Author: Peter Wells
Date: 2016-01-31T13:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; General; Short Stories (Single Author); Lgbtq+; Gay; Family & Relationships
Description: Poignant, lyrical and bitter-sweet, this novella is about coming to terms with your own sexuality and finding love. 'I am still not sure what homo means, apart from being in Truth and having to commit suicide in the bath . . .' Lemmy and Jamie. Jamie and Lenny. Two friends. Together. At a time of need.
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Rights: © Peter Wells 1997

Lemmy and Jamie.
Jamie and Lemmy.
Two friends. Together.
At a time of need.

Poignant, lyrical and bitter-sweet. One of THEM! introduces Jamie Caughey, the narrator of Peter Wells’ novel, Boy Overboard.

ONE OF them!

pETER
wELLS

Contents

1. Title Page
2. One of THEM!
3. About the Author
4. Copyright

One of THEM!

‘It hurts to be in love’

‘I JUST DON’T get Dad,’ says Lemmy in the flat tide-out voice he uses when he’s thinking about something else. ‘I mean, I just can’t see why he won’t get his eyebags surgically removed. They’re so ugly, and I mean: ug-leeee!’

‘Yes, Lemmy,’ I say, looking down at Vogue New Zealand which lies open on a cushion in front of us. We’re doing research on what a facelift can do for you. I’m 14, Lemmy’s going on 15 and he’s fat. I don’t ever say this to him, I wouldn’t dare. He’s four foot nothing, human dynamite.

I’m five foot 10 and thin. I like to think I’m Audrey Hepburn thin, sort of elegant. When I sit I try to cross my legs over, like I’ve seen in books.

When people see us together, they laugh. We just don’t care. We laugh back. At least Lemmy does.

Lemmy’s got eyeliner on, just the faintest line, and he’s done his hair all spun gold and ironed flat, not a curl in sight, and he’s borrowed some Stay Firm from Dianne, his sister. The faint smell fills the air, we breathe it in hungrily, like it’s a perfume.

Lemmy wrote my note and I wrote Lemmy’s note and we’re hiding out back at his place, windows closed, door shut, we keep away from the windows. His mother’s not at home, she was taken away. It happened last week. Now I look around the room, thinking this is where it happened.

Outside there’s not a person in the street, not a car: nothing. I watch a blackbird spear a drowned worm. Beak slashes it aside, disgusted.

Lemmy’s getting bored, I can feel it. Lemmy gets bored a lot, sometimes he does things just to stop being bored.

He goes over to the radiogram. Lemmy doesn’t move a facial muscle as he puts on one of Dianne’s records. I relax and wonder what’s coming next.

The music swells all velvet around us.

It hurts to be in love,
when the only one you love
turns out to be
someone
who’s not in love with you.

I look at Lemmy and Lemmy looks at me as the red velvet unrolls all around us and we lie back into it; we loll.

Lemmy lights up a Bold Gold, blows out a stream of smoke. He says: ‘You know he’s one of them?’

He says it slow and husky, soft, like it’s not a question really.

I just look at Lemmy, I’m almost frightened, I’m waiting.

So I cry a little bit (to be in love)

‘Him?’ I say soundlessly and I suddenly think of Gene’s face on the record cover and I get this overpowering waterfall of feeling that I want to pull his fluffy poloneck jersey down, down round his neck, I want to licklicklick and kiss him right under there, where it’s warm, it’s hot, it’s sticky. This shocks me. I see Lemmy looking at me closely now, he’s got this cruel look on his face. Don’t laugh at me, Lemmy. Don’t. Please.

I look back at Lemmy, forcing my eyes to look into his. His eyes are hard. ‘That’s really disgusting,’ I say. ‘He must be really sick.’

And so you
die a little bit

‘I don’t believe you,’ I say desperately, wanting Lemmy to say it’s really true, and I pick up a book, any book, and pretend I’m really interested in it. But as I flick through all I’m thinking about is Gene’s fluffy jersey and his soft parted lips. I can feel myself getting red, slowly, like a stain all through me I can’t get off. I can hardly breathe now, yet I force myself to go on flicking through the book, like everything’s normal. Normal. I hate that word. Then I look down and see what I’m holding and it’s a sex book. Lemmy just looks at me, blows out this cool veil of blue-grey smoke. He’s watching me now, real close.

I act like I’m not surprised but my hand has turned dead on me, I can see it down there, a dead gull dried by the wind, eyesocket staring back at me, watching. ‘Look at this,’ my voice says for me. ‘Look!’ And I let out a strangled laugh. I wave at him the cover which says: A Report on Real-Life Sexual Experience, compiled by Dr Alfred K. Kitchsenburger, PhD (Med) (Hons) (Tuvalu Uni).

Now I’ve got Lemmy’s attention and he’s no longer looking at my face. He reaches over, snatches the book out of my hand, cruel, so I’m left naked again, with only my face to hide behind and I can’t hide what’s in my face. I’m not like Lemmy.

Lemmy now rolls over onto his back and, holding his cigarette in this exaggerated stilt-way, starts reading out.

He reads it in an American accent like I Love Lucy.

I followed him into the changing room and as he rammed his 10-inch black cock into my mouth, I gagged but then I found I liked it and I started …

He stops now, glances over at me. I’m so naked I grab the book off him. He’s surprised I’m so violent. I grab the book and I start reading, practically calling it out at the top of my voice, practically singing:

And I just got down on my knees there on that dirty floor and started worshipping his prick, with people just outside the door, on their way to work, but, oh, so help me God, the demon of sex was upon me and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t keep a control of myself!

Everything’s so silent all you can hear is our breathing, a charged duet, and I know I’ve got to go on reading.

I feel something dismal and confused and magnetised, I can’t explain it and I look at Lemmy and Lemmy has this flushed look and then I hear my voice and it stops me: ‘I don’t believe you, Lemmy Stephenson. I just don’t believe you.’

‘What?’ he says, all flat again. He looks up at the ceiling, bored. Then he stubs his cigarette out real slow, he kills it.

‘I don’t believe you. Gene’s not one of them. He can’t be.’

‘Why not?’ He doesn’t even look at me.

‘You’re making it up. Aren’t you? Tell me. I only want to know the truth,’ I say. Both of us know I’m lying and I know we’re both thinking, thinking about this world we’ve just opened up.

‘You made it all up!’ I cry out, my voice all dry and full of hurt, and Lemmy looks at me suddenly like he really hates me and then he yawns very elaborate and long and slow like he’s just heard the most boring thing in all existence and I’m it.

Lemmy acts like he’s just suddenly been woken up from a snooze; he’s such a good actor, Lemmy. He acts like he’s surprised to see me there, with the sex book in my hand. In fact he acts like he’s surprised he’s even on planet Earth. He didn’t plan it. ‘Oh … sorry,’ Lemmy says to me, fanning his fingers over his open mouth. ‘Someone must have slipped some librium into my coffee. You were saying …?’ and he looks at me, enigmatic.

‘Nothing, Lemmy,’ I say all defeated. ‘Nothing.’

Lemmy leaps up and goes over to the window out of which I can see, just see, a little old woman in a fawn overcoat wheeling her shopping trolley behind her like she can’t get away from it and she’s been walking for days and days but the trolley is still following her and won’t go away, and she’s just about going crazy with exhaustion, yet she can’t stop.

Lemmy stands behind the net curtains, and he screams in this sound so shrill it’s like spun sound made sharp and stalactited so like a sliver of glass it enters the flesh, breaks off, can’t get out, aims straight for the heart, arrow of hate, sliver of hurt, all scarlet and drenched. Lemmy just opens his mouth and screams out in this high wavering falsetto, outdoing Lucille Ball: ‘I JES’ CAN’T KEEP A CONTROL OF MYSELF, SO HELP ME GOD!’

I crack up and Oh Lemmy, I say, I’m laughing but I’m actually frightened, Oh Lemmy, you’re such a scream. Such a scream. And I think. Lemmy Don’t kill yourself Lemmy.

I had no idea I was doing wrong. I loved Lemmy. It was only later I realised it was wrong. Yet it was necessary.

I learnt this too, later, after it happened. All the things which I did which were so wrong were also necessary.

‘A town without pity’

‘OK’ SAYS LEMMY, who’s gotten over being bored. He’s suddenly a fired-up crackercaper. He’s 20 tied-together tomthumbs all splattering and battering the silence out of the air, beating it up as the crackers crack, leap, ignite. Tang of gunpowder laces the air.

I look into Lemmy’s face, his long straight nose, his gilded hair. His eyes glitter, outlined in mascara. He examines his nails, carefully, as if for dirt.

I stand there, wondering what’s coming next. I hope he doesn’t notice I’ve got a pimple coming up, right in the crease by my nose. Lemmy is very critical of things like that. But Lemmy is looking right through me, like he’s read me cover-to-cover, I’m Sandra Dee, or Bobby Darin, positively South Pacific point, corny as Kansas. No I’m not, Lemmy, I silently say: test me.

This is how it always begins, right from the start: test me.

Lemmy jumps up and does his Peter Sinclair imitation — you know, from Happen Inn, ‘New Zealand’s Own Go-Go Show’. The Chooks inside cages, with rockhard beehives and go-go boots. Pete Sinclair jumps onto the blackwhite screen, like he’s a genie just dying to get out from inside. He’s wearing his old old crooked smile and baked-on hairdo. He turns sideways, sort of Spanish, clacks his heels, claps his hands together twice, hard, like castanets and yells out, ‘Let’s go!’ Clap! Clap! ‘Lets go!’

When Lemmy does it, it’s like he lets you see the joke inside. And the joke is this: everything in New Zealand is so crummy, it’s laughable. Once you see the joke you can’t stop laughing. This is the trick Lemmy taught me.

So we decide to fan the breeze, as Lemmy says. We escape into town, on the trolleybus, looking for excitement of which, that day, there is none. Instead it is cool, wet, lead-grey. The sky is all laced down to earth by black powerlines, as if everyone in this town is frightened to let the sky get too high; it might show us up for how small we really are.

We have a cup of coffee in the mezzanine lounge in 246, watching people go up and down on the escalators, but still nothing’s happening so Lemmy takes me down to this toilet in a carpark. He takes me in very casually and we have a cigarette and read all the messages and words on the walls. While I am reading them, Lemmy gets out this pen and, like he’s done it before, writes right central and where it can’t be missed, ‘STICK YR STIFF DORK INTO MY HOT HOLE — a schoolboy’. Then he writes: ‘I am all sexed up and ready’.

Underneath it Lemmy writes that very day, that very hour. I laugh, Oh Lemmy, I say, you’re such a scream.

Lemmy goes deadpan: ‘Let’s go outside and watch the fun develop.’

We hide behind the concrete pillars and smoke away about 5–10 minutes of no-time, when time stops and waits for something next to happen, to push it along again.

While we’re waiting, Lemmy goes back to his old point: Why?

‘Why what?’ I say to Lemmy, my heart sinking because I know what he’s talking about.

‘Why bother?’ Lemmy says then, throwing away his cigarette, so I watch it roll over and over itself, disgorging ashes and splinters of fire and spark, till it dies. The wind then rocks it back and forth, gently, as if to show its emptiness.

He’s talking School Cert.

‘What’s the use?’ Lemmy says then, his unanswerable question.

What is the use? I don’t know. I did once, I thought I did, then Lemmy showed me different. ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ I say to Lemmy, stalling for time, trying to stop him, lying.

‘I just gotta get outta this dump, Jamie,’ Lemmy says, using my name which he hardly ever does — only when it’s serious. ‘If it’s the last thing I ever do …’ as his voice dies off into silence in which there is no sound at all, only a distant car horn suffocating. I think about what he means. Yet I know what he means: it’s like we’re on gas and it’s being turned down so low you can hardly breathe any more; you’re slowly dying on your feet but you keep on walking. It’s like there’s all the air in the world in this place but no oxygen.

