by Gee, Maurice
‘Thank you, Mrs Bolton,’ Kitty squeaked. Her voice had never seemed very big to her.
‘Only because you are taller than Irene Chalmers. Britannia is tallest. You must keep your head up and your neck straight. And never smile. I don’t like the way you show your teeth all the time, Kitty.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bolton.’
‘Now, Irene.’ She gave her favourite a touch on the head. ‘Gallant Little Belgium, brave and beautiful.’
Irene went pink and then went white. She loathed Mrs Bolton, who was always patting her and telling her how nicely she spoke, and stood, and chewed, and kept her fingernails and played the piano. The last was what angered her most – to have Mrs Bolton talking about music as though it were no more important than good manners and dressing properly. Irene stared at her fingers and didn’t say thank you. She heard Melva Dyer in the next desk whispering that Charmy-Barmy was going to cry, she thought she was getting Britannia. It wasn’t true! She wanted to be nothing in Bolter’s pageant. She didn’t even want to sing in the chorus.
‘Next,’ Mrs Bolton said, ‘New Zealand. We need a big strong boy with shoulders back and nice clean teeth. Not you Wipaki, someone white. Wix! New Zealand! Heart of Oak!’ Her face swelled with emotion. She put her hand on the table to steady herself.
‘Who’s going to be the Kaiser, Mrs Bolton?’
‘Not me.’
‘Not me.’
‘The Kaiser is a most important role,’ Mrs Bolton said. ‘He doesn’t have to act much, just pull faces. Miller, stand up.’
‘I don’t want to be the Kaiser, Mrs Bolton.’
‘Don’t argue with me, Miller. Pull a face. Make some sort of nasty noise, boy.’
‘I can’t, Mrs Bolton.’
To Noel, sitting a couple of desks away, it seemed that Phil was going to cry. He saw the greedy look on Bob Taylor’s face and knew what Phil would lose by being Kaiser or breaking down. It puzzled him that he should feel as if it were happening to himself. He didn’t like Phil Miller. His clothes stank for one thing, and he was always skiting and belching and twisting the arms of kids smaller than himself. But he felt if Bolters made him Kaiser it would be some bit of torture, done on purpose. He stuck his arm in the air and climbed to his feet. ‘Mrs Bolton, I’ll be Kaiser. I can do faces.’
‘I’ve already chosen you for New Zealand.’
‘You watch, Mrs Bolton.’ He went cross-eyed, he sucked in his cheeks and pushed out his lips. He hooked his fingers like claws and took a sudden step at Mrs Bolton. She gave a jump.
‘That’s enough. Keep away, Wix.’
He made a sound like a bull bellowing.
‘All right, boy. That’s enough.’
‘And Phil can be New Zealand. He’s tallest in the class.’
Mrs Bolton looked at them. She saw that the Miller boy was half a head taller, and then, with surprise, better-looking too, if he brushed his hair. Noel Wix looked rather Italian and had a rubber face that wouldn’t keep still. Miller, on the other hand…
‘Come here, both of you.’ She stood them back to back, then said to Phil, ‘Show me your teeth.’
He showed them.
‘Yes, all right. But you’ll have to clean yourself up, boy. New Zealand doesn’t have greasy hair.’ She gave it a tug and wiped her fingertips on her dress. ‘And nails. Just look at them. Quite filthy, Miller. Out to the tap and scrub them straight away.’
Phil went. He sent a murderous look at Noel from the door.
Chapter Three
Buck’s Hole
Irene and Kitty were no more friends than Noel and Phil, but they wanted to be. Kitty admired Irene’s aloofness, and envied her skill on the piano, and her clothes, and liked her prettiness, her pink and white skin and black, shiny hair; while Irene, who was not aloof, and hated to be thought so, but was cut off from her classmates by her voice and clothes and her mother’s pretensions, and was too proud to work at coming close, saw in Kitty, noisy and careless and popular, many of the things she wanted to be. It was the first year they had been in the same class. Kitty had skipped standard five (which did not please Noel). She was quick at learning – too clever by half, Mrs Bolton thought – but it came naturally. She did not have to work very hard. Everything interested her, and what she was interested in, she remembered. She was big for her age and rather clumsy. Like Irene, she took piano lessons from Frau Stauffel, but cleverness did not help in that. She played, according to Noel, like a bunch of bananas, and the sight of Irene’s fingers, skipping and dancing and sometimes seeming to stamp with a skinny ferocity on the keys, filled her with longing and admiration, and sometimes with bitter envy. She did not join in the game of making fun of Charmy-Barmy.
