Without saying what he is going to do, Henry leaves and returns with a bottle of port and pours half a glass for everybody.
‘Just this once,’ he says, splitting his sides with loud laughter.
‘Never again,’ says Margaret, her teeth so black she seems to have lost them all in a street brawl.
James turns the TV up.
‘James, turn that off!’
‘I’m watching something,’ he says, like a baby.
‘Just turn it off!’ shouts Margaret. ‘Or I’ll come and sit on your head!!’
Then Margaret says something in French and Henry laughs so hard it’s contagious, and we are all laughing. For the next few hours we take it in turns to tell stories about strange people we’ve known. Margaret and Henry tell more stories about Uncle Pete and other crazed relatives, like the aunt who wears aviator sunglasses and a red scarf when she drives, and Margaret’s great-grandmother who wore corsets so tight she flew to Switzerland each year to have her lungs reinflated.
While everybody is laughing I stand and turn off the only lamp in the room. Nobody asks me to turn it back on. I often wish that all conversation could take place in the dark; that it were always night and that the redness of my skin could never be seen. In this dark room, I feel no inhibition. I sit close to Henry on the couch; Margaret sits on the other couch with Bridget. James sits at his mother’s feet. I feel the beautiful warmth of the port around my heart.
Henry pours more port into my glass and winks at me. I wink back. James massages his mother’s feet and for a long time I can’t keep my eyes off his hands; the way that he takes each of his mother’s toes in turn, squeezing each of them equally so that none miss out.
I am finally and completely at home; in this dark room, with the slightly drunk Hardings.
‘Well,’ says Margaret when the birds begin to sing, ‘I think we’d all better hit the hay.’
What a nice change it is for me not to be alone, awake in bed, when the birds start to sing.
‘Yes, we’d better,’ says Henry and both he and Margaret begin to laugh, perhaps at the surprise of having completely shattered their usual routine. Perhaps laughing at Margaret who has pulled the phone plug out and who is trying to walk away with the plug still in her hand, trailing the phone behind her, or perhaps they are laughing at James, who has fallen asleep and is snoring.
The following day we get out of bed late, and, as though we have signed a solemn agreement, no one mentions last night. Breakfast is made and eaten with less talk than usual. It seems the Hardings have all been made coy by last night’s late-night laughter and drinking. I have slept well for the first time in months. I feel good and wish that every night were like last night and that every morning I could wake from a night of rest instead of sleepless misery.
At the end of breakfast, when it is nearly time to go our separate ways into the day, I say, ‘Last night was great fun! We should do it again.’
I understand at once, from the look on Henry’s face, that I have said the wrong thing.
‘Lou,’ says Margaret, her lips tight and angry, ‘last night was not something we intend to make a habit of. Henry and I were a little drunk, and more than a little irresponsible. It will most certainly not be happening again.’
James and Bridget gaze into their bowls of cereal shaped like space-craft and say nothing. Nothing. The room is stuffed with righteousness and dented morals and I am left to look like the only fool who thought last night was a good idea, that drinking together made us happy and free.
I go to my room, grab my bag and head out to the supermarket parking lot for a smoke. I wonder whether there are just some people who need to live a different kind of life. I buy a small bottle of gin with what’s left of my pocket money and go home to watch the first movie I have rented for myself, to watch by myself. Nobody bothers me all day. I lie on the couch and remind myself that I am better off here than at home with my slutty sisters who can beat me up whenever they feel like it and never get punished.
I eat three packets of Oreos and re-read a book by a famous forensic pathologist who specialises in the study of serial killers. He says that serial killers often have one thing in common: a history of being treated randomly as children. Being treated randomly, he explains, means that no matter what these psychopaths did as children, whether their behaviour was good or bad, their parents treated them randomly. Willy nilly, without warning, they might be punished one day for doing something that the day before they had been rewarded for. Therefore, the serial killer, as a child, can never know which way the parent is going to turn: hot or cold. But the forensic pathologist doesn’t say anything about the effects of being treated with embarrassing consistency.
