Barney was restless. His nighttime wanderings were starting to worry me. It got so that he never seemed to be able to sleep at night without getting up and heading off on some mysterious ramble or other. He would sigh, looking into the fireplace, and he would say “deary me” under his breath and I would keep on baking, but I was beginning to think that a thousand apple tarts couldn’t cure the thing that Barney had.
So this one night, I stayed awake patting Homer on the head and wishing Barney was back. I was glad when I heard the clank of the gate.
“OSCAR! OSCAR! OSCAR!” He shouted as if he had something quite urgent to tell me and I went to the door and I saw him struggling up the hill like a man on a serious mission. He was standing at the gate leaning over. I waited, and he kept on standing at the gate, and then he held on to the pillar. I decided to go in and put the kettle on because there were still two slices of my last tart waiting for us and what could be more agreeable in the middle of the night—as he would say himself.
But Barney didn’t come to the door. I kept on making the tea and putting the last two slices of tart on Peggy’s plates, which have little pictures of lighthouses and sunsets on them. And suddenly, then, I felt afraid. I sort of knew that Barney was not going to come in, and I knew that something had happened to him and I could not bear it. I could not bear to go out to him. I just wanted to keep on making the tea and setting everything up nicely, because maybe if I pretended that nothing had happened, maybe if I kept on going on as if everything was completely normal and as if Barney was fine, then everything would be.
But Barney didn’t come.
By the time I got to him, he was lying on the grass and I said, “Barney, Barney, please get up,” but he couldn’t. He could hardly even speak. He patted me on my head and I didn’t know what to do. I asked him if he needed anything and he shook his head and all he’d say was, “My dear boy, it was a forgery!’
I’d no idea what he was talking about and thought he might be delirious or something so I said, “Don’t try to talk, Barney, you’re going to be fine.”
I knew that if he wasn’t going to be fine then this would be my fault too and I began to be really sure that I was the kiss of death. I wished that I had power and I wished I was strong but I was useless and I was weak and I killed the people I loved with apple tarts and stupid actions and not being able to bear to look.
I ran out of Barney’s house, down the lane and I stumbled and I fell and I hurt my arm and hand and face. When I got up again, I kept running, waving my arms and saying, “Help, help, please help me, it’s Barney Brittle. I think he’s dying. He needs a doctor. We need to get him to a hospital fast. Somebody. Please. Help.”
The ambulance men were really nice and they made Barney comfortable and they were patient, even though I asked them a lot of questions about what was wrong with Barney and whether he was going to be okay and whether or not it might have been bad for him to be eating quite as much apple tart as we’d been having recently. They said that they didn’t quite know what was wrong, but that he was an old man and that even though he was impeccably dressed and obviously well-cared for, it was often hard to say how someone of his age might recover from an “episode” like the one he appeared to have had. They said poor Barney was a bit agitated and I wanted to sit beside him but they said that he needed specialist medical care.
“Dear boy!” he shouted again. “She never wrote that letter! She never wrote it. It was a forgery!” None of us knew what he was talking about and the more Barney tried to speak, the more urgently one of the nice ambulance people kept preparing something in a syringe, and then they plunged it into his arm and Barney’s words melted into a low murmur and then he went to sleep altogether.
It was a relief to me on one hand, because I didn’t want him to be distressed or disturbed or in pain, but the problem was that Barney breathing peacefully gave the two ambulance people a chance to focus on me.
“And who are you?” one of them asked me, to which I lied that I was Barney’s grandson. They asked awkward questions then about the names of my parents and my siblings and whether I’d been staying with my grandfather alone and they were interested in lots of other things too. I wasn’t going to get drawn into a discussion. I told them I was far too upset about Barney’s health to be subjected to such an interrogation.
“Em, excuse me, but this is an ambulance. Can we please shift the focus back to the sick person?” The two of them said, “Yes, of course,” but you could see they were looking at me suspiciously. I just stared very attentively at Barney, then, and inside my head, I begged him to be all right.
