How the Light Gets In (27 page)

I amuse myself by closing my eyes and trying to guess what somebody looks like from the sound of their voice. When I open my eyes there are usually four old men staring at me. I try to look unhappy so that this is what the men will see.

I bet they don’t believe I’m a
bona fide
alcoholic and they’re right. If I speak, it will at once prove them right and probably both enrage and sadden them. I don’t blame them for wishing
I didn’t exist, for wishing I had suffered more.

Is there an old alcoholic man who could feel happy for the likes of me? Nobody could expect the old men to feel glad for me when my very appearance will remind them that their own point of salvation was crossed perhaps forty years too late. The fact that I will probably suffer one-tenth of their pain should make these old men want to hurt me.

My dad would say that these ugly, snotty-eyed old men have made their beds and should lie in them. My dad would say they had a choice and have nobody to blame but themselves. But nobody chooses pain. A lifetime of pain – the kind that makes these old men so revolting – is what follows as punishment for choosing to do something to avoid pain in the first place.

I lower my head and send a message to each old man in the room:
I don’t blame you for hating me
.

The meeting ends with cups of tea and instant coffee. I can tell the room is a happier one because of my messages. I watch two old men exchange an embrace and two others laugh. One of them stomps his foot to stop himself from choking on laughter. ‘Cut it out,’ he says to his friend. ‘Are you kidding me?’

I am whisked from the room before I reach the urn. My chaperone says, ‘I’ve been told to get you home straight away.’

‘That’s fine,’ I say and as we drive home our silence fills the car until there is so much silence, my ears pop.

The school teacher does not walk me to the door. ‘Next week,’ he says, ‘my wife will pick you up.’

‘I won’t be here next week,’ I say.

I close the car door as gently as I can but this causes it to stick halfway.

‘Leave it,’ says the school teacher. ‘I’ll fix it.’

I don’t like him. Who will I ever like?

When Mr Bell opens the door, and as he reaches for my long black coat, I almost ask him if I can call Lishny.

Last night I said I was a vegetarian, so that I could change something about myself, and the Bells have saved me a plate of leftover mashed potatoes. I pick out the hard green bits.

George and Paul are nowhere to be seen and the silence is causing my eardrums to slide back into my skull.

‘Why don’t you have a TV?’ I ask Mrs Bell, stunned to find myself craving a few loud hours in front of something pointless; to be anaesthetised by advertisements.

‘Rots the brain,’ says Mrs Bell.

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘that’s probably true.’

Mr Bell has a sudden coughing fit and leaves the room, embarrassed. He manages to say, ‘I beg your pardon’ as he goes spluttering along the hallway.

Mrs Bell is sewing a name onto a handkerchief and I watch her for a while.

Then I clear the plates.

Then I run the water and soak the plates.

Then I put the kettle on.

Mr Bell comes back with watery eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ I ask.

He looks happy. ‘Yes, thank you. Just a bit of that chicken,’ he says.

I wish I hadn’t lied about being a vegetarian. I wish I’d just said I was allergic to liver, and fish with heads still on and green soup.

‘Where are the boys?’ I ask.

‘At their Aunt Sarah’s place,’ says Mrs Bell. ‘She’s just around the corner.’

‘What do they do around there?’

‘Watch TV,’ says Mrs Bell, laughing. Mr Bell laughs too. They both laugh loudly. Their heads go back and they cover their mouths with their hands. This involuntary trait is so similar, it is as though they are siblings.

Mandy comes in and stares at me. She’s been listening outside. ‘They might not be watching TV,’ she says. ‘They’re good kids. They might be helping Uncle Stipe remove the wallpaper.’

I wonder how the hell Mandy has heard the conversation.

Mr and Mrs Bell laugh even more. I don’t laugh. I think – for Mandy’s sake – I probably shouldn’t.

We sit at the kitchen table and drink tea and eat biscuits and there’s more talk of Christmas Day. It’s so cold my hands feel bruised. Mrs Bell peels some potatoes and puts them in a saucepan of water when they are done. I wonder why she’s cooking more potatoes.

