Something for Everyone

by Lisa Moore

  They’d heard a crash inside the house and they both glanced up at the window but nothing else happened.

  Did he quit? Raylene had asked. For a long moment Chelsea had no idea what she was talking about.

  He killed himself, Chelsea said.

  I’m sorry to hear that, Raylene said. Killed himself, she repeated.

  * * *

  The last week of summer, there was a party next door. When Chelsea looked out there was Raylene, standing there in the backyard by herself, drinking a can of pop. She was looking off in the direction of the university, where the sky was bright red and mauve. Three other women came out the back door of the house.

  One of them, the one they called Mackenzie, had a stair railing she was swinging through the air, back and forth, as though she was warming up for a baseball game. Chelsea had been reading in her bedroom. She’d rolled off her futon and crawled on her knees to the window.

  Come here, ’til I hits you, Mackenzie said to Raylene.

  Fucking slut, said one of the other two girls. The one everybody called Victoria. The other girl was new, and Chelsea had never heard her name.

  Raylene was swaying with the breeze, eyeing them with what looked to Chelsea like an unfocussed longing. She drank from the pop, tilted up the bottom of the can and glugged it for a long moment and then she turned the can over and gave it a little shake as if to prove it was empty. She pressed her fist to her chest and burped silently. Then she spoke.

  I never did nothing to you, Mac, Raylene said. But I never liked you, not first nor last.

  They were all stoned on something that made them violent and languid. Every word they said was, not slurred exactly, but dislodged with great effort and precision.

  Mackenzie was taking giant steps toward Raylene, like a schoolyard game, and with each step there was a swing of the railing. She gripped it in both fists.

  Chelsea could hear the thwip, thwip as the railing sliced the autumn air. Mackenzie’s big steps brought her close enough to the other girl that the swinging stick fluttered a tendril of Raylene’s hair, lifting it from her collar. One more step and the railing would bash out her brains.

  Maybe Raylene was ready for it, the splatter of her own brains across the grass a necessary diversion. Chelsea shoved up the window and shouted out for them to stop.

  You with the stick, Chelsea shouted. The women, all four of them turned toward Chelsea. They appeared curious and stalled.

  Put down the stick or I’m calling the cops, Chelsea said.

  What business is it of yours, Mackenzie asked. But she’d dug one end of the railing into the ground and was leaning on it while she spoke. Then there were several sirens out front, all overlapping and shrill.

  A window on the third floor of the blue vinyl house screeched up in its wooden frame. One of the men from the house jumped, or was shoved. He was caught in the sheer curtain as he fell. It was draped over his head and shoulder and his outstretched hands so that his fingers looked webbed. He was wrapped in the greasy yellowed film like it was a caul. The curtain flapping up between his legs, under his arms, ballooning wings. He landed on the roof of the white van parked below the window.

  The roof boomed.

  For an instant the man didn’t move. He lay still on his stomach; then he lifted himself onto his hands and knees and shook his head like a dog. He was up, batting his way out of the curtain which clung to his legs, causing him to trip and fall off the roof of the van. It was the man she’d given the coffee to.

  He was running hard, slipping, the curtain twisted on the ground, a flayed skin. He thrashed his way through the chest-high vegetation in the back of the yard, sending up puffs of white fluff from the fireweed. Using one arm as a pivot, he swung his body over the fence and collapsed like a sack on the ground but was up and gone before the cops came out through the back door, three of them, and then four more, chasing him to the parking lot of the burnt-out convent behind the garden. Another cop stuck his head out the window the man had jumped from. He had an old ice cream container in his hand. He called down to one of the officers.

  This is full of cellphones, the officer called. He held up a phone that had a sparkly pink case. And he shook the ice cream container so the cellphones rattled.

  Five phones, bastard kept the phones, he shouted. We got him. We got him now.

  They were the phones of the women who had been raped. But the guy had outrun the cops. He was gone.

