Boy Overboard Read online

  But outside I hear the silent tug and glug of power which announces the advent of a trolley bus. Distant at the moment, soon it will be there in a barrage of sound, a bash, a whoosh, a weird whirlpool of motion into so much stillness.

  This means the driver will wander in following on his footsteps, a stranger occupying them until he stands beside me, creaking, and asks me, impartially, yet sweating in some part, a dimple of fear in each eye, would I like to hold his thing? ‘No thanks, thank you though.’

  I know that is no mystery. That is simply like an unflushed toilet, kack all over the floor.

  I QUICKLY DIP down the stairs towards the beach. One hundred and five steps exactly, forty-three steps first of all, a landing, then a further steep run. These steps are thick with gravel chunks — crude, pockmarked, like a biscuit recipe with not enough mix in it. A metal tube is the single handrail, worn smooth by the hundreds, no, the thousands of hands which have rested on it. These stairs are steep, dangerous. You may fall and stub your toe, break your nose. After an afternoon at the beach, these steps grow even steeper. And the metal rail glitters like an eel, taunting.

  My brother says the steps were made during the Depression. Hungry men built them. And some of their pain, their hunger has gone into the terraces where you are meant to lie, sunbathing — they are filled with sharp shells to press into your flesh, reminding you that you are lucky to be relaxing, you are one of the fortunate ones to be lying there, face turned up towards the sun. Steep stairs whispering, ready to send you sprawling, you are at the poor person’s beach.

  Down I go, down I flow past the changing sheds, of green corrugated tin, with their shower and in summer the efflorescence of naked men. Why is Matthew so often lingering in there? I don’t understand. I do understand. One part of me does.

  I pass by the whisper of its sound, the shower nozzle running silvery and silent, calling me in but I wander on by.

  Down onto the beach.

  The tide is coming in, overlapping waves sending in a sharp tang of salt, and beneath that the pickled smell of mangroves. Through the softer spools of dark, sprat storms etch the glass. Pohutukawas lean down, old women bathing, lowering their tresses and dresses, already damp and clinging, into the sea.

  To the right the long white bow of the cockle beach.

  I look at the sea, wondering mutely whether we will ever return to summer again. I mean by this, one of those summers by which Ponky and I mark the highwater mark of our happiness. I think of bottlefishing, of swimming under the sea. Keeping your eyes open, seeing the sprats inside the bottle. You have to kill them, bash them quick. An eye looks up at you. Sweetscented mixture of capture and release, those summers, oblivious birth leading into quick death.

  But today the sea is too cold for bottlefishing. Besides it has all changed. Now Ponky has a fishing rod. Bottlefishing is something only kids do. Babies. Now she goes down to the rocks where bigboys go, where the mystery is strongest. She has penetrated this world and left me behind.

  There is no bottlefishing any longer.

  The day for sprats is over.

  AT THE VERY end of Hungry Creek are the cliffs. The wind here is brisk, impatient, having travelled vast distances. I do not want to linger. I can see right up the harbour which opens out before me like tinfoil unrolling and falling.

  A sudden and wild exhilaration overtakes me.

  ‘Ponky, I don’t care!’ I yell into the wind, knowing the words are taken away from me, off me, unsnared. ‘Maddy, I don’t care!’

  I pause to see if there is an answer.

  When I don’t get one, I mutter to myself, whispering to the only person who can hear.

  ‘MumnDad, I don’t care if yous never come back!’

  THEN, FROM HIGH on the cliff-top I see her. Spy her. Fishing with the bigboys.

  A wicked spirit enters me. I want to yell down — She’s a gurl doan yous know it?

  But in that second, PK turns her weight sideways and I see in the bowl of her face such a slide and shade of vulnerability, of nakedness, I can’t bring myself to do it. More than this, she makes a quick and funny grimace to me, which says I can’t speak to you now, don’t tell on me, I’ll talk to you later; the hidden semaphores of meaning I have known all my life. She does this with her back to the boys around her who, grim with their own importance, do not deign to notice the countermovement of her dance — it does not fit within their severe diagramatics — but the second she has sent this message to me and I have received it she turns away from me, and I know she has already forgotten me.

