How the Light Gets In (11 page)

‘Well,’ says Tom, looking at Henry so as not to leave him out, ‘it was horrible, but then she went into complete remission. She’s still alive and doing extremely well.’

Anybody else would have described this as a miracle. My mum would have said it was ‘the work of God’. My dad would have said ‘it was meant to be’. But Tom lets the facts speak for themselves.

I swallow some potato and look at him.

‘You must have been relieved,’ I say, and he smiles as though I have been his friend through it all.

‘Yes,’ he says, taking me in, ‘but then, like everything, you get used to it and everything’s taken for granted again. My father and I tried not to forget what might have happened to us, but we have. We go on as though nothing ever happened.’

I stare at Tom and he stares back at me, as though we are alone in the room. His hands rest loosely in his lap, one jumper sleeve rolled up, his long white fingers like little people wearing glass helmets.

I feel good just from looking at him.

Margaret clears her throat and puts her knife and fork across her plate to show that she is finished.

‘Aren’t you going to eat anything, Tom?’

Tom looks away from me and pushes his plate towards the middle of the table. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I don’t really feel like eating after all.’

Margaret is cross. I can tell by the way she fidgets with her wedding ring.

‘It’s really easy to lose your appetite,’ I say, ‘when you have been talking about your mother nearly dying of cancer.’

James reaches across the table, ‘I’ll eat it,’ he says and takes this extra plate of food into the living-room; something normally forbidden in the Harding home, but under the circumstances, completely ignored.

‘See you later,’ says James to Tom as he leaves the room. ‘Thanks for the ride home.’

Tom stays for an hour, talking about his trip around Europe. Margaret clears the table and Tom doesn’t offer to help. This reminds me of my first weeks here and how often I forgot to offer to help, too nervous to speak, too nervous to say please or thank you.

Margaret is still angry with him for leaving his food uneaten. Henry wants to know about Spain and asks if Tom will come back one day and show us the photographs.

Margaret stands. ‘Well, it’s getting late,’ she says untruthfully. ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to get home to your family.’

As Margaret shows Tom out, she says, ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’

Bridget goes to the living-room without saying goodbye.

I do not go to the door, but stand near the hallway bookshelf.

‘Bye,’ I say, and think what a dull house it suddenly seems now that Tom is leaving it.

Tom looks at me. ‘I hope I’ll see you at school,’ he says, and then he winks.

As we watch him get into his flash red car, Margaret stands by the window and grips the curtain.

‘What an interesting person,’ I say.

‘What a rude young man, more like it,’ she says, anger bulging around her chin and making her face ugly. ‘Can you believe he took a meal and just left it there?’

Henry agrees even though he probably thought Tom was interesting too.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I’ve seen better manners.’

I follow them into the kitchen. I want to hear what she will say. Henry starts washing the dishes and says nothing while Margaret continues to complain.

‘Don’t you think he was very arrogant?’ she asks him.

‘I guess he seemed a wee bit over confident,’ says Henry, doing a pretty good job of a Scottish accent, ‘but that might be a cultural thing.’

Margaret turns sharply and takes a plate out of Henry’s hand.

‘Why is that your excuse for everybody’s bad behaviour?’

Henry frowns and tries to will me out of the room, but I stay where I am.

I lift a plate from the table and drop it. It hits the floor and breaks neatly in half. From where Margaret stands, it is impossible for her to tell whether it has been thrown or whether it has merely slipped. But Henry knows, and he frowns at me.

Margaret turns on me. ‘Tell James I would rather not see that boy in my house again.’

Henry stops what he’s doing and follows his wife upstairs. I know – without knowing how I know – that he will go along with her and Tom will never be allowed back in the house.

It’s the end of my second week at school. Last night I had trouble getting to sleep and when I did finally sleep, I dreamed about Leona and her fiancé, Greg.

