How the Light Gets In (2 page)

Henry drives us home. The Mercedes smells as though it has just come out of its plastic packet.

‘Is this a new car?’

‘Yes,’ says Margaret. ‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s lovely,’ I say.

‘It’s a pretty long drive,’ says Margaret. ‘We hope you enjoy the scenery.’

‘I will,’ I say, but all I can see so far are cars and billboards – just like Sydney.

Henry and Margaret take it in turns to ask me polite questions. What food do I like? What sports do I play? How hot does it get in Sydney? Do I like the beach? Have I ever seen a kangaroo?

I sit in the back and wish I did not have to talk. I feel too nervous and can’t help lying. I say I play lots of sport. I say I like the beach. I say I once had a pet kangaroo called Skippy. They like these stories and so I tell more of them. I feel dirty. They have such white teeth and mine are so rotten.

‘Do you agree with capital punishment?’ I ask.

Margaret turns around to look at me. It’s the first time she’s looked at me without smiling.

‘Me?’

‘Yeah, and Henry.’

She looks at Henry.

‘No, I most certainly do not,’ she says, as though I’ve accused her of something.

Henry looks at me in the rear-vision mirror.

‘No, I don’t either. Definitely not.’

Margaret faces the road.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I just wondered,’ I say.

Nobody speaks.

‘I think I’ll lie down for a minute,’ I say.

‘If you like,’ says Margaret. ‘But keep yourself strapped in.’

Henry wakes me as we enter town.

‘We’re here,’ he says, pointing at the sign that says ‘Welcome to B—’ and tells you the population, which is 480,320. The sign says B— is ‘A Great Town to Be In’.

Margaret tells me about the national parks, the new shopping centre and about the teacher-to-student ratio in the high school I’ll be going to, and then we pull into the wide drive of the Harding house.

My new home is a suburban mansion: two storeys, wide, tall and white, with six big white columns on the front porch and curtains clean as milk in the windows. The middle attic-style window at the top has one pale-blue shutter open, one closed. I want this to be my room.

The quiet street, lined with identical trees, has the cropped symmetry of a street in an elaborate model village or train set, freshly painted, no dirt.

‘What a magnificent house!’ I say. ‘I love it.’

Henry pushes the front door open with his back. He goes up the staircase, dragging my two suitcases behind him. Another wheel falls off.

‘Come with me,’ says Margaret. ‘I’ll take you on the grand tour.’

There are stained-glass windows on either side of the front door. In the entrance hall, red and blue spots, cast by the glass on the sun-soaked floor, look like spilt paint.

‘Oh, look!’ I say, as though I’ve just seen a cat use a sewing machine.

Margaret smiles. ‘Isn’t it pretty?’

‘Yeah,’ I say.

When I say ‘yeah’ I think I have already picked up an American accent.

Margaret shows me some of the fifteen-room house: dining-room, kitchen and family room. The air is fresh for the inside of a house. It’s a dewy, clean air, easy to breathe, as though the leaves of the giant trees are inside as well as out.

Where I used to live there is carpet so threadbare you can see through to its veins, and the couch and armchairs are made of vinyl that peels away like sunburnt skin. But here there are polished wood floors, heavy, solid furniture, oil paintings and ceiling-high bookshelves.

I point to the panels of wood that reach half-way up the walls.

‘What’s that called?’

‘Wainscoting. Do you like it?’

‘It must be like living inside an enormous tree house.’

‘I’d never thought of it like that. What a sweet idea.’

She sounds like she has a cold. So does Henry, but I like their accents. Not too strong, not too distracting.

Margaret leads me up the stairs. I am just thinking how I will probably like her and Henry, and how I hope they like me, when she puts her arm through mine. My arm feels like a sick snake, allergic to something, hot and poisoned. My face
grows hotter. My ears and my neck burn red. I try not to let her see my face. Henry comes out of a door at the top of the landing.

‘We’ll meet you downstairs,’ says Margaret.

‘Good idea,’ he says with a smile so tight and wide it must be hurting his face. I know how he feels. When the pressure to be happy is this strong, it feels like somebody is strangling you.

Margaret takes my hand and leads me along the hallway.

‘This is mine and Henry’s room.’

This room is yellow, has a four-poster bed and an ensuite.

‘This is Bridget’s room.’

