Pynter Bender (21 page)

Deeka took up a handful of bramble, broke them in the middle, doubled them up and broke them again.

She tossed them in the fire.

What Pynter did not tell them at home was that here, in his school above the ocean, their headmaster, John Coker, was saying the same things as Deeka. He hid his urgings behind words, disguised his raging with a voice that fell on Pynter's ears like the tinkling of copper bells. Every morning, they said, their headmaster received a phone call from a man with a beautiful voice somewhere in San Andrews. It ordered him to hold his boys in. To lock the gates and keep them there. To guarantee their best behaviour to and from his school. Because his pupils had been standing on oil drums and boxes beside the road, hot with hate. They had no fear of guns. The man in San Andrews wanted to know
the source of this new recklessness, which had them shouting curses even as they were lifted into long blue vans.

John Coker used to be cruel. He would take a piss-soaked strip of leather to a boy's naked behind for nothing. The wickedness had been there on his face for all to see: the quick pink tongue which slipped across his lips like a flame, tasting their nervousness, savouring their fear of him.

It was Marlis Tillock, who Coker had once hated, who had taught him love. It was the only way Pynter could put it, though he would never have said this to Marlis. Coker never mentioned Marlis knocking out his son all those years ago. But from that time on, the headmaster seemed to know him. He punished him for everything: the loudness of his voice; the shabbiness of his shoes; a missing button on his shirt; the dirt beneath his fingernails. For strolling when the bell rang; for running when he was supposed to walk. For talking with his mouth stuffed.

Perhaps Marlis had softened the headmaster with his shamelessness. Perhaps John Coker got so tired of chastising him he'd lost the joy in it. They became accustomed to the sight of Tillock sitting on the rails of the veranda, his legs swinging with the regularity of twin pendulums, while Coker leaned against the door frame of his office and read to him or talked. Their conversations after school lasted hours, more often than not with Coker's finger somewhere on the pages of a large book and Tillock leaning over it, looking up at him from time to time and nodding. It was a conversation that seemed to have no end to it.

John Coker was there against the doorway of his office with a book in his hand during the lunch break, with a little smile on his face, when word reached the school that Tillock had been lifted off the road. Sislyn returned to the staff room, sat at her desk making circles in the air with the pencil in her hand.

The school went silent. Their eyes were on the white shirt in the office, the hard, dark curve of the telephone pressed against John Coker's ear, the rapid rise and fall of his arms. His voice
came high and sharp just once before subsiding into something softer. And then there came the sense of frozen time as the headmaster stepped out of his office, reached for the bell and rang it.

He told them to go home.

Pynter watched the boys file out of the courtyard, their humming mixing with the drumming of the sea below. Now he sat alone and watched Coker, his shoulders squared and stiffened, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up past his elbow. He'd dropped the bell on the chair beside the doorway, brought the palm of his hands up to his hair and brushed it vigorously. It was a Marlis Tillock gesture. And for no reason that Pynter could point to, he felt his heart flip over. Coker rested his elbow on the railings and stared out into the empty yard. Now he seemed almost at ease, as if the troubles of this morning had never really happened.

Pynter pulled his books together and stepped into the courtyard. It was early. He didn't want to go home. He might walk over to Patty's store and spend some time with her.

A flash of white at the corner of his eye made him raise his head.

Coker was on the veranda above him, looking down as if he'd never seen him before. And then the voice, relaxed, matter-of-fact. ‘Tillock, he was, er?'

‘In my class, sir.'

‘And you're, er?'

‘Pynter Bender, sir.'

‘Yes,' he said, as if the name was so obvious it was foolish of him to ask.

‘Uhm, Painter Brenda? You remember what Hegel said about, er, cabbages and, er, death?'

‘Don' know nobody name no Hegel, sir.'

‘Pardon me?'

‘I'm not aware of the existence of anyone called Hegel, sir.'

‘French Revolution?' Coker cocked a chin at him. ‘The coldest, shallowest of, er … '

‘I still don' know, sir.'

