How the Light Gets In

by Hyland, M. J.

  ‘Catch!’ she says, and the ball hits one of us in the chest or head.

  Whenever we get stuck in traffic, Margaret suggests we play a word or memory game and James always refuses to play.

  ‘You’ve got some competition now,’ says Henry, winking at me in the rear-vision mirror. ‘You’d better get used to it.’

  Wherever we go, James wants a new pair of expensive gym shoes or a new comic book.

  ‘You have plenty already,’ says Margaret. ‘Why do you always want more?

  ‘Call it boredom,’ says James, ‘call it the materialist age. Just let me be free, man. Just let me be free.’

  In the roadside diners, we sit with our fries and our burgers and above us slow fans turn, covered in grime. Henry orders the same thing at most meals: a piece of steak, rare or medium rare, which he covers in maple syrup. I feel dirty and dishevelled and wish I could have a cold shower and lie down in the shade. I wonder how it is that the Hardings always look clean; how even when they say they find the weather hot, they do not seem to sweat.

  Perhaps it is a question of having lived cleaner lives, a cumulative thing. The brand-new clothes they have bought already look filthy on me, and I’ve worn them only once.

  In the back of the van I try to read in spite of the heat and car sickness, but there is always a fly or two harassing me, and one big fly, in particular, who seems to be staying with me all the way. He edges his way across the page, reading one word at a time. When I shoo him, he comes right back, and crawls sideways from the start of the page as though I have made him lose his place.

  Henry asks me whether I’m okay whenever we are alone.

  When I say I’m fine, he frowns, so I say, ‘Do I not seem okay?’ and he always answers in the same way, ‘No, you seem fine.’ It’s like an argument with no subject. It stops all conver sation – this checking up on me – so I tend to ask him back, ‘Are you okay?’ and he says, ‘Of course I’m okay.’ And that’s that.

  We don’t get much further even though it’s clear we both want to. Sometimes we talk some more, but if Margaret is near, his sentences become shorter and he slips away.

  I want to be back in the house. Henry and I alone in Henry’s den, at night, each in our own matching armchair, him smoking his pipe and me reading. It would be best of all to go back in time, to my first or second night, or forward in time, to winter, so we could be wearing woolly jumpers. That would be best, with the open fire burning. We could start again.

  It is our sixth day on the road and Margaret and Bridget and I are sitting on a bench in a small-town shopping mall while Henry takes James to look at colleges.

  Nearby, a woman beats her child. She is screaming at him, smacking his bottom. The woman says, ‘Bad boy! Bad boy!’ over and over, while the child cowers between her legs, and when she whacks him hard across the head, he runs behind a pot plant and howls, with guttural disbelief.

  I walk towards the woman. I hope that when she sees I am watching, she will stop beating her boy. Margaret rushes after me, takes my arm and says, ‘Come and sit down. There’s nothing we can do.’

  I take Margaret’s hand off my arm and say, ‘What’s the point of just standing here and watching a woman beat the living crap out of her child!’

  Margaret pulls harder on my arm.

  ‘Lou,’ she whispers. ‘Don’t ever speak to me like that.’

  ‘Why the fuck not?’ I say, using the word fuck as though it were capable of inflicting pain.

  Margaret walks away and the woman drags the boy into the bathroom.

  I sit down on the bench next to Bridget and put my head in my hands. ‘That was stupid,’ she says. I am too angry to speak, so I look at the floor. A few minutes later Margaret returns holding three ice-creams, one flavoured scoop on top of another; three brightly coloured Sesame Street scoops each.

  We eat our ice-creams and nobody speaks until I say to Margaret, ‘This is the biggest mall I have ever seen.’ Bridget is still furious with me and she narrows her eyes.

  Margaret smiles. ‘This is nothing. Some malls are so big, joggers use them in winter for doing laps.’

  Bridget drops her half-eaten ice-cream into a bin. She looks at me as though I were something the cat dragged in.

  ‘Let’s find some new clothes for Lou.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘But there’s really no need.’