Bridget’s room is pink and neat.

‘This is James’ room.’

James’ room is blue and messy.

She leads me back the way we came, and we stop at the top of the landing. ‘And this room is yours.’

Margaret opens the door and I see the clean, white, tiny room with the attic window; one pale-blue shutter open, one pale-blue shutter closed.

‘This is your bed.’

‘What a beautiful room,’ I say. Life would be perfect if she wasn’t holding my hand. ‘It’s great.’ I let go of her hand.

The quilt is as white as a new stick of chalk and hangs down to the dustless floorboards. There is a stack of pillows on the bed, white, pink and cream, like marshmallows spilled fresh from a bag. All I want to do is sleep.

Here is my walk-in cupboard and here is my redwood desk with its set of drawers. Here are the keys to the drawers.

‘Do you like it?’

At home, the room I share with Erin has buckled posters of stupid pop stars all over the walls, and ugly, smutty photographs of my sisters stuck on the back of the door; photographs
from the day they paid a hundred dollars at the shopping mall for a makeover and slut-like portraits. There are always stinking ashtrays full of butts next to Erin’s bed and knickers drying on the doorknob.

‘It’s perfect,’ I say.

‘Good,’ says Margaret, suddenly standing between me and the bed, her eyes flickering blue and delighted. I feel dirty and don’t know what to do.

Her hair is shiny and tied in a neat bun on her round head. I am like a small, rotten boat with a leak, bobbing in the water under the hulk of a luxury liner.

I think she wants me to hug her and I think I want to; at least I wish I were the kind of person who knew how to hug somebody.

Margaret moves around me to get to the other side of the bed. She pulls the quilt back and fluffs the pillows.

In place of physical affection, I say, ‘This is a
really
beautiful room. Thank you so much.’

‘Good,’ she says, standing close to me again, in a way I thought only people in films did. Is she waiting for me to get undressed in front of her?

‘We were worried it would be too white,’ she says. ‘You don’t think it’s too much like a hospital room?’

I happen to like hospitals and hospital wards and especially hospital beds. I like to have the doctor call on me in the dead of night with a white coat and leather case and I like it when I’m taken to hospital. Nothing compares to the comfort I feel in a hospital bed when a doctor or nurse comes towards me with a stethoscope or a clipboard, and the promise of pills.

The cleaner and whiter the room, the better, as far as I’m concerned. I like hospital gowns too; modesty gowns made of blue tissue paper, the ones that tie up at the back like shoelaces,
flimsy, small, disposable and sterilised, cold and nude around the back.

‘No,’ I say, ‘I really love it.’ I yawn, and look around the room for something to hang onto.

Margaret stays still. Her hands hang by her sides without the need to fidget, fold or point. It is as though her body does not exist in the way mine does. Her body is no obstacle, no hindrance. It’s as it should be: a thing for carrying thought, and for converting thought into action.

‘Do you want me to help you to unpack?’ she asks. She wants to see what I own.

‘Thanks,’ I say, so afraid of being touched again, my tin-foil teeth have begun to rattle.

‘You just sit,’ she says. ‘I’ll hang your clothes.’

Why don’t you let me sleep?
I want to say.
Why don’t you pull back
the covers, tuck me in, bring me tea and toast, draw the curtains and make
it dark? Don’t you know how difficult it is for me even to stand up
straight?

Margaret works slowly, and to put my nervous misery in perspective, I do this thing.

I think of Mawson, the Australian Antarctic explorer. I read a book about him once, about how he had to eat a jelly made from the boiled bones of his sledge dogs so that he wouldn’t starve to death. He ate so much dog liver that he got vitamin A poisoning, which causes desquamation, which in turn causes the skin to peel off in sheets, especially from the hands, feet and genitalia. Mawson had such a bad case of desquamation that the soles of his feet came away and he was forced to strap them back on to keep them from being lost forever.

I stand up, take a bundle of clothes from Margaret, open a drawer and dump them inside. She takes them straight back out from the drawer and rearranges them.

I step back and sit on the bed.

‘Do you know what desquamation is?’ I ask.

Margaret folds my pyjamas and puts them on the end of the bed.

‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘I read about it in a book about Antarctic explorers who sometimes perished in the snow. They suffered from desquamation. I just wondered if you knew what it was.’

