Louis Beside Himself (25 page)

Anne leaned down and felt my forehead. ‘He's burning up.'

Somehow, as if her words had given my body permission to let go, my stomach heaved and apple juice and chips and an awful sadness rose up into my throat and came out all over the pot plants at my feet.

‘Oh Louis, for heaven's sake!' snapped Dad. ‘Have you been smoking too?'

I shook my head but that made everything worse. I got up to go inside, wondering vaguely if gardenias could die of the hydrochloric acid in vomit, when I saw Anne reach out to touch Dad's arm.

‘Mr Montgomery,' she began, ‘could I just say something?'

I didn't hear anymore because it became
I
MPERATIVE
, as in
totally necessary
that I concentrate on every step I was taking to the door. I managed to find my keys in my pocket, unlock the door, walk in and close it behind me. Then somehow the need to lie down became even more imperative so I let my legs collapse beneath me, like our foldable outdoor furniture, and darkness came to get me.

20
THE FOREVER MOVE

The next time I saw light, something hard hit my hip, stumbled over me, and crashed to the floor. I opened my eyes to see Dad rubbing his knee.

‘Louis?' Dad swung around on his bottom and crawled over to me. Moonlight flooding in through the kitchen window caught the side of his face. The hollow of his cheek was grey. ‘What are you doing here?'

Having a party
came to mind –
break-dancing
.

Before I'd had time to choose a reply, Dad knelt over me and smoothed the hair back off my forehead. His touch was gentle. I couldn't remember the last time he had touched me like that. Smart-arse replies vanished.

‘You've got a fever,' he said. His voice was as gentle as his hand. ‘You need to get to bed, my . . . my brave young man.' His voice wobbled on the last word. He didn't sound like my father.

I stared up into his face. His eyes glittered in the moonlight, the way Anne's had done in the car outside. I couldn't stop looking at my father's face. His mouth and chin were trembling. He bit his lip as if to stabilise everything, but it didn't work. His blue eyes blurred.

‘Dad, are you okay, what's happened?' Anxiety made the cracking of my voice worse.

He smiled a sad-but-happy smile. ‘Anne told me what you did tonight. That you deliberately went to a house where you might be in danger.'

‘I know, I'm sorry, but you see there wasn't anyone else, I mean she couldn't— '

Dad put up his hand. ‘You made a decision, a judgement call. You did it for a friend. That was brave. Braver than anything I ever did at your age. And you handled it all with words, didn't you? With your famous vocabulary.'

I squinted up at his face to see if he was being sarcastic. But his smile was kind, maybe even . . .

‘Anne said she had an extraordinary conversation with you tonight. You helped her understand her . . . situation, and her daughter. She said I was very lucky to have a son like you, and she wondered if I really appreciated who you are.' His mouth turned down then, as if he was ashamed.

I could feel my own eyes glittering now and the lump had returned, so big it felt like a watermelon in my throat, only a watermelon with sharp edges. But the hurt was kind of exquisite.

‘You know,' my father went on, and then he stopped. His chin came up and he sucked the inside of his cheek lugubriously. ‘You know, Louis, your mother was the one with the words.' He cleared his throat, but didn't say anything more.

I waited. It was unbearable. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Well.' He coughed again. ‘Your mother was remarkable. The way she could talk to people. Anyone had a problem, they could come to her and she'd winkle it out of them, turn it around and make them feel good about themselves. She . . . she did that with me all the time.'

‘You never told me that. Really?'

Dad nodded. He was smiling now. ‘And she was funny – she made up jokes, puns, told stories – the most ordinary thing might have happened to her at the shops, but she'd come back and tell you and you'd sit, mesmerised . . . Ha! She was fascinated by words, always jumping up in the middle of dinner to look up some new thing in the dictionary.'

‘My
Roget's Thesaurus
. . . with all those words underlined . . . was that hers?'

‘Yes, I gave it to her for our first anniversary.'

‘But how come you haven't told me this before?'

Dad looked away. ‘I don't know.' He looked as if he wanted to say something more but it was too hard.

