Louis Beside Himself

by Anna Fienberg

  Harper Lee was the author. To Kill a Mockingbird was a bestseller in her lifetime. But she never wrote another book. Isn’t that crazy? To have so many words, so many magnificent words, and then suddenly dry up. Why would that happen? Maybe a burglar invaded her kitchen one night just as she was finishing the book, and she froze and wasn’t able to help the burglar, who ended up camping in a tent in her back yard. Maybe that stopped her writing. I wish she was still around so I could ask her.

  Thinking about Harper Lee took up quite a bit of time and helped me to forget my other troubles. I actually reread the last few chapters of her book and felt excited and afraid and furious and sad and wise all over again.

  I must have fallen asleep reading, because when I woke up at 1:11am my neck ached where it had been scrunched up against the wall, and I was still in my school shorts. I rubbed my eyes – they were dry and sore.

  I crept out of bed to get a glass of water. Rosie’s bedroom door was closed, with no crack of light underneath, and snores rumbled from Dad’s room. I tiptoed to the kitchen sink. Moonlight drifted in through the window, making lakes of silver on the floor. Out on the lawn, the tent pitched a dark shadow against the night, but deep inside was a faint lemony glow. Torchlight.

  As I settled back in bed I felt anxious again. Images of Cordelia lying alone, reading – what? – rose up in my mind. I tried to think about counting the goats in Afghanistan, but lonely Cordelia-pictures stuck in my brain like those weeds growing in the cracks of our path.

  She’s okay, I told myself. She’s not scared of the dark and she’s probably enjoying a good read. That’s always a comfort. But what was she reading? Had she been to the library? What if it was a crap book, the kind where it’s all description of a mountain peak at sunset and people playing cricket while others enjoy a maths quiz? She’d hate that. She had a low boredom threshold. And then she’d lie there alone with her thoughts. She might even start to think about how she was homeless, with only a mute lie-addict next door to depend on.

  I sat up in bed. I knew what Cordelia needed. I was so sure, my toes tingled. What Cordelia needed, totally and absolutely, was Atticus Finch. She needed a father with an abundant vocabulary, someone who would stand up in court to defend her. Someone with exactly the right words.

  I grabbed To Kill a Mockingbird and dashed into the hall, past the snoring and the kitchen moonlight, and out the back door.

  At the frangipani pot on the porch, I stopped to breathe. The perfume was so strong you could almost see it, hanging in sweet layers like honeyed smoke. I took another deep breath and crept out onto the lawn.

  Ouch! Something sharp stabbed the sole of my foot. A red-bellied black snake. I should have worn shoes. I waited a moment, swearing a bit. Slowly the pain faded. Probably just a stone. Probably I wasn’t going to die, which left me with the problem of still having to face Cordelia and break the Dark Reign of Silent Night.

  At the door of the tent I stopped. How should I do this? I didn’t want to give her a fright, but I didn’t want to sneak up on her either. Also, a big part of me wanted to run away and forget I’d ever thought of Atticus Finch and his admirable qualities.

  After about a million seconds, I knocked on the canvas flap. In what I hoped was a very BENIGN, meaning kind and unscary voice, I said, ‘Knock knock, ha!’ Then I coughed a bit.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Um, me,’ I said, crawling into the tent. So lame. At least I could have thought of a good knock knock joke.

  Cordelia was in her sleeping bag, although it was a hot night. She quickly shut the book she’d been reading, but the freckled face of Anne of Green Gables stared up at us. ‘I thought I’d have another go,’ she said casually. ‘Nothing much else to do at the moment.’

  She looked away. Her voice sounded thick and nasally, like it does when you have a cold, or . . . you’ve been crying.

  ‘I . . . um . . . I saw your light and thought maybe you needed something to read.’ I thrust Mockingbird at her like loot from a bank robbery.

  Her eyes were red, her lashes wet. ‘Thanks, Louis. I could do with good old Atticus to talk to.’

  ‘Couldn’t everyone!’ I agreed too loudly.

  I didn’t know what to say. She was really, actually, upset. She didn’t crack a joke or tell another funny story to cover it. For the first time since I’d known her, she seemed fragile. Her skin was shiny like Mrs Livid’s china teacups, something that could break easily.

