Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  When Julian asked me if Jews had Chanukah carols, I went completely blank for a moment—Sally and I weren’t exactly the most observant family on the West Side—and then I remembered the blessing that you chant when you’re lighting the candles. That one I know, because Grandma Paula taught me, and I sang it for Julian.

  “Boruch ata Adonai,

  eloheynu melech haolam,

  asher kidshanu b’mitzvosav,

  v’tsivonu I’hadleek nehr,

  shel Chanukah…“

  Julian’s always been quick with songs. He had this one in no time, his Hebrew pronunciation no worse than mine, and we sang it together while I lighted the lead candle, the shammes, and then lighted the first-night candle from it, just to show him how it was done. So there we were, Julian and me, kneeling on the floor in that cold, cobwebby room, the walls lined halfway around with Sally’s boxes, and with tattered old trunks and valises from some other Sally, who always meant to get around to going through them, one day soon. There we were, the two of us, chanting our heads off, praising a God neither one of us believed in for commanding us to light the Chanukah candles. You have to see us, it’s important.

  Because that was when I smelled vanilla.

  Eight

  Meena, if you’re the least bit cool you’ll skip this part. I’m going to have to pretend you’ll mind me, because otherwise I’m never going to be able to write it. Okay?

  Okay. In the spring, the girl who’d sat next to me in Lower Third form room dropped out because her father got a job in Namibia or somewhere, and Meena Chari moved down a row. We hadn’t spoken two words to each other that whole first term, even on the bus. Not because she was Indian or anything, but because she was so pretty. I don’t mean knock-down, drop-dead, movie-star gorgeous, like Stacy Altieri back home—Meena doesn’t look like that at all. But she’s got this incredibly smooth brown skin, which wouldn’t know a zit from a jelly bean, and big dark eyes like pansies, even behind her glasses. And even in that school uniform, Meena’s always really wearing some elegant sari—you can tell by the way she moves. You had just better not be reading this, Meena!

  I don’t go around with girls who look like Meena, that’s one decision I made early on. A lot of girls do—at Gaynor, people like Tracy and Vanessa had their own little packs of groupies, all hoping it would rub off on them somehow, or that boys would try to get to the pretty ones through them. Which happened, I’m not saying it didn’t work, but I couldn’t. I just hung with Jake and Marta and was glad I had them.

  But Meena. What are you going to do with someone like Meena, who doesn’t know the rules about things, who doesn’t act pretty? I know, right—when you look the way Meena looks, you can afford not to care, but she really doesn’t. Girls mostly think she’s conceited, and boys are mostly afraid of her, because she gets perfect marks and she’s going to be a doctor, like her grandfather. She’s as cool and neat as I’m hot-tempered and sloppy, and it was a long time before I could start to believe that she actually wanted to be friends with me. Nothing to do with modesty—I just understand the rules.

  We’ve talked about it a couple of times. The first time, she took forever to get what I was asking. She kept saying, “Why shouldn’t we be friends, tell me that? We like the same books, the same kind of music, we laugh the same—we have so much in common, you might as well have been born in Madras, or I in New York.” Meena talks like that. Her mother and father have Indian accents, but with Meena it’s not the way her English sounds, but the way she uses it. Same thing as the uniform—you see one thing, or you hear one thing, but you feel something else. And Meena doesn’t even think about it.

  When she finally caught onto what I meant, she didn’t answer right away. She put her hands together and rested her chin on her fingertips, and she looked at the ground for a long time. Then she looked up at me, and she said, “Because I’m a very good girl. I’m an only child, and I’m everything my mother and father ever dreamed about. Very good student, perfect English, perfect manners—presentable enough, yes—right on track for a double First at Cambridge, where we always go. Nice if I were fair-skinned— you get a better choice of husbands that way—but there, you can’t have it all, Jenny, do you see now?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I don’t think I do.” What I thought was that I probably ought to be angry, and I was trying to work up to it. “You mean I’m your absolute opposite—I’m so different from you I’m like a novelty? Like that?”

