by William Boyd
It was a variation on the theme of his sister’s death, but this time it also included his father. His father and sister had died in a car crash and Gavin had to break the news to his mother. As she sobbed with grief she clung to him for support. Gavin would soothe her, stroking her hair as he’d seen done on TV in England, whispering words of comfort.
In the dream Gavin’s mother never remarried, and she and Gavin returned to England to live. People would look at them in the street, the tall elegant widow in black and her son, growing tall and more mature himself, being brave and good by her side. People around them seemed to whisper, ‘I don’t know what she would have done without him’ and ‘Yes, he’s been a marvel’ and ‘They’re so close now’.
Gavin shook his head, blushing guiltily. He didn’t hate his father – he just got angry with him sometimes – and it made him feel bad and upset that he kept on imagining him dead. But the dream insistently repeated itself, and it continued to expand; the narrative furnished itself with more and more precise details; the funeral scene was added, the cottage Gavin and his mother took near Canterbury, the plans they made for the school holidays. It grew steadily more real and credible – it was like discovering a new world – but as it did, so Gavin found himself more and more frustrated and oppressed by the truth, more dissatisfied with the way things were.
Gavin slowly pushed open the door of his parents’ bedroom. Sometimes he knocked, but his mother had laughed and told him not to be silly. Still, he was cautious as he had once been horribly embarrassed to find them both asleep, naked and sprawled on the rumpled double bed. But today he knew his father was at work in his chemistry lab. Only his mother would be having a siesta.
But Gavin’s mother was sitting in front of her dressing table brushing her short but thick reddish auburn hair. She was wearing only a black bra and pants that contrasted strongly with the pale freckly tan of her firm body. A cigarette burned in an ashtray. She brushed methodically and absentmindedly, her shining hair crackling under the brush. She seemed quite unaware of Gavin standing behind her, looking on. Then he coughed.
‘Yes, darling, what is it?’ she said without looking round.
Gavin sensed rather than appreciated that his mother was a beautiful woman. He did not realize that she was prevented from achieving it fully by a sulky turn to her lips and a hardness in her pale eyes. She stood up and stretched languidly, walking barefooted over to the wardrobe where she selected a cotton dress.
‘Where are you going?’ Gavin asked without thinking.
‘Rehearsal, dear. For the play,’ his mother replied.
‘Oh. Well, I’m going out too.’ He left it at that. Just to see if she’d say anything this time, but she seemed not to have heard. So he added, ‘I’m going with Laurence and David. To kill lizards.’
‘Yes, darling,’ his mother said, intently examining the dress she had chosen. ‘Do try not to touch the lizards, they’re nasty things, there’s a good boy.’ She held the dress up in front of her and looked at her reflection critically in the mirror. She laid the dress on the bed, sat down again and began to apply some lipstick. Gavin looked at her rich red hair and the curve of her spine in her creamy back, broken by the dark strap of her bra, and the three moles on the curve of her haunch where it was taughtened by the elastic of her pants. Gavin swallowed. His mother’s presence in his life loomed like a huge wall at whose foot his needs cowered like beggars at a city gate. He wished she bothered about him more, did things with him as she did with Amanda. He felt strange and uneasy about her, proud and uncomfortable. He had been pleased last Saturday when she took him to the pool in town, but then she had worn a small bikini and the Syrian men round the bar had stared at her. David’s mother always wore a swimsuit of a prickly material with stiff bones in it. When he went out of the room she was brushing her hair again and he didn’t bother to say good-bye.
Gavin walked down the road. He was wearing a striped T-shirt, white shorts and Clarks sandals without socks. The early afternoon sun beat down on his head and the heat vibrated up from the tarmac. On either side of him were the low senior-staff bungalows, shadowy beneath their wide eaves, and which seemed to be pressed down into the earth as if the blazing sun bore down with intolerable weight. The coruscating scarlet dazzle of flamboyant trees that lined the road danced spottily in his eyes.
