‘Then let’s get some,’ he says.
We go to the nearest store. I don’t feel the effects of the speed until we are inside. Under the bright lights and with the music loud around me, the effect seems to kick in suddenly. When the shop attendant is giving me the change I start talking and can’t stop. I’m practically dancing on the spot.
We go outside and I’m still talking.
‘Good isn’t it?’ asks Tom.
‘I think so,’ I say and I keep talking and talking about nothing, and yet it feels as though I’ve worked everything out.
Tom and I walk down the main street. I see Bridget in a parked car with her boyfriend, the rufous one. She is brushing her hair and looks as though she’s been crying. There’s a six-pack of Coors on the dashboard.
‘Let’s go and say hi to Bridget,’ I say.
Tom takes my hand. ‘You’d better not. She’ll know you’re out of it.’
‘But I should get a lift home,’ I say.
‘Don’t,’ he says, grabbing my arm. ‘You’re too out of it.’
But I’m more awake than I’ve ever been and I can’t stop moving. I head towards the parked car. It takes off just as I get close enough to see Bridget reapplying her pink lipstick. Rufus speeds off without indicating.
Tom and I keep walking and near the Town Hall there’s a boy busker, playing the flute. There’s a toy shop next to him and in the window – which the boy can’t see – a mechanical toy unicorn is bobbing its head from side to side in perfect time with the boy’s tune.
‘Look,’ I say, ‘the toy’s head is moving in time with the tune that boy is playing.’
‘Huh?’ says Tom.
‘What a wonderful thing.’
‘I guess,’ he says. ‘It’s a pretty good coincidence.’
I sit on the kerb outside the toy shop. Tom sits down with me. I’ve got to tell him that it’s much more than a coincidence. And so, I spend the next hour telling him that the unicorn’s head swaying in time to the boy’s tune sums up the whole of life. More than that, it tells us the very point of life itself.
It’s after ten o’clock and Tom and I are lying on his bed. His parents are out. I’m thirsty but not hungry. I want to talk about the big things. I have all the answers.
I feel as though I could do anything, anything but sing, that is. I might be full of amphetamine but I know that my mouth is loose and my words are fast and muffled. I know that the outside doesn’t sound like the inside feels. What the world hears when I speak is probably something like a talking sock.
We lie on his bed until after midnight.
‘I’d better go home,’ I say.
‘Sure,’ he says sulkily. ‘You better go home.’
We keep talking.
I know that either Margaret or Henry will be waiting up for me and I know they’ll be angry, but I don’t care. I am full of things I want to say to them. I have an enormous amount of insight and wisdom and confidence and I know it won’t last. I am looking forward to talking to somebody other than Tom. I realise that I love Margaret and Henry and I can’t wait to see them again.
Tom drives me home in his flash red car.
Henry is sitting in the kitchen with the radio on. He stands up when I walk through the door.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
He searches my face so he can decide whether to keep his anger or shift to concern and sympathy. After all, something terrible might have happened to me.
All I want to do is get myself another cigarette, light it up, make a coffee and chat with him until the sun comes up.
My mouth starts to move of its own accord, as though it were stuffed full of mechanical, self-chewing gum.
I sit down. ‘Do you think there’s something different about the air between midnight and sunrise?’ I ask.
Henry doesn’t answer.
‘I think the air is quite different and that’s why people are different,’ I say.
‘Even you are different right now,’ I say. ‘Don’t you think that when the alarm goes off at five a.m. that there’s something different about the air? Don’t you think the air is airporty?’
Even though the face looking at me is hostile, I can’t stop talking.
‘At five a.m. the air is a packed suitcase or the phone about to ring for the first time in ten years,’ I say. ‘The air is full of calm emergencies.’
Henry is furious. He’s also busy trying to work out what’s wrong with me. I want to keep talking but I also wish this wasn’t happening and that I could go and chain smoke with somebody really interesting. Somewhere where there is alcohol and music.
