Chapter Sixteen
SIXTEEN
Ted manages to accidentally doze off, in that way that means he wakes up surprised, not knowing how long he’s been asleep. Just a few seconds, maybe? Minutes? What time is it? That’s when he realizes how exhausted he is, as he blinks groggily up at the lights in the ceiling of the train. He was woken by a drumming sound. He looks around for a while before he figures out what it is: Louisa is tapping her fingers on the armrest, restless as a wasp in a jar.
“When’s the train going to stop again? I need to pee!” she hisses.
He stares at her as if she’s joking, but she most certainly isn’t.
“There… there are toilets on the train,” he says, as gently as he can, because he doesn’t want her to feel stupid.
“Are you kidding? I thought they only had those on trains in movies!” she says loudly, apparently not feeling stupid at all, and then he can’t help thinking that it might be appropriate to feel a little bit stupid after all. But he points toward a door with the word “Toilet” on it, and she bounces away as if someone had yelled, “Free marshmallows!”
Once she’s gone, Ted sits alone and marvels at how silently an eighteen-year-old can get to her feet, without so much as a single groan or creak of the spine. When you grow up and see how naturally a teenager moves, you realize the logic of Stone Age people dying when they were twenty-seven, because from then on, the body does everything it can do to die. You think you’re going to be young forever, but suddenly you reach an age where getting up from a chair can’t be taken for granted, it requires planning, and Ted has now reached that age. Not so long ago he had gotten a stiff neck when he sneezed. “You’re starting to get old,” the artist had grinned, and Ted had felt so insulted that he blurted out: “Says someone who’s actually dying!”
He had instantly felt so ashamed that he covered his mouth with both hands, and oh, how the artist coughed then, because he was laughing so much.
Ted nudges the box of ashes and his voice breaks as he says:
“I can understand what you saw in her. I know who she reminded you of.”
The train gains speed, the world flickers past outside, first houses and roads, then farms and fields. Soon trees and darkness. It’s a long way from here to the sea, unbelievably long.
The toilet door flies open and Louisa comes back. Ted wipes his cheeks and tries to hide by looking out the window. She lands on the seat beside him as if it were the long-jump pit at the Olympics.
“Why do you look so sad? Have you been crying?” she asks.
He wipes his eyes hard with his wrist and mutters irritably: “No.”
“Is it because of your hair?” Louisa asks with deep sympathy.
At first he doesn’t understand at all, but then she looks just a few seconds too long at the top of his forehead, so he mumbles: “No. No! No? Why… why do you say that?”
She shrugs her shoulders nonchalantly.
“I just guessed. You were sitting there looking at your reflection in the window, so I thought it was because of your hair.”
“I wasn’t looking at my reflection !” Ted declares.
Then he does his very best not to look as if he’s looking at the reflection of his forehead while looking at the reflection of his forehead to check how far back his hairline has actually crept now. He thinks of what Joar used to say: You know you’re old when you have to use soap on your head and shampoo on your ass.
Louisa interrupts him amiably enough with a far more important question:
“Where does the poop go?”
“Excuse me?”
“The poop people poop on the train, where does it go?”
Ted clears his throat the way the most uncomfortable man in the world would clear his throat.
“I… I assume there’s some sort of container beneath the train.”
“What happens if that gets full, then? Do they just empty the poop onto the tracks, or what?”
He looks almost shocked by the idea.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
She thinks for a long time before asking, very seriously:
“What if it’s really windy outside? So if you were walking next to the rails, you’d get a poop tornado right in your face?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” he confesses.
“How can you not have thought about it? It’s all I can think of now!”
He sighs so deeply that it’s a miracle the fields of wheat outside the train window don’t get flattened.
“Maybe… maybe we could have a little silence break for a while?”
She shrugs her shoulders and mutters:
“Okay. Sure.”
She takes a sketch pad out of her backpack, makes herself comfortable in her seat, and puts her feet up on the backrest of the seat in front of her. Ted really, really tries not to point out that that isn’t allowed, but soon every field all the way to the horizon gets flattened when he sighs:
“Can you please take your feet down from the seat?”
“Why?” Louisa asks, uncomprehendingly.
“You’ll make it dirty,” he says.
She looks at him, then at the back of the seat, then at him again.
“What if I take my shoes off, then?”
“That isn’t what it’s about.”
“So what is it about, then?”
“It’s about not sitting with your feet on the back of the seat in front!”
“Why not?”
“Because only badly behaved kids do that!”
She looks at the back of the seat, then at him.
“Okay. Backrest police.”
The train brakes, creaks, and rocks as it pulls into a station. Louisa notes that Ted keeps looking at the time.
“Why do you keep looking at your watch?” she asks.
“To check if the train is on time,” he replies, more irritably than she thinks is strictly reasonable.
“Are you in a hurry?”
“No.”
“So why do you care if it’s on time, then?”
“I always care about things being on time.”
She looks at him as if he were crazy, which he really doesn’t appreciate. He contemplates going to the bathroom, then realizes what a nuisance it would be to stand up, and decides that it isn’t worth it. Louisa takes a cigarette out of her backpack and balances it between her lips as she draws.
