Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘It won’t be me who does the firing. Sandra, all I can do is – put your case.’

  ‘In words like that? You really make the language stand up and sing.’

  ‘And you are a nasty piece of work. What’s the matter, Sandra? Is it your nature or did something go wrong?’

  Sandra laughed. ‘OK, good. You can bite. One thing, I’m not apologizing. And I’m not giving them hosts of daffodils either.’

  ‘Do you want to stay?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I like Saxton and I like the school. Although more and more I wonder why.’ She grinned, Norma could not tell whether to soften or emphasize. She looked a little joky with her Nell Gwyn tray of berries at her waist, and her thin zinc-whitened nose and starved-clown cheeks. She’s starved for kindness too, Norma thought. Sandra was confusing, contradictory.

  ‘I’d better pick some boysenberries or I’ll get the sack from here.’ She turned away, then back. ‘Hey, you’re friends with Tom Round, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m a friend of his wife.’

  ‘Is anything still going on with them?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s trying to move in on me. Sure, you turned him down. That shows good taste. I’m a kind of specialist in bad taste.’

  ‘He’s got a friend already, you know that?’

  ‘Friend meaning girlfriend? No, I didn’t. The cunning sod.’

  ‘It sounds as if he might be succeeding.’

  ‘It’s – fluid. Anyway, thanks. His wife is OK, is she? And the girls?’

  ‘I think,’ she had a sudden inrush of loathing for Tom Round, ‘I think you’d be doing them all a favour. You mightn’t be doing yourself one, though. He’s not a man I’d recommend.’

  ‘Well, with me, that’s a recommendation.’

  Norma did not want to talk about Tom – that bad taste, bad smell in the air. ‘Are you still seeing something of Lex?’

  ‘Seeing something of. I love your language.’

  For a moment Norma thought she was going to cry. I’m tired, that’s all. I need a bit of kindness from someone. Sandra Duff had the mouth of a snapping turtle. Sandra Duff had shark teeth, pick-axe chin. Her sinewy stained hands tore things apart. But I like her, Norma thought, and I want a kind word.

  ‘I mean,’ she said carefully, ‘do you still visit him?’

  Sandra gave a mocking caw; then peered hard at Norma. ‘Now and then. If visit’s the word. Are you all right?’

  ‘The sun’s so hot.’

  ‘Do you really want to know about Lex?’

  ‘I liked him. But it’s mainly curiosity.’

  ‘Did you ever see that picture where the scientist turned into a fly? Lex is turning into a goat.’

  Norma gave a laugh, just a single note. She was not sure Sandra meant to joke. This sun is going to make me faint, she thought.

  ‘I don’t mean growing horns and hooves, or getting goatish in the usual way,’ Sandra grinned. ‘In fact, I think he’s putting that behind him, which is just as well, he could hurt someone. I mean he’s trying to see the world the way a goat would and it’s got to the point where it’s not voluntary any more.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘He thinks – God, what does he think? Thinking’s out, you see, because goats don’t. But in the beginning – which is appropriate – he must have decided that goats were, well, Adam and Eve before the apple, taking all that as a metaphor. The apple was self consciousness, am I right? And goats don’t have it, they live in a light perpetual and they don’t cast any shadows either. I think Lex is getting rid of knowledge. And he thinks of it as being a goat. Which is what he’s turning into, the poor sod.’

  ‘Shouldn’t something be done for him?’

  ‘Like what? Put him in a strait-jacket and pump him full of drugs? No, what I hope is he’ll get where he’s going and then remember the apple and take himself a bite and start coming back. Not that he’s going to find me waiting, after last night.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I went up to see him – and God, Norma, he’s filthy, he stinks. Don’t goats get dipped or drenched or something? Anyway, I went, and I tried to talk him into having a shower, eating some decent food, anything. I told him to change and come into town and we’d get a meal in a restaurant. We were outside in the yard and you know what he did? He just dropped his pants and started having a shit, there on the lawn. You don’t believe me, do you? It’s true. Goats shit just wherever they shit. The anal sphincter’s not under conscious control, so why not Lex?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Went home. What else?’

