It was the year when Kat and I got noticeably closer, and the spring of her first as yet ineffectual quarrels with her parents. To see us together at school, laughing or whispering along with Dianne, with whom I shared my newly acquired friend as a matter of course, was a common sight. But at some stage this companionship, restricted up to now to recess times, no longer satisfied Kat.
One day she appeared at the high front entrance to Visible, a little face with bright red cheeks. “You never told me you lived in a castle,” was all she said in surprise as she took in the masonry, her head raised majestically. Kat managed to evade all her parents’ prohibitions by ruses that would have taken even the most practiced criminals by surprise. Whenever the opportunity to run off presented itself, she would set off for Visible from the far side of the town in any weather. Usually she would arrive tired out and then allow Glass to revive her with some warm beer.
Her presence made Visible a brighter place. Kat cured me and Dianne of our fear of the dank winding corridors of the house. She challenged us to play hide-and-seek there and would take us by surprise by shrieking loudly as she leapt out of dark corners, when we least expected it. She taught us to transform our terror into terrified delight. As only children can do, Kat taught us the thrill of fear. I loved her for that, and in gratitude gave her sand from a small glass bottle that Gable had brought me as a present from some distant shore. The sand was very fine and yellow. I poured it over Kat’s outstretched palms, saying, “That’s how long you’re going to live, one year for every grain. So you’ll never die.”
Kat usually stayed until her father would drive up in a fury in the afternoon or early evening to fetch his daughter. To start with, he used to treat Glass like a child kidnapper—on such occasions, there would be heated exchanges, with furious accusations leveled from both sides. For Glass these clashes were entertaining rather than annoying, for the two of them were well matched. She thought highly of Kat’s father for making a marked effort—unlike his wife—to set aside the prejudices that were hurled against Visible’s walls from across the river, like the waves of an ocean that never retreated. Though increasingly exasperated by the escapades of his daughter, at a certain point the man’s resistance crumbled, perhaps because he realized that even child kidnapping can become an everyday affair. A friendly undertone gradually crept into the exchanges between him and Glass. Without being aware of it, Kat’s father fell under the spell of my mother’s siren song. Since the Battle of the Big Eye, the number of women clients calling on my mother at dead of night had steadily been on the increase.
And so Kat became a regular visitor at Visible, to the delight of not just myself but also of Dianne. Dianne had taken an instant liking to Kat, one of the rare instances when she replaced her customary lively distrust with unreserved friendliness. But it didn’t take Kat long to see things as they were. For months she observed the way that Dianne and I interacted, and sensed an imbalance in the scales against her, invisible to us, arousing her jealousy. Finally she dropped Dianne. Her visits became less frequent, and then she stopped coming altogether. At school she told me that Dianne was weird and scared her; she said she’d once observed my sister in the garden, talking to—talking to!—a lizard. She maintained that Dianne was simply mad.
That was the last time I saw Dianne cry. For weeks on end I tried in vain to comfort her. Glass and I were at a loss. For reasons she never explained to us, Dianne regarded the end of her friendship with Kat as a punishment; at that time neither she nor I could understand that Kat’s abrupt rejection actually had nothing to do with her. Instead she convinced herself that whatever she touched was destined to fall apart, leaving nothing but shattered fragments. When Kat began visiting Visible again, she would regularly phone beforehand to say she was coming. Then Dianne would disappear for the rest of the day, leaving me alone with my friend and a painfully guilty conscience.
It was the year when on a boiling hot August day I spoke to Wolf. He couldn’t understand why I’d left him on his own in the forest the previous summer, and for what reason I’d avoided him after that. It didn’t seem to occur to him that he’d done anything wrong by shooting the Hedgling birds. And I didn’t dare explain that every time I saw him or thought of him the sight of his strangely horribly vivid forehead appeared in front of me. “What do you get up to without me, Phil?” he asked, without a hint of regret or reproach in his expressionless voice. I couldn’t think of an answer. I felt like dead wood.
