I took it up to my room so I could open it in private, and before I did, I glanced across at Paloma’s window. There was a new kind of light in there, strong and dazzling, making it very hard to see properly. It felt as if I’d been staring at the sun.
the seventh slice
When you move somewhere new, the difference and adventure and surprising experience feels like its own kind of forever. The mundane, repetitive times in your life are the ones that slip away in your memory as if they’ve hardly happened. You’d think it would be the opposite—that the uninteresting bits would seem to take ages, and the fun times would fly by, but that’s not actually the way it works.
From the moment we arrived, practically everything was sprinkled with newness and surprise—a fresh adventure around every sunny corner.
I learned to water-ski and to swim in that new strong way that you need to learn when you’re swimming in a lake. Lake swimming is a silky, slippy kind of feeling. There’s none of that saltiness to hold you up, so you have to work much, much harder to stay afloat. When you compare it to swimming in the Irish Sea, it is about as completely different an activity as you can get.
I got used to the hot weather and I got to know a lot of people too. And by the time January came, I’d got used to cycling to the lake for a swim almost every day after school with a bunch of my new Kiwi friends.
In Ireland, taking a swim anywhere outdoors in the middle of January is a borderline lunatic type of activity. In New Zealand it’s more like a basic human right.
Houses in Rotarua are made of wood. At night they creak and groan as if they are alive. The swans on nearby Rotoiti Lake don’t have the glaring blue white feathers of normal swans. They’re black and sleek, and their beaks are blood red. In New Zealand, the ground underneath your feet behaves in a way you think you’ll never get used to: it shudders, and most of the time no one else seems to notice, and sometimes it boils and burbles and occasionally it even spurts out hot muddy water straight up into the air.
When you’re from a rainy, wet, cool, cloudy place, you’re not familiar with the feeling of being blasted in the face every time you go outside, as if you were opening the door of an oven.
In the end, though, I learned to like these strange things and to cherish the differences and to appreciate the adventure. I had a brilliant time, just like Oscar had said I would.
He was right, in the way Oscar had been right about so many things. The trip did work out perfectly okay. I mean at least at first. Everything he predicted was pretty much what happened. When I felt the feelings about him creep to the surface of my brain in the way they kept on doing, I’d try to picture my mattress at home in Ireland and in my head I’d push those thoughts and feelings under it, like the letter I’d written. And then I would keep on hurling myself into New Zealand life with the careless enthusiasm of someone courageous, leaping into an unknown sea.
Mum and Dad continued to be surprised and happy by my change of heart—“thrilled” is what they said—about how much of an effort I was making.
They said my positive thinking had made all the difference.
I’ve discovered that you can have a great time somewhere while at the same time missing somewhere else, and I missed Ireland. I obviously missed Oscar more than you might imagine was possible for anyone to miss another human being without getting sick or permanently sad.
I used to dream about him, and in my dreams he’d always be framed by his window, swinging his legs and smiling his beautiful smile.
I’d got him to promise to tell me the minute someone even looked like they were going to move into my house. I told him that even if someone didn’t move in, still he was to stay in touch on a regular basis. And he promised he would, and I did too. And so—in the beginning—we did.
To: Meg Molony
From: Oscar Dunleavy
Subject: A few things to keep in mind
Didn’t want to tell you this before you left, but now that you’ve embraced the adventure, here are a few useful things you should probably know:
Fact number one: New Zealand harbors deeply unpleasant, often life-threatening waterborne diseases, many of which are rife throughout the country. Do not drink the water.
Fact number two: New Zealanders are a reckless people, their most popular sports including white-water rafting, bungee jumping, cricket and other generally hazardous activities. Again, avoid.
Fact number three: the weather in New Zealand can be unpredictable, so ideally do not attempt to engage in travel of any kind and stay indoors as much as possible. If you are forced to embark on a journey, never leave without a bunch of stuff including drinks, sunscreen, food, provisions, warm clothes, phone and preferably signal flares.
Fact number four: they practically have an earthquake a minute, so it is imperative that you learn the protocol for effective earthquake survival.
To: Oscar Dunleavy
From: Meg Molony
Since when have you been a health and safety expert?
M Xox
To: Meg Molony
From: Oscar Dunleavy
Meggy, take this seriously, I mean it, you can’t be too careful. O xx
And then one day not long after that I saw this message from him on Facebook:
Oh hey, Meg! Sending this from my bedroom and I’ve seen a light in your bedroom flicker on!
I can see someone with long hair strolling around your room and slowly taking things out of her bags and hanging them up and putting stuff into drawers. Weird that it’s not you, Meggy. Wish it was.
Xxx
“I know, totally,” I’d replied, trying to ignore a big judder I suddenly felt inside my body.
Later he’d sent more details:
Thought you’d like to be kept up to speed about the renters. You’ll be delighted to hear that they are fine and they’ll take good care of your house. Yes, that girl I mentioned is living in your room now but don’t worry, she’s super nice, plus tidy. It’s good to have someone next door again. I mean obviously I’d prefer if it was you.
