Bilgewater Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be to get in as a boarder when you live just a few miles away, as Terrapin did.
    Great rumours circulated about Terrapin—both parents were said to have put their heads in gas ovens, all his other relatives were alleged to have gone to Australia in a body rather than take him on. One somehow heard these things—half heard them from gossip among girls at the Comprehensive and what seeped into my ears around father’s House though never a breath did I hear from father or Paula who never even hinted to anyone that they knew the slightest thing about any boy’s private life.
    But there was clearly something spectacularly odd about Terrapin because not only was he a boarder and local but now it appeared we’d got him in the school holidays, too. There Terrapin stood in father’s place at the edge of the pool.
    â€œHi Bilgewater,” he said.
    He had a sepulchral voice now, still hoarse and rough as when breaking. Terrapin’s voice was taking its time, breaking slowly, like the dawn on a wet day. But it was a voice of great power and when he spoke his eyes stuck out and cords appeared in his neck. He grunted at intervals between statements, and simultaneously with the grunts he picked his nose. He was a very short boy with fine straight white-yellow hair which came from a central point on his skull and hung down all around with his awful face peering out of the middle. He looked like a small albino ape.
    I said, “Get out,” and turned on my back. Then thinking of his sticking-out eyes scanning my big hips I turned on my front again.
    â€œWhere’s your father?” He was looking at me and not at my face either, with a really frightful leer and I began to kick my feet up and down tremendously sending up a wake like a battleship. I rushed down the pool at a rate of knots.
    When I got to the steps at the other end he was there, squatting down at the top of them waiting for me to come up, so I spread myself out underneath him with my arms and elbows lying along the railing round the edge, and I stared into the distance.
    I heard grunt, grunt up above.
    He said, “You haven’t half got nice arms.”
    I kicked off and did a thundering sprint down the pool again with my head in the water all the way, only my legs moving, with water going up fit to raise rainbows. When I got to the far end I kept my back to him and hung on to the hand-rail. When eventually I got out he had gone.
    Â 
    I felt sick. He was the most revolting thing I had ever seen. He was like Caliban—Paula had been reading me
The Tempest
on Thursdays—he was so foul I should have liked to get him by his beastly ankles and drag him into the water and trample him down. Every time he came up for air, all snotty, neck and eyes bulging, down I would bash him.
    â€œBilge! Bilgewater! Help! Help!”
    â€œ
Down
you go, you filthy boy.”
    â€œHelp! Help! I can’t swim!”
    â€œDrown then!”
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    But the terrible thing at the time—I think I was thirteen. I might just have been fourteen. Perhaps I was twelve—the unthinkable thing was that when he said that about my arms I felt pins and needles sweep over me in a wave, starting at the top of my skull, rushing downwards to the base of my spine.
    â€œYou haven’t half got nice arms.”
    I examined my arms that night at bedtime, turning them outwards and inwards. I have a pale skin and a very precise blue vein going diagonally across the inside of the elbow. The hands at the ends of the arms are all right, too, with pointed effective fingers and clean nails. I like clean nails.
    Mrs. Gathering, the headmaster’s wife at father’s school, once came to tea when I was small. She brought her daughter—the one I rather got on with, the one who went away. Funnily enough I can’t remember the daughter on that occasion though I think there was something about her breaking one of my dolls—all I rememher is Mrs.