He would say: “You’re a big fat helpless female,” as they mucked around the sideroads in the blazing dew. In the empty classroom, waiting for the time to pass, he would say: “We’re not propping each other up, are we?” Then, of all times, perhaps he loved Arthur most. It was good not to have to think, but sit.
“I’m that tired,” Arthur used to say, laying his head on the desk, and making the noise as though he had constipation and was straining on the dunny.
“It isn’t ‘that’. It’s just ‘tired’,” Waldo used to say, ever so prim.
It made Arthur giggle. Then Waldo might giggle too, motion rubbing their skins together. In the empty classroom hatred had never broken itself against the blackboard.
Johnny Haynes sometimes arrived early, looking for Arthur’s help with a sum, and they went down under the pepper trees. Waldo no longer counted, but tagged along. Everything had that varnished look.
“But can’t you see?” Arthur used to say, sternly, officiously. “It’s that easy.”
All the time his lips would be moving through some mysterious maze of numbers, until at the end, he produced the miraculous, always the correct answer.
Waldo and Johnny had to make an effort not to show they were impressed. It was all too uncanny. In Arthur. Waldo kicked the ground as though he were a little brother waiting. Johnny Haynes, in many, though not in all ways, the brightest boy in the school, grew shiny-lipped and deferential, because for the moment Arthur Brown was necessary.
Poor Arthur, Waldo thought, and might have been loving himself, it was so genuine, in the early sunlight, under the pepper trees.
While numbers, or something, continued to strengthen Arthur against greater evils than Johnny Haynes.
Waldo hated Johnny. Johnny was good at History, Geography, English. And, by arrangement, Maths. When Waldo wrote the essay What I See on the Way to School, and it had to be read aloud to the class, he could not get his breath because of Johnny Haynes sitting in the fourth row. Whenever he could control himself Waldo read in a prim imitation of Dad’s voice, of Dad reading from an intellectual book, say, Urn Burial in the Everyman, which Waldo had suspected might be of interest until he found out.
“‘Many curious and interesting weeds grow in the dust beside the road I take to school’,” Waldo read aloud.
Then he added a catalogue of names which went slightly to his head, like the stench of crushed weeds at certain expectant or exhausted moments.
“‘Boggabri or red-leg, cobbler’s pegs, which some call cow-itch or devil’s pitchforks, the cotton- or woody-pear, and frizzy fennel.’”
Arthur heard that, because he was interested in fennel.
“Frizzy fennel!” Arthur laughed low, loving it.
Mr Hetherington pointed at him, which was what he did when he wanted to frighten boys.
Coming to the bits he knew to be the best, Waldo could feel his heart choking up his throat, till he almost couldn’t bring out the words.
“‘There is the old stone tumbledown house amongst the pear trees where nobody lives any longer, the roof has gone, which looks like a house in which somebody might have committed a few murders …’”
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.”