We stop only once so that Flo and the bearded men can get some coffee and food. I don’t eat and don’t speak until we arrive, even though when it starts to snow I would love to tell somebody I’ve never seen snow before and how beautiful it looks.
We pull up outside a four-storey building in a busy city street in the heart of Chicago.
The entrance to the accommodation is next door to a pizza parlour. Flo gets my suitcases out of the boot and says goodbye to me on the kerb.
‘I’ll be keeping in touch with Margaret and Henry,’ she says, as though the three of them are life-long friends, ‘and if you have anything you’d like to say to them I suggest you put it in writing.’
‘Whatever,’ I say and hear Bridget’s voice in my head.
The two bearded men let themselves in and take me up the three flights of stairs to my dormitory. On the way up we pass through a big room with barred windows and about ten teenagers sitting on couches.
‘This is where we leave you,’ says the man with the smaller beard who sat next to me in the car.
‘Good luck,’ says the other.
I sit up on the bottom bunk in my small dormitory, which has two bunk beds, a small cupboard, a barred window and a single chair. It’s a dark, cold room.
One of the accommodation staff comes in.
‘Hi, my name’s Gertie Skipper,’ she says. She’s short and thin and looks about eighty.
‘Hi,’ I say.
She gives me a cheese sandwich on a small white plate, tells me why I am here and some of the rules.
The essential rules for wayward exchange students are as follows: I am not permitted to leave the accommodation unless accompanied by a chaperone. She will keep my allowance. There are weekly excursions to tourist attractions and, depending on one’s religion, there are chaperoned trips to nearby churches, synagogues and mosques. Other than that, I will leave the building only to attend various rehabilitation appointments with doctors, psychiatrists, counsellors, and, if I am lucky, for interviews with prospective new host-families. Bedtime is ten o’clock and the kitchen roster is on the notice-board in the common-room downstairs.
Gertie sits on my bed and pats my leg.
‘You’ll be staying here until you are either sent home to Sydney or another suitable family is found for you. What happens will depend on your progress.’
‘What do you mean by progress?’ I ask.
‘Your rehabilitation, I suppose you could call it. Your counsellor will tell you more about this when you meet him tomorrow.’
One by one the other inmates – there are eleven of them – are brought to my door and introduced to me.
They stand in the doorway and say ‘Hello’ then leave. I sit up with my back against the wall with the uneaten cheese sandwich on a plate resting on my legs.
I’ll be sharing with three girls: Miranda, Rachel and Veronique. I’ll find out why they’ve been sent here later.
Gertie tells me that she and the other staff are here to help me and that I should take a few quiet moments to eat my snack and unpack my bags.
‘When you’re ready, why don’t you come downstairs and mingle with the others.’
She makes it sound like a holiday camp.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
Gertie leaves and shuts the door behind her.
I begin to unpack, but when I feel like I might start crying, I stop for a moment to look out the barred window at the busy street below. I realise how much I’ve missed being in a big and noisy city. Perhaps if I could live here, things would be completely different.
I lie down to sleep, but can’t sleep, so I stare up and count the springs under the bunk bed above me. I let myself get colder and colder. I lie like this for what seems like hours, thinking about how nothing feels real, then feeling sorry for myself for being in such a cold, dark room.
I am about to go downstairs when there’s a knock on the door. A tall, skinny boy with shoulder-length black hair comes into the room.
‘Hi,’ he says, ‘my name’s Lishny. I’m from Russia.’
He has a very big nose.
‘I’m Lou,’ I say. ‘I’m from Sydney. Australia.’
He sits on my bunk bed.
‘I just arrive two days ago,’ he says. ‘Can I help you to unstuff?’
‘You mean unpack.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s okay,’ I say. ‘I can do it myself.’
I begin to unpack. He stares at my pile of books.
‘Can I check at your reading materials?’
There’s something fishy about Lishny’s struggle with English. I wonder if he’s been sent to spy on me: to find out if I’m remorseful.
‘Yeah, all right,’ I say.
He scatters all my books on the floor and rummages through them like he’s starving and the books are loaves of bread.
‘What do you read?’ I ask, standing with my back against the window, my arms folded.
He is flicking through the pages of one of my books and doesn’t answer.
‘What kind of books do you like?’ I ask.
He screws up his face. ‘What a banal question.’
I agree.
‘I agree,’ I say. ‘You’re right.’
He smiles. What a charming smile. I smile back.
He points to the cover of my collection of short stories by Gogol.
‘This is one of the worsted translutions of Gogol I have ever witnesses,’ he says.
‘Is it?’
I have copped on to his fake bad English routine and I think he knows I have, but I don’t want to stop him speaking in his silly pidgin. It’s cheering me up, which is, perhaps, what he intends.
‘Sure. It’s really dreedfoul.’
‘I see,’ I say with a grin on my face that tells him I’ve definitely copped on to him.
He flicks the pages and rants in Russian.
I nudge his back with my foot.
‘Yes?’ he says. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’
I smile at him. He smiles back.
‘So, doctor translution,’ I say. ‘What exactly is wrong with this book, then?’
‘If you would like to sit down, I will explete.’
‘Explain.’
