How the Light Gets In (20 page)

‘I wished we could meet again when I’m eighteen and you’re nineteen.’

‘I wished we could meet again too,’ I say, lying.

‘Oh my God,’ says James. ‘I’ll go mad waiting.’

‘I hope you do,’ I say.

‘Me too,’ he says. ‘Goodbye.’

I open the door and Flo takes me by the elbow.

‘Just let me see my room one last time,’ I say.

‘Well hurry up then,’ she says.

I begin to sob when I see how little remains in my room. There’s nought but a pile of letters tied up with string; they are all the letters and stories and short plays that I have sent to Margaret and Henry and James and Bridget. The rubbish bin is full of sweet wrappers and shop receipts. The bed has been stripped and the cupboard is bare. There is an oil burner on the desk, its small white candle purifying the room. I slam the door and go back downstairs.

Flo Bapes hands me two copies of a document and gets my signature. Margaret is clearing cups from the table. Flo has already called my mum and dad.

I am angry now. ‘Do I get to know what’s happening next?’

She tells me that my mum and dad have given their consent to have me placed with a new, temporary host-family. What happens to me next is up to her, she tells me, not Margaret or Henry, and certainly not me.

‘All right,’ says Flo, ‘we better get going.’

Henry puts his hand on his throat, and speaks softly, ‘You’re being taken to the home of an intermediate host-family a few miles from here and then you’ll be sent …’

‘Sorry, Henry, I’ll have to interrupt you there,’ says Flo, in
her best officious voice, concerned not to let too many cats out of the bag at once.

‘We don’t know what will happen from here. What happens next partly depends on Louise and partly on the rules which, as you will understand, I didn’t have enough warning to read, considering the very grave circumstances.’

Henry is angry now too, for having been put in his place by an ignoramus. He walks towards me, winks, and picks up one of my suitcases. ‘I’ll help you out to the car with these if that’s all right with the rules.’

‘Thanks,’ I say.

Margaret doesn’t come out to the car. She stands in the doorway, crying, holding a piece of paper to her chest. She doesn’t look at me as I leave. Henry waves at me from the kerb. I wave back, like the Queen waves, and wonder if he’ll get this terrible joke.

I sit in the back seat of a black car with one of the bearded men. Flo is driving and the other bearded man is in the front passenger’s seat. When we have driven a few blocks, Flo tells me that I’m going to Chicago to stay in a ‘hostel for wayward exchange students’, until a decision is made about my ‘long-term future’. She tells me again that my parents have given her permission to take custody of me and that I am now in her ‘charge and care’.

‘I thought I was going to stay with a new family or something?’

‘No,’ says Flo, ‘you’re going to stay in secure accommodation.’

She loves this.

‘You mean a prison,’ I say.

‘No, young lady. It’s secure accommodation.’

‘Then you lied to Margaret and Henry,’ I say.

‘They’ve suffered enough,’ says the bearded man sitting next to me.

We stop only once so that Flo and the bearded men can get some coffee and food. I don’t eat and don’t speak until we arrive, even though when it starts to snow I would love to tell somebody I’ve never seen snow before and how beautiful it looks.

We pull up outside a four-storey building in a busy city street in the heart of Chicago.

The entrance to the accommodation is next door to a pizza parlour. Flo gets my suitcases out of the boot and says goodbye to me on the kerb.

‘I’ll be keeping in touch with Margaret and Henry,’ she says, as though the three of them are life-long friends, ‘and if you have anything you’d like to say to them I suggest you put it in writing.’

‘Whatever,’ I say and hear Bridget’s voice in my head.

The two bearded men let themselves in and take me up the three flights of stairs to my dormitory. On the way up we pass through a big room with barred windows and about ten teenagers sitting on couches.

‘This is where we leave you,’ says the man with the smaller beard who sat next to me in the car.

‘Good luck,’ says the other.

I sit up on the bottom bunk in my small dormitory, which has two bunk beds, a small cupboard, a barred window and a single chair. It’s a dark, cold room.

One of the accommodation staff comes in.

‘Hi, my name’s Gertie Skipper,’ she says. She’s short and thin and looks about eighty.

‘Hi,’ I say.

She gives me a cheese sandwich on a small white plate, tells me why I am here and some of the rules.

The essential rules for wayward exchange students are as follows: I am not permitted to leave the accommodation unless accompanied by a chaperone. She will keep my allowance. There are weekly excursions to tourist attractions and, depending on one’s religion, there are chaperoned trips to nearby churches, synagogues and mosques. Other than that, I will leave the building only to attend various rehabilitation appointments with doctors, psychiatrists, counsellors, and, if I am lucky, for interviews with prospective new host-families.
Bedtime is ten o’clock and the kitchen roster is on the notice-board in the common-room downstairs.

Gertie sits on my bed and pats my leg.

‘You’ll be staying here until you are either sent home to Sydney or another suitable family is found for you. What happens will depend on your progress.’

