Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (23 page)

‘You won't get long, Shell. Maybe just a fine.'

‘I don't want a fine. I want prison.'

Their father's car was at the gate and he came down the path with a hold-all.

‘Where's Mum?'

‘They've admitted her, girls. I'm just taking round some stuff for her.'

‘Why'd they admit her? Because of me?'

‘No, Shell.'

‘Yes it is. Jesus, I wish –'

‘They've got some drugs they want to try on her. That's all it is.'

‘What sort of drugs?'

‘I don't know. Something that kind of – maybe gives her a shock. Anyway …'

‘They wouldn't admit her just before Christmas.'

‘Well –' He looked away. ‘I got her in a private place.'

‘You can't afford that,' Shelley cried.

‘Yes I can. It's only a month.'

‘Because of me.' She went up the path and into the house.

‘Go and talk to her, Hayley. I've got to take this stuff.'

‘It is because of Shell, isn't it?'

‘They thought your Mum should be out of the way. Don't say that though. She's got enough things to worry about.'

Shelley was lying on her bed. ‘Go away.'

‘Shell –'

‘I'm all right.'

‘Can I make a cup of tea?'

‘I don't want one. Close the door. Leave me alone.'

Hayley went into the yard and threw some fast balls, rattling the tin. Then she cooked the big meal Shelley had joked about.

Her father rang Melbourne that night and Hayley heard herself being shifted around. Auntie Beth would pay her fare, but why did her father want her in Melbourne? He would be alone, and wouldn't he need her?

‘I'm not going.'

‘Yes you are. Beth's making the bookings and they'll telegraph them through.'

‘Why can't I stay and help you?'

‘I don't need help. I'll be working all day, and nights I'll have to visit your mother.'

‘When do I go?'

‘On Friday. You'll be back in time for the tournament.'

‘Stuff the tournament.'

‘Take your mitt with you. Do some practice.'

She started to say no, but saw his eyes. The look in them was like the gorilla in the cage.

She went into her bedroom and turned off the light and lay face down on her bed, trying not to cry.

In the morning Shelley said, ‘I don't want you there.'

Hayley understood that. She did not want to see Shelley getting told off and taken away; she felt that she would stand up and shout things at the judge.

‘And don't come in the cells. Dad's not coming either.'

‘Shelley,' her father began.

‘No one's coming in the cells. Say goodbye, Hayley.'

They kissed and hugged.

‘When you and Mum come out it's Aussie, eh?'

‘Sure.'

‘Don't get any tattoos, Shell. They're dumb.'

She put her togs and towel on the bike and rode towards town. Her father and Shelley passed in the car, tooted the Birtles goodbye, long and two short, and went round the corner out of sight. She speeded up, but they were gone round the next corner too. She felt lonely riding down the road and wondered where to go. There was no one she wanted to see. Then she thought of Lex and decided there was no harm in riding that way. She would see if the Land-Rover was there but not go in. It would have been good though to talk about Shelley even if Lex had nothing to say.

It was cooler in the valley than in town. Already cars and bikes were at Monday Hole and kids were swinging on the swings. Someone had a canoe on the water and a ghetto blaster was going at full bore, ‘Funky Town'. She rode by Freaks' Hole – no one there. Women had the golf course today and she pedalled slowly, watching them swing, and knew she could do better than them if she played. But golf was too slow and stuck-up and what Pure Muir would call ladylike. Even the men who played seemed ladylike.

She stopped at the bend by Lex's hill. Some goats, the last six left, were crossing the face. It was so steep they looked like cutouts pinned on a board. She wheeled her bike behind a willow tree and looked for Lex. In a moment she saw him come out of a
shed and climb the hill behind the house. Up and up he went towards the pines.

