Hello Now Page 5

  Novo stepped inside and stood next to me in the hallway. I took his hand and we started up the stairs. Henry’s door was shut as we passed it on the landing. I told Novo not to expect much. “We only just moved in, remember. I’ve hardly touched it,” but the room we walked into was completely different. Not full of dust and dead flies. Not unclaimed and empty at all. The floorboards and walls were a clean bright white and covered already with my rugs and posters. My bed was in the corner under the skylight, my books were unpacked and on shelves. There were plants and candles, an angled lamp and a slender wooden rocking chair I’d only ever seen in the pages of a magazine. It was the room I didn’t know I’d been imagining for years.

  “Who did this?” I said, and Novo smiled.

  “This was you?”

  He shrugged. “It did itself, really. Same as mine.”

  “It did itself.”

  “Is it okay? Do you like it?”

  “It’s perfect,” I said, pulling at drawers, scanning my bookshelf, opening the wardrobe. Everything was where it should be. Some of it was mine and some was brand-new but I also knew it, knew where everything was supposed to be, like I’d done it myself. I remember wondering if Novo could see inside me, see my imagination like a film screen, and I didn’t want to know the answer. I didn’t even want to ask.

  “Am I scaring you?” he said.

  It was ridiculous and unthinkable. It should have scared me. But what can I say? It just didn’t.

  “I mean. This is nothing,” he said. “A bit of DIY. If this was too much already then we’d have a problem.”

  I smiled at him. “You’re not scaring me.”

  “Good,” he said, looking up through the skylight. “That’s good.”

  “Want to see the roof?” I said, standing on the bed and pulling myself up and through it. Novo came up after me and we stood together outside under that dome of blue. Down below us, across the street, the noise had finished now and all the contents of Mrs. Midler’s house were in the front yard, arranged room by room, as if the building had just picked itself up and moved over a bit when our backs were turned. There were people out there, milling about, picking over everything. Two women in bright anoraks were having a serious think about some hunting-scene place mats. Some kids played building blocks with a load of shell-thin china cups until somebody noticed and told them to stop. A man was trying to persuade his wife to take home an enormous oil painting of a dog. The woman opposite-but-one was looking at lamps, tugging at their wiring, lifting them up to see underneath. Other strangers flicked mercilessly through Mrs. Midler’s books, pulled at her clothes with the tips of their fingers, passed judgment on her taste in art and crammed their feet into her favorite shoes. A girl at a table full of jewelry weighed a pair of heavy costume earrings in her hand.

  I thought about Mrs. Midler’s life, whoever she was. Unique, same as everyone else’s, with its own bar charts of disappointment and reward, its own strict and arbitrary rules. And still somehow it ended up in boxes marked HELP YOURSELF.

  “It’s her life story,” Novo said, and I said, “Yes. I was thinking that. Let’s go down there. I’d like to see.”

  So we did, and I found myself standing at a table packed sky-high with matching china. An obstacle course of etiquette broken up into affordable lots, so the soup bowls would never again see the saucers, the breakfast cups the milk jug. Nobody likes being dismantled. Nothing wants to get taken apart. I felt sorry for them, even if they were only plates.

  Novo picked up a cup and the pattern on it glowed, almost fluorescent. His touch changed the chemical composition of everything, trailing technicolor, the space around him so much bolder and more vivid than anywhere else. He blinked slowly. All over the garden people stretched like cats and curled back into themselves, suddenly blissful, practically purring. It was as if he’d dropped a euphoric in the tap water. Faces soft as warm butter, the hard locks suddenly gone from jaws, scowls smoothed out like they were pillowcases and Novo was the iron. The woman opposite-but-one, so tightly wound, went all out of character, loose-limbed and agile, and swept like a dancer across the lawn. The knotty old couple glowed and stippled like sunlight in a forest. This little boy was screaming in his stroller and when Novo smiled at him the screaming stopped, just like that, and the boy went straight to sleep, thumb-in-mouth blissful. I wondered if anybody noticed it on me—my right smile back, my long spine, this warm-bath feel, the way everything was precisely and fluidly and perfectly itself, because of him.

  He turned in a circle, and everyone in the garden turned too, exactly the same but just a beat behind him, like an echo. I saw it.

  “Shall we have some fun?” he said.

  “Always.”

  He laughed. “Can you dance?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I bet you’re good,” he said.

  “You reckon?”

  “Sure. But are you as good as us?”

  He was smiling, lifting his arms over his head, tilting his chin while all around, the assembled company copied him and lifted theirs. He turned again, a slower circle, arms out, palms flat, graceful as a dervish, and every single person on that lawn did the same. It was a natural, peaceful thing to watch, like a cornfield bowing in a breeze, or the stop-frame blooming of a rose. If Novo was the stone hitting the water, the people all around us were the ripple.

  “Let’s see,” he said, and he stepped close to me and slipped his arm round my waist, and for a second, all of my thoughts were focused right there, only there, where he was touching me. All over the garden, people reached for one another the way we did, and stood joined and waiting.

  “Ready?” Novo said, and his cheek was as close as it could be to mine without actually touching, and I felt the soft warmth of his skin near mine, and he took my hand.

