How the Light Gets In

by Hyland, M. J.

  I stopped tears then, the way I do now, by convincing myself that excitement and danger are better than boredom. But even when I breathe deeply, there is a strange burning in my nose, like the tingling you get when you are about to fall.

  Gertie sits on the bunk bed with me and puts her small clammy hand on my lower arm and holds it there, holding onto me as though to keep me for herself. Even through the thick wool of my jumper I can feel the intense heat of her skinny old body, and I wonder if the body stores up its heat as it grows older, if it stews away like something left for a long time on a stove.

  She looks into my eyes and says, ‘You must conjure up Louise Connor in ten years and wonder what will happen to her if this Louise Connor takes another wrong turn. You must make the most important decision now, about your future, even though you have no concept of a future and no concept of a continuous life.’

  I can tell by the look on Gertie’s face that she thinks this is the best speech she has ever made. It’s probably giving her goose bumps.

  ‘Lou, you have to pretend to be somebody else for long enough to get yourself out of this mess.’

  Gertie suddenly seems embarrassed, even confused, as though at some point along the way she didn’t get something right.

  ‘I’ve seen signs of change already. I’ve seen you being patient and even listening to people you don’t like. We think it’s because you have become less self-centred.’

  The idea of me being self-centred comes as a bit of a blow, but I smile at Gertie and her hand falls from my arm, the heat and dampness lingering. Nobody has ever said so much to me before.

  When Gertie has left my room, abruptly, full of drama and silence, I sniff at my arm. The wet patch of wool reeks and I smile at Gertie’s strange smell.

  The other inmates are being taken out to do some Christmas shopping, perhaps to distract them from the fact that one of us is being set free.

  As I sit and wait, I remember when I shared a room with Erin and we spoke of our fantasies. It was not so long ago. I was fourteen and had just started taking elocution lessons. Erin had been out drinking with her then boyfriend, Shane, an air force pilot, who was more than ten years older than her.

  I told her that my favourite fantasy had a number of parts to it but always involved waking up in the morning to discover that miraculously I had become equipped with an extraordinary talent for the piano or the violin or an exceptional facility for new languages.

  ‘I don’t want to just wake up and find I can instantly play the piano or speak several languages, but to find myself with the will and drive and capacity to learn them.’

  Erin laughed at me. ‘Why wouldn’t you just fantasise about being able to speak like a hundred languages straight away. Just because you wake up with a sudden thingo … what’s the big deal about that?’

  I told her that she had completely missed the point but she wasn’t interested in the reason why she had missed the point. She didn’t care what she had missed. She said, ‘Anyway, that’s a stupid fantasy.’

  I thought I should ask her what her fantasy was, to be nice, or to try to ‘keep the peace’ as my mum is so fond of saying. ‘What’s your fantasy then?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘ever since I’ve been going out with Shane I can’t get this fantasy out of my head that what I do is get on a crowded jumbo jet full of hundreds of passengers and Shane is in the cockpit steering the plane and we leave the door open and start having sex and then …’

  At this point I was quite sure I knew what Erin’s fantasy involved, but unfortunately I was quite wrong. It was much worse, far more explicit and violent than any of her previous grubby tales.

  My sister’s sordid cockpit fantasy made me cry. She stopped talking, not to make me feel better, but so that she could listen to me sniffling for a while.

  In quite a sinister way, I fascinate my sisters, and they love to watch my reaction to the horrible things they say. If my parents weren’t complicit in all of this, perhaps I could love them.

  ‘God,’ said Erin, ‘what’s so fucking sad about wanting a root in a cockpit? When the time comes, you’re gonna have really big issues, kiddo. Really big issues.’

  I sobbed more than I usually did, maybe because of the ‘when the time comes’ part. I said exactly what was in my head even though I knew it would mean nothing to her.

  ‘It’s all violent,’ I said. ‘Everything about you is so violent. In your head it’s like an abattoir where all the people are horny all the time and it makes me afraid. I mean, how do I know how many other people are living with horny abattoirs in their heads?’

  ‘Go to sleep,’ she said. ‘Just go to sleep.’

  But, of course, I couldn’t.

  21

  Gertie is driving me and as she drives she tells me all about the new family, as though I am going to be spending the rest of my life with them.

  ‘They already have an exchange student. She’s also from Sydney. Her name’s Mandy. Do you remember her from the orientation camp?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Oh well. Maybe you’ll remember her when you see her again.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘The mother is a clerical worker and the father is unemployed at the moment.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I say, stupidly.

  ‘They’re not very well off.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘They’re being very generous offering to take you in like this, at such short notice.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Mandy may feel a bit threatened by your presence.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I say.

  ‘Well, Lou, I’m sure you can figure out for yourself that you’ll have to be extra careful not to step on any toes.’

  My new host-family lives on the barren, industrial outskirts of the city. Gertie keeps her gaze fixed on the road, her arms held out straight and rigid at the steering wheel.

  She says, with a smirk I have never seen on her face before, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to you, but I hope I never see you again.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I hope I never see you again either.’

