Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 02 - The Geranium Girls

by Alison Preston

  “Just a few minutes ago,” Beryl said.

  The pharmacist, whose name tag said “Dhani Tata” guided her — pushed her really — to a bench where an elderly couple sat waiting for their prescriptions.

  “Excuse us!” he announced and edged Beryl onto the bench next to them. The pharmacist seemed unsure on his feet, but he fell purposefully to his knees in front of Beryl.

  The old woman began struggling to her feet but Dhani encouraged the couple to stay put.

  “Where were you stung?” he asked Beryl.

  “On my foot again, the right one,” she said, and showed him the spot.

  He removed her sandal and placed it on the floor.

  “I’d like to try something now, but only with your permission,” he said.

  “Yes? What?” Beryl asked. “What do you have in mind?”

  “I’d like to suck the poison from your foot as best I can, to try to minimize the reaction that way. It sometimes works for snake bites so I think it might be worth a try,” he explained.

  “Well…if you think it’s worth a try, by all means,” Beryl said. “Are you sure you want to?” She looked at her foot.

  “Yes, quite sure.”

  And then his mouth was on her instep drawing out the poison. He spit once onto the floor.

  “Sorry for spitting,” he said. “I’ll clean it up after.”

  The elderly couple observed with interest. A few other people had gathered by now and they watched as the pharmacist fastened his lips once more onto the soft inside of Beryl’s foot. He sucked hard for all he was worth and spit again.

  “I can taste it!”

  He sucked till he couldn’t taste it anymore.

  Beryl felt relaxed. She wanted to close her eyes against the small gaping group, and lie against the chest of this odd man who had so willingly taken her foot into his mouth.

  He returned her foot to her.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “I hope it helps.”

  She held her foot up in front of her and liked what she saw. Beryl thought of her feet as her best feature, though she had learned to keep that point of pride to herself. When she was a teenager she had mentioned it to a boyfriend once and he had said, “Nobody has nice feet.”

  It had hurt her feelings, but hadn’t stopped her from admiring her own feet. If she was having a bad day, one of those days when she hated her face and her life and all the things she had done, and more things that she hadn’t done, her feet sometimes helped — just the sight of them.

  “You have beautiful feet,” Dhani said quietly, so no one but Beryl could hear.

  “Thank you,” she replied.

  “The show’s over, folks.” He spoke loudly now and the crowd loosened up a bit. A disappointment to those who arrived too late to see what the excitement was about.

  “It’s still going to hurt.” He helped Beryl to stand up. “But I’ll bet it won’t hurt as much. Come and sit behind the counter with me for a few minutes and we’ll talk about pain.”

  She obeyed. She wanted very badly to talk about pain with this man. What could be better! She followed as he toddled along. He had a peculiar way of walking, a bit Chaplinesque, Beryl decided. He leaned backwards, as though to keep himself from falling forwards, but almost to the point of tipping from overcorrection.

  “Careful,” she felt like saying, but didn’t.

  She sat on a chair and Dhani sat across from her on a stool. Two other pharmacists or pharmacists’ helpers bustled about behind the counter. They smiled at Beryl and didn’t seem to think she was out of place. Perhaps Dhani made a habit of acts such as these.

  “Okay, so pain?” Dhani said.

  Beryl felt again the hard round bone of the mushroom girl pressing into the arch of her other foot, the left one. A duller, achier pain than the sharp sting of the wasp.

  “I came to think of it differently,” he said, “before I had my toes done.”

  Ah, Beryl thought. So there’s something wrong with his feet.

  “Yes,” Dhani said and Beryl tried to figure out from the way her mouth felt if she had spoken aloud. No, she was sure she hadn’t.

  “I had rheumatoid arthritis in my toes,” he went on. “It was so bad there was nothing to do but chop them off.”

  Beryl let out a little gasp.

  Dhani held up one of his own feet.

