How the Light Gets In (6 page)

He returns to a supine position, so that I can’t see his face.

I go to my room, but feel lonely straight away. I decide to find Henry. I want to talk to somebody.

I knock on the door to Henry’s den.

‘Come in,’ he says.

‘Hi,’ I say, ‘I was wondering if I could come and sit with you for a while.’

I look at his armchair and the identical armchair opposite him. He has a newspaper on his lap and is smoking a pipe. I have always wanted to smoke a pipe. He looks at his watch.

‘Sit down,’ he says. ‘Is there something you need to talk about?’

‘Oh no,’ I say, ‘I just wanted to sit in here with you and maybe read a book or something, while you keep doing whatever you’re doing.’

‘Okay,’ he says, ‘if you’d like.’

‘Oh.’

He puts his newspaper down and starts asking me questions; the kinds of questions he and Margaret asked me on the drive from O’Hare airport. What do I like to do on weekends? What are my favourite subjects at school? Have I seen many koalas? If I tell too many more lies, I’ll have to write them down, to keep track.

I like talking to Henry. He is shy, yet calm. He makes me feel better. I think he’s the kind of person I’d like to be. His shirt is loose, about three buttons undone. I feel like telling him something about my family, something that will make him realise I should never go back. Instead I say, ‘Could I just read one of your books for a while?’

Henry tells me to help myself and I take a book off the shelf. We sit in silence then and it is good to sit and read in Henry’s den like this. I look at him and his relaxed body and try to relax like him. I read five pages and then suddenly I start talking.

‘Actually,’ I say, ‘my life at home is probably not what you think it is.’

Henry moves in his seat and sits up straighter.

‘I know that your family isn’t well off,’ he says. ‘Which must be hard sometimes.’

‘It’s not that,’ I say. ‘The trouble has more to do with my sisters and the bad characters they hang out with.’ I pause to swallow, but not long enough to stop myself from telling this lie.

‘My sister Erin’s boyfriend Steve is in prison and before he went inside he was always hanging around with his mates in our flat and giving me a hard time. I’m not looking forward to him getting out.’

Henry rubs his neck.

‘What is this Steve character in prison for?’

‘Grievous bodily harm,’ I say. ‘He’s a violent guy.’

Henry shifts in his seat and frowns.

‘I don’t know what I should say,’ he says slowly. ‘I would have thought the Organisation would have told us something as serious as this.’

Henry is suddenly standing. I don’t know why. I stand too.

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I didn’t mean to shock you. It’s really no big deal. My sister is going to break up with him anyway. I’ll probably never see him again.’

I think Henry wants me to leave but he also looks like he wants to give me a hug. I think I want him to hug me.

‘Well,’ he says, standing back, looking almost angry. ‘I hope that your sister has enough sense to get rid of Steve and that you’ll keep out of his way.’

‘Okay,’ I say.

Henry closes the door and I stand in the hallway, my heart thumping. I don’t know what to do next. I wish that I could start again.

I find Margaret. She’s working on her laptop at the dining-room table. I ask her if I can have a bath.

‘Of course you can,’ she says. ‘And you don’t need to ask. You’re part of the family now, Lou. Just go ahead and make yourself at home.’

She says all of this while typing, as though she were telling somebody where the pencils are kept.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Thanks a lot.’

I am feeling happy until I realise the chair that I’ve been using to stick under the handle has been taken away. I undress in my room and run to the bathroom wearing a robe. I leave the door open while I run the bath so that they will all know this is what I’m doing and so nobody will come in to use the upstairs toilet.

A few minutes later somebody knocks.

‘I’m in the bath,’ I say.

‘It’s only me,’ says Margaret. ‘I just need to get something from the cabinet.’

I want to say ‘No’ or ‘Wait’ but she is already inside. She’s got a small towel wrapped around her torso. She’s naked. I can see some of her pubic hair poking out, black against the pink of the towel. She looks straight at me – not for long – but still, she looks.

She’s humming. She opens the cupboard over the sink and then turns to me.

‘Scoot over,’ she says. ‘Make some room.’

I do not speak. I pull my legs into my chest. I think I say ‘There you go’ or ‘Okay then’ but I can’t be sure.

‘Only kidding,’ she says. ‘I’m taking a spa in the ensuite. It’s all yours.’

