Margaret smiles. ‘Isn’t it pretty?’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
When I say ‘yeah’ I think I have already picked up an American accent.
Margaret shows me some of the fifteen-room house: dining-room, kitchen and family room. The air is fresh for the inside of a house. It’s a dewy, clean air, easy to breathe, as though the leaves of the giant trees are inside as well as out.
Where I used to live there is carpet so threadbare you can see through to its veins, and the couch and armchairs are made of vinyl that peels away like sunburnt skin. But here there are polished wood floors, heavy, solid furniture, oil paintings and ceiling-high bookshelves.
I point to the panels of wood that reach half-way up the walls.
‘What’s that called?’
‘Wainscoting. Do you like it?’
‘It must be like living inside an enormous tree house.’
‘I’d never thought of it like that. What a sweet idea.’
She sounds like she has a cold. So does Henry, but I like their accents. Not too strong, not too distracting.
Margaret leads me up the stairs. I am just thinking how I will probably like her and Henry, and how I hope they like me, when she puts her arm through mine. My arm feels like a sick snake, allergic to something, hot and poisoned. My face grows hotter. My ears and my neck burn red. I try not to let her see my face. Henry comes out of a door at the top of the landing.
‘We’ll meet you downstairs,’ says Margaret.
‘Good idea,’ he says with a smile so tight and wide it must be hurting his face. I know how he feels. When the pressure to be happy is this strong, it feels like somebody is strangling you.
Margaret takes my hand and leads me along the hallway.
‘This is mine and Henry’s room.’
This room is yellow, has a four-poster bed and an ensuite.
‘This is Bridget’s room.’
Bridget’s room is pink and neat.
‘This is James’ room.’
James’ room is blue and messy.
She leads me back the way we came, and we stop at the top of the landing. ‘And this room is yours.’
Margaret opens the door and I see the clean, white, tiny room with the attic window; one pale-blue shutter open, one pale-blue shutter closed.
‘This is your bed.’
‘What a beautiful room,’ I say. Life would be perfect if she wasn’t holding my hand. ‘It’s great.’ I let go of her hand.
The quilt is as white as a new stick of chalk and hangs down to the dustless floorboards. There is a stack of pillows on the bed, white, pink and cream, like marshmallows spilled fresh from a bag. All I want to do is sleep.
Here is my walk-in cupboard and here is my redwood desk with its set of drawers. Here are the keys to the drawers.
‘Do you like it?’
At home, the room I share with Erin has buckled posters of stupid pop stars all over the walls, and ugly, smutty photographs of my sisters stuck on the back of the door; photographs from the day they paid a hundred dollars at the shopping mall for a makeover and slut-like portraits. There are always stinking ashtrays full of butts next to Erin’s bed and knickers drying on the doorknob.
‘It’s perfect,’ I say.
‘Good,’ says Margaret, suddenly standing between me and the bed, her eyes flickering blue and delighted. I feel dirty and don’t know what to do.
Her hair is shiny and tied in a neat bun on her round head. I am like a small, rotten boat with a leak, bobbing in the water under the hulk of a luxury liner.
I think she wants me to hug her and I think I want to; at least I wish I were the kind of person who knew how to hug somebody.
Margaret moves around me to get to the other side of the bed. She pulls the quilt back and fluffs the pillows.
In place of physical affection, I say, ‘This is a really beautiful room. Thank you so much.’
‘Good,’ she says, standing close to me again, in a way I thought only people in films did. Is she waiting for me to get undressed in front of her?
‘We were worried it would be too white,’ she says. ‘You don’t think it’s too much like a hospital room?’
I happen to like hospitals and hospital wards and especially hospital beds. I like to have the doctor call on me in the dead of night with a white coat and leather case and I like it when I’m taken to hospital. Nothing compares to the comfort I feel in a hospital bed when a doctor or nurse comes towards me with a stethoscope or a clipboard, and the promise of pills.