  “There are special slippers inside my shoes, with toes built in. False toes all in a clump. A malleable clump so it doesn’t hurt my stumps.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “the business with my toes was the worst pain I ever had. Not so much after they were lopped off, but during the time leading up to the operation. Pain killers weren’t very effective and, anyway, I didn’t want to end up in Winnipeg’s version of the Betty Ford Center.”

  He smiled at Beryl. “So I came to think of pain a little differently.”

  “I’m sorry about your toes,” Beryl said. “You seem very young to have rheumatoid arthritis.”

  “Yes, I am young,” Dhani said. “Just thirty-nine now and the operation was four years ago.” He held up both shoes this time. “I’m still getting used to my new feet.

  “Anyway, I decided to begin from scratch with the pain. Pretend I had just met it and treat it differently from the vantage point of this new start. It was a presence all right, one that couldn’t be ignored. But it didn’t have to be the boss like it seemed to have been for so long.

  “I didn’t call it pain anymore. I called it Roberta. Roberta was my powerful companion. I felt her presence but it wasn’t unpleasant anymore. It simply was.”

  Beryl wanted to ask why he gave the pain a woman’s name. Was all pain part of the same sisterhood that she and mosquitoes and maybe wasps belonged to? But she let him go on.

  “Roberta came and went as she always had. I started to miss her a little when she vanished completely and I greeted her heartily when she returned. She became a bit like a big unwieldy dog who’s more trouble than she’s worth but whom you love to pieces.”

  “You loved your pain to pieces?” Beryl asked.

  Her foot began to throb and she wanted to raise it and rest it on a pillow, or on Dhani’s knee. She wanted to sleep. The talk of his relationship with pain was all very well, but she knew she wasn’t the type of person who could pull off something like that.

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t have the patience,” she said. “I’d succumb, like I’m succumbing now.”

  Dhani leapt up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said and lurched over to a small freezer where he reached in and came back with a cold pack. He wrapped it in a towel and pressed it to the sting and then sat down again with her foot upon his knee.

  “The ice should help and I’ll give you a couple of Tylenols before you go.”

  “Is it the female of the species, do you know,” Beryl asked, “the female wasp that does the stinging?”

  “I don’t know,” Dhani said.

  She longed to talk to him about the thing that had happened to her left foot last Saturday, the other thing she’d stepped on. She would tell him, but not just now. For sure she would be seeing him again.

  He was thirty-nine. Was that too old for her? She was just twenty-nine last November. Ten years difference. When she was fifty-nine, he’d be sixty-nine. When she was eighty-nine, he’d be ninety-nine. Georges had been older too, but not by so much. That hadn’t turned out very well. But he was nothing like Dhani.

  “Call me later and let me know how your foot is,” Dhani said as she was leaving. “I’m here till nine.”

  On her way home Beryl realized she had forgotten to pick up the shampoo that she had been heading to the drugstore for in the first place. The coupon was folded inside the pocket of her shorts.

  Certain things inside her had begun changing since last Saturday. She couldn’t describe the changes or even be absolutely sure what they were, just that they were there. Or maybe the whole of her was shifting, not just things inside her. She didn’
t know.

  And she was missing her dad for the first time in her life. She hadn’t even particularly liked him when he was alive, but now she wished she could ask him things and apologize for being the way she was.

  Plus, she was doing things she’d never done before, like cutting out coupons, for one: she’d never done that. And washing her hair twice a day. That’s why she needed more shampoo. She was counting on getting over that one. It was too much.

  Please, don’t let there be a message from Joe, Beryl prayed, as she unlocked the door and stuck her key back under the flower pot. He had phoned every day for the past week and she didn’t want to talk to him. She was never friendly and was starting to be rather short with him. She wanted to shout: “Can’t the most popular man in the pet world find someone who actually wants to talk to him?” But she didn’t.

  There was no message from Joe. But there was a hang-up. Beryl dialed *69 to see if she could find out who it was, but the taped voice started with the “We’re sorry” business.

