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.
In a shelf between two books, I found an old scrap of paper with a recipe called “Peggy’s lemonade” and I said that looked great. Soon he was coming home every night with bags, and in the morning I’d see that he’d bought things like brown sugar and lemons as well as the ingredients I’d asked him to get for apple tarts.
An old shed was buried right at the back and we’d pulled out the rusty mower and it had taken a while, and I’m not saying we’d have won a tidy-garden competition, but things got slightly neater and tidier and less jumbled and scrambled and not quite as much of a mess—and the dumpster got filled up with rubbish.
Every so often, Barney would try to suggest that people might be missing me, and that this was no place for a boy in need of help, but I told him it was perfectly okay.
“I can’t go home,” my voice said every time he talked about how people must be frantic about my disappearance. I wished things were simpler. I wished I could go back to my window and lean out and chat to Meg the way I used to. Part of me thought about myself walking out of Barney’s and down the long hill and back into my house the way he was suggesting. But some people can’t come home, and the reasons are never simple or easy to explain and when I told him that he said he knew what I meant.
I told Barney about my dad and how since my mum died he’d got quieter and quieter until it seemed to me that he stopped saying anything. Over the years my dad had slipped into the gray silence that I’d often remembered wondering if he was ever going to come out of.
It had taken a while for my dad to undergo this metamorphosis, but by the time it was complete his old friends had to look twice before saying hello to him in the street. People stopped recognizing him in shops, and even my teachers went, “Is that your dad?” when they saw him standing in the school yard waiting for me in his limp-looking coat. It was embarrassing.
Later when I started secondary school and could cycle home by myself, Stevie didn’t see any improvement. When he went to pick Stevie up, Dad wouldn’t talk to anyone else, not even when people said hello. He stood, hands in pockets, not noticing even when rain had started to fall and even when it was dripping off his nose and his chin and his earlobes.
“Right then,” Barney had said, “we will have to write a list, and you, young man, are going to have to make a plan.” I didn’t want to make a plan—I didn’t know of any plan that was going to get me out of the situation I was in, but I did say I’d keep helping him with the house and I thought that was a relatively good start considering what a bad state of mind I’d been in not so long ago. And I hoped that we could keep on doing stuff to clean up and that I’d make myself so useful he’d forget about coaxing me back home.
I told him about how the car my dad had bought after the accident had, over the years, got louder in inverse proportion to Dad’s growing silence. It used to drive me mad. Clattering home on account of the exhaust being loose, and Dad not saying a single word.
I’d tried to get him to talk. I thought if I did, then maybe the cloud that followed him around might lift. I hardly remember my mum’s face, even though Dad did his best on that front. Instead of reading me stories before I went to bed, he would sit with the same big book every night. It had no words in it. It was just full of photos of my mum. And I began to think that the inside of my dad was exactly the same: no words. Only pictures of her. Silently he would turn the pages until he got to the end, and then he would kiss me on the forehead and turn off the light. Pictures of your mum are not the same as your mum. I couldn’t remember the smell of her, or how she looked when she walked into a room, or what her voice sounded like. All I remembered were the photographs—flat, still, shadowy things.
I did my best with my dad. I was forever thinking up things to say to him, stuff that might have made him laugh. Funny things that had happened in school, interesting information the teacher had taught us, strange questions about the state of the world.
It seemed to me that when Dad had lost my mum, he’d also lost his voice. On the plus side, he became amazingly tidy. Like a ghost, he would move silently around the house, keeping things in order.
I ended up telling Barney practically everything—not just about Meg’s letter and Paloma and Dad and his silence and Stevie, but about other stuff too. And because of the no TV and no Internet in Barney’s house, talking was the thing we did most. Barney was a smoker, which I wasn’t too keen on and when I told him, he was all apologetic and sometimes he used to excuse himself after tea and I’d watch him standing out in the garden with a cloud of smoke surrounding him like a halo.
I hadn’t wanted to talk about the apple-tart fiasco, but, as I might have mentioned before, Barney was a listener.