‘Oh Lemmy, look at this,’ I say, then I do an imitation of the Supremes singing ‘Baby Love’, with a mike and everything. I sing all falsetto. Lemmy looks at me, kind of smiles, a crooked curl of a smile, then he changes again, quickly. He forgets me. He puts his finger up to his lips.

‘I think we got a live one.’

I lean out from behind the pillar very slowly.

A man in clinging Bermuda shorts gets out of a car slowly, looks both ways carefully, then, with an almost elaborate casualness, crosses the road and disappears into the toilet so quickly it’s as if he’s never been in the road at all.

I know Lemmy has got it wrong. Because this man is like any man you might see on the bus, he’s not a pansyfairyqueerhomo, and just because of his ordinariness I feel my whole flesh burn with the words on the wall plugholearsecock and I look at Lemmy feelspunkdork and Lemmy looks through me; he has the same fever I can see.

But Lemmy waits for one second then beckons me from behind the pillar with his finger. It’s very like a movie this: we silently move forward to the toilet door beyond which we can hear the slippery silvery sound of the water in the urinal cascading down and there’s a kind of great silence, waiting.

I look at Lemmy as he listens. He is so tense his face has turned to metal: only his eyes flash over at me as he decides to enter, occupy this empty cell of silence.

He goes inside there for a moment, creeping in. I suddenly feel alone. I realise where I am. What if someone who lives up the road sees me? Then Lemmy tiptoes back, hides. Now his mouth opens wide, and Lemmy lets out his great screaming shriek from behind the wall.

I feel an intense rush of fear and excitement as Lemmy’s scream echoes all over the concrete carpark, multiplies, comes together again, crashes and splinters apart. I don’t know what to think, I am so excited by what Lemmy has just done.

The man torpedoes out of the toilet, quickly, not turning around, as if his face couldn’t be seen, at all costs he must remain anonymous. I see now he is not so handsome, he is frightened. He gets into his car, a grey Morris Minor, registration number EY 6542. He accelerates away while I scream out, taking over from Lemmy: ‘WeirdoQueerPansyPoofterHomo! You Ought To Be Put Down! You Ought To Be Dead!’

He kissed me on the lips till I came, I think.

‘Serves them right,’ I say to Lemmy after we’ve run away and finished screaming and shrieking, when we’ve slowed down and we realise there is nowhere else to go; that is our excitement for the day.

‘Serves him right, eh Lemmy,’ I say, but Lemmy doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say a word, just walks along all silent and unknown. Then suddenly he looks at me and I am scared. No Lemmy, no. Don’t. Please Lemmy, don’t laugh at me.

‘I only want to be with you’

THIS IS HOW we met, in violence.

We were playing tiggy one day at school. You take the ball and spin it, and brand someone, so the ball, which is wet, heavy and harsh, hurts. In the game, you could do this to people and they wouldn’t know till it hit them. Then everyone laughs. And everyone laughs nervous, so it won’t hit them. Everyone is praying it’ll be someone else. And when it hits whoever it is — someone with glasses, or fat, or thin — everyone laughs even louder, because it’s not them.

This day, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming about our head prefect who I can see. This prefect, I can’t help myself, he’s so handsome and each night I have the same dream: the school catches on fire and I rescue the head prefect and then alone together, amo amas amat. Then I hear Lemmy, four foot nothing, fatboy with legs so fat they rub together at the knees, and he says very low, whispering in that flat voice I get to know so well, without emphasis, without any emotion: Let’s brand the beanpole. Me. Five foot 10, aged 13.

I am fast, too fast: I am the champion sprinter in all the school. I am famous for fastness. So the ball skids past tearing open the air as it goes, hurtling past me, then into the creek.

I run now to get it, I am hot. Behind me I hear over the wet grass the heavy heartbeat poundbash of other footsteps rushing to get the ball so they can brand me again. I know now the ball will be wet: it will sting. But as I bend over the kikuyu forest, in among the stamens and tongues of green, I see this sandwich, just floating so innocent.

It has been luncheon sausage, and the bread, white, has turned into softsoft blotting paper, floating apart so it comes to pieces and gently nudges the turd floating beside it.

My fingers close around the sandwich, I pick it up real gentle and careful so it won’t fall apart and then I balance the soggy grey mass cupped inside my palm. I feel tendrils of power rushing down my arm, chill, cold as death. Boys shy away, stand still, panting inout inout scarletblood danger. I hold it high now and then I find fatboy and he’s looking at me now, without any expression, I see this in a quick glimpse, like a photo, then beanpole yells to fatboy so loud everyone can hear, urgent, as if to catch the real ball with which I’m going to brand him forever, TAKE THIS FATBOY!

The sandwich flies through the air, disintegrating as it whirls, catching in its path all the power from the other boys whose eyes watch entranced, chanting, singing, yelling in one rush of breath, an arrow of pleasure it’s not them: BRAND HIM, BRAND FATBOY. BRAND FATBOY.

The sandwich splatters all across fatboy’s face. He stands there with it dripping and dropping, his face that frozen expressionless mask I get to know so well, when I know what it means. At the same time, his whole face, from his neck up, starts going deep bright red — the stain. Everyone laughs now, released, relieved it wasn’t them that got hit. Everyone is secretly pleased too it is fatboy who has this cruel laugh.

But Lemmy is not finished. He picks off a piece of the sandwich and fishes out the scarlet skin of the luncheon sausage and, holding it between his fingers like it’s a delicacy, he opens his mouth, looking at Ken Johnston who is lying on the grass laughing with tears forcing through his lids going heeeeehhhhheeehhheehhh, like he’s punctured and all his fear is coming out. ‘Fatboy got hit,’ Ken says over and over again, so glad it’s not him. Lemmy goes M … MMmmmmm!, as if it’s the Maggi soup ad on TV, and we all stop so still because, just for one second, we believe it.

Then Lemmy opens his mouth, drops the luncheon sausage in, and we all go totally quiet watching him and he looks at all of us one by one as if he is remembering our faces for later retribution. And when we are all silent apart from Ken Johnston who is wheezing now, having an asthma attack of tears and nerves and joy, Lemmy finishes eating, licking his fingerpads delicately clean. And when he swallows I swear, across the whole football fields under that dirtysheet sky, you can hear us all swallow hard and dry, as if we are trying to swallow a lump, a rock, sand, dirt.

When it is all gone, Lemmy just says, ‘Tas-ty!’

Then he walks away from us, on his own, his fat legs rubbing together at the knees.

A few days later we are sitting in Latin class. Lemmy, who usually sits down the back, quietly takes a seat right behind Ken Johnston. We’re waiting for Mr Chisnall, our Latin teacher, to arrive.

Now Ken Johnston has this Brylcreemed swished-back hairdo he is very proud of. He has an old grey-yellow comb he slips out of his back pocket, sharp as a knife, which he then pulls luxuriantly through his hair, so we can appreciate the extra length. This comb always has a thin line of pus in it from grease and dandruff. Normally someone would have said something about it but the fact is Ken Johnston’s father has the only swimming pool in our class and a two-storey house, and you could tell every time Ken pulled that comb through his Fabian hairdo he was just thinking about being the only boy in our class with a swimming pool and who can he invite home for a swim.

But Ken Johnston is pretty clever; he never actually says his father has a swimming pool. He doesn’t have to. Every move he makes advertises it, and the way his hair is all sort of elaborately piled up on his head and swished back into a kind of duck’s tail says it for him. Ken has a bike with turned-up handlebars, which he rides looknohands, and to see him you know all he’s thinking about is how to get that beautiful Brylcreemed hairdo home in one piece so he can float it, all reflected, in his swimming pool.

Anyway, we’re all waiting for Mr Chisnall to arrive, to bang his books down on the desk with an extra thump and for him to look at us fierce and angry, and begin. Mr Chisnall is a sports hero. He represented New Zealand in sprinting and it’s always like he’s straining at the start line, muscles tensed, waiting for the gun to go off. We’re all making a lot of noise, filling in our freedom with waiting.

Suddenly I notice the others nudging one another and pointing down the front. I look. There is Lemmy looking very very serious and, while Ken is putting out on show his native woods ruler and pencil sharpener in the shape of San Francisco Harbor Bridge, Lemmy is very very intently picking something off the back of Ken Johnston’s black jersey. It is the way Lemmy is doing it that gradually gets everyone’s attention.

He plucks a little piece off like it’s gold, just on the tip of Ken Johnston’s shoulder, just out of his sight. Lemmy then holds it up in the air, as if he’s inspecting it: then, suddenly, it turns into a flea, he drops it with a look of distaste on his face, blows it away from him, flicks at it as if it might jump back on him.

He starts off slow and concentrated but, bit by bit, he is finding so much of Ken’s dandruff that, one by one, everyone in the class starts watching.

There is this pure corridor of silence, we all stand down one end and watch Lemmy touching, or rather not touching Ken, so delicate is his whisk. Then Ajax Murphy, who has thick pebble lenses and is just about as unpopular as Lemmy, starts off this hyena laughter; it’s like he can’t really control it.

Ken can hear this laughter and he turns around, but Lemmy is faster. He’s reading his Latin book very seriously, slowly turning the page. The moment Ken turns away, there is Lemmy back doing it, even more exaggerated and bored.

Ken starts going red, he can’t turn around too quickly or his elaborate hairdo might sort of glide to the side, the fringe’d come unthatched. Besides, Ken is so cool he can’t move quickly; cool people don’t. So he just sits there wanting to die with this big cheese-eating grin on his face every time he turns around, suddenly, to find everyone just looking at him and laughing and laughing, and Lemmy sitting there so cool and still and flicking over a page, his lips even moving as he reads.

I looked at Lemmy whose face never changed once, though you could tell behind its whiteness beat this fierce rush, and I suddenly thought I want to know you, Lemmy Stephenson. I need to know you. Lemmy please know me.

‘Where he goes, I’ll follow’

‘I USUALLY WAIT till Mum’s gone out then I go through her cupboard and use whatever eyeliner I like. I think it’s really important to have eyebrows. Don’t you?’

Lemmy looks at me. He has this way of looking which is to look all over your face like suddenly it has turned into a great big planet and he’s a long way away on the moon gazing at every square inch of it through a telescope.

‘You’re a runner,’ he says, more like an accusation. ‘You’re the fastest boy in the whole fourth form.’

I can’t help it, Lemmy, I want to say, but we are just getting to know each other, standing by the wire-mesh fence high above the swimming pool, Lemmy giving it a good hard vicious kick every so often, so it rattles.

In the background we can see the tall stooped figure of Mr Brakevich, our gym teacher, who Lemmy christened Mr Shitalot. Mr Shitalot likes to cane a lot; a kind of cloud of unhappiness envelops him so much that he looks out at everyone, not quite seeing them, but spraying them with hate. It was his job every year to make sure that any boy who didn’t participate in sport took part in the school marathon, which was by way of punishment. You had to keep running till you dropped, over the school farm, up the extinct volcano, through the creek, avoiding the hidden boulders, with everyone waiting at the finishing tape to see how much pain you were in. Sport is important at our school. It builds character.

Like Mr Shitalot, who this very moment is pushing into the chill water the boys who are too slow getting in. He’s really enjoying himself. You can tell because the creases in his face go white, and he bites his lip into a sort of grimace, as if he’s laughing to himself inside all the time.

The biggest mistake Mr Shitalot ever made was sending his son to our school: he was a punching-bag within a week and he stayed that way till he ran away and was brought back. Then he got sent away to somewhere mysterious. But in that time Mr Shitalot’s son changed. For life. Our school builds character, you see. It makes us into men, which is what sport is all about.

And this is how Lemmy and I first ended up being together.

We both had letters from our mothers saying we weren’t allowed to swim. I had earaches and Lemmy had a complaint nobody was allowed to know about. Lemmy told me he was his mother. ‘It makes things so much easier,’ he says airily. ‘You just have to make sure your writing shows confidence.’

I look at Lemmy and I can tell there’s something strange about him when he talks about his mother. Or rather when he doesn’t talk about his mother. It was like he didn’t have one. But I knew he did.

