How the Light Gets In

by Hyland, M. J.

  ‘But isn’t Lou a boy’s name?’ says James.

  ‘Don’t tease,’ says Margaret.

  She sees that my face is red and puts her hand on James’ shoulder. ‘Okay. Let’s leave Lou in peace for a little while before dinner.’

  ‘That’s no problem,’ I say.

  James continues to look at my face even though I’m blushing, and when I redden further still he looks down at my suitcases, then straight back up at me and says, ‘Don’t you think you should unpack all your presents and stuff?’

  He’s still staring at my face, fascinated, curious, wondering what will happen to it next.

  ‘Come on,’ says Margaret, pulling the door closed behind them. ‘Let Lou have some peace.’

  I lie down on my stomach and moments later James comes back. He leans over me, as though to whisper, but he does not whisper. His voice is loud, almost angry.

  ‘What IQ did you need to score to get into that gifted school, or whatever it’s called that you go to?’

  I sense the danger in telling him, and the equal yet different danger in not telling him. I whisper the answer, and like everybody else, his reaction is a combination of impressed, depressed and disbelieving.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that’s pretty phenomenal.’

  He leaves quickly without looking at me again. At least he didn’t ask me whether I’m going to find a cure for cancer or why I don’t work for the space program or why I don’t play chess and win millions of dollars or something.

  Finally, with the thesaurus opened on my chest, I drift into sleep, but Henry wakes me by rapping on my door. ‘Time to hit the road!’ When I don’t answer, he opens the door and looks in.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, his voice cracking. ‘It’s time to go.’

  ‘Wait,’ I say. He comes into my room. ‘I just want to say thanks heaps for letting me come and live with you.’

  Henry sits on the bed, the top three buttons of his shirt open now, almost-albino blond hair on his chest, rising and falling with his deep breaths. He leans awkwardly to put his hand on my knee. He is nervous, like me, and I feel calmer in his company than in Margaret’s.

  ‘I have a feeling,’ he says, ‘that having you in our house will be pure pleasure.’

  The air is thick with our happiness. I hold my breath and look at the quilt.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Thanks a lot.’

  Henry leaves the room, and for a moment I feel calm.

  We climb into Margaret’s black four-wheel drive, a high monster of a vehicle. I prefer the Mercedes. Maybe I could get a licence while I’m here and drive it fast on some open country roads.

  We drive through the centre of B—, past the shopping strip and the town hall and the brand new civic centre, heading somewhere to have dinner. The sun is hot and bright.

  ‘We drive the kids around a lot,’ says Henry, whose invisible eyebrows are visible now, wet with sweat and shining.

  ‘We’re not kids,’ says Bridget.

  ‘Kids belong to goats,’ says James.

  Henry ignores this exchange and taps the windscreen. ‘Bullet-proof,’ he says. ‘All the windows are bullet-proof.’

  The business district is full of low-rise glassy buildings, tinted windows reflecting identical office buildings across the street. There isn’t a single old car on the road and all the rubbish is where it should be. No police sirens, no car horns, no used syringes and no graffiti.

  ‘It’s such a peaceful town,’ I say.

  James laughs a sudden and ugly laugh, full of derision. He wants me to look at him and when I do, he smirks, his face and body agitated by an emotion so strong I can smell it.

  Henry looks at me in the rear-vision mirror, smiling, as though worried I might have leapt out the window since he last checked on me. I know that the Hardings expect me to talk and so I try to think of something good or nice to say. I look around for inspiration in the streets.

  We stop at traffic lights and a woman is wheeled across in a wheelchair, her young face contorted by involuntary grimaces.

  As the wheelchair is lifted onto the kerb, I say, ‘Do you know that witches who were burnt at the stake in the seventeenth century have descendants with Huntington’s chorea? All that horrible grimacing might have been what caused people to think these women were witches in the first place.’

  Nobody responds.

  I wish I hadn’t spoken at all. I don’t like the sound of me. I’m an impostor. A fraud. James says something under his breath to Bridget, and she pushes the heel of her hand into his forehead.

