The Apple Tart of Hope (5 page)

He took a bite. And he closed his eyes and after another minute or two he said, “That, my goodness, that is quite something.”

“See,” I said, and I started to feel relieved, and proud and happy.

“Oh my gosh,” said Barney, “did you really make this yourself? I haven't tasted anything like that since, since . . . I've never tasted anything like this before. This is . . . why it's
sublime
.”

“I know,” I said.

Homer's mood had totally changed and he was beside himself with the kind of delight that dogs communicate by shaking their entire bodies and rushing in and out between people's legs.

Meg and I had a slice too, and we even gave a little to Homer. We sat munching and smiling and there was that comfortable feeling that sometimes happens when there's no need for conversation.

A wild splash of sunshine poured across the sea from the island and everything was flooded by a golden glow. I looked at my phone. We'd been there for hours longer than it had seemed. I'd be completely murdered if my dad found out that I was out of bed, not to mention out of the house, at the pier, talking to strangers and eating tart.

“You take the rest home with you,” I said to Barney, “—it's yours.”

“Oh dear boy, thank you very much indeed. I do think I shall be off. And I suggest the time is long gone for you two to get back under your covers. I feel I've done quite enough in keeping you awake in these small hours.”

We shook hands and smiled at each other.

“You're going to be okay,” I said to him and he said, “Yes, yes, in point of fact, I daresay I will.”

And Meg and I grabbed our bikes and we both headed up the lane.

I made her wear my shoes on the way back, which were too big for her.

“Oscar, has anyone ever told you how strange you are?”

“Yes. You. Practically every day.”

“Well, that's because you are.”

“Makes me more lovable, doesn't it? Admit it,” I said, and I pushed her gently with my shoulder and she said, “Yeah right, sure thing.”

We went back to our houses and we waved to each other from our rooms.

“What am I going to do without you, Oscar?”

“You'll be fine,” I answered. “You could probably do with some time away from me. I'm a pain in the neck. You're always saying so.”

“You're right,” she said. “It'll be great to have you out of my hair for a few months . . . Oscar, seriously though.”

“What?”

“Stay in touch, will you? Please?”

“Of course I will.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, I promise.”

“Good, because I'm really going to miss you.”

It was hard to keep up with Oscar. Take that night we first met Barney. One minute Oscar was sitting at the window, swinging his legs as usual, and the next minute he was flinging himself out of the window and doing these trapeze-artist moves down the cherry tree, armed with an apple tart. And then he was gone, a silver streak in the night, his feet a blurry circle.

Oh bloody hell, I'd thought, as I'd got my own hoodie on, pulled the window to its fully open position and launched myself at the tree, as Oscar had done. And like Oscar, I'd practically fallen out of it, except that the branches had helpfully broken my fall. I'd scrambled to my feet and tiptoed toward the garage, whose door had creaked agonizingly loudly as I'd opened it to grab my own bike, hoping that my parents weren't going to wake up.

“Oscar,” I had said under my breath. I could see him, by now far off, a flash of light bobbing slightly in the distance like he was floating on a choppy sea.

“Oscar, Oscar, Oscar,” I whispered again, heading as fast as I could in the direction of the pier. That's something I've got used to
doing, whispering his name under my breath in my head like that, over and over again.

“This is an apple tart,” Oscar had said solemnly to Barney that night as if it was the answer to everything, and as if it contained a million explanations of its own.

“But it's not an ordinary apple tart. It's the apple tart of hope. After you've taken a bite, the whole world will look almost completely different. Things will start to change and by the time you've had a whole slice you'll realize that everything is going to be okay. ”

And when Barney took a bite, his face did change. I'm not claiming there was anything magic about his tarts but I will say they tasted great.

“You keep an eye on the dog,” Oscar whispered to me, “and I'll have a bit more of a chat with Barney.” I called the dog over to me and sat patting him while Oscar and Barney talked for a while and though I couldn't hear everything they said, after a while, I could hear them laughing. Oscar's chuckle echoed toward me and then off over the sea, followed by the old man's low, wheezy guffaw, which sounded something like relief or liberty. At least it was a surprisingly cheery kind of a sound, which made me feel something that I could not precisely name—something comforting I guess. A nice warm kind of a thing, which was handy as well as nice, considering how I was standing in my bare feet, wondering why I was there at all, with the ends of my PJ bottoms feeling muddy and damp.

“No offense, but I didn't expect him to have such a nice voice,” I'd said after we'd said good-bye to Barney and were heading home.

“Perhaps that's because you haven't spoken to many people like him before.”

I'd never even
met
anyone like Barney before.

It was like that when I hung out with Oscar—always doing something new. Thinking in a fresh way. Meeting someone different.

Oscar had acted as if his apple-tart strategy was the most normal, unremarkable thing ever. He didn't seem to realize that he was out of the ordinary. If anyone else in the entire world
had
thought of baking an apple tart from scratch, and if by the same miracle they saved another human being in the way that Oscar just had, they would probably look triumphant or at least a bit smug or self-satisfied. But Oscar had the same plain look on his face.

And lying in my bed that night, I thought about the trip to New Zealand, and how near it was getting, and how excited I should be feeling, and I asked myself why I so desperately didn't want to go.