I pretend to laugh but my face, neck, ears and throat are burning with shame and my throat feels like someone’s fist is stuck inside it.

After my bath, I lie on my bed and read a letter from my mum. Here is some of it:

To recover from this obscene letter, I write seven pages of promises, pacts and undertakings.

I write that I will learn a language and take up the piano. Margaret can teach me. This might help her get back to what she misses and loves to do. I write a promise that I will do extremely well at school, sleep well and write for the school newspaper. I will swim in the mornings before school to get fit and develop legs like Bridget’s. I will fulfil my enormous potential, learn a new word every day, read a novel every week and become the world’s most impressive autodidact and polymath. I will go to university and live in student digs.

This is only the first page.

When I finish, I lie down and look at the light coming in under the door and I am convinced that everything will be better from now on.

The Harding vacation is about to begin. Bridget and James are packing their bags and Henry is whistling in the bathroom. I want to stay here. It’s hot out there and my eyes are stinging.

Last night I couldn’t get to sleep. I got up and walked around the house in my socks. I drank some milk at the kitchen table and then I stood outside James’ bedroom and looked at him sleeping. Henry and Margaret’s door was ajar, so I opened it and looked inside. Henry snored. I walked up and down the landing and wished that I could wake somebody. I thought about it. I thought about making noise and waking them just to have somebody to talk to. The longer I paced the angrier I got with them for being able to sleep. I thought about emptying the pots and pans from the kitchen cupboards or pushing a bookshelf over in the library then running back to my bed.

We could sit up together and talk about whether there had been a burglar and whether or not to call the police. But when the excitement faded, they would return to their pillows to sleep and I would still be awake.

I sat against the banister and fantasised about throwing myself down the stairs and lying there at the bottom. Henry would find me first. I would lie there with my eyes closed and they would think I had sleep-walked and fallen from the top of
the landing. I could do this five or six times, get myself covered in bruises and then they’d send me to a sleep clinic. I wanted not to be awake and alone.

Margaret comes into my room without knocking.

‘Are you ready?’ she asks, her mouth red with lipstick, her long hair out of its bun and in two thick plaits. She is wearing shorts and long socks.

‘Yep,’ I say. ‘When are we leaving?’

I wonder if I might have time to snooze for ten minutes.

‘Now!’ she says, grabbing me playfully by the hand. ‘Let’s hit the road.’

‘I’ll just pack some books,’ I say.

‘If you think you’ll need them, go right ahead.’

What?

‘But you might want to take a break from the books and take in some scenery.’

‘Okay,’ I say and we leave my room together.

The vacation will last fourteen days and take us through three states. The mini-van (the Hardings’ third vehicle) is packed to the gills with blankets, pillows, games, a first-aid kit and junk food. But I have only one book packed, and I feel uneasy about all the time I’ll have to fill.

It is our second day on the road. James and Bridget and I lie on our stomachs and stare out the back window at the broken white lines oozing out from under the van. I am sick from the heat and doze fitfully, having eaten my way through several bags, buckets and cartons of food made mostly from salt and sugar.

I open my eyes after a foul-mouthed sleep and catch James staring at me. I look out the back window and discover that we are travelling through completely new scenery, steep mountains and deep, green valleys, but I am too palsied by the
immense heat and over-eating to think any of it beautiful.

Margaret turns around in her seat. ‘How are you getting on back there?’ she asks. ‘Fine,’ we say, or ‘Great.’

When Bridget and James fight, Henry threatens to pull over and when they stop he says
tsk tsk
. I am surprised to hear him say
tsk tsk
. My mum does this. It drives me mad.

Bridget plucks her eyebrows, plays solitaire and talks about her best friend, Sonia, whose mom and dad – she tells us several times – have bought a yacht and gone sailing. She doesn’t say she wishes she could have gone with them, but it’s obvious that’s what she’s getting at.

‘Can I use your cellphone, Mom?’ asks Bridget every time we stop to get gas.

‘Just one call,’ says Margaret.

James reads comics and waits until Henry and Margaret are out of earshot so that he can make sarcastic remarks using words he has obviously picked up from the cartoonists. He tells me I’m weird about ten times a day.

‘Why?’ I say.

‘Because you are,’ he says. Or, ‘Because you can’t help it.’

I read a few pages of my book at a time, until I feel car sick and need to lie down and doze. I want to be back in the airconditioned house. I want to be alone so that my heart can slow down.

