Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (16 page)

‘There are other ways of getting close to the sun.'

Norma moved away. They could be left. ‘I'm going for my walk, John. I won't be long. Oh, there's peanut brownies in the car.'

‘Your car runs on peanut brownies, I think.'

‘There's a car that runs on gas from pig manure,' Duncan said.

‘We must do away with fuels and aim for telekinesis. Move about with our brains, what do you think?'

She left them talking and climbed the slope through the Gravenstein trees. The apples, green and hard and ready for thinning, made her mind shiver and contract. She pictured it for a moment like a walnut in its shell, unreceptive. She did not care for the sort of fantasizing John and Duncan had fallen into, thought it shallow, possibly damaging, yet liked the ease it created for them. She felt exhausted herself – Duncan had that effect, he kept one alert, but at the end one suffered a collapse from the hard work of it all. Perhaps that was why the springing greens of the orchard failed to refresh her – she was too small and dry, and time rather than place would
work a renewal. The long grass swished and tickled round her knees. She bent this way and that like a Balinese dancer, avoiding branches. She splayed her hands, arched her fingers back (wished for long nails), made movements of her forearms on a plane, and slid her head back and forth in the dancer's way; proceeded several yards through the trees in silken gown and head-dress, making ritual flight from a demon; then laughed at herself, caught in her own kind of fantasizing. But was refreshed, in that quick moment. Wonderful, the mind, its powers of renewal. Perhaps telekinesis too was in human possibility. Not now, of course, or for centuries. But Duncan might be a pioneer, one never knew.

She did not, though, want to think of Duncan. She had thought about him too much in the last few weeks. Her time in the orchard was for herself. She thinned an apple cluster, hoping that she left the right ones on. Trade skills, trade knowledge, even at their most simple, demanded respect, and were an aspect of, well, spirit, what other word? She felt she had been guilty of a minor blasphemy, of taking easily what should be treated with reverence, and wished the apples back on the tree, left there for the hand of one who knew. Then laughed at herself, trilled out amusement. Fantasizing again – investing the mundane with, oh, deep significance. Looking for pathways to a hidden meaning. What a disease it could be. One had to deal firmly with these symptoms or find oneself outside the quotidian, and that was the end of being useful.

Really, she thought, I'd better just find some sunshine and lie down.

She reached a fence with rusty wires and posts furred in lichen. Beyond was a paddock left for hay, then the forest began. How pines darkened a landscape. Even in this stillness, how they stilled. One could imagine … no, she declared, enough of that. No gnomes or trolls or wood-sprites; and no pantheistic transports. Sensuous things only, please, she asked. Grass stroking her legs, sun on her skin, clean air washing out her lungs. Scent of pines. Brittleness of lichen. Valley, mountains, to delight the eye. More than enough.

She climbed the fence, half afraid the rusty wires would snap, and walked up the paddock to the pines. There would be haymaking soon, and one more apple harvest, then the valley would be turned to another use. No need for John to repair fences. His
house would be pulled down. Bulldozers would root out his apple trees – loop a chain around them, give a tug, out they'd come like thistles in a garden, and a new crop, little glossy, green, bristling pines would take their place. Aggressive little trees those, invaders, survivors; but she could not work up the hatred for them some of her conservationist friends felt. One had to look on pines as another crop and see that it was kept in its proper bounds.

She sat on a mat of needles and looked down the paddock, over the orchard, to the house. John and Duncan were setting up one of the telescopes on the lawn. They must be going to do some sun-watching. She hoped John had warned the boy not to look directly, then put that worry out of her mind. Duncan would know. He had brought out John's binoculars and was looking down the valley – perhaps over the plains, over Saxton, at the mountains of the Armitage, lovely clean-limbed Imrie with the gleaming mica face, and jagged Corkie where the aeroplane had crashed in the winter. She wondered if the glitter on a ridge was part of it. One of her girls had died in the crash. When you had nine hundred girls the deaths came all too frequently.

