How the Light Gets In (9 page)

It’s another Saturday, and the last weekend before school starts. Margaret wakes me at eight o’clock by bursting through the door without knocking.

‘Hey, lazybones,’ she says. ‘Get up! We’re leaving for the game in ten minutes.’ Her voice is harsh.

I pull the sheet over my head and wonder what to do. I have spent the night in a terrible state of fear. Woken suddenly at three a.m. after a violent dream, and unable to sleep again, I spent the next five hours in a mood so black it was as though I was at the mouth of a dark cave, a cliff beneath my feet, a small gust of wind playing at my back, pushing me forward, pulling me back.

When Margaret pulls the curtains open and stands over the bed, I remember the dream that woke me.

A man is lying across a table and another man has cut him down the middle with a pair of scissors; a deep but bloodless cut from neck to groin. The man stands on the table, undoes his zip and urinates into the other man’s wound. Both men are versions of my dad.

Margaret tugs at the sheet and I wrench it back.

‘I feel sick,’ I say. Her voice is sharp and I would like to know why. It is as though she has seen inside my mind.

‘Are you sure you’re not just being lazy?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘I want to go to the game. I’ve always wanted to
go to a real baseball game.’

She doesn’t believe me.

‘Let me have a look at you,’ she says.

I drop the sheet and squint into the harsh white light.

‘I’ll get the thermometer,’ she says.

Margaret’s voice, and the way she wants to tear the covers from my body, reminds me of a nurse who pressed her knuckles hard into my skull because I asked for more pills.

It was about two years ago and I had been taken to the emergency room in a taxi, suffering from another bout of mysterious and terrible headaches. I called the nurse back three times because she wouldn’t give me anything for the pain. The third time, instead of using the red buzzer at the end of the wire, I screamed out for her.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she snapped. ‘You’d think somebody was trying to murder you.’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I’m in a lot of pain.’

The nurse made a fist of her hand and rammed her knuckles into my skull, a kind of surrogate punch, the closest she could get to hitting me without being accused of assault. She left the room then and came back with the pills.

It was a public hospital, full of poor people without private health insurance and plenty of teenage junkies looking for pills in place of heroin.

My sisters were sitting on the end of my bed watching daytime TV. Both of them scrawny and slutty, wearing jeans so tight that when they walked into the room you could see the outlines of their fannies.

Margaret takes my temperature and it turns out that I do have one. Only a slight one, but enough to change the tone of her voice.

‘Can I get you anything?’ she asks, the back of her hand pressed lightly against my forehead.

‘Maybe a few pain-killers, ‘I say. ‘Some pethidine, maybe?’

She takes her hand away, frowns at me, then leaves the room, which radiates with unfriendly light.

A little later Henry comes in carrying a breakfast tray with eggs, toast, cereal and coffee and after he puts it down on my bedside table, he turns off the light and closes the curtains. It is a struggle not to clap my hands together with delight. The nightmare’s residue has long worn off and I feel calm. Sitting up in bed in the dark like this, with Margaret and Henry standing over me, I feel the opposite of skinless, the opposite of my usual nervous state. I feel quite wonderful, in fact, especially when Margaret tidies my blankets, tucking them in around my hips, her firm hands jutting in quickly under my thighs.

‘We think you should eat something,’ says Henry.

‘Do you want one of us to stay home?’ asks Margaret, her voice so kind I nearly change my mind about not going.

‘No, no,’ I say. ‘You’ve been looking forward to this game for ages.’

Henry looks at his watch.

‘Oh well,’ he says, looking at Margaret, ‘sometimes you catch fish, and sometimes you don’t. If you’re sick and need looking after, that’s just how it is.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Don’t stay home.’

I want them to leave immediately so that I can drink the coffee from the perfect white cup on the perfect lacquered tray.

Henry closes the door and Margaret sits on the bed.

‘Lou,’ she says, ‘I know you don’t feel well, but we’ve been wanting to talk to you and we had been hoping to do it today.’

