Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (27 page)

‘Oh, Mr Birtles,' going back to him a step or two, ‘I've got some strawberries in my car. Far too many for me.'

‘No. It's all right.'

‘Perhaps you could take some to your wife.' She asserts herself. It's punishment, a little, and he deserves it. Takes him through the dunes and along the path. The berries she had meant for John Toft
are in a plastic ice-cream carton on the back seat of her car.

‘There.'

‘That's too much.'

‘Take them. I can't eat them. Goodbye.'

She starts the engine, reverses out from the pines. I enjoyed that, she thinks. What a nice, awkward man. Yes, I enjoyed that.

She toots her horn as she drives away.

New Year's Eve and still it does not rain. The pine forests are closed to picnickers and the hand on the fire danger clock points at Extreme. Hosing restrictions are in force and back-yard fires are banned. None of this affects the Rounds' New Year's Eve party. Tom sprinkles his lawn and freshens his pool with water pumped through holding tanks from the river. (There's a notice for busybodies on the gate –
Private Water Supply
.) And no one expects a barbecue. ‘How bloody bourgeois can you get?' As for his sauna-house, built against the brick garden wall and furnished not with an electric heater but a wood-burning stove and real stones, it isn't quite finished yet, so no one feels short-changed on New Year's Eve.

Professional caterers have done the food. ‘If you think I'm cooking for a hundred people, think again,' Josie says. It's laid out on tables by the pool – hot and cold, sweet and savoury – and looks ready to be photographed for an up-market magazine. ‘Gastronomical porn,' Sandra says. The drinks – better quality booze than she's used to – stand on trestle tables on the lawn so if any bottles fall they won't break. The caterers have sent a barman too and Sandra agrees with Josie, he's the best-looking guy at the party.

Sandra and Josie are alike and Norma finds it surprising that they get on. Sandra has made it clear why Tom invited her. ‘I'll go away if you like but I'll have something to eat and drink first. He promised me food.' There's something hectic in her manner tonight. Sandra is a little feverish. She looks beautiful in a vulturish way. She still wears her Indian cottons though. Tonight's dress has tiny pieces of mirror sewn into it but still has a grubby appearance. Sandra declares that she won't pretend or even try. Take me or leave me, Sandra says. She looks, in spite of her gauzy dress, more than ready to bite and tear, and Norma wonders if Tom Round likes the threat of being hurt.

Josie laughs at Sandra's sharp remarks. Perhaps she wants Tom to be hurt.

Tom has admiring acquaintances but no friends. His friends, he believes, live in other towns. He names to himself a number of men, successful, gifted, practical, with whom he would live on close terms, of shared interest and ability, of special knowledge, if he chose to shift to Wellington or Auckland. He meets them when he goes there, and comes away dissatisfied: lack of time stops him from getting the friendship he deserves. Tom believes he has a gift for friendship and cannot see his need to be first. He looks around his Saxton acquaintances at the party and feels himself exiled among little men.

Make no mistake though, they are useful to him. He understands that very well.

Tony Hillman has come along. ‘Get your tie off, Tony. It's not the Royal Garden Party, mate.' The lawyer is only half a man, Tom believes. His Christ's College accent, summer suit, pained smile, are symptoms of an inability to grab hold and hang on and gobble up. Tom has little time for pickers and choosers. ‘I don't think Tony's balls have ever dropped.' It would shock him to be told that Tony has ‘scored' with a woman who turned him down.

Deputy Mayor Don Compton is there, in clothes that really lower the tone: black shoes and baggy suit. He has his jacket and waistcoat off and – it's unbelievable – his trousers are held up with braces. ‘Jesus Don, where'd you get those, they're off the Ark.' Tom snaps them against the deputy's lardy tum. ‘The smart thing – the name of the game –' Don Compton converses, lifting and kneading huge invisible breasts as he makes his point.

There are half a dozen of John Toft's ‘little millionaires and clever bankrupts'. There's Rock Edison, who got his name because of his resemblance to the actor. He enjoyed it for many years, promoted it, but would like to get rid of it now. Tom Round has started making pansy jokes. There's Morris Martin, who owns a BMW but drives a clapped-out Cortina when he goes to visit the hard-up farmers he arranges loans for. His wife drives the BMW in town. It's Tom's feeble joke to call Morris Aston. There are … but they don't matter, they fill the lawns and rooms, and fill the night with their opinions. Their wives are more interesting because, on the whole, they've had to work more on themselves and make finer adjustments. But they don't come into our story either. They walk by the pool, eat, drink, watch their husbands, talk about the things
that make them the same as and different from each other (golf, gardens, fashion, travel, the beach-house, grandchildren, World Vision). One drinks too much and cries because her life seems empty. One walks into the dark and lies down in the dry grass and listens to the party and wishes she could go further away, deep into the earth, or up into the sky and glitter there with the Southern Cross.

