“Can you explain though?” I said as six chairs marched through the front window and onto the lawn. “Please? I mean, to me?”
“Is it wearing off?” he said.
“Is what wearing off?” I said, and I ran through my list of known hallucinogens: acid, mushrooms, mescaline, DMT, ket, PCP.
“What is it?” I said. “Which one have I taken?”
“Stop,” he said. “Jude. You haven’t taken anything. I just softened the border, that’s all.”
“What border?”
“Between us. So you can see what I see, without losing it.”
“I am losing it though,” I said. “I really think I might be.”
He walked across the dark lawn and put his hands on my shoulders, like I was a lighter-than-air thing, a thing that needed holding down. The glow from his hands fell through me like a faraway firework.
“How is this possible?” I said, and Novo stretched his arms above his head and licked his lips and smiled at me.
“Anything is. I told you. Just breathe, Jude. It’s all good. You can trust me.”
He pulled us both out of the noise, into the sleeping street, and he put his finger to his lips, his soft sigh lifting the stooped flowers, stirring the leaves high in the trees.
“Are you real?” I asked him, and he smiled.
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“Am I dreaming?” I said. “Are we in a dream?”
“Maybe. Probably. What would you do if we were?”
I knew the answer instantly, felt it without thinking, a stone in my belly, how pockmarked with letdowns the rest of my life was going to be if I woke up. I knew all this, and more, even though we’d only just met.
“That’s easy,” I told him. “I’d just stay asleep.”
THIRTEEN
Time all but stopped when Novo and I were together. The afternoon I followed him through town to the beach, whole days passed inside the world we created. But back at our house, at Henry Lake’s house, time had hardly moved. Mum was on her way down the stairs when I opened the front door, and she just about registered my presence, as if she’d knocked on her bedroom window and frowned at me in the yard seconds before, as if that had only just finished happening. She still wasn’t dressed. She didn’t see Novo because he stayed back, behind me. I felt him hold back. I felt him pause.
“Coffee?” she said, and I said, “Not for me,” and she carried on into the kitchen, her slippers face-slapping the floorboards all the way. I heard her slamming cupboard doors and banging stuff down on the counter, crashing through still-packed boxes to find the coffeepot. A one-woman symphony of rage. I didn’t know what it was this time. There was always something. Like it was just built in. My mum never closed a door if she could slam it. She stomped when she walked, like she was crushing bugs. She held things like she wanted more than anything to break them. She shouted, even when she said she wasn’t angry. She’d done it since I was born, as far as I could make out. She probably did it before. My earliest memory is of her playing a room like a set of drums, bashing out rhythms with the sheer force of her disappointment and fury, and who knows? That might even have been when I was still in the womb.
Novo stepped inside and stood next to me in the hallway. I took his hand and we started up the stairs. Henry’s door was shut as we passed it on the landing. I told Novo not to expect much. “We only just moved in, remember. I’ve hardly touched it,” but the room we walked into was completely different. Not full of dust and dead flies. Not unclaimed and empty at all. The floorboards and walls were a clean bright white and covered already with my rugs and posters. My bed was in the corner under the skylight, my books were unpacked and on shelves. There were plants and candles, an angled lamp and a slender wooden rocking chair I’d only ever seen in the pages of a magazine. It was the room I didn’t know I’d been imagining for years.
“Who did this?” I said, and Novo smiled.
“This was you?”
He shrugged. “It did itself, really. Same as mine.”
“It did itself.”
“Is it okay? Do you like it?”
“It’s perfect,” I said, pulling at drawers, scanning my bookshelf, opening the wardrobe. Everything was where it should be. Some of it was mine and some was brand-new but I also knew it, knew where everything was supposed to be, like I’d done it myself. I remember wondering if Novo could see inside me, see my imagination like a film screen, and I didn’t want to know the answer. I didn’t even want to ask.
“Am I scaring you?” he said.
It was ridiculous and unthinkable. It should have scared me. But what can I say? It just didn’t.
“I mean. This is nothing,” he said. “A bit of DIY. If this was too much already then we’d have a problem.”
I smiled at him. “You’re not scaring me.”
“Good,” he said, looking up through the skylight. “That’s good.”
“Want to see the roof?” I said, standing on the bed and pulling myself up and through it. Novo came up after me and we stood together outside under that dome of blue. Down below us, across the street, the noise had finished now and all the contents of Mrs. Midler’s house were in the front yard, arranged room by room, as if the building had just picked itself up and moved over a bit when our backs were turned. There were people out there, milling about, picking over everything. Two women in bright anoraks were having a serious think about some hunting-scene place mats. Some kids played building blocks with a load of shell-thin china cups until somebody noticed and told them to stop. A man was trying to persuade his wife to take home an enormous oil painting of a dog. The woman opposite-but-one was looking at lamps, tugging at their wiring, lifting them up to see underneath. Other strangers flicked mercilessly through Mrs. Midler’s books, pulled at her clothes with the tips of their fingers, passed judgment on her taste in art and crammed their feet into her favorite shoes. A girl at a table full of jewelry weighed a pair of heavy costume earrings in her hand.
I thought about Mrs. Midler’s life, whoever she was. Unique, same as everyone else’s, with its own bar charts of disappointment and reward, its own strict and arbitrary rules. And still somehow it ended up in boxes marked HELP YOURSELF.
“It’s her life story,” Novo said, and I said, “Yes. I was thinking that. Let’s go down there. I’d like to see.”
So we did, and I found myself standing at a table packed sky-high with matching china. An obstacle course of etiquette broken up into affordable lots, so the soup bowls would never again see the saucers, the breakfast cups the milk jug. Nobody likes being dismantled. Nothing wants to get taken apart. I felt sorry for them, even if they were only plates.