‘I hate running,’ I say suddenly. ‘I don’t even know why I do it. Or rather I do, I s’pose. It’s because,’ I say bitterly, though this vein of bitterness is new to my voice, like I was just finding it by saying it, ‘it’s because, like, my mother and father were so good at sport.’ I said the last words like they were one word, which they are in a way. Anyone who went to our grammar school knew that beinggoodatsport was a single attribute, like truth, or beauty, or knowledge.

Lemmy gave the fence an extra hard boot. Unlike me, he was wearing orthopedic-heavy shoes and socks, even though it is supposed to be summer. I reckon to myself that he wears them for extra protection. Getting home without being bashed up can sometimes be difficult.

The fence rattles in complaint.

‘My father was almost an All Black,’ I say, ‘and my mother played basketball for Southland and …’ It was like a catechism stretching back into my childhood.

‘Misses Stephenson and Caughey!’ drifts across the grass. It was Mr Shitalot, suddenly catching us in his spray of acid. The other boys’ laughter follows in a curtain. We both straighten up, whipped. ‘If you can spare us the time from your hen party, perhaps you can get on picking up rubbish. Quicksmart!’

‘Yessir,’ I call back, then feel Lemmy look at me again like I am the planet Earth and he is deep inside a crater on the moon, so distant.

I follow Lemmy away from the swimming pool, losing Mr Shitalot and the boys. Lemmy doesn’t say anything. We just walk on. Then we are alone, on a playing field down by the school creek, pitted and pitched with volcanic rocks. Lemmy lies back like a beauty queen, stretching himself out comfortably.

‘We’ll empty one of the bins for our rubbish,’ he tells me and yawns elaborately. ‘Shitalot’s such a mental retard he’ll never notice.’ He yawns again.

I don’t say a word.

I lie back too, slowly, and watch a radiating sphere grow around the sun. The sky is very white, stretched tight like a drum. A single bird, very high in the sky, changes its direction and flies away from the flock. In the far distance we can hear the occasional roar of Mr Shitalot on his way, as Lemmy says, to his first heart attack (‘and hopefully his last’).

‘I’m going to leave New Zealand just as soon as I can,’ I say in a tight voice. I am looking up at the sun and thinking how it looks like a giant diamond. I glance at Lemmy, who seems ruby-purple, streaked with orange flares of light. I can’t see him but I speak. ‘I’m going to be a famous dress designer in Paris.’ I tell him what I’ve told no other. ‘I’m already doing designs after school for my first collection.’

Lemmy doesn’t say a word.

‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ I sing falsetto. ‘I DO!’

Lemmy lets out a croak.

In the distance Mr Shitalot’s voice reaches a pitch of intensity approximating insanity.

‘Do you know Archie Bumstead?’ Lemmy says suddenly.

Before my eyes I see us all in the changing sheds, struggling out of our clothes, trying not to reveal ourselves. It is cold and wet. And there, on the far side of the shed, is Archie, standing completely naked, no towel, nothing; displaying for us all to see his thick long penis softly embedded in a luxurious nest of black pubic hair. Archie Bumstead, who spent all his science lessons drawing pictures of bums, making them into a kind of targetboard, with circles moving concentrically inwards. I gulp. My throat is dry. The sky suddenly races with stars.

‘Why?’ I ask, trying to blank the screen out. It frightens me. I know it is wrong, very wrong. ‘He’s horrible.’

‘He lives down the road from me.’

Silence.

‘What,’ I say very faintly, ‘Lemmy, what are you going to do when you …’

‘Grow up? he offers darkly.

I flush scarlet. Lemmy is now sitting up. He has a stone in his hand and he throws it, sharply, at a cow which freezes, turns a startled eye on him then shambles away. The other animals awkwardly follow.

‘Yes but,’ I hurry on, ‘what are you going to do when you leave school?’

Lemmy looks at me, surprised. He leaves a long pause in which we both stare at the flat horizon of small houses all crouched down under the sky, as if it is crushing them with its invisible weight. From over by the pool comes a frantic tugging whistle, frayed by the wind, flittering the sound apart till it fades, an echo inside its own emptiness.

‘Nothing,’ he says, as if it is a matter concluded long ago. ‘Nothing,’ he repeats in a lighter voice as he gets up and I struggle to follow him.

‘Hey, Jamie,’ he says to me suddenly. It’s the first time he’s called me by my Christian name. I hum with pride, with happiness. All five foot 10 of me follows along happily behind his four foot nothing, tailing his every step. ‘Hey, do you want to go into town this Friday night?’

‘I can’t,’ I say automatically.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not allowed.’

‘Ask.’

I look at Lemmy and Lemmy looks at me.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘I’ll ask.’

Lemmy doesn’t smile. But he suddenly yells out, like I told you he did, ‘Let’s GO!’ and he smacks his hands together so hard a startled flock of sparrows lift up, zigzag in panic and speckle through the heavens. I laugh and laugh like something in me is broke and I say, ‘That’s right, eh, Lemmy? That’s right.’

‘Ever since we met you had a hold on me’

WHEN WE WALKED into the sunroom, they could see it all over my face.

I could see AuntyJoy, UncleBill, MumnDad just stop everything they’d been doing up till that time and freeze in their armchairs, the only living thing in the room the smoke twirling out the end of their cigarettes and the little beads, inside their glasses of beer, racing to the surface. It was like time had stopped and they all just stared into my face together with one set of eyes and then I saw all their eyes — the eyes inside — turn to look at Lemmy.

‘This … this is Lemmy’ I said to UncleBillAuntyJoyMumDad.

Dad and UncleBill expect Lemmy to come into the room, to shake them by the hand. But Lemmy doesn’t move. He doesn’t even come into the room. He stands by the door. By me.

AuntyJoy, who is six foot three (UncleBill, five four), uncrosses her long legs and places her stilettos on the carpet as if for support. She taps the ash off the end of her cigarette and says to Lemmy, friendly-like, ‘Hello Lenny, love.’ I feel Mum wince at AuntyJoy’s lower-class speech.

‘It’s Le-mm-y, AuntyJoy,’ I say in a low voice so the others can’t hear. ‘Not Lenny.’

AuntyJoy pulls one of her ‘Aren’t I a mug’ faces, rolling her eyes up to the smoky ceiling when Dad cuts through.

‘That’s a funny name. A very funny name.’ You can tell he doesn’t think it’s funny.

UncleBill doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t need to. I can see by the way he’s straining to look at Lemmy, he doesn’t think he’s exactly normal.

I turn to Lemmy, and suddenly I see him as they might. To me, all night, he’s very smart in his cut-down secondhand double-breasted herringbone tweed jacket and leather gloves. The powder on his face is barely discernible. His eyes darkly glitter. But to MumDadUncleBillAuntyJoy, to whom English Vogue’s Winter Styles are all still a mystery, Lemmy is danger.

I can see their eyes change suddenly and they’re all looking at one another, quickly, darting some foreign intelligence between themselves like a bird which leaps and bows and stabs its bright bloody beak into the watery pools of all their eyes and suddenly the birds start to fly at me.

But I know like Lemmy now. I know how to make my eyes, my heart, into an iron plate where the birds can’t go. I have learnt how to play a part.

I turn away, and playing my new part I pretend to be the same Jamie I was — and because I look like the same person I was up until I changed, they believe it.

I turn around, and pretending to still be Jamie-the-good-boy I call out, ‘I’ll take Lemmy into my room and show him my records. Then I’ll make you a cup of instant if you like.’ And I look at Lemmy and Lemmy looks at me as I hear Mum say, ‘That’s a good boy, Jamie,’ and we go into my room and shut the door tight before we break down into helpless crazy laughter because the play has begun.

‘Cos you started something’

THIS IS WHAT happened.

I met Lemmy outside the Civic and he was there already waiting. I saw him standing there, smoking a cigarette, watching intently in the way only Lemmy can watch. It’s like he’s searching for someone in the crowd. He suddenly saw me and looked a bit taken aback, don’t laugh, Lemmy. His eyes swept down to my new chiseltoes, up to Dad’s corduroys I had altered to fit, to my school jacket I’d dyed brown last Sunday, to my hair which I’d washed, brushed one way, then brushed the other, to get the curl out. He threw his cigarette away then, as if he’d have to make the best of a bad job.

I was trying hard not to show him it was the first time I’d ever been into town on my own at night, and it was Fridaynight, you could feel it in the air, all the excitement and rush. It was like being near the top of a huge waterfall, maybe Niagara, and the river’s rushing and you can hear the distant roar and suddenly it’s all gushing so quick you can’t stop moving, you’re being swept along in the boygirl crowds past all the Hell’s Angels lined up in leather, candypink bulbs flashing, oh flashflashing like my heart.

Lemmy led me, Lemmy led me out into the middle of Queen Street, right into the streaming traffic, where we stand, together, dodging death with the cars streaming by, red rinses flashing in my eyes. Downtown downtown I sing to myself in a fierce subdued whisper. Lemmy sings I’m a mod, I’m a mod. And I realise then, in this pure and crystal moment, as if everything around me has stopped, all traffic, all noise, and in this moment of perfect silence I realise I am thinking: I can be killed with Lemmy and it would be perfect. This knowledge is so overpowering that, when Lemmy lurches off after a car breaks open a gap, I don’t hesitate to follow. I don’t even look. Horns scream, brakes screech, a car skids, someone even calls out: ‘Stupid kid! Why don’t you look where you’re going?’

But I know where I am going.

‘I feel hungry,’ Lemmy says, not even looking at me, not even noticing that, with crossing the road, at that moment, I have changed all my life. ‘I wanna eat, honey’ Lemmy often talks American, all whiny and bored. We have both agreed Lucy is OK. It’s like Liz Taylor is OK: Doris Day is death. Norma Holyoake is a signpost pointing to hell.

‘But I don’t have the money,’ I say, feeling suddenly into my pocket to find the thick disc, a half-crown I have lifted from my father’s tobacco-smelly trouser pocket.

Lemmy says, ‘Money? Who needs money?’

And now we move into John Courts, past the glacial mirrors and make-up stands where the assistants’ faces are echoed in mirrors so many times that it’s only when a red mouth opens out, like a pink flower, into a yawn, you realise it’s a person you’re looking at, not a dummy.

‘Fourth floor ladies’ lingerie, fifth floor manchester doilies draperies linen supplies, sixth floor furniture lamps carpets annnnnnDDDD resttTTT-O-Rant!’ a dwarf chants as he flings back the metal door, like he’s opening the gates to heaven itself.

Lemmy selects a cottage pie, a sausage roll, two ham and mustard sandwiches, a cream doughnut, a rum ball, a chocolate milkshake and a lemon pudding. There’s hardly any room on his tray for his cup of coffee. His face shows no expression. He’s too busy choosing a good table for us.

After we have gorged, Lemmy points out his favourite waitress to me. She’s so old that her back is bent as if from the weight of carrying so many trays of dirty dishes out to the back kitchen. Her hair is dyed an improbable fiery ginger, and her face is like those theatre curtains at the St James, a cascading concertina of folds, tucks, bulges and creases. The real point about her is that, aged approximately a 1000, she is keeping up with modern fashion by wearing a mini-skirt. She has hand-altered the hem of her smock to raise it. And her wobbly old legs with heavy kneecaps look obscenely bent, naked. Lemmy calls her the Duchess of Windsor.

As she walks by, Lemmy very carefully flicks a whole spoon of sugar onto the lino. When she walks back again, we’re both looking down, eating very seriously, swallowing our crazy laughter. But we hear the Duchess’s footsteps all crunchy. She looks around a little surprised, then, as she passes again, spray, another spoon, all over the floor.

Lemmy does this for quite a while, till everyone going by our table has to crunch past, like Fijians on broken glass.

Suddenly the Duchess comes over, very quick. She bends down frighteningly close.

