by Eva Crocker
My grandmother was in an armchair by the Christmas tree with her purse in her lap. She was wearing a pink dress shirt with tan pants that had a crease ironed in them and a pair of electric-blue running sneakers. I leaned over her to say hello and she laid her shaking hands on my shoulders and kissed each of my cheeks. Kris hung back, her hands clasped in front of her like a hostess at a fancy restaurant. It was some other persona, not her usual cowboy swagger. Normally Kris was always leaning an elbow on the counter and flirting with the barista or stomping into the gas station and asking the guy behind the counter if he was “Busy ’er what?”
“This is Kris,” I said, straightening up.
“Nice to meet you, Kris,” my grandmother said, her eyes drifting over Kris, taking in the short hair and men’s pants.
“Nice to meet you,” Kris said. “It’s a beautiful party.”
“What’s that?” My grandmother leaned over her purse.
“A lovely party,” Kris said louder.
“We’re going to get some food, would you like anything?” I asked.
“Wait now, I’ve got something for you,” my grandmother said.
She took something wrapped in a piece of quilted paper towel out of her purse. She pressed it into the palm of my hand. Kris watched over my shoulder as I opened the parcel. The Pope spoon.
“Your great-aunt wanted you to have that.” My grandmother took my free hand in hers.
“I remember,” I said.
“Take good care of it,” she said to me, and then to Kris, “that’s a real keepsake from the Pope’s visit.”
“Thank you.” I kissed my nan on the cheek and put the spoon in the pocket of my cardigan.
I brought Kris to the food table and made her a plate with thick slices of ham, a bun and three shortbread cookies. I handed her utensils from a wicker basket I’d lined with a green cloth napkin. I looked at my grandmother, alone on the other side of the room with the party swirling around her. It hurt her to stand up too long.
“See, that wasn’t so bad,” I said to Kris and started making up my own plate.
“I want to meet your dad, where is he?”
“Gone to get ice.”
Kris and I sat on the sofa and tried to cut the ham into bite-size pieces without ripping through our paper plates. Kids were tearing around the room, drips of sauce down the front of their shirts and icing ground into their corduroys. A group of older people drifted towards the couch, the backs of their legs and butts blocking our view of the room. Bits of their conversation tumbled down — they were talking about the public inquiry into the financing of Muskrat Falls. The general sentiment seemed to be “about time.”
The five-disc CD changer my parents still used clunked to the next CD. In the pause between the final notes of “Tickle Cove Pond” and the beginning of some medieval choral music someone said, “I mean, if the CEO of the company is calling it a boondoggle.” A skinny teenager sat on the arm of the couch, absorbed in a hand-held video game.
“Should we go look for Dad?” I asked Kris.
Right at that moment Viv and Mike broke through the people in front of us and sat on the couch. Viv wrapped her arms tight around me. The hug felt good.
“Hey,” Mike said.
Kris nodded to him from the opposite end of the couch, like they had something in common. As partners of me and Viv.
“Here we are, another Christmas party.” Viv smiled, she was stoned. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Let’s get some punch, I haven’t had any yet,” Mike said.
Viv, Mike and I stood up. I waved Kris off the sofa and she followed. I couldn’t tell if Viv was actually mad at me.
“Is your mom here?” I asked her as we made our way through the stuffy room. “I want to say hi.”
Viv pointed across the room to where her mom was talking to my uncle. She was holding the hummus and pita dish on an upturned palm, plastic wrap still stretched over the top of it.
My dad was at the food table taking up a plate for himself. He hugged Viv and Mike.
“This is Kris,” I said.
“Very nice to meet you, will I hug you too?”
“Sure.” Kris submitted to the hug.
I set four plastic glasses on the edge of the table and dunked the ladle in the punch.
“None for me,” Viv said.
“What? Really?”
“I’m just not feeling great,” she said. “My stomach.”
“Did you want some, Dad?” I asked.
“Why not?”
