Mr. Pico arrived. He looked round them all, his birdlike eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his spectacles, and tapped one neat finger on the table.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to perform a play from a bygone age. You will find in this play that a certain stage direction appears ten times. That direction is: Lights cigarette. Which gives you some idea how long ago this play was written. Naturally none of you here has ever even seen a cigarette.”
This was his usual style: dry, sardonic, collusive. Because his manner was eccentric and he had no known wife, he was widely presumed to be gay. No one ever laughed at his jokes in case it showed they understood gay code, and so were gay too.
“The cigarette smoking will be cut in our production.” He gave a thin smile. He was himself a smoker. “Hay Fever, by Noël Coward. Who would like to tell me what this strange play is actually about?”
There followed the usual silence. Maddy hated these teacher-induced silences. They embarrassed her, and the embarrassment made her feel compelled to speak. This time some of the others spoke first.
“It’s about a family weekend with guests.”
“It’s a sort of farce.”
“It’s about mixed-up love affairs.”
Mr. Pico nodded at each offering and made no comment.
Maddy said, “The mother’s an actress. It’s about acting.”
“Aha!” Mr. Pico snapped to attention. “Thank you, that girl! This is a play about acting. This is a play that replaces the truth of emotions with the acting of emotions. So when we act it we must know that we are acting acting. I trust I make myself clear.”
For the audition he asked each student to pick a section of a part to read aloud with him. This led to a flurry of page-turning. Maddy, alone among them, had her lines by heart.
“Have you traveled a lot?” she trilled, playing Jackie.
“A good deal,” said Mr. Pico, playing Richard.
“How lovely!”
“Spain is very beautiful.”
“Yes. I’ve always heard Spain was awfully nice.”
“Except for the bullfights. No one who ever really loved horses could enjoy a bullfight.”
“Nor anyone who loved bulls either.”
It went well, she thought.
Joe Finnigan made no effort at all, but it was at once obvious that he should play Simon. Grace was surprisingly effective. She got a big laugh when she read out in a kittenish voice Sorel’s line, “I’m devastating, entirely lacking in restraint.” She looked straight at Mr. Pico as she said it, and he raised his eyebrows right above the rims of his glasses.
As they were all leaving Maddy felt a tap on her shoulder. There was Joe, and there was Joe’s smile.
“You’re good,” he said.
“Thanks. So are you.”
“Oh, I’ve got no talent. But I can do a decent enough job.”
“I’d say you’re a natural.”
“Well, let’s see who Pablo picks. Should be fun.”
Off he went, with Gemma following him half a pace behind.
“It’s like having a dog on a lead.”
This was Grace, watching them go.
“You were good, Grace.”
“It’s not as hard as I thought. I think it could be a hoot, as you say.”
They headed across the Oval towards the dining hall for lunch, along with the rest of the school. Maddy’s attention was caught by Rich Ross, a boy in her year, who was staring at Grace. He too was crossing the Oval, tipped sideways by the weight of a huge bag slung over one shoulder. Maddy could see that he was heading for the lamppost. Before she could shout out to warn him she saw him give a heave to his load of books, swing to one side, and walk straight into the post.
Maddy burst out laughing. She couldn’t help herself. So did everyone else who saw it happen. It was just so comical, the way he hit the post and reeled back and fell to the ground. His bag burst open and all his books came out. Then someone saw that there was blood on his face and everyone stopped laughing. A couple of boys helped him up. Maddy, a little ashamed of herself, helped gather up his books and put them back in his bag. They were all schoolbooks except for an old yellow paperback called The Art of Loving.
Rich was saying, “I’m fine now. Honestly, I’m fine.”
“But you’re bleeding.”
“Am I?”
He touched his face and looked genuinely surprised to see the blood on his fingers. Maddy gave him back his books. The boys who helped him up went with him to the Med Center.
As soon as he was out of hearing Grace started to laugh, and that set Maddy off too.
“We shouldn’t laugh,” said Maddy, laughing. “You know why he did it? He was gawking at you.”
“Was he?” said Grace. “Serve him right.”
“You know those books he’s carrying? He’s got one called The Art of Loving.”
Grace’s blue eyes opened wide in shocked amusement.
“Rich! With a sex manual!”
There was something ridiculous about it. Rich was the quiet, studious type and had never been known to have a girlfriend. Maddy found herself wishing she’d kept quiet about the sex book. It was Rich’s private affair, and now Grace would spread it round the whole school. Rich had done nothing to deserve such mockery. He was harmless.
Suddenly she caught a memory of how he had looked just after banging his head: straw-colored hair flopped over his brow, blood streaming down one cheek, a bewildered look in his eyes. His expression seemed to be saying, “Why do you want to hurt me? What have I ever done to you?”
5
Rich’s impossible dream
“But how on earth did you do it, darling?”
“I don’t know. I just wasn’t looking.”
Mrs. Ross gazed up at her son across a kitchen table covered in papier-mâché masks.
“You’re such a dreamer.”
