Surrender (12 page)

In a small town the generations are corralled like cows on market day: Evangeline was my generation, the twig of her family tree. I knew her parents and grandparents; I’d smiled and nodded at them. I knew her house, its white camellias, although I’d never been inside. Her family name was inscribed three times beneath the soldier who guarded the war memorial; a street planted with plane trees bore the same name. In the cemetery, a cherub cast a bulbous shadow across her great-great-granddad. I don’t know if Evangeline gave this long lineage any thought — it was her inheritance from the cradle, so perhaps boring to her. But to me, who came from nowhere, whose family tree spread no further than a girl in a photograph, who glimpsed the future only through the sheenless prisms of my parents, Evangeline’s history seemed a precious and extraordinary thing. I liked the way the sturdy branches of her tree lifted her up to the sun.

I had known her forever, as is the way in country towns. She and I had started school together as children, and traveled through it at a matching pace year after year. For most of those years we paid scarce attention to each other, and rarely spoke but to apologize for a knocked book or trodden toe. Evangeline’s obliviousness was a reason to like her rather than not: I liked least those schoolfellows whose awareness of me invariably caused misery.

So I knew her, and always had, but we’d never had anything to say. She was popular; I was not. She came from a respected family; I, as Finnigan delighted to remind me, sprang from kooksville. In the lives of one another, we were like feathers — inconsequential; and other.

In the end I didn’t even see her, but only heard:
Evangeline
.

I was gazing out the science-room window, my mind flat as a plain, and when the teacher barked her name a soft thought came drifting down on me.
Evangeline
, I thought: what a beautiful word.

I looked along the aisle and saw her, and it was as if I saw her for the first time. Everything changed. The ancient featureless interior of me spangled orange, mint, cat-blue. I looked back to the window immediately, my face damp, my breath caught. And worried I would never have the courage to look at her again.

The recollection of this is making me wheeze.

I don’t want to go back there, through all of it. Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that’s sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair. Back then, I didn’t know this to be the fact I know it is now. But I knew enough to realize that I needed to take care; already, from the moment I heard her, I was working to minimize the harm. And the first safekeeping rule I made was this: do not tell.

Yet that very afternoon I saw Finnigan loitering in a lane, and as I came closer I saw that he already knew. He had guessed; he was laughing; I warned him sourly, “Don’t say anything to her.”

“Why not?” He laughed. “Won’t you?”

Of course I would not. I knew my lowly rank. I pledged to keep, around Evangeline, a selfless silence, and suffered in it. It stung when we passed in the corridors; her voice would slice my skin. My eyes smarted at the sight of her sitting against a brick wall. A day spent in her vicinity left me exhausted: “Ain’t love grand,” said Finnigan.

One fateful day she caught me studying her; she quirked an eyebrow and glanced away. I blushed scarlet and stared at the tabletop, an oceanic roar in my ears. I was mortified — yet quietly pleased. I felt as if, after a long time’s explaining, I had made myself understood. I wondered if she was looking at me, thinking about me, or if I’d dropped clean from her mind. Whichever it was would kill me. I was sixteen, and life wasn’t simple.

The ocean in my ears parted. “Anwell!”

I looked up, empty-headed. The green glare of Volton, the English teacher, pinned me. He stood by the blackboard, chalk in hand. I’d seen this man in the supermarket, buying bulbs and frozen pies. My classmates turned to look at me, three rows of eager anticipation. In the stillness I heard the window rattle, the warble of a currawong. I groped for the unknown response to an unheard question. Had I been anybody else, someone would have come to my aid, muttering the answer at the cost of reprimand. But there was only silence, a slowly spinning white noise. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t listening.”

“What were you doing?”

The moment hung: “Thinking. I don’t know.”

“Thinking! Care to share your thoughts with us?”

I watched him. My desk was in a corner, tucked against the wall. Gray faces looked at me; some of them dumbly laughed. Many times I had seen Volton taking his morning constitutional around the town, followed boldly wherever he went by his slim black cat Tinker, whose collar was red, who shied at no thing. I knew where he lived and what he ate and I knew what was close to his heart. “No.”

