Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  “Ah . . . sure,” he said, the “sure” a sucking in of breath as Victoria’s mouth wrapped around his penis.

  He and Victoria made love, showered, made love again. He didn’t even leave the apartment until after eleven-thirty. He’d already decided to spend the afternoon looking for a Christmas gift for her. Something personal. A ring maybe. Not an engagement ring; she’d think that was stupid. But something personal. And expensive . . .

  He took a sip of the draft the waiter had put on the table. Was this his fourth beer? Fifth?

  “Now you take the Leafs . . .” Ward tried to snap himself back into the conversation. Not Bald John was still talking hockey. “I mean, the Leafs won the Cup—what was it? Four years ago? Centennial Year. Now look. Out of the playoffs two out of the last three years. Expansion. That’s the problem. Fourteen fucking teams! The fucking California fucking Golden fucking Seals for fuck’s sake! I mean, there’s not enough hockey players for fourteen NHL teams. The—”

  “But that’s not Toronto’s problem,” Bald Tom cut in. “Toronto’s problem is incompetent management. They let Imlach go to Buffalo, and he takes half the Leafs with him. He even got Eddie Shack back from L.A. or California or wherever he was . . .”

  “I still say expansion is ruining hockey.” Ward suspected they’d performed this routine before. “I mean some defenceman winning a scoring title. What kind of shit is that?”

  “Bobby Orr? Bobby Orr’s not some defenceman.” Bald Tom again. “Did you see that goal he scored against St. Louis in the finals last year? Flying through the air and he still scores—I’m sorry.” He stopped suddenly, looked at Ward. “We get carried away sometimes. What it is to work with someone for so long. We’re like some old married couple.”

  “Except you’re not nearly as good looking as my wife,” Not Bald john added. They both laughed. Ward was sure this was part of their shtick. Which had now served its purpose.

  “Anyway,” Bald Tom said, “we didn’t ask you to lunch to hear us bitch. How’s school?”

  “Fine.” If this wasn’t about vote buying, what was it about?

  “Tom’s thinking of going back to law school himself,” Not Bald John said. “If any place would have him . . . You like the new apartment?”

  Wha—how did they know about the apartment? “Good.”

  “Your girlfriend’s a looker,” Not Bald John added. “She move in yet?”

  Were they just showing off their knowledge of the intimate details of his life, or trying to intimidate him with them? Did they know about the gift he was planning to buy Victoria, or that she’d invited herself to Christmas dinner at his parents’ place? “I can’t be your secret forever, you know,” she’d said. He didn’t know why not.

  He visited his parents less often since he’d got his apartment. The apartment, in the south-end university ghetto, was close to law school and close to the law firm, close even to Victoria’s parents, but as far as possible from his parents’ north-end bungalow. Even though he had Jack’s car for his own use, and even though he’d spent a good deal of time in the old neighbourhood during the election campaign, he’d only visited twice, both times at his mother’s insistence, for perfunctory Sunday dinners. “You have to have a home-cooked meal every once in a while,” she’d said.

  Ward didn’t tell her he’d developed a taste for something other than overcooked roast beef, mashed potatoes and canned peas. When he wanted roast beef now, he ordered it medium rare at Chez Henri, where it arrived with Yorkshire pudding and an assortment of fresh vegetables. Not to mention a carafe of red wine. Followed by an after-dinner Kahlua and a cigarette. His mother didn’t serve alcohol or allow smoking in the house; whenever his father wanted a nip of rum or a quick smoke, he slipped away to his workshop in the basement.

  What would Victoria really think of his parents? He couldn’t decide whether she was genuinely interested in getting to know them or whether, like him, they were members of an alien species she found exotic in an anthropological way: the working poor.

  She never tired of being amused by the things he didn’t know—about music, travel, theatre, art. She insisted on bringing him along to openings at the college gallery. Once, it was an exhibition by one of her favourite professors. The centrepiece was a slide show in which a series of words, with their definitions, were projected on a white wall for ten seconds at a time, one after the other after the other. The work was titled Four-Letter Words, and it purported to be a complete listing of all of the four-letter words in the dictionary. From “Abba: noun Father: a title anciently used with the names of patriarchs” to “zeal: noun Ardour for a cause or, less often, a person.”