‘Yes,’ I say, my stomach dipping.

‘We need to know whether there’s anything troubling you. You’ve been acting a little strangely.’

‘You seem a bit on edge,’ says Henry. ‘Is there anything you’d like to talk about?’

I am desperate for Margaret to go back to where she was only a few moments ago, straightening my blankets, her hands under my thighs, smiling, running her hand just once along the soft down on the side of my face, lifting a glass of water to my lips. I redden suddenly with desire and memory: part pleasure, part confusion, a taste in my mouth of a bad ham sandwich. I wish that right at this moment I could be treated with the kind of unreserved love dished out by intelligent and warm parents to a beautiful first child.

‘No,’ I say. ‘What do you mean?’

Henry leans against the door like a security guard, and at once my usually airy white room feels dank and stingy, robbed of breath, like a gloomy locker room.

‘We’ve been noticing that since we returned from the trip you’ve seemed quite withdrawn.’

‘Oh,’ I say, relieved that this is all it is. I had worried they might know about the cigarettes or the gin. I want to drink my coffee but also want to look too sick to drink it.

‘Maybe I’m just tired. When the weather isn’t so hot I’ll be better.’

Margaret puts her hand on my knee and when I flinch, she moves her hand to the bun of hair coiled on her head, as though to stop it from leaping off.

‘James says you’ve been very rude to him since we got back. He says you don’t speak to him in a civil way.’

‘Really?’ I say.

Henry brings a chair over to the bed and sits in it. He seems not to want to say what he has to say. He looks at Margaret before he begins, like an actor looking to his prompt.

My food is going cold.

‘Lou, it’s going to become a serious problem if you can’t get along with our children, especially James. It was his idea …’

‘Well,
and
ours,’ says Margaret quickly, ‘but James was particularly looking forward to you coming to live with us. He has wanted us to get an exchange student for a long time.’

What happens next happens without any forethought; as though my body, injured by Margaret and Henry’s words, has taken over my mind.

‘I bet he was,’ I say, ‘I bet the fucking creep was looking forward to me coming.’

I take the cup of coffee and throw it against the wall behind Henry’s head. I realise that this is what I have done only when I see brown liquid running down the wall. The idea of grin-faced, oily James; the idea that he has spoken in hard-done-by tones about me, that he has complained, that he has made trouble, makes my arms burn with rage.

Margaret gets off the bed and moves backwards towards the door. Henry gets up out of his seat, slowly, and stands, mute. I know I should apologise, take it back, but when Margaret and Henry simply stare at me and then at each other as though I am a lunatic, I cannot stop myself from making things worse.

‘Don’t look so shocked,’ I say. ‘You must know it’s true.’

Margaret is suddenly crying and I feel absolutely nothing but curiosity. It’s interesting how people cry – I think – interesting how when something awful happens it doesn’t feel real.

Henry wants the scene to end immediately. He has no interest whatsoever in more information, or any kind of resolution, good or bad; no interest in any confession or apology. He puts his hand into the small of Margaret’s back and guides her out the door and onto the landing. They talk in whispers for a while and Margaret is no longer crying. I cannot hear what they are saying. I wait for them to come back but they don’t.

About ten minutes later the Mercedes pulls out of the driveway and the Hardings are gone. I have the house to myself for the whole day.

I take a shower in the ensuite in Henry and Margaret’s bedroom, use some of Margaret’s perfume, try some make-up and stand naked in front of the full-length oval mirror in their beautiful bedroom. I give myself the creeps by imagining Margaret and Henry changing their mind about the baseball game, coming home and bursting into the room. They would see my bare back and my reflection in the mirror and I would turn and face them, or not turn to face them, and do what I can never do – stare at them through the mirror – the way some women do in bathrooms when they hold comfortable conversations with each other, about nothing.

