Meg Rosoff: How I Live Now

Back at the house Osbert was annoyed because he’d had to milk the goats himself and it was Piper’s job, and it turned out that Aunt Penn had called from Oslo and told him she was doing everything in her power to get home and in the meantime there was some money in the bank account to tide us over, and she’d already spoken to the bank manager about us getting it. Osbert said she sounded more worried about the world than about us, but he didn’t seem annoyed at being second best and Piper said It’s because she knows we’ll be fine.

For a second while Osbert was talking about Aunt Penn, Edmond’s face looked very pale, but he was facing Isaac so I couldn’t be absolutely sure and when he turned around again he looked fairly normal and said There are people all over the world who will help her if they can. And that was the end of the conversation.

The good old Royal Mail didn’t seem to have any clue that there was a war starting up and that day there was a letter from my dad, and one from Leah. Dad yammered on a lot about Davina the D and how she was feeling what with the pregnancy and all, like it was preying on my mind that she might be feeling uncomfortable when in fact I just hoped her ankles would swell up like balloons and her breasts would sag down to her knees and the silicone in them turn to cement. There was a little something stuck on at the end of the letter about missing me, and how I should be careful not to become a Victim of the Terrorist Threat and had I managed to gain any weight blah blah blah.

Leah’s letter was much more entertaining, with reports that Ms. Cool Herself, Melissa Banner, was going around telling everyone that she and Lyle Hershberg were Hooking Up. Well if this banner headline is true, I swear to god I will assign all my worldly goods to the Salvation Army and I’d say there’s no danger of some religious tuba player ending up with my DVD player given that Lyle was famous for telling his last girlfriend Mimi Maloney that if she didn’t Satisfy His Needs at least three times a day he’d have to find relief elsewhere and Melissa Banner is the world’s most famous living professional virgin. Leah walked in once on Lyle Satisfying His Needs all by himself in homeroom when everyone should have been at school assembly and she said Well well well Lyle Hershberg, don’t look now but there’s a Smurf with a hard-on in your pants. Or at least she claims that’s what she said but not to be disloyal or anything I’ve always had my doubts.

I wanted to talk all this through with Leah right then and there and I nearly cried with how much I missed having a cell phone that worked and e-mail even if I did have a hundred and twelve wacky cousins instead.

So I sat down and wrote back all about Edmond and Piper and Isaac and the animals and the house and the war, and I made it sound even better than it actually was, and by the time I finished the letter I’d convinced myself that This Was the Life oh yes and Boy Had I Lucked Out. But it’s easier said than done to convince yourself that god has smiled on you when the actual fact is that you’re living with strangers due to the evil workings of your wicked stepmother not to mention your official next of kin.

Then in came Osbert again with a face like a dead pigeon and said there were more attacks this time in the U.S.A.

And when, to seem interested, I said How terrible, where? He said Pittsburgh and Detroit and Houston only he pronounced it Hoos-ton. Well part of me was happy they hadn’t bombed the Upper West Side and part of me started having this pretty good fantasy about Dad and Davina all bandaged up and limping and trying to come live here with us and us saying We are just SO SORRY but the airports are shut otherwise we’d simply LOVE to have you, really we would.

I tried eating a little bit of bacon today because Edmond particularly asked me to but it tasted like pig and I gagged.

I’m thinking now would be a good time to talk about Isaac because he’s the one who gets left out of most of the action due to hardly ever saying a word but I’m starting to realize it’s the ones who aren’t yakking all the time who sometimes turn out to be worth keeping an eye on.

At first I barely noticed him what with noticing Edmond so much and Piper holding my hand all the time and chickens clucking, dogs barking, sheep baaing, not to mention half the world blowing up and the pipes banging night and day. So it took me longer than usual to get the picture that while Piper and Edmond were busy watching over me, Isaac was busy watching over them.

He didn’t do it in an obvious way like Osbert who was always pushing himself into the conversation with superior information and making it clear that he was the one with Family Responsibilities which Frankly Exhausted Him and He’d Rather Not Be Bothered only Seeing As How He Was the Eldest, Well, deep sigh.

Edmond on the other hand was totally up-front even if he did surprise you in about half a million ways each day. When Edmond was listening in to your thoughts, you could tell by looking at him looking at you.

Isaac was more shadowy and Kept His Counsel, as my doorman used to say about anyone who didn’t like to gossip. This doesn’t mean there was anything sneaky about his way of watching, or anything sentimental either. He just accepted the things people did, without comment or judgment and maybe without being terribly concerned. Even his family seemed to interest him in an abstract way, like lab specimens he’d come to feel responsibility and affection for.

At times I thought he was more animal than human. For instance if you were walking in town on market day and there were tons of people milling around, you would never have to worry about losing him in the crowd even if you totally forgot he was there and got separated for ages. You could zig and zag and make turns on a sudden whim and stop for tea and cut across a few back streets and decide that today would be a good time to do something totally different and try that bakery that none of you normally went to when in actual fact you had plenty of bread already at home so there’d be no reason to be in a bakery at all, and the next time you looked up Isaac would be right at your elbow, totally casual, like he’d been there all along or possibly just followed your train of thought through the crowd.

It was like he understood humans objectively and could see your entire life stretching out in both directions including whether you were going to make a detour to the bakery and which one and when.

With nonhumans he was completely different. With a dog or horse or badger or fox every fiber of his being was totally engaged. Even his face was different around animals, with the expression of polite distance he always wore for humans replaced by something concentrated and alive.

They knew it too. You could search hours for a pregnant cat and Isaac would tell you to Look under the hedge felt in the garden shed and there she’d be with five kittens, probably already having told him what each one was named. Piper said people used to borrow him when they went to buy a new dog because he could always see if something wasn’t quite right just by looking, or if it was the type to savage your new baby to death on a whim.

You might wonder, as I did, what a dog or a sheep had to say to a person like Isaac that’s so interesting but I guess he might have said the same thing about a foreign life-form like me. What have I ever said that’s so riveting to anyone but myself?

Shrinks don’t count.

They listen for cash.

Today there was a knock on the door and it turned out to be two bored-looking men From the Council coming to register us and Determine our Medical and Nutritional Exigencies which turned out to mean did any of us have appendicitis or scurvy?