I make my way over the outstretched legs of Bridget and Henry and Margaret
‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I whisper.
I sit in the foyer for about twenty minutes and then decide to find something to drink. A drink will help the panic and maybe help me sleep when we get back to the motel. What I need to do is buy a small bottle of gin and drink some now and some later, but not too much.
I take my wallet out of my pocket and check for the twenty dollars Margaret gave me.
I walk a few blocks and find a licensed grocer. The woman behind the counter bothers me. There’s no doubt I look older than I am, but older women are better at knowing the difference between sixteen and twenty-one.
The shop is dark and there is a group of teenage boys getting ready to shoplift in the back corner.
‘Can I have a small bottle of gin, please?’
The shopkeeper is trying to keep one eye on the shoplifters and one on me. She puts her pen in her mouth and looks me up and down.
There’s a Guatemalan worry-doll stuck to the cash register with sticky tape – a thick wad of tape wrapped round the head and feet – a sad, desperate and superstitious presence in this bleak, grimly-lit place. I decide to speak a little more; perhaps my accent will help convince her that I’m old enough.
I say, ‘If you don’t have any gin I’ll have that vodka instead.’
‘We have gin,’ she says with tired resignation, putting her pen down on the counter. ‘The big bottle is on special if you want that.’
I realise that this is a gift horse.
‘How much is off the usual price?’ I ask.
‘Two dollar twenty,’ she says. I am surprised she hasn’t asked me what part of England I’m from. Everybody else does.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘that’s a terrific bargain. I’d better take two.’
Suddenly she is suspicious and she squints at my face. I get ready to leave, worried that I might collapse or vomit.
There is a menacing burst of laughter from the corner full of boys.
‘Damned kids,’ says the shopkeeper.
She looks back at me one last time then swings around. With her back to me, and one hand reaching up for the bottle of gin, she says, ‘One bottle per customer only.’
I say, ‘One bottle’s fine.’
I sit in a nearby park and drink enough gin to feel soft. I stand once or twice to see how I am on my feet and I am fine. I wrap the bottle inside a jacket in my backpack and head back to the cinema. I buy a bottle of water and wait in the foyer.
Margaret comes out of the cinema looking angry. ‘It’s bad manners to walk out of a film. It makes the other people feel awkward. Where did you go?’
‘Nowhere,’ I say. ‘I just didn’t like the film and I thought I’d go for a walk around the block a few times.’
Margaret has strong feelings about this, which is rather strange. I walk out of films all the time, especially when actors continually don’t know what to do with their hands and have only got parts because they’re handsome or pretty.
‘You should always finish what’s on your plate,’ she says. ‘When you start something you should finish it.’
All along I expected her to be cross about me being on my own in the dark, in a strange town, but this doesn’t seem to be her concern.
‘You should apologise to Bridget,’ she says as we walk out.
‘Let’s hit the road,’ says Henry when he catches up with us a few minutes later. For once, he isn’t trying to hide the fact that he’s having a boring time. I wink at him, but he doesn’t wink back.
In the back of the van I tell Bridget I’m sorry. ‘What for?’ she says.
‘For walking out of the film.’
She rolls her eyes and looks away from me. ‘Whatever. I don’t care. You can do whatever you want.’
Our motel for the night is down-market; neon sign busted, a skip of overflowing garbage near the manager’s door and brickwork the colour of shit.
Margaret comes back from the manager’s office with only one key. I notice this right away. James and Bridget are swimming in the pool.
‘There’s only one room left,’ she says.
‘Couldn’t we go somewhere else?’ I say.
‘It won’t kill you,’ she says.
Henry gives her a look, as though he’d like to argue with her, but can’t find the courage. She always gets her own way.
‘I’ll walk up to the motel further back that way,’ I say. ‘I’ll ask if they have three rooms.’
Henry shakes his head and makes his favourite tsk, tsk sound.
‘It’s not the end of the world,’ he says. ‘Just relax.’
There’s no airconditioning in the small room, not even a kettle or small basket of plastic-wrapped biscuits. Worse still, there is only one double bed and that’s where Margaret and Henry will sleep. There’s no other room or beds and I am desperate for some privacy.
James, Bridget and I collapse on the couch and sulk about the prospect of having to sleep on the floor. Margaret puts her hands on her hips and says, ‘It won’t kill any of you.’
Bridget keeps on protesting, and saying that it isn’t fair, and when she looks at me I’m suddenly aware that this is my punishment for trying to intervene when that woman was beating her child, or for walking out of the film; or both. It’s obviously not an economic necessity.
We put our blankets on the floor and lie down under sheets with two pillows each under our heads.
Bridget and I are in the middle of the room, and James lies away from us, nearer to the wall. We have agreed that none of us will sleep on the couch, for the sake of fairness, but I wonder if James plans to move there once Bridget and I are asleep.
The window is open but there is no breeze. For several hours I lie awake listening to cars arriving, people spilling out and making their identical arrangements. I watch the motel room wall on which car headlights cast sudden beams of light, and I imagine this is what it must be like crouching under the searchlights of the enemy. One beam of light scans from left to right and then holds to the ceiling for too long, and I think the enemy has no intention of giving up. Another beam swipes quickly across the wall and disappears and I know that the enemy is leaving. I wonder if the enemy, whose beam has just been doused outside my door, will stay up all night drinking, the TV turned up too loud.