It was the year when Dianne and I hid under the kitchen table together for the last time, listening to the conversations between my mother and her clients. This occasional eavesdropping had become a tradition for us over many years, and I’m sure Glass knew about it. The soft scraping at her feet when Dianne or I shifted our weight, growing restless or tired from sitting still too long, can’t have escaped her, but she never said anything about it. Dianne and I learned some ugly words there under the table, words that weren’t in any dictionary. We soon got to tell various visitors apart from the sound of their subdued voices, revealing their secrets to Glass—secrets that were sometimes so trite that Dianne would fall asleep on me and I had to shake her roughly to wake her after the two women had left the kitchen. Then again, some were so awful that even the autumn wind howling round Visible would drop, as if to listen in awe.
It was the year at the end of which Tereza backed out of the customary New Year’s Eve bash and drove to friends who had a little house on the Dutch coast, where she wanted to spend a few quiet days. When she returned, she wasn’t alone. She introduced Pascal to us, and Dianne and I both agreed she was too broad-shouldered and altogether ugly, her only redeeming interest for us being that she was a boatbuilder, which sounded highly exotic to us. Our dislike of Thereza’s lover was sheer jealousy, because Thereza now visited us less and less. We missed the popcorn.
It was the year I received an account of Gable’s travels, a crumpled letter from somewhere in one of the four corners of the earth. Gable wrote he’d been able to watch whales, their barnacle-encrusted backs rearing out of the ice-blue water, and he’d heard them singing. The world was colossal, he said, we humans and our problems tiny and unimportant, no more than dust in the hands of time.
It was the year my body changed. My voice became deeper and broke. One morning I woke, my head still full of blurred images, to find a sticky warm puddle on my stomach. The fluid tasted salty, like the skin of the little dry seahorse given me years ago by Gable, but at the same time it had a distant, strangely heavy, almost suffocating sweetness.
It was the year I discovered the list, where the number three appeared instead of a man’s name.
That year I kept having disturbing dreams, which I remembered in crystal clear detail after waking, probably because so many boundaries began shifting, because I so often experienced reality as dreams and dreams as reality. Familiar smells took on a new intensity. Colors suddenly became much deeper, with hitherto unknown brilliance. Even sounds and noises took on another dimension; it was if I’d only heard them through a filter before. I went for long walks as if I was sleepwalking, always without Dianne. I discovered the world and my place in it anew. People I’d previously regarded merely as individuals were now suddenly linked in secret groupings, as if an all-embracing, interlocking network had enveloped them. Seemingly insignificant occurrences had far-reaching consequences—to our astonishment, Handel, the new math teacher, told us that the tiniest air current released by the beating of a butterfly’s wings in distant Asia could result in a violent hurricane over Europe.
I watched, I listened, I tried to understand, and I wrote down my dreams. I noted them religiously in every detail in dark blue ink in a little exercise book, as if they were the most precious material that might be woven into fairy tales of the kind that Tereza so recently used to read to two openmouthed children.
_____________
“Have I ever actually told you how much I hate this shitty violin?”
“I’ve been k
eeping count.”
“Really?”
I grin. “Really. Once I filled up the first notebook, I chucked it.” The upper half of Kat’s body is hidden behind the open music book propped up on the wobbly music stand. I watch her bowed head dipping forward and then whipping back slightly in a flowing movement, her face a mask of concentration, the eyebrows arched skyward, as fingers and bow dance across the strings of the violin. The air is awash with rippling, vibrating musical phrases.
“Will you be long?”
“Five minutes,” she breathes through pursed lips. “You can hear my scraping all over the house, and my mother times me, you know.”
I do know. As usual, her mother welcomed me with about as much enthusiasm as you show a stubborn zit that keeps reappearing in the same place for weeks on end. As soon as I enter her house, she behaves as if the thermometer has dropped to freezing; even in summer she makes a point of turning up the thermostats on all the radiators—sheer helplessness in the face of Kat’s stubbornness in insisting on my visits.