Greg was sitting up in bed, naked, scratching his leg with oil-stained, eczema-scarred fingers. The bed was covered in a cheap red satin sheet, and his knees were up against his chest, his testicles squeezed between the tops of his thighs, purple and blackened with thick dark hairs. Leona sat in a chair in the corner of the room, sobbing without noise, staring at him. I was in the bed next to him, curled up against his awful arm. He whispered, ‘Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen. That’s my motto.’

I go red whenever I think of him. He’s in my mind like a word I use in company when I don’t know its exact meaning and yet it just pops out of my mouth. I know I’m about to be caught out but I can’t help saying it.

I go to the cafeteria at lunchtime hoping that I might sit at a table and have somebody come and sit with me. But as I walk into the brightly lit room – its awful smells, its terrible scraping of dishes and clicking of bottles in crates, its exaggerated laughter and squealing of hordes of students funnelling food into their throats as though they have no teeth to chew with – I see a boy with only one arm, sitting alone near the entrance, spreading tomato sauce with a spoon onto white bread. I walk away.

I spend the lunch hour without food, walking around the enormous campus pretending I’m running late for an appointment.

I have now explored every corner: the indoor swimming pool, two gymnasiums, four tennis courts, a theatre and three basketball courts with retractable bleachers.

There are students everywhere carrying sports bags and racquets, their hair wet, the armpits of their t-shirts lightly damp. There are so many healthy, good-looking teenagers, that a few crooked teeth, or short, fat fingers, suddenly take on the proportions of deformities. Everywhere there are bare limbs: well shaped, hairless, perfect. An end of summer gaiety, a sporting spirit. I cannot wait for winter.

The Organisation has held several parties for exchange students. I went to the first one, but was bored witless. Flo Bapes was there – my alleged mentor – and she wanted to know why I hadn’t been at the assembly on the first day of school. ‘Didn’t the Hardings tell you?’ They didn’t. Henry told Bridget to tell me, but Bridget forgot. At least, that’s her story. In any case, I don’t like the way the other exchange students constantly complained about their difficulties with study and I’d rather avoid Flo Bapes – and her pestering and voyeuristic interest in my impoverished background – if that’s at all possible.

Sometimes I sit in the mezzanine of the library and look down at the tennis courts and wonder what it would be like to wear a pair of shorts and sit with my knees apart opposite somebody who is also wearing shorts sitting with their knees apart.

I have seen many teenagers wearing shorts sitting with their knees apart and I have wanted to stare at the extra-white soft loose flesh of the inner thigh because it looks so surprised by the world, so apart from the rest of the body.

It is time to go home and I am at my locker. The corridor is nearly empty and the only sound is the hellish scraping
coming from the cafeteria where white-coated staff pile orange plastic chairs too noisily onto blue plastic tables. It sounds like war in Lego-land. I gag at the smell of frying fat being poured through funnels into enormous vats.

Tom emerges from the bathroom, his hair damp.

‘Lou?’ he says.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘It’s great to see you again,’ he says. ‘Is this your locker?’

‘Yes.’

‘Stupid me,’ he says. ‘If it wasn’t your locker you wouldn’t be rummaging around in it, would you?’

‘I might,’ I say, ‘if there was something I really wanted to rummage for.’

‘Fair play,’ he says and offers to hold my things so I can keep looking with free hands.

He takes a camera out of his bag.

‘Hey,’ he says, ‘you’ll think I’m really vain, but I need a good picture for an audition. Would you mind coming outside with me and taking a few?’

He leans against his locker and smiles, aware of his beauty. I don’t like actors. But I am feeling too happy to really mind. I wonder at the way it is that I can be a different version of myself around different people. For no apparent reason, I am not a blusher around Tom. My skin started out liking him and, so far, it still does.

‘Sure,’ I say.

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘Do you know that the person who had your locker before you died in a car crash and now there’s a plaque for her on the bridge at the river? It says
Blithe Spirit
. It always makes me sad when I see it.’

