The Apple Tart of Hope (3 page)

And then, as hope of finding Oscar was gradually fading, his dad kept on trampling along the craggiest parts of the shore with binoculars pretty much permanently stuck to his face.

It wasn't logical, that's what a lot of people said, but his dad must have kept on believing, like Stevie did, like I was trying to—otherwise what was he doing out in all weathers, searching, searching, searching?

“Hey, Meggy,” he would say whenever we bumped into each other, and he'd smile. But it wasn't a proper smile. It looked more like some heavy thing was being pulled across his face.

“Hey, Mr. Dunleavy,” I would say back to him and he'd tell me to call him Bill.

“How's Stevie?”

It was one of those questions you ask so as to have something to say. I already knew how Stevie was.

Stevie's bedroom was downstairs in the Dunleavy house, on account of the wheelchair. If I'd been in my own house, I'd have been able to talk to him from our living room, just like I'd done from my bedroom upstairs with Oscar. But I wasn't in my own house. The Killealys—Paloma and her mother—were in it. I'd started cycling
over there as often as I could, and hanging around outside his window, right beside the squashed-up cherry tree underneath the space that once belonged to me and Oscar.

Sometimes we'd look up and see Paloma's light going on but we didn't say anything about her. I didn't care if she thought I was some kind of prowler. I didn't even want to think about her, though all the time it felt as if she was very close.

“Stevie's fine, thanks, Meggie,” said Bill Dunleavy. “To be honest with you, he's a lot more cheerful than you might expect. The heartbreaking thing is he keeps telling me that Oscar's absolutely excellent, that he's in a safe place, doing really well. Honestly, Meg, it would be almost funny, if the whole thing wasn't so desperately sad.”

He laughed a strange kind of a laugh and pulled the back of his hand across his eyes and sniffed a bit.

“I'm trying my best, Meg. I'm trying to stay focused on Stevie because you have to give your energy to the living—it's what everyone keeps telling me. In fact, Stevie's the one who spends most of his time reassuring
me
: ‘I'm fine Dad,' he says. ‘I'm really okay. You don't have to worry.' ”

It was as if Oscar's dad had forgotten that he was talking to anyone at all, and he began to mutter things then that I wasn't able to hear. His big shoulders slumped, his binoculars dangled sadly, twirling a little despondent, demented pirouette at the end of their string.

Part of me felt like telling him to stop his obsessive searching and go home. Stevie could probably have benefited from his only remaining parent being present these days. But another part of me thought that if Oscar's dad stopped looking, it would be the final turning point of despair, and I wasn't ready for that.

As the early days of the search grew into weeks, you could see that the frantic activity stopped being quite so frantic and people began
to shake their heads slightly as they walked away from their daily search, and the panic that had been in everyone's voices in the early days, well, it started to fade. Panic might feel like a bad thing, but in actual fact, it contains thousands of little splinters of hope. When panic is gone, it usually means that those splinters are gone too. Even Oscar's dad looked as if he had given up, and he had started to talk about Oscar as though he was definitely dead.

And so, everyone came to accept the unacceptable. Oscar wasn't coming back. He hadn't left any of himself behind, unless you count the bike. And the waterlogged shoes.

The whole time I kept wishing I'd never gone away on that stupid trip to New Zealand, because I was sure that if I hadn't, Oscar would be here and I wouldn't be staring into the dark wondering what the bloody hell had happened, and how things had got so bad that he'd come to make such a terrible, hope-deprived decision.

It had been practically a whole year before all this that my parents had first mentioned the trip. I'd thought it was a mad idea that they would talk about for a few days and then forget. But quite quickly, their enthusiasm for leaving home got more intense and more detailed and soon they were talking about nothing else. They seemed entirely amazed that I wasn't doing the same.

Things started appearing in our house, like huge posters of surfers and dolphins and sheep and sunshine. With massive fanfare, my mother stuck them to the wall of the den,
removing
pictures of mine which, as far as I was concerned, was a perfect metaphor for the way in which this whole New Zealand plan was barging into my life and overwriting the plan I had myself—the one that involved staying where I was.

Life is hard enough when you're fourteen. You don't want to stack the odds even further against you by moving away from everything
that's even vaguely familiar to you and being forced to start over again in a completely different place.

But before I knew it the tickets were booked, the plans were made and Dad was hogging the iPad so that he could Skype his brilliant new colleagues on the other side of the world.

Mum started folding our belongings into huge plastic boxes with lids on them. And they put an ad in the local paper telling the world that our house was available to rent for the six months that we were going to be away.

And then there was only a week left, and I was beginning to realize things that I'd never realized before.

I had to pack too—the things I was supposed to take with me, and the things I was supposed to leave behind. It felt wrong, stuffing my favorite hoodies and boots and tracksuit bottoms away when I should have been pulling them out.

There'd been a few fairly massive fights in my house before we left. Oscar had claimed he'd been able to hear every word due to my mother's habit of throwing the windows wide open as soon as it was June. He reckoned that I'd sounded mean and ungrateful, which according to him was in no way consistent with my real personality. He said he hardly recognized the new angry me. I was a strange girl sometimes, he said, difficult to figure out.

Our houses were so close together that me and Oscar could talk to each other from our bedroom windows. I remember the exact moment he came to the neighborhood. We were both kids then. The removal van had darkened our kitchen as it passed by and I'd peered over from the front door, and that's when I'd seen him, tall even then, and thoughtful and faraway-looking. I remember the first time I saw Stevie too, small and chatty in his wheelchair, and their dad, carefully taking out these
gigantic boxes and stacking them in the front garden, but not saying a word and with no expression of expectation that you might imagine there would be on the face of someone who's moving into a new home.