Four days pass in this way and the only relief from the tedium of driving comes when we stop to eat at roadside diners or to picnic in a forest. At first, I liked the tacky roadside truck-stops; each one of them different and yet all of them the same, with their salmon or peach coloured plastic chairs, cigarette burns on the toilet seats, striped or floral curtains gathered up with greasy ribbons.

But like the motel rooms we stay in, these truck-stops are only satisfying for a little while. The first sight of a motel room gives me a thrill of newness and surprise, but by the morning it has closed in on me and I feel dirty.

At first I took an inventory of peculiar American brand names and slang words. But this novelty has already worn off and I have to force a kind of traveller’s awe. It’s not really very interesting that things are called something else.

The only entry in my diary is a long one about fast food and the neon signs and billboards advertising giant-size portions of everything. The food in the ads is so big that by the time you unwrap your burger it looks like a flea. I want more. I want something different. I’ve never felt this hungry before. I’ve never felt like I needed to put so much in my mouth. Maybe the ads produce saliva. Suddenly I expect food to give me an emotion, the one I
saw
, the one I’ve seen on the billboards of beautiful people.

After years of exposure to this advertising frenzy, people must start to despise each other for being ugly, for having so much as a birthmark on their chin with hair growing out of it.

Yesterday, when we got our photos developed, I hardly seemed real to myself: teeth not white, hair not shiny and arms not lithe. I felt like ripping my face off my skull.

That’s the only thing I’ve written about in my diary.

Whenever we stop somewhere, Henry spends a long time taking our rubbish to the bin.

‘There’s a trash can right here,’ says Margaret, but Henry wants to walk with the rubbish bags.

‘I feel like stretching my legs,’ he says and it’s clear he wants to be alone.

Bridget always has her basketball with her and she runs up ahead and dribbles the ball, sometimes circling us and throwing the ball at us when we aren’t ready.

‘Catch!’ she says, and the ball hits one of us in the chest or head.

Whenever we get stuck in traffic, Margaret suggests we play a word or memory game and James always refuses to play.

‘You’ve got some competition now,’ says Henry, winking at me in the rear-vision mirror. ‘You’d better get used to it.’

Wherever we go, James wants a new pair of expensive gym shoes or a new comic book.

‘You have plenty already,’ says Margaret. ‘Why do you always want more?

‘Call it boredom,’ says James, ‘call it the materialist age. Just let me be free, man. Just let me be free.’

In the roadside diners, we sit with our fries and our burgers and above us slow fans turn, covered in grime. Henry orders the same thing at most meals: a piece of steak, rare or medium rare, which he covers in maple syrup. I feel dirty and dishevelled and wish I could have a cold shower and lie down in the shade. I wonder how it is that the Hardings always look clean; how even when they say they find the weather hot, they do not seem to sweat.

Perhaps it is a question of having lived cleaner lives, a cumulative thing. The brand-new clothes they have bought already look filthy on me, and I’ve worn them only once.

In the back of the van I try to read in spite of the heat and car sickness, but there is always a fly or two harassing me, and one big fly, in particular, who seems to be staying with me all the way. He edges his way across the page, reading one word at a time. When I shoo him, he comes right back, and crawls sideways from the start of the page as though I have made him lose his place.

Henry asks me whether I’m okay whenever we are alone.

When I say I’m fine, he frowns, so I say, ‘Do I not seem okay?’ and he always answers in the same way, ‘No, you seem fine.’
It’s like an argument with no subject. It stops all conver sation – this checking up on me – so I tend to ask him back, ‘Are you okay?’ and he says, ‘Of course I’m okay.’ And that’s that.

We don’t get much further even though it’s clear we both want to. Sometimes we talk some more, but if Margaret is near, his sentences become shorter and he slips away.

I want to be back in the house. Henry and I alone in Henry’s den, at night, each in our own matching armchair, him smoking his pipe and me reading. It would be best of all to go back in time, to my first or second night, or forward in time, to winter, so we could be wearing woolly jumpers. That would be best, with the open fire burning. We could start again.

It is our sixth day on the road and Margaret and Bridget and I are sitting on a bench in a small-town shopping mall while Henry takes James to look at colleges.

Nearby, a woman beats her child. She is screaming at him, smacking his bottom. The woman says, ‘Bad boy! Bad boy!’ over and over, while the child cowers between her legs, and when she whacks him hard across the head, he runs behind a pot plant and howls, with guttural disbelief.

