by Meg Rosoff
32
Justin stayed on at Agnes’s flat.
It was not so much a moving-in as a not-moving-out, and it wasn’t at all what she’d had in mind. But he was only fifteen. He wasn’t well. She felt guilty.
Justin didn’t question his exile from Agnes’s bed, but spent most of his time hunched on the sofa watching her, his eyes tragic and dilated with love.
After living with his middle-of-the-night wanderings and insomnia, Agnes now had to check morning and evening that he hadn’t fallen into a coma. He slept almost constantly and showed no real interest in food, though would eat dutifully, like a child, any meal she put in front of him.
But she was not a cruel person (she told herself) and she wasn’t about to throw him out on the street. So it was with a large measure of resignation that she left for her studio each morning, leaving Justin fast asleep on the sofa.
After two or three days, she arrived home to find him staring gloomily at MasterChef on TV. And she had an idea.
‘Justin, I’m working so hard, and I haven’t had a decent meal in days. What if I leave you some cash and a cookbook and you see what you can do?’
He looked shocked. What can I do? I can panic at the possibility of having to venture out of the flat. Or having to cook. Why doesn’t she ask a question I know the answer to, like, would you like to have sex with me again?
But then he realized that this was something he could do for her that would make her life easier, a way to thank her for being kind to him. A way to win back her love. Yes, it would require getting dressed, going out, making choices, calculating change, following directions. But he owed her so much. It would be a start.
He told her he would try.
The next day, a Saturday, she left some money on the kitchen table with a copy of Cooking World, and went off to the studio.
He made it as far as the butcher’s on the corner. It was an old-fashioned family butcher’s, one of the few left in town, and there was a semi-skinned rabbit hanging upside down in the window. Justin caught its eye and it winked at him. He recoiled in horror.
And then he heard the horrible whispery voice, only this time it was singing in a high-pitched, squeaky tone, like a rabbit’s. When he dared look again, he saw that it was the rabbit singing, its dead mouth opening and closing with the words:
Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run.
Where was his greyhound, now, when he needed him? He tried ignoring the horrible figment of his imagination, hoping it would go away, but the rabbit continued to sing.
Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run.
Justin forced himself to walk to the meat counter where the butcher stood chatting casually with a woman and her daughter, a soft-featured, sturdy girl with thick brown hair and clear, fearless eyes. All three seemed strangely impervious to the singing rabbit, but when Justin approached, they turned to look at him.
He was a peculiar sight. Tears rolling down his face, shouting to drown out the sound of the singing rabbit; he said he needed help, pointed to a chicken, handed over some money, grabbed his parcel and bolted out the door in a panic.
Boys, thought the butcher.
Drugs, thought the woman.
Justin Case, thought Dorothea. So we meet again.
He heard the terrifying voice of the rabbit shouting after him.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Goes the farmer’s gun.
So RUN rabbit, RUN rabbit, run, run, RUN!
He ran, shaking with fear. He couldn’t look at the chicken, its loose yellowy flesh reminded him too much of his own. It looked pathetic, naked and dead. He couldn’t bear to touch it, began to cry when he thought how vulnerable chickens were, how misused, how short and tragic their lives.
He missed his brother. His dog. His former self.
When Agnes returned home, she found Justin curled up asleep in the foetal position and the chicken, still wrapped in paper, leaking blood on to the hob of her cooker.
Well, she thought, I wouldn’t call the experiment an unqualified success.
She cleaned up the mess, rubbed the bird with salt and oil, stuffed it with a lemon and placed it in a hot oven, along with some ancient potatoes and beans from the bottom of the fridge.
An hour later the smell woke Justin, who, for a brief ecstatic moment, thought he’d managed to cook a meal by himself. Agnes would be impressed and grateful; she would invite him across the flat once more and into her bed. The reality disappointed but did not surprise him.
That night they ate together.
He didn’t tell her about the singing rabbit, just sat and listened as she talked about her day, the photographs, her plan for a show. As the narrative unfurled he stopped hearing her words and listened instead to the delicious cadence of her speech. The sound of her voice soothed him, he drew it around his shoulders like fleece.
