Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (28 page)

Her gin and tonic runs out and she puts the glass in the angle where the seat meets the wall. Tom Round's lovely house – walls of Mediterranean white, earth-coloured tiles, conservatory like a ferny cave; and pool with inward-looking eye, lawns with shaven cheeks, chunky rocks and pricking rock plants and white little flowers like stars – lovely house, lovely place. Tom is a very clever man, and more than clever perhaps; but a man who is horrible as well. She does not know any word, or combination of them, any idea that will contain him. Watches him eye Sandra, who wanders by the pool, while cupping Stephanie's bottom in his palm. Desire, lust, whatever it may be, isn't horrible; but that lust to own, possess, to gorge, increase … people as food, as nourishment … it makes her shrink and shiver and angle her head and turn her eyes. Does he eye Belinda as well? She cannot look.

Soon she hears a rustling in the grass over the wall, a thud and hiss and snorting, and thinks, There's sheep out there. The wall makes a tiny tremor where something bangs it. Hooves scratch.

‘Mrs Sangster.'

‘Oh Duncan, it's you. I thought …' She looks at his face looking down; smiles at his horror-movie face.

‘Do you want to have a look through my telescope?'

‘Yes, I'd love to.'

‘Go round by the gate. I'll meet you there.'

She does as she is told; walks a short way down the crackling drive and finds a picket-gate in the fence. Duncan holds it open for her.

‘There's a lady lying in the grass over there.'

‘Is she all right?'

‘Drunk, I guess. She keeps on saying, "Lovely, this is lovely." I think she wants to be left alone.'

‘Where's your telescope?'

‘Up in the fire-break. In the pines.'

‘Are we allowed there?'

‘No one knows. As long as you don't smoke it's OK.'

He turns on his torch and lights her up the hill. Her soles slip and she has to take handfuls of grass to hold herself.

‘It's easier in the pines. I've got a track.'

She looks back from among the trees and finds the house and lawns and party shrunken: toy figures on a table, like a war game. The women's coloured clothes look beautiful and what a slithery motion on the water. She is suddenly afraid of the dark trees and the boy. His torch, as he angles it through the trunks, makes ridges, oily planes, on his face.

‘How far is it?'

‘Not far.'

The trunks move by like men, bracken crackles at her waist and she's thankful for her linen slacks.

‘Gorse here,' Duncan says, lighting it. Halfway through she slips and grabs; cries out as prickles stab her.

‘Are you all right?'

‘I got a handful. I'm all right.' Sucks that sweet-sour taste, that living her.

I should be home. Oh damn New Year.

Duncan climbs in clay steps with the torch angled back. She remembers that clay is a missing link. Clay was there when the spark of life made its primal flash. It seems unlikely, feeling the stuff slide and crumble under her feet. She is not keen on the spark of life. Would almost as soon it had never flashed.

The party is gone: an isolated cry, a bodiless laugh. The sky rolls open on the other side of the ridge. ‘Here,' Duncan says. He shows his telescope on its stand. ‘I've got some sacks on the ground. You can sit.'

She does so, gratefully. He flicks off the torch – and Norma cries out at the splendour of the sky.

‘Duncan, look at it.'

‘Yeah,' he says, as though it's his.

‘I've never seen so many stars.'

‘Not all of them are stars. There's planets and galaxies and nebulae and globular clusters. Most of them are stars though, in our galaxy.'

‘There's a shooting star.'

‘I see a couple every night.'

‘I'll make a wish.' No reply, he disapproves, but she makes it all the same: a happy encounter for herself.

Duncan is busy at the telescope. ‘I've got Jupiter if you want to see.'

‘Yes, I'd love to … I can't see.' That black hood is her eyelid – but when she tries again the planet is there, a yellow ball, but weightier; and huge and perfect; huge. She feels all her breath go sucking out.

‘See the moons? There's Europa and lo and Ganymede.'

‘Yes, I see them.'

‘There won't be any eclipses tonight. Callisto is the one way out. I don't think you'll see it. See the red spot?'

‘Yes.'

‘You could drop two Earths in there. I like the red spot.'

‘I'll have to stop. It's making me shaky.'

‘Yeah. It did that to me a bit. Do you want to see a binary?'

