Barney said that the apple tart had been like a magic thing.
“People often ignore the misfortune of others, you see. The world is a heartless place but it’s not always because they don’t care. It’s sometimes because they are embarrassed, or because they don’t know what to say, or because they simply cannot bear to look into the eyes of someone who is suffering.
“Your Oscar had invented his own quite perfect response to people’s troubles. As soon as he came across misfortune, he’d knuckle down to the only task that made sense to him at the time. He’d make one of those magnificent apple tarts.”
For a few nights in a row, it seemed as if Barney could always be relied on. In the dead of night, he’d sit patiently on the bollard, with everything around him silent and hard to see apart from the orange glow of his permanently burning cigarette.
“Hello again, my dear,” said Barney, and again it was as if we were meeting each other at a normal time in a normal place, not in the dead of night at the pier.
He told me he’d done a lot of things in his life but that recently someone had said that he was a good listener, and he’d realized that this was the thing he was probably most proud of now. Listening, he said, may be the most important skill you’ll ever learn.
And it was true. He was really good at letting me finish whatever I started to say. Never asking stupid questions, but always encouraging me to go to the end of each story. Half a story is no good to anyone. And I don’t know why, but explaining things to him helped me to understand them myself.
I told him about The Ratio, which was something that Paloma had tried to explain to me.
“It’s the reason why people like Andy Fewer always get the girl with the perfect skin and the chocolate brown eyes and the hair like golden silk.”
“Do you know what kind of a person she is?”
“Not really, I guess. I only know some things about her, but from what I do know, I think she’s horrible. A horrible person with the face of an angel.”
A little bundle of sticks and a log were bunched beside the bollard tonight, and on the other side, a purply suitcase sat scarred and pocked with age, a metal clasp glinting at its seam. Otherwise everything was pretty much the same as usual.
He rubbed his hands together and leaned over.
“You look as if you could do with some warmth,” he said, opening the suitcase and unfolding a huge green blanket with one graceful gesture.
“Here, put this around you.”
He lit a match under the nest of sticks. They crackled and popped for a second and then a great whoosh of light billowed into being. A seagull shrieked above one of the fishing boats and the wind made soft puckers on the surface of the sea.
My face got warmer by the fire and the blanket that had looked so light when he had tossed it across to me felt heavy around my body, pressing on my shoulders and my arms with its comforting weight, keeping me firmly planted on the spot.
“Meg, my dear” he said. “Is the loss of your dear friend weighing on you?”
“It’s tormenting me,” I replied. “In fact, I think it may be driving me mad. I came back because I was determined to find him. I came home refusing to believe what everyone else seemed to take for granted from the start. I’ve been searching for him, Barney, even when I don’t mean to. I’ve been looking for his face in crowds, in corners, in places where he might have gone. I started my searching with so much hope, so much confidence, so much certainty, but my hope is running out now and I’ve almost forgotten what Oscar’s face even looks like.”
“That would be a tragedy indeed,” Barney replied.
“Do you think I am missing anything?” I asked him, then, because he seemed so wise and so clever.
“Hmm,” he said, “I’m not sure, but sometimes I sense things down here that could provide us with some kind of clue.”
“What do you mean?”
“I get hints wafting up from the sea.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes,” he said, “things like grief, great loss and worry. Humiliation and guilt. And friendship and love and disappointment.”
“Barney, do you have any idea what happened to him?”
“I can’t answer that question but I will tell you a couple of things that I know.”
I thought he was going to give me some information, something to go on, some lead to follow, but what he said was this:
“Nothing is as you think it is. Lots of things are not what they appear to be. Sometimes things look a certain way, but perhaps they are not. Sometimes people need you to keep searching for them, or at least asking questions on their behalf. And very often, people have been silenced and they need other people to speak for them. It’s when you stop searching and asking and speaking that they really will be lost. Don’t give up, Meg.”
“So you think he might be alive?”
“It’s not what I think that matters,” he said. He was being annoyingly cryptic, but it was good to talk to him and all of a sudden I found myself telling Barney about the letter.
“I wrote him a letter, telling him I basically loved him, but I’ve found out that Paloma switched it for a horrible letter that she wrote herself.”
“Eh, Sorry? Excuse me? What did you say?”
I was in the middle of explaining it to Barney again—repeating how Paloma’d written a note and pretended it was from me. He was old and it seemed to me as if he might not have heard the first time.
“You loved him?” asked Barney. “You loved Oscar? Not just as a friend, but in the ancient way? The way that girls have loved boys for as long as there have been girls and boys?”
“Yes, what did you think?”
“And Paloma did what with your letter?”
I told him again.
“That venomous little vixen.”
I told him I couldn’t have come up with a better insult than that. And then he was struggling to his feet, putting out the fire and wrapping up his blanket, and suddenly he seemed to be in a terrible hurry.
“Dear me, Meg, I’ve remembered something. I need to be going, thank you I mean, good-bye, I mean, I must get back home, straightaway, I do apologize.”