They allowed me to wait outside his room in the hospital and they promised they would let me in as soon as he was well enough to talk. I was totally delighted when I saw him next, because even though he was hooked up to monitors and tubes and stuff, he was cheerful and awake and he patted the bed and said I was to sit.
“Oscar,” he said, “things might be about to change for both of us.”
I said not to jump to any conclusions yet. This could be a small health hiccup and we could be back at the cottage before it got dark again.
He said possibly, but that we might have some explaining to do, and I knew he was right but I did my best not to think about it.
“I’ve been trying to tell you something—something you need to know. Your friend Meg—she wanted you to know that she was falling in love with you, and that’s what she wrote in the letter, and that other . . . that so and so . . . that vixen of a girl, she ripped out those precious words from the envelope that Meg had put her letter in, and that, brat . . .” Barney began to cough and I had to give him some water even though I was starting to feel fairly numb, thinking about what he was telling me:
“. . . that brat . . . replaced Meg’s lovely words with other words, all untrue. Oscar, you simply must not let this misunderstanding prevail, do you hear me? This is your chance to clear everything up.”
I didn’t know if Barney really knew what he was talking about. Perhaps he’d imagined it, or had some vivid dream; they say that sometimes happens to the seriously ill.
“But Barney, you promised, you promised that I could stay with you in the cottage, and that you’d never ask me to go back.”
“That was before this!” he said. “This changes everything and my promises are null and void. Meg wanted you to know that she loves you. My dear fellow, you must face everyone. Not just Meg, but your poor father and that little brother of yours and your friends and you must tell that awful girl, Paloma whatshername, that her behavior has been of the worst kind. She must know that you cannot attempt to damage people in the way she attempted to damage you.”
“How do you know? How do you know about this?”
He told me how he’d met Meg at the pier. That’s where he’d been going. He’d had whole detailed conversations with her about lots of things apparently, including Paloma.
“We got to know each other quite well. She’s a terrific person,” he explained.
“She’s the one who told me about the Day of Prayer for you and how everyone was crying about you being gone, and so forth. She’s the one who told me where Paloma and her mother are living now. Number two, The Paddocks—you know, on the other side of town.”
I thought about Meg and how much I wished I could see her and explain everything, but it felt too late and I wondered how I could face anyone, especially her after what I knew about myself and the accident and all this pretending and hiding and this big massive lie that I had been telling the world.
“But Barney, what could I say to everyone? What could I say to Meg? How would I explain? How can I go back now?”
“How can you not?” said Barney, smiling at me.
He rummaged in his jacket then and pulled out a pile of wrinkled yellow notes.
“They’re messages from Stevie,” he replied. I began to read.
“Excuse me, does your name happen to be Oscar Dunleavy?” asked a woman in glasses and a ponytail who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. I supposed it was only a matter of time. I mean my photo had been everywhere, and there’d been a massive search and everyone knew what I looked like. I explained to Barney that if I was going back, I was going to do it in my own way. Ponytail lady’s beeper went off and she scurried away. It was my cue. I kissed Barney’s old hand, I stuffed Stevie’s notes into my own pocket and I ran.
The rain was like a thousand little whips pelting at me from all angles. I leaned into the wind like one side of a triangle and I walked fast and steady, not stopping or hesitating or turning around because I’d decided by then and when you decide you should follow through.
I went to number two The Paddocks, and stood on the porch for a long time, looking at the details on the mailbox. I put my hand on the door for a minute or so, to get my balance. I told myself to stay strong even though I thought that as soon as I saw her, my new psychological might and wisdom would melt and I would be the Oscar I had been before, prepared to put up with anything for the sake of peace. But peace built on lies, I reminded myself, is no peace at all.
I stood on my toes and peered into the peephole.
Paloma was approaching and her face was distorted. Her nose looked massive —one eye huge, the other tiny.
I felt brave and that feeling is pretty much inked onto my brain now, like a permanent tattooed message that I will not forget.
