to him. ‘No Dad, he’s not Italian,’ Norma says, but has given up explaining further than that.)

  She had a good close look at both of them. There were whisker patches on her father’s chin, so he, not the district nurse, had done the shaving. (Sometimes he gets fed up and stops halfway and goes about with a silver left cheek and jaw.) She kissed him and he said to his wife, ‘Who’s this pretty girl?’ For a moment she thought he did not know her – always a shock – then saw he was recognizing people today and had paid her a compliment. It was a sign of how well he felt that he wasn’t in his dressing-gown and slippers but had dressed himself – slacks and shirt and cardigan and slip-on shoes. No socks. He always got impatient at the end. ‘Stable door, Dad,’ she said, but he was protesting about the change (which seemed only yesterday to him) from buttons to zips and made an angry push at her when she came too close. She wouldn’t dream of trying to do up his fly, and saw no reason why it should be done, he never went out.

  ‘What’s the new district nurse like?’

  Her parents answered together: ‘A lovely girl’, ‘A stupid damned woman’, which made Norma laugh.

  ‘She holds me too damn tight. I’ve got bruises on my arm.’

  ‘She had to hold you, Ken, because you tried to hit her.’

  ‘I won’t have a damned woman drying my bumhole.’

  Norma went to the kitchen and put the kettle on. ‘Has he been hitting you?’ she asked her mother.

  ‘Just a little punch now and then. It’s nothing personal, dear. He gets so angry about things – chairs and tables and knives and forks, they won’t do what he wants. He tore up last night’s paper because he couldn’t fold it properly. Never mind, there’s never any nice news.’

  ‘Where has he hit you?’ She was worried her father would punch her on the chest.

  ‘Nowhere that hurts.’ But Norma saw her limping and guessed he had hit her legs with his walking-stick. He whacked her the way he’d whack a cow in the yard. There was no way to prevent it short of putting him in a home. Her father walked slowly and her mother was good at staying out of range – a quick mover in spite of her spindly legs and beetle hump. She saw her bruises as love trophies anyway. Norma knew the danger but could not work out the rights and wrongs of it.

  She made tea and her mother put peanut brownies on a plate. Mrs Schwass made peanut brownies every morning. Creaming the butter and sugar, adding the flour and cocoa and peanuts; then putting neat dobs on the oven tray; and taking the hot cakes out, cooling them on a wire rack, stacking them neatly in a tin lined with greaseproof paper – she would not give this up for anything. Norma and Clive
and the district nurses carried cakes away in paper bags. She left them out for the milkman and the postman and the paper-boy. Her husband did not eat them, nor did she, but she put out a plate with every cup of tea, and enjoyed looking at them, they made her feel she was in command of things. She made macaroni cheese as well but only on the days when meals-on-wheels didn’t deliver. The meals-on-wheels lady got a bag of peanut brownies too. Norma ate the ones she took home, they were very tasty.

  Today she carried away half a dozen for her friend. ‘Mum, don’t you let him bully you,’ she said in the entrance hall.

  ‘It’s really all he can do for himself,’ Mrs Schwass replied.

  ‘Does the district nurse look at you too?’

  ‘Oh yes, she’s very thorough. Ken likes her or he wouldn’t try to hit her. He likes pretty girls. I have to keep my eye on him.’

  Norma could not say more than ‘Good’ to that. Then noticed there was no bulb in the hall light-socket.

  ‘He forgot where the switch was to turn it off. So he got the kitchen stool and took the bulb out. He was careful’ – seeing Norma look shocked ‘– he used the tea-towel so he wouldn’t burn his hand.’

  ‘Good God, Mum –’ But it was no use, her mother would not be frightened by anything. And did it matter, Norma thought, if her father electrocuted himself or fell off the kitchen stool and broke his neck? Any time now the final thing could happen. She saw them innocent as two babies on a motorway. Death and danger rushed by everywhere but somehow they made it acceptable.

  Norma put her cookies on the car seat and drove away to visit her ‘Eyetie’ friend.

  South through Darwood, past the meat-works, round two sides of Schwass’s berry farm. The road ran straight through pea fields, then followed the curving south shore of the inlet. She saw plover in the fields and black-backed gulls and herons on the mudflats. Tar-seal gave way to metal. She drove up a valley in low hills, leaving dust as fluffy as whipped egg-white behind her. John Toft’s orchard lay at the head of the valley. Beyond it the road stopped at a padlocked gate and a clay forestry track went into pines. The forest was ready for milling and a consortium of Australian and New Zealand companies was buying the farms and orchards in the valley to build a timber mill and a chipboard plant. The residents were holding on – some only for a better price. Norma hoped that when John had to go he would buy a smaller place close to town.