‘It’s okay,’ said Audrey. The kitten hopped up and turned, padded quickly away across the mezzanine, then disappeared behind the renovation clutter at the far end. Audrey watched the floor where the kitten had sat.
‘That happened,’ she said out loud, to hear her voice in the room. ‘I saw that.’
‘Yes, I believe you,’ Audrey said back to herself. ‘There’s a kitten in here. That happened.’
She stood up then. Shook her legs to try and get feeling back in her feet. Her wet clothes clung tightly all over. She walked to the fireplace to see about her dead fire. Last night’s ashes were cold in the iron rack. She crouched on her heels and crumpled up newspaper. There was a thick pile beside the firewood, drugstore flyers and a three-year-old Calgary Herald, and she didn’t ration but clumped up several pages. She picked up the matches and then put them back down.
You have enough time, Audrey, she told herself. Time to do things right. In the seventh grade you learned to start a fire with a single match. You did it last night.
She opened up her pocketknife and peeled kindling slivers off a fire log. Her hands shook. She had to start and stop with the knife, shaving the wood until the amplitude of her shake grew too wide, and she set everything down to hold her knees, breathe deeply for an interval, then started again. She made herself think about the steps during these pauses. Only think about the steps and nothing else. Cut the kindling and then pile it in a teepee around the crumpled newspaper. Then the matches. Then wood around the fire and wait. Once all that was accomplished there would be a new set of steps to decide and execute.
She struck one two three four matches that her shaking put out and the fifth little flame she held steady long enough for the newsprint to catch. The fire grew and she put her smallest quarter log in when the kindling had all taken. Waited sitting on the floor until the little flames moved and sank roots into the wood.
Just a little bit of warmth, but make use of it, Audrey.
There was a card table in the corner, with a pair of wooden dining room chairs. She pulled them over to the fire front. Then she took off her boots and socks. Curled her bare arches away from the cold concrete. She hung her socks off the back of a chair, then tugged off her wet pants and hung these over the other. She lay her jacket flat on the seat of a chair. She set the pillow down on the floor and sat in front of the flames with the blanket around her shoulders.
If there were a farm around, it might be a barn kitten. She didn’t know the roaming range of a barn kitten. How far it could manage to get lost. There weren’t any farms or barns nearby that she knew of though, none that you could see from the top-floor window. None that anyone had ever pointed out to her across the lake. She hadn’t seen new lights the night before across on the other shore.
She sneezed and her nose ran. Her lip was damp and her stomach hurt. She’d stopped for pizza, the night before. Earlier in the evening, before seeing the Skinny Cowboy. She’d stopped at a pizza-by-the-slice place on 1st Street, the size of a coat-check alcove, slices rotating under a hot lamp in a glass box, the man behind the counter blue and red, lit by the Open sign in his window and the reach-in Coca-Cola cooler behind him. Eaten a cardboardy slice of Hawaiian pizza on a paper plate before everything else, at maybe six o’clock. That was the last time she’d eaten, and once she ascertained this duration her stomach came alive and hurt.
She couldn’t count to herself the logs she’d burned the night before. Hadn’t made a tally as she’d fed the fire. She stared at the stack of cut firewood, wondering about how long they’d last, smallest to thickest burning, and didn’t have an idea. She might have wood for six hours or she might not have wood for ten.
She thought about an hour spin cycle in a tumble dryer: it lasted an hour and was quicker than a hanging rack in front of a wood fire.
There are steps to execute in order and this one right here is the hard one, Audrey.
§
Later her pants and socks weren’t dry but she pulled them on anyway. Her stomach hurt. There was a cardboard box under the card table, full of worn paperback science-fiction novels and Dungeons & Dragons manuals. Make the trip once, Audrey, she said to herself. She emptied the box. Then she dug in her jacket pocket and found the flashlight from Alex’s office.
