A History of Forgetting

by Adderson, Caroline

‘Can somebody please tell me where the hair goes?’

  In the back room, her question went unanswered because it immediately prompted another one: does hair continue growing after death?

  ‘No,’ said Malcolm.

  Roxanne said she thought it did. ‘They know from when they unwrapped the mummies.’

  That first week, if someone called for an appointment with Christian, and Thi was there, Alison would hand the phone to her, then duck outside and only come back when she saw through the window that Thi had hung up. It got so she didn’t want to be alone up front.

  ‘I don’t remember his name, but he permed me once and it lasted and looked good right to the end.’

  ‘Jamie?’ she hoped. ‘Robert?’

  ‘He’s kind of dwarfish.’

  ‘Oh. He’s not here any more. Would you like to book another stylist?’

  ‘He was brilliant. Do you know where he is now?’

  Good question, Alison thought. What it seemed like: that Christian had simply stepped away from their little circle so the rest of them had to draw in tighter to close the gap. No one complained about the back room being cramped any more; they huddled there between appointments and on breaks, ordering sandwiches from the deli to share. They gave each other back rubs and dried each other’s tears. Except for Malcolm. They found it hard to look at him.

  Donna told Alison she was sorry for all the times she’d been unkind. ‘Christian told me I was a bitch to you. I am a bitch. I just am. I’m sorry.’ They hugged, Donna murmuring that life was too short to be mean. ‘Let’s be friends.’

  ‘Friends,’ Alison agreed.

  The next week the memorial service was held in a packed chapel. Though Alison didn’t see anyone who looked like family, his regular clients were all there paying the greatest tribute possible to a hairdresser: all of them, without exception, looked fantastic. Barbara, the pregnant one, told Alison as she offered tissues from a box, ‘You know, I’m seriously thinking of Christian for a name.’ The deli man was there, too, but without his coat and cap Alison didn’t recognize him until she saw the dimple. On the chapel steps, she threw her arms around his neck and sobbed.

  How loved Christian had been. All the stories people got up to tell were about Christian the clown, the trouble and expense he would go to for a joke. In his own zany way, he had devoted himself to making the world a better place—by helping people feel good about how they looked, by making them laugh. And no one failed to point out that the brutality of Christian’s death showed just how badly the world needed him.

  After the service, they went back to Vitae where Roxanne announced she was going to shave her head.

  Alison stopped kneading Donna’s shoulders. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m mourning.’

  ‘I think you should do what Christian would have wanted,’ said Alison. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted you to shave your head.’ He would have wanted Roxanne to eat a square meal, Alison knew.

  Her ribs like slats on a cradle, she hugged herself and began to rock. Jamie, taking Roxanne’s arms, lifted her off the bench, slid in under her and resettled her in his lap with his scribbled arms around her. She looked like she was faring the worst of all of them, but maybe that was because black didn’t become her and her lip was still swollen and her face full of metal.

  ‘He used to drive me crazy phoning all the time. Sometimes I’d swear at him, you know, ‘cause he’d wake me up.’

  ‘When did he call?’ asked Alison, thinking she meant the middle of the night, which would be when he wasn’t on the phone with her.

  ‘I don’t know. Nine or ten. I go to bed early. I like to turn out all the lights and curl up and not think. Now nobody calls.’

  Alison nodded. Death had turned the ringer off.

  ‘He even called me,’ said Thi, blowing her nose.

  ‘He came over to see me,’ said Malcolm, ‘unannounced, of course.’

  ‘He had this uncanny habit of calling me when I was in bed with someone,’ said Donna.

  Jamie laughed. ‘Me, too!’

  ‘Babbling away on the machine right there. Like he was watching.’

  ‘I’ve been calling him just to listen to his voice,’ said Alison. ‘It’s so clear. It sounds just like he’s there.’

  Everyone looked at her, surprised, and Donna said, ‘Aren’t you smart?’

  Silently, they filed to the front, Alison, Jamie, Roxanne, Donna, Thi. ‘Greetings, loved one . . .’ The receiver passed from hand to hand. ‘. . . You have reached three-three-one, zero-two-four-nine.’ Robert and Malcolm came up last and Alison, handing Malcolm the phone, said ‘I used to think you didn’t like him.’

  ‘. . . rest assured,’ said Christian, ‘that I do, with all my heart, miss you.’

  At home that night, Alison called one last time before she went to bed. Billy, lying on the couch waiting for her, said nothing. He’d been so sweet and tender with her these last ten days.