  I squirmed inside my own skin. This was almost worse than her bravery – I’d got used to feeling inadequate with that. We nodded at each other for a while. I thought of those toy dogs that sit in the backs of cars, heads mindlessly nodding every time you go over a bump. Maybe I should talk about Atticus and Harper Lee – there was the whole of the human species right there, all the prejudice and loneliness and wonder of being a person. If I could just think of some way to begin.

  But I couldn’t think. The silence was too deep. It pressed against the tent, the black heads of the trees drooping over us, shooshing us.

  ‘Harper Lee sold thirty million copies,’ I whispered. ‘She won the Pulitzer Prize.’

  ‘Anne of Green Gables was my mother’s favourite book,’ Cordelia mumbled. She turned off the torch and drenched us in darkness.

  I closed my eyes to get used to the dark. When I opened them the moonlight had stolen in, saving us a little. I still didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Mum loved the name Cordelia, that’s why she chose it for me. She said it sounded hopeful.’ Cordelia snuffled, a small animal sound.

  The pool of moonlight stirred between us. A warm breeze floated in through the tent flaps.

  ‘What Anne wanted most was a best friend. Mum said I was her best friend. She said there was no one she felt closer to. But that was a long time ago.’

  Cordelia’s voice ached. I patted the moonlight near her knee. I wished I knew how to take the ache away. Her voice was flat and low. I hadn’t heard this voice of hers – it was raw, like a person with all their fancy clothes taken off so you could see just their poor plain flesh. It was a voice easy to talk to, listen to. It didn’t expect anything, just a listening quiet.

  ‘I like your voice in the dark,’ I blurted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, go on telling me.’

  ‘Keith – that’s one of Mum’s boyfriends – he told me I had a whiney voice, like a squeaky gate. I guess I was always wanting something when he wanted Mum all to himself. I just . . . but she was my mum, you know? There was no one else. And we were like best friends when I was young. We lived down south when I was little, at Jasper Bay. We had this small cosy house with a real fireplace and a little woodfire stove. In winter we’d collect kindling from the bush and at night we’d sit in front of the fire just watching the flames. You can watch the fire for ages, it’s like the sea, always moving, telling stories if you listen well enough. Mum would tell me stories about when she was young. We talked a lot back then.’

  ‘So why did you move?’

  ‘And we worked in the garden. We mulched the ground and planted lettuce, spinach, pumpkin, carrots. I was so excited when those carrots came up – you could just see their green furry heads at first, I couldn’t believe it, they came from nothing, just a speck of seed and suddenly there’s this springy little forest. We used to sing to them and it felt like they were listening. The day Mum said they were ready, when we dug up these lovely dirty grown-up carrots, it was like a magic trick. Only real.’

  Cordelia’s face was bright in the moonlight. It didn’t seem like she needed me to say anything, so I just nodded.

  ‘And there was a lake at the end of our garden, where ducks came. Once, we found a pile of eggs laid in the staghorn near the water, and Mum said they’d need protecting because all kinds of animals could get them, eels and birds and . . . S o we built a chicken-wire fence around it, and one morning we came down and there were twelve little ducklings, all crumpled and damp from birth and as cute as
anything you’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Do they really swim in a V after their mother, like you see in pictures?’

  Cordelia didn’t say anything for a while. Then she whispered, ‘I wanted to stay and see them do that, I wanted to stay and pick the pumpkins coming in, too, but Mum said we had to go.’ She sniffed. ‘I don’t know why, I can’t remember exactly the reason. We ran out of money I think . . . and she said I needed to mix more with other kids anyway – we were pretty isolated down there. But maybe it was Mum who needed the extra company. Who knows? It’s such a blur now. I just remember being happy and finding the world a magical kind of place and then suddenly being in a big empty asphalt playground where I knew nobody and nobody knew me. I felt like I’d been kidnapped and put to sleep, and I kept wondering when I’d wake up and know where I was.’

  ‘Did you ever have a father?’

