How the Light Gets In (12 page)

‘Good morning, Lou,’ he says with affection so deep I want to touch him. He must love me, I think.

He moves to the edge of the bed, and pulls the blankets back, so that a large white triangle is formed, neat and white and empty. But when I see his grinning face, I remember just who he is, change my mind and want to keep things as they
are. I do not climb into his bed. I get down on my haunches by the bed so that he can see my face, so he can remember who Iam.

‘I just wondered if you wanted to talk about your granny,’ I say. ‘I was too sleepy to talk before. Now I’m wide awake.’

He brings his hand out from under the covers and hangs it over the edge of the bed so that it touches my arm.

He groans.

‘She’s okay,’ he says. ‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘I’m fine.’

He moves across in the bed so that he is pressed up against the wall and pats the space next to him.

‘I’ll be good,’ he says.

I climb in and lie on my back.

We lie shoulder to shoulder, the backs of our hands touching, but not holding, and talk until the dawn; until the birds start up and it is becoming too light and I worry about seeing his face, about him seeing mine. I worry about the light and the way that it will make us conscious again.

‘I better go back to my room,’ I say.

James rolls onto his side so that he has his back to me.

‘Goodnight, Lou,’ he says, in that same affectionate voice.

I look at the clock and see that it is not yet six o’clock.

‘Sleep for an hour,’ I say. ‘I’ll see you at breakfast.’

It’s Monday. American History class. The fat girl is sitting alone. The fat boy she has been holding hands with every day is sitting away from her; has swapped desks with somebody. I stare at her and try to tell her telepathically that I am sorry for her and that I hope she and her boyfriend can make it up.

I want somebody to talk to in this place.

At the end of class I decide to follow her. She goes to the cafeteria and eats some breakfast: scrambled eggs and bacon. I sit near the entrance where the one-armed boy eats his tomato sauce on white bread. I watch as she eats. She finishes every mouthful. She walks to the library and I follow her.

She goes to the large-books collection and pulls out a hardback volume about Jim Henson and the Muppets. She takes the book to a study room. The study room is small and brightly lit with three walls of glass. She sits down to read and look at the pictures.

I wish I had met Jim Henson. Ask me who I would bring back to the earth if I only had one choice, and it would be him. I’d ask him if he could take me to his muppet studio and I’d watch him work. If he liked me, and we got along, he might give me a muppet that I could be the voice for. He would teach me to work and he would give me a job on ‘The New Muppet Show: A Revival’ looking after some of the smaller muppets, thinking of story lines and song lyrics.

The only problem is, I’m not that good on voices, but I could think of muppet scenarios. I’d love that. Maybe I should write to Brian Henson. Maybe he’d be interested in some of my muppet scenarios for whatever muppet programs he’s putting together.

I open the door and go inside.

‘Hi,’ I say.

She is not surprised.

‘Hi.’

‘Are you a Jim Henson fan?’

‘Does the pope shit in the woods?’ she says.

We laugh loudly and the librarian taps on the glass.

We talk in a whisper for a while. ‘Do you want to go somewhere and have a coffee or something?’ she asks.

‘Is the bear a Catholic?’ I say.

The librarian returns. She opens the door and one of her breasts presses against the glass like a balloon filled with water, ready to burst if she presses any harder, ‘Should you two be in class?’

‘Journalism project,’ says the girl, whose name is Yvonne.

When the librarian leaves, I say, ‘Did you see her boob pressed up against the glass? It looked like a balloon about to burst.’

‘Yeah,’ says Yvonne, ‘I noticed that too.’

Maybe I could talk to Yvonne about my obsession with breasts and how I’m worried that mine look like pork-buns.

We leave school and walk to the end of Main Street and go to a dark and dingy café where I drink coffee some weekends and where they don’t care if you smoke. I light a cigarette and Yvonne looks at me as though I have taken out a gun or a knife, but she says, ‘Oh, God! You’d better give me one of those.’