I will feed Agnes, he thought, and in exchange she will take me back.
And so he set about channelling every ounce of fear, anxiety, nervous energy and love – especially love – into food.
On Monday morning he found a recipe for meatballs, uncrumpled the money left over from Saturday’s chicken, shoved it into his pocket and ventured out. The brightness of the day hurt his eyes, but the world felt cold and pleasant against his skin. He approached the butcher’s window cautiously. The rabbit was gone. Perhaps he had imagined it.
He entered, asked the butcher for 500 grams of minced beef, handed him the money, accepted his package and his change, and left.
As he passed the window again, he felt cautiously triumphant. He risked a tiny sideways glance. Still no rabbit. Excellent.
The way another person might have pursued the meaning of life, Justin made meatballs, shaping each ball into a sphere so laboured and perfect, it caused his eyes to fill with tears for the flesh of the noble cow, for the perfection of three-dimensional geometric forms in nature, for the relentless universality of dinner time.
He tried explaining this to Agnes and she laughed, but stopped when she caught sight of the expression on his face. He turned away before she could see the tears fall.
Oh lord, she thought. Woods. Not out of yet.
She had hoped the cooking would bring him out of himself, lead him back into the real world. But it didn’t. In the kitchen he was like the sorcerer’s apprentice: he couldn’t stop. The orderly rhythm of recipes calmed his jangled nerves, there was no need for value judgements and approximations. He disliked pinches and handfuls, hungered after precise measures and medium (not small, not large) eggs. It calmed him to choose ingredients, to prepare each according to its true inner nature. The feel of raw materials and the sound of sizzling comforted him.
It comforted him most of all to feed Agnes.
‘It’s good, Justin, you’re a natural,’ Agnes said, helping herself to another meatball.
Yes, he was a natural. A natural lunatic. But he enjoyed putting his mind to simple tasks, enjoyed her approval, enjoyed her pleasure at eating something other than sandwiches. It made him feel closer to the person he had lost track of, the person he had been not so long ago, before his brain got all tied up in catastrophe.
And he felt closer, if only by teaspoons, to his heart’s desire.
33
Justin had planned a special meal to celebrate two weeks of living with Agnes. As he adjusted the heat under the lamb chops, he heard a knock on the door.
Wrapped in a thick winter coat, Peter Prince looked gawky and unfazed as ever, like a relic from a life Justin had almost forgotten. Beside him stood his sister.
‘Do you remember Dorothea?’ Peter asked.
‘Hello,’ she said, noting the dark circles under his eyes.
Though her face looked familiar, Justin could not recall having met her before.
The three stood in awkward silence. Justin wished they would go away. He squeezed his eyes shut, but when he opened them again, brother and sister were still there.
Peter smiled his awkward smile. ‘Your mother said you were livin
g here now.’
‘Yes.’
‘Something smells good.’
‘Lamb.’
During this exchange, Dorothea observed Justin calmly. Justin, who had often marvelled at Peter’s ability to sustain an uncomfortably long silence, now wondered if the talent were genetic.
He sighed at last, defeated. ‘Won’t you come in?’
Peter brightened. ‘Thanks. That would be nice.’ He stepped in before Justin could change his mind and once inside, looked carefully around the little flat. He noted the crumpled duvet on the sofa, the breakfast dishes still on the table, the sink full of water and unwashed mugs. ‘You don’t come to school any more,’ he said.
Justin nodded.
‘Or cross-country. Coach was asking what happened to you.’
‘Worried, was he?’
‘I wouldn’t say worried exactly. Hacked off, more like. I think your lamb is burning.’
Justin dashed to the hob, grabbed the frying pan and hurled it on to the kitchen table. Having seared his palm on the handle, he reached over to turn the heat off with his good hand, plunging the other into the sinkful of dirty, cold water. Smoke continued to billow from the burning frying pan. He stared at the charred meat as the smoke alarm began to shrill.
