Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (4 page)

‘What are you thinking about?' his mother asks.

‘Nothing.'

‘You can't think about nothing.'

‘OK. Birds.'

She buys him books on birds. He reads them with no interest. At the library, on those afternoons when Stella drops him off on her way back to school, he reads whatever is lying on the table. Sometimes he wanders off and walks in the town. He plays the machines in the game parlours now and then, but would just as soon walk by the river watching water running on the stones.

Duncan makes some people jumpy. Others try to talk to him and he answers yes or no. There are those who think he should be in an institution, and kept out of children's sight with his burns. Others say he's bound to do something violent one day because the pain has probably warped his mind. He's not interested in what people think of him. He watches when they move in useful ways and will follow a postman up a street or stand by a hole in the footpath watching P and T men solder wires. He's getting to be a well-known figure in the town.

There has been plastic surgery and more is planned when the time is right. He does not mind but Josie is against it. She can't believe anything can improve him. ‘Cutting and pasting' is her name for it and ‘tinkering' describes the psychological treatment Duncan has. Tinkering is a defensive term. She simply wants to forget what the psychologist has said: one day Duncan will have to scream. ‘Then perhaps we can move ahead.'

Duncan feigns indifference with this man. He plays at being three-quarters dead. He pretends that feeling and consciousness are burned out, while knowing that the truth is different: feeling is gone, most of it, but consciousness is the huge bright land up
ahead. He sees it stretching off into the haze.

Duncan has enough to keep him busy.

The accident happened on a summer afternoon when Duncan had just turned fourteen. He and his friend Wayne Birtles had ridden to the beach on their ten-speeds and eaten fried chicken for lunch and spent the rest of their money on the hydroslide. They were making the most of their holidays. On Monday it was form four – teachers who speak with forked tongue, seniors who were up themselves, Wayne said. He was a sharp-tongued boy, given to mimicry and extravagant statement and Duncan found the tension between what Wayne liked and what he liked of great interest. It was the first time he'd understood that other people's ideas and behaviour might affect his own by sympathetic leverage. (Compulsive leverage was the sort he was used to.) He was grateful for Wayne's company although he knew he had it by default as Wayne's better friends were away on holiday.

They rode back from the beach and stopped at the Birtles's house. No one was home so they shared a can of beer from the washhouse then rode to the Round house for a swim in the pool. They went by the river road and down by the footbridge saw the gang of street kids who had come to Saxton at Christmas and been in the newspaper ever since sniffing glue from plastic bags.

‘Killing off their brain cells,' Duncan said. He imagined huge panels like the control board in a generator house and red lights winking out one by one.

‘Who told you that?' Being on the bag gave you a buzz, Wayne said. You didn't give a stuff about anything.

‘Have you done it?'

Wayne had: sniffed paint and petrol and glue and fingernail polish. Lots of things could turn you on he said.

The Round house was two kilometres up the river, on a hillside overlooking the golf course, with the city council's pine plantation coming down the slope and the state forest going into the distance, hill after hill. (It's a Tom Round house and a show place – one of those that's won a prize and been in magazines. It looks like a series of white pill-boxes dropping down the hillside, or, if you half close your eyes, a waterfall in the pines. It has pantiles on its slopes of roof and solar heating panels, and inside are
slate-covered concrete floors to store the heat. They warm up in the sun and radiate in the night and even in midwinter the house is toasty warm, Josie tells the interviewer.)

Duncan and Wayne rode up and left their bikes leaning on the brick garden wall. ‘It's like the town shithouse,' Wayne complained.

They climbed the wall and dropped into a rock garden and stepped down among prickly plants. The swimming pool was shaped like an egg and its blue tiles made it look icy cold. Striped canvas chairs stood on the lawn with cane tables beside them and folded sun umbrellas on the grass. The house was through a glass room filled with plants. Wayne could not work out if it was meant to be inside or out.

