Proof I was Here

by Becky Blake

  About this Book

  The highly anticipated debut novel from the two-time winner of the CBC Literary Prize

  Days after she arrives in Barcelona, Niki’s world is turned upside down when her fiancé calls off their engagement. Unwilling to return to Toronto and face a looming assault charge, she turns to life on the streets. Living among pickpockets, squatters and graffiti artists in a city she barely knows, she is challenged to reassess her ideas about family, luck and art. With the help of a passionate Catalan separatist who dreams of building a new country from the ground up, Niki realizes that starting her life over from scratch could be an opportunity – if she can just find a way to clear her name.

  Praise for Proof I Was Here

  "In Proof I Was Here, Becky Blake takes us on an extraordinary journey through Barcelona's underbelly, exploring with empathy and insight the human need for belonging and security, and what it means to lose everything. Finely crafted and richly imagined, Proof I Was Here is an enthralling, intelligent and fast-paced novel you won't be able to put down."

  – Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Art of Leaving and The Best Place on Earth

  "Proof I Was Here is laced with grit, art and angst. This evocative novel explores the intersection of privilege and survival, 'good' and 'bad' behaviour, permanence and the ephemeral . . . it reminds us of the power of our choices, but also shows how serendipity can, in a moment, change what we think about ourselves and the world."

  – Leesa Dean, author of Waiting for the Cyclone

  For my sisters, blood and chosen.

  Contents

  Cover

  About This Book

  Praise for Proof I Was Here

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  Barcelona. Spring 2010.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Barcelona. Spring 2010.

  Part One

  1

  I pushed out through the front door of the building and walked away from the apartment that was no longer mine. Barcelona had turned ugly. The leaves of the palm trees were dead and brown, the cobblestones of the sidewalk broken and dirty. Even the sunlight looked damaged – gritty and soot streaked. I brushed away the first few tears that came, but after a while I didn’t bother. Nobody was paying any attention to me. It was late Saturday afternoon and the Gothic Quarter was gridlocked with last-minute shoppers: teenagers with cell phones, parents with strollers, couples holding hands and taking up way too much space.

  The old itch was starting under my skin, but I ignored it. I just needed to sit down somewhere and collect myself. A bar across the street looked dim inside and not too busy. I reached into the pocket of my trench coat for my wallet, then checked my other pocket. For a second, I thought I’d been robbed. Then I remembered the sign at the Boqueria market warning about pickpockets; that I’d moved my wallet into my shopping bag for safekeeping – a bag now sitting on Peter’s kitchen counter. After throwing my keys at him, the only way to retrieve it would require doing things I couldn’t face: standing on the wrong side of his locked door, and begging to be let back in.

  The itch travelled up my arms and converged in the centre of my chest, a maddening spiky mass that needed to be torn out. I stepped into a souvenir shop and walked up one of the aisles, past the magnets, T-shirts and statuettes: tacky souvenir versions of all the attractions I hadn’t had a chance to see yet. At a rack of postcards, I stopped. Slowly, I spun the carousel, reviewing its contents – famous paintings by Velázquez, Miró, Goya, Dalí.

  I checked the mirror in the corner of the shop. The sales clerk was busy with a customer at the cash. I slipped a Picasso postcard into my pocket, and the prickling scratch in my chest was soothed for a moment by a warm rush of heat.

  Time slowed as I moved toward the exit. I saw the cashier’s finger pressing down hard on a ribbon she was tying, the customer shifting his weight from foot to foot. In the front window, the pages of a book had turned yellow from the sun. The bamboo wind chimes jangled like hollow bones as I opened the door to the street.

  A block from the shop, I glanced back. No one was following me. In my pocket, the shiny surface of the postcard felt reassuring – I deserved to have at least this tiny thing. I walked for several minutes, feeling buoyant and indestructible. Peter wanted to send me back to Canada, but I wasn’t going to go. I had a three-month tourist visa. Maybe by the time it ran out I’d have found some way to belong in this city without needing to be his wife.

  “Niki, I can’t marry you,” he’d said. For a second I’d wondered if he could have found out about what I’d done on my last day back home, but I didn’t think that was possible. Something else had happened. An affair with one of his new co-workers maybe, while I was busy packing up our apartment in Toronto. When he’d denied it, I called him a liar. So then he admitted the truth: “I didn’t miss you,” he’d said. “I didn’t miss you when you weren’t here.”

  I pulled the postcard from my pocket. It was a portrait of an asymmetrical woman, the two sides of her face so dissimilar they could belong to different people. I stopped in the middle of the surging crowd on Portal de l’Àngel, unable to take another step. As I looked around, only two people made eye contact: an old woman begging in front of a restaurant and a homeless man sitting on a piece of cardboard beside the Zara entrance. The man had scabby bare feet and long dirty hair. His eyes pinned me in place. He knew what I knew: that in just one moment, everything could change; that the change could leave you invisible, except to others who were unlucky. I had a strong urge to go and sit beside him, to let myself sink down to the ground and then stay there.

