How the Light Gets In (8 page)

I have read somewhere that one is not permitted to think of the Torah whilst on the toilet. I have also read that when Tolstoy was a child, his older brother would torment the young writer by telling him to stand in a corner and
not
think of a white bear. Consequently, a white bear was all that Tolstoy could think about.

This morning – the morning of our last day – all I can think about is sleep. Breakfast has finished. The others have gone to buy some more soft drinks and Margaret and I are sitting in the airconditioned fast-food restaurant where we had our breakfast.

I decide to tell her about my problems with sleep.

‘Margaret, I think I have insomnia.’

She raises her eyebrows.

‘You just need to relax. Try not to think of sleep. You’re probably thinking about it too much.’

‘That’s funny,’ I say. ‘I was thinking that maybe that’s my exact problem but the point is that because I can’t sleep it’s impossible not to think about it all the time. Like Tolstoy and the white bear.’

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I just think maybe it’s a treatable condition. Maybe if I went to see a specialist in a good hospital or something.’

‘Just relax. Breathe deeply through your nose and out of your mouth like this.’

Margaret demonstrates how to breathe. She even makes me put my hand on her diaphragm so I know how it all works.

But I already know all about breathing and relaxation techniques. I know about the importance of being calm and doing exercise, and drinking hot milk and all that crap. Mrs Walsh is an expert.

I wish I had told Henry instead.

‘It’ll come,’ she says. ‘It’ll come.’

I want to tell her that as a member of that class of slack-minded, unimaginative, easy-sleeping snorers who do not understand insomnia and never will, she has no right to tell me how to sleep. I want to tell her that not only can I not sleep most nights, when I do sleep, my dreams are awful.

Instead I say, ‘I’ll try that. Thanks.’

She hugs me for too long and says, ‘It’s only a phase. It’ll pass.’

‘What if it doesn’t?’ I say. ‘It’s been happening for a long time. Maybe I should see a doctor or something? Some kind of specialist?’

Margaret’s hair is back in its bun and she reaches to adjust it. This means she is either annoyed or bored. She says, ‘You just need to relax your mind. Stop worrying. It’s all a question of serenity. Peace of mind. Just don’t worry so much. You’re too young to worry so much.’

I want to kick her in the shins. That’s where I always want to kick somebody when they’re being stupid. Right on the bone.

I also want to tell her that my insomnia and my blushing are closely connected – the less I sleep, the more I blush – and that perhaps I have a treatable condition, but she is standing up, looking for her purse.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll try relaxing a bit more.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Margaret says and we start walking towards the door.

Now she’s using her loud voice, the voice she uses when it seems she wants everybody to enjoy the benefits of her wisdom.

‘You know, at your age you really shouldn’t be so uptight. When I was your age I slept like a baby. Maybe you could try some more exercise. That’ll fix you. Wait till you’re my age and working all hours, then you can lie awake all night thinking about what to do with the world.’

I feel annihilated but I smile.

‘Thanks,’ I say.

After breakfast we stop at an amusement park called ‘Old MacDonald’s’, somewhere in a field on the outskirts of a country town. The whole fair is based on the nursery rhyme, with rides made out of plastic sheep and cows and chickens. It’s my fault we’ve stopped here at all. I pointed to it as we drove by and when Henry asked me if I’d like to have a look I said ‘Yeah, that’d be great fun’ because I thought, for once, I should sound enthusiastic about something other than visiting bookstores or playing word games in airconditioned motel rooms.

It’s another hot day. The clouds sit low and are full and bulging, like egg whites whisked into stiffness; a benign blanket above. Usually this kind of cloud cheers me up.

We walk up and down the Barnyard of Games, the tune of Old MacDonald tinny and insistent, the smell of manure forcing me to breathe through my mouth.

We don’t play any of the games and ignore the prospect of shooting ducks, gagging geese with ping-pong balls or throwing balls at bales of hay.

There is something depressing about a small and dirty fairground; the cheapness of the stuffed-animal prizes, the smell of frying fat, the way the games are rigged, and this one is the worst I’ve ever seen.

