Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 6, June 1992

Prickly Pairs by Neil Jillett

The river gleamed as they ran across the paddock. Without looking back, the boy in the lead shouted, “Protestant dog, Protestant dog! Smells like a frog, smells like a frog!”

The other boy knew the proper reply. “Stupid mick, stupid mick! Makes me sick, makes me sick!” That was what kids from school yelled when they encountered one of the boys who were taught by the nuns. But now he did not even mouth the rhyme silently. Billy might turn and catch him at it.

Billy did turn round. He looked ready to start a fight. He always won, although Robin, just turned eleven, was a few months older and taller. He was heavier, too, but clumsy and timid compared with his adventurous enemy.

“Come on, Robin.”

Billy was running backwards. The winter sun glinted on his red hair and bounced off the wind-ruffled willows by the river.

“Come on, Robin.” The sneer in his voice matched the sneer on his face.

Robin’s mother often told him why his name must not be shortened. Years later he could imagine how unspoken thoughts would have colored his parents’ voices.

“Robin — after my brother — if that’s all right with you, Clare?”

“It would save thinking up two names.”

“Robin for a girl, Rob if it’s a boy.”

“Robin is what your brother was christened, John.”

“But everyone calls him Rob. It’s got a good, reliable ring.”

“You give a child the name you intend to use. If you want to call him after your brother, fine. But — Rob...? Frankly, John darling, it’s, well, you know, it’s...”

His father often called him Rob, though not if his wife was likely to hear, since she thought it sounded common. Robin’s friends learnt a similar caution when she was around. Otherwise, he was Rob.

But not to Billy. Billy never called him Rob. “Robin-Robin-Robin. What a sissy name!” Billy kicked at a tussock with his tough feet. “Come on, Robin, you fatso. Frightened of the water?”

When Robin, with the satchel dragging at his shoulders, came up to him, Billy set off again across the paddock, still in the lead, as if walking together would be an admission of equality.

“Hurry up, Robin, you lazy galoot.”

For what seemed to be the millionth time Robin said, “Everyone calls me Rob.”

“Not everyone, Robin.” Billy knew how to pick a soft spot. “Not everyone does, you sissy liar. Not your mummy, she doesn’t. Mummy calls her little baby Robin.”

“Rob’s what my mates call me.” The word, which his mother had told him not to use, felt awkward on his tongue, but it was what Billy always said instead of friends.

“What mates, Robin?” Billy mimicked his pronunciation as well as giving that sneer to his name. “And who says I want to be your mate, fatso?” Robin knew there was no answer to that, and Billy went on, “Rob! A real tough guy’s name. But you’re not a tough guy... Robin. You’ve got a girl’s name, Robin, and it fits.”

Robin thought Billy was an even sissier name than Robin, though he would never dare to say so. But Bill, that really was a tough guy’s name. He risked an outright plea. “Please call me Rob... Bill.”

Billy waited for Robin to catch up again and then punched him in the chest. “Don’t call me that. Billy, that’s my name. It’s my dad’s name, too.”

Was your dad’s name, Robin amended to himself. Billy’s father, a worker in the local quarry, had been killed in an accident three years ago.

“And when Father Sullivan baptized me — Billy Francis Patrick — he used holy water all the way from Rome. The pope blessed it.”

“What’s so important about that?”

Billy took this genuine inquiry as a blasphemous insult from someone who should know better by now, even if he was a Protestant. He punched Robin again. The boys fell over and wrestled, but only for a few seconds. Robin surrendered easily. Billy was satisfied to give him another thump before getting up and running off.

“Come on, sissy Robin. Or is mummy’s little baby scared of going near the river?”

“Coming, Billy,” Robin shouted back, deciding, as he had done nearly every day since he had arrived in Warwick, to make the best of things. But it was hard trying to get along with someone you hated, especially when Billy said, “There’s some prickly pears over there, Robin. Going to take them home and make a nice little garden for mummy?”

In Brisbane some of his friends from school lived in the same street. They were always in and out of each other’s houses. Robin, though not a leader in their games, was a star in summer. He could swim better than anyone else.

“Come on, Rob,” his father had said as they stood on the edge at the shallow end of the municipal pool. He poked the boy in the stomach. “A porpoise like you couldn’t possibly sink.”

