By now I was in a cold sweat. Emma seemed to be calmer. “But are we going to be lucky there Maria?” she persisted.
Madame Maria turned towards Emma. “Yes, you are going to be very lucky. You will meet with much favour there.”
“Tell us more about the dark building,” Emma almost shouted.
Madame Maria grimaced in disapproval. But she reshuffled the cards and dealt a further two. “These are your specific cards, Emma. Your spirit has control over this dark place. You can do as you please there. I see only bright fortune for you.” Her voice was emphatic. “Now I am getting tired and the spirits are departing me. I must stop.”
She gathered up the cards and it was over. At the door she stuffed our two fifty dollar bills into her small, wizened bosom and gave us a palm-outwards blessing.
Out on the street, Emma faced me. “What did you think of that?”
By now I’d got my composure back and was sorely tempted to say that I thought the whole thing was ambiguous, well-practised guesswork. But I knew what would happen if I did. “Odd how she hit on the dark building, and the Church next to it,” I observed neutrally, “Did you say something about that when you called her?”
“No, I didn’t. She’s pretty good, eh?” Emma spoke in an awed, reverent tone.
I still wasn’t convinced, but kept quiet. By the time we got home I’d pushed the entire evening to the back of my mind as a silly, expensive, waste of time. The sort of thing you sometimes have to do to keep a girlfriend happy.
The following night I went downtown and took another look at our target. There was a service on at the church and the long stained-glass windows were brightly lit, the intricate scaffolding clad against one side like a collapsed spider’s web. The lights made the warehouse next door look all the darker, a black maw waiting to swallow up the unwary.
I shivered and wondered about Madame Maria, and if there really was such a thing as a gypsy curse.
*
Tuesday came. From the window of Emma’s tenth floor student apartment I watched the red sun set. Street lights came on block by block across the university campus. I sipped plain water from the tap while Emma checked and double checked the equipment.
I kept going over in my mind what we were about to do, until I was so nervous that bile rose up in my gut and I had to run to the bathroom to retch. She didn’t say a word about it, just took my empty glass and filled it with some more water.
When it got completely dark we grabbed our backpacks, hurried down the stairs, and slipped out the rear door of the building.
And that’s how I made the biggest mistake of my life.
4.
MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS
Present day
I swallowed hard, fought the anger and confusion down.
“Hi,” I mumbled feebly.
“Can we talk?” she asked. When I didn’t reply she added, “Please?” The tone seemed sincere but was impossible to interpret further. Unlike my strangulated responses, I’m sure.
“OK.” I was barely able to form the word.
She turned and we weaved our way through mostly empty tables, down past the long faux oak counter to a quiet area at the far end, where there were couches, a low table, and some kind of African tribal art on the walls. Fortunately it was a slow time for customers and no-one else was sitting there. She took one end of a small sofa and I sat at the other. I cleared my throat but couldn’t think of anything to say. She turned to me and smiled.
“Would you like another coffee?”
How did she know that I’d just finished one? Had she been watching us?
“Sure,” I mumbled, “One cream, no sugar.”
“I know.” She smiled again and got up.
I watched as she got two fresh coffees, wondering if she still took hers black with no sugar. She’d changed a lot since I’d known her. Back in our university days she’d worn her hair short, like a tomboy. She’d dressed simply then, often buying her clothes from thrift shops. Now her hair was long, swept back from her forehead and falling down around her face in golden tresses. The old, second-hand leather pants she’d worn on Friday nights at the Students’ Union bar – her party pants as she’d called them – had given way to more sophisticated clothing that I guessed had designer labels. She moved and spoke with a confidence that proclaimed class and money. It was another reason not to like her.
She turned towards me with the coffees and I looked away, glancing down at the handbag she’d left on the floor. It looked expensive. Her sunglasses, folded and sitting on top of the open bag, had the little word Bulgari on the left leg.
She’d come a long way in the last decade. Again, unlike me.
“Here you are,” she said, setting the steaming mug on the low table in front of me.
“Thanks.” This conversation was going to be difficult.
For long, uncomfortable seconds we sat in silence, stealing glances at each other between sips of our drinks. It was good coffee, strong but smooth, just the way I liked it. I knocked it back quickly until there was hardly any left, then slowed right down, dreading having to put an empty mug on the table and be the first to speak. At last she put her cup down, ran her finger around the rim, and gave me a cautious look.
“You’re still angry,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied. I had to look away as I said it.
“You have every right to be,” she replied.
“Yes I do, don’t I?” My voice rose as anger surged through me again.
She didn’t answer and there was another silence. I finally looked straight at her. Ten years of pain surged up in the emotional pressure cooker inside me. I had one burning question pulsating through my mind, but my lips asked her something else entirely.
“What do you want?” I blurted out.
She looked surprised at the question, or at least the tone of it. “I don’t want anything”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“We met by accident just now.”
“You’re lying,” I replied. The big question still loomed and I could no longer hold back from asking it. “But now you’re here, answer this. Tell me why.”