  ‘Are you sure’ – she felt sick, but wildly amused – ‘it wasn’t just a clever way of getting rid of you?’

  ‘If it was he should patent it. No, he’s loopy-de-loop. But he’s a pretty smart fellow too, in some things anyway. I think he’s got a good chance of coming back.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘I think, you know, he should be walled off and left alone. It’s an interesting experiment, after all. Maybe he’ll write a book about it one day. God, there’s your brother glaring, I’d better pick some berries.’

  ‘He’s glaring at me. Do you think it would help if I talked to Lex?’

  ‘No, stay away. Everyone should leave him alone. I’ll see you, Norma. Don’t let buggerlugs Stanley spoil your Christmas. Oh, I was sorry about your old man.’

  She walked down her row and started picking. Norma went to the house and said goodbye. Driving out to the valley, she found a flaw in Sandra’s reasoning. Lex might squat and defecate whenever the urge took him but he remembered to drop his trousers. And if he was a goat now, shouldn’t he run naked on his hill? Human consciousness was operating, it could not be put off by design. Still, she conceded, he was up to something unusual. She hoped that when he wanted he would turn round and come back. It might be a question of finding the way. He might by then have had too much practice in going too far.

  She hoped very much he would not be lost.

  John had been reserved; was always Norwegian on the phone. She half expected him to say ‘Mrs Sangster’. In his letter he had managed a degree or two more warmth, but one thing he had written made her shrink – ‘these dread events that use up all our hope’. It wasn’t so. Her hope was not used up by a vicious boy; or any number of vicious boys. She must not let John get away with that. She had almost fallen into the trap of taking her wisdom from him; wisdom from a man who could not love. He had the wise appearance of a crocodile on a mud-bank, and really, she thought, he doesn’t know any more about love than a crocodile does. He did though have knowledge of himself, she must be fair; he knew that he had lost his life. John had made not a regressive journey like Lex Clearwater’s but a sideways one along a path that turned out to be a cul-de-sac – and it suited him well, there he remained. It had taken her father’s death to show that she must not spend her time with John. She drove up his valley without her usual sense of arriving home; yet felt her usual affection for John Toft.

  She did not walk in his apple trees. They sat in canvas chairs on his porch and sipped cold beer while she told him about Neil Chote and Shelley Birtles.

  ‘You are a little bit ruined by ethicality,’ John said.

  Normally she would have turned that over, worried it. Today she thought, He’s too easy with his ideas about me.

  She told him Duncan Round had bought a telescope and did not seem to need her any more.

  ‘That makes you sad?’

  ‘No. A little bit for me, not for him. There are things going on in that family that would “use up hope” far more quickly than Neil Chote.’

  ‘They are not things I will want to hear.’

  No, she thought, you wouldn’t.

  ‘You judge me, Norma. You weigh me in your scale and find that I am made of fluff and feathers.’

  ‘I just feel people can’t step away all the time. You were very good with Duncan, John. Thank you for that.’<
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  ‘You brought him with you and I made the effort. But I do not want you to bring him again.’ John smiled. ‘I am like Lop Nor. You know Lop Nor, the wandering lake? It shifts about, so when the explorers go back it isn’t where the last one marked it on the map. I too shift about so you cannot find me again.’

  ‘This way of talking John, it’s an evasion. You use it to hold me at arm’s length.’

  ‘I must do it this way or we stop.’ He looked away from her and gave a little sigh or laugh. ‘You are a lonely woman and you look for company. You must understand, I cannot …’

  ‘Why, John?’

  ‘You see me move, so I am alive, and you come and stand alongside, and I breathe – yes, he’s alive. So you start feeling in with your fingertips, eh? In we go, a little bit, nice and warm, but not far enough, a wee bit more – and what do you find, Norma? Where you would discover John Toft, nothing is there.’

  ‘Because of a woman, is it, John?’

  ‘Aach!’

  ‘I’m sorry. So it’s not?’

  ‘You want this story, Norma? I do not need to tell.’