The five-year-old Robin let his father carry him into the water. In a few minutes he learnt to dog-paddle, and on frequent visits to the pool he taught himself the main strokes. At the school’s sports day, five years in a row, he won all the races in his age group.

He practiced duck-diving at the deep end to pick up a brick, to prove he could hold his breath and keep his eyes open under water, and pretending to be a rescuer, he found it easy to tow another boy his own size the whole length of the pool.

The day Robin was declared the best junior lifesaver in the district and awarded a certificate his father decided to join up.

“Why should you?” Robin heard his mother ask. “You’re forty-two and hardly the warrior type.”

“They need dentists as well as warriors in the forces.”

“It’s because of your brother Robin—”

“Rob!” His father’s voice had a sharpness that Robin had never heard before. The much younger brother had not returned from a bombing raid over Germany. “The rest of us must get this business done with as quickly as possible. Especially now the Japs have joined in.”

The argument was soon over. Robin’s mother, who knew she could not win, did not even protest when her husband insisted on the move to Warwick, almost a hundred miles to the southwest.

“The way the war’s going,” he said, “we can’t pretend Australia mightn’t become the front line. The Japs could bomb Brisbane any time. I want you two safely out of the way before that happens.”

Robin’s mother dreaded the thought of being deprived of the seventeen-year-old girl who lived in and did all the rough housework and most of the cooking, but she dreaded even more the prospect of air raids.

So Robin’s father became an army dentist “somewhere in the Pacific,” and Robin and his mother went to Warwick. Although they were among the first to escape the threat of attacks on Brisbane, they left their move too late to find a flat or a house to themselves. They became Mrs. O’Hara’s tenants, in her shabby little house on the edge of the town.

Billy’s mother was a thin woman, redheaded like her son. She seemed to Robin so much older than his own pretty mother that she could be her mother.

“Not the type I’d choose as a bosom friend,” Mrs. Curtis told Robin. “No horizons beyond domesticity.”

She hoped that Mrs. O’Hara would share the cooking, or do most of it in return for having the kitchen tidied up for her afterwards. But Mrs. O’Hara, quickly assessing her tenant’s limitations, said, “Two women in the same kitchen. It never works.” She drew up a roster, headed Me and You, which set out the times when meals for the two families should be cooked and eaten, and pinned it on the broom cupboard.

Every day Mrs. O’Hara cleaned the house’s small, dark rooms. With a damp cloth she wiped the Sacred Heart pictures and plaster Virgin and Child statuettes. Then she worked in the vegetable garden. Behind it was a wired enclosure in which chooks pecked and clucked. Mrs. Curtis wondered whether she should graciously accept as gifts the potatoes and carrots, the greens and tomatoes and eggs she was sure to be offered. Or should she suggest a token payment? But the offer was never made. Mrs. O’Hara sold to the corner shop any produce she did not need for herself and Billy.

Robin and his mother rented the room that Mrs. O’Hara said had been the lounge. Mrs. Curtis slept there on a bed that was turned into a couch during the day. A door opened onto a partitioned corner of the verandah. Here Robin slept. It was fun having a bed that was almost out of doors, although on windy nights the louvered windows rattled in a spooky way, making it hard to sleep.

If his mother heard him tossing and turning in the dark, she never said anything. She was more concerned to find ways of occupying the daylight hours. It did not occur to her that she should be a companion to her son. That was a father’s role.

“This town doesn’t seem to be a hive of social activity,” she complained.

In Brisbane there had been bridge and tennis and rehearsals for amateur dramatics. Mrs. Curtis wondered whether giving all that up was too high a price for being away from the dangers of war.

“It looks as if you’ll be luckier than me, Robin darling, with a nice little friend all to yourself,” she said.

But she soon found alternatives to bridge and tennis. She attended meetings of the Country Women’s Association, where camouflage nets were woven for anti-aircraft guns and socks knitted for the troops. Such tasks were not for her, but she did help to pack food parcels for victims of air raids on London and other British cities. “They’re a pretty dull lot at the CWA,” she told Robin. “All they think about is recipes for scones and what time of the year is best for planting potatoes.”