  We laugh and before I know what I’m doing, I reach out and hold Gertie’s hand. She keeps my fingers squeezed tightly in hers and my chest swells. When I can speak again, I ask, ‘Do you happen to know what desquamation is?’

  Her hand returns to the steering wheel, as though she needs both hands steadied in order to think.

  ‘I do,’ she says. ‘It’s a scaling of the skin. It can be caused by too much vitamin A. My nursing days come in handy sometimes. Why do you ask?’

  I can hardly believe Gertie is the first person to know.

  ‘I’ve seen it in books about Edwardian explorers and they always seemed to be getting it when they died in the snow. Do you know why they got it?’ I ask.

  ‘Too many polar bear and dog livers.’

  ‘Wow!’ I say. ‘How horrible.’

  It’s lunchtime and we stop for a sandwich in a roadside café. I feel comfortable with Gertie and eat two sandwiches. Gertie is the closest any person has come to answering my question and I wish that I was going to be living with her and not this poor new family who live in the sticks and already have an Australian exchange student. Gertie tells me that she often wonders how Lishny is doing. I haven’t thought about him all day.

  We cross a narrow, derelict bridge and arrive at the house.

  The day is unnaturally dark and yet I feel lighter than I have for a long time, and calm, as though I can see the future and the future is calm too.

  When I get out of the car, I spin around on the gravel path. My boots crunching the ground makes a great noise and a big flock of starlings stir and whoosh in the brooding sky. They look like leaves in a cup of black tea. Gertie looks up at the sky and smiles and I smile too.

  ‘I feel good,’ I say.

  ‘I can tell,’ she says.

  ‘I love it when the weather is serious. When it makes you t
ake notice.’

  She holds my hand and I don’t mind. My hand is dry.

  The house is small and grey, rectangular and wet looking, like a rain-soaked concrete bunker, a single scrawny tree in the front yard like the last hair on a dying animal.

  A small man greets us at the door.

  ‘Hello,’ he says and makes a most unusual gesture with his hands, clapping them together as though about to pray and leaving them together, his fingers pressed against his double chin. Unlike every other person I have met in this country, he does not offer to shake our hands.

  ‘Come inside,’ he says. ‘We’ll take care of your belongings later.’

  He leads us into the kitchen, a small dark room directly inside the front door. His wife and her two children get up from the kitchen table where they have been sitting in front of bowls of soup, and the sound of chair legs scraping the concrete floor, all at once, is like sudden, heavy rain. The soup is an intense green and they eat it with slices of brown bread.

  Without any hand shaking, the introductions begin.

  My new host family are: Mr and Mrs Bell, and their two small boys, George and Paul. The boys look remarkably like their mother, and like her, their hair is loose, curly and ashen, oddly dull and dirty. Their faces are long, with serene stares of boredom and fatigue. They look like sheep but bear no resemblance to their father; it is as though Mrs Bell gave birth to them without his involvement.

  ‘Sit down,’ says Mrs Bell, whose long white neck is dotted with a vivid red rash.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, and Gertie and I sit at the small wooden kitchen table. ‘Would you like some soup?’ asks Mrs Bell.

  There’s a small old dog under our feet, who snorts and snuffles, his bared teeth grubbing and shovelling for fleas, digging into his raw, hairless groin.

  The soup looks like spinach soup and smells like hot weeds rotting beneath a summer sun. The boys continue to eat it after they have said hello, the spoons scraping against their teeth.

  I know this is going to be the kind of silent house in which every nerve-jangling noise is amplified; it’s something about the lack of furniture, the bare floors, the thin curtains and the cold. I’ve been in a house like this before, in the countryside, and I rode a motorbike around a paddock until it ran out of petrol just to make some noise.

  ‘No thank you,’ I say, ‘we’ve just had something to eat.’

  The boys haven’t spoken since saying hello, but as they finish their bright green soup, they find a moment to smile at me. They have the strangest of smiles for children, full of welcome, void of suspicion or competition. Mr Bell is unloading my luggage and taking it to a room at the back of the house.

  ‘Let’s go into the family room,’ says Mr Bell when he returns, running his fingers through two small squares of neat grey hair on either side of his otherwise bald head.

  We cross the narrow hall and enter another small room, only slightly larger than the kitchen and equally dark. There are six hard-backed wooden chairs scattered about as though a game of musical chairs has recently been played. There is no couch. No bookshelves.

  There are only the chairs, a pile of cushions in the corner, with names stitched in them, and a wooden table, which is identical to the kitchen table, piled high with board games. I see myself and the sheep-boys, sitting around on the floor playing games, with bowls of grass soup on our laps.

  Mrs Bell brings a pillow in from one of the bedrooms and I am given the biggest of the hard-back chairs to sit in. I put the pillow on my lap. Mr Bell comes up behind me.

  ‘Move forward a bit,’ he says, and puts the pillow nicely behind my back.

  Mrs Bell says, ‘Why don’t you take off your mittens? Is it cold in here? We could bring a heater in.’

  It is numbingly cold. Paul offers to fetch me a blanket. ‘I’m fine,’ I say, even though I should take it.