Peter grabbed a tea towel and fanned it violently under the alarm, while an unruffled Dorothea walked over to the window and opened it. Eventually the noise stopped and the smoke cleared.
‘I saw a picture of the airport disaster,’ Peter said, in the dramatic quiet left by the shrieking alarm. ‘And…’ He hesitated. ‘I thought I saw you.’
Justin stared.
‘My god, you are one lucky guy.’
‘Lucky?’ Justin pronounced the word with exaggerated care, his teeth clenched, his entire body rigid with disbelief. Dorothea removed his burnt hand from the dirty sinkwater and examined it.
Peter Prince hesitated. ‘Uh… well, yes, lucky. The way I figure it, you must be just about the luckiest guy on earth.’
Justin exploded. ‘Are you totally, utterly insane? I’ve nearly been blown to smithereens in a freak airport accident, just about had a plane land in my lap. It’s the first time in history anything bad has ever happened at Luton Airport and I just happened to be inches from the epicentre. The fact that I’m here today is thanks only to the bizarre coincidence of Agnes arriving five minutes this side of apocalypse, thus saving me from spending the rest of my days as a teaspoonful of vapour.’
Peter nodded his head sympathetically. ‘Yes, I guess so. Only…’
‘Only what?’
‘Only… you’re still alive. She did arrive, and you weren’t vaporized. And you were hanging around in an airport, which strikes me as kind of dangerous in the first place. Airports! I mean think about it. They’re a hub, a crossroads for all sorts of lowlife operators: drug dealers, pickpockets, international criminals, forgers, arms dealers, black marketeers, smugglers, slave traders, spies, deposed dictators…’
As Peter totted up potential horrors on the fingers of his left hand, Justin froze, though it might be more accurate to say that time ceased to advance around him. He experienced a kind of philosophical vertigo, his thoughts spinning wildly as Peter Prince’s words sunk in.
One lucky guy.
His brother hadn’t fallen out the window. He himself had survived a blast of epic proportions that should have killed him. Maybe he was lucky after all.
He didn’t feel lucky, but he was alive. Thanks to luck, and to Agnes. Without her, he had nothing. Without her, it was possible he would cease to exist altogether.
Dorothea wrapped a clean tea towel around Justin’s hand. ‘You’ll live,’ she said, and he stared at her.
Peter glanced around the flat once more. ‘Where’s Boy?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since the crash.’
Peter looked genuinely shocked. ‘No wonder you’re so upset.’
And then suddenly Justin remembered why he liked Peter, and was grateful.
They heard a key in the door. Agnes entered grumpily, stomping her feet and shaking the rain off her umbrella. ‘It’s vile out there. Is something burning?’ She spied Peter. ‘Oh, hello. You’re the boy from the track team.’
Peter’s smile was shy. ‘Peter. It’s nice to meet you. This is my sister, Dorothea. It’s your supper that’s burnt, I’m afraid. You look amazing.’
She did. Her mac covered a tiny flutter of patterned skirt, pale green tights and a skinny green turtleneck over which she wore a pink satin Edwardian corset. She sat down and removed her boots and a large green vinyl fireman’s hat, shook the hat violently, and threw it on the back of the sofa. She was secretly pleased Peter and his sister had come, saving her from another tense evening alone with Justin.
‘I could make cheese on toast,’ Peter offered. ‘It’s my fault Justin burnt the meat.’
Dorothea watched Agnes. She takes up a lot of space, Dorothea thought, like a particularly colourful parrot. And she wants him out, that’s for sure.
Peter and Dorothea stayed for dinner. Agnes dug a pizza out of the freezer and scraped a salad together from what was left in the fridge. She poured herself a glass of wine, and as they ate, they talked about a new movie none of them had seen, the latest band from Norway, and endangered birds.
After they left, Justin slugged the dregs of the wine, attempted to kiss Agnes, accepted her cheek with furious self-loathing, and crawled like a cur into bed on the sofa.
On the way home, Dorothea thought about magnets, repelling as easily and naturally as they attract.
