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

turned away if it stopped. Today he did not come, was almost certainly too far down the orchard to hear.
    She hung up and went back to her brief.

2
    On Saturday morning Norma went to a softball match. She understood the rules of the game but found the rituals difficult to grasp. Some of the gestures were a form of praise – that slapping of palm on palm as the batter ran back after scoring, quite attractive. Much else about the game she could not like: the shouting and gum-chewing and the apishness in stance and the mock-American speech. These girls were broken from the mould that had fixed her and made it impossible that she should ever squat with thighs so wide and work her jaws and shrill those exhortations to hit, run, throw, slide, win – but were they as free as they liked to think? Were they not simply fixed in a new mould? She decided, though, that the new reality (like the old) shaped only externals. The things that had always mattered were the same. There was no change in the verities. So smile, applaud, she told herself, and look as though you’re pleased, and keep your old-fashioned judgements out of the way.
    The girl who had just scored was drinking greedily at the water fountain. Norma touched her shoulder. ‘That was a whopping hit, Hayley.’
    ‘Yeah, Mrs Sangster. I thought I bust the ball.’
    ‘We’re ahead now, aren’t we?’
    ‘Yeah. Three-one.’ She wiped her mouth.
    ‘Are we going to win?’
    ‘Easy. We made a coupla’ errors, that’s how they got their run. They can’t hit our pitching, that’s for sure.’
    ‘Who’s our pitcher?’
    ‘Me.’
    ‘Oh well, congratulations.’ She had to work for ease in these exchanges and felt the tiny failures in tone she was guilty of must be huge to the girls and a subject for contempt or mirth.
    ‘Bit of gum, Mrs Sangster?’ Hayley fished the packet from her sock and offered it with a stick poking out like a tongue. She watched Norma with an alertness that might be friendly orinsolent. All that animal health in Hayley Birtles, that full sack of vigour, but was her measure of happiness large enough? And her measure of intelligence? Norma wanted
access
to her girls. She imagined a place like a subterranean lake, with a roof bending over in the dark and gleaming like bone. They had no proper access themselves, and her job …
    ‘Want one, eh?’
    ‘Not just now, thank you. It amazes me you girls don’t choke on it.’ She’d made that protest to the phys. ed. teacher when told players must chew because it was traditional in the game. Everywhere else in the school chewing was banned – along with half a hundred other things. Those thin strips of leather for example, tied around ankle or wrist. Hayley was wearing half a dozen of them. Were they gang badge or decoration? Whichever it was, the ban had turned them into cause.
    ‘You’re not supposed to wear those, Hayley. I think you know.’
    ‘Trouble is you can’t untie the knots, Mrs Sangster. You gotta wait till they wear out.’
    The sincerity was bogus, insolent too, and Norma felt a tiredness in her mind, the sort of thing only a flash of anger would clear. It did not come. Synapses out of order, she supposed; though a simpler reason might be that she was uncertain. She did not want to lead Hayley Birtles here or there, but help her find a path for herself – and leave trivialities out of it.
    The school team innings came to an end with an easy catch and Hayley said, ‘Gotta go, eh, Mrs Sang,’ and turned her back and loped away, ending discussion; and that, Norma thought, put things in a proper perspective, and put her back where she belonged, tiny figure on the horizon, with expression too minute to be seen. She climbed the zigzag path above the playing area – diamond, was it called? – putting herself physically out of the way. Mrs Sang! She hadn’t heard that one before, but it was just tongue laziness, or perhaps the wad of gum got in the way. As for leather bracelets,