‘Hey Mandy, put your togs on,' Duncan said.

Wayne saw a naked girl lying on a towel by a flower-bed. She was tanned an even brown down her front and she shone with oil. The hair between her legs was sticking up as though she'd dried it hard with a towel and her flattened breasts fell one each way. She had a straw hat over her face and did not bother to lift it as she said, ‘Get lost, Dunc.'

‘Wayne and me want to have a swim.'

‘Wayne and I, for Christ's sake,' the girl said. She lifted her hat and looked at Wayne and rolled on to her stomach, flicking an edge of her towel over her buttocks. ‘Don't let him piss in the pool.'

Wayne heard himself grunt. He felt sick. The world seemed to tilt on an angle and bits of it lose their joining place with other bits. Then it all came back with a clang. He wanted to run at the girl and come down with his knees on her spine.

‘Fuckin' bitch.'

‘Come on.' Duncan plucked at him. He led him to the garage. ‘You don't want to let Mandy upset you.'

‘I should piss in the bloody pool.' He was sweating from his ride and wanted a swim, but he had to get even first. He had another trouble too: with her naked there he'd get horny and she'd see. His togs were the sort that wouldn't hide it. (Wayne had that problem at the beach now and then but there he could go in the water till it stopped.)

‘Come on. Get changed.'

‘In a minute.' He looked around the garage. It was big enough to hold the Birtles's house, with golf clubs and skis and canoes on the walls and only one car home, a Honda City.

‘Whose car is that?'

‘Anyone's, I guess. Mandy's using it tonight.'

Wayne Birtles smiled. He found a nail on the work-bench and pressed it in the valve on the Honda's rear wheel, letting it down. Duncan did not interfere. Mandy had asked for it. He liked it even better when Wayne let down the spare tyre too. He could see Mandy changing the tyre – she'd do it herself, didn't believe in asking men for help – and lowering the jack and finding the spare flat as well. He admired Wayne for thinking of that, there was something really evil about it. Then Wayne did a thing he did not like. He saw the keys in the car's ignition and took them out and opened the petrol cap. ‘Drain her tank.'

Duncan wanted to change sides. He didn't think Mandy deserved to be stuck on the road; and Wayne was treating him too with contempt. ‘Lay off,' he said.

‘Chicken. Where's a siphon?'

Wayne found some plastic tube coiled on the wall and siphoned petrol into a can. When it was full he looked for another, then changed his plan. ‘Grab a couple of tins, I'll show you how to sniff.'

Duncan did as he was told. The silent rush of the coloured fluid in the plastic and Wayne's casual folding of the tube to block the flow had set up a pressure and motion in his head and he wanted more. He fetched two Jellimeat tins his mother kept for potting native trees and Wayne let petrol flow into them, stopping it an inch from the top. He pulled the siphon out and closed the cap.

‘Bring them over here out of the sun.'

They squatted in a corner and started to sniff. The fumes attacked Duncan in his head, lightening and squeezing at once. He felt himself float and roll and sink, all in one motion, and waited for the quick soaring flight that somehow was promised beyond this. Wayne stood up. He walked away without seeming to turn. Duncan heard the car door open at the end of a tunnel. His mind was stretched out and folded back. He felt he could reach Wayne with his arm and bend it round him like a garden hose. Wayne slid up beside him and shrank to half his height. He
had Josie's cigarettes and lighter and he flicked a cigarette half out and pulled it with his mouth. The ‘J' in Josie picked Duncan up and turned him in a slow loop and slid him down its tail. Wayne's thumb rose and bent and Duncan felt the working of its joint and the oily roll of bone on bone. ‘Better not,' he said. The words came out long and thick and changed into a python, which turned and looked at him with small bright eyes.

‘Eeeee,' Duncan said.