In the kitchen, she shone the flashlight beam around the steel-and-tile room and walked carefully into the path it showed her. Past the refrigerators, which she did not open, not wanting to find whatever mould and moss had grown into the last allowance of air sealed inside. At the back of the room, the wire-rack pantry shelves were still stocked. Cardboard cereal boxes had been chewed and shredded, inward and outward, all the grains and Os taken away. Flour bags split open, the white innards spotted with black mouse droppings.
It’s been at least one winter and one summer, she guessed. A winter’s worth of cold and a summer’s worth of hungry critters with easy access to the place.
There were plenty of cans and jars, all of them rodent-proof. She hunted for anything salt-packed, pressure-cooked, unexpirable. Filled her box with chickpeas, green beans, tuna, and tomatoes. She took a carton of table salt and a zip-lock bag of ground black pepper. She moved slowly, held up by the range of her flashlight and the need to set it down for free hands. She tracked down a can opener and a spoon. She put the pitcher she’d found earlier into the box, propped the box into the crook of one arm, then picked up the water jug she’d opened in the morning. Her hands and knees shook, in the cold air, in the cold fabric of her damp clothes.
She sat in front of her fire and opened up a can of chickpeas, a can of diced tomatoes, and a tin of tuna. Shook some salt out of the carton onto the top of each can and started to eat, a spoonful from each. She picked up a can at a time for a spoonful, chickpeas, tomatoes, tuna. Told herself to eat slowly and go easy on her stomach, and didn’t. Her hands shook picking up the cans. Tomato juice ran down her chin.
She was about halfway into the chickpeas and then stopped. She looked down at the can in her hands and the other two cans on the cold floor and the splatters of tomato juice and chickpea brine that had splashed down onto the concrete.
‘Audrey,’ she said, ‘there’s bowls in the kitchen. You could have brought a bowl.’
She set down the chickpeas and hung her head into her chest and laughed, crying a bit at the same time.
‘Kitten,’ she said loudly. ‘Kitten, you should have reminded me about bowls. I’m pretty ridiculous here, Kitten. Help me out.’
She opened a second can of tuna and set it out in the middle of the floor.
‘In case you feel like company,’ she said to the back of the room.
§
She sat in front of the fire until her hips got sore. She wished she had something hot to eat. Something baked or with a crust. She had seen flour and sugar sealed in plastic jugs on the pantry shelves. With some of the water and her fire maybe she could make a pancake. Maybe she could wrap bannock dough around a stick above the coals.
She stared out the window at the falling snow, which was falling maybe a little more thickly than it had been earlier.
She thought about not checking her phone for the time, to save the battery, then checked it anyway, and it was 3:14.
‘Kitten, it’s barely been an hour,’ she said to the room.
It’s barely been an hour, she thought, but you don’t have many hours now, and you’re still damp. The sun will go down, she thought. It will be dusk in another hour and black middle-of-the-Alberta-winter night in two hours. You have to leave now if you have any chance of making it to the town. Your clothes are still damp but you need to go.
Or you could stay. Build up the fire. Spend the night. Leave first thing in the morning, dry and properly prepared. There are clothes around the building. She’d seen balled-up sweaters in messy rooms, and she was sure she remembered a pair of socks.
It will get dark fast. No street lights. Last night the moon had been big and white, but the road curved between high trees and
she still didn’t know how far it was. She thought about the coyotes, yowling in the night, and the long steep sides of curving road snaking along hillside.
‘Audrey, if you get trapped in the dark in damp clothes in that cold, you will die,’ she said.
§
Audrey turned away from the window, and her first step back toward the couch she kicked an empty beer bottle by mistake. The bottle rolled across the floor with a harsh glass ring and clanked loudly against the far wall. She bent down to pick it up and the bottom was full of shrunk cigarette butts, whatever heel of beer they’d been dropped into for extinguishing evaporated long ago, leaving just a paste of ash and paper behind in the brown glass. Audrey stuck out her tongue and made a face.
‘Fined for operating an unlicensed establishment,’ the newspaper article had said. There must have been a big bust. RCMP up from Nordegg. She imagined the confusion. People running around when they spotted the flashing lights coming up the road. People running around, flushing things down toilets, hiding, looking for any evidence in plain sight.