‘Yes, all right.' She knows about binaries from her evenings with John.

‘See the Southern Cross, way down low. Now find the big star in the pointer. That's Alpha Centauri. You think that's just a single star, don't you?'

Squatting, she looks through his telescope at the two stars holding hands.

‘It's three stars really. There's Proxima Centauri too but you don't see that. It's a red dwarf. Those two you can see go round each other every eight years. Proxima takes millions of years.'

There's nothing glib or easy in it. He holds this stuff as natural. His scale is different from ours, Norma thinks. These times and distances are things he can reach out to and take in. The band he can work in is stretched, it's widened out. Millions of years? – it seems to have a meaning for him. Would he understand a pico second? And all those dreadful chances and improbabilities …? Norma wants to back away from him, and hug him too. Is it alcohol, loneliness, possessive desire barely in control? She does not simply want to admire.

He says, ‘The moon will be coming up in a minute.' She looks along the spiny back of the hills to Imrie and Corkie and sees a white radiance over their twin hump.

‘Can we look at it?'

‘We'd have to get binoculars. This is not a moon telescope.' He starts to dismount it from its legs. ‘Hey, Mrs Sangster, I was wondering, are there courses I could do in, you know, physics and maths and astronomy?'

‘I'm sure there are.'

‘I can, like, read all the books and remember them, but most of the time I don't know what it means. I never got to physics at school.'

‘You could go back.'

‘No. Are there correspondence courses? I'd ask Mum but I thought you'd know.'

‘I'm sure we could get you correspondence courses. Would you like me to find out?'

‘That'd be great.'

‘I think you'll learn like a fizz-bomb, Duncan.' She is elated. He wants to know meanings and she sees her part in it. She believes that he is out of danger now and will be a great man one day.

He puts his gear in the box and snaps it shut. ‘See.' Imrie has a molten tip. ‘Up she comes.'

They watch the moon take shape and break free, and it's too heavy, Norma thinks, to stay in the sky, it should crash down and burn through the Earth like a cannonball. Except of course – but she knows all that. Openness, susceptibility – that is the better
way tonight; although the boy beside her is a fact.

‘The moon's too close. I don't want to go there,' Duncan says.

‘Well, you never will.' He'll work in little rooms, with instruments and figures – but travel out of course, travel far.

They walk down through the trees, climb and slide, and hear and see the party again. The house gleams like mother of pearl and the golf course spreads out from the foot of the hill, smooth pale slopes and pits of shadow. The cars on the drive are vertebrae – are rounded slickly shining butter-pats.

Duncan puts his case down by the gate. He darts away and comes back grinning. ‘She's gone. All there is is a flat place in the grass.'

‘I don't think I'll come back to the party. Duncan, there's my bag in your mother's room. It's a cloth one with a red silk scarf tied round the handle.'

‘Sure,' he says, and runs up the drive and through the garage. She leans on the gate and waits for him. Like waiting for your boyfriend, she remembers, but not with any sadness or longing. The night has made a gift and she's satisfied.

He brings her bag. She knots her scarf round her neck. ‘Goodnight Duncan. Thanks for showing me.' She kisses him on his undamaged cheek and walks down the drive.

‘Hey, Mrs Sangster. Happy New Year.'

‘Happy New Year, Duncan. Same to you.'

Her car is parked by the bridge. She gets in and sits a while with the window open, listening to the water and the far-off chirp and chatter and the crack of gum leaves in the night. Here, she thinks, here or anywhere is good enough. I don't really have to want too hard.

People are serving themselves at the bar. The barman has stripped to his grundies and is horsing with Miranda in the pool.

‘He's a student too, surprise, surprise,' Belinda says.

‘Hey Duncan, come on in,' Miranda yells.

He sees the barman discover him and the guy is pretty good, just a flicker.

‘You do anything bad to my sister, I'll come and get you one foggy night.' He shows his teeth.

‘Duncan,' Mandy screeches, ‘you little bastard, I'll get you for that.'

Miranda is pleased with him. Mandy likes me, I never knew.