  AS I WALK along, my head hung low, I keep an eye out for threepences. But I see none.

  Silence

  AFTER SCHOOL THE next day I see him coming towards me, my heart flares up. It is as if I have never seen him before, so completely. Matthew. I can see all the suburb arranged round him, outside of him, an outer skin attached to him, and he is in its centre, cut-out. Matthew. I have never seen him before. He who is inside me and so much a part of me he is my own body, flesh of my flesh.

  Now I see him, and I realise with a shock I miss him.

  ‘Hi, Matthew?’ I say, tentatively, shyly, uncertain about what drives him to see me.

  ‘Hello, James,’ he says to me smiling his awkward strange smile, like a coathanger twisted skew-whiff in a cupboard, the clothes falling off. This is Matthew. He is thin, Matthew, with the high, wide coathanger shoulders of our mother.

  I can smell him, even as he stands there.

  Aniseed balls. Aniseed.

  He is my deep shame, my brother, a brother who, with a choice of all the sweets in the whole wide world (that is to say in the local dairy which alone operates at the front of the closed down hotel), my brother chooses the purple-brown sugar berries which give off an odd fennel-like smell. He always has a bag in his pocket, melting and falling apart, balls glued together. He no longer bites his collar, like he used to. Gnawing the edge of his collar, intently, nervously, passionately inside his own world.

  Matthew.

  Why have I got a brother like him, instead of another kind of brother? Nobody in the world likes such weird things as aniseed balls. My Quiz Kid brother, who wears glasses. He is different, my brother, and it frightens me.

  Now I glance about us, spy-like, to see if anyone can see us together. He is leaning his maroon bike against his legs, as he talks to me.

  This is so typical of Matthew. Other boys would put their bikes down. Other boys would balance their bike, riding their crotch on the seat, pushing the bike hard into the space between their legs, an odd smile playing on their lips. But Matthew stands there, his bike leaning against his body, his body a wall.

  Nervously, in his excitement at seeing me, he pushes it back and forward. Though I am his younger brother, I feel older.

  He is excited to see me. This annoys me. What annoys me is that I am excited, thrilled to see him. Waves of warm rush through me, to the end of my fingertips. I can’t help myself smiling.

  As we stand in the street, with nowhere to go.

  We’re too old now for the hollow under the pine tree facing the harbour, which was Ponk’s and Matthew’s and my own bunker.

  ‘Have you heard?’ he says to me, a little tense. ‘From them?’

  I look into his peeled-grape eyes, with their tiny burrowing pinprick. He owns all of me, my brother, he owns every part of my body. Cellophane beside him. So I cling to what everyone else thinks of him.

  Brainbox. Foureyes. Aniseed. Poison.

  We are joined together at the mouth.

  Until we went to school, neither of us realised we spoke strangely. Forming our words correctly, even running sentences together.

  Punch! This is the difference between us: I learnt, by watching what happened to him.

  Punch! Kick! Thump!

  Face down in the dirt, arm twisted behind his back.

  ‘Lissen to how ’e talks. LA-DI-DA. Think you better than us? Think we’re not good enough?’

  I learn to slu
r my words and slouch my language. I learn never to put my hand up in class. None of this, he knows. None of this essential language of survival does he know.

  Can I know him? He who owns me? In private, in our private hours, flesh of my flesh, breath of my breath, another hand or limb stretching out from my mother.

  ‘You’re always so quiet and good and tidy, Jamie. Stop that Matthew! Stop it!’

  His toys spread everywhere. On a quiet moment he comes to me and pinches me and pushes his face into mine, screwing it up into a mask, a mask of hate. At other times, he becomes a magician. In the limitless ocean of time on which we sit becalmed, he swims towards me, causing ripples all around me to move.