The university campus was a large one but Gavin had come to know it intimately in the two years since his parents had moved to Africa. In Canterbury his father had only been a lecturer but here he was a professor in the Chemistry Department. Gavin loved to go down to the labs with their curious ammoniacal smells, brilliant fluids and mad-scientist constructions of phials, test-tubes and rubber pipes. He thought he might pay his father a surprise visit that afternoon as their lizard hunt should take them in that direction.
Gavin and his two friends had been shooting lizards with their catapults for the three weeks of the Easter holidays and had so far accounted for one hundred and forty-three. They killed mainly the male and female of one species that seemed to populate every group of boulders or area of concrete in the country. The lizards were large, sometimes growing to eighteen inches in length. The females were slightly smaller than the males and were a dirty speckled khaki colour. The males were more resplendent, with brilliant orange-red heads, pale grey bodies and black-barred feet and tails. They did no one any harm; just basked in the sun doing a curious bobbing press-up motion. At first they were ludicrously easy to kill. The boys could creep up to within three or four feet and with one well-placed stone reduce the basking complacent lizard to a writhing knot, its feet clawing at a buckled spine or shattered head. A slight guilt had soon grown up among the boys and they accordingly convinced themselves that the lizards were pests and that, rather like rats, they spread diseases.
But the lizards, like any threatened species, grew wise to the hunters and now scurried off at the merest hint of approach, and the boys had to range wider and wider through the campus to find zones where the word had not spread and where the lizards still clung unconcernedly to walls, like dozing sunbathers unaware of the looming thunderclouds.
Gavin met his friends at the pre-arranged corner. Today they were heading for the university staff’s preparatory school at a far edge of the campus. There was an expansive outcrop of boulders there with a sizeable lizard community that they had been evaluating for some time, and this afternoon they planned a blitz.
They walked down the road firing stones at trees and clumps of bushes. Gavin teased Laurence about his bandy legs and then joined forces with him to mock David about his spots and his hugely fat sister until he threatened to go home. Gavin felt tense and malicious, and lied easily to them about how he had fashioned his own catapult, which was far superior to their clumsier home-made efforts. He was glad when they rounded a corner and came in sight of the long simple buildings of the chemistry labs.
‘Let’s go and see my Dad,’ he suggested.
Gavin’s father was marking exam papers in an empty lab when the three boys arrived. He was tall and thin with sparse black hair brushed across his balding head. Gavin possessed his similar tentative smile. They chatted for a while, then Gavin’s father showed them some frozen nitrogen. He picked a red hibiscus bloom off a hedge outside and dipped it in the container of fuming liquid. Then he dropped the flower on the floor and it shattered to pieces like fine china.
‘Where are you off to?’ he asked as the boys made ready to leave.
‘Down to the school to get lizards,’ Gavin replied.
‘There’s a monster one down there,’ said David. ‘I’ve seen it.’
‘I hope you don’t leave them lying around,’ Gavin’s father said. ‘Things rot in this sun very quickly.’
‘It’s okay,’ Gavin affirmed brightly. ‘The hawks soon get them.’
Gavin’s father looked thoughtful. ‘What’s your mother doing?’ he asked his son. ‘Left her on her own, have you?’
‘Israel’s there,’ G
avin replied sullenly. ‘But anyway she’s going to her play rehearsal or something. Drama, drama, you know.’
‘Today? Are you sure?’ his father asked, seemingly surprised.
‘That’s what she said. Bye Dad, see you tonight.’
The school lay on a small plateau overlooking a teak forest and the jungle that stretched away beyond it. The outcrop of rocks was poised on the edge of the plateau and it ran down in pale pinkish slabs to the beginning of the teak trees.
The boys killed four female lizards almost at once but the others had rushed into crevices and stayed there. Gavin caught a glimpse of a large red-head as it scuttled off and the three of them pelted the deep niche it hid in and prodded at it with sticks, but it was just not coming out.
Then Gavin and Laurence thought they saw a fruit bat in a palm tree, but David couldn’t see it and soon lost interest. They patrolled the deserted school buildings for a while and then hung, bat-like themselves, on the Jungle-Jim in the playground. David, who had perched on the top, heard the sound of a car as it negotiated a bumpy rutted track that led into the jungle and which ran for a while along the base of the plateau. He soon saw a Volkswagen van lurching along. A man was driving and a woman sat beside him.