“No, I’m not, actually.”
Rich had no desire to explain that he’d walked into a lamppost while looking at Grace Carey. When she wore her hair pulled back in a ponytail, revealing the curve of her high cheekbones and the line of her slender neck, he could hardly take his eyes off her. His appreciation of her beauty went unnoticed, of course. But it was not a dream. Grace Carey was real. One day she would know all about him.
He retreated from the chaos of the kitchen, which was given over these days to Tiny Footsteps, the kindergarten his mother ran from the big front room. He found his sister Kitty reading on the stair-lift.
“What happened to your head?”
“I fell over.”
“Oh.”
“Why are you reading on the stairs?”
“I like it.”
“But there’s no light and you’re in the way.”
“Maybe I like no light and being in the way.”
No one ever won an argument with Kitty. Only ten years old but fiercely assertive of her rights, she rejected all criticism on principle.
“You should be nicer to me. When you were a baby I held you in my arms.”
“Shut up.”
He climbed past her up the stairs to his room and picked through his collection of vinyl records. He pulled out Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and set it up on the deck. As the opening heartbeat drum notes shivered through the air, he lay down on his bed and mouthed with the voice that followed.
“I’ve been mad for fucking years …”
He waited for the guitars to enter, and as the great wave of sound began to roll he picked up the book he was currently reading, The Art of Loving.
“The deepest need of man,” he read, “is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.”
He should be doing schoolwork. Instead he was listening to Pink Floyd and reading Erich Fromm and savoring the sharp alien taste of his life. His mother called him a dreamer. For Rich it was the world round him that was a dream, school most of all. In the dream of school everyone was wearing masks and no
one could hear anyone speak. Each one in the prison of their aloneness.
Holy crap, he thought, I’m channeling early Simon and Garfunkel.
A rock feels no pain.
An island never cries.
Time to move on. “The Boxer,” now, that was Paul Simon in his more mature phase.
A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
Rich was developing a liking for irony. On the fly-leaf of his copy of The Romantic Poets he had written: I am a genius with no talent. If challenged he could pretend it had been written by Coleridge, but he wrote it about himself.
He lay on his bed pondering the possibility that he was a freak. Alone among his peers he had no mobile phone, no iPod, no laptop. It had started with an impulse of pride. Knowing that money was tight in the family, he had taken over his father’s old hi-fi system together with his collection of LPs, and turned this eccentric preference into a boast. Vinyl delivered a fuller acoustic range than digital, he told his disbelieving friends. Modern technology had taken several steps backwards. The present was not better than the past.
Max Heilbron called him a retro-geek. He refused to share Rich’s interest in sound recordings that crackled. Grace Carey was another matter. There was nothing eccentric about obsessing over Grace Carey. It was merely hopeless.
“Your trouble, Rich,” said Max, “is that everything happens inside your head. You’re neglecting the outside of your head.”
“What’s the outside of my head?”
“Your face.”
“What’s my face got to do with anything?”
“It’s the bit you need if you’re ever going to kiss Grace Carey.”
“Oh, that.” Rich sighed. “I can’t imagine any circumstances in which Grace Carey would let me kiss her.”
“You could always pay her.”
“Oh, sure. And what would I use for money?”
“True. You’re not just a loser, you’re poor.”
“And short.”
“You’re not short. I’m short. I have the patent on that particular inadequacy.”
Max was short. It was his most visible characteristic; so much so that he was widely known as Mini-Max.
“Well, I’m shorter than Grace Carey,” said Rich. “What do they feed these girls on? Fertilizer?”
“How about you kidnap her and keep her chained in a cellar until she falls in love with you?”
“Yeah. Why don’t I? Excellent plan, Max. Except we don’t have a cellar.”
Rich heard the shuffle-clunk shuffle-clunk of his grandmother’s Zimmer frame heading across the landing outside his room. He pictured her frail form negotiating the transition from Zimmer to stair-lift. A second Zimmer frame waited at the foot of the stairs. Gran had lived in the house for her entire married life. It was in fact her house. Now widowed and made wobbly by two minor strokes, she persisted with her familiar routines as best as she could.
Rich read more from his book.
“People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love or be loved by is difficult.”
Well, yes. You find the right object easily enough. But how do you get the right object to love you back?
Mr. Pico had lent him the book.
“I think you’re ready for this,” he had said. “I wish someone had given it to me to read when I was your age.”
Rich liked Mr. Pico and wanted to like the book, but it was not proving to be an easy read. Also it didn’t always get things right. For example: “Infantile love follows the principle, I love because I am loved. Mature love follows the principle, I am loved because I love.” This second principle seemed to Rich to be plain nonsense. He could love Grace Carey till he popped, but it wouldn’t make her love him back.
As Max Heilbron pointed out to him on a daily basis, he should not have picked on Grace Carey for his love obsession.
“She’s way out of your league. You have no chance whatsoever.”
“She hasn’t got a boyfriend.”
“You don’t know that.”
