Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (15 page)

‘He wants to come in,' Belinda says.

‘Not with me in here,' Tom says. ‘I'm fussy who I swim with.'

‘Just for a minute. He needs a bath.'

‘No way.' He climbs out and brings his dive gear from the garage. ‘I'll give you a lesson.'

Josie shifts to a cane chair in the conservatory, where she can get a better view. Ferns and flowers keep her company – she believes, currently, in personality, fear, desire, in plants – and Duncan too is company in a way. He has shifted into the rock garden, two levels up by the brick wall, and is sitting on a stone, which probably has some warmth left from the sun. She can see his body but not his face – and that, she thinks, is a bit of luck. Tom straps a diving-tank on Belinda and helps her with the mask, making her monstrously embryonic; and when she's in the pool and out of sight, Josie imagines her curled up and kicking in that womb. Little moths dance in the green light of the garden. It's more pleasant to watch them, she thinks, and push back imaginings and keep family out. Nice to be here all alone, wouldn't that be nice, oh wouldn't that be loverly, flitting with the moths and finding some corner to sleep in, high up in a corner in the dark.

Belinda floats weightless in dim water. She feels that rules have been changed and is frightened and elated equally. Duncan, looking down from his cooling seat, sees her elongated, sees her as
oily convexities and yellow lozenges of light, yet knows it's her; faces a huge perceptual gap and wonders how he can measure it.

Tom porpoises around her, butts and lifts her, and can't understand why his energy seems frustrated, why his happiness runs backwards, breaks inside him and is gone. After a while he pulls her out and unstraps the tank, puts it in the garage. He comes back and dives into the pool and swims alone. Up and down, up and down, twenty-five lengths. He grabs his towel and leaps sure-footed up the rock garden (sees Duncan slip away) and sits on the brick wall drying head and torso. Along the valley a light burns in Clearwater's house. Westward the city glows and pricking lights stand on the port hills. Clearwater cannot see the city but can see the caretaker's house at the Baptist camp. We're like a row of warning fires, Tom thinks. Maybe the Vikings are coming. Maybe Te Rauparaha is on his way down. A good massacre, a bit of blood-spilling, wouldn't do Saxton any harm. Burn the place, he wishes, knock it down, then I can build a town worth looking at.

Belinda turns her light on and closes her curtains. Josie strokes her throat as she reads. Tom wants his house washed clean of them – Stella, wherever she is, Duncan lurking in the dark. He feels the house, he floats his mind into each space and level and feels himself co-extensive with it. It's as though he had flung a lump of house-stuff at the hill, then moulded it and squeezed it and hollowed out the rooms, and breathed his furnace breath and baked it hard. The people in there dirty it somehow, they're an infestation. He'd like to spray them out with a giant aerosol, a people-poison; or let off a small neutron bomb, get rid of them and keep his house intact.

He stands up and towels his body. The rubbing of the cloth brings a hunger leaping in his mind, and he runs again, down the rocks and through the house; like a boy, he thinks. He dresses, grabs a bottle, roars nastily with his car, sprays the lawn with sea shells, and is gone.

Thank God it's her not me, Josie thinks. Naked, hideous, male … She feels the gratifications of stillness and possession of herself. The smells of soil and dampness surround her. Far away Belinda practises her guitar. Duncan closes his bedroom door. Like Tom, she lets her mind flow out and fill the house. She would argue that living inside it makes it hers.

We've lost Stella somewhere. Let's say she's in her room studying. Her scholarship exam is getting close.

Before beginning her French she writes to her sister:

Dear Mandy,

It's starting to happen so we'd better get ready. He can't help himself but that's not the point. And she's so innocent I can't believe it. What's worse, she's so soft …

On her way to visit John, Norma stopped at her parents' house. The boy wanted to wait in the car. ‘Come on, Duncan, they won't bite, try and face up to people.' That was a little unfair as he still had John ahead of him. He climbed out and went inside and let Mrs Schwass pat his face. ‘Poor boy, I do hope it doesn't hurt too much.' She gave him a plate of peanut brownies.

