Kevin Chivers

I went swimming with Kevin Chivers one day at Midway Point when we were nine years old. I was always popular at school, sought after as a companion by other boys and able to take my pick, so had never considered a friendship with Kev before. Mum referred to him as ‘a poor little bloke’, which I did not understand but took to be a shameful thing. She said that his father was ‘a real roughneck’, and I did understand that the wild look in old man Chivers’s eye terrified all the kids. She said Kev’s mother was ‘a baggage’, and that made me think of the way her tits wobbled about inside her dirty dress.

At school Kevin wore short pants, gray and too tight for him. He sat just in front of me, and when he stood up in class you saw where the edge of his seat made a red mark across the backs of his fat legs. Other boys spoke to him only to pass the attendance book, or hand out worksheets. Kevin never thanked anyone for anything, and when it came his turn to read aloud in class he was tediously bad at it. You could tell he was not even going to try, and you waited without much sense of anything being achieved. I took offence at that in particular, and Kev seemed to know I had it in for him. He flicked a wad of chewed paper at me during my turn, and had to go to the back of the room. Afterwards he was too worried to look at me.

So it was strange that the two of us went swimming together. I do not recall how that came about. It was a Saturday. They were sealing the roads around our district at the time, and I remember the smell of new-laid bitumen as I bicycled to his place. I kept thinking the smell was coming out of the trees, then remembering it was from the roads.

Doug’s little sister came to their front gate when I arrived. She had chicken pox and someone had painted every pock with a separate spot of white calamine. I thought that was very funny, and so did she. When Doug arrived he seemed to have grown older and more sure of himself than he was at school. He put my lunch box in a Gladstone bag on the back of his bike, with his own, and told his sister she was not to come any further than the gate.

It must have been a long ride for boys of nine to Midway Point where we swam. Everyone knew the place where sandstone ledges and shallow caves looked out on a rocky sea, but I had only been there with my parents before.

We hid our bikes in the bushes beside the road, then climbed through a barbed-wire fence to take a short cut to the water. You could not see the sea from the road, only the blur of sheokes overlooking it from the cliffs. Between lay a stretch of marshy land where brown grass sprouted from soft blue mud. We set out across it. Soon Doug said we should take of our sandshoes. They were already covered in stinking mud, and we tried to carry them away from ourselves, by the laces. We sank up to our ankles at each step, and the sensation without shoes made us laugh; spiky on top but soft and cold underneath. Then we made dirty prints on the smooth stones by the shore, before washing our feet in the even colder sea.

We washed our hands too and picnicked immediately among the boulders there, chucking our crusts into a pool. Doug had a hard-boiled egg, and I remembered seeing him eat those at school. He ate with his mouth open. Now he talked as he ate too, and spluttered me with bits of egg on purpose, not caring what I said about it. He gave me some of his raspberry drink, which I had never had before, then poured the rest out even though I had said I liked it.

‘You bastard,’ I said, and he looked embarrassed.

‘Let’s swim,’ he reckoned.

‘You’re stupid. We’ve just eaten,’ I said.

‘What’s that matter?’

He stripped off, staring at me as if it was some kind of a dare and throwing his clothes about carelessly. Then he jumped in with a shout. So I undressed and jumped in too.

The sun was hot by the time we came out again. We found a good spot to lie at the cliff-base with our heads in the shade and the rest of us cooking. Doug asked a lot of questions about the other kids at school, and I was surprised how much he knew about them already.

Later we went for a walk, poking at things among the rocks.

‘I can smell beer,’ Doug said suddenly.

‘Yeah,’ I said, though I was not sure what beer smelled like.

‘There,’ he said, pointing to a broken brown bottle just ahead, and a patch of froth still damp. ‘There’s someone else here,’ he said.

Not long after, we discovered a man and woman lying together in each others’ arms, another beer bottle beside them. We made funny noises but they did not seem to notice. Then we crept up round the back and looked down on them from the cliff. They stirred when we threw pebbles, which Doug thought was terrific fun. We came down the other side and crowed at them from the rocks further along the shore. Then we swam back and spied on the from the sea, causing them to sit up again, but that was all.

Then we swam out beyond our depth and trod water, considering ourselves very brave with no adults keeping us in check.

‘Ever swum in the nuddy?’ Doug asked.

He had large, baggy trunks which he took off under water and held above his head. I laughed at the idea at first but eventually wriggled out of mine as well.

‘Doesn’t it feel lovely,’ he jeered, ‘the water swishing about your bare bum.’

On the way home I remember the sour bitumen smell again, a hot smell now, and the noise of cicadas. We wove about the road on our bikes, shouting to each other. I could not hear what Doug was saying well enough to have a proper conversation, but I felt like shouting anyway. I wondered if his sister would be waiting for us at their gate, but she was having tea. At my place I told Mum it had been a good day, and she was pleased.

   Things did not work out at school, though. I thought the relationship would continue, but it did not happen. I could not pursue it in front of the other boys. I would sometimes talk to Kev when no-one else was around, and he seemed grateful for that. Once I borrowed some money from him.

I thought about this dilemma a lot, I recollect now, without resolving it. I thought about it sitting on my own in the roots of the big pine tree at school. I felt pleased with life most of the time in those days, and wished I could love everyone. But what if I can’t get things right? I worried. There was a part of me that tried too hard to be normal, and another part that knew that normal was not always right. What about my other task, I asked, of working out what is right for other people, instead of vice versa?