The Solid Mandala Page 4

  “Ye-ehs,” Mr Allwright said, and smiled.

  He was a tall man in thick glasses. Waldo and Arthur loved the little soiled calico bag in which he carried his change.

  But you could see that nobody would ever really understand about the classical pediment. And Dad’s hands, thin and yellow, trembled as they offered the open book.

  “Good-o, Mr Brown!” Mr Haynes said helpfully at last, after it had grown embarrassing. “We’ll make yer happy! We’re gunna see you get what you’ve set yer heart on.”

  So the classical pediment rose by degrees above the normal weatherboard, giving it the appearance of a little, apologetic, not quite proportionate temple, standing in the trampled grass.

  “That what you had in mind?” asked Mr Haynes, stepping back with his hands in the pockets of his leather apron the evening they were officially finished.

  “More or less,” Dad replied low and indistinct.

  It had been auditing week at the bank.

  Later on, when the twins got to refer to their father as “George Brown”, Arthur affectionately, Waldo with irony and understanding, they would look back and see him seated on the front veranda under the classical pediment, the branches of increasing quince trees hemming him in, the long trailers of the rambler drenching his taut skin with crimson. The boards at the edge of the veranda were eaten by the weather already in his lifetime, but the day-bed held out till well after, only giving in to the borer the year the boys retired.

  But in the beginning, when the house stood square, smelling of timber, and still wholly visible, they used to sit on the veranda in a fairly compact, family group — Arthur a little to one side, picking his nose till Mother slapped him. (Waldo, who picked his in private, would watch to see his brother caught out.)

  “We haven’t thought what colour to paint our house,” it suddenly occurred to Dad.

  Mother was stringing beans because they were in.

  “What do you fancy, Annie?” he asked.

  “Oh, I!”

  Mother held up her long throat.

  “Haven’t you any ideas?”

  “Ideas?” she said. “Yes!” she said. “That is what they accused me of.”

  “But we must have some sort of colour. Red white green.”

  Arthur began to snigger and shake.

  It was about this time that Waldo decided every member of his family was hopeless but inevitable.

  “Or brown,” said Dad. “Brown is a practical colour. And, by George, appropriate, isn’t it?”

  He too was amused at last because he had made an appropriate joke.

  “Brown, yes, is a practical colour,” said Mother softly, looking at her fingers and the pared beans.

  There was black by then in the cracks of her fingers, to say nothing of the rough patch the needle had pricked on one, which was possibly the most interesting finger of all.

  Anyway, when the money was saved, they had the house painted brown, and it was accepted by the landscape, because at that time all the other houses were brown. As the hot brown box settled into the steaming grass the classical pediment was no longer so painfully noticeable.

  It was Waldo who disturbed the peace.

  “I’m thinking of writing a play,” he announced. “It’s going to be a Greek tragedy.”

  Dad raised his head as though scenting an approach.

  “How?” he asked. “You never ever saw one. Haven’t even read one.”

  “I read part of a play,” said Waldo. “The one about the man on the rock.”

  It was difficult to tell whether Dad was annoyed or pleased.

  “You’d better learn to live first.”

  “Don’t discourage him, George,” said Mother, enjoying the possibilities.

  Waldo began to sidle. He was never easily carried away.

  “I’ll write it,” he said. “Afterwards I’ll act it. Here on the veranda.”

  Then Arthur, who had come up carrying the full pail, on the way from the tether to the scullery, halted, and started gulping for words.

  “Waldo,” he said, “I can act in your play, can’t I? Can’t I?” he repeated.

  It was suddenly too much for everybody else. They fell silent, in the light through the young quince trees. The western horizon was a thin, strangling, copper wire.

  Arthur had put down his pail. They heard the clank when the handle fell.

  “Can’t I?” he gulped.

  “No,” said Waldo.

  Because he knew this was something he could not bear to share with his brother, whose breathing he used to listen to whenever he woke in the night, the brother who looked almost right inside him when they opened their eyes on twin pillows in the morning.

  Arthur was not put off. He was as usual so good-tempered. Leaving the pail he began to clamber up on the veranda.

  “Oh well,” he said, “I’ll have to write a Greek tragedy myself. Then I can act all the parts.”

  Dad was prepared to humour him, and Mother said: “Yes, dear. Certainly” — in one of her softer voices, and touched him.

  A gentle attention prevailed, because from certain angles and at certain moments, Arthur was a strong and handsome boy. Now he was standing astride the veranda, raising his flushed throat, so that the words rising were clearly visible inside.

