How the Light Gets In (15 page)

‘Hi,’ she says. She closes the lid on her laptop and moves forward as though getting ready for a long chat. ‘How’s school?’

I stay in the doorway even though she gestures for me to sit down.

‘It’s fine. The teachers are great and I think I’ve chosen the right subjects.’

Margaret rolls a pen across the desk. ‘Who are your friends, Lou?’

My heart flickers. ‘Just people in my classes,’ I say.

‘These days,’ she says, ‘it’s important to make contacts as well as friends. It’s a tough world out there. You won’t survive on your brains alone.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘I know.’

She smiles. ‘Well, it’ll be getting much colder soon. We’ll have to go shopping for some new clothes.’ She looks me up and down.

‘Thanks,’ I say, bewildered by this intelligent woman’s obsession with shopping and the clothes that people wear. I wonder if she and Henry ever had that discussion about me visiting their family doctor. I decide to ask her, in spite of my embarrassment, but she opens the lid of her laptop and clears her throat.

‘Lou. Don’t forget that you can hang out with Bridget if you’d like to. She’s always there for you. You don’t have to spend time with people who you don’t really like.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Just don’t forget that Bridget would like some of your company. Don’t be a stranger to her. Okay?’

Bridget doesn’t even like me. I don’t even know how to talk
about any of the things she likes to talk about, and yet, I’m flattered.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Bye.’

I poke my head inside the door of Henry’s den. He’s smoking his pipe and he looks as though the novelty of life has completely run out on him, and yet, as though, if somebody gave him a surprise, the novelty would come back.

Perhaps he looks sad because he is so fair and because his eyebrows are almost invisible – albino invisible.

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Could I maybe sit in here and just read for a while?’

Henry frowns. ‘It’s probably better if you read in your room tonight. I’ve got a bit to do here.’

‘Okay,’ I say and turn to leave.

‘Everything okay?’ he asks. I turn around. He takes the pipe out from between his lips.

‘Excellent,’ I say.

‘Have you checked the schedule?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s my turn to make dinner tomorrow night and I’ll have to get home early.’

‘That’s the way,’ he says, ending all hope of conversation.

‘Goodnight,’ I say.

‘Goodnight.’

I go to Bridget’s room and knock on the door. She’s on the phone.

‘I’m on the phone,’ she says and I realise I’ve never been in her room with her in it.

I go to my room, still a bit tipsy, and sing just about every song I know. I sing at the top of my voice. My heart races when I hear noises outside my room, but I don’t stop. My voice is working well and I want the Hardings to hear it.

It is nearly ten o’clock when James knocks on the door. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

He sits in the chair by my desk. I’m sitting on the bed, cross-legged.

‘You sound good,’ he says.

‘Thanks.’

He looks at the books on my desk; most of them are Russian and Norwegian novels that have nothing to do with school.

He smiles at me. ‘I think those notes you’ve been sending are really weird …’ He stops but I can tell there’s more he wants to say.

‘Oh,’ I say, hangdog as hell. ‘I thought everybody liked them.’

‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘I don’t mean weird in a bad way. They’re really good. We were all just talking about them earlier.’

‘Really?’ I say.

‘Yeah, but maybe you should stop now, you know. They’re really good, but maybe there’ve been enough.’

‘Oh,’ I say, dumbfounded.

‘So, anyway,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry about what happened, you know… that night ages ago.’

‘Which night?’ I say cruelly.

He stands up suddenly and moves towards the bed. ‘You know?’ he says.

‘On the trip?’

‘Yes.’ He stands awkwardly, arms lost by his side. ‘Can I give you a hug?’

‘Okay,’ I say, but when he presses too hard into my body and we both begin to lean backwards on the bed, I push him away.

‘Let’s stop,’ I say. ‘It’s not a good idea.’

‘You’re such a tease,’ he says. ‘You’re driving me insane. I wish you’d never come to this house.’

He walks to the door. ‘And you
smell
funny,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Don’t worry,’ he says, about to start crying. ‘I guess you can’t help it.’

I look away. He recovers quickly and then in a low voice, his back against the door, he says, ‘I came to say I’m sorry but now I want to sleep in your bed …’

Suddenly he’s crying, snorting back snot.

I stand up and put out my hand. ‘Let’s just shake hands like you Americans all love to do so much and forget about all this.’

He starts to cry again. ‘Oh fuck,’ he says.

I hug him as carefully as I can, my groin held away from his, my right hand stroking his arm.