We smoke and talk and laugh.

‘I’m a Mormon.’

‘You don’t look like a Mormon,’ I say.

‘I don’t taste like one either,’ she says.

I laugh loudly, a kind of ecstatic choking, almost exactly the way she laughs and I wonder if there’s something wrong with me; a style of laughter is something you have for yourself, a highly personal trade-mark, it’s not supposed to be contagious like a ’flu. But I continue to laugh hard and long for no good reason.

Yvonne puts her hand over my mouth to stop me.

‘No, seriously,’ she says, ‘you should know that if my mom or dad were to walk in here now you’d have smoked your last, and your ass would be grass if Bishop Burpcrumb found out.’

Yvonne doesn’t look nervous; doesn’t look like somebody pretending to be tough or brave. She’s not the biddable type; not trying to impress me because she needs a friend. I like her.

‘Do you have to go to church and stuff?’ I ask.

‘Yep. Until I leave home. No sport, or anything else for that matter on Sundays. No caffeine, no alcohol, no sex before marriage, no anything much at all.’

‘No masturbation?’ I say.

‘What’s that?’ she says grinning, and we laugh.

Next time we see each other I’m going to ask her if she’s ever masturbated. I’ve done it about thirty times, and I want to know when other girls start doing it and whether I’m the only one or whether I’m in some kind of minority group.

Yvonne and I eat lunch. She tells me all about Mormonism.

‘We baptise the dead you know.’

‘Why?’

‘To save their souls, so they can go to heaven. So far two hundred million dead people have been baptised, including Buddha, Shakespeare, Einstein and Elvis Presley.’

‘What’s heaven like?’

‘I’ll show you.’

She pulls a piece of cardboard out of her bag; it’s a picture of Mormon heaven. It’s all pink bunny rabbits, fairy-floss, soft white clouds, green meadows and fields of daisies with what looks like hundreds of six-year-old, blonde-haired, multiple twins, holding hands.

We laugh and I don’t want Yvonne to go home and I want to tell her this, but instead I look at my watch.

‘Do you have to leave?’ she asks.

‘No, not yet,’ I say.

I think about what I am about to say next for some time. I try to weigh up the pros and cons. I lean across the table and whisper, ‘Do you want to have a drink? I have some here.’ I tap my bag. ‘We could have some gin. I could order some orange juice and we could mix it?’

‘God, I’d love that,’ she says and I am immensely relieved
that I haven’t persuaded her; that I haven’t talked her into something she isn’t ready to do. It could have been such a filthy thing to do, enticing a Mormon to drink. It could have been such a horrible thing to do.

At six o’clock Yvonne looks at her watch and for the first time I see dread in her eyes.

‘I better run,’ she says.

I don’t want to move from the table in case my mood moves with it.

‘I might stay a while,’ I say. ‘See you on Thursday?’

She fiddles with the straps of her backpack.

‘I won’t be at school on Thursday. I have to do something at home. But we’ll meet again, for sure.’

‘For sure,’ I say. I want to tell her how funny she is. I want to tell her that I like her face.

‘For sure,’ I say again and watch her go.

Margaret is standing in the hallway when I get home.

‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ she says.

‘Sorry,’ I say, but cannot remember why I was supposed to be home early.

‘You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I say, the base of my spine shivering, telling me I need to clench or I’ll urinate right where I’m standing. Everything seems to collapse with something my body has realised before my mind.

‘Tonight is James’ first heat for the national debating championships. They’ve gone on ahead.’

Nobody has told me this.

‘I didn’t know,’ I say.

Margaret is angrier than I have ever seen her; her mouth tightens, her chest heaves and she has to fold her arms across
her chest so that I won’t see her hands shaking.

‘Bridget told you. I checked with her before she left. She said she told you after dinner and if you can’t remember that far back then there’s really something wrong with you.’

‘Oh,’ I say, paralysed, impotent, ready to cry for the second time in less than a week.

