Best Canadian Stories 2018

by Russel Smith

  ‘I see. Just to be clear, ma’am, it’s the boyfriend your daughter used to have that you are complaining about, not the one who wrote the letter?’

  ‘Yes. That boy—young man—Andrew Smiley, betrayed our trust. He sat in our living room having tea while this was going on. He is nineteen now. At the time, he was eighteen and she would have been under age, so yes, I certainly want to report it.’

  ‘I don’t!’ Louise said, the clarity of her voice, its almost steadiness, startling all three of them. Sergeant Whitney returned his attention to her. ‘No one did anything wrong,’ she continued, ‘and anyway it was months ago, and it’s all over.’

  ‘You could be pregnant!’

  ‘No, Mum—’

  ‘Of course you could. Would you stop interrupting me!’

  Whitney ran his hand over his bald pate, then placed both hands heavily on his desk.

  ‘Let’s all calm down now. Do you have that letter with you, Ma’am.’

  ‘Yes!’ she said. But when she looked in her bag, it wasn’t there.

  ‘I think I left it on the kitchen counter,’ she said. That was where she must have put it, on her way to the low chair by the phone, where she sat to call the police and then to wait for Louise to get home from school.

  ‘Please get into the car,’ she’d said to her as soon as she came in through the front door, careful not to say why, in case Louise refused.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll know soon enough … I’ve read that letter from David Armstrong,’ she told her once they were on the main road.

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘The one in your desk.’

  ‘Oh,’ Louise had said, staring out of the car window and smiling, as if it were nothing, nothing. Goading her: ‘What was it about?’

  Whitney drummed his fingers on the metal desktop, studied the pair of them some more.

  ‘Well, we’d certainly need to see the letter,’ he said. ‘Meantime, I’d like to have a word with the young lady.’ He picked up the phone and called for someone to escort Evelyn back to the waiting area.

  Louise sat very still. Whitney was a big man and part of her wished her mother was still there, though another part was glad she had gone.

  ‘Your mother’s very concerned about your behaviour,’ Whitney began. Stop staring at me, she wanted to say. ‘She’s worried that she can’t keep you under control so that you stay safe. If I was your parents, I’d feel exactly the same. And if you go on like this, you’ll end up on the streets… Believe me, we see girls from nice homes in that line of work and it’s not a pretty sight.’ The whites of his grey eyes gleamed in the fluorescent light.

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong!’ Louise told him, in the same, almost steady voice. ‘And I have no intention of ending up on the streets.’ Her hands had balled into fists. She willed them to relax.

  ‘Let me tell you, life is not about what you think you intend,’ Whitney said. He pushed his chair back, half stood and, propped by his arms on the desk, leaned towards her, breathing heavily. ‘No. Life is about consequences—’ he jabbed his index finger at her ‘—how one thing leads to another.’

  Despite her efforts, Louise’s eyes welled up. She wiped the tears away with her sleeve, stared back at the lowering face, the grey irises floating in their bluish whites. She knew it was very important not to look away or down. ‘Now, tell me, did you have—’ he lowered his voice, ‘did you have sexual intercourse with—’ he studied his notes ‘Andrew Smiley?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘What did you do, then?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Her hands were shaking now, so she sat on them.

  ‘Well my advice to you, young lady, is that it’s best not to do things you don’t want to talk about.’ Whitney let out a gust of stale breath and sat back heavily in his chair. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘listen carefully to what I’m going to say…’ He paused. She stared back at him. ‘What we need in any investigation is proof. In this case that would have to include a physical examination of you by a police doctor, in order to establish whether intercourse has taken place—’

  ‘What?’ She didn’t decide to stand, or to knock the chair over as she did so.

  ‘Pick that chair up and sit back down, please!’

  She picked up the chair, didn’t sit, but took a step back and stood behind the chair, holding the back of it. He glared at her, she stared back, ready—whether to fight or to flee she had no idea. She was pretty sure the door was not locked, but what about the one at the end of the corridor? She noticed, behind him, a yellowing poster of a car crash.

  ‘Your mother,’ he continued ‘says you were fifteen at the time of the sexual activity, but you are sixteen, now?’

  She gave a small nod. Beneath her shirt, sweat ran down her spine.

  ‘So in that case, we’d need your authorization for the physical examination. We can only proceed if you are in agreement.’

  She was crying properly now, face in hands. Whitney walked around to her side of the desk and sat on it, his navy blue pants stretched tight over his thighs. He seemed far too close. She could hear his breath.

  ‘Well I’m not,’ she said.

  ‘Then it’s very unlikely that we can proceed, and I’ll tell your mother that when I talk to her … You should bear in mind what I’ve said to you.’

  It was dusk when they emerged from the police station. Her mother’s eyes seemed larger than before, very shiny. She gripped the steering wheel as if to throttle it.

  So what did you do?

  Silence.

  Did this happen under our roof?

  No.

  Where?

  Silence.

  In his house?

