Chapter Twenty-Eight
TWENTY-EIGHT
The baby is clutching Louisa’s finger tightly. It’s the first time she’s been hugged since Fish was around.
“Do you believe in God?” she asks quietly.
“Sometimes,” Ted replies.
“Sometimes I do too,” she says, with her nose against the back of the baby’s neck.
The mother comes back from the bathroom, as grateful as only a parent who has been able to go to the bathroom undisturbed can be. She gently takes the sleeping child from Louisa’s arms. Louisa looks like she’s freezing when her body is alone again.
“What was the competition? The one Joar found in the newspaper?” she asks.
“It was for young artists, you were allowed to paint whatever you liked, and the first prize was having your painting hung in a museum,” Ted replies.
“That’s all?”
Ted smiles down at the box with the ashes.
“That’s exactly what Ali said. She kept saying it sucked. She thought you should win money or a car or something, like on game shows on TV. But mostly she just nagged because she thought it was fun to annoy Joar. Deep down she knew that it didn’t matter. We weren’t trying to get him to win, we were just trying to get him to paint.”
Louisa frowns.
“Still a pretty useless prize.”
Ted shakes his head slowly.
“No. It was a fantastic prize. Because we thought that if he could just see his painting there, on a big white wall beside other artists’ paintings, just once… then he’d realize he belonged there.”
Louisa says nothing for so long that he almost starts to worry, before she concedes sullenly:
“Okay, then. Not completely useless, maybe.”
Ted looks out through the train window and sees a whole life. It’s strange what our memories do to us, editing our feelings.
“All summer, I tried to get him to laugh…,” Ted remembers.
“Did you tell him the one about the penguins?” Louisa groans.
“No,” Ted says, but he can’t help smiling.
Because he remembers now that this was how they dragged the artist back to life after Christian’s funeral: one giggle at a time. He tells Louisa how one day at the start of summer vacation, the artist whispered that he could try to paint the sea, even if he would only be doing it to make Joar happy. But it wasn’t until the end of June that he actually started.
That was after Ali had lain beside him on the pier, saying: “I know what you should paint. You should paint us!” Joar immediately pointed out that Ali was so self-centered that what she actually meant was “paint me,” but Ali had just shrugged nonchalantly and said: “You can be in it too, you’re so short you won’t really be seen anyway!” Joar chased her into the sea then, and she laughed so loudly that you could still hear it when she was underwater. And that was how the artist decided to paint them, not the way they looked, but how they made him feel. He decided to call the picture The One of the Sea , just to tease Ali, because she really did think it should be called The One of Ali .
On the last day of June, the artist went to Christian’s grave, sat there alone for several hours, and drew the first pencil sketch of what would one day become a famous work of art. Then he went to the pier with his friends, took all the pills he had stolen from Ted’s dad’s bathroom cabinet out of his backpack and threw them one by one into the water. Then all his friends felt, just for a brief moment, that perhaps everything could be all right.
“I believed in God when I saw him paint,” Ted says on the train.
He has so many memories of the artist, he realizes, but his brain almost always picks one where he’s smiling like a child who’s just found a coin. That last period in his big apartment, he would often lie on the sofa next to Ted, showing him photographs of all the places he had been in the years between art school and becoming famous. They showed him standing on boats and beaches and next to walls full of imagination, always with paint on his clothes, cans of spray paint in his hands and eternity in his eyes. He had danced and painted his way right around the world, and when he was lying there on the sofa he would smile at Ted and say that he didn’t care what people said about him when he was gone, just as long as no one said he died young. Because he had lived for a thousand years.
“I’ve never prayed to God,” Louisa suddenly says.
“Sorry?” Ted says.
Louisa is drawing in her sketch pad, her eyes hidden behind her hair again.
“I said, I’ve never prayed to God. But I prayed to the demons, like you did. But they still took Fish.”
Her pencil dances between explosions on the paper as two tears land there.
“I’m sorry,” Ted says.
