The Journey Prize Stories 25

by Various

  But Megan wasn’t playing “bus driver” the day Reggie and Nancy brought their Sophie to my shop. Facing them – that woman with her fingers digging into her daughter’s shoulders and her hard, calculating eyes fixed on me – I wanted to order them out. Whatever they had to say I didn’t want to hear. Instead, with a heartiness I did not feel, I said, “So what’s up?”

  Nancy pushed Sophie forward, leaving her to teeter. “She’s a good girl. She won’t be any trouble. Will you, Sweetie?”

  Reggie could not contain his agitation. He began to pace, throwing himself from one end of the office to the other.

  “She’s in perfect health,” Nancy continued. “She hasn’t had so much as the sniffles since all this started. Has she, Reg?”

  “What?” He was running both hands through his hair, and with his fingertips still fixed to his scalp, he shook his head. “No.” He stopped as if to reflect. “No.” He laughed. Then he bent forward. I thought he was going to burst into tears.

  We stood in rigid silence, staring at each other for all of thirty seconds.

  “I told you this wouldn’t work.” Reggie jerked his whole body toward the door. “I told you.” He came back, grabbed his daughter’s hand and hauled her outside.

  Nancy followed hard on their heels. “Reg, Reg,” she sniped. “You promised. We agreed.”

  He kept marching, head down, toward the road, their little Sophie struggling to keep pace. They had a house several blocks from us over on Queenston.

  Later that night as our walls creaked with a sudden drop in temperature, I told Adele about Reggie and Nancy, how they had come by the shop with Sophie, and the peculiar mood they were in. I tried to make light of it, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she was thinking what I was thinking.

  One of the wilder rumours going around in a world full of wild rumours, an old wives’ tale really, was that parents were trading children. Hurried and clandestine exchanges were taking place on the principle that the idea of eating your own child was abhorrent, but in circumstances dire enough you might at least consider eating the child of another.

  The change in the weather was sudden – from a frost that disappeared with the rising sun to a cold so dry we woke up the next day to find the windows deceptively clear. The visit from Reggie and his wife, however, had a much more dramatic effect on me. Their showing up with their daughter the way they did had changed my thinking. The shop was now off-limits, opening it every day, no matter how briefly, a link to the past that I finally had to admit had no future, at least not one that pursued a commerce I wanted to entertain. What if they brought their Sophie around again, and wouldn’t take no for an answer, simply took what they wanted, and over my dead body if it came to that? The shop was simply one more thing I would have to leave behind in a world where it seemed we were leaving behind more than we had ever thought possible.

  The cold was a good enough excuse to forestall any questions Adele might have about our not going to the shop that day. Indeed, when I told her Megan and I were going to stay put, she barely raised an eyebrow.

  Joel announced that if I was going to be around, he was heading out to see what he could find. The cold worried him, presaged worse weather to come. But he was gone less than an hour, though he did not return empty-handed. “Mom?” he called from the back door. “Mom?” There was enough of a strain in his voice to make me lift my head.

  I was reading to Megan, snuggled up with her on the couch.

  After a long pause, I heard Adele say, “Who’s this?”

  “This,” Joel replied, “is Sophie.”

  He had found her bundled up in a parka outside the shop.

  “Frank?” Adele called out. “Frank. Come here for a sec.”

  I was already on my way. Joel had no idea of the bargain he might have entered us into, no idea. When I arrived at the back door, I half expected to find Reggie and Nancy waiting. Did they really think we were going to turn Megan over just like that? But Sophie was by herself.

  Adele said to me, “Is this … the girl?” When I said yes, she told Joel to bring her in, quickly, and quickly she went to the door and locked it.

  Megan had followed me into the kitchen. With a mixture of surprise and delight on her face, she said softly, “Can Sophie come and play?”

  Adele was crouched in front of the little girl. She was holding Sophie by the shoulders. She shook her ever so slightly, “Where’s your mommy and daddy?”

  We found out a couple of days later.

