Boy Overboard Read online

  ‘All I ever get are Cs,’ she says in a black voice.

  ‘It was rigged all along,’ I say. ‘I knew it.’

  She doesn’t answer me and her thin blade gouges out a rough, wild Y, its tail slicing off in a trail of dust.

  It looks desperate, somehow.

  She flicks the blade back and looks at me closely.

  ‘You would of taken me to Honolulu if you’d won, though, eh, Ponk?’ I ask.

  It is important. More important than if she had won. ‘I doan need to meet him,’ I said. ‘The King.’

  Ponk had told me she was sure she would run into Elvis on the sands of Waikiki. We had rehearsed what she would say to him.

  ‘I doan know,’ she says, looking into my face. ‘I guess so.’ Then in a different voice, cooler, harder. ‘I hadn’t decided.’ She looks straight at me.

  Then she says softer, a little hesitant, like she is about to say something to me, ask me something, maybe even confess, ‘Jamie?’

  ‘I don’t mind dressing up,’ I say shyly, in a low voice. I like dressing up. We often play dressups in the hut. Maddy and me.

  She says nothing for a moment, as if she is baffled.

  Tony’s mother is just standing there, on the beach, a lone figure, the wind rippling her wet dress.

  Both of us feel ashamed for some reason. Fall silent. Hope we fade into the rocks, turn into camouflage, mangroves growing out of our ears. The sky rearing so high over our heads is one big ear listening to us.

  ‘You got to promise to wear shoes and socks, Jamie,’ Ponk says, as if she doesn’t like what she is saying but must. She knows, just as Aunty Gilda knows, what must be said. But it seems, at the same time, this is not what she was going to say.

  She snaps her penknife shut.

  She walks off.

  ‘Hey, Ponky!’ I call when she is a certain distance away. ‘That’s not a problem. I promise.’

  AS I COME in the door Aunty Gilda calls me to her.

  She is cutting the potatoes for dinner and I watch the slim knife scrape the skins. Revealing their whiteness, moist.

  She drops them into water.

  She does not look at me when she speaks.

  ‘Jamie, if anyone asks you about the red car …’

  She is silent as the knife digs into and flicks out an eye.

  The dark rot falls onto paper.

  She rinses the potato under the tap, then goes on speaking as if she has just remembered I am there.

  ‘We’ve decided not to use it for a while.’

  Her words form carefully, moulded by pre-thought.

  Her eye falls upon me. I realise the seriousness of what she is saying — not so much what she is saying, but that whatever she says — and its meaning mystifies me — is important. I read that in her eye, which has no laughter.

  ‘It’s going to be parked in the back garage for a while,’ she says. ‘But don’t tell anyone. If anyone asks …’ she says, leaving a trail of questions multiplying in the space of her silence.

  I want to ask why so I can make sense of this, but I know, just in the seriousness with which Aunty Gilda returns to her potato, knife skurfing and slashing, that the sense must not be questioned. She is in some hidden part angry and perhaps even miserable. Her lips, her scarlet lips are a little worn by being rubbed together and they are clamped shut and slightly down-turning on the corners.

  No birds of freedom fly from them today.

  ‘OK,’ I barely murmur.

  I shrug-shrug my allegiance.

  It does not matter.

  ‘I’ll wear my shoes and socks for the party,’ I say softly, running the sheer fabric through the goldring of my love for Aunty Gilda, my admiration. Because she often seems to me like a cut-out doll, always so carefully dressed, so perfectly turned out. Not a thing out of place.

  She turns to me, Aunty Gilda, looking surprised at finding me there, and she breaks a bleak smile.

  I seem to hear a gull cry, piercing.

  THE NEXT DAY I stumble by the garage up the drive. The doors are shut. More than this, they are locked.

  This has never happened before. It is so novel I go over to the padlock and pull on it.

  The great wooden doors groan outwards, shriek, then, jointed together by the steel heart, they refuse to come asunder.

  A warm gust of moistness fluffs out and down my throat.

  I cough, caught on all the smells of old plaster dust, oil soaked on concrete, hot tin, and the sweet epiphany of kikuyu grass bleeding white in the shade, but still moistly growing.