  Maybe Joe was starting to get that he was bothering her.

  Beryl phoned Hermione to let her know she wouldn’t be by today and why.

  “No problemo,” said her friend. “Put your foot up and relax.”

  Beryl put on her favourite Little Feat disc, the one with “Willin’” on it, the live version, and lay down on the couch to rest her foot. Her two cats, Dusty and Jude, joined her there. She drifted off, with Lowell George’s voice, singing — telling her how he’d driven every kind of rig that’d ever been made, how he’d driven down the back roads so he wouldn’t get weighed.

  Chapter 6

  The part he liked best was filling her mouth with dirt. He was surprised that it was hard to keep open. It wanted to shut itself against his efforts. He had to pack it full. Her mouth wouldn’t open and her eyes wouldn’t close. She watched him all the while. He would have preferred that she didn’t, but in a way it was better. It stirred him; his body told him so.

  His hand reaches now for his glass of water. The thirst never goes away; he hates his thirst. Without taking even a sip he hurls the water down the drain.

  He pictures the flower pots that used to line the window sill above the kitchen sink. The old wood frame house belonged to Aunt Hortense in those days. Or Auntie Cunt as he thought of her. Auntie Cunt and her geraniums.

  How he hates the smell of geraniums! Heavy, oily, pungent stink. And then they change and smell like apricots. Tricky, nasty flowers. He hates apricots too.

  She had needled him into helping her. Always with the dirt. Feel the dirt on your hands, Boyo. Don’t be afraid of the dirt.

  Boyo feared far more than dirt but he didn’t let on. He smiled. Because she told him to. He smiled because if he didn’t she tied his mouth open with one of her slippery woman scarves. She hadn’t wanted any gloomy Guses in her house!

  It was on one of those dirt days that Hortense finally told him something about his mother.

  “Your ma was a ’tard, if you must know,” she said.

  “She was a what?’”

  “A retardo. Dull as that lump of dirt in your hand, Boyo. Born that way.”

  He dropped the soil and ran.

  If his own mother had been retarded, what hope was there for him? He did well enough at school, but Aunt Hort could not be satisfied. If he got a B, he was punished for not working hard enough; if he got an A, his mark was regarded with suspicion: he must have cheated; the teacher must be a moron.

  His punishments were many. Much of the time he had no idea what he had done wrong. If he had, he would have gladly apologized, not that it would have helped.

  The punishments usually took some form of denial. The worst one was when she wouldn’t let him use the biffy, as she called it. She would see him walking towards the bathroom and shout, “Not so fast, Boyo! Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To the bathroom,” he said.

  “Let’s just see if you can hold on a little longer,” she said. “Are we talkin’ number one or number two?”

  “Both, I think.”

  “See if you can hold on till morning.”

  So he would try to go at school, when he was away from her, but often, to his huge frustration, he would sit and sit inside a cubicle in the boys’ room but nothing would come out. More than once, he wet his pants in the classroom or in the gymnasium during physical education. He was tormented mercilessly by the other kids in the class. Stink Boy, they called him.

  Sometimes, on his way home from school, he would go down to the river and seek out a little privacy there to do his business. One time Hort saw him coming up from the bushes lining the river bank and suspected him of doing just that. She got out the duct tape that time and covered the head of his shrivelled penis. He wasn’t allowed out all weekend. She kept him in the house where she could keep an eye on him and use him for what she called a scrub and rub.

  Hortense’s house belongs to him now — has for years. It came to him by default, as her closest living relative, her only one. She didn’t leave a will. She hadn’t expected to die.

  He writes a name on the doodle pad they gave him for free at St. Leon Gardens, the market where he buys his fruit. Beryl Kyte, he writes. It’s the name of the woman who found the tall one. He wonders what the person called Beryl is doing right now.

  Chapter 7

  Beryl was watching her neighbours to the south, the Kruck-Boulbrias, heading out to their mini-van on Sunday morning. They had two squirrels in a cage.