She looked genuinely puzzled. “Why what?”
There; she’d said it, as I knew she would. In the maelstrom of emotions swirling around in me, the predominant one was still pent up anger. And now she dared to ask me Why what? She’d lit the blue touch paper. Now she’d better stand back.
“What do you think?” My chest felt tight as a drum and I had trouble breathing. In the end, the words rushed out in a volcanic torrent. “Why’d you do that to me? Why’d you ruin everything we had?”
*
There was a tense silence. She sat perfectly still, looking down at her coffee. I’d shouted out the questions without realising it and several customers stared at me over their lattes. I stared right back and they looked away.
“I’ve wanted to tell you that for a long time,” she finally said.
“Then why didn’t you?”
She shrugged. “It’s a long story.”
“I’m listening.”
“OK, but give me a chance, right? Here’s what happened . . .”
And then she told me a long, breathless story about hearing sounds of footsteps on the roof while she was waiting for me, of turning and seeing a dark figure approaching her. A security guard? She didn’t say and I wouldn’t have believed her if she’d claimed it was one. She insisted that this mysterious stranger was ominous, threatening. Well, on that roof, that night, he sure would have been, just by his presence alone. That’s supposing he ever existed.
She said she panicked and ran away and didn’t look back, hoping I’d make it out safely and be right behind her. How I was supposed to do that she didn’t specify. She claimed that she almost dislodged the plank as she ran across it and I imagined how that must have scared her; then she said she’d almost fallen down the scaffolding, and almost got caught running out the back of the church courtyard.
Too many ‘almosts’ for me to believe.
“And this started the instant after I gave you the two backpacks?” I asked her when she was finally done.
“I’d heard the sounds – footsteps or whatever they were – before that, but then the figure appeared after you handed the packs up to me.”
“What about the stuff?”
Her forehead creased; puzzled.
“The two backpacks.”
“I left them right there. Believe me, they were the last thing on my mind.”
I didn’t believe a word of it. The fact was she hadn’t given me a single good reason to believe a word of it. I still had plenty of unanswered questions. My impulse was to fire them at her and I opened my mouth to begin the barrage.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” she pre-empted.
Something in her sad expression made me pause and shrug. Despite myself, I took my time and turned her story over in my mind. In the end I had to admit that it was just possible. Someone might have spotted us climbing up the scaffolding and followed, then found the plank and crossed it to see what we were up to. Anyone who did that on the spur of the moment would have to be a tough nut indeed. A tough, scary hombre with an eye for the main chance. If such a person existed, seeing him on the roof would have scared me too.
Yes, it was possible. Not very likely, but vaguely possible.
“He saw the backpacks, Michael. He’d have done whatever it took to get them off me, I’m sure of it. I think he had a weapon too.”
I was still sceptical. If there was a person . . . if, if, if . . . then, yes, she was right to make a run for it. We’d agreed beforehand that if we encountered anybody up there, we’d immediately turn tail and make a run for it. We didn’t intend committing any violence and we didn’t intend getting arrested either. That meant: RUN if discovered. If what she was saying was true – a very big if – then she’d done just that.
“Do you believe me?” she asked.
I stalled for a minute, picked up my mug, swirled the remaining coffee around in it and took a sip of the tepid, gritty dregs, just to give me time to think.
“Maybe,” I replied. Even if she’d just had a panic attack and imagined it all, this was still better than what I’d believed for the last ten years. Hell, even if she’d made it all up it was better than the not knowing I’d had up until now. And at least I now had evidence of some remorse.
I was still wary though. She’d sown a seed of doubt in my mind and made me question my own judgement. What she’d said could be the truth, some version of truth anyway, or it could be a manipulative story. I put down the mug and looked hard at her. Maybe that was a mistake. But unless she’d become an accomplished actress in the interim, I was pretty sure that the anguished expression on her face was genuine.
As I examined her features, the changes and sophistications of the intervening years fell away and I saw the twenty-year-old I’d once known. The scatty, amusing, imperfect and incredibly exciting girl I’d dated a decade ago. To my great surprise, I was beginning to feel a renewed yearning for those years and for that girl. I frowned in annoyance at myself and looked away from her. Over the last ten years I’d rehearsed this meeting a million times in my head and this wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
I struggled to clear my emotions off the table, forcing myself back to being cold and businesslike. “That doesn’t explain the vanishing act afterwards,” I said.
She knew exactly what I was talking about. “I know.”
“You left me in the lurch.”
Her hand went up to her face, pushed back a strand of hair. “I’ve always felt guilty about that, Michael.”
“Then why’d you do it? Why’d you just disappear afterwards? I searched the whole of UBC but could never find you.”
“Did you really try that much?”
“Of course I did. I even went to the Registrar’s Office. They wouldn’t tell me a thing. Nearly threw me out when I lost my temper.” I still remembered the argument I’d had with the shrew of a woman behind the counter, and the swearwords I’d heaped on her blue-rinsed head. It hadn’t been my finest moment.