Mandy’s legs are crossed and one leg is swinging violently, kicking the underneath of the table.

‘I can’t wait,’ she says in a loud and spoilt little girl’s voice. ‘I love Christmas. It’s my favourite day of the whole year and I bet you it snows, like in the song.’

‘That reminds me,’ says Mrs Bell, ‘Lou can sing, can’t you, Lou? We heard you have a big part in the school musical.’

It occurs to me that I haven’t thought about the musical for ages, or the Hardings. They might as well not exist.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but I’m shy about it, really.’

Mandy stops kicking. ‘How can you be shy about it if you were going to be on stage and everything? You would have had to sing in front of the whole school.’

I don’t think she got my mental message. ‘I just am. Take my word for it.’

Mandy grabs my arm, just below the elbow so that my funny bone squeals at me. ‘I know!’ she cries. ‘You can sing on Christmas Day. Grandma Bell has a piano and I could sing with you. I’m probably not as good, but I could sing along.’

My face burns. I need to get outside. I want to get drunk.

‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘If you’d really like me to.’

‘We’d love to hear you sing,’ says Mr Bell.

I stand up. ‘I might go for a walk,’ I say.

‘Really?’ says Mandy. ‘But it’s freezing out there.’

‘I like exercising after dinner,’ I say.

Mr Bell stands quickly, as though the phone has rung, his small body vibrating with enthusiasm ‘Perhaps we could all come for a brisk walk.’

‘Okay,’ I say, dreading the idea.

Mandy has put even more lipstick on and in the darkness the red looks blue. She tells me about school and all her new friends, her arms linked through the arms of Mr and Mrs Bell. I fondle my half-empty pack of cigarettes and want to be alone.

We have been walking for nearly an hour when Mrs Bell says, ‘By the way, Lou, we’ve moved all of your belongings into Mandy’s bungalow …’

Mandy cannot wait for Mrs Bell to finish her sentence because she’d been hoping to say all of this herself. ‘Yeah, I thought it would be cool fun for us to share after all. George can have his room back.’

‘It’s warmer in there,’ says Mr Bell. ‘Mandy bought a big heater with some of the money her parents sent for her birthday.’

Not able to bring myself to feign joy, I say ‘Happy birthday’ instead, and wonder why the hell she doesn’t drag the stupid heater into the house once in a while.

‘But that was ages ago,’ says Mandy, lamely.

I let Mandy go to bed first and spend some time at the kitchen table with my frozen hands resting on top of a hot-water bottle. When she has been gone for an hour or so, I walk out the back door.

She is still awake and the bright overhead lights and big noisy heater are still on.

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘I thought I’d let you have some peace and quiet before barging in on you.’

Mandy sits up with a magazine on her lap. The cover shows a bony model in a ball gown and I catch a glimpse of the headline,
Star’s Nightmare Diet
. The very skinny model on this mag azine cover makes me imagine her skeleton, which is not far from her sheath of skin, and this makes me imagine death and coffins and the skull without eyes.

Mandy puts the magazine down with a sigh. ‘I couldn’t really go to sleep knowing you’d be coming in and waking me anyway. The door always slams in the wind.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ll turn off the light now, then.’

I turn the light and the heater off and the moon fills the room with a faint and milky fog. Mandy lies on her side with her eyes wide open and watches me undress for bed.

‘I can see your ribs,’ she says. ‘They really stick out.’

I pull a buttoned-up cardigan over my head. ‘Do they?’ I say. ‘That’s funny, I was just thinking about death.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Are you going to sleep in that?’ she asks, sizing up my cardigan.

I move away from the window. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I get cold.’

She watches me get under the blankets.

‘What’s AA like?’ she asks.

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘I’ve only been to one meeting.’

‘What did you do?’

‘We talked and we told stories about why we used to drink and why we’ve decided to stop drinking.’

She’s incredulous. ‘But you were forced to stop!’

‘Yes, but I’m glad,’ I say. ‘I was sick of myself.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I wasn’t real any more.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘What else did you do there? How come you were gone for two and a half hours?’

