Cherelle meanwhile sat on a chair simpering, eyeing me from top to bottom. I refused to make eye contact with her. I asked myself whether she was there with intent or by coincidence.
“Get sa faiseur la ene coup. Si li pas vantard li voleur,” Cherelle said snidely.
Terrence turned to face her. “Eh?”
“Ignore it, she’s, uh, probably damning you in some devil language.”
“Is this about the women’s?” Jake queried.
I elbowed Terrence hard into his side, turning my palm out at his front pocket.
“You haven’t won anything,” Terrence muttered under his breath.
“No one’s taken care of the problem in the women’s lavatory,” Adrienne interjected. “It’s been hours and everyone’s been avoiding it. It’s absolutely farcical.”
“It’s not about that,” Terrence said, keeping his attention on the matter at hand. “If you’d just look to Mommie Dearest.”
Finally seeing an opening primed for his area of expertise, Jake perked up and said, “Oh, I loved her in Daisy Ken-yon.”
The police came and went, escorting Cherelle and her daughter off-site. She didn’t say anything to me again and I didn’t try to reach her afterwards. She didn’t come ’round again either, so I tried to put her out of my mind. Child Services made their visits, and after telling my story three hundred times over the telephone to everybody’s sister, a detective said he wanted to meet me in person to corroborate the information I had given one final time. At last, the wits would be matched. My very own nemesis.
His swirling vacuum of questioning made me consider if I’d ever seen anyone so thorough in their applied execution of inanity, which coming from my mouth I realize is saying something. I wondered if perhaps he’d been coached in a new technique to get what they wanted out of us; a blessedly stupid and familiar approach of interrogation, with stratagems designed to snare guttersnipes into incrimination maybe, though it did not necessarily work on the higher class of guttersnipe to which I felt duly connected.
This dick they had come ’round to see me, plainclothes officer Holmes he said his name was, was crafty enough to lead me into the shadowy corridors of his cunning. To see if I could keep up, maybe. He reminded me very much of someone I was trying to eradicate from memory, even while I kept his codex in my locker at all times. How could I repay him that way, when he had attempted to fill in the gaps of my knowledge of the Sous during a time when he thought it mattered most to me? Holmes wasn’t like the other constables I’d been talking to. For one thing, he didn’t strike me as someone who came up very far from the people he was investigating; an inside track sort of feeling nudged up against me. The other sort were more liable to treat you like a criminal because of what spices your clothes smelled of, but me and Officer Bracegirdle here were cut from the same cloth – strategy or not, his method was so disarming as to make me prone to speaking plainly about things.
And so he talked to me as if we were old mates, and then occasionally perked up with a question intended to catch me off balance, or in a lie all knotted up. The first choice plum he plucked almost from the air was, “I just want you to know that there’s no pressure here on you at all except to tell the truth about what you saw, as accurately as you can. Your testimony, however, will decide for us and Child Services what the future regarding the child will be.” What a pot-bellied laugh you are good for, chief. What a nice lawn ornament you would make.
Question: Do you remember what happened?
Answer: I’ve been giving my version enough times to make me remember for a lifetime.
Question: Tell me again so that I can be sure.
Answer: Two pops to the face, one in the gut. No contest.
Question: Are you sure? You should know, some communities – they have different ways of handling things. The way they mete out discipline, for example.
Answer: This was no pitty-pat, if that’s what you’re asking.
Question: Is there any chance the mother was reacting in self-defence? That she was just putting her hands up and the child ran into her?
Answer: Hey mister, when was the last time, pushed or otherwise, you opened wide for a bolo punch?
Question: Are you some kind of nihilist?
Around and around we went, going over what I saw while he played noughts and crosses on his little pad of paper. I had filled my share of St. Albans incident reports beforehand, passed them on to Recourses, and Management had called me over and over again. Still I was expected at meetings about what had happened. This was going to be the end of all this horse-and-buggy noise in my head one way or another, and all I could think about was if I could only get Jake on this circular bent, my wallet would be a hundred dollars heavier tenfold.