  * * *

  Chelsea was volunteering at the Rape Crisis Centre that fall and she was on call when the sixth rape occurred. She got the call at four in the morning and got a cab to the Grace. The woman at reception buzzed the door for her and let her in.

  After the guy got away from the place on Merrymeeting, the police had issued a warning that said women should observe a curfew, stay in after dark.

  Social media exploded. Why not keep all the fucking men in, people wanted to know. They were the perpetrators, weren’t they? Why weren’t they the ones had to stay inside?

  The police were silent for a day, and then issued a PSA more or less saying they did not mean to victim-blame, but women should nevertheless stay inside after dark in high-risk neighbourhoods for their own safety.

  If they didn’t want the rapist to get them. If they didn’t want a cheekbone smashed with a fist. If they didn’t want a blade to their throat. If they didn’t want their dangling earring torn out of their ear so that the earlobe was left in tatters. If they didn’t want to collapse in the hall of the emergency at St. Clare’s on their way to give evidence. If they did not want to find themselves taking off their clothes while standing on a sheet of plastic until they were naked and cold. If they didn’t want their cuts and bruises photographed and notes taken about the cuts and bruises. If they did not want swabs taken from under their fingernails and their vaginas. If they didn’t want those swabs dropped into brown paper bags that allowed the wet swabs to dry out without growing mould but made sure the swabs weren’t contaminated with other DNA, paper bags like you might use for a half-dozen croissants or loaf of bread, in a bakery. If they didn’t want the older nurse speaking gently to them, guiding them, saying it would be over soon, asking permission, while taking the pictures and the click, click, click of the camera and, that one’s blurry and there, got it, okay now, almost done, almost done, okay, okay, and the volunteer from the Rape Crisis Centre standing there not doing anything, except when the nurse tells her, because she finds she isn’t able to function, it turns out, in this situation. If they didn’t want their clothes bagged and to go home in other clothes. Not their own clothes, but clothes that had been purchased for them, purchased with the forethought that they would show up, people had been waiting for them, that their agony was foreseen, and clothes purchased at Walmart for the occasion, one size fits all, because five women had come before them and there was no reason to think there wouldn’t be more, because they hadn’t caught the guy, the guy they said wore big rings that were snakes or dragons. If they didn’t want to have to get themselves to the hospital from the scene of the rape with their eyes blackened and the blood everywhere, mostly from a scalp wound because those wounds bleed a lot, and other wounds too, but basically streaks of blood all over their face, and the clothes all ripped off so there’s no way to cover themselves, and having to get in a car with a strange man because that’s the first car, having walked/crawled out of the parking lot with double vision because a fist had detached a retina and there was at least two of everything and sometimes five of everything moving like a slow carousel, and stepping in front the car, the headlights, because better to be hit than left at this hour alone, and him, the driver, the strange man, opening the passenger-side door, and the car sitting there, not moving, and the man asking did they want to put on the seatbelt, and them trying to do it, but the metal not sinking into the thing, but clinking ineffectually, the tongue of the seatbelt and the groove, and the
man reaching over and securing the seatbelt but not looking at them, keeping his eyes straight ahead and the smell of the pine-scented air freshener and his cologne and the heater on blast because he’s trying to make it warm, because they’ll be in shock, because he knows first aid and the heat and he turns off the radio, the man pulling up outside emerg and helping them out of the car but not touching them, vigilant about not touching them, not frightening them further, but saying, Okay there? Okay there? If they didn’t want to end up collapsing in the hall, legs of jelly, of water, unable, quite unable to stand or walk or get down the hall to a room just, what? a two-minute walk, a minute and a half, unless they wanted to collapse on the way to the room where they would take off their clothes, and their cellphones taken and their eyes puffed up like plums, really swelling shut, with the room turning in a circle and the volunteer, the young volunteer just standing there with her arms crossed over her chest. Unless they wanted a tongue all over their face and then the fist and if they did not want to appear in court, but if they were going to appear in court, and if they didn’t want to be asked what they were doing out and how much they had to drink and didn’t they spend a lot of time downtown drinking, and wasn’t it true they had engaged in sex work and had a record of petty theft and haven’t they appeared in court a lot, and aren’t these the dates they appeared in court, and don’t these dates go back a long way, and weren’t they often walking home in the dark, if they did not want to be on antidepressants, and finally on whatever they could get their hands on, whatever they could inject, or eat, anything, if they did not want to be taken over with panic at odd moments for years, for the rest of their lives, after the assault.

