by Lisa Moore
The condom hung close enough to Colleen’s mouth and nose that she could smell its humanness. It smelled of latex and rot and fish and some drunken girl in the back of a car because she had nowhere else to go and cologne and cigarettes and failure and shuddering release. Then a police car pulled lazily onto the Holy Heart parking lot and the gang took off.
And here was Fitzy again, at the Murphy Centre, the same girl, pinned beneath a pregnant belly on a couch with bad springs. She was splayed in the humidity, arms and legs dangling, and a look of sheer relief came over her face when she saw Colleen.
We were in school together, she said, patting the seat beside her on the couch.
You’re Colleen, right? She wiggled her fingers at Colleen. What do you think of my engagement ring?
Colleen decided instantly she wouldn’t be painting murals. Something had happened when she and Frank were having sex and she felt it and he felt it too because her eyes flew open and his eyes were open and he saw it. They both felt it, which, that’s why she took the money and also because it was a lot of money. She got up from the couch.
Where are you going? Fitzy asked.
Way the hell out of here, Colleen said.
ISOBEL
WAVES TRAVEL A long distance without effort. They curl because they cannot not curl. Because when a wave is punched in the gut it caves. Because a wave is all show and no substance. The curdling spew rushes ahead. Foam scribbling over the sand, a note to say the wave is over. Because the glare on the water is in Sanskrit. Because the sea smells like the sea and she’s got the dress wet already and it’s clinging to her shins. Because she believes in submitting and has made a minor religion of it. Because there’s a big fat red-haired man, pale as potato in a sunhat, charging through the water with an inflatable shark. Because the theatre is a cult and people give their whole lives to the cause, which is what exactly? Because perfume is looking good right now, making a living is looking good. Not having to worry about money is looking good. Because only women who have come and come and come and come or who wear thick silver bracelets or who have lost a lover or who have vision or who have lost everything or who know what limelight feels like could possibly understand her and there are none of those women left.
Because she gave up everything and came home to Newfoundland. Because she had nothing to give up in the first place. Because early on she fell in love with Chris, who led her astray. Chris Morgan, who took her cross-country skiing, and they found their way out of the wilderness with a compass. He’d found the compass in a junk shop and had to hit it with his axe to get the needle to waver. Chris, who had drawn their supper out of a hole in the ice and built them an igloo with a fire in the centre so all night long they kicked off the blankets and slept naked and were soaked with sweat, and who made love to her in every single way it is possible to make love and the roof collapsed. Blocks of snow fell on their heads.
Chris, who was ridiculous, vital, super-horny, athletic, a liar and a cheat, who had a photographic memory, who always knew what regime had fallen where and what their major export was and how it related to the spoonful of cereal she was about to put in her mouth, who was untamable, who had introduced her to tahini and Tarkovsky, who was vigilantly agnostic; it had required a vigilance because his natural inclination was to believe.
And Isobel couldn’t not think of him whenever she snapped the clunky silver bracelet onto her wrist, the bracelet from Mexico. They had taken an outdoor steam bath in the backyard of a minor politician they’d met while hitchhiking. The pool was cobblestones and fed by a natural hot spring and there were seven or eight of them. The steam rose and shredded when it met the night air and his naked thigh bumped against her with the hot bubbles and whir of water and she loved him. Or she loved something so huge it must have been him and later there was the bracelet on her pillow.
She had come home to Newfoundland because she had failed. She didn’t get the soap and there was Chris, my God, directing a soap opera.
The anticipation of the hurling mass of the next wave, which is cold and mounting triumphantly and about crotch high, is huge, and if this wave hits her she’s getting all the way in. Like the world exhaling. A hammering home of the truth. A refusal to be a wave any longer. The wave accepts the absurdity of being a wave, but also recognizes the beach for what it is: a reckoning. Who said it would go on forever?
Nobody said.
They said quite the opposite.
There is no cold on earth as unequivocal as this wave that is higher than her head and about to smash itself against her skull. It is as cold as cold can be. Because how can matter be so blasted with sunlight, so sparkle-riven, and curve with such blood lust and be so soul numbing? A wave is the bone around a marrow of light.
Isobel is standing up to her waist and wading out and she gets the wave full force, right in the face, up her nose, in her ears, in her mouth, down her throat, out her nostrils.
Valentin is behind her on the beach, overdressed. Even while she is deep under the water she can feel his eyes on her, the red dress billowing out and clinging, billowing out and clinging with every stroke she takes. She’s a jellyfish making for the horizon. She knows she’s safe for the moment; he won’t risk getting his leather shoes wet.
MADELEINE
SHE HAD WOKEN in a sweat; Archbishop Fleming in the corner of the room, the ghost of Archbishop Fleming.
He was showing up in her dreams more frequently since she’d gone into production with the summer shoot. Fleming had wanted silver chalices for the Eucharist in every church on the Southern Shore. Archbishop Fleming cracking a whip over the backs of four white stallions, and they come tearing out of a snow squall like the wrath of God.
