Boy on the Edge (13 page)

When he’d herded the cows to pasture after morning milking, Henry went straight to the rock mine. He stacked the rocks he’d been mining the day before, but he didn’t have the energy to do much else, so he just sat there, dozing off in the sun.

Emily brought sandwiches for lunch. The little ones crowded around her, happily enjoying her company, but Henry sat aside. He wondered if he should tell her about the party, but then decided to say nothing. After all, he’d provided the cave, so in a way he was an accessory to the crime-not-yet-committed. He felt guilty and looked away when Emily glanced at him, smiling.

It was close to evening by the time John and Mark drove back to the farm. Henry was leading the cows to pasture after evening milking when the green tractor suddenly appeared on the dusty road. John sat at the wheel, bare to the waist, and Mark sat on the fender beside him. The rake was suspended high in the air behind them, the wheels rotating slowly, the pikes shimmering. This was their victory chariot. They were like soldiers coming home from war, full of pride for their deeds on the battlefield, young and excited, with a great feast awaiting them. They didn’t notice him, or pretended not to. The cows became afraid of the racket caused by the diesel engine and kicked their hooves, pricked up their ears, and flared their nostrils, while the monstrous rear wheels gobbled up the dusty road.

John and Mark talked loudly to each other and laughed like grown men. Mark was wearing a red T-shirt with a light jacket tied around his waist. He raised a tight fist and shouted, making the veins bulge on his forehead and his neck. John joined in. They were heroes.

Henry stood in the swamp, below the road. He couldn’t go any farther because the cows wouldn’t move until the danger had passed. As they came closer, Mark ripped off his T-shirt and swung it like a battle flag above his head, shaking his fist at Henry with his other hand, and bellowed a war cry. John lifted one hand from the steering wheel, as if greeting Henry, and held it still in the air while the victory chariot rumbled by in a cloud of brown dust and the stench of diesel fumes.

The wheels on the rake squeaked as the faded pikes slowly turned another circle.

Henry had a hard time falling asleep that night. He was kind of hoping that John would come and invite him to join them in the cave. After all, it was his cave. But John didn’t mean anything he’d said. He didn’t care about Henry. They could go to hell anyway. Henry thought about when John raised his hand off the steering wheel. He’d probably been mocking him. Maybe the gesture was his way of saying, “Here I am, riding my warhorse, and there you are, stuck in a bog behind your cows’ asses.” He should wake Emily up and expose them. Then they would get their punishment on Reverend Oswald’s return.

But then he was also hoping that John wouldn’t invite him at all. His mother had sometimes had parties when he was small. She’d drink with ugly men who bellowed loudly while she lay limp and silent, the apartment engulfed in a gray cloud of cigarette smoke, bottles falling over on the coffee table. Then, sometimes, he had gotten scared.

No. He was not interested in parties.

He tossed and turned under the duvet and tried to sleep, but his heartbeat kept him awake. The longer he lay, squeezing his eyes shut, the more relieved he felt that John hadn’t invited him to join them. But, at the same time, he wondered if John had ever intended to anyway. Then he became angry. Vacillating between relief and anger, he tried to fall asleep.

But just as sleep was finally gaining the upper hand, he heard the cowshed door open. A second later someone peeped into his room, chuckling in the dark.

A foul stench of booze filled the room, as Mark stepped in and sat on his clothes, which lay on the chair. Mark was holding a bottle, which was lit up by the dim moonlight coming through the window. He was smoking.

“Listen,” he said, inhaling sharply and then exhaling. “There’s a problem. We just have two girls. But there are three of us. Three boys, two girls: trouble. Cute girls even. Phew. A big problem.

“John asked me to tell you,” he went on, “that maybe it would be better if you joined us next time. What do you say about that? This won’t be our last party, and that’s a promise.”

Henry lay rigidly in his bed with the duvet covering him. For some reason he was suddenly afraid of Mark, and the familiar troll’s fist punched his stomach from inside. The boy seemed somehow bigger and more threatening, all smiling and happy with a little booze in his head.

“This is for you,” Mark said, handing him the bottle.

Henry had never tasted alcohol. He had seen how it changed normal people into monsters. He was enough of a monster as it was. And it smelled awful as well.

“G-go away,” he said.

Mark put the bottle on the floor and stood up with the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

“Unfortunately the mixers are all in the cave,” he said. “But I’ve always liked it best unmixed; straight from the cow, as they say,” he added with a grin.

Then he staggered out and closed the door behind him.

Henry was relieved for only a moment, and then full of fury. Why did John have to send Mark? Why hadn’t he come himself? And why did he send a bottle? What was Henry supposed to do with it, drink it on his own?

He turned to face the wall, rolled the duvet between his legs, determined to sleep. But he could feel his heart beating fast in his ear, which was pressed against the pillow. He turned onto his other side.

On the floor stood the bottle from John.

What an idiot Henry had been, imagining a friendship just because John had asked him about the east and north, just because they’d laughed together on the knoll that day. What a fool he had been when John had pretended to be helping him with the cows. How stupid to let Mark go so easily. He should have beaten him up, taken the bottle and smashed it in his grinning face. What an idiot.

He pulled the duvet off and sat up with a thousand screaming seagulls in his head. Before he knew it he was fully dressed, walking down Spine Break Path with the bottle in his hand, as fast as his clubfoot would allow him. He was going to give the bottle back to John and tell him to rot in hell.

There was a half-moon in the purple night sky. The breeze from the cliffs brought with it echoes of girly screeches. Henry lay on the edge and looked down. A small fire was burning on the ledge outside his cave. He heard the voices of John and Mark telling the girls tall tales about themselves. They talked fast and loud, interrupting each other all the time. The girls gasped and whined with laughter.