A woman with rings on her fingers, big fat rings, solo-waltzes by, humming ‘Greensleeves', and takes off her shoes and dress and tights and climbs into the pool in her knickers and bra. She swims like a learner to the middle and stands bouncing gently on her toes. ‘Come on, sausage, come on out,' pleads a man in a Hawaiian shirt, but she turns from him, dog-paddles away, still humming her tune. Duncan thinks it won't be long before more people go in, with no togs on probably. It would only take a push with his little finger to tip the man; who's so anxious about his wife he doesn't notice half his drink slop in, though the ice goes plop. How long will it take before it melts? Duncan goes to the bar and gets some cubes and drops them in the pool one by one.

‘Give me, Dunc,' Miranda cries. She grabs one and tries to stuff it in the barman's grundies. Duncan has never seen her like this. She must have had too much to drink. Someone should get her out of the pool. He looks for his mother, but sees her trooping with her friends into the weaving-room. That's the end of her for a couple of hours.

A men's platoon led by his father comes out of the garage. Tom has his golf clubs on his shoulder – it looks crazy in the middle of the night – and Rock Edison is carrying the bucket of balls. They go past the pool and round the side of the house and through the door in the brick wall to the flat bit of paddock Tom keeps mown – his Scotchman's tee. Some mornings before breakfast he spends half an hour out there shooting at the seventh green in the bend of the river. The whack of his club wakes everyone up; and when he's finished Belinda goes down with the bucket to find the balls. Five dollars if she comes back with every one, which she usually does. Tom doesn't often miss the green. One morning he scored a hole in one and made Josie drink a glass of whisky to celebrate.

Duncan hoists himself on the wall. The barman is out of the pool pulling on his black trousers and white shirt. Mandy has scratched him under the jaw. None of her boyfriends get very far with her, she won't be touched. The teacher in the Trade Aid dress is wrapping a towel round her, so that's all right. The men look like burglars in the moonlight; or murderers, with their golf clubs flashing in their hands.

‘What do you use here, Tom?' Morris Martin asks.

‘Me? A four iron. Some of you jokers are going to need the driver.' Tom laughs.

‘I think you should be handicapped for local knowledge, Tom,' Rock Edison says.

‘I think you should start from further back.' Don Compton.

Duncan knows who most of them are. They come out in twos and threes, talking business. They're in a deal – Tom is a partner and the architect as well – to build a retirement village out by Darwood. It's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to get in, but it's value for money, Tom says: croquet greens and bowling greens and a cinema and shops and a hairdresser and health club and an indoor swimming pool, all private. There'll be a security fence round it all. It's a concentration camp for the afflu-old, Josie says.

‘Who's holding kitty?'

‘Me.' Tony Hillman.

‘I'll put an extra hundred in. That's my handicap.'

‘Fair enough.'

‘How much in kitty?'

‘Nine hundred now.'

‘Everybody choose a different ball. Tony, how about making a note of them?'

‘Hot Dot, that's no good, I want a Dunlop.'

All of them are rich, but Duncan sees how eager they are to win.

‘Do we putt as well?'

‘No. It's the closest to the pin.'

‘There isn't a pin.'

‘Yes there is. See that piece of stick with a cloth tied on. You can just see it. I put it in as soon as it got dark.'

‘You planned this, you cunning bugger.'

They've got no hope. His father will win.

‘Do we draw for positions?'

‘Nah, let's do it alphabetically.' That will make Tom at the end.

Duncan climbs down and runs along the inside of the wall. At the front of the house he climbs again and drops into the paddock. The dry grass is up to his hips and makes a hissing noise as he slides into a grove of silver dollar gums. Dead leaves snap under his feet but they're arguing so loudly on the tee no one can hear. He climbs a barbed-wire fence and ducks along a row of young macrocarpas,
tree to tree. The house lights edge out from behind the gums. Women stand with their backs to the windows in the lounge. As he runs on rough inside the macrocarpas the men on the tee come into view. He keeps the trees as a barrier and gets to the willows on the river bank. The course stretches away, so white in the moonlight it seems coated with frost. Over the road and river the south-facing hills are dark. There's no light in Lex Clearwater's house (the reason: Lex has not paid his bill and his electricity is cut off. It doesn't bother him. Lex doesn't need electricity any more) and no lights in the clubhouse. The men up the hill are like hunchbacks and cripples. They seem to slide leftwards all the time, pushed by the moon. All except Tom. He stands up straight and bounces the light off his face.