“To have a bonfire after that,” my mother said; a glass clinked. “It’s unfeeling. They’re like animals.”
“Hold on now, it wasn’t ever proved,” said my father. “You can’t condemn someone without a fair trial.”
“I know. You’ve only got to look at him. I know.”
“Well, we’ll agree to differ. Remind me tomorrow, I must buy that Beethoven.”
Nothing about a trunk. In a far garden a ball of fire leapt up screaming. I picked up my history sentence, and next day, drop-kicking a can to Joe, I said: “What was your brother called?”
“Frankie.” Savagely he kicked the can against a bus-stop.
I wanted to trust him. “You never did tell me what happened,” I prompted.
His eyes fastened on the can; they glazed with fear, distrust, the look I’ve seen before my desk when I’ve enquired into family backgrounds. He strode exaggeratedly to the can and crumpled it beneath his heel. Suddenly he muttered: “We had a bonfire. It was going out. My father got a can of paraffin and we threw it on the fire. It spilled on Frankie. We called an ambulance but they didn’t come in time.”
I was silent; he hadn’t helped my trust. “I bet they all think we’re cruel round here, having a bonfire this year,” Joe said.
“They don’t know anything about it. Anyway, you’re not,” I told him. I couldn’t repeat what my parents had said: I wasn’t ready to oppose them.
“It was my mother’s idea to have one this year. I think she wants to make me forget.” Or somehow to prove to herself that she was wrong to suspect: not that I made this connexion then. “I don’t want to have a bonfire all by myself,” Joe continued.
“You won’t. I’ll be there,” I said. Some part of me trusted him.
At dinner on Guy Fawkes” Night, after my usual taste of table wine, I told my parents: “They’ve let us off homework tonight,” which was true. “I’m going to see The Bridge on the River Kwai with some friends from school,” which wasn’t.
“I don’t see why not,” my mother said. “Joe Turner won’t be there, will he?”
“No, he won’t.” He wouldn’t.
“You won’t have time to listen to this, then,” my father said, reaching beneath The Times on the coffee table to produce Beethoven’s Seventh. For a moment I was ashamed: they trusted me, they bought me presents, and I betrayed them. But they condemned Joe without ever having met him. I knew Joe; I’d seen how withdrawn his parents were from him; tonight he’d be alone if I didn’t keep my word. “Thanks very much,” I said, and took the record to my room.
Night had fallen; curtains glowed and shadows moved. I glanced back, but my parents weren’t watching. Again I felt a twinge of shame. In the sky around me it had started; green stars sparkled blue and fell; the twinkling blue star of an ambulance swept past. I stood before the Turners’ door. Mr Turner swearing, drinking; I didn’t want to face that. Once more I was ashamed; if Joe could stand him, it was up to me to do so for Joe’s sake. I knocked.
Mr Turner pulled the door from my grasp. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, falling against the door-frame, hooking his braces over his shoulder. I half-expected him to close me out, but he seemed triumphant about something. “I’m not the bloody butler,” he said. “Come in or don’t, it’s all the same to me.”
I heard voices in the front room; I entered. Joe was on the floor, counting out fireworks: volcanoes, worms, wheels, stiff-tailed rockets. Around him stood boys I’d never seen before; one had a head-scarved girl on his arm and was fondling her. I knew they were from Lower Brichester. I looked at Joe, waiting to be greeted. “There you are,” he said, glancing up. “These are some of my friends from where I used to live.”
I felt out of place, no longer important, in a sense betrayed; I’d thought it would be Joe and me. But it was his home; it wasn’t my place to judge — already I’d determined not to harden prejudice as my parents had. I tried to smile at the girl. She stared back; I suppressed my suburban accent. Ill at ease, I stood near the door, peering into the hall as Mrs Turner came downstairs. Her eyes were red; she’d been crying. She confronted her husband in the kitchen, out of sight. “Well, now you’ve built your bonfire, aren’t you going out to watch?” she demanded.
“It was your idea, not mine, my girl. I’m not getting dressed to go out and play with all his little bastards. I’ve done my bit for the bonfire,” he laughed.
“You’re scared,” she taunted. “Scared that you might see something.”
“Not me. my girl. Not anymore. I’m not going to hear the moving about any more.”
“What are you saying?” she cried, suddenly audibly afraid — and Joe said: “Wake up everyone, time to start.” We carried fireworks through the kitchen; Mr Turner’s feet were on the table, he lay back with his eyes closed, smiling; his wife turned from him to us with a kind of desperation. A vest dripped on me.
