No Safeguards

by H. Nigel Thomas

  “How’re you so sure I do?”

  “I know you don’t, and your mother — I was adopted — doesn’t have a clue.”

  “No point arguing with you. You’re smart enough to know that cruelty won’t endear you to others.”

  “And you’re not smart at all. You’re a parrot. Your sayings come from Grama. You’re like the moon. You shine with borrowed light. Parrot! I’ll get you fake parrot feathers from Dollarama.”

  “Buy them for yourself. You’re the only one here who’s flying, straight to God knows where.”

  On another occasion, when he’d let fly a few expletives, and Anna begged him not to use that kind of language around her, he got his journal, grinned at her, and read:

  You’re thirsty, Ma:

  Love parched.

  Heaven’s your mirage:

  The oceans of water

  Thirst-crazed travellers,

  Already delirious,

  See in parched deserts.

  He closed the journal and stared at her with his mouth half-open, his extended tongue twirling. He knew it annoyed her. “Ma, I need $10,000.”

  “Paul, stop your foolishness.”

  “I’m serious, Ma.”

  “What for?”

  “To bury Jay and you. You’re the dead, Ma. Your beliefs stink. Soon you’ll be stinking too. I must bury you. $10, 000 will do.”

  “He’s just trying out his bad poetry on us. Ignore the buffoon.”

  “And you’re a silly loon.”

  “And a good cut-arse will get in tune.”

  “Try it and you’ll be in heaven soon.”

  Even Anna couldn’t help laughing.

  12

  BY 13 HE was in full-blown puberty and brought hell to our apartment. Entropy, I suppose. “Your pot never boils over on the neighbour’s stove,” Aunt Mercy often said. He blasted our ears and the neighbours’ with hip-hop music. At home he performed his own rap compositions. He’d read a “toast” called “Dolomite” and tried to shock us with his own takes.

  I’m Dolomite

  Two hundred percent spite

  Always ready for a fight

  My food is strife

  I’ll put out your lights

  Put you in orbit

  Don’t gimme no shit

  Take this lightning split

  Now git, fore I ball my fists

  And make you grow tits.

  “If you continue like this you’ll soon be inviting us to dine on your offal.”

  “Offal! Listen to yourself! Shit’s the word, man. You’re like so fucking corked.” Laughing, he grabbed his crotch, rocked his torso from side to side, and turned the scene into a ghetto sidewalk rap session:

  You’ve eaten my offal all your life

  To make you understand

  I need a drum and a fife

  You think you’re clever

  But you’re a river

  Where all and sundry

  Empty their sewer.

  From this point on I began to worry that we’d lost the Paul that came from St. Vincent. His vulgarity made Anna wince, and when he entered his “rap space,” she covered her ears or went into her bedroom, closed the doors, and turned up the volume on her television.

  The neighbours complained about the noise. Anna pleaded with him to turn it down. She even bought him a set of stereo earphones. To no avail. He’d stomp on the floors and increase the volume whenever the neighbours called. One evening during my first-year university, I found two police officers in our living room when I came home. A Jamaican woman had recently moved into the apartment on our left; she didn’t return our hellos. She’d knocked on our door and told Paul to turn down his music. All six speakers of his stereo were stacked on each other right up against the wall of her bedroom. He told her: “Instead o’ bitching, come let me give you some loving.” She called the police. A month or so after this, Lea Abramovitch, who lived directly under us, called to complain about the noise. He slammed the phone on her. She and Anna were friends of a sort. Just before we came to Montreal Anna had cared for her at the Jewish General and had mentioned that she needed a two-bedroom apartment because her children would be coming in a month, and Ms. Abramovitch had persuaded her brother Saul to let Anna have an apartment without the surcharges he added for people with children. She and Anna exchanged recipes and gave each other gifts of food. Whenever she saw us, she told us to be good boys, to make life easier for Anna, and to study hard so that one day we would make Anna proud. Despite Ms. Abramovitch’s pleas, and Paul’s apology (he wrote her a letter of apology), Saul ordered us to move. We refused initially, hoping his rage would cool. It was late November, and for two weeks he cut the heat to our apartment, and didn’t restore it until Anna agreed to move on January 1.

