Turquoiselle Read online

  After the move, which had also meant little to him, or even probably to his mother, Andy went to the school one day because he felt like it. (The novelty, perhaps.)

  The midmorning break came nevertheless, and found Andy in the school yard, with some as ever non-personal items he had thieved in his pockets, already having lost interest and thinking of leaving. But the sun was warm, and he leaned on the brickwork, being a lizard and absorbing it as lizards did, apparently, in hot, still noonday countries – Brazil, Spain, the Caribbean.

  Lizardlike, motionless, his soulless eyes swivelled in his static scaly frame. And soon he saw Heavy up near the rain-shelter, with the two bullies, Cox, (who had not lost a tooth) and E-bone, looming over him.

  Andy had not come across Heavy since their encounter in Station Road. There was no reason he should have done.

  Cox had kept out of Andy’s way too, since Andy had thumped him. And E-bone was a moron, Andy had long ago deduced, a muddy-coloured, black-white spite-fuelled boil, inert but able to burst when given a cue.

  The lizard watched.

  Some of the other ‘young people’ – as custom was coming to title them – did too.

  “I wonder if he’d just fall over,” said Cox. “Yeah?”

  “Go’won,” said E-bone. “Pushim.”

  “Shall I push him?” Cox, raising his face to the sky, asked God.

  Seemingly God concurred it was feasible.

  So Cox set his big hands on Heavy’s big fat shapeless torso and pushed.

  Heavy did nothing. He looked at Cox, as if not sure what Cox was. Heavy did not appear frightened. But he was very big, a blubbery consolidated mass that rocked a bit but did not give.

  “It’s a game,” said Cox to Heavy, determinedly. And this time he drew back, considered, and slammed himself against Heavy, and E-bone laughed, and some of the others who watched sniggered in chorus, glad it was not them being attacked by Cox.

  Heavy seemed to go over only after an interval, and very slowly, like a too-large and wrongly-made doll. He swung backwards, not resisting, his face even now without any dismay, let alone panic. Too thick to drop easily, somehow defying gravity all the way down.

  When he hit the ground, the hard concrete below the edge of the rain-shelter – also concrete, chipped and grazing, and his huge unwieldy unsightly head banged down too, and the smack of the impact sounded, or seemed to sound – even then he did not really react. And after it, he lay there, as unmoving as Andy the lizard against the warm brickwork. But Heavy’s expression did slowly change. It became one of the vaguest surprise. Brainless, Heavy. What peril could there be for him in having his skull smashed on the ground?

  Then he got up, and it was a marvel. A sort of jumbled upward flight– Why had Cox and/or E-bone not put the boot in? Laughing too much maybe. They also missed the curious beauty of Heavy’s getting up, the cumbersome grace – agility –

  Heavy anyway was again on his feet. Gracefully he shambled forward, across to them. He did not look as if he had been hurt.

  Abruptly Andy noticed he had unpeeled himself from the hot wall. He was not a lizard. He was a human, and wide awake.

  “It’s a game,” said Heavy, to Cox and E-bone.

  “Wan’ notha go?” asked E-bone.

  “It’s my turn,” said Heavy, with gentle logic.

  And reaching out, effortless – like a gigantic fuddled swan— he too pushed with his two flails of arms that were wings. Cox and E-bone simultaneously, astounded and howling, fell backward. In due season, their bodies hit the hard and bitter earth, their heads smacked – crack, crack – on the concrete.

  There was not much noise now in the yard, which once had been called by the name “Playground”.

  Then there came the sounds of Cox puking, and E-bone crying.

  Rather oddly, Andy remembered right then someone had said E-bone’s father had been killed. Perhaps this was not true. Or it had been long ago. But in E-bone’s sobbing misery, Andy unnervingly heard somehow his own helpless lament, his mother lying by the cooker after the advent of his father’s fist, and he curled up against the wall, waiting for the next onslaught “Shut up you little cunt–”

  “Shut up, you little cunt,” said Andy, under his breath.

  And as he did so, Heavy, who could not have heard him, turned to gaze his way. And then Heavy was bending over Cox and E-bone. Heavy murmured, sadly, “It’s just a game, you didn’t ought to play with it, if it makes you unhappy.”