The snake swallowed Wayne, then made an easy loop and swallowed him …

Mandy heard the clap and felt air lift the brim of her hat. She was on her knees when he came out. Fire stood on top of his head and made a yellow rippling down his side. He walked cork-screwing on the lawn, escaping it. She does not remember how she crossed the space from her to him but feels sometimes the softness of his arm and the hardness of the bones inside as she runs him at the pool. He stumbles like a child dragged by its mother and swings in a quarter circle as she heaves him in. Then Mandy jumps in the pool herself and holds him afloat and knows enough to keep him there cooling his burns and enough to keep his air passages open. Saves his life. Loves him, then and after; but will not look at it, and gives no sign.

Wayne Birtles burns on the garage floor, lying on his elbow, with one leg under him and one out straight. ‘You mustn't imagine pain,' they tell his parents. ‘He really wouldn't be conscious any more, after the first shock.' They believe it, and Josie Round too rules out pain. She can't believe in pain without some quickness and it comforts her to think of him in semi-conscious wonder at his death.

Josie was in her studio half a level higher than the garage next door. She was sitting on a rug by the window, seeming to stare along the edge of the forest, but had her eyes closed and was meditating. (Mail-order meditation, some of her friends say. She does not dispute it – instructions and her mantra came by mail – but it does her good and she sees no need for ‘the real thing' they try to get her started on. It's dangerously close to a religion she feels.) She was just getting on to her plateau when she heard the
Whoomp
from the garage, heard the door rattle, and felt a pressure
on her ear-drums. She climbed to her knees and heard Mandy yelling at the pool; knew from the sound she made that their lives were changed. She ran to the door and into the garage and saw the boy lying on his blanket of fire.

She thought it was Duncan and called his name, then saw a face looking calmly out. No expression. Saw a face completely in repose. She ran down the stairs and halfway to him, then back to her studio where a pile of new rugs ticketed for the shop lay by the door. She ran back with armfuls several times and threw them over Wayne until she could see him no more, then brought a hose and ran water on the smoking pile as hard as she could and all around at the burning petrol on the floor until it went out. She left the hose running and tried to shift rugs and find his face but uncovered parts wrongly coloured, wrongly made.

Tom drove up and ran first to the pool, then to the garage. He pulled the rugs off Wayne and looked at him and saw there was nothing he could do, but took the hose and played water on his head and chest. Josie went into the house and dialled 111 and got ambulance and fire engine and police. But Wayne was burned all over and could not live.

It was a thing of circumstances, of this which followed that, inside and outside the head, but do the connections have the force of law? If, one is impelled to say. If the day had been cooler and the boys not wanted another swim. If Wayne had not seen street kids sniffing glue. Would that have been enough to alter things? If Mandy had not been so irritated by Duncan's grammar that she said something cruel to his friend. If she had been wearing her togs. And Josie not forgotten her cigarettes. So on, so on. They reached a certain point. Then came a quantum leap. All other possibilities collapsed. Wayne is dead, and Duncan scarred, it can't be changed.

The Rounds learned a new language, of full-thickness burns and hypovolemic shock and the rule of nines. Josie found the phrase ‘gross physical insult' very helpful and claimed there was psychological insult as well, for all of them. Nobody blamed ‘the other side', not openly. The Round and the Birtles parents met and both pairs edged away as soon as they could. Neither wanted any connection. ‘There's no call for anything ongoing,' Josie said.

The police worked out how it had happened. Tom Round was upset about the scorching on the garage floor. Duncan had nothing to say. Months later, when he was able to talk, he told Belinda he had seen it happen before it happened. He had seen Wayne lift the lighter to his cigarette but did not have time to stop him even though it happened rather slowly.

‘You should have teleported yourself away,' Belinda said.

Although the plastic surgery allowed him only one side of his mouth, Duncan smiled.