  We moved to Linton, to a bigger, more expensive and, overall, superior flat. The city had just planted trees at the front of the buildings and in the divide to replace, I assumed, those destroyed by the ice storm a year earlier. Our part of Linton is on a gentle slope. At the bottom of the hill, at Victoria, where the street ends, is Coronation School, looking like an ill-placed fortress. The metro and the Van Horne Shopping Centre are a mere two blocks away. Paul could still walk to school. Then the neighbourhood population was visibly Black; some called it Côte des Nègres.

  The flat — we’re still living in it — is on the first floor and has lots of light. The rooms are bigger too. But the garage is under us, and we hear the cars coming and going and the creaks, bangs, and thuds of the garage door every time it opens and closes. Our turn to live with noise above and below us. From then on we’ve had our own bedrooms. After we moved in Anna halved Paul’s weekly allowance to $10, and Paul has learned — had his head slammed into reality, was how Anna put it — that he can’t abuse the neighbours and get away with it.

  By then Paul hardly did any schoolwork beyond French, English, and history, but he still read voraciously and watched documentaries. His favourite television stations were PBS, Télé-Québec, TVO and National Geographic. There was always something or other he was hounding me to watch with him.

  At school that year, he had a showdown with his biology teacher. A February morning, a little more than a month after we’d been forced to change apartments, I went to buy computer paper at a stationery store in the Côte des Neiges Plaza, just a short distance from where we used to live, and saw Paul — in camo jacket, ochre overalls, the crotch almost at his knees, a blue head-wrap, silver studs in both ears — talking with a group of students in the Harvey’s across the street from the shopping plaza. It was 9:27. School started at 8:30.

  He ducked when he saw me. His friends — a mix of Blacks, Latin Americans, and Whites, held their breaths, their gaze alternating between Paul and me.

  “You’re shadowing me or what?” Paul eventually said.

  I said nothing.

  “I’m too old to need a minder.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Anyways, I have a free period. See” — one hand behind his head, the other kneading his chin. He glanced around at his schoolmates, and I could see he was vacillating between dissing and cooperating. “You don’t trust me? Go ask the principal.”

  “I’m on my way.” I beckoned for him to follow. He didn’t move. His schoolmates looked on riveted. The joint was silent.

  Paul hesitated for a few seconds and then came toward me.

  His Black friends steupsed.

  “All right, Jay my main man — ” he moved his head this way and that, signalling he was compromising, sparing me the showdown his buddies wanted — “lemme come clean with you.” He was now outside the door. “I’m skipping first class. You caught me, right. Let’s shake hands on it and keep it from Ma. You’re one cool dude. Right, my adorable bro?” He jerked his head backwards then faced me with his eyes shut. “Anyhow I’m g
oing to class now. No need to get all hepped up. And you, you’ll be late for your class” — one hand rubbing the back of his head, the other busy at his chin: a dead give-away.

  “I’m working on a school assignment at home, Paul.”

  “You don’t trust me or what?”

  ***

  He was standing on the sidewalk just outside the school’s main entrance when I emerged from the building with a copy of the suspension letter and a photocopy of Paul’s oeuvre that had caused the suspension. “Jay, Bro, my main man, my cool, cool brother, let’s keep this from Ma, okay.” He raised his hand in anticipation of sealing the deal with a high five. “You know how she worries about me. Have a heart! You won’t want to burden her any more. How can you be so heartless?”

  I looked at him, squinting. It was a stinging cold, sunny, windy morning, and my eyes were tearing. “Paul, what happened to the letter the principal sent Ma?”

  Paul grinned, stared at the ground, gave me a darting glance, and resumed looking at the ground. “I took it from the mailbox before you guys could get to it.”

  For a while neither of us spoke.

