“This is an apple tart,” Oscar had said solemnly to Barney that night as if it was the answer to everything, and as if it contained a million explanations of its own.
“But it’s not an ordinary apple tart. It’s the apple tart of hope. After you’ve taken a bite, the whole world will look almost completely different. Things will start to change and by the time you’ve had a whole slice you’ll realize that everything is going to be okay. ”
And when Barney took a bite, his face did change. I’m not claiming there was anything magic about his tarts but I will say they tasted great.
“You keep an eye on the dog,” Oscar whispered to me, “and I’ll have a bit more of a chat with Barney.” I called the dog over to me and sat patting him while Oscar and Barney talked for a while and though I couldn’t hear everything they said, after a while, I could hear them laughing. Oscar’s chuckle echoed toward me and then off over the sea, followed by the old man’s low, wheezy guffaw, which sounded something like relief or liberty. At least it was a surprisingly cheery kind of a sound, which made me feel something that I could not precisely name—something comforting I guess. A nice warm kind of a thing, which was handy as well as nice, considering how I was standing in my bare feet, wondering why I was there at all, with the ends of my PJ bottoms feeling muddy and damp.
“No offense, but I didn’t expect him to have such a nice voice,” I’d said after we’d said good-bye to Barney and were heading home.
“Perhaps that’s because you haven’t spoken to many people like him before.”
I’d never even met anyone like Barney before.
It was like that when I hung out with Oscar—always doing something new. Thinking in a fresh way. Meeting someone different.
Oscar had acted as if his apple-tart strategy was the most normal, unremarkable thing ever. He didn’t seem to realize that he was out of the ordinary. If anyone else in the entire world had thought of baking an apple tart from scratch, and if by the same miracle they saved another human being in the way that Oscar just had, they would probably look triumphant or at least a bit smug or self-satisfied. But Oscar had the same plain look on his face.
And lying in my bed that night, I thought about the trip to New Zealand, and how near it was getting, and how excited I should be feeling, and I asked myself why I so desperately didn’t want to go.
The truth tumbled on top of me right then like a marshmallowy sackful of soft sweet simple things. The feeling was colorful and clear and gentle and full of certainty and it pummeled me gently inside and out, and I understood. I understood these battles I’d been having with my parents and why an adventure away from Oscar felt like such a terrible thing.
I didn’t want to leave him. I didn’t want to sit by a new window in a strange house in a foreign country and not be able to talk to him. Oscar was the reason. He was the reason I wanted to stay.
Our departure date got even closer, of course, and then because you can’t hold things back, it arrived. It was very early and I was still in bed, hoping for some disaster to happen that would mean we didn’t have to go, when Oscar’s familiar tap, tap, tapping came at the window.
I rolled out of bed with a thump and hobbled over to the window, getting ready to say the good-bye that I didn’t want to say. Oscar wasn’t there. Instead, a patchy smudge of condensation was on the window as if someone had breathed on it, and when I pulled the window open the first thing I felt was a tiny familiar gust of cinnamony sweet-smelling warm air rising into my face. A rope and two pulleys had been constructed between our houses.
And swinging slightly on a little suspended shelf—in a box made of the same white cardboard I’d seen him carry to the pier that night—sat one of Oscar’s apple tarts. It had a golden baked letter M right in the middle and a tiny pastry airplane with pastry clouds around it and a little pastry smiley face. And a particular smell surrounded me, the one you get when butter and sugar and spices have been mingled into a single thing and cooked in a hot oven.
I could hear my mum storming up and down stairs. I could hear my dad’s voice, tense and grouchy. The phone kept ringing and my parents kept roaring at each other to answer it. The air fizzed with a kind of prickly energy that happens when people have been bombarded with a relentless campaign of resistance and are now filled with uncertainty about a big decision they’ve made that’s too late to back out of.
I pulled the tart indoors from its little swinging shelf, took it downstairs and put it on the kitchen table.
“Where did that come from?” Mum asked, stopping suddenly and gazing at the golden raised pastry.
“Oscar,” I said as if that explained everything. When my dad saw the M and the clouds and the airplane and the smiley face, he smiled too.
And in a series of enchanted slow-motion movements, the three of us got ready to eat the tart. My dad lifted three plates out of the cupboard, I put the kettle on for tea and my mum rummaged around for a knife. Carefully, she placed a crumbly appley sweet slice in front of each of us.
A new feeling settled on the room—a feeling that didn’t have any resentment or stress in it. And as the pastry melted in our mouths, other things seemed to melt too, like misgivings and doubts and the things that had made us grumpy and withdrawn.
The shadows of our uncertainty seemed to disappear.
I know that possibly sounds a bit peculiar, but after each of us had taken a few bites, all of a sudden, everything looked different.
Something good and open-minded started waking up inside my head, and I surprised even myself by making a short speech about how much I admired my parents’ adventurous spirits and how I was determined to make this a worthwhile trip for all of us and how I was going to try to be much nicer about the whole plan.