‘Hey, Lex,' she said. Then louder, ‘Hey, Lex.' He was wearing the red shirt he'd worn on that day with her. Once he stopped and hacked at something with his heel. Puffs of dust went up. ‘Lex,' she yelled, behind her tree. She saw him turn and look out over her, and she said quietly, ‘My Mum's in the loony bin, Lex. And Shelley's going to prison today.' He turned away and climbed again and went into the pines. Hayley got on her bike and rode down the valley. She felt happier. She couldn't visit Lex again, that was the deal. She'd felt things with him she would never forget – fucking, sure, but more than that; going with him up into the hills. It seemed to prove that things would end and other things start up and the bad luck in their family wouldn't be for ever.

She hid her bike off the road in case of Gary Baxter and had a swim in Freaks' Hole by herself. Soon Belinda Round came along the path on the other side. She dived in and came up alongside Hayley.

‘Gidday.'

‘I thought you had a swimming pool up there.'

‘We do. Mum's friends are using it. Anyway, I like the river better.'

They swam a while, paying no attention to each other, then sat on the shingle side by side.

‘Haven't got a fag, have you?'

‘No,' Belinda said.

‘What's your Mum and them doing, drinking fancy drinks?'

‘They're supposed to be planning a book. But what they're doing is lying in the sun and swimming nuddy. There's too many white boobs for me.'

Hayley snickered. ‘What sort of book?' She didn't know you had to plan for books.

‘About weaving and feminism. Stuff like that.'

‘It sounds dead boring.'

‘Probably will be. If you have to be fit for softball why do you smoke?'

‘I thought you'd say that and you did.' She grinned at Belinda, thinking she was OK all the same. ‘I saw your brother yesterday.'

‘Where?'

‘In Space World. He's neat on those games. He got the highest score in “1942” I've ever seen.'

‘Mum told him not to go there.'

‘Why?'

‘The kids pick on him. They call him Yuk.'

‘He should belt them.'

‘The intermediates are the worst. One of them stuck a notice on his back.
Walking Wounded.'

‘If I was there I'd sort them out.'

‘Me too.'

‘I've got a sister –' Hayley stopped. She had meant to say that Shelley, like Duncan Round, was a sort of cripple and had to be helped, but that wasn't true, and it seemed like giving in. ‘You remember Shelley?'

‘She used to run. She broke all the school records when I was in the preps.'

‘She's in court today. She's going to prison.'

‘Is that about Mrs Sangster's father?'

‘It wasn't her fault,' Hayley said. ‘She's got a boyfriend called Neil Chote.' She told Belinda about Neil; then how she'd broken Gary Baxter's arm.

‘I saw him,' Belinda cried. ‘I was riding home. They were helping him over the fence and he was crying.' She looked at Hayley with awe. Later, after another swim, she talked about Golden Hills.

‘One lunch-time Mrs Kirby was fighting Mrs Satchell, whacking her on the side with her walking-stick, and when I got them apart the sister told me why. I'd put Mrs Kirby's feeder on Mrs Satchell. They all have their own feeders and you can't get them mixed up. Miss Freed cries when she doesn't get hers.'

‘Do you have to feed them?'

‘Yes. Like babies. Open wider, Miss Freed.'

‘Jesus, I couldn't do that.'

‘I didn't think I could at first. But now I love them. I have to take Miss Freed for walks and one of her legs won't work. So I tie a stocking round her foot and hold the other end and lift it up each step. We go right round the lawn. She likes to put her hand on my cheek so she can feel what young skin feels like.'

‘How did you get that job?'

‘I just went in and asked.'

‘If I tried they'd say no.' Because, she thought, of how I look and talk, ‘anythink' and ‘youse', just to get up the teachers' noses most of the time. Who wants to feed old ladies anyway? She turned her head the other way because tears had come into her eyes. Belinda Round was stuck-up without knowing it. If her own friends or Belinda's were here today they'd never talk; they'd probably never talk to each other again.

She looked at her watch. ‘I gotta see Dad.'

‘I hope your sister will be all right.'

‘Yeah. Thanks.' She pulled on her jeans and T-shirt over her togs. ‘See ya.'

Along the bank she stopped and called, ‘Hey, Belinda. I told your brother not to talk about Wayne. But tell him it's OK. He can if he wants to.'