I handed Dad the glass I’d filled for Viv; Mike passed Kris a cup before picking up his own. I was touched by the small gesture, he was making an effort to include her.
“What’s happening with the cops?” Viv asked.
“What?” I said.
“I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“I think she should file a complaint,” Kris said.
“Against the cops?” Viv said. “Yes! Definitely.”
Mike was nodding, impressed by Kris’s suggestion.
“You should do it now, there could be a time limit. It might even be too late,” Viv said.
“I looked it up, you have up to six months after the incident,” Kris said. I noticed that her wide-legged, swashbuckler stance was back.
“I don’t know if I want to.” I looked at my dad.
“Sounds like something to consider,” Dad said. He took a butter knife from the wicker basket and sawed into the melting yule log. “What are you doing for work now, Viv? Are you still at the restaurant?”
Kris helped herself to a second glass of punch. My dad slapped a slice of yule log onto a poinsettia napkin.
“And I think she should go to the media,” Kris said.
“Holy shit, yeah,” Mike said.
“The investigation is ongoing,” I said, reaching into my pocket to rub my thumb over the curved back of the Pope spoon.
A mother tapped my dad on the shoulder, she and her son were leaving, they wanted to say thank you and goodbye. My dad followed them to the door.
“I think Kris is right, Stace,” Viv said, blasting me with the full intensity of her eyes.
“Don’t let them get away with it,” Kris said.
“Nail those fuckers,” Viv said.
* * *
The morning after the Christmas party, I woke up and found my phone beneath my pillow. It was dark in my bedroom because I’d been sleeping with the curtains closed since the incident, in case there were cops out in the parking lot. I turned towards the wall to keep the light from the screen out of Kris’s face. First I checked my email, then Instagram, and finally Facebook.
I scrolled past a CTV article with the headline “Cost of Muskrat Falls Hydro Project Rises by Another Billion, CEO says” above a photo of two figures in orange jumpsuits hanging off the side of a rock wall in a massive, blasted-out pit. Then a picture of a child’s birthday party — a group of kids gathered around a bowl of Cheezies, the elastic chin-straps of their party hats digging into their necks. Then I came to a block of text Viv had posted. It already had over a hundred likes.
A good friend of mine had her home and privacy invaded by a group of Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (Viv had tagged the RNC) officers recently. She was alone when several cops, all big men, stormed into her house to search for “illegal digital material,” which they told her was transmitted from her address months before she moved in. They confiscated her electronics and are currently searching them for evidence of illegal activity — no doubt hoping to find something that would retroactively justify their actions. Yet another example of the rnc’s dangerous incompetence and lack of accountability.
When had she done this? I looked at Kris’s sleeping face beside me. I checked the timestamp: late last night. I wished I could rewind to a moment before, to slide back betw
een Kris’s sleep-heavy limbs and lie there a little longer without knowing this was out in the world.
I went downstairs and turned on the shower. I sat naked on the toilet seat, still looking at Viv’s post while the bathroom mirror steamed up. There were thirteen comments. I stared at the pattern of mildew on the bottom of the clear plastic shower curtain for a long moment before opening the comments. Mostly people I didn’t know. “Holy shit, so fucked up.” “Your friend should contact a lawyer.” Strings of sparkling hearts and angry-face emojis. I dropped my phone in the porcelain basin of the sink.
After I showered, I climbed the stairs in a towel. I leaned over Kris and let my wet hair drip on her face and the bed around her.
“Kris.”
“What are you doing? You’re wet, get away.”
I held my phone in her face, showing her the post. She wasn’t fully awake, there were bags tinged with purple under her brown eyes.
“You’re upset?”
“Why would she do that?”
“Nobody knows it’s about you.”
“Why wouldn’t she tell me first?” I said.
“It’s not about you. It doesn’t say your name. It’s about the RNC fucking up.” Kris was starting to wake up.
I stood up and screeched open the top drawer of my dresser.