That lunch hour she was sitting under the trees with two of her friends, Melva Dyer and June Truelove, talking about the pageant. Melva had been chosen to play India, and June, Egypt, and they were excited about the costumes they would wear.
‘I’ll wear a turban with jewels in it,’ Melva said.
‘I’ll paint my cheeks. And wear baggy trousers,’ June said, ‘Fancy having to be on the same side as Phil Miller.’
‘He stinks,’ Melva said. ‘I saw a flea jump off his shirt.’
‘Where did it land? Hee, here’s Gallant Little Belgium. Irene, a flea jumped off Phil Miller on to your dress.’
‘You’ll have to dance with him in the pageant.’
‘And kiss him too.’
There was something especially exciting in imagining Irene with Phil Miller. It was a game they often played. Irene took no notice. She put her lunch-basket on the grass and sat down by Kitty, leaving a gap large enough to make it seem she was by herself.
‘Phil Miller likes you,’ June said.
‘He’s got your name carved in the lid of his desk.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘He’s got a heart with initials in it,’ June said.
Melva tried a new tack. ‘Your mummy wouldn’t like you sitting with us.’
‘When are you going away to a private school, Irene?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Mrs Bolton told my mother you were.’
‘I’m not. I like it here.’
‘You like Phil Miller. You’re in love with him.’
‘The flea bit him and now it’s biting you.’
Irene began to feel dizzy. The words seemed to come out of the trees, and from the sky, not from Melva and June. She wanted to scream and she wanted to cry, and wanted also to go far away. She wondered how Kitty Wix could be so quiet.
‘I wonder who it likes biting best.’
‘Soon there’ll be lots of little fleas.’
Irene closed her basket. She managed to stand up and that seemed to put her far away from Melva and June, but it did not shift her away from Kitty. Unless Kitty did something this moment was going to grow more horrible. She would never believe in kindness or goodness again.
Kitty too was faced with something simple. She liked Melva and June, but if she let them do this to Irene, she was doing it too. That made her sick. It was as though she had eaten something bad and her stomach wanted to get rid of it. So she stood up. It was difficult. Her legs felt swollen. She picked up her lunchpaper. ‘Wait a minute, Irene. I’m coming too.’
Melva and June were sitting on the grass like two wooden puppets with open mouths, waiting for someone to make them talk. Kitty and Irene walked away. They found a place under a lime tree and finished their lunch.
‘Did Bolters really say you were going away to a private school?’
‘Probably. She’s been talking to my mother. She wants me to.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘Sometimes. With pigs like June and Melva. Mostly I like it here though. I pretend I’m sick. I can make myself faint. Then dad says I’ve got to live at home. I can make him do most things I want.’ A look of slyness made her face go gnomish. Kitty found it exciting. She saw through adults easily, but could not shake off her feeling of being ruled.
; ‘Can you teach me to faint?’
‘You hold your breath,’ Irene said…
They sat under the lime tree, practising, and did not hear the shouting from the back field. Clippy Hedges heard it and strode out of the staffroom and across the field and parted the yelling boys with his hands and found Noel and Phil wrestling on the grass. Phil had a leg bar on Noel and was leaning so hard that the knee bones seemed on the point of springing apart; and Noel had captured one of Phil’s hands and was bending the fingers back like willow twigs. Hedges expected to hear them snap. Their faces were atrocious; they appalled him. He gave a bellow and seized them and flung them apart.
‘Clear off, the lot of you!’ he shouted at the spectators. Then he marched Phil and Noel into his classroom by their shirts. He strode to his table and took his strap and let it fall out to its full length.
‘Who started it? Wix?’
Noel said nothing. Phil had, coming up and shouldering him, but he could not say so. All he knew was that he was sorry he hadn’t let Phil be the Hun.
‘Miller?’
Phil shrugged. He didn’t care about getting strapped. He hoped it would make Wix howl. He didn’t need help from Wix, with Bolters or anyone.
‘Both gone dumb?’
‘No one started it, Sir. It just happened,’ Noel said.