The gravel path was strewn with twigs; what had been a flowerbed was now waste, heaped with wood. The girl tacked Catherine wheels to the fence; the boys staked out the soil with Guinness bottles, thrusting a rocket into each mouth. I glanced up at the bonfire against the arcs of fire among the stars, remembering the wooden figure like a witch’s skeleton at the stake. “Where’s the guy?” I asked Joe.
“Come on, you lot, who’s got the guy?” Joe called. But everyone protested ignorance. We went back into the kitchen. “Has anyone seen our guy?” Joe asked.
“Someone must have stolen it,” his mother said uneasily. “You’d think up this way they’d know better.”
“After I dressed it up, too,” his father mumbled, and turned quickly to his Guinness.
We searched upstairs, though I couldn’t see why. Nothing beneath a rumpled double bed but curlers. Joe’s room featured a battle of wooden model aeroplanes and a sharp smell of glue like paraffin. One room was an attic: dusty mirrors, footballs, boots, fractured chair-leg. Behind two mirrors I found a trunk whose lock had been forced. I opened it without thinking, but it was empty. “The hell with it,” Joe said finally. “It’s the fireworks they’ve all come for, anyway.”
The girl had set one wheel whirling, spurting sparks. They lit up Mrs Turners” face staring from the kitchen window before she moved away; her husband’s eyes were closed, his mouth open and wheezing. Joe took a match and bent to the bonfire; fire raced up a privet twig. Above us hands of fire dulled against the night. One of the boys sent a rocket whooping into space; its falling sparks left dents of darkness on my eyes. I had no matches; I approached the boy and asked for one. He passed me a handful. Beyond the fire, now angled with planes of flame, the girl was giggling with her escort. I struck a match on my sole and counted: “Ten nine, eight, seven, six — ” when the rocket leapt. I’d forgotten to muffle my accent, but nobody cared. I was happy.
The girl came back with her escort from a region where chimneys were limned on fans of white electric fire. “The bonfire’s going out,” said Joe. I gave him some of my matches. Red-hot flecks spun through the smoke and vanished; the smoke clogged our nostrils — it would be catarrh in the morning.
Over the houses rose a red star. It hung steady, dazzling, eternal. Our gasps and cheers were silenced. The white house-walls turned red, like cardboard in a fire about to flame. As suddenly, the star sank and was extinguished; in another garden someone clapped. Everything was dimmed; Joe felt his way to the bonfire and struck matches.
Someone stood up from the corner of the house and moved behind me. I looked round, but the face was grey and formless after the star. A hand touched my arm; it seemed light as paper. The figure moved toward Joe. My sleeve was wet. I lifted it to my nose and sniffed; it was stained with paraffin. I might have called out if Joe’s mother hadn’t screamed.
Everyone but Joe turned startled to the kitchen. Mr Turner stirred and stared at her. “You must be bloody off your nut,” he snarled, “waking me like that.”
“Frankie’s clothes!” she cried, trying to claw at his face. “What have you done
with them?”
“I told you I’d find your trunk, my girl,” he laughed, beating her off. “I thought I’d do something for the bonfire, like dressing up the guy.”
She sat down at the table and sobbed. Everyone was watching, aghast, embarrassed. Our eyes were readjusting; we could see each other’s red-hot faces. Suddenly, terrified, I looked toward Joe. He was kneeling by the bonfire, thrusting matches deep. My eyes searched the shadows. Near the hedge stood a Guinness bottle which should have held a rocket. Desperately, I searched beyond. A figure was creeping along the hedge toward Joe. As I discovered it, it leapt.
Joe twisted round, still kneeling, as it reached him. The fire caught; fear flared from Joe’s face. His mouth gaped; so did mine as I struggled to call the others, still watching the kitchen. The figure wore trousers and a blazer, but its hands — My tongue trembled in my mouth. I caught at one boy’s arm, but he pulled away. Joe’s head went back; he overbalanced, clawing at the earth. The rocket plunged into his mouth; the figure’s other hand fell on the bonfire. Flames blazed through its arms, down to the rocket’s fuse.