And before I could say another word, Barney was gone.
the last slice
Barney was restless. His nighttime wanderings were starting to worry me. It got so that he never seemed to be able to sleep at night without getting up and heading off on some mysterious ramble or other. He would sigh, looking into the fireplace, and he would say “deary me” under his breath and I would keep on baking, but I was beginning to think that a thousand apple tarts couldn’t cure the thing that Barney had.
So this one night, I stayed awake patting Homer on the head and wishing Barney was back. I was glad when I heard the clank of the gate.
“OSCAR! OSCAR! OSCAR!” He shouted as if he had something quite urgent to tell me and I went to the door and I saw him struggling up the hill like a man on a serious mission. He was standing at the gate leaning over. I waited, and he kept on standing at the gate, and then he held on to the pillar. I decided to go in and put the kettle on because there were still two slices of my last tart waiting for us and what could be more agreeable in the middle of the night—as he would say himself.
But Barney didn’t come to the door. I kept on making the tea and putting the last two slices of tart on Peggy’s plates, which have little pictures of lighthouses and sunsets on them. And suddenly, then, I felt afraid. I sort of knew that Barney was not going to come in, and I knew that something had happened to him and I could not bear it. I could not bear to go out to him. I just wanted to keep on making the tea and setting everything up nicely, because maybe if I pretended that nothing had happened, maybe if I kept on going on as if everything was completely normal and as if Barney was fine, then everything would be.
But Barney didn’t come.
By the time I got to him, he was lying on the grass and I said, “Barney, Barney, please get up,” bu
t he couldn’t. He could hardly even speak. He patted me on my head and I didn’t know what to do. I asked him if he needed anything and he shook his head and all he’d say was, “My dear boy, it was a forgery!’
I’d no idea what he was talking about and thought he might be delirious or something so I said, “Don’t try to talk, Barney, you’re going to be fine.”
I knew that if he wasn’t going to be fine then this would be my fault too and I began to be really sure that I was the kiss of death. I wished that I had power and I wished I was strong but I was useless and I was weak and I killed the people I loved with apple tarts and stupid actions and not being able to bear to look.
I ran out of Barney’s house, down the lane and I stumbled and I fell and I hurt my arm and hand and face. When I got up again, I kept running, waving my arms and saying, “Help, help, please help me, it’s Barney Brittle. I think he’s dying. He needs a doctor. We need to get him to a hospital fast. Somebody. Please. Help.”
The ambulance men were really nice and they made Barney comfortable and they were patient, even though I asked them a lot of questions about what was wrong with Barney and whether he was going to be okay and whether or not it might have been bad for him to be eating quite as much apple tart as we’d been having recently. They said that they didn’t quite know what was wrong, but that he was an old man and that even though he was impeccably dressed and obviously well-cared for, it was often hard to say how someone of his age might recover from an “episode” like the one he appeared to have had. They said poor Barney was a bit agitated and I wanted to sit beside him but they said that he needed specialist medical care.
“Dear boy!” he shouted again. “She never wrote that letter! She never wrote it. It was a forgery!” None of us knew what he was talking about and the more Barney tried to speak, the more urgently one of the nice ambulance people kept preparing something in a syringe, and then they plunged it into his arm and Barney’s words melted into a low murmur and then he went to sleep altogether.
It was a relief to me on one hand, because I didn’t want him to be distressed or disturbed or in pain, but the problem was that Barney breathing peacefully gave the two ambulance people a chance to focus on me.
“And who are you?” one of them asked me, to which I lied that I was Barney’s grandson. They asked awkward questions then about the names of my parents and my siblings and whether I’d been staying with my grandfather alone and they were interested in lots of other things too. I wasn’t going to get drawn into a discussion. I told them I was far too upset about Barney’s health to be subjected to such an interrogation.
“Em, excuse me, but this is an ambulance. Can we please shift the focus back to the sick person?” The two of them said, “Yes, of course,” but you could see they were looking at me suspiciously. I just stared very attentively at Barney, then, and inside my head, I begged him to be all right.
They allowed me to wait outside his room in the hospital and they promised they would let me in as soon as he was well enough to talk. I was totally delighted when I saw him next, because even though he was hooked up to monitors and tubes and stuff, he was cheerful and awake and he patted the bed and said I was to sit.
“Oscar,” he said, “things might be about to change for both of us.”
I said not to jump to any conclusions yet. This could be a small health hiccup and we could be back at the cottage before it got dark again.
He said possibly, but that we might have some explaining to do, and I knew he was right but I did my best not to think about it.
“I’ve been trying to tell you something—something you need to know. Your friend Meg—she wanted you to know that she was falling in love with you, and that’s what she wrote in the letter, and that other . . . that so and so . . . that vixen of a girl, she ripped out those precious words from the envelope that Meg had put her letter in, and that, brat . . .” Barney began to cough and I had to give him some water even though I was starting to feel fairly numb, thinking about what he was telling me:
“. . . that brat . . . replaced Meg’s lovely words with other words, all untrue. Oscar, you simply must not let this misunderstanding prevail, do you hear me? This is your chance to clear everything up.”