Mum and Dad had looked at each other and then turned to me and said how good this was of me and how mature and how decent. And then both of them gave me a warm sweet apple-tart hug.
“I mean honestly,” Mum said later. “Is there a single other teenager you know in the world who’d go to such elaborate lengths to make and deliver something like that—who’d notice how busy and stressed we have been and how it’s been quite a while since we’ve had anything homemade? So exquisitely baked! He must have made that pastry himself. That’s very unusual indeed. And such thoughtful, appropriate, carefully cut out motifs on the top! There’s really no one like him.”
“No,” I said, “there isn’t.”
After that, getting ready to leave stopped feeling like a big negative chore and began to feel more like a celebration.
“Be sure to say thank you to Oscar for that tart,” my mum had said, looking kind of mystified and happy, while Dad had nodded dreamily in the background.
“Okay, I will,” I said.
Who would’ve guessed that something so specific, so definite, so full of butter and sugar would have been the answer to my fears? It turns out, though, that Oscar’s tart was the solution. Such a simple thing.
Oscar said that now that I was committed to the trip, it was going to be better than even he’d predicted. As soon as I arrived, everything was going to be instantly fantastic—I was going to have a wonderful time and it was all going to work out perfectly brilliantly.
But along with these new warm feelings, there was something else too. The thing that had been haunting me swelled up inside me again, and I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer, which is often a time, I have found, when it is important to write something down.
Dear Oscar,
I don’t know how to say this any other way, but, you see, I need to explain something. I can’t stop thinking about that night when you rescued Barney with your tart—and how good and kind I realize you’ve always been. It wasn’t until this morning when you sent me an apple tart of my own that I finally knew what it is that I have to tell you.
The timing is pretty terrible, but, you see, the reason I haven’t wanted to go away is because I’ve wanted to stay here, and the reason I’ve wanted to stay h
ere is because of you.
I’ve nothing against New Zealand or anything but because of how I feel, specifically about you, the whole world looks different.
I don’t know whether it’s because everything has got darker or lighter. I guess that depends on how you feel about me which is, I hope, the same.
So anyway, look, you’ve convinced me that I should, as you say, “embrace the adventure” so that is what I have decided to do. It was the taste of your apple tart that finally made up my mind to give this my all. But I need to know you’ll be here when I come back.
I love you, Oscar Dunleavy.
I’ve been falling in love with you since the day we first met.
I need to have some idea about whether you feel the same way about me. Send me a sign. Anything will do.
Love,
Meg
I put my hand flat on the paper and I thought for an insane moment that I’d stroll over to his house and drop it into the mailbox. I wondered about the possible things that Oscar would say or think or do if I’d ever had the courage to send it.
I never sent the letter because I was afraid. I was afraid he would laugh at me. I was afraid that what I had written would seem ridiculously stupid. I was afraid it might break something that me and Oscar already had. I was afraid that he didn’t . . . that he would never feel the same way. So even though I put the letter in an envelope, and even though I wrote “To Oscar Dunleavy” on the front of it, and even though for a while I thought about running next door, right then in the middle of that night to post it, in the end I never did.
Instead I turned and twisted that letter in my hands until it got puckered and crumpled, and then I smoothed it out again and I shoved it under my mattress—a soft, silent, stifled place that nobody can see.
the sixth slice
When Meg left for New Zealand, I missed her all the time. I’d look over at her window and when I saw her room, blank and vacant, something inside me would twist, like a pain. I’d got so used to seeing her face that not seeing it felt wrong and miserable and kind of hopeless.
So when Paloma Killealy moved in . . . of course, she wasn’t Meg and she could never replace Meg or anything . . . but I did think that maybe she would be a person I might get to know, and it turns out that she thought the same, and that was pretty good, I thought. At the time.
The Energizer was on and during the first week Paloma arrived and the day before it at school, in front of a whole load of people, including Andy and Greg, Paloma asked me if I’d take her to it.
It was obvious that she’d no clue about how The Energizer worked, because it is this event that happens a couple of times a year in a big hall with fields around it outside of town.
When you arrive, you spend the whole night shouting at your friends just so they’ll be able to hear you and you watch people like Andy and Greg kissing girls. That’s all that happens. It’s a bit boring to tell the truth, but everyone goes. I’m not sure why.
One thing that I do know, though, is that nobody “takes” anybody else to The Energizer. That’s not the way it works. I explained that to Paloma and she said, “Oh right, I see, okay then,” and she walked out of the yard, and her hair swung from side to side and Andy and Greg were like, “Oscar man, are you crazy? She definitely wants you, and would you look at her?”
They claimed that our school had never had someone as fit as her in it, in its entire history, not since it was founded, which was in 1968.
“She’s giving herself to you on a plate. What’s going on inside your little head, buddy?” asked Greg, and he caught me in one of those headlocks he and Andy always loved to do.
Paloma discovered our windows, the way Meg and I had, and it wasn’t long before we started chatting. It felt weird, but Paloma was nice in her own way, and it was good to see someone in that window. Plus she hadn’t a clue how things in our school worked, so it was an opportunity to explain.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you in front of your friends,” she said, and I said it was okay.