“Are you sure? I don’t doubt they were fascinating. You were looking at Evangeline: have you something to say to her?”

Through death-throes I repeated, “No.”

Volton tapped the chalk in his palm. “In my class you think about English, Anwell. The rest of it stays in your bedroom. Get it?”

The class burst like a firecracker, shrieking raucously. Morose and taciturn farmers’ sons rocked in their chairs. The girls wriggled and squealed. The air rang with wolf-whistling; someone threw a paper plane. The teacher himself flashed me a smile, suggesting his persecution had meant no harm, suggesting, perhaps, that he’d done me a favor, making me appear the puerile equal of any other young man. He clapped his hands to quell the disorder and the class gave it up reluctantly, chuckles skimming the room. Volton returned to the blackboard and I cautiously raised my eyes. I made myself deaf and blind to everything but Volton. I watched him writing, strolling about, flipping through textbooks, speaking words. I watched his shoulders, his vulnerable neck; I watched the working of the tendons on which his lonely life hung. I did not look at Evangeline, and felt I never could again. In my mind was turning a single word:
rue
.

Later, when I told him this, Finnigan hooted like a drain.

For days, each breath I drew was quaky.

Disgraced, I saw my folly. I had tried to be like everyone else. I had seen my peers teased for their affections, seen them blush purple, heard the same catcalls, but sharing the experience didn’t bring us closer. Rather, it stretched the distance between us. My excursion into their world had ended in humiliation, and resentment of my trespass. In the schoolyard a quiet melody followed me —“Evangeline! Evangeline!”— until the thing I’d loved,
Evangeline
, made my stomach clench.

I determined to restore my life to what it had been. In the corridors I kept my distance; in the classrooms I chose a seat far away. Always I kept my gaze steadfastly on the ground. If I heard her voice, I did not look up — my heart would beat urgently, but this I’d ignore. On the main street, if I saw her, I’d swing like a puppet through the nearest shop door. Walking Surrender around Mulyan, realizing her house was near, I would veer down one road, then another, roaming lostly on streets I’d always known. For weeks I was only eyes and ears, scanning for her, listening, ignoring my heart’s flutter, chewing my fingernails. And as the weeks passed, the wounds I’d received began to heal, though they left behind ropy scars. At school I could look up from the linoleum; I could share the supermarket with her. I saw that, one day, things could once again be as they’d always been.

Finnigan watched all this through amused eyes. The mere mention of her name made him cackle. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson,” he said, sounding just like my mother.

Then one Saturday morning at the start of the holidays I was on my knees in the backyard when I heard her say, “Anwell?”

My heart stopped.

She was standing at the wire gate that marked the line between our yard and a public lane. The lane was forested with weeds and overgrown with briar; it was a shortcut to Mulyan’s shops and Evangeline carried a carton of milk. But her house stood on the other side of town — the lane wasn’t a shortcut to anywhere, for her. The reason she stood there was me.

Surrender was pacing at the gate, staring up at her. He had not barked, and his tail swept slowly; I wondered how long she’d been there. I didn’t stand up — I didn’t know what she wanted. I wondered if her friends were watching from the shadows that hulked across the lane. A bead of sweat went down my back. Finally I said something. “Hello.”

She reached a hand over the gate and stroked the dog’s head. “Hello, Surrender.”

It felt like a punch, that she knew his name. She scratched his ear, and the dog’s tail waved. She glanced across the grass to where I crouched imprisoned against the earth. I stared at her, transfixed. Distantly I prayed that Mother wasn’t at the kitchen sink, where the view through the window ducked the arbor and stretched down the lane.

And Finnigan, I begged,
Keep away
.

Evangeline said something, her voice coasting the grass. “What are you hiding?”

I was using my T-shirt to hammock a small creature and I looked down at it, stupefied. In a moment she was going to walk away, wondering why she’d bothered; she would not come again. I gathered my thoughts and said, “Shut your eyes.”

She looked surprised; then she smiled, leaned the milk against the gate, and closed her eyes trustingly. I gathered the creature inside my shirt, stood up, and crossed the lawn. Bees and a single dragonfly flew up, from the grass. As I drew closer I could smell her, lilac. “Hold out your hands.”

