How the Light Gets In (26 page)

So many exclamation marks, I feel unwell. The one and only test Leona ever passed.

Mr Bell brings a dusty portable radio with him when he returns from the backyard shed where he makes the chairs we are sitting on. He sits with us in the lounge room and puts the radio on the floor by his boots.

Tinny music catches in the air between our shy words: a box of broken instruments shaken by a violent wind somewhere far away. The boys squint when they look at the radio, as though to hear better.

The small Christmas tree with its single strip of fairy lights flashes in the corner; dozens of small presents, wrapped, lie underneath.

One of Erin’s ex-boyfriends, who was a bikie, rode his bike on Christmas Day wearing antlers attached to his helmet. He also had a small plastic Christmas tree strapped to the passenger seat and a dozen gift-wrapped copies of his favourite novel in the panniers.

It drove me mad when I asked Erin what the book was and she said she didn’t have the foggiest idea. I was not surprised when the bikie threw her over for a woman who worked in a museum and liked books and history.

I stare at the Bells’ shabby Christmas tree and have a brief and irrelevant fantasy about a magic Christmas decoration
which is a beautiful hand-painted sled affixed to the end of a mechanical arm, run by electricity, of course, which orbits the tree for a few minutes every hour. The sled is pulled by a troop of reindeer, of course, with Santa crying ‘Ho, ho, ho’ and gaily throwing tiny gold-wrapped presents from his sack onto the floor, and these presents are, in fact, tiny chocolates which can be picked up and eaten whenever you feel like one.

‘Brian makes all the furniture in the house,’ says Mrs Bell.

‘Wow,’ I say and wish, once again, that the word hadn’t been invented.

Mr Bell raises his hands to flatten the tufts of grey hair on either side of his head. His hands are large and his fingers fat and calloused.

‘You’ll meet Mandy soon,’ says Mr Bell, looking at his watch. ‘What time you got?’ he asks Mrs Bell.

‘It’s after eight,’ she says.

‘She’ll be home from her fencing class soon,’ says Mr Bell.

‘I can’t wait to meet her,’ I say and as I say it a strange shudder travels from my coccyx to the middle of my back, then stops, panic over, as suddenly as it came.

It is cold tonight and the emptiness of this room surely makes the air colder still. The emptiness also causes everyone who speaks to sound too loud, as though there are tiny microphones hidden under the chairs.

I cannot sit still.

I look around. The boys seem comfortable in the hard-backed chairs and talk happily about school.

Mr Bell says, ‘You’ll come with us to visit the children’s grandparents on Christmas Day?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’d love to do that.’

Mrs Bell, whose eyes are large in her long and narrow face, lowers her voice and leans towards me, but the sound still
clatters around the walls, ‘We have a special surprise for you for Christmas Day.’

‘You shouldn’t get me anything,’ I say.

Mrs Bell looks across the room at her boys and I look across too. I make an effort to record the details: the colour of the children’s eyes, the shape of their mouths and the size of their ears. I would rather listen. I don’t want to think about what to say next. I don’t care whether I ever say anything witty again. This must be a better way to be. I want to listen and so I do. I sit and listen until it is nearly nine o’clock and I wonder why the children aren’t going to bed.

George has blobs of jam around his mouth and nobody does anything about wiping them away.

My hands are so cold they feel skinned alive and my toes feel as though they have joined together in a stiffened, woody block and can no longer be moved as individual toes. The Bells are still wearing light summery clothes. Mrs Bell is wearing a t-shirt and underneath I can see her big bra.

It is half past ten when Mandy arrives home, carrying foils, and head armour – which looks like the head of a giant white fly.

‘Hello everybody,’ she says, dropping a long black bag heavily on the floor.

I stand up to greet her but she does not look at me; instead she hugs the boys and kisses them on the cheek.

‘How are my favourite family?’ she says.

‘Hi, I’m Lou,’ I say. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’

‘Yeah,’ she says, smiling weakly, ‘it’s nice to meet you too.’

I shake her hand and when we are finished, she folds her arms across her chest. I notice that the irises are too high up in her eyes; there is too much white showing.

Suddenly, I realise that I do remember Mandy from the orientation camp.