  “But what’s the point?” Ward wanted to know.

  “The point is the point,” she’d answered.

  And then there was the night they’d gone up on the roof of the Art College building to watch a visiting artist from New York, whose performance art consisted of walking around naked with his entire body painted green. It was titled Envy. Ward didn’t envy him. It was a cold fall evening and the man’s cock had shrivelled up into his balls until it had almost disappeared completely.

  “I don’t get it,” Ward had said.

  “What’s so hard to get?” she’d answered. Ward sometimes thought Victoria probably didn’t understand it either but knew enough—from her upbringing?—not to let her ignorance show. He loved her for it. He loved her because she was nothing like him.

  “We’re talking about living together,” he said finally, answering Not Bald John’s question. “Maybe after Christmas.” How long had that silence gone on? He’d almost drained another beer. Four? Five? He couldn’t remember. It dawned on him that Bald Tom and Not Bald John hadn’t been matching him round for round. They each had almost half a glass left. Of how many? Two? Three?

  “Waiter?” It was Bald Tom. “We’re ready to order. How about one of your rib steaks, medium rare?”

  “Medium rare?” The waiter laughed. “You can have it undercooked or overdone. Your choice.”

  “Undercooked, I guess. What’s it come with?”

  “Well, you can have fries or fries. Your choice.”

  “Well, since you put it that way, I guess I’ll have fries.”

  “Good choice. And you, sir?”

  They all ordered the same. “And another beer here for my friend, Ward, when you get a chance.”

  Ward knew he should protest but he didn’t. Maybe he wouldn’t go shopping after all.

  “Well, Ward,” Bald Tom began again when the waiter had gone. His tone had changed. “You’re probably wondering why we wanted to talk with you. I told you when I called this morning that John and I work with S and I, Security and Intelligence, in Ottawa. I don’t know how much you know about us; we’re members of the RCMP, but a special section off on our own. Our job is to collect information on people who might want to do harm to Canada—from inside or outside the country—and make sure they don’t get that chance. Finding Cross?” he said proudly. “That was us.”

  He had Ward’s attention now. Last week, Ward had watched it all on the old TV with the broken rabbit ears Victoria had stolen for him from her parents’ house. He’d been studying for his Christmas exams when Victoria called to tell him the authorities had found British diplomat James Cross; it was on TV. Ward could still recall watching the news a few days after the provincial election when police had found the body of Pierre Laporte, the Cabinet minister who’d been kidnapped by another FLQ cell. He’d been strangled and stuffed into a car trunk. James Cross was still very much alive.

  Ward had to insert a coat hanger into the hole where the rabbit ears had been and then twist it this way and that to get a snowy picture. He’d watched for hours, even though there really was nothing to see. Mostly just a static wide shot of what had been the grounds of Expo 67 in Montreal. The announcers talked endlessly about the almost nothing they knew about
what was really going on. “We’re expecting a bus carrying Mr. Cross and his kidnappers to arrive here any moment,” they repeated every five minutes. “That car you can just make out in the distance”—Ward couldn’t see beyond a few ghostly outlines of buildings—“is the Cuban ambassador’s limousine.” The only thing the journalists seemed to know was that the police had found the FLQ’s hideout and made a deal with the kidnappers; the police agreed to provide them with safe passage to Cuba and, in return, the kidnappers agreed to hand Cross over to the Cuban ambassador, who would hold him until the kidnappers’ plane touched down in Havana.

  “Really?” Ward said. He wasn’t sure he believed Bald Tom.

  “Really,” Bald Tom answered, then amended his reply. “I mean, not ‘us,’ specifically, but ‘us,’ as in S and I.” Ward was disappointed. “John and I work mostly on the English side. Campus radicals, communists, labour activists.”