“I had to go back to Victoria. My dad was ill, terminal in fact. Mum needed me. In the end it was a long drawn out thing. After he died I finished my degree over there.”
“And you couldn’t have called, or written a letter?”
“I was scared what you’d think of me running out on you.”
“You could have tried.”
“I know, I wasn’t thinking straight. What with dad and all . . .”
Maybe she was pulling on my heartstrings; then again, this was plausible. I vaguely recalled her once saying something about aged parents who’d had her late in life, and about her father having a cancer scare. Her scenario was just about believable.
“Didn’t you care at all about me?”
She reached out and put her hand on top of mine. “I did, Michael, I did. I always wondered. I went over that night in my mind a million times. I had nightmares about it, always ending with you stuck down there and the alarm going off. That man must have triggered it, I don’t know how or why.”
I wanted to believe her. “It took me a long time to get over it,” I said.
Her fingers stroked the back of my hand. “That was the worst part of it. Not knowing how you coped, if you were doing all right, or how long you had to endure it.”
This was a bit too cryptic. “Endure what?”
“Well, with you being stuck down there and all . . . I mean . . . I always wondered.”
“Wondered what?”
She hesitated. “Well . . . however long it was, it must have been hell for you. That’s the one thing that tormented me. Not knowing where they’d taken you or how much time you were serving.”
It must have been the tension needing a release. I felt something surprising and unexpected well up inside me and I had to let it out. I burst out laughing.
5.
STROKE OF LUCK
Ten years ago
I awoke to the blare of the alarm and the worst headache I’d ever experienced. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes since I’d fallen or the security guards would have been on top of me by now. My first thoughts were of Emma, and what the hell had happened. Angry, confused, I shook my head to clear it and scrambled to my feet.
Searing pain shot through my ankle and I immediately lost my balance. My scream as I went down was drowned by the hellish thrumming of the alarm.
I knew I only had another minute or two at most. Since I couldn’t walk I crawled, dragging the leg with the busted ankle and useless foot behind me. My right shoulder still bled and ached where the Klein bolt cutters had hurtled down on it, so I shuffled across the floor on my left side, good arm extended. I searched among the tools strewn across the floor, found the screwdriver I was looking for, and inched my way across the room towards the red ‘Exit’ sign on the far wall. The doorway was typical warehouse variety: plain brown double doors, three hinges on either side, handle in the middle. Locked of course.
But, as I knew from my stint here last summer, it was not much of a lock. The outside doors were padlocked, barred and alarmed, but inside ones were opened and shut too often for that degree of security. It was assumed that anyone inside the building was authorised to be there, so internal precautions were perfunctory.
I propped myself against one of the doors and reached up. The gap between the two doors was tight but at last I got the screwdriver in, forced it between the door handle and the faceplate, and pulled it sideways with all the strength I had. The wood cracked slightly but the lock held firm.
I slumped back down. By now, the second hand on the clock in my head was coming down on me like an executioner’s axe. If I was lucky, I might have half a minute left to get out of here.
Sheer desperation gave me a reserve of strength I didn’t know I had. I heaved myself up from the floor, ignoring the torment shooting from my ankle up my leg and through my body. T
he pain was indescribable, but through it all I was still aware of precious seconds ticking away.
I struggled to my feet, leaned against the door and pushed the screwdriver in further. An animal growl escaped my clenched teeth as I wrenched the tool sideways again and again with all my might.
With the full weight of my body behind each lunge, the wood soon splintered. One last two-handed thrust and the lock came apart. I dropped the screwdriver and swung myself out the door.
*
I still couldn’t move my foot beneath the damaged ankle and had to hop along, sidling against the wall to keep myself from falling over. Sweat poured into my eyes and I wiped it away angrily as I looked around me. My knowledge of the building could save me now and I racked my brains to remember details of the building’s layout.
There was a goods elevator opposite, with green floor lights displayed on a brass plate beside it. As I looked, the light changed from third floor to fourth. I was on fifth. That meant one of the building’s two security guards was working his way up, searching systematically, while staying in radio contact with the other guard below. The fourth floor was largely offices, which would take him a while to search properly. If I could just get away from here, I had a chance.
Apart from the elevator there were two stairwells, the central staircase that everyone used and a narrow back stairs that served as a fire escape. The second guard would probably be posted at the bottom of the main staircase, waiting for anyone flushed out by his colleague on higher floors. With government cutbacks, two out-sourced security guards were all this old building could afford.
The back stairs were my only option. I hobbled down the corridor as fast as I could and stopped to catch my breath in front of what looked like a cleaner’s closet but was actually the entrance to the back stairs. I pushed the door open and went in.
The stairs were bare wood and so twisty that they were never used for moving stored materials. I must have made quite a clatter going down the first flight, but the alarm hid the sounds of my hopping and sliding, my bad leg clunking against each step and my sweating body leaning heavily against the creaking handrail.
Meaner Things Page 4