Mr Schwass, with a white towel round his head and his stick held rifle-like across his knees, looked like a mad old desert sheikh resting from the sun. ‘One of the few, eh laddie? Spitfire pilot?'

‘No Dad, he wasn't even born.'

‘No time to bale out, eh? Bad luck.'

‘Has he got Alzheimer's disease?' Duncan asked as they drove away.

‘Yes, he has. Where did you find out about that?'

‘My grandma's got it. Last time Dad went to see her he said, “I suppose you'll say you don't know who I am,” and she said, “No, who are you?” '

Norma laughed. ‘Once Dad said to me, “Are you my mother?” He thinks Mum's his nurse or one of his girlfriends or a cow. “Get a move on, Gert.” '

‘Was he a farmer?'

‘All his life. He never went to the war, though you wouldn't think so. Now he wants to drop atom bombs everywhere. We're still fighting the Germans and Japanese. Every time he hears a German name he goes “Oink, oink”.'

‘Schwass is German.'

‘He doesn't think so.'

‘The ridges on the brain shrink and you get fluid in the space between the membranes, that's the reason. Is the man we're going to visit old?'

‘He will be to you, not to me.'

She was following an intuition in taking Duncan to John. In the three Saturday visits he had paid her she had not so much built up a
picture of him as reduced him to a manageable size. In one way it had been like unwrapping a joke parcel and finding a bent penny or a chicken bone inside. He had a huge amount in his head but nothing in his mind. She left aside the memory feat, which was, she thought, no more than a kind of magnetic adhesion, pins and paper-clips, no credit to him, and had not looked at yet (was afraid of looking) the psychology of it, the flash of agony and flash of sight, and what she sensed must be the dangers of accumulation and not being able to forget. She kept her attention on mental uses and had not found him teachable so far. It was, she believed, a matter of getting him interested. Then perhaps he would differentiate and select, and learn instead of remember, and use instead of store up, and throw out all the things he did not need. But was he, she asked, when all was done, when you got past the victim with his sickness, this weird mechanical ability, and came to the ordinary boy, was he equipped for learning, was he able? She had not answered that question yet.

For the rest of it, she found him likeable. She enjoyed his jokes, admired qualities of silence and abruptness he possessed and found his physical over-emphasis – in turning not just half away but turning his back, in squatting suddenly when he wanted privacy, in swinging his arm (the left, unburned) faster and faster, in a wider arc, when he was angry – found it amusing, and sometimes alarming. She worried about the corresponding emphasis in his head, did it hurt? She wanted to touch his little, melted, yellow-rose ear and the horny spike (surely it could have been removed) on the angle of his jaw, try with her fingers if it was sharp. At times she felt like a tourist, like a voyeur, and felt she was indulging herself. She had always hated saints who kissed sores.

It was time to move the boy out of sole care and introduce him to a second teacher. She hummed with anticipation as she drove along; and was pleased with Duncan. He had fitted one of the bits of information in his head – Alzheimer's disease – to someone he had come across. He'd made the connection. She wanted to reward him but could only think of childish ways.

‘Would you like an ice-cream, Duncan?'

‘No thanks.'

‘Eat one of those peanut brownies then.'

‘I'm allergic to peanuts.'

‘Really?' She saw that he had made a joke.

‘I'm getting sick of nuts, Mum puts them in everything. Belinda's turned vegetarian.'

‘And that means the rest of you have to be?'

‘Not Dad. He keeps on talking about things like tripe and liver just to try and make her feel sick.'

‘Does she? Feel sick?'

‘She keeps on eating. I guess it's Mum who feels sick. Dad reckons she's neurotic in her stomach as well as her head.'

‘I wouldn't say Josie was neurotic.'

‘Everyone is in our house. Except me.'

Was that another joke? It was spoken in a neutral tone. She suspected him of taking cover from her and was disappointed he should think it necessary still.

Duncan had learned that by seeming to shift moods and opinions he could make her resemble a girl. It caused a little flicker in her outline. He enjoyed that not maliciously but because he felt a largeness in himself when it happened.