‘Were you around for that, Kitten? All the action? All those scared kids emptying plastic baggies into the toilets? Must’ve been something.’
She put the bottle into her cardboard box.
She walked around the parlour, looking under the couch, in the corners, and found more beer bottles. Brought them all back to the front of the fire and stacked them in the box. She filled the box with brown and green and clear beer bottles and pushed it against the wall.
‘How did it go down, Kitten, when they showed up? What did he say to all those big RCMP officers in their big jackets? How did Alex explain it all?’
She went back into the parlour and put a new log into the fire. Stirred and blew the flames higher. Tried to sit awhile longer on the pillow, close enough to the fire that she could feel the heat on her face and on the skin under her clothes. When it got too hot, she scooched backward. She pushed forward and backward every few minutes, hunting for comfort in the fuzzy boundary between the hot fire front and the cold chill radiating from the hard floor.
§
In the summer a kitten could eat a cricket, she supposed. It could track down a Cheerio missed by mice and magpies. The stony lakeshore must grow marshy in places, rocks giving to reeds, and a kitten could learn to pounce on a young frog. Birds would elude it, but would a kitten eat an egg? Mice, of course. The walls and ducts must run rampant with mice. Clean water for lapping up would drip from split pipes in the basement. There were worse places for a clever kitten to get stuck.
§
She wandered around the building carrying her cardboard box, picking up bottles. They turned up in twos and fours in the empty rooms upstairs, in clusters around old mattresses or sitting alone on radiators. She slid open the brass elevator cage door and found a Scotch bottle with a finger of brown liquor still in the bottom, the cork stopper still in the neck.
Wandered around picking up bottles, and when she got too cold she headed back downstairs to the fire. She’d found a few more boxes and she sorted the bottles: brown and clear domestic bottles, green import bottles. Sorted them by colour and then sat on the pillow to warm up until the fire felt too hot.
The bottles rang and clanked in the box while she walked around.
The glass clanked and the wind howled. Louder and shriller on some floors. The pitch of it changed in some rooms. Sometimes she opened the door to a room and the glass was cracked or a pane broken, and she found snow blown inside, swirled in little drifts around the window, in the corners. A broken window on the fourth floor was furred all over in thick white frost. The walls and floors showed old water stain rings where previous snows had blown in and melted.
She took her bottles downstairs, then went back to the kitchen with her flashlight. Hunted in the dark until she found a box of green plastic garbage bags.
Up in Alex’s office she found a roll of strapping tape.
She walked from room to room, and when she found a broken window she pulled out a green bag. Tore it from the serrated border. She bit off a few inches of strapping tape and covered the window with plastic. Sealed it up with tape against the cold and snow. The wind howled or whistled or moaned, depending on the size or shape of the break or crack, and she muffled these sounds with plastic bags and tape.
Some rooms had broken windows and others did not. Some rooms had empty bottles on windowsills or sitting in corners and she made an inside-her-head map for the next things to do.
§
There were worse places for a clever kitten to get stuck, but this kitten was pretty little. And if at least one winter and summer had had their way with the place empty, it must have come after the evacuation.
Probably they’d come up recently in a van or truck, someone who’d known someone who’d been up here before, back when it was the Crash Palace and not just an empty building in the middle of nowhere.
I know this place, someone told someone else, this crazy place. We’ll have it all to ourselves.
Knowing the conditions, you’d pack accordingly, like you were camping: sleeping bags and a butane stove, flashlights and lanterns, hot dogs and buns, potato chips and beer. Everything but a tent. They came up and camped out in the empty building and someone told stories about the crazy things they’d got up to here.
And someone with a kitten in their jacket. It would have wandered off while attention was in a bottle or a kiss. They’d have conducted a search the next morning. Calling and looking behind doors, under couches. But there was too much crawl-into-able darkness for a spooked thing so tiny. Audrey imagined a teenage girl crying as they got back into their van and drove away.