‘An act of God, eh? Like an earthquake?’ Hedges laughed sourly. He rolled his strap and threw it in the drawer. Noel couldn’t help giving Phil a grin.
‘Yes, grin away,’ Hedges said. ‘But why should I be a thug just because you are? Come and see this.’ He took a chart from the drawer and held it flat on the table. The boys came to his side and looked at his finger tapping the pink petals of something they took at first for a rose. ‘The human brain. That’s the cerebrum. That’s what makes us human.’ He rapped them on the head with his knuckles. ‘We’re supposed to think with it. And here, down here, that’s the reptile brain. Left over from when we lived in the swamp. That’s what you’ve been using. Do you want to be a man or a crocodile, Wix?’
‘Yes, Sir. I’m sorry.’ He thought it wasn’t fair. He hadn’t started the fight.
‘Miller?’ Phil just shrugged. He was not going to apologise.
‘I’ve got a good mind to cut out your swimming,’ Hedges said.
‘You can’t do that, Sir,’ Noel said.
‘Can’t I?’
‘It’s our diving test.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten. I’ll think about it. Off you go now, the pair of you. And see if you can use your brains instead of just your brawn.’ But he called Phil back. ‘Let me look at that knee. Put your foot on the chair.’
Phil lifted his foot and Hedges got some cotton wool and iodine from his cupboard. He looked at the bleeding scab on Phil’s knee and wondered if it was impetigo, then saw it was crusted blood from a graze. He picked it off with cotton wool and dropped it in his wastepaper basket. ‘This will hurt.’ He dabbed iodine in the wound. Phil gave a hiss.
‘Have you thought about college, Miller?’ Hedges asked.
‘No, Sir.’ Phil spoke in a lifeless voice. He hated this subject.
‘Did you ask your father?’
‘He doesn’t want me to go.’
‘What about you?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Would you like me to talk to him?’
‘No, Sir. Don’t do that.’ Phil was alive now. He did not want Hedges to find out he was living alone.
‘Well, I’ll see. You could do college. If you worked.’
‘I want to get a job. Get some money.’
Hedges believed that. The boy needed better food and clothes – but money by itself wouldn’t be enough. What he really needed was better care. His mother had died five years ago, and his brothers and sisters had been shunted off to an aunt in Christchurch. Then his father had lost his job as a tally clerk and sunk to rag-and-bone man, pushing a handcart round the streets and nipping into back alleys for a swig of gin from the bottle he kept hidden in the rags. Come to think of it, Hedges hadn’t seen Charlie Miller for a month or two.
‘How is your dad, anyway?’
‘He’s all right. He’s good, Sir.’
‘I haven’t seen him.’
‘He’s been working down the other end of town.’
‘Mm, I see.’
‘Can I go now?’
‘Yes, off you go.’
He watched Phil cross the playground, and heave a smaller boy out of his way. His aggressiveness came from being treated with contempt. Time was short, Hedges thought, if he was going to do anything for Phil. He grew sour about the need to make him acceptable to people who practised such easy scorn. What he should try to do was give the boy his chance to be anything he wanted, and to hell with Jessop. Just now all he could manage was not to cancel swimming. Phil was like a fish in the water.
Hedges wouldn’t have minded disappointing smug young Master Wix.
At 2 o’clock standard six started for the river. They crossed the footbridge from the town and went along the clay path through the scrub to Marwick’s Road. The girls went into another path leading to Girlie’s Hole, where Kitty was soon in trouble with Mrs Bolton for swimming by the rapids and swimming overarm. ‘Swim like a lady, Kitty,’ Mrs Bolton called. She did not like anything more strenuous than dog-paddling. Meanwhile, the boys had crossed the one-way bridge to Marwick’s farm and turned up the bank of the river towards Buck’s Hole. The Marwick house stood several hundred yards off, with gables, fretwork, finials, a corner tower, white as marble against the dark-green bush. Its roof had faded to a washed-out pink, with a rusty patch here and there, but it managed to look like a faery castle – though its denizens were anything but faery, Hedges thought.
‘Don’t go in till I get there,’ he shouted to the boys in the lead. ‘In fact, stay with me.’ He had seen Edgar Marwick shovelling dirt into a barrow in the garden.
The boys came running back. ‘Sir! Sir! They’ve put a notice up.’