  “Tell you what,” Paul said, breaking the silence but continuing to stare at the ground, lifting his eyes occasionally to gauge my reactions. “You’ll accompany me the day I’m to be re-admitted, and you’ll tell Bégin you’re like standing in for Ma. You’ll tell him she starts work in a factory at seven and would lose her job if she shows up for work late. You’re like my cool brother, right? It’s just a little favour, a little favour, man. You know how hard it is for me to like beg anybody for anything.”

  “Come. Let’s go home,” I said. “To think how hard Ma tries. Every cent she spares she puts aside for our education. And this is how you thank her?”

  “Don’t be such a fink, Jay. Be cool, for once at least. Don’t tell me you’re a délateur. A snitch. A snoop. Tell Ma and I’ll never forgive you. What happened to our buddy system? Spare me this one time. Jay, I won’t do it again. I promise.”

  He’d been suspended for a week and would be readmitted only if Anna accompanied him to school when the suspension ended. Caught, he told me what had happened, facing me from the far end of the dining table. He’d recorded the entire incident in his journal.

  It all began with a verse fantasy he’d composed in which he proposed having sex with Mrs. Bensemana, his biology teacher. He’d circulated it among his classmates and they dared him to send it to her. And he did, by mail, signing it, “your secret admirer.” The class waited, even renamed him Meatman. Weeks passed. Mrs. Bensemana said nothing. The principal never came to find out who’d done it. His classmates were disappointed. They baited him. He took the bait and sent her an unsigned note: “Your secret admirer awaits your urgent response.”

  Two days later, biology being his last class that day, Mrs. Bensemana kept him back when the class ended. Her classroom overlooked the school yard. He saw her looking outside. He peeped too and saw his classmates were bunched up down there, staring up at her window. “Shit! I knew she’d like know she’d hit bullseye.

  “‘Have a seat, Paul,’ she said to me, laughing.

  “She sat down on her side of the desk. Her eyes twinkling, she said: ‘Is your nickname Dr. Feelgood?’

  “‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  “She chuckled. ‘Never mind.’

  “‘Paul Jackson!’ She shook her head slowly and sighed. ‘Such a bright boy! Such a bright, misguided boy.’ She shook her head again slowly and stared hard at me for a few moments before continuing. ‘Trying to destroy yourself, Paul? What’s the matter with you?’ She pulled out the top right drawer of her desk, took a sheet of paper from it, and put it on her desk. It was the poem I’d sent her. She picked it up and read:

  Mrs. Bensemana,

  In a blue mist

  From sexual starvation —

  Let me be your salvation.

  Let me release you

  From the prison of privation.

  Let me unlock your fetters

  Let me feed you meat

  That matters.

  Desire for you

  Is a whorl of briars

  Flaming in me.

  I’ll be my own funeral pyre,

  Unless your love, gentle as a lyre,

  A purring river, wash over me

  And quench the flames

  Rampaging in me.

  “She guffawed, paused, guffawed again. Then her face turned ugly, a mask. For a while she stared in front of her and said nothing. Then in almost a whisper, she asked: ‘Paul, how did you think you could get away with this?’ She smoothed the back of her head. ‘I’m very happily married. I thought you had been listening to Aretha Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood.”’

  “She stopped speaking and gave me another burning stare. ‘Here’s a bit of advice. Take it for what it’s worth: The benighted, the unfortunate, and the desperate — the people your generation calls losers — look for valorization in sex. It’s all they have when they have it. You are not benighted; you are bright and, I hope, not weak.’ She continued to stare at me. ‘All living things engage in sex. There’s nothing elevating or debasing about it. It’s a biological function. As a Black adolescent, you won’t want to be branded as a stud. I’ll speak to Monsieur Gaugin and tell him to let you do a project on the subject. You’ve heard of Phillip Rushton, haven’t you?’

  “I shook my head.

  “‘Find out who he is and what his views are. Now back to your opus magnum.’

  “‘You can’t prove I wrote it.’ By now I’d stopped trembling.

