How the Light Gets In (13 page)

‘That’s okay,’ I say.

He half clears his throat the way a person does when they don’t want you to know that they need to clear their throat.

‘You have a lot of sheer humanity,’ he says awkwardly.

As these words roll over in my head, Henry stuffs a newspaper into his briefcase, looks nervously towards the kitchen door, shuts the lid heavily and locks the lock. He looks around at the kitchen door again and I know he is worried about Margaret.

He smiles with effort. ‘That came out wrong,’ he says.

‘That’s okay,’ I say.

As he walks out the front door, I grab hold of the words and make them stand up:
sheer humanity
.

I can’t let Henry leave without something lighter, something friendlier, passing between us.

He stands on the doorstep and I pull the door closed behind us.

‘Henry,’ I say. ‘Do you know what desquamation is?’

He lifts his briefcase to his chest.

‘Are there any clues?’

This is an interesting approach. I have to pretend to know less than I already do.

‘All I know for certain is that Antarctic explorers suf fered from it quite often before they died in the snow. From my reading, it seems desquamation was always around when Edwardian-era Antarctic explorers perished.’

Henry is glad of the change in tone and wants to employ his powers of deduction.

‘Ah, well. I remember reading something about this. Is it what happened when a type of volatile fuel was used for portable cooking stoves? I think it refers to the effects of toxic fuel gases inhaled in close quarters, like in tents?’

Henry walks towards his car but is happy talking about this. I should ask him more encyclopaedia-style questions.

‘Could be,’ I say. ‘That’s sounds plausible to me.’

He opens the passenger door of his car and puts his briefcase on the seat. ‘Anyhow, I could look it up for you at work. I have a good dictionary on my desktop.’

‘No, don’t do that. I want to find out for myself.’

‘Bye, Lou,’ he says, ‘have a good day at school, and don’t worry.’

‘No?’

‘No, I don’t think you should.’

‘Okay.’

As he is getting in the car, I walk around and stand next to him. He hugs me and I feel good. I know that I will start all over again; rewind this, and go back to the beginning.

The weather is colder, at last. At lunchtime, I lie on the lawn where I compose my apologies for Bridget, Margaret and James.

I feel a hand on the back of my head.

‘Lou,’ says Tom. ‘I thought it was you.’

I look up and smile.

‘It is me,’ I say, ‘and you must be you.’

I’ve been carrying Tom’s camera around ever since he gave it to me and I’ve finished the roll of film, but haven’t wanted to use my short supply of money to get it developed; nor have I known how to contact him without asking James. I’ve been hoping that Tom would find me.

‘Did you take any pictures?’ he asks.

‘Yeah, they’re in here.’

‘Great. Any hints?’

‘Oh, they’re not that interesting. I hope you didn’t miss any deadlines or anything?’

‘What for?’ he says.

‘The audition,’ I say.

‘Oh,’ he says, not a good liar, his eyes shooting out over my shoulder as though he’s casual as anything. ‘I decided not to worry about that. It wasn’t a good play, anyway.’

Tom is crouching like a frog.

‘Do you want to lie down?’ I ask.

He lies down and we talk for a while. There is no explanation for this that I can think of, but in Tom’s company, I am like a different person. For one thing, I still don’t blush.

‘What’s your favourite film?’ I ask.

‘What’s yours?’ he asks back.

‘I have a few,’ I say. ‘
The Shawshank Redemption
is up there.’

‘I love that film,’ he says.

‘Really? What’s your favourite part? What’s your favourite line?’

Tom isn’t uncomfortable even when he’s stuck or trapped.

‘I dunno,’ he says, ‘I just love the whole thing.’

‘What about when Morgan Freeman says “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.” I love that line.’

‘Isn’t Morgan Freeman the greatest,’ says Tom, like one great actor complimenting another.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘But what about that line?’

‘Sure,’ he says. ‘It’s an awesome line.’

We are silent.

‘What other films do you like?’ he asks.

I half expect him to ask me what my favourite colour is, like the boy I held hands with at the roller-skating rink.

‘
Down by Law
,’ I say, ‘and
Smoke
.’

‘Never heard of them,’ he says, as though he knows every other film and I just happened to have mentioned the only two he hasn’t seen or as though these films are bad or don’t count.

We are silent again.

‘I like you,’ he says, reaching for my hand and his eyes give me another shock. But still I do not blush.

I put my head on his leg and close my eyes.

‘I was wondering,’ he says. ‘Do you want to escape with me? We could take the rest of the day off, go to one of those one-hour photo places together.’