I think of home and of pubs with beer-sodden carpets and my sisters lying wasted and half dressed on the lounge-room floor; salt poured over red wine spilt from cheap casks onto the carpet. I change my mind and wish I were straight. I wish I were a completely different kind of person, straight and clean and tall and tidy, like Bridget, who drinks light beer with her friends but never gets drunk or foolish.
Henry’s face is right up close to mine. ‘It’s two-thirty in the morning. Margaret’s been driving around the neighbourhood all night. She’s only just now got into bed!’
‘Is she in bed now? Is the mini-bus in bed? Is the mini-van in bed?’
I love the sound of the words mini and van.
‘Have I ever told you what I call the mini-van? It’s called shitty shitty prang prang, or sometimes it’s called …’
Henry smells my face. ‘You’ve been smoking!’
‘Not really.’
‘Lou, look at me!’
I look at his nose.
‘Have you been taking drugs?’
‘Drugs?’ I say. ‘No. I haven’t taken drugs. I’m just sleepy. I should go to sleep.’
‘Lou-ise!’ shouts Henry, nearly making me laugh. I hate the sound of that name. Loo-ease. Ill at ease. Loose eze.
‘I only tried one cigarette but it was despicable.’
Henry grabs me by the elbows so that he doesn’t get his hands dirty. ‘How could you do this? Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been?’
I let myself go limp and his fingers lose their anger. He folds his arms across his chest. I realise for the first time that Henry isn’t that old, he’s probably only about forty or something, which isn’t exactly old. He has a handsome face and if he wasn’t an almost-albino I’d probably find it hard not to be attracted to him.
‘After all the nights Margaret and I have sat up in bed arguing about you … this is what you do? And me wasting my breath defending you!’
‘I better just go to bed,’ I say. ‘I better get out of your radio … I mean, out of your way.’
Henry has no choice but to let me sleep it off; whatever it is. He knows there’s no point having it out with me while I’m under the influence.
He opens the door. ‘Get to bed. Margaret and I will talk to you first thing in the morning.’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
I go to my room and smoke what’s left of my cigarettes. When I try to sleep, I can’t. All I can do is sit up and rock myself back and forth and rub my legs and arms, which ache as though they swam home and want to swim some more.
There’s a knock on my door at nine o’clock. I’m under the blankets, fully clothed. I have fallen asleep just a few moments earlier.
‘Come in,’ I say, but Margaret and Henry are already inside.
Margaret looks awful. Her hair is lank and greasy and she looks much older.
She says, ‘You’d better have a shower, then meet us downstairs in the kitchen. James and Bridget have already left for school.’
Henry opens the window. ‘Keep this window open and your door shut until we say otherwise.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. I can still feel the speed in my blood, but I’m not high. I just want to sleep.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘So are we,’ says Margaret, meaningful and serious as hell. I don’t blame her.
I take
the stairs on tiptoe and listen at the kitchen door. Margaret and Henry aren’t talking. Margaret is blowing her nose. I go inside. The kitchen is the most cramped room in the Harding house and I have never liked being in it.
With its door at each end, a long table which takes up most of the space and forces you to stand close to whomever is doing the cooking, a small window which sees the branches of a tree and no sky, and the schedule on the fridge telling everybody what they must do, it is the most unnerving room in the Harding house.
‘Aren’t you guys going to work today?’ I ask.
Henry stands up and pulls out a chair for me to sit in. Both doors are shut and there is no tea or coffee on the stove.
‘No.’
I want him to say more.
‘Lou, you don’t really expect us to go to work after what’s happened? What would your own mother do?’
I sit down and think to myself that it would be water off a duck’s back for my mum. She’d keep brushing her hair in an earthquake and she doesn’t believe in discipline. When Erin and Leona beat me to a pulp, she yells out from the kitchen, or over the din of the TV, ‘Youse can fight your own battles, but break that table and I’ll break your necks.’ Afterwards, when I lie on my bed, she comes to me with a cup of tea. I take it and the tea on my swollen tongue makes me happy. ‘Can you stay here a while?’ I ask, and she does, and we talk until I fall asleep.
