by Meg Rosoff
‘Not yet.’ He looked away.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Justin broke it. ‘So, I want to be perfectly clear on this question. You’re saying you’re not in love with me?’
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘You just thought it would be nice to take a few pictures to help make you famous and then dump me?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You know that’s not true.’
‘Do I?’ His voice took on a pleading tone. ‘Couldn’t you try to be in love with me, just a little? I wouldn’t be nearly so crazy if I knew you were in love with me.’
‘You can turn it on and off?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I know it’s not. But look at yourself, Justin, you’re bouncing around like a ping-pong ball. I can’t save you, there aren’t enough hours in the day. You’ll get through it, I’m sure you will. You just need lots of time. Peace and quiet. Nothing to confuse you.’ She frowned. ‘Maybe you should see a doctor.’
‘No.’
‘A counsellor?’
‘No.’
‘Would you consider going back home?’
He turned away.
‘Well then… isn’t there somewhere else?’
‘You don’t want me any more.’ His voice was flat.
Agnes sighed. She had once liked the thought of helping him. She just hadn’t realized how much help a person could require.
They ate dinner in silence. The pork was excellent.
‘What about Peter and Dorothea?’ she asked, putting the kettle on.
‘What about them?’
‘Maybe you could stay with them.’
Justin nodded, defeated.
35
There were no last words when Agnes dropped him off at Peter’s house.
She rang the bell, greeted Peter, said goodbye to Justin without touching him or meeting his eyes, and left. Justin was relieved that only Peter was present to witness his rejection.
Peter offered a quick tour of the house, explaining that his mother was usually first out in the morning, followed by the girls, that Justin would meet them all later, and in the meantime should help himself to whatever he could find in the kitchen. Then he took his friend’s bags up to the bedroom they would share, and left for school.
In contrast to the rest of the house, which was filled with books and paintings and too many pieces of hopelessly mismatched furniture, Peter’s room was spotless and noticeably devoid of stuff. It contained two single beds, a large bookcase stuffed nearly but not quite to overflowing, a map of the Milky Way that took up an entire wall, a colourful chart of the periodic table of elements, an impressive-looking refractor telescope, and a large note on the door that read Feed Alice.
Justin wondered who Alice was.
He slowly unpacked his things, then wandered cautiously down to the kitchen, fixed himself four pieces of toast and Marmite, ate them slowly and returned to Peter’s room. He lay down and tried to read some of Peter’s books, most of which dealt with the finer points of cosmology. He examined the telescope and wondered if it could be used to scan the neighbourhood for suspicious characters. Then he gave up and fell asleep. It was late afternoon when the sound of a cough woke him, and he struggled into a sitting position.
Peter’s youngest sister (he guessed she was about six) stood in the doorway. She had bright blue eyes and fat pink cheeks, but the resemblance to Peter was indisputable. She gripped the end of a long, slim plastic lead.
‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’m Anna. Peter says you’re going to live here for a while.’
Justin nodded.
She seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘Don’t you have a family of your own?’
Justin sighed. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘But we don’t really get on.’ He thought of Charlie with a pang.
‘I don’t always get on with my sister.’ Anna indicated Dorothea, who had entered the room behind her, and dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘We can be quite horrible to each other.’
Dorothea ignored her. ‘Hello again.’
‘Hello.’ He looked at the two girls. ‘I have a brother,’ he said.
‘What sort of brother?’ Dorothea looked interested.
‘Quite a small one.’
‘Well,’ said Dorothea. ‘Small can be very exasperating. Don’t you miss him?’
Justin did, suddenly. ‘He’s not a usual sort of child. He’s quite unusual, in fact.’
‘In what way?’
He thought for a moment. ‘He seems to know things.’
‘Precocious.’ Dorothea shot a glance at Anna. ‘Very wearing.’
Justin looked at the floor. ‘I also had a girlfriend.’
‘Had?’
‘She hates me now.’
Both girls gazed at him with interest. Then Dorothea seemed to remember something. ‘Peter said to ask about your dog.’
‘He’s still missing. But he’s not real anyway.’
She considered this information. ‘What sort of not-real dog is he?’
‘Greyhound.’
‘Hmm. Might have been tricky. Might have been problems with the cats.’
‘And Alice,’ said Anna, brow furrowed with anxiety.
Justin said nothing.
‘Well, we’re glad you’ve come. Mum works much too hard, so we’re rather like orphans and could use the company. Will you cook for us?’
Justin nodded.
‘Excellent. You’re welcome to stay then, as long as you’re kind to Alice.’
He considered the condition carefully. Perhaps it was a trick. Perhaps Alice was impossible to be kind to. ‘All right,’ he said finally.
Their faces relaxed into expressions of relief, as if the subject had been worrying them.
Dorothea extended her hand to seal the relationship. He shook it.
‘Your burn is better,’ she said, examining his palm, then turned to her sister. ‘Alice can come in now.’
Anna tugged gently on the lead and a soft, sleepy-looking rabbit the size of a small mountain lion hopped slowly into the room.
‘This is Alice,’ Dorothea said. ‘He’ll be your pet.’ She looked at Justin dispassionately. ‘You need a rabbit just now. Alice, this is Justin.’