Her name’s Paloma. Paloma Killealy.
I don’t know why, but I told him to take a photo of her and send it to me.
Will send you a proper one when I get close up enough. For now you’ll have to make do with this. Hope you’re applying the sunblock and staying away from the scorpions.
Oscar xx
I clicked on the attachment and found a picture of a person in shadow, just an outline really was all I could see, standing behind my white curtain. The person’s head was bent and it looked like she was carrying some kind of unreliable light—a candle say, or a bad flashlight, and it cast strange shapes in my old bedroom making it look like a foreign place, and I wished immediately that I hadn’t asked Oscar to take any photograph at all, or now that he had, I wished that he hadn’t sent it to me.
Not long after that, he sent another photo just as he had promised. It wasn’t any clearer, with a dark shadow still covering her face, but it was of her sitting on my window ledge, with her body leaning forward in a way that it only would be if you knew the person who was taking the photo extremely well.
After a while, Oscar didn’t really talk much about anything or anyone else.
He seemed to have learned a huge number of details about her, like she was coming to our school, and how she had a mother who was a businesswoman and how they were looking for a bigger house while they rented ours and how she didn’t like certain things in my house: for example it was much too small and the pipes rattled whenever you turned the faucets on, and how the boiler room had a funny smell and how the shower beside her room was totally unpredictable—scalding one moment and freezing to death the next.
“Tell her they’re not unpredictable,” I wrote back to Oscar. “Tell her that she only has to get to know them properly.”
He said he’d pass that along, and then he went on about how she had massive brown eyes and hair like golden silk.
Golden silk?
&
nbsp; I’d studied the two photos he’d sent, and from what I could make out, her hair didn’t look anything like golden silk to me. It looked like ordinary hair—the kind of hair that anyone would have. Nothing amazing at all.
I tried my best to be pleased for Oscar. When I told my mum about how he was getting to know the girl who was living in my room she asked me if I had any particular feelings about that situation that I might like to talk about.
“What do you mean?” I’d asked her, and for the first time in ages, I felt kind of annoyed, and she said, “It might be difficult for you to hear of someone sleeping in your bed and spending time with Oscar like that.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied, slamming my laptop shut, and heading to the door. “And anyway, you’re the one who decided to rent out our house. I never thought it was a good idea, and on top of that, it doesn’t matter now, I don’t even care, because I’ve loads of friends here. I’m not dependent on Oscar for anything.”
“I didn’t say you were, it’s just—”
“Mum, honestly, I’m fine. I mean, Oscar can hang out with whoever he wants. How could I stop him from doing that? In fact I’m glad. I’m really glad for him. I was worried about how he was going to spend the winter, what he was going to do and now, see, look at that! He’s made a new friend and it’s great. Really, really glad for him, okay?”
Then I told her I was off to hang out with a bunch of my own new friends at the lake. We might even go water-skiing.
And we did, and then afterward I chatted to Keira and Dougie and a few of the others and I told them about this girl and I wondered aloud if Paloma Killooly or whatever her stupid name was, knew how to water-ski or surf or if she’d ever swum in a lake with black swans gliding nearby and huge craggy mountains looking at her from a clean pale sky.
We sat at a picnic table and I pulled at a few strands of my red hair and I held them in between my fingers and I wondered what I would look like if it was a different color—swan-black say, or golden silk.
“I’ve done a load of interesting things here that I bet she’s never done,” I announced to everybody. I wasn’t sure why, and neither were they.
“Hey, Meggy, don’t fret,” Dougie had said. “You’ll be going home in a couple of months, and you’ll be back in that room and you and Oscar will pick up exactly where you left off.”
I often thought about those words afterward, and they used to hit me between the eyes sometimes, as if someone had thrown a big rock straight at my face.
To: Meg Molony
From: PalomaK
Subject: Hellllooooo!!! From YOUR ROOOOOM!!!!!
Dear Meg Molony!!
Oscar Dunleavy has given me your email and so now I’m writing to you—I hope that’s okay!! So as you probably know, my mother and I are living in your house! And I’ve moved into your room!! And I thought it would be nice to drop you a line to introduce myself seeing as we’re gonna B in the same year at school when you get back!!!! Hope u enjoyin NZ!!! Have made VERY GOOD friends with Oscar!!! Isn’t that fun? He’s fantastic!! Will be so gr8 to meet you too when u get back!!
PalomaK
PS Please tell me for goodness sake—how does your shower work? I will never get the hang of it.
She sounded okay, I had to admit. I mean it was a friendly note and—apart from the exclamation mark overdose—I couldn’t really fault it. She was being nice, and Oscar was always reminding me that most people are fundamentally decent and that it doesn’t pay to think badly of them. And why wouldn’t she make friends with Oscar? Everyone wanted to be his friend. Nobody in our school didn’t want to hang out with him—and nobody didn’t like him. That’s the way he was.
