Between My Father and the King (23 page)

‘This is Charley, my brother,' he said. ‘I had him pawned on to me for the day. He's dumb and won't tell. Play with your pocket-knife, Charley,' Bluey said, almost sounding like their father. ‘Here, take this bit of wood and make something while we amuse ourselves. Unless you want to swim.'

‘I haven't got anything to swim in,' Charles said, blushing again, and looking at the tall girl, Liz, with the bony legs.

Bluey slithered up the small cliff to the bike and came back with a pair of shiny satin shorts, out of the leather strapped bag at the side of the bike. There was a fish embroidered in one corner, its head bent to its tail as if it had the stomach ache.

‘Here,' Bluey said, ‘have mine.'

‘But aren't you going in too?'

‘I'll wear my Jockeys,' Bluey said. ‘Eh?'

Everyone laughed then, and the plump girl called Pearl lay down on the sand and closed her eyes.

‘We won't look,' she said.

So Charles went up behind the tree and put on Bluey's bathing shorts. And they fitted. They had
S-T-R-E-T-C-H
written inside the waistband, which meant they were like the socks Bluey wore, that were baby socks to look at but anyone, even a boxer or a woodchopper, could wear them; and so it was with the bathing suit, for everyone in the world now was treated as the same size. Charles ran out from behind the tree and went straight for the water; but it was no use, he knew he wasn't supposed to be there, and their looks kept saying Clear Off. So he began to play unhappily by himself on the sand. He was too old for sandcastles, and too young for what Bluey and one of the girls were doing, swimming together, meeting under the water, and laughing. Bluey pulled the girl's bathing cap off.

‘Oh my hair,' she cried, and looked really afraid; but it was not any danger, no octopus; it was just her hair had been set for the dance that night. She crept her cap back around her head, and swam off, deeper, and Bluey followed. Once they both disappeared together. Then she came slowly to the top, like someone floating out of a dream. She spluttered.

‘Why didn't you come before?' she said. ‘I've been waiting half the morning, playing gooseberry.'

Then she ducked down again. The other man and the girl had disappeared along the sandhills.

And Charles, not swimming, had gone up near the bank and was sitting miserably and uselessly on the sand, playing with his pocket-knife, carving things, nothing in particular. An ant ventured out of the grass. Charles cut it in two, just by its waist; he felt no remorse. It did not join again, as lizards do, but died. It had a log of wood — an ant's log of wood — in its mouth too; probably for the fire, and the cooking. Charles covered it with a few grains of sand but the creeping wind blew them away. Charles didn't care. He felt like crying. He knew it was a terrible thing for boys to cry. Or else perhaps he would kill something. And he knew that it really wasn't because of the beach and Bluey and Nick and Liz and Pearl, and being alone there, but because his mother had sold his father to get the Big Money; and with things as they were, and the rising cost of living, they'd never be able to buy him back again. So there'd be no profit, and no share, and no father; none of the three.

So they spent the day swimming and going off into the sandhills. Once they buried each other, but the girls wouldn't be buried because of their hair and the sand in it. Pearl and Liz buried Bluey and Nick, scooping up the sand and patting it over them. Charles couldn't help laughing then, for it was a bit of a joke to see Bluey's face like a dead head looking out of the sand, and Bluey trying to sing,

Roll me over easy

Roll me over slow

Roll me over on my right side

For my left side hurts me so.

Then the others, spluttering and laughing, joined in the chorus about two men, one's name Frankie, the other's name Johnnie, except as it happened they were men's names, and one of them was a woman, waiting at the door of the milkbar to shoot. And it was all so funny that Charles couldn't help laughing and laughing, and when they asked him what the joke was he had forgotten to be scared and lonely, and said in his old strong voice that he hadn't really used since he walked through the empty house,

‘I'm tickled pink,' he said.

They laughed out loud, and the girl, Liz, smiled at him, and he knew he was in the gang. He ran quickly down to the water, and dog-paddled up and down, then ran out and lay down, quite still, in the sun to dry. Then he knew he was hungry.

‘I don't know about you people,' he said, in his giant voice, ‘but I'm starving.'

They discovered they were all starving. They put their coats on and went along the beach to the ordinary everyday beach to a place with a large red and white notice outside: Ice Cream Fish and Chips Hamburgers to Take Away.

They bought fish and chips, and waited, staring at the silly everyday people sitting at the small tables eating fish and chips. The man frying them was called Antonio, and the place was supposed to be a foreign place; but all of them knew that Antonio's name was Dick Higgelby, and his brother was a taxi driver, and his other brother had been run in for keeping a common gaming house; and his father had the Commercial Hotel, which wasn't the one where Bluey worked. Oh no. The Commercial Hotel was up at the top of the Main Street, in the cheap part, where the pawn shops were, and the secondhand clothes with only the wind wearing them swinging outside. The Commercial Hotel had water running down the side of the walls, and little dogs gathered round it. But the hotel where Bluey worked was the best one, by far the best, with umpteen floors and lifts and a blonde girl sitting inside
the door working the telephones and saying good morning, she was paid for it, to visitors — actors, musicians, parliament people, smart people from overseas. At work, Bluey had told them, he wore tight black pants, a black coat and tie, and a white shirt. He was Lounge Steward, and that was the aristocracy — that was the word he used — of the hotel staff: carrying drinks, with his hand bent back and the silver tray resting just so upon the palm. He knew everything, Bluey did, oh he knew everything. And in the weekends he slept at the hotel, in one of the best rooms with a shower and a plastic curtain, and hot and cold . . .