She’d invented the character, Fleming, on a blustery afternoon several years ago while reading letters he’d written to the Pope. She came out of the Roman Catholic Archives and the world had been transformed, a fresh blanket of snow. And now when she falls asleep in the afternoon, there is the archbishop standing in the corner with his white robes and scarlet cape and his staff.
The premier had said they could helicopter the horses to shore. Because of the ice, they had no way to get the horses. There was a sling they could use, and it was expensive and dangerous, but it had been done with racehorses in Kentucky.
The animals would be blindfolded of course, and they would be lowered very carefully from the clouds. She had made a few phone calls. It was impossible, she had been told. It had never happened in Kentucky, or anywhere else. They would not helicopter the horses in, was she crazy? The animals would die of panic.
FRANK
HE HAD TOLD Valentin he would give him $1,000. They had met on the stairs and the Russian had said about cigarettes he wanted to buy cheap and sell at twice the price.
He wanted to borrow a grand that he would return the next day and even give Frank some extra for his trouble. Valentin said all of this casually, without reference to the ransacking of Frank’s apartment or the desecration of Frank’s mother’s ashes. Valentin honestly seemed to be asking for the loan the way someone might borrow a cup of sugar.
We are neighbours, said Valentin. When Frank agreed to the loan the Russian took his hand and shook it vigorously and said he thought they would be great neighbours now.
We must be friends, the Russian said. I like you because you are a businessman. You are like me. This is what we have to understand: there is a system but it is like a suspension bridge, it has give. People like us must exploit the give, do you know what I mean? Frank said he understood.
With persistence and patience, Valentin said. He clapped Frank on the shoulder.
But now all Frank’s money was gone and he could hear the Russians waking up. He could hear the toilet and something boiling and the door to the fire escape banged against the wall and he could hear them speaking to each other in Russian. Valentin would be down soon looking for the money.
She was from a comfortable home where, Frank bet, she had never needed anything.
She’d never been in a welfare office. She had never had to get a brown paper bag from the breakfast program at school. She’d never been evicted from an apartment because her mother was three months behind in the rent. She had never eaten Kraft Dinner for supper unless she wanted to. She had never worn a windbreaker, one of three hundred, donated by a sports store to a shelter for battered women and distributed throughout the city to needy families, a windbreaker that became an immediately identifiable mark of poverty, but had to be worn anyway because at all costs it was important to pretend to one’s mother that one loved the wind-breaker. She had never seen her mother live with a toothache rather than pay to get it fixed.
Yet, she had taken his money, and that’s the way of it.
That is the way of money.
Frank put on a fresh T-shirt and picked up his keys and decided to walk down Duckworth Street to see if he could find Colleen. He’d get his money back.
On the street the boy from next door was playing with a bubble wand. He pressed a lever in the handle and the wand opened out into a large diamond shape and bubble liquid shot up from the clear handle and coated the plastic diamond when he tipped it into the breeze and a giant bubble wobbled into the air and lifted from the wand, and it caught the reflection of the landlord’s Jaguar, which was parked outside the bed-sit and the black streaky gleaming car slithered on the curve of the oversized bubble.
The boy put out his hand to touch the bubble and it broke with a sun-sparkling mist and Frank started up the sidewalk and as he did he gouged his key into the side of the landlord’s Jaguar and dragged it from the taillight all the way to the headlight feeling the paint crust against the tip of his key.
COLLEEN
I’M IN THE Toronto airport with a connecting flight to Louisiana in a few hours and I am so hungry I could pass out. I go into Swiss Chalet and the waitress has a tag that says Veronica. She’s past middle age, perhaps forty, and she has her blond hair swept into a French twist and should I call Mom and tell her where I am? Not yet. Not yet. Veronica has a beauty mark on her cheek. I try to think who Veronica is in the Bible.
I know the boy in the kitchen, Veronica says, and I tell him you don’t have much time, so he does me a favour. Veronica has an accent I don’t recognize.
She winks at me and puts down the plate of chicken and a bowl of gravy and a finger bowl and I am so hungry. The chicken is moist and good.
Soon I’ll be sitting in the plane while it turns circles on the runway waiting for clearance to take off. They’ll turn off the cabin lights and the flight attendant will touch the overhead bins with her fingers all the way up the aisle. I can’t leave Swiss Chalet without paying because this is an airport and how easy it would be to get caught. But once I’m through customs I’m through and it’s so busy here, a table full of women in purdah, another table of five pilots, there’s a toddler screaming her head off. I could slide out the door pretty quick. I should be able to keep going for a while on Frank’s money, but it would be good not to have to pay for every meal. Swiss Chalet is a big chain, like probably part of some multinational. Veronica has her back turned. They’re busy as hell, she’s probably been on for hours already; she’s probably exhausted. There are two entrances, and if I went out the one next to the bathrooms I wouldn’t have to pass anybody. I could get out of here and it would take Veronica at least five minutes to see I’m gone.
MADELEINE
SHE REMEMBERS A luncheon in Sydney, Australia. Was she speaking about the art of documentary? Yes she was. She was speaking about how you could change the world with a good documentary. Earlier that week she had come close to drowning.