I put my hands between my thighs.

‘We held hands, and sang songs and walked in straight lines with our arms outstretched to make sure none of us were drunk and we …’

‘Shut up,’ she says, without the slightest trace of humour. ‘What did you
really
do?’

‘We said the Serenity Prayer and then drank cups of tea and talked a bit more.’

‘What’s the Serenity Prayer?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

I’m only talking to her because I feel like talking and it passes the time and it’s reassuring to hear my voice, especially when it sounds confident.

‘Sure I do.’

‘It goes:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference
.’

‘Do you believe in God?’ she asks.

‘Not particularly.’

‘Then how can you pray?’

‘I pray to myself.’

She suddenly props her head up with her fist, ready to argue. ‘What’s the point of that?’

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘Explain it anyway,’ she says.

‘Well, to me God is just a word for what I do when I talk to the best possible version of things: perfection. Or maybe God is the best possible version of myself. Maybe when I say this prayer, I’m appealing to a future, possible and perfect chair.’

I throw the word chair in there to check her listening skills. But she hasn’t heard the last bit of my sentence. She clicks her
tongue on the roof of her mouth. ‘It’s not God if it’s just all about you.’

‘It’s not God if it isn’t me. It can’t be God without me thinking of God,’ I say.

‘You’re not God!’

‘I’m not saying that. I’m saying that God is the thought of God. The very thought of God is what God is. There are no words for that thought and the thought is different for every person and by necessity, beyond language.’

I sit up and start using my hands. I’m starting to feel as though I understand what I’m saying. I don’t care for her, but I want to say this.

‘The whole point of God,’ I continue, ‘is that God can’t be explained. God is the very thing that causes the thought of God and the thought itself. I have God thoughts and that’s what God is: the fact that my brain has the thought is …’

I have no real idea what I’m saying after all.

Mandy rolls over noisily to face the wall. ‘That doesn’t make sense! How can God be just the thought of God? You’re just going around in circles! I’m going to sleep.’

Mandy falls asleep quickly (as I thought she would) and she snores; a kind of vacant rattle.

I lie on my back for hours and think of life and whether I believe in anything at all. I open my mouth and exhale my final answer into the silence.
God is like all those bits of wood in
Mr Bell’s shed waiting to be made into a chair and God is what happens
when Mr Bell talks himself into making the chair even when his hands are
cold and his stomach is full of bright green soup
.

‘G’night,’ I say to myself. ‘Sleep well.’

It’s Christmas Eve morning. The boys are wearing red and green. Mr and Mrs Bell are in their Sunday best. They are out of bed long before I am. I offer to make some scrambled eggs, knowing that we have run out of eggs and that I’ll have to go to the shop.

‘We have no eggs,’ says Paul. ‘We ran out yesterday when I made a cake.’

‘When
we
made a cake,’ says George.

Both boys look extraordinarily happy, as though there really is something in the air at Christmas time. They are sitting up straight in their chairs eating watery porridge as though it tasted like chocolate.

‘I’d be happy to go down to the shop and buy some eggs,’ I say. ‘I really feel like some eggs.’

‘I know,’ says Mandy. ‘I’ll get some from Aunt Sarah’s place. She’s got chickens.’

Mr Bell stands up, abandoning a piece of toast and a half cup of tea. ‘I’ll go,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to pop over and deliver a chair today, anyways.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Why don’t I go? You stay here and finish eating your breakfast. Just tell me the way.’

‘Well,’ says Mrs Bell. ‘I suppose it’s not so hard to find.’

Mandy makes eye contact, sudden and serious. ‘I’ll go too,’ she says.

When we get outside I realise I have no choice but to tell Mandy I want to smoke a cigarette.

‘Mandy,’ I say. ‘I have to tell you something, but you have to promise not to say anything to Mr and Mrs Bell.’

‘You want some cigarettes,’ she says, pleased with herself. ‘And guess what?’

My skin is suddenly cold in spite of thick layers of hot thermal clothes. ‘What?’

‘I’ve got some. I smoke too. I could smell it on your clothes in your suitcase.’