“Are you out of your mind? You can’t smoke in here!” Ted says instantly.
“Look, for someone who wanted to sit in silence, you’re making an awful lot of noise,” Louisa points out.
“Surely you understand that you can’t smoke in here,” Ted hisses, so she hisses back:
“I haven’t even lit it! I don’t even have a lighter! I don’t even smoke!”
“Why do you have cigarettes, then?”
“They’re not mine! They belong to my friend Fish!”
They stare at each other, the thirty-nine-year-old and the eighteen-year-old, with funerals in their eyes. It’s hard to cope with seeing yourself in someone else.
“Okay,” he mumbles.
“Okay!” she mumbles.
“You shouldn’t smoke, you’re too young,” he persists sullenly as he looks out the window.
“Why?” she says, looking down at her drawing.
“Because it will kill you.”
“If you wait until you’re old enough to smoke, you die even if you don’t smoke,” she replies, which is irritatingly hard to argue with.
But she does at least take her feet down from the seat, and removes the cigarette from her mouth.
“Thank you,” Ted says quietly.
“Are you married?” she asks, without raising her eyes from her drawing.
“No.”
“Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“What a waste.”
“Sorry?”
“I said it’s a waste, being as annoying as you are, you might as well be someone’s annoying dad.”
Ted sighs and closes his eyes, in the futile hope that she will too.
Louisa stays quiet for as long as she can possibly manage—so something like a minute and a half—before she asks, “What sort of flowers are they?”
Ted opens his eyes and wrinkles his nose with such surprise that his glasses slip off.
“Flowers?”
Louisa carries on drawing, lets her hair fall down and hide her face, as if the question embarrasses her.
“On… on the painting. The ones lying next to you on the pier. What sort of flowers are they?”
It’s the first time he’s heard her sound uncertain, as if she’s worried she’s wrong and might appear stupid. Ted’s shoulders slump, it’s a burden to hear yourself in others.
“Hardly anyone ever sees those flowers,” he admits gently.
“I didn’t see them until I saw the painting in real life, you can’t see them on the postcard, you have to stand really close,” she says quietly.
Ted nods thoughtfully, then leans forward, lifts the painting carefully out of its box, and looks at the tiny pink and purple marks next to the teenagers on the pier. Then he whispers:
“Geraniums and lavender. It was Joar’s mom who—”
Louisa suddenly forgets to feel embarrassed and changes back into an overexcited child again, and exclaims:
“Joar? The one who farted?”
Ted’s brain strongly disapproves, the way an adult brain is supposed to, but the corners of his mouth can’t help twitching.
“Yes… yes, Joar used to do incredible farts. He could blow holes in his jeans. Maybe that was why his mom grew so many flowers, now I come to think about it, it was probably the only way to survive when you have a son who’s like a chemical weapon.”
He laughs, so does Louisa.
“She sounds like a good mom,” she says.
Ted nods, but sadly now, his muscles unable to maintain the laughter. His face isn’t used to it. When you get old, gravity pulls the corners of your mouth down, the road to a smile grows longer.
“Yes, she really was remarkable at growing things, everything smelled so good around her. She managed to help everything… survive.”
His mouth drowns in wrinkles at the end of the sentence.
“You must all have liked her very much if her flowers were included in the painting,” Louisa declares.
Ted cleans his crooked glasses to give himself a chance to blink more slowly.
“Yes. Everyone loved her. We couldn’t understand how her and Joar’s home could smell so good, that something so lovely could exist in a place where someone so evil lived. Because Joar’s old man was… he was big and strong, but he was a tiny man. He used to beat Joar and his mother like they weren’t even human beings, he…”
Ted falls silent again, firstly because he doesn’t know how to describe men like that, but then because he realizes that Louisa probably already knows all about them.
“I understand,” she whispers.
“I’m sorry that you do,” he whispers back.
She smiles at that, strangely enough. She’s young, it’s still so easy for her, it doesn’t cost her body anything.
“Geraniums and lavender,” she repeats dreamily from behind her hair, the words falling down onto her sketch pad, and then she says something quite remarkable:
“Thank you.”
“What for?” Ted wonders.
She shrugs her shoulders.
“For telling me things. And for letting me come with you.”
Ted says nothing for so long that she almost taps him on the nose to see if he’s still breathing. In the end he blinks and mumbles:
“Joar was actually the shortest of us, but he looks tallest in the painting.”
Louisa looks up and tucks her hair away from her eyes.
“Even shorter than you? Seriously? What are you, hobbits?”
“I…,” Ted begins, feeling a little insulted, but she quickly explains:
“I mean, hobbits are people in The Lord of the Rings , they’re really short!”
“Thanks, I know what hobbits are,” Ted sighs.
Louisa rolls her eyes.
“Well, sorry I tried to explain, then! You’re really old, so how am I supposed to know what films you’ve seen?”
Then she disappears behind her hair again, adding quickly:
“Maybe Joar was bigger in the painting because that’s how you saw him. Fish felt big to me, even though I was much taller. People think it’s bad if someone makes you feel small, but it really isn’t.”
Ted doesn’t respond. He just looks down at the box of ashes and concludes, however much it annoys him, that the artist was right. She’s one of us.