‘What do you mean by progress?’ I ask.

‘Your rehabilitation, I suppose you could call it. Your counsellor will tell you more about this when you meet him tomorrow.’

One by one the other inmates – there are eleven of them – are brought to my door and introduced to me.

They stand in the doorway and say ‘Hello’ then leave. I sit up with my back against the wall with the uneaten cheese sandwich on a plate resting on my legs.

I’ll be sharing with three girls: Miranda, Rachel and Veronique. I’ll find out why they’ve been sent here later.

Gertie tells me that she and the other staff are here to help me and that I should take a few quiet moments to eat my snack and unpack my bags.

‘When you’re ready, why don’t you come downstairs and mingle with the others.’

She makes it sound like a holiday camp.

‘Thanks,’ I say.

Gertie leaves and shuts the door behind her.

I begin to unpack, but when I feel like I might start crying, I stop for a moment to look out the barred window at the busy street below. I realise how much I’ve missed being in a big and noisy city. Perhaps if I could live here, things would be completely different.

I lie down to sleep, but can’t sleep, so I stare up and count the springs under the bunk bed above me. I let myself get colder and colder. I lie like this for what seems like hours,
thinking about how nothing feels real, then feeling sorry for myself for being in such a cold, dark room.

I am about to go downstairs when there’s a knock on the door. A tall, skinny boy with shoulder-length black hair comes into the room.

‘Hi,’ he says, ‘my name’s Lishny. I’m from Russia.’

He has a very big nose.

‘I’m Lou,’ I say. ‘I’m from Sydney. Australia.’

He sits on my bunk bed.

‘I just arrive two days ago,’ he says. ‘Can I help you to unstuff?’

‘You mean unpack.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s okay,’ I say. ‘I can do it myself.’

I begin to unpack. He stares at my pile of books.

‘Can I check at your reading materials?’

There’s something fishy about Lishny’s struggle with English. I wonder if he’s been sent to spy on me: to find out if I’m remorseful.

‘Yeah, all right,’ I say.

He scatters all my books on the floor and rummages through them like he’s starving and the books are loaves of bread.

‘What do you read?’ I ask, standing with my back against the window, my arms folded.

He is flicking through the pages of one of my books and doesn’t answer.

‘What kind of books do you like?’ I ask.

He screws up his face. ‘What a banal question.’

I agree.

‘I agree,’ I say. ‘You’re right.’

He smiles. What a charming smile. I smile back.

He points to the cover of my collection of short stories by Gogol.

‘This is one of the worsted translutions of Gogol I have ever witnesses,’ he says.

‘Is it?’

I have copped on to his fake bad English routine and I think he knows I have, but I don’t want to stop him speaking in his silly pidgin. It’s cheering me up, which is, perhaps, what he intends.

‘Sure. It’s really dreedfoul.’

‘I see,’ I say with a grin on my face that tells him I’ve definitely copped on to him.

He flicks the pages and rants in Russian.

I nudge his back with my foot.

‘Yes?’ he says. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

I smile at him. He smiles back.

‘So, doctor translution,’ I say. ‘What exactly is wrong with this book, then?’

‘If you would like to sit down, I will explete.’

‘Explain.’

‘Sure. If you are so creezy about this creezy Russian odour.’

‘Crazy, not creezy,’ I say. ‘Author, not odour.’

‘But why? You can say this creezy odour stinks.’

We start laughing and it is hard to stop.

‘Your English is perfect, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘This pidgin rubbish is just some kind of quaint gimmick.’ My voice sounds formal and forced. I wish, sometimes, that I could remain silent but silence is an art I know nothing about. I must add silence to my list of things to get better at.

‘You might be right.’

I take a pillow off the bunk and hit him on the head.

‘Don’t hit me! I’m quaint,’ he says. He takes a pillow from the other bunk and hits me back. ‘I’ve never been quaint before.’

When we stop playing with pillows, we each sit on a bunk, under the blankets, and Lishny tells me why the translation
of Gogol is no good. He says it captures none of Gogol’s irony.

‘I’ll go to my dorm and get my copy and show you,’ he says.

Lishny takes ages to come back and when he does, he not only has his Russian copy of Gogol but two enormous pieces of chocolate cake. He holds a piece in each hand. He has a smear of chocolate on the end of his nose.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I was getting really hungry.’

‘There’s a party downstairs for Gertie’s sixtieth birthday. Do you want to go down and join in?’

I can hear tinny music, the way music sounds when an old tape is playing. There’s some talking too and a bit of laughter, but it sounds flat and boring. I hate people in groups.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’d rather stay here.’

‘Me too.’

We eat our cake with our fingers and talk about books. It is such a relief to be talking to someone who isn’t an idiot.

Gertie comes to check on me. She stands in the doorway, holding a clipboard, and tells me that I’ll need to come downstairs soon, for dinner and to sign some papers and to have my induction session.