I wrote back to her saying how “gr8” it was to hear from her and that I was looking forward to meeting her in person too.
The morning after that, there was another email waiting for me:
To: Meg Molony
From: PalomaK
Subject: BTW
I took your mattress off the bed today and guess what I found under it? Yes! A letter for Oscar!! How did it get there?!! Anyway, I posted it through his mailbox, okay? No need to thank me—that’s the kind of thing that roomies do for each other!!! Write back! Let’s be pen pals! Wouldn’t that be a laugh? Px
A massive wave of heat flooded through me, followed by what felt like a skewer of ice stabbing me in the stomach. Bloody hell. I tried desperately then to remember the exact words that I’d written, but all I remembered was that it had definitely been my declaration of love. And now Oscar was going to read it—that’s if he hadn’t already. It wasn’t Paloma’s fault. She’d thought she was being helpful. No one could blame her.
I felt dizzy and a bit sick. Perhaps I still had time, I thought for a moment as the image of Oscar actually reading my secret note became more and more clear and more and more mortifying.
I checked the time of her email, thinking for one bright and comforting second that I might still be able to reverse things and persuade Paloma to snatch that letter back before Oscar had had a chance to read it. But no chance, of course. She had sent it over a day ago. He already had my letter, and he knew what was in it and it was too late to do anything except sit blinking at my laptop thinking what kind of damage-limiting thing I should try to do next.
the eighth slice
As soon as I’d read it, I’d wished I hadn’t.
Dear Oscar,
Just in case you have some idea that you and me could ever be a couple, I thought you would find it useful to know that that’s never, ever going to happen. I’m not into it and you might as well get used to realizing that. Maybe it’s time for you to move on? Stop obsessing about one person and look at possibilities elsewhere. It’s okay being your friend and everything. Stop me if I’m making any assumptions here that I’m wrong about. I just thought I should be clear with you so you can get on with your life and I can get on with mine.
What I’m really saying is that you need to spread your wings.
Adios,
Meg
I lay on my bed then all rigid and tense, letting a thousand cheerless thoughts chase each other around my head. And then I heard a noise. It was Paloma throwing those little bits of plaster—plaster she’d found on Meg’s sill—at my window and asking me about the letter. I wasn’t in the mood to talk about it but Paloma had this way of blinking at me quite slowly, and it made me want to tell her my secrets. And before I knew it, I was confiding in her about how Meg didn’t have any interest in . . . well . . . in me. She listened carefully and she nodded her head a lot and went “uh huh, I see, mm.” She said she had some advice. She said that the only way to respond to a letter like that was to ignore it completely, and to act as if I didn’t care about what it said—as if what it said was totally immaterial and of no consequence to me whatsoever.
“Oscar, you need to let her know that what was in that letter is so irrelevant that you’ve practically forgotten what it says. That’s by far the best way to deal with something like that.”
I reckoned Paloma was doing her best to be wise and honest and helpful and I wanted to take her advice.
“I’d say you’re better off not thinking about that girl. She doesn’t sound too nice,” Paloma said, then, which was Paloma’s own opinion and possibly fine if you’re able to apply logic to a particular situation. But the things I felt about Meg, they didn’t operate, they didn’t even exist, in the logical, rational part of my brain. Paloma might as well have been telling my heart to stop beating, or commanding my blood to stop flowing through my veins.
After Paloma had said good night, an email pinged into my mailbox:
To: Oscar Dunleavy
From: Meg Molony
Subject: Accidental letter—please disregard.
Oscar, I’m really sorry but Paloma’s been in touch and she told me that she dropped a letter from me in(?) to you and yes, it’s from me but you weren’t supposed to get it and you see I never really meant what I s
aid when I wrote it —I wasn’t really thinking. You see, I’m not sure what got into me and not only did I not mean to write it, I definitely never meant for you to get it. It was only a kind of a hypothetical doodle—none of it is really true.
So please disregard. Can you pretend I never wrote it, and that you never read it? Hope that is okay with you. Tell me when you’ve received this email and we can put the whole thing out of our minds.
Meg
From Oscar Dunleavy
To: Meg Molony
Subject: Accidental letter—please disregard
Meg, I was pretty relieved to get your email. And I’m totally fine about forgetting the letter. To be honest, I was kind of baffled when I first read it, so to hear that you never wanted me to read it in the first place makes a lot of sense. Let’s forget it like you suggest. I’m okay with that if you are, and I definitely think it’s the best thing to do.
Oh and, Meg, by the way, if I’ve ever given a wrong impression to you—you know, if I’ve ever tried to imply something about us in the past, you should forget about that too, because I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to send any wrong message, okay? If I’ve given you any reason to think that I think about you in a particular way, then I apologize. I never deliberately would have wanted you to get that impression. Let’s still be friends, though, because, I mean, that’s what we are, isn’t it?
The Apple Tart of Hope Page 5