‘Hey, Gavin,’ David said without thinking. ‘Isn’t that your mother?’
Gavin climbed quickly up beside him and looked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nope. Definitely.’
They resumed their play but the implication hung in the air like a threat, despite their suddenly earnest jocularity. In the unspoken way in which these things arrange themselves, David and Laurence soon announced that they had to go home. Gavin said that he would stay on a bit. He wanted to see if he could get that big lizard.
Laurence and David wandered off with many a backward shouted message about where they would meet tomorrow and what they would do. Then Gavin clambered about halfheartedly on the Jungle-Jim before he walked down the slope to the track which he followed into the teak forest. There was still heat in the afternoon sun and the trees and bushes looked tired from a day’s exposure. The big soup-plate leaves of the teak trees hung limply in the damp dusty atmosphere.
Gavin heard his mother’s laugh before he saw the van. He moved off the track and followed the curve of a bend until he saw the van through the leaves. It was pulled up on the other side of the mud road. The large sliding door was thrown back and Gavin could see that the bunk bed inside had been folded down. His mother was sitting on the edge of the bunk, laughing. A man without a shirt was struggling to zip up her dress. She laughed again, showing her teeth and throwing back her head, joyously shaking her thick red hair. Gavin knew the man: he was called Ian Swan and sometimes came to the house. He had a neat black beard and curling black hair all over his chest.
Gavin stood motionless behind the thick screen of leaves and watched his mother and the man. He knew at once what they had been doing. He watched them caper and kiss and laugh. Finally Gavin’s mother tugged herself free and scrambled round the van and into the front seat. Gavin saw a pair of sunglasses drop from her open handbag. She didn’t notice they had fallen. Swan put on his shirt and joined her in the front of the van.
As they backed and turned the van Gavin held his breath in an agony of tension in case they should run over the glasses. When they had gone he stood for a while before walking over and picking up the sunglasses. They were quite cheap; Gavin remembered she had bought them last leave in England. They were favourites. They had pale blue lenses and candy-pink frames. He held them carefully in the palm of his hand as if he were holding an injured bird.
MUMMY . . .
As he walked down the track to the school the numbness, the blank camera stare that had descended on him the moment he had heard his mother’s high laugh, began to dissipate. A slow tingling charge of triumph and elation began to infuse his body.
OH MUMMY, I THINK . . .
He looked again at the sunglasses in his palm. Things would change now. Nothing would be the same after this secret. It seemed to him now as if he were carrying a ticking bomb.
OH MUMMY, I THINK I’VE FOUND YOUR SUNGLASSES.
The lowering sun was striking the flat rocks of the outcrop full on and Gavin could feel the heat through the soles of his sandals as he walked up the slope. Then, ahead, facing away from him, he saw the lizard. It was catching the last warmth of the day, red head methodically bobbing, sleek torso and long tail motionless. Carefully Gavin set down the glasses and took his catapult and a pebble from his pocket. Stupid lizard, he thought, sunbathing, head bobbing like that, you never know who’s around. He drew a bead on it, cautiously easing the thick rubber back to full stretch until his rigid left arm began to quiver from the tension.
He imagined the stone breaking the lizard’s back, a pink welling tear in the pale scaly skin. The curious slow-motion way the mortally wounded creatures keeled over, sometimes a single leg twitching crazily like a spinning rear wheel on an upended crashed car.
The lizard basked on, unaware.
Gavin eased off the tension. Holding his breath with the effort, heart thumping in his ears. He stood for a few seconds letting himself calm down. His mother would be home now, he should have enough time before his father returned. He picked up the sunglasses and backed softly away and around, leaving the lizard undisturbed. Then, with his eyes alight and gleaming beneath his oddly heavy brows, he set off steadily for home.
