Hello Now Page 3

  “Rocks change,” I said. “The water changes them,” and Henry smiled.

  “You’re a smart one, aren’t you. I can see we are going to be friends.”

  “Friends are a bit of a sore topic for me,” I said.

  “It’ll pass,” said Henry. “Life will provide.”

  “You reckon?”

  “I’m an unspeakably old man,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So I’ve seen it enough times to know.”

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  “But you will.”

  It was quiet then, and I looked at the woman’s portrait again, the smooth skin of her back, her turning head. I looked at her for a long time.

  “I do like that painting,” I said, and he smiled.

  “Lifetimes since I did that.”

  “You did it?”

  “I used to love to paint,” he said. “A very long time ago. And then a very long time ago, I gave it up.”

  Some tiny part of me believed the woman in the portrait might actually turn around. I remember thinking how silly that was, that I felt like that, even in that moment. “She’s very lovely.”

  “Yes.” Henry frowned and carried on typing. “She was.”

  He turned the laptop screen toward me, some kind of aerial view. Wild dust, scrubby trees, a shrunk river. A pack of dogs crossed the picture from bottom corner to top. Tall slanted shadows, left to right. “Look at this,” he said. “Today, we’re on the savanna.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes. See?” He got up and pointed to the giant wall map. “Sub-Saharan Africa. About here.” He put a pin in it.

  “Have you been to all of those places?” I said. “With all of those pins?”

  The estate agents had called Henry Lake a recluse. They hadn’t mentioned anything about world travel.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said.

  “What manner?”

  He didn’t answer me. Not directly. He said, “Have you ever seen these dogs in the wild?”

  “Me? Nope. Never been anywhere. Not like that. I don’t even know what kind of dogs they are.”

  “Well,” he said, flourishing his hands like a magician at the end of a trick. “There. Painted dogs. You’ve seen them now.”

  “Yes, but we’re not in the wild, are we. We’re not actually there.”

  Henry reached out a hand to touch the screen. “We work with what we have,” he said. “There’s more than one way to see the world these days.”

  “Okay,” I said. “If you say so.”

  The look on his face was kind of pleading. He so wanted to be right. “Those dogs are moving across that ground right now. Right this minute. Look. Isn’t that something? Isn’t that good enough?”

  He typed something into the filthy keyboard and the picture zoomed, close up, a dog moving low to the ground, ears turning like satellite dishes, mouth dripping chewed foam and a grin. I remember the stark, strong shadows and the dogs’ tongues lolling, and I might have heard the ragged sounds of their breath. I can’t have felt the blunt heat of the air, the greasy nap of their fur. Still, my memory fills in those blanks for me anyway, and those dogs seem hyperreal now to me.

  “How does it work?” I said. “Do you just shut your eyes and stick a pin in the wall?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Right.”

  “Modern technology. It’s a tremendous help for someone like me.”

  “Someone like you?”

  “I can’t get out,” Henry Lake said.

  “What, ever?”

  He shook his head. “It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “Really?”

  I wanted to know how he lived like that. Where did his food come from? What happened if he got sick? And I wanted to know why too, more than anything, but I’d only just met him, so I was nervous to ask. Mum started calling me from downstairs, fifth-gear annoyed with me already—something about a chest of drawers, something about my skateboard being a death trap, something else about me lifting a finger to help.

  “You’d better go,” he said, and I picked up my boxes from where I’d left them by the door, and our conversation was over.

  Henry hunched down closer at his table, a world traveler under house arrest, with his elbow in a plate of dried sauce, his gnarled, papery hand scratching at the roots of his beard. One foot in the savanna, the other trapped in the yolk of an egg.

  SEVEN

  I helped Mum do a few things, and then I got away as soon as I could, on my own for the first time all day. Upstairs, my new room in the attic was a mixed bag, two parts brilliant, two parts the opposite of that. It was the place where all the flies came to die. I watched them flitting and buzzing at the windows like crowds at the turnstiles, exiting their weightless corpses across the sills and along the very edges of the floor. Henry Lake’s boiled soup smell was strong up there too, but the space was massive, the whole width of that massive house. I’d never had so much space in my life. I explored a bit, poked around in its dark corners, tried to picture it all cleaned up and perfect, but the dust in there was threatening to kill me, so I took my book, made my exit, and climbed up through the skylight and down onto the flat roof below.