‘Why are you boys doing that?’ she says, and the surprising thing is she isn’t angry: it’s just like she’s trying to work us out. This is far worse than if she had been angry. I feel a terrible shame as I look at her close up. Now this is strange: Lemmy doesn’t say a word. I look at him quickly, imploring him to help. But his face is stone, no expression: nothing. Except this slow flush creeping up his neck, over his chin, up his cheeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. Then: ‘It wasn’t us. Truly.’

She looks right into me with her 1000-year-old eyes, the pupils faintly ringed with white. She is wearing false eyelashes.

‘It’s me that has to sweep it up,’ she says then, and we both turn to look at the mess sprayed all across the floor.

‘It wasn’t us,’ I lie with a sinking sense of humiliation so that my face, the sweat on my forehead, everything about me is telling her the truth. She just looks at my lie long enough for me to look at it too and wonder why something which had seemed so funny doesn’t appear to be now.

She lets out a very long low sigh, as if now, suddenly, she realises there is no hope. She’s exhausted by us, the sugar on the floor, the people at the tables, the dishes out the back: everything.

She leaves our bill behind.

There’s a slight pause now. I am uncertain. Lemmy’s eyes scale across my face: he hates me, I can tell.

He suddenly gets up, as if he doesn’t know me any more. He turns his back and, going straight towards the queue, ignores me, as if he’s never seen me in his life before. ‘But Lemmy,’ I say out loud, because I want to say, I haven’t got enough money to pay. I’m holding the bill in my hand. It is three pounds 17 shillings and eightpence.

But Lemmy will not turn around.

Other people in the queue turn to look at me, because the tone of my voice is so plangent, like a guitar chord echoing off-key. They look into my face. I break into a coughing fit, to disguise what I was going to say. Lemmy never turns round for one second. He does not know me any longer.

We inch forward. It’s like the Berlin Wall here: you get to a window with a small hole in it behind which sits Madame Commandante, uniform a black shiny dress, a marcasite watch, swinging earrings. Madame Commandante examines your bill, stares into your face hard and intense, then she relents and punches on the till, the drawer shoots back like a gun going off in your face, and you pay for the privilege of being set free from her stare. She always seems furious for some reason — perhaps spending most of her life in a glass box.

Lemmy has magically joined himself onto a flustered-looking young mother with three kids. The kids are whining about what they got to eat: the oldest wanted a banana milkshake and got a glass of milk, the youngest says she wants to be sick. The mother’s begging her to wait. Lemmy’s just standing by them looking bored and cross, like you might expect someone that age trapped with a public embarrassment like that.

I watch as they get to the Berlin Wall. The mother is so harassed that she spills her money onto the floor. The youngest girl, who’s going to be sick, runs through, heading straight towards the china department — Royal Doulton section. The mother pays desperately, grabs her change, sets off after the little girl, and Lemmy moves with them, amoeba-like, for a moment, till he dissolves away among the china stands.

Now he looks back at me, eyes glinting, the other side of the Berlin Wall.

He waits for me, he waits for me.

I know now what to do.

As if in a dream, I quietly meld with an elderly couple having a treat by coming into town on a Friday night (‘then we had a light supper at John Courts’). They turn towards me, glance at me, and the old man, who has a pink face so clean it looks like it gets Janolaed every morning, smiles at me from behind his glasses as if he might know me. I go bright red but I don’t say anything. I am so tense with excitement because now I know what I must do: I must act as Jamie the good boy. This will be my protection. I smile back at him and he and his wife exchange a look which says ‘and there’s a nicely brought up boy’. I realise, with a harsh laugh echoing inside me, yes Jamie-the-good-boy has his uses.

Quietly, silently, smiling and bobbing my head, looking at this elderly couple covered in camel-hair, stinking of Remuera, I act like I’m their boarding-school son and as they pay I move effortlessly through with them. They turn, a little startled to find me still with them, and I flash them one final special smile and I thrill as I see them softly taken in, thinking: do we know that boy, perhaps he’s the son of…?

Then I see their faces change. They are looking at my clothes. I quickly abandon them, and I find Lemmy by a crockery stand. He smiles at me and says, ‘How is the air up there?’ and I say, ‘Boo to you, I just don’t care.’ And we laugh and I think, I only want to be with you.

‘Being good isn’t always easy’

AFTER THIS LEMMY takes me into a shop and very carefully, while the shopkeeper is attending to a customer, Lemmy slyly picks up a packet of cigarettes and quick, up under his jacket it goes, held gripped in his armpit. I goggle. Lemmy just looks the same, sort of waiting impatiently when the shopkeeper glances at him. Lemmy looks as always — bored. My heart bangs away, I have never known such excitement. Then I realise Lemmy is waiting for me to take some too. I can’t stop myself. I look at the shopkeeper then my hand of its own will moves away from my body and I see it lift up a packet of Bold Gold so sophisticated and smelling of swinginglondon and twiggyandcarnabystreet and this gold bar attaches itself to me, joins my flesh. It cuts in, hard.

Suddenly I get frightened. I think of what it might mean if I’m caught; Jamie the good boy has to meet Jamie the bad boy, everything would change. But already it is too late, I am caught in the river again, whirling me along, too fast for me to stop. I realise that now I am giddy with speed, I can never stop.

The shopkeeper’s face under fluorescents looks faintly sick, with great big pools and bags under his eyes (overhead lighting is no good, I memorise, practical as always, grabbing at details — as if they’ll save me). But it is like snatching at dry leaves as I whirl by, spinning aroundroundround, getting nearer and nearer the edge of the waterfall: the door.

‘Oh boys,’ says the shopkeeper suddenly, moving round the counter. ‘Hold on a minute.’ But Lemmy keeps walking as if he can’t hear, so I can’t hear either, our ears are sealed over, till we hit the door, the dark, then we break into a run, joining our flesh onto the flash of speed we feel inside our veins. We run until we meld into boygirl.

I don’t know what I’ve just done. I don’t know what it means. I look down at Lemmy trying to work it all out. ‘Here,’ I say, and give him my cigarettes. But he already has his packet out and he’s unconcernedly ripping aside the cellophane, as if it’s so thin it just doesn’t matter. The cellophane falls to the ground, blows away. I watch it and feel suddenly tired and sad. He pops open the top, offers me one. I look down at the cigarettes, then I look at him, then I look down at them.

‘I don’t smoke,’ I say.

Lemmy just shrugs and lights up, and I watch him and he doesn’t look at me. We move back under the pink flashing lights, swim through the river of looks, and I think how different we are now; my life has so suddenly changed and it’s because of Lemmy. When we’re on the other side, in the warm dark, I say, ‘Oh Lemmy’ very casual-like, ‘could I borrow a cigarette. Would you mind?’

Lemmy squares his herringbone-tweed shoulders (as seen in English Vogue) and he shakes out a cigarette and offers it to me, and I get this shivery feeling all over me, right down to the bottom of my socks. I can hear the sweat pricking and I feel suddenly — oh — I’m being washed, showered all over with silver and I take the cigarette and Lemmy leans forward and lights it looking into my eyes quite curiously and the cigarette catches fire and I say, ‘Thank you, Lemmy. Thank you.’

‘Little by little by little by little’

SO IT HAPPENS Lemmynme are always together, fatboyandbeanpole; people see us so often, they forget even to laugh.

We walk home from school together, then when we get home we rush to the phone and talk to each other for hours: we talk about hairstyles, fashions, what’s on TV, film stars; our parents, their friends. This is important.

We go to the pictures a lot. I mean what else is there to do in Auckland except sit in the dark and imagine living someplace else? One night at the St James the film wasn’t any good, it wasn’t even funny; but Lemmy doesn’t let that spoil his enjoyment in the sweet jaffa dark with the men and girls all glued together flesh touch-touching.

Lemmy sits there looking all around at them, then is silent. Then he starts laughing. He starts off very low and casual, like he’s the only person in the audience who really gets the joke, and the couples aren’t noticing under the wall of wash which flickers silver shade all over us. But Lemmy wants to let out his laugh so he laughs some more, even at things which aren’t funny.

I start laughing too. We laugh in the dark like our laughs are coming from somewhere else, some other part of the plastery ornate theatre. Lemmy starts laughing more and more, like he can’t control it and he’s watching the funniest thing in the world.

And suddenly it is funny because up there on the big dream wall are all these stupid film stars acting and carrying on, opening car doors and looking at each other and patting their hairdos and they can’t see the joke: they’re locked out.

Now Lemmy in the plush lush dark has all the couples coming unglued. Lips leave lips as the air all around us fills with Lemmy’s uncontrollable laughter, backed up, bit by bit, seat after seat, row by row, by other people who start off laughing at Lemmy’s laugh but before long in the tight night everyone is laughing, the whole place is going mad, a sad man along from us sitting alone is laughing so hard he’s in pain, he’s crying and he’s laughing and he’s pleading please, stop, please, stop and the back doors have swung open as the usherettes swarm in, their torches strobing the dark, and Lemmy stops laughing, he just cuts it off with a razor, he nudges me sharp in the ribs and whispers PeteSinclair, Let’s GO!

His voice is so urgent that I cut off my own laughter and we run out of the dark, push open the back doors and leave all these people sitting in the dark laughing so hard some of them are crying. And the wonderful thing is: not one of them knows they are the joke.

‘I must go where my destiny leads me’

LEMMYNME GO STRAIGHT down to 246’s record bar and, feeling so good, shoplift two 45s (me, Shirley Bassey’s ‘I Who Have Nothing’; Lemmy, Julie Driscoll’s ‘Light My Fire’), except we say we ‘bought’ not ‘shoplifted’ because, you know, if you change the words, the meaning changes too.

Anyway we’re standing down at Lemmy’s bus-stop, I’m spending every last second with him, Lemmy’s trying to get me to come out to his place to have some instant and listen to our new records. But I’m saying to Lemmy, I can’t, I have to be home by 11 o’clock at the latest. Lemmy says it’s only 9.30 now, he’ll drive me home. But you don’t have a licence, I say. So? he says.

But while Lemmy is persuading me and I’m hanging round, lingering still in the stardust of his glance, I can’t help notice Lemmy is looking at this ugly man, about 30, short, muscular, drunk. He is so ugly, chills frill and flitter up and down my spine; I feel my back arch.

But Lemmy, he is so excited about what happened at the St James, he’s not thinking. He keeps just looking at this man. Lemmy, I say, Lemmy! but he doesn’t say anything, he just keeps looking so hard the man sort of wakes up; he lifts his head up from staring into a deep tunnel-pit in which all he can see is himself standing alone, at a bus-stop, on a girlboy Fridaynight.

And he suddenly starts looking at Lemmynme and of course he doesn’t know we’re the two who started everyone laughing at the St James and it’s like he’s confused about what he’s seeing: because we are not boygirl but boyboy. Worse, he looks at us as if all he can see is a short fatboy four foot nothing and an Audrey Hepburn kind of boy.

Lemmy is already laughing at him. I laugh too, but I begin to regret wearing the waistcoat from my father’s evening suit, my tasteful pale grey paisley tie, silver watch chain.

I get on Lemmy’s bus; we are together. The man comes right down and sits opposite us. As the bus moves his legs bump into mine. I shift mine away, as if I’m burnt.

The bus is full. I don’t even dare look at Lemmy but I see in the window Lemmy is looking ahead just blank and like he can’t even be bothered registering what’s going on.

‘Well, suppose we share the joke then?’ this man suddenly says right in my face. His breath is warm, beer-bloaty. His eyes burrow into my face.

I could just die. I dart a look at Lemmy but suddenly Lemmy’s acting like he’s not with me, he doesn’t even know me. Don’t leave me on my own, Lemmy, I cry but Lemmy does not move, even when the man says again, in a loud voice, so the whole bus can hear: ‘What’s the fucking joke then?’

My eyes pass over his face, very quickly, a fantail dart, then I quickly shoot them away because I know I can never speak. Everyone on the bus is looking at us now, a few people are laughing. I hear someone call us an ugly name, a word which hurts.

