The Apple Tart of Hope (6 page)

Meg

I put my hand flat on the paper and I thought for an insane moment that I'd stroll over to his house and drop it into the mailbox. I wondered about the possible things that Oscar would say or think or do if I'd ever had the courage to send it.

I never sent the letter because I was afraid. I was afraid he would laugh at me. I was afraid that what I had written would seem ridiculously stupid. I was afraid it might break something that me and Oscar already had. I was afraid that he didn't . . . that he would never feel the same way. So even though I put the letter in an envelope, and even though I wrote “To Oscar Dunleavy” on the front of it, and even though for a while I thought about running next door, right then in the middle of that night to post it, in the end I never did.

Instead I turned and twisted that letter in my hands until it got puckered and crumpled, and then I smoothed it out again and I shoved it under my mattress—a soft, silent, stifled place that nobody can see.

When Meg left for New Zealand, I missed her all the time. I'd look over at her window and when I saw her room, blank and vacant, something inside me would twist, like a pain. I'd got so used to seeing her face that not seeing it felt wrong and miserable and kind of hopeless.

So when Paloma Killealy moved in . . . of course, she wasn't Meg and she could never replace Meg or anything . . . but I did think that maybe she would be a person I might get to know, and it turns out that she thought the same, and that was pretty good, I thought. At the time.

The Energizer was on and during the first week Paloma arrived and the day before it at school, in front of a whole load of people, including Andy and Greg, Paloma asked me if I'd take her to it.

It was obvious that she'd no clue about how The Energizer worked, because it is this event that happens a couple of times a year in a big hall with fields around it outside of town.

When you arrive, you spend the whole night shouting at your
friends just so they'll be able to hear you and you watch people like Andy and Greg kissing girls. That's all that happens. It's a bit boring to tell the truth, but everyone goes. I'm not sure why.

One thing that I do know, though, is that nobody “takes” anybody else to The Energizer. That's not the way it works. I explained that to Paloma and she said, “Oh right, I see, okay then,” and she walked out of the yard, and her hair swung from side to side and Andy and Greg were like, “Oscar man, are you
crazy
? She definitely wants you, and would you
look
at her?”

They claimed that our school had never had someone as fit as her in it, in its entire history, not since it was founded, which was in 1968.

“She's
giving
herself to you on a plate. What's going on inside your little head, buddy?” asked Greg, and he caught me in one of those headlocks he and Andy always loved to do.

Paloma discovered our windows, the way Meg and I had, and it wasn't long before we started chatting. It felt weird, but Paloma was nice in her own way, and it was good to see someone in that window. Plus she hadn't a clue how things in our school worked, so it was an opportunity to explain.

“I'm sorry if I embarrassed you in front of your friends,” she said, and I said it was okay.

“Everything is so different here from what I'm used to. It's taking me a while to adjust,” she explained. “Where I came from before, we had school dances and boys took girls to them.”

“Oh right, I see,” I said, and I told her she didn't have to be sorry and it was perfectly understandable that she'd assume that it was the same here.

“I have a question for you, Oscar,” she said, and she leaned out of
Meg's window and she twisted her hair around her long fingers and she opened and closed her eyes slowly and I said, “Okay, well, shoot.”

“I'm curious. I mean, I'm wondering—if boys
did
take girls to The Energizer, I mean—if that
was
the way it worked, you know, I wonder
then
would you be interested in taking me?'

I saw straightaway what she was getting at. She stroked her arm and tilted her head to one side, and looked at me with her liquid shiny eyes. And she did look fairly lovely all right.

I thought then that Paloma Killealy was definitely interested in me, which was a good feeling, especially considering how much almost every boy in my class had been talking about her since she arrived. At school, people sighed when she passed by and they smelled the air that she'd walked through, and Andy and Greg had become more or less obsessed with thinking about her. They never stopped asking me questions about what it was like to be her next-door neighbor.

It could have been most flattering thing that had ever happened to me. But just because a gorgeous girl is interested in you, it doesn't mean you should change your plans.

“Paloma, it's really nice of you to ask me a question like that. I really appreciate it.” But then I said that I was about to tell her something that I'd never told anyone and I got her to promise to keep it to herself. She said of course she promised, and her face was as serious and trustworthy as you can imagine a face would be.

“You see, there's this girl. Her name's Meg. She used to live in the room you're in now and when you move out she'll be back, and you see most of the time, she's all I think about. I think about what she's doing. I wonder what she's thinking. If people took other people to The Energizer, Meg is the one I'd like to take. I hope you know what I mean; I hope you understand.”

“Oh right,” she said, and then she repeated what I had said as
if it was a difficult thing to understand: “Meg's the name of the girl you're interested in.”

And I said, “Yes, that's exactly it.”

“So wait,” she said, “what you're actually saying is that
you're
not interested in
me
?”

“No,” I said because I believe people always deserve to be told the truth, “not in that way, Paloma. But I can tell you, in case you didn't already know, that apart from me, every boy in the class is really, really interested in you, so you still have a lot of choice if you ever want to—”

“You're
not interested in
me
?” she interrupted, saying that same thing a couple more times in exactly the same tone of voice.

