Between My Father and the King (22 page)

He went to the kitchen and found a plate in the cupboard, and took two scones.

‘Why aren't they under a teatowel on the bench?' the girl asked.

‘Silly, that's only for
made
scones. These are the ones you pay for. Here, one each, and here's butter. You can have yours open if you want to, but I'm having mine shut up.'

‘I'll have mine shut up too,' the girl said eagerly.

‘Well, come on.'

And they walked through the house, their footsteps echoing on the pale naked floor with its tidemark of dust where the carpets, rich and red, had lapped at the skirting boards. They trampled through the house, into every room, and the bedroom too, where the beds were made up on the floor for the night; but there was nothing there, nothing to see, and nothing to listen to but their giant footsteps, like knocking, on the pale wood. The boy felt lonely, and knew then, though he didn't understand how or why, but he
knew
that they were bankrupt.

Two days later when the little girl walked past the house there was a sign nailed across the front fence.
FOR SALE
it said.
APPLY HEDGE AND HAMERS
. The boy, the pocket-knife, the buttered scones, shut up, had vanished. Already the small garden looked uncared for: someone had picked the few flowers; and an untidy wind from over the sandhills had come sneaking, with loads of sand it didn't want, and left it piled up against the front door. The front path, always so neatly swept, was covered with sand.

The little girl screwed up her eyes and would have cried, but the railway lines, red and blue, were there, sharp and bright, going north.

At first being up north was brave and wonderful: as the days passed it grew less brave and less wonderful. The boy and his elder brother and his mother and father didn't live in a house with land; they lived in a flat called
Only Temporary
, where they could hear people walking over their heads, and breathing and coughing in the morning, and playing music; and it was like being for sale, and living on a shelf. Every time visitors came, the boy, whose name
was Charles, noticed that his mother kept saying over and over, the name of the place where they lived.

‘It's
Only Temporary
,' she would say, and wave her hand around the room where they ate and sat on the only chairs they had left now. The others had gone, and the best wardrobe, and the piano and the organ. The boy understood there was some connection between the name of the flat and the way the boxes where they kept the tea things stayed packed, with straw in them, and dust on the plates. There was no best china any more, with roses, and gold rings around the tops of the cups; just plain white china from the sale at Woolworths, and no writing on the bottom.

Soon the boy discovered that the people downstairs called their place
Only Temporary
as well — many people called their place that name — and then he knew it must be the name of everywhere. There was another place, too — well, it might have been the name of a place and it mightn't, but Charles' father talked about it often, excitedly, and his eyes very bright.

‘
Starting from tomorrow
,' he would say.
Starting from tomorrow
. Perhaps instead of a house to live in, or a place,
starting from tomorrow
was a bird to catch with salt on its tail, or a race to win the double on, and the man saying tremendously and firmly,
And this time they're off
.

But Charles' father — Mr Cleave on the letters — didn't work every day now, because, he said, the small man was gradually getting crowded out. Yet he was not small, he was tall and thin, with the bottoms of his trousers not meeting his shoes, so you could see his socks, and their patterns shaped like diamonds, without sparkling. On the days when he was home he did what his wife started to call
lolling about
; sometimes he hammered a nail into a piece of wood, and clawed it out again with the hammer. Then he would say, ‘Be back soon,' and go down the stairs, and come back at half-past six, smelling of what everybody called, with fear in their voices,
drink
.

Though they needn't be so secret and scared, Charles thought, whenever he heard them, for he and Bluey had had the dregs of a bottle they found on the beach. Up north was a beach, certainly, and sea. The beach was covered with squashed onions, orange peel, dog mess, bits of wood with katipo spiders lying there, and other spiders small round and red like little fire alarms, and broken bicycle tires, never whole ones, but chewed away with rat's teeth. And there on the beach, further along on the rocks, the sewers flowed out full and khaki with everybody's business, into the sea . . .

When Mr Cleave in Clinton had to fill in forms, he always wrote Stanley Cleave, Representative.

‘What does it mean?' Charles would ask.

And his father would turn his finger in on himself, pointing it stiffly, like a gun, and tapping his chest, like saying a threat to himself.

‘It means,' he said, ‘that I represent. I stand for, in a business way.'

‘What do you stand for, Dad?'

‘I'm concerned in small leather goods, novelties, pencil cases.'

‘You mean that you stand for them? You are instead of them?'

‘No, I'm
concerned
in them, Charles. I
sell
them.'

It was when he was listening to his mother talking about drink that Charles found out the terrible news. His mother said, ‘To say the least, I'm
concerned
about your father.'

Concerned, concerned, selling?

So Charles found out the real reason they had come up north. It was not for the chewing gum machines or the stairs that whizzed you to the top; it was, as Bluey and their mother and father had kept saying over and over, for the Big Money. And to get the Big Money, it was quite evident to Charles that their mother, on the sly of course, was prepared to sell their father. Charles heard her say, when she didn't know he was listening,

‘Stanley is my one and only concern.'

Stanley — that was their father.

So as the days passed and the holidays came, and the hot summer days, Charles had to spend nearly all of his time at home, watching. It was not that his mother was going to sell their father — that, he thought, would be all right, as long as they bought him back afterwards. It would be all right for him to be sold for a few days, but not forever — and not on the sly. Though in a way he felt sorry for his mother, sitting there sometimes crying because she was getting fat, and wanted to go back to Clinton — for the view, and for not having a drycleaning smell at the kitchen window from
SMOLLET'S BETTER CLEAN BETTER SAVE HOUSE
, where it smelled like bits of burned people left inside the clothes.

