Help him drag the boards. Drag them up the tree. Arms of a silky sinewy white monkey. Gilbert Horsfall is doing it all. A hard hand helps drag me up, like some old board. Only when he has arranged the boards, says he must get a hammer and nails, and we are crouching there on our platform, you will know what to tell, say, do. Stroke your throat waiting for this moment you might have dreamt about now forming in the fork of this black tree.
But the blood, will it trickle down on the platform, and farther, through the cracks in our house?
* * *
Viva says, ‘Elsie Chapman’s wearing the rags. That’ll curb the cow. It’s nothing, though, Lily and Eva have to take a bath. Essie Bulpit—everybody knows. It’s only the boys don’t understand. Boys are stoopid. Didn’t your auntie Mrs Lockhart tell you about it?’
‘If ever there’s anything you want to ask me, ask, Ireen.’ Never see Aunt Ally, or almost never, now.
It turns out that Mrs Bulpit knows ‘… something that happens to all of us…’ from finding it on this ottoman called a bed. ‘… not to worry, Ireen. Ah, dear…’
She would rather not be faced with things, even those she knows about.
* * *
Gilbert Horsfall is the one who must have either the grinning mask of the ivory monkey he puts on with other boys, or stretched out lying on the floor of our house, elbows pointing at a moon which has not yet come alive, a silver disk before it starts to palpitate with the unborn twins behind its thin skin. Or pneuma you will never talk about again with G. HORSFALL or anybody.
He says, ‘This is nothing like. We’ve got to do something about it — make it real.’
He says ‘we’ but means ‘he’. You are just there as a kind of shadow to his ideas.
He gets hold of a load of old hessian through somebody, think it’s the brother-in-law of Mr Burt the bus driver everybody likes. We — or Gil makes walls for the house out of musty hessian. The hair is sprouting in his armpits. Moisture trembles down from the tips of the pinkish hairs.
Gil says, ‘That’s okay. But not the real thing, d’you think?’ as though expecting you to give an answer.
He thought of the biscuit tin, the upright Arnott’s Arrowroot one, washed out. He borrows the brace-and-bit from the bus driver’s brother-in-law. And tin cutters so that he can tear a hole in the bottom of the biscuit tin. He tears his hand. He bores the hole in the platform, or floor of our house, bleeding and sweating all the time.
‘There,’ he says, ‘we’ve got a dunny now,’ and wants me to sit on the biscuit tin and let him hear I am peeing in our dunny.
Once Mrs Bulpit passes underneath and calls up, ‘You kids up there, what are you doing I’d like to know?’ Her head tilted back, and her mouth, her plastic teeth open, like as if she is laughing when she isn’t.
‘House-keeping’ Gil answers back, kind of not laughing too.
She closes her mouth. ‘I wouldn’t expect to be cheeked by better class children.’
‘But it isn’t cheek — it’s true!’ Has his voice begun to break, or is it just the schoolboy’s cockerel laughter?
You are sitting on the Arnott’s dunny where to please Gil you have learnt to pee. Now you have begun, you can’t stop on any account.
‘And this — raining down. I hope it’s nothing rude — I can’t stand rudery — not in my state of health.’
‘It’s nothing, Mrs Bulpit. Only a possum.’ You jam your thighs together.
‘A possum by daylight? Not likely.’
He pulls you down beside him on the platform, and you lie side by side like the snipers in the mountains in the presence of the enemy.
‘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 pricking hessian. Bruce Lockhart knew a bloke who caught the crabs. They shaved him around the cock, 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 class, 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. Nobody 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 bloody 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 tits.