  He was halfway up Hawthorne Road, (his new route home) before he realised Heavy was again, as once before, shambling along in his wake.

  Andy ignored him. Last time telling Heavy to fuck off had not worked after all. But in a short space the fumbly stupid sound of Heavy’s feet and shoes annoyed Andy enough he did turn round.

  “What?”

  “Isn’t the sky blue,” said Heavy.

  “No. It’s orange. Piss off,” Andy added, despite the redundancy. It would not work, nor did it. As Andy resumed his journey back to the new flat, Heavy fell in beside him.

  How completely weird he was. You knew it, obviously, but then you sort of really looked at him, and really knew it. And it was much, much worse than you had ever reckoned.

  “I saw an oransh sky once,” said Heavy, meditatively. “Something was on fire.”

  “Your fucking brains.”

  “Oh,no. Old houses.”

  Andy glared at the passing traffic. Cars, buses. Congested. Fast.

  “And in a film,” said Heavy, “I saw.”

  Andy said, “Look, shove off, would you?”

  Heavy did not seem to know what had been said. He kept on walking at Andy’s side, and smiling up into the sky.

  “There’s a bird,” said Heavy, with soft pleasure.

  Evidently birds had just been invented, and were still a rare phenomenon.

  Andy thought about Heavy pushing both Cox and E-bone over, and how someone had gone for the nurse and then, while somebody else asked E-bone, who was still crying, if he had pushed Cox over, E-bone said he had not meant to, they had just been playing about was all. Heavy had already ambled off, but it appeared E-bone was afraid of Heavy now and would not incriminate him. Cox, who had stopped being sick, had been taken to lie down.

  Andy wondered if he could get the better of Heavy in a fight. Surely he could? He could not picture, however, Heavy fighting him. Heavy’s plasticky skin was impervious. How ugly he was. So ugly it was not actually ugly, but some other type of visual shock.

  Andy was staring at Heavy. Andy moved his eyes away.

  As they turned up Lodge Road, Heavy said, “What’s it mean, your name?”

  Beyond the traffic lights, Andy could see the off-licence on top of which was Sara’s new flat. This was far enough. He stopped, angled round and looked at Heavy. Andy thought, He’s like a punch-bag. If you hit him he would come back at you. Like he did with Cox and E-bone. It was not a defence or a reflex, not anger, but a built-in mechanism.

  “Look, man,” said Andy in a level grown-up voice he had heard his mother use, and some of the people with the social services, “I need to be on my own. All right?”

  Heavy looked at him. Heavy’s round eyes were the colour of mud, or slime.

  “I had an apple in my lunch,” said Heavy. “I like apples. Some people don’t like apples, like in the By-bell.” (He meant Bible, Andy knew that from some class when they were being taught things from the Bible and Heavy pronounced it as he did, and seemed unable to alter this, so the teacher gave up.) “That was why he gave it her.”

  Perhaps, Andy thought, he could just take to his heels like last time. He would soon outrun Heavy. But he heard himself reluctantly say, “Who did?” And did not know why he had.

  “The serpan. He didn’t like apples so he gived his one to that woman in the garden.” (Oh. he meant Adam and Eve, What the teacher called a Parable, or something. Some senseless fairy tale–) “And she liked the apple, but she shared it with her boyfriend, because sh
e liked him too and wanted he should have some. And then that other one came and he was angry. But the serpan was only not wanting to waste it and she was only being kind. My moth–ah told me. She tells me stuff.”

  “You are,” said Andy, slowly and precisely, “off your fucking nut. Now fuck off or jump under a car, whichever you’d like best.”

  “I’d like best,” said Heavy, with a sudden dreamy energy, “to fly–” And spreading out his two bolsters of arms, he spun away, careering off along the pavement, laughing in a drainlike gurgling, and here and there jumping up the half foot that was all his bulk and discoordination seemed to allow.

  Andy too ran for it, the other way, dodging in behind the shops before Heavy could think better of flight and try to rejoin him.