Norma paused by the tennis courts, where Stella and Belinda were playing a match. The difference in their styles made her smile. Belinda joggled in her puppy fat. She grunted as she hit, snapped her teeth, argued that the ball was in or out, and called her winning score with a grin. She flicked her hair away and blew it noisily from in front of her mouth. She scratched her ribs and hooked her finger in the crotch of her shorts to loosen them. Stella moved with an easy flow, like glycerine, and hit the ball with a ‘pokking' sound, but seemed to let style get in her way and was often late or soft in her returns. She lobbed a good deal and never came to the net, where Belinda loved to crouch and jump for the ball sailing over her head. Belinda had pulled her sweat band off and thrown it by the net. Stella's hair was tied with a green silk scarf and she patted her damp upper lip with a handkerchief.

It's more than just their ages, Norma thought, they seem to come out of separate times. Yet, strangely, Belinda was the old-fashioned one. Self-esteem was not in short supply with the Rounds, but hers seemed natural, while Stella's was an artefact and always on display. Norma knew that she was in a poor trade in Stella's eyes. The law, where Stella went, was for ‘top minds' and being a schoolteacher a job for second-raters. Tom had fixed the hierarchy – architecture, law, medicine, mathematics and physics, scientific research – and Stella put the argument in an essay much read and commented on in the staffroom. Norma had not been able to laugh. The steely hardness of that crafted thing, Stella Round, made her want to cover her vulnerable parts.

Well, Norma smiled, at least she can't play tennis very well. She laughed at Belinda's glee in whacking Stella's half-lob away. Belinda would win her share of contests with her sister, and win in pleasing people as well – although she did not seem to care about it; gave her headmistress no second glance.

Norma went on, thinking of the Rounds: of Josie, her untrustworthy friend; and Tom who made it plain he would be
her lover. But Tom would simply have her – have, exactly – then betray. She had seen it in his self-regarding eye as he smooth-talked her. In his heavy redness and the hungry swelling of his throat. Being wanted in that way was most unpleasant. Unpleasant, too, the mind in his desire. But Norma had sufficient of her own self-esteem to know it wasn't just his daughters' teacher he was after. He said she had a Mona Lisa smile. ‘You'll never know what's amusing me,' she had replied. She had a taste for light remarks carrying heavy loads.

As for Josie – well, she was not a Round; she was Josie Duncan. She had the Round quickness and cleverness though. She saw connections in their hard sharp way. Where she fell short was in self-love. Josie must try for improvement and that caused her untrustworthiness. Other people took on a simplified shape; were silhouettes magnetized on a board, with Josie in the centre, full-faced coloured Josie smiling there. Friends dropped off at intervals. She could never work out why. But Norma stayed on, for it was like a stammer Josie had and not dandruff or dirty nails. She liked her less only on occasions. Josie had good feeling at least. Norma doubted Tom had that at all. She saw at times another face under his smiling face – a muzzle structure somehow lupine.

‘I can cope with his women,' Josie said. ‘What I can't tolerate is the way he treats me as part of himself. God, the self-referral. Whatever I do is to the greater glory of Tom Round.'

‘What you need is a marriage sabbatical. Six months away.'

‘What I need is Tom crawling. Then I'll go.'

Rounds can dominate your life, Norma thought. You can't afford to let them get a grip. Even the girls made one look back and study them – an awful fascination. They were crocodiles and birds of paradise. They were like dentists, they drilled at you.

She watched Stella and Belinda win a point each, then went on and turned among the graves, letting the Rounds go with the fading ‘pok pok' of their game. The cheering of girls came from the softball ground and she heard the name Hayley cried like an incantation. Then a squealing, a ululation, rose like a wave and fell away. It meant, from its duration, home run; and Norma was pleased. Hayley needed all the triumphs she could get. ‘Round' might colour, enfeather one, but ‘Birtles', it had come to seem, marked with a shadow …

A movement in the graves startled her. A head looked over the top of a broken column and withdrew, leaving a ghostly image that seemed improper. Some furtive thing was there; some bit of villainy was going on among the graves. Norma thought of girls – her girls – and walked across to investigate. The smart teacher looked the other way out of school but she had never been able to do that. Parents might bristle and pupils and their boyfriends laugh at her, it did not matter. Once, along the river, she had taken a razor-blade from a girl who was trying to work up nerve to cut her wrists. (That girl was doing well at university now – not that that was the end of it, there was no end, Norma said.)