  The next day, Henry, Bridget and I go to a basketball game. Margaret stays in the motel room, because she has a bad back and James is staying with her, in case she needs help.

  It’s hot. This kind of intense heat pins you to the ground and, sooner or later, you feel like crying.

  Henry stares hard at the game and when I talk he doesn’t want to look at me.

  I take out a tissue and wipe the sweat that is crawling along the back of my neck. I want this vacation to be over; to go back to the airconditioned house.

  ‘I’m boiling,’ I say. ‘It’s too hot.’

  ‘Hum?’ he says.

  For the next hour I sit quietly and Henry looks sideways at me every few minutes. He’s probably wishing that Margaret could be here too, instead of having to go to bed with lumbago. That’s how Henry said it: She’s gone to bed with lumbago.

  I want to tell him that ‘going to bed with lumbago’ makes it sound like Margaret has gone to bed with another man, probably a Spanish man with lumps, but I change my mind.

  Henry presses his finger into the side of his face and chews at the flesh on the inside of his mouth.

  I try to distract myself by concentrating on Bridget’s legs. Her brown skin is like a stocking and you can see the muscles shudder as she extends her legs, strong and animal. Although she has fair skin on her face, like her father, she doesn’t redden and, unlike James, her skin is never damp.

  The game finishes and Henry rushes towards the exit. We go to the car park and Henry is holding Bridget’s hand. He buys her a drink from a man with a fridge on wheels. The man has a flat, squashed nose.

  ‘That man,’ I say as we get into the car, ‘looked like somebody would look if they wore a stocking over their face.’

  ‘How cruel and mean,’ says Bridget.

  Henry is silent.

  I don’t want to point out to either of them that every one of Bridget’s friends looks like a model, that none of them are black, Asian or Hispanic, and that most of her conversation is about clothes and who looks good wearing what. I don’t want to explain how hypocritical Bridget is, even though it might help Henry to know.

  My insomnia is getting worse, and as we drive for hours and hours in the hot sun, I daydream about a world full of rental beds where insomniacs could sleep. These beds would be in small, neat, clean rooms. You could drop a coin into a box and obtain a half-hour of guaranteed sleep. Perhaps these special rooms could fill with a benevolent sleeping gas, or include a bottle of something to drink to help you along. It would not matter, so long as these beds were everywhere you needed them, and so long as they were comfortable and the sleep was guaranteed.

  These special rooms for insomniacs would be found in shop ping malls, in restaurants, in libraries, in cinemas and in schools; the beds tucked away behind discreet, sound-proofed walls with lockable doors, in small, temperature-controlled rooms with music if you wanted it and a toaster and a kettle (and a basket of plastic-wrapped biscuits).

  Yesterday morning James bought a flick-comb: a fake flick-knife that opens out into a hair comb. He uses it constantly. He flicks it open now at an old lady who is looking at us from across the diner.

  ‘Stop that!’ says Margaret, but James continues.

  Henry gulps an enormous lump of meat too quickly.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, James?’ he asks.

  James flicks his flick-comb at my face.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he says, his baby moustache like a scribble above his lip.

  ‘Please stop it, James!’ says Henry. ‘I don’t know what ‘s wrong with you. You’ve been acting very strangely ever
since …’

  Henry realises what he is about to say and turns away, awkward, shifting in his seat, ashamed. But who are you ashamed of? I want to ask. Are you ashamed of your son or of me? What have I done wrong?

  It is our ninth day on the road and we stop at a roadside cafeteria because I say I need to go to the toilet.

  ‘The bathroom,’ says Bridget. ‘You need to use the bathroom.’

  Margaret follows me into the cramped cubicle. It smells foul; a mixture of human waste and ‘Pine Forest’ air freshener. The smell forces me to breathe through my mouth.

  There is one small sink in the cubicle, a room so small that when the door opens it comes close to hitting the toilet bowl.

  When Margaret follows me I think she must be coming in to use the sink while I urinate. I expect that when she realises both sink and toilet are in the same tiny room, she’ll leave and come back when I’m finished. But when I open the cubicle door she is right up behind me, and I can feel her bosom on my back.