  ‘No – I mean, I guess so, but I never knew him. He lived overseas, Mum said. We didn’t talk about it.’

  We were quiet, watching the shifting moonlight.

  ‘But it was all right, I didn’t miss anything when we lived down south. And even when we moved it was okay between Mum and me, in the beginning. I mean, she was tired all the time, and came home late – she got a job at the cinema selling tickets, and that was great because I could get in free on Saturdays. And we’d talk about the movies and stuff. But, I don’t know, after primary school finished we didn’t talk so much, and I started getting into trouble at high school, and she brought Keith home, the first of those mangy boyfriends. Well, Keith was harmless, I suppose, but Mum and I, we just seemed to fight all the time. All we did was argue.’

  Cordelia unzipped the sleeping bag. ‘So humid, isn’t it,’ she said, in that bright, other voice. She held the zip-cord in her fingers, staring down as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world. But when she looked up I saw that her eyes were filling with tears. She held them wide so they wouldn’t spill over. ‘I just don’t know how we could have got here,’ she whispered. ‘Mum and me.’ Her voice had changed. It sounded broken. ‘Everything’s so strange, you know? Nothing seems real, it’s as if I’m living someone else’s life, as if— ’

  ‘You’re beside yourself,’ I suggested, not knowing I was going to.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s it.’ And she smiled.

  I nodded, pleased. ‘I feel like that sometimes. Beside myself.’ We sat there in the floating dark, nodding away at each other. Beside ourselves. Beside each other.

  ‘But can’t you talk to your mother?’ I suddenly blurted. ‘You know, tell her how you feel? You can always tell the truth if you do it with kindness and consideration. I mean, how else can you know what’s going on inside someone?’ Even as I was talking I was thinking, this is what I used to believe, that words could fix everything. But now I was seeing that we were all locked inside our own country, with our own flag and language, so how could we ever cross the border?

  Cordelia wasn’t convinced, either. She was trying not to sneer at my suggestion, I could tell.

  Then she said something surprising. ‘So what’s your favourite word?’

  ‘Oh!’ I didn’t know where to begin. ‘Well, I used to have a whole bunch of them but lately, I don’t know, they’ve lost their— ’

  ‘Mine’s lambent.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Softly bright. Like this moonlight here, that’s a lambent light.’

  ‘Mm, that’s good. It sounds sort of liquid with that l, round and friendly with the m.’

  Cordelia grinned. ‘You’re a word man, aren’t you?’

  I laughed. ‘Yeah. Funny, no one’s ever said that to me before – as if it’s something okay to be. I don’t think many people are interested in words, do you? Dad’s not into them, he’s into wrestling. Me, I hate wrestling.’ I couldn’t help looking around in the dark, to make sure he wasn’t hiding somewhere, listening. ‘Chris Jericho is more the kind of hero Dad admires. You know, the famous wrestler? If I could just be more like him, I reckon Dad would be happier.’

  Cordelia shook her head. ‘I read Chris Jericho’s autobiography. Jimmy told us he used to wrestle when he was younger – did it when he was hard up for cash. He tried to model himself on Jericho. So I thought I’d take an interest, you know, so Jimmy and I could talk about something. That was before I realised what a pig he was. Anyway, Chris Jericho liked words, too. His favourite word is agog.’

  If I’d been sitting on a chair, I would have fallen off in amazement. Agog! The word with its eyes on stalks. My word! My word!

  ‘What’s it like? The autobiography, I mean.’

  ‘I found it interesting, and I’m not even into wrestling. There are some great photos. He writes about the strange people he’s met in the ring. He reckons in wrestling it’s all about the character you’ve chosen to be, like Lion-Heart or Bad Guy, and the story you make up about them. Wrestlers plan all their moves before a match, you know that? So they hardly ever get hurt. It’s more like a drama. Jericho even used Roget’s Thesaurus for finding a name for his fans.’

  ‘Really? So what did he call them?’

  ‘Jerichololics.’

  That sounded like a lolly, which was a positive thing. But somehow his being good at words as well as wrestling was depressing. He could do both things – write a book AND be a wrestling star.