Everything is automated. There are no carnies to take tickets for rides. Instead, machines into which coins are fed and from which tickets spew out, operate the rides. The gates open to let people through only when enough tickets are taken, and then the rides begin.

The whole thing depresses me in the same way that bathroom vending machines do; those machines that issue condoms, polo mints and headache tablets all at once. It makes me gloomy to think that, one day, vending machines will issue books and music and shoes and wigs and underpants and goldfish and death certificates.

And so we walk up and down the same avenue of farm-yard-themed arcade games listening to the metallic sound of Old MacDonald Had A Farm, Eeee Eye Eeeee Eye Oh. There’s nobody to explain the rules, nobody to grab at a soft toy from the back wall with a comical hook.

I catch up with Henry.

‘Could I talk to you?’

‘Sure,’ he says.

He slows down and we let the others go on ahead.

‘I have insomnia,’ I say. ‘Most nights it takes me hours and hours to get to sleep, or I wake too early, and then I feel tired all day. I think it’s a treatable condition.’

Henry looks at my hands while I speak, a habit that is driving me crazy. It’s as though he’s some kind of body language expert trying to catch me out, and his habit forces me to put my hands in my pockets and then I feel like I’m going to fall over.

‘How long have you had trouble sleeping?’

‘A long time,’ I say. ‘Maybe since I was nine or ten.’

‘That’s a pretty serious problem then. Have your parents ever taken you to a doctor?’

My parents? It sounds like such a strange and out of place word,
parents
, a word referring to a concept I’m not exactly familiar with.

‘Not really,’ I say. ‘They know about it but they just keep telling me it’ll go away.’

‘Well,’ says Henry, ‘why don’t I talk to Margaret about it and we’ll work something out. Maybe you could see our family doctor. He’s very good. We met him on the flight coming back from Paris. About eighteen years ago.’

Henry looks at the pavement in front of his shoes.

‘Eighteen years,’ he says. ‘Could it really be that long?’

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ I say, sarcastically.

Henry’s voice has become flat, like my dad’s is most of the time. I wonder if Henry is disappointed with his life. I remember what my dad said a few weeks before I left, late at night, when Erin and Leona and my mum had gone to bed.

He was sitting forward in his chair and, quite unexpectedly, he turned the TV off and stood up, and he looked down at me and said, ‘When I got to the age of thirty-three, the age they say Jesus was when he died, I started to panic because I hadn’t done all the things I’d planned to do.’

He started to open the door to the hall and then he turned around and let me see that his eyes were wet and he said, ‘Don’t let time run out on you.’

We’ve been back for two days. It’s Saturday night and Henry and Margaret arrive home late, after dinner with friends, their teeth blackened by red wine. They look oddly beautiful, deranged, and somehow more real. They come into the living room to chat before going to bed.

‘Did you have a nice night?’ asks Bridget.

James, who is sitting on the floor, close to the TV, turns up the volume and does not look around to greet his parents, perhaps because this would involve looking at me, which he hasn’t done since we got back from our vacation.

‘Yes,’ says Henry, smiling broadly. ‘We had a wonderful time. But there’s something wrong with your Uncle Pete.’

‘What?’ says Bridget.

‘Well, he might have gone a bit mad.’

‘Mad
der
,’ says James without turning around.

Henry laughs hard and I stare at him. His face is flushed and he looks handsome, his eyes have lost their weepiness and seem brighter. He sits on the arm of the couch, grinning and swaying, as though he is sitting deck-side on a cruise ship, moved gently by the waves, pleased with his lunch, keeping an eye out for whales or seagulls.

‘Wait till you hear this,’ says Margaret, and Henry continues.

‘Early in the night, while everybody was drinking wine, he asked for some milk and after he drank it, he said, “This milk
is really weird. The cows must have been eating unusual things. I think I better pour the rest down the sink.”’

‘And did he?’ I ask.

‘The whole lot,’ says Margaret, ‘and we had none for our coffee after dinner.’

I laugh and so does Bridget.

‘That’s
stupid
,’ says James, looking at me.