  ‘You go first,’ she says.

  I am paralysed by this idea. I know that I should say something smooth and easy like, ‘Okay. You wait outside and I’ll yell when I’m finished.’ I rehearse this sentence but can’t speak.

  She stands in front of the locked cubicle door, and is staring, in her phlegmatic way, at the lower half of my body. She strikes me as being emotionless, a person who would never blush or burst into tears over anything. She is too normal, too relaxed, as she stares right at me and talks loudly at me about the heat.

  I am skinless.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t need to go after all.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I’ll go then.’

  And so I stand and stare at the wall, red-faced, while Margaret slowly unbuttons the metal studs on her jeans.

  Back in the van, while James and Bridget sleep, I remember saying goodbye to my mum at the airport.

  ‘Okay, I’m going now,’ I said.

  My mum looked down at the brand-new camera hanging around her neck. ‘But there’s an hour and a half till boarding.’

  ‘I just want to go,’ I said.

  She wanted happy pictures of us together. She wanted something good to happen, so that one day it would be possible to say, ‘Remember when I saw you off at the airport when you were going to the States?’

  She looked over her shoulder at a group of exchange students sitting with their families in the cafeteria. She wanted to ask one of them to take a photo of us, our arms around each other, smiling.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  She lifted the camera up over her head and put it carefully back in her bag, making a comfortable nest for it and checking to see if it was secure, as though it was a miniature me she was stashing away. My mum wore her cardigan wrapped around her waist, the other mothers wore theirs draped around their shoulders.

  ‘Gimme a hug,’ she said. So, with my backpack on my back and my shoulder bag swinging heavily down to my elbow, I hugged her and my breasts made awkward contact with the top of hers. Her breasts, flattened against mine, repulsed me. They were too large and warm, eager to maintain contact, mine small and cold.

  I let go, adjusted my bags and said, ‘Rent out my room if you want. You could probably get thirty dollars a week for it.’

  I turned away from her and started walking, my throat fat with grief, my jaw shaking and my teeth grinding. Even at a distance of a few metres I could hear her crying. I adjusted my bags again, felt for my passport and rushed towards the boarding gate. My throat cleared.

  Her sadness didn’t matter. If my new family could afford a sleep clinic or good doctor to help me, I’d take them; I’d take two dozen of whatever I could lay my hands on.

  A few hours later, James sits up close to me and stares. His once thin and scrawny moustache is thicker now, more like those being grown by the friends he takes down to the basement. We are under his black sheet and his leg is rubbing against mine.

  ‘Hey there, weirdo,’ he says, his voice a deep, low whisper.

  ‘Piss off, loser,’ I say, and to stop myself from turning red, I think of myself as a disused telephone, its plug wrenched from the wall, the cord dangling, no longer capable of being startled.

  ‘Weirdo,’ he says.

  6

  It’s our eleventh night on the road, and I’m sitting cross-legged, looking out the back window, riding the bumps in the road, letting myself sail. At times the road is so quiet that we seem to hover like a spacecraft under the bright stars, taking off when the road climbs up a hill and landing when it glides down the other side.

  I like the open country road at night. It is one of my favourite things, along with the sound car tyres make on a wet road, and road signs with knives and forks on them to signify food, and beds to signify sleep, and the sight of an aeroplane at night, with its landing lights on. Everything that is stupid by day seems intelligent and meaningful by night. I love to look out the wide back window and pretend that I am alone.

  I love how the road lights burn holes in the dark. The damp air, and the darkness, inside and out, remind me of my first game of murder in the dark. The shock of pitch black, of hands reaching out for hands, exaggerated cries, an odd weightlessness in my legs as I ran fast to hide in a cupboard at the end of the hallway. I was nine or ten and my sisters’ boyfriends were much older, adults compared to us.

  When we drive at night, I feel that same weightlessness and speed in my blood. And when we drive at night something happens to James. During the daylight hours his conversation is quick and sharp, defensive, like verbal kung fu.