‘Sure. If you are so creezy about this creezy Russian odour.’
‘Crazy, not creezy,’ I say. ‘Author, not odour.’
‘But why? You can say this creezy odour stinks.’
We start laughing and it is hard to stop.
‘Your English is perfect, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘This pidgin rubbish is just some kind of quaint gimmick.’ My voice sounds formal and forced. I wish, sometimes, that I could remain silent but silence is an art I know nothing about. I must add silence to my list of things to get better at.
‘You might be right.’
I take a pillow off the bunk and hit him on the head.
‘Don’t hit me! I’m quaint,’ he says. He takes a pillow from the other bunk and hits me back. ‘I’ve never been quaint before.’
When we stop playing with pillows, we each sit on a bunk, under the blankets, and Lishny tells me why the translation of Gogol is no good. He says it captures none of Gogol’s irony.
‘I’ll go to my dorm and get my copy and show you,’ he says.
Lishny takes ages to come back and when he does, he not only has his Russian copy of Gogol but two enormous pieces of chocolate cake. He holds a piece in each hand. He has a smear of chocolate on the end of his nose.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I was getting really hungry.’
‘There’s a party downstairs for Gertie’s sixtieth birthday. Do you want to go down and join in?’
I can hear tinny music, the way music sounds when an old tape is playing. There’s some talking too and a bit of laughter, but it sounds flat and boring. I hate people in groups.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’d rather stay here.’
‘Me too.’
We eat our cake with our fingers and talk about books. It is such a
relief to be talking to someone who isn’t an idiot.
Gertie comes to check on me. She stands in the doorway, holding a clipboard, and tells me that I’ll need to come downstairs soon, for dinner and to sign some papers and to have my induction session.
I thank her and she leaves.
When she’s gone, Lishny tells me that this so-called hostel is really a prison and that the chaperones are really guards. He tells me that it’s partly run by the Organisation and mostly run by the immigration department and the police.
‘They say the bars on the windows and the locks on the doors are to stop us from doing ourselves harm, but it’s really about making sure we don’t escape and make ourselves at home in this allegedly wonderful and free country.’
When it gets dark we don’t turn the light on.
Lishny comes over and sits on my bunk and we talk until it’s too cold to stay still.
‘I feel like going downstairs,’ I say. ‘It’s freezing in here.’
‘It’s freezing all over this building. A polar bear would think it was too cold.’
We laugh.
‘Why are you here?’ I ask.
‘I can’t talk about it,’ he says. ‘I’m being questioned by the police and forbidden to discuss it.’
‘Oh.’
‘And what about you? What is your crime?’
‘I drank too much,’ I say.
‘You should get the hiccups from drinking too much. Not a prison sentence.’
Lishny and I go down to the common-room where the others are watching TV and playing board games. There are two couches, four armchairs and a small square table.
A Christmas tree sheds its needles in the corner by the barred window and snow adheres like breadcrumbs to the frozen glass.
Lishny and I sit on the end of one of the couches. One of the other inmates sits on the floor by the wall next to the only heater in the room. He has one trouser leg rolled up to the knee and holds his bare leg close to the heat. He scratches at his shin, which is covered in scabs and fresh welts; blood trickles into his socks.
‘Why can’t they give him something for that?’ I say. ‘He’s covered in sores.’
‘Maybe he has something to help him but he doesn’t want to use it.’
We sit and talk until a bell rings for dinnertime, then we gather around the kitchen table to eat stew. Gertie and one other guard, Phillip Tanzey – a medical student who works here part time – sit with us through dinner. The other inmates talk about the snow and pop stars and film stars, and excursions they’ve been on, and other places in Chicago they’d like to visit. Nobody talks about incarceration or wanting to be freed.
‘What percentage of inmates end up being sent home?’ I ask.
Phillip puts his knife and fork down and wipes his hands on a napkin.
‘You’re not an inmate and I don’t know what the percentage is,’ he says, ‘but probably more than half. But lots want to go home. There are lots of complicated reasons.’
Gertie smiles at me.
‘Don’t you worry,’ she says, ‘it’s early days for you yet. You just settle in and we’ll cross that bridge …’
‘When we come to it,’ I say. ‘God, I hate clichés.’
‘Me too,’ says Lishny. ‘I hate and avoid them like the plague.’
Lishny and I smile at each other. Nobody else has got the joke.
One of the other inmates, Mike, from England, speaks with his mouth full.
‘Do you know about the points system yet?’ he asks.
‘No.’
‘You start with sixty points and you lose two points every time you give cheek or swear or miss a meal or don’t make your bed or talk after lights out.’
Phillip wipes his hands on a napkin again.
‘Mike, you know it’s not that simple. Lou, we’ll talk about this more after dinner.’
I wonder how many points I’ve already lost.
After dinner, I stay in the kitchen with Gertie and Phillip. They close the door and take me – point by point – through the induction program. At the end of this long lecture, Gertie asks me to sign a form. I’m agreeing to be sent home unless a new host-family is found. As I sign it, I wonder whether I might be able to escape.
Lishny and I sit together on the floor behind the couch huddled under blankets he has pulled from his bunk.