Justin knelt on the floor and made a little clucking noise. The rabbit looked at him blandly.
‘Stroke him like this,’ Dorothea said. She ran her hand firmly from the base of his ears to the middle of his back. ‘Otherwise he gets testy.’ Alice stretched to his full length and rolled over on one side with a little sigh of pleasure.
Dorothea looked at Justin. ‘He’s fairly safe as pets go, but be careful anyway. Things can happen with rabbits.’
Justin stared at her. Things? What things? Singing-in-butcher’s-shop-type things? He shook his head to erase the image. ‘Why is he called Alice if he’s a boy?’
‘He just is.’ Dorothea looked at her watch, a fat digital with large numbers. ‘We have to go now, it’s time to feed the cats. You’ll find rabbit food in the shed behind the kitchen. Goodbye for now, Justin Case,’ she said with grave formality. ‘Good luck with Alice.’
They left him alone with his pet.
Justin and Alice stared at each other. The rabbit twitched his ears. Justin looked deep into the large placid eyes, wondering what he was thinking. Alice gazed back at Justin, his expression mild.
Neither of them blinked. Peter found them like that when he arrived home from school an hour later.
36
The first night they were awkward with each other. Despite the warm reception he received from Peter’s sisters, Justin felt like a broken armchair that had been passed from house to house and was destined, eventually, for the dump. He didn’t feel much like talking.
‘I hope you’re OK about living here,’ Peter said, after he’d turned the lights out. ‘I mean, I know it’s not your first choice.’
Justin stared at the ceiling above his bed and said nothing for a while. ‘Why
do you have a male rabbit called Alice?’
‘Dorothea named him. I don’t think she considered gender.’
Justin sighed. ‘I had a bad experience with a rabbit once.’
‘Really?’
But Justin didn’t elaborate, and for a while both boys lay awake, thinking. Peter thought about the shape and behaviour of the universe. Justin thought how he’d blown it with Agnes. How the only person on the planet who stood between him and further catastrophe had rejected him outright. How he was a goon and an oaf, and prone to hallucinations as well. How he was lousy at sex. She was probably with some older, more sophisticated friends at that very moment, laughing at his pitiable technique. He thought how pathetic it was to want to have sex with someone who despised you. He also thought about his brother. He missed Charlie, wondered if the child missed him.
Eventually he fell into fitful unconsciousness.
The next morning, Justin remained in bed while the house rattled with action. He could hear Peter’s mother and the girls, disorganized and noisy, and then Peter, quieter, on his own. Justin heard him moving about in the kitchen, and then he too was gone.
The silence of the empty house felt safe, reassuring; there were no complicated relationships to negotiate, no sexual snares, no emotional booby traps. He had been transplanted into a family, yes, but it wasn’t his family.
For company, there was Alice. Within ten minutes of everyone leaving, Justin heard the thud thud thud of his heavy hops on the stairs, and then in the hall. When he opened the bedroom door, the rabbit looked up at him expectantly.
‘Hello, Alice.’ Justin stood aside to let him enter and Alice hopped past him into the room, limbo-dancing his way under Justin’s bed. Alice didn’t take the place of Boy, but Justin liked his enormous, lumbering presence.
He stayed in bed, getting up only once, to call his parents. They wanted phone numbers, addresses, and assurances that he was all right, but in the end they accepted his plan to stay with Peter a little longer, agreeing to inform the school that he would make up any work over the holidays. A few seconds before they hung up, Justin heard a click on the line, and there was something about the quality of the silence that made him hesitate.
‘Charlie?’
The little boy’s breathing was heavy with excitement.
‘Hello, Charlie.’ Justin’s pleasure gave way suddenly to guilt. How could he explain to his brother why he no longer lived at home? I cant live with you just now, Charlie, but it’s not because of you, it’s because of all the disastrous things that might happen to me? Or perhaps, Don’t take it personally, Charlie, it’s just that I feel I’m going mad half the time and the rest of the time I feel nothing at all?
‘I’m sorry, Charlie.’ He felt his eyes well up. ‘I miss you.’
It’s all right, said Charlie. I miss you too. Come home when you can.
Justin could hear the little boy’s breath, amplified by the mouthpiece he was holding too close. He smiled. ‘OK, then. Bye-bye.’
‘Bye-bye.’
Neither of them moved.
‘You can hang up the phone now, Charlie.’
Justin waited for the click, replaced the phone carefully and went back to bed. He couldn’t think about his brother, not now. It made him want to cry. Instead, he buried his head in his pillow and slept through to the following morning.
For the first few days the girls were cautious, respecting his privacy, whispering in barely audible voices outside his door and then creeping away disappointed. But as time passed and he became more of a fixture in their lives, they became inquisitive and imperious, like robins.
Now they burst in, noisy and exuberant, with cold air caught between their layers of clothing, bearing exaggerated tales of the outside world. They cracked the door open if he didn’t answer, and slid in, hiding under Peter’s bed or in his wardrobe and talking in stage whispers until Alice and Justin emerged from their shared lassitude, lured out by the keen scent of a foreign existence. Alice maintained his appearance of dignified calm, but Justin’s face lost a bit of its pallor at their approach.