She is much fatter now. What was once a small, perfect face,
framed by a neat blonde bob, is now mumpy and wan and folds of skin engulf her blue eyes. Her hair has grown and it hangs limply around her chin, perhaps to hide some of the flesh around her jowls.

During those hot orientation days in Los Angeles, I remember I was bored and wanted to play table tennis in the recreation room. Mandy and her mob of pretty friends sat around talking and eating lunch at a table.

I stood in the doorway.

‘My mother told me never to cross my legs. She never crossed her legs and she never had one varicose vein,’ said one of Mandy’s friends.

‘Yeah, my mother says the same thing. Don’t cross your legs if you don’t want to have any bad veins,’ said another.

A girl with a sandwich uncrossed her legs and pushed her long fat tongue out to greet the bread, as though she intended to lick it. I was revolted by that tongue and by the conversation and the sound of the chirpy voices of these pretty girls.

I walked into the room, took hold of one end of the table-tennis table and began to drag it across the floor. They looked at me and Mandy put her fingers in her ears, but I didn’t stop. The broken wheel screeched against the floor. I continued to drag the table.

One of them said, ‘Do you mind? We’re trying to have a con versation in here!’

I continued to drag the table across the floor. I dragged it all the way to the double gymnasium doors and then left it there, blocking the exit. It was Mandy who said, ‘Are you nuts or something?’

I didn’t look at any of them. I left the room by climbing out of a window near where they sat and fell hard on my arm.

Mandy and her friends wore scrunchies around their wrists so that they could make efficient ponytails with their thick
blonde hair during meals and sporting activities. They had all been water and snow skiing. They wore make-up, dieted and drank lots of water. Eight glasses a day. Their socks were white and stayed white; I examined them in the dormitory. Even the heels of their white socks were white. Like Bridget’s.

Mandy lifts George out of his seat and puts him on her knee. There is something strange about the way her hands run through his hair.

‘Hello, gorgeous,’ she says. ‘How was your day?’

George wraps his arms around her neck and giggles. ‘I didn’t have a day.’

Mandy’s voice is so full of spark, and so loud, it is almost violent. ‘Oh, but, Georgie, you
must
have had a day. You
must
have done something?’

George looks out from under Mandy’s mane of hair, at me.

‘I like Lou,’ he says.

Mandy looks at my face for the first time. ‘That’s great,’ she says.

‘Thanks, George,’ I say.

Mr and Mrs Bell are watching us, but their benign and curious faces show no concern at all. My throat is tight and my face is starting to go red.

‘Are you learning to fence?’ I ask Mandy, whose wobbly face is rubbing against George’s face with a kind of unabashed affection that doesn’t seem quite true.

‘I’ve been competing for seven years,’ she says, her nose pressed against George’s nose, acting as though she likes the way she looks while she does just about anything.

There is a faint smell of urine in the air. I wonder if it is coming from George’s pants.

‘That’s impressive,’ I say. ‘You must be good.’

Mandy squeezes George around the chest, and rocks him sideways, the way I’ve seen people do with children before.

I’ve never laid hands on a child.

‘I used to be better. I’ve put on a bit of weight in case you didn’t notice. It’s the fatty food.’

‘It’s the food in the school cafeteria,’ says Mrs Bell.

‘You don’t look like you’ve put on weight,’ I say, smiling hard at Mandy. She will not make eye contact so I have an idea. I will look carefully at her face, with a smile playing on my lips, and send her a message. I play the message in my head, send it over to her with my eyes:
You look good, Mandy. You’ll always look good.
Don’t be angry at me for being here
.

‘Nearly eight kilos,’ she says. ‘You
must
have noticed.’

Mr Bell stands.

‘How about a cocoa for everybody, as a special treat to welcome Lou?’

The boys leap out of their seats. George says, ‘I’ll help’ and Paul says, ‘Me too.’ Mandy and Mrs Bell follow them into the kitchen and I am left alone.

Tomorrow, somehow, I will get some cigarettes. After Christmas, I’ll give up.

It’s morning. George and Paul run down the hall to see me.

‘I’ll show you Mom and Dad’s big room,’ says Paul and he takes me in there.

The walls are covered in dozens of photographs of the boys, taken at yearly intervals, sitting in the chairs that Mr Bell makes. In every photograph they wear the same thing: a pair of overalls over a yellow t-shirt.

