Chapter Twenty
TWENTY
Ted doesn’t mention that last bit to Louisa. Nothing about the knife.
Joar hid it at the bottom of his wardrobe that winter, and when spring came he hid it in the dirt under the flowers in the flower box outside his bedroom window, and then in his backpack. He didn’t touch it until the summer, when August was approaching and his old man would soon be on vacation from his job in the harbor. Joar kept hoping that he would think of something else, that someone would come and save him and his mom, like in Ted’s superhero comics. But no one came, and there was no way they would survive another summer.
The train stops for a short while at a gray station. A plastic bag dances in the wind on the platform. In the painting on the floor, the birds fly in the sky, chili sauce glints in the light, the three friends on the pier laugh at a fart, and the artist is all around them. In every brushstroke. Ted watches the plastic bag’s erratic flight on the other side of the window and bites his lip, he has never told anyone the story of his childhood, there’s a kind of boundary for the sort of emotions you’re prepared to share with others when you’re hardly comfortable sharing them with yourself. After all, Ted is the kind of man who can hardly bear waiters asking him how the food is, because he thinks it’s slightly too intimate a question.
“I like Ali!” Louisa declares beside him.
“What a surprise,” Ted replies.
“Why is it a surprise?” Louisa asks seriously.
Ted lets out a middle-aged sigh, which is a quite particular type of sigh, it takes far more effort than a teenage sigh.
“Doesn’t your generation understand irony?” he says.
“Does YOUR generation understand irony?” she asks back at once, and he can’t work out if she’s being ironic or not.
So he presumes she wins.
“You have a lot in common. You and Joar too. They would have liked you,” he admits.
“Thanks!” Louisa exclaims.
“That isn’t altogether a compliment, they didn’t have five functional brain cells between them, those two,” Ted replies sullenly, but the corners of his mouth are bad at lying, so she has time to notice the smile.
“Still, thanks,” Louisa grins.
Then she goes on drawing behind her hanging hair, and Ted looks at his watch, a little frustrated. The train has been standing at this station for so long, they’re behind schedule now. The plastic bag dances along the platform, as if mocking his anxiety, as if trying to say: Look here! See how easy it is for me to make myself happy!
The artist and Joar and Ali would no doubt all have laughed at that, if they were here—the fact that Ted is so neurotic that he can feel envious of a plastic bag.
He goes to the bathroom again. He seems to have reached the age where he needs to go even though he hasn’t drunk anything since the last time, as if his body is inventing its own liquid, when you’re approaching forty perhaps you start to melt internally. Louisa sees him come back out, but to her surprise he turns the other way and disappears into the next carriage. For a moment she starts to panic because she thinks he’s going to get off the train, because where else would he be going? When he comes back after a while with a newspaper and a Coca-Cola, she stares at him as if he’s just pulled a rabbit out of a hat.
“Where did you get THAT from?” she exclaims, because she can’t see a damn hat anywhere.
“The restaurant car,” he replies, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“I thought those only existed in films,” Louisa mumbles in astonishment.
“No, they exist in… trains,” he says.
“I really, really ought to have learned to break into trains instead of cars,” she declares.
“I don’t know if you like Coca-Cola?” he says, as if he’s never met a teenager in his entire life.
“Are you kidding?” she says, snatching it out of his hand like a happy raccoon.
She and Fish used to steal Coca-Cola from the shop occasionally, but only when they had something to celebrate, for instance, if a really idiotic guy had just moved out of the foster home. Or, come to that, any guy at all. The soda is ice-cold on her teeth and she laughs when she gets brain freeze. Ted laughs too, without any sound, she just sees his chest rocking in the seat beside her.
“Have you heard of the internet?” she asks, staring at the newspaper in his hand.
“I like newspapers,” he mutters.
“Do you think that might be because you’re so damn young? Do you find traveling by train difficult too? Do you miss a horse and buggy?” she asks.
“Funny,” he says.
“It’s called sarcasm, didn’t your generation have that?” she grins.
He is about to say something smart in reply, like that newspapers are better than the internet because you can’t roll up the internet and hit someone in the face with it, but he doesn’t have time. Because they’re interrupted by the conductor entering the carriage to check the tickets of new passengers. Louisa looks up and hisses, a little too loudly:
“You should talk to him!”
“Sorry?” Ted says, insulted.
“The conductor! You should give him your phone number!” Louisa suggests.