At the end of the following century, Lemmy’s arm, almost of its own accord, rises up to the cord, pulls it sharp. People are laughing at us, pointing at what we are wearing, but I say nothing. In silence now, under everyone’s gaze, we get off the bus and it pulls away.

We walk along in the dark, silent.

I can’t understand Lemmy not saying anything. I wait for him to speak, explain. But Lemmy does not speak.

‘Half heaven, half heartache’

NOT LONG AFTER this Lemmy’s father went up north to look at some land he had. Lemmy’s father always had these bright schemes for making money, and as time went on we just sat back waiting for them to turn to dust.

That day Mrs Wilson came along. Lemmy had told me about Mrs Wilson and how she was Lemmy’s father’s special friend. Lemmy had nothing against her personally, he just hated her. And Lemmy always had this way of homing in. He picked on one little thing and you might have noticed it and thought nothing of it but by the time Lemmy was finished that one thing was all you could see and the person in question was a hostage to this one detail.

So with Mrs Wilson all Lemmy said to me, deadpan, was: ‘Neat the way she goes to so much trouble to dye her roots black, eh?’ And sure enough, if you looked really closely — and Lemmy had this way of looking at everything from a great distance, through a telescope, so all the pores and dents came up in ultra close-up — you suddenly noticed in a very embarrassing way that Mrs Wilson’s hair, which at first glance appeared very ‘naturally blonde’, actually had this thin black line peeping out, under the thatch, looking at you, staring you in the face.

Miss Clairol 1932 is what Lemmy called her. Often he’d say it in her presence, but vague, like it was a riddle, as he looked between Mr Stephenson and Miss Clairol: ‘Now which twin wears the Toni?’

No wonder Mrs Wilson looked a little edgy every time Lemmy came close to her, and gazed right through her. She’d flush this very old faded pink and look at Lemmy’s father, as if she understood.

Anyway, there we were, all four of us in Lemmy’s father’s rundown old Vauxhall, bright blue and blowsy, heading away from all this, up past all the caravans with the fridges sitting on a square of carpet, the sea fighting to get through all the lines of washing. I had a special costume on that day, ‘suitable for those unexpected alfresco invitations to dine outdoors’ (Vogue).

Where was Lemmy’s mother, you ask? I asked myself that, but I knew more than to say it out loud.

I’d only ever seen her once, that night after the St James, when she came into the kitchen while we were heating up the jug for coffee. She was very short, like Lemmy, but dark and brooding like she carried this storm along with her. And when she saw some crumbs on the floor, she just fell on them, letting out this cry, like she was killed by them. I looked at Lemmy quick, I didn’t know what to do. I was standing up ready to say Howdoyoudo, like you do to people’s mothers, but Lemmy’s mother hadn’t heard of that game, I could tell. Lemmy just said, speaking to her slowly, ‘Mum, this is Jamie, he’s from school.’

It was like they were speaking code. Then her eyes, Lemmy’s eyes, turned and focused on me and looked all over me, from my shoes up to my hair. I got very embarrassed and the words howdoyoudo suddenly seemed very stupid.

She looked embarrassed too and almost ashamed. ‘’Ello,’ she said in a small hurried voice. Then she was gone. It was as if she was hot on the trail of more crumbs. For once Lemmy didn’t say anything to me and I knew not to say anything to him. Later on, just when I was about to catch the bus home, I said it was nice to meet your mother. Lemmy looked away. I said ‘She’s not from here, is she?’ And he said, covering it over quick, because it is a flaw, a blemish, a terrible thing not to be like we all are, born here: ‘No, Dad met her in the war. She’s from Italy’ ‘Italy?’ I say and feel sorry for Lemmy. And he says as if he just wishes I’d stop talking about it, ‘Hey, do you want to see my postcards I found at the tip, of Mamie Van Doren? She’s got the cutest colour hairdo.’ And I say yes. After that we never talk about it ever again. It’s what Lemmy wants.

As we left the houses behind, Lemmynme scrunched down as far as we could in the back seat so we didn’t have to look out the windows at all that boring scenery of hills and sea and stuff. We compared favourite TV programmes (The Avengers versus Get Smart, no competition) and in between, when we got bored, we just sang, me doing Dusty’s bits while Lemmy did the back-up chorus.

Every so often Lemmy’s dad would turn around and say to us in this really peeved voice, like he didn’t like what he was hearing, ‘Will you boys shut up for a minute? I want to catch the 2.45 at Avondale.’ He’d start trying to dial up the races on the conked-out old car radio that he was so proud of. Lemmynme’d sit there trying not to burst out laughing, thinking what hopeless horse he’d backed now and how far back down the track it’d be and if it’d reach the glue factory by the time we reached Warkworth.

Miss Clairol 1932 sat beside him, looking straight ahead. She was acting out the bit in the Sunday movies where the heroine, the love interest (another Lemmy term for her), sees the problem, can’t do anything about it but understands. So that we had an excuse to let out our laugh, Lemmy did the Chicks’ instant pudding ad, crowing out, Whisk Up A Treat! Just the thought of them two in their boots and sprayed hair and everything was enough to crack us up.

‘Lemmy,’ Lemmy’s dad’d say, as he tried to get the races and only got this scratchy scrawling static sound instead, ‘I’m warning you boy. I’m only giving you one warning.’

Lemmy’s answer was to give the back of the love interest’s seat one hard vicious kick, but as if by accident. We’d watch this red flush creep up the back of her neck but for Lemmy’s father’s sake she pretended nothing was happening, she understood. That sent us off deeper into laughter and Lemmy only had to mention the word chook and we just about wept at the ugliness of everything outside the window as we went through all those one-horse towns which get the movies even after we do in Auckland, most of them with not even a dairy open or anything, and only a spare mongoloid swinging on a farm gate.

‘This is not Carnaby Street,’ I whisper to Lemmy as we pull into this dirt patch covered in thistle, toitoi and gorse. Mr Stephenson, a socialist, can only see gold: all it needed was a change of government, he said, and the industrial project across the harbour would leap ahead. Mr Stephenson was always full of pipedreams, like working in a socialist bookshop where everybody shares the profits. Translated, this means he ends up selling sex books out of a dairy in a busy no-name street. Everyone knows it’s no use having dreams in this dump.

Well, Lemmynme wouldn’t get out, we just sat in the car eating a whole packet of spearmints followed by caramels, feet up on the back of the front seat while Mr Stephenson and the love interest walked all over the dirt patch, first of all vaguely, then from side to side, as if by walking around it they were getting closer to feeling its true value.

In the end the love interest and the eyebag went away together and had a cigarette and talked quietly. Then the eyebag came back and pulled open the car door and let in all this cold air and asked, why didn’t we get out and stretch our legs?

Lemmy said we didn’t want to; we were listening to the Top Twenty.

The eyebag said we could listen to the Top Twenty anytime.

‘Not Dusty, we can’t,’ says Lemmy then, sharp and intense.

I nod.

Mr Stephenson looks from Lemmy to me, from me to Lemmy and back again. It’s like he’s never seen boys like us before, like we’re a new invention or something. I pick imaginary lint off my knobbly tweed trousers.

He lets out this breath which goes on for a long time, as if it’s coming from a long time back, maybe from when he first met Mrs Stephenson in Italy, when she was a laughing dark-eyed beauty, sort of a pint-sized Sophia Loren maybe: before Lemmy had even been invented.

Now the eyebag is looking straight at me. I am embarrassed, I suddenly feel naked.

‘I’ve been listening to you two all the way up,’ he says then, leaning right into the car so I am embarrassed by his personal odour — I mean, hasn’t he heard of Old Spice? ‘I’ve been listening to you two, and all the time you two boys have been going on about how nothing — nothing in New Zealand — is good enough for you two. Everything’s a joke!’ He is lost for words. He gestures towards the blue peeling sky, the clouds, the hillscape. ‘Isn’t there anything you boys like?’

Silence.

I look just beyond Mr Stephenson’s right shoulder, concentrating on space. Lemmy has taught me this trick. It helps you to appear very blank.

‘You boys are in for a real shock when you grow up,’ he says then, in a voice which has no anger in it, only a vague undertow of sadness mingled with bitterness.

Lemmynme sneak a look at each other, then, in simultaneous action, like the Chicks, raise our eyes up to the car roof.

After Lemmy’s dad takes his eyebags away, I let out a long sigh. I mean, what does he mean? A shock? What exactly does he think this place is?

‘In the middle of nowhere’

‘WHY BOTHER?’ LEMMY takes up his favourite theme, rolling over onto his back, looking up at the sky.

We’re at school and it’s a warmwool day, this day, the clouds are all light puffs running across the sky, chasing themselves. Even the earth is breathing. I rub my body into the grass and don’t say anything. A worm slithers succulently round a blade of grass, its rings all concertina-ing in as it disappears. I am hot, sweating.

‘Dontyouevenknowyourleftfromyourright’ comes out in one long screamed sentence.

We’re lying on a grass bank low enough for nobody to see us.

Lemmy has got me out of military service by getting me into the medical unit where all we do is wind bandages and smoke cigarettes as, natch, there are no casualties (unless you count, as Lemmy says straight-faced, everyone out there on the field).

I hear Lemmy let out this hollow laugh. ‘Which twin wears the Toni?’ he murmurs. Lemmy and I are only at school because I’ve persuaded him we have to turn up sometimes. We write each other’s exeat notes about once a week now, go off on daytrips, things like that. Last week we took the train up to Wellsford, this hell-hole tinpot town at the end of the line. Lemmy shoplifted up one side of the street while I did the other. It was a competition to see who got the most. I did, by one can of hairspray. We only take important things like deodorants, hairsprays, cigarettes, bath perfumes: things that’ll come in useful. On the way back we sort of went mad and sprayed each other with the shaving foam and perfume and everything, then threw it all out the windows. It was fun.

‘Why?’ says Lemmy, his voice almost dramatic. Because things are changing in our lives now. Things are getting different.

This is what has happened.

I told you how I was the fastest boy in all the fourth form. This is not a small thing, at this school. It sort of protected me, being an Audrey Hepburn kind of boy, from being bashed up. But things went really wrong when I fell out of favour with our French teacher.

It was after the word went round that Freckles’ll bum you for free, and some boys said that made him into a homo, and then everyone argued because, up till that time, nobody had connected bumming, which was just boys having fun with each other’s bums, with being a homo. That connection had not been made. But someone in our class said the connection was there, pure and simple, and it was wrong.

I can remember this moment, very clearly.

We were all standing outside the gym, waiting for Shitalot to start his performance; he was late for some reason. It was a cool day, it was about to rain. And the word rippled up and down the line we were in, about Freckles Friggs being a homo. And our French class was next. And Ken Johnston, in front of everyone, asked me if I was a homo. I said No! because of course I am not. But it frightened me, because I am still not sure what being a homo means, apart from being in Truth and having to commit suicide in the bath with blood running everywhere in ribbons from your wrists so someone you love finds you and is haunted for life.

I am confused, really confused. I mean, I feel this sort of hot uncontrollable feeling overtake me at the sight of the hairylegs, hairychests — hair anywhere — it just makes me feel I can’t hardly breathe at all, yet suddenly my whole body’s breathing for me, it’s like my whole fleshy form is just this one big breath shimmering soundlessly, almost crying with the want of it, the fear of it. I just don’t understand.

I even look at a library in town covered with Virginia creeper and when the leaves fall off I sort of look at the way all the whiskery veins connect and feel their hairy tendrils out from a central knobbly root and this strikes me dumb because it’s so like that little tickle, tiny twists of hair, lying softly against each other as they weave themselves a rope-ladder up over that long taut muscle all the sports boys have, at the back of their thighs: I keep seeing the hairs riding up, climbing up under the black serge, at the very back of their shorts.