‘You don't have to worry about Dad making passes at you.'

‘Oh?'

‘He's got a new girlfriend. She sells dresses. They go scuba-diving in his boat.'

‘How does Josie take that?'

‘She doesn't care. She calls her the mermaid. She tells Dad not to stay down too long.'

Mrs Sangster blinked and the car made a sideways hop. He had thought his mother said it in a double kind of way.

‘I practise with Dad's gear when he's at work. I stayed down five minutes yesterday.'

‘In the pool?'

‘Yeah. Belinda does it too, he's teaching her, so she gets the blame for the tanks not being full.'

‘That's not very fair.'

‘Bel can take it. She's Dad's favourite.'

‘Youngest daughters often are.'

‘Did Mum tell you Bel's got a job? At Golden Hills on Sunday mornings.'

‘I would have thought she's too young for that.'

‘She told them she was sixteen. Anyway, she's only washing dishes and serving tea but all the old ladies think she's a nurse.' He put his hooked forefinger up and said in a quavery voice, ‘ “Nurse, nurse, you forgot to put sugar in my tea.” Bel loves it when they call her that. There's one lady there a hundred and three. That means she was born in 1883. And there's a lady who says, “Here you are again. What do you want? I've got nothing for you, go away.” She tries to hit Bel with her walking-stick.'

The car went past berry farms and kiwi fruit orchards enclosed in black mesh windbreaks. It crossed the river, where a shingle scoop was working, and went through fields of young corn and by two potteries with big brown jugs and blue plates standing in the windows. (One of his mother's friends made little white porcelain jars with red and green and yellow eyes on them and those were the ones Duncan liked, he often turned them round in his head and looked at the eyes looking out.)

‘See those birds over in the paddock?'

‘Sure. They're plover.'

‘They only arrived in New Zealand recently.'

‘Yeah, like swallows. I found a swallow's nest under the bridge. They build them out of mud.' He wondered why everyone thought he was loopy about birds. Birds were OK to watch but it seemed you had to get worked up about them and say how beautiful they were. The good thing was how their wings worked and the way their feathers were designed to shift the air and give them lift and momentum. Some of them did up like zip-fasteners. ‘With one wing he swept the water.' An eagle could weigh ten kilograms yet fly a line as thin as a piece of string and if you drew its curve – on the water, say – the angle of the arc would never vary. That was the sort of thing that interested him, not what colour they were or how they fed their young or if they had one mate all their lives. It would be better if they didn't have mates and lived alone.

He said, ‘That guy Zeno you told me to look up, he was a nutter.'

‘Oh, why?'

‘All he had to do was look and he'd see Achilles pass the tortoise.'

‘Of course. But you do see the paradox? It's possible to prove mathematically that a fast thing can never pass a slow one.'

‘A fast car can't pass a slow one on a bendy road.'

‘Come on Duncan, you know what I mean.'

‘No I don't. It's tricks, that's all. Like that thing with beans under walnut shells.' He knew it was more than that – had seen that Zeno was both right and wrong, and known there must be proof about the wrong, but he couldn't find it and gave up trying after a time. He had drifted off to sleep that night with the paradox in his head. He saw it might drive someone mad but he liked the evenness of it. The weight of the idea pressed on the weight of the real thing, the balance was exact, and back and forth they went like a perpetual motion machine. The same sort of thing had happened when he found a Mobius strip in a book Mrs Sangster had lent him. He made one out of paper and tried to see how it was possible. It wasn't like the paradox, the real thing seemed wrong; but there it was in front of him. He ran his pencil round it, ran his mind: one continuous surface, a band with a single side. It delighted him. He carried a Mobius strip in his head and every now and then zipped through it on a roller coaster ride.

‘It was part of an argument for Zeno,' Mrs Sangster said. ‘He was trying to prove that Being – that's everything – can't be broken up in little bits. Even Aristotle couldn't prove that he was wrong. You've heard of Aristotle?'