‘I’m not taking drugs,’ I say. ‘I was just in a weird mood from lack of sleep. You know I have really bad insomnia.’
I’m not stoned, but I seem to have acquired a thicker skin, a layer of immunity. I feel as though I could say anything and not feel in the least bit skinless. How wonderful it would be to always feel immune; immune from things and people, what they think and what they say.
‘Lou, please don’t lie to us,’ says Margaret. ‘Lying is the worst thing you could do right now.’
Henry is less angry. ‘We know how troubled you are, Lou, but that’s no excuse for what you’ve done. There are two children in this house who we need to protect and we can’t have you around them if you’re taking drugs.’
They’re using my name a lot. I decide the best thing to do is tell some of the truth; to cooperate. Make them feel as though they’ve cracked a hard nut. Let them get on with their lives. I’ll deal with Tom later and make my move as soon as I can. I’ll tell him that I want his family to adopt me.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘you’re right. I did a really stupid thing last night and I can’t believe I did it. I tried some drugs. But as you can see, I didn’t enjoy the experience.’
Henry leans under the table and takes his diary out of his briefcase.
‘We’re going to have to call Flo Bapes. The Organisation has to know about this. Your parents will have to be contacted. The decision is not ours. It’s out of our hands.’
The very sound of that name – Flo Bapes – makes me shudder. When I called her last week to ask her if I could see a doctor, she told me this was a matter for Henry, who I now believe is glad to have me out of his hands. He wants to wash his hands of me. In fact, he’s at the kitchen sink doing just that. He feels cleaner already. He feels relieved. The manual has told him what to do and all he has to do is follow it. It hurts. I’m amazed at how much it hurts.
He reaches for the phone.
I start to sob; great gulps of air and heaving convulsions. I hadn’t thought that it would be this serious. I would rather die than go home. Henry’s hand hovers theatrically over the receiver, waiting for me to give him a reason not to dial the number.
Then I realise that it is only a threat. I feel like laughing.
I say, ‘Is there any way I can stop you from telling them? It’d kill my mum if she knew. It’d kill my dad too. Can’t you just ground me or something?’
Margaret is pale and small dark bags, filled with a foul blue liquid, sag under her eyes.
‘Who gave you the drugs? We need to know who’s behind this before we can agree to anything.’
I pluck a name out of the fluorescent kitchen sky. ‘A girl called Simone,’ I say.
My appetite is coming back. I feel like pancakes. I feel like being hugged and put to bed, but not my own bed, a new and different bed. Henry and Margaret’s four-poster bed. I wish I was at the airport meeting Margaret and Henry for the first time.
I say, ‘I’ve never met her before. I was walking home from school and she came up to me. She is really pretty and friendly. She said she’d seen me at the audition and wondered if I’d like to have pizza with her and her friends.’
As I tell this lie I can see Simone and her friends. They look like regular high school students. They are in the drama club and they have a 3.8 grade point average.
‘And what happened?’ asks Henry, wrapping his hands around an empty cup as though to warm them.
‘We were having pizza and somehow I was telling them how lonely I’d been feeling and they asked if I’d like to try something that’d make me feel really happy. They told me it was one of those natural herb things, you know, like that guarana stuff you can buy in the shops.’
Margaret has been rubbing her eyes by sticking her fingers under the lenses of her glasses, as though she’s too tired to take them off. She stops and slaps the table. ‘And you believed this? You fool!’
‘It sounded okay. They were so casual about it. They seemed like really nice people. Simone is bright. She’s going to Yale and wants to do pre-law.’
I have no idea what I’m going to say before I say it. Margaret doesn’t agree with Henry. She thinks I should be sent home. She wants me to be punished. ‘Well, you’re not as smart as you make out, are you?’
‘I suppose not.’
She takes her glasses off, holds them in the air and peers through them at the calendar on the wall, affecting a strange toughness, as though she busts drug users for a living.
