by Nadia Bozak
The woman, Jackie, likes Shell’s army jacket. But that can’t be the truth. The camouflage is heavy with damp. Standing there in the cool of the bare white gallery that should smell only of the lilacs on Jackie’s desk, Shell detects the sour odour of the East German soldier who wore the jacket before her as well as of the smoke lingering on Dad’s jeans.
Down a narrow hall and beyond the toilet there is a beaded curtain concealing an overflowing file room. Dad and Shell sit at a tiny desk and sort through slides sent to Data Darling by people who want Jackie to exhibit their art. Dad writes each applicant’s name on a plastic folder and hangs it in a metal cabinet. Most of the slides show paintings and photos combining nudity and war. Shell wishes she hadn’t looked.
“Would you send your work here, Dad?” Shell glances up from the slide viewer.
Dad shakes his head. He pokes his finger in the direction of Jackie’s crackled old voice coming from the front of the gallery. Then he leans over and whispers something about not being Jackie’s cup of tea.
Jackie has an envelope for Dad. Oh, and a poster for Shell. It’s a white square of cheap paper with lines and lines of upper-case sentences she can’t stop reading. “‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise,’” Shell whispers. It’s the kind of poetry Shell wants to write.
“The artist is a woman.” Jackie wriggles her arms so her bangles chime like on storybook records when you’re supposed to turn the page. “Jenny Holzer. She’s magnificent.” Shell can hardly wait to show Mum and Barb Nutt the next time Barb comes over to proofread one of Mum’s essays. Over coffee and bran muffins at the harvest table, they talk about women artists and writers and politicians. “Good for her,” they are always saying.
“Abuse of power comes as no surprise.” Shell thinks about that all the way up Queen. By the time they get to Bathurst, she’s concluded that Jenny Holzer is an existentialist like her and Camus.
Shell’s swollen feet burst the glue holding her sneakers’ canvas uppers to rubber bottoms. Stones and grit keep getting in; especially bad is the right. A million streetcars ding by as Dad leads Shell up past the shops and parks and punks they saw on the way down. The CN Tower creeps up alongside on their right, and then around the corner is the Greyhound station.
Stopped at a light, Shell asks Dad where they are going to stay tonight, and Dad just says, “What? Are you worried?”
“No,” Shell lies.
Dad said that same thing to her and Mum and Kremski when they were late getting to Algonquin Park their last summer there, and they canoed into the park anyway instead of camping near the park ranger’s cabin like Mum had practically begged. They’d been on the water for at least an hour when Dad whistled for them to stop. He lifted up his glasses and squinted at his map, comparing it with the needle of the compass strung around his neck. Shell was curled up among the packs and Thermos cooler, and she got to drag her fingertips in the water so long as she didn’t cause a lean. Mum’s hair was in pigtails. She was looking all around, her face straining to find a clearing in the dense tree-lined shores where they might pull over and pitch their tent. Kremski sighed a lot, asking Shell if there was time for a cigarette, and when she shrugged, he pulled out matches and a pouch of Drum. Loons were gliding along the horizon and the water was a deep navy blue beneath a rosy orange sky. The hollow rocking of the boat and the rich scent of Kremski’s tobacco made Shell sleepy.
“Well, now where to?” Mum had said. “Can you at least tell us where you think you’re going?”
They eat trail mix in front of Sam the Record Man before going inside. It’s already seven. Dad says let’s look here until eight.
It’s good to be alone in the immensity of Sam’s and with a sense of purpose. She heads for Rock and fills her arms with so many tapes she might not have enough money to pay for them. There’s tapes by people she knows, like Patti Smith and The Clash, as well as one she chose based on the cover — Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues — and also she’s got a tape called Bad Moon Rising. It was playing over the stereo and she heard the guy at the counter tell someone else he could find it under S for Sonic Youth. Shell followed the guy over and got one too. She had fallen in love with its wrenching, low-strung mood.
Shell’s looking through Blues LPs now. Dad’s nearby in Jazz. She’s lost within the rhythm of people flipping through the tapes and records, as lost as Mum when she’s typing an art history paper on the old Smith-Corona.