  Music started up somewhere. The piano was playing itself, and the kids with the china cups were on percussion, a yard-sale orchestra, cutlery and plates, doorstops and old telephones chinking and clattering in perfect time, an odd and delicate, off-kilter, handmade sound. Novo and I spun, and the garden spun, and even with my eyes wide open this was suddenly not a Saturday-morning house-clearance giveaway at all, but some kind of extravagant masked ball, rich with elaborate costume, the sky over our heads heavy with sparkling chandeliers. Bright anoraks became cloaks, and the women in them poured champagne out of watering cans. The knotty old couple glinted with diamonds. Mrs. Midler’s earrings caught the light as the girl wearing them leaned in closely to her partner and poured her smile into his eyes and lifted her chin to laugh. Novo held on to me and we turned with the crowd in the garden in ever-tightening rounds, the air bristling with the sweep and whisper of gowns, the flattened grass sighing, the dance pulling more and more of the world into itself like a whirlpool, quicker and quicker, snapshot and time travel and film set, until what began as a slow circle got spun out and ramped up, feverish and chaotic.

  Novo turned me and turned me and that was when I saw Henry Lake at his window, watching. He was rooted to the spot, the only piece of stillness in that whirlpool, the only one of all of us and everything that wasn’t moving. I looked for him again as we spun and there he was, and a third time, and a fourth. A statue leaning out into the air, his face a dull stone, his mouth open, his startled eyes.

  “Wait,” I said to Novo.

  “Too much?” he said. “Too Cinderella maybe?” and the music changed suddenly to something distorted and industrial, something played on vacuum and food processor and megaphone and iron poker. Berlin nightclub, the sky low and solid as a ceiling, and the crowd changed suddenly, cornered and edgy, closing in, drawing together, hot with effort, claustrophobic, breathless, sweating. Their eyes looked like Charlie Parker’s eyes—quick black buttons, all reflective, absorbing nothing. I shook my head. “Stop.”

  Novo stopped instantly and closed his eyes, and when he inhaled I felt my own lungs ex
pand too. The yard went silent, holding itself at the top of his breath, and a cloud went over the sun so that everything was gray for less than a second, and steel-cold, like a blade. Then the blade flashed, Novo breathed out, and the world went back to what it was before. All the bargain hunters picked up where they left off—trawling through cutlery, sniffing the armpits of coats, counting out change, like nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened. All except Henry, a gargoyle at his window, his eyes the only part of him quick and alive, fixed on Novo, all recognition and devotion but also something more. Something darker. Something like pain. Or fear. I pointed up at him, “Look,” and I held Novo’s arms and turned him slightly, in the right direction, so he could see.

  For a moment he was as still as Henry. The two of them were the same cold column of stone. Everything else inside that moment was still too, the crowd under his spell and also the circling birds and the ants all-day-long seething in the pavement cracks and the nodding flower heads and the leaves that should have been shivering in the breeze.

  Even the breeze.

  Everything stopped. And, where time is anything but linear, I think there’s a place, in or out of the known universe, where that is still happening, where Henry and Novo are still seeing each other for the first time in a garden full of spellbound strangers and a dead old lady’s things, with me as their witness. And what I’m witnessing is strong enough to bring life itself to a halt.

  Novo moved first. Nothing else. He said something under his breath, like “Unbelievable,” and his searchlight eyes turned on me. I felt his fingers, light as feathers, on my arm.

  “Do you know that man in your house?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Who is he? Not family?”

  “No. He was already there. Kind of part of the deal. It’s Henry.”

  “Henry,” he said. “Henry,” and he opened his arms then, high and wide, in something like triumph, and with my own eyes I saw Henry Lake’s weightless body float straight through the window and out into the paralyzed air in bewildered slow motion, moving more like a strung puppet than a man. He got closer, limbs flailing, until he was hovering just above us, his mouth clamped shut, his eyes burning white-hot with the things he wanted desperately to say.

  “What are you doing?” I said to Novo, but he didn’t answer. “Why are you doing that to him?”

  Tears welled up in Henry’s eyes and fell on my face like the beginnings of rain, and his mouth bubbled and trembled like a saucepan lid, and in the corner of the sky I caught a fork of white lightning and I counted to four before the thunder growled.

  I looked at Novo, and I was so ready to call him cruel, so close to getting it wrong, but his eyes were full of tears too, so I bit my tongue, and held still, and just watched. He steadied himself to guide Henry down, and the old man landed lightly in his arms. So insubstantial and frail, hardly more than a heap of clothing. His panic vanished. He rested his head on Novo’s shoulder like a child, and Novo folded over him, a bird in sleep, and they were quiet, and they glowed like soft bulbs, there on the stopped lawn, their heads together, just touching. They made a circuit, and the current that passed through them was silent and lit with bliss.