Ken Birtles sat in the front row of chairs and watched her bare neck and the white scar on her elbow where she'd skinned it to the bone falling off her trike. He wished he could see her face but guessed she had set it in a mask. Only her feet, shifting weight, showed that she was more than just a dummy set up to give the appearance of listening.

That's my daughter, he wanted to cry. Don't you talk to her like that.

He wanted to get up and lift his chair over the rail and put it in the box. The judge was sitting, everyone was sitting now the lawyer had had his say. For God's sake, she's a woman, let her sit.

The reporter was writing in her pad; a girl not much older than Shelley. All this would be in the paper.

Her long legs in their jeans were beautiful. Her ankles were thin and beautiful. How can they talk about her as though she's just a thing? He felt they were trying to strip her down – take away the times that were past, the time she'd spent growing, the things they'd done, all the days and years, the arguments and good times and the love they felt, take it all away, say it meant nothing, and make her just a dummy in a dock for half an hour, with nothing more to her than they could see, nothing more than they had written on their sheets of paper.

Plenty of paper, hundreds of sheets, but Shelley was more than
that. Why didn't they ask
him
who she was?

Birtles, the judge was calling her; as though what she'd done had cut her down to a single name? He wouldn't talk to other women that way. He was saying, what was he saying? – judge with sandy hair and jug ears and raw face – he accepted that she was sorry now, accepted too that she had been subjected to physical abuse and hadn't meant … But it was all something he'd said before, thousands of times, and Shell was Shell and could only be spoken to in words for her. And no one could say them, not even him. A turning point … chance to pull herself together … Her feet shifted weight. If she really had a chance now, it was not because of what they said to her, but what went on inside her head.

He made himself calm. You can do it, Shell. And when the judge's weighing was all done and she would go for six weeks' corrective training, he thought, Yes, that's all right, she can do it; and felt she was back from the place they'd put her in, and this court the worst that was going to happen, and prison would be bad but she was Shelley still at the end of it.

She turned and came out of the three-sided box and he stood and hugged her over the rail, and she went away out of court.

He turned when she was through the door – policeman's hand an inch behind her back – and side-stepped past knees all turning as though a wind had hit them. The exit door whack-whacked. He crossed a room of second-class young, down-staring, elbows on knees. Green tree-heads stood at window height. They looked as if you could walk on them like little hills. He went down the stairs into open air, then ran to the side of the building to see her taken over the lawn to the station cells. But either they had got her out fast or were keeping her in a courthouse room until a batch was ready to ferry across.

Waiting broke his promise not to see her. He went to his car and drove away. Town was overflowing with shoppers and schoolchildren. Touring cycles with foreign flags on their panniers moved in the streets. There wouldn't be an end to them, and the campervans and backpackers and tour-buses, for three months now. Shelley would miss them. The tourists were the best thing about Saxton, she said, they reminded you there was a world out there. He did not like the tourists himself. They made holes in Saxton his daughters might fall through.

He drove towards home but the empty house turned him away and he went up the port hills and the long hill to the lookout and sat in his car looking at the bay. Miles of pale blue sea with currents running through it, silver white. The land around the edges looked dried out and used up. The two huge yellow cliffs across by Darwood were a kind of sliding away and giving up. It seemed as if strength had failed and part of the land been lost. It all fitted in with Shelley and Wayne.

He got out and looked at the sighting plaque; identified the mountains one by one. Imrie. Corkie. Mt Misery. He supposed some early settler had been miserable there – got lost in a blizzard, died in the snow. And Cannonball, named because it was round and smooth. The knobby one was Devil's Toe. New Zealand was full of toes and thumbs and elbows, boots and forks and dining-tables, the devil's. Anything crooked or unusual got his name. That seemed a tiredness in people new to a land.

I'm new and I'm tired, he thought. Go somewhere else. A flat land would be better. He'd been climbing up and down ever since he came here. No smooth places. No straight lines except the edge of the sea. He looked out there and wanted to round his family up and go.

I don't belong any place, he thought. So it doesn't matter where I am, any place will do.