Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The Read online

  Duncan Round had taken an unusual posture too. He had pulled up his hood and squatted so the skirt of his parka touched the pavement and was safe and dry inside a shell with hailstones shooting off in arcs as though a force in him repelled them. High over his back a green field on Stovepipe sank into a cloud-hole and was gone. Hail came in harder strokes, with a fierce downward thrust. Norma shivered – but smiled at the tame end of it all, the little coy curved domestic bounce on path and lawn. The storm drew itself in and moved away. Saxton increased in size; it came out, enamelled, in the sun. The bell for the end of school rang at that moment. Norma found it all appropriate. There was a balance in all this.

  The girls walked out hesitating, giving little cries at a world so fresh. They scooped up hail and tried it on their tongues. They looked at the receding storm, pointing as though at an aeroplane, and turned to see the huge bright sky on the other side. Norma watched them possessively.

  Duncan Round took a handful of hailstones from the angle of the car windscreen and seemed to weigh them in his palm. He too tried their coldness on his tongue. Belinda, his young sister, crossed the road with her school pack low on her back in the style that was fashionable, and turned his hand over, spilling the hail. She took out her handkerchief and wiped his fingers dry. Norma found it touching, even though Duncan did not need this sort of care. Belinda was the nicest of the Rounds by a long way, and no less clever than her sisters. One somehow expected kindness to reduce cleverness but in this case it was not so. Mind you, the girl did not waste kindness on her friends but treated them in the Round way. They shouted to her across the street but she took no notice. She gave Duncan a piece of chewing-gum.

  Now the ten-speed bikes came down, cutting neat parabolas among the turning cars. Norma put her window up and watched for near-misses. She admired the skill and energy of the girls and wished they showed it more in class. There was Hayley Birtles, with hissing tyres, making Stella Round step back – that took some doing – and throwing a word at her, ugly no doubt, as she went by. And there was the shoplifting gang, subdued now that they had been caught, riding in a bunch for solidarity. Would they break up and go straight home as they had been ordered or was it all a waste of time? Spray rose from their tyres and wet the legs of the footpath mums.

  This spinning-off of bits, this disintegrating of school at the end of the day, was sometimes painful to Norma but filled her with relief at other times. Today she felt elated and regretful – that the world outside was beautiful and her girls should live in it, and that all this imperfection, all this unmade, unmakeable, stuff should be loosed on it.

  Stella Round crossed the road and got into her car. She opened the rear door for Duncan, then said something sharp to him and handed him the key. He took his wet parka off and put it in the boot. He seemed too thinly clad standing there, in white T-shirt (with words on it?) and washed-out jeans and sneakers without socks. His face and arm and finger-backs were baby-naked. The burning had almost glazed him, Norma thought. She hoped it had been too shocking for pain. Pain must have come later, in hospital; and was there even now perhaps? She did not know much about the pathology of burns, but surely nerve endings were affected.

  Stella, discomposed – one almost never saw that – leaned out her door and called him in. The words on his T-shirt made Norma laugh. How marvellously inappropriate: Hump your ass off. (Tom Round’s little joke, no doubt. He had recently visited ‘the US of A’.) Duncan had probably pulled it on without reading it; or perhaps – was he capable of malice? – had meant to embarrass his sister. He did not hurry into the car but gave girls walking by a chance to read.

  Stella leaned back. She grabbed his ruined arm and hauled him in, and the Rounds drove away.

  The road was warming up and starting to steam. Teachers hurried out along with the girls: Sandra Duff, in her Indian cottons and silver bells, looking too fierce and concentrated for such filmy wear (what indiscretion had she committed? There was a new one every day); Helen Streeter in leather suit and leather hair, untouched, or seeming untouched, by her day relating over crayons and clay to a hundred girls; David Dobson, like a bearded tramp, with whisky flask shaped to the curve of his buttock (no secret from the girls, though he hunched in dark places to drink from it); and Lex Clearwater, in his red utility with the rust-eaten panels, looking like Heathcliff escaping to the moors. He had started as a heart-throb but now he was a joke.