Later I'd spotted Oscar again, this time from my bedroom, sitting in his window, staring at the sky, the breeze in his face, his chin resting on his arms. A gigantic telescope was right beside him, which, from time to time, he peered into. In the beginning, I'd pretended not to see him; I don't really know why. Then from the cherry tree that was squashed between our houses, he'd broken off a dead branch and whacked it on my window. When I opened it, he said “hi” and stood there smiling at me.

Oscar had a straightforward, dimpled, happy smile. It was one of the hundreds of great things about him.

And after that we were best friends. It had been as simple and inevitable as the striking of a match.

He came over all the time and we'd hang out. One day we sat under the kitchen table in my house and carved our names on it where nobody could see. And from then on that table was special because it had our secret underneath.

You don't notice yourself growing up, but one day, sooner or later, it's just not comfortable to sit under the kitchen table anymore. When we were old enough to be allowed out on our own, the first place we used to go was the harbor to throw stones into the water. We took it in turns to see who could skim theirs farthest. I always used to win, but he didn't care.

“Everyone has their special skills,” he'd say, “and one of yours happens to be a strong intuitive sense of the aerodynamics and contact requirements of disc-shaped seashore skimming stones.”

He'd make me laugh almost all the time with the way he spoke, and the things he said.

We got to sitting at our windows, late at night, at the end of every day. He was different from anyone I'd ever met, and when Oscar was my friend, nothing was annoying or complicated. Everything was simple and enjoyable and fun. Everything made sense.

I don't remember now who took the photo of us, but I've had it in my room for years. We're leaning out of our windows and we're laughing at each other with a joyfulness purer than anything to do with the polite smiling you get used to doing when you get older. That photo has the kind of proper smiles that happen when you're looking straight into the face of someone who's been your best friend for a long time.

During the weeks before the trip, our talks had taken on a new and mournful tone. I'd sit at my window sniffing while Oscar sat at his, looking at me with a tender kind of a frown on his face. He had this way of swinging his legs from side to side with his hands on the window frame, holding on. I'd developed a habit myself that involved picking the loose plaster off our outside wall. It was a measly kind of rebellion—my resentful response to feeling so sorrowful and so misunderstood.

The nights before I left were hotter than I had ever remembered. But in our town, even on the stillest of summer nights, the cold is never far away.

I told him about how I didn't want to go—how my parents were robbing me of my most fundamental human right by making me do something that was completely against my will. I told him about what nightmares I was having because of the gigantically hard job it was going to be to get to know bunches of New Zealand people I'd never met, and who already had friends and weren't in the market for a new pale red-haired freckly one from Ireland.

Even though Oscar Dunleavy was my friend, it didn't mean he automatically agreed with everything I said, or believed the things I believed. And when it came to the trip, he was definitely on my parents' side. He told me I should embrace it, which is exactly what Mum and Dad had been saying the whole time too. Embracing it, he reckoned, was the only way anyone should treat an opportunity like the one that was being handed to me on a plate.

“It's really not something to complain about,” he had said, pointing out that I was going somewhere brilliant and different for half a year, and reminding me that I'd be living in a house that had a swimming pool in the garden and a fantastic lake nearby surrounded by mountains. He said that if I was grumpy about a trip like that, people would get jealous of me—they'd think I was taking for granted something that hardly anyone ever got a chance to do, which is to get away from the life they're living, and try a completely new one for a while.

According to him, it could be quite bad luck to have the evil eye of resentment following me around when I was in the middle of getting used to a whole different country.

I tried to explain to Oscar how dangerous and unrelenting the sun was going to be and how, compared to the New Zealand people, I would look so pale that everyone was going to assume I had some serious illness or pigmentation-related disability. I was sure to be marked out as a misfit, and I was positive that no one was going to talk to me.

“They're going to be
dying
to talk to you,” he had said. “Nobody's going to think there's anything wrong with you. You'll be so exotic and fascinating and pretty much the whole population will want to be your friend. Plus, there are things that have been invented for hot climates, you know, like sunblock. Air-conditioning. T-shirts. Meg, there's a solution to every problem. What you're doing right now is looking for reasons not to want to go.”

He told me that within a few short weeks I'd have forgotten all my unwillingness about the trip and that I'd be populating my Facebook page with photos of smiling sunny fantasticness.

Meanwhile, back here, he reminded me, the Irish winter would be sneaking up on everyone. The mornings would be growing colder and gloomier, and getting up for school would be the depressing activity that we both knew well. By the time October came everyone's teeth would be chattering, their hands fused in clawlike grips around the handlebars of their bikes because of the icy rain that would be pelting down from a great height.

“How many people do you know who have ever had the chance of a sunshine-filled expedition to a new bright land with white beaches and outdoor parties and surfing lessons?”

I kept doing my best to try to think that he was right. But there was an anger in me that seeped into almost everything during those weeks before I left. My parents hadn't had the decency to check with me, not even out of curiosity, whether the trip was something I was interested in. I couldn't stop thinking about that, and dwelling on it, and it had soured the air around me.

I'd wanted a mature discussion, which would have included me informing my parents—because it had obviously escaped their notice—that I wasn't cut out for New Zealand, what with my love of temperate climates and my shrimplike complexion.

Oscar said lots of things to me from his window in those weeks before I left. He told me that he'd miss me a lot. He told me that he had a whole load of information about New Zealand, which was going to come in fairly handy. He said he'd email it to me as soon as I arrived.

I wanted to say lots of things to him too. Things that had gradually become clearer just before I was supposed to leave. But sometimes
the things you want to say most are exactly the things that somehow you are least able to.

And then there were the things my parents kept
on
saying such as, “Meg, thousands of children would be so
grateful
for an opportunity like this.” And, “We really have no idea why you're being so difficult.”