Grand Menteur

by Jean Marc Ah-Sen

  I made for the men’s lav instead, making sure not to be importuned by anyone along the way. Once there, and continuing along the mystery train of thinking over the hundreds of books I’d read inside, I pulled Jake’s memo from my hind pocket. Unfurled in all its rearward glory, it took on a depraved kind of meaning.

  To: St. Albans Staff

  Subject: Information

  So we are going to be responding to the tide of discontent and the ensuing drift of our clients to the “competition.” Specifically Sally Ann and Seaton.

  I need your help in compiling the necessary information in order to make our changes.

  Specifically find out:

  Do they have double beds?

  Do they have mixed activity rooms? How many?

  Do they provide breakfast?

  Do they provide lunch? What specifically?

  How far out can they schedule beds? A day? 1 week? More than a month?

  How long before your bed is turned away? What time specifically?

  Who are their main benefactors? Governmental or agency support? Specify what level of government.

  I sense that it is the non-permanent social workers who are driving this discontent, so I think they are the best people to approach. But talk to anyone you have a relationship with.

  We are on a mission.

  Write down your information immediately and as accurately as possible.

  – Director of Multivariate Marketing Analysis & Accounting

  I could not decide whether to beat my head against a wall or flop on the floor like a mudskipper and die from laughter. It was no Sous Futura but it should do. Because when a dog is drowning, everyone offers him water. The first question drumming inside my head was whether or not this really was a memo being circulated to St. Albans staff, to Maintenance staff specifically, or if Alpha Prime had meant it for one pair of peepers alone and had intended to ensure such a result by hounding me all the merry long way to Accounting. I cleared the steps four at a time to the sub-level before smashing through the last landing and through the doors. I whipped out my keys, knocked the Shop door nearly off its hinges, and slapped the memo on the table. Terrence was there washing the sickness off his fingers and whiskers and as I expected, he barely acknowledged me.

  “Olly olly oxen free!” I chirruped. “What’s the score?”

  “I know what you pulled, you bimbo. They all said you took one look in there and turned tail like your ex-husband was moaning for you.”

  I gave a smirk that threatened to make new sockets for my eyes.

  “Hey sonny! I asked you for help the other day with transporting the chemical supply order and you left me holding the bag. On your bike, Wing Commander.”

  “Well, I’ll take carrying a couple of boxes any day of the week over what I just did.”

  “Here, look at this. Tell me what you makes of it.”

  I studied the memo again intently over Terrence’s shoulder. It was allegedly the first he’d seen of it.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, his tone suddenly losing its piquancy.

  “You’ve never seen it?”

  “Who gave you this?”

  “Alpha Prime. He come ’round knocking.”

  “He’s off his nut. You can’t open your yap to perfect strangers about this kind of stuff.”

  “So you never got one of these? You’re absolutely certain?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. It’s new.”

  I sank back in my chair and considered my narrowing scheme of options.

  “Look,” Terrence said kindly, the timing of which moved me to forget his plaguy insinuations. “I didn’t say anything about your situation. We get enough stick here as it is.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to offer rebuttals for once. Either Jake knew far more than he let on or I was just being overly paranoid, which for once rendered me without very many options.

  “You don’t have nothing to worry about,” Terrence continued. “It’s not like you’re spare parts around here. If anyone’s going to go, it’s going to be van Leeuwen. Jeffries maybe.”

  I considered this advice closely. Jeffries was so unreliable that he could never be counted on to deviate from the letter of the law which his tasks were originally composed and assigned. Van Leeuwen, on the other hand, was also practically ready to retire from the human race, and went so far as to disconnect thermostats in the building so that he could tell staff that he could not change the set-points, saving him hundreds of useless pages. Maybe Terrence was talking sense, but I could still feel Jake’s scythe whooshing about my head, circling for repeat manoeuvres. It felt as if all the piffling actions of the past lustrum were finally amounting to some lodestone heap of trouble. You started to grow defensive after thoughts like this: it was worth conning those hours for this long if I got sacked; even if he cornered me, I’d spin the room in my favour and he wouldn’t have a prayer left in high heaven. Now was the time to drag the knowledge of every dirty secret and every dirty kickbacker in your possession out into the open and along with them a few hopeless bystanders.