I clamped my teeth together because they had started to chatter, on account of me being so wet and pelted by the rain. The doorbell wasn’t working. I tipped my finger at the flap of the mailbox and it swung and rattled back and forth pathetically, making a sound that probably nobody would hear. So I closed my fist and I hit the door with around ten bangs and I whispered Paloma’s name and Paloma came. As soon as I saw her, a wind blew through me as if I was the door that had been opened. Her head was wrapped in a towel and her face had a white mask of cream smeared all over it.
“Paloma, it’s me. I never died.”
Her mouth opened for a second and then it closed and so did her eyes. She fainted like a bad actor from a movie, falling into a crumple of towel and cream and soft skin, and the towel miraculously stayed wrapped around her head like a turban. I picked her up. I had to. Nobody else was there.
“You replaced Meg’s letter with a different letter, didn’t you? And you were the one who made everyone think my apple tarts were lame and dorky? It was you, wasn’t it? And you made up The Ratio because that’s the way you want the world to work, but it doesn’t have to work like that does it? And you knew I didn’t know about the accident that killed my mum and injured Stevie and you told me about it on purpose, didn’t you? You tried to break me, Paloma, but you have failed. I am not dead. I didn’t kill myself.”
“But, Oscar, someone had to show you things about yourself. You were a creep. You stared at me every night with that disturbing telescope. You stalked me inside my own bedroom.”
“Paloma. I used that telescope to look at the stars. Why would I have used it to look at you?”
“Because I’m so beautiful,” she said, a tense pulse beating inside her jaw.
I wanted to give her a chance to explain but nothing she said was plausible. She tried a different approach, then. She said she didn’t know her actions were going to drive me to suicide.
“They didn’t,” I said.
“Why have you decided to come back?” she asked, tilting her head over to the side the way she always did.
“Love is the reason,” I told her.
“Oscar, I like you a lot,” she said, “I like you an awful lot more than everybody used to say. But I don’t love you. I’m not in love with you.”
“That’s perfectly fine with me, because I’m not in love with you either.”
“Then why did you try to kiss me that time?”
“Because I thought you wanted me to, and I was confused. But I’m not confused anymore.”
“Then why are you here?” she asked, and I wondered how someone could be so deluded.
“I’m here because I have to tell you that it is wrong to do the things you tried to do to me. And you can go on pretending, but it’s not going to make any difference. I’m here to ask you to tell me what Meg’s letter said.”
“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” she said, and she tried to slam the door shut, but I put my foot in the way and I held it open.
“You work hard to make boys dream about you,” I said to her. “Well, for your information, I don’t dream about you. I dream about Meg.
“Boys falling in love with you makes you feel powerful and important, but it’s a trick. I think you need to start thinking about other ways to feel good about yourself. That’s my advice, Paloma, take it or leave it.”
She thanked me and I said she was welcome and she said I was right and that I deserved someone better than her, which is a thing beautiful girls often say, regardless of whether it’s true or not, but in this case she was totally right.
She told me that even Andy and Greg missed me, and I was like yeah right I really believe that okay, and she said, “No seriously, Oscar, it’s true.”
I’m not going to say too much about when my dad and Stevie saw me. What I will say is that first it was silent, and then it was loud, and then Dad cried and he kept saying “good grief,” two words that shouldn’t, when you think about it, go together.
Stevie came trundling out and did not look angry either. He hugged me around my knees the way he always used to. “I knew it,” is what he said. “I told everyone, but nobody believed me!” he shouted, and he whizzed around and then hugged me some more, and I could feel the familiar scrawniness of his arms, only they weren’t quite as scrawny as I remembered them having been. And he was talking fast saying stuff like, “Woo hoo. It wasn’t a dream. I was riiiight I was riiiiight!” and talking about the notes he’d left on the pier.
Amazingly, the three of us started to laugh. We laughed until we had to sit down on the grass in the front garden to recover.
I took his notes out of my pocket with the words of hope on them. They were short, full of encouragement and cheerfulness and I’m going to keep them for the rest of my life. They say things about how we need to keep going, and about never giving up and how valuable and good I am. Some of them ask questions, mainly about what are the things you need if you want to make a perfect apple tart.