  Margaret points out the window. ‘Your school is at the end of that street.’

  ‘When does school start?’

  ‘In about four weeks,’ she says. She turns around in the front passenger seat. ‘You’ll have ages to settle in first.’

  Henry looks at me in the rear-vision mirror. ‘But before school starts, we’re going on a two-week vacation.’

  ‘A nice long road trip,’ says Margaret, ‘so we’ll get to spend some quality time together. As a family.’

  ‘That sounds great.’

  ‘We’re mainly going for you,’ says Bridget. ‘Mom never takes holidays.’

  ‘That’s really nice,’ I say. ‘I’ll be able to see more of America.’

  I don’t care about scenery but maybe I’ll find a college I can go to next year.

  James laughs his ugly laugh again. ‘What’s so funny?’ I ask.

  He’s staring at me and I stare back.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Just how you say things. You’re weird.’

  ‘Don’t be nasty,’ says Margaret and suddenly, from the front passenger seat, her hand reaches out for mine. I don’t know what to do with it. I look out the window and put my hands under my legs. She turns around in her seat but I don’t look at her. My hands are wet. She wouldn’t really want to know about them. She reaches around and squeezes my knee instead.

  ‘Everything okay?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Why are you all red then?’ asks James.

  Bridget hits him on the arm.

  ‘Shut up, James!’

  We pull into the car park of a large family restaurant, the kind that’s probably part of a countrywide chain.

  ‘It’s enormous,’ I say, to cover my disappointment.

  Margaret opens the back door, ‘Don’t you have restaurants like this at home?’

  ‘Nothing like this,’ I lie.

  It would disappoint them, perhaps, to know that around the corner from where I live, there are places just like this one; just as big, with dire food and disturbing décor. The kind of place my sisters rush to with their dole cheques after not having eaten properly for two days.

  Henry is frowning at me again. Maybe he likes the way he looks when he frowns.

  ‘We’ve never been before,’ he says. ‘But we thought you’d like it.’

  ‘I will,’ I say. ‘I can already tell.’

  I stand in the smorgasbord queue with Margaret. The others have rushed up ahead. Margaret stands close, just like she did in my bedroom, so that when I turn to look at her, I can smell her breath. It’s like milky picnic tea poured from a flask.

  She puts her hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m so excited about having you stay with us. We’ve been really excited. Haven’t you been excited?’

  I redden as though I have been thinking – or have seen – something indecent. I go red now just as I do when somebody tells a dirty joke, or there’s a sex scene on TV and my mum and dad are in the room.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. The real answer is that I am happy to be here. I want to tell her exactly why I am so happy to be away from my family, but if I do, all the hatred I feel for my sisters will rise up, bilious, like a putrid emotional burp.

  We move a little further along the smorgasbord, and I try not to breathe in the smell of bacteria struggling to survive.

  Margaret puts her hand on my arm. ‘You haven’t chosen much to eat. Isn’t there anything yo
u’d like?’

  ‘No, no. I’m fine. I’m just tired and I can’t eat much when I’m tired.’

  Margaret spoons some potato salad onto her plate, next to a large chicken schnitzel, flat and thin, like a strip of human hide. I take nothing. She grabs my empty plate.

  ‘Honey, are you sure you’re all right?’

  I am trying to think of something to say and then I notice Margaret has small breasts. Through her thin, white t-shirt, I can see brown, erect nodes for nipples, like the hard dark knots found on trees. She has become flesh. I can’t help but think what it really is to be a human being; how perishable the body is, what goes on, and how it will end up.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Margaret smiles. ‘How about you try some re-fried beans? They’re nicer than they look.’

  They’d have to be.

  ‘They look nice,’ I say, afraid I might vomit.

  When we get to our table, I have three chicken wings on my plate and they look like the elbows of that girl in the wheelchair. When Bridget sees my plate she stands up.

  ‘Mom, I’m going to get her something. Don’t let her move.’