‘I know what you mean,’ I say, ‘but we have to get on with things. We could both get in heaps of trouble and I could get sent home. We have to forget all about it.’

He hugs me hard and won’t let go. ‘Have you fallen in love with me too?’ he asks, his wet nose on my neck.

‘Yes,’ I lie, ‘but we can’t do anything. We have to keep it all in our heads.’

‘Okay,’ he says, his hand gripping the door handle. ‘I better go to bed, but if you ever can’t sleep …’

I just nod.

James opens the door again. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘the auditions for the school musical are on Friday night. Bridget said maybe you should try out.’

I can’t sleep. I think about auditioning and it terrifies me. I don’t even like musicals. But if I can do this, maybe I can do other things. Maybe I can learn to be confident. Maybe I will change – if I do this. If I do this one thing – if I can do this one thing right – I’ll change who I am forever.

The auditions are held in the school’s dark basement, in the vast auditorium, where all assemblies and prize presentations take place. I take a few sips of gin and then sign up at a table outside the entrance.

The musical is an original called
Hippydrome: Hits of the Sixties
and Seventies
. It’s not so much a musical as a collection of hit songs strung together with a script written by the musical director, David Babbitt, and his drama students.

‘Name?’ asks a boy with fat fingers and big ears.

‘Louise Connor,’ I say.

‘You’re number eighteen,’ he says. ‘You can wait here if you want, or go somewhere else. It’s gonna be about twenty minutes, at least.’

I sit and wait and I feel sick with nerves. Then I imagine singing on opening night with the Hardings in the audience and I am nauseated, even though one of the reasons I want to do this is to show off to them. I go to the toilet and drink some more gin.

My number is called and I go into the auditorium. A woman wearing a red poncho waves me over to the piano and I walk with my hand shielding my eyes from the floodlights. Only the front rows of the audience can be seen, but it’s noisy out there. There must be a hundred people or more.

I don’t care. The alcohol has settled in. I am edgeless,
tall, light, quick and powerful.

‘What are you going to sing?’ asks a man in the front row.

I have decided on a song from
Annie Get Your Gun
. A stupid idea, but I thought they might like it. I’m not even sure I know the right title. ‘“I Can Do Anything Better Than You Can”,’ Isay.

‘No you can’t!’ screams a joker in the back of the auditorium. I couldn’t care less who it is. I even think this is a fairly funny remark.

A man cries out, ‘Keep it down.’

The woman in the red poncho asks me what key I want her to play in and I don’t have a clue. I want to say,
You could play the
front door key for all I care
but instead I say, ‘It doesn’t matter. You choose.’

Somebody laughs with a short snort. It sounds like James. Perhaps it is James. I don’t care. I’m indestructible. I’m not even blushing. I’m high as a kite.

I sing better than I ever have, as though some kind of spell has been cast. It’s a voice I didn’t know belonged to me and I don’t want to stop singing. I don’t have to stop. I get all the way to the end of the song without interruption. From what I know of what happens at auditions, at least in the movies, this must be a good sign.

I peer into the front row. The director introduces himself. His name is Paul, a skinny man with a skinny moustache. Beside him is David Babbitt, bald, without a moustache.

David calls out, ‘Okay, we’ll see you back here tomorrow. Six o’clock. Sharp.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘That’s great.’

The morning after the audition I catch up with Bridget as she is heading out the door to go to the river to hang out
with her friends. The top she’s wearing under her jacket is small and tight, like a bandage worn to protect a pair of broken ribs. Bridget and I don’t see each other at school, and she is hardly ever at home during the day on weekends. I want to talk to her; not just because I am convinced that she is the reason Margaret and Henry found out about my smoking, but because it’s making me worry. Without her on my side, I don’t think things will work out the way I need them to. Maybe I just want to be nice. Maybe I would enjoy being nice. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s making me do something.

‘Thanks for passing on the tip about the audition,’ I say. ‘I really appreciate it.’

‘What audition?’

She is still walking. As usual, her body tells me that she’s in a great hurry and that she has somewhere better to be and somebody more interesting to see.

‘James said you heard me singing and told him to tell me about the auditions.’

She scrunches her perfect nose at me. ‘Nah.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Anyway, I went for an audition.’

‘Awesome,’ she says, without meaning it. ‘I hope you get a part.’

I smile but she doesn’t smile back. She is afraid I’m going to follow her.

‘Do you know Tom McGahern?’ I ask.

‘Yeah,’ she says, and keeps walking. ‘James brought him over that night.’