  She had mixed race too, as E-Bone did, Sara, his mother. Sara’s father, for protection from racial prejudice, had changed the family name to its anglicised version, Carver, which Andy then at birth received, as he was a bastard, (or born out-of-wedlock, as no one any longer said... did they?) E-bone’s mum’s dad had not altered their family name, and so E-bone received that, as he too was a bastard boow. Andy did not remember this name, though it had something to do with islands, he believed. E-bone’s proper first name was Ebony. His mother perhaps had been making some statement, rather an out-of-date one, if so. It might have been an OK name, but not when you were eleven. Nor, at any rate in England, would Andy’s real first name have been. Andreas. Which probably would get pronounced Anne-dria, or Andri-arse. Andy was the easier option.

  E-bone meanwhile had a dead father, maybe killed, or only dying young. And Andy had no father, for that monstrous thing was gone from their lives too, Sara’s and his. Heavy’s mother (or moth-ah) was definitely dead. Some of them had been told this early on, by a teacher trying to protect Heavy from them. Yet, as Andy had seen, he always referred to her in the present tense.

  But Heavy was mental. Went without saying. You could not look like that, and not be.

  “The leaves that are left are leaving,” said Heavy.

  “You shouldn’t try,” said Heavy, “to lock the stable door after the horse has bolted it.”

  Heavy said, “That girl has a lake in her eyes.”

  Heavy said, “Look how the wind runs backward.”

  Heavy said, “A tortwas can’t change its shell.”

  “Shilt,” said Heavy.

  “Shit.”

  “Shilt,” Heavy agreed.

  Nothing was special about Sackville, it was an ordinary secondary school. A modernish, many-celled glassy building, with yards outside and ‘playing’ fields, where organised compulsory unplayful games took place. Andy attended sometimes, and sometimes did not, as before. As before also, if more lavishly and sharply, he was warned, and told that his mother would be requested to explain his absences. Andy paid no true attention, simply politely nodded. The attempted control of the Young was already toughening, but stayed sporadic, and, initially, without full back-up at Sucks. The teachers here seemed especially harassed and incompetent, at least to Andy.

  That Heavy also appeared at Sackville-Sucks never suggested itself as an oddity. Heavy was, the general opinion had it, sub-basement-normal. But Sucks was not exactly an educational paradigm. It took what it was given, and tried to drone, yell, mock or coerce fragments of knowledge into it. And where presented with slippery and non-absorbent subjects such as Andy, at one extreme, and the ‘moronical’ Heavy at the other, gave up. Only legal punishments were allocated – extra work, enclosures, reviews, and tirades promising parent-victimisation in lieu of pupil-torture. These were not absorbed, either, and rarely gone along with.

  When Andy first noticed Heavy, slowly wandering over a games field where he had been told to “Run, boy, for Christ’s sake –” Andy was not unduly astounded.

  Heavy, by then, kept turning up in Andy’s vicinity. Most frequently since their last days at the primary.

  It went without saying, Andy, back then, always attempted – and as a rule succeeded in – getting away. This became a sort of tiresome game, pointless and stupid, for Andy. Just as were the organised rugger, cricket and football later, at Sucks. Yet Heavy still morphed into a fixture, meandering along behind Andy, or at his side, until sloughed. Oblivious to insult or the waves of hatred Andy expelled in his direction: conceivably Heavy had become accomplished at such a thickening of emotional skin. He took no notice of Andy’s gibes, though when Andy ran Heavy let him go – maybe because physically, Heavy was not equipped to pursue. While they were ‘together’ Heavy would offer his curious observations, mis-takes, musings. And sometimes, as partially with the ginger cat, and fully the flying, Heavy would, at last, now and then himself leave Andy.

  Why Andy never physically went for Heavy remained unsure. Andy suspected it would be useless. Like the push-induced fall. Heavy would simply once more rise up. Possibly, too, Andy pitied him. Though it did not seem like that.

  And then the other thing happened.

  It was on the final day when he finished at the primary school. Andy had gone in mainly to see what he could steal, since thereafter these venues could be off-limits, short of breaking in. And that Andy never did. Had never had to.

  “There was a wolve in the garden,” said Heavy.

  Andy going home – had been, and now they jointly were – walking along Hawthorne Road.