L is for Lead Belly. Dad used to sing her those songs, “Goodnight Irene” and “Take This Hammer,” but now the record’s gone from the shelf in the living room at home. A man comes up and starts to flip through Lightnin’ Hopkins, so Shell moves over. He says, “Oh, pardon.” He has an accent. With a sharp, trim beard and an overcoat with the cuffs rolled up to the elbow, he inches closer. Then, very quickly — like a mosquito in the ear — he says he’s a photographer. Would Shell like to come with him to have her picture taken?
Shell dreams that Camus might have done this too: seen something special in her that no one else can. Shell is sure it is in her, deep down. Like kids with big teacup ears or when the teacher wrote on Shell’s A Clockwork Orange book report that she had so much “potential” — she just has to grow into that something she’s got.
“Me?” Shell says.
The man nods, running his thin fingers up and down the LPs. Somehow his accent makes it okay that he does not smile.
“I live in a hotel nearby,” he says. “Could be quick.”
“Okay. Hold on.” Shell grabs her tapes. “I just gotta ask my dad.”
Shell squints. Five or so rows over, Dad’s got his notebook out, discussing something with a clerk.
“Hey Dad!”
Dad looks up, frowning. “What?” he mouths.
Shell waves then turns around to speak to the photographer who is now, so suddenly, gone.
It’s almost nine when they get back to the Greyhound station. Dad took forever getting the clerk to find the Miles Davis recording from Massey Hall that Dad himself had attended. A block down from Sam’s they passed a store whose front was hung with T-shirts for Bob Marley, Mötley Crüe, hammers and sickles, and marijuana leaves, all of which were grey with the pollution of Yonge Street. There was a Ramones T-shirt too, so Shell went inside and bought it. Dad asked the Pakistani woman behind the counter if she had any shirts like his. He opened his jacket and explained the meaning of “nuclear sanity” while Shell, beside him, looked at buttons with ugly expressions on them about boobs and butts and farts and smelling like fish but tasting like chicken.
The bus locker smells of the basement back home and, more than that, of Mum and Dad and Kremski and Algonquin Park. Dad won’t let Shell carry the camp pack. He says they’ll get on the subway now and go have some supper. They share the last Italian bun and a slice of cheese before going out to the street.
“What’ll we eat, Dad?”
They’re on the Yonge line going north.
Bengali. Dad knows this great little hole in the wall up near campus. “I’ve not been there myself, but people leave leftovers in the studio fridge and those’re quite nice.”
They make two transfers: to the westbound Bloor line and then at Keele they get a bus that trundles north. Dad reads the Toronto Star that was on his seat and Shell looks at her tapes. After a bit, Dad starts looking out the dark windows for something that the driver says they’ve already gone past. They get out at the next light and Shell follows Dad south down Keele, then turn onto another street which, like Keele, is more of a highway. But it’s a highway loaded on both sides with strip malls full of Jamaican, Korean, and Indian restaurants and grocery stores, and also there should be a certain Bengali hole in the wall, the name of which Dad doesn’t know.
“You mean Bangladeshi?” Shell calls out when they pass a place with that in its name.
Dad keeps going, the camp pack strapped to his back.
>
“How about Sri Lankan?” Shell says, squinting.
“I was sure it was Bengali,” Dad calls over his shoulder. The traffic whizzes past, white lights blinding whenever Shell tries to find the eyes of drivers.
Dad finally stops out front of a South Indian place called House of Fire.
“This must be it,” he says, looking around at the landscape of signs written in languages from everywhere in the world that’s had a war or flood or famine recent enough Shell knows about it.
“Are you sure, Dad, it’s not an omen?”
“Omen?” Dad opens the door. House of Fire is written in gold on the frosted glass.
“Well, like with Jonathan.”
He hesitates for a second. Then he ducks through a bamboo curtain. Shell’s being silly. “There’s no such thing as omens.”
As Shell passes into House of Fire, she has to admit Camus would probably agree with Dad.