She did so, the smile slung on her lips, sunlight tilting on her hair. Her hands made a creviced cup lined with ten bitten crescent-moons. Around her left wrist swayed a silver chain — I had noticed it before. To see it in such detail stung my eyes. “Don’t be afraid,” I said.

“I’m not.”

Her teeth weren’t perfect: I liked that. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I believe you.”

I scooped up the creature and placed it in her hands. My knuckles brushed her fingertips. The creature blinked black beads at me; it did not pipe or struggle. “All right,” I said, “you can look.”

Evangeline opened her eyes. The duckling was yellow as buttercup, fluffy as snowflakes; its wings were twin butterfies. She caught her breath, couldn’t think what to say. She and I, Surrender and the duckling, the roses, the weeds, the sky, the trees: she looked at me and laughed like a bell. “Beautiful,” she said. “How beautiful, Anwell.”

I went to laugh with her, went to say something — and stalled. I suddenly remembered our audience in the shadows, the laughter rollicking round the classroom. My stomach pitched; I stepped back. Evangeline glanced up from the duckling. “Everyone reckons Mr. Volton is an idiot,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you that.”

I trod on my toes and almost tripped. Evangeline had already looked away. She stroked the duckling with the tip of her thumb. Her nose was powdered with freckles, her ears pierced with many silver hoops. “His heart’s broken now, though. His cat’s disappeared.”

“. . . Tinker?”

“Yes; poor thing. He loved that cat. He walks around calling for it. He’s put notices in all the shop windows.”

I said, “I haven’t seen it.”

“No, it’s long gone.” She shrugged, her eyes on the duckling, which, grown restless, was struggling in her palm. “I suppose that’s what happens when you make other people’s lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.”

She, too, had suffered on that day: I said, “I’m sorry, Evangeline.”

She smiled gracefully. “You don’t have to be. It doesn’t matter. Stupid things like that don’t matter, Anwell.”

A bird called; I could look away.

She said, “I’m thinking of walking up Rabbit Road. Want to come?”

Once more I stalled — I admit I was afraid. Of my mother, my father, what Finnigan would say. As the moment skipped by, Evangeline added, “No one else is going — only me. Maybe Surrender.”

“OK,” I said. And felt a keen freedom doing so; I would have been a fool to do otherwise.

“I’ll take the milk home. Then I’ll meet you at the end of the lane.” She looked up at the sky. “Will it rain?”

I glanced at the cloudless, heat-bleached sky. “No.”

“Hmm. If it rains we’ll go anyway. All right?”

“All right.” I smiled; it seemed funny. She passed the duckling over the gate. Again, her fingers touched mine.

“See you later,” she said.

I watched her stride down the lane, the carton of milk swinging at her knees; she did not look back or wave. At the end of the lane she rounded the corner and disappeared, leaving only the smudge of flattened grass by the gate to prove that the morning was real.

Surrender yawned and lay at my side, and for the first time in centuries I breathed.

I open my eyes. There is noise.

“Sarah?”

The door to my room stays marmishly shut. But nonetheless there’s noise. There shouldn’t be any noise in this town that holds a requiem-hush for me.

I glance, confused, around the room.

Maybe — it could be — I whisper it: “Evangeline?”

I wait, my heart thumping. Moments pass, the noise goes on. Now I know it’s not her. “Sarah!”

To raise my voice always makes me cough. I rasp and splutter, curl up like a worm. My vision swims with tears. Colors spangle the window — it’s dark outside, yet there’s color. There’s what sounds like commotion. “Sarah!” I roar, furious now.

The door opens, my aunt hurries in. “Gabriel, I’m sorry!” She says it like she means it. Cool air has come in with her. She skirts the bed and pours water.

“What’s happening?” I ask, although I know.

Sarah doesn’t look up. The glass fills. I see her hand is shaking a little, that the glass is not held still. “What do you mean? Nothing’s happening.”

She’s lying. “There’s lights,” I say. “There’s noise.”

“It’s nothing special,” she insists. “Nothing, as far as I know.”

I gaze coolly at her. There’s no point arguing. I know what the light is, and the color.

It is fire.

It’s Finnigan.