“I most certainly should not,” Ted informs her.
Louisa nods eagerly.
“Yes, because you should meet a man who isn’t a genius! Do you want me to talk to him?”
“No! Absolutely not! And what do you mean by that? You don’t know anything about him! Maybe he is a genius!” Ted whispers, his voice nervous now, like when you see a monkey carrying a bomb. Louisa snorts.
“He’s got tattoos on his hands, I don’t think he’s a genius…”
“There’s nothing wrong with his tattoos,” Ted grunts, but regrets it at once.
“So you’ve checked out his tattoos?”
“No! And I’m not giving him my phone number!” Ted hisses.
“Why not? What if he’s the love of your life?”
“Stop it!”
“Isn’t he your type? Are you worried you aren’t his type? That he doesn’t like geeks?”
“I didn’t say… What do you mean by that… Stop it! Just stop it!”
Louisa peers thoughtfully first at the conductor, then at Ted.
“I think you’re worried he’s the sort of person who only likes slightly dangerous men, and you’re worried you aren’t dangerous enough.”
“Don’t do anything stupid, plea—” Ted manages to say, but by then it’s of course already too late, because as the conductor walks past, Louisa raises the can of soda and says:
“Hello! Cheers!”
The conductor smiles in surprise.
“Hi, cheers to you too.”
“We’re celebrating!” Louisa nods triumphantly.
“Oh?” the conductor smiles.
“We’re celebrating the fact that Ted here just got out of prison!” Louisa says.
The conductor’s eyebrows bounce so high, they could reasonably be described as bangs. He clears his throat for so long that he has a whole new voice at the end of it.
“O… kay. Well, congratulations, then!”
Louisa nods cheerfully. Ted does nothing, because of course he’s already sunk into the ground and burned up in a river of lava. The conductor looks around nervously and mutters beseechingly: “New passengers?” toward the other passengers, and hurries on. Ted’s face couldn’t be any redder if he had been missing his skin.
“Why did you do that ?” he hisses furiously.
“Now you seem dangerous!” Louisa informs him helpfully.
“Thanks, thanks a lot,” Ted says ironically.
“You’re welcome,” Louisa replies, without a trace of irony.
Ted tries to think that he should at least be grateful that she didn’t say he’d kidnapped her.
“Ali and Joar really would have loved you,” Ted grunts toward the picture.
“Thanks,” Louisa smiles.
“That still isn’t a compliment.”
“But it’s still a thank-you. Can I ask something?” Louisa says quickly, without waiting for a reply, because every word that comes out of her mouth is already rushing downhill. “Was Ali raped?”
Ted turns and stares at her, so shocked that even Louisa is a little taken aback.
“Why… why do you ask that?” he manages to say.
Louisa disappears behind her hair and shrugs her shoulders.
“I just wondered. There was something about the way you told the story. That she said ‘I believe in you’ when you said ‘I love you.’ When you’ve been raped, that’s pretty much the biggest thing you can do, I think. Believing in someone, like really… believe in them. Trust them. Especially a boy.”
The train is standing still, so it takes a long time for Ted to realize that he’s the one rocking.
“Were you…?” he whispers, but Louisa quickly shakes her head.
“No. But Fish was, in the foster home where she lived before we met. That’s why we always slept with screwdrivers in our hands.”
