Lemon

by Cordelia Strube

  Her sheet and blanket are in a tangle at the foot of her bed. ‘Are you too hot?’ I ask. ‘Or do you want me to straighten these out?’

  ‘Is it time for me to go to heaven?’

  ‘Definitely not,’ I say. ‘It’s just the chemo. It’s always like this.’

  ‘It wasn’t this bad before.’

  I don’t tell her it was but didn’t seem as bad because it was her first and second time. By round three you’re familiar with the suffering, you wait for it, fear it. I tell her about the kids in the out-patient clinic who come in for maintenance, who’ve gone through what she’s going through and have no cancer. Kids with new hair who are back at school kicking balls around.

  ‘Do you want to go to the playroom?’ I ask, trying to change topics. She doesn’t answer, just stares up at the bird mobile her dad hung up for her. She loves birds.

  ‘Why’s my mum always crying?’ she asks.

  ‘She’s sad because of all the chemo and the pokes you’re getting. She knows you’re hurting.’

  I saw her mother on the way in. She was scurrying to her night cleaning job. She looks about ninety.

  ‘There’s a blue jay’s nest in our backyard,’ I say. ‘You can see the chicks poking their heads up and squawking any time one of their parents is around with food. It’s like they’re squealing, “Me, me, me!” You’d think they’d be quieter so no predators could hear them.’

  ‘What’s predators?’

  ‘Animals who eat them.’

  ‘The babies don’t know that they can be eaten,’ Kadylak says. ‘That’s why they don’t keep quiet. They don’t know that they can die.’

  I stroke her forehead until she goes to sleep. I know she’ll wake up in agony in a couple of hours and no one will be here. She’ll rock and rock, calling for her parents. I tuck Mischa the bear into her arms.

  Now that she doesn’t have a day job, and when she isn’t ambushing felines, Drew waters the plants every two seconds, rotting the roots. She’s slouched at the kitchen table surrounded by dead vegetation. ‘Maybe they need plant food,’ she says. She’s still in Damian’s PJS. Her only contact with the outside world is the newspaper. She reads every single page, which is enough to stop anybody going out.

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t read that all the time,’ I say. ‘It’s all under corporate control anyway.’

  ‘One of those fucking cats killed a bird,’ she says. She’s eating peanut butter again. ‘It was flapping its wings but was too injured to fly.’ She stares at the sandwich. ‘I didn’t know what to do. So I did nothing.’

  ‘Chasing the cat off would have lengthened its suffering,’ I say.

  ‘I want to kill those cats. When I’m dead those fucking cats will be shitting and pissing on my grave.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s legal to bury humans in backyards.’

  ‘Fucking vermin. The basement stinks of cat. It seeps through the foundation. I’ll be trapped underground, steeped in cat piss.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to be cremated.’

  The cats are her world now. Her enemies. All her life she’s protested against violence. Now she wants to slaughter felines.

  ‘There’s some wacko in Calgary,’ I say, ‘skinning cats and ripping out their entrails.’

  ‘Do you have his number?’

  ‘Remember,’ I say, in an effort to change the subject, ‘how Taliban women’s bones get all soft from never going outside? That’s what’s going to happen to you.’

  ‘I go outside.’

  ‘To put the garbage out and chase the cats.’

  ‘I’m taking time off, alright, give me a break. For the first time in my life I’m resting.’

  Call that resting? Pacing, plant-killing, cat-chasing?

  ‘Nobody’s saying go back to work,’ I say. ‘Just go outside for more than two minutes.’

  This is a switch because she used to be the one telling me to get off my ass. I start making a peanut butter sandwich.

  ‘How was school?’ she asks. What she wants to know is did anybody ask about her. I don’t tell her nobody asks anymore, except old Blecher who makes Drew’s skin crawl. She actually said that: ‘Blecher makes my skin crawl.’

  ‘We had an assembly with a cop,’ I say. ‘He told us if we live by the sword, we’ll die by the sword. Oh, and Mr. Zameret had a stroke.’ Zameret’s one of the geography teachers. When he isn’t talking about tectonic plates or something he’s washing his hands. He says he never gets sick because he washes his hands all the time.

  ‘Is he going to be alright?’ she asks.