  Meena looked as though I’d hit her. “Not that! Not that, no!” She jumped up and grabbed both my hands. “You have such spirit, you make your own plans—you wouldn’t go along with what everyone else wanted, just so they’d go on thinking you were a good girl. You don’t care what anybody thinks—that’s what I admire so much about you. I wish I were like you, Jenny truly.”

  Nobody else in my whole life had even come near saying something like that to me. Nobody. I told Meena so, but as smart as she is, there’s no way she could ever really know what it meant when she said that. Meena understands a lot, but if she understood something like this, she couldn’t be Meena. That’s just the way things get set up.

  Anyway. We first got to be friends when we both hid out in the girls’ john, ducking Games, and then later when Meena started helping me with Spanish and I helped her with a music project she was doing, comparing the way Indian singers improvise with how Western jazz singers do it. Once I told her it didn’t count like helping, because of my parents being musicians, and she got really angry with me. She said friendship wasn’t a bloody cricket match, you didn’t keep score, there wasn’t a point system. I almost like watching Meena being mad, because she does it so well, considering it lasts maybe five minutes, no more. Meena can’t ever work up a good sulk.

  She lives just outside Yeovil—her mother’s at the hospital there, and her father commutes to Dorchester to teach physics at the university. The first time I ever went to stay overnight at Meena’s house, I was edgy because I didn’t know if I should be different with Meena there than I was when it was just us, and she was edgy about how her parents would be with me. And they were edgy because Meena hadn’t brought anyone home from school before, and they didn’t know if I could eat Indian food, or how Jews were about graven images and shrines in the front hall. So between us we had the makings of a real disaster, but it worked out all right. Mr. and Mrs. Chari were as nice as they could be to their daughter’s weird American friend, and I didn’t knock anything over or say anything really stupid. And I know about Indian food—I’m from New York, for God’s sake.

  So it was a lot easier when Meena came to spend a weekend at Stourhead Farm. Tony and Julian fell in love with her the moment she walked in the door—okay, I was a little jealous, especially watching Julian following her around, offering to carry things for her—and I couldn’t help thinking, I bet Sally wishes I looked like that and acted like that. But I was proud of her, too, —she’s my friend, what’s that make me? —and at the same time I felt guilty that I wasn’t ever like that with Jake and Marta. Some days there’s no damn way I can let myself alone.

  Evan was out with a well-driller, and Sally was with the vet about some of the sheep, so Tony and Julian took Meena around the Manor, with me wandering along behind. Tony showed her the ground-floor room in the east wing that he’d been turning into a dance studio—he even had a bar on one wall, and he was putting up every piece of mirror glass he could find, fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. He was sanding the floor, too, on weekends, over and over, till it was practically transparent. So then, of course, Julian had to show Meena his rock collection, and his pressed-leaf collection, and his sugar-packet collection. And the stuffed gorilla in my room, but he never once mentioned that it was really his. Julian. I still can’t get him to take it back.

  At dinner the boys were both talking to Meena at the same time, and Evan and Sally were asking her the same school questions Mr. and Mrs. Chari had been asking me. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her
in peace until we went to bed in my room. And then it took me half an hour to talk Meena into taking my bed and letting me get into Evan’s old sleeping bag on the floor. Indians keep wanting to treat you like their guest, even when they’re yours. They can wear you out.

  But then, finally, we got down to business. We lay there and talked about our families, and people at school, and I told Meena about Jake and Marta, and she told me about Lalitha, who was her best friend in Madras, and we compared books and movies and songs, and who had worse periods, and who hated Mr. Winship more—he taught Organic Chemistry—and why the monsoons are so important, and why I was going to take her to meet an old man they call Poet O in Central Park. Today it’s just a few years later, and already I can’t remember why, when you’re thirteen, all that stuff absolutely has to be talked about in the dark, when you’re supposed to be asleep. But it does.