The place is empty. But there is cheerful clangy-type music and a spicy onion smell, so they stay. A tall waiter, very brown and in shirt and tie, welcomes them to sit where they wish. There are thick menus on the table, from which Dad orders chicken biryani, potato dosa, tomato rasam soup, and banji banji crispy snack. The waiter goes away and they don’t see him again for about an hour, it seems. The kitchen is the source of much laughter and music but not, Dad says, of food. Dad drums his fingers and scrounges in his fisherman bag for stray morsels of trail mix. Then the waiter comes with the water they asked for, half of which he spills. His eyes are red and droopy, his shirt unbuttoned and tie loosened; even Shell knows the man is drunk.
Another waiter, also hazy-looking and unsure of his footing, brings their food. It comes all at once. Shell’s mouth burns at the first bite and right away Dad starts to sweat. Though they agree the food has a lot of heat, they are hungry and continue to eat, engaging forks, thumbs, few words, and lots of napkins. Dad takes off his glasses because they keep sliding way down his nose. He has his jacket off too, and his napkin is a damp ball by his plate.
“Wow,” he keeps saying as he wipes his head and chews.
They’re out of water and the waiters are in the kitchen, where the party is really going now. Shell fills their glasses in the basement bathroom. There are cases of Coke and Sprite and some bottles of Indian malt under the stairs, and if she had her shoulder bag with her she might just snatch something. Dad chugs his water and sends Shell for more. His T-shirt is drenched, but he keeps eating, shaking his head.
When the dosa and biryani are gone, Dad purses his red lips and lets go with one of those sharp whistles that would always bring Shell back home from playing, in time for bed. There is silence. The cook comes out, his shirt unbuttoned to the belly button. He wipes Dad’s moist face with the greasy towel he has slung over his shoulder and laughs in his own language. Then he leaves Dad with some candied fennel seeds and a bill badly miscalculated in Dad’s favour. Shell says, “Right on,” but Dad takes out the envelope Jackie gave him and pays what he thinks the full amount should be — but doesn’t leave a tip.
They have to catch another bus. On the way to the stop they pass a Chinese bakery, where Dad buys hot lotus balls. There’s a Tim Hortons across from the stop. Dad takes the Thermos from the camp pack and runs across the road. A bus goes by while he’s gone, so they wait fifteen minutes for another, watching the cars, the cars, the cars. The air is chill with damp. Shell pulls her jacket around her, crosses her arms over her chest to keep her warmth to herself.
Dad’s standing rigid against the bus shelter, the camp pack at his feet. His watch says eleven. They get on the bus and Dad promises that after a few more stops they can go to bed.
“What’s the next stop?”
“Campus.”
Shell yawns. Dad yawns. The black man beside them yawns, then the turbaned man beside him yawns, and the Chinese girl standing up with a big suitcase yawns, and then Dad pulls the bell and he and Shell get off the bus.
A sharp wind greets them as they step out onto the student commons, a roundabout where a lineup of empty, brightly lit buses wait for no one, really, to come. There are few shadows. Mostly the campus is as empty as House of Fire; and like House of Fire, there is the distant noise of music and laughter.
Dad brought Shell to his campus studio the first time she came to Toronto. The ceilings of the second-floor fine art wing where Dad’s cohort are assigned their own small work spaces are just as high as she remembers. The smell is the same too — Varsol, acrylic paint, warm wood chips, fresh-ground dust, and coffee. Fluorescent lights hum overhead and somewhere a rattling boiler keeps the air warm if not hot. The walls are painted a flat gesso white so every scuff and bit of graffiti, poster, splash of spilt paint, or jotted phone number stands out.
Dad leads Shell down a wide, empty corridor. Each studio is self-contained with its own door, but the high walls don’t reach the ceiling, such that someone with a ten-foot ladder could climb up and, leaning over, look right in.
They stop in the communal kitchen, where Dad scrounges for a couple of clean cups and plates. Dad forgot to get Shell milk at Tim Hortons, so he helps himself to what’s in the fridge, ignoring several notes saying not to.
