Klara and the Sun

A voice said in a pretend whisper: ‘I believe we’re still out here…so we can eavesdrop!’

This brought another big laugh, and the Mother was smiling once more.

‘If they need us,’ she said, ‘we’ll hear about it. Please, go on through.’

As the adults started to move into the kitchen, I could hear more clearly the voices from the Open Plan, but couldn’t make out any words. An adult passed near me saying: ‘Our Jenny got quite upset after that last meeting. We spent the whole weekend explaining to her how she’d misinterpreted everything.’

‘Klara. You’re still here.’

The Mother was standing before me.

‘Yes.’

‘Why aren’t you in there? With Josie?’

‘But…she didn’t take me in.’

‘Go on. She needs you with her. And the other kids want to meet you.’

‘Yes, of course. Then excuse me.’

The Sun, noticing there were so many children in the one place, was pouring in his nourishment through the wide windows of the Open Plan. Its network of sofas, soft rectangles, low tables, plant pots, photograph books, had taken me a long time to master, yet now it had been so transformed it might have been a new room. There were young people everywhere and their bags, jackets, oblongs were all over the floor and surfaces. What was more, the room’s space had become divided into twenty-four boxes — arranged in two tiers — all the way to the rear wall. Because of this partitioning, it was hard to gain an overall view of what was before me, but I gradually made sense of things. Josie was near the middle of the room talking with three guest girls. Their heads were almost touching, and because of how they were standing, the upper parts of their faces, including all their eyes, had been placed in a box on the higher tier, while all their mouths and chins had been squeezed into a lower box. The majority of the children were on their feet, some moving between boxes. Over at the rear wall, three boys were seated on the modular sofa, and even though they were sitting apart, their heads had been placed together inside a single box, while the outstretched leg of the boy nearest the window extended not only across the neighboring box, but right into the one beyond. There was an unpleasant tint on the three boxes containing the boys on the sofa — a sickly yellow — and an anxiety passed through my mind. Then other people moved across my view of them, and I began to attend instead to the voices around me.

Although someone had said as I’d come in, ‘Oh, here’s the new AF, she’s cute!’ almost all the voices I now heard were discussing Rick. Josie must only recently have been standing beside him, but her conversation with the guest girls had caused her to turn her back to him, and he was now by himself, not conversing with anyone.

‘He’s a friend of Josie. Lives nearby,’ a girl was saying behind me.

‘We should be nice to him,’ another girl said. ‘It must be weird for him, being here with us.’

‘Why’d Josie ask him? He must feel so weird.’

‘How about we offer him something. Make him feel welcome.’

The girl — who was thin and had unusually long arms — picked up a metal dish filled with chocolates and went towards Rick. I also moved further into the room, and heard her say to him:

‘Excuse me. Would you care for a bonbon?’

Rick had been watching Josie talking to the three guest girls, but now turned to the long-armed girl.

‘Go ahead,’ she said, raising the dish higher. ‘They’re good.’

‘Thank you very much.’ He looked into the dish and chose a chocolate wrapped in shiny green paper.

Though the voices continued all around the room, I realized that suddenly everyone — including Josie and her guest girls — was now watching Rick.

‘We’re all so pleased you came,’ the long-armed girl said. ‘Josie’s neighbor, right?’

‘That’s right. I live next door.’

‘Next door? That’s a good one! Only your house and this one, that’s all there is for miles!’

The three girls Josie had been talking to now joined the long-armed girl, all the time smiling at Rick. Josie herself though remained where she was, her eyes watching anxiously.

‘I suppose so.’ Rick laughed quickly. ‘But that still makes me next door.’

‘Sure does! Bet you like being out here. Must be peaceful.’

‘Peaceful is correct. It’s all quite perfect until you want to go to the movies.’

I knew Rick hoped everyone listening would laugh as the adults had done about the pizza deliveries. But the four girls just continued to look at him in a kindly way.

‘So you don’t watch movies on your DS?’ one of them asked eventually.

‘I do sometimes. But I like going to a real movie theater. Big screen, ice cream. My mother and I enjoy that. Trouble is it’s such a long way to go.’

‘We have a movie theater end of our block,’ the long-armed girl said. ‘But we rarely go.’

‘Hey! He likes movies!’

‘Missy, please? Sorry, you have to excuse my sister. So you enjoy movies. Help you relax, right?’

‘I bet you like action movies,’ said the girl called Missy.