‘He was a Greek. He owned some oil-tankers.'

‘I sometimes can't tell when you're joking.'

He grinned at her. ‘Aristotle. Greek philosopher.
BC
384–322. I like it the way dates go backwards before Christ. Makes you think they started old and grew down into babies.'

The idea of gravestones lifting up and wrinkly old people coming out, wrapped in bits of rotten cloth, with earth dropping off them, made him laugh; but babies crawling back into their mothers was gross, it hurt his head. He frowned and got away from it. ‘This guy we're going to see, is he a Scot?'

‘Scot?'

‘You know, Scot no friends. Nobody likes him.'

‘I just can't keep up with the language,' Mrs Sangster said.

‘I got that one from Bel. She reckons Stella's a Scot. I'm one too because of my face. I can look at people and make them turn into stone, eh? Like Medusa.'

‘Med-you-sa, not Medussa.'

‘Yeah. I saw her in the pictures. There was this guy Perseus, what
a name, he got her by looking in his shield for a mirror. Whacked her head off. I was hoping she'd get him. I liked her best.'

‘I didn't know they'd made a movie of it.'

‘Then he used her head to kill the sea monster. She was the best thing in it. Her hair was snakes. I'd like to be like her, eh? Pow! Stone.'

There was something benign, though, in his wish. She was almost prepared to say that he looked on humans as a soft species, squashable, a bit like, say, caterpillars, and he handled them with care, put them in a safe place; forgot them. And looked on himself as hard and solitary, free. Non-human or non-caterpillar? that was the question. He must not be allowed to withdraw from the human race.

‘John isn't a Scot,' she said as they drove up the valley. ‘He's just a man who's happy with his own company.'

‘So what does he want to see us for?'

‘Oh, he likes to see people. He's not a hermit.'

John was sitting in a canvas chair on his lawn, reading a book and drinking a glass of beer. He wore a sun-visor that gave his face a greenish graveyard tint, made him look ill. When he pulled it off, his long, northern face took a russet hue and his nose gleamed like a misshapen strawberry. Duncan turned half away as though by putting himself side on he might be invisible. ‘Yeah,' he said to Norma, ‘nice place.'

‘Duncan, this is Mr Toft. John.'

The boy gave him a quick look. ‘Hi.'

‘So you are him, eh, the boy Norma talks to me about? You can learn whole books is what she says.'

‘That's not the only thing about him,' Norma protested.

‘And you have these bad burns, yes I see. Do they still hurt?'

‘They itch a bit. Sometimes they ache.'

‘And the doctors, they had you wrapped in tin foil like a loaf of garlic bread?'

‘For a while.'

‘And they robbed you of some skin from your bottom for your hand. Is that fair to your bottom, do you think?'

‘It's a bit sore sometimes when I sit down.'

‘Does it feel like hand skin now or bottom skin? Perhaps it has some memory of where it belongs.'

‘John, for heaven's sake, you'll give him nightmares,' Norma said.

‘And goes crawling in the night, eh, back to its proper place?' Duncan said. ‘Hey, that's neat.'

‘The pair of you are being quite revolting,' Norma said. She felt some comment of that sort was called for; but, like Duncan, had grown interested. How had John known that the boy would play this game?

‘I've got a bit of leg skin on my face.' He touched his cheek-bone. ‘I guess it feels OK there. It give me a speedy sort of face, eh?'

‘Medical science is mighty clever,' John said. ‘They can move the skin around, and change over livers and kidneys, and make rubber hearts, or is it plastic? And soon, no doubt, they will graft fast feet on to slow runners and make them win Olympic gold medals.'

‘Stick tails from sharks on swimmers,' Duncan said.

‘And maybe eagles' wings on men and women and make them fly. And all this will alter our minds. We will have a great new age.'

‘I have dreams where I fly.'

‘Too near the sun, like Icarus. You know that story?'

Duncan was still a moment. Norma almost felt his mind go click. ‘Yeah, I read it. His old man made him wings but the sun melted the wax. He was dumb.'