‘Why not,’ I say, pretending to be casual just like him. ‘Let’s go.’

I move quickly to prove I’m keen, and to my amazement, I keep holding his hand.

‘Maybe we could get a coffee,’ he says.

‘I was just about to think that,’ I say, smiling, and watch as one side of his face lights up more than the other.

The photographs are developed and we go to a café to look at them. Tom is satisfied with the pictures I have taken of him.

‘You’re good at this,’ he says.

‘Thank you,’ I say, worried about the photographs I have taken of myself, sitting up in bed, using the camera’s self-timer.

‘It’s a photographic essay,’ I say. ‘It’s called “Insomnia”. I took them in the early hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep. I look like a corpse. Except, of course, not.’ Cos a corpse gets lots of sleep, and I don’t.’

‘You couldn’t ever look awful,’ he says, looking into my eyes.

I wish that people I want to like wouldn’t say such stupid things and even though it’s Tom that should be ashamed of this corny line, I blush for the first time since we met. Unlike James, he looks away to let me recover, and I do, quickly. For this I like him.

‘I was going to do an essay called “A Day in the Life of a Tea Towel” but I would have needed high-speed film.’

‘That’s pretty funny,’ he says.

‘Then I was going to do an “Elegy for the Apple”, but every time I tried to find an apple, Margaret beat me to it and devoured the poor thing before I could get started.’

I have used the word elegy in the wrong place. I meant something else but can’t think what I meant.

‘How bad’s your insomnia?’ he asks.

‘Very,’ I say. ‘Sometimes I want to die just so I can shut down.’

‘Me too,’ he says, leaving his free hand resting prone on the table like it has fallen from a height.

‘Really?’ I ask. I hope like mad that he is a fellow sufferer but I also suspect he’s lying, and that I might find him out.

‘How bad? How many nights in a week, on average?’

‘At the moment … about five out of six.’

‘What about the seventh?’ I ask.

‘Then I don’t so much sleep as knock myself out.’

‘How?’

‘With stuff,’ he says. ‘But you don’t want to get into that. It’s stuff my mum had to use when she was really sick.’

‘Morphine?’

‘Sort of, but you really don’t want to get into that.’

Tom’s face shows a mixture of not wanting to talk about it and wanting desperately for me to ask him more.

‘Well, my friend,’ I say, pretending to be very urbane and in some kind of cool movie, ‘what shall we do now?’

‘Go home?’

I’d love to be inside somebody else’s house.

‘Could I have a nap at your house, in a spare bed, or something, like in a guest room? I really like sleeping in spare beds, especially in box rooms,’ I say.

‘Me too. I love to nap in other people’s beds.’

‘Really?’ I say. It’s hard to believe that Tom shares yet another of my most personal obsessions.

‘Yep. I used to get my mum to set up beds in all the guest rooms in the house until I was about fourteen …’

‘But eventually even those beds lost their knack?’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ he says and he lunges at me to kiss my cheek.

I am still not embarrassed, but when he finishes kissing me, I look down at the fleshy part of his thumb and think about the way it looks like a toddler’s thigh, to stop myself from thinking too much about what is happening.

‘I used to sleep on the fold-out bed in the lounge-room,’ I say. ‘I could always sleep this way.’

‘It’s a funny beast … insomnia,’ he says.

‘How many bedrooms do you have?’ I ask.

‘You’ll see.’

‘Is anybody home?’

‘No, they’re away.’

My heart kicks like a boot in my chest.

We arrive at Tom’s house. It’s so enormous it makes the Harding house look like a shack. He stops and grabs my arm.

‘Shit,’ he says. ‘I forgot about the char.’

‘The what?’

‘Char. It’s short for charwoman.’

‘As in maid?’ I say, incredulous. I think I know this word from Austen or Dickens, but I’m not quite sure. I just know it. ‘How awful,’ I say.

‘It’s a pretty big house to keep clean,’ he says.

‘I suppose,’ I say. ‘It’s not exactly a cabin, is it?’

‘The second-biggest house in town,’ he says.

‘Who has the biggest?’

‘Actually,’ he says, ‘I think mine is the biggest.’

Leona and Erin would love to do over Tom’s house, and kick him in the shins in a dark alley. They’d call him scum and say that it was disgusting that three people should take so much for themselves.

A few years ago my sisters brought me along as a kind of decoy when they burgled houses in wealthy suburbs. They thought nobody would suspect two teenage girls dragging their little sister around with them.