  “The funny thing is,” I managed to say with only a mild dose of squeamishness. “I’m probably the most qualified person to answer his stupid questions. That’s what I’m thinking about. Does that skunk know the truth about me?”

  “You’ll be the most qualified person out of a job then,” Terrence said. “They’re not going to stand for what you do here after hours.”

  I could do nothing but silently agree.

  10.

  St. Albans Homeless Shelter, Moss Park, Toronto, Canada, 1979

  I FIRST GOT THE IDEA to live in the four penny coffins of our age in my third year at St. Albans. It’s a wonder I didn’t think of it sooner, what with the restless ratiocination of my useless lump – the final endowment gifted from my father, a brainbox spiralling out against rest. Leastways, it’s not a big leap from wrestling rats to making peace with the idea of spending a few hours in a strange cot with another hundred restless souls hiccupping blood, sick, and dead nerves through the night. In order to have my Friday nights, I would sometimes not come into work at all, and make up for the lost work on weekends when the shelter was closed, all for the sake of a good bender. One weekend, just after I had fled Marjorie’s place (I suppose that would have put me in my mid-twenties) and had only just started at the shelter, I forgot altogether to make up for the lost time, and only recalled it late Sunday evening as I was setting my head down for the final time. I chucked on my trousers and bolted out the door for St. Albans as fast as my poor rubbery excuse for legs could carry me. Somewhere amid the bladdered haze of sleep, I managed to buff a zigzag pathway across two whole floors, faintly resembling my initials – even with the horrors, my subconscious still raved for acknowledgment. After I bodged the rest of my duties, I awoke sometime later to Terrence turning on the lights of the building, turned over as I was in one of the cots normally reserved for the deadheads that came through for their morning paces, cheek by jowl the other buggers who managed not to choke on their own vomitus through the night.

  In return for his silence, I had to pinch-hit for Terrence for six whole months, the savvy prick. Once a week, one of us would usually not come in for our designated shift at all and the other would perform the labour required of two people. Because I’d been caught with my arse over tit, I was forced to work an unconscionable five-day week for half a year for that rat-bellied fink. In retrospect, I don’t think Terrence had it in him to really have me thrown out, but one remembers past betrayals so easily that soon everyone shares in her guilt.

  But this fateful night spent with scabrous stink-biologies, coupled with my six-month jail sentence, led to my permanent decampment from my costly apartment carrying what little possessions I had for the higher calling of the best money-making scheme short of knocking off a bank and getting shot up to ragged pieces in the process that I, with my limited capabilities, could think of. Plus, my grandmother on my father’s side was apparently in
and out of debtor’s prisons all her life anyway, so no one can tell me that my squalor comes even close to her blue-tongued wretchedness . . . so there’s that.

  With virtually nothing but the skin off my back and a bag of clothes, I lived entirely inside of my St. Albans locker, my existence condensed to its mean essentials. If things got a little too hairy, and I thought someone might suspect my extracurricular activities, I would stay at one of the other shelters in the city for a few days until the heat died down, and then resumed my residency anew.

  The first week at St. Albans went well enough, though there were many occasions when my heart fell out of its cavity and wished for the comforts of hearth and home. I would shower in a scum-stained, muck-hardened basin with a low-pressure hose, and lather my hair in an all-purpose chemical cleaner while my clothes spun in our washers with the mop heads I’d just used to disinfect faeces from the walls. I would often work in the skin I was born in while my clothes dried, or enjoy the solitude of the doctor’s cool, sanitized medical table with my literary heroes Woozy Winks and Win Jenkins close at my side to gladden my spirits – the right approach to the bespoke nonsense I was tailored for. When my stomach pricked up with complaint, the commissary was only a few yards away, where more than just cooling slop awaited my fingers.

