How the Light Gets In (24 page)

Flo starts the engine and I climb into the back seat.

Mr Franson tells me he’s a surgeon and that he’s taken a whole day out of his work at the hospital to take me back to the hostel.

He strokes the lapel of his expensive coat as he tells me how sorry he is that ‘things haven’t been going so well’.

I am struggling with my seatbelt when he turns to me, ‘We’d better stop and help you with that.’

‘I can do it myself,’ I say.

‘I’m sure you could do just about anything but that doesn’t mean that people can’t help you sometimes.’

I stare at the road. ‘You should write that down. It’s very inspirational.’

Nobody, not even Flo, could fail to detect the sarcasm in my voice. But Roger turns in his seat, looks at me, then looks away, his mealy mouth clamping shut over the second pair of imperfect teeth I’ve seen in almost six months and says, ‘Thank you.’

Gertie tells me that although the Hardings have agreed to take me back, they want me to spend some more time in counselling. I don’t tell her I already know this.

‘You’ll be going back after Christmas. In the New Year. It’ll be a new beginning.’

Beginnings are always new, I want to say.

‘That’s fine,’ I say.

‘And you’ll be spending Christmas with a host-family who already have a host-daughter from Sydney.’

‘But why?’

‘Don’t you think it’ll be nice to spend Christmas with a family?’

‘Maybe, but why would anybody want to take in a stranger just for a few days? It seems like a lot of trouble for nothing. I don’t mind staying here with you and Phillip and …’

‘Well, that’s just it. We’ll be with our own families.’

‘Oh yeah,’ I say. ‘Of course.’

Three long and boring days have passed. I’ve only been on one excursion and am never left alone. I’ve been visited by students of sociology, criminology, penology, ethics, anthropology, biology, ethology, psychology, psychiatry and statistics.

I know by the way they look at me that they would like
to measure the size of my cranium but are too polite to ask. The question they want to ask is an inane one: how could somebody with a good brain have been so relentlessly stupid? The only other inmate who gets as much attention from the students is Lishny.

Because it is so close to Christmas, we have eaten a special treat of pizza for dinner and we’ve each been given twenty dollars so that when we next go on an excursion we can buy ourselves a present.

At seven o’clock the police will be here to interrogate Lishny again, perhaps for the final time. I sit with him in the common-room on the straw-mat floor behind the couch, under blankets. The other inmates sit on couches and stare numbly at the flickering television screen. They have copied us and are also cloaked in grey blankets pulled from their dormitory beds.

I pull the blanket up to cover my neck, but the wool is so cold it feels wet.

Lishny looks at his watch again. It is half-past six. He smiles at me, ducks under the blanket and rests his head on my lap.

Lily comes over and sits down. She wants to distract Lishny with endless prattle about the cold.

‘Lishny,’ she says, ‘take that blanket off so I can see you.’

Lishny takes his hand from my thigh and lifts the heavy grey blanket from our bodies.

‘Why don’t you two go and sit with the others?’

Lishny’s eyes are black.

‘Do you have any oranges or sardines?’ he asks.

Lily doesn’t think this is as funny as I do, and she goes away to watch the television.

‘I’m in love with you,’ he says.

I put my hand on Lishny’s back, rest it lightly over his thin white shirt. ‘I saw you today,’ I say, ‘you were standing alone in
the dark upstairs hallway, sliding the backs of your fingers across your face. I’ve been watching you a lot.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Then I saw you looking at yourself in the boys’ bathroom mirror examining your nose and I …’

Lishny lifts his head from my lap and comes out from under the blanket.

‘I’m lonely,’ he says. ‘I’m so lonely I wore your socks as gloves to bed last night.’

For the first time I am worried about what will happen to him. Until now I have only worried about what will happen to me when I don’t have him to be with. I’ve never worried about what will happen to somebody else before. Not that I can remember.

‘And,’ he says, ‘I licked your eyebrows in my dream.’

Lily is on her way over to us again. She stands over us with a nasty face like my mum’s when she’s wringing out wet towels and telling me how hard it is to raise three ungrateful daughters.

‘Terrible cold night, isn’t it?’ says Lily, her back stooped so that she looks less tall.

‘Sure it’s cold,’ says Lishny. ‘It’s worse than Norilsk.’

That’s where Lishny is from.

Lishny pulls the blanket over our heads and Lily walks away again.