I don’t know exactly what blithe means. It’s one of those words whose actual meaning never convinces me; whose actual meaning doesn’t seem to suit the word, and I think, therefore,
that it must mean something else; usually something quite opposite. In this case, I decide that
blithe
means ill, or vile, or diseased.

‘Was she your friend?’ I ask.

‘No. I didn’t even know her really. A cheerleader. Too bouncy,’ he says, peering into my locker.

I search for something clever to say.

‘I don’t think cheerleaders are my type either,’ I say. ‘They’re always climbing up on each other’s backs and making human pyramids.’

‘Exactly,’ he says, thrilled to pieces, obviously glad to have me to talk to, one half of his face smiling.

We start walking up the stairs together.

I suddenly remember that I have to meet Bridget after her basketball practice if I want a lift home. Otherwise it’s a long walk in the sun. Tom follows me, his steel caps clicking on the floorboards.

‘I’m an exchange student,’ I say, as though this explains everything.

‘I know that, of course,’ he says, checking for the cigarette packet in his top shirt pocket. ‘James told me. Plus all the exchange students were introduced at assembly and you weren’t there, but they showed your picture on a slide with all the others and gave, like, a synopsis of where you’re from and everything.’

He is staring at my profile so I stare back at him. The thing about Tom’s beauty is that it is not the perfect, symmetrical, blue-eyed blondness that’s supposed to signify superiority. It’s more that his bright green eyes deliver sharp and beautiful electric shocks every time you look at him. It happened to Margaret too, and Bridget and probably even Henry.

‘You look better in real life,’ he says, delivering a few quick shocks to my stomach. ‘Anyway, there are seven exchange
students in total, if you don’t already know. They all got to say something about themselves. This school seems to absolutely adore exchange students. Practically treats them like royalty.’

‘What did they say about me?’ I ask and feel my insides curdle. I imagine what it would have been like if I’d gone up on that stage in front of hundreds of students, stuttering and stammering and sweating like a moron.

My face heats up as though I am reliving something horrible. I see myself as naked and wet as a peeled tomato, being led from the stage by the pig-boy, and I feel as though there is salt under my skin. I hide my face from Tom by looking at the ground.

He puts a cigarette behind his ear.

‘I can’t remember exactly what they said. Something really good though.’

I know that he remembers nothing and I don’t care.

Tom and I walk through the school and onto the field. I take a few photographs of him sitting on the grass.

He sits cross-legged with a cigarette in his hand and looks up at the sky, not at the camera. I wonder if I should be directing him to tilt his head, lie on his stomach, put his chin in his hands. We are silent as I move from left to right, crouch down, then stand up again and all the while he is just looking at me as though he is falling in love or something.

‘I better go,’ I say. ‘I have to get a lift home.’

We walk across the field and when it is time to say goodbye and we are standing at the gate, the breeze is blowing our hair across our faces. We stare at each other; we don’t speak or move. Then he smiles, a quick, easy smile, especially on his left side, which rises up when he’s amused.

‘Which way do you have to go?’ he asks.

‘That way,’ I say.

‘I’m the other way,’ he says, ‘Well, I’m not
really
the other way, if you know what I mean!’

This is a stupid pun, a lame joke, and smarmy too, but he laughs like a person should, and when he finishes his eyes are swimming with water and his cheeks are red.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I know exactly what you mean. Oh, here’s your camera.’

Tom puts his hand on my arm and says, ‘I have an idea. There’s about ten pictures left. Why don’t you take some and then when I get the film developed there’ll be some of me and some of you and I’ll get a great surprise and you get to keep your pictures if you like them.’

‘That’s a great idea,’ I say. I don’t care that I know he made the audition up. I don’t care that he is vain and pretentious. I don’t want to go home. I want to keep feeling good. So, I give him a playful shove in the chest and walk away. I turn back and he is still standing there, looking at me.

Two weeks later, a Saturday, and James and I are in the kitchen. I hand him a freshly laundered tea towel. It smells of the backyard autumn sun.

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I hate washing.’

‘Good,’ I say, ‘I hate drying.’

