Читать книгу What Kind of Child - Ken Barris - Страница 7

Club Foot

He watches his mother as she works. Her hands are chapped, the flesh pale. The light coming in through the window is stark, and bleaches her face and arms almost the colour of milk. She is cleaning a galjoen, scraping off the scales with her old sharp knife. They spring into the air, rasping off in silver-grey showers. The kitchen stinks of fish blood.

He longs to talk to his mother. He knows she won’t answer. Her mouth is a healed gash. She is a creased milky body that breathes and moves and speaks only when necessary. He closes his eyes and tries to enter her flesh. He wants to move her arms, see through her pale eyes. He wants to live inside her where, perhaps, it is warmer. But she remains impervious and distant, and he remains where he is on the kitchen chair, kicking his heels softly against its wooden legs. He can taste the whiteness; it is like eating chalk or sand.

The sounds coming from outside – the teasing wind, the screaming gulls, the sea – combine with the scraping of his mother’s blade. They twist together into lines of music, briefly caught, something he might sing; then they are simply sounds and noises again. The scraping stops altogether. The fish slaps onto the board, he hears the cold tap running. He knows it is the cold tap because it sounds different to the hot one. Then comes the paddling of her hands and the smell of Sunlight soap.

He opens his eyes again. His mother is watching him. As usual, he cannot read the expression in her eyes. He looks away.

‘It’s cooler outside,’ she says. ‘Come, we’ll walk down the beach.’

Silently, he shifts off his chair and limps to the door. They step down onto the white sand, the scraggy grass. Light knifes into his eyes, and his foot hurts more than usual. He sits down on the step.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he says.

The flesh around her eyes seems to soften. She says, ‘I’ll carry you the first bit.’

She kneels down, turning her back to him. He climbs onto her back and wraps his arms around her broad shoulders, his legs about her hips. With a grunt of pain, or weariness, she straightens up and walks down to the sea.

He presses his face into the back of her neck. There is the jogging of her stride and the milky odour of her body. The breeze coming off the sea tugs at her hair; wisps brush against the side of his face. Then his mother walks into the sea, and stands ankle-deep in the surging water. She lets him down. The icy shock is a relief to his foot. They stand together looking at the horizon, holding hands.

‘It’s getting too cold,’ he says.

Reluctantly she turns away, and they begin their walk down the beach. He crouches over a large stranded jellyfish, a pudding of flesh almost a metre across, with a mob of whelk boring into it.

‘Is it dead?’ he asks. ‘They’re eating it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she replies. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Can it feel?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

He picks up a whelk by its conical shell. With nothing to attach itself to, the sucker squirms about blindly. He puts it back on the jellyfish and watches as it begins to dig into smooth, clear meat. He thinks: it must have a mouth in its foot. Then he straightens up and limps onwards. Pain curls through his foot and shoots up the muscles of his lower leg. He turns back, and looks at his mother.

‘Alright,’ she says, ‘we can go back.’

But they stand still for a while. There is no-one else on the beach. They are alone with the white light, the noises of sea and wind, the long converging lines of the shore. Am I alive or dead, he asks. Is my mother alive or dead? Can we feel? He hears his mother’s voice reply: I don’t think so. I don’t know.

* * *

It is a hot morning. He sits staring at the patch of light falling through the open door. When he doesn’t blink for a while, phantom colours emerge from the rectangle of light and drift across it. When he does close his eyes, the lids sting pleasantly. His mother is working in the kitchen, humming. It is a wordless song about being tired, and wanting things she doesn’t have, and about having things she doesn’t want.

He turns back to the rectangle of light. He can feel its heat on the surface of his eyes. It is a dangerous desert, and he is flying safely in a boat above it.

He is distracted by the irregular beat of an engine. It approaches the cottage and pulls up with a sharp squeaking of springs. His mother falls silent, and a door creaks open. They wait. Then, as the visitor’s shadow falls across his patch of light, a reek of unwashed flesh enters too.

It is hard to see the man who stands at the door, because of the glare behind him. He is tall and has long, wild hair. He clears his throat and asks, ‘Would this be the home of Caitlin Turner?’

The boy scrambles to his feet. He looks around, to see his mother approaching. She drops the plate she holds – it breaks with a dull sound into two uneven pieces – and then she stands quite still.

‘Caitlin,’ says the visitor, ‘Caitlin – it’s been . . .’ His voice tails off, and he starts again, almost pleading: ‘It’s been a long time.’