Yet. Yet. When I found I had hair down there, I did the strangest thing, I can’t even explain it to myself, except I had to do it, I was driven to it (this is what I mean by wrong but necessary). I got home early from school, went into the bathroom and got Dad’s razor and, alone in the white room, sun shining in the opaque window, I lathered up some soap and pulled my trousers down. I looked down at that thing, sitting there, all very carefully snuggled up, innocent … and carefully, very carefully, I razored all the hair away. Then I carefully washed out Dad’s razor. This is the truth. I don’t want it to happen to me. I don’t.

Our French teacher, Freckles Frigg, is a small wrinkled man who, Lemmy pointed out to me, likes to get the boys lined up writing on the blackboard then he walks up and down with a ruler, whacking it smackily on his palm while he looks with glistening eye at the boys’ rumps. He gives free French lessons to promising pupils, at home. They even get to stay the weekend.

And he liked me because, as he said, I wasn’t rough like the other boys. I had a nice soft voice.

Normally at French I sat down the front, being almost his pet. But this time, as we came in, I ran down the back, me with my shaved downthere, being called a homo, I ran down the back, just dying, and when Freckles asked me, of all the boys who were cowering down the very end of the class, rubbing their hands all over their legs and in between them, breathless with excitement, with the thought of the danger of it, why I wasn’t sitting up the front as usual, I said I just wouldn’t ever sit up the front again, not me. I would just die if I had to.

It somehow didn’t matter too much about being the best runner in the whole fourth form after that.

Each time in French, Freckles got me to read out loud and my voice would falter and the boys would laugh and then Freckles would say, Listen boys to how soft Caughey’s voice is and suddenly, as if for the first time, everyone heard how soft my voice was and now everyone wanted to hear my voice, as if it had never been heard before, and each time I spoke they would scream and laugh and imitate it as if it was the funniest thing in the world. I began to realise I could never raise my voice again.

Lemmy was the only person I could talk with, after that.

‘So why bother?’ says Lemmy now, lying on his back, blowing a cigarette ring while, out in the sun, all the casualties carrying heavy rifles around on their shoulders get yelled at.

I know what he’s talking about. Because Alan Blender, the biggest boy in our class, has come to me and asked me — rather, told me, as if it was a big favour — that I was going to be allowed to be the last runner in the fourth form relay at the end-of-year school sports. I could represent our class. What it really meant was, if they were lagging behind in the other three parts, they could rely on my speed to get them out of trouble. ‘Being so fast. Eh, Caugheyboy,’ says Alan Blender as he runs his hand up my back, then punches me companionably.

‘Why bother even turning up?’ Lemmy says this in a voice which has so little emphasis in it I suddenly realise how easy it might be, not to turn up. It’s as if it doesn’t mean anything at all, any more.

I lie there, not touching Lemmy: we never touch. I think about it all and as I think about it I just start laughing. This laugh sort of forces its way up my chest, like a big bubble of air coming up from the deep ocean floor, it rises upwards towards the surface and it pops.

‘But where’ll we go? I say tentatively, not letting Lemmy know I’ve suddenly crossed that bridge too, almost too quickly, I’m in such a hurry to get away from Blender and Johnston and all their voices always asking to hear my voice so they can laugh. Yet now they seem as far away — no, further — than their voices carrying in the slight soft wind.

Down below Ajax Murphy is being wrapped in bandages then dipped slowly into the school creek. We do not listen to his muffled screams.

‘Go?’ says Lemmy, as if there is a question. He looks me in the eyes. ‘Why don’t we just stick around and watch the fun develop?’

We both laugh then, as if gasping for air, we really need the air to breathe, but suddenly it’s as if we’re laughing so hard we can’t get the air into our bodies.

It didn’t matter even being bashed up after that. I decided then if I was going to be hated I might as well give them something to hate me for. And it was worth it for that moment, sitting beside Lemmy up in the back of the school grandstand, watching them run that race and get to where I was meant to be: and I just wasn’t there. I thought to myself: I’ll never be there again. I’ll be with Lemmy. And I was glad.

‘Now I need a place to hide away’

AFTER THIS LEMMYNME really started not turning up at school, it was like this sickness got into us and we wanted to just keep moving to get rid of it, keep walking and talking and not doing very much at all. It was then Lemmy used to take me into toilets and we would read everything on the walls and I started to learn one or two things. We would shoplift and maybe sit on the beach and smoke cigarettes and talk about what we might do in the future. Lemmy thought he might go to Swinging London. I wasn’t sure.

There were all sorts of parts of Auckland being demolished at that time for the motorway and we spent days just sitting inside these very old houses, sometimes smashing them up and laughing, other times just talking about film stars and sex and things. But while we didn’t talk about it too much, ticking behind all this, like a huge bomb about to go off, was School Cert, its sound growing louder and louder the more we chose not to listen to it. Because Lemmy had already told me, he wasn’t going to sit it. And when he said that he just looked at me and went silent, like he was waiting for me to speak.

‘He’s no rebel to me’

‘WHY?’ I SAY. ‘Why?’

‘Because Dad doesn’t like him.’

‘Why not?’ I say very quiet.

‘Because,’ says Mum, and she’s floundering suddenly, switching her eyes away from my face which is searching hers for clues, for knowledge. ‘Because,’ she says finally, like it’s been decided between the two of them, ‘because he’s not a good influence.’

Mum and I are standing in the front room, that is how important it is. Out our front window you can see the reef, the dump, the city, then, behind it all, rising like a green-black moon, Rangitoto.

A trolleybus whistles down the road. First of all an eerie sound, almost a presentiment: then the bus, the pub bus, full of men drunk enough to come home cheerful, till they open the screendoor. Mum and I watch little lights and fires fight and flare at the end of the trolley poles, like birds trying to escape as they are dragged along. Dad is on that bus. Dad, the disappointed almost All Black.

‘Mum, he’s not a bad influence,’ I say softly. ‘He’s just not.’

‘No, James,’ says Mum in this sort of firm voice which says it is going to be law and it hurts her but it has to be. ‘Lemmy’s a bad influence on you and we’ — we, I thought, I’ve never heard that before — ‘we don’t want you to see him.’

‘But he’s my friend, Mum.’

‘You’ve got other friends.’

I think of them. Alan. Kevin. Lionel. They all faded away into complete nothingness when I got to know Lemmy. Besides, Lemmy doesn’t like me having other friends. He gets critical.

‘But Lemmy’s my special friend, Mum,’ I say looking at her, not moving, after a pause. We can hear Dad’s footsteps up the side of the house, the almost blind bang of the flyscreen as it closes behind him.

‘That’s what we don’t like. We don’t, James. We don’t think he’s having a good influence on you.’

But I’d die without Lemmy, Mum, I want to say. I’d die.

There isn’t a mountain too high. There isn’t a valley too deep.

But I say nothing. Dad is home. The vegetables are overcooked.

‘Anyone who had a heart’

‘YOU MEAN THERE’S not even a dairy down there?’

We are on the way out to Rangitoto Island. It is now three weeks two days, four hours before School Cert but Lemmy wants to go on a trip to an extinct volcano which sits out in the harbour, not a living soul on it. I know it is a challenge, I have to accept. Test me.

I am wearing an interesting outfit, ‘suitable for country rambles’: tweed trousers with a soft nubbly weave, a suede emerald-green jerkin, with a softly rolled poloneck, a small silver chain on my wrist. But the coup de grâce is my new shoes.

I was so excited when I got these shoes I could hardly sleep. I kept waking up all through the night, thinking it was a dream I had them: then the sweet smell of soft leather and newness would greet me, I would reach out to touch them, just softly. The tissue paper would crinkle crisply, singing its song of ‘justbought’, while below, waiting to slip onto my feet, wings of happiness to uplift me, speed me along to all those places I dream of going to, chariots of dream: my new chisel-toe suede shoes.

Lemmy says nothing. He looks at me, eyes sceptically sweeping up and down my person, as if he can’t believe he has to be seen out in public with me. He hunches over his cigarette, bitterly almost, as if he can hear the silence which is growing all around us, which comes from us not talking about School Cert: that is the thing we can never talk about, and suddenly it is as if we can’t find anything else to talk about either. Fashion, movies, film stars: they have all fallen away from us as the boat leaves Auckland, and the city, the town, becomes a small toy behind us, just little buildings and cars growing smaller by the second. I wonder if I will be seasick. The waves glow green and silken.

Ahead lies Rangitoto, vast, still, uninhabited.

‘I just can’t believe it,’ I murmur to myself. All I have brought along is a can of lacquer and an apple. ‘It sounds so uncivilised.’ I wonder secretly to myself what on earth we will do there. There is no shoplifting to do. No movies. Nothing, I think as I gaze at all the horrible green so uniform and dense and unchanging: a jungle.

Lemmy doesn’t say anything: he is wearing jeans. I look at him and think of how I can entertain him: Lemmy is getting moody these days, it’s like he’s listening to that silence growing around us too much.

‘I’m not supposed to be seeing you, Lemmy,’ I say then, as if he can see it’s a joke, because I am with him. Lemmynme, forever together. Beanpole and Fatboy.

‘Why not?’

Lemmy says this flat, while his eyes run over and over the green-deadflatness of the volcano. It’s like he’s hardly even interested. I don’t like Lemmy when he’s like this. He frightens me a little. It’s like he can’t even see I’m on his side. It’s like he sees me as the enemy.

‘You’re a bad influence,’ I say to him, laughing mouthdry.

‘Oh.’

It is like this has happened to Lemmy before. He turns a little away from me and I can see his face is a mask, shutting me out. I look beyond him to the wharf, over by a mangrove swamp. It is a grey day so pale that the sky is a hot iron sheet on the tops of our skulls, descending, the sun a blind orb, pupil covered over with a skim of skin. Stink humid.

I can feel my fashionable emerald-green jerkin cutting up under my armpits. It was my mother’s, I have not cut it down properly to size. But it looks good. I have also powdered my face just faintly, so I look more English. Then a ghastly thing happens: my porkpie hat just lifts up off my head and flies out, onto the waves. And Lemmy laughs.

‘Lemmy!’ I cry, hurt. But then I have to laugh too, flushing a painful red which creeps up my skin from the inside sole of my foot, right inside my suede chiseltoes.

Other people, ordinary New Zealanders dressed in sensible shoes and walking boots, look at me like I am from outer space. They are interested in Lemmynme, very. They look at us like we’re a sideshow. Normally Lemmynme’d laugh right back at them, Lemmy picking and pointing out how the fat woman has a bra-strap just about bursting up on her shoulder, held by a safety pin; how her kid just missed being a mongoloid by a half-second. But today, listening to the silence, Lemmy just edges away from me.

I sit on the boat, grasping the thick peeled paint of the railing. I watch the crown of my hat bob away from me, moving further and further away: my heart somehow turns to lead, sinks, plummets. But I say nothing, my own laugh frozen on my lips.

There is no dairy. There is nothing but gnarled old trees like arthritic hands curled round and trying to pick up something. Even the tide is out: there is mud, pick-picking sounds and this ugly scoria of dried-up old explosion which hardly allows anything to grow on it. Already it is warmer. I wish I had a mirror to check my make-up. There is only the green water pleated into little waves, which withdraw, a soft sneer in every move.

Around us the families organise themselves into troops. The dads give orders and lead them off.

‘Rangitoto,’ says one, wearing most unfortunate walking boots and reading from a pamphlet, ‘was once a Maori burial ground, home to parrots, a look-out during war. It is particularly inhospitable, because of its lack of soil, absence of water, and harshness of scoria.’

Lemmy says to me: ‘Let them take off. With a bit of luck we’ll find them, half-fried to death in the interior.’

The father folds away the pamphlet and blows a metal whistle.

Lemmy watches them go: ‘Hawkmeat,’ he yells at them.

A lone kid cries as they blend into bilge green.

I can see Lemmy is thinking of what I have said to him about being a bad influence. He’s not even seeing I see it’s a joke. He is not looking at me. Or if he does, it’s as if I have changed into a mirror which he doesn’t want to look into. As if he no longer likes what he sees.

Oh Lemmy, I think. Don’t.

