PETER CLARKE
It was evening and the first stars were out and everything was kind of quiet the way things become when night starts settling down. Already people were relaxing and talking on their balconies after having finished supper when Benny came down past the houses in Cardiff Road with a bundle of wood on his shoulder and his dog, Rinty, running alongside of him.
He didn’t have to look to see that they were staring at him as he passed because he could feel it. The same way that he could feel when there were people talking about him. And they were talking about him. They always did.
‘There goes that James kid. He’s not all there, you know.’
‘ ... and so young too. Twelve. What a pity, hey.’
‘And they say he’s very headstrong too. Must really be a burden for Uncle Herb. That poor old man really had a raw deal when he took him on.’
‘M-mm. I wonder if they can’t do anything about it, get him into a Home or something? I wouldn’t feel safe with him around, he might just get mad all of a sudden and what with that terrible temper ... l ‘
‘You’re telling me. It’s a good job the children keep away from him too or else I wouldn’t know where I’d be with all the worry.’
‘God, yes, hey, and I said only the other day .. .’
That’s the way it goes, he thought bitterly, always talking about me, always, always talking about me. It makes me sick. It was always the same thing. People thought he was mad. Of course they didn’t say so to his face but he knew it all right.
Some of the kids said it though, but they always made sure that they were a good distance away when they said it, especially since the time he had caught hold of Billy Witton and banged his head so violently against a wall that the blood ran. He could still remember the bright redness of the living blood as it seeped beneath his fingernails and stained the fresh whiteness of his clean shin when his fingers accidentally touched it. Oh yes, they kept away from him all right but it didn’t worry him.
Often he wondered why it should have happened to him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘it’s crazy.’ And in a way it was. It made him seem normal in a crazy way and made everybody else seem crazy in a normal kind of way. It was all so very
confusing. He was always wondering about it and the question was always popping up in his restless mind, ‘Am I really mad as they say, am I really mad?’ - and there was always the same indeterminate answer, ‘I don’t know!’ It worried him and forced him to think of things which could provide suitable solutions and so prove that he wasn’t mad. ‘Augie never said I was and he should know and Rinty doesn’t think so either. But then dogs don’t speak, do they?’ But as far as he was concerned Rinty was different Benny had had Rinty for a long time and they understood each other so well that it was as good as speaking. Sometimes he wondered if Rinty was really not speaking. Often, when his tongue lolled out, it looked as if he was.
Augie could speak to animals and make them understand and the strangest thing was that they never ran away from him. Even birds, they wouldn’t fly· away when they heard his voice. They only sat and listened as his voice went on and on. Thinking of it, Benny knew what made them listen like that to Augie. It was the goodness in him.
‘That is why he was my friend,’ Benny said, ‘and he still is. But then I· suppose you’d think it funny me saying that when Augie isn’t alive any more. He’s dead, you know. I killed him although of course they said I couldn’t have. But 1 did.
‘I still see him up in the forest sometimes and then we speak to each other. I always liked him though most everybody else didn’t. I don’t think they liked him because he was ugly and he didn’t have a family and his clothes were nearly almost always raggedy and shabby. Uncle Herb was one of those who didn’t like him. He was always calling him ugly names like “You guttersnipe” and “You dirty little bastard” and “You filthy bundle of rags”.’
Only once Benny saw Augie cry and that was after Benny received a thrashing from Uncle Herb for playing with him. Uncle Herb was furious that day.
‘Look, Benny,’ he yelled, ‘how many times haven’t I told you not to play with that filthy bastard and you keep on, keep on, keep on. I’m tired of telling you the same old thing over and over and I’m not telling you again to keep away from him.’
He was really very angry. Benny could see that, as he came towards him, at the same time unbuckling his belt which had a heavy brass buckle. Benny was standing in a comer of the front room then, that dark front room with the eternally drawn curtains and the heavy brown furniture that he hated so much and there was no way of escaping from Uncle Herb. His big hands tore so hard at Benny that buttons popped off and, his braces loose, the trousers slipped down his legs while the belt lashed at his bare backside. He screamed and
screamed at the top of his voice because it seemed Uncle Herb was becoming mad with anger the way the buckle was biting into his flesh.