But she enjoyed the novelty of doing something useful and talking to women who had not heard her stories about rehearsing plays by Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham. To the sturdy country women she had a degree of glamor, and although she knew her status as a minor celebrity would not last long, she would make the most of it while it did. The pleasure she gained from the CWA meetings helped to take the strain out of her occasional attempts to be friendly to Mrs. O’Hara.

The two boys were not friends, but necessity made them companions.

Billy was not popular at the Catholic school. The other boys shut him out of their after-school and weekend games because of his readiness to pick fights and the ease with which he won. Robin, at his school, was the new boy who did not fit into established gangs and friendships. It was easier to put up with Billy and his temper than to try to push in where he was not wanted.

Robin was soon in awe of Billy, although he tried not to give him the satisfaction of showing it.

He admired the way Billy could always find something to do, even if it was only climbing a tree he had already climbed a hundred times. He envied Billy’s ability to make a bow and arrow out of a whippy branch and the stem of a dry dockweed and the way he ran barefoot across grass or roads without complaining about burns or the gravel hurting his toes. Horror tinged but did not diminish Robin’s admiration of the accuracy with which Billy threw stones, right hand or left, and knocked pigeons off the power lines. He was admiringly shocked by Billy’s ready use of words whose meaning neither of them understood.

He admired as much as resented Billy’s assumption that he was always the leader, or if he wasn’t leading it was only because Robin was not bold enough to follow. “Sissy!” Billy jeered as Robin watched him hop backwards and forwards across the railway line just outside town, when a train might come around the corner any minute.

One day Billy chopped off the head of a chook that Mrs. O’Hara said was ready for the pot. Although he shut his eyes and covered his ears to block out the sight and sound, Robin admired Billy’s enthusiasm for the savage task.

He even admired him for having the confidence to say there were things he could not do.

“I’m going to learn to swim one day,” Billy said. There was no embarrassment in the implied admission, only pride in the certainty that he could do whatever he set out to do. “Reckon it must be easy.”

It did not occur to Billy that Robin might be able to swim, and Robin knew that if he told him he would be sneered at for lying and boasting.

Perhaps most of all Robin admired Billy for the openness with which he talked about being a Catholic.

Because his parents were not religious, Robin never thought about God much. He knew God was supposed to reward or punish people for being good or bad, but he saw no evidence that this was the way things worked out.

Billy, though, took God very seriously, or being a Catholic.

“When you’re a Catholic, you can do anything you like and you don’t get into trouble so long as you confess it afterwards,” he said.

“Confess?” Robin was puzzled by this use of the word.

“Everyone knows what confession is except stupid Protestants.”

But Billy did tell Robin a few things about being a Catholic and being a Protestant. Robin, for all his admiration, did not believe them, but he was interested enough to seek his mother’s opinion, although he was careful not to say it was Billy who had told him these odd things. Mrs. Curtis knew she should have a word with Mrs. O’Hara.

“I really would prefer that Billy didn’t tell Robin he’s going to fry in hell because he’s a Protestant,” she said.

Mrs. O’Hara had taught her son most of his beliefs but did not fancy a debate with her Protestant tenant.

“You know what boys are like,” she said.

“I wish you’d speak to Billy about it.”

“Then he’ll think your son’s being tittle-tattling. Let them sort it out for themselves.” She avoided Mrs. Curtis’s eyes and looked at the You and Me roster on the broom cupboard. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m busy...”

One day Billy showed Robin his rosary. “Protestants can’t say the rosary. That’s one reason they’re damned for all eternity.”

“What’s saying the rosary?”

“Don’t you smelly Protestant frogs know anything?”

It seemed to Robin strangely girlish of Billy to take such pride in what looked like a piece of jewelry. Yet this pride, so unembarrassed, was another reason he admired him. Any other boy would have been worried about being called a sissy for showing off a string of beads he kept in a little leather bag around his neck.

“Mum says I shouldn’t carry it around with me,” Billy said with rare softness, “but I tell her Jesus and the Holy Virgin wouldn’t let me lose anything that belonged to my dad.”

Robin tried not to let Billy know he could see the start of tears shining in his eyes, but Billy tucked the rosary back in the little bag and punched him and said, “Bugger off. I’m sick of playing with you, sissy Robin.”

Robin saw no point in hanging around while Billy was in that mood, so he went off to do something he had been meaning to do for several days.