  I split my eye through the crack.

  In the warm dark I can just see a slit, a slash of scarlet. But in the shadows it is hard to see.

  Yet it is in there.

  Even under a blanket.

  I give the door one vicious pull, which sends a peel of thunder inward.

  Above me birds rise up, spiralling, screaming, squawking.

  As I turn I see the oily blackness of a myna bird, its yellow beak poised in thought.

  A Hard Word

  NEXT WEDNESDAY IS my appointment. What began as a simple interruption now takes on the form of a ritual, one I must await with dread, refusing each time to believe that it will happen. Praying that it won’t. Or, if it does, some magical tongue shall fall from my mouth, and deliver me into the arms of truth.

  Wednesday comes as my appointment and I await the inevitability of the hour when the loudspeaker first crackles into life, sending searing sparks scalding through the dark, then the black flower opens its heart, its dread stamens call for me: Jamie Caughey, your father your father your father is waiting for you.

  Dad.

  Like a tide it carries me, but a black tide, a chill tide, the creek has overflowed. The sportsfield is under water as I lie, carried in an eddy past the faces and the flesh and the legs (I am carried just slightly underwater so I can hear all the sounds, of chatter and voices and you said and he did and I won and she ran as I drift towards him, my waiting father).

  I see him from a long way away. He cannot see me, standing there, wavering on his feet, caught in some inward storm of the emotions. He stands in a circle of light, naked, I see, even though he is dressed as always as the salesman. He is better dressed than any man here, his clothes are his armour, speaking of success. But to me he is naked, as he stands there peering out into the dark, waiting for me.

  ‘Jamie Caughey, your father is waiting.’

  So I am carried in that tidal drift towards him. Yet now his appearance brings with it a complication of troubles. For subtly and stealthily about me I have begun to notice things: looks of consternation, faces frozen in the middle of a question which does not yet possess the words. The words. I know these words. I know.

  I know, simple as they are, they can possess a power so terrible that lives turn shipwreck and bodies carry dead flesh and hope is so lacerated it can continue on living only by bleeding, and mending in the dark. I know these words. They have after all attached themselves to my flesh. Cissy is my name. Sooky is my heartbleat. Stab me with these words. I know. I know.

  I know the explosive potential in a word.

  As I am carried into the circle of light I see Uncle Ambrose turn into a fountain overflowing with wordwordword, he gushes, he flows, he flutters the word paint all over my face, trying to pour it plashing down my throat so the wordword will fountain back into his. His need, he is needing and alone, I sense this, and pity him.

  I feel the dry tear of sweat at the back of his heart and how this lone trickle falls down, undevelops. He is alone, in all the world, in his circle of light, and I am to come to him. Not understanding. Not knowing. Knowing only this. He is alone. And he has mistaken me. (Just as he, Uncle Ambrose the best salesman in Hungry Creek, the man who buys me the first ticket to the moon, is simply this man here now, with a strange smell flowing from his damp chill fingertips, just as a rim of gas-blue fear runs over him, so melted and mown down by this other flame, he wants to burn me, melt me
into him, so our skin is joined.)

  But he does not understand.

  He is not my father.

  Yet as I walk and think of this, Ponky’s face forms before me, Aunty Gilda scurrying along on her high-heel stroke, turning, over her shoulder calling out to me, Jamie, sweetheart, you’re my darling pet, hurry up, we’re waiting for you, and Ponk’s big fat slab of a face comes and leans against me, soft and warm as our old mog, and she murmurs, hey, Mutt, let’s go bottlefishing, eh? And then she turns back and pads off, turning over her shoulder, ‘Act caj,’ she murmurs out of the corner of her mouth, rolling along off down the rocks on the thick soft cushions of her feet.

  Act caj.

  Them I cannot betray.

  This is my heartbleat.

  It is I who must save them.