Coker stroked his head. ‘Tillock would have known,' he said.

He walked into his office and closed the door behind him.

The next day they were chewing on their lunches when the bell rang. The school already knew that the night before Coker had travelled to Marlis's home. Whatever he met there was still in his eyes when he stood before them, haggard, his white shirt a pale bloom against the gloom of the large hallway. From now onwards, he said, they were going to leave the chair of every missing boy in every classroom empty. No one would use those chairs. There was also a small blackboard beside the door of his office with a mark on it for every one of them who, for reasons other than delinquency or truancy, did not return. Word of this slight modification in school policy must not go beyond these gates, of course. Did they understand that?

He rested his elbow on the edge of the stage. He'd been thinking about Troy and the early days of Christendom, he said. He'd been thinking about the Seven Ages of the World and the Ravishing of Lucretia, all worth talking about in some detail, of course, but it wasn't the point of this assembly. He'd been wondering, you see, not so much about the marvellous things that Jason of the Argonauts did, as about why so many of his men, certain of the death he was taking them to, still wanted to follow him.

They should think about that, he said. That was worth thinking about.

And in this glass-walled hall, the images of blood and fire Coker fed them seemed to meld with the layering hum of the boys and the sound of the sea thrashing against the rocks below.

Outside, their teachers were standing in small groups when they left the hall. They seemed as sober and adrift as Coker. Sislyn curled a finger at Pynter. He followed her to the back of the school. She sat on the grass above the lagoon and patted the earth beside her. He sat down and pulled up his knees.

‘You wrote this?' She held up a sheet of paper.

‘They my words, miss.'

‘What's all this end-of-the-world-o'-God-my-belly-hurtin thing with you? And you so young for all o' that? Eh?' She waved the paper at him.

Pynter kept his eyes on a schooner in the distance. The mast was leaning low, the bottom of the boat turned halfway up towards the sky. Sislyn followed his gaze. For a while she too seemed to be absorbed by the struggles of the boat. She folded the paper and rested it on her lap.

‘I like your mind. I like your restlessness. I always did. And I don't like that. I don't like looking at you when I'm not supposed to. I'm a teacher. There are boundaries. You think you special, but you not. You … '

‘You like the poem, miss?'

A current of irritation flashed across her face, and then she laughed. ‘Well – “the clashing of wet shackles” – that's not bad. The rest, well … the rest is history. You been doing this a long time?'

‘Since Jordan.'

‘Since … ?'

He told her about Jordan. He was not sure that she was listening to him. She'd lifted her chin and seemed preoccupied with the thrashing of the rocks against the water below them.

‘Methuselah gone mad,' she said as soon as he finished. ‘Old men – Victor and the people who surround him. In this country old men don't give way to the young. They rather consume them. I don't like old men.' She turned towards him, her forehead
knotted in a tight frown. ‘Promise me one thing, Bender. Stay as you are. Keep your cool. Watch your words. Don't do anything reckless. I listen to Coker stuffing y'all head with those, those … you know what a trope is?'

He shook his head.

‘Meme or theme or motif – it's all the same. Nations respond to tropes. In some places it's rape; in others it's their flag. Fire, darkness, land – whatever their history makes them desire or fear the most. Use it in a certain way, you can make a country go to war or wreck itself. Clever politicians know this.'

‘What's ours?'

‘What's what?'

‘Meme or trope or … '

‘Listen to Coker – he's using it on y'all. Anyway, you know it. You're full of it, you just don't realise it.' She flicked the paper in the air. ‘This is the only thing I've read from you where I see no sign of it.'

Sislyn glanced at her watch and got up. She plunged a hand into her bag and brought out the pen she'd held up to the class the first year they arrived.

He was surprised she still had it. He could barely remember the question she'd asked them; he'd never forgotten the pen. It glowed like a stick of honey in her outstretched hand.