‘It's okay, Dad— ' ‘

No.' He took a breath and then held out his hands, suddenly
R
ESOLUTE
, as in
determined
, marching through the silence between us like a soldier without a weapon. ‘Your Mum was the one with the words, like I was saying. Looking back, I suppose I depended on her to solve things for me, emotional things. And when she went, it was just too . . . Maybe you, the way you are, maybe you remind me too much of her.'

He took hold of me. ‘Sometimes it hurt too much. I'm sorry . . . I'm so sorry if I didn't . . . if all these years I didn't show you how much I love –
admire
your . . . Oh, I'm hopeless! But Louis, I want you to know something. Your mother would be proud of you tonight, she'd be so damn proud of you.'

I looked Dad in the eye. ‘And you, would
you
be proud of me?'

Dad opened his mouth but he didn't need to say anything. He had that pleased, proud expression that I'd always wanted to see. And even though my stomach was still seasick and my head hurt, I wanted to look up ten thousand synonyms to describe exactly how this moment felt so I'd never, ever forget.

‘Now, let's get you to bed,' said Dad.

He scooped me up as if I was little again, and I sank into his arms, way down deep, knowing now that I could let myself go, that I could be my heaviest, weakest, most delirious self and he would never let me fall.

21
THE TROUBLE
WITH SPAIN

I slept all day Saturday until four o'clock. This meant I missed Singo's match, which was a bad thing. The good thing was that we got to relive it, step by step, from my hallway. His mother said he could only visit if he kept a distance of two metres, on account of my germs, so instead of sitting on my bed he kept the door open and talked to me from there.

Singo's team lost, 33 to 22. But guess who scored a massive fourteen points?!

You should have seen him as he trooped down the hallway. He was high-as-the-sky
happy
. In fact, halfway though his recount I wondered if he was coming down with a fever too. The change in his vocabulary, now rich with wonder and adjectives, was amazing. He was out there on the court, ‘flying'. His legs became ‘feather-light', his mind ‘clear as glass'. He'd stopped second-guessing, there were only impulses that his body obeyed, and the ball was his. He said he wished he could live his whole life like that.

Hassan dropped in near dinner time. He slapped Singo on the back and started to tell me about the game all over again. I didn't mind. They tore about my room, demonstrating Singo's amazing
alley-oop
,
swats
and famous
dunk
with such enthusiasm that I got quite frenzied watching them. Despite my low threshold for things sporty, I became very caught up in the game. But when they trooped out the door, I practically passed out.

The next day I stayed in bed. And the next. I only got up to go to the toilet and take painkillers. My throat stung as if it had jumped out of my mouth, hung from a tree and been attacked by bees. Each time I stood up my head throbbed and the room floated. Staying in bed for days wasn't even boring.

I slept. I read. I daydreamed. Which are actually my three favourite things. If it hadn't been for the pain, you could have called it a holiday.

Have you ever had glandular fever? Turns out that's what I had. Unfortunately, I had to go to the doctor to have my blood analysed, and even though the doctor said, ‘Now, Louis, look the other way,' as she put the needle in, I couldn't help looking. Blood is an exquisite colour, isn't it? It was quite good that I looked, though, because I was so entranced by the
V
IVID
red that I stopped thinking about whether it hurt. Which it didn't, actually.

The best part of being sick was that no one expected me to arm-wrestle or perfect my Jericho hold or learn the Vice Grip. Dad took Monday and Tuesday off work and seemed happy just to sit on my bed and bring me cups of weak ginger tea with honey and lemon. And we talked. He asked how my throat was and I told him about the lump that had come on mysteriously in Anne's kitchen. ‘Maybe that was the glandular fever being born,' I said, and he smiled.

We talked about my losing my words, and my new voice, and he said it wouldn't always be unreliable and crackly like this. It was just Breaking, which sounds ominous, but don't worry, a voice box isn't fragile like a Roman vase from the first century that can't ever be mended. All boys go through it, he explained, and my body was doing exactly the right thing at the right time.
His
voice had behaved the same way when he was thirteen, around the time the terrible thing had happened to him.