  “Fox,” Andy corrected.

  “No, it was a wolve,” said Heavy gently, prepared to be patient with such ignorance.

  “You don’t get fucking wolves here,” said Andy. But without real anger. It even crossed his mind that a wolf had got out from somewhere, and with luck would kill and eat Heavy.

  “You get wolfs,” said Heavy. “Just people lie about it.”

  Two women were walking towards them down the sloping street. One had a small black puppy on a lead, eager and intrigued, even it seemed by the noisy, reeking flow of traffic.

  Andy thought it was best if he just kept quiet and let cracked fucking Heavy ramble on. Andy could make his own getaway in the usual place. (Andy’s pockets were lined with little thieved bits and pieces. Nothing needful. Nothing really of value . His.)

  Sara might already be home. Her cleaning work had been rather sketchy in the past seven months. Some regular clients had moved. Others were economising, (or had sacked her). She would not though, even if in, stay long. It would be a ‘girls’ night out’, like all evenings when she washed her hair the previous morning, as she had today.

  They were almost level with the two women and the dog. Heavy, Andy saw, was staring at the dog, yet not with his usual mesmerised-by-animal pleasure. Heavy looked – concerned –

  “Oh, Joan,” said one woman to the other who held the dog’s lead, “your –”

  “Fuck –” said Andy.

  Rush, grunt and roar said the traffic, breaking open, leaving a space, as someone turned off into a driveway – with oncoming vehicles speeding adjacently forward from each side –

  And the eager, intrigued puppy-dog, which had, with its antics, somehow snapped its lead, went bounding forward –

  Hurling itself out –

  On to the mindless, lethal, hungry road.

  What happened then remained for Andy a puzzle, its images kaleidoscopic, only really assimilated afterwards, and perhaps incorrectly.

  The dog had managed to gallop across half the road, due to the brief gap caused by a single car leaving the stream; a bus ran along behind it, moving rather more slowly.

  But the traffic on the far side, pouring left to right, was at full charge.

  And now once more, as the bus hove forward, the near side – right to left – was also congesting and pouring, an urgent glittering snot of vehicles.

  In the split second that followed the dog’s dive into this murdering sandwich, something else had shot forward, off the pavement and into the river of death.

  The motion of this second springing thing was lumbering and big, was a senseless rubbery tumble. But als
o – it was swift, honed, imperious, coordinate. A leopard springing that was, too, a jelly-lead balloon.

  Sounds altered.

  Screeching and bumping, tinkle of tiny things that shattered, horns, psychopathic shouts.

  And at the centre of the sounds, a scene. A bundle was curled up on the road, somehow glimpsed, seen fully, in the middle of a formless chaos where speed became stasis, a stopped frame, a still.

  Huge and incongruous, Heavy curled up on the ground in a ball, with motionless traffic inches from him.

  The two women who had been with the dog were crying. One had screamed, yes, Andy could hear the scream even now, hung up, snagged in the air, with the new voices crashing about below it.

  Drivers were gabbling in their cars, some getting out.

  Both traffic lanes had been stalled by the stop-frame, but they remained animate. How odd, no one seemed hurt, only unnerved and made feral by rage.

  Heavy, of course, was dead. At least one car must have struck him. The dog would be dead too, somewhere under or furled into his bulk, when he tried to save it –

  And then Heavy unfolded himself, again with that ungainly, ugly, and somehow perfect physical connectedness. Up he stood, holding the small black dog in his arms. And the dog was wagging its tail – Andy could see it clearly, waggling, a tiny black penis of joy. It was licking Heavy’s face, joyously. Rather than minced, it had apparently just had the best thrill of its immature life.

  With his usual shamble Heavy clumbered off the road on to the the pavement, ignoring the bluster of the various drivers, none of whom really anyway seemed to register Heavy completely, so busy were they inspecting wing mirrors from which the glass had fallen out, or bumpers and fenders scraped by fellow motorists’ motors. The line of stalled left to right traffic stretched quite a way. People were crowding on to the pavements farther along, craning to see what the fuss was about. The near side had resumed its forward momentum.

  Without any bother at all Heavy came over, and presented the laughing puppy to its weeping owner.