  ‘He’s a total vegetable. He was lying on his kitchen floor all weekend in shit and piss. The other teachers thought it was weird that he was absent since he’s never sick. Brimmers sent Coombs over to check on him. The police had to break down the door.’

  Drew drops her head into her hands and starts convulsing.

  ‘I didn’t think you liked him,’ I say.

  ‘He has no one to look after him.’

  Who does? Is she imagining I’m going to stick around to change her diapers?

  She puts the kettle on for the thousandth time. ‘He’d made big plans for retirement. Florida, golfing, the whole bit.’

  ‘Good. Means he’s got cash for a nurse.’

  ‘Sometimes, Lemon, you are so harsh.’ She wanders off with her kettle on the boil. She’ll forget about it. If I don’t turn it off, the house will burn down. Which might be alright.

  So I’m up in a tree, which was peaceful until a group of crystal-meth abusers showed up. They don’t notice me, which is why I sit in trees. Nobody ever looks up. Most people trudge through life staring at the sidewalk. I recognize one of the druggies, she used to be one of those artsy types who’s always doodling in little notebooks. She’s really skinny now because ‘tina’- I love it that they give this lethal drug a girl’s name - makes you lose your appetite. Tina is cheap and causes weight loss, which makes it real popular among teenage girls. The hitch is it’s highly addictive so pretty soon you start stealing to pay for it. Anyway, this artsy girl, Shannon, couldn’t cut it academically. She dropped out and started staying out all night, only showing up at her parents’ to steal techno-gizmos she could sell. I know all this because Shannon’s mother kept expecting Drew, the school principal, to do something about it. Drew sicced old Blecher on Shannon, which probably made drug abuse look pretty inviting.

  Shannon and company must be coming off a high because they’re pretty aggressive, pushing and shoving and talking dirty. Larry Bone, dullard extraordinaire, says he has more sketch but tells the girls they have to suck him off to get it. He orders them to wear lip gloss so they all scramble around in their purses and start lubing their lips. Glossed up, they get on their knees in front of Freakboy. I look away, through the leaves at a horizon that’s tainted brown.

  Shannon’s mother blames her daughter’s new ‘friends’ for her drug addiction, calls them ‘wolves’ and ‘downright evil.’ I don’t know how she fits herself in the picture, what with your mother supposedly being the strongest influence in your life and all that. I look down and there’s the artiste with her mouth around Bonehead’s joint. Her mother told Drew that Shannon had been ‘bright’ and ‘bubbly’ and ‘effervescent’ before she came to our school. When Drew asked me about Shannon, I told her that having to be bright and bubbly and effervescent would make anyone a junkie.

  Bonehead looks skyward and spies me. I stare back at him, forcing him to look away. He loses his erection and starts taking it out on Shannon, slapping her head and calling her nasty names. She falls back on the grass and he starts climbing the tree. ‘It’s the dyke!’ he shouts and they all gather around with potholes for eyes. I imagine myself sacrificed, ripped open, burned. I start singing ‘Rule, Britannia!’ really loud, with a British accent the way Mr. Swails sings it in history class.

  Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves,

  For Britons never never never shall be slaves.

  Usu
ally my outrageous singing gives egregious assholes pause, but Bonehead starts grabbing at my feet while the others hop around, anticipating bloodshed. I yank myself higher into the tree, singing even louder, but he keeps coming.

  Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves,

  For Britons never never never shall be slaves.

  My impending death makes me try to think of all the things I’ll miss when I’m dead, but I can’t think of any. Bonehead’s breaking branches, hurting my tree. This, more than anything, ticks me off and I jab my army boot into his face. He releases his grip to grab his schnoz and squeal. His body makes a convincing thud as it hits the ground. The formerly effervescent Shannon searches his pockets for his stash then makes a run for it. The other junkies chase her. I swing out of the tree monkey-style and beat it.

