Dark Places (3 page)

We gathered around Morrison in the glum corner behind the bike-shed, where a sharp smell of burning rubbish always filled the air from the incinerator smouldering there, and Morrison told us what he knew about females.

Their
titties
hung down to their waists, he said, so they had to strap them up, and he brought an engraving of some primitive wrinkled female in Africa to prove it. Some, he assured us, had dugs so long they could toss them over their shoulders or knot them together.
Down there
, Morrison told us, whispering hoarsely so we all had to strain forward to hear, women had a gaping slit like a mouth. There was nothing there, he said, only a lack, a gap, a hole where any proper normal person had a thing you could hold in your hand. What was more, the lips of this unimaginable mouth drooped: ‘I have seen the lips hang down just about to their knees,' Morrison claimed. ‘The old ones, you know, the old ones like your Mums.'

There was silence behind the bike-shed at this, as each boy thought of his mother and this frightful hidden thing about her. Morrison sniffed—he was an adenoidal boy who sniffed day and night, winter and summer, and even one of the best schools had not succeeded in getting him to use his handkerchief—Morrison did not care, for his mother had died when he was little, but we other boys would never look at our mothers with the same eyes again.

‘What's the difference between the Jenolan Caves and an old woman?' he asked, but spared us trying to answer: ‘The Town Hall wouldn't fit in Jenolan Caves!' He told us of the way women could take hold of a man's organ with this hole and refuse to let go, strangling a man's manhood while he struggled in her grip. And were there teeth? Listening to Morrison, we were not quite sure. I thought of my sister, Kristabel of the mocking eyes, and was struck with the likelihood of what Morrison was telling us. If Kristabel knew she had something between her legs that could tear a man apart, no wonder she thought herself so superior! Morrison told us of the insatiable appetite of women for men: ‘They don't, you know, have a squirt and be done with it, they can never get enough of it,' Morrison whispered, and not a boy crouched on the scuffed dirt would have been the one to ask, ‘What is this “it”, Morrison?'

When we arrived back from holidays one term, there was a new master. Cargill was tall and thin, and walked with a faint shamble, as if he was wearing feet a couple of sizes too big. He was a loosely put-together individual with a permanent rash on his jaw where his starched collar rubbed the skin; his slow smile showed a crooked tooth and his large face was mild and attentive. He was a man whose academic gown was stiff and new, whose laurels still sat unfaded on his brow. He had been a prodigy, we heard, and would go far, and was full of schemes to get his boys developing team spirit. Under Cargill's direction, we boys with
chests
were no longer to moon on the edge of the football games hugging ourselves in the wind. ‘You are all part of the team too,' Cargill shouted over the grunts of the players. ‘You will barrack, and I will teach you to barrack as you have never barracked before!'

He took it seriously, as he wanted us to. Once a week he sat us in the assembly hall, among the rows of dusty chairs, and directed us from where he sat right at the back of the hall. ‘Project,' he would declaim, ‘project, boy, I want them to hear you in Broken Hill!' and we would try again:

‘Rovers Rovers red and blue,

Rovers we are counting on you,

North and South and East and West,

Rovers Rovers you're the best!'

If we could not get the hang of projecting our thin voices as far as where he sat, he would stride down through the chairs with his long legs, bound up onto the platform, and grasp a boy around the waist to demonstrate the existence of the diaphragm.

I was that boy once, and could hardly breathe, let alone project, as he stood behind me, one hand in the small of my back and the other on my stomach. ‘Push, Singer!' he exclaimed. ‘I want to see my hand move out as you take in air, go on, push, boy!' I pushed, and we all watched as Cargill's large hand was moved outwards by the volume of air I had taken in. ‘Now, project, Singer, on that chestful of air,' he urged, and I found myself filled with a resonant and steady voice which filled every corner of the chalky hall. ‘Well done, Singer, well done indeed, that is quite a voice.' Cargill said, and let go of my back and my stomach, but gave me a smile into my eyes that made the world warm for the rest of that day.

