Boy Overboard Read online

  So …

  ‘Aunty Gilda and Uncle Ambrose will have you.’

  And …

  ‘… You can stay with Ponky!’

  You can stay with Ponky?

  But when I say: ‘I don’t want to, Mum,’ she looks at me and the bridge between us turns caramel stiff. ‘Sorry, dear, what was that you were saying?’ her lips say but I see her eyes lift up and she is looking elsewhere. Why is it everyone is looking elsewhere, to other places? Once we were all together but now ………………………………………. the dots have become a train track, a prison line leading out of here.

  Everyone joins in and wishes Mum and Dad good luck.

  Good luck.

  After all, it is a golden opportunity.

  Ponky, Matthew and I stand out at the airport, behind the barrier and the plane takes off. It disappears.

  And that is the end of it, they are gone, and I know she has finally got away and I am left in this foreign land.

  Time stops and stretches and goes on forever.

  EVERYTHING AT THE Casements’ is different, and done differently. They do not have tablecloths on their Formica. The cutlery (stainless steel) sits on the tabletop nakedly. A tomato sauce bottle sits on the tabletop. Mashed potatoes are scooped out of the pot by a glamorous ice-cream server. This is how different the world can be.

  And this is what allows me to lie, to tell a different form of truth: that I drive in a poppyred satinsmooth Jaguar, not one kept in prison, to stamp round its cage, smelling of its own dirt, covered in flies and letting out forlorn cries which die before they even reach the ocean.

  No.

  This Jag, Jag, Jaguar is a metal animal, a chariot which will drive me out and away from here.

  This is my world at Ponky’s.

  FOR-MY-CAR.

  ‘HE HAS THE biggest,’ says Keely matter of factly, a natural authority. ‘He has the biggest in the world.’

  Keely and Carrot have just come back into the class. They have been out in the boys’ toilets, together, alone, doing I don’t know what, but I want to know, I do.

  ‘It’s sooooo big,’ takes up Carrot, his face flushed pink, eyes dancing. His eyes dance a polka in front of me.

  I smell him freshly now, at this moment, his banana-smell is like a robe all over him, investing him with a strange dignity.

  ‘How big?’ I say, trying not to sound interested.

  We are down the very end of the metalwork classroom, hidden by a wall. It is another day. Time lies all round us, like a still ocean.

  ‘He has the biggest cock in all the world,’ says Carrot, assured and matter of factly. ‘Erroll Flynn.’

  The way he says cock it is like he has swallowed it and brought it back up, inside himself.

  ‘It is … yards … long,’ says Keely, nodding, reeling me in. Keely and Carrot exchange a smooth glance.

  ‘Yards and yards and yards and yards long,’ sings Carrot.

  I think of this. I feel very small. I look between them, they are so married. Their eyes keep catching each other’s and returning, like a ball, their glance. Licked ball, goobyball, a gobstopper sucked down smooth, exchanged between them, lip to lip.

  ‘Foursquare,’ I say, knowing this will catch them out. ‘Can I play at lunchtime? With yous? I’m good,’ I say. ‘Betternyou.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Keely all cool as a winter draught right into my face.

  He turns his shoulder to me. He leans down and brushes something off his shoe. Something he has just seen. I see all of him, all over, in one piece.

  Please, I don’t say.

  Keely is down there, polishing his shoe with his pullover sleeve. He leaves it shiny black, mirror-sleep, in which I read our three faces, looking down as if into a pool. I see our faces, flushed, staring at the same point, frowning.

  What do we see?

  MY FEET. I’M watching them in my pedals as I push. Down the slowhill, smoothhill, away from the shops. This is when I know I’m almost in the clear. Left Winkie at the top of the road, by his mousehouse, which is across the road from the convent. Blackbird nuns coast along the streets, beaks glittering, gathering in little skeins of Catholickids, off to hell, ring the bell.

  Plastic shoes push in rhythm. Winkie is a Catholic. I know this. My eyes flick sideways, shuttling the knowledge to the back of my head.

  I have to be careful here. Because one afternoon, one long still afternoon as I gazed down at my feet in the pedals, lost in the rhythm, the peaceful surging circle of the cycle, the click-clicking as the chain fell in and sat sweet and squat on the spike, sending the spokes flickering and silvern, blurring everything around me into a sweet swoon, I — forgetting there was even an I, a fleshly sac — went splat into the hooped back of a parked car.