  “‘I can’t!’ Her eyes narrowed, a hardness came into her face; she bit her lower lip. ‘Paul, I always knew it was you. Which of my other students can write like this? Mrs. Mehta and I had a good laugh over it.’ She locked eyes with me. ‘Just confess and get it over with. You’ll get a lenient punishment.’ She lifted her arms and spread her palms like an open book. She kept them like that for at least twenty seconds. ‘Your choice.’ She shrugged.

  “‘You’re bluffing.’

  “‘I am?’ She pressed the intercom on the wall behind her desk. A couple of minutes later, Bégin entered, bleating like sheep in hot weather, a manila folder in his hand.

  “‘How’re we doing, Mrs. Bensemana?’

  “‘Not very well, Monsieur Bégin.’

  I visualized Bégin as Paul spoke: raw-red knuckles, which he opens and closes and sometimes cuffs while talking to you; aquamarine eyes with swollen pink-rimmed lids; flaking patches of skin around his lips.

  “Bégin removed a sheet of paper, and read from it. ‘Dear Mr. Bégin, I found this in my son’s school bag.’ He held up a copy of my poem. ‘X told me that a certain Paul Jackson, a classmate of his, wrote it. His classmates have even renamed him Meatman.’

  “Jay, I went cold. Man, that slimy Bégin. We think he’s gay.”

  “‘Young man, today Mrs. Bensemana said to me that if you were penitent and prepared to apologize to her in front of the class, the matter would end there — l’affaire serait terminée là.’

  “I shook my head. Man, there’s no cred in that. That’s a losers’ game.” Paul grinned. “Your game, Jay. If Bégin wasn’t gay I’d have given him a wink.”

  “‘Now, I’ll throw the book at you. Have it your way.’

  “I cupped my hands and pushed them towards him. ‘Go ahead. Throw it.’” Paul stopped talking briefly and stared at me. “Jay, my only regret is that I couldn’t make a video of the whole thing.”

  13

  THINGS DID CHANGE between us. “You betrayed me, man. From now on, it’s war the whole fucking way. It’s over between us. Over! Fini! Snitch!” He sliced the air with a hand sweep. “I’m your mortal enemy . . . And listen to me carefully: stop fooling with your life. Never you make the mistake of dissing me again in front of my friends, or yo
u’ll be dead, man. Dead! You’re lucky I didn’t tell you to kiss my arse or go fuck yourself, or give you the finger. You snitch!”

  I didn’t always resent how much of my time Paul took; there were pleasurable moments, like when he shared something he’d written or read me passages from books he was reading. I missed that. About a week before the incident with Mrs. Bensemana, he’d come into my bedroom, handed me a sheet of paper and said: “What you think of this? I just finished it.”

  The Metro

  Blue pythons speeding, hissing

  Through burrows underground

  Blessed to have food come willingly

  Cursed to expel it undigested

  From the same mouths

  Eating and shitting.

  Keep far from their mating

  It’s a cataclysmic coming.

  Nodding admiringly, I handed the sheet back to him. “How many poems do you have?”

  “At least a hundred.”

  “You must show me some more.” But he never did.

  During the next year he called me every insulting epithet that I’d already heard: dolt, dingbat, clotbrain, twit, boho, bozo; a few that I hadn’t: foozle, gunk-head; and many I have since forgotten.

  And the putdowns! “Paul, will you please turn the music down? I have a headache.”

  “No, it’s a herniated brain. It happens to cretins who think they’re Einsteins.”

  Not long after this Paul began putting weekly maxims outside his bedroom door. On occasion Anna invited work colleagues to the flat. After she rejoined fundamentalism her guests included church members. She argued with Paul to put his maxims up inside his room. He refused, saying they were there to make her think, “if you still think.” They left me intrigued and on occasion worried. But I complimented him for those maxims I liked (a mistake I now think):

  Obedience is warm because it lives in a barn.

  Opt for comfort and lose your sight,

  Soon followed by your rights.

  Flee compliance. It’s a deadly blight.

  Cultivate your thoughts;