  They did it all the time — captured squirrels and drove them someplace.

  “We live in a treed neighbourhood,” she said, after saying good morning and not meaning it. She did not wish them a good morning. She wished them different personalities, that would allow them to leave the squirrels where they belonged.

  “In these parts wherever there are trees there are bound to be squirrels,” she went on, yanking weeds out of the garden along the fence where she had planted lettuce and carrots.

  Mort, the husband, looked sheepish. “My wife is afraid of the squirrels,” he said. “She hears them on the roof and they scare her.”

  They both did that — called each other “my wife” and “my husband” instead of using their actual names.

  Ariadne, the wife, was already in the vehicle with the door closed and the window rolled up, looking straight ahead.

  Beryl wanted to say, “Why don’t the two of you move into a cement building surrounded by cement and leave the squirrels alone?”

  But she didn’t. She left it and went back to pulling out the little elm and maple seedlings that were trying to take root in her tiny vegetable garden.

  Why am I so grumpy? she wondered. Why can’t I be more like Stan, with his easygoing ways, his ability to laugh at stuff rather than throw fits about it? He’d probably be best friends with the Kruck-Boulbrias. He’d probably teach them to like squirrels.

  The phone rang and she ran to listen to the message. She was hoping to hear from Dhani. They were planning an evening out.

  It was Joe. He didn’t give his usual spiel about how he thought she might want to talk, he knew he did, and so on. This message was short and to the point: “Hello, Beryl. Joe Paine here. I just wanted to let you know I won’t be bothering you anymore. So, good luck, I guess, and that’s about it. Okay, bye.” It was obvious by the odd lilt at the end of his sentences that he was trying to keep the resentment out of his voice, but he didn’t quite manage it.

  An uneasiness crept in, only mildly tempered with relief. What had happened other than the fact that she had never been nice to him when he called? Maybe Stan had said something to him. She tried to recall if he’d said anything about having to take Scrug or Leo to the vet lately. She didn’t think so, but couldn’t be sure.

  Beryl had been whining a lot to Stan about Joe but she hadn’t actually wanted him to do anything about it. I should just keep my whining to myself, she thought, and talk to Stan about football and the post office. But both of
those topics would probably involve whining too.

  She wished she hadn’t recycled Sergeant Christie’s phone number. She hadn’t returned his call and was mildly curious that he hadn’t tried again.

  Beryl wondered how the investigation was going, wondered if the cops would tell her anything if she phoned.

  After the first flurry of stories in the Free Press, about the discovery of the body, there hadn’t been much. Just a short paragraph a few days later, saying that the police were following up some leads, that the trail was by no means cold. That could mean something or absolutely nothing.

  And they mentioned a hooker, Charise Rondeau, who had been murdered about a year and a half ago. Her killer had never been found. They hinted at a possible connection between the two deaths. Charise’s body had been dumped in a parking lot off Higgins Avenue, close to the Low Track, on a bitterly cold winter night. There was no mention of how either woman had died.

  Beryl’s picture had been in the paper on that first Sunday. She’d been huddled under a blanket by the side of the road. They identified her as Beryl Kyte, the “jogger” who had tripped over the body. She wasn’t a jogger; she never ran if she could help it. But at least her name had been spelled correctly.

  The phone rang again and this time it was Hermione, so Beryl picked it up. Her friend just wanted to know how she was getting along. It had been awhile since they had seen each other face to face, although they had spoken on the phone several times since the events in the park. The two of them decided that Beryl would drop by the shop one day soon on her way home from work, so they could get properly caught up with each other.

  Chapter 8

  Beryl and Stan sorted their mail side by side, with conveyor belts rumbling over their heads. The sound always caused Beryl to feel that she was wearing a hat that was far too tight. Something needed a lube job this morning. There was a terrible screech every few seconds.

  “Have you been to the vet lately?” Beryl asked.

  “What!”