‘How’s school?’ he asks.

His thin, juvenile moustache has been shaved off, his skin is almost clear of pimples and, except for a raised smear of dried blood on his chin, he looks quite handsome. We are alone together in the house for the first time since the vacation.

‘Okay,’ I say.

He stands close to me and twists the tea towel through his hands, ‘You have Mr Caldwell for history,’ he says. ‘He probably
loves
you. Does he
love
you?’

I run my tongue across my teeth and watch James’ fingers squeeze the tight rope he has made from the tea towel.

‘Shut up,’ I say.

‘Okay,’ he says.

We are silent, but James is looking hard at my face.

‘How about you?’ I ask. ‘How’s the old southpaw coping with advanced everything?’

James lunges and puts the tea towel around my neck.

‘Argh,’ he says, as he pretends to choke me.

His face is close and laughing. I do nothing, my hands dead, limp by my sides.

‘Argh,’ he says again, which is the sound I am supposed to make; a gurgling protest.

I lift my hands and put them on top of his hands but I make no sound and I do not look into his face.

He wraps the tea towel tighter around my throat, to see my face bulge and redden. My fear is suddenly real. James is pulling too tight, desperate for a sound from me, dying for me to scream, or to touch him.

I put my hands between the tea towel and my neck.

‘Don’t!’ I say.

I break away and run around the kitchen table. He comes after me and grabs hold of my waist. He pulls my chest against his, his heart pumping. I put my face next to his, my cheek against his cheek. I do not want to see his eyes.

‘Argh,’ he says, pressing himself against me and rubbing sideways.

I am stronger than he is. Much stronger. I resist every push and pull and so we do not move. He stops pushing me, just holds me. My arms are limp but they want to touch him. I count to ten. I want to touch him because he is a boy and I am a girl, but he is the wrong person to touch.

Still, I want to let everything happen. I count to ten again and listen to his breathing in my ear. I am staring at the fridge and wonder what he is staring at. He has an erection. His eyes are probably closed and I am in there somewhere. I want to see what would happen next if I let it. I count to ten one last time. He has put his hand into his trousers. I wait for him to finish what he has to do. I am not a part of this any more.

When he’s finished, he holds onto me as though I might slip through a hole in the floor, and as he holds me, he makes a
muffled noise, a soft snort and then a groan. I groan softly back, then pull away.

The front door slams. Somebody is home.

‘See you later,’ says James.

‘Yep,’ I say, ‘see you later.’

James is taller than when I first arrived.

I decide to borrow Bridget’s bike and ride into town. I want to find an old Catholic church like the one around the corner from my high school at home; a church with a tabernacle, a refectory and a nave, a church that’s at least one hundred and fifty years old.

I want a church where people genuflect and whisper their prayers. A church with the Stations of the Cross around the walls. I want to find a church and see what the stations are. I’ve forgotten them. I want to pay more attention to the detail this time.

I want to light a smooth white candle, one the size and shape of a finger, with a wick where the fingernail should be, and squeeze it tightly into the slot; line it up with all the other candles, each of them signifying a prayer.

I’d like to put coins in the collections box the way that you’re supposed to; to pay a debt for all those candles I’ve lit without giving any money.

I wonder how much I owe; perhaps, at five cents a candle, I owe God about thirty dollars. That’s not much. Maybe I should pay some interest.

I find a Catholic church and go straight to the candles and light four of them. I don’t exactly pray when I light these candles, or say a novena. I merely sit and stare at Mary’s statue and watch a lady move in and out of the confession box.

I like it when people climb inside the confessional and
shut the door as though they are climbing into a pantry to be with jars of jam and boxes of cereal. I like knowing that the priest will whisper behind the red curtain. It makes no difference to me that the Catholic church is shot to pieces with sleaze and sex scandals. Once I’m inside a church I feel calm.

I especially like the church near my school back in Sydney. I like that it has passages and alcoves and places you can’t see when you are standing in the middle.