Tonight, there are three guards on duty, and one of them, Lily Beesman, who arrived after dinner, is on her way over to talk to me.
‘Hello, I’m Lily.’
‘Hi,’ I say.
We shake hands.
‘You’re not supposed to be on the floor,’ she says, crouching down. ‘You’ll get a kidney infection. You should be sitting up on the couch.’
Lishny has told me that Lily was once a kindergarten teacher. She says she has enlarged kneecaps from years of bending to talk to children. Her tall, waistless body is roughly made of three segments, with a strange bulge in the middle. She looks like an enormous finger.
‘Why does it matter,’ I say, ‘if we sit on the floor?’
‘Well, I suppose it’s all right,’ she says, standing up and dusting her swollen knees.
Lishny and I spend the rest of the night talking and laughing. I find out that he’s only just turned sixteen and that two months ago he won a chess tournament in Seattle. He wants to be a GM.
‘What’s a GM?’ I ask.
‘A grand master. I made it to the semi-finals when I was fourteen at Sudak in the Crimea. I lost because my end game sucks. When I go home I will work on it.’
I wonder what it’s like where he lives and whether I could go and stay with him.
It’s my second day. I didn’t sleep at all last night and couldn’t turn on the light to read. The door to the common-room was bolted shut so I couldn’t go in there to watch TV.
All the other inmates have been taken on an excursion to see a movie, with Phillip and Lily as chaperones. I have to stay because at three o’clock I have an appointment with Rennie Parmenter, the counsellor.
I have a pain in my stomach. I go downstairs to look for Gertie.
She’s in the kitchen, standing on a crate at the sink, and she wears her watch on the outside of her cardigan sleeve.
‘Are there any pain-killers?’ I ask.
‘Do you have a headache?’
‘No, it’s a cramp.’ She leads me into her bedroom, which is on the same floor as the common-room and kitchen.
‘Sit down,’ she says and I sit on her single bed.
Gertie shuts her bedroom door and I am overcome with a sad tiredness, a craving to lie down on top of the floral eiderdown, to cover myself in her crocheted blanket and her smell of lavender, and be read to sleep.
She puts her small warm hand – so warm it’s like a hot-water bottle made of flesh – on my shoulder. It’s remarkable how much heat is coming out of her old body.
‘What kind of cramp is it?’
I look at her eyes and realise I haven’t looked properly at them before. I never pay enough attention to people’s eyes. It’s time I learnt to pay closer attention to the details of people’s faces. I can’t remember what colour Margaret’s eyes are. This is something I should know. Maybe if I paid more attention to this kind of thing, I’d feel better and none of this would have happened.
So I look into Gertie’s eyes, and she looks into mine, and a shudder rips through me like a root being pulled from the soil. Suddenly what I feel has nothing to do with what I’m thinking. I’m thinking she’s old and senile and I don’t like her, but I feel like I want her to hug me.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘just a cramp.’
She holds my hand. ‘Is it your undercarriage?’
I want to say something sarcastic about the word undercarriage but I decide not to. I want to be kind. I want to see what it will feel like to act in a different way. I will practise on Gertie.
‘No,’ I say, ‘it’s just a stitch I get sometimes. Like someone’s sticking a k
nife in my side. I get it when I haven’t slept properly, which is nearly all the time.’
‘Okay,’ she says, ‘but don’t be afraid to tell me anything at all. I know teenage girls sometimes have things go wrong downstairs.’
I smile at her instead of saying something mean, and she squeezes my hand and then she hugs me and I feel as though I’ve been drugged. Maybe it’s because it’s warmer in her room.
‘Could I lie on your bed for a while?’ I ask.
I’m sure it’s against the rules for me to be in her room or to sleep in her bed.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘just this once.’
Gertie wakes me from my nap with a hot cup of tea, and I feel completely resuscitated. This is the best I’ve slept for months.
‘Better get up now. Rennie’s here to see you.’
I feel as though the sleep I’ve just had is my reward for being good to her, for something marvellous I have done. Maybe this is how life works.
‘Thanks for letting me sleep here,’ I say. ‘I’m really grateful.’
She nods and sits by my feet.
‘I know you’ve already made friends with Lishny,’ she says, ‘but it might pay to make friends with the others too. Lishny will be leaving soon.’
‘Why?’ I ask. ‘What’s he done?’
‘That’s for him to tell you. I just think it would be a good idea for you two not to get too attached.’
‘Does he know he’s leaving soon?’
‘Yes, of course. This isn’t the terrible place he likes to pretend it is.’
‘Then why can’t he tell me why he’s here?’
Gertie sighs.
‘He can tell you. There’s absolutely nothing stopping him. Maybe he just doesn’t want to.’
Rennie Parmenter is waiting for me in the counselling room. It’s a small room upstairs where the dormitories are. It has no window, a round table in the centre, two chairs, a small heater, and a box of tissues on the floor. Rennie is short, has greasy red hair and is wearing a loose woollen v-neck jumper without a t-shirt underneath.
When I sit down, Rennie gets up and slams the door shut.
‘Oopsie,’ he says. ‘Sorry. There must be a blizzard outside.’
How the Light Gets In Page 19