I didn’t know if Barney really knew what he was talking about. Perhaps he’d imagined it, or had some vivid dream; they say that sometimes happens to the seriously ill.
“But Barney, you promised, you promised that I could stay with you in the cottage, and that you’d never ask me to go back.”
“That was before this!” he said. “This changes everything and my promises are null and void. Meg wanted you to know that she loves you. My dear fellow, you must face everyone. Not just Meg, but your poor father and that little brother of yours and your friends and you must tell that awful girl, Paloma whatshername, that her behavior has been of the worst kind. She must know that you cannot attempt to damage people in the way she attempted to damage you.”
“How do you know? How do you know about this?”
He told me how he’d met Meg at the pier. That’s where he’d been going. He’d had whole detailed conversations with her about lots of things apparently, including Paloma.
“We got to know each other quite well. She’s a terrific person,” he explained.
“She’s the one who told me about the Day of Prayer for you and how everyone was crying about you being gone, and so forth. She’s the one who told me where Paloma and her mother are living now. Number two, The Paddocks—you know, on the other side of town.”
I thought about Meg and how much I wished I could see her and explain everything, but it felt too late and I wondered how I could face anyone, especially her after what I knew about myself and the accident and all this pretending and hiding and this big massive lie that I had been telling the world.
“But Barney, what could I say to everyone? What could I say to Meg? How would I explain? How can I go back now?”
“How can you not?” said Barney, smiling at me.
He rummaged in his jacket then and pulled out a pile of wrinkled yellow notes.
“What are those?” I asked.
“They’re messages from Stevie,” he replied. I began to read.
“Excuse me, does your name happen to be Oscar Dunleavy?” asked a woman in glasses and a ponytail who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. I supposed it was only a matter of time. I mean my photo had been everywhere, and there’d been a massive search and everyone knew what I looked like. I explained to Barney that if I was going back, I was going to do it in my own way. Ponytail lady’s beeper went off and she scurried away. It was my cue. I kissed Barney’s old hand, I stuffed Stevie’s notes into my own pocket and I ran.
The rain was like a thousand little whips pelting at me from all angles. I leaned into the wind like one side of a triangle and I walked fast and steady, not stopping or hesitating or turning around because I’d decided by then and when you decide you should follow through.
I went to number two The Paddocks, and stood on the porch for a long time, looking at the details on the mailbox. I put my hand on the door for a minute or so, to get my balance. I told myself to stay strong even though I thought that as soon as I saw her, my new psychological might and wisdom would melt and I would be the Oscar I had been before, prepared to put up with anything for the sake of peace. But peace built on lies, I reminded myself, is no peace at all.
I stood on my toes and peered into the peephole.
Paloma was approaching and her face was distorted. Her nose looked massive —one eye huge, the other tiny.
I felt brave and that feeling is pretty much inked onto my brain now, like a permanent tattooed message that I will not forget.
I clamped my teeth together because they had started to chatter, on account of me being so wet and pelted by the rain. The doorbell wasn’t working. I tipped my finger at the flap of the mailbox and it swung and rattled back and forth pathetically, making a sound that probably nobody woul
d hear. So I closed my fist and I hit the door with around ten bangs and I whispered Paloma’s name and Paloma came. As soon as I saw her, a wind blew through me as if I was the door that had been opened. Her head was wrapped in a towel and her face had a white mask of cream smeared all over it.
“Paloma, it’s me. I never died.”
Her mouth opened for a second and then it closed and so did her eyes. She fainted like a bad actor from a movie, falling into a crumple of towel and cream and soft skin, and the towel miraculously stayed wrapped around her head like a turban. I picked her up. I had to. Nobody else was there.
“You replaced Meg’s letter with a different letter, didn’t you? And you were the one who made everyone think my apple tarts were lame and dorky? It was you, wasn’t it? And you made up The Ratio because that’s the way you want the world to work, but it doesn’t have to work like that does it? And you knew I didn’t know about the accident that killed my mum and injured Stevie and you told me about it on purpose, didn’t you? You tried to break me, Paloma, but you have failed. I am not dead. I didn’t kill myself.”
“But, Oscar, someone had to show you things about yourself. You were a creep. You stared at me every night with that disturbing telescope. You stalked me inside my own bedroom.”
“Paloma. I used that telescope to look at the stars. Why would I have used it to look at you?”
“Because I’m so beautiful,” she said, a tense pulse beating inside her jaw.
I wanted to give her a chance to explain but nothing she said was plausible. She tried a different approach, then. She said she didn’t know her actions were going to drive me to suicide.
“They didn’t,” I said.
“Why have you decided to come back?” she asked, tilting her head over to the side the way she always did.
“Love is the reason,” I told her.
“Oscar, I like you a lot,” she said, “I like you an awful lot more than everybody used to say. But I don’t love you. I’m not in love with you.”
The Apple Tart of Hope Page 13