  St. Albans routinely received donations from the city’s finest culinary greats, hoping to improve their standing among themselves – outdoing each other’s charity and all that tosh. Anyways, the larder was always well provided with meat and dairy, so well-stocked in fact that there really was no finer privilege of my new accommodations than a four-in-the-morning American breakfast of six Balkan yoghurts, a half-a-dozen sausages, and a hot brew of coffee. What began for me as an illegitimated experiment in fiscal responsibility, suddenly took on the ears of a providence. I took home every red cent that I made that the state didn’t have a hand in, having now rarely to pay for food and lodgings. I needed no longer to slough off daytime insults from the “clients,” because I could now exact my crippling revenge on their beds: if there’s ever two things that shouldn’t mix, it’s someone who makes your bed and knows your bowel movements like the comings and goings of the sun and moon.

  But maybe there were other reasons for Jake’s memo. I’d had a few close shaves of the boot in my time, counting up past reprimands. Maybe things had in fact built to a proper peak. Heading off the whirligig languor of the people of the abyss on a daily basis can stultify you, but on the day that a rat-faced gorgon and her washtub bustle lost her balance stepwise, carrying her newborn whelp no less, it was a lucky thing I’d been somewhat mesmerized by the God-defying proportions of her undercarriage. That baby would have been a broken bag of giblets had I not sacrificed a wonderfully prepared guava bannock sandwich to the stars above, all so that I could lean down on bended knee with arms outstretched like supplicating the Holy Mother (no guavas were hurt in the making of this story). But there was no word of thanks and gratitude, no commendations for saving that airborne child’s life; instead, a charge of dereliction, as the stairs, technically falling under my purview of floor care, had not been properly relieved of their dressings. But you could no more tangle your feet around coils of dust and shreds of paper than you could on cushions of air. If you were lame and afflicted with bowlegs or raced up the flights with one hand over your eyes, you could certainly kiss the pavements because of those magic afflictions, but to no other causes attributed.

  The rum bunch upstairs didn’t see it that way, and I was summarily racked on the knuckles for it. Then, of course, there was the time, a few years before I’d made St. Albans my home, that I’d accidentally left one of the windows open in the kitchen because the smell of rancid meat had begun to infiltrate the higher offices. While Alpha Prime and his staff enjoyed the flavours of the high winds and the assurances of superior air circulation, the next morning it was an entirely different tune being sung. A kit of pigeons had decided that they were not above leaving their nests for a banquet of dried pasta and spent meat, along with the warmest toilet they’d ever set their mottled feathers on. Still, to be able to put the fear of pestilence into the beastly fowl swinging a broom in the air and finding a freshly laid egg in the kitchen sink is a sight I’ll likely take to my grave knowing that days like that are infinitely more interesting than the humdrumming toil of flitting through papers and protocols in an office.

  The mind will often purr itself awake when you have enough rope and is likely all you have keeping you from running into a wall reaching for the Living End and the keys of the kingdom. Naturally, I am reminded of the suicide protocols enforced at St. Albans: Each Responder will be assigned a month in which they will be expected to respond to incidents wherein clinicians and counsellors need assistance. Methodology: The clinician will notify their team leaders of the need for the Responder. The designated Responder will then complete a ten question Self-Harm Risk Screening Matrix . . . and so on and so on until your bollocks drop. It was like something out of the United Nations handbook.

  Undoubtedly, this most recent transgression might have broken me in two – and then where would I be? All the beggarless years on the fiddle, safe from the streets and the knuckleheaded policemen, were beginning to catch up with me. When you’ve been dipping batteries in staff coffeepots for as long as I have, seen all the gippy stomachs and bawling outs from bureaucrats who, out of desperation of being rendered terminally inadequate, will make you their private sock puppet, you recognize a good thing when you see it, even if it comes down on you with the weight of a collapsing elephant.

