Meg Rosoff: How I Live Now

Then she showed me a bunch of sheep with long tangly coats and some chickens that lay blue eggs and she found one in the straw that was still warm and gave it to me and even though I didn’t know what to do with an egg straight from a chicken’s bottom I thought it was a nice thing to do.

I can’t wait to tell Leah about this place.

After a while I was feeling pretty shivery and told Piper that I had to lie down for a little while and she frowned at me and said You need to eat something because you look too thin and I said Christ Piper don’t you start it’s only jet lag, and she looked hurt but Jesus, that old broken record is one I don’t need to hear from people I hardly even know.

When I got up again there was soup and cheese and a huge loaf of bread in the kitchen and Aunt Penn was there and when she saw me she came right up and put her arms around me and then stood back and looked at my face and just said Elizabeth, like it was the end of a sentence, and then after a while, You look just like your mother, which was obviously a gross exaggeration since she was beautiful and I’m not. Aunt Penn has the same eyes as Piper, all serious and watching you, and when we sat down to lunch she didn’t give me any soup or anything but just said Please Daisy, help yourself to whatever you’d like.

I told them all about Dad and Davina the Diabolical and Damian the devil’s spawn and they laughed but you could tell they felt kind of sorry for me, and Aunt Penn said Well Their Loss is Our Gain, which was nice even if she was just being polite.

I tried to study her without being too obvious because I was hoping to get some kind of clue from the way she looked and acted about the mother I barely ever got a chance to meet. She made a point of asking me lots of questions about my life and listened very carefully to the answers like she was trying to figure something out about me but not in the way most adults do, pretending to listen while thinking about something else.

She asked how my father was and said she hadn’t seen him in many years and I told her he was fine except for his taste in girlfriends which was totally un-fine, but he was probably feeling lots better now that I wasn’t around reminding him about it day and night.

She smiled a funny kind of smile just then like she was trying to keep from laughing or maybe crying, and when I looked at her eyes I could see she was on my side which as far as I’m concerned made a nice change and I guess had something to do with my mother being her younger sister who died.

There was a fair amount of arguing and talking at lunch and except for talking to me she didn’t get too involved but kind of observed, and overall I’d have to say that the main feeling you got from her was that she was a little distracted, I suppose because of the work she was doing.

A little later when all the others were talking she put her hand on my arm and said in a low voice just to me that she wished my mother were here to see how I’d turned into such a vivid person and I thought Vivid? that’s a pretty strange word to choose, and I wondered if what she actually meant to say was Screwed Up. But then again maybe not because she didn’t seem like the type to sit around thinking up ways to be bitchy, unlike some people I know.

After looking at me for a few seconds more she put her hand up very gently and pushed the hair off my face in a way that for some reason made me feel incredibly sad and then she said in a regretful grave voice that she was sorry but she had to give a lecture in Oslo at the end of the week on the Imminent Threat of War and had work to do so would I please excuse her? She would only be gone a few days in Oslo and the children would take good care of me. And I thought There’s that old war again, popping up like a bad penny.

I didn’t spend much time thinking about the war because I was bored with everyone jabbering on for about the last five years about Would There Be One or Wouldn’t There and I happen to know there wasn’t anything we could do about it anyway so why even bring the subject up.

It was when I was thinking things like this that I sometimes noticed Edmond looking at me in his odd, listening kind of way and sometimes I looked back at him doing the same expression myself just to see what he’d say. But mostly he just smiled and half closed his eyes and looked more like Wise Dog than ever and I thought to myself If this kid turns out to be thirty-five I won’t be a bit surprised.

So that was pretty much all that happened on my first conscious day in England, and so far I was finding Life With My Cousins more than OK and a huge improvement over my so-called life at home on Eighty-sixth Street.

Late that night I heard the phone ring somewhere in the house and I wondered if it was my father calling to say Hey I made a mistake sending my only daughter away to another country because of some scheming harpy’s ruthless whims, but by that time I was too sleepy to bother getting up and wandering around looking for a keyhole to listen at. So as you can see, that old country air must be doing me tons of good already.

Early the next morning I was strolling around as usual in my unpleasantly populated subconscious when I heard Edmond’s voice very close to my ear saying Daisy Wake Up! And there was his face right near mine and a burning cigarette in one hand and some kind of striped Turkish slippers on his feet, and he said Come on we’re going fishing.

And I forgot to say I hate fishing, and fish too now that you mention it, and instead pulled myself out from under my blankets and put on some clothes without washing or anything and next thing I knew Edmond and Isaac and Piper and I were sitting in the jeep and bumping down a bumpy old road and the sun was streaming in the windows and it felt much nicer than usual to be alive even if it meant a bunch of fish were going to have to die.

Edmond was driving with the rest of us crammed into the front seat and not wearing seat belts because there weren’t any and Piper singing a song I’d never heard before with a funny jagged melody and her voice as pure as an angel.

We got to a place by a river and parked the jeep and got out and Isaac carried all the fishing stuff, and Edmond brought lunch and a blanket to lie on and although the day wasn’t very warm, I made a nest for myself by trampling down a little patch in the tall grass and put the blanket down and lay very still and as the sun rose up in the sky I warmed up even more and all I could hear was the sound of Edmond talking in a steady low stream of conversation to the fish, and Piper singing her odd song, and the occasional splash of the river or a bird rising into the air near us and singing its heart out.

I was thinking about almost nothing except that bird and then Edmond was next to my ear whispering Skylark, and I just nodded, knowing it was futile to ask how he knew the answers to questions you hadn’t even got around to asking yet. Then he handed me a hot cup of tea from the thermos and disappeared again back to the fishing.

No one caught much of anything, except Piper who caught a trout and threw it back (Piper always throws fish back, said Edmond, and Isaac said nothing as usual). I couldn’t have been happier as long as I didn’t sit up because there was a coldish wind, so I lay there all dreamy and thought about Aunt Penn, and my life so far, and got a little bit of a flashback of what it was like to be happy.

It was times like this when I let my guard down for something like half a nanosecond, that Mom had a habit of strolling into my brain. Even though she was dead, which made people put on this sickening pious kind of face and say Oh I’m SO sorry, like it was their fault and in fact if everyone wasn’t so busy apologizing all the time about asking a perfectly normal question like Where’s your mother? I might have managed to get more information out of someone than just She Died To Give You Life, which is the party line on Good Old Mom.