I walk towards the woman. I hope that when she sees I am watching, she will stop beating her boy. Margaret rushes after me, takes my arm and says, ‘Come and sit down. There’s nothing we can do.’

I take Margaret’s hand off my arm and say, ‘What’s the point of just standing here and watching a woman beat the living crap out of her child!’

Margaret pulls harder on my arm.

‘Lou,’ she whispers. ‘Don’t ever speak to me like that.’

‘Why the fuck not?’ I say, using the word fuck as though it were capable of inflicting pain.

Margaret walks away and the woman drags the boy into the bathroom.

I sit down on the bench next to Bridget and put my head in my hands. ‘That was
stupid
,’ she says. I am too angry to speak, so I look at the floor. A few minutes later Margaret returns holding three ice-creams, one flavoured scoop on top of another; three brightly coloured
Sesame Street
scoops each.

We eat our ice-creams and nobody speaks until I say to Margaret, ‘This is the biggest mall I have ever seen.’ Bridget is still furious with me and she narrows her eyes.

Margaret smiles. ‘This is nothing. Some malls are so big, joggers use them in winter for doing laps.’

Bridget drops her half-eaten ice-cream into a bin. She looks at me as though I were something the cat dragged in.

‘Let’s find some new clothes for Lou.’

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘But there’s really no need.’

The next day, Henry, Bridget and I go to a basketball game. Margaret stays in the motel room, because she has a bad back and James is staying with her, in case she needs help.

It’s hot. This kind of intense heat pins you to the ground and, sooner or later, you feel like crying.

Henry stares hard at the game and when I talk he doesn’t want to look at me.

I take out a tissue and wipe the sweat that is crawling along the back of my neck. I want this vacation to be over; to go back to the airconditioned house.

‘I’m boiling,’ I say. ‘It’s too hot.’

‘Hum?’ he says.

For the next hour I sit quietly and Henry looks sideways at me every few minutes. He’s probably wishing that Margaret could be here too, instead of having to go to bed with lumbago.
That’s how Henry said it:
She’s gone to bed with lumbago
.

I want to tell him that ‘going to bed with lumbago’ makes it sound like Margaret has gone to bed with another man, probably a Spanish man with lumps, but I change my mind.

Henry presses his finger into the side of his face and chews at the flesh on the inside of his mouth.

I try to distract myself by concentrating on Bridget’s legs. Her brown skin is like a stocking and you can see the muscles shudder as she extends her legs, strong and animal. Although she has fair skin on her face, like her father, she doesn’t redden and, unlike James, her skin is never damp.

The game finishes and Henry rushes towards the exit. We go to the car park and Henry is holding Bridget’s hand. He buys her a drink from a man with a fridge on wheels. The man has a flat, squashed nose.

‘That man,’ I say as we get into the car, ‘looked like somebody would look if they wore a stocking over their face.’

‘How cruel and mean,’ says Bridget.

Henry is silent.

I don’t want to point out to either of them that every one of Bridget’s friends looks like a model, that none of them are black, Asian or Hispanic, and that most of her conversation is about clothes and who looks good wearing what. I don’t want to explain how hypocritical Bridget is, even though it might help Henry to know.

My insomnia is getting worse, and as we drive for hours and hours in the hot sun, I daydream about a world full of rental beds where insomniacs could sleep. These beds would be in small, neat, clean rooms. You could drop a coin into a box and obtain a half-hour of guaranteed sleep. Perhaps these special rooms could fill with a benevolent sleeping gas, or include a
bottle of something to drink to help you along. It would not matter, so long as these beds were everywhere you needed them, and so long as they were comfortable and the sleep was guaranteed.

These special rooms for insomniacs would be found in shop ping malls, in restaurants, in libraries, in cinemas and in schools; the beds tucked away behind discreet, sound-proofed walls with lockable doors, in small, temperature-controlled rooms with music if you wanted it and a toaster and a kettle (and a basket of plastic-wrapped biscuits).

Yesterday morning James bought a flick-comb: a fake flick-knife that opens out into a hair comb. He uses it constantly. He flicks it open now at an old lady who is looking at us from across the diner.

‘Stop that!’ says Margaret, but James continues.

Henry gulps an enormous lump of meat too quickly.