How the Light Gets In (3 page)

‘Maybe you could go part time,’ I say.

‘Oh boy,’ she says, ‘don’t
you
start!’

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I just …’

‘That’s okay,’ she says, ‘it’s an obvious solution.’

As we walk around the house, she tells me about Henry’s work as an actuary. I don’t ask what this means, even though I know I should. She tells me about her kids’ plans to go to the best colleges in the country and how they both want to be doctors.

‘Me too,’ I say. ‘I desperately want to be a doctor. Reconstructive plastic surgery and other –’

‘Oh, like faces and – ’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Definitely not facelifts. Hand transplants, that kind of thing.’

‘That’s so great,’ she says. ‘I think the three of you will get along just great.’

She tells me what ‘the kids’ are studying and what sports they play. She tells me so many things it feels like every new fact is pushing an old one out of my brain. But I try hard to concentrate. I want to remember the details. Only selfish people don’t listen to other people’s details and the most selfish of all people never ask any questions. Like my sisters. They don’t even ever ask anybody how they are. They just launch into puerile conversation about the sales on at the shops, or the way certain stockings ride up your arse.

When we are standing under the tree house in the enormous garden I say, ‘This is the poshest house I’ve ever set foot in. You must be so rich.’

Margaret stops and grips my hand.

‘I know this is a different world for you,’ she says, ‘but I don’t want you to compare us to your family.’

‘But this is like a castle compared …’

Margaret hugs me, without warning, holds me tight and pats my back, then lets go and looks right at me. Just like Flo Bapes, it’s as though she is hoping I will cry.

‘No comparing,’ she says. ‘Now, let’s go to your room.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’m so tired.’

Alone at last. I draw the curtains, kick off my shoes and lie on the single bed with its chalk-white quilt. There’s a breeze circling my bare feet and I’m desperate for sleep. But within minutes of closing my eyes, my brain springs open, like a flick-knife. It has been nine days since I slept for more than four or five hours. Although I’ve had insomnia for a long time, it has never been as bad as in these past few months. Every morning I wake just seconds before the birds do, as though my sudden waking is what causes them to start their chirping. Then I lie there, a dead weight, listening to the birds and hating them.

I open my suitcase, get the thesaurus out and look up synonyms. At the start of the year I made a promise that I would learn two new words every day, and so I lie on my back and say them over and over again: soupy, juicy, sappy, starchy, marshy, silty, lumpy, ropy, curdled, clotted, gelatinous, pulpy, viscid, grumous, gummy, clammy, sticky, treacly, gluey and glairy. I think,
I am counting slime instead of sheep
and this makes me smile, but I would rather sleep.

I am about to get down on my knees and pray for sleep when my host-brother and sister arrive home. I hear them coming up the stairs and their quick footsteps on the floorboards on the landing.

Margaret calls out, ‘Louise, are you awake?’

I sit up. ‘Come in,’ I say, as though I am the important occupier of a big office.

I stand up when my host-sister and host-brother walk into the small white room. I have learned that this is what you should do when in somebody else’s home. Margaret stands in the doorway with her arms around the shoulders of her children.

‘Louise, this is Bridget and James.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I say, and shake hands with both of them, wishing I’d had time to re-talc my palms.

James’ hand is dry and strangely small and soft; a hand-shaped cushion.

Margaret squeezes her children close to her side but they break away and come into the room. I sit on the pillows with my back to the wall.

‘You look different in your photos,’ says Bridget, looking smack into my eyes the way her mother does. I must have looked like a gargoyle in my photographs.

‘Do I?’

Bridget is thirteen, but looks older. She is taller than both her brother and her mother. She sits on my bed and crosses her long, bare, brown legs then pulls them in to her chest, as though she has no joints. I cannot stop looking at her legs and her clean white shorts.

‘Maybe it was the uniform that made you look different,’ she says. ‘We don’t wear uniforms at our school.’

She too sounds as though she has a cold.

My school has no uniform. I borrowed a navy one with
burgundy pinstripes from Mrs Walsh, my English teacher, whose daughters go to private schools. She told me I looked a million dollars in that uniform and she took twenty-four photos of me standing next to her piano. I thought that these photos were the best to send because when somebody is in uniform you can’t tell much about where they come from or what they’re really like.

Bridget smiles, so at ease considering she is speaking for the first time to a stranger who will live with her, as a sister, for a whole year. She wants to know about the orientation camp in Los Angeles because I sent them a post-card from there every day.

I tell her all about the campus and the three swimming pools and the library with – I lie – more than seven million books.

‘Do you like reading?’ she asks.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Do you have many books?’

‘Not seven million, but you wouldn’t be able to read them all in just one year.’

But
, I think,
what if I should stay much longer than that?

James sits on the bed next to his sister as though to gang up on me. ‘Did you know that I’m exactly one year younger than you?’ he says. ‘I’m fifteen and you’re sixteen.’

‘Wow,’ I say, wishing the word hadn’t been invented.

Bridget gets off the bed and stands next to Margaret. She is very tall.

‘I need to take a shower,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

James stands and opens the drawers of my empty desk. He is chubby. His skin is pimply around the chin and there is a thin and patchy growth of hair above his top lip, the beginnings of a juvenile moustache.

He looks at Margaret. ‘Is Louise going to do chores too?’

‘Call me Lou,’ I say.

Margaret smiles at me as though to tell me not to worry.

‘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 you’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.