“Thank you, my sordid Lord,” Mark said in a sanctimonious voice, imitating Emily saying grace at dinner. “Thank you for the grub and the fat and the shit that I shat. Amen and hallelujah!”

The laughter seemed to come from every direction, even the ocean. The surf giggled; the cliffs chuckled. And there was music too, a demonic sound that made the rocks tremble.

“Cheers!” John shouted. Then bottles clinked.

Henry stretched his neck farther over the edge, turning his head a little, pricking up his ears. One girl appeared at the mouth of the cave and asked if there was somewhere she could pee. Mark said she could just place her bottom over the ledge and let go. “The biggest toilet in the world!” he said, laughing.

There was a rattling from the chain, then three dark figures crawled up the steep path. Henry jumped to his feet and limped for cover in a hollow close by.

Three girls climbed with ease up to the ledge, three elves from the underworld, looking around them for a good place to pee. John’s worries had obviously been unfounded, because they didn’t seem to be afraid of heights in the least. Three girls, black around the eyes, with purple nail polish and flaming red lips. One in a very wide T-shirt and miniskirt with a dog-collar necklace around her neck. Another with a teddy-bear backpack hanging over her shoulder. The third pointed with a glowing cigarette across the lava field, and the three of them tiptoed over the sharp rocks.

Three girls. One each if Henry had been invited. Somehow this lie was the worst of all.

They squatted in a circle, facing one another like witches, peeing in the lava and throwing glowing cigarette stubs in all directions, whispering about who should get which boy.

One liked John, another liked Mark, but one was afraid of Mark, and the one who liked John agreed Mark was disgusting. They put on more lipstick and ruffled their hair, squawking like seagulls in coarse voices as they inched themselves back down the chain. The demonic music grew louder as soon as they disappeared over the edge.

Henry stayed still, taking in what they’d said. If Mark was disgusting, what was Henry? He wasn’t even good enough to be invited, even though there were too many girls. He was a monster. No doubt about it anymore. Henry lay still and looked at the moon. It looked like half a face, peeping from behind a dark curtain. Maybe God’s spy, checking what the naughty children were doing while the good children were sleeping.

“The devil’s children,” as Reverend Oswald had called them. “Intoxication and Lust are their parents,” he had said. “They will have to live with that dreadful legacy, unless they accept Jesus Christ as the master of their lives. Only then can the devil’s children receive forgiveness,” he’d said.

The Peeping Tom in the sky looked down upon Henry with a furrowed brow. He was also a devil’s child, begotten in the multiple sins of his mother, who probably didn’t even know who his father was. Why does God allow the devil’s children to be born? Henry wondered. Is it so that they can be saved? And what of those who don’t get saved? Are they outcasts forever?

It was easy to understand why the devil was lonely and wanted to make friends. Jesus was, of course, very good and all that, and that’s why he had so many friends. That wasn’t a problem when your dad happened to be God Almighty, who lived in heaven where everybody wants to be. The devil has nothing except himself and his loneliness. Why shouldn’t he try to win people over by every conceivable means? The devil’s children were his children, so why couldn’t he have them in peace?

The eye of the moon moved slowly above the moss-covered lava and the music boomed out over the silver ocean. The surf rumbled in a deep voice, churning sleepily down below, in the bewitching lap of the waves.

Henry wasn’t sure if he fell asleep.

When he opened his eyes the music had stopped, the moon had disappeared, and the sky was gray. White wisps of fog glided over the lava like ghosts. He stumbled to his feet and looked around him. The bottle from John lay on the ground. Now he wished he’d had the nerve to tell Emily everything the day before, for he suspected that if she learned of this later, John and Mark would say that he had been involved. Perhaps she wouldn’t believe them, but the reverend would. Oh, yes, the reverend would punish Henry too, just in case, as a warning.

He owed nothing to the two friends who now slept peacefully in the cave, but he owed it to himself to speak up, before it was too late.

For hadn’t the Lord said: The truth will set you free?

Reverend Oswald climbed the cairn in his shiny shoes, took the top stone with the white cross, and climbed down again.

“The first shall be last,” he said in a somber tone of voice.

He drew a big circle beside the cairn with the heel of his shiny shoe. Then he turned to Henry.

“You will not be going to sleep tonight,” he said, “for tonight you will rebuild this cairn inside this circle here, stone by stone, before the sun rises tomorrow morning.”

Henry bowed his head.

“You might not see the point,” Reverend Oswald continued, “but therein lies your lesson. Since you broke the rules, by not telling us what you knew, but instead deciding to assist John and Mark in their wicked ways, you will work one night for no purpose, in the name of Jesus Christ. Remember this, Henry: this is not a punishment; this is a project from which I hope you will learn a hard lesson. May God be with you.” Then he walked across the yard and disappeared into the house.

Henry stood for a while, looking up at the cairn, wondering what would have happened if he’d kept silent. He had taken the bottle to Emily and told her everything. But she already knew, for the police in the village had contacted her: three girls from the village had come home in the early hours. When their parents asked what happened, they started to cry and said that two boys from the home had forced them to drink, and they had made other, darker, accusations.

Henry was certain he would never forget the look on Emily’s face when she realized that he was an accomplice to the crime.

“You knew? And you only tell me now?” she’d asked, hoping she had misunderstood. But she hadn’t. And Henry knew he had broken her heart.

He hadn’t said a word until he’d realized that there was a possibility that he could have been blamed also. If only he had kept his mouth shut he wouldn’t be here now.

He climbed the cairn and grabbed the first stone, took it in his arms, crawled backward, and placed it in the middle of the circle that the reverend had made on the ground.

The stones were equal in size, each one almost the breadth of his chest, and they stacked nicely. But they were cut from lava rock and had a rough surface, which tore at Henry’s skin. And the stones were heavy.