Louis Beside Himself (13 page)

‘You know, your mother used to have her nose in a book all the time,' he said suddenly. ‘She used to read in the bath – can't tell you how many books were ruined by being dropped in the water. Her favourite books, too . . .' Dad was smiling, his eyes far away.

I stared at him. I couldn't remember him ever saying something so personal about Mum. I could just see it – how she'd have sunk into the piping-hot water, opening her book with excitement. But had she been in our exact same bathroom? I wanted to imagine it properly. Or maybe it had happened in a different house, before they had us kids.

‘So Dad, did she drop her books in this same bath? Like, the one we have now?'

‘What?' Dad jerked up out of his reverie. ‘Oh, what does it matter? I suppose so.' His hand fell from my back. ‘Put that ice on the other side now.'

But I wanted to keep talking about Mum. I wanted . . . something, something close, comforting. A Mum story. ‘Hey Dad, did you ever wrestle with Mum, you know, just for fun? Like give her a Bear Hug or maybe a Five Star, train her up, like, so you two'd have something to do in the evenings?'

‘No! What do you take me for?' Dad looked pained, as if I'd slapped him. It was a familiar expression of his. It reminded me why I didn't ask about her anymore. Once, he'd said, ‘Some people are irreplaceable. You're lucky if you find someone like that.' He'd said that when I was quite young.
I
RREPLACEABLE
was one of the first words I looked up in the dictionary.

I didn't like that word. It had no hope in it. And too many
R
s.

11
THE DREAD

On Monday morning, in between science and maths, Hassan came rushing towards me. ‘How's Cordelia? I thought about her last night when it was raining. Did the tent stay dry?'

‘Fine.' I felt a stab of guilt. Raining? I'd fallen sleep without even noticing it. This morning I'd glimpsed her briefly, waving at me as I tore out the gate. I suppose I should have stopped to apologise about hitting her friend. And hurting her foot again. And causing her general pain and embarrassment. I don't know why I didn't – maybe it had something to do with the fact that each time I looked at her, or even
thought
of her now, a shameful dread came over me.

‘She said she's going to stay for a few more days,' I lied. ‘You know, while she thinks what to do.' I rubbed my nose. It still hurt, but the swelling had gone down. I would have told Dad that this morning, if he'd bothered to ask.

‘What about Rosie?'

I shrugged. ‘Rosie only came home for about five minutes this morning, to change into her uniform and get to school.'

‘And Monty? No problems there?'

I shook my head. ‘I didn't even see him. Must have left early.' An odd prickle ran down my back. I remembered hearing the front door bang. It was only just light and the kookaburras hadn't even started. I'd guessed that the bang was him, and not another burglar who'd used his bed for the night. Surely fate wouldn't strike twice? No, when I got up to pee, there was the lemony smell of his soap in the bathroom, and that nice new blue shirt lying face-down on the floor. And no note on the kitchen table. Normally he'd have squeezed an orange juice, or even cooked porridge, to cheer us on for the day. But this morning there'd only been a coffee mug, which had left a grey circle on the polished wood.

I didn't say anything to Hassan. He often ate breakfast alone, as Mady went out early to the market to find the best produce for the day's menu. And it wasn't that I'd minded getting my own breakfast – it was just the strangeness of it all. Because even though Dad didn't go in for hugging, and preferred discussing the Discus Leg Drop or Walls of Jericho, he'd always
been
there. Hovering, fussing, watching, nagging – being Monty. Who was he now?

I was wondering whether to tell Hassan about my Clothesline massacre – before Singo did – when a sudden shove at my back sent me sprawling into Hassan. I swung round to see Bobby Thornton. In two seconds flat he had me in a headlock and I was crushed against the buttons of his grey shirt, my nose screaming with
M
ALAISE
, which means
ill-health
and
agony
. ‘Gerroff!' I shouted from under his arm, breathing his smell of old wet towels. Then I performed the Slippery Eel move, which released me from the headlock and delivered him a short sharp jab up under the ribs.

‘Ow!' said Bobby, rubbing his side.

I watched him with satisfaction. At least I could still handle
Bobby
. That was something. And the sting I'd just given him was especially evil. But then came a bolt of alarm – wasn't this how bullies were made? What was happening to me? It was like that domino effect I'd read about. One person gets hurt, shocked, deranged – and unless the hurt is dealt with, it gets passed on to the next guy standing in line, the next
innocent
guy . . .

Only Bobby always asked for it, didn't he? The surprise headlock was his most common greeting – and he wondered why people just had to look at him to feel annoyed (or absolutely freaking
furious
, particularly if they happened to be already annoyed to start with!).

I glanced at Hassan. I wished I could talk to him about all this. But he seemed too far away.

‘Hey, did you guys do that maths homework?' asked Bobby. ‘Can I copy?'

We both stared at him. I was still breathing hard from shock and malaise.

‘You, Bobby Thornton, are one of Life's Great Mysteries,' said Hassan.

Bobby laughed with recognition. ‘Old Mainprize! Don't you miss the guy?' He laughed. ‘Come on, let's go sit at the back.'

Hassan was shaking his head as we walked into the classroom. But he was grinning. I noticed how straight his back was. Had he grown? At the start of the year he'd only come up to Bobby's nose. Now he was half a head taller. Amazing. ‘Walk tall,' was another saying of Mr Mainprize. Well, Hassan was doing just that.

But I reckon you can only walk tall when you've got something to feel tall
about
.

AFTER
school, I caught the bus home with Singo. I hadn't seen him all day. Which was lucky.

‘Clothesline,' he snickered as soon as he sat down. You could see he wanted to have a good old laugh all over again. He prodded me in the ribs. ‘You sure got hung out to dry!'

‘Oh shut up,' I said, as if last night had merely been annoying, not
D
EVASTATING
.