“Why don’t you record that crap on tape and leave it playing so we can clear off?” I said over the sounds of the violin.
“I’m nearly done.”
I’m no expert in music, but to me Kat’s violin playing sounds wonderful. The final bars sound totally relaxed, body, mind, and instrument forming a harmonious whole.
I can see Kat’s determination give way to a satisfied, almost triumphant smile.
I’d originally set out with the firm intention of telling her about my date with the Runner. But now her fleeting smile is enough to make me abandon the idea. That fleeting smile marks the victory over the piece she’s practicing. Notes, modulation, rhythm—Kat has internalized them all, has mastered the score, dominates it. It’s her piece now. And Kat doesn’t like sharing. Once she’s monopolized something, conquered it, made something belong to her, she won’t let go—particularly if she’s had to put a lot of effort into it. She can be honest, generous, or downright magnanimous, but as a rule she only gives in order to end up possessing more. “It’s different for you,” she never tires of declaring. “D’you still remember when I gave you my nightie, Phil? Not for anyone else in the world …” Maybe it’s true. That night in the Earnoseandthroat, when Kat was searching for a fellow sufferer, maybe she’d found a soul mate instead and had handed over her nightie out of a kind of intuitive gratitude. But my affection only means something to her because she had to fight for it for so long, not with me but with her parents—of this I’m quite certain. Sooner or later Kat always gets what she wants. If it means launching a Holy War, that just makes it all the more attractive. Once she’s attained one of her targeted objectives, she frequently soon gets bored; she can lose interest as suddenly as a child given a new toy will play with it for a short while and then throw it into a corner, where it will stay but not be forgotten—whatever Kat may have acquired as an outcome of clashes remains her inalienable property until she decides to revoke it.
Even her affair last year with Thomas fits this pattern. It was sheer curiosity that made Kat share her body, and maybe her dreams as well, with Thomas. But I’m absolutely sure that at the time she was always standing on the outside observing herself and the short-lived relationship with the clinical eye of a scientist monitoring an experiment. Later on she informed me, with her own special brand of arrogance, that at least she’d had the grace never to let Thomas know that his significance in her life had been little more than that of an experimental laboratory rat. In that instant I saw her before me, hidden behind the curtains in her darkened room, looking out of the window and watching Thomas with satisfaction as he prowled around her parents’ house at night, weeks after she’d dumped him, with his unrequited passion burning holes in the snow—a lost sleepwalker in search of his heart, which the blond girl up there behind the curtains held in her hands.
Kat maintains that Thomas doesn’t mean anything to her anymore, but I am utterly convinced that her reaction to any girl daring to approach him any closer than ten feet would be one of undisguised jealousy and an aggressive bloody fistfight. Thomas had once been hers and therefore belongs to her forever. Or at least until his feelings for her cool off. Or until Kat decides to set him free. This has nothing to do with vanity. The fact that Thomas is still absolutely eating his heart out on her account simply fills her with the calm, barely perceptible satisfaction extended to things taken for granted, and it is this characteristic of Kat’s that now makes me unsure. I don’t come into the category of a boring toy. I am the exception that for years has confirmed the rule, and this is the very reason I fear Kat’s jealousy, that she might believe that she would lose me to Nicholas or slip into second place as a girlfriend. This is why I hold my tongue as the last notes fade away and she puts down the violin.
“You play well,’’ I say appreciatively. “I guess if you wanted to, you could become an exceptional musician.”
“Exceptional, eh?” Kat repeats slowly. Her hair falls over her face as she bends down to put the violin and bow in their case. She snaps the lid shut and looks up. “D’you believe in exceptional people?”
I shrug. “I believe in talent.”
“Talent isn’t enough to make a special person of yourself. Someone really different from others.”
“Like who, for example?”
“Glass,” she says.