  “I can see you’re puzzled,” Not Bald John cut in, “like, ‘What does any of this have to do with me?’”

  Ward nodded, felt the beer dizzy him.

  “What do you know about an organization called Black Hands?” Black Hands? “Nothing,” Ward said. “Never heard of it.”

  “Black Pride?”

  Ah, so this was about the photos! “Just that it’s an organization, you know, the government set up. A self-help group for black people. Is that right?”

  “What can you tell us about a guy named Raymond Carter?”

  Ray? Ray Carter? “Ah . . . I knew him. When I was a kid. I haven’t seen him in . . . I don’t know? Years, at least . . .”

  “We know that,” Bald John said. If they knew so much, Ward wanted to shout, why did they ask him so goddamn many questions? “And we know you don’t have anything to do with the stuff he’s involved with these days.”

  Which was?

  “We’re just trying to put together a file,” Not Bald Tom added. “Background stuff. We thought you could help us fill in some of the blanks from his childhood. When you did know him.”

  “Has he done something wrong?” Ward asked, not expecting an answer.

  “He’s just someone we’re interested in knowing more about,” Bald John answered. “He’s been involved with some people who are involved with some people we’re interested in. That’s all. So you met him when?”

  What the hell? Ward thought. They didn’t seem to care about the vote buying. What harm could it do?

  “I met him my first day of school . . .”

  “Ssshhh,” Rosa giggled, guiding Ray through the darkened living room, around the Christmas tree, by the fake mantelpiece her father had transformed into a photographic shrine to the memory of Rosa’s mother, past a wall festooned with framed certificates attesting to Deacon George Johnstone’s many and various good works and then down a long, echoing—he should have taken off his boots—parquet hallway, where she finally ushered him into her bedroom. As Ray allowed himself to exhale, Rosa gently closed the door behind him and flipped on the overhead light.

  It was a little girl’s room, soft pink walls, frilly white curtains, a collection of stuffed bears neatly arranged at the head of the bed. He shouldn’t have been there.

  That had been made very clear to him three weeks ago, at the Queen Elizabeth High School Christmas dance, when Ray had run into his old teacher. At first, Mr. Dunphy had seemed delighted to see him. “Seems like I see you on the news most every night,” he’d said, pumping his hand like a long-lost friend. Ray guessed that not too many students in Dr. Dummy’s class ever ended up on TV, unless it was in film footage showing them being led into or out of a courtroom, probably in handcuffs.

  “What brings you back to your alma mater tonight, Mr. Carter?” he asked, cheerfully enough. But when Ray nodded in Rosa’s direction—she was pouring them glasses of punch from the bowl in the corner—Mr. Dunphy did what seemed to Ray like a double take.

  “Oh,” Mr. Dunphy said, arching his right eyebrow in a look that mixed surprise and disapproval. “I see.” And Ray could see that he did. Or was Ray just imagining censure in his tone. Because of his own insecurity.

  After that night at the demonstration nearly two months ago, Ray had flipped it back and forth in his mind—he would/he wouldn’t; he should/he shouldn’t—before he’d finally called, asked Rosa if she wanted, maybe, to have a coffee with him, if she had time, of course, and only if she wanted to.

  She’d laughed at his awkwardness. He liked her laugh. “Sure,” she’d answered, then laughed again. “Just as long as you don’t talk about that academic-streaming stuff.”

  He didn’t, and they hadn’t. They’d talked about growing up in Africville, happy childhood memories, Aunt Annie’s treats, their fathers’ rivalry.

  Their first “dates” had all taken place in the same tucked-away booth at the far end of Calhoun’s, the very same booth where he’d met—no, don’t think about him.

  Truth? He couldn’t stop thinking about her. Between their first coffee and their second a week later, Ray had become so distracted he’d missed an important meeting Calvin had called so Ray could explain to some angry Black Pride board members why he’d agreed to limit the number of black speakers at the City Hall rally. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Calvin had said the next day, reporting to Ray on what had happened at the meeting. He’d been more gracious than Ray had any right to expect. “You didn’t need to be there. They just needed to get it off their chests was all.”