We begin to walk off, following these ugly tracks sort of carved into petrified lava which convicts have been forced to make, under the lash, under the sun which beats down now as if it has never stopped. Suddenly it seems like the face of a too-hot iron, pushed right up close to you. I push my sleeves back, gently, so they won’t wrinkle. Lemmy is walking too fast. I hurry to catch up. But the track is uneven: there are all these little snares and catches just to wrench at my chiseltoes. I look down: already a soft white-clay powder is dusting the ends of them.

‘Don’t go so fast,’ I say to Lemmy, pleading even while I’m asking.

Lemmy doesn’t answer. He doesn’t slow down either.

I realise I’ll just have to look down at my feet all the time, making sure my suede shoes aren’t damaged. I can’t look at the countryside, the ‘views’, anything. In fact, in front of me turns into this extremely long monotonous movie in which the only image is a clay-grey stretch of ground interrupted every so often with this stumpy semi-mongoloid piece of twig which looks about 3000 years old and yet it’s only grown two inches: it hates you for putting your foot onto it. In this movie, the front of my chiseltoes zigzag, hastily finding a smooth place to fall as I hurry to keep up with Lemmy.

Lemmy is wearing old sandshoes, so ugly.

‘What’s the race?’ I call out. ‘Lemmy!’

It is heating up as we climb, in fact it is quite steep. When I interrupt the most boring movie on Earth to glance around I see only an uninterrupted vista. The convict roads snake away into nothingness. There is nothing on this island, except a cone which rises up, seemingly the same from every side, which only makes it more of a nightmare. I mean: how do you know where you are?

‘Anyone who ever loved,’ I sing to myself in a tight bitter voice.

Lemmy is just far enough away from me to pretend he can’t hear.

‘Anyone who ever dreamed … Lemmy,’ I say. I raise my eyes up and feel, like an attack, my feet catch on one of those abrasive little snags which maliciously wait to trap my new shoes. ‘What’s the hurry, Lemmy?’

A small rivulet runs down my face, disgorging through the powder, dragging it down and round into a crease by my neck. The poloneck grabs up at my throat, rubbing against my soft skin, sandpaper. My eyes smart. The sheeny sky wavers for a moment.

Lemmy doesn’t even answer. He keeps on walking.

‘Without you I’d die dear’

I DO NOT want to be left alone here. I stop for a moment, to catch my breath. Far down below now, across the sheet of water, I see the small whiteness of Auckland. It looks like a whole lot of crushed shells littering a hillside. For the first time ever I long to be back there. But the sea stretches between us, a cruel mirror.

‘Lemmy,’ I call, ‘Lemmy!’

I want to reach out and grab hold of his back, to hold him still, to keep him from moving remorselessly away from me. But I don’t dare. ‘Lemmy,’ I say. ‘Can’t I have … can I have a smoke?’

Lemmy doesn’t stop walking. It’s as if he hasn’t even heard. Then he slows down and stops so abruptly I practically walk into his back, I am walking now on such automatic scramble.

Lemmy turns, his eyes scald as they pass in a beam all over me. I do not look my best: I am sweating, scarlet, almost panting. But we have stopped moving upwards, at least for a second.

I look down. My suede shoes, ‘black as a summernight’, are now clouded over. And a small wire of pain is beginning to announce itself, growing at the back of my heel, where they rub up and down, cruelly. This is strange, I have never noticed this before. But my feet, inside the suede, are starting to burn, pumping with heat. White light dazzles.

It is so eerily still. There are no birds, no people. In the far distance, I can hear a family calling to one another. You could get lost here, I think with a small freeze of fear.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘I’d love a cigarette.’

Lemmy fumbles in his pockets and brings a packet out slowly. But he doesn’t offer them to me, pulling the lid back like he normally does, offering them like in a cigarette advertisement. He throws the packet at me, hard, with real force. It hits me on the neck but I scrabble to catch it before it falls onto the ground, boldgold forever tarnished. Just before it reaches the petrified lava, I catch it. My fingers are shaking. Tears sting my eyes: tears or heat, I can no longer tell.

‘Who can I turn to?’

I look at Lemmy’s face, which has no expression whatsoever; just this blank masked look, as if he won’t even let me see what he’s thinking, feeling…

‘They think they can separate us. That’s what they say,’ I say, lighting my cigarette with a small, scratchy flare and drawing in deep. I breathe out, like Lemmy does, through my nose, very sophisticated, hard, and I laugh. But my laugh comes out funny, off-key, then. It betrays me, reveals me. Now it is the silence again, the big and noisy silence, knowing, growing around us, accentuated by the hideous emptiness of that island.

‘That’s what they think,’ I say, brushing the sweat off my face, holding my poloneck open so the air can get in. But the air is sticky, hot.

Lemmy doesn’t answer.

‘It doesn’t mean a thing,’ I say, dropping the lit match onto the ground so it lies there, burns on the rock for a moment, then, getting no sustenance, flutters, withers, dies. ‘It won’t mean a thing. When I ring you up I’ll just put on a voice. You do the same for me. They won’t even notice.’

‘Really, Lemmy,’ I say again, when he says nothing but slowly moves away from me and climbs onto a boulder of dead lava, which he stands on, looking right over my head, as if he can see something far away. I look up at Lemmy outlined against white, cut into it, backed by it, harsh, and I think with a shock: Lemmy’s getting thinner. He’s lost weight quickly, he’s no longer straightening his hair, it’s starting to grow curly and long, wild.

Lemmy’s changing, I think. He no longer looks like one of the Small Faces, he looks more like David Hemmings or maybe even Terence Stamp. My heart sinks. It’s like he’s almost changed in front of me, but so gradually I haven’t even noticed. I’m so busy studying for School C, I hardly notice anything. I feel fear. What will we be if we’re no longer fatboy and beanpole, Lemmynme forever together? Who will I be? Maybe he’s even seeing someone else.

‘What do you think, Lemmy?’ I say, slowly rising up so that, as I grow taller, all around me everything is suddenly this beautiful orange-red as blood sweeps down through my head, my lids, everything. ‘We’ll both just pretend we’re someone else, eh? That won’t be difficult.’

But Lemmy says nothing, apart from a very casual, flat, ‘Whatever.’

Lemmy has never said whatever before.

And slowly, all around me, the beautiful fiery reds fade away and I am left with a dark empty moonscape, the silence going from horizon to horizon. Lemmy has his back to me, walking away, growing smaller and smaller.

‘Something beautiful’s dying’

I FOLLOW BEHIND Lemmy; my shoes are now definitely hurting and each footstep is a rinse of pain, a raw scraping at the back of my heels. Inside the suede, my feet pump hot angry blood, like bombs of defeat which might go off.

‘Lemmy,’ I call out.

He doesn’t answer.

I stop.

I call out across the petrified lava, ‘I can’t just be nothing!’

Lemmy keeps walking.

‘I mightn’t get to be a dress designer in Paris. I mightn’t be an opera singer!’

No answer.

I look around this moonscape: we are the only people alive in it.

‘… I don’t want to end up in a factory,’ I yell out.

Lemmy finally turns around. He looks at me.

‘I’d die, Lemmy,’ I say in a small close voice, because he’s not that far from me. Yet he seems so distant.

‘It’d … kill me,’ I say. ‘They’d kill me.’

He doesn’t answer me. His feet do.

‘Get lost,’ he yells. ‘Why don’t you?’

‘It’s such a climb, eh Lemmy?’ I say to him, between gasps. ‘Sort of like Auckland’s Eiffel Tower, eh?’

We are sitting on top of the world, on a World War II observation bunker which was built to see the Japs come into our harbour and kill us all, except it never happened. Graffiti covers it and a family sits, their legs over the edge. They even smile at us, palely, as we emerge from the undergrowth, almost staggering. Lemmy surprises me: he speaks to them. Normally this is a contract he refuses.

We sit in silence for a long while, just looking at the world we have lived in all our lives, without ever seeing it, as it were, from the outside. It almost surprises me, it looks so pretty. There are harbours and small eruptions and flares of landscape with the odd distant domes of volcanoes under the sky. It is both tiny, detailed, and immense at the same time. It soothes me.

The family move off, down another path.

I wait, almost breathless, for Lemmy to begin. I look down at my shoes. I take them off. My feet inside throb like my heart. I know now it is useless to talk of film stars, movies, fashions. Even the Chooks lie faded and pale, old props from a senseless play.

Then Lemmy speaks. He does not look at me; he turns away, as if to hide his face.

‘Glen Miller,’ he says after a long while, as if the word has been forced out of right inside him.

I pause. I do not know this game. ‘Glen Miller?’ I go.

‘On the radiogram.’

‘Oh no,’ I breathe out then, a long long breath, as long as the time we’ve known each other, since we first met.

‘“Moonlight Serenade”?’ I murmur to him, hardly daring to say the words.

Lemmy barely nods. His face is turned totally away from me, hidden.

I look at the back of his neck. It says nothing. Except I notice, again, how his hair is growing long, changing, changing forever. Mine is still so curl-less, rigid with hairspray. I pick up my stupid can of lacquer, I throw it away into the scrub.

We watch as it arches into the air, glitters static, is lost. A single, very small bird flutters up into the air, then dives back into the green.

I don’t know quite what to say. You see, the last time Lemmy’s mother stuck her head in the gas oven she’d been listening to ‘Moonlight Serenade’. Lemmy’d found her with the record still playing, the arm going back to the beginning whenever it finished. It was music she’d known when she first met Lemmy’s Dad in Italy: before he got eyebags and Miss Clairol, and ended up selling sex books in some no-name street. Perhaps it was what she thought life in New Zealand might be like: a Moonlight Serenade.

‘Pills,’ Lemmy says in this flat emotionless voice.

‘Oh Lemmy,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry, so sorry.’ Then: ‘Is she OK?’

Lemmy just shrugs, gets to his feet and starts singing hard and angry, in imitation Yank, yelling out at the world lying there silent and distant and unhearing at our feet:

I like to be in America!

Everyone free in America!

He turns and looks at me for a second and I can tell that he hates me.

‘She’s in the bin.’

Then he starts walking off, like he wants to leave me behind forever.

I quickly stand up. I glance around again at the world down there, a last glimpse. It has changed in that second from being a landscape which all fits together, a brief puzzle which makes sense, into a series of discarded shapes, without sense: or something which makes sense only in its senselessness. Why does it never change? I hurry to follow Lemmy. He moves remorselessly ahead, too quickly, my heart misses a beat. He is taking another way down. He disappears into the scrub. I know now he is trying to get away from me. I hurry to follow.

The sun is a high cynical eye which gazes down on two small figures as they move across a dead landscape, along the roads trapped convicts have made. And one of them, Lemmy, spits out his song, in falsetto: ‘Everybody free in America!’

‘No Lemmy,’ I say. ‘No. That’s the wrong way.’

Two threads in the stone road wind away into nothingness. Head hums, stings.

‘We’ll miss the boat,’ I say, firm.

‘Will we?’ he says in this flat voice, like he couldn’t care if we did.

‘Oh Lemmy,’ I say. ‘Come on, this is the way. I’m sure of it.’

But he says nothing. In fact he does a surprising thing: he picks up a stone and throws it at me. Hard.

It hits me.

‘Oh Lemmy,’ I don’t even laugh now. ‘What are you doing that for?’

He throws another.

A trickle of blood burns down my face.

‘You bloody bugger,’ I say, copying my parents. ‘Stop that.’

But he doesn’t. He throws another stone.

He walks off on one path.

And I walk off on mine.

I watch him grow smaller. And as he does, I sing to myself,

If you see me walkin’ down the street
and I start to cry
each time we meet
don’t stop!

walk on by.

After a few hours of agony I finally see, up ahead, Lemmy, sitting silent and still, smoking, as he watches me limp towards him. He doesn’t say anything but as I get near, he looks at me and says, ‘Go, beanpole,’ and I sort of don’t say anything but crease down and sit on this excruciating piece of lava which bites into me.