“Everything is so different here from what I’m used to. It’s taking me a while to adjust,” she explained. “Where I came from before, we had school dances and boys took girls to them.”
“Oh right, I see,” I said, and I told her she didn’t have to be sorry and it was perfectly understandable that she’d assume that it was the same here.
“I have a question for you, Oscar,” she said, and she leaned out of Meg’s window and she twisted her hair around her long fingers and she opened and closed her eyes slowly and I said, “Okay, well, shoot.”
“I’m curious. I mean, I’m wondering—if boys did take girls to The Energizer, I mean—if that was the way it worked, you know, I wonder then would you be interested in taking me?’
I saw straightaway what she was getting at. She stroked her arm and tilted her head to one side, and looked at me with her liquid shiny eyes. And she did look fairly lovely all right.
I thought then that Paloma Killealy was definitely interested in me, which was a good feeling, especially considering how much almost every boy in my class had been talking about her since she arrived. At school, people sighed when she passed by and they smelled the air that she’d walked through, and Andy and Greg had become more or less obsessed with thinking about her. They never stopped asking me questions about what it was like to be her next-door neighbor.
It could have been most flattering thing that had ever happened to me. But just because a gorgeous girl is interested in you, it doesn’t mean you should change your plans.
“Paloma, it’s really nice of you to ask me a question like that. I really appreciate it.” But then I said that I was about to tell her something that I’d never told anyone and I got her to promise to keep it to herself. She said of course she promised, and her face was as serious and trustworthy as you can imagine a face would be.
“You see, there’s this girl. Her name’s Meg. She used to live in the room you’re in now and when you move out she’ll be back, and you see most of the time, she’s all I think about. I think about what she’s doing. I wonder what she’s thinking. If people took other people to The Energizer, Meg is the one I’d like to take. I hope you know what I mean; I hope you understand.”
“Oh right,” she said, and then she repeated what I had said as if it was a difficult thing to understand: “Meg’s the name of the girl you’re interested in.”
And I said, “Yes, that’s exactly it.”
“So wait,” she said, “what you’re actually saying is that you’re not interested in me?”
“No,” I said because I believe people always deserve to be told the truth, “not in that way, Paloma. But I can tell you, in case you didn’t already know, that apart from me, every boy in the class is really, really interested in you, so you still have a lot of choice if you ever want to—”
“You’re not interested in me?” she interrupted, saying that same thing a couple more times in exactly the same tone of voice.
After that conversation, Paloma quickly got back to being herself again. She said that Meg must be a really special person for someone like me to feel those things about her. She said Meg was lucky and I said thanks.
She even asked me for Meg’s email because it would be nice, she said, for her to drop her a line and introduce herself, seeing as she was renting her house and living in her room. So I wrote Meg’s email address on a torn scrap of paper and I rolled it up and tossed it over to Paloma, who caught it in her long fingers and started uncrumpling it straight away and putting the details into her phone.
“Call over to me tomorrow, okay?” she said, not looking at me and pulling across Meg’s curtains. And I said that I would.
Next day when I knocked on her door, Paloma’s mother showed me into the back garden. Paloma was standing by the fence with a huge fanlike bat in her hands, hitting a mattress so hard that dust was rising from it in huge clouds.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Wh
at . . . THWACK! . . . does . . . THWACK! . . . it look like . . . THWACK! I’m doing?” she replied, panting and scowling a bit on account of the effort that this was taking.
“It looks like you’re beating up a mattress.”
“I’m airing it,” she said. “Which is obviously something that your girlfriend Meg never did because it’s rancid. I’ve no idea how on earth she expected me to sleep on it in that condition.”
“For the record, she’s not my girlfriend, and also for the record that conversation was confidential.”
Paloma continued with her whacking and didn’t reply.
“What’s wrong, Paloma?”
“Why would you think there’s something wrong?”
“Oh, I don’t know, it’s just that you look so scary and angry.”
She stopped beating the mattress and she smiled at me.
“Maybe that’s because I’m not used to boys rejecting me.” She laughed a high, shrill, trembly laugh that didn’t sound like her. I started to say something but she held her finger up to my mouth and in this juicy kind of a voice she said, “Oscar, you don’t have to say anything in response to me, I was only messing.”
“Of course, I knew that,” I said, but messing, I mean that kind of messing that Paloma was doing, seemed sort of sour. It felt like biting into a bitter fruit and finding that at the gritty center there were hundreds of tiny pips of truth.
Paloma had found a letter in Meg’s room addressed to me. She dropped it into the mailbox with a note attached to it: Oscar!! Found this letter to you. I didn’t read it or anything—just passing it along!! See u soon!!!!!! PalomaK xxx
That was nice of her, I thought, looking at the envelope, which was a bit battered, and noticing that the lip of it seemed to have been opened and closed a few times because it was crushed and a little bit torn, as if Meg had possibly changed her mind and taken the letter out once or twice and then put it back in again.
The Apple Tart of Hope Page 4