  But it busted out all over social media, Don’t fucking tell us to stay inside, don’t tell women, don’t tell us that. Do you hear us? Don’t tell us that. We don’t accept it.

  * * *

  One in the morning and the skywalk and this boy could damn well listen to her speak. She just wanted him on the bloody phone until she was through the skywalk and had passed the dumpsters and the construction between the library and the music building, past the campus, down onto Elizabeth Avenue, past everything, and rotting in a grave with her nose broken and her skull cracked, the rags of whatever they’d buried her in clinging to her yellowish bones, her teeth and clumps of hair, a pelt of maggots moving as a single piece of fabric, a slithering satin of rot, when she was finally past fear.

  Okay, I’m going, now, she said. But she barely had the sentence out when her phone rang. She was instantly worried about her mother. Was her mother calling to say something had happened? She was patting all her pockets and found it and answered and the boy, David, looked straight into her eyes and said, Hi, and she heard it twice: one hi, his breath hanging in the air between them, and then again, as if it were coming from a long echoing hall, a kind of reverb in the phone.

  Over the next two weeks they spoke at least four times a day. They called each other between classes and at night from bed while drifting off to sleep. She called when she was on her break at Shoppers. She talked about three bridesmaids who had come from the hair salon, in the same strip mall, and wanted her to do their makeup, taking advantage of the Friday afternoon free makeup tutorial, each of them with matching smoky eye shadow. It was at a time when he was watching all of the Simpsons reruns. Sometimes he would recount the jokes and the plot of whatever episode he was watching.

  He called her to see if she had to walk home in the dark, and he would just talk to her while she walked. They said things about work, he was working then in a restaurant and the owner was moving him to front of house and it meant better tips but he was just polishing glasses and you couldn’t talk to anyone so he preferred the kitchen.

  Once when she was walking home he spoke for twenty minutes about various phone packages, he explained the advantages and disadvantages of each package and how much data you could get for free with each one and he told stories about friends of his who had run up astronomical bills by accident and had then pleaded with the phone company, and the phone company cut the bill in half. He told these stories as if they were melodramas, as if something profound was at stake and he did the voices and made everything very funny, and described the circuitry of being put on hold and where the people were on the other phone, in India or Ireland, and how they would always say their department wasn’t the right one, and they’d have to transfer the call but instead they would hang up on them, his friends. It seemed many of his friends had accidentally run up a phone bill. The story of the accidental phone bill was a quest narrative, the way he told it, which Chelsea had learned all about in 1080: Critical Reading and Writing, with peaks of tension, and three-dimensional characters, and insurmountable disappointment. Chelsea was striding through the dark listening to him speak and there was someone on the phone was the thing.

  Their knowledge of each other was like a biopsy – they knew certain aspects of each other’s being to the very core, but only certain parts, not their childhoods or families, not what they wanted or what they had lost.

  They didn’t mention their single mothers, how they felt responsible for them, the weight of which was unutterable. Hers a widow whose husband had committed suicide, shot himself in the woods, the top of his head blown off; and they did not talk about his mother or his father, because he didn’t know his father, it was something his mother refused to talk about, and he did not know why she had never said anything, nor did he ask, because he was afraid to ask. He was afraid of his father’s nature, and wondered if these things could be inherited. It was the basis of his humour, the fear that he was indelibly tainted. The belief that his salvation lay in caring for his mother, but her loneliness was a sucking vortex that might swallow him whole; he saw the brief moment of her taking that cat’s paw, with its extended claws, into her mouth. Just holding it there. Neither Chelsea nor David had spoken of any of this, during the two weeks they spoke on the phone, nor did they mention the rapist again.