She bends down and picks up the pieces of the plate. She straightens and says, ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’

He comes in then, his smell overpowering the small room. She looks at him in dismay.

‘God, Arthur, you’re a mess,’ she says. ‘How on earth did this happen?’

He gestures lamely, lets his hand fall.

‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘One thing after another . . . I lost control, I suppose, quite badly.’

As if driven by the same impulse, their heads turn to the boy.

‘Is he the one?’ asks the old man.

She nods: ‘His name is Luke.’

The man and the boy study each other. There is something wild about the man’s face and eyes, his skin is brown with ancient dirt, his fingers are long and bony; they tremble when he raises his hand and scratches his chin. It frightens the boy.

‘Luke,’ says his mother, ‘this is your grandfather, Arthur Turner. You can call him Arthur.’

The old man grins desperately, showing gaps in his teeth. His eyes are moist. He advances on Luke, holding out his hand. Luke shrinks back, and his grandfather stops.

‘I suppose not,’ he mumbles. The grin vanishes. ‘It’s all too much for him.’

Luke limps to his mother’s side. Half his fear is her speech, her voice: usually when she speaks, it is as if she moves through deep water, or is caught dreaming in a heavy rain. Now it comes out too quickly and tastes sour. The old man has changed her into a different mother.

Her hand goes down to his shoulder and stays there. The grandfather fills the room with uncertainty. He seems to be casting about, trying to find his bearings.

‘Caitlin,’ he says, ‘I suppose people have told you that he is frighteningly beautiful.’

‘People around here don’t talk. They don’t talk to me. But I know that he is.’

Her hand tightens on his shoulder, to protect him from this dangerous idea. Again, there is a terrible silence. Then his mother says, ‘I suppose you’d like some tea.’

‘I don’t suppose you have any brandy?’

‘There is no alcohol,’ she replies bluntly.

‘Ah, well. Tea then, thank you.’

They move into the kitchen, where there is a worn table and four chairs. Caitlin opens both windows as wide as possible, and the back door as well. She fills the kettle and switches it on.

‘I’d forgotten,’ Arthur Turner remarks, ‘how charming this place is.’

She ignores him, and keeps her back turned as she gathers what she needs. He makes no further attempt at conversation until the tea is ready. All the while, a mist of pain builds up in the air. Luke knows that it isn’t his own, though he can feel it.

Caitlin pours for her father, and her son, and then for herself. The old man takes a sip and grimaces. ‘Rooibos tea,’ he says, ‘of course.’

She watches him expressionlessly, and waits. He takes another sip. ‘It’s not bad, really,’ he adds hastily. Still she says nothing.

He abandons the effort to communicate with her then, his eyes rove about the room, aimlessly picking out details: the cheap stove, the paraffin fridge, the blue shelves, the stacks of chipped plates, the patchy distemper, the forlorn etching on the wall. He sips his tea, and she sips hers. Perhaps a century passes in this way, while Luke studies the grain of the table surface, as he has many times before, the waves of dry brown colour that converge and then shake themselves free of each other and march in endless ranks from horizon to horizon.

Arthur puts down his empty cup, his hand trembling.

‘No quarter given, Caitlin. I should have expected it. I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I was stupid to come back here.’

Her shoulders hunch; she leans forward and asks, ‘What was a mistake, Arthur? Coming here like this, or staying away for five years? I’d really like to know.’

‘I didn’t come here to fight with you,’ he replies, rising, his lower lip trembling visibly. As he does so, his chair falls over backwards; they both wince as it crashes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeats, bending over to pick up the chair. He straightens, his face white under the grime. ‘I’ll leave you now. But please bear in mind that it was you – it was your decision – it was you who refused all contact, afterwards, after it happened.’

His eyes stray to the boy. It appears that he wants to say something to Luke, a struggle of indecision passes over his features. Then he turns round and leaves the kitchen heavily.

‘That is true,’ Caitlin mumbles, not to Luke; but she remains hunched in her chair.

The door of Arthur Turner’s car slams shut. There is a prolonged silence. The car door creaks open again.

‘I think he’s coming back,’ says Luke.

His mother looks at him mutely, her expression a mixture of dull anger and relief. Luke turns away.

Arthur comes back into the room. ‘It won’t start,’ he says lugubriously. ‘I suppose it’s the battery. Can I borrow your car? I’ll try to get the damn thing out and take it in to Lambert’s Bay. I’m sorry, you’re stuck with me for at least a day. But I’ll sleep in the kombi.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says his daughter. ‘You can sleep in here.’