I’m not sure how long I’ve been sleeping when it happens; when I am woken by James, whose hand is in my underpants. I think that I am dreaming at first, and move to shake it off.
I have my back to him and move away, in case he is sleeping and doesn’t know what he’s doing. But he moves in closer, and I decide to pretend to sleep. If I am asleep, then how can it matter? It will be as though nothing has happened.
I close my eyes, to remove myself from this strange thing. I am woozy at first then something else. It’s a surprise, the slow release of a pleasant poison, drip by drip. I should want him to stop, remove his searching hand, but if we are asleep, what can it matter?
I lie still. His hand is moving and I don’t block its path. I’m curious. I’m curious as hell about what happens next.
His hand makes its way – as though it belongs to somebody else – into the front of my pants. I clench up. I want the feeling, but don’t want James to be at the other end of it. I clench still more, then relax. His finger starts to rub.
Tomorrow it will be as though nothing has happened. I don’t want to touch him and I don’t have to. How can somebody who is asleep touch somebody? His finger continues in its fast, silent, and tireless way and the better I feel the more I wonder how it is he knows what to do and what it is that he’s getting out of it.
He stops and we both play dead.
In the morning, Margaret opens the curtains and the room becomes too bright, too soon.
‘Time to get up,’ she says. ‘Time to hit the road.’
7
I have read somewhere that one is not permitted to think of the To
rah whilst on the toilet. I have also read that when Tolstoy was a child, his older brother would torment the young writer by telling him to stand in a corner and not think of a white bear. Consequently, a white bear was all that Tolstoy could think about.
This morning – the morning of our last day – all I can think about is sleep. Breakfast has finished. The others have gone to buy some more soft drinks and Margaret and I are sitting in the airconditioned fast-food restaurant where we had our breakfast.
I decide to tell her about my problems with sleep.
‘Margaret, I think I have insomnia.’
She raises her eyebrows.
‘You just need to relax. Try not to think of sleep. You’re probably thinking about it too much.’
‘That’s funny,’ I say. ‘I was thinking that maybe that’s my exact problem but the point is that because I can’t sleep it’s impossible not to think about it all the time. Like Tolstoy and the white bear.’
‘What?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I just think maybe it’s a treatable condition. Maybe if I went to see a specialist in a good hospital or something.’
‘Just relax. Breathe deeply through your nose and out of your mouth like this.’
Margaret demonstrates how to breathe. She even makes me put my hand on her diaphragm so I know how it all works.
But I already know all about breathing and relaxation techniques. I know about the importance of being calm and doing exercise, and drinking hot milk and all that crap. Mrs Walsh is an expert.
I wish I had told Henry instead.
‘It’ll come,’ she says. ‘It’ll come.’
I want to tell her that as a member of that class of slack-minded, unimaginative, easy-sleeping snorers who do not understand insomnia and never will, she has no right to tell me how to sleep. I want to tell her that not only can I not sleep most nights, when I do sleep, my dreams are awful.
Instead I say, ‘I’ll try that. Thanks.’
She hugs me for too long and says, ‘It’s only a phase. It’ll pass.’
‘What if it doesn’t?’ I say. ‘It’s been happening for a long time. Maybe I should see a doctor or something? Some kind of specialist?’
Margaret’s hair is back in its bun and she reaches to adjust it. This means she is either annoyed or bored. She says, ‘You just need to relax your mind. Stop worrying. It’s all a question of serenity. Peace of mind. Just don’t worry so much. You’re too young to worry so much.’
I want to kick her in the shins. That’s where I always want to kick somebody when they’re being stupid. Right on the bone.
I also want to tell her that my insomnia and my blushing are closely connected – the less I sleep, the more I blush – and that perhaps I have a treatable condition, but she is standing up, looking for her purse.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll try relaxing a bit more.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ Margaret says and we start walking towards the door.
Now she’s using her loud voice, the voice she uses when it seems she wants everybody to enjoy the benefits of her wisdom.
‘You know, at your age you really shouldn’t be so uptight. When I was your age I slept like a baby. Maybe you could try some more exercise. That’ll fix you. Wait till you’re my age and working all hours, then you can lie awake all night thinking about what to do with the world.’
I feel annihilated but I smile.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
After breakfast we stop at an amusement park called ‘Old MacDonald’s’, somewhere in a field on the outskirts of a country town. The whole fair is based on the nursery rhyme, with rides made out of plastic sheep and cows and chickens. It’s my fault we’ve stopped here at all. I pointed to it as we drove by and when Henry asked me if I’d like to have a look I said ‘Yeah, that’d be great fun’ because I thought, for once, I should sound enthusiastic about something other than visiting bookstores or playing word games in airconditioned motel rooms.
It’s another hot day. The clouds sit low and are full and bulging, like egg whites whisked into stiffness; a benign blanket above. Usually this kind of cloud cheers me up.
We walk up and down the Barnyard of Games, the tune of Old MacDonald tinny and insistent, the smell of manure forcing me to breathe through my mouth.