‘My dad sells chairs,’ says Paul, ‘and this is how he remembers them all.’

‘They’re beautiful photographs,’ I say. ‘You look beautiful.’

Paul jumps up and kisses me on the cheek. ‘You’re nice,’ he says. ‘You’re nicer than Mandy.’

George holds my hand and leads me into the kitchen.

Everybody is sitting around the table. There are flapjacks for breakfast. I should eat enough for the whole day, maybe even a few days, camel style, just in case there’s more green soup on the horizon. I am beginning to feel life’s atmosphere, or to feel that life has an atmosphere: a good mood that cannot be named, that goes missing when you are anxious.

I am ready for a good breakfast, followed by some games with the children.

Mandy has washed her hair and wears it in pigtails. She is also wearing splodgy red lipstick, the size of her mouth exaggerated, like a clown’s. Her teeth look orange.

‘Up at last,’ she says without looking at me. ‘Did you sleep well?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s a very comfortable bed.’

‘Good,’ she says as she uses a small spoon to scoop out a small amount of cereal from the bowl and guiding the spoon between her lips, the way women do in order not to ruin their lipstick.

‘I won’t eat pancakes,’ she says. ‘So you can have mine.’

She wants this to sound like a sacrifice, like a favour, but I know it has nothing to do with kindness and everything to do with her diet.

‘That’s very kind,’ I say. ‘Are you sure?’

She does not answer. I try to find her eyes so that I can look at them. I need to send her a message.

She will not look at me.

I decide to speak to the whole family. ‘I just want to say thanks to everybody for letting me stay and I want to say a special thank you to George for letting me have his room.’

No matter what I say, or how I say it, it never sounds quite real.

After washing the dishes I tell Mrs Bell that I’d like to go for a walk.

‘Would you like one of the children to show you where the store is? It’s about a mile down the road.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘I’m sure I’ll find it. Anyway, I feel like a nice long walk.’

‘Don’t get lost now.’

I buy my cigarettes from a café next to a twenty-four-hour petrol station. It is one of the dirtiest cafés I have ever seen, with plastic furniture coated in greasy bacon and petrol fumes and darkened plastic fruit hanging off the walls. But I am glad of its warmth. I order a coffee and take a copy of the local newspaper from the counter.

‘Have a seat,’ says the waitress.

I sit. She brings my coffee, offers me cream and then cleans some tables. She is petite and light-footed. She glides from the tables to the kitchen as though she is filled with helium. Her singing is tuneless.

‘Where are you from?’ she asks when she brings me a refill of coffee.

‘I’m living with the Bells, just up the road. Near the little bridge.’

‘I know the Bells,’ she says, excited. She sits down. ‘I used to baby-sit for them. But that was before I got this job. I hate it pretty much but it’s more money than sittin’ for babies.’

She speaks quickly. I mostly listen. I notice the colour of her eyes, the shape of her mouth and the size of her ears. But after a long time of listening to her, I am disappointed. My mouth aches with the effort to smile.

I want to talk to somebody I really know, to talk about something bigger. I want to talk to Lishny. I wish somebody
I loved and hadn’t seen for years would walk through the door, so that we could have a heartbreaking reunion. But when I try to name somebody that I would like to meet, I realise that I am somebody who could never feel that way about anybody and when I think about those TV reunions I wonder if there might be a distinct sub-species within the human race that is capable of this kind of joy. Or is it merely that cameras make people cry, and even I would do the same?

I get back to the house in time to be taken to an AA meeting in a nearby school hall. I say goodbye to Mr and Mrs Bell, who are both reading in the kitchen. ‘You’re a brave girl,’ says Mrs Bell and I flinch at the word girl.

My chaperone comes to collect me in his car. He’s a local high-school teacher. He’s about fifty and wears tinted spectacles.

At the AA meeting, the walls are decked with plastic holly and faded decorations. The meeting’s chairman wears a red Santa hat. The room is packed and full of smoke. There is an ashtray at both ends of each row of seats, but not everybody uses them to ash their cigarettes.

I ask for a cigarette and a man gives me five. My chaperone doesn’t tell me not to smoke. In fact, he says nothing, as though stunned. I join with most of the people smoking and use a polystyrene cup with some cold water in the bottom to ash my cigarettes.