I would like to kick her in the shins for sniffing my clothes.

‘Thank God,’ I say. ‘I didn’t think you’d be a smoker. You look far too healthy.’

‘It’s good for weight loss,’ she says. ‘I’ve lost about three kilos since I started.’

Mandy is further proof that you’d have to be a moron to smoke. I should introduce her to my sisters one day. I imagine us both as skeletons. ‘And in the end it’s the best weight-loss program of them all,’ I say.

She frowns. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘Where shall we go?’

‘There’s a park, around the corner. Then we’ll go to Aunt Sarah’s.’

‘Thanks for this,’ I say.

She puts her arm over my shoulder, heavy and abrupt. ‘What are friends for?’

‘For cigarettes,’ I say, forgetting to put my arm over her shoulder.

When I do not touch her, she withdraws her friendly arm and walks a little way ahead of me until we reach the park. This new aloofness is my punishment, I suppose, for not putting my arm over her shoulder; for not knowing what to do with her body.

‘I usually sit on the merry-go-round to smoke,’ she says, ‘and keep an eye out for the children.’

We smoke three each of her menthol cigarettes and I feel gravely ill; as though the merry-go-round, which hasn’t budged, has been spinning at great speed with me tied to its centre.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘You saved me.’

On the way home Mandy asks me, ‘Why haven’t you put on any weight?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I haven’t really thought about it.’

‘You look great,’ she says. ‘You look really fit and everything.’

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I really haven’t thought about it.’

‘Well you do,’ she says, her mouth bulging with words she won’t speak. ‘Does alcohol help you stay skinny?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, wishing I had some.

When we reach the front gate she stops. ‘Didn’t you have a boyfriend when you were living with the Hardings?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Kind of.’

‘I guess you miss him a lot.’

‘Not really.’

‘You must,’ she says. ‘How could you not miss him?’

‘I forgot about him when I met somebody else.’

‘That’s obscene!’ she says, her face scrunched with anger and disappointment. It’s as though she wanted me to be a different kind of girl and that because I’m not, I have wrecked the world.

She’s not the person I want her to be either. The difference is, she seems to hate me for it. While I, on the other hand, am just sad that I can’t like more people and that I am forced to add Mandy to the list of people I don’t like.

‘That’s really sick that you can just go from one guy to the next,’ she says.

‘Is it? I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I haven’t really thought about it that much.’

‘God,’ she says as she lifts the lock. ‘I’d think about the guy a lot if he was
my
boyfriend.’

It is Christmas morning and after breakfast we open our presents under the tree in the lounge room.

I am about to tell the boys about my fantasy Christmas tree decorations (I have thought of some others) when the phone rings in the kitchen.

It’s Gertie Skipper. ‘You can talk on the phone in our bedroom, if you like,’ says Mrs Bell.

I go into Mr and Mrs Bell’s strange bedroom with the photos of boys in chairs all over the walls and pick up the phone. Gertie must have bad news. I have a terrible dead feeling in my chest. It feels like everything has closed down.

‘Hi,’ says Gertie.

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Merry Christmas.’

‘So, how are you enjoying your stay with the Bells?’ she asks.

‘It’s great,’ I say.

I feel like I can stop whatever bad thing is about to happen by telling Gertie how I feel about everything.

‘I mean,’ I say, ‘there’s nothing particularly great about it but it’s great to be here and to have another chance at staying on and not being sent home. I’m really looking forward to going back to the Hardings and it’s great that I’ll be able to finish high school. It’s great that I am better and that I’m not ruining my life any more.’

‘Well, then you’ll enjoy hearing this. I’ve been told you’ve been a model citizen. The Hardings are very pleased and you’re leaving on the third of January.’

‘That’s the best news I’ve ever heard,’ I say. ‘I thought you
must have had bad news. I had a really sick feeling in my stomach, like you get before bad news.’

‘Well, it’s all good news, so not to worry. How’s the other girl. Mandy?’

‘She’s okay, I suppose,’ I whisper. I’m surprised how pleased I am to be talking to Gertie. I want to stay on the phone for as long as possible.