Henry and Margaret are in great form, quite drunk. Henry is less polite. When he can no longer hold himself up on the arm of the couch, he rolls off and lands next to me.

‘Shit. Sorry,’ he says. ‘The couch must have the hiccups.’

I move across to give him more room, but we are still close; close enough for my knee to knock his whenever he moves.

Margaret is lying across the other couch with her legs on Bridget’s lap. Her hair is down and it is long enough to reach the belt of her trousers. Henry reaches across and strokes Margaret’s head and this makes her laugh for no apparent reason. It is as though they are celebrating some secret and wicked deed, and the fact that we have no idea what it might be makes them even jollier, and adds a perverse and pleasing angle to their smiles.

Without saying what he is going to do, Henry leaves and returns with a bottle of port and pours half a glass for everybody.

‘Just this once,’ he says, splitting his sides with loud laughter.

‘Never again,’ says Margaret, her teeth so black she seems to have lost them all in a street brawl.

James turns the TV up.

‘James, turn that off!’

‘I’m watching something,’ he says, like a baby.

‘Just turn it off!’ shouts Margaret. ‘Or I’ll come and sit on your head!!’

Then Margaret says something in French and Henry laughs
so hard it’s contagious, and we are all laughing. For the next few hours we take it in turns to tell stories about strange people we’ve known. Margaret and Henry tell more stories about Uncle Pete and other crazed relatives, like the aunt who wears aviator sunglasses and a red scarf when she drives, and Margaret’s great-grandmother who wore corsets so tight she flew to Switzerland each year to have her lungs reinflated.

While everybody is laughing I stand and turn off the only lamp in the room. Nobody asks me to turn it back on. I often wish that all conversation could take place in the dark; that it were always night and that the redness of my skin could never be seen. In this dark room, I feel no inhibition. I sit close to Henry on the couch; Margaret sits on the other couch with Bridget. James sits at his mother’s feet. I feel the beautiful warmth of the port around my heart.

Henry pours more port into my glass and winks at me. I wink back. James massages his mother’s feet and for a long time I can’t keep my eyes off his hands; the way that he takes each of his mother’s toes in turn, squeezing each of them equally so that none miss out.

I am finally and completely at home; in this dark room, with the slightly drunk Hardings.

‘Well,’ says Margaret when the birds begin to sing, ‘I think we’d all better hit the hay.’

What a nice change it is for me not to be alone, awake in bed, when the birds start to sing.

‘Yes, we’d better,’ says Henry and both he and Margaret begin to laugh, perhaps at the surprise of having completely shattered their usual routine. Perhaps laughing at Margaret who has pulled the phone plug out and who is trying to walk away with the plug still in her hand, trailing the phone behind her, or perhaps they are laughing at James, who has fallen asleep and is snoring.

The following day we get out of bed late, and, as though we have signed a solemn agreement, no one mentions last night. Breakfast is made and eaten with less talk than usual. It seems the Hardings have all been made coy by last night’s late-night laughter and drinking. I have slept well for the first time in months. I feel good and wish that every night were like last night and that every morning I could wake from a night of rest instead of sleepless misery.

At the end of breakfast, when it is nearly time to go our separate ways into the day, I say, ‘Last night was great fun! We should do it again.’

I understand at once, from the look on Henry’s face, that I have said the wrong thing.

‘Lou,’ says Margaret, her lips tight and angry, ‘last night was not something we intend to make a habit of. Henry and I were a little drunk, and more than a little irresponsible. It will most certainly not be happening again.’

James and Bridget gaze into their bowls of cereal shaped like space-craft and say nothing. Nothing. The room is stuffed with righteousness and dented morals and I am left to look like the only fool who thought last night was a good idea, that drinking together made us happy and free.

I go to my room, grab my bag and head out to the supermarket parking lot for a smoke. I wonder whether there are just some people who need to live a different kind of life. I buy a small bottle of gin with what’s left of my pocket money and go home to watch the first movie I have rented for myself, to watch by myself. Nobody bothers me all day. I lie on the couch and remind myself that I am better off here than at home with my slutty sisters who can beat me up whenever they feel like it and never get punished.

