The Solid Mandala (5 page)

He almost could not bring himself further, in front of all those others. And Mr Hetherington. And Johnny Haynes. Some things were too private, except perhaps in front of Arthur. As if Johnny Haynes cared. He was chewing a supply of paper pellets, to soak in ink, to flip at Norm Croucher's neck.

“‘Sometimes when it is early or late',” Waldo's voice came bursting, gurgling, wavering like water escaping from the bath, “‘I have thought I saw the form of a man hurrying off with a basin of blood.'”

Here Mr Hetherington grunted in that fat way.

“‘Of course it is only the imagination. But I think this person, if he had existed, would have murdered the many children he lured in through the black trees.'”

Some of the class were laughing and hooting, but Arthur clapped, and Mr Hetherington called for order.

Afterwards, in commenting on the essays, Mr Hetherington remarked that Waldo Brown displayed keen interest in botanical detail, but relied too heavily on imagination of a highly-coloured order.

Waldo was not so much listening as watching Johnny Haynes's back, wondering how much Johnny had heard.

Next day Johnny showed how much he had. He called to Norm Croucher, who was Johnny's permanent offsider, and said: “Come on, Normie, we'll show Waldo what we got in our bloody basin.”

They walked all three down to the pepper trees. If Waldo accompanied them voluntarily it was because he knew it to be his fate.

There he stood, a little apart, on the white, windswept grass. With Johnny saying: “That bloke hadn't reckoned on one more murder. Amongst the pear trees,” he added.

Waldo heard the knife click. Though he couldn't see Norm Croucher's face, he could feel him holding his wrists from behind, he could feel Norm's breath in the nape of his neck.

Then Johnny came with the knife, and went prick prick prick with the point right away round under what Dad called the gills.

“Just as a preliminary, like,” said Johnny. “He doesn't fancy the prick, eh?”

Norm sniggered, who on one occasion had been caught at it.

Waldo shivered, and his goose-flesh must have been visible as the blood shot out in little jets of scarlet fountains. Because although he knew none of it was real, it was. Not even his mother's hand could soothe the fear out of him, his mother's hand dappled and dripping with his lost blood.

His vision made Waldo whimper.

“Arrhhh let me don't Johnny Norm I'll give I can't,” he whimpered past slippery lips.

“What'll you give?” Johnny asked. “You dunno what it's worth. Not yet, you don't, by half.”

And he drew the knife in a loop round Waldo's wincing flesh. Waldo could feel the point bumping against the lumps of goose-flesh.

When they all had to turn suddenly round. Even Waldo.

It was as if the flaming angel, though Dad said there was no such thing, stood above them, or didn't stand, flailed and flickered.

“You let my brother alone!” Arthur Brown was bellowing.

Johnny and Norm would not have known what to answer in much easier circumstances. Now they were frightened. Waldo was frightened.

Because Arthur seemed to have swelled. The pale lights were flashing from the whiter edges of his skin, from under the normally hateful hair.

The fire was shooting in tongues from every bristle of Arthur Brown's flaming hair.

“I'll kill,” Arthur continued to bellow, “the pair of you bloody buggers if you touch,” he choked, “my brother.”

His fist had split, it seemed, Johnny Haynes's lower lip. Now the blood was really running.

The bell tolling.

They were all four as suddenly still. Even Arthur. Except for his panting.

They went in to Geography.

Afterwards, as they walked down the road called Terminus,
where nobody else had begun to live, or some perhaps, in the past, and given up, the Brown brothers were alone as usual, at last, and Arthur tried to get Waldo's hand, to keep level with him.

“Leave me!” Waldo shouted. “How many times have I told you not to hang on to my hand?”

“But when you walk fast!”

Arthur was shuffling and running, bigger than Waldo, a big shameful lump.

“You only want to make a fool of me,” Waldo said; he could not, he hoped, have made it sound colder. “And splitting Johnny Haynes's lip. You've always got to show us up.”

“But you was the one they were making a fool of,” Arthur snivelled.

“‘Were',” said Waldo. “Only I wasn't.”