And to have bought himself a motorbike on the sly! Charles, standing waiting for the fish and chips, couldn't help feeling proud and happy about Bluey and all the tricks he was up to; he had been hearing the one about the milk bottles, and nicking the money out of them, and out of the machines that sold chewing gum — getting it out the back way. And the peanut butter! That was the funniest Charles had heard for a long time. Bluey had taken it from the bag on the motorbike and shown them — ‘I get a jar a week,' he said, ‘just for the practice; always at the same shop. I also specialise in salmon and shrimp and tinned sardines in or out of tomato sauce.'

Bluey was witty.

The sun was so hot, almost fizzling the fish and chips inside them as well as in the newspaper. They had separate parcels, it was better that way, so that when Bluey and Nick and Pearl were finished, and Charles wasn't, Charles turned to them, holding out the little heap, mostly shrivelled, that was left, and said grandly, but inside almost choking with delight,

‘Here, help yourself.'

There never was any day like that one. Fancy that about the peanut butter, and the chewing gum, and the other one about the toy pistol, when the man had been really frightened.

‘Up with your hands,' Bluey had said.

And the man put up his arms, just bent at the elbows the way they did it in the pictures, with his hands spread out.

‘Don't shoot,' he said, whimpering. ‘I'll hand over the diamonds.'

After fish and chips they went back to the beach. The girls seemed to be getting sick of it all, so they went off again, Nick and Pearl and Bluey and Liz, along the sandhills, with Charles sitting by himself. But he didn't mind. He was in with them now, one of the gang; one of them, he thought it was Pearl, had said he would be their mascot. Their mascot! Yes, he was in with them now, like living in the same house; and their going away together like that was just like going into another room to get some peace, in private.

So Charles knelt down on the sand, and with his pocket-knife and his hands and a bit of driftwood he began to make what he hadn't made for so long, because he thought he was too old for it. He didn't care now. He made a sandcastle, the best and biggest he had ever made, with windows around the outside, and diamonds falling out of them, and a little man standing on top of the castle, with more diamonds around him; standing, looking down on the world, and choosing.

When it all came to an end, Nick and Pearl went a different way home on Nick's bike, but Liz didn't go anywhere, for she lived by the beach. She looked strange standing there and waving kisses to them, to Charles as well; strange as if they had forgotten her and she would be left behind to spend the night with the katipo spiders and the squashed onions. She screwed up her face at them, or at the sun in her eyes, then gave them one more wave, and was gone, her long brown legs scuttling like spiders into the sandhills.

But it was all right; she was not lost or forgotten; she would be at the dance that night, with her hair set, and lipstick and powder on and that white cream spread under her arms to take away the smell; just like their mother used to be, thought Charles.

Their mother?

But before Charles could think anything about their mother or their father or going home, Bluey, with the bike hopping about under him, turned to Charles, shouting in a dark voice, roaring like God in the wind,

‘Remember,' he said, ‘I'll blow your brains out!'

He was wild, because the sun had burned his face, and it would hurt to shave, and he'd have to be smart about getting off work.

So it wasn't any different, then, nothing was different; and Charles knew he ought to have hopped it in the first place, and not made a sandcastle.

And perhaps their father was sold forever.

On the way back Bluey stopped at the same garage, and left his bike there. The man, he said, was a friend of his. He was a dark man, small, who hadn't shaved, and he kept his head up in the air, and he looked as if he hadn't slept for a long time, as if he spent all night walking round and round a monument. He came over to Bluey and put something in Bluey's pocket; Bluey put his own hand in his pocket, and their hands touched, and Bluey smiled, in a surprised way, and nodded.

‘Okay,' they said together, clinching things.

Then Bluey turned to Charles. ‘Well,' he said, ‘I'll be off; I'm late as it is. See you Monday or sometime. And remember what I said,' he added, warningly.

He was jiggling up and down then, walking with Charles to the tram stop. They passed the Men's. Bluey gave Charles his tram fare, and said, ‘Okay,' which was his way of saying goodbye; then he slipped into the Men's, and Charles, wondering if he wanted to go too, and not sure about it till the time would come, slipped in after him. But Bluey wasn't doing anything in line with the two old men standing there, he was up against the wall, looking at something in his hand. It was what the garage man had put in
his pocket. He turned and saw Charles, and put whatever it was he had back into his pocket. He smiled, at least his face moved the way of a smile, but he wasn't pleased.

‘Fancy meeting you here,' he said, and unbuttoning his fly he stood beside the two old men who were just finishing, and leaned back.

When Charles got home he found his mother sitting crying on the sofa. He didn't know at first that she was crying, because there were no tears coming out; then he saw they were the tears that came out your nose first. She was blowing her nose with a wet blue hanky, one of their father's best from the top righthand drawer in the only dressing-table they had left now.

Charles didn't know what to do. He was remembering what had happened to their father, and seeing his mother cry he wanted to cry too, it was the sort of crying that spreads, like something spilled. But then, what about Dad? he thought.

‘What about Dad?' he said, in a small boy's angry voice.

His mother blew her nose again.

‘I'm sure I don't know,' she said. ‘He's gone and got a job as a married couple on a farm.'

Tell that to the Marines, Charles thought.

‘Or else a rouseabout with dogs,' his mother went on. ‘I don't know. Why can't everything be as it was? Why does it have to be different? What was the matter with Clinton, it was nice enough there, and I was on the Wives' Union, and your father selling those pretty little novelties that everybody was wild about, and everybody wanted them to put on their mantelpiece. And just because we come up north, look what we get. A delinquent son.'

She looked over at Charles and spoke to him as she would to a grown-up.

‘Yes Charles,' she said. ‘Your brother Bluey's taken the wrong turning. I found out today, only today. I don't know how we're
going to keep it out of the courts, and out of the papers' — she broke into a fresh cry — ‘and it'll be in the Clinton papers, the
Sun
and the
Star
. Now Charles, I want you to promise to never do the things Bluey has been doing.'