I wanted to explore these rich houses alone. It was my fantasy to discover that the owners would not be back for a few days and to stay there, so that I could treat the house as my own. I wanted desperately to find an oubliette, a secret
passageway or a secret dungeon whose only entrance is a trapdoor activated by removing a book from a bookshelf or moving a bar of soap from one part of the bath to another.

I craved being alone in these big rich houses the same way that I crave being alone in old Catholic churches.

Tom smiles. ‘Tom’s cabin …’ he says. ‘I just got it. That’s why you said cabin.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Uncle Tom’s cabin. You took a while.’

‘I’m a bit slow sometimes,’ he says. ‘We’ll have to come back another time,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Doesn’t matter. I think I might go back to class. I have Modern Literature. We’re doing
Death of a Salesman
.’

‘That’s one of my favourite Arthur Miller’s,’ he says.

‘I like it too,’ I say.

I want to talk about Willy Loman and about Biff stealing the fountain pen, but somehow I don’t want to talk to Tom about it.

‘I might just go for a walk,’ he says. ‘Do you want me to walk you back?’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘That’d be great.’

We say goodbye at the school gate.

‘Farewell, my fiend, until next time,’ I say.

‘Wait!’ he yells. ‘Do you want to meet tomorrow, the same place, same time and all that?’

I have no idea what I want. If Tom wasn’t perfect looking, if he had an uglier face, I don’t think I’d give him the time of day. That’s what beautiful people can do.

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘That’d be good.’

When Tom pushes his face forward to kiss me, I respond too slowly and our cheeks collide. He holds my shoulders and we try again and this time our lips meet, not for long, but long enough.
We stare at one another for an instant and my body is so alarmed I might as well have flung myself onto an electric fence.

‘Oh my God,’ he says, and this seems like the right thing to say.

I turn and walk away.

After dinner I write a note to Margaret.

In the morning, when James and Bridget are getting into the van, Margaret kisses me on the cheek. She’s wearing one of five almost identical navy suits, all spick and span and creaseless and smelling as though soaked in perfume overnight; cleaner than any of my clothes could ever smell.

‘Thank you,’ she says.

‘You’re welcome,’ I say.

‘But you don’t need to write me. You can talk to me anytime,’ she says. ‘I’m available for you at any time. If you want to talk.’

The thing is, I have lost the desire to talk to Margaret. I don’t want her to put her hand soothingly on my arm, or sit too close
to me and grab at my eyes with hers, or clean her reading glasses with a serious face and talk at me like a kindergarten teacher.

In American History class I find out that Yvonne has left to live in another state. It occurs to me that I haven’t thought about her once since we met and it really makes no difference to me that she’s not here any more. I’ve never really missed anybody and probably never will. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to miss somebody. I would. I’d like to miss somebody very much. I simply never have.

At lunchtime I write a note to Bridget in which I tell her that I dreamed she was a surgeon and that she won an extremely prestigious award for her work in a Third World country. I tell her that in this dream she gave such a beautiful speech that it was played on every TV station in the country. Although I didn’t really have this dream, it sounds right.

Tom doesn’t appear and I feel sorry for having spent the whole day feeling sick with nerves: sorry that I haven’t eaten since we parted and that the saliva in my mouth has become flocculent and gluey with hunger and fear.

I stick the note in Bridget’s locker five minutes before the end of lunchtime and she finds me at my locker at the end of the day.

‘I just want to say thank you for the note,’ she says. ‘You’re very sweet.’

‘That’s all right,’ I say. ‘My dream might be a sign about your future.’

‘Maybe,’ she says, blankly. ‘Maybe not.’

Suddenly she leans across to kiss me on the cheek. But again, I move forward too quickly. Our faces collide and it feels as though my nose has poked her eye. She puts her hand over the left side of her face.

‘Sorry,’ I say.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she says. ‘Anyway, I have to go to basketball practise now. I’ll see you tonight.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘See you.’

It’s a ridiculous thing but I almost say
I love you
, as though the words are waiting – like a bee – to land on somebody.

After dinner, I write a note to James, borrowing heavily from the sentiment in the card to him from Isabella.

Several weeks pass. Instead of watching TV at night, I lie on my bed and compose notes. I am at peace doing this, in my lovely room, which seems to have friendly feelings towards me again.

Sometimes I draw pictures or compose stories for my letters; funny stories or detective stories in which Margaret, Henry, James and Bridget feature as characters. My notes are flying all over the house and although I have never received a written reply, I suspect that the Hardings are now sending notes of their own to each other. The house has become quieter; has a new atmosphere. We don’t sit together at night, or borrow videos, or eat out at family restaurants or talk in the kitchen.