Stevie and I talked for the whole day and into the night and Dad didn’t stop us or tell us it was time to go to bed. We talked about life. I told him about how I had taken him out of his car seat when Mum was driving and that was why the accident had happened. And I asked him how he could ever forgive me and he said there was nothing to forgive.
We went outside and Stevie rolled around on the tarmac. “Listen, Oscar, and look at me, this is me now. If you’re full of guilt because of something that couldn’t possibly be your fault, that makes me feel like some kind of lame boy. I’m not a lame boy. In fact I’m pretty happy with myself,” he said, and then he did a little twirl in his chair, spinning around and around and leaning backward and forward in a whole series of gravity-defying impressive moves.
“Watch me,” he said. “See? Seriously, Oscar—who else in the world can do that? There are enough people who stare or cross the road or talk loudly to me like I’m a retard. Don’t make me your sad secret, Oscar. I’m your brother, okay? Oscar? D’ya know what I mean?”
I did know.
And Stevie did his wheelchair moves and his chair shimmered in the light and sparks flew out from him as if he was made of moon drops, and as he twirled around they scattered around him, throwing a pale and beautiful reflection on his face.
I never really remembered that much about my mum, but my dad has begun to tell me about her. Apparently she was lovely. The most important thing about her was that she was kind. I think she must have learned it from my gran, who was extremely kind too.
Dad says kindness is magic. It looks gentle and mild on the outside, he says, but it has hidden powers. I know for sure that’s definitely true. For example, it’s still powerful enough to wake me up and have me jump out of my bed at weird times like three o’clock in the morning to make tarts.
You might think that eating apple tarts would be the last thing that someone would want in the middle of a crisis, but it turns out that the smallest forkful can make everything bearable again—even if the crisis is bursting with huge amounts of grief or if it’s packed with massive loads of despair.
There’ve been journalists and TV guys and writers who’ve come especially to interview me about it, but when they ask me what the secret is, I shrug my shoulders because it’s difficult to explain.
I realized I’d been avoiding her because I couldn’t figure out what I was going to say. But I couldn’t wait any longer. So the next night, I’m sitting at my window wondering what it’s going to be like to be back at school and her light is on and then I can see her. It is Meg, of course, and she comes to the window and it’s a bit like none of this has ever happened and it’s just us again, because she doesn’t say, “How dare you?” or “Where were you?” or “How could you?” and her face is soft.
“I need to talk to you,” I say, and she goes, “You’re talking to me now, aren’t you?” And she is smiling. I tell her about the accident and what I did and she also says it’s not my fault and the tears on her cheeks seem to make her face glow in the dark. And I’m feeling so many things at the same time that I can’t breathe. Mainly that I never want Meg to feel sad. I want to take away all the sadness she’s feeling now, and all the sadness she’s ever felt and all the sadness she’s ever going to feel, even though I know that I can’t do that.
Then I tell her that the thing I need to say to her can’t be said here at our windows. And she asks me what I mean, because we were always able to tell each other everything from here. But I tell her it won’t do for the thing I have to say now. And I ask her to meet me by her gate.
“Be there in two minutes, then,” she says. And she is, and before I have a chance to say anything, she puts her hand flat on the middle of my chest and she keeps it there for a long time. And though the future feels fragile and uncertain, the present has something new in it. Something sure.
Whatever waits for me tomorrow or next week or deep into the future, Meg’s hand is right on the center of my body, still and flat and strong and small. I can’t imagine anyone being more beautiful.
And if again I find myself on the end of a pier, thinking of jumping, or if I am again lost or desperate or if I feel I have nowhere to go, the imprint of Meg’s hand is always going to be there, long after she has taken it away. It is going to be the thing that saves me.
I move my face down to hers and she moves her face closer to me and I say, “Is it okay?” and she says “Yes.” I’m holding my breath when I kiss her. She closes her eyes and she kisses me back. I don’t close my eyes. I keep them open so I can look at her close-up.
I still have lots of things to tackle of course, like my first day back at school, and Andy and Greg and the things that people might still be thinking or saying about me.
Right now, it’s just Meg and me telling each other something that we both already know. We are alone, but I wish the whole world was watching. It is night, but already I’m wishing for the new day.