It was Cargill whom I began to adore, and longed to resemble. ‘What are you slouching for, Albion?' my stern unfriendly father demanded when I went home for holidays, and jabbed me in the button of my jacket. ‘Stand straight, boy, be a man.' I would not tell him, or even myself, that I was being Cargill, that I was trying out the skin of another being who I longed to be one with. I felt my toes turn in and I took the long gangling strides that Cargill took, and was at peace and in a tumult of excitement both at once, because I was feeling what it was to be Cargill, and to leave lonely Albion somewhere else.

Cargill's smile was a leaf caressing the sky. It was a bird through blue, it shaved the stone away from the world and left soul shining through. In the angular and bloodless cold world in which I lived, Cargill was the moment of warmth in it, the only moment when it felt acceptable to be Albion Gidley Singer. Stony boy that I was, with a reputation for being one for tittle-tattle and going to the authorities, disliked as I was for my stiffness and prissiness, and too much insincere politeness: this stony boy could melt when he thought of Cargill's smile turned towards him.

I turned out to have an aptitude for bellowing the Rovers' warcry across the churned mud. I even embellished the simple roar with several yodel-like variations of my own, and schemed for those moments when I could produce a new sort of noise that would cause Cargill to look at me, with his smile that turned me to water inside my vest, even though I felt myself to be an empty bell, my throat producing volumes of sound out of a centre of blank air.

In the classroom, where we laboured over gerundives, Cargill bent over me to examine what kind of botch I had made of my parsing. With his hand over mine, he guided my foolish pen so that it drew the correct lines and loops and arrows, splitting the sentence neatly into its parts, and as he did so—I, breathless, feeling every molecule of my hand where it was touched by Cargill's—I saw between us one of his hairs slip down on a current of air and settle on the edge of my book. When he had moved on to some other desk, some other boy for whom I had to choke down envy for being so close to Cargill, I laid my palm over that hair: gently, so it would not take fright, I captured it. Cargill turned and met my eyes as he spoke in a humorous way of the split infinitive, and all the while I had to leave my hand awkward over the hair, and I saw his eyes linger on me, watching and wondering why I sat so stiff and wooden, with my hand ablaze, covering my treasure.

One Sunday in our free time after dinner, I was alone on a cliff mooning at the unfriendly polished surface of the sea. I stared glumly at where grey sea met grey sky and wished for the holidays to arrive: failing that, a tidal wave would have done. All at once there was Cargill, coming towards me with his awkward long-striding walk over the bumpy grass, the wind lifting the hair from his forehead. My heart thudded in my chest and I could not breathe; but he was definitely coming towards me across the wet grass with a smile on his face, his eyes looking into mine.

I had allowed myself to dream of Cargill's arms around me. On countless nights I had rescued Cargill from burning houses, swum through whirlpools to save him from drowning, sucked the venom from the twin puncture-holes in his ankle. Together we had stared up at Victoria Falls (six hundred thousand cubic feet per second), gazed down from the Eiffel Tower (nine hundred and eighty-six feet, with a lateral movement of five inches in a high wind), and shaken each other's mittened hands at the North Pole (lowest recorded temperature, minus seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit).

Now Cargill was beside me, not in dreams but in flesh, beside me in the wind, sharing the same cold air, and while it was what I longed for, I feared it as well. Up close, all my difficulties began.

Far below us on the sand, two men were straining at a boat that was stuck like a rock in the sand. At the bow the man in black tugged so hard we saw his hat fall off his head, and I heard myself laugh my unpopular laugh; and at the stern, a man in yellow was a tiny hopeless machine, nearly horizontal in his pushing. I laughed and stood beside Cargill, glad of a pretext to laugh aloud, because my breathless joy was forcing its way up and out of me, and just for a moment the void was spinning off harmlessly beyond us.

‘I am pleased to see you here, Singer,' Cargill said out of a long silence into which my laugh had been absorbed. ‘Very pleased indeed,' and I glanced up to see whether there was some detail of gerunds or the subjunctive that he wished to share with me. His mouth was a trifle strange, as if he were trying to smile and not smile, at once. His eyes met mine and slid away: I could not guess what was in his mind, but it did not appear to be gerunds or the subjunctive. I was awkward then, standing thick and sullen, with only the most unhewn and clumsy words coming to me in a moment that I knew was one requiring delicacy, and if words at all, then words of a flute-like fineness.

Cargill and I stood so close I could sense his body swell with each breath he took, although we were not touching, except perhaps that the fluff of his tweed might have been brushing the fluff of mine.