  The car rode into my flesh invading me with white shock. It tore the breath out of my throat. For one moment my body died. I know this.

  Forever after I carry on the bridge of my nose not only a strange sort of hollow but a tiny scar, shaped like the continent of Africa. This scar started out as a weeping flower, all scarlet, throbbing. It grew into a husk, stitched into my skin. Finally it dropped off, leaving behind a naked whiteness. So this is me, this tiny identifying mark, this nakedness. Alone on my body this is the pure essence of who I am. All else is excess, unnecessary, an exterior. But if you wish to look into my heart, see that tiny continent of Africa: in memory of the moment when, daydreaming, I crashed into the hard wall of reality.

  SHE IS NOT home when I get there. Hot from my bike-ride, I go out into the wash-house and feel up the suede insides of the weatherboards, still warm and damp from the sun. Locate the key, which fits into my palm strangely.

  I unlock the backdoor, invade the still space of Ponky’s house.

  When I get near her room, a small crease of paper tells me: she is there. She looks up at me silently. She does not exactly breathe out heavily, but I feel her big strapping body lull out a sigh … of disappointment that I have come back.

  ‘… Go, Ponky,’ I go, hesitating on the frill-edge of entering her boudoir.

  Floral carpet strands me.

  Ponky does not answer, or she is leaving a small hesitation, large enough for me to fall into. Ponky is listening to her own transistor radio. The first one I have ever seen. Is hers, natch, as if she cannot quite hear me above the radio noise, she sighs, eyes shuttling back to her comic.

  She buries her eyes.

  She must have taken off her uniform for Richmond View as soon as she was inside the door, shedding it like a skin she cannot wait to get off, the hat, the gloves, the stockings, the shoes, the dress, the jacket: the weight of her private girls’ school education now lies scuffed on the end of her bed, abandoned.

  She is lying back, being Elvis. Slow cud of her chuddy.

  On the radio I hear Connie Francis sing ‘Don’t fence me in’.

  Nose wrinkling up like stink, Ponky reaches down, eyes never lifting from the page, turns Connie down.

  She sigh-sighs.

  Ponky chews concentratedly, allowing only a bubble to pop out as a sign that she is aware of my presence.

  Pffflock! goes the bubble. The easement of air is her real greeting. She wrestles over, with a grunt, presenting me with a broad empty cliff of a back. Flick over page of comic.

  Silence.

  I put my bag down by my end of the bed, careful not to muck up her room.

  ‘How’rrrre ya been.’ She doesn’t even make it into a question. She drags out all the rrrrrrrs, like they’re a growl. Often she talks American. Either Elvis or John Wayne.

  ‘I’m …,’ I start up, all bird-squeak. I unravel my day in loose spools all around me, carefully leaving out anything important.

  Suddenly, she gets up. Without another word, she walks out. Straight into the bathroom.

  Door shuts in my face. I don’t understand this. She is always going in there. Hiding.

  I look at the pink-painted door, thick pink, lustrous. Doorknob, a thin skitter o
f chrome, in ziggurat. What is happening in there? I sleep in her room every night, across the carpet from her. Our dreams entangle. Seaweed round a corpse. Or like something from summer long ago: an old ice-cream carton, the writing just about leached off it, so you can hardly read Tip Top. We have eaten all the ice-cream, forgotten, almost, its chilly soft taste — but there it lies, trapped in seaweed, surrounded by the bones of a fish, a sprat. A long forgotten sprat.

  Me.

  AFTER A LONG while, the toilet flushes, but late, like it’s an afterthought. She comes back, face blank. I notice she does not swagger so much. She sinks down on her bed with a groan. She turns a half-eye over to look at me.

  ‘Ja wanna play … softball?’ She half-whispers this.

  I eye the baseball bat, wooden and stiff, leaning just inside her door. This is the only one in our district. Who has ever heard of anyone possessing anything so American? Ponky does, Ponky, whose father Uncle Ambrose is the source of all gifts, all objects, all things beyond our power. She even has a real American baseball glove, made of sweet-smelling oleaginous leather. But Ponky is alone. An only child. A child alone cannot play softball. So, to her who is given everything, these things are precisely useless.

