My Friends

Chapter Twenty-Two

TWENTY-TWO

Ted’s story is interrupted by a sneeze. From him. Obviously he starts to panic at the first tickle in his nose, the way almost-forty-year-old men do when that happens in public, because men of that age can no longer sneeze just once.

“What’s happening to you?” Louisa says in horror when he’s sneezed six times in a row.

“I don’t know,” Ted sniffs, after which he sneezes once more.

“I’ve never heard anyone sneeze more than three times in a row,” Louisa says, impressed.

“When I was young I never used to sneeze more than twice,” Ted declares, red in the face.

“Maybe it started when you got stabbed? Perhaps you’re allergic to nickel or something?” Louisa suggests.

It’s impossible to tell if she’s being sarcastic or not, young people really are the worst. Ted sneezes again.

“Bless you!” says the conductor with the tattoos, because of course he is going past just then, seeing as the universe really is the worst too.

Louisa turns around seriously and explains:

“Ted caught a cold one night when he was in prison, you know! There was a terrible wind blowing through the bars!”

The conductor smiles with the uncertainty you feel when there’s a fifty percent chance the person you’re talking to is joking, and a fifty percent chance that she’s a psychopath. When he’s disappeared into the next carriage Ted sniffs:

“Stop saying I was in prison!”

“I’m telling you, it makes you seem dangerous and attractive,” Louisa explains amiably.

“If you want him to think I’m dangerous, maybe you should tell him I got stabbed instead?” Ted hisses.

Louisa shakes her head very patiently, as if she’s talking to someone who wears their bicycle helmet into the grocery store.

“The fact that you got stabbed doesn’t make you seem dangerous, it just makes it seem like you’re a dangerous person to have as a friend.”

Ted sneezes again, but misses the crook of his arm, spraying the whole of the back of the seat in front of him.

“Don’t say it,” he begs, mortified.

But it’s too late, Louisa is already pretending her hand is a phone that she’s talking into dramatically:

“Yes, hello? Is that the backrest police? I want to report an incident! Yes, that’s right, the man who said I mustn’t put my FEET on the back of a seat—”

“Move, I need to go and blow my nose,” Ted grunts with a degree of desperation, holding his newspaper in front of his face.

He struggles out of his seat, while Louisa comments:

“You know this is why male serial killers always get caught, right? DNA everywhere! Have you ever thought about that? That female serial killers never get caught? And now you’re thinking: ‘But hold on, there aren’t that many female serial killers?’ That you know about, maybe! Because they never get…”

Her voice is drowned out by another sneeze from Ted before he reaches the bathroom, louder than all the previous ones, and the other passengers all turn around. When Ted closes the bathroom door behind him he feels so ashamed that he’s actually short of breath, and he blows his nose so hard that it feels like his brain is trying to smuggle itself out of him. He accidentally looks in the mirror, which is never a good idea, the jacket of the man looking back at him is all wrinkled, and his face is as red as a priest in a brothel. He feels embarrassed, not only because of the sneezing, but also because he’s been talking too much. He shouldn’t have told Louisa that story. He can hear his mom’s voice from his childhood: “Don’t babble like an old woman, you’re making a fool of yourself.”

It was always important to Ted’s mom that he and his brother not act like old women. They had to be men. They weren’t allowed to cry, or get hysterical, or ever come across as weak. Their mom had such clear definitions of her sons’ masculinity that Ted can only assume it was because she knew what this world does to girls. When her husband got cancer, she had to be both mother and father to the boys, and no doubt she did her best, and that’s the worst thing about being a parent: that almost everyone does their best, but almost all fail regardless. Ted’s mom saw it as her job to make him tough, she saw softness as a luxury, something only princes and princesses could afford.

He’s still holding the newspaper, he hasn’t even opened it yet, because he knows they will have written about the artist. He bought it out of habit, the way he always bought all the newspapers when they wrote about his friend, even though the artist hated it. Ted was too proud, he cut out all the reviews and articles in secret. But today he can’t read a single word, because in the face of death grown men are like children, we think that if we close our eyes, we become invisible. We imagine that if we don’t open the newspaper, nothing terrible can have happened yet.

He tosses it in the trash can, glances at the mirror, an anxious and overwhelmed man with skin as soft as room-temperature cheese glances back. He’s never liked himself much, but even less today. He regrets babbling to Louisa, the way you regret things you said when you were drinking, but in his case it was grief that dulled his judgment. He should never have brought the girl with him at all. He’s terrified of responsibility, because he knows he’s a failure of a man. Everyone he loves keeps dying. The thought occurs to him to abandon Louisa here, it’d be so easy now, just sneak out of the bathroom and run off down the platform. She’d be okay on her own, wouldn’t she? Surely better than with him. He’s bad luck, he’s sure of it.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t even get a chance to try, because when he opens the bathroom door, he hits Louisa in the head with it, because she’s standing right outside.

“Ow!” she exclaims, the way you do when you lack a basic understanding of how doors work.

“Why are you standing there?” Ted asks, which is a reasonable question.

“I’m waiting for you!” she replies, entirely unreasonably.

