Sword and Song

by Kate Story

  She feels Rowan’s gaze on her and flushes. Guys are usually turned off by her opinions. But is it her imagination, or is Rowan looking at her with admiration?

  “Especially now, with the Union. They need to generate neo-patriotic fervour,” he agrees.

  She looks into his eyes and smiles.

  Someone starts singing “Blowing in the Wind.” Ophelia and Candace warble harmonies and get a laughing attack. The song falters and dies.

  Time passes. Candace has to pee so badly she even gives up on flirting. Finally she squats and pisses next to the hospital, Ophelia shielding her for some privacy.

  And just as Candace is doing the shake-and-dry, some shoving starts on the other side of the group. Even giraffe-like Rowan can’t really tell what’s going on. Shouts, some people are taken, maybe. From here, all they can really see is the line of shields opening, closing. A feeling like a tooth being pulled. The “kettle” is getting smaller.

  One woman has a panic attack; she folds, bending, falls to her knees, she can’t breathe. Ophelia knows how she feels. She gets them sometimes, too. She puts a hand on the woman’s back. It’s bad.

  “We need some help here!” she calls to the police. “Help!”

  The cops open their line, two of them dart forward. The woman is seized and disappears as surely as if the line of black is an open maw, a ravening beast.

  Ophelia feels sick. Candace sees her face.

  “It’s not your fault, sweetie.”

  “I shouldn’t have called on the cops to help.”

  “What else were you going to do? Girl, you feel guilty about everything.”

  More time passes.

  Now Ophelia has to pee.

  It’s all going wrong, going wrong in slow motion.

  “The ratio of cops to protesters must be two-to-one,” Rowan mutters. He’s got his phone out, long, clever fingers typing furiously, his bicycle leaning against one jutted hip.

  “That’s crazy,” Ophelia says.

  Rowan’s eyes, she notes, are as blue as pictures she’s seen of the Caribbean Sea. He’s beautiful. She feels all intelligent thought draining from her. Guys aren’t beautiful—they’re supposed to be handsome, aren’t they? But him, he’s beautiful.

  He smiles.

  She’s entirely undone.

  And then the line of cops opens again, and two guys dart in and seize Rowan’s bike.

  “Hey!” He tries to hang onto the bike and his phone flips into the air. Ophelia catches it.

  The cops wrench the bike toward the horrible black line; Rowan’s hanging on, he’s being dragged. The crowd swirls, there are shouts. Ophelia tries to follow, but loses sight of Rowan—has he gone down? Has the black maw devoured him?

  Her breath gets short. She puts her hands on her knees, braces, like that woman. She’ll be taken. Just breathe. Be calm. Don’t lose it. The fear of having a panic attack is greater than the attack itself. Remember? The fear is worse than the thing itself. The fear is worse . . . Breathe. . . .

  The ground is heaving, shaking. Her mind opens, calms. She’s sliding in. No, not now, not here . . . but it will help. Yes.

  And she lets the crowd and noise and confusion go—or is it that she drains away from it?—and she’s gone, gone to her other place.

  Chapter Three

  Her Imaginary Friend

  Are you ready?”

  The air is sweet and calm. The ocean, an impossible turquoise, laps at the light, almost white sand. A wooden sailing ship anchors in the bay, great red sails blooming against the lapis sky. Distant music ebbs and flows, carried on the wind. The ground is shaking a little. This always happens when she comes here; she knows it’s a minor tremor, soon to pass.

  Behind her, green slopes and hills mound up and up, round like a woman’s body, mist wrapping around the rising land like a sari. Far off in the distance, at the north end of the island, the great mountain looms, barely visible, snow on the peak.

  “Are you ready?”

  Green silk edged in gold whispers over Pim’s brown skin; her hair in its million tiny braids swings in the breeze. A smile quirks her lips. She’s waiting for an answer.

  Ophelia grins. “Ready for what?”

  Ophelia has been coming to her other place ever since she can remember. And always Pim has been there—tall, slender, strong, with her infectious laugh, and her magical ability to turn into any animal she pleases. Her imaginary friend, her mother called Pim, back when Ophelia was young and didn’t know enough to keep her visits to this place to herself.