‘And so you took this drug – this unknown substance – on the strength of a pretty face who claims she’s going to Yale?’
‘Yes, I was stupid,’ I say. ‘They just had a small brown packet and poured powder into my drink and then I drank it. I felt sick. Then I said I should go home and they offered to drive me. That was about eight-thirty. They drove around and around and I kept telling them to drop me off or let me out.’
As I tell this story, I can see Simone’s car. It’s a Saab with white sheepskin seat covers. She has two friends, one girl and one boy. The boy has blond hair. The girl has short red hair. They laugh a great deal and I laugh too. We are driving fast, listening to loud music.
‘I was lost. I didn’t know where they’d driven me. I wouldn’t have known how to find my way home and I thought it would be more dangerous to get out of the car. By the time they dropped me out front it must have been late.’
‘It was two-thirty a. m.,’ says Henry, exhausted.
Margaret wants to know if she and Henry can search my room. I agree and stay downstairs with my head on the kitchen table. I have stashed an empty bottle of gin under my mattress and the rest of the speed is in my underpants.
They are taking a long time. I lie on the couch and watch some TV, hoping they’ll leave me alone for the day. Then I remember that the first all-cast rehearsal is on tonight and that I still haven’t solved my problem.
Henry comes in first. ‘We didn’t find anything.’
Margaret is still angry. ‘We need to look in your wallet. Can I have it please?’
‘Yes,’ I say and hand it across the back of the couch.
‘There’s not a cent in here,’ she says. ‘Not a penny. Did these people make you pay for the drugs?’
I have no idea what the right answer is. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘After I’d already taken the drug and we were in the car, Simone and her boyfriend told me that I had to chip in or they might not be able to get me back home.’
This Simone girl and her boyfriend sound like lunatics. I hope I never see them again.
‘Good God,’ says Henry. ‘How much?�
��
‘Twenty dollars and all my change,’ I say.
Margaret and Henry leave the lounge-room to confer for a minute.
‘We want you to promise you’ll never see these people again,’ says Henry. ‘They could have killed you and left you in a ditch on the side of the road.’
Margaret is still cross. ‘Next time anything like this happens we’ll be calling Flo Bapes. There’ll be no more sympathy. We will not allow you to corrupt our children. If you ever consume alcohol or any kind of drug again, you’ll be on the next plane home.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m really sorry. It won’t happen again.’
I don’t believe they’ll send me home.
‘You’d better stay home today,’ says Henry. ‘You look like death. But you won’t be going anywhere tonight. We’ll talk about your schedule later. And don’t talk to James and Bridget about any of this. Just say that you were sick today.’
I feel like telling them that Bridget and her friends drink all the time and that she spends most Friday nights playing drinking games, like ‘quarters’ and ‘spin the bottle’. I feel like pointing out that I haven’t met a single American kid over the age of fourteen who doesn’t drink.
‘But I have the first all-cast rehearsal tonight at school. I have a big part in the musical.’
Margaret and Henry have forgotten all about this. They leave the room once again to confer and I listen to their hushed, angry voices. Henry must be sticking his neck out for me again.
He comes back in alone, his neck red, ‘We’ve agreed you can continue to go to rehearsals. You’ll need to give me a copy of the timetable and Margaret and I can show up at any time. You’ll only be going to rehearsals and nowhere else. Besides rehearsals, you are grounded until we say you can go out again.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘You’ve saved my life.’
Henry and Margaret go to work. I sleep on the couch for a few hours and then wake up when the sun floods the room. I draw the curtains and lie down again, but the wave of sleep has washed up on the shore of my unhealthy skull and I am filled with dread again. I can’t rehearse without alcohol and I have no money. In two hours Bridget and James will be home from school joyfully making cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise that squeezes straight out of the container, and then they’ll lie on their bellies in front of the TV, talking and laughing before they do their homework. I have no choice but to try the booze cabinet.
How the Light Gets In Page 16