Part 7 (2/2)

*I don't believe anything anyone tells me, not since I last saw Doctor.'

Through the knothole you can see her trying to trace a deceit. She closes her teeth. She clears her throat, and walks away. Staggering slightly, to her real house.

He puts his hand where the pee is still wet, that he has called up, then pulls his same hand away, it could have been scalded.

I would like to tell him something. I would like to write, or better, speak, the poem G. has put into me. I I I show Gilbert Horsfall that I am me me me. Not a mewing cat. He might stroke me if I were, which I would not want, or do I?

I shall not write this poem. Memory is safer than invisible ink, that all the school knows about, playing at spies, exchanging coded messages.

Lily Feizenbaum comes up in break, looking more than usually mysterious. She shoves a folded paper in the pocket of your cardy. Unfolded, the paper is perfectly blank.

*What has she given you?' Viva is always on the watch.

*A sheet of paper.'

*Betcher that's the old invisible ink. You hold it up to heat and it brings the writing out. See? Silly nonsense. I wouldn't want to know what Feizenbaums have to write you. So you needn't tell me.'

Your pocket could hardly wait. You heat the stove. Essie was out, Gilbert mucking around outside, on one of the days when he gets sick of you. You hold Lily's blank paper to the flame (what if you burned it and never got to know?).

The message grew, a yellow brown spidery.

Momma says you are welcome any Shabbat night at our table. Lily F.

*Hi there,' Gil's voice, *where've you got to.'

Hold the paper quickly to the flame.

*What's that?'

The paper melted into tinkling ash. *Some notes I don't need any more.'

*Not cribbing?'

Better not to answer.

*Come on out and do something!'

Climb up behind him, into our tree, our house. He falls down grinding his neck into the heap of old hessian snippets we use as pillows. *Christ, it's boring! We gotter think of something to do...'

I stand looking out through the doorway of the house above the hanging garden. We will always mean I. He does not want me. What if I speak the invisible poem I feel inside me. Will it give me back the power I thought I had on coming here? The poem that cannot be put into words.

Inside these musty, suffocating walls, this lumpy heap of p.r.i.c.king hessian. Bruce Lockhart knew a bloke who caught the crabs. They shaved him around the c.o.c.k, armpits too, and painted him blue. Anything could crawl out of a heap of filthy old hessian.

What would they say if they saw you painted blue in the dunny at school?

*I'm gunner walk around a bit.'

Shake her off. This girl got in his hair at times.

He swung down quickly out of the tree to show he did not need her company. He would have walked over to Lockharts', only the old man might stare him out. *He mightn't even know your name. Who are you?' *I'm Gilbert Horsfall-sir,' *Who?' Hang around outside while they had their tea. Till the boys came out. They still mightn't want him. He hunched his shoulders trying to count up the people who might know about and want him. The Colonel knew, but you couldn't say he wanted. After that Ma Bulpit, Irene Sklavos, the teachers while you were in cla.s.s, the Ballards if they hadn't forgotten. His list petered out.

Walking down the winding, swooping streets he said his name *GILBERT HORSFALL!' He liked it, but turned round, in case somebody might have heard and thought him a nut. He liked to run his hands over his body. n.o.body ever noticed it. It was there, though.

The evening swirled around him. Lights were coming on in some of the homes. An old woman was cuddling a cat on a veranda. Old people. Running her fingers through the cat fur. She had lifted it up and was rubbing noses with the b.l.o.o.d.y cat. They say a cat has worms in its nose. This old dried up woman had it coming to her if she didn't know enough by the time she had reached well, fifty at least. Old people got on his t.i.ts.

From time to time he pinched his nipples, they itched rather pleasantly, then harder till it hurt.

He didn't like to think about the old nipples of the woman playing with her cat. The girl on the beach had covered them up as soon as she saw you were looking at what was red and rubbery, sort of flowers cut out of a wet bathing cap.

Sandy skin. What if you sucked on a t.i.t that had been making flowerpots in the sand ...

Bruce knew a bloke who got the clap or siph or whatever it was from going with a woman down at Mrs Macquarie's Seat.

Must be somebody who hasn't got it.

In the street he was walking down lined with big fuchsias, tree fuchsias, it was already oily dark. The deep blue sky had begun p.r.i.c.kling slightly with stars. In a lit window a man was grinding his mouth in a woman's open one backwards and forwards like he was swallowing her down, all the while running his hands. Some of them had brown nipples (Bruce says they don't have to be boongs).

Gilbert b.l.o.o.d.y Horsfall tore off a branch of the giant fuchsia and whipped the darkness. Ta.s.sels flew in all directions. The soft, fleshy, sticky stems.

He threw the mangled remains away.

Ohhhh he groaned, swallowing the warm damp sea air, gulping at the stars, he would have swallowed them down if he had been close enough. What was the point of anything at all? Run away, and join up and get killed. A hero on a memorial. Eirene Sklavos had seen killing, if you could believe her. Her father had been murdered. All bullsh probably. But what she had seen, done and knew stuck like splinters in his mind.

Less murders nowadays. Ma Bulpit said it was because there's a war on. Not without a soldier murders some girl for holding out on him. There was the boy the sailor murdered. Pervs. There was that sailor at Neutral Bay who let down his ap.r.o.n and waved his d.i.c.k at you. Like you were a perv. You weren't-or were you?

He lurched round the bend, reeling, like on a s.h.i.+p in a rolling sea beneath the high swirling wastes of an ultra-marine, p.r.i.c.kling sky, fell down at last on a bit of wasteland above a culvert, las.h.i.+ng out at lantana and the wiry trailers of morning glory as the stones ate into his back? Or were there others around him in the darkness?

Big boongs with coffee coloured nipples, blousy girls with cut outs of red bathing-cap rubber. Experienced guys in business suits and moustaches grinding into unwilling mouths. Sailor on sailor.

He was so hard he got to pulling it off, moaning for the stones, lantana smelling of cat p.i.s.s and s.e.m.e.n, the cold blue enamel of the sky. And lay wilting, not crying, it was sweat-or s.e.m.e.n.

He had shrunk right into himself into a kind of guilty purity he had never experienced that he could remember. Wondering what Irene Sklavos would have thought. Why, for Chrissake, this Ireen, who was nothing to do with him. But might have been standing over him looking down, prissy lips pressed together, like she had just been not explaining the bleeding pneuma. Haunting him on this wasteland above the culvert.

He sat up presently, b.u.t.toned his fly, and started the walk towards Cameron Street. He felt drained. His legs could have been parcels of straw. As he brushed against the hedge of giant fuchsias, he was sprinkled with drops so cold and silver he shuddered for his own enormity. Were they eyes glittering amongst the foliage and fleshy ta.s.sels? What odds? She was nothing to him, another kid, a girl, a Greek reffo Lockharts said was her mother's b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

When he got in there was no sound from the other side of her door. Must have gone to bed. He could see her lying on that ottoman like a queen on a tomb. He could hear the sounds of furniture and dry rot inside Ma Bulpit's dunny.

His own room, under the warrant officer's leaning portrait, was one big yawn tonight. Neither light nor darkness let him alone. He lay remembering forever all that he most wanted to forget. And Eirene Sklavos was advancing on him her plait trailing across the carpet behind her like a long black snake, its tail still had to enter the room when she had almost reached his bedside.

*... running late ... miss the bus if you're not careful...' It was Ma Bulpit's voice twitching him awake.

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