  I was shielded by trees up there, kind of hidden, with a view of the street in front and the sea behind. I sat with my back against the wall. Warm bricks, salt breeze, sunshine. I took some pictures of the sky on my half-dead phone. Through the cracked screen it looked like someone had taken a hammer to the clouds. The sun was bleeding rainbows round their edges. Way above all the mess and the action, the world is forever a beautiful place. I read for a bit but my head was too crowded, so I shut my eyes and let the light push through my eyelids, coral and warm. Henry’s open window offered up some weird record, grown men singing through their noses, moaning all together like ten types of wind trapped down a well. There was a cricket match playing on someone’s radio, the low bellow of the docks, the muted crash and roll of all that water, and above me, when I opened my eyes again and looked up, the long straight out-breath of a passing plane in the blue.

  The breeze dropped. I looked down sideways over the edge of my roof to the floor below. The straw-yellow bird was dancing about on Henry’s window ledge, the gulls on next door’s roof sizing it up, deciding just how and when to rip it to pieces and fight over the spoils. I waved my arms at them, international bird-speak for leave the little one alone, and they stood up, flapped, and shifted, flinging their eyes at me like stones.

  “Parker?” Henry said. “Charlie Parker, come inside at once,” and it struck me, because the bird I’d always imagined Charlie Parker to be was something sleek and soaring like his music, not a fluffed-up, crapped-out old parakeet in a cage. I wondered if this Charlie Parker was even a tiny bit tempted to risk it, take its chances with the big world, and just fly. But birds like that don’t survive in the wild. Not here anyway. Maybe it traveled like Henry Lake did, not for real, just in its own head. Henry’s hand came out then and the bird hopped straight onto the bowl of his crumpled, ancient palm, and there was my answer. The window rumbled shut and I thought, Oh well, we’re here now, let’s see what happens. I bet it’s nothing at all.

  Just how wrong can a person be?

  Novo

  You are the place I return to, in between times. My fulcrum, the point at my center, around which all of me turns. You are my chance at stillness. The rock in my water. I know you.

  I wait for you to see me. I hope for it, that pin drop in my infinities. I know to hope, but not to be certain. It is never guaranteed.

  I would show you all the magic there is if you asked me. I would bring you the universe on a plate, take you out from under the rules that apply, so that anything was possible. You could slip between layers of sky and count the atoms. You could reflect light like the moon. You co
uld hear all the languages of the world, all their words and all the wordless ones too, and you would know them. You could fly in water and swim in air. You could spend a whole life’s worth of time in the moments it takes you to blink.

  I would give you anything you asked for, in exchange for one of your looks.

  EIGHT

  Jude

  I remember everything about the next day clear as glass, because it’s when Novo showed up. Nine thirty-four A.M. on the first of July is a page-corner, red-letter, highlighter-pen kind of Now. After it, nothing was, or is, or could ever possibly be the same. Nine thirty-three I was out front, reading in a sunlit patch of grass, medicating my sad situation with something made-up and far more dramatic, with better characters and sharper dialogue than my little life could ever muster, up until then. This thing happening, his car arriving, made me stop. Nine thirty-three was the quiet before the storm, the lull before the penny dropped, the last in-breath of life, as I knew it anyway. And then the miracle. Then Novo. I remember.

  Out of nowhere, his battered black car banked the corner, shadowing the curb like a whale underwater, swallowing up the light. A trash truck was in the road, jaws grinding, and the whale-black car had to wait behind it, stuck there for me to study, covered in dents and scrapes, engine running, windows up, music loud on the inside, I could just tell. A boy. One hand on the wheel, one arm stretched long across the blood-red leather seat-top like the branch of a tree. He bit his lip, stroked his jaw with the flat of his hand. Straightaway I wanted to be in that car with him. It pulled at me, the way you feel a tooth being pulled, not just there in your mouth, but also somehow dead center in the hub of the wheel of your stomach. I don’t think I could have looked away if I’d tried, like he was the target and I was the missile—preprogrammed, set on lock, already hurtling.