Benny felt he could have died then if suddenly he wasn’t calm enough to think and his hand grabbed at Uncle Herb’s long, straggly, greasy grey hair and hung on until he felt quite nauseous smelling its horrid oily odour and got sick, vomiting all over Uncle Herb’s head and on to Aunt Martha’s carpet. Only then Uncle Herb stopped. By then Benny was so weak he couldn’t get his fingers loose from Uncle Herb’s hair as he lay on the floor and Uncle Herb had to pry them loose one by one. He was calm enough then to see that he could have killed Benny and he was so shaken that he knelt there behind an overturned chair shaking like a leaf in a breeze, while Benny lay crying with his hands knotted into fists in the air and his trousers still around his ankles.
They were both scared at what had happened so suddenly that they didn’t move from where they were on the floor and they stayed that way for what seemed hours and hours until finally Benny stopped crying and Uncle Herb, wiping his head, got up, kind of sheepishly and mumbled, ‘I’m sorry, Benny, I’m really very sorry. I’m sorry, Benny .. .’, until it sounded painful to Benny’s ears and he shouted, ‘Shut up, shut up, I hate you, I hate you,’ while he pulled up his trousers and held it with one hand while with the other hand he grabbed up one of Aunt Martha’s silly ornaments, a porcelain woman with a band of painted flowers, and threw it blindly at him. He ducked and it banged against the greenstriped wall paper and splashed into billions of tiny bits that scattered all over that part of the room.
Rinty saw him running up Cardiff Road to the mountain and followed, he always did, when he saw him heading in that direction. That’s why he liked Rinty. You needn’t tell him a thing and he’d know what to do. That’s why he followed him. He was a smart pal, that dog.
Benny was tired already when he reached the field, so tired that he could only fall into the stink white and yellow daisy bushes and crawl into their shelter, staying there quietly until he was sure nobody had followed. He stood up carefully and went to the grass hut. It wasn’t a grass hut really. Just dead branches that Augie had arranged into a hut and over this he had carefully woven other branches, live ones with leaves. Nobody walking around there would say it was anything but a big bush because there was nothing to give it away. Even the entrance was so placed that the other children would not notice it.
Augie was there of course, just as Benny thought he would be, and he was surprised to see him looking the way he did. He had to explain but he burst out crying before he could finish. Augie put his arm around his shaking shoulders and when Benny looked he was crying too, not openly as Benny was, but just a
little. He didn’t say anything then, not until they were both calm again and then he said, ‘Oh, Benny, my friend, my friend.’
Augie was like that, he didn’t say much but when he did he often said things that were beautiful. But then, Benny thought, it’s because of the way he was. You know how I mean. He was ugly but inside his heart he was beautiful and kind. It couldn’t be seen on the outside, it was in the inside, and his ugliness was only the wrapping that covered it up like paper around a parcel.
Everybody said Augie was ugly. Once Uncle Herb said he looked like his father, who was a big, black French Moroccan sailor and not a bit like his mother who was a street-woman and who was small and light-complexioned. They both disappeared before Benny could remember. Because he never saw them and Augie never spoke about them he never wondered about them. With him, Augie just happened to be there, in the same way that waves beat on the shore and clouds come along in the sky and you see them there without wondering where they come from and it doesn’t worry you. They’re there and that’s all. That’s the way it was with Augie and Benny.
Augie was thirteen and big and strong for his age whereas Benny was eleven and small. He was very much darker coloured than Benny too, almost black, with thick lips and a flattish nose and narrow, almost slant eyes. His pitch-black hair was thick and very curly because he did not always bother to comb it. Whenever Benny saw him he always seemed to be wearing the same things but he got so used to seeing him wearing them that after a time he didn’t even notice them. Only once he saw Augie wear shoes and that was the day of his grandmother’s funeral when he was lent a pair of shoes by one of the neighbours. The shoes pinched and one could see that they were painful. Afterwards, the child, whom those shoes belonged to, refused to wear them again, not even after his father beat him for it. They had to give the shoes away. That’s the way children were with Augie.
Even in school. He went to school for only a few years, up to Standard Four, but he didn’t enjoy it because he couldn’t seem to learn, besides it irked him to have to sit and to be shut up like that in a classroom the whole day. And another thing, children didn’t like to sit next to him because they said he was dirty. Benny didn’t want to sit next to him either simply because he didn’t like the way he looked but the teacher forced him to sit there so he did. He wasn’t so bad after all and Benny got to like him. Benny was lonely for a friend, as lonely as Augie then, and so after a while he didn’t mind at all having to sit next to him. Besides, Augie spoke about so many interesting things which he normally never heard about and which made him much more interesting than anybody else that Benny knew, even the cleverest grown-ups. And
the places on the hills that he’d been to, even though merely about the town, sounded as wonderful to him as if they were foreign places in strange lands because he had never yet been to those parts.