  By then Sophie and Megan had become inseparable. Sophie would not let Megan out of her sight. It was a pleasure to hear their whispers turn into bursts of laughter and their shouts of glee accompany them as they ran upstairs to play.

  Adele, as aware of all the various rumours as I was, had speculated that Reggie and Nancy might have gone for help, packed what they could carry and set off on foot, heading south, where some said the government had set up camps. Leaving Sophie with us served two purposes: on the one hand it allowed them to travel more freely, on the other it was a promise that they intended to come back.

  Perhaps.

  I didn’t need to remind Adele that Sophie was another mouth to feed. I tried not to think about that as I selected five small potatoes from our dwindling pile in the cellar. Potatoes were one of the staples we had sought out in the early days of the crisis, when we thought we might have to hold out for a couple of weeks. Joel and I had nailed some scrap lumber together to build the walls of what we thought at the time was an enormous crib. Now, six months later, I could see the pallet we had used for the crib’s floor. The pile had resolved itself into a collection of individual potatoes; soon I’d be able to count on the fingers of one hand how many we had left, and the crib would be good for nothing except to augment our little pile of firewood.

  I returned from the basement to find Adele sitting at the kitchen table. She seemed puzzled. “Look what Sophie gave me.” She opened her fist to reveal a key. “She and Megan walked up just now and handed it to me, said I was supposed to have it. What is it, Frank?”

  “A house key by the look of it.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  The next day, with the key in my pocket, I set off for Sophie’s house hoping for an answer. The day after Joel had brought Sophie home, a snowstorm had swept through, and now I found myself mired in snow up to my knees in places. There were few fresh tracks, however. The snow and then the cold that had come in behind it was keeping everyone holed up, the gangs included.

  Reggie’s house was an ordinary house on a street of ordinary houses. How many had been abandoned I couldn’t have said. The ones with the broken-in doors for sure, but the whole block might have been deserted for all I knew.

  I went around back, knocked a few times, then pulled out the key. I could see immediately it wasn’t going to fit, and I berated myself for coming out on a fool’s errand, exhausting myself for nothing. But what was the point of the key?

  I experienced a prolonged moment of frustration before I thought of the garage.

  It had a side door entrance that was secured by a deadbolt, and sure enough the key fit. I opened the door and peered into the darkness. A single window allowed some light in, and slowly my eyes adjusted to the gloom. But it was not until I stepped inside that I saw them hanging from the rafters, Reggie and Nancy, their bodies at the far end of the garage, and my heart sank.

  As I got closer I could see the chairs they had stepped off. Did they go together, holding hands? Or did one go first, leaving the other no recourse but to follow?

  Suicide was not something Adele and I ever talked about, but it had crossed my mind more than once, and hers too I had no doubt.

  I cut them down. Their bodies were already frozen and they fell like pieces of stone, despite my efforts to let them down gently.

  What was I going to tell Sophie? What was I going to tell Adele? Only when I imagined the conversation with Joel, that I was going to need his help, did a prospect I had not previou
sly considered enter my mind.

  And at this I wept, wishing there was a God to save us, wishing that some did not have to die so that others may live, and wondering what I would do given the circumstances, wondering how willingly I would give up my life so that others may live – and I realized I had been wrong about Nancy.

  I thought of Reggie saying how we were the blind leading the blind. Now we were the dead leading the dead.

  I thought of Megan and Sophie.

  I thought of Megan’s bus.

  NABEN RUTHNUM

  CINEMA REX

  The Cinema Rex sign was completed long before the rest of the theatre. A quick whitewash of the exterior shell of the building had elevated it into heavenly brilliance, and when the sign was attached, it seemed to be hinged to a low-hanging cloud that was too pure for the Mauritian sky to produce. It was a sign that suggested great things inside.