  This moment of decision comes to me and lasts as long as I walk towards Uncle Ambrose. And now, having arrived there, having reached the very edge of the circle of light, in which, burning slowly, he stands (a guy stuffed full of objects, toasters and cigarettes and Coca-Cola bottles and sweets and tickets to the pictures), around us, stealthily, the eyes have rearranged themselves to form a tightening circle, and now, though the sound of danger is shrill I realise he, my uncle, can hear nothing.

  He throws his arms wide apart for me, then makes a rush towards me, a kingfisher stab for the centre of my flower.

  BOOK THREE

  STRAIGHT IS THE GATE

  Girls

  ON HER BIRTHDAY, Ponky is dressed as a girl.

  I cannot stop looking at her.

  She does not know how to walk. Or sit.

  An odd, defensive look has fallen over her face, a brute mutiny, a mask of steel which reveals only a slight flush, a fallen scarlet which taints her chalk cheeks.

  Her eyes avoid mine, or when they concuss, she dares me to smile, to speak, to say the treacherous words: — How nice you look.

  She despises me for even hearing the silent whisper of her thoughts, those tiptoeing mice. Like a big sullen tomcat she swipes them away with a clawed paw. She snarls inside her foil of stiff lace and muslin, the pink ribbon woven so carefully through the broderie anglaise, her usually bare feet (splayed flat and comfortable on the hot asphalt, feeling through the soft tar to the heartbeat of the universe, the throb of all growing things, the lull of the tide, the shift of the wind, the sound the piperfish make in the sea as they sliver through the springtide), now those feet are encased in brilliantly shiny black shoes, which do up, like a lock, in a bright nodular button. They are doll’s shoes for humans, just as she is encased in, dressed in, entrapped by a doll’s frock for a mutiny.

  Small white socks, ruffled down and threaded, again, with the ghastly insult of pink. Candypink, coconut-ice pink, the pinkiest of pinksin echo of the hideousness of what her nose defines as the stinkiness of stink.

  AUNTY GILDA IS stern in her admonitions. Her dressing of Ponk has had all the high seriousness of a religious ceremony. We have arrived, at last, at the unavoidable importance of an occasion: and Ponky walks through her bedroom door, behind which I heard many arguments, ultimatums, sudden rebellions quelled by yelled appeals, of remarks about how much everything was costing; how it is all for you; how it is only one day; how she is being asked to do it only for her mum and dad; how it isn’t much to ask; how it is a lovely dress anyhow; how Aunty Gilda herself had always dreamed, always, of having a dress like this when she was that age but …

  My ears had heard the long litany, like the drone in a religious service which leads up, through its own stasis of boredom, of a held pattern, to that moment of revelation when the door falls back and out of it comes: Ponky, eyes down to the ground, as if in the pattern of the carpet she is tracking a key that might unlock a meaning which will help her pass through these minutes of hell.

  I KNOW I should say nothing. If only I could become an ornament sitting up on the pelmet. Or the white telephone before the mirror which returns to Ponky a many-reflected image of herself, as if, because this is her day of all days, she has to divide up into many beings, rehearse what is about to happen later: how she will appear at the head of a long table, a small crucified smile on her lips, as we all sing happy birthday to her in one humiliating drone; how she will open all the presents, awarding a word of congratulation expressed through a gust of surprise to each bearer of gift; how she must keep an eye on all the guests making sure nobody is left out and that everyone is having a good time; how the party is less a celebration than a serious social test which she must, on all accounts, pass, for this is just the reason she is attending a private school, to be successful in a wider social world than her parents know.

  In this sense she must turn into an explorer, but not of that world we know so well: Hungry Creek. No, now she must study blindly and mutely other things, learn the minutiae of gloves and petticoats and high-heels and how the red lipstick slides, unguent, out of the gold tube. How in all these things she has to break apart from being the one Ponky whom I have known up until this point, the Ponky of fishing and the flicks, and become another Ponky altogether: one who holds within herself any number of contradictions and suppresses whatever has been natural and easy to her (and to me) and become someone more suitable to the person who is wearing those clothes — that dress, those shoes, the tenor of pink, the consuming aura of white — assume the proper modesty which befits stiff petticoats and the almost-communion-white bodice (ones ironically I myself might like to wear, for at least a little, experimental while).

