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The Outcast Hours

Page 21

by Mahvesh Murad


  She woke sweaty, Oswald warm and stirring by her side, the room overheated. The dogs were barking. She snapped up, panic billowing. Maybe she’d slept through her 5:30 alarm. The dogs were revolting, demanding to be let out. But her phone, blazing in the dark, read 4:03 am. “Shut up! Lemme think goddamnit,” shouted Kris, squinting and holding out the phone. In the pale light of the screen, she saw the dogs’ open eyes throw the light back. They were barking at the garage door. Giving whining Oswald a couple of scratches for reassurance, she lowered her legs off the creaking cot, using the phone to make sure her feet didn’t land on anything living or excrement. She could see the glitter of rivulets by the dismal light. Some had relieved themselves ahead of their dawn yard time. She needed to as well.

  “Quiet!” she bellowed. Some of the dogs quietened, not all. She joined them with a startled yelp as a mournful howl cut through the barking. From outside.

  The phrase Dee of the Shadows popped into her head. Heart pounding, she felt the remnants of a dream burn away in the harsh glow of her phone. Had she dreamed of Dee? She grasped at the dissolving dream for a second, but let it go—she had other problems. A room-full of riled up dogs, and a mystery howler. Surely the howl hadn’t come from the yard. Just a prankster out on the streets beyond. It was Halloween, after all. Or it was a coyote sniffing around the hinterland. Or she’d accidentally left a dog outside.

  Fuck. It couldn’t be, she had checked thoroughly, as always.

  But what if she had? She had to check. Buoyed by the sea of noise gushing from the throats of her dogs, Kris sighed. She put on her hoodie and got up. There was another but. What if there was something other than a dog outside? She took out her keys and held them between her fingers, vaguely remembering that this wasn’t the best way to punch someone. Fuck it, she thought. I can’t defend myself anyway, at least it makes me feel more badass.

  She walked through her pack, key-braced fist and open hand held out like a warrior martyr’s. Some of the dogs licked at her fingers for salty succor. Others merely barked louder, encouraged by their pack leader’s roused stature. Kris pulled at the chain of the yard door. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll protect y’all, just stay the fuck back, okay?” she said. The door rose with a metallic growl, slow like a guillotine. Dim ambient streetlight poured through the gap. “If someone’s out there you better not be here to hurt these dogs cuz I’ll key your motherfucking eyes out,” Kris muttered tremulously. As the door rose up, she ducked and looked, half expecting to see a feral figure crouched in the yard, dog-head bristling, eyes aflame. But the grating door’s slow progress revealed an empty yard—

  Fuck

  and a dog’s head on the ground. I left a dog out there and something beheaded it…

  “You stupid shit,” said Kris, shaking her head and continuing to pull the chain.

  It’s just a. “Fucking mask.”

  The ordered rule of sleep-time was shattered. Though some of the dogs chose to go back to sleep, others followed Kris outside, shitting two hours early and emptying bladders on drizzle-dampened asphalt. Kris carried Oswald outside in her arms, to compensate for rudely waking the old creature. The dogs head lay on the ground in the centre of the yard, looking desiccated with no human to fill out its emptiness. Its stiff ears still stood up straight.

  Kris bent down by the mask, huffing as she transferred Oswald’s heft to one arm. Picking up the mask, Kris felt something leap from her chest to her throat, fleet as a hound. It left as a small laugh, leaving her throat aching. She looked around, gooseflesh prickling across her arms. No heads peeping over the corrugated metal fence. No howls. “Thank…you?” she said to the night. Kris looked at the mask, with its yellow rubber fangs and dirty mane. It had to be the person she’d seen on Terminal. Had they climbed the fences into the yard? Thrown the mask over while passing? Leaped through the night sky and landed on the asphalt on nimble, elongated paws? She was disappointed to see that there were no Christmas lights rigged into its eyes. If there ever had been, they were gone. Well, I have a costume for Halloween now. Tabs would love it.

