Ghost Boy Page 18

  I’ve only been on one short domestic flight on my own; now I’ll have to cross oceans alone to see Joanna, and there are so many practical considerations to take into account. I know all my parents want is to keep me safe, but I also know I can’t spend the rest of my life easing myself away from their expectations and fears. At some point I will have to leap into the unknown without them.

  “My love?”

  A message from Joanna pops up on my screen. I texted her a few minutes ago to tell her that I needed to talk.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” I type back. “I have something to tell you.”

  I explain to her what my mother has done and the worry I have about dissuading her from doing what she believes is for the best.

  “But why is your mother involved at all?” Joanna writes when I’ve finished explaining.

  “Because she found out that I was going to book the flights and says she is worried the prices will go up if I don’t get the tickets soon,” I reply.

  I don’t need to say Mum is also worried Joanna and I will break up during my visit to the UK, which will leave me with a useless plane ticket.

  “But can’t you stop her?” Joanna types. “Tell her that we’re organizing it together?”

  “I’ll try, but I’m not sure she’ll listen.”

  “She’ll have to!”

  My screen goes blank for a minute.

  “I’m getting angry,” Joanna eventually writes. “I don’t understand why your mother is involved in this at all. Isn’t it up to you? If you need help with anything, then I can do it.”

  I wish I could explain it to her, make her see that it’s not so simple. We have always understood each other until now, but suddenly I wonder if this will be the first time we won’t be able to.

  “This all makes me so angry,” she types. “Why can’t you just tell her not to interfere?”

  It’s the closest we’ve ever come to an argument, and I feel afraid. How can I explain myself to the girl who roamed the bush and swam in deep water? How do I make her understand when our experiences of life have been so very different?

  “My parents are the ones who get me out of bed in the morning,” I write. “And they are also the ones who help me to dress, feed me my breakfast and wash me, drive me to work and pick me up again.

  “What would I do if I made them so angry that they didn’t want to do all of those things? I know it wouldn’t happen, of course, because they love me and would never do anything to hurt me.

  “But knowing something doesn’t always mean you aren’t afraid of it, and being in a wheelchair means that you need people in so many ways that those who aren’t don’t.”

  My screen is blank for a moment. Then five words pop up on the screen from Joanna: “I am sorry, my love.”

  We agree to speak tonight, but first I want to talk to my father, so I email him to ask if he will speak to my mother on my behalf. Nothing is said, though, until I sit down with my parents after supper.

  “I need to talk to you both,” I say, using my alphabet board. “It’s important.”

  My parents look at me. My heart pummels my chest. I have to be direct with them if I’m ever going to make them see how important this is to me.

  “I’m going to go to Canada with Joanna,” I say. “She is going to assist me on this trip because I want her to.”

  My mother looks as if she might say something, and I pray that she will be silent long enough to let me finish speaking.

  “I know you don’t think it’s a good idea but it’s time you started trusting me,” I tell them. “I have to be able to make my own decisions and mistakes. You can’t protect me forever, and I’m more sure than I’ve been of anything before that Joanna and I will make this work.”

  My mother is silent for a moment.

  “We don’t want to stop you from doing anything, Martin,” she says. “All we want is your happiness.”

  “I know,” I tell her. “But if that’s really what you want, then you must give me the chance to find out what my happiness is. Please let me have it. Please let me do this.”

  My parents are silent for a moment before my mother gets up.

  “I’m going to make more coffee,” she says quietly.

  Neither my mother nor my father says anything else. There are so many things my parents leave unsaid. I can only hope that this time they will listen to me.

  53 COMING HOME

  My heart felt as if it was going to stop beating a thousand times after the pilot announced we were flying over Paris. Now I almost wish it had, as a man pushes me through Heathrow airport. Joanna is just a few moments away on the other side of a wall somewhere in this vast building. I try to breathe smoothly but can’t. Will the technicolor world we’ve lived in for the past six months be dulled to shades of gray when we finally meet?

  “Nearly there, sir,” I hear a voice say.

  I wonder if this could be a dress rehearsal. Will a director shout, “Cut,” so I can go back over my lines one final time? In fact, what are my lines? What am I going to say? My mind has gone blank.

  The flight was like an assault course that I had to master stage by stage: get home from the office and pick up my bag; get to the airport and check in; get on the flight and fly for eleven hours without eating or drinking to make sure I didn’t spill anything down myself and arrive looking untidy to meet Joanna. But just as I thought I’d got over all the hurdles, a stern-looking official came onto the plane after we had touched down.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  Joanna and I had talked again and again about what kind of questions I might be asked, and I’d prepared a special communication board for the flight. But the answer to this question wasn’t on it, and the man looked annoyed as he waited for me to say something.

  “Where is your connecting flight taking you?” he asked.

  I stared at him.

  “What is your final destination?”

  He sighed in frustration at my silence before finally asking me a question I could answer.

  “Is London your final stop?”

  I nodded, and he gestured to an older man.