  Meena told me about Karthik, her white mouse, and I talked about Mister Cat—or I did until my throat started to tighten up again. So Meena changed the subject without seeming to change the subject, which is something she’s very good at. She said, “But what a palace he’ll be coming home to, your Mister Cat. So much space, so many shadowy corners to investigate, so many interesting new sounds… I’d love to be a cat in this house.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “Other people have cockroaches—we’ve got gnomes, or boggarts, or something.” I told her about the voices in my bathroom, which I hadn’t told anyone, and about the rooms Julian wouldn’t go into, and the things the carpenters and electricians had said. The longer I went on, the crazier it sounded, but Meena listened without laughing or interrupting once.

  When I got through, she said, “Well, Julian was right—you definitely do have a haunted house. Dollars to doughnuts.” (Meena’s crazy about American slang, and sticks it in every chance she gets.) “In India we’ve got haunted houses all over the place—we’ve got haunted apartments, haunted gardens, even haunted garages. Our old house in Madras had a poltergeist, one of those spirits that breaks things, throws everything around. I saw her a few times as I was growing up.”

  I’m glad it was dark, so maybe she didn’t see my mouth hanging open. “You saw it? Her? The poltergeist?”

  “Oh, yes,” Meena said. “Not very often, though. A little girl, about Julian’s age, with a scar down one side of her poor face. Like a burn scar. Maybe that’s why she was a poltergeist, who knows? We felt so sorry for her.”

  “What did you do? Do Indians have, like—I don’t know—like with a priest? An exorcism?”

  “Yes. In a way.” Meena half laughed, but there was a little catch in it, too. “But Jenny, she lived there, she’d lived in our house longer than we’d done. What could we do?” Then she giggled outright and said, “Besides, she scared away a lot of relatives I couldn’t stand. And she left my room alone, except once or twice. I think sometimes she almost liked me.”

  I thought about that for a while, and finally I said, “Well, whatever’s in our house, it doesn’t like us all that much. Not the way those nasty little voices sounded. I’d rather have a real flat-out ghost, if we’re going to have anything. I’d rather even have a pooka.”

  Meena wanted to know what a pooka was, so I told her what Evan had told us, and about boggarts and the Wild Hunt. She said, “I don’t see why you couldn’t have both—boggarts and ghosts. I bet you do. It’s just the sort of house that would.”

  I said thanks, I really needed to hear that, and Meena laughed a real laugh this time. “When you grow up with old houses, the way I did, you grow up with ghosts, too. They’re people, they’re always drawn to places where people have been living for a long time. You don’t get ghosts in shopping malls.”

  “Great,” I said. “I hope the ghosts at least run off the boggarts, that’d be something.”

  We didn’t say anything for a while, and I was starting to think Meena was asleep. Then I felt her hand reaching down from the bed, bumping around to find mine and taking hold of it. She said, “When you go to get him. Your Mister Cat. I could come with you, if you like.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just squeezed her hand and mumbled, “Sure, I guess, okay.” I think we fell asleep holding hands like that, but I don’t remember.

  It was a beautiful day when we drove to Goshawk Farm Cattery for the last time. You have to be careful with English springs—you can’t ever turn your back on them, because they’ll drop thirty degrees and start thundering and lightning while you’re taking your shirt off. I know for a fact that the poet who wrote “Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there” was living in Italy at the time.

  But this one early April day stayed warm and clear all the way to Dorchester. There were pink and white blossoms on the trees, and daffodils everywhere, and new lambs in the fields with big red numbers painted on their sides. People were out on tractors, plowing and harrowing, and the car’s front windows were partway open, so in the backseat I kept smelling raw turned earth from every direction. Not that I was paying any attention to it, or the lambs, or to Sally asking Meena more school questions in the front. I just hunched up around the pain in my stomach and tried not to think about how I used to imagine the way it would be, bringing Mister Cat home at last.

  When we got to Dorchester, I was wishing Meena wasn’t with us, because then I could have just waited while Sally went in and picked up Mister Cat. But they were all happy and excited, so there wasn’t any choice. I still remember how heavy my legs felt, and how long it seemed to take to climb out of the car.