“I’ll replace it tomorrow. He never comes in on Sunday,” Dad says of Ken Carroll, whose name is marked on the carton.
Dad’s studio is full of wood. He says his thesis project is going to be fully three-dimensional and mobile, not painted flat and lifeless on canvas as he’d been doing all those years before. Along with a drill and saw and several sizes of chisel, Dad’s got coffee cups, maps, notebooks, pens, pencils, and cassette tapes strewn about. Dad pulls up a stool for Shell and they both sit at his work table, drinking coffee and milk, slurping the sweet, mealy paste out of the lotus balls.
“That food was really hot,” Dad says. “Gad. I can still feel it in the back of my throat.”
Dad has Shell help him move the work table away from the wall. Then Dad pulls away some leaning sheets of plywood, behind which a neat circle has been cut in the drywall — about four feet in circumference, near to the floor. The circle becomes a hole when Dad pulls along the bottom and, as if removing a manhole cover, lifts out the drywall.
“Look. It’s hollow inside.”
The wall dividing Dad’s studio from the one beside it is indeed empty, top to bottom, the recess yielding about three feet of wiggle room. An air mattress and sleeping bag occupy the floor inside, plus Dad’s Braun alarm clock, a few charred books, a flashlight, and a pair of scorched leather slippers.
“Plenty of room, Shell,” Dad says. He’s blowing up the narrow air mattress Shell brought from home; the sleeping bag’s already unrolled.
“Quiet, warm, and free,” Dad goes on. “But don’t tell your mother or anyone else, otherwise my goose is cooked. Okay?”
In the washroom down the hall, Shell takes off her jacket, letting her skin breathe. She ducks into a stall to change into her flannel nightgown but then puts the jacket back overtop for a robe. The water she splashes on her face and neck is cold. She dries with brown paper towel then brushes her teeth with no paste because she thought she’d just use Dad’s or Jonathan’s.
In Czech sneakers, East German army coat, flannel nightgown, and giant glasses, Shell hurries back to Dad’s studio — the only one with light coming out the top and from under the door. Dad’s wearing a pair of donated pyjamas — he hates plaid — and drinking the rest of his coffee.
“Ready, Shell? You go first.”
Shell peels the Cellophane from her new tapes. She takes these, plus Camus with the Jenny poster and the Ramones T-shirt, into the hole in the wall. She wriggles into her sleeping bag, elbows banging into the drywall on either side, and, sitting up, takes off her jacket.
Dad leaves his glasses and denture plate on the work table and climbs in too. While Shell holds the flashlight, Dad lifts the circle of drywall back in
to place, sealing them up until morning, when Dad says they’ll go back downtown and have huevos rancheros. Then they’ll go to a photography show for one of Dad’s friends and hit Little Italy for a late lunch before Shell catches her bus. If security comes, Shell’s to hush. They make the rounds about one and again at three o’clock.
“Just a formality,” he says.
Dad and Shell lay foot to foot in their sleeping bags. Shadows flicker in the skylight above. Dad snores before long, his arms crossed over his chest like always. Shell stays up with the flashlight, reading Camus and memorizing the lyric sheets from her tapes. A door creaks open down the hall. Shell switches out the light then holds tight to her breath — one, two, three — letting go only when the heavy, deliberate footsteps of the security guards are gone and she and Dad are home free.
Mum’s waiting in the very same spot on the platform. How quiet the house must be when Shell goes to Toronto. Does Mum think she hears burglars like Shell does when Mum is working late? She doesn’t want Dad to feel lonely either, but she also hopes that he is thinking about Shell and missing her too.
Shell’s army coat smells of sawdust now. She has only her shoulder bag, no luggage underneath. Mum smiles but waits for Shell to reach for a hug before pulling her in. Mum’s leaner now that she’s been reading Diet for a Small Planet and going with Barb Nutt to tai chi.
“Did you have supper?” Mum asks in the car. The Greyhound lot is crowded. Mum gets honked at trying to back up.
“Gnocchi,” Shell says. “You know what that is?”