“Lady, nobody gets up on a wooden foot without days of practise. Look at you.”
Look at me, you think. You walk feeling fierce and ready. Your agile card-dealer’s fingers grip the ropes of the young man’s muscly upper arms, but not for stability. You think of dancing with him that night. But more: you could go on your own now, if you wanted.
/ / /
All that was known was that the bastard wanted to meet the young man, that he had a proposition for him regarding the young man’s ties to the family lands. You were aware of the bastard’s purpose, of the maps. What you might never know is why the bastard didn’t include you, why he felt you had to be eliminated in his quest for more.
The boardwalk leading to the dock is strung with tiny, white lights. You grin at the fact that the party is being held on Jablonsky’s superyacht, and that you are the mystery guest. As you jostle slightly down its three steps, you feel some doubt. Your foot has minimal bend at the ankle, and the young man adjusts, trying to make your gait more supple. You’d agreed the entrance would be seamless and ceremonial.
“You okay?”
“Okay,” you say, but the anticipation of seeing the bastard eye to eye wells up in you like a storm.
You feel the young man’s unwavering loyalty as he leads you through the crowd, which turns to look at you both as you pass. Beaded dresses parting as you approach, nighttime sunglasses tentatively lowered. In your periphery you see Coke-Bottle and Jablonsky turn, their shoulders joining in a twinned shudder. A glass of champagne hits the floor, its smash lost in the noise of the band. The ragged melody goes on and on. Like nothing is wrong, nothing has changed, drowning out the series of gasps as your identity comes into focus.
Then the tension behind all of the eyes not-seeing you, blocking your way should you want to jump overboard and out of this. But you don’t really feel it anymore, the impulse is historic.
Now, like a sheet ripped open, the group parts and turns its back so that you walk alone with the young man along a strip of deck, toward the apex at which he, the bastard, stands, puffy-eyed and elegant in white.
His eyes flit for a half-second your way, the recognition is there, you see it, the sort of recognition that will know you and deny you all at once. And then he carries on.
“Finally we meet.”
“This is . . .” the young man begins to say, you’ve rehearsed it this way, that he would introduce you by your full name and watch the bastard cringe. But he stops, the three of you stay quiet.
The slow motion of taking in every inch of your husband. You are tall in Versace. You look at him eye to eye. He has aged. The breeze has undone his careful combing, his hair sits up like a flimsy box on top of his head. A hint of a smile crosses your lips. He sees it and coughs.
You catch a movement across the deck, the split-second flash of a woman at the rails, tossing her hair, and you know: it’s Her. The bastard’s new girl. A version of you. But younger.
And suddenly you feel the great weight of yourself and the familiarity of your man right there in front of you and you want to reach out to him. To take his hands and pull him into you.
And you read in his eyes a blank ferocity, and the sting you feel deepens as his hair falls into a position you know and love, and his face shifts, taking on a quizzical look of pride – for the woman he once adored, then killed off. Tried to kill off for reasons only the two of you alone will ever know, but you managed to survive against all odds. The respect is palpable. He almost sees it as a testament to his own ruthlessness. He dares you to challenge the bulletproof script in his head, the one he switched around on you, the new one which he has repeated to himself over and over, as to why you were erasable, why this situation was exceptional, how he is exceptional, even rare. “No, no, Bunny, you have not been replaced, my darling.”
Toss of lush blonde hair in your periphery. It might as well be a photograph of you two decades ago, pushing your butt out to the crowd, having a cigarette break between deals. The smoke spins outwards, away from her beauty, and you feel her youthful confidence, a confidence that sears. “It’s all our lot, lady, get over yourself.” The plotlessness of competing with this unknown woman. You shift your weight to the new left foot. A pain erupts there: an ecstatic tide soaring up through your leg. Your eyes turn to slits that hold the bastard’s gaze, but then soften, and you look at him as you always would have. A plain and simple look between two people who have known each other a long time. His eyes drop and he sees your beige foot. His lip curls at the sight of it. He turns away to the rails. The blonde is fiddling with her purse.
It’s okay, I get it, you don’t see me. You’re disgusted.
You laugh a little, though not at him.
A squeeze from the young man.
One last meaningful look at the bastard and you follow your impulse: to lean in to kiss him goodbye.
The moment is suspended, to be recorded by everyone who watched: how you fell a little too deeply into each others’ embrace, to the point of forgetting all falseness. Fell so that your vision of a wall of flames transporting the superyacht into the island’s history books of Epic Accidents prophetically encircled you and him first, concealing a kiss like a fugue, like a tsunami which couldn’t even touch the firewall containing and exposing the love within your hate, and how in that transcendent state the stiletto of your Versace accidentally stepped on the bastard’s slipper and pierced both shoe and foot all the way through. You didn’t feel a thing because, naturally, it was the otherworldly foot’s doing.
You see tears shroud his eyes. He leaves you and walks to Her. As he reaches her side, half-stumbling into her arms, you watch it take shape: a cartoon-sized teardrop painted blood red by the coloured bulbs of the band’s lighting system.
Your heart hardens and then, strangely, opens itself to the night air and the clear view of the prow skimming over the black waters towards an even blacker horizon. The yacht has already long pulled away. The crowd of friends and acquaintances are following the bastard’s lead. You are there, but to be ignored. The tension is thick and emboldening in the way that exile is beyond solitariness. It makes you fearless. Only the neutral figures, the waiters, don’t know to ignore you, and they bring you glass after glass of champagne, which you sip but mostly throw out to the oncoming waves. The young man left your side long ago, though you do see him looking down at you from the upper deck and you share a look of complicity. His eyes flash in recognition: of the euphoria, at some freedom you share. At the wildness that has overtaken you. And somehow his is a more ancient understanding of what it means for you to wear the otherworldly foot. Even though, you think, he is still too young to know.