The TV crew had done an advance visit to our school to plan everything. They were looking for stories of ordinary kids doing amazing things.
“That boy has talent dripping from his fingertips,” Mr. O’Leary had said after I’d brought a tart in one day for no other reason than because my dad had broken his normal silence to suggest that I should. And I was to demonstrate to everyone how I made them and they were going to make it into a show. The funny thing was that I didn’t even really want to do it. I kept on telling them it was an ordinary, unremarkable thing and I wasn’t too sure if anyone would even be that interested. I kept telling them that they should look for someone with a more obvious talent to take the slot. But they wouldn’t hear of it. And they insisted, and so the cameras were scheduled and signs went up in school, and Paloma didn’t say that much to me about it, not after the decision was finalized.
Her mother came into the school and was a bit loud talking to Mr. O’Leary in a booming voice right in front of everyone. She’d said, “What are you thinking? My daughter is among the most talented children in the entire country and this would be the perfect opportunity for her and instead you’re giving the slot to some nerdy kid who’s obsessed with cooking? Come on, you and I both know that’s not the kind of thing that’s going to put this school on the map. In fact it’s not the kind of thing that will do anything except to shine a rather odd light on you. And you have this glorious girl sitting right in front of your face? Come on? Have a bit of sense.”
Mr. O’Leary had asked Paloma’s mum to leave because she was not entitled to talk like that but everyone had heard and once something is said, nobody can pretend it hasn’t been said. You can try to pretend, but it stays in everyone’s head.
“Pastry from scratch—butter and flour and sugar, kneaded slowly, with cool hands. Bramley apples, skinned and carefully sliced, with an extremely sharp knife—never cut apples with a blunt knife; you might as well use a spoon—the pieces must be crisp and flat. Cinnamon crushed directly from bark, nutmeg sprinkles, brown and pungent grated straight off a whole nutmeg.”
It was what my gran had taught me.
“You need patience and you need skill and you need to get into a particular state of mind, but without the right ingredients, there’s not much point in even starting. You might as well go off and do something else.”
Whispers and rustles floated in the air. Andy and Greg made fart noises from the back of the class even though they were in the middle of recording the whole thing. Paloma did her languid, slow-lidded blink. And some of the others like Christina Bracken and Paul Campion snapped their chewing gum and stared menacingly at my demonstration.
“Apple tart? Oscar, that’s weird,” somebody said from the back row, but I continued with my demo, and Mr. O’Leary kept saying, “Shush, shush everyone, please give Oscar some respect and attention.” As if that was going to make any difference because once a class of people has decided to turn on you, you can’t do much about it.
“Go on, Oscar, please continue.”
“To be able to mingle different kinds of food into one single delicious thing is a kind of alchemy. Not everyone appreciates that.”
“No indeed,” said Mr. O’Leary, glaring at the rest of the class, “not everyone does.”
“A normal-sized apple tart should easily be enough for six people.” I kept going. I didn’t want to wreck the recording, and I’d started so I wanted to finish.
“The butter should be pale yellow and fresh and unsalted. The sugar needs to be the brown, almost moist kind that slowly tumbles over itself when you spoon it into the mix, like so. See?
“Even after they’re cooked, the apples should have a bit of bite to them. The pastry has to be extremely light so that it melts the moment it’s in your mouth. If you take the time it needs, and if you concentrate properly, what you’ll end up making is this!”
I pulled out a tart I’d prepared earlier.
“Ah, Oscar, that’s very good, that’s very good indeed. Now let’s hear a bit about your influences? Your inspiration? The people who taught you this skill.”
In my mind I saw my dad’s photo album of my mum and I thought about her mum too, who was my gran, and I got filled up with sadness the way you sometimes do when you’re not expecting it. But I kept going:
“In everything you do,” I tried to explain, “you need to respect the integrity of things, especially when you’re cooking. Ingredients should always have a hint of their former selves, that’s what my gran used to say. She’s dead now but I remember everything she taught me. She made me practice for years and years, and even though I was quite a small kid, she never let me off the hook.