The cleaner and whiter the room, the better, as far as I’m concerned. I like hospital gowns too; modesty gowns made of blue tissue paper, the ones that tie up at the back like shoelaces, flimsy, small, disposable and sterilised, cold and nude around the back.
‘No,’ I say, ‘I really love it.’ I yawn, and look around the room for something to hang onto.
Margaret stays still. Her hands hang by her sides without the need to fidget, fold or point. It is as though her body does not exist in the way mine does. Her body is no obstacle, no hindrance. It’s as it should be: a thing for carrying thought, and for converting thought into action.
‘Do you want me to help you to unpack?’ she asks. She wants to see what I own.
‘Thanks,’ I say, so afraid of being touched again, my tin-foil teeth have begun to rattle.
‘You just sit,’ she says. ‘I’ll hang your clothes.’
Why don’t you let me sleep? I want to say. Why don’t you pull back the covers, tuck me in, bring me tea and toast, draw the curtains and make it dark? Don’t you know how difficult it is for me even to stand up straight?
Margaret works slowly, and to put my nervous misery in perspective, I do this thing.
I think of Mawson, the Australian Antarctic explorer. I read a book about him once, about how he had to eat a jelly made from the boiled bones of his sledge dogs so that he wouldn’t starve to death. He ate so much dog liver that he got vitamin A poisoning, which causes desquamation, which in turn causes the skin to peel off in sheets, especially from the hands, feet and genitalia. Mawson had such a bad case of desquamation that the soles of his feet came away and he was forced to strap them back on to keep them from being lost forever.
I stand up, take a bundle of clothes from Margaret, open a drawer and dump them inside. She takes them straight back out from the drawer and rearranges them.
I step back and sit on the bed.
‘Do you know what desquamation is?’ I ask.
Margaret folds my pyjamas and puts them on the end of the bed.
‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘I read about it in a book about Antarctic explorers who sometimes perished in the snow. They suffered from desquamation. I just wondered if you knew what it was.’
‘We have an encyclopaedia downstairs. Do you want me to show you?’
Margaret’s a bank manager, but she sounds like a primary school teacher.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Maybe I’ll look it up later. Maybe I should have a little nap now.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘But don’t you want to see the rest of the house and grab a bite to eat before resting?’
‘Oh,’ I say, my eyes burning. ‘Yes.’
Henry sits at the table reading a newspaper and eating an apple. He is healthy and handsome, like Margaret. I don’t know much about healthy people but they seem peculiarly clean and they smell brand new. It will be so much easier to eat in this clean kitchen. Maybe I’ll even start eating breakfast.
‘Do you like your room?’ asks Henry. ‘We were worried it might be a bit small.’
‘No. It’s fine.’ I say. ‘It’s utterly perfect.’
My voice sounds posh, the way I’ve been prac tising. I like how it sounds, slipping itself into the house like a new piece of polished wood furniture across the polished wood floor.
‘You look prettier in real life,’ says Margaret as she opens the fridge and picks an apple from a big, see-through drawer. There are many a
pples in this drawer. Carrots too.
Henry looks at me.
‘It’s true. Your photos don’t do you justice.’
Margaret holds two apples.
‘You have a very lively and pretty face,’ says Margaret.
‘That’s good,’ I say.
‘We hardly recognised you at the airport you know,’ says Henry, and it feels like they’ve had a meeting to discuss this.
Margaret stands behind Henry and now there are two faces looking at me.
‘Would you like one?’ asks Margaret, holding two apples aloft.
I hate apples. I haven’t grown up with them. I haven’t developed a technique with them and I’m worried about my teeth. I’m wary of hard food.
Within a week of one another, both my sisters lost adult teeth eating hard caramels at the movies. Erin brought her tooth home wrapped in tissue paper. The tooth was wedged in the caramel, bits of melted chocolate like dried blood around the edges, mixed with saliva. My mum said her favourite thing to say (which also happens to be one of my dad’s favourite things to say): ‘You made your bed and now you’d better lie in it.’