I sit and wonder if I should pray for something or someone. Maybe the woman who works at the school crossing opposite the church near my school at home.

She’s one of my favourite people: a ‘lollipop lady’ who wears a white waterproof jacket with a fat orange diagonal stripe through her middle and a matching white waterproof hat with orange stripe around the brim.

We used to talk together and she’d ask me why I wasn’t at school but she didn’t ever get officious about it.

She took time out from working the crossing and hid behind a Moreton Bay fig tree so that she could jam her face with packets of chips and hot dogs she’d bought from the 7-Eleven around the corner.

As I crossed the road, I could see her white waterproof jacket bulging out from behind the tree, equal slices of white jacket on either side of the dark grey trunk, and I’d watch her fat white arm moving up and down to her mouth like an earth mover.

I should have told her that nobody would mind if she sat on the bench outside the church, where she could have eaten openly and without rushing. I wish I could say this to her now, so I close my eyes and talk to her as though she is dead and I am talking to her in her grave.

After dinner I go to my room to study but can’t concentrate on reading and am desperate for a cigarette. I have developed the habit of taking a break from study at about eight o’clock and going for a walk around the block, finding a place in the supermarket parking lot and having a few cigarettes crouched behind the shopping carts.

If I had the right kind of friend, I’d ask them to push me around the car park in a shopping cart and we’d ride around like this for hours. If I had Tom’s phone number, I’d give him a call.

I go to Henry’s study to ask him if I can borrow some money. The door is open and he is hunched over the desk.

‘Hi,’ I say.

I look at Henry’s face and I wish that I had come for another purpose. I want to act like a nice person. Maybe I should say I just stopped by for a chat; ask him if he feels like a break, a cup of tea or a game of chess.

‘Hi,’ he says, a smile so big it looks like he thinks I’m going to give him a present.

I don’t know what to do with my hands, so I put them on my hips.

‘Margaret forgot to give me any pocket money this week,’ Isay.

Henry points to a seat, as though he is a doctor and I his patient.

‘I thought she might have spoken to you about that.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘Well, maybe we should discuss it when Margaret is here.’

I do not show my panic.

‘Can’t you tell me?’

Henry puts the lid on his pen and thinks for a moment.

The telephone rings but he doesn’t lift the receiver. He waits for somebody else to pick it up on the other line. It’s
probably Bridget talking to the same mysterious person she speaks to every night in her bedroom for exactly fourteen minutes. The Harding phone-call limit on school nights is fifteen minutes.

‘Margaret will want to clear this up herself, but she thinks that since you have all the clothes you need, and there’s always plenty of food in the house for lunches, and since you rarely go out, it’s probably better if you ask for money as you need it, or on special occasions.’

I’ve cried only once since turning thirteen. Now, to my astonishment, is the second time. The last time I cried was when Steve told me he’d seen a tomcat rape my kitten. I knew it wasn’t true. It was the fact he was lying, and that he had waited until I was alone with him in the laundry, that made me cry.

This time I’m crying because I can’t have what I want, when the whole point of my being here is to get everything I want and I’m standing in a big house where everything should not only be possible, but easy to get.

‘Oh,’ I say, turning away from Henry.

‘Are you okay?’

The tears hit me in the jaw and I know that if I speak I will not be able to stop myself from gasping. I also feel the sad rush of pleasure that comes with the heat and uncontrollable nature of tears. I head for the door and as I do, Margaret comes in.

‘That was your father on the phone,’ she says to Henry. ‘Your mother’s had a fall. We need to get over to the hospital right away.’

There is something peculiar about the way Margaret speaks. It’s as though she is enjoying the drama; as though she relishes the gravity and urgency of being suddenly needed in this way.

Henry does not speak. His eyes swell and redden and his
mouth goes slack. He takes his cardigan from the back of the chair.

Margaret does not look at me and appears not to have noticed that I’m here.

‘Get Bridget and James,’ she says to Henry. ‘We’ll take the van in case we bring your father back here with us.’

