The Apple Tart of Hope (2 page)

“Oh Stevie,” I said, and I leaned over to hug him and I closed my eyes and the tears that I'd been trying to keep inside came tumbling out.

“It's okay, Meg,” he whispered, even though obviously it wasn't. But I felt something a little like relief when I got a chance to look at
his face properly. “When did you get back?” he asked, and I told him we'd been back since the night before. That we'd come as quickly as we could, as soon as we'd heard the news. It occurred to me that part of the reason everything felt so wobbly was because I must still be jet-lagged. I couldn't see straight.

But surrounded by this fog of grief, there was a gladness in Stevie, a light in his eyes that lifted my heart slightly, and made me feel that maybe there was some reason to be cheerful, or hopeful, or even faintly optimistic.

“What happened, Stevie? What on earth happened? And why is everyone acting like this? This mass? A
mass
? I mean, you're not supposed to do that unless it's completely clear that the person you're having it for is definitely dead. Not unless there's proof. I mean, there's no reason for us to believe he's
dead
. Is there?”

Stevie looked up at me and swiveled a little closer.

“Exactly!” he whispered. “That's what I've been trying to tell everyone! Thank goodness you're home, Meg, because seriously, you're the first person, the first person I've talked to—apart from myself—who doesn't believe it. I knew I'd be able to count on you and I'm
so
completely glad you've come back, because basically I felt on my own here, kinda thought I was going mad to be honest. Everyone's going around saying he committed suicide. I mean seriously, right? That doesn't make any sense—it really doesn't.”

“Stevie, you've got to tell me everything you know. Every single thing that happened before he disappeared.”

“I'll do my best, Meg,” Stevie said. “I've been going over everything again and again in my head. There's no time to talk now, though,” and Stevie frowned and looked around, and he sounded much older and wiser than a kid his age usually sounds. “Let's meet at the pier later on. I'll see you there. Leave it till about midnight, okay?”

“How are you going to get there on your own at that time of night, Stevie?”

“No problemo,” he said, in a definitely non-grieving tone, which kept giving me hope. “A lot has happened since you've been gone. I'm practically self-sufficient!” He grinned so widely that he started to attract some unwanted attention, so he changed his expression to something more grave, and, speaking with the furtive confidence of a spy, he told me to mingle, to say nothing and to meet him later as instructed.

The crowd milled. Arms were put around people and there was a lot more crying. Off in the distance every so often I glimpsed the golden hair of Paloma Killealy, and everywhere within the murmuring crowd I seemed to hear her name spoken softly from person to person as if it were a poem. Paloma Killealy. Paloma Killealy. Paloma, Paloma Killealy.

I didn't die. I never died. I'm not dead. Okay, I feel pretty rotten about the whole situation—the way I disappeared that night without saying where I was going and how everyone assumed I really was dead, and the way I let them believe it.

Things had got on top of me. It was because of this whole sequence of events that made me want to cycle faster than I'd ever cycled before down to the shore and tumble into the black sea.

I remember how afterward I kept telling Barney about what a complete idiot I obviously was, and how worthless I had become and how much I really did hate myself.

He kept saying that he knew how I felt, and it wasn't a pretend thing that some people say when they're trying to help you. I knew more or less for certain he was telling the truth.

The truth's a fairly important thing to hold on to when you've been pulled out of the sea after wanting to drown in it. I could've let the sea take me. I could easily be dead now, which is funny when
you think about it. When I say funny, what I actually mean is weird and kind of disturbing.

When there's the loud sound of a siren screaming in your head, it doesn't take too long before a feeling of not caring what happens washes over you and you become recklessly self-destructive. I used to be full of energy and happiness but I could barely remember those kinds of feelings anymore. The cheerful, childish things I used to think had been replaced. A whole load of new realizations had begun to grow inside me like tangled weeds, and they were starting to kill me. That's why I'd made the decision that involved heading off to the pier on my bike in the middle of the night and cycling off it.

The plans I'd once had had been ruined and by the time that night came, they felt like the bent-up metal of a car crash and there was nothing left—nothing that wasn't warped and destroyed, nothing that made any sense.

I didn't manage to kill myself. And when I discovered I couldn't even do that properly, I decided to do the next best thing. I decided to stay away, and to pretend I'd died. For a while, afterward, part of me wanted someone to come and find me.

It was a bit annoying the way nobody seemed to look that hard. Within a distressingly short space of time, everyone seemed to be fairly happy to assume I was a goner—after a search that can only be described as halfhearted—and get back to their lives as quickly as possible. A couple of policemen did call at Barney's house, but as soon as he told them to go away and stop bothering him, that's what they did.

You shouldn't give up on people when they vanish. You shouldn't go, “What a terrible pity but, oh well, that's that.”

In actual fact, the disappearance of someone is exactly
everyone's cue to get out and search, and keep searching and not stop until there's dirt under their fingernails and wretchedness in their souls from the number of rocks they have pushed aside to see whether I'm under one of them. If you want to know my opinion, coming to terms with someone's disappearance is a bit of an offense. It's an insult to someone's memory.