He could not explain a ritual to Arthur, who could not even remember always how to lace up his own boots.

They walked on, between the red-leg, the cotton-pear, and cobbler's pegs, which some call cow-itch. Waldo Brown shuddered to remember his deliverance by what had appeared to be the flaming angel. It has been proved, Dad had already told them, that everything of such description, everything ignorant people refer to as the supernatural, is non-existent. Waldo was proud to know. He would have liked to go permanently proud and immaculate, but his twin brother dragged him back repeatedly behind the line where knowledge didn't protect.

“It was all because of the old essay,” Arthur was keeping on, “that Johnny Haynes thought was silly. Because the bloke couldn't have collected the blood. See? Not in the basin. The kids he was murdering would have been kicking too hard. But I liked it, Waldo — the idea. Waldo? Those black old trees — they're black all right — and perhaps there was a possum scratching in the chimney.”

Waldo decided not to listen to any further dill's drivel.

And soon other things had begun to happen.

That evening after tea he slipped round quietly hearing Mr Haynes had come. Arthur was down with Jewel for something, taking a cabbage leaf, or filling the water-bucket. While Mr
Haynes was standing on the front veranda, under the classical pediment he had built.

“I warn yer, Mr Brown,” Mr Haynes was saying, and his usually jolly chins were compressed, “you'll have to restrain him. Yer don't realize a big lump of a boy like that can turn violent. In his condition. It's hard, I know, for the parents to see.”

“I'll see when there's anything to see,” said Dad.

“But Arthur is the gentlest creature,” Mother was trying to persuade.

“I didn't bring along my boy's lip to show.” Mr Haynes was turning nasty now. “His mother is too upset. But I warn yer.”

“Thank you, Mr Haynes,” said Dad. “You already have.”

Mother was protesting with her tongue. She had fastened her long hands together like people did in church.

“Next thing he'll be peering in at windows. Frightening women. Jumping on girls. That's what happens before parents'll admit they've got a loopy boy at home.”

Dad was sitting on the old day-bed. He could have been hit over the head.

“Mr Haynes,” said Mother finally, “parents realize more than you, apparently, believe.”

So Mr Haynes was ashamed, and turned grumbling down the path.

“What is it?” asked Arthur, who had come up suddenly through the grass.

His thick white nostrils scented something.

“Nothing, darling,” Mother said. “There's that bowl of cream waiting to be churned.”

While Waldo, who was the cause of it all, had shrivelled up. If it came to that, in moments of exposure, his common state was one of runtish misery. He longed for Mother's hand to reach out and touch some part of him which perhaps could never be touched.

So he went away into what they called the Side Garden, which the grass had already reclaimed. While Dad continued sitting, as though considering the problem Arthur was becoming. As though Arthur was only Dad's problem. When Arthur was Waldo's club
foot. As Waldo limped, over the uneven ground, through the sea of grass and submerged roses.

That night Arthur tried to drag him back behind the almost visible line beyond which knowledge could not help.

“What is it, Waldo?” Arthur golloped. “What were they talking about?”

Arthur was taking, had taken him in his arms, was overwhelming him with some need.

“Nothing,” said Waldo.

He should have struggled, but couldn't any more. The most he could do was pinch the wick, squeeze out the flickery candle-flame.

“We don't mind, do we, Waldo?”

The stench of pinched-out candle was cauterizing Waldo's nostrils. But he did not mind all that much. He was dragged back into what he knew for best and certain. Their flesh was flickering quivering together in that other darkness, which resisted all demands and judgments.

Waldo suspected early on they could not expect more of their father. He was too pathetic. Dad had not recovered from the evening of Mr Haynes's accusation, though he went about trying to show he had, Waldo realized later. “George Brown” as he referred to their father when he had learnt to tolerate him, clung to his principles, or illusions, but did not succeed in impressing himself.

Once Waldo had come across the parents sitting at that deal table they had dragged out into the shade of the plum tree. (Waldo was of the age where his pants would no longer button at the knees — “the leggy stage,” Mother called it.) The light falling on his mother and father through the branches had jaundiced them. They cringed slightly for they were not, in fact, protected, as they had really been hoping and expecting.