He stands where he is in the doorway, silent and proud.

‘Providing,’ she adds, ‘that you have a bath.’

‘Very well,’ he replies grumpily, and comes in. ‘But there’s no point in cleaning up until I’ve taken out the battery, is there?’

‘I suppose not.’

He sits down at the kitchen table, his ripe smell filling the room. The stink reminds Luke of rotting seaweed. Does his grandfather come from the sea too?

* * *

Arthur Turner returns from town in the late afternoon, with a skinful of wine. Now there is a great deal of splashing, and a song. He sings about jermin officers crossing the rine. Luke comes to the blue-painted doorway – there is no door – and watches his grandfather labour to clean off his own filth. The soap doesn’t lather in this hard water.

Arthur stands up in the tub. He is painfully thin, except for a sagging little belly. His skin is an ivory colour; his penis is darker, a thick, blind earthworm the colour of cooked liver. His ribs stick out, and there is a huge scar down his chest. The scar is a shiny pink-brown, with florid stitch marks on either side. Luke wonders why his grandfather has been cut open, and what has been taken out. The water in the bath is brown.

‘They drank the women and kissed the wine,’ sighs Arthur Turner, staggering where he stands. ‘Careful,’ he says, ‘careful.’ Then he sits down, and eases himself back into the water. ‘Oh God,’ he says. It sounds to Luke like a sob. Arthur rests his head against the back of the tub, breathing heavily, on the edge of snoring. Luke thinks he might be asleep, but then he peers over the rim of the tub.

‘You don’t say much, do you?’

Luke looks down at the floor.

‘You might find this hard to believe, boy, but I dreamt about you once. You had no face.’

Luke raises his hand to his face. It is still there. There is a strange hissing sound, which frightens him; he realises that his grandfather is laughing.

‘You can understand that missing face,’ says the old man. ‘Your mother kicked me out of her life before you were born. What do you think of that?’ He splashes water about and snorts. ‘She’s like that,’ he says. ‘She can be obtuse. She becomes an obtuse mess in moments of crisis. Mass, I should say, a doughy but unyielding mass of silence. It has an almost religious quality, you know, a religious mass. You can’t really penetrate that, can you? It’s baffling and tormenting, and of course utterly demoralising. To suffer like that in silence; to turn the other cheek – it’s an abuse of power and a bloody lie, my boy, but I suppose you know that, better than most. Oh yes, you’re an expert yourself.’

Luke feels the weight and pressure of the words. He doesn’t know what they mean, but he likes the sound of ‘obtuse’ and ‘tormenting’ and ‘bloody lie’.

‘Obtuse or not, she kicked me out.’

He looks up at his grandfather; Turner’s eyes are focused on him now, glittering cruelly.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve met your father?’

Luke shakes his head.

‘Has she ever told you about him?’

‘No,’ replies Luke, his first word to his grandfather.

‘Of course she hasn’t, with bloody good reason, too.’ He lies back in the tub again, and mutters wearily, ‘But she should have done something about your foot. She’s let you down there, old son. Not my business, of course . . .’

Luke limps out of the bathroom.

Arthur calls him back; he stands silently in the doorway.

‘Has she ever told you?’

Luke shakes his head, not knowing what question he answers. His grandfather rises messily out of the tub and seizes a towel.

‘She should have told you. She should have told you that you’re good-looking. No, that’s not quite right: you’re a beautiful child.’

Luke turns round and limps off to his room.

There is a tarnished mirror above his work table. He climbs onto his chair and kneels on it to look at his reflection. A solemn brown face stares back. He is slightly plump, with full lips, dark eyes and curly black hair. His grandfather is wrong. It is an ugly face; the image makes him feel mildly ill. But he forces himself to look at it, and after a while the figure splits off from himself and becomes a picture of someone else. He thinks he can see that other person grow older, and become a dark, strong person, grow into a life that isn’t his own. He prefers then to look at the space behind and around the image. He peers in at the sides of the mirror, both sides, trying to see more. It is a clear world that he cannot get into – everything in it is hard and clean and real. It is a better world.

* * *

Luke goes out into the sun. Even though it is early, the light is harsh and makes him squint. He wanders round the side of the house to where his grandfather’s car is parked, a decrepit Volkswagen bus, orange and white. He slides open the middle door and climbs in. He pauses, hit by a ripe smell of human habitation, mildew, petrol, burnt oil. But he doesn’t mind the smell that much because it is sharp and vertiginous – he can position himself in it, stay at a certain level – and his curiosity drives him on.