I walk towards her. ‘Should I come too?’ I ask.

She seems surprised by the question.

‘No, I think it’s important that you stay here and look after the house.’

Margaret plays with the rings on her left hand. I still have tears rolling down my cheeks and I want her to notice. Some people look good when they cry.

Bridget and James hurtle down the stairs, ready to leave in an instant.

‘What’s wrong with Granny?’ asks Bridget, already crying.

‘She’s had a bad fall and she’s in the emergency room at the hospital,’ says Margaret with maximum
gravitas
, enjoying the suspense her voice creates when she could so easily tell Bridget and James that their granny is going to be just fine.

Henry’s mum is sure to have broken her hip getting out of the shower or running to the phone, like my Aunty Sally, and be back on her feet, with a new hip, in a few weeks.

James is angry and grabs his father by the elbow. ‘Come on! Let’s get moving.’

I walk with them to the door and catch Margaret as she fumbles around in the key basket for the right keys.

I want her to see my face still wet with tears, one of them so plump and full it is running all the way down my neck like an animal.

‘Is it true that I can’t have any more money?’ I ask.

She stops rummaging. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I know it’s not a good time …’ My tears have dried up and
my voice is too calm, no longer sodden with water or constricted by a pleasant and awful misery in the chest and throat. ‘But I need some tonight,’ I say. ‘I’m going out with a friend to the movies.’

Margaret is red around the neck, something I’ve never seen happen to her before.

‘I don’t understand you,’ she says. ‘I just don’t understand you.’

She turns away from me, reaches into the basket and finds the right keys while I adjust to the shock. I’m wondering what she means and whether I should speak again.

‘You’re not going anywhere tonight,’ she says. ‘And if we’re not home by ten o’clock, please go straight to bed and if you must smoke, please never, ever do it in my house again.’

She is happier in this particular moment than she has been for a long time. Bridget is standing behind Margaret and she, too, looks satisfied.

‘What about Henry?’ I say. ‘He smokes!’

It never occurred to me that I’d be found out, caught like this, and I can’t bring myself to apologise.

Margaret opens her mouth to show her bottom teeth: a shocked snarl.

‘Henry is an adult and you’re not. End of story.’

‘Fine,’ I say, instead of sorry.

I go to my room as soon as they have left and lie on my bed feeling lousy and guilty. Although the light is on, I fall asleep and do not wake until James stands in the doorway and softly calls my name.

‘Lou?’ he says.

‘Hi,’ I say through my drowsiness.

‘Do you want the light off?’

‘What time is it?’ I don’t need to know the time; I just want to speak to him. He is better than nobody.

‘It’s nearly midnight.’

The light goes off and I turn on my side to look at him, but he has gone.

Although I have slept easily with the light on, waiting for the Hardings to get home – just as I can sleep on the couch in front of the TV, especially when Henry is in the room – I cannot get back to sleep now that it is time.

It must be two hours later when I stand outside Margaret and Henry’s room. The door is ajar and when my eyes adjust to the darkness I can see their shapes in the bed. I can also see Margaret’s slippers and Henry’s jug of water.

I want to go inside and sleep at the end of their bed or on the floor near the central heating duct. I fantasise about being there on the floor when they wake up, lying on the carpet without pillows or a blanket.

I imagine them finding me there and lifting me up from the floor. I would say, ‘I couldn’t get to sleep on my own.’ And Margaret would say, ‘You poor dear thing. Here, get into our bed. Sleep for a while. You can go to school late today.’

I would sleep in their bed while they showered together in the ensuite and I would drink the coffee Henry leaves for me on the bedside table in a perfect white coffee cup.

Henry moves, so I leave their room and go to James’ room. His door is wide open. I have no intention of going in at first, but then I see him move and I wonder if he is awake.

‘James?’ I say. He groans straight away and I am sure he is awake.

‘Hi.’ I wonder if he can tell my voice apart from Bridget’s.