  Silence. She would not be saying, in his room above the kitchen, with the books and paintings and the single bed. His long bony body. The rough stubble. How they took off her blue top, but, by agreement, not her jeans. How his face flushed as he struggled with his zip, pushed his jeans and underpants down. And then, the way his penis sprang out from the confines of the clothes, livid, taut, huge-seeming—though probably, in retrospect, about sixish inches—and how he had asked her to touch it, and then, the instant the skin of her fingers met the skin of his penis, which he called his cock, and maybe she would too, the sperm-stuff blurted out. Sorry, he said then, grinning. They’d both laughed.

  ‘Believe me, the police may be spineless, but I’m not leaving it there. There are going to be consequences for you, and I’m going to take this up with Andrew’s parents.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with them! Or any of you.’

  Louise, crying again, was thinking about how Andrew had ended it, walking in the woods near his home on a damp day, beads of water on the spiders’ webs, and both of them had cried, and then hugged at the bus stop before she climbed on; how she had been pleased with herself for not pestering him when she felt low in the aftermath, never once calling or sending him a note. None of which her mother would ever know. All of which would be ruined if—

  There was a near miss when the vehicle in front stopped to let out a passenger. Another at the roundabout.

  ‘Mum!’

  Evelyn struggled with the gear stick.

  ‘You’re making me ill. I can feel my heart banging in my chest.’

  Evelyn, her bladder at bursting point, left the car on the drive to avoid parking it in the too-narrow garage, and rushed inside to use the bathroom; so Louise found the letter on the kitchen counter and, to the sound of her mother peeing in the next room, stuffed it into the boiler, saw it catch fire before slamming the door closed, then ran up to her room and locked the door.

  Harry arrived, with the steak and kidney not even started. They had to settle for poached eggs on toast … It was hard for Harry to make sense of what had happened. An incriminating letter about penises that had disap
peared. Andrew, who had come to the house a couple of times and talked about physics and modern art, and then another boy, this David, in Lancashire, to whom Louise was secretly writing about things that should never have happened, but in any case should be private. But then, the police! Utterly ineffective and spineless, she told him, to think we pay their wages! Surely not the best place to start, he thought … What was she thinking? And now, this idea that they should call Andrew Smiley’s parents, people they had only occasionally glimpsed in a car and twice chatted to on the doorstep, and make some kind of accusation.

  ‘I’m not at all sure that’s a good thing to do,’ he said, pushing aside his plate with its smears of egg.

  ‘Are you telling me I’m wrong? That we should let our daughter do whatever she pleases?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Are you afraid to deal with them? Because I’m not.’

  ‘But what would be the point of it? I think we should try not to blunder about and I’d rather think it all over.’ The phone rang and Evelyn took the call: Valerie. Louise had called her from upstairs.

  ‘The thing is, Mum, times have changed. These are the kind of things teenagers do. It’s all fairly normal. And from what she says, they were pretty responsible. Though I do think the letter-writing thing is rather strange.’

  ‘Did we ask for your opinion? And does being a trainee vet qualify you to pronounce on this?’

  ‘No, I’m just offering it, Mum, for you to consider. Of course you’re right to be concerned in case something’s amiss or she’s pregnant, but I don’t think that’s the case. She’s quite upset and—’

  ‘Do you think I’m not upset?’ Evelyn hung up and, even though it was after midnight over there, called her oldest, Lillian, in Perth, who after all had studied Law.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘I’m out of touch on the British legislation on the age of consent, but I do expect the police officer knew what he was talking about,’ Lily eventually said. ‘I can see both sides, of course. It must be worrying for you, but on balance, I think it’s best not to aggravate things. And no, I really wouldn’t call the boy’s parents.’

  ‘I expect you’ll feel differently when your two are teenagers,’ Evelyn told her, and again, hung up.

  Neither she nor Harry slept very much.

  He got up as soon as it was light.

  ‘Are you going to speak to her or not?’ she asked him when he came in from the garage where he had been sanding an occasional table that she wanted refinished.

  ‘In due course.’

  ‘When would that be?’

  ‘Please stop hectoring me,’ he said, and knew as the words left his lips that it was a mistake.

  ‘So somehow, I have become the one in the wrong here?’

  ‘No. Please, Evelyn, let’s not talk like this.’

  ‘Like what? All I am asking is for you to do your part … And remember, please, not to leave that book on the table. It goes on the shelf.’ For heaven’s sake, Harry did not say, this is ridiculous!

  ‘I do sometimes think you’re doing it to spite me,’ Evelyn said.

  ‘Doing what? Reading?’

  ‘You know full well what I mean. Leaving your things all over the house.’

  ‘I left that book and my notebook on the dining room table, so far as I remember. I was reading it with my coffee before I went out to revarnish that side table for you, and I intended to return to it. Why shouldn’t I leave a book on the table? Where else do you want me to put it?’

  ‘Away. On the shelf, or is that too much to ask?’

  ‘I intended to return to it.’

  ‘How many times do I have to say—’

  ‘Evelyn, you’re being unreasonable.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me!’

  Unreasonable, he felt, put things mildly—truth was, there was a line between strong minded and outrageous that Evelyn now crossed with increasing frequency. Though sometimes it was his fault, for goading her. Or, according to his daughters, for letting her get away with murder. Or even, as he admitted to himself, because there were still times when he found Evelyn’s anger arousing, and enjoyed making up afterwards …

  ‘I am reading it,’ he told her, sitting down and reaching for the book. ‘Or will, when I have a chance.’