“Sometimes I can’t bear the fucking thought that she isn’t here,” she whispers.
Ted nods to the box containing the painting.
“He carried on painting those skulls, because then it felt like Christian was still alive in his fingertips. Perhaps it’s like that for you too. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”
Louisa draws tiny falling flakes.
“Did it snow much in winter where you grew up?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“It hardly ever got cold enough where we were. But one winter, nature seemed to sort of short-circuit, you know? So one night there was an insane amount of snow. Fish and I snuck out that evening and had a snowball fight. I hated having such a big body then, because I was so easy to hit, but of course it didn’t matter because Fish was so bad at throwing. Seriously, she couldn’t have hit a box from inside it, a snake would be better at throwing snowballs than she was! Then she made a snowman and I mean… it was so ugly it gave you a migraine. I had to ask if she’d ever actually seen a snowman before. Had she even seen a man ? She said it was a modern snowman and that I didn’t understand art. I laughed so much my voice went hoarse. Then we made snow angels everywhere, all over town. Every time I think of that night, it feels like it lasted a whole winter. It was like we gathered up a hundred days of memories all at once. If I lay them all out, I think I’ve got enough to make a happy childhood…”
The train disappears into a tunnel and the world stops. Ted cleans his glasses for a long time and puts some new tape on the frame. When the tunnel spits them out on the other side, he says:
“Maybe that’s enough? Sometimes I think that my whole childhood lasted two years, between when I was thirteen and fifteen,” he says.
“Would you swap those two years for a whole childhood? I mean, like, a happy childhood, only with different friends?” Louisa wonders.
“I wouldn’t have swapped those idiots for a thousand childhoods.”
Louisa nods, and draws a million snowflakes.
“Fish said she’d read in a book that in Heaven you could choose a moment in life when you felt really good, and then you got to feel like that for all eternity. She said it didn’t matter if we lived to be eighty years old, because that’s only a billion different nows, and one really good now is enough.”
“And that night in the snow is your now?”
Louisa nods.
“What’s yours?”
“Any day on the pier.”
“Have many people you’ve loved died?” she asks, out of nowhere.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been lucky, really,” she says.
“How do you mean?”
“I haven’t loved many people.”
Ted glances at the mother and baby on the other side of the aisle. He thinks about what she said, about the days passing slowly but the years quickly.
“What I hate most isn’t that people die. What I hate most is that they’re dead. That I’m alive, without them.”
“Maybe you should start smoking after all?” Louisa suggests helpfully.
“They would have liked you,” he laughs.
“Who?”
“All my people.”
In the seat beside them, a baby is sleeping in her mother’s arms, the mother dozing in her baby’s breath. Perhaps she was a different sort of person once upon a time, but now she’s one of those who will always answer the phone on the first ring.
Louisa glances at them too, then she asks Ted:
“You said the janitor’s mom was a teacher, didn’t you?”
“Yes. She taught art history at the university. But I think she liked fiction better than history, to be honest. She talked much more about myths than facts.”
Louisa raises her eyebrows.
“What do you mean, myths? Like, fairy tales?”
“Yes.”
“So why don’t you just say fairy tales, then?”
“Because they aren’t quite the same thing.”
Louisa frowns.
“Tell me a myth, then.”
Ted sighs.
“Well… okay. Here’s one: In ancient Greece there were two artists, Zeuxis and Parrhasius. They challenged each other to a contest to see who was best. Zeuxis painted a picture of some grapes, and it was so true to life that birds flew down from the sky to try to eat them. So he turned to Parrhasius, confident of victory, and said: ‘Now do you admit I’m the greatest artist?’ But Parrhasius just smiled and said: ‘Pull aside this curtain, my painting is behind it!’ So Zeuxis went over and took hold of the curtain, but he couldn’t, because the curtain was the painting. So Zeuxis had to admit he’d been beaten, because he had only fooled the birds, but Parrhasius had fooled Zeuxis.”
Ted falls silent. Louisa looks confused.
“Is that the whole myth?”
“Yes.”