  We went in, and Sally told us, “I’ll handle the paperwork, you two go get the big guy.” I was going to argue about it—he’s my cat, I’ve handled every damn miserable bit of this all the way, I’ll be the one who finishes it—but Meena grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the cat runs. So I couldn’t stall even a minute longer.

  Okay. This is hard, this is what I mean about trying to write how another person felt at one particular moment, six years ago. I may not be that same person anymore, but I’ll never forget how it was for her, having to run with her new friend to find her best friend and bring him home, even though she already knew he wasn’t going to speak to her or even look at her again. And she had to go through with it, there wasn’t any way out, and the cat runs kept getting closer. And there was Martin, the nice guy from the airport, unlocking Mister Cat’s run, and smiling at her, saying, “This is my favorite part of the job.” And throwing the gate wide.

  He didn’t come out at first. He stood in the doorway and he stretched his front and then his back, the way cats do, and he yawned like a hippopotamus while he was doing it. I heard Meena say, “Oh, he’s so lovely!” but she sounded somewhere far away. I knelt down by the gate, and he did look at me with those orange eyes of his. I said, “Please. I’m sorry.” I don’t think anybody heard me.

  Mister Cat lowered his head and bumped it against my chin. Then he put his front paws around my neck and made a little sound he makes sometimes, which is always like a question I don’t know the answer to. I picked him up.

  “Oh, he missed you,” Meena said. “Look at him.” She stroked his back, but he didn’t turn to look at her. He kept pushing his head against me and purring. I tried to say, “Come on, kid, we’re blowing this joint,” but the words wouldn’t come out.

  He didn’t like the farm at first, I’m sure of that. He won’t ever admit that anything’s too much for him, but after a whole life in a New York apartment, and then six months in a cat run, he just couldn’t handle it all, and he didn’t want to. The first couple of days, he stayed in my room—under my bookcase, mostly—and he hissed at everybody except me, even Sally. Julian was really hurt about that, because he’d practically planned a whole welcoming party, with decorations and cat treats. I had to say something, so I told him that in another day or two he’d be able to pick Mister Cat up and wear him around his neck like a mink stole, so he felt better after that. Julian.

  The third day was a Saturday, so I
was home. Mister Cat woke me walking on my face, patting gently at my eyes. He’s done that since he was a kitten, once he figured out I’m awake if my eyes are open. As soon as they were, he ran to the door, which usually means litter-box time. The box is in my bathroom, but that wasn’t what he was after. Today, exactly like Julian, he was waking me up to go exploring.

  “After I wash,” I said. “After I eat something. Give me a break here, all right?” Same thing I was always telling Julian. So Mister Cat went off and used his box, and then he had something to eat, and a quick bath himself, and he was ready when I was.

  Today it was just the Manor he had in mind—he wasn’t quite ready for the great English outdoors just yet. We started with the Arctic Circle, me showing off the new range and the cupboards Evan had put in—not to mention another new refrigerator—and Mister Cat sauntering along beside me, tail up like a snorkel, digging on everything, just as though he might be thinking about buying the place. My throat got achy again for a bit, watching him.

  West wing, east wing, corridors, closets, rooms… we walked the whole first floor, taking our time, letting Mister Cat go where he wanted. You can’t ever figure what interests him—he hardly glanced into a couple of rooms that I’d have been curious about if I were a cat, but he took forever sniffing around one empty little alcove, looking up at me impatiently, as though I ought to know exactly what he was smelling and be doing something about it. I always disappoint Mister Cat, but he’s used to it. Like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

  To get to the second floor, you climb a stair that curls around the west chimney—there’s no stair in the east wing, I don’t know why, but once we got to the second floor, Mister Cat’s whole attitude changed. He sort of slunk along, not quite with his belly to the ground, but more as though he were stalking something—a bird, a big rat. His ears were down flat, his tail stuck straight out behind him, and he was growling a thin, mean growl that I’d never heard before. I said, “What? What? Those things in my bathroom?” but he didn’t even look at me. Mister Cat was on the case, and there really are times when I wish I’d had a dog. Something fluffy.