‘A present from a man who didn't want me to forget him,' she said. ‘I didn't. I wanted to have his children.' Sislyn looked away briefly, then angled her face towards him. ‘Y'unnerstand that?' She was looking at him closely.

He nodded.

‘He went home to fight a war that didn't need him. Y'know anything about Angola?'

Pynter shook his head.

‘Anyway, I promised. I wanted to. I thought returning here would make the waiting easier. It's five years now and between that place and here – it's not just that.' She pointed at the sea.
‘It's – it's a whole heap of silence. Problem is,' Sislyn pulled her feet together and wrapped her arms around her knees, ‘waiting can become a habit.' She stuck the pen in his shirt pocket and got up. ‘I'll tell you what I told him the night before he left. I told him war is not a place for poets. And for what I believe is coming, I hope to God you prove me wrong.'

Over the years, he had come to know her face – the expressions that flowed across it – almost as well as he knew Tan Cee's. The pupils were her project, she said. Which was why she'd ‘owned' every class they had progressed to. He was eleven when he first walked through the gates of this school. Now he was fifteen. In those four years of watching her and listening past all the things she said, he'd realised that Sislyn was always crying, even when they managed to make her laugh.

Pynter reached into his pocket and handed her a bit of paper.

‘S'for you,' he said. ‘S'how – s'how I feel.'

She looked at the paper in his hand, then at his face. She shook her head. Her voice dropped almost to a whisper.

‘I can't take it, Pynter. I'm not s'posed to and I won't.'

He watched her shifting shoulders as she strolled across the courtyard.

It was the first time she had ever called by him by his first name.

He went to meet Patty at the store in the hope she would lighten his mood. He was doing this almost every day now, since Marlis Tillock was no longer there to sit on the wall of the courthouse above the town and have long arguments with him.

Pynter leaned cross-legged against the building on the other side of the street, watching his aunt through the moving gaps in the traffic. She was chatting with three young women at the counter and making dainty arcs above their heads with her hands. Her store-girl friends were prodding each other and laughing. From here, with the grating of the traffic making a
wall of sound around him, and the chattering of gulls over the far end of the street, Patty looked as if she'd always been a store-girl.

She looked up once and saw him; waited for a gap in the traffic then fluttered a hand at him.

Over the months, his aunt had replaced her hill-woman walk with small, high-stepping movements that reined in the swing of her hips, stiffened her spine some more and pushed her chin up further. Patty jingled when she walked. She'd taken to gold bracelets and earrings, until one morning she asked him how she looked. He said that silver would suit her better. She'd soured her face at him. So, to show her what he meant, he went into the house, brought out the little bag he kept his steel marbles in and dropped some water on it.

‘Rainwater on dark velvet,' he said. ‘Same like silver on yuh skin.'

She'd looked at him, a strange expression on her face. ‘Lord ha' mercy, Pynto! No wonder …' She'd shaken her head and left.

He did not go over to Patty straight away. At the bottom of the street he stood on, the sea had taken on the colour of a burst pawpaw; and above him and the market square, the courthouse was glowing like a wedding cake. It was up there, on the brink of the hill that led down to the centre of the town, that he had often parted company with Tillock.

His aunt stepped out of the shop. She winked at him, then looked up and down the street. ‘Come,' she said. ‘We getting a ride part-way.'

He followed her to a courtyard at the back of the building. There were seven cars, parked one beside the other. Patty leaned into the one nearest to the exit.

Dark-brown eyes in a light-brown face looked up at him. Slim arms in long white sleeves rested on the steering wheel. Pynter pretended not to notice the man's brief smile.

‘Richard,' Patty said. ‘He offer to drop us off. Richard is the boss.'

Richard mumbled something and Patty swung her head back towards him. The man said something again and Patty flicked a finger at his ear and laughed.

Pynter pressed his back against the seat and stared at Patty's bobbing earrings. He listened to her new laugh. He studied the hands of the man describing little circles above the steering wheel, rarely ever gripping it, except when they turned a corner.