  ‘I’ve got the book at home. I could lend it to you . . .’ Cordelia’s face suddenly clouded over again. ‘Oh well, I could have, before, but now . . .’

  ‘No, don’t worry,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m not a real Jerichololic anyway.’

  Cordelia nodded. She was fiddling with the sleeping-bag zip again. Her shoulders drooped.

  ‘You’ve got such a good general knowledge,’ I said. ‘I mean, you know so many things, about so many different subjects. You’d make a great teacher.’

  ‘I’d have to finish school to do that.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  The quiet of the night grew loud in my ears. Or maybe it was the cicadas. I hadn’t noticed them before. Cordelia pursed her lips into a thin line. I remembered that expression from the first night I’d seen her. I realised I was getting to know her a little. When she was scared or worried, she did that thing with her lips. It made her look lugubrious. I’d have to tell her to stop doing it if she ever went in a modelling competition. She could go in a modelling competition, actually. She’d probably win. Maybe I should tell her that now?

  ‘How can I go back to school?’ she murmured to the sleeping bag. ‘I would have graduated next year.’ She stared out through the doors of the tent. ‘Oh, it’s all such a mess. I can’t believe my mother would just let me go. You know, that she’d choose some dropkick she’s known for six months over her daughter . . . but I guess that’s how much I got on her nerves.’

  I yawned – I couldn’t help it. Sometimes when I get very emotional and don’t know what to do, these terrible fits of yawning come over me. It’s a bit like sneezing – I never do just one, I have to do at least ten in a row.

  Cordelia rubbed a hand over her face. ‘I’m sorry. Raving on, aren’t I?’ Then she reached down and touched Elena’s book. ‘Tell her thanks.’ She tried to smile. ‘And thanks for Mockingbird, Louis. You’re great. You better get some sleep.’

  I mumbled something, reaching over awkwardly to pat her shoulder. When she didn’t say anything more, I crawled out of the tent.

  I WALKED back across the lawn, through the LAMBENT patches of moonlight. That way I’d see any snakes lying in the grass. I wished I could take back my yawns. That had been the worst part of the conversation. The best part was the way her face had looked when she’d said, ‘You’re a word man’. I turned it over and over in my mind, like a mint in my mouth.

  But then I heard the ragged sound, like cloth ripping. Soft. I stopped and held my breath. The sound again, followed quickly by another. Crying. I stood paralysed in the moonlight, hooked like a fish. It was the loneliest sound I’d ever heard, like
crying from the bottom of the sea.

  My feet turned around and took a step towards the tent. My mouth twitched. I yawned. No, no, no. What could I do? What could I say to help? I just didn’t know. I pictured Cordelia, hands over her face, pressed into the sleeping bag, trying to cry quietly.

  I made my feet walk back across the porch, past the table, towards the house. With each step the noise of the crying grew quieter until, as I opened the back door, it vanished completely.

  HAVE you ever deliberately walked away from someone who is crying? I don’t know a worse feeling. At least when you are the person who’s upset, you might have an idea when you’ll reach the end and start feeling better. When it’s someone else, you haven’t got a clue.

  I sat on my bed. 2:13am. I felt water ping off my chin. I hadn’t realised I was crying, too. It was as if her feelings had run into mine.

  I knocked my fists against each other until they hurt. My blood panicked. I paced up and down the length of my bed (only three paces before each turn). I had to keep moving. Think!

  I thought about what it was like when I felt helpless, as helpless as Cordelia’s crying. It happened when words failed me. It had happened in the kitchen when Cordelia was a burglar, in the garden when she was a friend, at the corner shops with The Clothesline. In all those places, I’d have given anything to be saved by words. Imagine if someone had magically appeared who could explain and comfort with just those same words that were hiding inside me.

  For Cordelia, there was no such person. I knew it now. And she knew it. That’s what was so terrible about her crying. It was crying without hope.

  A cold feeling crept over my back, like Antarctic spiders walking up my spine. Each one of my vertebras was brushed by their icy, hairy legs. I shivered. I knew these spiders. They warned that no one else was going to suddenly appear, to help. They warned that something was lying ahead of me, something big and dark and frightening. Something I had to do.