My Friends

Chapter Eighteen

EIGHTEEN

Everyone should be allowed to be fourteen for far longer than a year. There are so many other ages we could skip instead: thirty-nine, for instance, is an age that Ted would happily have done without. He feels a sudden urge to pee far more often now than he was prepared for, his body has started to wake him at night, he presumes it’s getting its revenge because it’s annoyed he’s keeping it alive. One time the artist read an article suggesting that people will soon be able to live until they’re one hundred and fifty, which Ted thought sounded unbearable, because at this rate he wouldn’t be doing anything by then except peeing.

The train shakes and rocks and groans, as if it really hates being a train. Its movements aren’t helpful to someone who needs to pee, so in the end Ted gives up and decides to go to the bathroom after all. It isn’t a decision he takes lightly, the various parts of his skeleton sound like sugar cubes being trodden on as he unfolds his body and squeezes past Louisa. The bathroom is cramped and the seat is too narrow in a way that you really don’t think about when you’re young. He wipes every surface before he sits down, hitting his head on various parts of the furnishings four times, and when he is finished he closes the lid carefully before flushing. Then he hears the artist’s laughter inside his head, because he was always amused by Ted’s fear of germs. The artist refused to believe that if you flushed with the lid open, all the germs got sprayed about, which drove Ted mad. Something else that drove him mad was when, after he had been living with the artist for two weeks, he was going to wash the bedspread and the artist had exclaimed: “You’re supposed to WASH it?” He’d been using the same one for years. When he noticed that Ted looked ready to throw up at the very thought, he promised: “I’ll wash it tomorrow!” but Ted dismissed the idea gently, saying: “No need. I’m going to burn it tonight.”

The brain is so peculiar, the things that get stuck in it.

He leaves the bathroom and weaves back to his seat. Louisa stands up so he can squeeze past, back to his seat by the window. He hopes naively that he might pretend to fall asleep, but there’s no chance of that, he doesn’t even have time to close his eyes before she asks:

“Do you normally celebrate Easter?”

“No,” he sighs.

She nods understandingly.

“Don’t you like Jesus? Some people who don’t like Jesus don’t like Easter. But you know who else probably didn’t like Easter? Jesus.”

“I have nothing against Easter. Or Jesus,” Ted says.

She considers this for a moment, then asks:

“Don’t you like eggs? Some people don’t like eggs. I mean, I don’t LOVE eggs, but we painted some at school when I was little and I liked that. One time I asked the teacher if I could paint my eggs like ninjas, and when she said yes, I just painted all the eggs white. She didn’t get the joke.”

Ted doesn’t respond, and she takes that as a sign that he’s definitely interested in hearing more.

“Fish didn’t like eating eggs, because she thought it was disgusting to eat an unborn chicken. But you know what she did eat? Chicken! And then she said I was the weird one, because when I was little I thought that Santa and Jesus were the same person. I got reeeally confused the first time I heard someone talk about the Crucifixion.”

“Okay,” Ted nods tersely, in the hope that that might suffice to end the conversation, which of course it absolutely doesn’t.

“Why do you have a limp?” she asks.

“I don’t have a limp,” he says, as a subtle signal that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Yes, you do! I noticed it earlier, when you ran along the platform!” she replies, as if she wouldn’t recognize a subtle signal if it hit her in the face.

“I was in an incident a few years ago,” he sighs.

“What does that mean?”

“An accident.”

“Hello, Mister Complicated, have you ever thought about just saying the words you actually mean? What happened?”

He massages his eyelids.

“I fell.”

She waits for him to go on, but nothing happens, so she mutters:

“Great story! Really engaging!”

He bites his lips, first the top one, then the bottom one.

“It’s a long…,” he begins.

“Oh no, not a long story! Not when I have so much to do right now!” she retorts with a dramatic gesture around the train carriage.

He glares accusingly at the box of ashes, as if this is the ashes’ fault. He feels exhausted. His heart has broken. He doesn’t know what gets into him, but before he knows it he finds himself telling the truth:

“I got stabbed.”

Louisa’s eyes grow as large as rich men’s wristwatches.

“Are you kidding?”

Then Ted looks up and does something very, very strange. He makes a joke.

“If I was kidding, I would have asked you how to get a one-armed man out of a tree.”

Louisa is so surprised by this that at first she sits there in silence, then when she does start laughing, she sprays saliva on Ted’s jacket. He panics and tries to wipe it off with his sleeve, and then she laughs even louder:

“Stop it! You’re just rubbing it in! You’re making it worse!”

He certainly isn’t laughing when he asks:

“Can’t you even laugh like a normal person?”

Louisa rolls her eyes.

“Do you always moan this much? Is that why someone stabbed you?”

“No!” he snaps.

She shrugs her shoulders apologetically.

“Okay. Why, then?”