‘But, Mum,’ said Erin, ‘I can’t walk around with a big black hole in my mouth.’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘You walk around with a big black hole in your head.’
Erin grabbed hold of my hair, kneed me in the stomach, and left. I fell to the floor, and as I lay there, I could smell the dirty dishcloth Mum uses to wipe the lino.
‘Enough of that,’ said my dad, re-hooking the strap on his overalls which had come undone without him realising, probably hours earlier.
‘Do yourself up, Mick,’ said my mum.
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ said my dad. ‘Dancing with a poodle?’
They laughed, and I got up off the stinking floor. My dad gave me a hard slap on the back and grinned at me.
‘Good one,’ he said.
‘No thanks,’ I say, ‘I’m not hungry.’
Margaret puts the spare apple on the kitchen table next to Henry’s newspaper and they kiss. They kiss on the lips in more than a perfunctory way and Henry says ‘Mmmmm’ with a deep voice that makes my stomach feel strange.
‘Come on,’ says Margaret, ‘I’ll show you through the rest of your new home.’
She shows me the piano room, a small library, two dens, the living-room, the two downstairs bathrooms, and as we walk, she chomps at her apple with large square teeth.
She tells me about the five years the family lived in Chicago, where she worked as the bank’s state president.
‘We moved here to get out of the rat-race,’ she says, ‘but I might as well still be the bank’s president with all the hours I have to put in.’
‘Do you hate work?’ I ask. I’m tired and nervous but I know I must talk.
‘No, but it’s just that I used to do so many things. These days,’ she says with a sigh, ‘all I do is work.’
‘What did you used to do?’ I ask.
‘I played the piano for many years and before the children were born, Henry and I lived in Paris and I taught piano and painted.’
‘You could still play now, and paint,’ I say.
‘Not these days,’ she says. ‘You’ll find out one day just how hard it is to do everything you want. Sooner or later you just have to get your priorities straightened out.’
I hate it when people say this kind of thing and I especially hate it when people use the expression ‘these days’. When people have verbal ticks, or clichés they can’t stop themselves from using, I sometimes have to count to ten to stop myself from screaming. When I walked out of the flat in Sydney I thought I’d never have to face another cheap platitude or homily again.
‘Maybe you could go part time,’ I say.
‘Oh boy,’ she says, ‘don’t you start!’
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I just …’
‘That’s okay,’ she says, ‘it’s an obvious solution.’
As we walk around the house, she tells me about Henry’s work as an actuary. I don’t ask what this means, even though I know I should. She tells me about her kids’ plans to go to the best colleges in the country and how they both want to be doctors.
‘Me too,’ I say. ‘I desperately want to be a doctor. Reconstructive plastic surgery and other –’
‘Oh, like faces and – ’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Definitely not facelifts. Hand transplants, that kind of thing.’
‘That’s so great,’ she says. ‘I think the three of you will get along just great.’
She tells me what ‘the kids’ are studying and what sports they play. She tells me so many things it feels like every new fact is pushing an old one out of my brain. But I try hard to concentrate. I want to remember the details. Only selfish people don’t listen to other people’s details and the most selfish of all people never ask any questions. Like my sisters. They don’t even ever ask anybody how they are. They just launch into puerile conversation about the sales on at the shops, or the way certain stockings ride up your arse.
When we are standing under the tree house in the enormous garden I say, ‘This is the poshest house I’ve ever set foot in. You must be so rich.’
Margaret stops and grips my hand.
‘I know this is a different world for you,’ she says, ‘but I don’t want you to compare us to your family.’
‘But this is like a castle compared …’
Margaret hugs me, without warning, holds me tight and pats my back, then lets go and looks right at me. Just like Flo Bapes, it’s as though she is hoping I will cry.