  But at night there is a change. James’ big face, his tufty, immature sideburns, his pimply skin, his oiliness, are all covered up. He looks better, but more than that, the fact that his flaws can no longer be seen in the dark seems to cause in him a psychic transformation, and his words are kinder.

  Bridget and Margaret are sleeping and Henry drives. All is quiet and smooth and peaceful. James sits close to me, and copies my cross-legged pose. In the darkness his face looks good and it occurs to me that mine might too. I look at him, much longer than I could bear to look at him with the light on us.

  James’ eyes rearrange me when he stares back. My body shudders; a tiny, sharp, quick pulse travels through me, and my face, rather than rising to a blush, feels warm as though I were sitting before an open fire. My palms, rather than sweating, crave the sensation of skin and so I rub my own hands, one over the other softly, deliberately, to feel flesh. James’ eyes have narrowed but they do not look away. He continues to gaze into my eyes and his chest rises violently; a deep, sudden breath. We have become something else in the darkness and it feels more like the truth.

  A car overtakes us, going too quickly, and Henry beeps hard and clicks his tongue on the roof of his mouth, tsk, tsk.

  I look away from James, excited, and afraid. We have nearly kissed each other’s shadow and now we pull away. We lie down, facing out the back window, close enough to each other for it to take a long time for the stirring to go away.

  One of us has to speak. I ask him, ‘Do you know what desquamation is?’

  James does not look at me.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s clearly a noun. Probably some kind of illness. Am I right?’

  ‘If I knew what it was I wouldn’t have asked you,’ I say, staring out of the window. This disappointing bit of conversation ends, and what had seemed to be the truth suddenly looks like a dangerous lie the darkness told.

  We are eating in a hotel restaurant to celebrate Bridget’s fourteenth birthday. Bridget opens her presents. Margaret and Henry give her a gold bracelet with a diamond in it and her grandparents have given her a gold pen. Henry orders champagne and my stomach churns at the sight of it. For the past few days I’ve been craving alcohol. I miss the way it makes me feel: soft, nerveless and edgeless. Most of all I miss how it helps me sleep.

  ‘Let’s toast to Lou. Our newest family member.’

  My glass is empty bu
t I don’t refill it. When we toast, I use both hands to hold on, and drink the air from the glass.

  I look at Henry. ‘Since it’s a special occasion, could we drink some champagne?’

  Henry looks at Margaret and Margaret looks at Bridget.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Margaret, ‘but the legal age for the consumption of alcohol is twenty-one.’

  After our fancy dinner we go to the movies in a decayed old movie house in a small country town. Bridget gets to pick the film. We shove our hands into boxes of greasy popcorn and the almost-fluorescent white pieces bounce like tiny erasers from our knees and litter the carpet.

  The movie is boring and it reminds me of Steve and his habit of deliberately disturbing innocent people in cinemas.

  Steve and his best friend, Ryan, find a romantic, feel-good movie and sit next to a woman, preferably an old woman. Then Steve turns to Ryan during the pre-movie advertisements and confesses to a murder or some other violent crime he pretends to have committed only a few hours earlier.

  In a loud voice he’ll say something like, ‘Look, I didn’t mean for the knife to go right through her lungs,’ or, ‘She wasn’t meant to fucking die!’

  Then he waits for the woman to get scared and move seats or leave the cinema.

  Steve has an unnerving and convincing imagination when it comes to making up crimes. I pointed this out to Erin once and she spat in my hair. ‘It’s only fun,’ she said. ‘But you wouldn’t even know what that is!’

  Bridget is holding her mum’s hand while watching the boring movie and Henry has fallen asleep. After all the popcorn has been eaten, James moves in his seat so that his shoulder touches mine. I move away but he moves closer. His knee presses up against me and then he pretends to scratch so that he can rub his hand on my leg.

  I feel as though I’ve swallowed fast-acting poison. I’m sweating, not just a light prickling sweat, but a pouring sweat from the palms of my hands. I need to leave the movie theatre.