  I was soon brought back to my senses – is this where Serge went when he disappeared into himself mid-conversation? – half-realizing that I’d left Terrence and the Shop, and was making my way to Alpha Prime’s office. I saw my own twisted monkey grip on my wrench, but soon recalling myself, I replaced it onto my tool belt and wiped the sweat from my forehead. I dammed up all the violent impulses coursing through my body and wished for the strength to suppress them for a few hours longer. I looked out the windows of one of the activity rooms, hoping to catch a glimpse of receding sunlight to carry me away on the wings of some last-call optimism, but before I could get closer, I heard the holy Christian gurgle of a child’s plangent wailing. Cracking open the window, and sticking my head out, I saw from six floors up a mangle of arms and heaving, flush faces; it was a drubbing out like no other, which resembled, from my elevated position, a crushed spider being stomped and slowly stirring back to life. A woman I saw only from behind stood not more than a foot taller than the girl who must have been hers; the presumed-mother used her size to her advantage, pushing down against her daughter’s arms held up in an attitude of helpless defence. Then came the punishing blows to the face, and the child fell away to the floor again, but not before her frowzy assailant held her leg out for one more volley to the stomach. The child’s cries grew louder, before diminishing into whimpers, and I stormed through a rumble of doors to the nearest stairwell, skipping steps two, three at a time (only a memo potentially ending your livelihood warrants four).

  I screamed down the stairwell like a messiah on fire to ensure there would be no obstacles, and luckily enough found myself safely at the first-level exit door. My back to the inner wall, hunched over and looking out the corner of the wire glass, I saw the two cross the window, making their way to the front entrance. As quietly as I could, I propped the door open with a runner so I could get back inside if I had to, and approached the two at a distance of a few yards. They seemed to pay no attention to me. I picked up my squawker, and when they turned the corner, I paged Terrence, who was much larger than I was, to meet me in the front lobby, in the event the two of us would need to restrain the mother and escort her off premises.

  “Mother Fistful is on a rampage!” I yammered into the box.

  The woman gave her child one last chiding before entering the lobby to sign the register. I signalled the receptionist behind the desk in a series of inarticulate hand movements to
keep them occupied and looked down the corridor to see Terrence running down and then slowing his movements as he neared us. When I turned to look at what the woman was doing with her daughter, my eyes widened with recognition and I could have sworn that her chattering teeth were giving off the distinct sound of typewriter keys. I stopped the circuitry of shock from flowing further through my body, because of the many eyes watching us. And even though I hadn’t seen or heard from her in yonks, I knew it was her. She had aged (hadn’t we all?), but she was unmistakable.

  Terrence entered the foyer and I instructed him to follow me behind the main desk where Hanna, the receptionist, was seated.

  “You missed one hell of a show,” I said. “Well, I guess that’s that.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Terrence hammered. “You should be filling out an incident report. You should know better.”

  “They’ll forget about it soon enough. Don’t worry about it I said.”

  “The police have been called.”

  “What the hell did you have to do a stupid thing like that for? I’m not getting involved with that circus ring from hell. Forget it. You talk to them if you want to.”

  “What do you want me to say, idiot? That I saw it through a brick wall?”

  “I didn’t call the police, you minger. I’m leaving.”

  And then he took the decision out of my hands.

  “Call Jake and Adrienne, Hanna. They’re the Responders for the week.” Terrence glared at me with disappointment in his eyes.

  When Jake arrived, he proved even more useless than usual. His clipboard was clasped against his chest like somebody ashamed of how they looked in a bathing suit, and his eyes scrambled for a place to rest on as I started explaining to Adrienne what had transpired. He stood dwarfed between the five of us assembled, including Hanna, unaware of the convoluted incident protocol he’d himself drafted ages ago.