The brick dug into my face; I’d clapped my hands over my ears and pressed my head against the wall. The girl ran screaming into the house. I couldn’t leave the wall until I understood. Which is why each pebble is embedded in my forehead; I never left that wall. Perhaps subconsciously Joe had meant to spill the paraffin; who knows? But why had his father given it to him? Perhaps Joe had wanted it to happen, but what justice demanded that revenge? I reject it, still searching for the truth in each face before my desk while I work to release them from backgrounds like my own and Joe Turner’s. The office tomorrow, thank God.
When the strongest of us went unwillingly toward what lay by the bonfire, away from the screams and shouting in the kitchen and the smoking Guinness bottles, we found a papier-mache hand.
THE OLD HORNS
“Look at that wood,” George said, standing above Eve as she lay on the hillock. “Can’t you just imagine satyrs chasing nymphs through the undergrowth, catching them in the shadows.”
I looked toward the trees: dappled shifting sunlight, soft hollows and rises resilient with pine-needles.
Eve laughed and looked in the other direction. “But why The Old Horns?” she persisted.
“It sounds like a legend,” George suggested. “Horns played by satyrs, a pagan orgy, revellers lying sated on the sand — a bit like us in fact — virgins dancing toward the man of their choice — ”
I sat up; my poem was disintegrating. “Paganism wasn’t like that,” I interrupted, raising my voice. “It degraded the body. It didn’t release you, it dragged you down into itself. It rotted you.”
“Who asked you?” George said.
I lay back, clutching a bottle of home-made wine. The sun swelled behind my eyelids, fermenting my brain. George and Eve whispered on the hillock to my left. Away on the right, where the grassy mounds became dunes, I could hear the others; friends of mine but blurred by alcohol — several girls and women carefully avoiding George, two children chasing, men who frowned at George but, like myself, never intervened. I gave myself up to the sunlight, the rustling grasses.
I thought:
To walk on needles sharp as scattered combs.
No, that was inappropriate.
Pines like arrows to the sky, the sea’s reflection.
Dunes.
But beyond the dunes lay The Old Horns, disguised as soft sand. Last week when we’d discussed the picnic, someone had mentioned the name. We’d decided at once; it sounded authentically mysterious. It was part of the beach, but we’d convinced ourselves that sand was half the fun, sand sprinkled on the garlicwurst like salt, sand crunching between the Camembert and crackers. We hadn’t known about The Old Horns. At noon we’d come upon it; one of the children, scampering ahead toward the beach, had screamed and sunk into what had seemed a dune. We’d pulled her free; her legs were clothed in socks of brown mud. Surveying warily, our eyes sharpened by the sunlight, we’d noticed that the dunes ahead were no longer the rich brown of wet sand, but the festering richness of rotting wood. “Keep close to me, you two,” Thora called to her children. We turned back; when we wanted the beach we’d go round. I examined the place as we hurried back to where the grey fungi, suddenly apparent everywhere, gave way to grass. The deceptive stain had leaked toward the beach, toward the dunes, toward the pines which curved round but hung back, their roots thick with the mud as if advanced tentatively and caught. Just inside the curve of the pines I saw the dull glint of a pool. We came to firmer ground. “Tobacco waste,” suggested someone, thinking of the factory we’d passed a mile away that morning, brown and rough and moist as chewed tobacco. “Donkey-dung,” George had laughed. Lying on my hillock, I felt my poem choked by The Old Horns; it was as though something had suffocated or was stirring feebly in its own filth, clogged, encrusted. When I’d looked back I couldn’t see the child’s footprints; all trace of her had been engulfed.
Water left to catch the leaves, to photograph the trees.
Eve screamed. I jerked erect to see her pulling away from George, who fell flat on the grass. “Protect me,” she pleaded, running to me.
“Of course. Have some wine.” I wiped the mouth of the bottle and passed it to her; she drank, then lay back. “It’s not so comfortable here,” she complained.
“Use this as a pillow,” I suggested, extending my arm.
“It might be hard,” she said, getting up and standing between the hillocks.
“Come on, baby,” George called, straightening his open-necked shirt, “we’re all friends here.”
Baulked of Eve, I felt rising to my lips the insult I’d conceived last time George had grabbed a girl. I tried to hold it in. Last time, when I hadn’t spoken, I’d seen that George’s way with women merely shielded a kind of emotional impotence, a lack of real relationships: an emotional void which might be filled by lust or by the civil servant’s blind devotion to duty, or in George’s case both. “Must you walk round with your emotional fly unbuttoned?” I blurted.
