The Apple Tart of Hope (13 page)

Suddenly I felt pathetic. It wasn't only that I'd declared my stupid love for him in that stupid letter. It was so many other things too. Bending his ear in the way I had about my trivial problems, when the whole time he was carrying proper real-life burdens. It made me feel like an idiot.

I wished more than ever before that he would walk back in through the door, so I could tell him I was sorry about how selfish I must always have seemed.

Katy was still talking.

“And so you see, Meg, you have to keep in mind the stuff that had happened at school.”

“What stuff?”

“How miserable school had become for him—the things I've been trying to explain to you.”

“How do you know he wasn't happy at school?”

“I've spoken to other people in the class.”

“Who? Who have you spoken to?”

“Oh goodness, Meg, I'm a counselor. You know I can't disclose things like that to you, but you see, there is what's known as the rough and tumble of normal teenage interaction. Teasing and a little bit of mocking. Mean slogans painted on lockers—things like that. Some people are fragile even though they might not appear to be on the outside. As I understand it, what started out as a bit of what I like to call ‘joshing,' ended up being something nastier. It turned into a form of toxic humiliation. We can't quite identify anyone in particular
who was at fault. These things evolve sometimes, and once they've set in, they're difficult to do anything about.”

“You've got to tell me what you're talking about,” I whispered. “I need you to explain. I am his friend,” I said, hammering on my chest and trying but failing to get out of the stupid beanbag, feeling like a beetle who'd been flipped over on its back. I stayed in a half-lying, half-sitting position feeling helpless and stupid.

“There's no logic to the things that happen to precipitate these kinds of situation—but in Oscar's case, one of the main triggers seems to have been to do with apple tarts. Oscar used to make apple tarts, you see.”

“I
know
he did. Of course, I know that. What's that got to do with anything?”

“Well, apparently, a few people began to mock him because he brought them to school.”

“Why would they mock him? Those apple tarts were delicious! And they were magic. They cured people of all sorts of things! I can't understand why people would make fun of him about that.”

Katy held up one of her beautiful index fingers, looked very carefully at me, and said, “Meg, you see it wasn't simply the tarts, it was something else too. A rumor had begun to go around that Oscar had been behaving, shall we say, quite inappropriately.”

“What does that mean?”

So then Katy Collopy told me there'd been this story doing the rounds—that Oscar had been using his telescope to peer into Paloma Killealy's room at night while she was undressing. He'd been stalking her, and the word got out, and because everyone had come to be very fond of Paloma, a lot of people took her side—felt quite protective about her. And also, because nobody could actually
prove
that Oscar was a pervy stalker, they pounced on other things about him, and
the apple-tart thing was the obvious target, and that was the excuse everyone used to start making his life a misery: scrawling nasty graffiti on his locker, whispering about him and building this campaign to stop him from representing the school in the talent showcase.

“So it was Paloma, then,” I said. “I
knew
it. I knew she was at the center of this—his so-called new best friend who's supposed to be devastated because he's disappeared—and the whole time it was her spreading stupid lies about him. Who else, who else was involved? Who else tormented him so much that he's . . . he's . . . gone . . . ?”

“Please, Meg,” said Katy with her infuriating calm voice. “This is a confidential space. As I keep telling you, if I started to disclose who said what to me then I would be transgressing one of the fundamental rules of counseling and I am not prepared to do that. I've told you this in confidence because I think you need to know that things can be more complicated than they seem.

“And another important thing that you need to keep in mind is that Paloma has been through an awful lot, and I don't want you making things more difficult for her. She's been quite brave, you know. Have you heard how well she rallied when it came to the talent showcase?”

I said no I hadn't.

“You see, when Oscar disappeared, somebody had to take his place and Paloma's a wonderful designer and we persuaded her to step in. And at first she said no she couldn't possibly, what with the trauma of losing Oscar, but eventually, remarkably, she said yes. She went forward with four fashion designs—she even modeled one of them herself—so elegant, so graceful, so creative. She did an excellent job, performing like that in front of the judges only a few days after Oscar disappeared. And you'd never even have known how much the loss of him was affecting her. Honestly, you'd never have known how upset she was. Everyone said it.”

“Maybe that's because she wasn't that upset,” I suggested.

“Don't be silly. Paloma adored Oscar. And Oscar adored her. That's one thing I'm absolutely clear about. They had become very close. It wasn't her fault that he had a more . . . well . . . a kind of . . . obsessive interest in her. She recognizes that. She says she's come across this before. Apparently lots of boys develop very strong feelings for her.”

“Oh shut up,” I said as I finally managed to stand up.

A small flicker of something furious flashed for a second across Katy's face but then she got calm and composed again and she smiled her tight smile, looked at her watch and said that our time was up.

“Meg, perhaps you want to come back for another session or two, but to be honest, I'm not sure how much more help I can give you,” she said coolly.

“No,” I said, “neither am I.”

Katy went on some more about being a qualified counselor and how in her professional opinion the possibility of Oscar being alive was remote. She said that my hope was a “form of denial” and that in her professional experience such denial could be destructive. And I tried to keep control of my voice.

“Hope is never destructive,” I said. “Hope is the thing that keeps you going.” I really meant it. You need hope as surely as you need to breathe air and drink water. Without it every one of us might as well fling ourselves off the pier into the murky sea below.