“So a myth is just a slightly rubbish story?”
“Well, no…,” Ted begins, because he wants to explain the moral of the story, but he doesn’t have time to before Louisa says:
“People do that with cakes now. There are TV shows. You think it’s a shoe, but it turns out to be a cake. You think it’s a car, but it’s a cake. You think it’s—”
“Okay, okay, I get it,” Ted sighs.
“I’m just saying, since you seemed pretty impressed when it was just grapes ,” she snorts.
“It must have been loads of fun having you as a student,” he notes.
“Did you tell that myth to your students when you were a teacher? Has it ever occurred to you that that might be why you got stabbed?” she asks, not unkindly.
“When I got stabbed, I’d just been teaching them about how Julius Caesar died,” Ted replies instantly.
Louisa grins, and he feels a little proud of her then, because she realized it was a joke. Then she asks:
“Do you really think you’ll never go back to being a teacher?”
Then Ted thinks about the ceiling in the school, and how he had lain on the floor of the classroom looking up at it while everyone screamed. The boy who had stabbed him had run off, leaving Ted lying there, he could hear the sirens in the distance but hadn’t realized they were for him. When the ambulance arrived, he had tried to stand up, because he didn’t want to be any trouble. When he got to the hospital, he was laid on his side so the doctors could feel and squeeze every part of his body, and only then did he realize there was so much blood everywhere that they didn’t even know how many times he’d been stabbed. When he woke up after the operation, he cried, first with shock, then with guilt. All the best people on the planet die all the time, die of nothing, but he doesn’t even die when someone stabs him with a knife?
“No,” he whispers, “I’ll never go back to teaching.”
“What are you going to do instead? Become a comedian?”
“I’m going to become a politician. And pass a law saying that annoying teenagers shouldn’t be allowed on trains,” he grunts.
“HELLO?” she exclaims.
“See? I’m funny,” he yawns.
She rolls her eyes so hard that she almost falls off her seat. Then she asks:
“How do you know all that about the janitor’s mother? That she was a teacher and liked myths and all that?”
Ted yawns again, almost as loudly as he sneezes.
“I met her, we all met her, at the end of that summer. It was actually because of her that I became a teacher. But that’s a long story…”
“Oh no! And I’m so busy!” Louisa says, gesturing toward the silent train carriage.
Ted looks at the time.
“We should try to get some sleep. We have to change trains later.”
He closes his eyes, which Louisa lets him do for about ten seconds.
“Okay. But don’t lie,” she says.
“About what?” Ted says, half asleep.
“You didn’t become a teacher because of the janitor’s mom. You became a teacher because of the Owl. Because you’re one of those people who want to make the world better,” she says, almost annoyed that he hasn’t realized that himself.
“Thanks,” he says quietly.
“Is that who we’re going to see? Christian’s mom? You said when we met that there was someone in the town where you grew up who can help us sell the painting? Is it her?”
“Yes. If she’s home,” Ted admits.
“You haven’t called to say we’re coming?”
“No.”
Because he would never do that to her. Every time her phone rings, she still thinks someone has died.
“So what will you do if she isn’t home, then? Or if she can’t sell the painting?” Louisa asks.
“I don’t know. But I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
“Me?” Louisa blurts out in horror.
“Yes. I believe in you,” he yawns.
A new record for the kindest thing he’s said.
The trains rocks on through the darkness, the world lies silent, but just as dreams are taking him, Ted mumbles to himself: “Good night, ghosts.” Louisa wants to ask what that means, but he’s already asleep, exhausted and huddled up in his seat. So she sits beside him for a long time, just drawing in the silence, waiting until his breathing becomes slow and calm, then she whispers:
“I’m sorry.”
Ted sleeps deeply and soundly for the first time since the artist was around. He dreams his best memories, of being fourteen years old and lying in the sun on a pier by the sea, of smiles and fingertips seeking each other. He doesn’t even notice when the train stops. When he wakes up, there’s a drawing on the seat next to him and Louisa is gone.