The Apple Tart of Hope (15 page)

Barney said that as far as he was concerned, friendship either is or it is not. It should never have qualifications—it should never need to be explained or excused.

“Are these the reasons you wanted your life to be over, Oscar?” Barney had asked then. And I'd said no. And he said I should be aware that the town was developing its theories about me, and how most people would probably think it was because of the beautiful girl. And I said, “What do you mean?” and he said the world loved to believe that boys killed themselves because of beautiful girls who didn't love them and I said it wasn't that. It was something else.

“It's the thing that happened that means I can never go back.”

“Would you like to tell me about it?” he said gently, but again he said that there was no pressure. And I said that yes I would.

A few nights before the apple-tart demo, Paloma's mum had come over to introduce herself to my dad and she was seriously all
over
him. And at first he hardly looked at her and hardly said a word even when she asked him tons of questions, and I'm secretly thinking, Dad, can you just please behave like a normal person. But the second time she called, Dad was a little bit chattier, and the third time he mentioned afterward that she seemed like a very nice person.

But, Barney, I can tell you now, I never really liked the look of her. She used to do this big sigh every time she saw Stevie as if he was the saddest sight she'd ever come across.

“Was he born in a wheelchair?” she'd asked as if he wasn't right in front of her.

“No,” I'd answered helpfully, “he wasn't. I think you'll find that nobody is born in a wheelchair. You get a wheelchair if you need one, after you're born.” And she thought this was the most hilarious
thing she'd ever heard because she laughed for much longer than someone should laugh at anything really.

So then she said, “Bill, you must come over to dinner,” but Dad says no really, thanks very much and everything, but I don't like to leave the boys in the evenings. And she said, “I know!” as if she had the biggest brainwave of all time. “I'll bring dinner over here! Just name the night and I'll do the rest!” And my dad mumbled something under his breath and then said, “Okay, then, give me your number and I'll text you.”

This turned out to have been the biggest mistake ever, because she insisted on getting his number too and every day for a week she texted him. Eventually even he realized it was impossible for him to keep ignoring her.

The following Friday she barged in with dinner for everyone. She did most of the talking. She even did the washing up, and just when we thought it was all over, she invited herself back again. And there was hardly any mention of Paloma except to say that she was studying, which is something I'd never seen Paloma doing—either at school or at home.

So then next time, Mrs. Killealy brought two bottles of champagne with dinner, and Dad was so nervous he drank it the way you might drink water if you were extremely thirsty, and they talked and talked and talked for the whole night.

She had some strong opinions about how to run a business:

“The only way to get ahead in life is to annihilate your rivals. Blow them out of the water. Sweep them away by whatever means necessary, that's the trick.”

She sparkled with diamonds from her ears and her neck and her fingers. And she clamped her teeth together in an aggressive
smile, and she nodded her head as she stood behind my dad and her bony fingers grabbed him by each shoulder and she squeezed them.

She snarled when she spoke and whenever she made a point, she leaned over and peered into my dad's eyes and banged her bony fist on the table for emphasis so that the pepper pot shook.

And the sun, I swear, was coming up when she finally left, and I don't know what they talked about but I do know that Dad was crying. Crying in front of Paloma Killealy's mother who, it turned out, is divorced, not that Paloma ever told me anything about that. It was obvious by now that she was throwing herself at my dad.

And, at first, I thought how awful that was, but then I started to believe that maybe it could be a good thing. My mum had been dead for a long time. By now my dad had been talking more to Mrs. Killealy than I'd remembered him talking to anyone for years. I didn't find out exactly what they'd been talking about until after I tried to kiss Paloma, but then Paloma told me. You see, Barney, there's something about my mum's death that I never knew, and now that I do know, I can't go back and you can't force me.

Barney said he wouldn't dream of forcing me to do anything, that I had to do things of my own free will, and I said thanks.

When you grow up by the sea there's a kind of magic that never leaves you. The shimmery silver of salty mornings stays inside your bones. The rattling of windows on a winter night sharpens your senses. There's always power and deceptiveness in a flat blue sea. I'm a coast-town girl. I know how quickly gentle water can turn into a black foaming mountain.

It couldn't have been coincidence, like some people said. Paloma Killealy had definitely been avoiding me. I tried again and again to confront her. I had a shed load of questions to ask. I needed to talk to her about the time she'd spent with Oscar, and the rumors that had been spread about him, and maybe get to the bottom of everything that had happened. I kept on scurrying around the school looking for her, and that day after finishing my session with Katy Collopy, I saw her slender legs hurrying out of the school gates, and her hair doing that swishing thing it always does.

I was sick and tired of trying to get a hold of her. After school I texted Stevie and told him I was just about to call into her house.

Well, it was my house to be precise, but I wasn't living in it. I
knocked on the door with my fist, and then I hammered on it. And then I could hear that familiar noise of my own front door opening, and there was Paloma.

I couldn't understand what the expression on her face meant: her lips were pressed together, her forehead puckered and her eyes half open as if she was squinting at a very bright, low sun. She stepped forward and put her arms around me.

“Oh Meg!” she said in a half whisper. “I'm so
grateful
to you for coming. You are so kind to come here to show your support at this difficult time. I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”

I'd been expecting a lot of things from my first meeting with Paloma Killealy, but the two things I hadn't been expecting were affection or gratitude.

And then she was taking me by the hand as if I was a small child, and leading me into my own kitchen and inviting me to sit on one of my family's kitchen chairs, at the table that me and Oscar had scratched our names on the bottom of when we were small. And I was saying,

“Please, Paloma, please, tell me what happened to him.”