‘But,’ I say, ‘she’s obsessed with how fat she is and with being fat in general and she hardly talks about anything else and she reads stupid teenage magazines full of models and make-up.’

Gertie is smiling, I can tell.

‘That’s all understandable,’ she says, ‘don’t you think? Maybe you could help her talk about other things. Use your brains on her.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ I say.

When I go back into the lounge room I realise that the Bells have been waiting for me. Paul and George have pres ents half unwrapped.

‘Come on,’ says Mr Bell, ‘it’s time to open your present.’

Mandy walks in, from the kitchen, with an angry face, and my bloodstream feels the heat of its own poison. I know by the look on her face, by the feeling in the air about her, that she has been listening to my conversation with Gertie, on the other phone, in the kitchen.

I open my present: a hand-carved box containing dozens of miniature elephants, the whole lot covering no more space than the tip of my baby finger. My hands are shaking.

‘They’re hand-carved in India,’ says George. ‘They use a magnifying glass to make them. We knew you’d love it.’

I kiss George on the forehead and withdraw just in time to vomit on the rug.

But it takes a few more hours for things to really go wrong, and I am forced to go on behaving as though nothing is about to happen.

After dinner, Aunt Sarah arrives, and we are going to Grandma Bell’s house. Mandy is the last to emerge from the house.

‘Has anybody seen my purse?’ she says.

I am in the back seat of the Bells’ car with Paul and George.

‘That’s the strangest coincidence,’ says Mrs Bell, who is sitting in the front seat. ‘I was about to ask the same question.’

Mr and Mrs Bell get out of the car. ‘Why don’t I help you look for it?’ says Mr Bell and I know these will be the last ordinary words I hear spoken for a long time.

I stay in the car and wait for it.

A few minutes later Mrs Bell emerges from the house with a handkerchief to her face, partly for somewhere to hide, partly for comfort.

‘Lou, could you get out of the car please?’ Her voice is choked, as I expected it would be.

‘Walk with me for a minute,’ she says.

We walk to the bridge.

‘We found my purse and Mandy’s purse hidden in the bottom of your suitcase. Not that it really matters now, but we also found a packet of cigarettes.’

It is remarkable to me how such a sudden, shocking moment can also feel inevitable. I look over the bridge and feel like laughing. I lean my head against the wood and wrap my arms around my head to deaden the sound of Mrs Bell’s voice.

‘Surely you knew you’d get caught? We know about the money you stole from the poor Hardings.’

I bash my head against the rail of the bridge. I have never been as angry or as ashamed.

‘Stop that!’ she says. ‘Haven’t you got anything to say for yourself?’

I am a deaf mute with snot running from my nose. I bang my head again.

‘You knew you’d be caught. You had to be caught. I don’t understand. And on Christmas Day.’

I am letting the tears roll off my face and onto my coat. Mrs Bell hands me her handkerchief.

I use the handkerchief and start to walk back to the car. Mr Bell is coming towards me. He’s shaking his head.

‘Somebody is coming to pick you up in a moment,’ he says. ‘You’ll be taken back to the hostel. Then we’ll all get on with our Christmas.’

He seems like a different person.

But the person who is coming to pick me up is late, and I must wait in the kitchen. Mrs Bell sends the boys to their rooms and they protest.

‘But, Mom, it’s Christmas!’

‘What’s the matter with Lou, Mom?’

Mr Bell eats half a Christmas pudding, which was probably intended to last a week or more. He does not look at me.

Mandy looks at me and shakes her head and says tsk. I want to kill her.

I look at the ground and I do not look back up again until I leave the house. When the driver asks me whether I want to say anything about what I’ve done, I recognise the voice. It’s Rennie. I smash my head against the window and scream until he shuts up. I look down and don’t look back up until I reach the door of the hostel and look to see who is letting me in. It’s Gertie and I want to break my silence and I want to hug her, but she takes a deep breath before I reach her and I know she thinks I’m guilty.

‘Fuck everything,’ I say.