Whenever my dad has a few too many beers he makes a point of embarrassing me by telling the same story. ‘I broke a man’s knee caps by pointing at them. I pointed at his knee caps and he fell off the earth-mover the next day and landed right on the road and broke both his knees.’
If somebody says, ‘But you can’t injure a man just by willing it to happen!’ my dad replies with one of three responses, the worst of which is, ‘Well, if you think that’s something, I made the first woman I had sex with levitate right off the bed.’
The next few days are peaceful, yet ominous. Nobody in the Harding family is the same as they were before, and when people are not precisely who you expect them to be, not exactly the people you have grown accustomed to, you cannot trust the world, even a dreaded world, in quite the same way.
Henry and Margaret work longer hours than usual, come home, cook and eat a healthy dinner and retire to their dens for more work or reading. Bridget comes home most days just minutes before dinner – as though she has been hiding behind a small bush outside, waiting for the smell of food – after spending all day in the sun, swimming, rowing or water skiing. James spends all day at the mall, or down in the basement playing loud music, or table tennis with his three moustached friends.
I spend a lot of time lying on my bed reading books for school. I memorise the names of every U.S. president and all the states, the rivers and the lakes. I read five novels and two plays. I learn seventy-nine new words. Margaret asks me if I’ve called my mum again (I’ve called only once since arriving) and when I tell her I haven’t, she tells me to do it ‘right away’.
I call her and we have a short conversation. When she finishes telling me about her volunteer Meals on Wheels job and who’s having a baby, I tell her that Margaret needs to use the phone and then I hang up.
Three days a week, my mum and dad drive a dirty van around the streets near our flat, delivering trays of sloppy, tepid food to the old and infirm.
Before the Meals on Wheels job my dad had two other real jobs. Once he worked at the dogs, the greyhound races, as a Tic Tac man and wore white gloves and communicated race results by gesticulating in a special hand-code. Before that, he worked on the roads, using a jackhammer to smash concrete all day long. From the roadwork job he developed ‘vibration white finger’, a vascular problem caused by gripping vibrating tools, which cut off his circulation, causing a blanching of his fingers.
Then one day my mum said to him, ‘Why don’t you sue your old boss for compensation and then deliver meals to the old folks with me?’ a sentence which my dad likes to quote and re-quote to friends, as a way, I suppose, of showing his gratitude for what he still regards as a stroke of genius on my mum’s part.
Now there are two of them collecting trashy hand-me-downs from the elderly who seem fond of saying ‘thank you’ by giving away egg-stained doilies, ornamental dogs without heads and hot-water bottles with teeth marks in them. Sometimes, I’m fairly sure, my parents even steal the odd object, such as kettles and toasters. Whenever we have something break down or explode in the flat, they seem to replace it as soon as they come home from work.
My mum used to work as a beautician and tells everybody she is an ex-model, but has no photographs to prove it (they were all stolen, she says). She has a
decent sense of humour, though, except when she’s making bad-taste jokes about my dad’s ‘vibration white finger’, which I don’t wish to repeat.
Sometimes, when I feel lonely, I go outside, to the side of the house, to the window of Henry’s study. I creep up to the window and look inside. I crouch low to the ground and look through the blinds and watch him as he smokes his pipe. His eyes are worse than ever, and he wipes at them with a handkerchief to soak up whatever it is that’s coming out. His face is much older in repose, when nobody is around, much older without Margaret, with nothing to do but wait for what might happen next.
9
It’s another Saturday, and the last weekend before school starts. Margaret wakes me at eight o’clock by bursting through the door without knocking.
‘Hey, lazybones,’ she says. ‘Get up! We’re leaving for the game in ten minutes.’ Her voice is harsh.