Tom Round thinks there's no one here who can understand him. They can't have even a glimmering of his other dimension. How can they know about the thing that happens in his mind, in his
being
, when all the preliminaries are done and creative functions take over; and the struggle begins, his to control them and stay aware, and theirs to run away with him; and out of this, this pain, this joy, out of this, by God, out of this Passion, there comes …

Tom, alone by his garden wall, knows he is a great man and no one understands. The house, how it glows there, glows with him, and no one sees. His wife and daughters there, Stephanie and Sandra, Norma Sangster, each one his – yet none of them even starts to see. If he just turns and goes away and never comes back their lives will collapse. They'll snuff out and have no existence any more. He sees himself as put upon, and groans under his burden, but grins in fierce enjoyment of himself. If I close my eyes they're dead, if I turn my back … He puts his glass on the wall, looks into the forest, blocks his ears; he's wiped them out. And now I'll let them live again – and they glitter, screech, perambulate, with the moment's being he allows.

Tom laughs. His daughters at the pool edge arrange their limbs to suit him. Wet and brown, they make arcs and cones of gleaming light. Josie, in flowered silk, levitates and crackles at his command, Stephanie splits with ripeness her red bipartite blouse, Sandra tinkles, floats, has sugared points and edges under her eastern dress, and Norma Sangster now, all smoothed-down, Norma will do for another day, Norma will keep.

The fat and skinny rich men, they are his, and their wives, though if he decides it he'll do without the lot. He can live in his house all alone if he wants, and be enough, be rich with all the things they can never have. There's a splendour in that he finds overwhelming. He dreams a blaze of cleansing radiation, a washing through of light that empties his house, de-bugs his house, and
leaves him pure and solitary. ‘Ha!' He throws his glass into the trees and hears it tinkle …

‘Hey!' His son is climbing in the grass with his black box in his arms. ‘You nearly hit me.'

‘Where do you think you're going?'

‘Up the forest. There's a couple of hours before the moon comes up.'

‘If you spot any flying saucers –' but the boy has gone. By God, Tom thinks, I might just find someone to talk to there, men from Arcturus eh? But he can't sustain the fantasy and he climbs down the rock garden and crosses the lawn for another drink. Not long ago he read a novel where an Indian boy was blinded by measles and his father, the chief, picked him up by the ankles and knocked his brains out on a rock. He loved his son but the boy was no good any more.

Tom understands. He overlooks the fact that he has never felt any love for Duncan.

‘The worst thing about working in a shearing gang,' Josie says, ‘is you get all these tiny hairs stuck in your nipples. You've got to pick them out every night or they itch like mad.'

She's proud of her days in the shearing gang and often tells her daughters and friends about them. (‘Yes Mum, mutton for breakfast, mutton for lunch, mutton for dinner, we know.')

‘Your hands get beautiful with all the natural lanolin in the wool. I've never had hands that soft again.' She means to put her shearing stories in her chapter on weaving but isn't sure her friends will approve. Perhaps I'll write my own book, she thinks. Decides on the spot that's what she'll do. Betrays them without a second thought. All they've done so far is talk and some of them can't put two words together anyhow. It hasn't been the friendliest time, these last two weeks.

She feels warm towards them all the same. They've had so many problems of the sort she's had, and battled through them, battled out. They talk about meditation, breathing, rebirthing. They talk about Mums.

‘I took her overseas with me, staying in Youth Hostels and carrying a pack and hitching rides. When we came back she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and no bra. Dad just looked at her at the
airport and turned round and walked away. But it took him only a couple of weeks, you know. She's back in permed hair and high heels again. She doesn't come and see me any more.'

‘Mine doesn't come either. My old Tom Sergei, you know, with his eye torn out, he ate her chihuahua. All we found was his head on the doormat. Well, they're so much like rats, chihuahuas, aren't they? I don't think Mum's ever coming back.'

Josie laughs. She has a taste for gruesome stories. Perhaps we can write a book about mothers. She was such good friends with hers though, until she died, that she would have nothing to contribute. You can't put good things in that sort of book. New Year, she thinks, and is disconcerted to find her eyes filling with tears for her mother. Goes across to fill her glass from the dishy barman she feels no desire for at all. He's just a pretty object and she wouldn't mind hanging him on the wall.