Not far from the house was a paddock where he had seen some cactus growing. He checked that there were no bulls or cows in the paddock, then climbed through the fence. There was a whole clump of cactus, greyish green, spiky, and blotched with what looked like the scabs that came when he grazed his knees. Some of the plants were nearly two feet tall, impressive and ugly, though not monsters like the ones he had seen in the cowboy serials at the Saturday matinees in Brisbane. Other plants were smaller than the palm of his hand.

He took out the pocketknife that had been one of the presents from his father last Christmas and dug out some of the baby cactus, careful to avoid the prickles. He wrapped the four best ones in his handkerchief.

Behind the hen run at Mrs. O’Hara’s place he found a pile of old jam tins. He chose the least rusty, shaking them in case of spiders, then filled them with soil and planted a cactus in each one. They looked good lined up on the sill, beneath the louvered windows, in his corner room on the verandah.

“They’re pretty, dear,” his mother lied. She had little interest in botany or gardening and even less knowledge, but she was glad Robin had found something to amuse him. “Don’t forget to water them regularly.”

The next day when he came home from school, later than usual because the whole class had been kept in for being noisy, he went to inspect the cactus. They were not there. He soon found where they had gone.

Billy was standing beside the battered oil drum that was forever smoldering in the back garden, fueled by household rubbish.

“Silly galoot,” he shouted, stirring the drum with a stick. “Fancy trying to grow prickly pears. They’re a weed, a pest. You can go to jail for that.”

When Mrs. Curtis asked about the missing plants, Robin just muttered, but she worked out what had happened.

“I thought we’d agreed,” she said to Mrs. O’Hara, “that Billy wasn’t to come into our part of the house unless he was invited.”

“He doesn’t.”

“But he’s taken those little plants from Robin’s room.”

“Must’ve got at them from the outside.” Both women knew that the jam tins could not have been eased through the louvres. “Anyhow,” said Mrs. O’Hara, forestalling debate on this point, “Billy’s done the right thing, getting rid of those pricklies. Some fool brought them into the country years ago, and they’ve been a pest ever since, ruining the crops and the feed for the sheep and cattle.”

“But they surely couldn’t have done any harm on our windowsill.”

“The way those things spread, they’d have been in my veggie patch before you could say Jack Robinson.”

“But really, Mrs. O’Hara, I think Billy—”

“Boys have to learn to work these things out among themselves. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a meal to get ready.”

Robin still admired Billy, despite what he had done to the prickly pears. But now he hated him, too, though he knew his mother was probably right.

“You’re a prickly pair, you two,” she said. “A bit like me and Mrs. O’Hara. But we’ll all just have to rub along together, at least until the war’s over and we can go back to Brisbane.”

One Friday afternoon towards the middle of the year, Billy said, “I’m going camping tomorrow. You can come, if you don’t carry on like a sissy.”

“I wouldn’t be allowed to stay out all night,” Robin said, sounding like a sissy before he could stop himself.

“Not all night, stupid. We’ll just take some sausages and things and make a fire and cook them for lunch. We might build a cubby, too. I know a special place, down by the river.”

Mrs. Curtis told Robin he could go. “It’s nice to see you and Billy getting over your silly squabbles and being friends.”

Billy carried the satchel, loaded with sausages and apples and biscuits, when the boys left the house next morning.

“Watch out for snakes, you two,” Mrs. Curtis shouted after them, sounding, she thought, like a real country woman.

“There’s no snakes around this time of the year,” Mrs. O’Hara said. “They’re hibernating.” But she had already ordered her son to keep his shoes on, just in case.

As soon as they were out of sight of the house, Billy took off his shoes and socks and stuffed them into the satchel, which he then ordered Robin to carry. Unlike his mother, he was sure there were no snakes around. He knew the places they liked, and he hadn’t seen one for weeks.

“Scared of snakes?” he said, when Robin made no move to take off his shoes.

Robin said nothing. He was afraid of snakes, but he was not going to say so. And it would be even worse if he complained about burrs and gravel.

Billy said, after the fight about Robin calling him Bill, that they could sit by the river for a while.

“How far’s the special place?” Robin asked.

“About two hours — as the crow flies. I can go for hours and hours without stopping, but I suppose you need plenty of rests.”