  ‘Tell me, John.’

  ‘Well, two things. Two little parts it has. Then you must go away.’

  ‘I’ll decide that.’

  ‘Oh, you will?’ He smiled at her. ‘Listen then. It is the war. The Germans try to build the atom bomb and what they need is heavy water. And Norway has it, did you know that? They made it at the Norsk Hydro factory at Rjukan. So down it comes to Mael on Lake Tinn, on its way to Germany, and they load it on the ferry there.’

  ‘I know about this.’

  ‘You do? You know about the bomb Norwegian agents put in the ferry?’

  ‘It’s a famous story. It helped stop Germany getting the atom bomb.’

  ‘That is true. The little bomb stops the bigger bomb. So – they put it there, clever, in the night. And out goes the ferry, and the bomb goes off boom! Just a little bang, but enough. It blows the bow off the ferry and down all that heavy water goes, in thirteen hundred feet of cold lake water. And twenty Norwegian passengers were drowned.’

  Norma did not know what to say. It was another story from the war.

  ‘I knew a man who drowned on the ferry,’ John said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And the men who planted the bomb. For a short while I trained with them.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Perhaps you do.’ Men he knew had killed a man he knew. He could no longer find the principle of order which he had been taught to look for in his work. Humans especially came to seem random in their behaviour and he came to look on them as a failed species.

  ‘John, I do see. After the Lofotens –’

  ‘Ah, the Lofotens. That was prologue. And Tinnsjö part one. You want part two?’

  ‘If you want to tell.’

  ‘It was at the war’s end. I was up in Finnmark. You do not know about this campaign?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We followed the Germans down from the Russian border, and they burn and run and blow up and run, all the way down to Lyngenfjord.’

  At Tromsø he saw the Tirpitz lying keel up in the shallow fiord – the warship that saw scarcely any war, whose usefulness lay in the fear she caused. The bombers had come from inland on that day six months before. The Tirpitz had had no time for a smokescreen. Bombs smashed through the seven-inch plates of the deck and exploded in the innards of the ship. She had been built to withstand the bombs of 1939 but not these twelve thousand pounders with noses of hardened steel – Tall Boys, they were called. (Fat Boy came later.) The Tirpitz rolled over and sank and nine hundred crewmen drowned inside.

  John looked at her shape in the waters of the fiord – a long roundness, like a resting whale. But he drew back from that natural likeness. He felt the terror of nine hundred men as they suffocated or drowned inside the hull. Men and women and children had been dying in that way – and ways more horrible, with their killers closer at hand – for many years, which he had known, but had not known. Now he saw Tirpitz and he knew. He looked beyond her at the hills and coast, which had been his; and took his further step. We do not belong, we do not belong in the world.

  ‘So, I – withdrew. There is no step along a human path for me to take. Do not try to lead me that way.’

  Others faced with things as bad, or worse, did not shrivel up and die, as John Toft died on that summer day. He knows. John is a man who knows many things; has thought his way time and again out of the dark place he is in, but cannot make spirit follow thought and so falls back and will not come out, although he is able to look out; see others there, happy there, whom he cannot think of as failed. If one is not, if he or she … if Norma is not … So he thinks; but cannot come out of his dark and cold and join her.

  Norma sat silent. She grew angry with John; looked down the valley so she would not burst out. The waste of it!

  John said, ‘It is a little bit sad, this story, eh? One wipes the eye, but curls the lip.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘I think perhaps you should not waste your time with me.’

  ‘It hasn’t been a waste of time. I like you more than anyone I know.’

  ‘But you can’t go on liking me. Otherwise you will stand in one spot. That will not be good for you.’

  ‘You do know more than a crocodile.’

  ‘Eh? What’s this?’

  ‘Nothing, John. Where will you go when you sell the orchard?’

  ‘Oh, it is sold. This week. The papers are all signed. This season we will pick and then I must go.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘That is decided too. I have bought some land. It is on the Coast, you know, it is south from Westport. There is three hectares and a tin house on a hill and the sea all in front of me, down a track with a thousand steps. I have been reading Axel Munthe again. Do you know it, The Story of San Michele?’