I pull the sheet over my head and wonder what to do. I have spent the night in a terrible state of fear. Woken suddenly at three a.m. after a violent dream, and unable to sleep again, I spent the next five hours in a mood so black it was as though I was at the mouth of a dark cave, a cliff beneath my feet, a small gust of wind playing at my back, pushing me forward, pulling me back.
When Margaret pulls the curtains open and stands over the bed, I remember the dream that woke me.
A man is lying across a table and another man has cut him down the middle with a pair of scissors; a deep but bloodless cut from neck to groin. The man stands on the table, undoes his zip and urinates into the other man’s wound. Both men are versions of my dad.
Margaret tugs at the sheet and I wrench it back.
‘I feel sick,’ I say. Her voice is sharp and I would like to know why. It is as though she has seen inside my mind.
‘Are you sure you’re not just being lazy?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘I want to go to the game. I’ve always wanted to go to a real baseball game.’
She doesn’t believe me.
‘Let me have a look at you,’ she says.
I drop the sheet and squint into the harsh white light.
‘I’ll get the thermometer,’ she says.
Margaret’s voice, and the way she wants to tear the covers from my body, reminds me of a nurse who pressed her knuckles hard into my skull because I asked for more pills.
It was about two years ago and I had been taken to the emergency room in a taxi, suffering from another bout of mysterious and terrible headaches. I called the nurse back three times because she wouldn’t give me anything for the pain. The third time, instead of using the red buzzer at the end of the wire, I screamed out for her.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she snapped. ‘You’d think somebody was trying to murder you.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I’m in a lot of pain.’
The nurse made a fist of her hand and rammed her knuckles into my skull, a kind of surrogate punch, the closest she could get to hitting me without being accused of assault. She left the room then and came back with the pills.
It was a public hospital, full of poor people without private health insurance and plenty of teenage junkies looking for pills in place of heroin.
My sisters were sitting on the end of my bed watching daytime TV. Both of them scrawny and slutty, wearing jeans so tight that when they walked into the room you could see the outlines of their fannies.
Margaret takes my temperature and it turns out that I do have one. Only a slight one, but enough to change the tone of her voice.
‘Can I get you anything?’ she asks, the back of her hand pressed lightly against my forehead.
‘Maybe a few pain-killers, ‘I say. ‘Some pethidine, maybe?’
She takes her hand away, frowns at me, then leaves the room, which radiates with unfriendly light.
A little later Henry comes in carrying a breakfast tray with eggs, toast, cereal and coffee and after he puts it down on my bedside table, he turns off the light and closes the curtains. It is a struggle not to clap my hands together with delight. The nightmare’s residue has long worn off and I feel calm. Sitting up in bed in the dark like this, with Margaret and Henry standing over me, I feel the opposite of skinless, the opposite of my usual nervous state. I feel quite wonderful, in fact, especially when Margaret tidies my blankets, tucking them in around my hips, her firm hands jutting in quickly under my thighs.
‘We think you should eat something,’ says Henry.
‘Do you want one of us to stay home?’ asks Margaret, her voice so kind I nearly change my mind about not going.
‘No, no,’ I say. ‘You’ve been looking forward to this game for ages.’
Henry looks at his watch.
‘Oh well,’ he says, looking at Margaret, ‘sometimes you catch fish, and sometimes you don’t. If you’re sick and need looking after, that’s just how it is.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Don’t stay home.’
I want them to leave immediately so that I can drink the coffee from the perfect white cup on the perfect lacquered tray.
Henry closes the door and Margaret sits on the bed.
‘Lou,’ she says, ‘I know you don’t feel well, but we’ve been wanting to talk to you and we had been hoping to do it today.’
‘Yes,’ I say, my stomach dipping.
‘We need to know whether there’s anything troubling you. You’ve been acting a little strangely.’
‘You seem a bit on edge,’ says Henry. ‘Is there anything you’d like to talk about?’