  I don’t know how long it lasted. I got lost just watching. Even to see it was the prize. When it was over, Novo opened his eyes, and in the time it took for him to blink the world sprang forward, catching up with itself like a piece of pulled elastic, stretched tight to its absolute limit and then let go—the birds circling, the ants seething, the nodding flowers and shivering leaves. Henry was at his window again, order restored, curtains fluttering, Charlie Parker hopping on the sill. He and Novo were still watching each other but there was no hint of cold stone anymore. All I could see in the air between them was a trace of hot light, fine as thread, and glinting like fire.

  Novo reached for my hand again and held on to it, and my veins ran with warm honey. He laughed softly to himself and shook his head slowly from side to side, one hand still on mine, the other cradling his own cheek. He didn’t speak.

  “Novo,” I said. “What just happened?”

  Quick pulses of light still surged beneath his skin. The look on his face said he’d just seen a miracle, this miracle boy. I remember thinking that must mean there are infinite levels of wonder, like a never-ending staircase, so that everyone gets to look up at something like that, whoever they are, and I really hoped I was onto something. I really wanted to be right.

  Novo hadn’t spoken. “Can’t you tell me?” I said, and he shook his head and his voice was soft and quiet when he said, “Not yet.”

  Under the high sun, his shadow was pure light. He was the magnifying glass, focusing the heat onto pinpoints of ground that simmered and caught behind him. The same pure light was coming from where Henry stood, billowing out into the morning in clouds of dazzle and luminous smoke. Novo picked me up suddenly and swung me around so the rest of the garden was a blur of color. He was a disco ball on the ceiling, setting off quick bouncing sparks of fire all around us. When he put me down, the light pouring from Henry’s window began to splutter and fade, faintly at first and then with gathering speed. I could still see the bright thread, but the thick clouds were diffusing into the sky, a paintbrush dipped in water.

  I pictured the Henry I’d met, stuck in those rooms with that dodgy bird and that rank soup and that rickety old laptop, pretending to travel. How could an old man like that have such an impact on this boy?

  Novo was still looking up at him.

  “What are you thinking?” I said.

  “I’m wondering what I can do. I’m hoping he’s all right.”

  “He never leaves the house,” I said. “I mean, never.”

  “No. He can’t.”

  “Oh, you knew that already?”

  He smiled. “I’m not even sure.”

  All the people in the garden, helping themselves to things, and not one of them looked up and saw the thread of light, those brilliant, fading clouds. Not one of them noticed the tiny fires that peppered the lawn. It’s staggering, the things we miss when we’re not searching for them, but facing the wrong direction, looking down.

  “Am I the only one who can see this?” I said, and Novo looked at me then, his arms still round my waist.

  “Yes, Jude,” he said. “You are the only one.”

  He moved and his shadow moved and the tiny fires followed. They burned a hole in one of Mrs. Midler’s evening dresses. They ate through someone’s raincoat, the plastic blistering and puckering in the heat.

  “You’re setting fire to everything,” I said. “Look.”

  “Am I?” he said.

  The garden began to empty around us, people drifting away with their new junk, the party suddenly over. Upstairs, Henry’s window rattled shut.

  Novo said, “I’d like to check on him. Let’s go back inside,” and the glow in him faded too. All the fires went out at once and his shadow went back to what it should have been, same as everyone else’s, just an absence of light.

  FOURTEEN

  The house was dead quiet and we filled it with sound. Our steps on the floorboards, the creak of us on the stairs. Novo breathing, a seashell sound, in and out, soft and constant. I could hear Henry’s ticking clocks. His door was wide open for a change, bright sunlight streaming onto the landing in strong, straight lines like someone had marked it there with a ruler.

  He was feeding the gulls. Three of them clashed and wheeled outside his window—wild and powerful that close up, their wide wingspan, their sharp, watchful heads.

  “Henry?” Novo said.

  He didn’t turn round. “Come in, both of you. Come in.”

  Charlie Parker tried to fly through the walls when we went in there, went at it like a fly at a window, wings hammering away.

  “It’s okay,” Henry said. “It’s okay, Charlie. Calm down.”

 
I looked at Novo. I asked him, without speaking, what that was about, and without speaking, he said he didn’t know. We watched as Charlie Parker panicked and Henry made clicking noises and held a thin strip of fish out the window. One of the birds angled sharply in the glare and snatched it out of his hand with its precise beak. The pins on the big map of the world glinted in the bright light.

  “Don’t be scared of him, Jude,” Henry said. “He won’t hurt you.” And I couldn’t say then, in that moment, if he meant the feeding bird or Novo.

  “I’m not scared. I’m not scared of him at all.”

  “I’ve known these gulls since they were young,” Henry said. “I knew their parents and their grandparents. Every year they come and visit. I can tell by their markings. The red spot on this one’s beak. That one’s mottled wing. They are seven or eight now. Did you know that seagulls can live to be fifteen?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  “It’s in their nature to come back,” Henry said. “Even a caged bird turns like a compass when the time comes. And it’s in my nature to stay here and wait.”

  Novo still hadn’t spoken. He was watching Henry so carefully, with so much focus, same as the seagulls at the window. They cut and hovered at a distance, responding to his every move, the exact same height in the sky as his bony, outstretched arm. They cut and hovered, and Novo watched, and it seemed like nothing else in the world was happening that was more important than that.