Patrick White - Happy Valley

Green-as-grass Halliday, chanted Arthur Ball.

Willy Schmidt sniggered through a liquorice pulp.

Rodney kicked at the ground. You could not say anything, because your throat, that hot swelling, and a sick tingle in your stomach, or turn, because to-morrow came, and you followed them down the yard. He hated Andy Everett’s face under the cropped hair, he hated the red mottled skin, his hands were very strong and muscular because in the evening he helped his father milk the cows.

What shall we do to Mumma’s boy? asked Andy, taking him by the arm.

The face was very close, those red spots, and the body hard as it pressed against your side. There was a lingering smell of cows on the old serge coat that Andy Everett always wore.

Give ’im a windmill, chanted Arthur Ball.

Once upon a time you resisted windmills, fought against the sharp twisting of the hair above your ears, and they all laughed, but you fought, and then it was no good. You did not resist. You let it happen. The ring of faces, with Willy Schmidt putting out an adventurous hand, and the toothy mouth of Arthur Ball, and Andy Everett’s bullet head. If you tried hard enough you became a thing, a dull whimper that did not come out, or only half, because they must not know.

I’ll give ’im the windmill, said Willy Schmidt.

But they all gave the windmill in turn, Andy Everett holding his arms, Andy Everett’s body pressed up against his back. They said you got lice from cows. Perhaps Andy Everett would give him lice. He did not care. Perhaps they would tear out his hair by the roots. Willy Schmidt had now gathered courage enough to give him several windmills in succession. He darted about from foot to foot, chewing wildly at the liquorice strap.

There are times when you’ve got to run your head against the inanimate agents of pain. Even though you know you’re mad, that they cannot feel, it is some relief to your feelings to increase that pain by venting them on the feelingless. It is desperate but necessary. So you kick the chair, so you bang your head against the wall. And it was in much this spirit that Rodney Halliday burst from Andy Everett’s arms and gave Arthur Ball a crack on the mouth and Willy Schmidt a kick on the shins. But then he was afraid. At once. It is only a momentary and stupid respite to attack the agents of pain.

I’ll break your bloody neck, roared Arthur Ball.

And Rodney Halliday knew that, metaphorically speaking, his bloody neck was as good as broken, knew he was lying on the ground with Andy Everett sitting on his chest and his ears singing from repeated clouts. There was a bell that rang erratically in his head. What have you done to your coat, all that mud, his mother said. He did not cry. There was no breath in his body. Or breath had curdled. There was a hard kernel of petrified breath that would not come out, and the bell ringing.

Better leave ’im. There’s the bell, said Arthur Ball, a thread of blood trickling from his lip.

Andy continued to deal monotonous clouts.

That’ll teach you, he said.

Then he got up grinning slowly, slowly wiping his hands. The small knot unravelled itself, the threads trailing across the yard, Andy and Arthur and Willy, their heads turned back, their faces still intent on reluctantly relinquished pleasure in the form of Rodney stretched still on his back.

P’raps something’s up, said Willy nervously at the door, but after all it was Andy’s fault, it wasn’t him, he hadn’t wanted to.

Then Rodney got up. Andy grinned. The three of them went inside.

It was over, Rodney Halliday said. He would go inside and do arithmetic. But it was over for the day. He tried to brush the mud from his coat. He was aching. He was bleeding. He was also free. And he would go home for lunch and read that book on Columbus till it was time for afternoon school. There was no break in the afternoon. He used to run home as fast as he could. Sometimes they chased him and threw stones. But he could really run very fast. And now there was a feeling of exhaustion and of triumph, almost like leaving the dentist’s in at Moorang, only Mother was not there to buy him an ice-cream. Instead he would go inside and wrestle with sums.

They did not look when he went in. They bent their heads over exercise books. Only some of the girls had a look. Emily Schmidt tittered behind her hand, because it was Rodney Halliday. She whispered to Margaret Quong. But Margaret Quong leant over her book, doing a leaf design in the margin, not looking up. And Rodney sat down. It was arithmetic. One of his knuckles had lost some skin.

If A and B are given a bag of one hundred and eighty apples, said Mr Moriarty, writing it up on the board. And A eats two a day, and B eats three, and after a fortnight they are joined by C, who eats seven, how long will it be before they’ve emptied the bag?

He spoke in a dry, precise voice, like chalk dust falling. Or he paused and you heard a wheeze that Willy Schmidt could imitate, though of course not loud enough for the old cow to hear. The chalk squealed on the board. Margaret Quong writhed and drew down her head, like a tortoise, into her jumper neck. One hundred and eighty apples, breathed Willy Schmidt. Somebody had upset the ink. Somebody made a smell. The stove crackled. The clock said a quarter past.

The school at Happy Valley was built like the rest of the town, with a purpose, and not for beauty. It was also built without regard for time, that had already made considerable incursions on its body, softening its joists, weakening its joints, blanching its colour, and scoring its face with cracks. The school was squat and completely drab. It lay on its square of bare yard with the two lavatories at the end, one for Girls and one for Boys, and almost seemed to totter a bit when the wind came down from the mountains and struck its side. A corner of the corrugated-iron roof flapped in the wind. It ought to be seen to, Mr Moriarty said, but as nobody saw to it, a basin continued to stand in the corner of the larger schoolroom to catch the water that fell inside.

In the smaller room sat the younger children with a pupil-teacher, a young Miss Purves, who suffered from chronic catarrh and chilblains on the feet. Altogether her time was pretty well taken up in straying from her nose to her feet, with dabbing and scratching, and rolling her handkerchief into a smaller ball or hanging it out to air on the desk. She had another handkerchief stuck through an armlet, as a kind of reserve, but this she seldom used. She just used to dab and scratch, or rest her receding chin on a cold hand.

The big children were dealt with by Ernest Moriarty in the larger and more imposing room, that smelt of a coke stove and clotting ink and settled chalk. When it rained you could hear the water dripping down into the enamel basin from the roof that nobody came to see about. But the room was not so lugubrious, in spite of Mr Moriarty sitting in his overcoat and scarf, for the sake of his asthma, he would have said, sitting there correcting exercises with his bluish hands. It was not so lugubrious. There were maps of Asia and Africa, and a larger one of Australia over the desk. And you could lean on your elbow when you were bored and wander up the Ganges or wonder about Irkutsk. There was also a stuffed fox in a case, and some jars of spirit containing various snakes. And somebody sometimes brought some flowers.

Rodney Halliday sighed. A and B and C. Sharing apples with Andy Everett and Arthur Ball. He experienced a mild shiver of recollected discomfiture, from contact with Andy’s body that smelt of cows. And he could not do sums. If you leant on your elbow and waited till it died, you were lost in the Indian Ocean’s turquoise glaze, you jogged across a saffron steppe east of the Caspian Sea, and the plain of India was a field of blood. But his knuckle no longer hurt. It was numbed from paying tribute to A, B, and C. He sucked his knuckle. His breath was a silver cloud, in spite of the restless coke stove his breath sailed out silverly into the Yellow Sea, beyond this the god’s face in the encyclopaedia, and a bearded cinnamon-tree, and a god squatting on a kind of plant, like Margaret Quong. He looked across at Margaret Quong, who sat, not on a lotus, but on a bench doing sums, and she was good at sums, she was the best, she was thirteen, and she helped her aunt make up the books at the store. He would like to play with Margaret Quong. She had a soft voice. But she was thirteen, and he was only nine. She was also a girl. So he had to go down with Andy and Arthur and Willy behind the lavatory, and you knew, and you knew. But you did not think of that. You turned over a page in the mind till A, B, and C were facing you. It was better like that.