  But lately, the visits to her other place have felt different. More intense, more . . . real. And sometimes, it feels harder to go home.

  Pim touches Ophelia’s cheek with one long finger. “You have to come through for real. And soon.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Ophelia feels her heart beat faster. “Pim, I can’t. This isn’t . . .”

  Is she going to actually say it? Kill the fantasy? Is she actually going to say this isn’t real?

  But as always, when Ophelia raises an objection, Pim interrupts. She waves her hand dismissively. “I’m getting itchy. My hands are hot.” She grips Ophelia’s shoulder and it’s true, Ophelia can feel the heat in Pim’s palm. “The ground shakes all the time. Soon the mountain will speak fire.”

  Pim sounds like Tonto in The Lone Ranger, and Ophelia imitates the voice. “The mountain speaks fire.”

  They both burst out laughing.

  “It would be good to have you here!” Pim giggles. She gets serious. “You will learn to . . .” Pim intertwines her fingers “. . . to knit things together. You have that power. We need you. I need you.”

  Her imaginary friend. Her imaginary world. You’ve got some imagination on you: her mother, not pleased. Imagination: not a good thing. Ophelia: always in trouble for going off into a trance.

  But you can’t smell an imaginary world, can you?

  Maybe if you’re impossibly romantic and lonely, you can.

  Sometimes Ophelia thinks of stories about this place and they’re so vivid she’s sure they have to come from somewhere. Like they are real. Sometimes she writes them down. Sometimes there will also be a song she hears and she’ll write it down, sing it. Or songs someone else has written, here in the real world, and she thinks, that describes the other place, exactly! She tells the twins these stories at bedtime, or sings a song to get baby Darryl to sleep.

  Well, not all of them. Not the scary ones.

  But this new obsession of Pim’s—that she has to “come through for real”—this is beginning to frighten Ophelia.

  The ground shakes again. The champagne-coloured sand, the blue water, Pim—it all starts to fade and recede. This is how it always happens: Ophelia can wish herself to the other place, but never knows how or why she leaves.

  Pim’s voice is faint. “My friend? You understand?”

  But Ophelia doesn’t understand anything except that she is coming back into the protest and she’s still trapped.

  The stale scent on her T-shirt hits her.

  Salt fish.

  “Jesus, Ophelia, this is no time to drift off into la-la land!” It’s Candace, shaking her arm, and the roar and the press of the crowd surrounds her again. “It’s creepy when you do that!”

  “Sorry.”

  “You gotta get your head examined.”

  Something hard in Ophelia’s palm—it’s Rowan’s phone. Where is he? Oh, there, right there, they’re all still packed together like sardines. The police didn’t take him. Ophelia’s heart sings.

  “They took my bike!” He looks angry and confused. “They just ripped it out of my hands.”

  “That sucks,” Ophelia says. “I’m sorry.”

  And then the bullhorn guy takes up “Blowing in the Wind” again. Rowan groans. It makes Ophelia laugh and she joins in, throwing her head back, singing at the top of her lungs, daring Rowan with her eyes to sing, too.

  It always makes her feel better, visiting Pim.

&
nbsp; Chapter Four

  There’s One Voice

  Up on a rooftop, behind a line of sickly potted trees, a tall young woman stands, swaying. Her eyes are open wide.

  She reaches out and takes hold of a sad sapling. It seems to steady her. She scans the sky, sniffs the air, and blinks, wrinkling her nose. She examines the roof on which she stands, and the closed ranks of sliding glass doors behind her. They reflect the tall building opposite, and the sky, darkly. No people.

  She shakes her head, then looks out over the edge of the building.

  Down below is a milling, swirling crowd: knots of colour amidst phalanxes of black armour. Lines of black-armoured soldiers with shields shove bright-coloured people into black-armoured vehicles.

  A rainbow swirl trapped in the middle are singing, but not very well. Oh, wait, there’s one voice . . . no, it fades down again.