In one way or another, she’s always moving. I don’t know what she looks like when her long legs aren’t propelling her towards something: launching her onwards, towards something better. I decide not to take it personally, not to withdraw. But perhaps I have left it too late.

‘What do you know about him?’ I ask.

She walks a little slower, but doesn’t stop. ‘He’s that millionaire freak who transferred from another school last year.’

‘Why is he a freak?’ I ask.

She stops out the front of a house, ‘Just look at him,’ she says, gazing anxiously down the street as though Tom might poke his pale head out of an attic window and spit on her. ‘He
looks
like a freak.’

‘Have you ever spoken to him?’

‘I don’t need to,’ she says, pulling her bag close to her chest. ‘Everybody knows he’s a freak. Even his parents are freaks. And he doesn’t have any friends.’

‘Give me an
example
of this freakishness then.’

She flings her bag across her shoulder and juts her head forward in anger. ‘Don’t yell at me. It’s not my fault he’s retarded.’

‘How can he be retarded if he’s on the honours roll?’

‘It’s called the National Honours Society and why don’t you ask him that? There’s a simple and embarrassing explanation.’

‘Like what?’

‘Haven’t you wondered why he’s like at least
three
years older than everybody else? He was kept down. Practically brain dead from drug abuse.’

I cannot breathe and therefore cannot speak. I look at the ground.

‘By the way,’ she says, her chest rising and falling, hardly able to breathe with anger and the restraint of her tight white bandage, ‘Mom can’t drive you anywhere today. She’s got lumbago again. Dad said if you go into town you could meet him at the office and he’ll take you home.’

‘I’ll walk,’ I say.

As I go up the stairs to my room, my nose begins to bleed. I go into the bathroom and let the blood drip into the sink.

I don’t try to stop the bleeding. I watch the blood splatter on the white porcelain, ‘as red as the nail polish Pushkin wore’, as Mrs Walsh said once when my nose bled into one of her white handkerchiefs.

I watch my blood drip and pool in the sink like red milk. I like to see how much blood I can lose.

With blood trickling down my chin I say to the mirror:
May
she have a terrible accident and lose the tip of her perfect nose and one long
brown leg from the knee down
.

But when I get back to my room, I undo the curse and pray that Bridget doesn’t hate me.

Then it suddenly occurs to me, like a thwack across the back of the head – it’s so obvious. If things don’t work out with the Hardings, and if I can’t live with them, I can live with Tom, in his mansion. When school has finished and my scholarship ends, I’ll move in with Tom’s family and become a citizen.

I need to see him as soon as I can.

Margaret calls out to me from her bed. I go in and she removes her glasses, rubbing the lenses with her cardigan sleeve. She seems like a spectre; not a hostile one, but simply not palpable or present enough. There is something not quite real about her.

‘You haven’t told me how your audition went?’ She sounds mildly affronted. I have left her out again. I’m not treating her like a proper host-mother.

‘It was good,’ I say, my head throbbing, ‘I’ve been called back. I have to go later today.’

There’s an odd musky smell in the room; a smell of satisfied human damp.

She puts her hand out for me. She wants to hold my hand. I can’t. This is something I still can’t let her do. My hand sweats
at the mere thought of touching her, just as when my mum tries to touch me.

I say, ‘I have to go now. I have to practise.’

She tries to sit up but her nostrils flare up with the pain.

I say, ‘Don’t sit up. You’ll hurt yourself.’

She slides down again. ‘Why don’t you sing for me? I’d play the piano with you except that my back’s not so good. Why don’t you practise in here? I’d love to hear you.’

My bladder twinges sharply as though stuck with a pin. I stare at the box of tissues next to her bed to stop myself from crying.

‘
Please
sing for me,’ she says.

I stare at the perfect white tissue sticking out of the box in the shape of a big white molar. ‘Oh no,’ I say, going red as hell, ‘I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’ she asks, offended again, or perhaps she wants to see me embarrassed.

‘You’ll be hugely disappointed. I’m not very good.’

She rubs her glasses again. ‘That’s silly and obviously not true,’ she says. ‘The standard of singing at that school is very high.’

Now she sounds like a school teacher and I wish she was a completely different kind of person: the kind of person who understands how another person is feeling just by looking at them; somebody who doesn’t stare all the time or speak in a loud and confident voice. Somebody who knows when to look away.

‘I better go,’ I say and leave the room.

There’s a supermarket around the corner but I decide to go to one further away. I ride Bridget’s bike. The shop is crowded. I look all around to see if there is anybody I recognise or who might recognise me. I go to the counter and ask for a bottle of gin.