‘Norma, how's your mother getting on?'

‘Oh, adjusting. It takes time.'

‘Will our daughters have to worry about us the way we worry about our mothers, do you think?'

‘I don't have daughters.'

‘Well don't make a long face, you're lucky. Look at them there. The potential for trouble in that lot. If you were a man could you keep your hands off?'

‘Probably not.' There's something false in Norma's laugh. Norma looks tired and as if she wants to go home.

‘Well, I'm glad to be out of it. Out of that –' Josie thinks – ‘sticky hormonal web. I know you thought I was joking, but I'm still alone, all alone oh. And loving it. It's like getting washed in cold water. God, you feel clean and fresh and ready for yourself.'

‘I'm glad.'

‘Look at poor dumb Stephanie. She thinks she's won first prize. And your little Sandra waiting for left-overs.'

‘I don't think Sandra waits for anything.'

‘They're welcome to him, you know. I just don't care.' She walks across to Tom and Stephanie. ‘If I was Solomon,' she includes Sandra, sitting elbows on knees in a chair nearby, ‘I'd say chop him down the middle. But I think, Tom dear, they'd both say go ahead.'

‘Shut up, Josie.'

‘His left side is better than his right.'

‘Shut up, I said.'

‘You could clone him.'

‘What's that you're wearing, Josie?' Tom sniffs elaborately. ‘It smells like dunny freshener.'

Josie laughs. ‘You didn't know he was a wit as well.' She ambles back to her friends. Being free is marvellous, she thinks.

‘Happy families,' Sandra says. ‘I think I'll go home.'

‘There are probably one or two of them quite happy. Josie is happy, I think.'

‘That boy with all the scars, was that the son?'

‘Yes. Oddly enough he's happy too.'

‘The girls are not. Stella's not anyway.'

‘Stella is ambitious.' And other things as well.

‘The oldest one is giving the barman the eye.'

‘That's Miranda. She's in med school. She wants to be a gynaecologist.'

‘I'd sooner be a horse-doctor. Looking at all these,' looks and sneers, ‘sisters.'

‘Well, in the mass we're not very lovely. But each one of us ... ' Leaves it unsaid. Why bother?

All the same Sandra says, ‘I suppose that's why you're a head-mistress, eh? You always know the right little cheesy thing to say.'

‘Oh don't, Sandra, please don't, not tonight. I'm not up to it.'

‘OK, OK, sorry. I'm a bitch.'

‘Don't run yourself down. You've got so much going for you.'

Sandra grins. ‘Jeez, Norma, I like you. You're consistent.' She steps back to let a couple by and a fern-leaf fingers her neck. ‘Let's get out of here before we get strangled.'

They go out of the conservatory and stand by the rock garden. Tom Round yells, ‘Belinda, get that dog out of the pool. I told you before.'

‘Aw, Dad –'

‘Now.'

The girl puts her arms on the pool edge and heaves herself out. She sits with her feet dangling, reaches in the water, takes the dog high on its forelegs, grunts with effort. Lifts the old huge-bellied thing and wraps it in her towel.

‘Pooh to you, Dad.'

‘He's not really the swimming companion I'd choose,' Tony Hillman murmurs.

‘Oh Tony, you gave me a fright. Do you know Sandra Duff? Tony Hillman.' Maybe I can do them a favour. But though he smiles his even smile she sees him recoil. Sandra, bright and clever, in her bazaar clothes, will not do. Not even for slumming; though really it is Sandra who would slum.

‘Let me guess, you're a lawyer.'

‘Does it show?'

‘You've got a way of floating an inch or two off the ground.'

‘Indeed?'

‘And saying indeed.'

‘If you'll excuse me,' Norma says. Sandra is too bloody-minded. And Tony too bloodless. She wants to sit quietly in the dark, and goes into the house, misdirecting Tony, who will get rid of Sandra and look for her; goes through Josie's workroom, where the loom stands arms akimbo, and down the steps into the garage, skirts the cars in the yard, slips through an archway and along by a wall and finds a stone seat – astonishing, still warm from the sun. Sits smiling with pleasure at her successful flight, watching them, Sandra, Tony, Tom, Stephanie, the guests and girls, all of them, and thinks, yes Sandra's right but I'm right too, we're light and dark, and sweet and sour, this and that; all those things. As her father used to say – looking in the innards of a tractor – ‘It ain't nonsense but it don't make any sense.'