Sheryleen Cato was the child's name, a first year preppy. Norma had not known her well but had studied the class photograph later on, and saw a bright-eyed face with pointed nose, a beetle blackness, beetle sheen, in her hair, and a happy shyness on her mouth – all smashed to pieces on a mountain-side. Five died in that crash, pilot and family, and Norma tried to see a flashing away of souls, like shards of glass, to some bright home, but could not make the figure, and came back to the thing she knew – child grinning at the camera. Loss and pain, she thought, that's what we're equipped to know, not happy futures or eternal life. She sometimes tried to put the child's few years into a sum, add them to the total of human experience, as though increase made a sort of meaning, no matter how short the life had been. But that left her out, that Sheryleen, and meaning went flashing off to nowhere, like those bright souls she could not see. The only thing to do, she thought, is grieve until you stop, and then go on with what comes next.

She looked back at the house and found Duncan watching her. She was, at once, violently angry. How dare he watch? With those strong glasses he must have seen her thoughts upon her face. She made a chop with her arm, turning him away; and, yes, he had
been watching, for he swung the glasses in a new direction.

Rotten boy, with that way of gobbling down whatever he could find. She felt that he had taken Sheryleen. She moved into the pines, climbed a little hump that hid the house from view, and came down to the paddock edge again, into sunlight. She sat, then lay, on pine needles, feeling their elasticity. The tree-heads seemed to rotate and their movements increase. That, she thought, was caused by passing cloud wisps in the sky. There was no promise of rain in those clouds, no rain in sight anywhere. (No rain since those October storms five weeks ago.) The stars would shine for Duncan tonight and he could suck them one by one like sweets and add them to the sum of himself.

She folded her hands under her breasts and closed her eyes and let herself drift to the place Josie Round called the plateau. Edges slipped, events, both imaginary and real, ran into one another, then grew thin and distant, went away, leaving her without any substance, and her consciousness without any weight. She sometimes came back frightened – by what, she could not say – but usually was refreshed and leaped up as though from a plunge in some cool stream. She wondered if, simply, the trivialities of her daily life, all the dust and muck of her feelings, were somehow put off like a skin. But being fresh, shouldn't she remember where she had been? And what caused the fear she sometimes woke with – came back shrinking with, terrified to move in case she might be noticed, in case an eye might slowly turn on her? Did she visit some good part of herself, and then – thank God, less frequently – visit a bad?

On this day, in the pines, Norma drifted a little way, then slept; and was woken by the shadow of John Toft falling on her. She sat up with a cry, not knowing him or the world.

John apologized for frightening her. ‘I have never seen you wake, Norma. It is a very naked thing.'

‘What did you see?'

He sat beside her. ‘How tiny and fragile you are. How thin the margin between sleep and death.'

‘It would be nice not to wake. But then …'

John laughed. ‘Ah, you have your double vision still. One of your eyes sees dark, the other light.' He lay on his back and sighted up a
tree at the sky. ‘This boy, he is unusual. I don't know if I can work him out.'

‘Where is he?'

‘Down at the house. He reads some books, then looks at the sun, then reads some more. I think he is like a dog and doesn't know when to stop eating.'

‘Have you tried him out to see if he remembers?'

‘No, I'll take your word. The problem is, as you say, to turn it into some useful course.'

‘He won't go back to school. And he doesn't want a job.'

‘Jobs are a long way off, I think. Perhaps he will never have a job.'

‘But he must. We can't just let him opt out.'

‘You are talking like a teacher.'

‘That's what I am. And I'm not going to let a good brain go to waste. Anyway, you said “useful” yourself.'

‘I meant useful to himself. So he can turn from, what shall we say, acquisition? Turn to interest. Turn to enjoyment. Otherwise, I think, he will reach an end one day and close his eyes and die.'

‘Ah, you've seen it too. All he's doing is filling himself up. Does he like the sun?'

‘I think it has a special taste for him. But it's no great thing. “The size will crush you,” I said. “And the distance will make you smaller than an atom. You must not try too hard to take possession because you cannot hold even a small piece of it all.” He said: “Aw, that's easy. Ninety-three million miles, that's easy.” ' John laughed. ‘And as for size – he turns it in his hand like a tennis ball.'

The image of the sun slides off the screen but the movement is the movement of the earth. Duncan smiles. Easy, easy. And zooming right down from huge to tiny, easy too – thousands of kilometres an hour down to this. A tortoise could go faster. He laughs. There's no need any more to fill huge spaces. All he needs to do is set up lines back to himself. ‘Make leaps,' Mrs Sangster has said, ‘you don't have to walk heel to toe all the way' – and it looks as if she's right. He can make a kind of web in the world, a web in space, and sit in the middle – he doesn't mind ‘like' any more – like a spider.