I wanted her to agree with me so we could snuggle and maybe have sex before I had to leave for work. She was lying down scrolling through her phone. I let my towel fall on the ground and stood naked, sorting through my T-shirts. My phone buzzed on my dresser. Viv had sent me a screenshot. And then another.
“What the fuck is this?” I said.
“What?” Kris asked.
“‘A message request from Constable Joe Michaels.’” I threw the phone at the bed next to Kris. It bounced on the mattress and landed on her chest.
“Hey!” Kris said. “That’s not okay.”
“It was an accident.” I wished it was an accident. “It slid out of my hand, I’m sorry.”
Kris picked up my phone and looked at the message. I watched her eyes flick back and forth across the screen.
* * *
Years after Jordan Nolan there was Keith Pike. I knew Keith Pike from shows too — I started going to all-ages shows when I was thirteen and he’d always been in the most popular bands. He was straight-edge and had three Xs tattooed on the back of his bicep to show he didn’t drink or do drugs. At shows, his friends sold zines about Anti-O organizing and DIY home repair and queer sex. Sometimes he brought a lime-green hard-shell suitcase of tapes recorded by bands from outside of the province. The tapes were tossed haphazardly in the curved bottom of the suitcase and the bands’ pins and patches were attached to the polyester lining inside the suitcase’s lid.
Between bands Viv and I would wander along the tables, flipping through zines, opening tape cases to look at the photocopied inserts. We blushed and mumbled when the people manning the tables offered bits of information like, “They’re from Vancouver” or “That’s their first demo.” Keith Pike was the oldest of the older people.
He screamed the lyrics in all of his bands; Flock to the Fight and Scab Drummer and later Death on the Ice. When he screamed his face went red. All the frontmen yelled that way (they were all frontmen), letting cords of saliva loose on the audience and making the veins in their necks stand out, but Keith Pike was more of a performer than the others. He stormed back and forth in front of the drum kit, whipping the mic cord like a lasso. He punched and high-kicked the air in front of him. Between songs he bantered, throwing his head back to laugh at his own jokes. He barked at the audience to “fucking mosh” and they hopped on one another’s backs. The air would be so full of everyone’s swirled-together body odour and damp-sneaker stink that it sank into our hair and clothes the way cigarette smoke does and we took it home with us.
The first night we slept together I’d been standing on a table in a crowded bar watching a band from out of town. Below me, guys were circling, pumping their fists in the air, warming up to mosh. I was twenty-one and he was thirty-two. He had some kind of social work/homecare job, he helped people do their taxes and go grocery shopping. I had seen him lifting an older woman’s walker onto the bus while they talked about the difference between Tide and no-name-brand laundry detergent.
I had just moved back to St. John’s after finishing my degree. Viv was still in Montreal, she would come home later that summer. She arrived in August with Mike, both of them tanned and muscular from riding bikes all over the city. They found a two-bedroom on Boggan Street and invited me to move in with them.
The night I first slept with Keith Pike, Viv was hanging out by the canal in Montreal. She texted me a photo of a dead dove one of her new friends had fished out of the water with a hanger tied to a piece of string. The stiff bird was a smear of white in the middle of a dark photo. I squinted at the screen of my flip phone, the table rocking beneath me, trying to understand the photo. I sent a string of question marks and she responded with a typo-filled explanation. She was drunk. I folded the phone and slid it into my bra.
It was a hot night in St. John’s, there were blotches of sweat on everyone’s clothes. I was pulling my dress off my back, arching away from the damp fabric, when I felt someone staring at me. I caught Keith Pike’s eyes moving over me, resting on my stuck-out chest. There was a screech of feedback, someone smacked into the corner of my table and I had to brace myself against the sweating cinder-block wall. He smiled, letting me know that he knew that I knew he was looking. It was so brazenly sleazy.