  A bichon by the name of Hampton twitched one ear as he sniffed at the small pile of shit he’d left Kris to scoop in one corner of the yard. Kris sat down on one of the plastic playboxes in the yard, placing Oswald and the mask on her lap. She took out her phone and texted Tabby. Home safe?

  Kris took the mask and slid it on. It stank—a mangy dogsbreath of rubber, weed, and sweat. Powder barked at her from afar. Argyle came and sat on her converses, eyes slitting. Kris could hear the buzzing of the streetlamps on the lot next door, the neon hum of the Tim Horton’s sign. The phone buzzed on the plastic of the playbox. In bed safe af & still drunk thx for checkin darlin. Why u up?

  Couldn’t sleep.

  Oswald was snoring again. Argyle’s eyes were closed. Powder had wandered back into the Nursery to sleep. Another text.

  U ok?

  Kris listened to Oswald’s whistling breath, scratching his graying fur, wondering how many more times he’d be there to greet her at the dog hotel before he never came back. She thumbed out a message on the phone.

  Let’s get a rescue dog.

  Kris tapped Send. Through the dark cocoon of the mask, she looked at the night sky, patches of stars among the clearing clouds, and thought of Dardenne, hundreds of kilometers away, where her parents were, their house empty of daughter and dog. Where she’d run into Aiden last at a bar this summer, on one of her visits home. He’d bought her a drink. They’d told each other about their lives (he was a carpenter now) as if they’d only just met, then reminded each other of the Dardenne they knew as children, which emptinesses had sprouted strip malls. They’d made out in his truck, drunk. She’d ended up holding Aiden’s balding head to her chest when he broke down in shuddering, embarrassing sobs half-way through a sudden apology for getting her dog killed. She hadn’t asked whether he was sorry for having bullied her too.

  After, he’d showed her the tiny white kiss of scar tissue in the crook of his arm, where Dee’s canine had punctured his skin. She had touched it tenderly, as if it might still hurt.

  Tilt

  Karen Onojaife

  If Heaven truly was a place on Earth, Iyere wondered, who was to say that that place couldn’t be a crappy little casino on the top floor of a shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush?

  If she really thought about it (and generally, she tried not to think about it), she understood that there wasn’t all that much of a difference between her and the patrons of the betting shops that seemed to sprout in every empty space on the high street. And next to the betting shops were the pawn shops, their windows emblazoned with bright posters depicting people inexplicably joyful at the idea of having to put prized possessions in hock. But those places, grubby with daylight and disapproving glances from passers-by, could make a girl feel like she had a problem, whereas a casino at two, three, or four am, while not necessarily a sensible choice, at least made Iyere feel like she had taken a considered decision to court decadence.

  “Decadence,” she could imagine her sister, Ivie, scoffing. “This place is called Barry’s Casino.”

  Which, fair enough. But until Iyere could figure out a way to make it to the neon-lit hiss of the Bellagio’s fountains, Barry would have to do. Besides, she had come to appreciate the fake solicitude from the liveried doormen; the powdery sweet scent of carpet cleaner that perfumed the tired shag pile lining the mirrored hallway; the complimentary warm, sugared pretzels that staff brought round on silver platters, presumably on the nights that Barry was feeling especially generous, and the unpredictable choice of soundtrack piped onto the casino floor—this early morning’s selection being a run through of Gloria Estefan’s greatest hits.

  What she liked most of all was that the two, three or four am crowd at Barry’s Casino knew what it was about; a loose camaraderie of sorts but essentially, people would mind their own business. No tourists wanting to distract with chatter, or rookies taking up valuable space at a table while they fum
bled over their chips and mixed up their bets. No, the early morning crew just hummed like a hive; gentle sighs and sometimes light taps on the back from a neighbour, either in celebration or commiseration depending on the cut of a deck.

  “What the fuck is it?” Ivie had asked her once, simultaneously incredulous and despairing on one shameful afternoon when she had caught Iyere rifling through her handbag for money. “What is it that you get from doing this? From being at that place?”

