William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

Yorty had to fire me after what he heard from Ruggiero. Sol said he had no choice. He was sorry but he would “have to let me go.”

I sold up and moved out after the party. That pool could never be the same after what they had done in it. I don’t know — it had lost its innocence, I guess.

Funny thing happened. I was standing on Sunset and a van halted at an intersection. It was a Ford, I think. It was blue. I didn’t get a look at the driver, but on the side, in white letters, was TRANQUILLITY POOLS. The van drove off before I could get to it. I’m going to file a complaint. Somebody’s stolen my name.

Gavin squatted beside Israel, the cook’s teenage son, on the narrow verandah of the servants’ quarters. Israel was making Gavin a new catapult. He bound the thick rubber thongs to the wooden Y with string, tying the final knot tight and nipping off the loose ends with his teeth. Gavin took the proffered catapult and tried a practice shot. He fired at a small grove of banana trees by the kitchen garden. The pebble thunked into a fibrous bole with reassuring force.

“Great!” Gavin said admiringly, then “Hey!” as Israel snatched the catapult back. He dangled the weapon alluringly out of Gavin’s reach and grinned as the small twelve-year-old boy leapt angrily for it.

“Cig’rette. Give me cig’rette,” Israel demanded, laughing in his high, wheezy way.

“Oh, all right,” Gavin grudgingly replied, handing over the packet he had stolen from his mother’s handbag the day before. Israel promptly lit one and confidently puffed smoke up into the washed-out blue of the African sky.

Gavin walked back up the garden to the house. He was a thin, dark boy with a slightly pinched face and unusually thick eyebrows that made his face seem older than it was. He went through the kitchen and into the cool, spacious living room, with its rugs and tiled floor, where two roof fans energetically beat the hot afternoon air into motion.

The room was empty and Gavin walked along the verandah past his bedroom and that of his older sister. His sister, Amanda, was at boarding school in England; Gavin was going to join her there next year. He used to like his sister but since her fifteenth birthday she had changed. When she had come out on holiday last Christmas she had hardly played with him at all. She was bored with him; she preferred going shopping with her mother. A conspiracy of sorts seemed to have sprung up between the women of the family from which Gavin and his father were excluded.

When he thought of his sister now, he felt that he hated her. Sometimes he wished the plane that was bringing her out to Africa would crash and she would be killed. Then there would be only Gavin; he would be the only child. As he passed her bedroom he was reminded of this fantasy and despite himself he paused, thinking about it again, trying to imagine what life would be like — how it would be different. As he did so, the other dream began to edge itself into his mind like an insistent hand signalling at the back of a classroom, drawing attention to itself. He had this dream quite a lot these days and it made him feel peculiar; he knew it was bad, a wrong thing to do, and sometimes he forced himself not to think about it. But it never worked, for it always came faltering back with its strange imaginative allure, and he would find himself lost in it, savouring its pleasures, indulging in its sweet, illicit sensations.

It was a variation on the theme of his sister’s death, but this time it also included his father. His father and sister had died in a car crash and Gavin had to break the news to his mother. As she sobbed with grief she clung to him for support. Gavin would soothe her, stroking her hair as he’d seen done on TV in England, whispering words of comfort.

In the dream Gavin’s mother never remarried, and she and Gavin returned to England to live. People would look at them in the street, the tall elegant widow in black, and her son, growing tall and more mature himself, being brave and good by her side. People around them seemed to whisper: “I don’t know what she would have done without him,” and, “Yes, he’s been a marvel,” and, “They’re so close now.”

Gavin shook his head, blushing guiltily. He didn’t hate his father — he just got angry with him sometimes — and it made him feel bad and upset that he kept on imagining him dead. But the dream insistently repeated itself, and it continued to expand; the narrative furnished itself with more and more precise details; the funeral scene was added, the cottage Gavin and his mother took near Canterbury, the plans they made for the school holidays. It grew steadily more real and credible — it was like discovering a new world — but as it did, so Gavin found himself more dissatisfied with the way things were.

Gavin slowly pushed open the door of his parents’ bedroom. Sometimes he knocked, but his mother had laughed and told him not to be silly. Still, he was cautious, as he had once been horribly embarrassed to find them both asleep, naked and sprawled on the rumpled double bed. But today he knew his father was at work in his chemistry lab. Only his mother would be having a siesta.

But Gavin’s mother was sitting in front of her dressing table brushing her short but thick reddish auburn hair. She was wearing only a black bra and pants that contrasted strongly with the pale freckly tan of her firm body. A cigarette burned in an ashtray. She brushed methodically and absent-mindedly, her shining hair crackling under the brush. She seemed quite unaware of Gavin standing behind her, looking on. Then he coughed.

“Yes, darling, what is it?” she said without looking round.

Gavin sensed rather than appreciated that his mother was a beautiful woman. He did not realise that she was prevented from achieving it fully by a sulky turn to her lips and a hardness in her pale eyes. She stood up and stretched languidly, walking barefooted over to the wardrobe, where she selected a cotton dress.

“Where are you going?” Gavin asked without thinking.

“Rehearsal, dear. For the play,” his mother replied.

“Oh. Well, I’m going out too.” He left it at that. Just to see if she’d say anything this time, but she seemed not to have heard. So he added, “I’m going with Laurence and David. To kill lizards.”

“Yes, darling,” his mother said, intently examining the dress she had chosen. “Do try not to touch the lizards. They’re nasty things. There’s a good boy.” She held the dress up in front of her and looked at her reflection critically in the mirror. She laid the dress on the bed, sat down again and began to apply some lipstick. Gavin looked at her rich red hair and the curve of her spine in her creamy back, broken by the dark strap of her bra, and the three moles on the curve of her haunch where it was tautened by the elastic of her pants. Gavin swallowed. His mother’s presence in his life loomed like a huge wall at whose foot his needs cowered like beggars at a city gate. He wished she bothered about him more, did things with him as she did with Amanda. He felt strange and uneasy about her, proud and uncomfortable. He had been pleased last Saturday when she took him to the pool in town, but then she had worn a small bikini and the Syrian men round the bar had stared at her. (David’s mother always wore a swimsuit of a prickly material with stiff bones in it.) When he went out of the room she was brushing her hair again and he didn’t bother to say goodbye.

Gavin walked down the road. He was wearing a striped T-shirt, white shorts and Clarks sandals without socks. The early afternoon sun beat down on his head and the heat vibrated up from the tarmac. On either side of him were the low senior-staff bungalows, shadowy beneath their wide eaves. They seemed to be pressed down into the earth, as if the blazing sun bore down with intolerable weight. The coruscating scarlet dazzle of flamboyant trees that lined the road danced spottily in his eyes.