“Well,” said Dad, “we have each other.”

Waldo at first resented what he heard. It was as though he, and less immediately Arthur, had been cast off.

“Oh, yes,” answered Mother. “We have each other. We needn't regret.”

“And our conscience is intact. We got out. No one can say it wasn't for the best.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mother. “They were intolerable. Beastly! What else could one expect from people so warped by tradition? My family!”

Although he was standing outside the blast, Waldo shivered.

“Sitting in their pews,” she said, “Sunday after Sunday. Keeping in with God and society. Then going home to sharpen their knives for the week.”

She laughed one of those laughs, and looked down to see what it was, and crushed the little green plums which were grating under her feet.

“We are free, at least,” said Dad, “here.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mother.

“Give the children a chance.”

“The children.”

She put her hand over her husband's. She was so preoccupied, it seemed there would be nobody but Arthur left for Waldo.

Then George Brown their father, a wizened man with a limp, got up and went in to stoke the stove for Mother as he usually did before tea. There were times when Waldo loved their father, he really did. He would have liked to, anyway, and often the intention is acceptable.

About the same period those Miss Dallimores called.

First Mother received the letter, so small, so that you didn't have to write too much, and scented, ever so slightly scented. Waldo realized later on that the Dallimores were specialists in what is done.

Mother said she would bake some scones, and perhaps a few of her rock-cakes.

“Ooh, yeees!” said Arthur. “The rock-cakes, Mum!”

He liked the sugar-crystals on them.

When the boys returned from school the Dallimores were already seated. Their hats were almost more important than themselves. Like their letter, the Dallimores were slightly scented.

“Have you got a cestrum?” Arthur asked.

“I beg your pardon?” Miss Dallimore replied.

“A cestrum. A kind of bush that smells at night. We've got one outside our bedroom window.”

Waldo could have kicked Arthur, but Miss Dallimore only thought it a quaint remark.

“Old-fashioned,” her sister improved on it, but faintly.

For the most part Miss Dorothy Dallimore wiggled her ankle instead of speaking, and helped underline what her sister had to say. It was Miss Dallimore — Miss Lilian — who did the talking. Her dress had little holes in it, which bees began to investigate, till she brushed them away. Angrily, Waldo suspected.

“It is a most curious coincidence,” Miss Dallimore said, and her sister Dorothy supported her in muffled tone, “that we should be paying this visit to Sarsaparilla just when we receive the letter from your cousin.”

“Most,” said Mother, “considering Mollie is not the best of correspondents.”

“But sends the drafts at Christmas. Doesn't she, Mum? Eh? She never forgets that,” said Arthur.

“Oh, we adored Mrs Thourault!”

Miss Dallimore almost gargled with the name, and Miss Dorothy agreed in undertone, watching her own ankle, which she wiggled worse than ever.

“Even as a little girl,” said Mother, “Mollie was the soul of kindness.”

“I bought the pen-knife, didn't I, Mum?” Arthur said. “Last time. With my share of the draft.”

“Oh dear, Arthur, you're tilting the table!”

It was the little ricketty wicker-and-bamboo one they had brought out from the living room.

“Won't you,” she said, “fetch us another plate of cakes?” Then Mother looked shy, for her. “That is, if Miss Dallimore or her sister would care for another cake.”

The Miss Dallimores agreed they adored rock-cakes. They also found Arthur so amusing.

Waldo did not believe it for a moment. He himself was disgusted. If it had been possible he would have taken the two Miss Dallimores, leading them away from the house in which his family lived, while telling them something of interest, preferably about himself, he would have to decide what.

“I am sure Mrs Thourault will be quite excited to have us report on you all,” said Miss Dallimore, who, unlike Cousin Mollie might have been taught her kindness.

“She speaks so
warmly
of you,” Miss Dorothy added, and seemed surprised at herself for having got it in.

“I do wonder whether Mrs Musto will see her way to visiting Tallboys. We did give her the address. We should so love her to meet Mrs Thourault. That would forge yet another link.”