  ‘I couldn’t read it. It was sentimental.’

  ‘You did not read far enough. You did not reach the rats in Naples eating the dead bodies. He is a strange man, this Munthe. It is as if he wears spectacles and one lens magnifies and shows all that is horrible and cruel and the other makes things fuzzy and pink – all butterflies and angel babies, eh? But, I will sit above the sea, like Munthe. I will build my house. There will be no villa of Tiberius to dig up, no broken heads of Nero eh, and no red Sphinx to stand before my door, or monks with crossed hands to re-inter. I will go down my thousand steps to an empty beach, not to Capri. That will suit me well, to be alone and have no past. I would say come and visit me, up my steps, but you will not.’

  ‘I might. Who knows?’

  ‘No, you will not.’

  She tried to imagine him building a new house round an old tin one, putting in fruit trees, digging a vegetable garden, planting vines; and in the evening walking on the beach, and trudging up his hillside path with driftwood tied in a bundle on his back. It was not real, it was sentimental, but perhaps that was the only way to keep a hold on him, through unreality. I can’t do it, she thought, I can’t lie about him. But unless I do he becomes something I can’t bear to face. She was terrified that she would come to loathe him.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll come John, I’ll just imagine you.’

  ‘Better, I think, if you forget.’

  ‘Will you forget me?’

  He looked at her. ‘Yes, yes, no trouble. You see, I am truthful. Skol, Norma.’

  ‘Skol.’

  She hoped she would forget him. If she did not she might drive to the coast one day and sneak in through the bush and tumble him head over heels down his thousand steps.

  Norma is having a bad time. She is not getting anywhere. But after leaving John’s place she has a lucky meeting. She drives away from the valley for the last time and instead of turning right on the highway to town, turns left instead and drives to Long Island where, in pre-Toft days, she used to go for solitary walks; long Saturday afternoon walks on the five-mile beach.


  She avoids the picnic ground and parks her car at the end of the public road. A forestry road runs beyond the gate and she walks in the pines for a moment, then follows a winding track through dunes and comes out on the beach. The tide is out as far as it can go, the sea is a quarter mile away. She takes off her sandals and rolls her linen slacks halfway up her shins and walks through the dry sand and over the hard wet sand, stopping to let a sand yacht roll by – not enough wind for sand yachts today. Along in front of the picnic ground people are swimming and floating on lilos, playing beach-cricket, sunbathing, throwing frisbees, trying to fly kites – not enough wind for kites either. Walkers are scattered for miles and at the eastern end half a dozen horses are wading in the sea. But where she is going, along at the western end, there is no one. She paddles a while, moving away from town, but turns and walks backwards and looks at Saxton now and then. It really is very tiny, just a blot or smudge – or brightly shining waterfly, on another angle. The coast runs away north-east, headland beyond headland, mountain rising at the back of mountain. There is Imrie, there is Corkie, and the big ones of the Armitage further back. A light flashes from Corkie, from the top – some tramper signalling his achievement home. It seems brave and foolish, the sort of thing John Toft would not do.

  She comes out of the water and starts to stride out, passing groups of strollers, smiling at those she knows – what a lot of people she knows. Soon there is no one in front of her. She sees a man and woman sunbathing naked in the dunes. She is passed by, circled round by, two joggers. They have used her as a mark. ‘It’s nice to be useful,’ she says. She starts to be happy and has the feeling, I can make it, I can get by, that she has learned to enjoy for itself.

  The beach is cut and broken at the western end, with sloping banks of shell-strewn sand running down from the marram grass and white tangles of driftwood and logs stripped of their bark. There are wide lagoons, shallow at the edge and deep in the centre, and fields of corrugated sand making a huge diamond shape where water from the estuary has rushed out. Norma walks the edge of the lagoons and plods on the soft corrugations out to the point of the diamond, making oyster-catchers and shags lift off. There she stands, wide-legged, with her face pointing at the sun and her arms flung out. Her straw hat hangs like a Viking shield on her back.