‘Where?’ He followed through the scrub and came to it, a good bit of workmanship, with the post skinned and dried and the board notched in, and the message itself lettered neatly: Private Property. Keep Out. By Order, J. and E. Marwick.
‘They can’t do that, can they?’ Noel asked.
‘No, they can’t.’ Hedges looked across the paddocks at Edgar Marwick, leaning on his spade now, watching them. Marwick made him nervous: a man with a burning in his eyes, a rage in him not held down properly. Hedges was sure of his position, however. He had no intention of letting this notice stand. The river holes belonged to the town. As long as the boys kept on this side of the fence, they had legal access.
‘They’re cheeky devils,’ Hedges said. ‘Pull it out. Wobble it, that’s right. Now give it a lift.’
They cheered as the post came free. They tossed it like a caber down the bank into a patch of blackberries. Hedges saw Marwick striding for the house, to get new orders from his Ma, no doubt: Mrs Julia Marwick. He’d never met her, but seen her once or twice sitting in her wicker chair on the veranda, with a floppy hat over her face and, he thought, a stick clasped in her hands. She gave an impression of witch and spider, disturbing to Hedges – although he was fond of spiders and liked the idea of witches too. It was the way she sat at the centre of things he found disturbing. It seemed to give her power, and secret knowledge. The notice was her idea, no doubt about that. He wondered what she would tell her son to do.
‘All right, down to the pool. Strip off. Don’t go in. Wait for the reading.’
He left them pulling off their clothes and crossed the shingle bank to the water. The loveliness of this pool took his breath away. It always happened. The sand and shingle, oatmeal coloured, with red pebbles, white pebbles, speckled ones and brown, strewn about like some Caliph’s treasure, and the water with the clarity of air and the coldness of stone, and the mossy banks, the bush with caves of shadow, the flow in, brittle, pure, the flow out, smooth as glass, and the green deeps, with
the river floor somehow warm at the bottom – it held him in a moment of delight. Then he crouched at the water and dipped in his thermometer. Warm today, warmer than last time. The trout would be feeling uncomfortable. He looked at the mercury thread. ‘Sixty-eight. Everyone in.’
They ran past him, shouting, boys naked and boys togged, with brown backs and white behinds, with grazed knees and stubbed toes and knobbly elbows and knobbly spines. They went in with a flurry of water and a chorus of screeches, and reduced his pleasure in the pool not at all. The place belonged to them. Soon it would go back to its quietness. He let them horseplay for ten minutes. Then he called the non-swimmers and made them lie on the shingle practising strokes. He climbed along the bank to the deep part of the pool and called Miller and Wix for their diving test. They came along like monkeys, one in bright-red togs, the other in a pair thrown out in a rag-bag, with ravelled holes in the wool and a leather bootlace for a belt.
‘Who’s first? You’re not going to quarrel about that too?’
‘He can go,’ Noel said.
Hedges took a tin lid from his pocket and flicked it into the water. It fluttered like a leaf going down, and shone like the belly of a fish.
‘All right, Miller. If you get short of breath come up quick.’
Phil made a clean dive. He knew there had been no splash, just a boiling on the surface. He grinned going down – let Wix do better – and swam fast in water full of sun. It was as easy as walking. There was a glare above him like a sky, and the pebble bottom leading on, and a brown trout under the bank, safe and still. He felt easy, strong, in control. Bubbles of air swelled at his lips, tickling them. He felt like yelling out, and not going back, though going back with the lid and waving it was a kind of treasure he saved up. His hands seemed very white. The bottom slanted down. And there, far away, looking bent, was the cigarette lid. It winked like an eye. He went towards it, digging in the sand, sending up puffs of silt like a crayfish. He grabbed the lid and put it in his teeth, thinking of pirates. It almost made him lose his air and he shot a look at the surface, making sure. It stretched like a cloth made of silk. Leaves lay flat on it and shadows loomed and shrank. That must be the bush. Hedges, up there, would be getting worried. He was probably timing things with his watch. Phil wished there was a record for staying down. He could go a while yet, even though his chest was getting sore. Then he glimpsed something deeper down. It was green and yellow and seemed to make a word, but he could not read it. He made a stroke towards it. The lid seemed to shift in his teeth and he took it out and knew he had no more time. With a beating of feet and a grabbing of hands, he made for the surface.