‘I have left you a note,’ he says. ‘It’s under your pillow. It explains everything.’

I know the note will say something about his plans to escape. Lishny has an uncle who lives somewhere in Illinois and he plans to find him. He wants me to escape and come and live with him and his uncle. He’s told me that he loves big libraries and that I will probably find him there if I can’t find him anywhere else.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ I say.

He puts his head on my shoulder. I put my hand on the back of his neck and he moves it to his thigh. We stop here, suspended, our breathing in unison, my hand on the inside of his thigh, his head on my shoulder.

‘I don’t want to talk to the police again,’ he says.

I put my lips on his face and neck. Lishny is always warm in spite of the iciness in the air and he wears fewer clothes than the rest of us, as though he were living elsewhere. His cheeks are always pink, and I don’t think he’s guilty of the crime they say he has committed.

At seven o’clock there is a loud knock at the door and Lishny comes out from under the blanket, sweat on his nose, his neck blotchy with a rash.

He kisses me and says, ‘This is not the end. Do you know it?’

I nod and we kiss some more.

Three police officers come into the common-room, snow clinging to their coats and boots. They put their black hats on the table. One of the male inmates, Ari, turns off the TV and runs upstairs.

Ari ran away from his host-family so that he wouldn’t have to return home to compulsory military service in Israel. He is nervous of the police. A few months ago, he was captured as he stepped off a train to buy a cup of coffee. He is so afraid of the police that at dinner, before they were due to arrive, his cutlery clinked his plate uncontrollably like nervous marionettes and he asked if he could use a plastic knife and fork from the pizzeria downstairs.

The other inmates are in a voyeuristic mood, glad of the distraction, perhaps glad to be seeing the back of Lishny. They turn around in their seats or stand along the wall next to the mural of counterfeit cows and meadows.

The police officers wear black turtle-neck skivvies under bulging, black leather jackets. They carry their walkie-talkies in
black bags strapped tightly across their chests.

One of the police officers has been here once before. He has an olive face and neck and white hands, as though he is a different person from the neck down. He takes his notebook out of his top left pocket and flips it open. I wonder if he has one olive parent and one white parent; so marked is the difference in skin colour on his face and hands: a half-and-half cookie in the human world.

Lily, Phillip and Gertie huddle with the police in the kitchen doorway and speak in urgent whispers. It is impossible to know whether they are encouraging the police to take Lishny away or beseeching them to let him stay.

The half-olive, half-white officer says, ‘Okay, everybody clear the room except for Lishny’s chaperone.’ Lily puts her hand in the air like a girl in a classroom who is busting to answer a question, ‘That’s me,’ she says.

Phillip goes to the front door and slides both bolts across and fastens the chain. When he comes back into the room he seems to find his hands too large. He picks up a police officer’s cap and moves it across the table.

The room is quiet with the television turned off and we can hear, more acutely, the taxi horns and police sirens, wailing in the busy street below. An ambulance passes, followed by the sound of more police cars. These are the noises I listen to at night when I cannot sleep and they are noises I have grown fond of and find comforting.

The second policeman, short and square, clears his throat, ‘Everybody upstairs. We need to have this room cleared pronto.’

When I don’t move he comes to drag me away. He smells clean and sharp from the night air, and the blizzard. Tiny gusts of cold air come from his glistening uniform buttons. I smile at him. ‘Hello, ossifer,’ I say.

‘You’ll have to go upstairs,’ he says.

I have no plan and stupidly turn away from him, hoping stubbornness alone will permit me to stay downstairs. His hand is on my elbow and I shrug it off.

‘Miss? You’ll have to come away from that window now. We need to be alone with Mr Bezukhov.’

‘I’m going,’ I say.

I pass by the kitchen door and look in at Lishny.

He looks back at me, and smiles a horrible, defeated smile with his small white teeth and thin, crimson-red lips. The face that only minutes ago looked perfect to me now seems the ugliest I have ever seen.

Phillip takes me upstairs and stands with me by the door to my dormitory. He wipes the sweat from his lip and keeps his finger resting lightly on the side of his mouth when he speaks.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asks, hoping my answer will be short and non-violent.

‘Fine,’ I say.

‘Good. The police will probably be a while. You might as well get some sleep.’