He carries on rubbing his jacket, and regrets every single word the moment he opens his mouth:

“It was… it was a student at the school where I worked. He tried to stab another student. I intervened.”

“Not so smart,” she says, trying to sound funny even though she’s actually a bit impressed.

“No, not so smart,” he agrees, and closes his eyes.

It’s somewhat ironic, perhaps, that more than twenty years after Joar hid his knife in the flower box, another teenager had stabbed Ted. He was already fragile before that, but afterward he thought that even the wind had sharp edges. He still has nightmares about both knives.

“Did you come close to dying?” Louisa asks.

“No,” he lies.

Louisa peers at him skeptically.

“You got stabbed but didn’t come close to dying?”

“It was… it’s a long story… I lost a lot of blood,” he grunts.

“But you didn’t die,” she concludes.

“You should be a detective, nothing gets past you,” he concludes in response.

She doesn’t seem offended by his sarcasm. He can’t help thinking that she ought to be a little offended. Typical teenagers—for a generation that seems to take offense at everything, they really are pretty hard to insult.

“So you saved that student’s life?” she asks.

“It’s hard to answer that,” he sighs.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a hypothetical question.”

She doesn’t seem particularly concerned about what a hypothetical question is.

“Were you scared?” she asks.

“I can’t answer that either,” he says.

“Because it’s another one of those hypnotic questions?”

Ted finally stops rubbing his jacket, his chest rises and falls with a resignation that you probably need to have begun losing your hair to understand.

“No. Because the question presupposes that I stopped being scared.”

Louisa says nothing for all of three minutes after that. Possibly a personal record, actually.

“When did it happen?”

“Just over two years ago.”

She looks at the box of ashes.

“Was that when you went and lived with him?”

Ted polishes his glasses to give himself an excuse to blink a thousand times. Then far more words pour out of him than he is expecting:

“Yes. He… he’d been asking me to come and live with him for several years, but I always said that I actually had a proper job, I didn’t live in a little Peter Pan world like him. But when I got out of the hospital, I didn’t know what to do, I was too frightened to go back to school. I… I really needed a Peter Pan world just then. So I went. And when I got there, it was the first time in forever that I slept through a whole night.”

His fingers are shaking as he puts his glasses back on, the tape has started to come loose and they’re crooked again. When he woke up after the operation, the artist was the first person he called, and it wasn’t until long afterward that the artist confessed that he had been so drunk that he had almost drowned in his bathtub the night before.

“Then what happened?” Louisa wonders, after waiting patiently for all of like twelve seconds.

“I stayed with him for a few weeks, then they turned into months, and then he got sick, so…”

He bites his top lip, then his bottom lip, then his tongue.

“So you never went back home?” Louisa says.

“He was my home,” Ted whispers.

Louisa is quiet for an eternity, maybe almost a whole minute, before asking:

“Were you the only person looking after him?”

“No, no, he had his doctors at the hospital, nurses, loads of…”

She shakes her head.

“No, I mean the only one of his friends. I just… assumed that if someone is as famous as he was, then they must have loads of people taking care of them.”

Ted glances out the window. He thinks about the beautiful apartment, furnished by a famous interior designer at incredible cost. He remembers the vast dining table with sixteen chairs around it, only one of them slightly worn.

“People worshipped his art. He was loved by millions of people. But there’s a difference between being loved and receiving love,” Ted says, but quickly checks himself, as if this time it’s his brain that is starting to slam doors shut and pointing out that surely this is enough personal information now?

Louisa recognizes that look.

“Can you sleep through the night now?” she asks curiously.

“No,” he admits.

“Me neither. Not the way I could sleep when Fish was in the same room, I got used to hearing her breathing.”

Ted looks down at the box of ashes. Then he glances at Louisa, smiles weakly, and says:

“He used to snore.”

“Fish too! Like, really badly! It sounded like someone strangling a dinosaur!”

Ted laughs loudly. It makes his throat hurt, as if his body has forgotten how to do it properly.

“Why aren’t you still living in his apartment?” she asks.

“We sold it. We sold everything he owned to have enough to buy back that painting. That’s his entire inheritance,” Ted says softly.

Her voice sounds heavier when she replies:

“He should have given it to someone else. I don’t know anything about art.”

Ted glances at her sketch pad. She’s been drawing cockroaches.

“How long have you had that postcard of the painting?”

“All my life, pretty much.”

“How many different foster homes have you lived in?”

Her face disappears behind her hair again.

“Don’t know. Loads. It doesn’t matter.”

“And you never lost the postcard?”

“Never!” she exclaims in horror, as if it were insane to even think such a thing.

Ted nods slowly.

“Then you know all about art. More than anyone I’ve ever met.”

It’s a good thing she’s sitting down then, otherwise she would have fallen over.

