Free Black Juice by Margo Lanagan Page B

gave the boy breath to pour out more.
    Dot and all the kids at first laughed. Then as this boy went on, the sounds fountaining out of his mouth so surely, they fell silent. World upon world opened at their ears, worlds of lawless noise and play.
    The boy’s mother came running, shouting. She knocked him into the mud, waking him up from his singing. They looked at each other, both seeming very frightened. The door of Bard Jo’s house moved aside, and the circle of his beard was like a white eye in the shadow. He came out of the house; the way he walked, all the kids shrank together.
    The mother stood at her son’s muddy head. ‘He should not make such a noise,’ she said to Bard Jo. ‘I’ll make sure he’s well beaten.’ She made herself sound angry to cover up fear.
    Bard Jo looked from one to the other, his face all gathered in except the jutting beard. ‘I will beat him myself.’
    ‘I won’t sing again!’ cried the boy. ‘Forgive me, Bard Jo!’
    ‘He didn’t know what he was doing!’ wept the mother. By now she had one of the boy’s arms and Bard Jo the other, and the boy was like some grotesque stick doll pulled back and forth over the mud, and muddying the Bard’s white dress with his kicking. Dot didn’t even know what to be afraid of, but he was sick with it, still as a ghost. Winsome gripped his arm hard.
    Bard Jo won the tug of war, being truly angry, while the mother was merely afraid. He got the boy, and the mother stood on the bank, her legs caked to the trouser-rolls in mud, her hands muddying her cheeks as she watched her boy dragged away. He screamed as he went; he quite lost himself, as does a much younger child. He was taken into Bard Jo’s house and beaten there, and Dot and the kids sat in the mud and listened to the terrible wordless sounds of Bard Jo’s rage, and of the beating, and of the boy. The boy’s mother bent and swayed, holding her head, grinding her eyes.
    After too long—‘He is killing him!’ Winsome whispered—Bard Jo threw the boy out of the house onto his stripes. Mothers came running and took him quickly to his own house, but still there remained on Dot’s memory—on the memories of all those kids so that they could never talk about it—the back of that boy, furrowed and weeping like a scored peach from shoulders to thighs, beige dirt patching the slime of it, and the piece—whether dirt or boy they didn’t know—that fell from him as the mothers gathered him up.
    That boy had always been strange and not talked much, but after that day no one heard a sound out of him. He hardly came out of his house, and even when his back had healed over, he moved all bent and carefully as if the cuts were still fresh.
    Dot stayed a favourite of Bard Jo’s. He didn’t know why. He feared it was some kind of terrible trick the Bard was planning, to calm and please everyone until the time came for Dot’s beating, so that the beating would be a more shockingand frightening thing. Dot could see no reason why he should be favoured above Winsome, whose mother worked so hard and whose father spread the Bard’s wisdom every time he opened his mouth. Or above Fanty and Toad and all those cousins, who were like a lot of little Bards running around.
     
    ‘W HAT ABOUT WHEN YOU FIRST SAW MY DAD , then? Was that special?’
    ‘No.’ Bonneh laughed. ‘We were children and I hated him. He was one of those Simpsim boys. They were noisy and thought too much of themselves. I hated the lot of them.’
    ‘So how did you get round to marrying one of them?’
    ‘Well, I looked at Morri again, didn’t I? With new eyes.’
    ‘And your heart turned over?’
    ‘No, no. I just knew. Our parents were bringing us together, and I knew that it would work all right. He had ears, you see.’
    Dot laughed. ‘As no one else did?’
    ‘He knew how to use them. He was a very careful man—until all that warring nonsense caught him up. You can hear too much, you know. You can think yourself able