  Ponky’s boudoir is all frilly and lacy, laid out like an ideal girl’s room by Aunty Gilda for the imaginary girl that Ponky isn’t. Ponky puts up with it all, silently, a soundless groan.

  I know what I have to do.

  ‘O, yesm,’ I say all hollow enthusiasm. ‘Yesm.’ I’m earning my way. ‘That would be really neat.’

  ‘Follow me,’ says Ponky, which I always do, dancing in her shadow, trying to follow the rolling ball of her feet.

  BUT SOFTBALL TURNS out to be no good because there’s only the lonely two of us. And the blank green of the park accentuates this fact. Cruelly.

  ‘How about … tennis?’ I mumble brightly. She looks over at me, thinks for a long hard second, then gives me the verdict.

  ‘OK,’ she breathes, like it’s all my fault the baseball glove and bat turn out to be useless.

  IT IS PART of Ponky’s power that she has the right to play tennis on the only private tennis court in our area. The court belongs to the shut-down hotel, the only hotel ever to operate at Hungry Creek. This was in the days Before-the-War. When people living on the main road would ring ahead when they saw the police heading out. By the time the police got there, all the alcohol had been hidden. Or drunk. There were coloured bulbs in the night, and a dancing platform way out to sea. Spotlights used to rake the still waters. When the tide was in, of course.

  But ever since the Accident, the hotel has been closed. They took the ropes off the maypole, the swings just hang there, never used. Rusting in their sockets. And old Mrs Kirk lives alone inside the hotel. Sometimes, on the seaward side, you see some washing hanging out. There are rooms and rooms there, locked up. You never know quite who’s living in there. Sometimes old Mrs Kirk takes pity on some hard-up honeymooners. Mum says one day she half-expects to find Mrs Kirk lying there, inside, with her throat cut. Not that anyone would know for a while. For a long time. And then imagine the smell, says my mother, wrinkling up her nose as though she can already smell it.

  The hotel is built right slap up against the beach. One day, everyone knows, the sea will claim the whole building. This is because the bottom rooms of the building are already open to the tide. These rooms were where Mr Kirk kept his boat. This was before the Accident, which my mother says was no accident at all. Mr Kirk simply swam out to sea and drowned, is the official story. My mother says (backed up by certain other locals) he was seen being picked up by a launch that very night. Mrs Crickwood’s daughter claims she saw him walking down the main street in Everton. Bold as brass. He had the same roll-your-own cigarette dancing on his outer lip. Unlit. ‘Common as,’ says my mother, even though they built the only hotel at Hungry Creek, and called it The Regina and had their own private cinema and a cocktail bar on the roof of the hotel. ‘Built because the building leaked,’ says my mother.

  It has been locked up all my life. Only Ponky has been inside.

  WE PLAY SILENTLY, with the enforced oddness of children near a sickroom. The few comments we make to each other are turned into quotations, as if surrounded by a listening silence.

  At one point I think I glimpse the mask of old Mrs Kirk dissected by the venetians. The next second, the window returns to sky. And the sound of our ball rises up, hollow and somehow sad, dying out as it is absorbed into the plaster which is turning green, in its folds, and flaking off, on the seaward side.

  UP THE DRIVE stumbles Mrs Randford, sweetheart from the American movies, bright blonde hair tied in a snood, cupid lips carved on her face, powder white in the afternoon light as she, unsteadily, a little, rehearses a smile — a vague wave in our direction, clutching her eternal brown-paper parcel under her armpit.

  ‘How’s your game goin, kids?’ she murmurs to us, as she slips up past the tennis court, wire-netting embroidering and letting slip the iron thread of itself as she wavers her way to her anemone home.

  ‘Mmmwinnin’ two sets,’ says Ponky who is sweating, to win.

  We play on urgently.

  It is important to win.

  It is terrible to lose.

  Uncle Ambrose knows this.

  But someone must always lose.

  Gradually, as if understanding, as if seeking to soften and smudge, and blur the harshness of all definitions, the sun starts to intensify its shadows, then string them out along the asphalt, joining small lump of gravel to the wire-end of weed.

  Birds sprinkle their shade over the tennis court, softening our faces. Buses run up and down the road like clockwork speeded up. And the sun runs down the bank to embed itself in a pure line of sea.