Not Yet, Jayette
This happened to me in L.A. once. Honestly. I was standing at a hamburger kiosk on Echo Park eating a chilé-dog. This guy in a dark green Lincoln pulls up at the kerb in front of me and leans out of the window. ‘Hey,’ he asks me, ‘do you know the way to San José?’ Well, that threw me, I had to admit it. In fact I almost told him. Then I got wise. ‘Don’t tell me,’ I says. ‘Let me guess. You’re going back to find some peace of mind.’ I only tell you this to give you some idea of what the city is like. It’s full of jokers. And that guy, even though I’d figured him, still badmouthed me before he drove away. That’s the kind of place it is. I’m just telling you so’s you know my day is for real.
Most mornings, early, I go down to the beach at Santa Monica to try and meet Christopher Isherwood. A guy I know told me he likes to walk his dog down there before the beach freaks and the surfers show up. I haven’t seen him yet but I’ve grown to like my mornings on the beach. The sea has that oily sheen to it, like an empty swimming pool. The funny thing is, though, the Pacific Ocean nearly always looks cold. One morning someone was swinging on the bars, up and down, flinging himself about as if he was made of rubber. It was beautiful, and boy, was he built. It’s wonderful to me what the human body can achieve if you treat it right. I like to keep in shape. I work out. So most days I hang around waiting to see if Christopher’s going to show then I go jogging. I head south; down from the pier to Pacific Ocean Park. I’ve got to know some of the bums that live around the beach, the junkies and derelicts. ‘Hi Charlie,’ they shout when they see me jogging by.
There’s a café in Venice where I eat breakfast. A girl works there most mornings, thin, bottle-blonde, kind of tired-looking. I’m pretty sure she’s on something heavy. So that doesn’t make her anything special but she can’t be more than eighteen. She knows my name, I don’t know how, I never told her. Anyway each morning when she brings me my coffee and doughnut she says ‘Hi there, Charlie. Lucked-out yet?’ I just smile and say ‘Not yet, Jayette.’ Jayette’s the name she’s got sewn across her left tit. I’m not sure I like the way she speaks to me – I don’t exactly know what she’s referring to. But seeing how she knows my name I think it must be my career she’s talking about. Because I used to be a star, well, a TV star anyway. Between the ages of nine and eleven I earned twelve thousand dollars a week. Perhaps you remember the show, a TV soap opera called The Scrantons. I was the little brother, Chuck. For two years I was a star. I got the whole treatment: my own trailer, chauffeured limousines, private tutors. Trouble was my puberty came to
o early. Suddenly I was like a teenage gatecrasher at a kids’ party. My voice went, I got zits all over my chin, fluff on my lip. It spoilt everything. Within a month the scenario for my contractual death was drawn up. I think it was pneumonia, or maybe an accident with the thresher. I can’t really remember, I don’t like to look back on those final days.
Though I must confess it was fun meeting all the stars. The big ones: Jeanne Lamont, Eddy Cornelle, Mary and Marvin Keen – you remember them. One of the most bizarre features of my life since I left the studio is that nowadays I never see stars any more. Isn’t that ridiculous? Someone like me who worked with them, who practically lives in Hollywood? Somehow I never get to see the stars any more. I just miss them. ‘Oh he left five minutes ago, bub,’ or ‘Oh no, I think she’s on location in Europe, she hasn’t been here for weeks.’ The same old story.
I think that’s what Jayette’s referring to when she asks if I’ve lucked-out. She knows I’m still hanging in there, waiting. I mean, I’ve kept on my agent. The way I see it is that once you’ve been in front of the cameras something’s going to keep driving you on until you get back. I know it’ll happen to me again one day, I just have this feeling inside.
After breakfast I jog back up the beach to where I left the car. One morning I got to thinking about Jayette. What does she think when she sees me now and remembers me from the days of The Scrantons? It seems to me that everybody in their life is at least two people. Once when you’re a child and once when you’re an adult. It’s the saddest thing. I don’t just mean that you see things differently when you’re a child – that’s something else again – what’s sad is that you can’t seem to keep the personality. I know I’m not the same person any more as young Chuck Scranton was, and I find that depressing. I could meet little Charlie on the beach today and say ‘Look, there goes a sharp kid.’ And never recognize him, if you see what I mean. It’s a shame.