A gull wheeled by below us and shot suddenly up into the air so I saw the sun illuminating it from behind, a lambent gull soaring, full of light. We watched birds squeaking across the sky in pairs, home to their plump branches. Those birds beating their way slowly across the ash-grey sky had my envy, for I knew they were together for always, or at least until death.

If a genie had appeared to me at that moment, my wish would have been to be able to melt into another, without any kind of fuss or embarrassment, the way one ice-cube could liquefy and become one with another. But I was no simple ice-cube: I was a complex lump of boy whose large body was a burden he could not escape. I knew that I was about to be put to the test, and knew already that I would fail.

‘Well,' Cargill said, and I heard the sigh, and a shudder in it. I felt my lips creak apart with the effort of thinking of something adequate to say. All at once Cargill turned and pressed me to him, so that my face was drowned in the heat of his chest and air rushed out of my body in a moan. He turned my face up to his, with his hand under my chin, and I felt how he trembled as he touched me.

What possessed me, that I flailed out then against Cargill, choking on fear, feeling my hand strike his face so he flinched? What terror filled my mouth with vile words like stones hurled into his face? In an ecstasy of anguish, I ripped myself out of his arms and stumbled across the grass. Gulls followed me, screeching and flapping like creatures of doom, and the earth tilted and rocked beneath my clumsy running feet, and behind me I knew Cargill stood watching, and knew he would have held out his arms to me in welcome if I had heeded those gulls and the tilting earth, and turned back to him. But I could not. I struggled on in despair, throwing my feet out under me, further and further from where Cargill stood watching with the wind blowing around him.

What was my fear? Was my fear the worst of all, of finding paradise and then being expelled from it? I had watched Cargill bending over other boys, their brown heads close to his, so close they seemed to be touching, and I had seen Cargill even take the skinny hand of other boys as he took mine, to guide it over the shape of a tricky sentence: I had seen, and been filled with pain.

I knew that there must be boys of the past on whom Cargill's musing eyes had smiled, and knew that there might be other boys in the future. To be locked into myself, hungering for the paradise of his arms, was a lonely and comfortless place; but I could bear that, could go on living with a few warm dreams at night in my thin bed.

But if I unfolded the petals of my embattled self to Cargill, if I allowed his arms around me, his whisper in my hair, and the fondness in his eyes: if I let myself be undone by all this, and stand naked in the blast of love, I would risk the worst death of all. I would not survive such a death as that, as Cargill having opened my soul and then with his mild manner moved on, leaving me flayed. It was pride and deepest fear, and it left me dry-eyed and stony-hearted later, leaning on a fence, thinking with despair how much life I had still to live.

Three

WHEN THE HOLIDAYS CAME, Mother and Kristabel continued with their normal lives, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The fact that I was home did not seem to be important enough to interrupt their endless little projects: pinning bits of cloth together in the drawing-room to make dainty things, disappearing together for periods of time into Mother's room, and calling endlessly on other ladies. Kristabel was surly through it all, impatient with the pins, preferring to be out in the garden rather than murmuring with Mother or the tea-time ladies, but there was no choice for her as there was none for me, and I heard her laughing with Mother sometimes too, and taking seriously the matching of one blue to another. ‘Oh, Albion,' Mother would say, ‘Kristabel and I are just busy for a few moments, can you entertain yourself for a while, dear?' and I would leave the cosy dimness of the drawing-room and its fascinating scraps of cloth, and drift aimlessly back outside into the sharp sunlight. Finally I would tire of waiting for the women to have time for me, and would wander the streets with a stomach full of cake and my pockets full of humbugs to suck on.

I watched women with ostrich-feathers in their hats getting onto trams, I watched men taking up a lot of the footpath, standing legs a-straddle discussing one thing and another, with their hats on the back of their head and their hands in the pockets stretching their pants tight over their buttocks. I watched bearded rough men guffaw outside public houses, and women in calico aprons looking cross and hurrying along with bundles wrapped in cloth. I watched runny-nosed children with scabs on their faces playing knucklebones in the dirt; and once I saw the streets of the Chinese, but I went away quickly because I had been told plump white boys like myself were considered delicacies for a Chinese dinner.