  He stopped across the street, outside Mrs. Midler’s. Louder music, door slam, and the car dipped and sighed, missing him already as he climbed out, tall with black hair and dark clothes, a streak of ink against the blotting-paper day. He checked his watch. He stretched his arms over his head and then spread them wide, open-handed, filling the space around him, eating it up like he was hungry. He looked up at the house, touched his fingers to his mouth, a habit I would come to know so well, and that first time there was nothing else in the world suddenly, for me, only those fingers and that mouth, only him doing that. Fast and strong as a big cat he stepped onto the bonnet and then the roof of his car and took in the view, turning a slow circle, stretching again like you do after a long sleep, rolling his shoulders, arching his back. The early sun glowed warm on his skin, carved out in light and sharp shadows the wide slope of his shoulders, his collarbones, the hollows at the base of his throat. The noise of his weight on the metal sat low in the air like a gong. Wild. Unparalleled. Shining.

  He jumped down and then climbed the flat front of Mrs. Midler’s house, blatant, lizard-quick, balancing on the narrow ledge of an upstairs window, moving with the casual elegance of the high wire, like he was inches from the ground, not two whole floors. This boy was not afraid of falling. And he wasn’t worried about getting caught either. I’d never seen anyone who cared less about that.

  It was from up there that he saw me. He looked down at me and for a moment everything about him stopped, the way an animal stops when it knows it’s been seen—so completely still that it hums with it, at some secret frequency, some planetary resonance, like a struck fork. Then it was over, so fast that I questioned it had happened at all. I don’t think I moved either. I didn’t blink. I must have stopped breathing, because it came to me from somewhere that I was running out of air. I wasn’t the only one. Every other creature in striking distance forgot what they were doing for a moment when Novo landed, derailed themselves mid-train-of-thought without knowing why. I guarantee. His brazen newness brought its own brand of silence with it. Someone’s cat broke from washing in a patch of sunlight, triangular, limbs stretched, feet splayed, eyes narrowed to slits. Even the gulls stopped their jaw and their hustle. It was only after he dropped neatly through an upstairs window and out of sight that the ordinary noise of things flooded back. My lungs regained their composure and the birds started up again and the cat slunk under a van and shot into a yard through a gap in the hedge. The old, always-gardening couple came out onto their porch like sleepwalkers, faces set to longing, leaf-blower to suck. The woman opposite-but-one came out and paused on her step for a second like she’d forgotten something, sniffing the air like a bloodhound, and then barricaded herself back in, kicking her door shut so hard it knocked over a plant and spoiled her spotless WELCOME mat with broken clay and clumps of thick black soil.

  Upstairs, Charlie Parker was getting tangled in the curtains and I could hear Henry cursing not so quietly under his breath. Mum banged on the front window and frowned, breathing Rorschach clouds against the glass, her skin already clammy with the heat and blotched like sausage meat. I said, “Did you see that?” but she pulled a face at me, arms spread out like, What, I have to do all this unpacking myself? so I waved her away and pretended it wasn’t anything special, even though I knew already that it was.

  The mailman parked his truck at the top of the road and made his way to Mrs. Midler’s front door, head down, whistle-whistle, same as usual, delivering mail to a lady who no longer existed, putting it through the letter box like nothing had changed. He didn’t notice the battered black car, didn’t feel all that novelty pulling on the air until it was tight as a bow. I don’t know how he could have missed it.

  I closed my book without bothering to mark the page, and I wondered if anyone else had heard this central thing in me, this core thing snapping like a twig. SNAP when the car pulled up and I saw that boy inside it. SNAP when we looked at each other. SNAP when those eyes blackened and that mouth opened and the breath tumbled out of him in soft clouds. He saw me watching, I’m sure of that. We watched each other, and I still dream of it now, his body turning away like it was supposed to but his eyes staying with me, the way dancers do it, the dark and light of them the very last things to go.

  NINE

  I was still in my sunlit place in the yard when Novo left through his new front door, singing, and I remember thinking how brilliantly shameless that was, to exit a house you just invaded, hands in pockets, loud, like nothing-to-see-here, breezy and carefree. I recognized straight off that the rules of normal did not apply. He was untouchable. Dazzling. I imagined the force field glinting around him, all that fearlessness catching the light. And at the same time I had this feeling that he wanted me, of all people, to notice him, that he was thinking right then about me.