  Ray wondered if Calvin would have been so understanding if Ray had confessed he’d forgotten the meeting because he was too busy fantasizing about Calvin’s baby sister?

  Ray knew it wasn’t right. He was twenty-one, Rosa only fifteen. “I’ll be sixteen in a month,” she’d said defensively when he’d finally raised the issue of their age difference, while simultaneously confessing he was in love with her.

  She already knew that, of course. She was in love with him too, she said. “But we can’t tell anybody,” she added. “Not yet.” It was their age difference, of course, and more. Her father mostly. Deacon Johnstone’s dislike of Lawrence Carter had become a blanket bitterness about his entire family, especially Ray.

  “He thought it was deliberate,” Rosa had confided during their first coffee. “He figured you wouldn’t let him speak that night because no one had bothered to invite your dad.”

  Ray had tried to explain about Spittle Man, but she’d cut him off with a smile. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not my father.”

  Still, it was her father who loomed like a dark cloud over the sunny skies of their first days. Ray would wait for Rosa after school and walk her home along circuitous side streets, but only to within a few blocks of Maynard Square, where they’d exchange a furtive kiss before she continued on to her apartment and Ray went back to work. At night, Rosa would tell her father she had to go to the drugstore—“I say I need some ‘girl stuff’ and he doesn’t ask any more questions”—and they would meet at Fort Needham, a grassy park overlooking Maynard Square, where they would lie on the ground and neck for as long as they could withstand the cold and for as long as they dared.

  “I only wish . . .” she would say.

  “Me too.”

  But there was no place for them to go to be alone together. Ray couldn’t afford a car. And he was still living with his father, sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor in the living room amid the stacks of boxes his father kept packed for his return to Africville, In his first six months back in Halifax, Ray had been working so hard at Black Pride that he only ever came back to his father’s apartment late at night, and only to sleep. It seemed pointless to waste his salary on rent. Now, suddenly, he needed a place of his own. He’d found one last week—a bachelor apartment on Brunswick Street—but he couldn’t move in until the beginning of January.

  Rosa hadn’t wanted to wait.

  “Don’t worry,” she’d said when they’
d rendezvoused earlier that night at the entrance to Fort Needham Park. It was December now, and far too cold to lie on the frozen ground. “Daddy’s a heavy sleeper. He won’t know we’re there.”

  Which was how they’d ended up in Rosa’s little-girl pink bedroom, Ray staring at the stuffed animals and wondering what in hell he was doing there anyway. He reached behind him to turn the light off.

  “No,” she said, drawing him closer. “I want to see your face.”

  The next thing he knew, he was squinting awake to sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window. But it wasn’t the sunlight that woke him. It was the sound of arguing from down the hall.

  “Your mother, God rest her soul . . . Her only daughter! And under her own roof? What would she think? What would she say?”

  “She would say, ‘Do you love him?’ That’s what she would say.”

  “Don’t you go blaspheming your mother’s memory like that. Don’t you dare! Not after what you’ve done. And with . . . that one!”

  “What one? Just because you and his father hate each other doesn’t mean we have to be that stupid—”

  “Don’t you call me stupid, young lady! I’m still your father and you’ll do as I say, so long as you live under my roof.”

  “Well maybe it’s time I moved out from under your roof then!”

  Ray rolled over, away from the light, pulled the covers up over his head. Maybe he was dreaming. He had to be dreaming.

  Chapter 7

  Fall 2002

  “Please hang up and try your call again . . . This is a recording . . . Please hang up and try your call again.” Uhuru Melesse sat hunched over his desk, the telephone’s handset still pressed against his ear. How long had he been listening to the insistent thrum of the dial tone before that disembodied voice finally cut in? What was he thinking? He should have said, Yes, thank you. Or, I wish I could, but I’m just too busy right now, call me again next month . . . Not: “I’m out of the property business.” Spoken with finality, even a kind of spiteful distaste.