  We are in shadow.

  ‘Mumndad won’t be home for a while,’ mutters Ponky wiping a look off her face. This look is crestfallen, naked, alone. ‘OK, Mutt,’ which is her pet name for me, ‘time for the Pause that Truly Refreshes.’

  INSIDE THE WASH-HOUSE her fingers play over the crate of Coca-Cola which is delivered each week for Ponky’s delectation. Here I glimpse the scale of her wealth, the true dimension of Uncle Ambrose’s ambition. Not one bottle of Coke like any other kid at Hungry Creek might aspire to, but an entire tray of them. They lie there obediently waiting the moment when they leap up into Ponky’s grasp and she, carefully, levers the lid off each one so the precious foam does not sliver down the glass.

  At this moment her fingers try to intuit the correct bottle. For there is a correct one.

  The fourth from the left, two down.

  No.

  The seventh along, four from the right.

  She opens the bottle.

  In the dark, her eyes rest on me, so — for this second now (in the silence before a trolley bus, somewhere, miles away, announces its advent with an eery whistle down the wires) — I realise I exist, and she leans forward and offers me a slug from her bottle.

  ‘But only two slurps,’ she says to me sternly.

  I glug down the gold and grab all the aeration which I need to keep me afloat, bubbling in the torrent of her regard. While it exists. She takes the bottle back, wiping its mouth carefully, twice, with the underside of her T-shirt. Now she lifts the bottle back and in one long draught she drains all the brown-gold inside her. I watch the bubbles sink. In silence, I appreciate the strength of her insides that they can drag into themselves so much all at once. I feel her need. She pulls the bottle away from her lips with a sharp smacking pofft! and she stands there, slightly wavering, as immense as a giant kauri tree which has been cut through and, for one instant of shock, celebrates its final moment of verticality.

  We both wait.

  Then, as we know it will, from out of the pit of her stomach, up through her soundpipe, crashing out of the crater of her mouth comes the entirely satisfactory sonic shape of a burp. Its sounds echo up and down the corrugations of the shed.

  She grins at me. I grin b
ack.

  ‘Good one, Ponky.’

  She lowers her glance to the Coke top. I sense the gambler in her gathering her forces in — for this is Uncle Ambrose speaking through Ponky’s fingertips. She almost closes her eyes and withdraws. I feel the tremble of all her nervous oscillations in the air.

  ‘It better be …,’ she half-murmurs to herself. ‘It bally well better be …’

  She reaches for the small screwdriver she always uses to prise the cork out of the undersides of the Coca-Cola cap. For Ponky is searching for the eternally elusive letter L which will complete the spelling of COCA-CO—A (the letters of which are randomly distributed under all Coca-Cola lids) thus winning for Ponk an All Expenses Paid Trip of a Lifetime to Honolulu, a Teal Blue Plastic Carry-on Suitcase, a Year’s Supply of Coke and, better than all of this, a guaranteed photo in the Evening Star of our friend, Ponky, alias PK, alias Davy Crockett, Happy Little Priscilla Casement (aged 12), grinning into the camera as she climbs up the airplane stairs into the air.

  True happiness always resides elsewhere.

  ‘Take me with you?’

  ‘I might. I’ll think about it,’ Ponk says coolly, keeping all her options open.

  But.

  And.

  If.

  The cork splinters back.

  She holds in her hand a ‘C’.

  Ponk hardly lets out a sigh.

  With one derisory flick of a thumb, Ponk sends the little metal object off into oblivion, signifying that from now on it is condemned junk. Its crinkle rings in the dark. Falls behind the concrete copper, to lie beside a wooden clothespeg and the skeleton of a mouse hunched into a foetal curve.

  ‘It’s a con,’ I say, eager to defend Ponky’s honour.

  ‘OK,’ says Ponk, stretching out to her full size, five foot eight and a half. ‘Time to hit the beach.’

  WE THREAD DOWN the overgrown steps, by the closed-up hotel. Hit by the smell of sand, and mud, and the fainter gossamer of sewerage, redolent of secrets, shame and pooh. The tide is right out and the sun runs a thin gilt glass over all the mud so that what is looking at us is a giant ballroom floor of gilded crystal.