  I hid from that feeling in the long grass because I didn’t trust it. He was the width of the street away from me, and I told myself it was nothing, even though my palms felt hot and my thoughts were giddy and my heart might as well have been beating in my neck. I tried to count ordinary things—blades of grass, gravel on the path, bricks in the wall, the contents of my pockets (mostly receipts and a twisted half-pack of gum)—but none of them were ordinary enough. None of them talked me out of getting up and opening the gate. I knew straightaway that something impossible was happening, something about this boy in the world that couldn’t be explained, not like a cheap magic trick anyway. I had this feeling, the kind that comes from your gut instead of your brain, the kind you should listen to, because your gut knows what it knows, and is usually right, and doesn’t need anything as complicated as logic to prove it. I had this overwhelming feeling. So I followed him.

  The walk to civilization from Henry Lake’s house was steeply downhill, quiet, just houses, and then a right turn at the cinema onto the main road. One-way traffic, a couple of streets of shops. Less than five minutes. Not much more than ten after that to walk all the way down to the sea. The boy was fast. He moved through town the way he’d scaled that house, fluid and quick as mercury, comfortable in his own skin, happy to take up space. Everyone seemed to know him
. More than that. They all wanted to welcome him, or touch him, or give him something, this returning prince, this little town’s prodigal son. I’d never seen anything like it, not for real. It was more like a film set. Shopkeepers hovered in their own doorways and forced free things on him as he passed—apples, honey, bread, a bottle of wine. Fresh-caught fish. Flowers. Books. A newspaper. They competed for his attention, elbowing one another out of the way and calling after him to come and have free haircuts and tattoos, a free massage, anything he wanted from the gallery, the new collection, from their own backs. Anything at all. Children fell in behind him like ducklings, a real-life pied piper, and their parents beamed, hands clasped at their hearts, and blushed with pride. A virtual game, dreamlike, a fairy tale. As finely choreographed as a dance, seamless and elaborate, but a piece of theater all the same. It had to be. A piece of fiction. Not real. Even though I could see it unfolding right in front of me, it was somehow not real at all. A woman crossing the road held out her child for him to take, and the boy smiled and shook his head, politely declining while more children grabbed at his legs and other passersby stopped to offer him the contents of their wallets. A jeweler chased after him with a tray of watches, begging him to consider, and he took a moment to appreciate them, but he turned down those too. He walked without breaking his rhythm, weaving through the narrow lanes and around his grateful subjects as freely and elegantly as a royal breeze. He didn’t stop moving forward, didn’t once look back. After he’d passed, behind him, in the space between us, those spellbound extras woke up from their dream, instantly forgot the delirium of his passing presence. The virtual went back to actual, the bright lights turned down, the extraordinary color gone. The real world zipped itself back up in his wake like water after a boat. And I saw all of it.

  Down at the beach, dogs chased each other in and out of the sea. A gang of kids burrowed heads-down furiously while their parents sat in a half circle talking and staring at the waves. A pile of students played dead on blankets by the rocks. A café bustled behind where the street gave way to the sand. The boy strolled ahead of me, vivid like sunshine, and the kids looked up in unison, alert as meerkats over their castles, the talk stopped in their parents’ mouths. The students stood up and drifted closer like sleepwalkers, slack-jawed with fascination, blissed out and bleary-eyed. At the edge of the water, he bent down and let his hands trail and circle, crouching low; and where he touched the sea it seemed to shimmer with phosphorescence, every cell in it lit up from within. The dogs splashed through the glimmering water, leaping and barking, surrounding him, challenging him to play. He stood up and the sea-lights flickered out. He moved backward to the line where the wet sand turns to dry, and then he sat down lead-heavy, with a sigh. The sea breathed, and he breathed, and everybody, even the dogs, went completely still. It was the loneliest thing I think I ever saw, the square root of loneliness, him sitting there with nothing moving around him at all, apart from the shifting, dimming water. Lonely warped the air around him, the way heat hangs over tarmac in the summer. It was a visible, wavering thing, clear as day. I thought I knew what lonely was until I witnessed that.