Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The by Maurice Gee

saddle that will bring them to the walkway and the sea. And here on his hill Lex Clearwater warms his face in the sun and is contented. A doe looks into his bracken nest. ‘Gidday,’ he says and puts out his hand to touch her nose. She backs off and turns away. ‘Suit yourself.’ Whatever the goats do is all right with him.
    In mid-afternoon he goes down to the house and eats some bread and Marmite and makes himself a cup of instant coffee. He turns on the radio and hears a voice say, ‘Last week’s Heylen poll must have been a shock to them’, and turns it off. He has forgotten Heylen polls and governments; and forgets electricity bills and rates demands and vehicle licensing until officials knock on his door.Forgets to buy food until he finds the refrigerator empty, and has not bought new trousers and shirts for several years. People are worried about Lex. His parents, who live in Auckland, are worried. He does not write to them any more and his ex-wife tells them Lex has gone bananas. Norma Sangster is worried, and the school board wants to know if he’s competent to teach young girls now he’s not married any more. Competent is a word that’s usefully vague. Soon they’ll want to be more precise. But they need not worry. Lex is giving notice. Sandra Duff is the only one who knows. Sandra is worried too, she’s frightened for him – wants to pull him back from the place he’s in and set him on a safer path. She does not love him – won’t love any man – but is fond of him and visits him for friendship and for sex now and then. She sees the goats as a symptom of something in his mind gone badly wrong. They’re entertaining creatures but she’d like to bring a gun and shoot them all. ‘Then maybe Lex can face himself and see what he wants to do.’
    Sandra is way off the mark.
    She arrives late on Sunday afternoon and finds him in the lean-to off the shed making yokes from plastic water-pipe. He snips off lengths and wires them into triangles. They won’t last as long as wooden ones but don’t rub the skin raw on the goats’ necks. He would like to do without yokes altogether but that would mean doing without fences and he’s had a warning from Forestry that animals in the forest will be shot. I’ll shoot anyone who shoots my goats, Lex tells himself. But patches the holes in his boundary fence and puts in timber stoppers where the goats burrow under.
    Sandra parks her car beside the ute and crosses the lawn to the shed, carrying a cask of dry white wine and a smoked chicken. She’ll get nothing eatable or drinkable from Lex. In her bag, slung over her shoulder, are two letters from his box at the valley mouth and thirty English folders she’s marked for him. She helps him out of friendship, not because she goes to bed with him. Bed is lots of fun and the feelings nicely uncomplicated. There’s easy agreement in bed (or on the lawn, where they sometimes spread a blanket although she feels under the eye of goats), and nothing of wife or little woman in Sandra’s sexual behaviour. She hopes that when Lex is finished with teaching he’ll sell his land – ten hectares ofsteep hillside in bracken and scrub, eroding where the goats make shelters and tracks – and get a job he can handle and come back into discourse with human beings. She’ll find him pretty boring then, she knows – he’s thick already – but better boring than lunatic, better for him. Their sex thing will peter out, but
c’est la vie
, one has to keep on moving or the brain starts to die. So Sandra tries to do her best for Lex.
    He turns and slips a yoke over her head. ‘Suits you,’ he grins.
    Sandra puts down the wine and chicken and takes the yoke off and flings it into the long grass by the drive. ‘Bugger you, Lex, I’m not one of your herd.’
    ‘Joke,’ he says, and retrieves the yoke. ‘What have you got? Château Cardboard, eh? And a chicken? Feeding me up.’
    ‘I just want a bit more than bread and Marmite.