Patrick White - The Vivisector

During break Tom Sullivan from Cox Street started making up to Ossie, whispering and laughing behind his hand. Ossie would have liked to laugh back if his long dopy face had dared.

‘What was Tommo telling you?’

‘Nothing,’ said Os.

‘It was too long to be nothing. Go on, what was it?’

Ossie Flood’s skin turned green.

‘Tell, or I’ll kick you in the guts.’

This had always worked in Cox Street. And Ossie Flood began to tell. His biggest teeth were grooved and green. He told spitting excited frightened he said how Tommo Sullivan said Hurt Duffield was the son of a no-hope pommy bottle-o down their street, who carried around in an old cigar box a pedigree like he was a racehorse.

Going down the steps after break Hurtle got up against Tommo Sullivan to tell him he was the biggest turd ever dropped from an Irish arse. He banged Tommo’s head once or twice against the wall. Though Tommo was bigger, it came easy. Tommo actually began to cry. The stone walls made it sound worse, and you wondered whether you had caught the nits off Tommo’s head, though they kept his hair shorn off close.

Miss Adams told her class she was going to start them on pothooks already that first day. Some of the kids could hardly hold the pencil: it wobbled in their hands. One girl’s cheek was so full of tongue she looked as though she had a boil. Then Miss Adams encouraged them to join the pothooks by imagining they were making a little hooped fence. Hurtle was so shocked by her old pothooks he couldn’t make anything at all.

He would have sunk pretty low if he hadn’t suddenly remembered, and taken the pencil, and lost himself.

‘What are you doing, Hurtle Duffield?’ Miss Adams had smelt a rat.

Everyone looking.

‘Droring,’ he confessed, though it pained him to do so.

It pained Miss Adams equally. He had to take it up to her. The girl with the flossy fringe giggled.

‘What is it supposed to be?’ Miss Adams squinted and asked through her cold.

‘Death,’ he said, and heard his own voice.

‘Death?’ Miss Adams was frowning. ‘Looks like a kind of elephant to me. An elephant with hair instead of hide.’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘An elephant in a lion’s skin.’

‘But Death? An elephant is such a gentle creature. Large, but gentle.’

‘Not always it isn’t,’ he corrected. ‘It can trample its keeper, without any warning, and rip with its tusks.’

All the kids were interested. Some of them pretended to be afraid. Perhaps some of them were.

Miss Adams made a noise through her blocked nose. ‘You were supposed to be forming pothooks.’

‘Pothooks! I can write!’

‘You sound like a vain boy. At your age. I don’t like know-alls. Who was your teacher?’

‘I learned myself, I suppose. At first. Then Mr Olliphant showed me some of the finer points.’

Nobody else was making a sound.

‘Mr Olliphant?’ She was so ignorant she hadn’t even heard of the rector.

‘Seeing that you can write,’ Miss Adams said, ‘you will write me something, Hurtle. Something about yourself. Your home. Your life. A composition, in fact. If, as you claim, you are so advanced. ’

She made a sour thin smile as she screwed up the drawing of Death and lobbed it into the basket.

He was glad to return to his bench. He would never write if he could draw, but he was so sick of school, it would be a relief to tell about himself.

He wrote and wrote to get through the time:

I am Hurtle Duffield age 6 though I often feel older than that. I don’t think age has always to do with what you feel because my father and mother who are old never have the same feelings or thoughts as me. They do not understand what I tell them so I have just about had to give up telling. And I did not tell Mr Olliphant our parson (he has died) though he could read Latin and French, that is nothing to do with it. I get a lot of ideas sitting up the pepper tree in the yard. I like to watch the sky till the circles wirl, these are white, or shut my eyes and squeeze them till there are a lot of coloured spots. Mumma goes crook if I draw on the wall, only the wall in the shed where I sleep with Will at the end of the yard where Pa keeps the harness that wall does not matter, I can draw there, and I am droring a picture which will be a shandeleer with the wind through it when it is finished, I would like to draw everything I know. There is drawing. There is bread. I like if I can to get hold of a new loaf and tear the end of crust off of it and eat it. I love the smell of bread but the bread at home is always stale because you get it cheap. Once I drew a loaf of bread with all those little bubbles

School was over before he had shown much. Miss Adams told them they could go. She looked as though she had a headache.

‘Not you, Hurtle,’ she called down. ‘I’m waiting to see your composition.’

As she read it, her head moved along the lines.

‘You’re a funny boy. What is a “shandeleer”?’

But he couldn’t go into that: it was his secret thing; and even if he had tried to explain, she wouldn’t have understood.

So he puffed out his mouth as if he was sulking.

Miss Adams said: ‘You can go now. But remember that people will dislike you if you pretend to know more than you do.’

Nothing of further interest happened that first day, except that the girl with the fringe let him smell her hankie. Because she was starting school her mother had given her a sprinkle of scent, which was why she kept on smelling the screwed-up ball of her handkerchief. Her name was Dolly Burgess, she said.

Lena and Hurtle Duffield continued going to school. They always started off together, because relationship made it unavoidable. Out of Cox Street, Lena usually broke away and joined up with some of her friends, unless she was feeling down in the mouth.

One morning after she had broke the chamber Mumma sent her to empty in the yard, they were still together walking past the shops. Lena said, to get her own back on somebody: ‘I hope you’re behaving yourself in class. I hope you don’t make a fool of us with a lot of your old show-off.’

‘I don’t behave any way at all. I act natural.’

‘Pigs act natural.’

He kicked her shin. She gave him a push.

That was when he dropped it.

‘Hey! Nao!’

It rolled down a grating, and he couldn’t even see it for the muck and darkness down below.

‘Serve you right — whatever it was!’ Lena screeched, rubbing her shin on her other leg.

As they walked on, he couldn’t help blubbering. He kept it very low, though Lena’s presence made it sound louder.

‘What was it?’ she asked, now more interested than hurt.

‘The sovrun Mrs Courtney gave me.’ He had never ought to carry it around take it to school his secret yet most solid belonging.

Lena was laughing her plaits off. ‘A sov-run! Why ever should Mrs Courtney give a boy like you a sov-run? I’ll ask Mumma as soon as I get home.’

‘Mumma doesn’t know.’

‘Course she doesn’t! It’s a fib! You’re the biggest dirty fibber!’

Lena felt so superior she forgot her shin, she forgot the chamber she had broke. At least she marched on ahead.

Losing the sovereign reminded him he had lost Mrs Courtney as well. As term continued, he asked Mumma: ‘Did you see Her?’

Mumma was off-colour. ‘Why should I see Her? I’m the laundress — the washerwoman.’

But on a brighter day she couldn’t wait to tell: ‘What do you think? Mrs Courtney sent for all us girls because she’s going to a masked ball. She thought we might like to see her fancy costume. Oh, it was a dream! And a black mask.’

‘What was her costume?’

‘I don’t know. Something French. Some lady who was friends with a king.’