My phone began to ring but I turned it off.

It was like being hypnotized and it felt funny being a stranger at my own table. She had a lovely smile and looking at it, I couldn't imagine her ever wanting to do any harm to anyone.

She told me about how she'd done her best. She'd tried to protect him from other people's bad opinion of him.

“I did my best to explain a few basic ground rules—ones that he hadn't been able to pick up on his own. I thought I could give him some feedback, steer him in the right direction. But he didn't do himself any favors. He used to make apple tarts. I mean seriously, who does that? What other boy do you know goes around baking things in their spare time? That's
not normal. Andy and Greg recorded this very silly apple-tart demonstration and him talking about his dead relatives, because they wanted to put it on YouTube. I told him that I reckoned he needed to give up the apple tarts. I told him it was too unusual. I thought I was doing him a favor.”

Paloma asked me if I'd like to join her in the living room and then she showed me the way as if I didn't know where it was. We stood in front of the fire for a bit, and she kept talking about how attached she had been to Oscar, and how she forgave him for his weirdness, and what a good friend he had been in other ways, and how much she missed him and how she really did hope that it wasn't her fault.

I hated myself and I hated my jealous, horrible heart. What was the point of being jealous of her now? She was beautiful. Oscar had been right about her having hair like golden silk. Her skin was so soft it glistened. It began to seem to me as if none of this was her fault. I didn't want to bother her anymore. As I was about to leave, and tell her how sorry I was to have troubled her, she gave a little cry and said:

“Oh Meg,” and she sank into our sofa, and she began to sob.

“Tell me,” I said, “what's making you cry like this?”

“Meg, you see the whole thing
is
my fault, and I've been living with it this whole time and I have no idea who to talk to about it, because you see, as soon as everyone knows, they'll think so terribly badly of me.” She put her head in my lap and she began to sob and I stroked her golden silky hair and I felt sorry for her because she really did look so sad, and I asked her to explain.

“Oscar was desperately, deeply, and devastatingly in love.”

“With who?”

“Who do you think?” She frowned a little and pulled her hair back from her face and stretched her long neck.

“I don't know,” I said.

“With
me
, of course. I think I must have broken his heart. Because
there was never going to be a scene between me and Oscar. Dunno if you've heard but Andy and me are a couple now and goodness, poor Oscar, look, I know he had a thing for me, it was obvious, but . . . I never thought the consequences would be . . . Meg, and then he started acting kind of weird. I began to see things about him too. I mean, he was really popular when I first came but you see it turns out that he was a weirdo. He freaked me out.”

“What does that mean?”

“He used to
look
at me—in my bedroom. He used his telescope to try and get close-up views. He invaded my privacy. But look, I understood. I forgave him.”

“You're making that up. Or you were imagining it. That doesn't sound like him. Not the Oscar I knew.”

“Yeah, well ask anyone. It wasn't just me. Loads of people had started to think he was strange.”

“People? What people?”

“Andy and Greg mainly, but others too. I tried to teach him. I tried to help him Meg, I honestly, truly did.”

A wave rippled through me as if a cruel wind had started to blow.

Everyone might be right after all. Oscar really might be dead. Dead from obsessive love for a girl who didn't love him back.

When I got up to say good-bye, we hugged again in the doorway. I felt comfort and warmth. She even smelled beautiful. Strawberries, almonds and roses were the kinds of things that Paloma Killealy smelled of. Good smells, and pure smells and things that it was difficult to be suspicious of.

But before I turned to leave, I could feel a shiver of something swimming around between us. Something secret. Something cruel.

When I got home I switched on my phone again and saw seven missed calls from Stevie, so I rang back.

“Meg!” he whispered. “Look, I'm sorry to be ringing you so late but I need to tell you something. It's about Oscar. He's not dead, Meg. He never died!”

“What?” I whispered back. “How do you know?”

“Because,” said Stevie, “he's been in contact!”

I held my breath for a few seconds.

“In contact with you?”

“Yes!”

“How?”

“I leave notes for him, down at the pier. In the beginning, I didn't have a proper system. I'd put a lot of important things down on those bits of paper. Things I wanted him to tell me, or things I wanted him to know. But they all fluttered away in the wind out to sea. So I stopped for a while, but for the last few days I've been writing some more, and pinning them down at the bottom of the wall with a rock. Each time I checked, the notes hadn't been moved. I was starting to lose hope. But tonight! When I went down there, all the notes were gone!! He's been back, Meg. He's here somewhere. He took the notes. Finally we have proof. Isn't it fantastic?!”

It was hard not to have hope. It would have been great if Stevie had been right, and for a second, I believed he was. I wanted to. Of course I did. Who wouldn't? I pictured Oscar at the pier again, picking up Stevie's sweet notes and reading them, and I too could feel a rock load of weight lifting off me.

But then something else happened. Big tears tumbled onto my face, splatting the glass on my bedside table with transparent shiny little sunburst shapes.

“Stevie, it's late. Let's talk about this tomorrow,” I said. And to the sound of Stevie talking, breathless and delighted, I turned off the phone. If Oscar had seen any kind of note from Stevie pinned down like
that at the end of the pier, he wouldn't have stayed away. It just didn't make sense anymore. An icy new feeling seeped over me. I threw my phone across the room, as if it was a bomb that was about to explode, but it just landed on the middle of my bed with a blunt thump.