  6

  I do Drew’s banking, anything she can’t do online. The atms are down so I wait in line with the Third Worlders who’ve all got babies and toddlers fussing and grabbing. These aren’t the Third Worlders crowding the lecture halls to become doctors and engineers. These are the ones married to the guys operating the car wash. I know this sounds racist but these women are pushy. If you wander slightly out of line, they get right in there and nab your spot. I’d never make it in the Third World. Weak whiteys get trampled. Which is appropriate if you consider how we’ve treated them over the centuries. You can’t say we’re not getting what we deserve. You can’t exploit somebody’s land and resources and expect them to love you. What makes me nuts is the slavery over there. Women and girls being owned by some psycho who cuts off their clitorises and rapes them. Even some male slave got his balls cut off for allegedly making eyes at the master’s wife. Although it’s not like we don’t have slaves over here, indentured labour and all that, scuzzbags trafficking women and children.

  The teller hands me the cabbage and I join the automatons pounding the pavement. It kills me how they all check out their reflections in store windows, just kind of glance casually, as though they’re not worried their asses look fat. What are they seeing in that reflection? Pants too tight, flab spilling over? Are they thinking, ‘If I just suck it up and run those extra forty Ks I’ll look like Brangelina.’ There must be a lot of ‘sort of’ qualifying going on. ‘I sort of look slim in these pants.’ I, personally, get seriously depressed when I look in store windows. I walk stooped, for starters. I’ll think I’m walking straight then catch sight of myself and see that I’m hunched like one of those little Chinese ladies carting jumbo packs of toilet paper on their backs. You know they’ve spawned forty kids and live on rice in a house with eighty grandchildren. Mr. Swails had us reading about China when it turned communist. What a screw-up that was, nationalists and communists cutting off each other’s heads, coolies turning on foreigners, raping and pillaging just like white people. Everybody was starving and barbecuing the cats and dogs. Chinese ladies hobbled around on bound feet. They’d endured years of pain and deformity to establish status and suddenly they were a joke. Crippled, they couldn’t defend themselves, which was unfortunate because everybody was angry and looking for somebody to kick around. It’ll be no different for us when we hit the wall.

  My plan is to die ignorant. I don’t see how knowing the details of Homo sapiens’ demise is going to improve my quality of life. It’s like the kids with cancer on their third round of chemo. They were better off ignorant. By round three they know what’s coming and it scares the shit out of them.

  Blecher’s eating little cheese triangles again. ‘Did you see the girl who won Miss Universe?’ she asks me. ‘She’s from Toronto. She said she always strives to maintain a positive attitude. She’s studying computer technology.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’ I say.

  ‘It’s a growing field.’

  One of these days the tech world’s going to short-circuit and we’ll be surrounded by computer geeks who won’t know how to grow food or make soap or talk to people.

  Blecher leans toward me, still chewing. ‘Limone, do you want to graduate from high school?’

  I don’t react, stare at the teddy-bear music box on her desk.

  ‘Because if you want to graduate, you’re going to have to apply yourself. I was talking to Mr. Huff and Mr. Lund and we’re all agreed that you are not meeting your potential.’

  That’s sweet, the three of them worrying about me. The only reason they bother is because I’m the stabbed principal’s daughter.

  ‘We’ve had an idea.’

  She’s waiting for me to ask what. The bear has red lips, human lips. Freaky.

  ‘We thought you could write a play. Mr. Huff would make it part of your English grade and, if you got some students to perform it, Mr. Lund would make it part of your Drama grade.’

  ‘I don’t know how to write a play.’

  ‘Of course you do. You think of a situation, then write things for your characters to say.’ She struggles to open a packet of crackers, goes at it with her teeth. The packet explodes, ejecting cracker bits office-wide. This distracts her. I jet out of there.

  Doyle’s wearing a T-shirt with Back Off 200 Feet printed on it. ‘We need more fruit salad,’ he tells me. We don’t, but he enjoys watching me gash myself dicing pineapple. ‘You going to Nicole’s party?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Everybody’s going.’

  I don’t react, run water over my strawberry-stained fingers while some little kid and his mother check out the flavours. ‘May I help you?’ I ask.

  ‘Give us a minute,’ she says. ‘He might take a while to decide.’

  ‘No hurry.’