He puts the lens cap on the telescope and pauses to look at the instrument. The finder-scope is set in the main tube at an angle.
That means mirrors inside, bending rays of light in a new direction. Interference, pressure, influence. His interest in levering and bending is coming back. And light – he blinks at the sun – must have the greatest influence of all. Does it have weight? There must be tons and tons of it pouring out of the sky. If you could concentrate it, bring it all together in one place … And does it have a sense of its own speed? Is speed a thing that happens to light or a part of it?

Duncan is not ready for that. Hard vibration starts in his mind. He picks up the binoculars and looks at the pines and the stillness and the darkness relieve him. He goes into the apple trees and walks in the shade. A track of bent grass leads to the top of the orchard. He sees where Mr Toft followed Mrs Sangster. They're somewhere in the forest, and maybe they want to be alone. That amuses him. Two old people like fourth-formers in love.

He finds a place where he can straddle the wires. The grass is fat, with heavy heads of seed, though farmers are complaining they need a week of rain for a good hay crop. It's great, he thinks, how seasons come and go all because the Earth is tilted on its side. If it was straight there'd be no cycle of things and no life. It all started because of an accident, the way the Earth was lined up with the sun. Millions to one against, that was the odds, which was why people thought there must be God. He cannot see the need for God himself – chance was an OK explanation. And when you thought of the number of galaxies out there, it must have happened thousands of times, so there could be thousands of races with brains as good as ours in the universe. If you believed in God you had to believe human beings were the only ones.

Duncan is happy, he's elated. He walks up the paddock to the pines and goes a little way into the shade and sits with his back against a trunk. Trees go off in every direction, side by side. His mother thinks, or says she does, that plants can be happy or afraid. He doesn't believe it. His mother likes to play games, that is all. But he's fascinated by the identity of each one, the chance of its being here, right here, and its atoms and molecules being
here
, not somewhere else. He looks at his hand and has a strong sense of his good fortune in having it – in being alive, in being himself – and is possessive, jealous of his identity.

Mrs Sangster and Mr Toft walk by in the paddock. She's holding
on to him like his wife, though it makes his other arm go kind of stiff. Stella and Bel would love to hear she's got herself a man, and so would Tom, but Duncan won't tell. He hears her voice, which seems too neat and sing-song for the country: ‘I've been thinking about a girl who died in a plane crash. One minute she was alive and happy and the next … And Duncan's friend, alive, then dead. And Duncan with his burns, all in a moment. For no reason …'

Duncan curls his lip. Of course there was a reason, Wayne did something dumb. Mrs Sangster got easily worked up and that made her thick about some things. With all the stuff she knew you'd think she'd be a bit smarter and not worry about what couldn't be changed.

Duncan watches them walk down the paddock. They sink into the slope until their heads are floating like two balls on the sea, and those go down and nothing's there. It seems like a message to Duncan. It seems to say people can be gone and it will make no difference to him. People can be emptied from his life and he won't care. The warm, yellow paddock is left. The sun and sky are left. And he's left here; and he's enough. He can let people move from left to right, or right to left, across his mind and not be touched. He can, of course, touch them if he likes and use them for some fun if he likes – but there's no need. ‘Whee!' he says softly to himself. He's a little alarmed. He wonders if there's something he has missed – some bit of danger he can't see. But he puts the binoculars up and looks at the sky and swings across: nothing there. He lowers them and looks at the valley. Most of the orchard is out of sight, but a farm stretches down to the plain. In a paddock by the creek a girl is jumping a pony over a white-painted log on a trestle. She could die too, any minute, fall off and break her neck, but right now she's alive and having fun. He watches her through the binoculars, sees her teeth grin as she goes over, and her helmet jog crooked on her head. It's a school friend of Bel's, Kirsty something – Davidson. She puts up a hand, straightens her helmet, pats her pony on the neck, then spits, a long one, curving, and jerks round to see no one's watching her. I'm watching, Duncan grins. He doesn't mind telling Bel that her friend spits.