  The young woman wears green silk edged in gold. Her forearms are covered in strange patterns. Most would call them tattoos, except they shift and change under the eyes, like shadows.

  Her eyes roam over the trapped group until she sees something that pleases her. A slow smile blooms, and she nods.

  With a puff of air and a soft pop, and a brief flash of colourless light, she is gone.

  Three whole blocks of city suddenly lose electricity.

  Chapter Five

  She Stays With Him The Whole Time

  The police keep them for over four hours.

  Rowan looks it up on his phone: they suspect sabotage because of the power outage. The guy with the bullhorn is seized, and a girl wearing a black hoodie, the panic-attack lady, other people. A strange sort of intimacy grows among the group. People talk, befriend each other, share information, food, water.

  And then the police go away, just like that. Rowan watches them disappear in their vans, zooming up the darkening streets.

  The sun is going down. The dazed remainder of the group wanders off in various directions.

  “Why the hell did they keep us here?” Joe looks angry.

  That girl, that beautiful girl, Ophelia, speaks. “Well, look at us. Nothing left. University Avenue is blocked off with police cars and roadblocks now. No chance of the protest getting to the houses of parliament. It’s over.”

  They stand in silence.

  “Well, I’m for home,” says Joe.

  “Me too,” Candace says.

  Rowan sees Ophelia look at her friend, open her mouth. She’s going to leave with Candace unless Rowan does something.

  “I guess I’ll head to the police station and see if they’ve got my bike.” Normally he’s shy; he’s never been very good at trying to make things happen with girls. “I’d love some company,” he blunders on, gazing intently at Ophelia, hoping she’ll read his mind. God, so awkward. He wants to sink into the pavement and die.

  Is it his imagination or is Candace shooting Ophelia an angry look?

  “What?” Ophelia mouths at her.

  Then she turns to Rowan.

  “I’d walk you to the station.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” says Rowan.

  And she smiles again. Her smile, it just kills him. She has one dimple. Her left cheek.

  —

  It takes about two hours for the police to find and process and return Rowan’s bike. And frankly, he’s surprised they even admit to having it, or that they have it at all; he sort of thought they’d throw it into Lake Ontario, his precious new bike. Teach him to want something that expensive so badly.

  But that Ophelia, she stays with him the whole time. It makes it okay.

  “At least you got it back. I was wondering,” she says as they emerge into the evening dark, “especially when the guy with the face like a smacked arse kept asking you the same questions over and over. . . .”

  “Like a what?”

  He starts laughing, and she dissolves into giggles. Soon the two of them are laughing like crazy people.

  “I’m starving. You want a hot dog?”

  Rowan buys her some street meat and a pop. “Thank you, thank you,” she says, like he just bought her a five-star dinner with champagne. Except her mouth is full and there’s a little spot of mustard on her lower lip. She stands there with her hip jutted out, licking her fingers—her tongue—oh, he almost wishes she wouldn’t do that, it’s doing stuff to him, she probably has no idea. She’s adorable. It’s hard not to stare at her. He wants to look and look and look.

  “You live nearby?” he asks.

  “Just off Parliament,” she replies.

  Luck! “Hey, I’m near there, I’ll walk you home.”

  She falters. “Um, that’s okay.”

  Oh. Not so promising. “Well, we’re walking in the same direction anyway.”

  They go along in silence.

  “It’s not that I don’t—” she bursts out. “Um, never mind.”

  He begins to laugh. “What?”

  She claps her hand over her mouth. “Nothing,” she mumbles between her fingers.

  “No, really, what?”

  “Look, it’s just that . . . you cannot meet my mother.” She widens her eyes, he can see under the streetlights. “Nightmare!” she clarifies.

  “Can’t be a patch on my parents.” He hears the bitterness in his own voice.

  “Wanna bet?”

  They start laughing again.

  But she is adamant and they say goodnight on a street corner.

  He watches her walk away. Didn’t even get her last name, let alone a number. Classic Rowan. He turns away.

  And then she calls his name.

  Back, he rushes back. It’s probably so obvious to this girl that he likes her, he has no dignity. “Yeah?”