It was a Friday that Mr Cleave didn't come home. Charles knew then that the time for the Big Money had arrived. His father had been sold, at what shop he did not know. He stayed up late, hanging around to find out; but all his mother did was cry, and take out her wedding photo, and then hide it. Then she brightened up, and Charles knew she was reckoning how long the Big Money would last, and what she would buy with it, and what his and Bluey's share would be. He hoped, as well, that she was reckoning on getting their father back. The next day she gave Bluey some money, telling him to take Charles to their aunt's place for the day; that she was going out and wouldn't be in for lunch. She had her best clothes laid out on the bed.

So Charles went with Bluey, taking the tram to the end of the city, where they got off, and Bluey caught hold of Charles' wrist and said,

‘If you breathe one word of this you know where you'll land.'

Charles didn't know where, but he guessed it would not be a happy place to land. So he shut his mouth tight; not, though, without asking why. He was entitled to know, just as he was entitled to a share from their father. He was quite sure now that
they would be able to buy their father back at a considerable profit, quite soon. Yes, at a considerable profit, Charles thought, and he liked the way the words sounded: like pressing for a rise, and the Big Money. The Big Money, he knew, was a tall circular building made completely of glass which did not break although you knocked your fist against it. Around the outside was a row of open windows with chutes hanging from them, that could be changed to moving staircases, so that you could choose how you took your share: either you pressed a button and the gold and diamonds came down to you through a chute, or you pressed another button and were carried to the top of the building where your fortune waited for you. There you had the advantage of looking down on the rest of the world.

‘Well, why?' Charles asked Bluey. ‘And let go of my wrist.'

‘Remember, if there's so much as a peep out of you, I'll brain you. And don't ask questions. You'll see.'

And to Charles' surprise, Bluey walked over to the garage at the corner, spoke to the man, and the man pointed to a motorbike leaning against the wall.

‘Okay,' Bluey said, and wheeled the bike over to where Charles was standing.

‘Hop on the back,' he said, unable to disguise his pride, and leaning down and fiddling with the engine, though he didn't need to.

Bluey's face was pale, as if he had been shut in a cellar, and fed through the cracks in the wall. His throat jutted out like a plum; and there were red peck marks under his chin where he had been shaving; and a blue vein, like the thin giggle from inside a fish, lying, throbbing, under his skin. He wore tight black pants, narrow at the hips, so that he bulged in front, like sheep's kidneys, and you could see it hanging. He was really Charles' stepbrother, from their father's other wife, and hadn't lived all the time with them.

Charles, looking at him bending down over the bike, felt a
shiver of delight and hate, and lashed out, punching Bluey on the arm, hard.

‘Come off it,' Bluey said. ‘Cut the rough stuff,' — speaking casually, and not really angry, as if Charles were a man, and a friend — ‘Now! Hold on to your lights.'

He sprang on the front seat of the bike, danced his foot up and down the side, till the engine woke, spluttering and snarling; then the bike sprang forward, skidding along the track into the road.

Charles, with the wind blowing in his face, pressed his face close to Bluey's back, and the oily smell of his leather jacket.

‘Is it yours?' he called out, muffled.

Bluey shouted back, ‘Whose do you think it is? Do you think I stole it?'

‘Where's Mum gone?'

‘Dad's hopped it. Forever,' Bluey shouted.

‘Did he bring much?'

‘Much what?'

So Bluey couldn't know, either, of the way his father had been sold. Charles didn't answer Bluey's question; it was too hard to talk and listen with the wind roaring in his ears. He wondered where they were going — certainly not to Aunty Dolly's.

Bluey stopped the bike at a beach, a small one alongside the long white one; the small one was guarded by huge rippled trees that sparked out dark-red blossoms like quiet fireworks. There was another bike leaned up against one of the trees.

‘This is where the gang meet,' said Bluey. ‘Good for a swim.'

They dismounted and walked through the bush and the grass to a small cliff jutting out, made of the old roots of the tree. They jumped down it, scuffling the sand, and flopped onto the small bright blue and gold beach.

‘It's ours,' Bluey said. ‘Hi!'

There were three people swimming in the water, and two were women with high voices.

Bluey turned, fiercely, to Charles. ‘If I thought you were old enough to know I wouldn't have brought you here. If you say a word about what happens or what you hear, I'll blow your brains out.'

He must have a gun, thought Charles respectfully, and promised on his word of honour never to give the show away; he did not think it was time for him to die yet.

The three people came up out of the water; they were glistening. The man had tiny shorts on and the two women wore small pants affairs tied with bows; and covering them at the top — just enough to hide, and at the same time just enough to show what they were trying to hide — they wore small pieces of stuff like bows. One of the girls had long long legs like a giraffe. The other, the one they called Pearl, was plump, and jutted out at the sides like a cliff, and you couldn't see between her legs as you could Liz's (that was her name) for her legs were close up to each other, with no space in between. She had fair hair.

‘What on earth,' said one of the girls, looking at Charles.

Charles felt himself blushing. He wanted, then, to cry. It was all very well, selling their father, and now, well, he knew they would tell him to hop it. He looked down at the sand and bored a little hole in it with his finger.

Bluey explained. Charles was surprised that he didn't say what was going on at home, or anything about their father, or that they'd had scarcely any breakfast that morning, and that their mother had put on her best clothes. By the way Bluey talked you would have thought they lived in a different house altogether, not even at
Only Temporary
.