By the time she reached the grave she had recognized the shape and knew it was the Round boy she would find. He had his back to her and was hunkered in the way of Indian beggars, watching black ants on a chicken bone. His sisters must have brought him for the ride and he had wandered off among the graves – as good a place to be as watching tennis, although it seemed to show a lack of care on their part. She watched him for a moment, knowing he must hear her panting from her climb.

‘Do you like ants, Duncan?'

He lowered his head and made an angry sound. ‘You made me lose count.'

‘You were counting ants?'

Still without looking at her – ‘I count all sorts of things.'

His healthy skin joined neatly with his burned skin and his hair was boyish on his undamaged side. Norma wanted to touch him. She moved across to a grave and rested her hip on the iron railing.

‘Did you come into town with your sisters?'

He made a forward jerk of his head.

‘It's nice and quiet up here. Do you like old graves?'

‘They're all right.'

‘Why do you count ants?'

‘To see how many I can get.'

‘And how many is that? Do you have a record?'

‘Two hundred and eighty-three. They move too fast.'

‘Two hundred and eighty-three is very good.'

He shot her a look of contempt. ‘Tom,' he said, ‘I think it's time for a few plain words. Josie is my friend but apart from that, attraction isn't there and it's a prerequisite wouldn't you say? I
won't come into your house again unless you keep your hands to yourself. Norma.'

He turned his head as he spoke her name and looked at her with eyes aslant. There was no malice in him. He was simply showing her what he could do; and she kept the smile that, in spite of shock, his mispronunciation of ‘prerequisite' had caused. She should have used the plain words she had promised.

‘Where did you find it?'

‘In his car.'

‘Well, I hope you burned it.' She went cold at the word.

Duncan grinned. His mouth moved freely on its undamaged side. ‘I just left it there.'

‘There's nothing between me and your father.'

‘Wouldn't worry me if there was.'

She felt the chill of life among the Rounds. The boy was double victim, and yet gave the impression of being untouched.

‘Do you remember everything you read?'

‘If I want to.'

‘I wrote that letter back in April. May?'

‘26 April you put on it.'

He was ready to go back to his ants but she would not let him. She was at the edge of some extraordinary place and refused to have her entry closed. His scarring had stopped affecting her, even that pulling-tight of skin that misaligned one eye and the building up of his nose that brutalized him.

‘Tell me something else you've read.'

‘Like what?'

‘Well, if you remember things … is that what you do?'

‘I can remember.'

‘Something nice. Something interesting.' But ‘nice' and ‘interesting' made no part of it; she saw a closing up in his look. ‘Hard then,' she said quickly, ‘hard to remember.'

‘Nothing's hard.'

‘All right, you choose. I promise I won't tell.'

He picked up the chicken bone and forced its smaller knuckle into the ground six inches away. The ants milled and scurried; then found it and swarmed to the top.

‘There's no stopping ants,' Norma said.

No reply.

‘If you like you can come around and read books at my place. Or play my records. Do you like music?'

‘Not much.'

‘Can you remember it the way you do letters?'

He gave a tiny smile at her joke and she felt her heart lift at the sign.

‘It's all just the same after the first time,' he said.

‘You don't need to hear it again?' She wanted to ask about beauty, and how it made him feel, but was afraid.

‘Tell me a page out of a book then, Duncan. Please.' She thought he was not going to respond. Then, still squatting, with his eyes closed, he began: ‘The retina is a thin sheet of interconnected nerve cells, including the light-sensitive rod and cone cells which convert light into electrical impulses – the language of the nervous system. It was not always obvious that the retina is the first stage of visual sensation. The Greeks thought …' He carried on for several minutes, without inflection or hesitation. The memory feat was remarkable, but Norma found herself grieving for what was lost. ‘That's very good. Do you know what it means?'