  Iyere, face flushed and eyes bright, hadn’t known what to say. To explain that she liked the sweat of cheap plastic chips in her hand seemed small. She liked to stack these totems upon the green baize of a table, liked to listen to the rattle of the ball as it skittered across the wheel as lightly as a girl skipping rope, liked the swish of cards through a croupier’s gloved hand as they fanned the deck this way and that, the flicker of white edges like breaking waves.

  She could have spoken to the science of things; the ticker tape parade of dopamine lighting up in her brain and the rerouting of neural pathways.

  Or she could have dealt in practicalities, for example, the fact that she had been borrowing money from the petty cash account at the community college where she taught so she needed to win some back and win big, so that she could replace it all before anyone found out.

  Or perhaps this: you and your little girl, Ofure, are in a local park one day and she is playing on a swing while you are reading a book. This playground is nothing special, just something that’s there on the walk home from school and there’s no way of telling, just from looking, that somehow the local council has missed the last three annual inspections, or that screws in the swing’s frame are coming loose, or that when Ofure clambers to a standing position on the rubber tyre, mittened hands clutching metal chains, the whole structure will groan and pitch forward, tipping her, your little girl, onto the hard ground, head first. Bright red blood splashed across snow.

  Iyere had always liked the things she liked too intensely. If it wasn’t gambling, it would have been other things, it had been other things—food, sex, or telling lies just because. But after Ofure died, the casino seemed the only place where Iyere could comfortably exist in time. It wasn’t that she enjoyed the losses—in fact those made her panicked and sick, and aside from an ephemeral flare of glee, she didn’t really much care for the wins, but these swings of fate either way seemed at least conceivable and therefore manageable, and matters that she had a hand in, as opposed to the loss of Ofure, which had been so complete, so profound and so unexpected that even years later, she could scarcely allow herself to accept that it had in fact occurred.

  So Iyere had said nothing, and Ivie had just stared at her. Iyere had known that if her sister hadn’t been tired from chemo, she might have tried to fight her right there in the hallway until, as Ivie had put it once, “you saw some fucking sense.” As it was, Ivie had been exhausted, giving a mirthless chuckle before sliding onto the nearby sofa in defeat.

  “Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not there,” Ivie had said, fixing Iyere with a hard gaze. “She’s not there. Not in a fucking casino.”

  “She’s not anywhere,” Iyere had said and then she had walked out, a stolen twenty pound note still in her hand.

  Iyere always knew what time it was, despite the casino’s attempt to dissemble by the regular flow of free drinks and the complete absence of clocks. Even without her watch she knew because she had always preferred the night hours, enjoying their relative quiet and the softness of possibility that sunlight tended to burn away.

  She had been there for about an hour, having had a couple of uninspired rounds of blackjack and Texas hold ‘em, when she noticed the croupier standing at an empty roulette table across the room.

  Iyere knew all the croupiers there by now and this one was definitely new. The woman’s hands darted into the thick fall of her locked hair, fingers moving swiftly as she arranged it into a messy bun. The action made the crisp white of her shirt draw tightly across her breasts and Iyere scolded herself for noticing; she looked away, her face feeling warm and her thoughts suddenly scattered. She made herself count to ten, made herself engage in boring chit chat with the dealer at her table, and then counted to thirty before she allowed herself to look again.

  The croupier was already looking at her, her head tilted to one side, one side of her mouth beginning to tilt in amusement. She let her gaze travel the length of Iyere’s body before it returned to her face and then she nodded once, mostly solemn but that half smile hinting at a degree of mocking in her assessment, or her invitation, or whatever this was.

  “Morning,” the woman said as Iyere neared her table. Iyere just nodded, not entirely trusting her voice to speak until she had taken a sip of her drink. “And how are we today?”

  “Oh, you know,” Iyere shrugged, letting her eyes fall on the woman’s name tag; ‘Essy’.

  “Oh, I know,” Essy said, allowing a grin to bloom across her face, leaving Iyere bewildered enough to glance behind her to see if Essy’s smile had been directed at someone else. But everyone else seemed far away somehow, although she could still see them and hear them, everything dulled as if with a thick veil and when she turned back to the table, Essy was closer, leaning forward slightly with one hand positioned on either side of the wheel.