  “He’s all yours,” he said, and I was pushed off the plane and interviewed by a poker-faced customs officer, who stamped my passport before I was taken to the baggage carousel.

  Now I’ve travelled through miles of corridor to reach two white doors that are gliding open automatically in front of me. As I’m pushed through them, I see a long metal barrier with people standing on the other side of it. Some are holding up signs that they wave in my direction; others are gathered in small family groups with expectant faces. Dozens of eyes flick over me before people realize I’m not who they were hoping to see. Signs droop and faces look away as they prepare to carry on their wait. I look around, scanning faces and feeling nervous that there has been a mistake and Joanna won’t be here to greet me. What would I do then?

  “Martin?”

  I turn my head. She’s here. I can hardly breathe. She is more beautiful than I ever thought possible. She smiles at me as she leans down.

  “My liefie,” she says in Afrikaans. “My love.”

  I feel awkward for a moment before our arms close around each other. Then, as I hold her for the first time, I realize that she smells of candy and flowers. I know that I will never let go of her again.

  I am home.

  54 TOGETHER

  I am drunk, intoxicated by everything that is happening to me for the first time: seeing her smile when she looks up at me sitting opposite her and losing myself in her kiss, watching her eyebrows knit together as she tries to decide what she wants to eat from a restaurant menu or sitting together underneath a hornbeam tree in the pouring rain.

  “My liefie,” she says over and over, as if trying to convince herself that I’m really here. “My love.”

  We’ve come to Scotland after spending a few days at Joanna’s flat, where we celebrated her birthday with Kim and some friends. But n
ow we are all alone, and we’ve hardly seen the rolling hills and sky that lowers and glimmers by turns outside our cottage. Instead we stay indoors, sitting or lying side by side, always connected by a hand within a hand, a shoulder against a shoulder, or a leg carelessly thrown across a lap. After all these months of longing for each other, we can’t bear to be apart even for a moment.

  I’ve hardly used the alphabet board. Instead I draw letters on her skin with my finger, words traced on her flesh that she can read. In many ways they are almost useless. We’ve said enough after so many months of talking and often don’t need words because Joanna understands so much just by looking at my face. An eyebrow or a glance is usually enough to answer many of her practical questions. Whatever fleeting thoughts I’d had before I arrived about whether we’d stutter politely as we wondered what to say or self-consciously try to entertain each other with jokes have come to nothing. From the moment we met at the airport, we have drunk each other in, comfortable in one other’s presence.

  I’ve never known a person who accepts me so completely and has so much peace inside them. Joanna doesn’t fill the spaces between us with mindless chatter. Instead we drift on the current of simply being together, and there are times when I jump almost in surprise as she touches me—my fingers flexing when she strokes my hand or my jaw twitching when she kisses my eyes. It’s as if my body can’t quite believe her gentleness. I’ve never had someone take pleasure in me before. It is the simplest but most perfect of feelings.

  We are cartographers of each other’s skin, following the lines of each other’s cheeks, jaws, and hands with our fingertips, imprinting the feel of each other onto ourselves for hour after hour. Her hands fit perfectly into mine and I stroke the scar she got when she caught her hand in the chicken coop as a child. I didn’t realize that love would pierce all of my senses as it has: every part of me is attuned to her as I watch her smile, breathe in her smell, listen to her voice, taste her kisses, and touch her skin.

  The one thing we don’t do is make love to each other. Joanna was brought up with a strong Christian faith, and she has educated and enriched my belief. We share a love of God and agreed before I arrived that we would wait to be physically together. We have the rest of our lives, after all. I haven’t proposed, but Joanna and I know we will marry. We discussed it even before I got here and know that I’m going to move to the UK in order for us to start a life together here. It amazes me how easily we can make such decisions; it’s as if we are each an extension of the other. I revel in such simplicity after a life in which even the most inconsequential things can be complicated. Making love to each other will be the final piece of our jigsaw together. We will save it for our wedding night.

  For now it feels as if Joanna is healing all that has been dammed inside me for so long as we learn more about each other day by day. I’m used to people trying to cajole me into doing things or wanting me to sit passively while they do everything for me. But Joanna accepts me as I am today and doesn’t mourn what I once was. What surprises me most, though, is that she seems almost uninterested in my rehabilitation. She doesn’t push me to do things or raise an eyelid if I can’t. It doesn’t matter to her that I only have my alphabet board here because it wasn’t practical to bring my old laptop with me. She doesn’t want to hear my “voice.” Nor does she hover like a mother waiting to pick up a crawling child. Instead she helps me only as and when I need it. She trusts me to know my own body while accepting that there are some days when it can do less than it can on others.

  “It’s not you that’s not working, it’s your hands,” she told me one day when I got frustrated while struggling to pull on a sweater. “Just give them a rest and try again tomorrow.”

  Even the unwitting mistakes she sometimes makes don’t panic or embarrass her as they would so many others.

  “My liefie!” she cried as she came in one morning to find me sprawled across the bed.

  She’d left me getting dressed, but I’d lost my balance as I pulled on my sweater and toppled over like a fallen oak.