“He should have given the picture to someone else, someone who’s been to one of those fancy art schools, someone who’s good at painting…,” she whispers.

“He didn’t want to give it to someone who was good, he wanted to give it to you,” Ted replies.

It takes a few seconds for Louisa to realize that’s a joke. Then she bursts out laughing, spraying more saliva on his jacket, and Ted regrets being funny.

“Sorry,” she giggles.

He takes a breath so deep that he almost ends up in the seat behind his before he replies:

“He often used to say that the only time he felt like himself was when he was painting. Everything else, life, reality, that was just an act. Only art was real for him. And when he met you… well, he saw himself. I hadn’t seen him draw skulls for several years until I saw that wall in the alley. He told me at the hospital that he loved your cockroaches. He said he’d never seen anyone paint insects so beautifully.”

The thirty-nine-year-old and the eighteen-year-old avoid each other’s eyes for a long time after that. Her fingertips stroke the sketch pad on her lap.

“There was an old woman, one of those rich assholes at the auction, who shouted that I was a cockroach when I got thrown out. But cockroaches are survivors. That woman is going to die in her ugly summer house, but the cockroaches will live on.”

Ted smiles.

“You’re one of them now, you know?”

Louisa frowns.

“One of what?”

“You’re a rich asshole,” Ted smiles, nodding at the painting.

Louisa screws her whole face up. Then she nods, suddenly much more cheerful.

“In that case, I’m no longer homeless! Because when rich people sleep outdoors, it isn’t homelessness, it’s camping!”

She feels like telling him that she really likes his laugh, but she doesn’t quite know how to say that.

“Camping,” Ted repeats with a chuckle.

He feels like telling her that the artist didn’t give her the painting because it was his inheritance, he gave it to her because he realized that she was the inheritance. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people. But he doesn’t quite know how to say that.

The train rattles on. Louisa says nothing for maybe four and a half minutes. Okay, probably closer to four, to be honest.

“Do you want to ask me anything?” she asks.

“Maybe not right now,” Ted sighs toward the window.

“Bit rude. I’ve asked you loads of things,” she points out.

Of course, it is practically impossible to argue with that, so Ted looks at the time, takes a deep breath, and asks:

“Okay. Why was your friend called Fish?”

Louisa brightens up, as if she has just found out there are toilets on trains.

“Because her eyes were, like, really far apart, so some idiots at our foster home called her ‘the Hammerhead Shark,’ and she hated it, because sharks are predators and she didn’t want to be one of them. So she and I decided she should be a fish instead!”

Ted tries really, really hard, but unfortunately he can’t stop himself from saying:

“Sharks are fish.”

“No. They’re mammals,” Louisa corrects amiably.

“No. Dolphins and whales are mammals. Sharks are fish,” Ted corrects, rather less amiably.

“You’re kind of spoiling the story,” she points out.

“Okay,” he sighs.

“Okay!” she goes on cheerily. “So: she wanted to be a fish because fish are like birds, only underwater. They’re free. If you get what I mean?”

He nods, a little less unfriendly now, but doesn’t ask anything more, so she replies to the question she thinks he should have asked instead:

“Do you know what Fish called me? The Giant! Because everyone else called me ‘Monster’ because I was the biggest girl in the house, and I hated it, but when she said ‘Giant,’ it sounded… kind of powerful.”

The train lurches and the box of ashes on the floor rocks. Ted bends over and catches it, then can’t quite bring himself to let go of it. His brain certainly thinks there have been more than enough questions for one day, but despite that, his lips move tentatively, and out comes:

“What happened to your parents?”

Louisa looks up as if she’d like him to ask again, just because it felt so nice that he cares.

“My dad took off before I was born. He’s dead now. He got killed in a fight in a bar or something. He wasn’t a good person, so I’m probably lucky he didn’t want to be my dad.”

“And your mom?” Ted asks.

Louisa draws harder and harder on her sketch pad.

“Well, I don’t think she was a bad person. I remember she used to sing, or at least I think I remember that she sang. And we had a TV! So she can’t have been a completely bad mom, because then she would have sold the TV.”

“What happened to her?” Ted hears himself ask, because now his brain has evidently given up all hope of stopping this conversation from continuing.

Louisa spins her pencil between her fingers, faster and faster.

“When I was five she left me with some neighbors and disappeared. She wasn’t a bad person, I think, she was just… broken. Like some bits of her were missing, if you get what I mean? The neighbors were nice, but they didn’t want a child. And then there was a problem, because when they called the police, the police thought they’d kidnapped me. And then they ended up in prison. Not because of me, though! They ended up in prison because they stole stuff. But they weren’t bad people either, I don’t think. I think we only had a TV because they’d stolen it for us.”

Ted’s voice is gentle, like he’s trying not to scare a bird, when he asks:

“How do you know all this?”

“A woman from Social Services told me. She said everyone deserves to know their background.”

