movie. I’ve seen it six times. Like when she gets in her plane to rescue them on the ice?”
But somehow we never got around to watching S.O.S. Iceberg that afternoon, maybe because we couldn’t stop talking long enough to go downstairs and turn on the television. Boris had had a more interesting life than any person of my own age I had ever met. It seemed that he had only infrequently attended school, and those of the very poorest sort; out in the desolate places where his dad worked, often there were no schools for him to go to. “There are tapes?” he said, swigging his beer with one eye on me. “And tests to take. Except you have to be in a place with Internet and sometimes like far up in Canada or Ukraine we don’t have that.”
“So what do you do?”
He shrugged. “Read a lot, I guess.” A teacher in Texas, he said, had pulled a syllabus off the Internet for him.
“They must have had a school in Alice Springs.”
Boris laughed. “Sure they did,” he said, blowing a sweaty strand of hair out of his face. “But after my mum died, we lived in Northern Territory for a while—Arnhem Land—town called Karmeywallag? Town, so called. Miles in the middle of nowhere—trailers for the miners to live in and a petrol station with a bar in back, beer and whiskey and sandwiches. Anyway, wife of Mick that ran the bar, Judy her name was? All I did—” he took a messy slug of his beer—“all I did, every day, was watch soaps with Judy and stay behind the bar with her at night while my dad and his crew from the mine got thrashed. Couldn’t even get television during monsoon. Judy kept her tapes in the fridge so they wouldn’t get ruined.”
“Ruined how?”
“Mold growing in the wet. Mold on your shoes, on your books.” He shrugged. “Back then I didn’t talk so much as I do now, because I didn’t speak English so well. Very shy, sat alone, stayed always to myself. But Judy? She talked to me anyway, and was kind, even though I didn’t understand a lick of what she said. Every morning I would go to her, she would cook me my same nice fry. Rain rain rain. Sweeping, washing dishes, helping to clean the bar. Everywhere I followed like a baby goose. This is cup, this is broom, this is bar stool, this pencil. That was my school. Television—Duran Duran tapes and Boy George—everything in English. McLeod’s Daughters was her favorite programme. Always we watched together, and when I didn’t know something? She explained to me. And we talked about the sisters, and we cried when Claire died in the car wreck, and she said if she had a place like Drover’s? she would take me to live there and be happy together and we would have all women to work for us like the McLeods. She was very young and pretty. Curly blonde hair and blue stuff on her eyes. Her husband called her slut and horse’s arse but I thought she looked like Jodi on the show. All day long she talked to me and sang—taught me the words of all the jukebox songs. ‘Dark in the city, the night is alive…’ Soon I had developed quite proficiency. Speak English, Boris! I had a little English from school in Poland, hello excuse me thank you very much, but two months with her I was chatter chatter chatter! Never stopped talking since! She was very nice and kind to me always. Even though she went in the kitchen and cried every day because she hated Karmeywallag so much.”
It was getting late, but still hot and bright out. “Say, I’m starving,” said Boris, standing up and stretching so that a band of stomach showed between his fatigues and ragged shirt: concave, dead white, like a starved saint’s.
“What’s to eat?”
“Bread and sugar.”
“You’re kidding.”
Boris yawned, wiped red eyes. “You never ate bread with sugar poured on it?”
“Nothing else?”
He gave a weary-looking shrug. “I have a coupon for pizza. Fat lot of good. They don’t deliver this far out.”
“I thought you had a cook where you used to live.”
“Yah, we did. In Indonesia. Saudi Arabia too.” He was smoking a cigarette—I’d refused the one he offered me; he seemed a little trashed, drifting and bopping around the room like there was music on, although there wasn’t. “Very cool guy named Abdul Fataah. That means ‘Servant of the Opener