It is brutally messy inside. Worn blankets, clothes, cooking utensils, a Cadac stove, jerrycans, food tins lie on the seats and on the floor. A pair of boots, a blown pack of Vienna sausages, scores of books, sections of rubber tubing, an old portable typewriter. Luke doesn’t know what the latter is, though it interests him greatly. He presses down on one of the buttons – marked e – and a grey arm rises from the middle. He tries a different button, and the same thing happens. He lifts a small silver lever, and part of the device ratchets noisily and swiftly to the side, giving him a fright. He leaves the machine alone, assailed by anxiety that he might have broken it.

Under one of the middle seats, he finds three yellowing typescripts, the paper blistered by exposure to moisture and sun; but then the world swims, revolves once, and lands with a definite, inaudible thump. It is too hot in the bus, the stink has become unbearable.

Luke realises that this is Arthur Turner’s house. It is a travelling house. He realises that his grandfather is a different kind of person to his mother and himself. He is a stranger who lives in a rich, violent mess, and doesn’t care about the things that his mother cares about so strongly. At a level deeper than thought, Luke welds together composites: his grandfather is a man animal, an everyday savage.

He stumbles out of the bus, head first, and falls onto the white sand and straggling seagrass, then somersaults, and rests on his back. The earth and air outside are fresh, and he grows solid again, bit by bit.

He goes back into the house. Arthur Turner sits at the kitchen table. He looks different, now that he is clean. His skin is pale, his limp grey hair falls across his forehead. Now his grey eyes are tired and shrewd. There is a cup of tea before him, and an untouched slice of toast.

‘Do you want this?’ he asks, pushing the plate towards Luke.

Luke silently takes the toast and bites into it.

‘Don’t tell your mother,’ says Arthur. ‘She’s trying to feed me up, but I don’t eat breakfast.’

Luke doesn’t reply; he is too busy with the toast.

‘She thinks I’m too thin. I’m not too thin, I’m too old. In fact, in my view, your mother’s too fat.’ He interrupts himself, quite irritably: ‘Don’t you ever speak, child? You’re depressingly like your mother. I’m surprised you can speak at all.’

Luke swallows, and says, ‘I can speak.’

Arthur raises an eyebrow and takes a sip of tea, ignoring the boy’s answer. Eventually he shakes his head and says, dogmatically, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I can speak,’ insists Luke.

‘I tell you what. If you finish that toast and pass the plate back here, and don’t tell your mother you ate it, I’ll admit that you speak all the time.’

Luke drops the remaining toast on the floor and stares imperiously at his grandfather.

Cruelty flickers in Turner’s face, in his eyes. ‘I can see your father now. In your features, in your demeanour. But you don’t know your father, do you?’

Luke is trapped. He doesn’t want to answer; but if he doesn’t, it will prove that he can’t talk.

‘I know my father,’ he says. It isn’t true. He has never seen his father before.

‘Of course you do,’ nods Turner grimly. It is clear that he doesn’t believe Luke. ‘I know your father,’ he says. ‘I came to know him surprisingly well, despite our brief acquaintance. He gave me this.’

He pulls his lank hair aside and leans forward, to show Luke the tail-end of a livid scar on his scalp. Luke stares at it in confusion.

‘It was a brick, boy. His instrument of choice. I tried to stop him, but I went down alright.’

The old man straightens up, his mouth the same bitter gash that is his daughter’s mouth, and lets his hair fall.

‘I was conscious, most of the time. I saw it, I saw most of your getting. But I couldn’t move. Your mother couldn’t speak, and still can’t.’

He smiles then, in horrible satisfaction. It is unbearable for Luke. The room has gone dark, and he doesn’t know why. He finds it hard to breathe; he doesn’t fully understand his grandfather’s words; he knows they mean something about his own life. It has to do with his mother, how he was made the wrong way.

‘That brick summed up everything,’ says the old, dry voice. ‘It was his personality. You see things clearly when you’re on the floor, broken and bleeding. It was the imprint of his personality, I should say. There is a relationship – in such moments – that surpasses explanation.’

The old man shudders visibly, pulls himself back within his own skin. He glances at Luke, apparently surprised to see him there. He looks down at his teacup.

‘Perhaps,’ he says quietly, ‘that is why you have so little to say.’

Luke’s face has pulled into a rictus of weeping, but there are no tears. He limps out and disappears into the blinding light.