  This is Matthew. He holds a saucer of sand in his hands. He has the heads of a thousand cinerarias all plucked from the dark side of the house, the wasteland beside the garage. The heads are vividly purple, so rich and varied, purple, white, a blur of blueness and an intense shade so pure I can hardly breathe as I watch him, quietly, silently, his head lowered intently, plant the small flower heads. From under his fingertips a pattern emerges. I watch intently. Behind his fingers is scattered a floral pathway, so decorative even I understand he has made something exist which, once before, never existed. Better than this, he has re-shaped time. He has, magician that he is, boldly taken time and re-formed it so that it re-emerges under his thin, nervy, busy fingertips, with the bitten-down nails and the broad spatulate palm of a hand, with the high rising mont — that hand, with warts on it — with even these hands he has boldly fingered time, and rearranged it so from out of his fingers comes this fine cineraria sand dish, the smell of the flowers and the damp sand so potent, I lower my face down into it, it becomes a kaleidoscope, dizzying me as it breaks apart. He is a magician, my brother, so clever. But I cannot know him.

  He is looking at me now, waiting. Leg banging against the side of his bike.

  ‘You heard from them?’

  Them, I know, means our parents.

  I don’t answer, I just shake my head, imperceptibly.

  Beyond his head I see Mrs Beveridge whose eyes are like a sewing machine, stitching everything together, a consequence to a cause, a slip to an intended insult, a passing comment to an over-emphasised formal letter of complaint. She is a busy ticking machine of a woman, carrying with her all sorts of offcuts and odds-and-ends.

  Her husband ran away from her. ‘No wonder,’ says Dad. She lives in shame in a house with beer bottles plunged upside-down into the soil for a flower border. This was done by her husband. Before he left.

  She says, ‘Hello, boys, missing your mum I expect.’

  Mrs Beveridge is naturally interested in absences … and the pain they cause.

  Her brightly blue eyes reach across space and try to find communion.

  ‘G’day, Mrs Beveridge,’ Matthew calls.

  I mean this is what is wrong with him. He calls back to Mrs Beveridge who nods happily, chirpily like a tug boat in the wake of his reply.

  ‘Can’t be too much longer,’ she calls out gaily, passing on, her day made.

  Maddy’s eyes re-find mine, invade them.

  We look at each other, a slim bridge swinging between us, frail thread wound by a spider, suspended.

  We inspect, from this joined bridge, the joint conspiracy of our parents.

  It is apparent neither will return. Or worse, they are enjoying themselves without us.

  The betrayal is deep, fundamental.

  Within the tight weft of our family has come this coldness. Within the tightly packed encyclopaedia of our family, one so immense it runs on for more volumes than the Encyclopaedia Britannica (each page made up of breakfasts and dinners and moments on the back steps and looks and repeated sayings), certain pages have been brutally ripped out. Our continuity is threatened.

  Now we know we are unwanted. Unwantable.

  My eyes catch on Matthew’s face. His face is changing, just as his body is beginning to thicken. It is as if there is some other monster inside the boy I used to know, and he is losing that thin urgent laughy sprite, who pinched me so viciously, whose elbows sharply dug and from the end of whose fingers flowery sandsaucers in a million kaleidoscopic shapes emerged. His legs are no longer so thin, or kicked and scuffed round the kneecap from being pushed into the dirt. His legs are becoming muscular. His neck is thickening. He is becoming someone else apart from the Matthew who I know.

  Think I know.

  His eyes glisten a little. Inside the pupil I see my own world returned to me, and I am standing there, waiting. Waiting.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  I do not tell him about going up to our old house, the house we used to live in once, because Ponky is staying late at school, silently preferring it to hanging round with me, a kid. So alone, lonely, like a sick dog, I retraced my footsteps across the gravel, went up the drive, all the while expecting a face, a voice to call out. Turning the corner of the house, the back garden stared back at me, like the face of someone I knew once so intimately I expected to know them all my life. Blind now, deaf now. It looks back at me mutely, till a riff of wind lifts up a plum tree bough and sinks down into it, so the plum tree creaks out a greeting to me. No plums now, empty.

  The clothesline rocks on its cradle.

  A cloud passes down a window gauzed with salt.

  In the far distance, high up in the sky, where a sun is suffusing a cloud, a single gull wavers, trapped inside the thickness of glass.