Ted’s voice isn’t entirely steady when he goes on:
“Ali was… She… she loved my mom’s lasagna. My mom worked nights, so she used to make meals and leave them in the freezer before she left home. Ali liked coming up to the kitchen with me to watch while I heated them up in the microwave. She would open the cabinets and look at all the canned foods and packs of spaghetti as if they were magic, because in her home, all the cabinets were empty except for the ones full of bottles. When you clicked the switch on the wall in my house, a light came on in the ceiling, because everything in our house worked. My mom was just as poor as everyone else on our street, but she… held everything together, you know? Everything worked. Ali had never experienced that. That was the first time I realized something was wrong. And then my big brother came home one time, he opened the front door when we were in the kitchen, and Ali reached instinctively for the cutlery drawer. That was the first time I had seen anyone apart from Joar do that, look for… weapons. Eventually she explained. It took a long time, everything she said came out a little at a time, one story could take several weeks. Her dad didn’t get violent when he was drunk, not like Joar’s. Ali’s dad just loved having fun. He was good at dancing and drinking wine, but even better at not opening bills. He didn’t want Ali to call him ‘Dad,’ he wanted to be called ‘Buddy,’ because he didn’t want to be an adult. Because adults like him don’t understand that adults have to be adults so that children can be children. So their house was always a lot of fun, always full of strangers, at the end of one party or the start of another. Groups of women smoking in the kitchen, and men singing as they stumbled from room to room. It was an insecure environment for Ali when she was seven, threatening when she was ten… dangerous when she hit puberty. She… she told me late one evening when we were on our own. About… about one of her dad’s friends, and the soda that tasted funny, and how she woke up naked with the man on top of her. She said she didn’t even remember what happened, she just saw the bleeding scratch marks on the man’s cheeks and couldn’t understand at first that she was the one who had made them. Then… then she just exploded. Like a monster waking up in self-defense. The man was drunk and slow, and Ali said she must have struggled so hard she got sweaty, and suddenly she slipped out of his grasp. She fought and kicked as hard as she possibly could, until he screamed and fell over. Then she grabbed a blanket and jumped through a window, from the first floor, she sprained her ankle as she landed but still ran off into the forest to hide. She was gone for almost twenty-four hours, her dad didn’t even notice. When she went home, he had just woken up, hungover, and thought she had been at school. She never told him. One night she stood on the roof of their apartment building and almost jumped. The next night she stood there again, a bit nearer to the edge. Night after night, nearer and nearer, until one day she got back to the apartment and found moving boxes everywhere. Her dad had gotten tired of the town where they were living all of a sudden, he said it wasn’t fun anymore, far too full of people who wanted him to repay the money he had borrowed from them. So the next day, there were only bills left in the apartment, Ali and her dad were long gone. That was how they ended up in our town. That was how she found us.”
Ted falls silent. He remembers the look on Ali’s face so clearly, the way she sat on his bed in the basement and told him all that. The big tears on the small, angular cheekbones, the way she threw out her hands like a sad magician and whispered: “And hey presto: now I’m here.”
He remembers her telling him she always slept with a knife under her pillow. Ted was so naive that he asked if that wasn’t dangerous, didn’t she cut herself on it while she was asleep? Ali just smiled and said that was the cutest thing she’d ever heard.
“You’re probably right,” Ted whispers to Louisa on the train. “She said she believed in us, never that she loved us, because that meant more to her than love.”
He still doesn’t mention the knife.
“She and Fish would have liked each other,” Louisa says behind her hair, drawing the most beautiful cockroaches in the world on her sketch pad.
“Yes, they probably would have,” Ted agrees.
“Can I ask one more thing?”
“Yes,” Ted says, as if you ever have a choice with someone like Louisa.
She nods toward the box with the painting.
“Why did he always draw skulls next to his signature?”
“He stole them.”
“The skulls? Who from?”
“From a janitor.”
“What?”
Ted adjusts his glasses.
“He used to say that art is coincidence. A beautiful painting is the sum total of a person, what has happened to them, blessings and curses alike. Coincidences.”
“So he stole the skulls from a janitor? When?” Louisa asks, a little frustrated, because she’s starting to think that the old man tells stories as if he were reading fortune cookies.
“In the spring, back when we were fourteen. Just before the summer when Joar found that competition in the newspaper,” he remembers.
“What competition ? Can you just begin at the start ?” she says in frustration.
Ted smiles weakly.
“There was a competition for young artists. That was how Joar got him to paint that picture to begin with. But that’s an entirely different story, Joar had…”
“Wait! Just wait! I don’t know if I want you to tell me!” Louisa suddenly exclaims.
“Why not?” Ted wonders in surprise.
Louisa’s gaze slips away from him like butter in a frying pan, she strokes the cockroaches on her sketch pad as if they were asleep.
“Fish used to love fairy tales, I’ve heard tons of them, so I’m not really sure I want to hear how this one… ends. Because this one really happened. And I know what happened to you, I know you survived! So now… now I know the other bit too.”
“What other bit?” Ted asks.
Like someone who has never had the chance to get used to happy endings, Louisa whispers sadly:
“Now I know that everyone else you’re talking about might have died.”
Ted hadn’t thought of that. Because for him, everything in the story has already happened, but for her, it is all happening now.
“Do you want me to…?” he begins, but she takes a deep breath, closes her eyes tightly, and replies seriously:
“No, no. Tell me! It’s too late to turn back now!”