  “Are you okay?” Joanna said with a giggle as she helped me up. “I must make sure I prop you up better next time!”

  She didn’t apologize in embarrassed confusion or feel guilty that she’d done something wrong, and her simplicity made me feel at ease. Instead she just smiled before kissing me and leaving the room so I could finish dressing. If she does want to say something, then she does it matter-of-factly, as she did a few mornings ago when I bent down to drain my coffee cup as I always do.

  “I don’t understand why you always drink and eat so quickly,” Joanna said. “It’s like you’re always in a rush.”

  For a moment, I hardly knew what she meant. I’ve never eaten or drunk slowly. These have always been hurried activities, mere refuelling exercises to be got out of the way as soon as possible because people spend precious time helping me to do them. I’ve hardly even considered savouring food or drink. But that evening Joanna gave me my first-ever spoon of crème caramel, and I made myself slow down long enough to taste it. First there was sweetness, then the dark richness of caramel as it flooded over my tongue, followed by the faintest hint of bitterness, and finally the richness of cream with the scent of vanilla above it.

  “You look so happy,” Joanna said.

  She has told me that the pleasure I take in things is one of the greatest joys I give her. She says that she has never seen anyone revel in things as much as I do, and it makes her happy to see that the world astounds me so often because there are almost as many new things as there are ways to experience joy.

  But until now these have been mostly private thoughts, and it is a pleasure to share my joy so completely with Joanna. She laughs when my eyes open wide at a crimson sunset or I smile in wonder as we drive around a bend in the road to see the beauty of an emerald green landscape stretching out ahead of us.

  Her acceptance of me is the reason I’ve started trying to do more since I got here. She makes me want to start trusting a body that I lost confidence in so long ago. A couple of mornings ago, after a week of watching Joanna in the kitchen, I decided it was my turn to try. I’d never made so much as a cup of coffee on my own before because my shaking hands are a liability that few people will trust in a kitchen. But Joanna had cooked for me all week and didn’t say a word when I told her it was my turn to make breakfast.

  After fastening a foam grip on my right hand to help me pick up small objects like knives and spoons, she loosened the tops of the coffee and jam jars that she knew I would never be able to open on my own before turning to leave.

  “I’m going to read my book,” she said.

  I stared at the kettle in front of me. I wouldn’t dare to try to pour boiling water, but I could flick the switch to heat it. I turned the kettle on before looking at the jar of coffee on the counter in front of me. It was almost at eye level, and I fixed it in my sights as I stretched my hand out and leaned as far forward in my chair as I possibly could. My fingers closed around the jar as I pulled it towards me and knocked off the lid. Then I picked up a spoon, my very particular kind of nemesis—a tiny object that my unfeeling hands won’t close around properly.

  The spoon clattered in my shaking hand as I pushed it inside the jar and dug into the coffee. Grains flew off the trembling spoon as I tried pulling it out and the last remaining few scattered across the counter when I finally did. Frustration burned, I wished I could command my unruly hands to submit to my will just once. Once, twice, three times I tried to get a spoonful of coffee into two cups before moving on to the sugar. By the time I knew I was beaten, one cup contained enough coffee to make syrupy tar and the other a watery imitation. It was a start.

  Next came the toast. Joanna had left some slices of bread in the toaster, and I pushed the switch down before pulling myself along the countertop to reach the butter and jam. I put them on my lap before pushing myself off from the counter towards the table, where I left them. Then I pushed off across the kitchen once agai
n to get to the cupboard where the plates were kept. Bending down, I opened it and took out what I needed before going back to the table and laying it.

  Finally I needed knives. Whoever said that breakfast is the simplest meal of the day? It didn’t seem like it to me. There were so many different things to get right. The toast had popped up and was getting cold, and the water in the kettle had boiled. I needed to hurry if I wanted Joanna to have something warm.

  I got two knives out of a drawer, dropped the toast into my lap, and pushed off for a final time towards the table. Although I wasn’t going to fill up the coffee cups, I was determined to try spreading the toast at least. I put it and one of the knives on the table before picking up the other and trying to steady it as it waved about wildly in the air. Pushing the blade towards the butter, I watched as it crashed through the top and out again. I stared at the huge crevasse I’d carved in what had been a perfect rectangular pat of yellow before jerking the knife down towards the toast. A yellow slick of butter appeared halfway across it.

  Now for the jam—my final Everest. I pulled the jar towards me and thrust my knife into it. It clattered inside the jar before skidding off in the opposite direction to the toast when I pulled it out. I forced the knife downwards, cleaving it to my will as it hit the side of the toast before skittering across the plate and leaving a glistening red slick on the table. I stared at the battered toast before looking at the floor, which was covered in coffee granules and sugar. The butter looked as if a wild animal had chewed it and jam had erupted like a volcano across the table.

  Euphoria filled me. I’d made toast, coffee was waiting in the cups, and the water had boiled—Joanna was going to have breakfast. I banged a spoon on the table to let her know I was ready, and a smile spread across her face as she walked in.