“How old were you then?”

“Seven, maybe.”

She’s still sitting in a train seat, but for just the blink of an eye, Ted can see her sitting on a pier.

“That’s very young to find out all about yourself,” he says.

She shrugs her shoulders.

“I think the woman from Social Services drank quite a lot. Like my mom.”

“I’m sorry,” Ted says, honestly.

The pencil spins and spins in Louisa’s hand.

“Don’t be. My mom drank herself to death without me. If I had been with her when she drank herself to death, maybe no one would have found me.”

“So you ended up in foster care?”

“Yes.”

“What was that like?”

“It was okay,” Louisa says, in the way you do if you have so many bruises and scars all over your body that eventually you can’t be bothered to think it might not be normal.

“I’m… sorry,” Ted repeats.

If he had been more comfortable touching people, perhaps he would have given her a hug. If she had been more comfortable having people touch her, maybe she would have liked it. But as it is, they remain seated where they are, with ten inches of air between them.

As many as seven minutes may pass this time, Louisa deserves credit for that. But then the conductor goes past, a man roughly the same age as Ted, but with more gray in his beard. Ted watches him, and Louisa watches Ted watching and grins. When Ted notices, he blushes.

“What sort of men do you fall in love with?” she asks.

“That really is none of your business!” he exclaims so abruptly that the other passengers in the carriage turn around, and the conductor glances over his shoulder, and Ted blushes so hard that you could have cooked waffles in his wrinkles.

“Okay, okay, oh my God, sorry for asking,” Louisa grins, then she looks at the conductor and declares confidently: “No, I get it, you could probably never fall in love with someone like him. He’s not your type.”

Affronted, Ted glares at her and mutters back:

“He might be! I mean, you don’t know anything about that!”

Louisa shakes her head thoughtfully.

“No, because there are loads of men like him, if you could fall in love with one of those you’d have found one already. Then you wouldn’t be alone.”

The way Ted looks at her isn’t entirely dissimilar to the way you would look at a spider on a sandwich. Then he looks at the box of ashes, as if the person inside has just said something about unwashed bedspreads. Then he takes such a deep breath that the paint almost peels from the walls of the carriage, before quickly wiping his eyes and admitting quietly:

“The geniuses. I only fall in love with the geniuses.”

Louisa’s face lights up.

“Fish was like that too!”

Ted nods slowly and says:

“That was why she loved you.”

The words come so quickly that at first Louisa doesn’t understand what he means.

“No, I mean, Fish fell for BOYS who were…,” she protests.

“I know what you meant. I’m just saying you’re wrong,” he says.

That sets a new record for the kindest thing an adult has said to her.

The conductor leaves the carriage and Ted does his best not to look at him as he goes, which doesn’t go very well. Louisa does her best not to ask any more questions, and that doesn’t go well either.

“What are you going to write on his gravestone?” she asks, nodding toward the box of ashes.

“I don’t know,” Ted lies.

She wrinkles her nose.

“He was super famous, it has to say something! Like, something poetic!”

“He was also an idiot, so he suggested it should say: ‘Here lies a man who ate his vegetables but died anyway,’?” Ted sighs.

Louisa laughs, then says slightly disappointedly:

“You’ll never put that. It’s a shame that the boring one out of the pair of you survived.”

Ted does his best not to smile.

“I love you and I believe in you.”

“What?” Louisa wonders, rather shocked.

“That’s what I’m going to put on the gravestone. ‘I love you and I believe in you.’ It’s something we always used to say to each other.”

Louisa is so taken aback that all she can manage to say is:

“Nice.”

“Thanks.”

“What subject did you used to teach?” she asks.

“History.”

“Seriously?”

“It would be a pretty strange thing to lie about,” he points out.

“Tell me one, then!”

“What?”

“A history.”

“About… what?”

Louisa leans forward and carefully lifts the painting out of the box again.

“Tell me about him! Tell me about the painting! Tell me about how he became world-famous, tell me about… I don’t know! I’ve thought about all of you so much that Fish said I was a bit of a psychopath. She said it wasn’t normal to fantasize about three strange boys on a pier this much, because you could be murderers or anything!”

“Or kidnappers,” Ted points out.

He presses desperately against the window to save his jacket when she starts laughing. Then she points toward the pier in the picture.

“So that’s you? And that’s Joar? And that’s… him.”

Ted sadly shakes his head.

“No. That’s Ali,” he corrects.

“What?”

Ted sighs so deeply that the sigh has another sigh in the middle of it.

“If you want to hear the story of that painting, really hear it, then I’ll have to start by telling you that you’re wrong. Everyone who looks at it is wrong. Those aren’t three boys sitting on the pier.”

Louisa stares at the painting, stares at Ted, stares at the painting. And then Ted does something he never thought he would do again. He tells the whole story, right from the beginning.