“Look, the bottom line is,” I said to Holmes, “I don’t want to be responsible for this brat getting lost in the system. There’s no telling she’ll be looked after with a proper family, right?”
“That’s right. They’re not homeless, these two, but they come into the shelter to avail themselves of its resources, it looks like. But if we step in, there’s a good chance the child will be removed. Is there any chance that the kick wasn’t a kick?” It didn’t exactly sound like a question.
“When is a kick not a kick? Said the actress to the bishop.”
“Look, we can say on record that the mother just put her leg up to protect herself. Do you want to say that?”
“Why? If we did that, what would happen?”
“Well, we would keep a record that a situation like this transpired in the event that the information becomes useful, but ultimately the child would stay with her mother.”
“How isn’t it useful now? I’m understanding that the needs of the real world don’t neatly conform to the way the law lays everything out, but my friend, I know what I saw. I’m not stupid.” The gablou didn’t believe you if you took the first way out – this would be true regardless of what side of the continent I was on.
“I wouldn’t be implying anything different. I’m just saying that, given how you feel about not wanting to feel responsible for the child being carted off, this is maybe the most feasible, temporary situation that works best for all. We’ll say there were a few slaps on the face –”
“You’ve got to be joking me with your slaps.”
“Yes, there was an altercation, which will be recorded, but the mother deemed herself fit to discipline the child in a suitable manner, so that the two could enter the shelter and proceed with – what time was this again? Dinner? This way we can avoid unnecessary heartache for all involved.”
“Frankly, you can do whatever makes you happy. I don’t know how many more times I can tell you a story before you get it the way you want it to sound.” I was laying it on a bit thick, but you can’t argue with results.
Link boys of Old London, sometimes a quick resumption of things is all you can ask for when you’ve been all but shot out of a cannon approaching terminal velocity. Cherelle was off the hook, the Sous were protected with their anonymity, and my St. Albans superiors were pleased as a purebred that I notified the Responders. Even more so to my credit, they were chuffed with my “commendable receptivity to discuss the matter in such explorative detail with the police.”
Jake called me into his office a week after my last statement to the police, and ushered me into a seat that was a go-between of a New Age tuffet and a ratty banquette. It effectively placed you a foot lower than the surface of his desk and a few more below his gaze. By this time, I had eased myself into the thinking that my performance review was never going to come, though a small part of me knew that if there’s one thing that civil service rejects are good at, it’s the unshakeable belief that no task, however trivial, must go without sanctification, if only to confirm in their empty skulls that life, somewhere for them, holds meaning of a kind.
“This is a long time coming,” Jake said, beginning a venerated line of pleasantries.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“That’s exactly what I think is up for discussion. Tell me, how are you doing these days, health-wise?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a fitter specimen. For this work, I mean.”
“It’s come to my attention that we can do better in terms of the quality of cleanliness in the shelter.”
“The results of your memo?”
“There’s that, but we’ve been noticing a steady drop in the east wing being maintained at the level that we’re comfortable with. The same goes for the commissary and the kitchen.”
This was it. My belly lurched sideways as I awaited my sentencing. The active ingredients had done their work.
“Yes, it’s not as if I haven’t noticed either,” I replied smugly. “You see things as you go by on your rounds, but your hands are tied all the same with daily responsibilities.”
“We appreciate that, very much so. But we are being forced to consider certain alternatives.”
“Oh?”
“It’s not overly complicated. A significant portion of our funding is dependent on the level of impact we make on the community. These involve questions of visibility, brand language. You are aware of our competitors in the city?”
“Competitors? What do you mean?”
“The other shelters. If they can do more under the same funding scheme and provisions – God help us, if they do more with less – then it puts St. Albans in a very poor way. Accreditation is coming up in a few months and we can’t afford to have the shelter looking in shambles.”