I eat three packets of Oreos and re-read a book by a famous forensic pathologist who specialises in the study of serial
killers. He says that serial killers often have one thing in common: a history of being treated randomly as children. Being treated randomly, he explains, means that no matter what these psychopaths did as children, whether their behaviour was good or bad, their parents treated them randomly. Willy nilly, without warning, they might be punished one day for doing something that the day before they had been rewarded for. Therefore, the serial killer, as a child, can never know which way the parent is going to turn: hot or cold. But the forensic pathologist doesn’t say anything about the effects of being treated with embarrassing consistency.

Whenever my dad has a few too many beers he makes a point of embarrassing me by telling the same story. ‘I broke a man’s knee caps by pointing at them. I pointed at his knee caps and he fell off the earth-mover the next day and landed right on the road and broke both his knees.’

If somebody says, ‘But you can’t injure a man just by willing it to happen!’ my dad replies with one of three responses, the worst of which is, ‘Well, if you think that’s something, I made the first woman I had sex with levitate right off the bed.’

The next few days are peaceful, yet ominous. Nobody in the Harding family is the same as they were before, and when people are not precisely who you expect them to be, not exactly the people you have grown accustomed to, you cannot trust the world, even a dreaded world, in quite the same way.

Henry and Margaret work longer hours than usual, come home, cook and eat a healthy dinner and retire to their dens for more work or reading. Bridget comes home most days just minutes before dinner – as though she has been hiding behind a small bush outside, waiting for the smell of food – after spending all day in the sun, swimming, rowing or water skiing.
James spends all day at the mall, or down in the basement playing loud music, or table tennis with his three moustached friends.

I spend a lot of time lying on my bed reading books for school. I memorise the names of every U.S. president and all the states, the rivers and the lakes. I read five novels and two plays. I learn seventy-nine new words. Margaret asks me if I’ve called my mum again (I’ve called only once since arriving) and when I tell her I haven’t, she tells me to do it ‘right away’.

I call her and we have a short conversation. When she finishes telling me about her volunteer Meals on Wheels job and who’s having a baby, I tell her that Margaret needs to use the phone and then I hang up.

Three days a week, my mum and dad drive a dirty van around the streets near our flat, delivering trays of sloppy, tepid food to the old and infirm.

Before the Meals on Wheels job my dad had two other real jobs. Once he worked at the dogs, the greyhound races, as a Tic Tac man and wore white gloves and communicated race results by gesticulating in a special hand-code. Before that, he worked on the roads, using a jackhammer to smash concrete all day long. From the roadwork job he developed ‘vibration white finger’, a vascular problem caused by gripping vibrating tools, which cut off his circulation, causing a blanching of his fingers.

Then one day my mum said to him, ‘Why don’t you sue your old boss for compensation and then deliver meals to the old folks with me?’ a sentence which my dad likes to quote and re-quote to friends, as a way, I suppose, of showing his gratitude for what he still regards as a stroke of genius on my mum’s part.

Now there are two of them collecting trashy hand-me-downs from the elderly who seem fond of saying ‘thank you’
by giving away egg-stained doilies, ornamental dogs without heads and hot-water bottles with teeth marks in them. Sometimes, I’m fairly sure, my parents even steal the odd object, such as kettles and toasters. Whenever we have something break down or explode in the flat, they seem to replace it as soon as they come home from work.

My mum used to work as a beautician and tells everybody she is an ex-model, but has no photographs to prove it (they were all stolen, she says). She has a decent sense of humour, though, except when she’s making bad-taste jokes about my dad’s ‘vibration white finger’, which I don’t wish to repeat.

Sometimes, when I feel lonely, I go outside, to the side of the house, to the window of Henry’s study. I creep up to the window and look inside. I crouch low to the ground and look through the blinds and watch him as he smokes his pipe. His eyes are worse than ever, and he wipes at them with a handkerchief to soak up whatever it is that’s coming out. His face is much older in repose, when nobody is around, much older without Margaret, with nothing to do but wait for what might happen next.