‘No comparing,’ she says. ‘Now, let’s go to your room.’
‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’m so tired.’
Alone at last. I draw the curtains, kick off my shoes and lie on the single bed with its chalk-white quilt. There’s a breeze circling my bare feet and I’m desperate for sleep. But within minutes of closing my eyes, my brain springs open, like a flick-knife. It has been nine days since I slept for more than four or five hours. Although I’ve had insomnia for a long time, it has never been as bad as in these past few months. Every morning I wake just seconds before the birds do, as though my sudden waking is what causes them to start their chirping. Then I lie there, a dead weight, listening to the birds and hating them.
I open my suitcase, get the thesaurus out and look up synonyms. At the start of the year I made a promise that I would learn two new words every day, and so I lie on my back and say them over and over again: soupy, juicy, sappy, starchy, marshy, silty, lumpy, ropy, curdled, clotted, gelatinous, pulpy, viscid, grumous, gummy, clammy, sticky, treacly, gluey and glairy. I think, I am counting slime instead of sheep and this makes me smile, but I would rather sleep.
I am about to get down on my knees and pray for sleep when my host-brother and sister arrive home. I hear them coming up the stairs and their quick footsteps on the floorboards on the landing.
Margaret calls out, ‘Louise, are you awake?’
I sit up. ‘Come in,’ I say, as though I am the important occupier of a big office.
I stand up when my host-sister and host-brother walk into the small white room. I have learned that this is what you should do when in somebody else’s home. Margaret stands in the doorway with her arms around the shoulders of her children.
‘Louise, this is Bridget and James.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I say, and shake hands with both of them, wishing I’d had time to re-talc my palms.
James’ hand is dry and strangely small and soft; a hand-shaped cushion.
Margaret squeezes her children close to her side but they break away and come into the room. I sit on the pillows with my back to the wall.
‘You look different in your photos,’ says Bridget, looking smack into my eyes the way her mother does. I must have looked like a gargoyle in my photographs.
‘Do I?’
Bridget is thirteen, but looks older. She is taller than both her brother and her mother. She sits on my be
d and crosses her long, bare, brown legs then pulls them in to her chest, as though she has no joints. I cannot stop looking at her legs and her clean white shorts.
‘Maybe it was the uniform that made you look different,’ she says. ‘We don’t wear uniforms at our school.’
She too sounds as though she has a cold.
My school has no uniform. I borrowed a navy one with burgundy pinstripes from Mrs Walsh, my English teacher, whose daughters go to private schools. She told me I looked a million dollars in that uniform and she took twenty-four photos of me standing next to her piano. I thought that these photos were the best to send because when somebody is in uniform you can’t tell much about where they come from or what they’re really like.
Bridget smiles, so at ease considering she is speaking for the first time to a stranger who will live with her, as a sister, for a whole year. She wants to know about the orientation camp in Los Angeles because I sent them a post-card from there every day.
I tell her all about the campus and the three swimming pools and the library with – I lie – more than seven million books.
‘Do you like reading?’ she asks.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Do you have many books?’
‘Not seven million, but you wouldn’t be able to read them all in just one year.’
But, I think, what if I should stay much longer than that?
James sits on the bed next to his sister as though to gang up on me. ‘Did you know that I’m exactly one year younger than you?’ he says. ‘I’m fifteen and you’re sixteen.’
‘Wow,’ I say, wishing the word hadn’t been invented.
Bridget gets off the bed and stands next to Margaret. She is very tall.
‘I need to take a shower,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you soon.’
James stands and opens the drawers of my empty desk. He is chubby. His skin is pimply around the chin and there is a thin and patchy growth of hair above his top lip, the beginnings of a juvenile moustache.
He looks at Margaret. ‘Is Louise going to do chores too?’
‘Call me Lou,’ I say.
Margaret smiles at me as though to tell me not to worry.
How the Light Gets In Page 2