We don’t play any of the games and ignore the prospect of shooting ducks, gagging geese with ping-pong balls or throwing balls at bales of hay.
There is something depressing about a small and dirty fairground; the cheapness of the stuffed-animal prizes, the smell of frying fat, the way the games are rigged, and this one is the worst I’ve ever seen.
Everything is automated. There are no carnies to take tickets for rides. Instead, machines into which coins are fed and from which tickets spew out, operate the rides. The gates open to let people through only when enough tickets are taken, and then the rides begin.
The whole thing depresses me in the same way that bathroom vending machines do; those machines that issue condoms, polo mints and headache tablets all at once. It makes me gloomy to think that, one day, vending machines will issue books and music and shoes and wigs and underpants and goldfish and death certificates.
And so we walk up and down the same avenue of farm-yard-themed arcade games listening to the metallic sound of Old MacDonald Had A Farm, Eeee Eye Eeeee Eye Oh. There’s nobody to explain the rules, nobody to grab at a soft toy from the back wall with a comical hook.
I catch up with Henry.
‘Could I talk to you?’
‘Sure,’ he says.
He slows down and we let the others go on ahead.
‘I have insomnia,’ I say. ‘Most nights it takes me hours and hours to get to sleep, or I wake too early, and then I feel tired all day. I think it’s a treatable condition.’
Henry looks at my hands while I speak, a habit that is driving me crazy. It’s as though he’s some kind of body language expert trying to catch me out, and his habit forces me to put my hands in my pockets and then I feel like I’m going to fall over.
‘How long have you had trouble sleeping?’
‘A long time,’ I say. ‘Maybe since I was nine or ten.’
‘That’s a pretty serious problem then. Have your parents ever taken you to a doctor?’
My parents? It sounds like such a strange and out of place word, parents, a word referring to a concept I’m not exactly familiar with.
‘Not really,’ I say. ‘They know about it but they just keep telling me it’ll go away.’
‘Well,’ says Henry, ‘why don’t I talk to Margaret about it and we’ll work something out. Maybe you could see our family doctor. He’s very good. We met him on the flight coming back from Paris. About eighteen years ago.’
Henry looks at the pavement in front of his shoes.
‘Eighteen years,’ he says. ‘Could it really be that long?’
‘I couldn’t tell you,’ I say, sarcastically.
Henry’s voice has become flat, like my dad’s is most of the time. I wonder if Henry is disappointed with his life. I remember what my dad said a few weeks before I left, late at night, when Erin and Leona and my mum had gone to bed.
He was sitting forward in his chair and, quite unexpectedly, he turned the TV off and stood up, and he looked down at me and said, ‘When I got to the age of thirty-three, the age they say Jesus was when he died, I started to panic because I hadn’t done all the things I’d planned to do.’
He started to open the door to the hall and then he turned around and let me see that his eyes were wet and he said, ‘Don’t let time run out on you.’
8
We’ve been back for two days. It’s Saturday night and Henry and Margaret arrive home late, after dinner with friends, their teeth blackened by red wine. They look oddly beautiful, deranged, and somehow more real. They come into the living room to chat before going to bed.
‘Did you have a nice night?’ asks Bridget.
James, who is sitting on the floor, c
lose to the TV, turns up the volume and does not look around to greet his parents, perhaps because this would involve looking at me, which he hasn’t done since we got back from our vacation.
‘Yes,’ says Henry, smiling broadly. ‘We had a wonderful time. But there’s something wrong with your Uncle Pete.’
‘What?’ says Bridget.
‘Well, he might have gone a bit mad.’
‘Madder,’ says James without turning around.
Henry laughs hard and I stare at him. His face is flushed and he looks handsome, his eyes have lost their weepiness and seem brighter. He sits on the arm of the couch, grinning and swaying, as though he is sitting deck-side on a cruise ship, moved gently by the waves, pleased with his lunch, keeping an eye out for whales or seagulls.
‘Wait till you hear this,’ says Margaret, and Henry continues.
‘Early in the night, while everybody was drinking wine, he asked for some milk and after he drank it, he said, “This milk is really weird. The cows must have been eating unusual things. I think I better pour the rest down the sink.”’
‘And did he?’ I ask.
‘The whole lot,’ says Margaret, ‘and we had none for our coffee after dinner.’
I laugh and so does Bridget.
‘That’s stupid,’ says James, looking at me.
Henry and Margaret are in great form, quite drunk. Henry is less polite. When he can no longer hold himself up on the arm of the couch, he rolls off and lands next to me.
‘Shit. Sorry,’ he says. ‘The couch must have the hiccups.’
I move across to give him more room, but we are still close; close enough for my knee to knock his whenever he moves.
Margaret is lying across the other couch with her legs on Bridget’s lap. Her hair is down and it is long enough to reach the belt of her trousers. Henry reaches across and strokes Margaret’s head and this makes her laugh for no apparent reason. It is as though they are celebrating some secret and wicked deed, and the fact that we have no idea what it might be makes them even jollier, and adds a perverse and pleasing angle to their smiles.
How the Light Gets In Page 7