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

dampballs of dust by the skirting-boards – and cuts the chicken up and they sit eating and drinking at the kitchen table. Sandra takes out the English folders and explains her marking. ‘That’s a dumb essay subject. “A Moving Experience”. Only three of them wrote about moving house.’
    ‘Do you want me to look at any?’
    ‘You’re a lazy bugger, Lex. You should look at the lot.’
    ‘Choose a couple, eh. Any good ones?’
    ‘From that bunch of meatheads? Hold on, what do you think of this?’ She takes a sheet of paper from a folder and reads in her sharp-edged voice:
    ‘A Moving Experience. Me and Mum and Dad and my sister went to Aussie last year to see my aunty. One day we went to the Melbourne zoo. We were walking along for a while and then we came to the gorilla cage. A big gorilla was sitting up the back. He was so big I sort of couldn’t breathe watching him. He sat and looked at us and we looked at him. He didn’t blink his eyes and his eyes were so little. He looked as if he hated us. There was a kind of concrete wall down the side of his cage. A wooden door was stuck in it and then there was a knocking at the door like someone was trying to get in. He came down and put his head by the door and listened. Then he bent down and put his mouth at the bottom of the door and kind of sniffed and stuck his finger under. We went along a bit and looked in the next cage and there was the female – “f-e-e” – gorilla. She was bending down at the bottom of the door and she had her finger stuck in too touching his. We watched for a long time. Tears were running down Dad’s face and me and my sister were crying too, it was so sad. That is my moving experience.’
    Sandra looks at Lex. ‘Hard to imagine with that one, eh?’
    ‘Hayley Birtles?’
    ‘It’s the dumb ones who surprise you.’ Sandra turns away. She does not want Lex to see her sympathy with the girl. She feels a hotness in her eyes and is afraid she will cry. She has a sense of something lost from her life and cannot find what it is.
    Lex too is disturbed. Hayley Birtles is not a person, she’s part of that sisterhood he calls the Blobs. He faces them four times a week and then forgets them and he does not like her coming forward to present herself. He shivers at her singleness. Once – when he was aschoolteacher long ago – he had loved it, the crashing of a new person into the foreground would keep him satisfied all year; keep him fizzing with her, and working to keep her single in ways so cunning and delicate he felt circuits open and new banks of neurons light up in his brain. They surprised themselves, these girls, with what they found, and were so ready to run, get out of there, where it was set up on display, back to their gum-chewing foul-mouthed sisterhood. He knew the relief of that retreat from the naked place they found themselves in, and worked hard to hold them; yet they got away, were so elusive; and fierce, rough, determined in escaping. He lost more than he kept; and now that he has given up being a teacher Lex does not want to try again.
    ‘What did you give her?’
    ‘Six out of ten. The grammar’s not bad but it’s full of spelling mistakes.’
    ‘Give her seven.’ The extra mark absolves him. He fills his glass at the winecask and wonders if Sandra will come back to bed before she goes. Knowing there’s no obstacle, he puts it off a while, and finds himself thinking of the gorilla; sees black unblinking eyes fixed on him, and sees the huge beast pad four-footed down to the door in the wall and listen there. He makes a grunt of sympathy – sees Hayley Birtles’s face wet with tears. ‘Good girl,’ he whispers, and stands by her side watching the gorilla in the cage.
    Lex Clearwater was a suburban boy but asphalt streets and close-packed houses made little part of his growing up. Auckland was a ferry ride away. The beach was at his back door and he was by turns paddler of a canoe, P-class yachtie, surfboard