"The fat boy must be made to pay": a crucifixion by Owen Marshall
The men coming from the railway yards were the first to notice the fat boy. He stood beneath the overhead bridge, among the cars illegally parked there. He had both hands in the pockets of his short pants and the strain of that plus his heavy thighs made the flap of his fly gape. The fat boy watched the passers-by with the froglike, faintly enquiring look that the faces of fat boys have. The fat boy’s hair was amazingly fair and straight; it shone with nourishment; it was straight and oddly medieval.
The men were leaving at twenty past four. It was a conventional extension of the time for washing up that their union had obtained. They resented the fat boy’s regard day after day. They were sure that he was stealing from the cars, and it was just as well they were coming past early to watch him, they said. Sometimes they would shout at the fat boy and tell him to get lost, as they walked in their overalls along the black margin of the track past the old gasworks. Seventeen thousand dollars worth of railway property was found missing when the audit was made. The men knew it was outsiders.
They remembered the fat boy. The fat kid is the lookout for the ring taking all the stuff, they told the management. Dozens of workers could swear to having seen the fat boy. They went looking for him, but he wasn’t to be found beneath the overhead bridge anymore.
Instead the fat boy began to frequent McNulty’s warehouse in Cully Street. Even through the cracked and stained windows the staff could see him standing by the side of the building where the bicycles were left. Sometimes he would kick at the clumps of weeds which grew in the broken pavement there, sometimes he would puff his fat cheeks and blow out little explosions of air, sometimes he would just stand with his hands in his pockets and look at the warehouse as if to impress it on his mind. He had a habit of pulling his mouth to one side, as if biting the skin on the inside of his cheek, the way children do. Often in school time he was there. Sometimes even in the rain he was there. The rain glistened on his round cheeks, and seemed to shrink his pants so that the lining turned up at the leg holes. The new girl looked out and said he looked as if he was crying. The owner said he’d make him cry all right. He was sick of ordering him away, the owner said.
McNulty’s warehouse burnt down in November. The owner made particular mention to the police of the fat boy, but when McNulty’s built again in a better area with the insurance money, the fat boy never appeared. The paper reported what the owner said about the fat boy. The railway men said it was the same fat boy all right. They said the fat kid was somehow tied up in a lot of the crime going on. The fat boy seemed to be in uniform, but although he was clearly seen by many people there was no agreement as to his school or family. Some said his socks had the blue diamonds of Marsden High, but others said the blue was in the bands of College. The fat boy had thick legs with no apparent muscles, and they didn’t narrow to the ankle. If just his legs could have been turned upside down no one would ever know it. When the fat boy lifted his brows enquiringly, one crease would form in the smooth, thick skin of his forehead.
The fat boy seemed to be a harbinger of trouble. The fat boy walked behind old Mrs Denzil on her way home from the shopping centre, and he loitered in the shade of her wooden fence, which was draped with dark convolvulus leaves and its pale flowers. The police maintained a quiet watch on the house for two days in case the fat boy came again. On the third night someone broke into Mrs Denzil’s house and tied her upside down in the washtub. Her Victorian cameo brooch was stolen, together with the tinned food she hoarded, and eighty-four-year-old Mrs Denzil was left tied upside down in the tub with a tennis ball in her mouth to block her breathing. Oh, that fat boy, they said; even murder, they said. That fat boy was so much more evil than their own sons. There wasn’t anything that the fat boy wouldn’t do, was there, they said.
Nigel Lammerton saw the fat boy on the night he was arrested for beating his wife. Lammerton told the police that when he returned from the hotel he saw the fat boy on the porch of his home, and that his wife couldn’t explain why. Lammerton said that he saw the fat boy looking in the window at them while they argued, but that when he ran outside the fat boy was gone. It was the fat boy, and the medication that he had been taking, that made him lose control, Nigel Lammerton told the court. Mrs Lammerton agreed with everything her husband said about the fat boy.
The fat boy could not be found for questioning, but then no one had ever known the fat boy to say anything. He just watched. The paper said he was malevolent. No one likes a fat kid staring at them all the time. Lammerton said that everyone was entitled to privacy without a fat kid staring at him. The fat boy had the knack of being where he was least desired.
There was a certain effrontery about the fat boy. He appeared in council chambers during the discussion in committee on a special dispensation from the town planning scheme. The deputy mayor was declaring that no present councillors had any connection with the consortium that had made application. He became aware of the fat boy watching him from the corridor to the town clerk’s office. The fat boy’s fair hair trembled a little as his mouth stretched in a cavernous yawn and, without taking his hands from his pockets, he tapped with his shoe at the wainscotting, the way boys do. One of the councillors went from the meeting to confront the fat boy, but he must have slipped away through the offices, the councillor said.
The deputy mayor thought that in all of his considerable experience he had never seen such a sly one as the fat boy. He said that somehow he could never bring himself to trust a fat boy, just never could bring himself to trust one, he said.
The fat boy was seen at the IHC centre the day before Melanie Lamb was found to be pregnant. The air was warm, sparrows chirped beneath the swaying birch catkins and pecked at a vomited pie in the gutter. The fat boy stood before the railings and held one of the iron bars like a staff. The children smiled at him as he watched, and were content in his presence, but the supervisors saw him there and remembered when the doctor said that Melanie was pregnant. The music teacher who lived next door to the Lambs thought it a very significant recollection. He said that when he came to think of it he recalled the fat boy standing in the evenings by the hedge at the rear of Melanie’s house. A very fat, ugly boy, the music teacher said, and everyone agreed that such a unique description fitted the fat boy perfectly and must be him. It was a terrible thing, the music teacher said, to think that the fat boy could take advantage of Melanie’s handicap, even if she was physically advanced.
More than any of the other things, it was what he did to Melanie Lamb that enabled people to close ranks against the fat boy. They recognised in him a common enemy. Vigilante groups organised from the King Dick and Tasman hotels began searching for the fat boy. Not many days before Christmas they caught up with the fat boy by the gasworks. Artie Compeyson was drowning kittens in the cutting, and saw the fat boy watching, but didn’t let on. The fat boy was stolid at the top of the cutting. His pudding face and medieval hair showed clearly in the moonlight and against the grimy storage tanks of the old gasworks. He was still waiting when the vigilantes came, and they surrounded him there in the patches of light and shadow. The fat boy didn’t run, or cry out. He watched them converge, his thick legs apart and his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his short trousers. He was sly all right.
They managed to overpower him, they said. Nigel Lammerton, with his experience as a wife-beater, got in one or two really good thuds on the fat boy’s face before he went down, and the music teacher, who had an educated foot, kicked the fat boy between the legs. Everyone knew the fat boy must be made to pay for what he had done.
No one seemed to know what happened to the fat boy’s body, and such a body wasn’t easy to hide. The moon seemed to go behind cloud just at the time the fat boy fell, and the vigilantes became rather confused after the excitement of the night, and the debriefing at the King Dick and the Tasman. Although the police dragged the cutting, they found only the sack with kittens in it, and five stolen tyres.
Nearly everyone was relieved that the fat boy had been got rid of. God, but he was evil, they said, that fat boy, all the things he did. It didn’t bear thinking about, they said. And no one likes a fat boy watching them, you know. They shared, among other things, a conviction that life would be immeasurably better for them all with the fat boy gone.
"The fat boy" (first published in The Day Hemingway Died, 1984) is taken from The Author's Cut by Owen Marshall (Vintage, $36), a newly published selection of stories by a master of the form.
Next Saturday's short story is Maria Samuela, from her new collection Beats of the Pa'u (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30).