  Yet I can see, even as she uneasily walks along (like someone fresh out of a painful operation), the heels of the shoes throw her off her natural lounging balance. She can no longer lope along, unseen, with a rifle leaning on her shoulder, or chew an invisible roll of gum, like a wad of tobacco, in her mouth.

  ‘Mum!’ she cries on an intake of a breath.

  But Aunty Gilda, like a top on a crazed journey, spins by her, touching her privately on the bare arm, her painted glittering nails resting fleetingly against her daughter’s flesh.

  ‘Now, Priscilla,’ she says to Ponky, as if by the formal use of her name she is reminding Ponky of her new invention.

  Don’t fence me in.

  Ponky sees in that instant just as she hears, in her name, that the area of movement is restricted, made tiny, in effect is ending. Just as she is caught in that dress, so she is captured behind that name. Just as now, for the rest of the day in front of her (and for what lies beyond that, neither of us can foresee, or bear to look ahead) she has to continue to be this new creature, a girl from a private school, a young woman in apprenticeship to her first formal birthday.

  PONKY CAN’T EVEN trust herself to sit down. I look away. I know if she sees me looking at her, this will be so offensive to Ponky as to mark the final perimeter of our friendship. I realise I will have to spend the rest of this novel day alone. I can no longer appeal to Ponky for hints, clues, ideas on how to behave, how to get out of difficult situations. We are both, and profoundly, on our own, more separated than we have ever been at any other moment in our life, or, as it was now becoming: lives.

  AND, IN FACT, girls are already coming through the door in a cluster of white and cream and pink, like fallen blossoms, their faces even wearing little touches of rouge, eyebrows discreetly plucked and pencilled in. There is the shrill intensity of their chatter, the sounds, like crystal breaking, of their shrieks on seeing each other, as if they are discovering each one for the very first time (at the same time rehearsing their future lives as society women, with all the inventive falseness, the assumed intimacy which cloaks actual enmity). Indeed, some of the little modoms, as my mother would call them, can be seen looking about Aunty Gilda and Uncle Ambrose’s flat with cruelly assessing eyes, eyes which meet with each other in silent mockery, only at the last moment to find that in the centre of the flower, as if within the heart of a ruffled and many-petalled camellia, is an arrestingly dark-skinned girl dressed in a uniquely soft shade of pink, through which is threaded s
lim ribbons of silver.

  This girl is clearly of some importance, so different are her looks (to me she looks part-Maori, with that luxuriant lush darkness of textures, soft hairiness on the head and eyebrows, the density of black in her large eyes and the surprising, yet natural, redness of her lips). This unusual girl has lurched to a halt on the checked lino and, looking about her in surprise, holds everyone — her court of admirers — about her in mute silence as they await the delivery of her verdict. In that second everything is held in balance. (Ponky’s future in the school, her social acceptability, whether she will be invited to other girls’ houses), but the little princess in pink flushes an acute swarthiness of colour (almost as if her hidden essence has increased and multiplied) and cries out, laughing, doves flying out of her mouth in a whole flock, this way and that, darting, flapping and cawing, sending into the air whole perfumes of feathers and leaves and blossom-petals:

  ‘Why, it’s so pretty, it’s just like a doll’s house!’

  ‘O, Sophie! Trust Sophie!’

  The other girls fasten on her pronouncement with such fervour it is as if she has a unique way of looking at the world, in which, in fact, is condensed the essence of being a Bensky.

  The crisis is over.

  The party will be a success.

  LIKE A FLOCK of gulls now they move towards Ponky, who stands bracing herself to face them much as a general might await the arrival of an army who might yet prove to be the enemy as much as they might be neutrals arriving with the news of a truce. And, as if in silent mimicry of this, these girls begin to hand over to Ponky wrapped boxes, parcels tied with vivid green and blue and pink ribbons, and small intricate shapes in circles, enigmatic packages and undisclosed treasures.

  This act of obeisance goes on through all its arcane rituals of greeting, kissing, handing over, opening … until finally Aunty Gilda, laughing as she spins all around her daughter, directs the little flock towards the glorybox of Ponky’s bedroom.