  I hate it when people say ‘her’ or ‘him’ in place of a person’s name.

  Bridget goes away and comes back with more salad than my entire family (aunts and uncles and cousins included) have eaten in a lifetime.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, with no clue how to manage a lettuce leaf. What are those little white crunchy cubes? Are they edible?

  James goes back for three more helpings. As he chews his food, an especially red pimple close to the right corner of his mouth seems to grow. He touches it between mouthfuls, as though it were something worth taking care of.

  It’s growing dark when we arrive at Flo Bapes’ house. We sit in a lounge room with eight other host-families and their exchange students. Flo stands before the gathering next to a whiteboard and writes up the rules of the Organisation. Along the back wall there are three bowls of punch, with pieces of pineapple floating around in them.

  Each of the exchange students is asked to stand up the front and introduce themselves. I am last, and I say some stuff I’ve been rehearsing for a long time. In front of a crowd I’m not as nervous as I should be.

  I talk about Sydney and I make people laugh. There’s no greater pleasure as far as I’m concerned. When I sit down, Henry pats my back and says, ‘That was very well done.’ James is staring at me sceptically and Bridget is plaiting her hair.

  In small, barely legible handwriting, Flo writes the following on the whiteboard: No drinking, No smoking, No driving, No drugs, and No hitchhiking!

  An exchange student in the middle of the room says, ‘I can’t read that.’

  Flo frowns. ‘Well, I have to write small so I can fit it all on!’

  Flo is an example of a smudge: a person with no definition, no clear lines of personality; a dull, untidy mind containing bad copies of original thoughts. You could spend a year locked in an empty fridge with a smudge and learn nothing. But the worst thing of all about a smudge is that they talk all the time and never listen. My sisters are smudges.

  It’s too hot in Flo’s house and I begin to have a vivid fantasy about the airport. I daydream that we stayed longer in O’Hare’s airconditioned terminal and that Margaret and Henry took me into a duty-free shop and asked me to pick out a present. ‘We’d like to buy you a welcoming gift,’ I hear Margaret say. ‘Pick anything you like from one of the shops,’ says Henry. ‘We’ll come back and get you in a few hours.’

  Suddenly my daydream is interrupted by a storm, and cracks of thunder that dent the sky. I stand up in the middle of one of Flo’s never-ending sentences and go to the window. The storm is close and the room is transformed by it. There’s crashing, war-like thunder and zigzag lightning. This is my favourite weather.

  I wish I had taken the ‘wake me for meals’ eye mask from the aeroplane. I could lie on the floor, put the mask over my eyes and listen to the storm until somebody carried me home and put me to bed in my new clean white room.

  Flo starts to stammer. ‘Oh d-d-d-dear.’ Her nostrils flare up like prawn crackers dropped in hot oil. ‘I’ll have to speak up,’ she says, almost crying with frustration.

  People shuffle to the back of the room and reach for corn chips. I can no longer hear Flo as she drones on under the storm’s perfect music.

  Margaret and Henry are standing with me by the window. We do not speak. Henry is standing close to me. We look out. There’s another long and booming crack of thunder, which sounds like a keg of beer being dragged along the concrete outside the pub on the corner of my street in Sydney.

  The lightning is so close it seems to strike the front yard of the house across the road. Margaret steps back from the window but Henry and I stay where we are.

  ‘What a storm,’ says Henry, with awe in his voice.

  Heavy rain pelts down on the driveway.

  ‘I love rain more than anything,’ I say.

  ‘It’s so clean,’ he says. ‘Isn’t it clean?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say and it is as though our neurones have taken a shower. I look up at Henry and smile, and he smiles back.

  ‘No spiders now,’ I say.

  I’m thinking of the nursery rhyme.

  ‘Let’s see,’ says Henry as he opens the large window all the way. The room becomes quiet and still. People are looking at us, at Henry and me, for the rain is getting in and the sound of thunder drums against the walls.

  ‘No. No spiders now,’ he says, and he is close enough for me to notice that his voice smells like rain.