I learned a lot, though. As the days passed, I learned that staying lost made its own sort of sense. I learned that there's not that much difference between pretending to be dead and really being dead. As far as I can see, both seem to amount to the same thing.

I learned that if someone you know disappears you shouldn't automatically jump to conclusions. You should ask questions, and look, and search until you know for sure. Don't write them off until you've exhausted every avenue. Keep hope in your heart.

According to the reports, Oscar had taken his old mountain bike from his garage and he'd gone rattling off along the road over Hallow Bridge, whose lights always look as though they're winking at you. People were saying he must have freewheeled from the top and launched himself into the sea.

“Is there any proof that he did that? Where's the evidence?” Stevie and I had asked each other when we'd met, as planned, the midnight after Oscar's mass.

“There was the bike,” said Stevie. “They did find his bike. One of the divers fished it out, twisted and dripping. Someone propped it up against the last stone bollard over there and it stayed like that for a few days.”

Stevie trundled over to the bollard and circled it slowly.

“Nobody wanted to touch it or move it. It was like a curse everyone was a bit afraid of. People wouldn't even
look
at it. You could see them carefully making sure they kept their eyes away from it.”

Stevie said he'd looked at it, though—he didn't have a problem with it. You have to examine all the clues very carefully if you're going to get to the bottom of something. He said he'd kept coming
back to look at it a load of times, until his dad had organized for someone to take the bike away. He said there had been something a bit human about the way it leaned over, as if it was looking for comfort from the cold bollard.

Loads of other people had visited the pier in the days after Oscar had gone—to leave flowers and to shake their heads at one another, but mainly, Stevie said, to be snoopy and nosy.

Mrs. Gilhooly from up the road—always a major drama queen, even at the best of times—had been an expert, my dad had said, in stirring up commotion. She'd sighed as she'd busied herself around the pier, talking to the scuba divers and filling people in on the latest developments.

“How cruel! The way that bollard stands hard and solid and insensitive, just as it must have done when that poor boy flung himself in.”

Stevie said he'd got really angry with Mrs. Gilhooly, and he'd started telling her she shouldn't make comments about things she knew nothing about.

“How do you know he flung himself in? Why are you jumping to that conclusion? If my brother is supposed to be so dead, then where,” he'd demanded, “where is his body? Tell me that if you're so sure!”

And nosy Mrs. Gilhooly had asked Stevie where his father was because it didn't do for grieving little boys in wheelchairs to be hanging around on their own at the site of their brother's tragic demise, in what seemed to her like a vulnerable and out-of-control condition.

Stevie had told her that for her information, he wasn't grieving. He was looking and searching and thinking very hard—and other important stuff that nobody else was doing properly. He had informed her that he was allowed to do anything he liked and that what he did, or where he went—on his own, or with anyone else—was nobody's business, especially not hers.

I hated the thought of that prying woman upsetting Stevie.

But I had to ask him some tough questions myself, even if they were difficult to think about.

“Might he have been that unhappy, Stevie? Do you think something could have happened to make him want to, you know, do something like that?”

“Look, everyone gets a bit sad once in a while. Doesn't make them suicidal.”

“Yeah, I know, but maybe . . .”

“Meg,” he said, holding up his hand like a little shield, “I need to be able to rely on you to keep the faith. You have to believe that he's alive. If we stop believing that, then nobody will be rooting for him, and wherever he is right now, he needs someone on his side. Don't you see? It's obvious he's just gone somewhere for a while. I know he's coming back. Our job is to find out where that somewhere is, and do whatever we need to do to help him come home. This is not the time for any doubt, Meg. It's really important. In fact, it is the most important thing we'll ever have to believe in our whole lives.”

I said okay, but I knew he'd spotted the hesitation in me.

Pessimism is a contagious feeling, and there was a lot of it around. Part of me had kind of begun to imagine Oscar doing the thing everyone said he had done, and I'm not exactly sure why, but I'd even started to hear a watery kind of splashing noise before I fell asleep, and I'd begun to dream that I could see Oscar's body floating somewhere, with the black water slapping, slow and salty against his pale, dead, shoeless body.

Hundreds of people had been involved in the search. Stevie had told me that he and his dad had been at the pier when a scuba diver found Oscar's shoes. The diver had handed them to his dad, and his dad had put them carefully into his backpack and you could see wet patches spreading out as he walked off toward his car. Stevie said it was as if
that bag had suddenly become the map of an unknown continent full of huge, dark, uneven-looking countries.

Stevie kept on claiming that no one was trying hard enough, but from what I could see, lots of people were doing everything they could. For a long time whole teams of guys in flippers and wet suits flapped around on the pier during the day taking big, exaggerated steps before plunging in to look for more evidence, or piling into orange boats and heading farther out over the water.

People didn't call it the search for Oscar's body, but gradually everyone knew that's what it was. Again and again they dived along that whole rocky coast.