Dorothea gave Justin ink blots and photographs to analyse. She listened intently to his answers, took careful notes.
‘What do you see in this one?’ she asked, showing him a black-and-white headshot of a pleasant-looking man in an old-fashioned fedora.
‘It’s the photograph on his obituary,’ Justin said. ‘He died in a terrible car crash, and that’s the picture his wife sent to the papers.’
‘That is a very strange answer,’ she said frowning, her brow furrowed with concern. ‘You are a very unnatural person, Justin Case.’
‘You’re not supposed to say it’s strange,’ he answered. ‘You’re supposed to say “I see” in a nice calm voice and write it down.’
‘Yes, I do see. But it’s still strange.’
He nodded.
‘What about this one?’ She held up a picture of a prancing circus horse festooned in brightly coloured banners.
‘No rider. He’s fallen off. They can’t stop the horse from galloping. It’s running away. Gone mad. Rider braindamaged. Or dead.’
‘You’re making this up, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not. That’s what I see.’
‘And this?’ She held up an ink blot.
‘I can’t tell you. It’s too gruesome.’ He turned away, shuddering.
Dorothea shook her head and made notes. ‘You make me look like Happy the Clown.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She looked at him, surprised. ‘There’s no need to be sorry. I don’t imagine you choose to see the world this way.’
They played word association with predictably morbid results. At other times Dorothea followed Justin around with a notebook. She claimed to be studying (his) abnormal psychology.
‘Do you suffer from bouts of melancholia?’ Dorothea asked, then looked up at Justin and snorted. ‘Next question. Would you describe yourself as possessed by demons? Do you practise self-abuse? Have you thought of becoming a priest? What dreams do you have?’
Yes, yes, yes, no. His dreams were either too disturbing or erotic to share, so he made them up. ‘I dreamt I had a tiny dragon living in the palm of my hand. Its claws were extremely painful. It spoke with a squeaky voice and had razor-sharp teeth.’
She scribbled razor-sharp teeth into her notebook and underlined it twice, as Anna watched nervously, hugging Alice for safety.
‘He is strange,’ Dorothea explained to Anna, ‘but not in a bad way.’
If I could just stick by her, Justin thought. If I could just tell her all the things in my head, knowing my thoughts won’t cause her to run away, or to wither. She doesn’t think I’m mad, or at least she doesn’t show that she thinks I’m mad.
It helped that at least a portion of someone else’s reality overlapped his own.
And so day by day, as Dorothea took notes and Anna clutched his arm, Justin fell in love with each of them a little more, with their soft bodies, blunt features and strange fantasies; with their high voices and cat eyes and casual ways of demanding affection. It wasn’t lust he felt, or brotherly love, but something lighter and more ambiguous.
They, in turn, talked with him, followed him around, welcomed his presence in their lives.
They were little girls, but girls nonetheless.
37
Justin missed his dog.
As the days passed and Boy failed to reappear, Justin began to accept that he had been gravely wounded or killed in the airport explosion.
A disinterested observer might expect the death of an imaginary dog to be less traumatic than, say, the death of a real dog, but this was not the case. Justin felt that Boy was the only living creature who understood the peculiar half-reality occupied by his enemy. It made sense. Boy lived in that world too.
Yet if this were true, Justin brooded, if Boy had come to exist because he, Justin, had conjured him out of thin air, out of the murky depths of his subconscious, then how could
Boy be killed off in the real world? His head spun.
The dog had offered him solace and loyalty. Protection. Love. Boy was his, his creation, his companion. His soul-mate. He was the only creature on earth who could fill the jagged void in his brain, in his heart. Who could possibly want to destroy that?
Justin knew. He dropped his head into his hands in despair.
I want my dog back.
I’ll talk to him, he thought. I’ll beg him to give me back my dog. I’ll do anything. I’m not proud.
And then he sat up, suddenly angry. But I created Boy. No one has the right to destroy him but me.
He was shouting now, spinning around like a blind boxer. You can’t just crawl into my head and destroy my creation! Do you hear me? He’s my dog! He’s mine, and I want him back!
Justin looked up and saw Dorothea staring at him. He brushed the tears from his face. Looked away.
‘I was talking to fate.’
She said nothing.
‘I want my dog back,’ he explained.
‘The greyhound?’
‘Yes.’
‘Big pale-grey dog?’
‘Yes.’
‘Kind of brindly?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wise eyes?’
‘Yes!’
‘I just saw him.’
‘What?’
‘I just saw him in the back garden. He was staring at Alice. To be honest, I didn’t entirely like the look in his eye. Greyhounds and rabbits, as I said before, not a great combination. But he didn’t touch him. Just stared.’
Justin bolted out of the room, down the stairs and into the back garden.
No dog.
‘DOROTHEA!’
‘Yes?’ She was standing beside him.
‘Where did you see him?’
‘Right there,’ she said calmly, pointing to a dense area of ferns by Alice’s hutch. And there he was, sprawled comfortably, half-hidden by the foliage, head cushioned on a bag of wood shavings, asleep.