I wear Henry’s dressing gown untied and lie on the bed. I sleep for a while, in a way that I can never sleep in a bed that’s my own. I look at the books they each have by the side of the bed, read a few pages of each, but cannot concentrate. I go to my room and get my collection of Gogol short stories and read some of them. I stand by the open window, daring myself to lean out bare-breasted. I change my mind. This is not my idea, but an idea Erin and Leona have planted in me. I close the dressing gown and look at the clouds: three dimensional, yet flat, hard yet empty, capable of dissolving in an instant.

Next I go to James’ room. I lie on his bed and smell his unabashed smell. I don’t sleep there and the blue walls make me uneasy. I go through his drawers and find a birthday card from somebody called Isabella, which says, ‘Dear James, You are such a great friend. I hope I know you forever, Love Isabella, with lots of kisses.’ There’s no date on the card, but I suspect that it is a few years old. It makes me cringe.

Bridget’s room is pink and has photographs stuck all over the walls; neat, in frames. Many are pictures of her standing in gangs of beautiful girls and boys. In every group photograph, she is the only girl without a boy’s arm wrapped around her middle or draped over her shoulder. I sit at her dressing table and open a tube of pink lip-gloss.

Bridget has a make-up mirror with three facets labelled Day/Evening/Office, which swivel so that you can pull one to the front and allow the others to slip behind. Each mirror is lit for a different setting: bright and natural for Day, subdued and pink for Evening and dully fluorescent for Office. I don’t understand what she cares about at all.

When I have been alone in the house for several hours, the only thing I can think to do is lie on the couch. I’m not in the mood to drink, so I take some gin from a bottle in the liquor cabinet and put it in a picnic flask for later.

I go to the supermarket and buy some cigarettes and smoke in the garden until my chest burns and I feel dizzy. I fall asleep on the couch and wake with an ear so squashed and sore that I wonder for a moment if somebody has belted me up while I was sleeping.

I make two cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches, go to my room and read some more books for school.

At seven o’clock, when I hear a car pull up outside, I close my curtains and undress for bed. I spend the next few hours listening to the sounds a family makes in a large and beautiful house; the noises of a family as they must have been before I arrived: the unselfconscious and peaceful sounds of doors opening and closing, chairs scraping on polished boards, a microwave beeping, names being called out and answered, a TV turned up too loud then turned down, a fridge door opened and closed, bathroom taps running and toilets flushed. I listen to all this with great concentration and remote sadness,
as though it were a radio play.

I don’t leave my room, except to use the bathroom.

It’s Sunday morning and time for the Harding family breakfast. I have slept badly and worry about facing Margaret and Henry. My head is full of sour, persistent thoughts.

Last night I read a letter from Erin. She writes, amongst other things:

I don’t reply to Erin’s letters. I don’t reply to any of their letters: Mum’s, Dad’s or Leona’s. They have all become shreds. I have written only one letter, a special letter – full of lies – to my English teacher, Mrs Walsh.

One day – a winter’s Sunday – Mrs Walsh was in the same train carriage as me. I was surprised to see her using public transport and didn’t want her to see me at all. I was with Leona
and Erin and three of their male friends; all three of them dirty with tattoos, and drinking stubbies of beer.

We were making noise, shouting obscenities. Mrs Walsh made a special detour half way up the carriage to say hello to me.

I was sitting apart from the others with an unlit cigarette between my lips, flicking it up and down with my teeth. She asked me how I was and congratulated me on my most recent assignment, for which I’d received ninety-six per cent. Then she looked at Erin and said,
sotto voce
, ‘Your intelligence is useless to you. You are clearly destined to fly economy class for the rest of your life.’

The train stopped and she got off.

I have written Mrs Walsh a tremendous letter; my only letter. I described an approximation of the contents of the colour brochures I saw advertising the benefits of this international exchange-student program: boys and girls in canoes on sparkling rivers, boys and girls rehearsing in full costume for a Chekhov play, families sitting together on a bleacher eating hot dogs at a baseball game, and a happy party of exchange students wrapped in the flags of their respective countries singing and dancing in the park.