  “And what will your play be about, Arthur?” Mother asked.

  “A cow,” Arthur blurted out.

  “But a Greek tragedy!”

  “A cow’s as Greek, I suppose,” said Dad, “as anything else.” Then he added, in the voice of somebody whose opinion is sometimes asked: “Whether she’s a figure of tragedy is a matter for consideration.”

  Arthur was grappling with his problem.

  “This is a big, yellow cow,” he told them. “She’s all blown out, see, with her calf. Then she has this calf. It’s dead. See?”

  There was Arthur pawing at the boards of the veranda. At the shiny parcel of dead calf.

  Everyone else was looking at the ground by now, from shame, or, Waldo began to feel, terror.

  “You can see she’s upset, can’t you?” Arthur lowed. “Couldn’t help feeling upset.”

  It was suddenly so grotesquely awful in the dwindling light and evening silence.

  “Couldn’t help it,” Arthur bellowed.

  Thundering up and down the veranda he raised his curved, yellow horns, his thick, fleshy, awful muzzle. The whole framework of their stage shook.

  “That’s enough, I think,” said Dad.

  “Oh, Arthur,” Mother was daring herself to speak, “we understand enough without your telling us any more.”

  Arthur stopped at once, as though he had been going to in any case.

  “But it isn’t all tragedy,” he reassured. “Because she can have other calves, can’t she? And does. She has eighteen before she dies.”

  “Yes,” sighed Mother. “Cows often last for years, and lead very useful lives.”

  “So you see?” Arthur laughed.

  Dad got up and limped inside. You could hear him lifting the porcelain shade off the big lamp.

  Mother continued sitting on the day-bed, which she used to say had an elegance, a character of its own, even though vicissitude had battered it a bit. In time, in the dusk, she might have forgotten about her family.

  At least Waldo was the only one who had remained standing by. He could not help wondering how Arthur of all people had thought about that play. Ridiculous, when not frightening. Waldo would write a play, something quite different, when he had thought of one.

  Then Dad, who had brought the dining-room to light, called from inside: “What about tea, Mother?”

  He sounded tired again, and patient.

  Mother said: “Yes,” and went in as if nothing had happened, to get the meal she had stopped trying to call “dinner”.

  Only Waldo lingered on the stage which no longer contained their wooden play.

  These were the flickering, barely-experienced, obsessive moments with which the mind
dealt more fully after they had been stored up. At the time, the rambling structure of days impressed its greater importance on the eye by sheer mass of repetitive detail. The Brown boys never stopped, it seemed, marching up the hill to school. There was the endless, suffocating, chalkdust fear of wondering how little you could get away with. There was the rather exhilarating traffic of the yard: taws for liquorice, or liquorice for taws. Brutality left its victories and its bruises. Once Arthur got a ferret from a boy called Eb Honeysett. I’m going to love it dearly, Waldo, Arthur confessed privately, I’m going to call it Scratch. Scratch looked over his shoulder and never came up out of the burrow. They were marching up the hill to school. Waldo could not bear to listen to Arthur breathing the way he breathed, and would look round to see whether anyone behind might be hearing, though of course if they were, he never let on there was anything unusual. He could not bear what he had to bear, his responsibility for Arthur.

  Occasionally they went up the hill earlier with Dad — Mother said he would appreciate it — when their father left to catch the train. Dad had to leave pretty early. At times it was barely milky light. The stationmaster’s lamp grated on the morning. But everyone, wider awake than normal, was exchanging conversation about the weather and other matters which had suddenly assumed importance. Dad, who had spent the night clearing his throat and turning on the other side of the wall, was perhaps the widest awake of any of them. As they walked with him past the loaded thistles and rusty docks, or crunched around the little, painted-up siding, Dad’s head, in spite of the hair, the eyebrows, and moustache, had the naked look of cherrystones. At that hour, but only then, he seemed to see through anyone. His eyes, Mother said, were black, though Waldo knew that that was imagination; they were brown. They were terribly brown as Dad stood shuddering in the dewy morning under the billycock hat he continued to wear, and which gave him away as a Pom.

  Waldo was always glad when the little train steamed off with Dad in the direction of Barranugli, and they need not expect him back till evening. He had an idea Arthur was glad too. But Arthur would grow sleepy again, and catch hold of Waldo’s hand, which even then Waldo hated.

  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 Wald
o’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.