  The teachers were no more finished than the girls. They were lumpy with their imperfections; a paradox Norma wrestled with. She did not leave her own imperfections out, and sometimes found herself wanting to teach only simple verifiable facts – that the two angles of the hypotenuse, so on, so on. There seemed to be not much else she could justify. Do this and this, not that, or else you’ll hurt someone, and you’ll be unhappy yourself. She looked at her half-happy and damaged staff, and was appalled by the certainties they uttered and felt she must not let them dump their rubbish on the girls; and yet she uttered certainties, dogma, herself. And was half-happy, damaged, too. Yet she must present a perfect shape.

  Two equal sides of Norma broke apart. Hard work, not argument, would make her whole.

  She telephoned Clive. Daphne, his wife, said he was out in the boysenberries. The storm had gone by on the other side of the inlet. Come and see us soon, Daphne said. Norma telephoned John Toft and let the phone ring for a minute or two. John never ran to answer it but walked in from the yard at his normal pace and shrugged and turned away if it stopped. Today he did not come, was almost certainly too far down the orchard to hear.

  She hung up and went back to her brief.

  2

  On Saturday morning Norma went to a softball match. She understood the rules of the game but found the rituals difficult to grasp. Some of the gestures were a form of praise – that slapping of palm on palm as the batter ran back after scoring, quite attractive. Much else about the game she could not like: the shouting and gum-chewing and the apishness in stance and the mock-American speech. These girls were broken from the mould that had fixed her and made it impossible that she should ever squat with thighs so wide and work her jaws and shrill those exhortations to hit, run, throw, slide, win – but were they as free as they liked to think? Were they not simply fixed in a new mould? She decided, though, that the new reality (like the old) shaped only externals. The things that had always mattered were the same. There was no change in the verities. So smile, applaud, she told herself, and look as though you’re pleased, and keep your old-fashioned judgements out of the way.

  The girl who had just scored was drinking greedily at the water fountain. Norma touched her shoulder. ‘That was a whopping hit, Hayley.’

  ‘Yeah, Mrs Sangster. I thought I bust the ball.’

  ‘We’re ahead now, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yeah. Three-one.’ She wiped her mouth.

  ‘Are we going to win?’

  ‘Easy. We made a coupla’ errors, that’s how they got their run. They can’t hit our pitching, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Who’s our pitcher?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Oh well, congratulations.’ She had to work for ease in these exchanges and felt the tiny failures in tone she was guilty of must be huge to the girls and a subject for contempt or mirth.

  ‘Bit of gum, Mrs Sangster?’ Hayley fished the packet from her sock and offered it with a stick poking out like a tongue. She watched Norma with an alertness that might be friendly or insolent. All that animal health in Hayley Birtles, that full sack of vigour, but was her measure of happiness large enough? And her measure of intelligence? Norma wanted access to her girls. She imagined a place like a subterranean lake, with a roof bending over in the dark and gleaming like bone. They had no proper access themselves, and her job …

  ‘Want one, eh?’

  ‘Not just now, thank you. It amazes me you girls don’t choke on it.’ She’d made that protest to the phys. ed. teacher when told players must chew because it was traditional in the game
. Everywhere else in the school chewing was banned – along with half a hundred other things. Those thin strips of leather for example, tied around ankle or wrist. Hayley was wearing half a dozen of them. Were they gang badge or decoration? Whichever it was, the ban had turned them into cause.

  ‘You’re not supposed to wear those, Hayley. I think you know.’

  ‘Trouble is you can’t untie the knots, Mrs Sangster. You gotta wait till they wear out.’

  The sincerity was bogus, insolent too, and Norma felt a tiredness in her mind, the sort of thing only a flash of anger would clear. It did not come. Synapses out of order, she supposed; though a simpler reason might be that she was uncertain. She did not want to lead Hayley Birtles here or there, but help her find a path for herself – and leave trivialities out of it.