I couldn't talk anymore, and I was a bit scared of what Katy had said to me. I straightened out my clothes that had got twisted up while I had been sitting talking to her.

“I still don't understand how any of this nonsense could have made him so miserable. How could he have got that much despair just because of a bunch of stupid rumors—and in less than six months?”

I stared at some of the brittle things inside the room—the
lightweight wicker table that slid around whenever I touched it, the glittery flecks that shot around the room from the gleam of Katy's diamond ring, the uncomfortable beanbag that had been impossible to sit on.

And I saw the whole situation for what it was: clumsy and uneasy and pointless—talking to a total stranger about things I couldn't bear and didn't want to believe.

Katy said she hoped I'd be all right.

“Remember, just because you were his friend, doesn't mean that any of this is your fault. You can't hold yourself responsible for it. You mustn't,” she instructed me. “Lots of people know how you feel, and everybody understands what's going on for you at the moment.” I seriously doubted that, but the hour was up, and I wanted to get out.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for that.”

I walked, kind of frozen, kind of shocked and silenced, back to the classroom. By now Mr. Grimes had got everyone to light these scientific blowtorches for the classroom experiment that had been causing so much excitement earlier.

Small fiery roars of blue flame were bursting in front of everyone, casting a strange new kind of light on the members of my class.

“Is anybody here going to tell me what the hell happened to him? He was perfectly fine when I left and now these stupid rumors have been spread about him and everyone's been teasing him and rejecting him and people think he's
dead
? Come on!” I shouted, trying to lift my voice above the spitting and popping of the torches.

In a single mystified movement, their goggles turned toward me. And suddenly they didn't look like ordinary people anymore. They looked like uniformed demons with frightening expressions, and faces I did not recognize.

What could you possibly be ashamed of, my dear boy?” asked Barney, looking astonished.

“Lots of things. Everyone in school suddenly thought I was an idiot. Part of it was people getting the wrong idea about me and Paloma, but part of it was to do with the fact that I'm a loser. I just didn't know it until recently. Everyone stopped wanting to be friends with me, including Meg. I don't blame her or anything. If I was her, I wouldn't want to be friends with me either. Not anymore.

“Meg sent me this letter explaining certain things in it, which made me feel like a fool too. I couldn't get them out of my head. I tried to put it behind me, but it was hard. The only person who'd talk to me anymore was Paloma, and even though she was a bit weird to me when we were at school, she kept on being nice to me in the evenings when she'd talk to me from Meg's window. I mean really nice. Friendly and stuff.

“People started to hate me. It got so that whenever anyone said my name it was as if they were spitting something bad out of their mouths. And for a long time I didn't know why. But I know now.”

Barney said that no boy deserved to be turned on that way, especially not someone like me. Talking about it, even thinking about it made me feel as if I might start to cry. Barney said we didn't have to discuss it anymore if it was going to upset me.

He and I got used to each other and to spending the afternoons together. He had a massive old garden in the back and it seemed as if everything in his life was tangled and twisted and that he couldn't sort out one thing from another. His house was disgusting.

Together we tried to straighten everything up. Barney wasn't poor, even though he totally looked as if he was. He had bunches and bunches of crumpled up money shoved into a stack of rusty old biscuit tins in a tall kitchen cupboard. He said he'd had no reason to sort things when there'd been no visitors in the house, but now that I was here, it was time he pulled himself together.

I said there wasn't any need to go to any trouble on my behalf, but he said, “No, no, I must bite the bullet. You are my lucky omen and I must respond accordingly.”

It was astonishing that anyone could think of me as lucky, but I liked that he did. He ordered a dumpster and he started to get rid of a lot of stuff.

He lit the fire, which filled the whole place with black smoke.

He said it felt good to be straightening things out. He said that Peggy would have hated to see him taking such poor care of everything. Peggy had been his wife but she was dead. There were pictures of her all over the place. She had curly hair and in all her pictures she was smiling and her cheeks looked lovely and round.

“She has a very nice face,” I said, and he nodded a few times and without looking at me hurried into the kitchen mumbling something about having to make tea. And I let him go off to the
kitchen on his own—sometimes people are not able to show their sadness to other people.

Newspapers, yellowed and curling, were stacked to the ceiling in the hallway. The kitchen was caked in substances so solid that it was impossible to say what they might have once been.

Every door that I opened revealed the same thing. Loads and loads of rubbish, teetering so dangerously it would be hazardous to walk around in case I was submerged in an avalanche of debris.

Although Barney was keen to get things cleaned up in my honor, there were lots of things he didn't want to throw out. It looked like he hadn't got rid of a single object or scrap of paper since around 1963. That's what you get for living in the past, is what he said.

It took us a while, but Barney said we could use the “storage room,” which was really a room full of rubbish, and slowly we made progress, agreeing together that dirty wads of paper that had been fused together by damp and age were not useful to anyone and could be dumped. After he had done that, he said it was a weight off his mind. Peggy would have killed him for letting things pile up the way they had.

Homer, who'd been suspicious at first, barking every single time he added something to the dumpster, eventually calmed down. Homer got into the habit of sleeping on my bed that we'd put together from cushions and blankets and pillows. When Barney disappeared during the nights, Homer stayed with me and any time I moved, he'd wag his tail as if to tell me he was glad I was there and to remind me that he wasn't going anywhere.