  “Hey, you know that band Romulus? They’re playing at the Spill tomorrow night.”

  An all-ages café just up the street, yeah, he knows it. “They’re great. Um, you like them?”

  “Yeah. I kind of thought . . . I’d go. . . .” She’s looking at the sidewalk and scuffing at something invisible with her toe. He wants to reach out and lift up her chin, look into those amazing eyes again. Touch her. He hasn’t touched her.

  “Then I will be there.”

  Her head lifts up and she smiles, blazing. That dimple. He’s undone.

  “Cool.” She’s backing away. “Cool. I’ll . . . see you there then.”

  Chapter Six

  The Strangeness Of Old Cartography

  Rowan bikes toward home, leaving the electricity and buzz of busy streets behind him, punching through humid darkness. The big old chestnuts close overhead; he feels sadness cloak him again. He doesn’t want to go home.

  Meeting Ophelia, that was like a shaft of light in a cellar.

  He swerves down the trail into the valley. There’s a moon tonight, gleaming softly through the smog. His mind plays over the day: the yelling, the line of cops, not wanting to admit how unexpectedly frightening they were; Joe, maximally tactless, saying, Hey, you and Rihanna seem to be really getting along—Ophelia hadn’t heard that, he hopes; that chick, Candace, flirting with him hard, and kind of mad at her friend. Well, he can’t help that.

  Ophelia has a little crease between her eyebrows that disappears when she laughs, and that single dimple on her left cheek. And her voice! That girl can sing, she can really sing. A deep growl under some of the notes, a chorded sound like there are two of her, something hidden inside of her. “Blowing in the Wind” never sounded so good.

  He felt like such a goddamn goof trying to talk to her.

  But it was her that mentioned Romulus. She’d kind of asked him out.

  Rowan realizes he is biking along with a big stupid grin on his face. He stands on his pedals and pumps, going fast, fast as he can. He could go on like this forever. A duck sleeping on the deceptive and still black surface of the river startles and takes flight, quacking like an indignant auntie. He realizes he’s lucky they got kettled, lucky the cops took his bike. Lucky he got it back. Lucky. He’s not used to thinking
of himself that way.

  —

  He lets himself in through the front door with the bevelled glass and brass knob, meticulously restored by his father. All quiet.

  Mom’s out working late of course. He can see light beneath the door of Dad’s study. A silk scarf on the floor; he picks it up, smells his mother’s perfume. She’d worn this one to her mother’s funeral. He remembers it. He’d been maybe eight, and his mother had given him the scarf to hold. That was the only time he’s ever been to Iceland—his mother’s dad died before he was born, and his widowed grandmother came from Akureyri to visit them in Toronto, never the other way around. He remembers landing in a grey place and the rocks were all jumbled up and sharp. Green so bright it hurt the eyes. Wanting to see whales and crying angrily when his mother told him Nei; they didn’t have time. He remembers a tall woman with a broad face and icy eyes, stroking his cheek and saying, in her accented English, how he looked like her own father. Rowan has his great-grandfather’s name Einar for his middle name. An important name.

  His mother has little trace of Norse in her accent; she was born and raised in England. So glad she got away, she says. That small place, that island. She’s never taught him more than a scattering of the language.

  Rowan hangs the scarf over the newel post of the staircase. He catches his reflection in the hall mirror and sees the face his grandmother saw, the face that his mother has also: the broad, tilted cheekbones and blue eyes. Strong genes, she always says. When he was a kid, he’d worried that he looked pretty. It’s a bit better now that he’s tall, and his jaw is bigger. He looks less like his mother now.

  He sticks his tongue out at his reflection.

  Next to the mirror is the gold-framed map. It’s always been there, something passed down through generations of his father’s family, very precious. Rowan loves the strangeness of the old cartography. It’s hard to get longitude right when you can’t keep time properly and don’t know how to account for currents or wind. Europe and Africa are pretty accurate, for something drawn in the early 1400s, and there are bits of something like Florida, and South America. But then there’s that red island. Halfway across the Atlantic, on a line of latitude just south of France. Antilia.