  The school team innings came to an end with an easy catch and Hayley said, ‘Gotta go, eh, Mrs Sang,’ and turned her back and loped away, ending discussion; and that, Norma thought, put things in a proper perspective, and put her back where she belonged, tiny figure on the horizon, with expression too minute to be seen. She climbed the zigzag path above the playing area – diamond, was it called? – putting herself physically out of the way. Mrs Sang! She hadn’t heard that one before, but it was just tongue laziness, or perhaps the wad of gum got in the way. As for leather bracelets, time for that next week. She hoped they would be worn out by then.

  Hayley threw a trial pitch and the opposition batter stepped up. It was a game, really, with very little flow, just stop and start, and all tightly bound in rules and space – diamond, box, mound, home plate – but Norma found the geometry of it mildly interesting, and there was interest in the physics too. Bat striking ball must generate considerable dynamic force. She wondered if anyone had measured it. Not that bat was striking ball at the moment. Hayley Birtles saw to that. The tunnel from her hand to the strike zone must be a thing she could visualize, and the skill required to hurl the ball along it, underarm, without having it bend or climb outside, must come from long practice as much as natural ability. What a pity she could not turn that effort into mental pursuits and use that visualizing, kinetic skill to achieve something more valuable. Yet value for the girl so plainly lay here. What a marvellous combination she displayed of concentration and vitality. Zip went the ball, flat and true, with a little dip at the end that took it underneath the swinging bat, and smack, lovely sound, into the catcher’s mitt. ‘She’s all yours, Hayley. She’s got nothing.’ Insulting the opposition was part of the game, though it seemed out of place on school playing fields. Out of place only to Norma Sangster. The truth was ‘school’ and ‘playing fields’ had no meaning for the girls. They had been swallowed into the past and new things given value in their place. It seemed a loss; and yet, Norma repeated, the verities aren’t in danger, they have to be approached in other ways and looked at in a different light, that’s all.

  Hayley struck the batter out. The poor girl’s no beauty, Norma thought; then cancelled the judgement. Hayley didn’t conform to her snobbish notion of what was pleasing; but managed to please in other ways, with knotty calves, slab-muscled thighs, square torso, big strong hands. Her face had an American prettiness, that roundness and plumpness, that no-shape, one saw on their beauty queens. Norma liked jaw and cheekbone to declare themselves. She preferred roundness in to roundness out. ‘Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind …’ and that applied to the male as well as the female face. Hayley Birtles had the well-fed look that seemed so far removed from history. That’s not to say she doesn’t suffer, Norma said. It struck her too that the girl might have a natural place in events that she must hold on to consciously or surrender. She had a sudden dizziness, suffered a loss of reference points, that made her think she floated in some universe minutely displaced from the one she saw, or lived a beat outside present time, and would never come back to synchrony. Hayley Birtles seemed a giantess, whirling her arm, and the ball spun like a planet, and Norma felt her own tininess, almost non-being; until the bat, slow as a swinging boom, made dent in the arc of the ball and bent it, egg-shaped, out of course. Then she snapped back, heard it whirring like a quail, and began to move out of its line. A man standing down the slope from her made two steps and raised his arm and picked the ball out of the air in front of her face. With a flick of his wrist and forearm he sent it back to Hayley on the mound. It was so quickly done, the ball was in her glove before Norma realized she would not be hit.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to the man. ‘I think that would have got me fair and square.’

  ‘No sweat,’ he answered, and she saw from his face sliding away that he was made uneasy by her too-articulated speech. It made her angry. She sometimes saw her work as an attempt to unite the valuable things in the primitive and the civilized states, and it was hard, but the thing she was contracted for. It was too much to meet the same challenge outside work.

  ‘You’re Mr Birtles, aren’t you? Hayley is just about a one-girl team.’

  He climbed up to join her on the path, a man of about her height, slightly built, with an evasiveness about him that made her want to take him by the shoulders and face him front. It was impossible to see him as dynamic softball coach, yet that was how the sports page in the newspaper portrayed him, and he had whipped his team – Deepsea Fisheries, was it? – to the local women’s title three years in a row.