  3

  I have read that a sheep raised by dogs will eventually learn to chase cars. But how long does it take to learn the tricks of another animal? How long will I need to live with the Hardings before I unlearn the tricks of my own family?

  It is my second day with the Hardings. We’re sitting, after dinner, at the dining-room table, and I’m facing the opened doors of the piano room and library. I imagine the scene at home: Mum, Dad, Erin, Leona, Greg and Steve, all in the boxy lounge-room, all smoking; so much smoke you can hardly see, the burning ends of their cigarettes glowing, moving from lap to mouth, somebody waving at the smoke to see the TV screen. No windows open.

  Margaret removes two small sheets of notepaper from the pocket of her jeans and puts them on the table.

  ‘I think Flo said some interesting things about conflict management last night,’ she says, as she turns a page and looks at Henry. ‘I might be able to use some of this stuff at work.’

  Bridget sighs. ‘Work, work, work,’ she says. Margaret pretends not to hear, or care.

  Henry puts his hand on his neck and clears his throat.

  ‘We should probably explain some of the house rules for Lou. Then we can get on with having some fun.’

  James looks at me, to see what my face is doing.

  ‘We have breakfast every morning at seven-thirty, as a family,’ says Henry, ‘and we’d like you to join us.’

  ‘Bridget,’ says Margaret, ‘would you explain to Lou what happens on weekends?’

  Bridget sighs again. ‘Can’t she just do what she wants? It makes no difference either way.’

  Margaret looks at Bridget. ‘We try to go to each other’s games and concerts,’ she says. ‘Bridget has jazz ballet, basketball and French club and James has science club and debating. We hope you’ll come along and support them in their extra curricular activities and that they’ll get along and support you.’

  Henry puts his hand on Margaret’s leg. ‘And Margaret sings in the local choir …’

  In the silence that follows, nobody bothers to speak for Henry. He stares at the table for a moment then takes his hand from Margaret’s leg.

  ‘We’re a busy family. It might seem odd to you at first but we keep our schedule on the fridge.’

  Margaret smiles as though this is happy news. ‘You might like to have a look at it later. We’ve put your name on it so that you can add you
r own appointments.’

  Bridget says, ‘But you don’t have to put stuff on the schedule. It’s just so we know where everybody is. It doesn’t really matter.’

  James looks at me. ‘Do you think you’ll join the debating team?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Want some ice-cream?’ asks Bridget.

  ‘Yes please,’ I say.

  Margaret picks an apple from the fruit bowl and slams it down on her side plate as though to declare war on the idea of dessert.

  ‘Not for me,’ she says.

  Bridget brings in the ice-cream and Henry and Margaret go on talking about meal times, the dishwashing roster, cooperation, teamwork and mutual respect. I look around at the spotless dining-room; the piano, the bookshelves in the library, the wainscotting and the framed family photos on every polished surface.

  I realise I’m not speaking enough and look for something to talk about.

  ‘Who do you think would win in a fight between an apple and an orange?’ I ask.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ says James.

  Henry smiles at me. ‘The orange,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah, because it has armour!’ says Bridget.

  We all laugh (except James) then nobody speaks again.

  Margaret drinks the last of the iced tea then gets back to the business of the rules.

  ‘There are really only a few other things that you should know,’ she says. ‘When school starts there’s a two-hour limit on watching TV and the weekend curfew is ten o’clock.’

  Bridget sighs. ‘Don’t call it a curfew, Mom. This isn’t apartheid.’

  Margaret smiles. ‘I think Lou understands what a curfew means in this context.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I have the same curfew at home.’

  In Sydney I stay out until the early hours of the morning playing cards, listening to music and drinking, without ever having to call home.

  James grins at me.

  ‘Hey! Why don’t we have a sing-a-long and Lou can sing.’

  James’ only aim is to make me blush again, but his parents don’t see it.

  ‘What a good idea,’ says Henry.

  ‘Do you sing?’ asks Bridget.