After that conversation, Paloma quickly got back to being herself again. She said that Meg must be a really special person for someone like me to feel those things about her. She said Meg was lucky and I said thanks.

She even asked me for Meg's email because it would be nice, she said, for her to drop her a line and introduce herself, seeing as she was renting her house and living in her room. So I wrote Meg's email address on a torn scrap of paper and I rolled it up and tossed it over to Paloma, who caught it in her long fingers and started uncrumpling it straight away and putting the details into her phone.

“Call over to me tomorrow, okay?” she said, not looking at me and pulling across Meg's curtains. And I said that I would.

Next day when I knocked on her door, Paloma's mother showed me into the back garden. Paloma was standing by the fence with a huge fanlike bat in her hands, hitting a mattress so hard that dust was rising from it in huge clouds.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What . . . THWACK! . . . does . . . THWACK! . . . it look like . . . THWACK! I'm doing?” she replied, panting and scowling a bit on account of the effort that this was taking.

“It looks like you're beating up a mattress.”

“I'm
airing
it,” she said. “Which is obviously something that your girlfriend Meg never did because it's rancid. I've no idea how on earth she expected me to sleep on it in that condition.”

“For the record, she's not my girlfriend, and also for the record that conversation was confidential.”

Paloma continued with her whacking and didn't reply.

“What's wrong, Paloma?”

“Why would you think there's something wrong?”

“Oh, I don't know, it's just that you look so scary and angry.”

She stopped beating the mattress and she smiled at me.

“Maybe that's because I'm not used to boys rejecting me.” She laughed a high, shrill, trembly laugh that didn't sound like her. I started to say something but she held her finger up to my mouth and in this juicy kind of a voice she said, “Oscar, you don't have to say anything in response to me, I was only messing.”

“Of course, I knew that,” I said, but messing, I mean
that
kind of messing that Paloma was doing, seemed sort of sour. It felt like biting into a bitter fruit and finding that at the gritty center there were hundreds of tiny pips of truth.

Paloma had found a letter in Meg's room addressed to me. She dropped it into the mailbox with a note attached to it:
Oscar!! Found this letter to you. I didn't read it or anything—just passing it along!! See u soon!!!!!! PalomaK xxx

That was nice of her, I thought, looking at the envelope, which
was a bit battered, and noticing that the lip of it seemed to have been opened and closed a few times because it was crushed and a little bit torn, as if Meg had possibly changed her mind and taken the letter out once or twice and then put it back in again.

I took it up to my room so I could open it in private, and before I did, I glanced across at Paloma's window. There was a new kind of light in there, strong and dazzling, making it very hard to see properly. It felt as if I'd been staring at the sun.

When you move somewhere new, the difference and adventure and surprising experience feels like its own kind of forever. The mundane, repetitive times in your life are the ones that slip away in your memory as if they've hardly happened. You'd think it would be the opposite—that the uninteresting bits would seem to take ages, and the fun times would fly by, but that's not actually the way it works.

From the moment we arrived, practically everything was sprinkled with newness and surprise—a fresh adventure around every sunny corner.

I learned to water-ski and to swim in that new strong way that you need to learn when you're swimming in a lake. Lake swimming is a silky, slippy kind of feeling. There's none of that saltiness to hold you up, so you have to work much, much harder to stay afloat. When you compare it to swimming in the Irish Sea, it is about as completely different an activity as you can get.

I got used to the hot weather and I got to know a lot of people too. And by the time January came, I'd got used to cycling to the lake for a swim almost every day after school with a bunch of my new Kiwi friends.

In Ireland, taking a swim anywhere outdoors in the middle of January is a borderline lunatic type of activity. In New Zealand it's more like a basic human right.

Houses in Rotarua are made of wood. At night they creak and groan as if they are alive. The swans on nearby Rotoiti Lake don't have the glaring blue white feathers of normal swans. They're black and sleek, and their beaks are blood red. In New Zealand, the ground underneath your feet behaves in a way you think you'll never get used to: it shudders, and most of the time no one else seems to notice, and sometimes it boils and burbles and occasionally it even spurts out hot muddy water straight up into the air.

When you're from a rainy, wet, cool, cloudy place, you're not familiar with the feeling of being blasted in the face every time you go outside, as if you were opening the door of an oven.

In the end, though, I learned to like these strange things and to cherish the differences and to appreciate the adventure. I had a brilliant time, just like Oscar had said I would.

He was right, in the way Oscar had been right about so many things. The trip did work out perfectly okay. I mean at least at first. Everything he predicted was pretty much what happened. When I felt the feelings about him creep to the surface of my brain in the way they kept on doing, I'd try to picture my mattress at home in Ireland and in my head I'd push those thoughts and feelings under it, like the letter I'd written. And then I would keep on hurling myself into New Zealand life with the careless enthusiasm of someone courageous, leaping into an unknown sea.