  ‘Oh, lovely one. That was another strike out, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Inside ball.’

  ‘She’s really very good.’

  ‘She’s got a lot to learn yet. Like all kids she wants to chuck ’em fast. I’ve got to teach her how to pitch slow.’

  Norma hunted for the term. ‘The bean ball?’

  ‘No, lady. That’s the one that clonks you on the head.’

  ‘Oh.’ She wondered if he knew who she was. She wasn’t used to parents calling her ‘lady’. But he had warmed up, there was a grin on his face; and he explained about pitching, making a cup of his hand and half-swings with his arm to show the work put on the ball. Again Norma found the physics intriguing.

  ‘There’s quite a lot of science in it.’

  ‘Sure thing. It’s not a game for meatheads, I’ll tell you that. See what Hayley’s doing now. She’s going to make this one curve away. This is a batter who swings late. The ball will be gone before she gets there.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Nice pitch, Hayley.’

  His accent was English Midlands, she could not be more exact than that. It had a solid, nicely smoothed-off vowel. His love of an un-English game was a little surprising, but perhaps he was one of those who put their Englishness off on arriving here. It was often class snobbery they rejected. She wondered about Mr Birtles. Anger and prickliness and comic hatred were not on show. He seemed rather private. His rattle of talk might conceal unhappiness.

  For a moment she could not remember the name of the boy who had died – burned in that accident with Duncan Round. Then she had it, Wayne. All the Birtles children were named after movie stars. She must not, of course, mention him, and should not, for her own sake, think of him, in his wrap of fire; but there was a question she should ask, even though it was difficult. She had a legitimate interest. When he had been quiet a moment, intent on the game, she asked in a voice both bright and neutral, ‘How is Shelley getting on, Mr Birtles?’

  ‘Shelley?’

  ‘I was sorry to hear about her spot of bother.’

  ‘Shelley’s …’ He shrugged, which seemed to mean he could not say.

  ‘I hope she won’t let it set her back. A lot of young people get into trouble and come out the other side unscathed. I suppose it’s really a matter of treating it as a learning experience.’ She saw Mr Birtles blink at that, and she did not like it herself.

  ‘She needed a bloody good hiding, Shelley did,’ Birtles said.

  ‘Oh surely not. A fine is a kind of hiding anyway. We were all so proud of Shelley, her running I mean. I do hope she’s going to
keep it up.’

  Mr Birtles said nothing. Did that mean the answer was no? An image of Shelley Birtles appeared in Norma’s mind: pony-tailed fifteen-year-old breaking the tape, with arms flung wide and breasts flattened under her blue school singlet and brown knee fore-flung, shining like an egg; and she grieved that it was in the past and would never come back – the physical moment done, achievement done with, beauty gone, and the girl immersed in ugliness.

  ‘Is she still in Saxton?’

  ‘Gotta be. The judge says she’s gotta report.’

  ‘Well, if there’s any way the school can help …’ Which was a stupid thing to say. Once they were gone they never came back. The good thing was the girl’s name was on the honours board as record holder and Norma hoped it would help her, even though it was a slender and receding thing.

  The next question, one she could not ask, was whether Hayley would go the same way and wind up in court. It seemed possible, even likely, for the older sister had surely been less tough and sly than Hayley. Less intelligent too; although Hayley’s was intelligence not put to use, unless in a pricking at weak spots and a managing of events. She had little doubt the girl was sexually active – one could tell – but that did not bother her as long as it did not lead to promiscuity. She had been fairly busy herself at sixteen, with a certain boy, though virgin until nineteen in body if not in mind; and sixteen then was roughly fourteen now. A time came for some girls when sex couldn’t be put off unless by some dark prohibition or false ideal that set them on an equally dangerous course. She was ready to argue that prohibitive morality and free sex led to defeat or viciousness about equally. Defeat and viciousness she feared; and Hayley was a candidate for both. Sport, however, saved a good many girls.

  She hoped Hayley would keep on with it, and Shelley come back.

  3

  Duncan Round scraped lichen from the headstone to see how long the woman had been dead.