As you turn to the prow, where the mist is rising, a vision intervenes: a wall of fire lighting up the ocean. Behind that wall, a thrash of swimmers moving in every direction into the invisibility of the night.
You nod into the mist long enough for it to make a film of saltwater on your face. You’ll make sure the young man gets away on the dinghy, you know it’s there.
Your shoe sparkles in the moonlight. A dagger. Holding the rail, you sway it this way and that, gyrating your hips to the music, digging your heel into the deck to feel out your weight. Majestic and robust. The foot radiates melodic power. It knows the music better than you and now you are its vehicle.
Confusion, then horror from the sidelines as you let go of the rail and dance openly, wildly, and deeper into the space of the decks. The percussionist spurs you on with her beat, she plays into your awkward movements, matching your strides as they clip, then fall, then catch. Gasps break out and someone reaches out to stabilize you. You feel arms grabbing at you, which you bat away but also fall into, you are tossed from old friend to old friend. You see their eyes, concerned or terrified, and their jeweled hands fumbling for you or pushing you away, not wanting to touch you. You are aware of a contrast in your skins. Theirs, silky and maudlin, encumbered by links of gold chain, while yours is strident, burred, as if you’
d grown a layer of rough hair. In your mind, you lick their arms. Kick them with your lurid prosthetic. Their drinks crash to the floor as you bump and falter and flail, you are dizzying them within your extended power of the music gone wild. You feel the young man, distant but there, smiling, as the drummer’s grin grows from wide to enormous. Some of your old friends are getting into it, they like it even, and approach you again and again until you find them in the mass of bodies.
It is then that you pitch yourself against the bastard’s girl, who screams when you touch her. In that second of contact, you smell your scent roll away from you onto Her. Pagan sweat washing over Dior Poison perfume. You want to drown Her with the reek of you, the horror of you, to rub your own nose into the young bulbs of her tits that bust out of her dress. In a way, you kind of love Her. Want to warn Her.
“Only one woman on the raft,” you say to Her as she weakly brushes you off.
It will be a night fire. The ropes cut free.
A sunrise rescue.
Jablonksy is there, smiling at you. And she nods. You nod back at her. The young man is there. He takes your hand and pulls you away from the dancers who have forgotten you. Now it’s the drummer girl who hammers their bodies into a Dionysian state, you laugh and mock high-five her, as your old friends throw off their jackets and stamp on the broken glass. Even Coke-Bottle. Even the bastard’s girl. Only the bastard watches you with dead eyes as you lean into the young man’s arm to go down the narrow stairs into the galley. On your last step you turn and see the bastard limp off, a spittle of dried blood marking his slipper.
“Here, eat this.” The young man feeds you their lobster and their caviar, butter and blackness dripping from his fingers into your mouth. You gorge on their hors d’oeuvres, ripping cellophane off the platters, letting blots of mushroom sauce and sizzled potato fall all over the galley floor. You gulp down their bubbly. All of it drips from both your mouths as you laugh and kiss and then laugh so loudly the staff runs in the other direction.
But reporting you is pointless. You are a ghost of flesh now and into forever. You cannot catch me, you think.
acknowledgements
For informing my research, I wish to thank Amy E. Potter for her graduate dissertation entitled Transnational Spaces and Communal Land Tenure in a Caribbean Place: “Barbuda Is for Barbudans” (Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University, Doctor of Philosophy, 2011).
The excerpt on p. 121 is from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts, le conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec, and to Passa Porta: la maison internationale de littérature a Bruxelles for the support and production of this book.
Thank you to my publishers Jay and Hazel Millar for their respect and enthusiasm, and to my editor Malcolm Sutton for his great investment in me as a writer.
For other close-reading, editorial and other killer advice, I am grateful to Kathleen Piercy, Kyla Brucciani, Devlin Kuyek, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Kristian Bakkegaard Andersen, Carmen Joy King, and most of all, to Caia Hagel.
Sending adoration from afar to my aunt Darlene who hosted me through the years in her home in the Caribbean, and who, two years ago, reminded me that if you are open to it, the place you travel to has a story of its own to tell.
I wish to thank the darkness of time when I wrote this book to “Thirteen Angels Standing Guard ’Round the Side of Your Bed” blaring late into the night in my kitchen in Brussels. And to Manuel, for holding my hand many months later, through a lighter time, in order to finalize the chapters.
And to my family: Kathleen, Jay and Liz (and their boys), Una and Fanon, my angels, I thank you for your help to me in the final stages of writing this, and I dedicate this book to you.
About the Author
Alisha Piercy is a Montreal-based writer, artist, and painting conservator. Studies in literature,art conservation and print media influence her creative practice, which ranges from drawing installations to sculptural bookworks to the writing of novellas. Her work has been exhibited in various galleries in eastern Canada, with international projects in Iceland and Mexico. Her chapbook “You have hair like flags~” won the bpNichol Chapbook Poetry Award in 2010. Find Piercy at www.alishapiercy.com or connect with her on Facebook.
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Print edition type + design by Malcolm Sutton
Edited for the press by Malcolm Sutton
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