“Why are you always having a go at me, Billy?”

“Because you’re a sissy and a smelly Protestant frog.” Robin stood up, sick of this abuse. It wasn’t worth it, just for the sake of having someone to play with. He wondered whether he should go home. But before he could decide that, Billy said unexpectedly, “And because you’ve got a dad.”

“But he’s at the war.”

“But you’ve got one.”

Robin sat down. Billy had taken out his rosary and was running the amber beads through his fingers.

“When my dad was killed...” Robin saw again those surprising tears in his enemy’s eyes. He looked away, not wanting to spark the anger that would lead to another fight. But he knew, too, that he was turning his head so that Billy would not have the hurt of being thought a sissy, the hurt he was so ready to inflict.

“When they got him out from the bulldozer, his rosary, it wasn’t even broken.” Robin could hear the beads clicking. “Father Sullivan said it was a miracle.”

Robin still dared not look at Billy. He was sure he was really crying now. The boys sat in silence for what seemed to Robin to be hours. Then he heard Billy stand up suddenly and say, “Reckon I’ll learn to swim next year. Be as easy as falling off a log.”

When Robin turned around, he saw there were damp smudges on Billy’s cheeks. Without thinking, Robin tested the truce that the enemy seemed to have declared. “I could teach you, Billy,” he said. “I was the best swimmer at my school in Brisbane.”

Billy’s sneer came back. “Bloody liar! A sissy like you, Robin, could never even poke your little finger in the water.”

“I can, I can! And I’ve got a lifesaving certificate, too.”

“Bloody sissy skite! You couldn’t even save an old prickly pear if all you had to do was piss on it to stop it burning.”

Billy still had the rosary in his hand. Fury — and the smudges, the signs of weakness, on his enemy’s face — gave Robin courage. He grabbed the rosary and ran along the riverbank. “Leave me alone, or I’ll throw it in.”

“Don’t you dare. You wouldn’t dare, sissy, bloody Protestant Robin!”

The rosary arched out of his hand. It seemed to Robin, stunned by his own daring, to hang in the air before splashing into the river.

“Bastard, bastard, bastard!”

Billy was making no attempt now to hide his tears. He howled as if he was in physical pain. And then he jumped into the river.

The water came up to his waist. As he moved forward, groping hopelessly for the rosary, he slipped and his head went under.

Robin shut his eyes, too scared to look any more. When he opened them, there was no sign of Billy.

He knew what he should do, and couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it. But he would have to run for help. And before he did that, there was something else he must do, to let people know he was brave, not the sissy Billy had so often called him.

Holding the branch of an overhanging willow, he slid into the river. The current pulled gently at him. It was not the savage tug he had expected. It was almost as calm as the swimming pool in Brisbane. He put his head into the water because he knew that when he found help he would have to be wet all over. For a moment he opened his eyes. It was not as murky as he had expected. He could see the bottom and, more dimly, where it shelved into deeper water. Perhaps... But instead of doing that, he grabbed the willow branch with both hands so that he could change his grip and put his other arm in the water. Now he was completely soaked.

He climbed out of the river and ran for the help that he already knew would be too late.

A week after the funeral Robin’s father came home on leave. The three of them had the house to themselves. Mrs. O’Hara had gone to stay with her sister in Toowoomba. His father’s arrival and the retelling of the story brought on another outburst of tears.

“I ran and ran—”

“But not before he’d tried to save Billy,” Mrs. Curtis said. “Even though he’d told him it was dangerous to paddle. But he dived in after him, without even taking off his shoes.”

Her husband already knew the story, but happily listened to it again.

“The man Robin found, a farmer almost a mile from where it happened, the one who eventually recovered—” Mrs. Curtis lowered her voice to a whisper “—the body, said the river was very deep there, the current fast and treacherous.” Embarrassed by the literary tone of her account, she paused before adding, “And the boys had become such good friends, really quite close.”

“It took real courage.” As he hugged his son, Major John Curtis, of the Dental Corps, felt his heart tighten with pride and with horror at how close they had come to losing him. “The best soldier doesn’t have more guts than you, Rob.” He looked at his wife across the boy’s shoulder.

Mrs. Curtis nodded, accepting her husband’s message. She never again called her brave boy Robin. Nobody did.