Eve laughed; George’s grin withdrew into its shell. My poem was ruined; I stood up unsteadily, emptied my bottle and joined the others.
One of Thora’s and Ken’s children was goading a doll to climb a dune. The doll was clockwork; it clumped up the inclined sand, tilted and fell back. I was chilled by it: motion without soul. Ken was measuring his home-made wine into paper cups. “Where are George and Eve? Oh, well,” he said, and filled a cup for me. We stood talking above the prostrate bodies in the sunlight.
Thora’s other child ran down to her. “Mummy, mummy, on the beach!”
“What, dear?”
“Someone playing with a big red balloon with a face on it! I saw it over the june!”
“Dune, dear, dune.”
The mist inflated the sun as it set.
“The minibus is breathing its last/ Ken told the sun-bathers. “Hope it lives until we reach the country club.”
George appeared, combing sand from his hair. “Bet I know what’s wrong with it,” he said, and explained.
“You know, you may be right/ Ken agreed. “Have some wine and we’ll take a look.”
They strode off toward the road which led to The Old Horns. I stood among the eyes closed against the sun, the faces streaked with sweat and sand. Off to my right the sea whispered glittering; over the dunes to the left rose the pines; ahead, invisible behind a rise, spread The Old Horns. I sipped the wine, making it last.
George and Ken returned. “Well done, George,” Ken called out. “We’ve operated on the minibus.”
“I may leave early,” George said. “I want to watch Julie Christie on tv.”
“What’s wrong, George, anti-social?” I shouted. “Isn’t anyone being friendly today?” But nobody laughed.
“That’s the last of the wine,” Ken intoned.
Bodies stirred to protest. Someone sat up and pulled out a pack of cards.
“Oh, not cards,�
�� Eve said, coming round a dune. She glanced at George, then at me; a stray wind thrilled trembling through her sleeves. “Let’s have a game of hide and seek.”
Voices mumbled assent; the others stood, brushing sand from their clothes. “Who’s going to chase who?” George asked.
“The girls will chase the boys,” decided Eve.
“One guess where I’ll be,” George said, winking.
“You two can play,” Thora silenced cries, “but only if you promise to stay away from the quicksand.”
“We’ll give you a hundred!” Eve called.
“Don’t you go after Ken,” laughed Thora. “He’s mine.”
“One, two, three — ” the women chanted.
With the rest, I ran. I rounded a dune and doubled back. I crouched low over two more and could no longer hear the chant. The sun hung close to the sea. I dropped into a hollow at the edge of the beach. The hundred must be up. I lay on my side. A long-legged spider straggled before my face; it scrabbled frantically over the sand, conquered the dune and vanished. Faint cries of triumph came from somewhere. Ahead along the beach The Old Horns suffocated my thoughts. I thought of George, waiting in the shade beneath the pines for Eve. Keep away, I willed him, don’t disturb me. I cupped sand, let it trickle, become one with the dune.
I caught up the grains with indistinguishable others. They were warm, lulling. It seemed they’d never end.
The others had gone. In the evening the sea whisked foam high and retreated. It was cold in the hollow. I stretched and rose. Then I heard the music: on the beach, low wet dissonances with a jagged jerking rhythm. I climbed toward it; from the top of the dune I’d be able to see. The sand sank beneath me; my feet flung wildly. I reached the rise and stared toward the beach.
Once I’d seen a film of a festival in, I think, Mexico: gay crowds had filled the streets, and above them had lumbered great heads, painted grinning mouths, blind eyes, monsters shaken with slow mechanical mirth. I felt now the horror I’d felt then. On the beach, at the edge of The Old Horns, figures were prancing, leaping in a puppet’s parody of joy. Their heads — no, they couldn’t be heads: on their shoulders were set huge paper masks like balloons, nodding horribly, their grinning mouths stretched wide as if bloated from within. The masks were the colour of The Old Horns: heads inflated by mud, glimmering red now in the sunset. The music came from swaying pipes thrust in the stretched mouths; thick notes drooled. Whatever the pipes were made of, it must have been rotten; one disintegrated as I watched, fell softly and merged with The Old Horns. There might have been a dozen of the stamping figures; I was terrified, but something drew me closer. Some wore robes as in a pagan ritual; some were dressed in Victorian suits; one wore trousers and an open-necked shirt. As I came near the stain which was The Old Horns, this figure turned its glistening unsteady head to me.
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