  I do not dare to move forward. I want to call out hello to everything in the backyard, retracing my footsteps as if by doing so I am re-threading up a web of all past uses.

  Instead I walk, uncertainly across the concrete backyard my father and his friends handymanned into existence so proudly, so that none of us would ever have to play in dirt, in muck, in mud again.

  But now all I see is a single pumpkin upraised in its own shadow, awaiting its ripening.

  A swift stroke of movement emerges from the bushes. It is Achilles the cat who stands there, indifferent yet watching. To him I am as the cloud on the glass, the gull in the cloud. I am the pattern of leaves under the apple tree, the small lichen attached to the very top of the clothesline.

  ‘Achilles!’ I call, overcome with joy to see him. Some spark incinerates in his green eyes. Does he remember all my cruelties towards him, love me, love me more. Love me absolutely. But he moves now, following his own fur footsteps across the concrete to me, a superbly indifferent arrow of … affection.

  Yet there is still a small frisson of uncertainty as he comes close to me. He scents my abandonment. He criticises me for it. Silently. I bend down and pick him up, feasting for one entire minute on the heat-thudding blood-pumping furry warmth as his flesh pushes into me. Mummy.

  I bury my face in his fur, crying unexpectedly, tears dragged out of me on thin burning wires. I never meant. I didn’t mean. I … I …

  Achilles twists in a shudder under my hands. He reasserts his independence, demanding gravity. I am lost again. I set him down on the ground, torn between establishing my own independence (‘See, I don’t care you horrible cat,’) and a bereft feeling of isolation and sadness which sweeps over me.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten you,’ I murmur to him softly.

  I tell Matthew nothing of this.

  His eyes silently read all the space on my face. Time (of which he is magician) has become elastic, as if his fingers had come and moved across my face. What is he reading? Of how I unlocked the stormdoor and penetrated the woodsmelling heat of the back porch? Of how I went into the wash-house and looked down at the houseplants sitting in their own warm wet moss of water? How I turned the tap on and gave them a fresh drink? How I left the tap running until a sudden storm of indifference and cruelty overcame me and I wished to drown all of them, or take them outside and throw them out? Instead of which I turned the tap off and tiptoed out and locked the stormdoor behind me.

  ‘Have you heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  �
�That they don’t want us.’

  Neither of us says anything for a while, then:

  ‘How’s school?’ I ask in a downward descant every schoolchild understands.

  ‘Alright. I came top in Latin. We study how Caesar conquered Britain.’

  ‘I got to do a picture,’ I say sullenly. ‘For the bank competition. Savings Bank,’ I say sourly, as if I am biting into a plum, unripe.

  He looks at me sharply then, as if he has suddenly had a dawn of knowledge.

  He does not know I have never told anyone my brother is a Quiz Kid. He does not know I have never told anyone I even have a brother.

  ‘Do you?’ he says. ‘Do you want some help with it?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I say sullenly, kicking the gravel under my feet, so I see a scuffmark open up. I keep on kicking. Don’t know. Don’t know. I don’t know anything, I want to say.

  We hang together, tentatively, words having outrun us. We steal looks at each other uncertainly, each unwilling to ask the other what he is up to, at that moment.

  ‘Do you want to go and have a look at the hut?’ he asks me.

  I see myself naked and feel the air coolly lifting up and inspecting all the finest hairs on my legs, my arms, my every part.

  ‘I doan know,’ I say, frowning.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘It won’t take long.’

  ‘I doan know,’ I say, again, as I turn and start walking along with him.

  ‘I doan know,’ I say, when I stand there, naked in front of him.

  But this requires no words.

  Messenger

  ‘WHAT’S THIS?’

  Aunty Gilda is using an ice-cream scoop to mound out the mashed potatoes on the plate. I see this as a part of her modernity. Here, in her kitchen, where everything is made to fit, there are no preserves, no tins full of homebaking. Aunty Gilda is a working woman, eager and smart, wearing thin stiletto high heels, so high it is as if she is walking up to the sky, small skyscrapers stacked under each of her arches, rising up tensely, straining as she moves forward, always half-running, in little geisha steps. Late, Aunty Gilda is always running late.