  This house is even colder and damper than the accommodation and I am sure I can feel a frigid gust of wet wind shooting up through the floorboards. It is as though the whole house is a series of refrigerated boxes sitting on a frozen lake.

  But the Bell family all wear summer clothing. How can this be?

  This is such an odd, cold home. I wonder if there is a hidden camera somewhere; a team of psychologists hidden behind a one-way mirror waiting to see how I react.

  I look at Gertie. She has her hands inside her cardigan sleeves and her knees are jumping up and down.

  ‘So,’ says Mrs Bell when we are all seated, ‘what do you like to do, Louise?’

  The boys look at their mother as though she has accomplished something fine.

  ‘I like reading,’ I say.

  George stands up before he speaks, ‘We get our books from a mobile library that comes around every second Sunday.’

  ‘Do you like reading?’ I ask him.

  ‘Yes. I’ve nearly read all the books for my age group.’

  Mrs Bell makes a tiny gesture with her right hand and George sits down.

  ‘Well, Louise, you’ll be sure and let us know if there’s anything you need for your hobbies and interests.’

  I look at an Alice in Wonderland chess set, which is on the floor under the table, ‘Perhaps somebody could teach me to play chess.’

  ‘I will,’ says Paul.

  ‘That’d be great,’ I say.

  Paul stands again, just long enough to say, ‘I tried to teach Mandy but she couldn’t remember how to move the knights or how to castle.’

  I am about to pretend I don’t know what castling is, to keep the conversation going, when Mr Bell appears in the doorway. ‘Paul, you shouldn’t criticise a person when they’re not in the room.’

  Paul faces his mother. ‘But it’s true!’

  ‘It may be, but how is Mandy to defend herself?’

  Gertie stands up.

  ‘Could we take care of some business before I go?’ she says.

  Gertie leaves the room with Mr and Mrs Bell and the kitchen door closes firmly behind them. I know that Gertie is telling them about the AA meetings which the Organisation has decided I must attend.

  The boys take a game I don’t recognise out of a big box stashed inside a cupboard and start to set up the pieces.

  ‘Do you want to play?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I say. ‘I’ll just watch.’

  I sit for as long as I can just watching. ‘Could I look around the rest of the house?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ says Paul.

  He shows me the bedrooms. There are no drapes on the windows, only thin, white net curtains; no rugs on the floors, and no sign of a radio or CD player. And then I realise what it is that makes this house what it is: there is no TV.

  It is dark now, and although I am calm and relieved to have been given this opportunity, I cannot remember ever having felt so bored; so bereft.

  It is well past dinnertime but there has been no dinner. We are sitting at the kitchen table, tea in the pot, and the boys are sharing what looks to be a left-over Easter egg, smashed up into small pieces, which they pass to one another.

  It has been decided that I will stay with the Bells for one week, to see how I get on. If it all goes well, the Hardings will pick me up in a week.

  So now it will all work out. I’ll finish my senior year and marry Tom immediately so I can stay in the country without needing to bother asking the Hardings if I can live with them. I’ll go to a good college, get a job tutoring, or whatever it is medical students do to pay their bills, and then when I’m a doctor, or just about, I’ll leave Tom and get on with my real life.

  Maybe I’ll find Lishny or somebody as good and funny as Lishny. Perhaps I’ll have fallen in love with Tom. Either way, I’ll never have to go home.

  Mrs Bell reaches her hand across the kitchen table. ‘I already know it’s going to be a pleasure having you here,’ she says.

  I take my mittens off, smile, and hold her hand as though I’ve done this a thousand times before. I’m getting good at this. A few moments a
go I was bored and now I am peculiarly peaceful.

  The boys wipe their mouths with napkins and take it in turns to come over to hug me. I hug them back.

  Gertie offers to stay until I am settled in.

  I am shown to my room, which has been evacuated by George. I can’t imagine where he will sleep, perhaps in the pantry.

  It is a small, tidy room, with a window looking out onto a field. Paul shows me the cupboards, which have been cleared out, and tells me I can read any of his books.

  ‘Where does Mandy sleep?’ I ask.

  ‘She sleeps in the bungalow out the back,’ says Mrs Bell.

  A shudder travels up my spine. I might have been asked to share with her, one room, two girls, changing clothes in front of a stranger, having to talk in bed, frightened of being seen.

  Gertie and I say goodbye at the car.

  ‘So this is it,’ I say. ‘I’ll never lay eyes on you again.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she says.

  ‘Thanks for everything,’ I say, wondering if I should hug her.

  ‘You don’t have to hug me if you don’t want to. I guess I’m a bit bony.’

  I laugh.

  She opens her handbag. ‘Oh, I almost forgot to give this to you. It’s a letter from your parents. It came yesterday. Sorry.’

  I wave Gertie all the way down to the end of the street and long after she can see me. I think, Perhaps I am being watched. Maybe I should always behave as though there were somebody watching me.

  I lie on my new bed and open the letter. It’s from my mum – sent before the news that the Hardings have agreed to take me back – scrawled on the inside of a musical Christmas card, with a fifty-dollar note sticky-taped inside. I wonder where this kind of money is coming from.

  Dear Lou,