  Instead, there were only the unfleshed bones of a movie house. During the months of construction, market labourers and sugar-cane workers who had got drunk after work and tried to pass out in the cool high halls of the unborn cinema did not have to be ejected. They breathed in the billowing sawdust that their loose, dragging footsteps had kicked up, noted the stray nails and dark gaps that took up more floor-space than the floor itself did, then walked to their tiny homes and the screaming wife, mother, or father they had been trying to avoid.

  Vik’s tutor, Reynolds, had taught his Friday afternoon students the word “marquee.” Its letters encompassed the towering bulbs that spelled out and outlined “REX,” and the slick, neighbouring blankness that would soon be filled by ever-changing titles. It stirred anticipation among the three thirteen-year-old boys who comprised the tutorial group, and who paid obeisance to the marquee after each weekly meeting.

  “Man, fuck Royal Cinema, I say fuck it right now,” said Siva, who insisted that the best way to integrate English into daily life was to master the swear words, which made the sounds of the language more exciting. “It’s already been a dead place for what, since we were in primary. They been showing that same Chori Chori shit thing for six months, and we all just keep going. Snacks rubbish too.”

  “The snacks are rubbish too,” said Renga, not letting go of his role as the tutor’s apprentice.1 Reynolds, who had formerly worked at a bank in Australia, was now making his living on an ancient third in English he’d received from Queen’s College. He assigned the assistant’s role every class, giving it to the boy who had achieved the highest marks on the take-home quiz. The competition was always between Vik and Renga, each of whom suffered the threat of a beating at home if he could not affirm that he’d won the temporary privilege. Siva was convinced that Reynolds had fled Australia in order to avoid a criminal charge, a theory that agreed with his idea of that country as a land populated solely by consistent lawbreakers.2

  The boys took in the Cinema Rex sign and the men labouring beneath it. The builders had their shirts off, and steel flasks of tea lay at their feet. Several times in the past weeks, Vik had witnessed a man pick up a flask that wasn’t his own and take a drink, then screw the top on and let it drop to the ground next to its rightful owner, who seemed unperturbed. Eventually Vik realized the workmen shared these containers, swigging indiscriminately, backwashing tea and saliva into a collective brew-up of fluids.

  The interior of the theatre was almost complete; the boys had been carrying on this ritual of staring at the marquee for months. “This one’s going to be better, that’s for sure,” Vik said, speaking in French, his eyes fixed on the sign. Vik felt a premature nostalgia, understanding that the act of staring up at these lights would decline in importance once the movies were actually showing. He spent a moment in peaceful reverence before Siva hit him in the balls with the side of his fist. Siva used a unique blow that he’d perfected – it was halfway between a graze and a punch. A gasp, a numbness, and an ache that would last about fifteen minutes succeeded the impact, but nothing as incapacitating as the aftermath of a real testicular mash. Vik folded into the dirt and the workmen laughed, laughing even more when Vik’s mother, Devi, appeared at the door of their house – just across the street from the Rex – and hauled her fallen son home with an utter lack of sympathy.

  “That’s what happens when you spend time around those apes,” Devi said, gesturing at the cackling construction workers. Devi was already notorious at the cinema, having lodged her first complaint just after the sign was erected. The workmen had been laying down a sea of jade-green tiles in the lobby and as a sort of hard carpet leading out of the doorway into the dirt street. The theatre owner had purchased a gross of the tiles at a very low price, he explained to Devi, and the workers knew this. It was perhaps why they were shattering so many, creating the shards that Vik’s mother was complaining about, waving her shrapnel-pierced sandal. The workmen flanked the boy and the woman, crowding in to absorb the sight of their boss being scolded. They hovered with their buckets and cheered Devi’s tirade, shuffling tiles like ceramic jacks and aces. The theatre owner shot his employees amused glances while Devi loosed her fury; her eyes followed his as though she could hunt down his gaze itself. She left with enough rupees from the theatre owner’s pocket to buy a dozen pairs of sandals, and with a promise that her family was welcome to come to the theatre, free of charge, forever.