“I follow then. What do you propose?”
“One option is to bring in a new janitor.”
I could see the light, that awful, blinding, burning light. “Go to the light!” I heard myself think. Strangle him and then abandon yourself to the light.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” I said resignedly, letting my arms fall at my sides.
“But we have another idea in mind, one that is perhaps less time-consuming. How would you feel about working extra shifts? Say on weekends or a double when we would need you?”
“Paid?”
“Naturally, yes. We understand you’re doing so much for the shelter already, and having seniority, we’re obliged to circulate new positions internally first. Not so much a new position in your case, but you’re our most senior staff member after Terrence. So . . . It’s either that or we create a new relief position.”
Away from the light, away! Fly back to this edge of darkness, where the frosted tangle of your men-at-arms awaits the second coming.
“That is . . . acceptable to me.”
“Excellent. We’ll draw up the paperwork immediately. There’ll have to be an interview, but confidentially, I think I can tell you that you’re our man. I mean woman. Congratulations are in very fine order.”
I stood up as best as I could, picking up my feet with my hands because they had fallen asleep from discomfort. I turned for the door, but as I moved past his view, Jake called out to me and, from the sound of crinkling cling wrap peeling away, I could tell produced another apple for his delectation.
“I would also appreciate, when you have the time, information on any other shelters you have been frequenting for the past few years to supplement the information we have already collected. Perhaps I could press upon you as well to go so far as to recommend to your fellow patrons the amenability of our establishment.”
The hairsplitting fuss-bucket had known the entire time I’d been diddling the company! Mo pas ouler croire! Though out of what exactly I doubt even he could peg with precision, considering the other patrons slept and ate for free. It was doubtful that my “promotion” came about because Jake recognized the “good intentions” that lay claim over my breast; more likely that there were easier questions to answer as to why an employee with a brass neck was getting all of a sudden more hours than why said floor-scrubber was suddenly out on her ear after she’d single-handedly avoided for the shelter some awesomely bad publicity or glory forbid, a violation of “brand language.”
Thus, did my flyblown story live to see another day. Before you could say, “I was born in an evil hour!” I was back to watching the breadcrumbs move from one end of the table to the next. I nearly quadrupled the amount of time I was skimming off the top on account of the fact that there was no staff to watch you on Saturdays or in the evenings, aside from the odd straggler who just couldn’t keep away; and yet I still felt as if Jake had something over me, and would continue holding something over me until he dropped dead of ugly. There are no sure things in this life, and so you are left to sort out your business as best you can, with no hope for clemency. In knowing this, I began to consider how to square things between us in the most scandalous of ways.
Earlier on in life, I would have been prudent and not risked anything that would jeopardize the golden goose I’d been golden ticketed, but prudence was for the birds; I realized where my father came from, mentally speaking, and understood why he threw caution to the wind regularly and couldn’t keep a job. I suppose the only difference between us is that I had thicker skin and could turn the other cheek. The Derwish would have arranged it so that someone like Darlo would have broken a geezer like Jake’s fingers or had him hit by a car in the dead of night, but I didn’t have the stomach for that like I had once believed. A man is no knapsack. So I couldn’t be obvious now about how I got even with Jake, and neither did I want the off chance of being reprimanded again to endanger what fortuity had so reverently bestowed before me.
Inspiration kept itself firmly out of reach and I was left with the spent machinery of my tired brain. Luckily for me, maintaining the individual offices, which included keeping desks, cabinets, and drawers free of fingerprints, oil, and dust, came to be included in my extra duties, and I began to really get inside the old man’s head – his habits and customs. In fact, you can make shockingly clear assessments of people based on the intimacies of their work environments, and grave pronouncements on questions of hygiene, attitude, and even political striping. Jake, as a helping hand of examples would testify, believed in hard and fast divisions, if the fastidious arrangement of his desk revealed anything. But at the same time, Management was there to manage and could not be troubled with other piddling considerations, and consequently, the rest of his office was an absolute sty, filled with discarded candy wrappers, bogies, petrified detritus from dead plants, and pair after pair of sweaty socks stuffed into his dress shoes. Such harsh contrapuntal arrangements did not suggest a mental break; it was far more pedestrian in nature, like so many others I tended to: he was simply being devoured inch by inch by his own hypocrisy.