Augie said, ‘I’ll take you there one day, Benny, if you like. Would you?’
‘Of course,’ Benny said, ‘of course.’ He was so eager to go that he could hardly even wait. ‘When will we go? Let’s go right after school today, as soon as the bell goes.’
‘All right.’ Augie hardly ever seemed to have anything to do after school anyway. ‘We’ll go then. I’ll wait for you up in the mountains.’
‘But how will I know you’re there?’ Benny asked, wondering on that point.
‘I’ll know.’ It was the way Augie said it that made him know for sure that he’d be there without fail. He had the kind of voice one trusts without question.
That same afternoon they went up the mountain to the brook above the waterfall, tracing their ways through paths that Benny didn’t know existed, between thick, scrubby bushes and over huge rocks to which they clung with only fingers and with a lot of air beneath them. If they dropped they would have fallen on to rocks in the river bed and been killed. Augie wasn’t scared at all although Benny was. He just said, ‘Aw, it’s nothing at all,’ rubbing his finger across his nose. ‘Just put your hands and feet where I put mine and don’t look down or else it’ll make you nervous.’
‘What about reptiles?’ There were long, deep shadows between rocks, most of them big enough for snakes and lizards and things to nest in.
‘What’s reptiles?’ he asked, clambering over a rock and holding aside an Afrikaner bush for Benny to come by. The scarlet flowers on the long green stalks looked like tongues of flame in the shadow.
‘Snakes and things, man.’
‘Not here. They’ll be gone after the sun. They don’t stay in one place all the time.’
They reached the heights above the waterfall. Looking down Benny wondered that they had come up what seemed nothing but a plain wall except for clumps of bushes and ferns tucked here and there between folds of rock. How were they going to get down again? He turned around. Augie was splashing his arm in the brown water of a pool, cutting it beneath the surface with his hand. Tadpoles scattered when he moved his fingers anywhere near them.
He looked happy kneeling on the hard rock with his arm under water and he could have stayed that way for ever, holding that moment with his arm under water and his knees paining from kneeling on the rock, if time would only stay
still. But it never did and it didn’t even drag like when one has nothing to do and one has to wait for something to happen and it takes such a long time before it does. He knew it because he got up, his arm held out slightly, stiff, the water dripping off his fingertips like tiny glass beads.
‘Let’s have a dip?’ he said.
The water looked lovely as it was, but they were still in the shadow of the hill-top and being July it was cool, not very cool for the month but cool anyway Benny wondered if he was serious.
‘Do you mean it?’
‘Yeh. The water’s grand, just nice for a dip. Don’t you believe me?’ He looked again at the water as if for its reassurance, but the surface was quite still and only reflected back his upside-down image as he stood on the opposite side.
Staring through the reflection one could see the tiny black tadpoles on the bottom of the pool. ‘I like this pool. Most of the time when the others go to the beach then I come up here. How would you like me to teach you to swim?’
Benny couldn’t swim yet and he wasn’t really friendly with the other boys so he never went to Long Beach with them when the weather was warm. The others could all swim fairly well and he didn’t want to look silly scrabbling about in the sea and half-drowning when the waves got him. In a way it was also because he was afraid of the sea. He didn’t like the noise it made when it smacked itself along the shore and once seeing somebody’s baby nearly drown was enough for him.
The winter days passed and spring came and they spent many afternoons climbing and exploring along the hills. There was Augie’s meadow. Sometimes, lying in the grass with his eyes closed, Benny remembered the meadow.
It wasn’t a meadow in the true sense of the word but the rich, milky grass grew so lush and thick there that they always thought of it as being a meadow. It was on the slope of a hill near the waterfall, so steep that one could feel the breezes feeling their way up from the valley away to the higher reaches of the kloof.
When he first went there, Augie said, ‘This is my meadow.’ He was proud of it, as proud as a king. Nobody else ever went there and he felt as if he owned it. It was his own little personal kingdom where the wind, the butterflies and himself were the only living things.
It was strange about the butterflies in Augie’s meadow. That was the only place where one found them sleeping on the long, slender blades of dewsprinkled grass, their tiny, fragile orange wings like the petals of many flowers. One could pick them up and they would sit contentedly on one’s finger like sleepy kittens. Benny loved that meadow and he could have stayed there for
ever and ever. But now he didn’t go to that meadow anymore because Augie wasn’t there and because of that absence it was silent and empty.