‘Maybe I forgot because Henry’s mum is in hospital.’

‘I doubt it,’ she says.

Margaret drives me to the auditorium in silence, but it is Henry who is most cross with me. During the last round of the debate, I lean over to ask him if he or Margaret would like anything to drink since I am going to the bathroom, and he turns on me, ‘For God’s sake,
please
just stay where you are.’

I stay in my seat and notice that Henry’s eyes are watering badly, and that he uses his sleeve to dab them dry.

After the competition – which James’ team wins – we go to a pizza restaurant. James is excited about his victory, but he’s disappointed that Margaret has made what he calls a bank manager’s decision not to go to the restaurant the rest of the team is going to.

‘You were excellent,’ I tell James, and he was.

As he stood on stage, waved his arms and walked into the aisles, he seemed much older, as though there are two versions of him.

‘Thanks,’ he says, blowing air on his knuckles and then rubbing them against his suit jacket lapel.

The mood is subdued. Margaret hardly eats and nor do I. She is distracted by every movement. When somebody walks in or out, she watches them; somebody scrapes their chair to get out from a table and she turns in her seat as though she is about to be arrested.

Henry does most of the talking, which is unusual, probably to make up for Margaret’s silence and he conducts a
thorough post-mortem of the flaws in the other debating team’s performance.

‘They were too greedy for laughs,’ says Henry. ‘Too worried about individual kudos to work as a team.’

‘They were just too
retarded
,’ says James, some stringy mozzarella dangling from his hungry mouth, and the other version of James, the better James – the one I saw up on stage, the one from last night – is obliterated.

I spend the dinner thinking about how I will make amends, how I will start again and how I will ask for help.

‘I was wondering,’ I say as we are walking through the front door, ‘if everybody could meet me in the living room in five minutes.’

Not only am I going to turn over a new leaf but I’m going to ask for help and start behaving like a new and nice person. I smile at everybody, such a smile my whole face shakes.

‘What for?’ asks Bridget.

‘I’ll tell you when we’re all together.’

Margaret drops the car keys into the basket and folds her arms.

‘I think we’re all too tired tonight, Lou,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you just tell us now?’

James is unnerved by something he sees in my face and holds his bag in front of his chest like a shield.

All of Margaret’s warmth towards me has been sucked dry, as though she was hooked up to a vacuum during the night.

Henry seems to harbour a deep suspicion, planted not by something he’s seen, but by something someone has told him. Perhaps Margaret has persuaded him, at last, that I am no good or too much trouble.

Bridget is impatient; for her I am irrelevant. I think that perhaps only James will feel anything when I say what I’m about to say. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ I say.

But that’s as far as I get.

I am about to say sorry. I am about to tell them that I still can’t sleep and that I want a doctor. I am about to apologise for everything and ask for help, but my nose begins to bleed.

James takes a box of tissues from the dining-room table and passes it to me. Margaret, who is normally so fond of any kind of action, especially action or drama involving the human body, takes a chair and places it behind me but does no more; not a single word is spoken before she leaves the room, followed obediently by Henry.

‘They know you smoked in your room again last night,’ says Bridget, and something tells me that she is the informant. ‘They’re really pissed about it too.’

James doesn’t know I smoke.

‘Fuck,’ he says.

Bridget breaks into a smile, the kind that sometimes happens when somebody’s nervous.

‘Smoking is such a loser thing to do,’ she says and storms out of the room, as though she needs to go away and fume in private.

I lie on my bed and take out four sheets of paper. I will write four apologies, starting with Henry.

I put this note in an airmail envelope and wait until three a.m. I go to Henry’s bedside and stick the note in his shoe. Somehow I know that he’ll read it privately; that he won’t tell Margaret and that he’ll think about what to do with me in a different light.

After breakfast, Henry calls me into the dining-room where he is stacking his briefcase.

‘Thank you,’ he says, a little nervously. ‘But there’s really no need.’