Ted looks into the bathroom, then at her, and frowns.

“Where did you think I was going to go? That I was going to flush myself away?”

“What are you talking about?” she says, and only then does he realize that it hadn’t even occurred to her that he might leave her.

Ted can’t help feeling slightly insulted that she hadn’t even considered it.

“Why isn’t the train moving?” he therefore asks, the way you do when you want to regain your authority.

“Technical problems,” Louisa replies, as confidently as if she’d had time to take an engineering exam while he was blowing his nose.

“What does that mean?” he wonders.

“Do I look like a train driver?” she asks.

Ted frowns unhappily, but she thinks it’s another sneeze and leaps out of the way. He groans:

“Who said it was technical problems?”

“The conductor. He said we can go out and stretch our legs if we want. I said you have such short legs that you can pretty much have them outstretched when you’re sitting down. But maybe you’d like some air anyway? Old people usually love getting some air.”

Ted looks out the window. A man with a black dog is walking on the platform.

“I’ll wait a bit. But you go,” he says firmly.

Louisa looks at the dog, then at Ted, and tilts her head to one side.

“Are you scared of dogs?”

“No. I just prefer being where dogs aren’t.”

“How many phobias do you actually have, Ted?”

“I have just enough!” he snaps.

Louisa grins, but doesn’t judge, because she understands him, her own phobia concerns people. Ted is scared of touching them, but she’s scared of being touched. So they wait until dogs and people alike have gone past.

“Fish and I always wanted pets, but you’re not allowed to have them in foster homes. But one time we did have a fish! It lived in a really big bowl under our bed,” Louisa explains brightly.

Ted tries to stop himself from sounding interested, but fails:

“So… Fish had a fish?”

“Yes.”

“What was the fish called?”

“Buster.”

“Good name for a fish,” Ted admits reluctantly.

“It is, isn’t it? I was the one who came up with it!” she smiles triumphantly.

The dog disappears. Louisa peers out from the train rather more dramatically than Ted thinks necessary, then waves to him as if they were secret agents, and creeps out onto the platform as if she is trying to avoid laser beams.

“Little brat,” Ted grunts.

“Miserable old man,” she grins.

The platform is full of other passengers wandering about aimlessly to stretch their legs. Ted looks around as if he is still working out an escape plan, just in case he decides to leave the little brat behind after all. There’s a road on the other side of the track, and a bus stop, but it has no roof and it’s starting to get dark and cold. Who knows how long a miserable old man would have to wait there for a bus? He imagines how much the artist would have laughed at the fact that one of the last things Ted said to him was that it would be nice to get some peace and quiet.

“Are you going to sneeze again?” Louisa asks.

“No!” Ted promises.

“Your face looks really weird,” she informs him.

Ted doesn’t reply. He walks along the side of the train with his hands behind his back, like a ski jumper, and Louisa bounces along beside him like someone who has never had a sore neck in her whole life.

“Does it hurt? Where you got stabbed?” she wonders, looking at the leg he’s got the limp in.

“No.”

“I broke my arm once, that hurt really badly. But you could draw on the cast! Did you get a cast when you got stabbed?”

“No.”

“Poor you.”

They walk on in silence. Eventually Ted’s curiosity wins out over his grouchiness.

“How did you break your arm?” he asks.

“A guy in the foster home threw me through a window.”

She says it like she is telling him that someone once threw a pencil at her.

“What?! What happened?” Ted exclaims, shocked.

“I had to move. They said I should have paid for the window.”

“The one you got thrown out of? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever…,” Ted protests, but she smiles weakly.

“No. The other window. The one I threw the guy through afterwards.”

Her sleeve has ridden up and he can see the network of scars.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“No need, I wasn’t badly hurt.”

“No, I mean I’m sorry that you talk about that like it was normal. I’m sorry you didn’t have a better childhood. It isn’t your fault.”

She bites her cheeks and concentrates on kicking a small stone in front of her.

“Are you going to be a teacher again when you get home?”

The question hits Ted as if she has fired it from a catapult.

“I don’t think so,” he says, his voice suddenly more brittle.

“Shame,” she says.

“Why?”

“You were probably good at it.”

“What do you base that on?” he snorts, more unpleasantly than he actually means to.

“You weren’t the one that student was trying to stab. You got hurt trying to protect someone else. All the teachers I’ve ever met would have run away.”

Ted clasps his hands tightly behind his back so she won’t see that they’re shaking.

“It isn’t a teacher’s job to protect their students,” he mumbles, not that he believes that, but because he heard a colleague say it once.

“Yes it is,” she replies calmly.

There are people sitting on all the benches they pass, so when they finally reach one that’s empty Ted sits down out of instinct. After taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and carefully wiping it first, of course. Louisa sits down next to him, without a handkerchief, and blurts out:

“So, instead of sitting on the train, you’d rather come out here and… sit?”

“You were the one who wanted to go outside!” he points out.

“Well pardon me for thinking you might need a bit of air! Here, have a free paper!” she groans.

Ted takes the newspaper in astonishment.

“Where did you get that?”

“It was lying on the bench.”

Ted lets go of it as if it has teeth.