  Vik, who had come to the tile confrontation against his will, returned home that day with a sense of elation as high as his current deflated-testicle state was low.

  “I see you talking with those men,” Devi said, releasing her son’s arm as soon as they were in their open courtyard. A large white dog – dubbed “White,” which wasn’t as boring a name as it could have been, because the English word had been used – ate the innards of chickens that had been slaughtered for the stew simmering in the kitchen. White could occasionally be trusted to receive some affectionate stroking, on the condition that the person doing the stroking was a very fast adult that the dog knew well. Anyone else was at risk of a serious mauling. A mutt-breeder had supposedly given White to Vik’s father in exchange for the erasure of an outstanding balance on a parcel of low-grade meat. This was a story that Vik had never quite believed, but he did believe many rumours about the breeder himself. The man was said to cultivate viciousness in his dogs by starving them for days, then throwing them honeycombs active with bees. The stings made them nearly insane with fury, and they learned the value of regular meals. The theory behind that process was that it produced an angry beast that would only serve the hand that fed it. All other hands would be bitten off. Vik had never tried to pet White, and he noticed an ember of contentment in the chained beast’s eye as it watched Vik walk past, clutching his nuts.

  “Stop grabbing that everywhere,” Devi said. “You think it looks nice to people on the street?”

  “But it hurts.”

  “Holding it won’t make it hurt any less,” Devi said. Vik saw the logic in this. He let go of himself as his mother herded him inside.

  Darkness. Devi treasured cool darkness in a country where the sun was absolute. She passed this philosophy on to the housekeeper, who was an unmarried aunt of Vik’s. She wasn’t actually paid or obligated to serve by any tangible means, but took on the upkeep of the house as another component of the suffering that she believed constituted her entire life.3 All windows were perpetually curtained, except for the small one over the kitchen basin and stove. This allowed some light to be admitted, in order to prevent burns and cuts. Devi pointed her son to one of the kitchen chairs, and continued to stress the importance of never exchanging a single word with the workmen, lest they take that dialogue as an invitation to enter/steal from/otherwise pillage the family home. Devi silently stared her sister out of the kitchen and began to tend to the various dishes on the range. Vik watched her through the single beam of light, trying to decide whether the visual effect was intimate or aquatic.4

  ––

  A week after Vik finished his plate of stew, Cinema Rex’s opening day a
rrived. The first film shown would be an American one: The Night of the Hunter, dubbed into French to make it comprehensible to the islanders. After school on opening Friday, the boys walked to their tutorial to find Reynolds slumped over his desk. The fake brocade cloth that usually covered the desk had slipped to the floor, revealing it to be a door with its handle broken off. Four boards nailed to the corners served as legs. Reynolds was not dead; he was snoring drunkenly. Renga pointed to the puddle of urine beneath their tutor’s chair.

  “The fuck we do?” Siva said, delighting in the opportunity to drop an English swear in front of the man who personified the language to him.

  “We leave, quick,” said Renga, already heading for the door.

  “Wait,” said Vik, reaching into his schoolbag for a loose piece of paper. He grabbed the pen stuck in the front pocket of Renga’s short-sleeved shirt and scrawled out a note on Reynolds’s door-desk. He stuck the thing to the outer wall of the shabby dwelling as they left. Boys all sick today. Sorry, pay still coming, it read, signed in an illegible geometric flourish that could have been the mark of any of their less literate parents. Siva thought that Reynolds might try to verify the note, until Renga reminded him of the pee.

  “Right, yes,” Siva said. “So now what? I can’t bloody go home.”

  “Yes, me neither,” Vik said, switching the language of the conversation to proper French, navigating away from Siva’s buccaneer English and the Creole that Renga favoured outside of the classroom. “We do need to get inside. Or in shade.” The heat was severe, a lapping humid organ that clung to anyone who stayed in the sun for more than a few minutes, depleting energy and the will to do anything other than sleep. A four p.m. nap might lead to grogginess at the seven o’clock showing of The Night of the Hunter.