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

near-misses. She admired the skill and energy of the girls and wished they showed it more in class. There was Hayley Birtles, with hissing tyres, making Stella Round step back – that took some doing – and throwing a word at her, ugly no doubt, as she went by. And there was the shoplifting gang, subdued now that they had been caught, riding in a bunch for solidarity. Would they break up and go straight home as they had been ordered or was it all a waste of time? Spray rose from their tyres and wet the legs of the footpath mums.
    This spinning-off of bits, this disintegrating of school at the end of the day, was sometimes painful to Norma but filled her with relief at other times. Today she felt elated and regretful – that the world outside was beautiful and her girls should live in it, and that all this imperfection, all this unmade, unmakeable, stuff should be loosed on it.
    Stella Round crossed the road and got into her car. She opened the rear door for Duncan, then said something sharp to him and handed him the key. He took his wet parka off and put it in the boot. He seemed too thinly clad standing there, in white T-shirt (with words on it?) and washed-out jeans and sneakers without socks. His face and arm and finger-backs were baby-naked. The burning had almost glazed him, Norma thought. She hoped it had been too shocking for pain. Pain must have come later, in hospital; and was there even now perhaps? She did not know much about the pathology of burns, but surely nerve endings were affected.
    Stella, discomposed – one almost never saw that – leaned out her door and called him in. The words on his T-shirt made Norma laugh. How marvellously inappropriate:
Hump your ass off
. (Tom Round’s little joke, no doubt. He had recently visited ‘the US of A’.) Duncan had probably pulled it on without reading it; or perhaps – was he capable of malice? – had meant to embarrass his sister. He did not hurry into the car but gave girls walking by a chance to read.
    Stella leaned back. She grabbed his ruined arm and hauled him in, and the Rounds drove away.
    The road was warming up and starting to steam. Teachers hurried out along with the girls: Sandra Duff, in her Indian cottons and silver bells, looking too fierce and concentrated for such filmy wear (what indiscretion had she committed? There was a new one every day); Helen Streeter in leather suit and leather hair, untouched, or seeming untouched, by her day relating over crayons and clay to a hundred girls; David Dobson, like a bearded tramp, with whisky flask shaped to the curve of his buttock (no secret from the girls, though he hunched in dark places to drink from it); and Lex Clearwater, in his red utility with the rust-eaten panels, looking like Heathcliff escaping to the moors. He had started as a heart-throb but now he was a joke.
    The teachers were no more finished than the girls. They were lumpy with their imperfections; a paradox Norma wrestled with. She did not leave her own imperfections out, and sometimes found herself wanting to teach only simple verifiable facts – that the two angles of the hypotenuse, so on, so on. There seemed to be not much else she could justify. Do this and this, not that, or else you’ll hurt someone, and you’ll be unhappy yourself. She looked at her half-happy and damaged staff, and was appalled by the certainties they uttered and felt she must not let them dump their rubbish on the girls; and yet she uttered certainties, dogma, herself. And was half-happy, damaged, too. Yet she must present a perfect shape.
    Two equal sides of Norma broke apart. Hard work, not argument, would make her whole.
    She telephoned Clive. Daphne, his wife, said he was out in the boysenberries. The storm had gone by on the other side of the inlet. Come and see us soon, Daphne said. Norma telephoned John Toft and let the phone ring for a minute or two. John never ran to answer it but walked in from the yard at his normal pace and shrugged and