The first germ of my revenge, however, grew from my discovery of a half-eaten apple inside his desk drawer, surrounded by the debris of excelsior, dust bunnies, and twines of his hair that had gone their separate ways and mutinied from his scalp. Days and days passed and still the obvious eluded me. It was only when I was changing a bin-liner one day, when I saw a decomposing apple core at the top of the heap, radiant and glistening like the aureole of the saintly angels, that epiphany beckoned loudly.
On a weekday when there was no apple to be found in Jake’s desk, I scrounged a representative candidate, subjected its merits to the scrutiny of my colleagues – some of whom volunteered to put it through its paces on the grounds that its captivations could be augmented – and found the time on the weekend to place it in a comfortable resting place. Sure enough, when I returned the next week to his office, all that was left in place of the apple that had seen what no apple should ever have been made to see, was an abandoned stem practically gurning to give me confirmation of my own twisted success.
11.
Sous Headquarters, Moss Park, Toronto, Canada, 1980
CHERELLE WAS WAITING inside her turquoise Allegro by the terminal entrance for arrivals. I loaded the car with Serge’s substantial but surprisingly light trunk that I had dragged behind me, his only form of luggage. Serge and
the boy who said nothing and I stepped inside quietly. Cherelle greeted my father felicitously. She was visiting her relatives a few cities over, and since she still felt guilty for grassing on me to her father about my whereabouts, along with a boatful of other indiscretions, she offered to pick my father up at the airport. I asked her to drop us off at St. Albans where, it being after hours (it was no longer an all-night shelter), I made them all a hodgepodge of vegetables and chicken, and a bowl of middlings for dessert. The three of them thanked me for my thoughtfulness, the mute boy giving the most imperceptible of nods.
In the silence that followed our meal, I thought to myself how life had dulcified in my adult years in a way that I hadn’t considered thinkable as a child. There was much misfortune in those early days, but the Sous could not have it any other way. Sinon zot pu perdi zot charme, non? My mother died at Stone House in 1974, pinballing around a spiral staircase, a feat I imagine could not have gone unassisted; the Derwish similarly had his legs mown down crossing the road on a red light, but was given satisfaction when arrangements were made for the driver to be found floating face down in the Thames by Teddington Lock. My father in his turn was now finally returned to me after nine years of fending for myself in Ontario; he surprised me with the Souse’s intention to settle here in Canada – communicated via an unmarked letter, care of the Derwish, and then passed on to Cherelle – and to make good on a promise he made me almost a decade before. I don’t think about whether or not he had been instructed by the Derwish or his hirelings to make contact with me, or if there is another motive for his return. I accept that he is here.
Now that I could properly take stock of him, I saw what ravages the years had worked over Serge. He had no hair left – karro cane prends dife. His face was riddled with lines that his eyes seemed ironically to welcome, and his skin was blotchy and scabbed over with illness. It was like looking at something chaffing with inactivity at the pawnbrokers, waiting to be picked up by its owner. All this disrepair, even though it seemed he was now in clover, for all those years gone hard by. He was wearing an orange plaid, tailored suit and a neat straw boater on his head. The sight reduced me to tears, in spite of the opulence it conveyed. There was something disestablished about him all the way down to how he leaned on his weaker leg while standing, pitched his chin down when listening to questions. Our first embrace at the airport confused him something wicked and blighted, even more so than my circumspection over the mute teenager who he’d arrived with.
Grand Menteur Page 12