Lemmy takes me to a cool chill pool under some trees and I bathe my feet, savouring each moment. Lemmy waits for my feet to dry, then he tells me he’s found some fun. It is a bach with a louvre window left open.

‘They must be expecting us,’ says Lemmy.

‘Oh Lemmy,’ I say. I am tired still, I am exhausted and uncertain. But Lemmy climbs in and is silent so long in there I know I have to go in, I have to join him, if we are to be Lemmynme forever together.

I crawl in and there is Lemmy standing there, looking around very interested. It is someone’s bach, with old Crown Lynn cups on a painted wood table, and a bath mirror hanging off a dressing-table, and wooden furniture.

Lemmy breaks open the still. He goes over to a cup and, picking it up, looking at me all the time, just loosens his fingers around it so it falls down to the concrete floor. It smashes.

He looks at me, in the dark, eyes glittering.

‘Silly me,’ he says, and does one of his yawns. I let out this laugh, weird, tortured, thin. And Lemmy watches and waits. I feel a kind of sickness in my stomach, a terrible fear. He is asking me to finally kill Jamie the goodboy, to assassinate him forever. To join him.

I tremble all over. As I move, my chiseltoes rub against my heel, a mat of torn flesh, dribbling blood. Lemmy watches me, dares me to prove we are not forever together, beanpole and fatboy.

I go over to the washstand and pick up a dinner plate.

I am in a dreamtrance as I kiss goodboy goodbye forever. My eyes glaze shut as my fingers grow stiff: chill porcelain brushes past my flesh and I watch as the plate hurtles away from me, growing smaller for a long time till it suddenly fractures, shatters, and is still. It lies there, broken yet still in its old shape. Goodboy goodbye.

‘Silly me,’ I say ‘… so clumsy.’

I have hardly finished speaking when, in a quick symphony sealing out soundlessness, Lemmy picks up another cup, it smashes. I do likewise. He reaches for the glasses. Fuckcuntcockdork, he says and smashes one. Cuntyfuckshit I say and smash the window. Soon Lemmynme are moving so fast breaking so much all we do is scream this crazy laughter and let out all the words we’ve read on walls and kept inside us, forever cutting, slashing, killing: smashfuckcuntcockdorkqueercuntpoofterhomo we scream, laughing so crazy, emptying it all out, everywhere around us.

Finally it is over, all is still, we are exhausted. We look at each other. And quickly now, quietly, we open the door and walk away down to the wharf where the families await, and silently now, like two good boys in heavy disguise, we wait with beating hearts for the boat to come and take us back to a place we know.

As we get on and the boat leaves our eyes lock and we both think: we will never be able to tell anyone what we have done. Neither of us says anything of what has happened on the island as we get back to Auckland. It is our guilty secret, one we will always share together.

As we say goodbye, we can’t meet each other’s eyes. I am frightened, terrified, the police will want us now, we are on the wanted list. And everyone will then find out Jamie the goodboy is dead. It will be Jamie the badboy and just like in that bach I will have to live up to it, smashing and screaming till I am broke too.

What was in me to do that thing, I ask myself. What? But there is no answer. I have acted now. And it was necessary, that is what is so terrible. We have acted and it was necessary.

Just before we say goodbye, Lemmy turns to me and says with a faint smile, ‘See you,’ and I say with a dry mouth, ‘See you next weekend, eh?’ And Lemmy just smiles at me and says, like, cool, without any expression, ‘Maybe.’ Maybe.

And he walks away.

‘These are the eyes that watched him walk away’

WHEN I RANG after that Mr Stephenson’d answer the phone, if anyone answered at all, and he’d always say, ‘Lemmy’s not here,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh that’s all right, I’ll call back later.’ And sometimes I did but the phone just rang. I’d listen to those beeps and as each one sounded I thought it was like watching lorries speeding along on a long lone road going somewhere and you were stuck in one particular place, like one of those dumps we saw up north, and you knew in your heart of hearts, you were never going anywhere ever again.

So I stayed in my room and listened again and again to Dusty’s ‘Colouring Book’, which seemed to soothe some part of me while I worked away desperately getting nearer and nearer to School Cert and Mum’d bang on my bedroom door and say, What’s going on in there, and I’d yell back so angrily I wanted to cry, Nothing, can’t I have some privacy, is that too much to ask?

This is the room I sleep in
and walk in and weep in and
hide in, nobody,
nobody sees,
oh call it lonely please.

And the phone never rang.

‘I only want to be with you’

IT HAPPENED AFTER this, but not in direct sequence. That is the strange thing of setting this confession down, to make sense of what was necessary in it. It all connects up like it was always meant to be but, when Lemmynme lived it, none of it made sense, none of it apart from him knowing me and me knowing him, that was the total sense of it. And that was necessary.

But after all this and School Cert, which Lemmy never sat and I did, he got new friends and I became sort of an embarrassment to him. It was like, with his new friends, he didn’t want to know an Audrey Hepburn kind of boy any longer. Then this thing happened.

Lemmy slit his wrists.

I hadn’t seen him for quite some time, he’d even left school.

I rang up his father. It’s Andrew speaking in my imitation-Andrew voice which I know never fooled anybody, I mean, anyone who’s ever loved could look at me and know, and he said Lemmy’s in the bin, not those words, Lemmy’s at Kingseat he says, like it was my fault too, just hinting at it, and my voice said, now no longer pretending to be Andrew, whoever he was, but Jamie, Oh, why’s he out there Mr Stephenson, in the bin? I don’t say, why’s my Lemmy in the bin, without you I’d die dear, I think, and Lemmy’s dad says then, like he accepts me as Lemmy’s mate, which I am most definitely not, he tried to kill himself and I think oh Lemmy why didn’t you call me, why didn’t you tell me, you don’t have to walk alone.

I went out to see him. I’d never been into a bin before. I was frightened but I was strong too, I knew I had to see him.

It was different from what I imagined and suddenly there he was, thin Lemmy now, with long straggly hair hardly even looked after, like it no longer mattered. He wasn’t expecting to see me, I could tell that.

Hi, he said to me and I could hear this little echo in my head saying Let’s go … but it just died, very faint like a pin falling in space, falling, now, forever, end over end, glinting as it fell into darkness. I am in this darkness, this space of unknowingness. But Lemmy looked at me like he didn’t hear it and Oh hi Jamie he says and he looked like he wasn’t unpleased to see me but he also didn’t look pleased. I thought yes my life seems dead and so unreal, there’s nothing left to feel but it was as if Lemmy couldn’t hear that: it was like he was listening to some other sound now.

It was quiet there.

We went and sat away from everyone else on a park bench and I got out the cigarettes I’d bought and gave them to him. He looked at them then up at my face. For the first time he seemed to recognise me. A faint smile flickered across his face, making him seem like Lemmy. He shook one out, put it into his mouth, then hesitated. It was like we were suddenly strangers, we didn’t know each other and had to make it up, to get to know each other again, introducing ourselves. I close my eyes and count to 10, I think, and I open them and you’re still there.

And Lemmy says I cut my wrists, and I close my eyes because I see the razor and I can’t stand the thought of losing Lemmy, of being alive without Lemmy, alone without him, I just wouldn’t be able to live, no. But I don’t say that.

We sit awhile in silence and let the silence breathe its way all over us, and Lemmy takes in a breath, sharp, and he looks at me and says Jamie?

I say Yes Lemmy?

And Lemmy pauses then, he takes in another breath and looks at me right into my eyes deep into my soul.

Jamie, he says. I’m one of them.

I can hardly breathe.

Oh Lemmy, I say with this sick laugh which dies in the air and crumples to the ground, I watch it at my feet. Oh Lemmy you’re having me on. Of course you’re not.

If you are, I am, I think to myself in a flash. It is not possible.

I am, he says, I am one of them.

I don’t dare move or breathe or even look at Lemmy, I keep very quiet.

We both look straight ahead.

Then my hand sort of falls down, of its own accord, like in an accident and just grazes past Lemmy’s. For one moment he goes to take his hand away, I can feel it, but, instead, he just lets it lie there. He relaxes.

Have you heard Dusty’s latest? I say, in a strange voice.

Lemmy doesn’t say a word.

It’s called, ‘I Only Want To Be With You’, I say.

Then Lemmy says again.

I’m one of them, Jamie.

And I say nothing.

We sit together for a long while in the silence not knowing what more to say to each other, whether it’s the end, or only the beginning. Then I say, Lemmy, like, would you like to hear how Dusty’s song goes, and he nods very slow and I stand in front of him and I sing:

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint in One of Them excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

‘It hurts to be in love’ by Howard Greenfield and Helen Miller. © 1964, renewed 1992 Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

‘Town Without Pity’ by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington. Reproduced with permission of Volta Music Corporation.

‘We gotta get out of this place’ by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. © 1965 Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

‘I Only Want to Be with You’ (Hawker/Raymonde). © 1963 Chappell Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

‘He’s a Rebel’ by Gene Pitney. © 1962 January Music (renewed). All rights administered by Unichappell Music Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ by Cole Porter. © 1956 Chappell & Co. (renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

‘Downtown’ by Tony Hatch. © Welbeck Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

‘She’s a mod’ by T. Beale. © 1964 Dick James Music Ltd. Reproduced by permission of PolyGram Music Publishing Australia Pty Ltd.

‘West of the Wall’ by Wayne Shanklin. © Chappell & Co (renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

‘How is the air up there’ (Duboff/Kornfeld). © 1976 Hudson Bay Music Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

‘Son of preacher man’ by John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins. © 1968 Tree Music Publishing Co., Inc. All rights administered by Sony Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

‘Little by little’ by Buddy Kaye and Bea Verdi. Budd Music Corp (ASCAP). By kind permission.

‘Yesterday’ words and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. © 1965 by Northern Songs Limited. All rights controlled and administered by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA Inc., New York, NY 10019. Under licence from ATV Music. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

‘I will follow him’ (‘Chariot’), written by Jacques Plante, J.W Stole, Del Roma, Norman Gimbel, and Arthur Altman. © 1962 MCA/Caravelle Music France (catalogue J. Plante).

‘Anyone who had a heart’ by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. © 1963 (renewed 1991) New Hidden Valley Music & Casa David. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

‘You’ve lost that lovin’ feelin” by Phil Spector, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. © 1964, 1965, renewed 1992 Mother Bertha Music/Screen Gems-EMI Inc. All rights controlled and administered by Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

‘Who can I turn to (when nobody needs me)’ from the musical production Roar of the Greasepaint — Smell of the Crowd, words and music by Leslie Briscusse and Anthony Newly. © 1964 (renewed) Concord Music Ltd, London, England. TRO — Musical Comedy Productions Inc., New York controls all publication rights for the USA and Canada. Used by permission.

‘America’ by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. © 1957 (renewed) by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. Used by permission of G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP).

‘Walk on by’ by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. © New Hidden Valley Music/Casa David. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

‘My Colouring Book’ by Fred Ebb and John Kander. © for the world by Times Square Music Co., New York. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

‘I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten’ by Clive Westlake. © 1968 Carlin Music Corp. All rights administered by Chappell & Co.

About the Author

Peter Wells’ first book Dangerous Desires, which included the novella ‘One of them!’, won the 1992 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and the 1992 PEN Best First Book in Prose Award. He has published a second collection of short stories, The Duration of a Kiss, and a novel, Boy Overboard. He has also co-edited New Zealand’s first anthology of gay fiction, Best Mates. Peter is an acclaimed film writer and director of such productions as Desperate Remedies and A Death in the Family.

Copyright

Random House New Zealand Ltd
Random House is an imprint of the Penguin Random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
penguinrandomhouse.co.nz

First published 1991
in Dangerous Desires (Reed New Zealand)

This edition © Peter Wells 1997
The moral rights of the Author have been asserted.

Printed in Wellington by Wright and Carman (NZ) Ltd
eISBN 978 1 77553 162 3

Cover design: Megan van Staden
Cover image: Soloviova Liudmyla/shutterstock.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in any information retrieval system or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.