“You picked up a newspaper that was lying on the bench ?”

“You’re the one who likes newspapers.”

“Not from benches ! Anyone could have touched it!”

“Says the old man who sneezes on people!”

Ted blushes.

“I sneezed on the seat. Not on anyone. I—”

“People have to sit on that seat!” Louisa points out.

Ted breathes through his nose and tries to think of something smart to say, but stops himself when he notices the sketch pad in her lap. She takes it with her everywhere. The artist was the same. So instead of something smart, Ted says something honest instead:

“I… I’m sorry I looked at your sketch pad while you were drawing earlier, that was wrong of me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she mutters quickly, but her voice is weaker and her grip on the sketch pad tighter.

“I should have known better,” Ted says, because he really should have.

When they were teenagers, the artist never wanted to show anyone anything that wasn’t finished. Art is a nakedness, you have to be free to decide when you’re comfortable with it, and with whom. Louisa weighs her words with her tongue for much longer than usual before she replies:

“It’s just that until I show a drawing to someone, it’s only mine. You know? It isn’t too late to fix it. I’m not good at drawing, I’m slow, people who are good at drawing are just good… all the time. Their worst drawings are still great. If you saw my worst drawings you’d realize that I’m actually just a fraud. But… before the drawing is finished it isn’t too late. That’s the only time I… like myself.”

Ted looks up at the sky, the corners of his lips trembling slightly, and the dimples in his cheeks grow deeper and fill again, grow deeper and fill again.

“I don’t know anything about art,” he confesses.

“Me neither,” she whispers.

“But I don’t think the most important thing for an artist is being able to draw, but having something to say,” he says, more to the sky than to her.

“You just said you don’t know anything about art!” she points out sullenly.

Then Ted sets a new record for the kindest thing he’s said to her:

“I think you’re like the drawing, you’re not ready yet. But one day I think you’re going to do something important. One day you’ll paint someone else’s postcard.”

Louisa quickly wipes her face with the back of her hand. Then, to Ted’s horror, she reaches down and picks up the newspaper from the ground. She leafs through it, although the wind on the platform does its best to stop her. She’s just about to tell Ted that if old people love newspapers, they must really hate reading, but then she turns a page and sees the artist, and all the air goes out of her. “Dead,” the headline reads. “No known family,” it says lower down. Beside the picture of the artist is a photograph taken outside his home, on a beautiful tree-lined street in the most expensive part of a big city. There are little candles and hundreds of roses on the sidewalk, left by admirers of his work. Louisa can feel Ted looking over her shoulder, but they ignore each other, just resting there in shared grief.

“PLEASE GET BACK ON THE TRAIN! DEPARTURE IN THREE MINUTES! ALL ABOARD!” a voice suddenly cries.

It’s the conductor. So the moment is ruined. You can always trust reality to do that.

“Come on,” Ted says softly, and gets to his feet with effort.

Louisa looks at the picture of the roses outside the artist’s home before carefully folding the newspaper around her sketch pad.

“Was that where you lived with him at the end?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“It looks nice.”

“It was.”

“Do you wish you could have stayed there?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

They’re walking slowly alongside the train, Ted with his hands behind his back and Louisa with her arms wrapped around herself. Then Ted explains just how bereavement feels:

“I could never have lived there without him. I would just have lain awake all night waiting for him to come home. I would have had to throw away all the eggs, because he was the only one who ate them, but I would have forgotten not to buy them. I would have forgotten that he didn’t exist, all the time. I would have gotten angry because the light in the bathroom was turned off, because I used to get so annoyed with him for always leaving it on. I would have saved all his shoes, all his shirts, and I would have been angry with the spring and hated flowers when they appeared because they drowned out the last smells of him. I would have always laid the table for two on the balcony. I would have had to eat all the popcorn myself. I would never have been able to pick a film.”

The entrance to the train fills with a slow line of frustrated passengers, the man and the teenager stand on the platform and wait till last, anxious that they might touch or be touched by some stranger in the throng.

“Can I ask something?” Louisa wonders, clutching the newspaper photograph of the artist in her arms.

“Has anyone ever been able to stop you?” Ted says, with half a sigh, half a smile.

Louisa thinks that she was right, he would have been a good parent.

“Were you a… couple?” she asks tentatively.

“No.”

“Because he was in love with someone else?”

Ted nods softly, his chin heavy with loss, but not bitterness.

“We were as close to a couple as you can get, maybe. It’s probably hard to understand.”

Louisa shakes her head slowly.

“No. It isn’t hard at all. You loved each other so much that you were scared of accidentally breaking each other.”

She rubs her lower arm, where the man in the tree is waving. She has known love like that too. Once all the other passengers have gotten on board, Louisa and Ted follow the conductor into the carriage and squeeze into their seats. When the train slowly starts to move along the rails Ted leans his forehead closer to the window, and his face cracks into wrinkles when he says:

“I could never have lived there on my own. I would have frozen to death in that apartment without his eyes on me.”

Louisa pulls her jacket around herself more tightly and whispers:

“That’s exactly how it feels.”

Then he’s glad he didn’t leave her.