“And anyway, I can’t help myself. I’m addicted. There’s nothing I can do about it. Maybe it’s an impossible dream, but at least I have a dream.”
“Christ! Next you’ll be saying you’re going to climb every mountain.”
“If necessary.”
“But you don’t, do you? What you do is walk into lampposts.”
“Yes. Well.”
“You’re a tit, Rich.”
“Even a tit can reach for the stars.”
At supper that evening Rich’s father gazed at him with a thoughtful, puzzled look.
“You seem different.”
“I’ve got a bandage on my head.”
“So you have.”
Harry Ross’s mind reverted to ancient Sparta, the subject of the book he was currently writing.
“I want a fig,” said Gran.
“Try again, Gran,” said Rich’s mother. All morning she fielded the babbling of toddlers. Then for the rest of the day she interpreted the fractured speech of her crippled mother-in-law.
“Fig,” said Gran. “String.”
“You want some water?”
“Yes, dear.”
Rich’s father called Gran “the Oracle.”
“You’ve become Delphic, Mummy. We have to interpret you.”
It was hard to believe that the Gran they had known for so long was still in there, just the same as ever, understanding everything they said. Her mind was unimpaired. Only her spoken words came out scrambled.
Maybe we’re all like that, thought Rich. Maybe we all find when we speak that the words don’t match our ideas. We talk to each other, but never know each other.
Loneliness is the default mode.
Rich found the idea consoling. All those crowds of happy, laughing people just faking it. Noise against the void.
I’m not so different after all.
No, that didn’t feel right. He wanted to be different. Different enough for Grace to love him.
He remembered the moment when he’d walked into the lamppost and everyone had laughed. He’d been looking at Grace and so knew for a fact that she wasn’t looking at him. She never saw the actual idiot moment. But she heard the laughter.
A wave of frustration washed over him. Why did it have to be so hard?
My problem is I should be more spontaneous. I should be swept by passion. Instead I have this burdensome longing.
He pulled his diary towards him, feeling a deep thought coming on. He wrote:
Unrequited love—like carrying a jug of pure cool water. I must take care not to spill it because this is what I have to give. I will give it to the one I will love forever. The jug of water gets heavier every day. My greatest fear is that I’ll let it fall and all my love will drain away before I find her.
He reread what he’d written and sighed. Was it tragic or merely ridiculous? Seventeen years old, zero experience of love, dreaming of the most beautiful girl in the school.
Face it, I’m screwed.
As ever, writing down the words made him feel better. He might be a fool but he wasn’t fooling himself. There was something to respect in that.
6
Flirting with Joe
Maddy loved her phone. It was a silver Nokia, with a two megapixel camera and a funky ringtone—although it was mostly set to silent or vibrate. Its background was customized with a photograph of her favorite spotty heels from Topshop. Every time she saw its little blue message-light flashing, or heard the perky double chirp that told her she had received a text, she felt a stab of love. Someone was thinking of her, and her phone was the bearer of the news. Someone wanted her, and her phone was their go-between.
She lost her phone once, for a whole day, and during that time she felt as if she had fallen to the bottom of the sea. A great silence surrounded her: she was overwhelmed by a panic fear of isolation. Using Imo’s phone as an audio sniffer dog she retraced her steps, calling its number, like a
mother calling for a lost child. Her phone answered at last, in the quiet of the evening, jiggling away in the outbuilding that housed the customers’ toilets. There it lay, vibrating on the cistern, forgotten but still faithful. She took it up and cradled it in her palm and kissed it. There were forty missed calls listed. Over half of them were from Imo’s phone, but all the time she’d been at the bottom of the sea her friends had been calling to her too, and her loyal phone had displayed every name with every call. Only she hadn’t been there to see.
“I’ll never lose you again,” she told her phone. But already in her secret heart she was plotting to upgrade.
Was this fickleness? Without ever quite putting it into words, Maddy believed that the soul of the phone was independent of its body. She had changed phones many times in her life, but each time the phone’s soul, its own unique number and its bank of remembered numbers, migrated into the new body. Her fidelity was to this invisible essence of phone, which was also a part of the invisible essence of herself, much like her name. Maddy, often reduced to Mad, was so exactly and rightly her name that to utter it was to bring her to life, complete with her curtain of brown hair and her loopy grin.
It was therefore a shock to learn that Rich Ross did not own a phone.
She had come into school early to finish her English homework. Rich was already in the classroom, deep in a book. He had a bandage on his forehead. Remembering how she had laughed at him, Maddy felt a stab of guilt.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“Yes, I’m fine,” said Rich. “It’s only a cut.”
“Your books went everywhere. I put them back in your bag.”
He looked up at her, surprised to hear this. “Thanks.”
“You could have lost your phone or anything.”
“I don’t have a phone,” said Rich.
“You don’t have a phone?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
“How do people reach you?”
“They speak to me. Like you, now.”
Maddy was stupefied.
“What if someone wants you and you’re somewhere else?”