‘We have an encyclopaedia downstairs. Do you want me to show you?’

Margaret’s a bank manager, but she sounds like a primary school teacher.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Maybe I’ll look it up later. Maybe I should have a little nap now.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘But don’t you want to see the rest of the house and grab a bite to eat before resting?’

‘Oh,’ I say, my eyes burning. ‘Yes.’

Henry sits at the table reading a newspaper and eating an apple. He is healthy and handsome, like Margaret. I don’t know much about healthy people but they seem peculiarly clean and they smell brand new. It will be so much easier to eat in this clean kitchen. Maybe I’ll even start eating breakfast.

‘Do you like your room?’ asks Henry. ‘We were worried it might be a bit small.’

‘No. It’s fine.’ I say. ‘It’s utterly perfect.’

My voice sounds posh, the way I’ve been prac tising. I like how it sounds, slipping itself into the house like a new piece of polished wood furniture across the polished wood floor.

‘You look prettier in real life,’ says Margaret as she opens the fridge and picks an apple from a big, see-through drawer.
There are many apples in this drawer. Carrots too.

Henry looks at me.

‘It’s true. Your photos don’t do you justice.’

Margaret holds two apples.

‘You have a very lively and pretty face,’ says Margaret.

‘That’s good,’ I say.

‘We hardly recognised you at the airport you know,’ says Henry, and it feels like they’ve had a meeting to discuss this.

Margaret stands behind Henry and now there are two faces looking at me.

‘Would you like one?’ asks Margaret, holding two apples aloft.

I hate apples. I haven’t grown up with them. I haven’t developed a technique with them and I’m worried about my teeth. I’m wary of hard food.

Within a week of one another, both my sisters lost adult teeth eating hard caramels at the movies. Erin brought her tooth home wrapped in tissue paper. The tooth was wedged in the caramel, bits of melted chocolate like dried blood around the edges, mixed with saliva. My mum said her favourite thing to say (which also happens to be one of my dad’s favourite things to say): ‘You made your bed and now you’d better lie in it.’

‘But, Mum,’ said Erin, ‘I can’t walk around with a big black hole in my mouth.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘You walk around with a big black hole in your head.’

Erin grabbed hold of my hair, kneed me in the stomach, and left. I fell to the floor, and as I lay there, I could smell the dirty dishcloth Mum uses to wipe the lino.

‘Enough of that,’ said my dad, re-hooking the strap on his overalls which had come undone without him realising, probably hours earlier.

‘Do yourself up, Mick,’ said my mum.

‘What do you think I’m doing?’ said my dad. ‘Dancing with a poodle?’

They laughed, and I got up off the stinking floor. My dad gave me a hard slap on the back and grinned at me.

‘Good one,’ he said.

‘No thanks,’ I say, ‘I’m not hungry.’

Margaret puts the spare apple on the kitchen table next to Henry’s newspaper and they kiss. They kiss on the lips in more than a perfunctory way and Henry says ‘Mmmmm’ with a deep voice that makes my stomach feel strange.

‘Come on,’ says Margaret, ‘I’ll show you through the rest of your new home.’

She shows me the piano room, a small library, two dens, the living-room, the two downstairs bathrooms, and as we walk, she chomps at her apple with large square teeth.

She tells me about the five years the family lived in Chicago, where she worked as the bank’s state president.

‘We moved here to get out of the rat-race,’ she says, ‘but I might as well still be the bank’s president with all the hours I have to put in.’

‘Do you hate work?’ I ask. I’m tired and nervous but I know I must talk.

‘No, but it’s just that I used to do so many things. These days,’ she says with a sigh, ‘all I do is work.’

‘What did you used to do?’ I ask.

‘I played the piano for many years and before the children were born, Henry and I lived in Paris and I taught piano and painted.’

‘You could still play now, and paint,’ I say.

‘Not these days,’ she says. ‘You’ll find out one day just how hard it is to do everything you want. Sooner or later you
just have to get your priorities straightened out.’

I hate it when people say this kind of thing and I especially hate it when people use the expression ‘these days’. When people have verbal ticks, or clichés they can’t stop themselves from using, I sometimes have to count to ten to stop myself from screaming. When I walked out of the flat in Sydney I thought I’d never have to face another cheap platitude or homily again.