The Apple Tart of Hope (12 page)

“Oh right,” I said, trying to sound uninterested, “and did you hear anything else?”

“Yes. I heard that everyone liked you enormously.”

“Yeah,” I said, “maybe some people did. Maybe they meant in the past, before everything changed. Anyway, it's easy for people to like you when you're dead. It's a pity none of them could see their way to liking me when it mattered to me, when I was alive.”

“You're still alive, Oscar. You're not dead. Had you forgotten?”

“Look, I don't want to talk about whether I'm alive or dead, and I don't want to talk about my old life. I don't want to talk about any of that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am ashamed,” I said.

In the weeks that followed, I tried to confront Paloma Killealy, but it didn't take a genius to figure out she was trying to avoid me. She and I were in the same year, in the same school. We walked along the same corridors, went through the same doors, ate in the same lunchroom. It seemed impossible that I wouldn't come face-to-face with her. But I hadn't—not since Oscar's mass. I could only assume she was deliberately avoiding me and I wouldn't have blamed her. I would have avoided myself too if I could have.

Now my only connection with Oscar was Stevie. He used to make me smile, particularly as he was the one person who kept believing that Oscar was still alive.

As the days went by, I felt the need to be close to all the gigantic hope that Stevie held inside his small body. Sometimes I'd call by, and Oscar's dad would let me into the house. But other times I'd go around there very late when I knew Stevie'd be in his room, with his candle always dancing in the window. I'd tap on the window and we could end up chatting there for hours.

It was nearly a month after I'd been home that my mum caught
me creeping back home on a school night, and naturally enough she wanted to know what I was doing, and where I had been and what I thought I was up to. And then before I had a chance to answer, she said it was too late even to think about having a proper conversation about it now, but next day, me and her and my dad were going to have to have a serious talk.

I snapchatted Stevie to say I was in trouble for sneaking out of my house, and he said he'd be the fall guy for me if that would do any good.

My mum said that my obsessive need to talk to Stevie was not good for either of us, and she told me that I needed to see the grief counselor at school, and that if I didn't set it up, she'd ring Mr. O'Leary herself, so I went okay, okay, I'll do it.

said the sign on the notice board outside the Lilac Room.

Mr. O'Leary and Mrs. Stockett both told me how helpful Katy Collopy was likely to be. She had been hired after Oscar had disappeared to help the students to “process their feelings” about the situation, and she'd already been a superb support to lots of people in the class, many of whom were understandably cut up about Oscar.

That watery noise was in my head again, this time accompanied by a kind of a banging, and even though I'd originally had no
intention of talking to any counselor or anybody else for that matter, the last thing I wanted was my mum coming into school and talking to people about me and my emotional condition.

In double chemistry, Mr. Grimes was acting as if life was supposed to be going back to normal, and everyone was getting ready to explore the heat-induced reactive properties of aluminum, using empty cans. People seemed disproportionately excited. Raymond Daly leaned over our preparation materials and whispered to me that Paloma Killealy had been the first to sign up for a session with Katy Collopy. I couldn't wait any longer after that, so I scraped back my chair and walked out of the classroom without asking permission. Nobody shouted after me or asked me where I thought I was going. I walked along the shining corridor that led through the push-bar double doors to the basketball court. I started to run across it, and straight to the Lilac Room to look at the sign-up sheet for myself. Raymond Daly had been right. Paloma's name was written carefully on the first line:

Even her signature was beautiful, tall, fluid and dreamy.

And then I saw her coming out, holding a tissue to her mouth, her head bent. I tried to get a proper look, seeing as I'd only ever seen her from a distance before now. She stood in front of me for a few seconds looking through me, and then she slipped off in her usual mysterious way, with a shadow of sadness falling across her annoyingly beautiful face.

I sat in the waiting chair staring after her as she disappeared. I wasn't going to shout
Hey, Paloma, Paloma come here, I want to talk to you
. Because I was feeling bad enough as it was.

Just then the door of the Lilac Room opened and Katy Collopy said, “Meg? Hello there, Meg. Come on in.”

Beanbags lolled around all over the place, and wicker shelves sat full of books with pictures of badly dressed children on them. The books had titles like
How Can I Be Me?
and
Talking to Your Teenager
.

It was kind of gloomy, and there was a cluster of electric fake candles on the shelf, their pretend flames pulsing away and throwing spooky little shapes on the walls.

Katy Collopy smiled a deliberate kind of a smile and slowly pulled at a huge red beanbag and then pushed it toward me with her foot. On it remained the full actual shape of Paloma Killealy.

“Okay, first, Meg, you need to relax, you need to get comfortable.” I sat with a gigantic crunch, to crush away the silhouette of that girl.

“Tell me,” she asked, after a huge, uncomfortable silence. “Did you know Oscar Dunleavy?”

“Did I know him? What do you mean did I know him?”

“I mean did you talk to him? Was he someone that you knew?”

“I am Oscar Dunleavy's best friend.”