  Beside me the roll-down door of a dress shop clattered shut. The woman closing up the store clicked a heavy lock in place, then pulled on her motorcycle helmet and hurried to the curb. She had somewhere to go, or someone to see. Those were the reasons that kept people moving – kept them from sinking to the ground. I needed a destination, but the only place I could think of was the Boqueria. I’d been shopping at the market every day – had been there just this morning. I loved the tall pyramids of brightly coloured produce, and the vendors who called out terms of endearment as I passed: ¡Cariño! ¡Querida! ¡Mi amor! They sounded like a giant family all clamouring to feed me.

  I looked around, trying to choose another destination while avoiding the homeless man’s eyes. Up ahead was a sign for the metro. As I walked toward it, I folded the postcard down the middle and dropped it in a trash can. At the entrance, I stepped onto a long silver escalator and let it carry me down. I would ride the trains until I figured out some other way to move.

  A line of people were waiting to feed their tickets into the automated turnstiles. When it was my turn, I
just climbed over. The soles of my boots smacked loudly on the other side. I smoothed my skirt over my leggings, then headed off down a long damp hallway to a set of well-worn stairs. On the platform below, I waited for the train.

  There was only one thing in my pocket – a paint chip sample I’d been planning to show Peter. As I touched its edge, I remembered the rush of stupid joy I’d felt holding up the little red square, imagining the white walls of our new home filling up with a colour that I loved.

  The tracks of the metro seemed especially close. I turned and placed my hand on the tiled wall, feeling the solid surface beneath my fingers. After a moment, I began to draw with my fingertip, tracing the skyline view from Peter’s balcony onto the wall: the Gothic cathedral’s spiky roofline, and beyond it the wide avenue of art nouveau buildings, then the distant curve of mountains on the horizon.

  When the train came, I got on and looked back at the blank stretch of tiles. Maybe if I stayed underground long enough, the city would look beautiful again when I came back up.

  2

  I rode the trains back and forth for hours, noticing the unloved people. They were suddenly everywhere. A thin woman in a window seat rocked herself back and forth. Quarter-sized bruises lined the inside of her arm. They reminded me of a shirt I’d shoplifted once – when I’d pulled off the security tag, it left splotches of permanent dye all down one sleeve. The thin woman rose and moved toward the exit, rubbing at her arm. People could also be ruined in ways that were impossible to reverse.

  A man with a neck brace got on at the next stop and planted himself in the centre of the aisle. He was holding a display box full of small coloured lighters. “My friends, forgive me,” he called out. His Spanish was slow and basic like mine. “I am ashamed to be begging for your help. I am a strong man, but I cannot find work. Please, any help at all.” He held out a lighter in my direction and flicked it. I had nothing to give him except my attention.

  He turned and walked off, starting his speech again from the beginning. At the far end of the car, a group of tall Black men slouched, loose and tired, in their seats. They were speaking French and I guessed they were from somewhere in West Africa. Each man had a large cloth bag between his feet. They were probably illegal street vendors – the kind who sold knock-off purses and sunglasses to tourists. One of the men dug in his pocket for some change and handed it to the guy with the neck brace. No one else gave him anything, and soon he moved on to the next car.

  As it got later, the passengers got louder. Groups of teenage boys jostled each other, drinking and spilling cans of San Miguel. On one train a throng of people in Megadeth concert T-shirts crowded around me, smelling of weed and shouting to their friends about epic guitar solos.

  Around 3:00 a.m., two security guards in bright orange vests got on at Plaça Catalunya station. They walked the length of the car with wide balanced steps. I sat up straighter as they passed, but they hardly looked at me. I checked my reflection in the window: a skinny tourist with staticky blond hair and a faint half moon of mascara under each of her eyes.

  The security guard at the department store in Toronto had taken a lot longer to assess me. A balding man with thick biceps, he had locked the door of the store’s security office, then pressed me down hard into a chair and taken my wallet out of my purse. Standing behind me, he tossed pieces of my ID onto the table: my credit card, my bank card, my driver’s licence, the art gallery membership Peter had given me for my birthday, the found photographs I’d put into the photo sleeves as a joke to create a fake family for myself.

  When he was finished, he bent down and spoke with his mouth so close to my ear that I could feel his breath on my neck.

  “Spoiled,” he said. “I see women like you all the time.”

  When I told him he didn’t know anything about me, he slammed a hand on the table and pointed to my belongings. “Tidy that up.”

  I worked to fit the cards and photos back in my wallet, while trying to keep an eye on his hands. “I swear I was going to pay,” I said when my wallet was back in my purse. “I was just looking out the window to see if it was raining.”

  The guard pulled a chair up to the table across from me. “Intent to deprive, that’s all I need to prove.”

  “But I wasn’t even outside the store. They’re seriously not going to charge me for this. You should just let me go.”

