Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

When she noticed me she gave me a wave and smile. I realised she was thanking me for the apples I had taken round to her house.

I thought she looked beautiful. Standing there, smiling back at her, but unable to talk to her, I felt a pang of homesickness like a cold finger on my heart.

Nathan appeared from the toilet. He was wearing baggy hip-hop-style pants and an LL Cool J T-shirt.

We all drank chocolate milk under an enormous skylight that relayed the spattering of the rain. I couldn’t be sure how much Terry understood of what I said. She never spoke herself, although she occasionally made a noise that was her approximation of ‘No, Nathan!’ when she felt her brother was getting out of hand.

‘My mom doesn’t let me drink chocolate milk at home,’ Nathan confided. ‘It makes me hyper.’

I realised Terry was accustomed to a hearing person’s inability to understand her language. She was patient with my incomprehension and, like her mother, skilful at using simple gestures to communicate. Nathan was our interpreter of last resort.

The two of them had been shopping, Terry explained. She needed some things for when she went back to school in the autumn. She was in her final year at Gallaudet, a university for the deaf in Washington, DC. She rolled her eyes when I admitted I hadn’t heard of it.

‘Ask your sister if she’s heard of Swansea,’ I said to Nathan.

‘Swansea?’ He finger-spelled it to his sister. She looked baffled.

‘It’s where I went to school,’ I said.

Her face said: Where?

‘Wales. It’s beautiful.’ I mimed big mountains. ‘It’s three thousand miles over there.’ I pointed through the back door of the drugstore.

‘I want to go to Indonesia,’ said Nathan. He was speaking and signing simultaneously. ‘I want to see the Komodo dragons.’ He performed an extravagant mime which concluded with him writhing on the floor. ‘They can swallow a whole goat.’

Terry was trying not to laugh. She warned her brother to take it easy. He was standing on his chair and lurching around with the frenzied energy of a dog who has just been let out of a car. I felt slightly envious that chocolate milk didn’t have this effect on me.

‘I’m thinking of seeing a film,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s on, but you’re both welcome to come.’

Terry looked doubtful. It hadn’t occurred to me until I said it that she wouldn’t be able to follow any of the dialogue. The gaucheness of my suggestion was overshadowed by Nathan’s reaction. He accepted my invitation by shouting, ‘Yeah!’ and standing up so quickly that he knocked his chocolate milk on to his sister. It spilled on to her lap. She was on her feet, scraping vainly with a napkin at a dark blotch that had spread down the front of her jeans. She was patently furious, both with Nathan and me. She flashed me a look that seemed to say: ‘You bought him the chocolate milk!’

I went to get some sturdier paper towels from the men’s room. As I stood holding the door ajar with my foot, snatching fistfuls of the green towels from the dispenser, I could see Terry upbraiding Nathan in sign. He kept looking away abjectly.

The towels made no difference. Terry went to the ladies’ room to try again with soap and water. I wanted to say, ‘It doesn’t look so bad,’ but it would have been a lie. The pristine effect was ruined: it looked like someone had poured a bottle of ink on a swan. The colour and location of the stain couldn’t have been more unfortunate. She walked slightly pigeon-toed to the toilet.

‘Your sister’s really cut up about those pants,’ I said.

‘She’s really mad,’ said Nathan. ‘She’s supposed to be meeting Michael.’

‘Who’s Michael?’

‘Her boyfriend.’ Nathan slurped the last half-inch of his milk.

Terry came back from the toilet. The ugly stain wouldn’t shift. I could see how badly she wanted to look good for her boyfriend.

‘What time does the ferry get in?’ I asked her.

Terry pointed at her watch and held up one finger.

‘Why don’t you go back home and change?’ I suggested. ‘Nathan and I will go to the movie and I’ll drop him off at your house afterwards.’

Terry considered it for a nanosecond. If she had any misgivings about entrusting her twelve-year-old brother to the care of a virtual stranger, they were quickly put in perspective by the stain. She gave him a perfunctory kiss and practically ran to her car, her wooden soles clattering on the tiles of the mall.

Most of the films had already started. We were left with a choice of two: an animated version of the Mahabharata that took place underwater, or a stalk-and-slash called Cross My Heart and Hope to Die. I would have been happy to skip it altogether, but Nathan was keen on the horror film.

‘It’s supposed to be wicked scary,’ he said.

The auditorium was less than a third full. Nathan and I appropriated a whole row and put the popcorn on a spare seat between us.

‘So did you ever see the Queen?’ said Nathan.

‘I’ve had her over for cups of tea once or twice.’

‘Have not.’

‘Have too.’

I felt very conscious of my responsibilities in loco parentis. I don’t think I would leave my child in the care of a man I’d only met two or three times. Laura and I once overheard part of a conversation between two black mums in Battersea Park. ‘Black people might be muggers,’ one of them said to the other, ‘but white people fuck their kids.’

The movie was an absolute dog and I drifted off to sleep about halfway through. The plot contained some or all of the following elements: an Indian burial ground, a girls’ boarding school, an unpopular fat student, heartless prefects, a Ouija board and a portal to another dimension, along with a high frequency of bloody murders and sexual shenanigans.

Towards the end of the film, I looked despairingly across at Nathan as the script yanked another worn garment out of the cupboard of horror ready-to-wears. The coldest hearted and best looking of the fat girl’s tormentors was necking with the young janitor in a row-boat, unaware of the music that announced the imminent approach of the ghostly knife-man.

Nathan’s face was itself a horror cliché. His mouth was slightly open and his eyes wide with fear. I could hear a faint rustling noise as he ground kernels of popcorn reflexively in his hand.

Twenty years earlier I had come to the same cinema with Patrick, Vivian and my father. It had been another overcast day. I had nagged my father to take us to see a 3-D Western called Comin’ at Ya. We were given special spectacles to watch the film and Patrick, who wore glasses anyway, had to figure out a way of wearing the two pairs together.

The movie was outstandingly bad, but my strongest memory of that afternoon is looking over to see Patrick with the 3-D glasses fixed crookedly under his own spectacles and shaking his head in resigned disbelief. My father claimed he had dropped his own glasses in the popcorn and had obscured half the screen with a buttery thumbprint.

After the cinema, the four of us had gone to play mini-golf. Vivian somehow managed a hole in one on his last shot and was awarded a free round by the man in the booth.

They were innocuous memories. It was impossible to square them with Patrick’s crazy letters — one to my father had ended ‘Watch out, short man’ — or with the writing in the notebook. Either I had been wrong to see the fragment as a clue, or it was just too dense for me to unravel.

‘That was awesome’ was Nathan’s verdict on the movie. ‘Were you scared when the girl looked in that mirror and saw the face of the demon?’

‘Not really,’ I said — honestly, since I’d been asleep at that point.