I ride home. I have one hour before the call-back audition. I go to my room, put a chair under the door handle, and drink as slowly as I can to give myself time to judge the gin effect. After twenty minutes I stand up and walk around my bed a few times to see how I’m going. I feel good, but I should have eaten something.
Gin-effect sounds like genuflect
, I think, and the phone rings in the hall. Margaret calls out, ‘Lou, could you get that please?’

I pick up the phone. It’s Tom.

‘Hey,’ he says. ‘I was thinking about you all night.’

‘That’s great,’ I say blankly, wishing that I could hang up and call him back on the phone downstairs.

‘I think I’m either in love with you or I have rabies,’ he says.

I know Margaret is listening.

‘That’s fine,’ I say. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m good,’ he says, confused. ‘I didn’t know if I should ring you at home. I don’t know how cool your host-parents are about me?’

‘Excellent,’ I say.

I imagine him sitting up in his bed, nothing but underpants on, no longer smiling. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Great,’ I say. ‘Only Margaret has a sore back. Poor thing.’

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Anyway, I was wondering if you’d like to go for a picnic this afternoon. We could go to the park. I can’t wait a whole day to see you and I need to know if I have rabies or not.’

‘I’d love to,’ I say, ‘but I’m busy.’

‘Whaddya doin’?’ he asks.

I feel desperate. If I tell him about the call-back he’ll get cross that I didn’t tell him about the first audition and he might want to come along and watch me and this idea terrifies me. I’m far from ready to sing in front of somebody I know.
But if I don’t include him in this and he finds out, I could blow everything.

I tap the receiver and say, ‘Hello? Hello? Are you there?’ I wait for what I think is a convincing length of time and then I hang up.

I call out in the direction of Margaret’s bedroom, ‘They must have been cut off.’

‘Who was it?’

I stay in the hallway for fear of her seeing my crimson face.

‘A friend from school.’

‘Call her back,’ says Margaret.

‘I don’t have her number,’ I say.

Margaret must control every situation. ‘I’ll look it up for you,’ she says. ‘What’s her name?’

‘I don’t know her last name.’

‘Well, if she calls back I’ll be sure and get her number for you. What’s her first name?’

‘Um, Judy,’ I say. ‘Her name’s Judy.’

I go to the call-back audition and when I get home, still a bit tipsy, I find out that Margaret’s back is so bad that she can’t come down for dinner. Henry, James, Bridget and I sit at the dining table, eating dessert and swapping stories about our day.

‘How was your audition?’ asks Henry.

‘Good,’ I say. ‘I might have a part.’

James has his mouth crammed full of spaghetti but he puts his hand over his face and says, ‘You’ll probably get the lead part.’

‘How do
you
know?’ asks Bridget.

James swallows as much as he can and speaks with his mouth half full. He suddenly seems about twelve years old. ‘I was there yesterday.’

‘Were you?’ I say, ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘You’re different up on stage.’ He smiles as though he’s captured my secret and he’s keeping it upstairs – like an insect in a jar – in his smelly room. ‘It’s weird. It’s almost like you’re a different person.’

‘Aren’t you nervous?’ asks Bridget. ‘Don’t you, like,
blush like
crazy?
’

I’m too exhausted to feel hurt by Bridget’s cruelty and spite.

‘Not really,’ I say.

Henry holds up his glass of orange juice. ‘I hope this isn’t premature, but I think a toast might be in order.’

‘That’s really bad luck,’ says Bridget. ‘What if she doesn’t get a part?’

The phone rings at half-past nine. I’ve got a part in the musical. The only thing that stops me from feeling pure terror is the knowledge that confidence, and a good night’s sleep, are only a glass or two of gin away.

It’s Sunday night. Margaret is out of bed and we are all in the living room watching a video Bridget has picked up from the video store.

‘Pause it for a second,’ says Margaret. ‘I need an apple.’

‘I’ll get it,’ I say.

I fetch her the biggest, roundest and reddest apple in the fridge.

‘Thanks, sweetheart,’ she says and pulls me towards her so that she can kiss me on the cheek. By the time I sit down again, tears of happiness are rolling down my face.

About halfway through the film there is an unexpected sex scene. The woman, who is wearing a summer dress, lies on a
kitchen table, takes her pants off, and spreads her legs, and the man, still wearing his trousers, undoes his zip and climbs on top of her. The camera is stationed at the woman’s head so that mostly what is seen is the man’s body pumping her, his head going back, his face grimacing.