  She looks embarrassed and I realize that the kid is retarded or mentally challenged or whatever you’re supposed to call it. His tongue lolls as he peruses the flavours and I just know his life is never going to get better than this. He’ll just get older and uglier and freakier. This makes me so sad all of a sudden I can’t breathe. I have to force myself to breathe. Other customers butt in, the usual suspects demanding bigger scoops, dips, sprinkles, hot fudge. The boy watches my movements, his eyes bugged with expectation. I don’t want him to decide because once he decides I’ll have to make it for him and there’s no way it’ll be as good as he expected.

  ‘Have you decided?’ the woman asks. She can’t be his mother because she looks as though she wouldn’t mind if he got hit by a bus. Maybe she’s a social worker. The boy’s oblivious, awash in his ice cream fantasy. Meanwhile a dragon mother keeps breathing fire at her twin girls who have horsey faces and nasally voices. The mother orders frozen yogourt, which is a serious drag because I have to use the compressor to mash the berries into the yogourt. They want different flavours, meaning I have to clean the frigging machine each time. My mentally challenged boy watches. Maybe he’s better off with limited brain power, spared the knowledge of all the horror in the world. What’s a competent mind give you except fear and despair?

  When you work in ice cream, you’re constantly sticky, especially your forearms, touching the sides of the tubs every time you scoop. So the money gets sticky, and the cash drawer and every other surface you touch. When you’re not serving, you’re supposed to wipe things down. Even after I’ve finished the yogourts for the dragon mother, my challenged kid hasn’t made up his mind. Not wanting to pressure him, I start wiping things down. His social worker keeps checking her watch. Doyle, who’s had his finger up his nose in the back, reappears.

  ‘Any time you don’t have customers,’ he tells me, ‘you should be wiping things down.’ I wag the J Cloth in front of his face. He’s got a zit beside his proboscis, one of those evil ones that you know is full of bile.

  ‘I think he’s decided now,’ the social worker says.

  Because he’s a little cross-eyed, it’s hard to tell which flavour the boy’s looking at. I aim my scoop at the Pralines ’n’ Cream but he shakes his head as if I’m about to snuff him. I head for the Wild Berry Swirl. This seems to work except that, after I scoop, he’s pointing at the Double Chocolate Chip.<
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  ‘Does he want a double?’ I ask.

  ‘Alright,’ the social worker concedes, not looking too happy about it. Maybe it comes out of her expenses. Even after I scoop the chocolate chip, he’s pointing at the Black Cherry.

  ‘No, Alberto, that’s enough,’ the social worker says.

  I worry that missing out on Black Cherry is going to scar Alberto for life or something. I check over my shoulder to make sure Doyle’s in the back then quickly cram a scoop of Black Cherry on top of the Chocolate Chip. ‘Third scoop’s on the house,’ I mutter to the social worker who smiles for the first time. Amazing how when you save somebody a buck they become your best friend. I hand the cone to Alberto who actually says, ‘Thank you.’ Not many kids say thank you these days. He’s got this aura about him. They walk away, slowly because he’s loaded down with the cone. And because he’s wearing a leg brace. I get so sad again I can’t stand. I squat on the footstool Doyle bought for Yang Yang because she can’t reach the cabinets.

  ‘Did you charge for that extra scoop?’ our hero demands. I stare at his festering boil.

  ‘You can’t go giving extra scoops,’ he warns. ‘If Mr. Buzny saw you doing that, you’d be out on your ass.’

  I start wiping again. Alberto is just a tiny figure now, limping toward the exit.

  When Doyle was chasing me, before I pretended to puke on him, he’d walk me home after late shifts because a girl was raped behind the dumpsters. Rumour has it she did everything the rapist ordered because she was scared he was going to kill her. It pissed him off that she was a virgin and didn’t know how to give blow jobs so he forced his penis into her anus before he shoved it into her vagina. He penetrated her in various orifices nineteen times before he let her go. The cops still haven’t charged anybody. They can’t figure out why she didn’t struggle.

  So walking alone at night is no picnic. Particularly after shoving my boot into Bonehead-the-junkie’s face.

  I hear a crashing sound and jump about ten feet before I figure out it’s raccoons going at garbage bins. I walk faster, even though I’m in no hurry to watch Drew losing her mind and bone density. I try not to think about what happened to Alberto after he finished the ice cream, when his hands and face were sticky and he had nothing left to dream about.