He looked at her as though he was insulted. ‘Doesn't matter what it means.'

‘Do you like it? Are you interested in the eye?'

‘What for?'

‘Why did you read about it then?'

‘There was lots of words. It was lying there.'

‘And you remember the whole book, cover to cover?'

He nodded with that butting of his head. ‘That's easy.'

‘How long ago?'

‘Last year. When I came out of hospital.'

‘Do you look up words you don't know in the dictionary?'

‘No.'

‘And looking at ants is more or less the same? What do they do? Inside your head?'

She'd frightened him and he would not answer.

‘Duncan, are there things you read and like? Things that you like more than other things?'

‘Yes.' She barely heard him.

‘Read me one. Say it from the book. I won't tell. Is that what frightens you, someone finding out what you can do?'

He nodded.

‘Look at me, Duncan. You can trust me.'

He liked the look of her well enough. She was old but her skin hadn't wrinkled yet, and that was why his father wanted her. ‘Here comes La bloody Gioconda' – which was a famous painting, Belinda said. Sneering showed Tom Round couldn't have what he wanted. Good old Mrs Sangster, Duncan thought now and then.

Her eyes were putting on a look he was supposed to trust, kind of soft and twinkly. He did not trust her eyes. They must get lots of practice looking like that with girls at school and she could probably change them when she wanted. He knew she could be tough because of what she'd written to his father. But he liked her mouth and was not sure its softness was a lie. It was like a girl's mouth, pink and clean and not with bits of flaky skin and greasy bits of lipstick. It smiled in a way he did not think could be put on. A rush of feeling started in his chest, almost making him cry. (He could not cry with one eye because the tear ducts were taken out.)

He turned his head away from her.

‘Came a bird from Lapland flying,

From the north-east came an eagle,

Not the largest of the eagles,

Nor was he among the smallest,

With one wing he swept the water,

To the sky was swung the other;

On the sea his tail he rested,

On the cliffs his beak he rattled.'

He enjoyed the brightness about those words, the little space around them, like a coloured coat.

‘Where did you find that?' Mrs Sangster said.

‘In a book.'

‘And it's something you like? Do you like birds?'

‘I like watching them.'

‘And not just to store them in your head?'

It puzzled him that she was so pleased. People got angry or embarrassed around him, and tears came into some women's eyes, which was OK, it really had nothing to do with him. Mrs Sangster, though, was pleased because of what he had done. He did not
know why she should feel like that but supposed it was because of poetry. She asked him if liking things made them easy to learn. He hadn't thought about it, but told her there wasn't any difference he could see, the difference was they kept on coming back and had a kind of coloured space around them; and they hurt.

‘Hurt?'

‘Not too bad.' He was alarmed. He pinched a bit of skin on his wrist. ‘About like that. It makes all the colours come out.' She moved her head, very quick, and seemed to be sniffing, and he remembered dogs around a rat-hole and knew she was excited and wanted to get something out of him. But still her mouth smiled and he trusted her.

‘Walk with me a little way,' she said.

‘Where to?'

‘My house. It's just through the cemetery. Would you like a drink? Or a biscuit?'

He went at her side through the graves. The older ones were deep in the trees, with names on the headstones he could not read. He wanted to scrape them to find out but she kept on putting her hand on his back and giving him a little push along. He liked her long round fingers on the numb place where his scars began. He had, in his mind, a map of his back, made from feeling it not from seeing, and could draw it on paper if someone asked. He was pleased he had dead places on his skin, and an armpit that did not sweat, and an eye that could not cry. The parts of him that itched were getting smaller. Sometimes he squeezed them in his head and made them shrink. He turned them cold and stopped them altogether, but could not keep it up for long and was bad-tempered when he stopped.