  “Bets, please,” Essy said, looking at Iyere expectantly.

  Iyere placed a chip on a numbered square, barely even checking where she’d left it, preferring instead to watch the flick of Essy’s hands as she spun the wheel one way and tossed the tiny ball the other. They both watched the ball stutter and skip until Essy murmured ‘rien ne va plus’ and a moment later, she swept Iyere’s losing chip away from the board.

  “So, you’re new?” Iyere asked. She had the sense that Essy barely managed to avoid an eye roll, surely having heard the question a thousand times over by now from various lecherous parties. Still, Iyere liked to think that there was a significant difference between being a lecherous party and an interested one.

  “Not really,” Essy said. “Was on days before. I asked to switch shifts because I prefer the night time crowd. They’re more—”

  “Desperate?” Iyere offered.

  “If you like. Bets, please,” Essy said, placing the tip of her right index finger on the polished chrome handle of the wheel as she waited. Iyere wasn’t sure how old Essy was; she was one of those women whose skin was so dark and unlined that it was always hard to tell. Younger than her at least, despite the wrinkled skin of Essy’s large hands and Iyere was seized with the abrupt desire to lose herself in every single fold of them.

  Iyere put a stack of chips on the table.

  Essy nodded and then started the wheel with a brisk whisk of her wrist. They both stared in silence at the ball, Essy eventually making a soft sound of consolation in the back of her throat before sweeping Iyere’s stack away. “Let me guess,” she said, pausing for a moment to survey Iyere once more. “Teacher?”

  Iyere gave a surprised smile and tipped her glass in acknowledgement.

  “Working here gives you all types of party tricks,” Essy said. “What do you teach?”

  “Fairy tales,” Iyere said. “The taxonomy of them. For example, did you know that pretty much every country has its own version of Little Red Riding Hood?”

  Essy considered for a moment before shrugging. “Makes sense. Show me a country where girls aren’t hunted by wolves. Bets, please.”

  Iyere lost another stack of chips.

  “Desperate, you said? Earlier?” Essy clarified, as she swept the chips away. “But you know what I think? I think ‘desperate’ gets a bad rap. Desperation gets people closer to being honest.”

  “Honest about what?”

  “About what they’re doing.” Essy said. “Bets, please,” she repeated, waiting for Iyere to place a short stack of chips on the table before continuing. “I mean, who isn’t gambling, really? It’s just that most of you like to pretend otherwise. The girl who fucks a fuckboy
because she hopes that good sex might tempt him into being a better boyfriend has placed a bet, no? All of the components are there; consideration, chance and prize.”

  Iyere choked briefly on her drink, both somewhat thrilled and taken aback by the boldness of Essy’s language. She wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand before meeting Essy’s gaze. “Well, I wouldn’t call a fuckboy a prize,” she said.

  “Ah, but the girl in our example doesn’t know that yet—no one does, until she lays down the stakes. Schrödinger’s Fuckboy if you will. Bets, please.”

  Iyere lost another two chips. “My sister thinks I have a problem,” she said.

  “Why?” Essy shot back. “Because it’s three am on a Wednesday and you’re at a casino, wearing pyjamas and your hair is still wrapped? Bets, please.”

  Iyere pushed the remainder of her chips onto a number, but her eyes were fixed on Essy’s face instead of the wheel. There was something about her tugging at Iyere’s memory but she couldn’t quite place it, faint as it was and overwhelmed by the flutter in Iyere’s chest whenever she allowed her gaze to rest on the curve of Essy’s full lower lip or the gleam of skin at her collarbone.

  Iyere lost again and Essy shrugged, sweeping the chips away with a flourish before folding her arms. “Well, it seems that you’re out of—”

  “I had a daughter,” Iyere blurted out, unable to stand the idea of having to leave Essy’s table now that her money had run out. She had never spoken of Ofure to strangers before, not like this and she wasn’t even sure what drove her now. Something in Essy’s gaze perhaps; it seemed soft but also demanding, as if her attention, once bestowed, required great things in exchange.

 

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