§
The light got grey and murky and there was less of it. In the valley-shadowed east side of the building, the darkness piled up in the hallways and in the corners of the rooms. She kept to the west side, pulling curtains open wherever she could to let the sparser and sparser light inside.
At home, this time of year, she could go days without seeing the sun. Wake up before sunrise and head out the door, Shelly’s mittened hand held in her own, everything black and dark like the sun was nowhere near rising. Just the street lights and the headlights of the snarled-up, sliding-around-in-the-overnight-snow traffic. She’d drop Shelly off at 12th Avenue United Church for daycare and walk downtown, and she could be inside the elevator on the way up to Goetz Environmental Consulting before the sun came up. Her little desk was on the inside of the building, nowhere near a window. If she stayed at her desk for lunch, she might not see the low-in-the-sky noontime sun. And then when she got out of the elevator and back out onto the street, that small, pale sun would be long gone. Just headlights and street lights as she headed back through the cold night to get her daughter.
Audrey sealed up a last few windows, and though the wind wasn’t quite as loud, the building wasn’t any warmer, and she headed back to her fire to rewarm. Sat on the pillow rubbing her legs to keep the blood flowing. Blowing on her fingers.
She looked over and the tuna was gone out of the tin.
§
When she was warm enough, she found a broom in the kitchen and went up to the ballroom.
She set the flashlight down on the floor to aim the beam as best she could across the room. The white light showed her a wedge of the huge, empty space. Threw enormous shadows off the debris littering the floor and dazzled off the broken glass. The rest of the room large and blackly invisible around her. She swept the floor. Pushed the cigarette butts and bird shit and broken glass and splinters of mirror together. Swept and then went back to the flashlight to turn it forty-five degrees. She swept the room a wedge at a time, doing her best to stay inside the cone of light. Swept everything together into the middle of the room around the smashed stem of the fallen mirror ball.
‘They’re going to tear all this apart, Kitten,’ she said. Her voice was big in the empty room and she looked around in the dark. ‘I googled it. I went to the website. “Clearwat
er Haven at Two Reel Lake.” They’re going to gut it and rebuild it into a whole new thing. I saw pictures on their website. Not pictures, “artist’s renderings.” A big modern ski-lodge-looking thing and a bunch of little cabins all along the lakefront.’
Her breath clouded while she spoke. She was hoarse from the dry air, but talking made her feel better.
Audrey pointed the flashlight beam toward the bar. The bar top was completely covered in empty bottles, broken glass, crumpled napkins, and paper towels. Fast-food wrappers and squashed pop cans. She moved the bottles one at a time down onto the floor. Swept all the trash around to her pile in the centre of the room.
She shone her flashlight around the bar: the mirrors were broken and it looked like the lightbulbs had been broken in their sconces. Some of the liquor bottles had speed spouts in the necks, the openings clogged with hardened sugar. A few had cork stoppers. She found a two-thirds-full bottle of bourbon and a bottle of red Cinzano. There were cocktail shakers under the bar, and a few of them sat open-end up, the insides fleecy with dust. There was one with the cap on and when she popped it open the inside was clean. Then she shone the flashlight upward.
In a corner behind the bar there was a black iron ladder, bolted into the wall, leading up to a square panel in the ceiling. She’d never noticed it before. She pushed a stack of boxed glassware out of the way and lifted herself up a few rungs, then a few more, right up to the ceiling. Reached up and pushed the panel, which lifted easily aside and provided entry to black space, wide enough for someone larger than herself to hoist themselves up and through.
Audrey climbed two more rungs, took a deep breath, and moved her head and flashlight beam up into the hole.
Ahead, a short tight passage led along the steel ribs of the ballroom ceiling. She moved the flashlight and saw a wider space beyond, a room, above one floor and below another. Inside a bulkhead, she thought, in some uneven slice of this overhigh second floor. She set the flashlight down and took a deep breath. Then pulled up, careful of her head in the small space, and hoisted herself by her elbows all the way into the crawl space. She found the flashlight and pointed the light up to see her clearance. Enough to stand crouching on the ceiling steel.
The Crash Palace Page 17