It was so hot our legs stuck to the seat. There was a
ssshtook
noise every time we lifted them off the plastic. The sky was white and dazzling like smeared lightning. You had to scrunch up your eyes to look at it.

‘So are you coming to my place?' I didn't know if I wanted him to or not.

Singo's mouth turned down. ‘No, Mum's taking me to the doctor to get a flu injection.'

‘
What?
Who gets a flu injection in the middle of summer?' ‘My mother. And me.' He sighed. But he obviously didn't mind too much. He gave the light, slightly disappointed sigh of a person who's missed out on the last biscuit on the plate. ‘There's a new flu virus in Bangladesh,' he said, as if that explained everything.

I nodded. No use arguing with Mrs Brown.

Singo got off two stops before me. ‘Good luck!' I said. I suppose I meant it, but I wondered if maybe I was the one who needed the luck right then. As the bus rumbled closer and closer to my house, my dread grew. I'd never really felt anything like it. The dread was a stranger who was becoming familiar. It almost had a shape and smell, following me wherever I went like a stray animal, nosing at me, shaming me,
dread-full
. I gazed out the window and winked one eye and then the other, making the houses and streets jump up and down, cracking open the afternoon in a crazy rhythm.

There was Hassan's house, the pale-grey fence embroidered by climbing jasmine. The blinds were down in the front windows, the newspaper still poking out of the letterbox. Hassan wouldn't be home for ages, because he and Elena were catching a bus into the city. It was Elena's mother's birthday, and Elena wanted to get some
cannoli
– sweet tubes of pastry filled with chocolate cream or ricotta – from a special Italian deli. But I liked looking at his house, anyway. Solid things like that didn't change in a hurry, or disappear.

At my stop I got off. The afternoon stretched down the road, shimmering and dancing along the line of asphalt. I thought of time as an endless piece of rope, metres of it, lowering you down, looping back, fraying into nothingness. I was thinking about the time-rope when I opened my gate – you had to fiddle with it because the latch didn't work from the outside, something my father had shown me how to fix with new screws but I couldn't remember now – when suddenly Cordelia was there.

‘Good!' I blurted. ‘And yours?'

Cordelia laughed. ‘My day? Not bad, thanks. Hullo.'

I felt myself blaring red. The heat swelled up from my black shoes, into my chest, straight into my face. I wasn't angry with her anymore. How could you be angry with someone who so bravely resisted pointing out your failures? Who looked at everything as a laugh – instead of a catastrophe? Cordelia and I sure belonged to different species, though.

‘Listen, Lou, I thought I might stay another night, if that's okay with you. And maybe tomorrow. It's just, well, I don't know where else to go until I figure this out, but . . .' She looked down at her feet.

I croaked something. I stared at her feet, too. They were bare, and brown. Her bad foot had a blueish-yellow bruise. She bent over to pull up some weeds from the cracks in the path.

I think I heard her sigh, but wasn't sure. She was probably bored. Certainly my conversation must have been
S
OPORIFIC
, meaning
dull enough to put you to sleep
, because 1) it was practically non-existent and 2) it didn't make sense.

I could feel her staring at me but no words came. She definitely sighed again. Someone like her would get easily bored, for sure. She had an amazing mind – she could think like lightning in a perilous situation, was as talented as any professional actor, was capable of doing so many things like . . . create a garden?

My eyes fixed on the new dollops of pink and purple in the flower border. The blossoms leapt out at you, smiling, and everything around them looked neater, somehow. The weeds were all gone! And the thick clumpy sprawl of ivy down the eastern wall of the garage was cut right back, so that it looked lacy instead of ferocious – more like the gentle green embroidery on Hassan's front fence.

Cordelia had done more in one day than I'd done all year. I went over to the frangipani pot and touched the leaves. Wet. Drops of water dazzled on the pale petals. The garden looked so different. Welcoming.

‘This is amazing,' I cried. ‘Everything looks so . . . good! And the lawn, I didn't, I mean that's usually my job, mowing the lawn, which I don't seem to get around to and the other day you . . .'

‘No, it's nothing,' she said softly, but her face lit up. ‘It's the least I can do, you know.'

‘And where did you get those pink flowers? They're new, aren't they?' I stopped. She didn't steal them, did she? My mouth closed like a clam. Damn! Could she tell what I was thinking?

‘From that grocer up the road.' She saw my face and bit her lip. ‘He gave them to me. Don't worry, Louis, I didn't steal them. I went to ask at the shops if anyone had a job going. We got talking and he gave me this pot of begonias – he said they're on their last legs. Still, we'll nurse them back to health, eh?' She smiled, but I could tell it was an effort.

I just stood there. Her bright face had clouded over. It's me, I thought, my species has this effect on people. I suck the life out of them like those evil Dementors in
Harry
Potter
. I ought to warn her. It was the last thing she needed, a Dementor in her life.

‘Hey,' I said wildly, ‘have you read
Harry Potter
?'

She looked a bit surprised. ‘No, I don't like fantasy. I prefer the truth.'

‘You mean non-fiction stories, like the ones in the newspaper?' My spirits sank.

‘Yeah, and biographies, real-life stories. They tell you how people deal with things . . .'

I wanted to say, ‘But wait, made-up stories are about true things too – and the more you read, the more you find out about people, the real insides of them. What people think, but never say.'

Instead I said, ‘Oh well, better get in and do my homework. I've got a ton of it.'

Her face brightened again. ‘Do you want some help? I could be useful, you know. I like being useful. As long as it's not maths – not too good at that.'

‘Oh bad luck, it's maths.' My voice honked on
maths
making it sound like
moths
. This was happening scarily often. I seemed to have no control over the sounds coming from my throat. Bad enough when I couldn't find the words, but even when I could they came out wrong.