I shake my head. “Glass may be different from a whole lot of other people, but there are plenty like her bouncing around on this planet. Anyone who doesn’t know her would probably call her eccentric or a bit mad. But that’s all.”
“Exactly, mad,” Kat agrees. “But not talented, right? Being exceptional has nothing to do with talent.”
No, I think, it has something to do with wounds. There are only two kinds of people who won’t compromise—those endowed with a strong will, mostly combined with a lack of insight, and those who’ve been so badly damaged that they enclose their hearts with steel plating. In that respect my best friend and my mother are two sides of the same coin. Hardly surprising that Kat has elevated my mother to idol status.
“D’you think,” Kat continues the train of thought, “that it’s only possible to be truly exceptional if you’re mad or something?”
I grin. “D’you take Glass for mad?”
“No. Your sister, more like.”
“ ‘How lightly condemnation trips off thy careless tongue.’ ”
“Says who?”
I shrug again. “When in doubt, Shakespeare.”
“Or Goethe.”
“Schiller?”
Kat lifts a finger: “Brad Welby.”
“Who the hell is Brad Welby?”
She bursts into giggles. “He writes medical romances that my mother reads on the quiet. And he really is exceptional.” “Madly exceptional?”
“Exceptionally mad, and madly awful.”
Kat moves to the window. I stand beside her and look down on the town rooftops with a haze of September mist wafting above them.
“Perhaps,” says Kat thoughtfully, “that’s what’s missing in this town. There’s not enough madness here.”
I shake my head. I think of women like Irene, whose profound loneliness made her see UFOs in the sky, and I see Annie Glosser waddling through the streets in red shoes. I think of boys like the Hulk and his pathetic mother. I think of Wolf, of a mist of spraying blood, so much unhappiness.
“Surely it’s the opposite, isn’t it?” I say. “Perhaps there’s too much of it.”
“Maybe, yes.” Kat shrugs and looks at me. She’s beginning to get bored with our conversation. “Fancy an ice cream?”
“Then hit the swimming pool?”
“Right. Let’s go.”
So we go. And I feel like a traitor.
I can’t get to sleep. The more I try to relax, the tenser I get. There are enormous ship’s propellers going round and round in my head; no matter whether I keep my eyes open or closed, there are rainbow-colored spots dancing in fr
ont of them. One more night—it’s the feeling of anticipation like before Christmas or holidays, only I don’t know exactly how the meeting with Nicholas will go. What I do know for sure is that there’s no point in thinking about it. Picture ninety-nine variations and the hundredth will catch you out.
I haven’t spoken to Nicholas at school, partly because I’m afraid Kat might ask awkward questions, and partly because although I’ve caught his eye during recess in the schoolyard and he’s given me a faint smile, he’s never made a move to step across to me.
By this time my alarm clock shows two in the morning, and I still feel I’m changing from a person into a coiled spring, so I get out of bed. I patter barefoot across the corridor, and a minute later I’m standing outside Glass’s bedroom on the second floor.
“Glass?”
I’m answered by a reluctant growl.
“May I come in?”
“What’s the matter? Is the house on fire?”
“No.” I stand hesitantly in the doorway. “I … well, I’ve got a date with a boy tomorrow.”
“Good for you, darling.”
“Mom!” Considering that I gave up the entire evening yesterday so that I’d be able to give her my opinion of Michael, I find her lack of interest seriously unfair.
I hear her clearing her throat. “You want me to tell you what you should do, is that it?”
“Well, yes, sort of.”
A short pause. Judging by the sounds that follow, Glass uses it to rearrange her bedclothes. “Right. Well, I’ll give you a mother’s tip—in fact, I’ll give you three if you promise to leave me alone after that.”
“Cross my heart,” I say hurriedly. My eyes gradually get used to the dark. I see Glass gesticulating. Her hands are two vague, faintly shimmering blobs, huge moths fluttering about wearily.
The Center of the World Page 13