Even now he couldn’t decide that Augie was really dead because he wasn’t t sure that he was. Everybody else said he was dead and he supposed that they felt they were right, but he still saw him in some of the old places. And yet be saw him die. It was strange and he couldn’t help wondering about it.
It happened by the waterfall. They were going to cross the stream and the water was coming down fast because there had been lots of rain. It was all white and brown in places and bubbly along the banks and they could hardly hear their own voices above the noise because it was roaring like a train in a tunnel. They meant to cross by swinging over on low branches. Augie went across first and then it was Benny’s turn to follow. But he was so scared of falling into the water that he hesitated. Augie looked back, saw him waiting and Bennie could just make out the words he shouted, ‘I’m coming back, I’m coming back. Hold the branch ... ‘
He held the branch and Augie jumped. For a moment he seemed like a bird in flight as Benny waited for him to catch the branch, but suddenly Benny slipped in the thick mess of wet, rotten leaves along the bank. At the same time he felt his hands stinging as if they had been burned with a hot poker as the branch went flying out of reach and he saw Augie miss it and fall into the middle of the churning waters with a great splash. The memory of that moment sent a cold shiver through him as he remembered the frightened look on that face and the bent fingers of the hands clutching out to catch hold of the branch that wasn’t there as the water swept him downstream until it reached the precipice and he went over the edge and was amazingly gone.
It seemed hours and hours before Benny could move and run for help, and when they came, there was nothing they could do but pull him out from between rocks in a pool at the bottom of the fall where he’d got wedged in. His body was all broken as if the bones in it had gone all soft and mushy.
Benny was screaming. He didn’t know what to do because it was his only friend and he was quite, quite dead. Never again would he see the blades of grass swishing against Augie’s legs as he walked through the mountain paths or see the stream of blood in the transparent body of a tiny fish he caught in the first waters of a mountain-pool in the springtime as he held it in the basin of his hands. He would never hear his voice alive and talking and laughing or see the gleam of his eyes watching the birds flying away on their long journeys before the long, cold months of winter set in. If only he hadn’t let that branch slip he could still have had Augie alive instead of the lifeless way that he was always going to be from then on. His friend and everything that was part of him was dead and finished.
People tried to hold him back after he had looked at the wet body lying on the ground there. The grass around him was sprinkled with glistening drops of blood and water. It reminded him of jewels that he saw once in a jeweller’s shop window downtown. Looking at it he couldn’t decide if they looked more like costly gems than drops of blood and water. Somehow it really seemed to matter a great deal to know, and not being able to know worried him until he felt him struggling to free himself and they thought that he had suddenly become crazed with fright; and they held on tighter and tighter; but he struggled so hard that they had to let him go and he immediately ran up to the forest.
It was dark and cool between the trees in the forest and he couldn’t hear anything except the hammering of his heart and the blood beating in his ears. Resting beneath the trees one could smell the sweet dampness of the leaves and earth in one’s nostrils like the smell of an autumn that was never going to end.
There was somebody else in the forest. Benny could feel it even without lifting himself up to look. And even before looking he knew who that person was going to be. It was Augie.
He was standing higher up the slope of the forest by a tree. Looking hard, Benny could see the chips flying as he cut into the bark with a small knife. Calling to him, it seemed he couldn’t hear Benny’s voice. He turned away without even glancing in his direction and started up into the forest, silently, disappearing among the trees. It seemed ghost-like the way he vanished with such suddenness. Benny couldn’t even hear the crackle of the bushes that happens when one forces one’s way through them. He should have heard it but there was nothing at all. It was silent.
Quickly running up the slope to the tree where Augie had stood, he looked for the fresh cut in the bark which would prove that he was there. There was the name spelt out in capital letters, A-U-G-I-E. But surprisingly, it had been carved out a long time ago because the letters were already brown and dry. It was strange. Had his friend really been there or did he just imagine it? He was sure that he’d been there and looked around for traces to prove it. In places the sunlight fell between the thick foliage overhead and shone on the ground, bright glowing dabs of gold in the gloominess. Leaves shivered in a slight breeze and two coins of light glowed in the hollow of a fresh footprint where someone, a short while before, had just stepped deep into the softness of the mouldy, spongy earth.
[April 1955]