I sit at my dormitory window and look across the street at the large digital neon clock in the shape of a spinning blue globe, advertising a telecom company. Further down I can see a lit-up bus-stop advertisement, ‘Welcome to First Class.’

Rachel gets out of bed and stands next to me in her slippers. I say, ‘Don’t you think the sirens make a comforting sound?’

‘Sort of,’ she says and smiles.

We rest our elbows on the windowsill for a while. She says, ‘Do you think they’ll arrest Lishny?’

‘I hope not,’ I say.

‘They will,’ says Miranda from her bed. ‘There are usually
only two cops. They must have brought an extra one to sit with him in the back seat of the cop car so there’d be two of them to restrain him and one to drive.’

Miranda’s in a bitter mood, probably because she hasn’t eaten for a month. A cold shiver travels from my coccyx up my spine. It waits there for a moment then travels, burning, into my groin.

‘Go cannibalise yourself,’ I say, and Rachel grabs hold of my hand and kisses it. People are strange sometimes.

‘I’m getting into bed,’ I say.

I lie in my top bunk and stare at the ceiling, which appears to be made of porridge. I have remembered Lishny’s promise of a letter, reach under my pillow and find it.

I imagine Lishny getting into a car, alone. There is no steering wheel, but the car drives smoothly out into an empty road and disappears.

He is going to stay in a posh hotel like the one he told me about, the one where he stayed after winning a chess tournament in some hot country.

Lishny told me that the hotel’s restaurant had wall-to-wall fish tanks so that he was surrounded by fish while he ate a meal. There were sharks and giant fish close to his dinner plate, with colours the likes of which he had never seen before. His hotel room had a spa, unlimited videos to watch, chocolates and a big bowl of fruit by the bed and a fridge full of alcohol.

There was no chess playing for an entire week. He had been
happy then. He told me that we’d go back there together one day.

I hug my pillow and imagine Lishny and me lying together, face-to-face, asleep with our lips together, breathing into each other’s lungs, in that hotel-room bed.

The police took Lishny away three nights ago and the chaperones still refuse to discuss what has happened to him. It’s boring here without him.

When I ask Lily about him, she smiles weakly at me, puts her hands in the apron pocket of her starchy pinafore and says, ‘It’s out of my hands.’

When I press her, she moves her hands in the baggy pocket in an obscene and excited fidgeting, as though her bulging pinafore is about to give birth to something with too many knuckles.

‘But is he still in the country?’ I ask.

Her fingers twitch inside her pinafore with increased agitation as she thinks of what Lishny and I might have done. ‘I can’t say,’ she says. ‘Anyway, maybe it’s time for you to let go.’

I have slept little these past few nights and tonight is no different. The sleeping pills don’t work at all any more. I leave my bunk bed to visit Phillip in his room at the end of the hall. He is awake and sitting up, a book open on his lap.

‘Lost the knack of sleep too?’ he says, with no apparent surprise at seeing me at the end of his bed.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Can I sit and talk with you a while?’

‘Sit down,’ he says.

He’s wearing a t-shirt with an iron-on transfer of a naked male body, laid out on a stainless steel mortuary slab. Heavy black stitching, crude like tacking, rips through his torso and seals the pathologist’s incision.

Phillip pulls the orange blanket up to his neck. ‘Sorry about the t-shirt,’ he says. ‘The others are in the wash.’

We talk for a long while about insomnia. I tell him I think that I have lost my mind when I close my eyes to sleep only to find that this causes me to become more awake.

‘It’s like sitting down to a plate of food, only to find that you have no mouth to eat it with. Even worse than that, it happens when you are hungriest, when the food is of most use to you, and when you are quite sure you have a mouth,’ I say.

‘In fact, only yesterday you were sure that your mouth worked very well indeed. You even saw it there on your face when you looked in the mirror, and you confirmed then that you were quite normal and had a mouth.’

Phillip smiles with recognition and a hint of something else; as though he likes what I’ve said but wishes it were somebody else that had said it. Perhaps this is the way I looked at James. He looks down at his book. ‘It’s a desperate and lonely feeling.’

‘Yes it is,’ I say and wish that we could lie in his bed together and talk ourselves to slumber.

‘You look as though you’d like to climb in,’ he says.

‘Could I?’ I ask, a surge of blood travelling to my face, warming me, filling me with a sudden desire to feel his skin; not for the sake of skin, but for the proof it would bring that he might care for me.