“Oh,” she said, looking at a yellow notebook and flicking through it. “Were you?”

“Yes, I am, and the reason I'm here is to see if you might be able to help me figure out what kinds of things I need to do if I want to find him.”

“Now, Meg,” said Katy and her voice got deep and unexpectedly stern. “I'm not sure that would be a fruitful way to use our time. I think it would be better if you and I talked about what's going on in your head, what you're thinking, Meg, what you're feeling.

“The last thing I think you need is to go on a wild-goose chase for Oscar, because we all know that would be futile, don't we? So, Meg,
come on, I think it would be helpful for you to talk to me about your emotions.”

I looked into her face.

“Well, you know, Oscar's gone. Disappeared. And I am his friend, I mean I was, I mean, I am. I am the one who knew everything about him, but for some reason it's Paloma who everyone is worrying about and taking care of, like I'd never existed—like me and Oscar were some meaningless thing that hadn't signified anything. It's as if Paloma Killealy has been here forever and I haven't been here at all. And on top of that, she's moved into my house, my
room
and at night she goes to sleep in my
bed
.

“It was always me who'd been in that room. That's
my
window. Those were
our
conversations. They didn't belong to anyone else.”

I told Katy Collopy that I'd started to hear watery sounds in my head and how every night I'd dream about the bollard and the dripping bike and Oscar's sopping shoes. And sometimes I dreamed that the bollard was speaking. You know, saying something very quietly and that if only I could get near enough, I'd be able to hear.

With an elegant clearing of her throat she said that me hearing the watery noise and dreaming of the bollard represented something significant and understandable. She explained that the mystery of Oscar's final moments must be so important for me to try to understand that I had started to
wish
the stone, which had been the only witness to his anguish, could talk to me. And she said that sometimes when you wish for something very hard, it can kind of come true inside your own head, and it can seem real.

I told Katy Collopy that if her theory was correct, then a lot of other things would be coming true inside my head too and that they'd be a heck of a lot nicer than a big stone whispering things to me in the middle of the night.

“Were you still friends with him when he died?” she asked, still looking a bit confused.

“Look, first,” I said, “nobody has any proof that he's dead so I wish you'd stop saying that, okay? And, secondly, ask anyone in my class and they'll tell you that me and him are best friends. We've been best friends for basically years.”

“Gosh, all right, I'll take your word for it, so now go on, keep going, tell me what's on your mind.”

Katy was good-looking and she had perfect skin, and I suddenly got a strong feeling that no hint of loss had ever cast any pain into the bright corners of her life. And I looked into her clear eyes and the whites of them were really white, almost blue, and her eyelashes were sweepy and perfect, and I think it was something about those eyelashes that made me realize what a waste of time this talking was. Katy was never going to be able to help.

“Meg, I understand, I really do. Especially now that you've told me Oscar had been your best friend.”

“He
is
my best friend, I keep telling you. The two of us are really close. But then Oscar is everyone's friend. Speak to anyone in my class. They'll tell you the same things about him. They'll tell you how great he is, how everyone loves him, how there isn't a single person who doesn't like him. And it isn't only my class. He is the most popular boy in the whole school.”

A long silence swelled between us like a bubble.

She shook her head slightly and she smiled a sad, frowny kind of a smile.

“How long have you been away, Meg?” she asked me then, and I told her.

“And how often were you in contact with Oscar during that time?”

I told her every day at the beginning, but hardly at all at the end, and a fresh wave of secret guilt crashed over me, and I asked her why she was asking me so many questions.

“Because, Meg, none of this is tallying with the things I've been told about Oscar.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Oscar had become a desperately unhappy boy.”

“He wasn't unhappy. He was fine.”

“Oh dear,” she said, leaning forward on her elbows. “He was deeply troubled and depressed.”

“No he wasn't! He was happy and lighthearted, and full of joy.”

“Was he? Are you sure about that? The facts suggest otherwise.”

“The facts? What facts?”

“Motherlessness. Paternal unemployment. Sibling disability. Those things alone represent a big complicated soup of difficulty if you ask me.”

“Okay, when you put it like that, when you say those things together it sounds bad but . . . he told me everything. If he was going to
kill
himself, bloody hell, if he was going to do
that
, I know he would have talked to me, he would have told me about it first.”

“Can you really know that, Meg? I'm trying to get you to think rationally—to stop holding on to false hope when you need to try to come to terms with this. It's not helping you.”

I was sick of talking. I looked out of the window and tried to think about something else.

“Meg,” said Katy Collopy, clearing her throat again for another important announcement. “I think it's time that you knew about some of the things that happened after you left. People were treating Oscar extremely badly. I understand he was subjected to a certain amount of pressure. And Oscar was keeping a lot of things to himself. It's common
for teenage boys to keep their troubles out of sight—sealed inside themselves until they become too much to cope with. Don't you think he might have been putting his best foot forward—not telling people about the things that were bothering him because he didn't want people to be worried—because he wanted everyone to be happy?”