Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The Read Free

Excellent, she’ll say, instead of good. Horrible, dreadful, she’ll say, feeling ill. Once she had to run to the lavatory and be sick while reading a book about Gestapo atrocities. None of this seems extraordinary to her.
    There’s behaviour, she’s inclined to believe, beyond conscience. There’s a disposition in us towards love or wickedness. Norma sees Original Sin as a great explanation and wishes it would do for her, but of course it won’t, because it leaves out too much she’s convinced of, leaves out knowledge of all sorts. ‘Ha!’ she says to that, caught in a trap. She has given up thinking about it. Just now and then she’s lifted up by an example of love, or wants, as she puts it, to resign from the human race. She does not understand how ready she is with these responses or how deeply they affect her behaviour.
    Her friends describe her as mature and sensible. Some say wise and sensitive. They all agree that even when she’s quiet you know she’s there.
    The brilliant interval came to an end, colour went out, and Norma reached the window in time to see hail strike. It rattled on the window panes and bounced like tiny balls in the street. School was due to finish in seven minutes and she considered having the bell delayed. Some of the pieces of ice looked big and sharp enough to cut the flesh. Then she thought of strawberries and apples and tried to see where the storm was coming from. There looked to be fine weather at the port, and the other way the sun was lighting the top of Stovepipe Hill. With any luck the hail was in a band and would miss her brother’s berry farm and John Toft’s apple orchard. A storm had wiped out Clive’s crop three seasons ago and she pictured him standing in his vine rows, letting today’s hail cut his face. Clive could not help making big gestures, usually of despair and rage. She had better telephone him as soon as the storm was over. And telephone John Toft. She saw him watching from his back porch, smiling enigmatically and stroking his chin.
    Duncan Round had taken an unusual posture too. He had pulled up his hood and squatted so the skirt of his parka touched the pavement and was safe and dry inside a shell with hailstones shooting off in arcs as though a force in him repelled them. High over his back a green field on Stovepipe sank into a cloud-hole and was gone. Hail came in harder strokes, with a fierce downward thrust. Norma shivered – but smiled at the tame end of it all, the little coy curved domestic bounce on path and lawn. The storm drew itself in and moved away. Saxton increased in size; it came out, enamelled, in the sun. The bell for the end of school rang at that moment. Norma found it all appropriate. There was a balance in all this.
    The girls walked out hesitating, giving little cries at a world so fresh. They scooped up hail and tried it on their tongues. They looked at the receding storm, pointing as though at an aeroplane, and turned to see the huge bright sky on the other side. Norma watched them possessively.
    Duncan Round took a handful of hailstones from the angle ofthe car windscreen and seemed to weigh them in his palm. He too tried their coldness on his tongue. Belinda, his young sister, crossed the road with her school pack low on her back in the style that was fashionable, and turned his hand over, spilling the hail. She took out her handkerchief and wiped his fingers dry. Norma found it touching, even though Duncan did not need this sort of care. Belinda was the nicest of the Rounds by a long way, and no less clever than her sisters. One somehow expected kindness to reduce cleverness but in this case it was not so. Mind you, the girl did not waste kindness on her friends but treated them in the Round way. They shouted to her across the street but she took no notice. She gave Duncan a piece of chewing-gum.
    Now the ten-speed bikes came down, cutting neat parabolas among the turning cars. Norma put her window up and watched for