Dad said he used to sing in the school choir back then – he'd been quite good, he confessed shyly – but suddenly he couldn't rely anymore on hitting the high notes. Without warning he'd croak like a frog or blare like a ship's horn, so he'd had to give it up. The choirmaster told him to come back the next term, but he never did.

He didn't say anything more for a while after that. I wanted to know what the terrible thing was – more than ever! – but I was getting used to the way he had to stay quiet before he told me difficult things. He said he needed to see it all laid out in his mind like a map, before he set off.

It wasn't until later that night that he came back to talk to me about it.

‘You know, Louis, it probably wasn't such a big thing. I mean, to anyone else just hearing about it, not going through it, it might seem . . . But to me, at thirteen, it was . . .'

‘Devastating? Catastrophic?'

Dad smiled. Then he laughed, reaching out to ruffle my hair. ‘Yes, exactly.'

‘That's the awful part,' I said. ‘When you think no one else is like you . . . it makes you feel like an alien. You should read
Gus Attack
, you really should.'

Dad nodded. ‘It happened when my father decided to quit wrestling. It wasn't that he was getting tired or anything – he was at the top of his game. But he thought that would be a good time to stop.'

‘Did Grandma want him to?'

‘No, she enjoyed the wrestling. She used to ask him to show her his moves. It was funny, until she learned to perform some moves better than The Demon. That caused a lot of tension in the house, I can tell you.'

‘And some interesting vocabulary, I bet.'

Dad laughed. ‘Yes! But really, The Demon just wanted to quit while he was still healthy and his head not too bunged up – and he wanted to study a language. My mother said why not a romance language, like Spanish? The Demon was pretty keen. He reckoned he wouldn't mind seeing a bullfight and eating paella, and so they made plans to go to Spain.'

Dad got serious again, then, and we had to wait a while. It took him ages to describe what happened next because he wandered off into lots of dead ends. So I'll summarise it here – if you've come with me this far, it's important you get to know my dad properly, the way I did.

You see, The Demon's manager didn't ‘take very kindly' to the news that Grandad was quitting. One night when Grandad was out at evening college, studying Spanish, the manager came around with a case of beer and sat on the sofa, drinking it. He got very loud and boring and angry, and when my grandmother told him to leave he refused. My dad, who was just a scared skinny boy with a large Adam's apple like mine, was watching the
I
NTRACTABLE
coach from the hallway. But what could he do? My dad was short, with those thin shoulders that actually never got any bigger, though luckily he didn't know that back then. So he just stood there, hanging onto the wall, wanting to rescue his mother but not knowing how. And then, when the manager lumbered up and tried to kiss her, wrestling her to the sofa – yeah, he was a really
I
MMORAL
manager – Grandma slid out, jumped onto the table to perform a Springboard Shooting Star Press, and leapt down, flooring the bully!

Shivering with terror and relief, my dad said he'd wished he'd paid more attention to wrestling, and that
he'd
been the one to floor the manager instead of his mother.

‘I think I must have pushed the whole thing out of my mind until I had a son,' Dad said, smiling
R
UEFULLY
. ‘Unfortunately for you, it made me determined that
my
boy would learn to wrestle like The Demon himself – that way, I reckoned, you'd never be placed in the same situation as me.'

The thing he said next made me feel so sad. He said that privately, deep inside, he'd thought that losing his voice at thirteen was a kind of punishment for not speaking up and ordering the coach out of the house.

He looked right into my eyes then and said, ‘That feeling stayed, Louis, even though in a little while the cracking stopped and my voice settled on an octave lower. It stayed because none of us ever talked about it. Dad stopped being a wrestler, took Mum on that trip to Spain, and I went to stay with a friend for a few weeks. It was all fine, but somehow, well, it wasn't. I just stayed feeling . . . weak, or not strong enough, or something.'

Dad took my hand in his. Normally we'd be squaring up to arm-wrestle when Dad did this. Now it felt different. His hand was warm and gentle – it didn't ask for anything. It was just there. I remembered how my hand had felt in his when I was little, maybe crossing the road or watching TV. It had felt so good, so right, that I hadn't noticed. Now I did.