I am desperate for Margaret to go back to where she was only a few moments ago, straightening my blankets, her hands under my thighs, smiling, running her hand just once along the soft down on the side of my face, lifting a glass of water to my lips. I redden suddenly with desire and memory: part pleasure, part confusion, a taste in my mouth of a bad ham sandwich. I wish that right at this moment I could be treated with the kind of unreserved love dished out by intelligent and warm parents to a beautiful first child.
‘No,’ I say. ‘What do you mean?’
Henry leans against the door like a security guard, and at once my usually airy white room feels dank and stingy, robbed of breath, like a gloomy locker room.
‘We’ve been noticing that since we returned from the trip you’ve seemed quite withdrawn.’
‘Oh,’ I say, relieved that this is all it is. I had worried they might know about the cigarettes or the gin. I want to drink my coffee but also want to look too sick to drink it.
‘Maybe I’m just tired. When the weather isn’t so hot I’ll be better.’
Margaret puts her hand on my knee and when I flinch, she moves her hand to the bun of hair coiled on her head, as though to stop it from leaping off.
‘James says you’ve been very rude to him since we got back. He says you don’t speak to him in a civil way.’
‘Really?’ I say.
Henry brings a chair over to the bed and sits in it. He seems not to want to say what he has to say. He looks at Margaret before he begins, like an actor looking to his prompt.
My food is going cold.
‘Lou, it’s going to become a serious problem if you can’t get along with our children, especially James. It was his idea …’
‘Well, and ours,’ says Margaret quickly, ‘but James was particularly looking forward to you coming to live with us. He has wanted us to get an exchange student for a long time.’
What happens next happens without any forethought; as though my body, injured by Margaret and Henry’s words, has taken over my mind.
‘I bet he was,’ I say, ‘I bet the fucking creep was looking forward to me coming.’
I take the cup of coffee and throw it against the wall behind Henry’s head. I realise that this is what I have done only when I see brown liquid running down the wall. The idea of grin-faced, oily James; the idea that he has spoken in hard-done-by tones about me, that he has complained, that he has made trouble, makes my arms burn with rage.
Margaret gets off the bed
and moves backwards towards the door. Henry gets up out of his seat, slowly, and stands, mute. I know I should apologise, take it back, but when Margaret and Henry simply stare at me and then at each other as though I am a lunatic, I cannot stop myself from making things worse.
‘Don’t look so shocked,’ I say. ‘You must know it’s true.’
Margaret is suddenly crying and I feel absolutely nothing but curiosity. It’s interesting how people cry – I think – interesting how when something awful happens it doesn’t feel real.
Henry wants the scene to end immediately. He has no interest whatsoever in more information, or any kind of resolution, good or bad; no interest in any confession or apology. He puts his hand into the small of Margaret’s back and guides her out the door and onto the landing. They talk in whispers for a while and Margaret is no longer crying. I cannot hear what they are saying. I wait for them to come back but they don’t.
About ten minutes later the Mercedes pulls out of the driveway and the Hardings are gone. I have the house to myself for the whole day.
I take a shower in the ensuite in Henry and Margaret’s bedroom, use some of Margaret’s perfume, try some make-up and stand naked in front of the full-length oval mirror in their beautiful bedroom. I give myself the creeps by imagining Margaret and Henry changing their mind about the baseball game, coming home and bursting into the room. They would see my bare back and my reflection in the mirror and I would turn and face them, or not turn to face them, and do what I can never do – stare at them through the mirror – the way some women do in bathrooms when they hold comfortable conversations with each other, about nothing.
I wear Henry’s dressing gown untied and lie on the bed. I sleep for a while, in a way that I can never sleep in a bed that’s my own. I look at the books they each have by the side of the bed, read a few pages of each, but cannot concentrate. I go to my room and get my collection of Gogol short stories and read some of them. I stand by the open window, daring myself to lean out bare-breasted. I change my mind. This is not my idea, but an idea Erin and Leona have planted in me. I close the dressing gown and look at the clouds: three dimensional, yet flat, hard yet empty, capable of dissolving in an instant.
How the Light Gets In Page 8