The truth tumbled on top of me right then like a marshmallowy sackful of soft sweet simple things. The feeling was colorful and clear and gentle and full of certainty and it pummeled me gently inside and out, and I understood. I understood these battles I'd been having with my parents and why an adventure away from Oscar felt like such a terrible thing.

I didn't want to leave him. I didn't want to sit by a new window in a strange house in a foreign country and not be able to talk to him. Oscar was the reason. He was the reason I wanted to stay.

Our departure date got even closer, of course, and then because you can't hold things back, it arrived. It was very early and I was still in bed, hoping for some disaster to happen that would mean we didn't have to go, when Oscar's familiar tap, tap, tapping came at the window.

I rolled out of bed with a thump and hobbled over to the window, getting ready to say the good-bye that I didn't want to say. Oscar wasn't there. Instead, a patchy smudge of condensation was on the window as if someone had breathed on it, and when I pulled the
window open the first thing I felt was a tiny familiar gust of cinnamony sweet-smelling warm air rising into my face. A rope and two pulleys had been constructed between our houses.

And swinging slightly on a little suspended shelf—in a box made of the same white cardboard I'd seen him carry to the pier that night—sat one of Oscar's apple tarts. It had a golden baked letter
M
right in the middle and a tiny pastry airplane with pastry clouds around it and a little pastry smiley face. And a particular smell surrounded me, the one you get when butter and sugar and spices have been mingled into a single thing and cooked in a hot oven.

I could hear my mum storming up and down stairs. I could hear my dad's voice, tense and grouchy. The phone kept ringing and my parents kept roaring at each other to answer it. The air fizzed with a kind of prickly energy that happens when people have been bombarded with a relentless campaign of resistance and are now filled with uncertainty about a big decision they've made that's too late to back out of.

I pulled the tart indoors from its little swinging shelf, took it downstairs and put it on the kitchen table.

“Where did that come from?” Mum asked, stopping suddenly and gazing at the golden raised pastry.

“Oscar,” I said as if that explained everything. When my dad saw the
M
and the clouds and the airplane and the smiley face, he smiled too.

And in a series of enchanted slow-motion movements, the three of us got ready to eat the tart. My dad lifted three plates out of the cupboard, I put the kettle on for tea and my mum rummaged around for a knife. Carefully, she placed a crumbly appley sweet slice in front of each of us.

A new feeling settled on the room—a feeling that didn't have any resentment or stress in it. And as the pastry melted in our mouths, other things seemed to melt too, like misgivings and doubts and the things that had made us grumpy and withdrawn.

The shadows of our uncertainty seemed to disappear.

I know that possibly sounds a bit peculiar, but after each of us had taken a few bites, all of a sudden, everything looked different.

Something good and open-minded started waking up inside my head, and I surprised even myself by making a short speech about how much I admired my parents' adventurous spirits and how I was determined to make this a worthwhile trip for all of us and how I was going to try to be much nicer about the whole plan.

Mum and Dad had looked at each other and then turned to me and said how good this was of me and how mature and how decent. And then both of them gave me a warm sweet apple-tart hug.

“I mean honestly,” Mum said later. “Is there a single other teenager you know in the world who'd go to such elaborate lengths to make and deliver something like that—who'd notice how busy and stressed we have been and how it's been quite a while since we've had anything homemade? So exquisitely baked! He must have made that pastry himself. That's very unusual indeed. And such thoughtful, appropriate, carefully cut out motifs on the top! There's really no one like him.”

“No,” I said, “there isn't.”

After that, getting ready to leave stopped feeling like a big negative chore and began to feel more like a celebration.

“Be sure to say thank you to Oscar for that tart,” my mum had said, looking kind of mystified and happy, while Dad had nodded dreamily in the background.

“Okay, I will,” I said.

Who would've guessed that something so specific, so definite, so full of butter and sugar would have been the answer to my fears? It turns out, though, that Oscar's tart was the solution. Such a simple thing.

Oscar said that now that I was committed to the trip, it was going to be better than even he'd predicted. As soon as I arrived, everything was going to be instantly fantastic—I was going to have a wonderful time and it was all going to work out perfectly brilliantly.

But along with these new warm feelings, there was something else too. The thing that had been haunting me swelled up inside me again, and I couldn't keep it to myself any longer, which is often a time, I have found, when it is important to write something down.

Dear Oscar
,

I don't know how to say this any other way, but, you see, I need to explain something. I can't stop thinking about that night when you rescued Barney with your tart—and how good and kind I realize you've always been. It wasn't until this morning when you sent me an apple tart of my own that I finally knew what it is that I have to tell you
.

The timing is pretty terrible, but, you see, the reason I haven't wanted to go away is because I've wanted to stay here, and the reason I've wanted to stay here is because of you
.

I've nothing against New Zealand or anything but because of how I feel, specifically about you, the whole world looks different
.

I don't know whether it's because everything has got darker or lighter. I guess that depends on how you feel about me which is, I hope, the same
.

So anyway, look, you've convinced me that I should, as you say, “embrace the adventure” so that is what I have decided to do. It was the taste of your apple tart that finally made up my mind to give this my all. But I need to know you'll be here when I come back
.

I love you, Oscar Dunleavy
.

I've been falling in love with you since the day we first met
.

I need to have some idea about whether you feel the same way about me. Send me a sign. Anything will do
.

Love
,