34
Justin didn’t sleep that night. He lay awake thinking about luck.
When Agnes returned home the next evening he had showered and dressed. He’d even made a stab at cutting his hair, though not a noticeably effective one. He had managed to tidy the flat, open the windows, put his sheets in the washing machine, fold all his things neatly and stow them in Agnes’s wardrobe, set the table, and put out two wine glasses. He prepared a fillet of pork in a peppercorn sauce that smelled delicious.
Instead of looking pleased, Agnes peered at him closely, her expression worried. ‘How are you, Justin?’
He spoke carefully. ‘I’m feeling a lot better, thank you.’
She waited.
‘Agnes?’
‘Yes?’
‘You know when Peter and Dorothea stopped by yesterday?’
‘Yes?’
‘Before you came home, we talked. I burnt the meat. Peter said they missed me at cross-country.’
Agnes’s smile was strained.
‘He said –’Justin took a deep breath and closed his eyes – ‘He said I’m the luckiest person he knows.’
Agnes burst out laughing. It was so unexpected. ‘What did you say in return?’ she asked, picking up her camera.
‘Put it away.’ He took a swing at it, furious. ‘I told him I am the luckiest person on earth. And it’s all because of you.’ He paused. ‘I love you, Agnes.’
‘Thank you, Justin. I love you too.’
‘You do?’ He beamed, picked up a carving knife and began sawing thick slices of pork.
‘Justin? What exactly are we talking about?’
‘Love. I love you. I’m madly in love with you. Well, madly obviously, given I’m mad as a mudlark. But you saved my life. I’d be dead without you. And you’re so good to me. And you love me too. How lucky is that? Amazing! Amazingly lucky. I can’t live without you. You’re my lucky charm.’
She felt a sudden desire to kill Justin’s well-meaning friend. ‘I’m not your lucky charm, Justin–’
He interrupted. ‘Have some pork. Oh yes you are. You’re my four-leaf clover. My rabbit’s foot. My amulet. Without you I’m completely at the mercy of the forces of doom –’
‘I am not your lucky charm! Do you hear me, Justin?’
He stopped and stared at her wildly. ‘But I love you, Agnes. I need you. I’m lost without you.’
‘Justin, you kno
w that’s not true.’
‘You don’t understand!’ He was nearly shouting, making alarmingly large, swooping gestures with the carving knife. ‘Without you I would have been killed. What if it happens again?’
‘Try not to think about it. It won’t happen again.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘I just… I have a definite feeling.’
‘A feeling isn’t good enough!’ He was shouting, despite knowing it didn’t help. He took a deep breath, placed a jagged plank of pork on her plate, and began to spoon sauce over it with a shaking hand. ‘I know you think I’m crazy, but you must realize I can see certain things more clearly than you can. Terrible things are happening every minute of every day. They lie in wait and if you try to avoid them in one direction they spring up in another. Unless you’re lucky. And that’s the problem. I’m not lucky. At least, on my own I’m not. With you it’s different. You love me, you said so. And you saved my life, I don’t know how you did it, but you did. And also you’re so…’ He faltered.
Agnes felt infinitely tired. She reached out and took his hand, wishing she were somewhere else.
‘Justin, please try to listen. I don’t want to be your lucky charm. I don’t want to be some sort of metaphysical bodyguard. If I saved you once, it was coincidence, a once- in-a-lifetime thing. But I can’t do it like a party trick, and I don’t want to have to protect you at all, really. My life is complicated enough, though of course I’m happy to do what I can because you’re my friend and I care about you, but it’s been really difficult knowing how to help you lately. I do love you, in a way, because you’re interesting and sweet –’
Justin winced.
‘– but at the same time I’m quite worried about your mental state, and to be honest it probably was a bad idea that we had sex that time, even though it was very nice in many ways, because I’m not in love with you, and I’m sorry if that makes you feel bad because I know you’ve been through so much lately, but I have to say it because it’s the truth.’ She peered at him and smiled a hesitant smile. ‘Don’t look so sad, Justin, it’s not the end of the world.’