  Hadn’t he already read at least one biography of Edward Thomas? she had asked him when he brought the book back from the library last weekend. Didn’t she send one to him during the war? Why read another?

  Fair enough, he thought, searching now for the page where he had left off in the early hours, but the war was a very long time ago and this was not a biography but a pair of memoirs, written by the poet’s wife. And he couldn’t really say why he was so drawn to it, though one thing was that you began to see where the man’s poems came from, how much of his life went into them, and how much reading, too. He was being given an intimate glimpse of a man by turns depressed, desperate, brilliant, and also a picture of an unequal marriage: how the two of them struggled, how impossible the whole thing was, even though Helen put a good face on it. He sometimes wished he could speak to the pair of them—make Edward see what luck he had to be so thoroughly loved, or else commiserate with him for his inability to accept her gifts; he wished he could warn Helen that she would never get back the measure of what she gave, and yet at the same time encourage her to continue … For what else could she do, being who she was? Some people could not help but love, and most people were the prisoners of their own natures. He identified with both players in the Thomas marriage, but especially with Helen because she was forever fitting herself around someone driven and intransigent. And it was oddly gripping, he had tried to explain to Evelyn, though also strange, to learn about the intimacies of another couple’s married life.

  ‘When are you going to fix that side table?’ she had asked. And now the question was: When would he talk to Louise? Talk to. He stared down at the page, but the words would not open themselves to him, stayed sealed, like some sort of hieroglyphics.

  She appeared at about noon, white faced, dressed in jeans and a grey granddad vest that Evelyn particularly hated. In silence, she filled and plugged in the new electric kettle, reached for the jar of Nescafé, spooned, poured, stirred.

  ‘Your father wants to talk to you,’ Evelyn announced. Louise did not reply, or offer to make a cup for anyone else. Now, it seemed, he had both of them against him.

  ‘Let’s go outside, just the two of us,’ he suggested. Evelyn would not like it, but it was the only way; she would hover otherwise, and interrupt. It was hard enough without that.

  They sat at the slatted garden table, out of earshot of the house, she with her back to it, shivering in the breeze.

  ‘Do you want the rug?’ She shook her head, but he went to the shed and fetched it. ‘You have upset your mother,’ he began, and paused, waiting for her to point out that she, too, was upset. She did not, so he cleared his throat, began: ‘The main thing is that we’re concerned for your well-being. Even if there is the pill and a different approach to sex now, that doesn’t mean it’s wise to rush into things … You still need to think carefully about what you do with your boyfriends.’

  ‘Actually, I do,’ she told him, staring into her black coffee, hair like a curtain, shutting him out.

  ‘How did you feel about Andrew?’ he asked.

  ‘I liked him a lot.’ She glanced quickly up at him then, gulped a mouthful of coffee.

  ‘Were you—in love with him?’ Excruciating, he felt, to pry like this—yet oddly, she did not seem to mind.

  ‘I’m not really sure what it was,’ she replied.

  ‘Then why go so far?’ he asked. She shrugged, leaned back, cup in hand. The sun was on her hair and face now and she looked more like herself again.

  ‘I liked him,
and I was curious,’ she said. ‘And Dad, it’s just a part of the human body.’ Well yes, he thought, but also, no. No just about it.

  ‘Don’t reduce sex to the physical,’ he said. ‘Your mother and I were very much in love, when we … ’

  Her gaze landed squarely on his face.

  ‘How has that worked out, then?’ she asked, the pure cheek of it catching him off guard and rendering him speechless. ‘You really should stand up to her more,’ she continued. ‘Hold your ground. Don’t give in so much.’

  In their different ways, all three of his daughters seemed keen to tell him that he was too accommodating with Evelyn. And he could see why. Of course he should be able to leave a book on the table! It was not as if he lacked backbone. He had withstood schoolyard bullies, the Germans, and countless liars and fools at work. Evelyn, though, was a different matter. Part of the problem was that he didn’t see it just as giving in. It was doing what he could to make things work. He could bend, she could not.

  ‘The thing is, that makes for a pretty miserable atmosphere,’ he told Louise. Again, the shrug, the stretching of her neck to the side, up, to the other side, down again. Her blonde hair all over the place, the fringe obscuring her eyes. She, the last child, was the one who most resembled him. Same eyes, everyone said. She flicked the hair away, stared right back at him, ‘Have you ever thought about giving up on it? I mean, sometimes I do wonder what’s keeping you two together. It can’t be me.’

  Harry took a deep breath.

  ‘I love your mother,’ he told Louise, his throat suddenly raw.

  ‘Dad,’ she said, just sixteen and sitting in the sun with her feet propped on the garden chair he had made when she was two, ‘Dad, these days, lots of people get divorced, you know. You two might be happier apart.’

  Was he unhappy? At this moment, yes, but in general? Marriages were not equal or fair: Look at his own parents, look at Evelyn’s mother’s senseless devotion to a man who did nothing for her. It was stupid to pretend otherwise.