  Standing there outside Bitters he’d phoned her and said hi and he’d met her eyes with a single-minded intensity. She’d turned immediately and headed to the skywalk.

  He talked her through the parking lot and across the road and up the darkened staircase. Get a move on, he told her. When she got to the window of the skywalk she looked down for him.

  I can’t see you, where are you? she said. And then she said, Oh, yes I can.

  I’m next to that parked car, he said.

  You’re in the shadows.

  Here, I’ll step into the light.

  I can see you, she said. By the car.

  After the two weeks of constant talking he lost his phone, and, with it, her number. He’d felt a brief acute stab of pain that haunted him for less than a day and then she was forgotten. He, too, was forgotten.

  4.

  Three years later, when they were in their early twenties and she was almost done her BN and a practicum in palliative care, they met again while she was on shift, at the bedside of a woman who would die within the hour.

  The patient was David’s Aunt Josephine. There were nine family members around the bed when he arrived. Chelsea didn’t recognize him at first. She had only seen him that one time, outside Bitters, and it had been dark. But he spoke to his grandfather, the patient’s father, and told the old man that Josephine had lived a good life, that he’d loved her because she was always going off travelling, having adventures, and because of her laugh, and her histrionics. He told a story about how she’d found him drunk on George Street once when he was fifteen and got him home without his mother ever knowing about it. Then Chelsea recognized his voice. His voice from three years before, on the phone.

  David asked her when her shift was over and offered to take her out for dinner and listed expensive restaurants, showing off, she thought. But they ended up getting fish and chips at Scamper’s.

  They arrived when the server was mopping the tiles for closing.
<
br />   Ten minutes for sit-down, the girl said. Takeout, you got a half hour. We does takeout right up until the last minute. The girl had dark hair and a pale, sharply arched nose that made her large eyes look too close together. She spoke as though someone had pulled a string in the back of her neck, reeling out details, and she blinked several times after each declaration. She stuck the mop into the bucket and dragged it on its wheels to the kitchen through a swinging door and came back out to serve them.

  We’re going to take this up to Signal Hill, David said. You want to come with us?

  Is he flirting with me? the girl asked.

  It seems like, Chelsea said.

  You and he together? the girl said.

  We just run into each other, Chelsea said.

  You want to be some hard up flirting with a girl in a hairnet, the waitress said. David was slouched over the counter, leaning on his elbow, a folded fifty-dollar bill poking out from his index finger. He pointed at the things he wanted with it. The drink fountain, the glass bottles of malt vinegar lined up on the shelf. He made the fifty-dollar bill nod up and down toward these things and then he moved it in little circles that were pointing at the girl’s mouth.

  We’ll have it in the car, he said. What do you have to say to that? Up to Signal Hill. And you’re welcome to join us.

  I don’t eat this stuff no more, the girl said. I have to think about my figure.

  And David swivelled on the elbow so that he could point the fifty toward the big window that wrapped around two sides of the restaurant.

  See that car out there? he said. Room for all of us.

  The flirt was ricocheting; it was meant for Chelsea’s benefit. But she was surprised by the tempered flow of charm; it held a kind of humour that made the girl in the hairnet grin, and Chelsea realized she was grinning too. There was a static electricity that caused the server’s white apron of thin plastic to suction itself to her breasts and crinkle with every move she made. It was an erotic sound that registered subcutaneously, followed by the roaring deep fat fryer and the heaviness of the atmosphere, loaded with molecules of floating lard, heavy as medicine balls, keeping the server’s skin moist and shiny.