Later we walked up from downtown together. I was still living above the laundromat with Dan, smoking the skaters’ weed and masturbating on webcam. We stopped at a bench outside Moo Moo’s Ice Cream and I said, “I don’t know if we should do this, I have a partner and I’m kind of a bit drunk.”
“How drunk are you? Are you too drunk?” He did ask those questions.
We were standing under the light that Moo Moo’s kept on outside their front entrance even when they were closed.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m nervous.”
“Why are you nervous?”
“I’m afraid I won’t be good at it.”
“But you’ve slept with other people?” he asked.
“I’ve slept with people.”
“How many people?”
“Two,” I said.
“Oh, it’s fine then. You’ll be great, I know you will.”
“Really?” The way he said it was like there was some empirical evidence.
“Yeah, I can just tell.” He raked his chin-length hair out of his face; there were the beginnings of crow’s feet around his eyes.
“Maybe we should wait, until next weekend,” I said.
“If you want to it has to be tonight.”
“Okay.”
We didn’t talk on the walk to his house but he held my hand. It was strange to hold the hand of someone so tall — he had to bend his elbow for my arm to hang at a natural height. I thought about Dan at home asleep. I thought about how Dan edited all my university papers for me, pointing out run-on sentences and confusing transitions but also good points I’d made. The fitted sheet we had always came loose and I pictured him drooling on the shiny polyester mattress.
Keith Pike lived with a bunch of guys who were closer to my age and also played in punk bands. I left my sneakers in the pile of dirty, worn-out Vans in the porch. His bedroom was lined with bookshelves filled with records. There was a record player with a cracked plastic cover at the end of the bed. A piece of clear packing tape was pasted over the crack.
“I probably have as many books as you have records,” I said.
“I own a lot of books too,” he said.
“I’m not on birth control.”
“Okay.”
“So we need to use a condom.”
“Yeah, definitely,” he said.
He went down on me and I came. When we had sex he put his hands around my neck and squeezed hard. I felt everything closing in. I thought, this must be the way people have sex. I got a panicky feeling from not being able to breathe but I thought, he’ll know when it gets too dangerous. When he let go, he said, “Was that okay?” And I worried he knew I was scared.
When we finished, I sat up and said, “I feel dizzy.”
I expected him to say, you should stay here, do you want some water? but he said, “I’ll call you a cab.”
When I got to the apartment the sun was coming up. I stood at the foot of the bed and put a hand on Dan’s calf.
When he opened his eyes I said, “I had sex with someone else.”
Dan went to stay with his parents and moved his things out while I was at work. We exchanged cold but respectful emails about cancelling the electricity and divvying up the damage deposit. I couldn’t eat for three days. Food seemed disgusting to me. On the third night I woke up at four in the morning and devoured a package of stale Fig Newtons. It felt like swallowing lumps of dust; I let the tap run and swallowed big mouthfuls of cold water to unstick the cookies from the roof of my mouth and the sides of my throat. I let the water splash over my cheeks and neck.
I went out a lot. I drank straight liquor and blacked out. That summer my body spent hours on the patio between Distortion and CBTG’s without me. At the end of the night Keith Pike would find me. We would go home and have sex. He praised my body and my flexibility and my endurance, I responded with slurred nonsense. In the morning there were yellow bruises on my thighs and chest. The outline of three long fingers and a thumb wrapped around each of my upper arms.
One night I said, “You can do whatever you want to me, I don’t care.” I did say that. I said it to a sober man a decade older than me, after slumping against the wall in the hallway and then walking into the door frame in the bedroom — but I said it.
Later he woke me up and said, “We didn’t use a condom that time.”
In my dream, I’d felt a weight moving on top of me, pinning me to the mattress. My grandmother told me about the old hag — an old woman who visits you in your sleep, sits on you, paralyzes your limbs, howls in your face. Bad things to come. To ward off the old hag you hammer a single rusty nail through a board and sleep with it balanced on your chest, the sharp tip of the nail pointed at the ceiling, ready to impale.