“ ‘Oh that’s not it at all,’ she’d say the first few times I tried.
“And then later, ‘Better than the last time, I’ll grant you that,’ and eventually, ‘Oscar, I daresay you’ve almost got it!’
“I finally did get it right, of course, because I kept on trying and I didn’t allow myself to be discouraged. I knew I’d done it, even before my gran told me—as soon as I lifted it out of the oven, I could see by the look of it—golden and toasty and spicy and hot—that I’d made the grade. My gran asked for her special silver fork and when she tasted the tart, she clapped her hands and she looked into my eyes and she said, ‘Oscar, my darling boy!’
“An hour later, she was dead. Too much joy in the body of a frail woman can apparently be fatal. That’s what my dad had said.”
I could hear loud laughs from the back of the room.
“I can’t really stand it,” I could hear myself saying, my voice so low because part of me didn’t want anyone to hear, “the way everyone has to die or go away in the end. I can’t stand it the way I think it was probably me who killed my gran, even though everyone said I didn’t, but on the other hand, I find it quite comforting that her final moments were sweetened by brown sugar, spices and the taste of perfectly cooked apples.”
The class was silent now but the boys were holding their hands over their mouths. I looked around the room. To finish up as quickly as possible I said, “Thank you, the end, thank you very much.”
And after that, the whole class just burst out laughing, and I walked slowly out of the room, grabbing Andy and Greg’s camera on the way, not looking at anyone. I took the memory card out of the camera and flushed it down the toilet.
Paloma wanted to run after me, she told me later, but she wouldn’t have been able to say anything and I could hear Mr. O’Leary saying, “Be quiet everyone. Nobody is to move, while I go and talk to Oscar. Do you hear me?” Paloma told me that before Mr. O’Leary left the room, he told Andy and Greg that they were not to attempt to pursue me for their precious memory card. Andy and Greg had a race then up to the front where apparently they pulled apart my apple tart and they stuffed it into their mouths. Paloma said she had told them to stop and to leave some for me, but they ignored her.
“He wants us to eat it,” they’d said. “Why do you think he went to the trouble of making it?” It was completely gone by the time I came back.
After that, I sat through the whole of double math, looking straight ahead at the wall, not looking at anyone or saying anything when Mrs. Fortune asked questions, even though I knew the answers.
Later when we were walking home together, Paloma told me I should do my best to try to forget about the apple-tart humiliation.
I looked at her and kind of out of the blue, I really did see then what everyone else had been talking about. I thought that maybe if I could kiss her, that would be a good way for me to forget about Meg and the apple-tart incident and everything.
And when we reached the corner before turning into our houses, that is what I tried to do. I tried to kiss Paloma Killealy. But she turned her face away from me and she said:
“Oscar, it’s too late. Timing is everything. I gave you your chance but you blew it. Paloma Killealy only ever gives people one chance. You’re not going to get another just because you’ve changed your mind. Oscar, sorry, but that’s not the way it works in my world. And, anyway, things are changing Ratio-wise too. I thought you were one of the alpha boys when I first got here, but now? Now of course we all know you’re not. I could only ever go out with someone on the A-team, if you know what I mean.”
I know it sounds like she might have been vain, but look, at the time, I thought she had a point. She was the one who knew about The Ratio, not me. And it wouldn’t have done for her to have made some terrible mistake as she was trying to settle in, what with me and my apple tarts and so on and how the class had kind of stopped understanding me. I understood that.
I asked her if we could still be friends, and she was like, Of course, Oscar, sure we can, but here’s what I’m suggesting: let’s stay friends, but when we’re at school, let’s give our friendship a lower profile, okay?
It didn’t really occur to me then that friendship shouldn’t have conditions like the ones Paloma was suddenly insisting on. If you’re a friend of someone outside school then you should be a friend of theirs inside school too. But she was pretty firm about it so I said, “Fine Paloma, whatever you think.”
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.