  “What I should do,” he countered, pointing his pen at me in a way that made me certain he’d held a weapon before, “is make sure you understand who’s in charge here, and what things cost.” He shoved the cashmere scarf across the table toward me.

  I stared at the scarf as we waited for the police to arrive; I couldn’t figure out why I’d taken it. As a kid I’d shoplifted food that my mom and I needed. As a teen I’d boosted clothes and makeup from big chain stores. But it had been years since I’d stolen anything. Plus, this time had felt different – more like the scarf had grabbed onto me instead of the other way around. It had been so soft. The colour so lovely, a perfectly cooked egg yolk. I had brought it to my face, thinking of another scarf I’d stolen. After that, it was in my purse.

  When the cops arrived, a female officer greeted the guard by name, then scribbled in her notebook as she listened to his report: how he’d watched me slip the scarf into my purse and then move past the checkout counters to the front door.

  “When I grabbed her, she elbowed me in the face.” The guard rubbed his chin with a woeful look. “And then, when I let go of her for a second, she turned around and cut me with her key.” Gingerly, he began to roll back his sleeve revealing a deep ugly gash on his arm.

  “Are you kidding me? I didn’t touch him!”

  “Mike, you should go to the ER and get that looked at,” the policewoman said. She turned to me. “If you assaulted him, that’s a much more serious charge.”

  “But I didn’t! If anything, I should be pressing charges against him. I probably have bruises all over me.” I could still feel the imprint of his fingers on my shoulders and arm.

  The policewoman ignored me and read me my rights while her partner motioned for me to put my hands behind my back. The security guard gave me a small smirk as the cops walked me out.

  In the tiny interrogation room at the police station, I waited alone, pacing and trying not to panic. When I asked for a lawyer, the on-duty counsellor called the phone in the room. I told him that the guard hated me for some reason, that he seemed like he might be dangerous, that he’d probably been in a fight; a key couldn’t make a gash that big – it must have been a knife or a piece of glass. The counsellor’s advice was to say nothing for now. It was the same advice he no doubt gave everyone, no matter what unfair shit they were dealing with.

  Finally, a police officer with a crewcut let me out. At his desk, he made me sign a blue sheet of paper with the words Promise to Appear at the top. On it was a court date over six weeks away and a list of my charges: theft under five thousand dollars and minor assault.

  “And don’t even think about not showing up,” he said. “Otherwise we’ll be adding an extra charge to that list and you’ll be spending some time in jail.”

  The moment I was free to go, I went home to pick up my suitcase, then took a taxi to the airport and checked in early for my flight. I’d already been planning to leave and never come back, so nothing had really changed. I just couldn’t believe I’d done something so impulsive and almost ruined everything. I was worried it might happen again.

  I was still feeling anxious as I cleared Spanish customs. But then the airport’s automatic doors opened, and I smelled a different country’s air for the first time, and spotted Peter’s face in the crowd of people waiting for their loved ones.

  Only a week had passed since then, but now everything was different. I rested my face against the window, letting my cheekbone bounce off the surface each time the train stopped and started, imagining a bruise fo
rming and then spreading, my whole cheek caving in like a rotten apple. I welcomed that level of damage; I deserved it for trusting Peter.

  When the train reached the end of the line again, I crossed to the other side of the tracks and settled into a seat on a train that was heading the other way. Travelling back and forth across the city, I was digging a groove, deeper and deeper, into the ground, like an eraser rubbing at the same stubborn mark. There were so many feelings I would need to forget: the rush of pride whenever Peter walked toward me in a room, my gratitude each time his family welcomed me on holidays, the thrill of being Peter’s “plus one” at art openings and my secret hope that one of his colleagues might someday want to show my paintings. Love – I’d felt that too. For the first time I’d let it take me over completely.

  The view from my window was mostly dirty grey walls punctuated by red plastic tubing. The stations were gaudy baubles strung far apart on a dingy cord of tunnel. After 5:00 a.m. the train slowed down, stopping in each station for longer. I wasn’t hungry, felt nothing in my body, and was thankful for that. The metro would shut down for a few hours on Sunday night, but that still gave me almost a whole day to decide where to go next. Eventually I would have to return to the apartment for my wallet and passport. I wondered how long I could survive with nothing in my pockets. Maybe a few days. Maybe longer. A few days of staying away from my mother’s apartment had turned into six years. Six years and counting.

  The train passed along a brief stretch of aboveground track, and the dawn-diluted sky looked bleached and empty. I’d been thinking about my mother more than usual over the last few weeks – how moving to Spain meant I’d probably never see her again. I’d even sent her a postcard the day after my arrival, the ocean between us making contact feel safe for the first time; there was no chance she could ask to see me. I’d also wanted to show off, let her know that I’d moved into a gorgeous apartment in Barcelona and that I was getting married. Now, if I ever spoke to her again, I’d have to admit that everything I’d been bragging about – all the differences between her life and mine – had disappeared. She might even think I’d been lying. All I could hope for was that maybe she’d moved, and the postcard would end up in the trash.