When she said change the world she thought of the sweat required to rev the engines of capital so you eventually got to say your piece. It took two years or more to browbeat the mucky-mucks and massage the concept and betray the concept, all the while remaining true. But if you displayed brazenness and fortitude, she had learned, you more or less got to say your piece. She was all for having your say.
She’d always start off a project by wanting to say a fairly simple thing, for instance: it was okay to kill baby seals, or wife battering was bad, or could we not help the people of Sudan before they all die in horrific, unimaginable ways? There were transvestites injecting gel into their chests so they would have tits and they were dying from it and this was bad. Cops carrying guns in St. John’s was bad. Whatever she said, she would want the pictures to carry the message, and yes, there bloody well would be a message if she were going to raise all that money. You bet there’d be a message.
This must have been what she was saying at the podium in Sydney, Australia. But she was thinking, while she spoke, of how she had gone for a swim at Bondi Beach earlier in the week and the tide had dragged her out. From the beach she would have been nothing more than a speck. She could see several bodies in black wetsuits, needle thin in the distance and sun struck. They were walking with their surfboards, which looked like wafers and she watched them wade into the water and lie on their boards and paddle out and then rise up and skim the crests of waves with their arms aloft. She thought about her green canvas sneakers on the sand. Her gold watch and hotel key were in the toe of one of her sneakers. She had wanted to go for a swim and she’d thought, If someone takes the watch, so what. I’ll get a new watch.
Yes there would be a strong message, she was telling them. But this is what she promised on the way. They’d get a story they weren’t expecting. They would belly laugh at least once. They would not be exactly as they had been before. She was saying something of the sort at the podium. She was counting the promises off on her fingers. She was popping her p’s on the microphone.
The ocean wanted her, really, really wanted her. She discovered in herself a willingness to give up. Why not take the easy way out for once. When she thought of the sneakers on the beach she saw it as a shot, veils of sand blowing over them, half burying them, but it would have to be a quick shot or it would be cheesy. Why not cheesy, she thought. What’s wrong with a little cheese? I’m dying here, after all.
She’d made a documentary about the cops carrying guns in St. John’s, she was telling them by way of example, and the question had been would she be able to get the security guard who had gone into a public bathroom and sat down and laid his pistol on the back of the toilet and walked out again to talk on camera.
Who was she talking to anyway? Older women with hats. There were some grey-haired, frail-looking men. She didn’t care who they were, she had almost drowned. Know your audience, she told them.
She was trying to keep it short because there was an elderly poet supposed to talk next and he had leaned over during the break and was trembling and had difficulty speaking, but his mouth was open and his eyes were earnestly trying to communicate his intent. He had to make fists with both his hands to wring out of his withered body what he needed to say and it was that he would die before the end of the luncheon if she dragged her talk on too long. He fought to go first but she was slotted to go first and she wouldn’t give up her slot. Let the old geezer croak, she had thought.
A guy in one of those black rubber suits whipped past her on a yellow board. He nearly knocked her brains out and the board twisted in the air. He was flung into the sky with a blast of white surf and the board smacked down and he smacked down on top of the board. Then a wave curled over him, a fiery green wall of light and rainbow and mist. He was riding toward her through a narrow tunnel. The tunnel was clenching behind him, closing like a fist, and getting narrower in front and he had to crouch and she didn’t have long left because there was no strength in her arms and anyway, it had been a good life. Then he was engulfed and oh well, that was that, but, the surfboard, which bobbed up quite close to her was tied to his ankle and he managed to get her on the board, never mind where his hands grabbed and pinched and how ungainly and squashed and unromantic and snot-covered and fat she was. Lady, he’d said.
He’d said, Lady, lady, lady. In that accent they have down th
ere. He raised a fist in the air, flung the water from his hair, and made a whooping noise. She had nearly been swallowed by malevolent death to leave no remains, but instead — she could not believe. Here was a man, muscled, lean, young, everything she loved, and he was paddling them back to shore. She didn’t get off the board until her dragging feet touched the sandy bottom and she was knee-deep in water. She saw he was winded but pleased with himself and they made arrangements for dinner because he had saved her life.
Later she sat in front of a big window looking onto Bondi Beach waiting for him. People were still surfing though it was dark but there was a moon and big lamps like those in ballparks. She drank her wine and waited and he didn’t show up. How simply he had shown up before, and now, with comparatively few impediments, he did not make it at all.
She decided to call Trevor Barker upstairs and see if he felt like going to a play on the weekend. There was a new production at the Hall and she had tickets. And if the evening was still warm they could walk along the harbourfront afterwards. Maybe get invited on the cruise ship for a look.
BEVERLY
SUNLIGHT BOUNCED THROUGH the patio windows onto the high polish of Beverly’s cherry-wood dining table. There was a white crocheted doily in the centre of the table. She placed the portable phone on her napkin. She was waiting for the phone to ring.
Helen French had made the doily — a high-school friend who specialized in christening gowns. Helen had sold christening gowns — it said on the tags that came with each purchase — to royalty in Germany and Malta. Colleen had worn one of Helen’s gowns when Beverly had her christened at Corpus Christi, seventeen years before, by Father O’Brien. The backs of his pale, bony hands were covered in warts.