I thank her and she leaves.

When she’s gone, Lishny tells me that this so-called hostel is really a prison and that the chaperones are really guards. He tells me that it’s partly run by the Organisation and mostly run by the immigration department and the police.

‘They say the bars on the windows and the locks on the doors are to stop us from doing ourselves harm, but it’s really about making sure we don’t escape and make ourselves at home in this allegedly wonderful and free country.’

When it gets dark we don’t turn the light on.

Lishny comes over and sits on my bunk and we talk until it’s too cold to stay still.

‘I feel like going downstairs,’ I say. ‘It’s freezing in here.’

‘It’s freezing all over this building. A polar bear would think it was too cold.’

We laugh.

‘Why are you here?’ I ask.

‘I can’t talk about it,’ he says. ‘I’m being questioned by the police and forbidden to discuss it.’

‘Oh.’

‘And what about you? What is your crime?’

‘I drank too much,’ I say.

‘You should get the hiccups from drinking too much. Not a prison sentence.’

Lishny and I go down to the common-room where the others are watching TV and playing board games. There are two couches, four armchairs and a small square table.

A Christmas tree sheds its needles in the corner by the barred window and snow adheres like breadcrumbs to the frozen glass.

Lishny and I sit on the end of one of the couches. One of the other inmates sits on the floor by the wall next to the only heater in the room. He has one trouser leg rolled up to the knee and holds his bare leg close to the heat. He scratches at his shin, which is covered in scabs and fresh welts; blood trickles into his socks.

‘Why can’t they give him something for that?’ I say. ‘He’s covered in sores.’

‘Maybe he has something to help him but he doesn’t want to use it.’

We sit and talk until a bell rings for dinnertime, then we gather around the kitchen table to eat stew. Gertie and one other guard, Phillip Tanzey – a medical student who works here part time – sit with us through dinner. The other inmates talk about the snow and pop stars and film stars, and excursions
they’ve been on, and other places in Chicago they’d like to visit. Nobody talks about incarceration or wanting to be freed.

‘What percentage of inmates end up being sent home?’ I ask.

Phillip puts his knife and fork down and wipes his hands on a napkin.

‘You’re not an inmate and I don’t know what the percentage is,’ he says, ‘but probably more than half. But lots want to go home. There are lots of complicated reasons.’

Gertie smiles at me.

‘Don’t you worry,’ she says, ‘it’s early days for you yet. You just settle in and we’ll cross that bridge …’

‘When we come to it,’ I say. ‘God, I hate clichés.’

‘Me too,’ says Lishny. ‘I hate and avoid them like the plague.’

Lishny and I smile at each other. Nobody else has got the joke.

One of the other inmates, Mike, from England, speaks with his mouth full.

‘Do you know about the points system yet?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘You start with sixty points and you lose two points every time you give cheek or swear or miss a meal or don’t make your bed or talk after lights out.’

Phillip wipes his hands on a napkin again.

‘Mike, you know it’s not that simple. Lou, we’ll talk about this more after dinner.’

I wonder how many points I’ve already lost.

After dinner, I stay in the kitchen with Gertie and Phillip. They close the door and take me – point by point – through the induction program. At the end of this long lecture, Gertie asks me to sign a form. I’m agreeing to be sent home unless a new host-family is found. As I sign it, I wonder whether I might be able to escape.

Lishny and I sit together on the floor behind the couch huddled under blankets he has pulled from his bunk.

Tonight, there are three guards on duty, and one of them, Lily Beesman, who arrived after dinner, is on her way over to talk to me.

‘Hello, I’m Lily.’

‘Hi,’ I say.

We shake hands.

‘You’re not supposed to be on the floor,’ she says, crouching down. ‘You’ll get a kidney infection. You should be sitting up on the couch.’

Lishny has told me that Lily was once a kindergarten teacher. She says she has enlarged kneecaps from years of bending to talk to children. Her tall, waistless body is roughly made of three segments, with a strange bulge in the middle. She looks like an enormous finger.

‘Why does it matter,’ I say, ‘if we sit on the floor?’

‘Well, I suppose it’s all right,’ she says, standing up and dusting her swollen knees.

Lishny and I spend the rest of the night talking and laughing. I find out that he’s only just turned sixteen and that two months ago he won a chess tournament in Seattle. He wants to be a GM.

‘What’s a GM?’ I ask.

‘A grand master. I made it to the semi-finals when I was fourteen at Sudak in the Crimea. I lost because my end game sucks. When I go home I will work on it.’

I wonder what it’s like where he lives and whether I could go and stay with him.

It’s my second day. I didn’t sleep at all last night and couldn’t turn on the light to read. The door to the common-room was
bolted shut so I couldn’t go in there to watch TV.

All the other inmates have been taken on an excursion to see a movie, with Phillip and Lily as chaperones. I have to stay because at three o’clock I have an appointment with Rennie Parmenter, the counsellor.