  When the recording started, she suddenly remembered a moment during the holidays: standing on the white beach. Where she had stood it was sunny, but far out over the ocean a dark curtain was being pulled across at a slant. Hours later, at dusk, they walked back together to see the sunset. She’d expected as clear a distinction between day and night as raining and not raining, but even after the sun had sunk below the water, the sky shone yellow between where the clouds had broken up. It lasted a long time, fifteen or twenty pinkening minutes, the moon right behind them—the two halves of the day overlapping.

  Rare, actually, to catch that earlier moment, to know precisely when something ends.

  She had just caught it again.

  ‘I’m sorry. The number you have dialled is no longer in service. Please hang up and try your call again.’

  2

  The day after the memorial service, one of the police officers phoned Malcolm with some information for him to pass along. Malcolm took it to work with him, walked in announcing, ‘They have been caught.’

  All of them stared, aghast. ‘They?’

  ‘Yes. Three strapping lads. They’ll be making a court appearance tomorrow. I do not intend to go.’

  Ever since his trip to the morgue, he had found himself continually battling a public display of weeping while, alone, in private, when crying might have restored him, he dried up completely. At Vitae, Malcolm watched them shed their tears unselfconsciously, comforting one another through their little cathartic moments, yet flinching when he came near, as if by taking on the dirty work he was in some way tainted or complicit.

  Who would go then if not Malcolm? He heard them talking about it all day. Finally, the girl approached him.

  ‘I’m going to go,’ she said. ‘Can you tell me where it is?’

  He stared at her. He did not believe she was serious. All along she’d worn such a look of wide-eyed bafflement that he couldn’t help but think she had not completely grasped what had happened to Christian. He kept wanting to take her hand and, patting it, tell her, ‘He’s gone to heaven. Do you understand that, dear?’

  Tomorrow she would understand. Tomorrow it would become quite clear.

  Through the glass doors of the court house stood the second portal of a metal detector. Two giants in tan uniforms, sheriffs, she read on their shirtsleeves, were there to tell her what to do, one motioning to search her handbag, the other mechanically beckoning her through.

  The courtroom was to the right, at the end of the lobby. Entering, she found herself teetering at the top of a large auditorium-like space, looking dizzily down the aisle of stairs between the rows of seating to a judge in the topmost tier of a platformed bench, Godlike in his robes. Below him, in the middle tier, were two young women, angel stenographers, and below them, two lawyers facing the judge with their sombre-suited backs to the room.

  She took a seat close to the door and tried to make
sense of what was going on. She’d arrived in the middle of one lawyer’s submission. He was reading an account to the judge in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Mr. Mitchell then seizes the complainant by the back of the neck and squeezes. The complainant tells Mr. Mitchell that it is impossible to drive safely under such conditions.’

  Mr. Mitchell, Alison guessed, was the man in the dirty blue ski jacket standing in the box to the left of the bench. He kept his head lowered, moving only to brush the lank hair off his face and, as he did, Alison saw that his cheekbones and forehead were oddly protuberant and that he could not seem to close his mouth. Meanwhile, there were constant comings and goings. At the far right of the bench was a door; another was just beside the box on the left. People criss-crossed the room, in one door and out the other, bearing briefcases and file folders. Each time they passed in front of the judge, they bobbed perfunctorily.

  She looked at her watch then around at the scattering of people in the public seating. Across the aisle and a few rows ahead a young man and woman were whispering together. In front of them a middle-aged woman was taking notes. Alison was alone in her bank of seats except for a man with very dark hair directly ahead of her and closer to the front.

  The lawyer concluded by recommending Mr. Mitchell’s continued detention, then the second lawyer rose and began to speak on behalf of Mr. Mitchell, giving his address and record of employment and extolling his willingness to continue alcohol counselling. Then a gesture made by the dark-haired man sitting in a row toward the front caught Alison’s eye; she saw his head bow and his hand reach for his face, so that even though she was looking at him from behind, she knew he was pressing his fingers to his eyes. She got up and clumped down the stairs to where he sat.

  ‘Malcolm,’ she whispered.

  He looked up but didn’t smile.

  ‘Thank you,’ she told him, taking the seat next to him and smelling the familiar mothball odour coming off him, strangely comforting now. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘Calling number 17 on the list, Vorst, in custody.’

  The sheriff in the box opened the heavy metal door, glancing in a room they could not see into, then letting the door go with a slam.

  ‘Where’s number 17?’ asked the judge.

  ‘They’re pulling him,’ said the sheriff.

  In the pause, as they waited, Alison began to feel cold. She had just taken off her coat, but now she put it on again. For the first time since she came in, all the back-and-forth bustle ceased. It seemed that everyone was waiting, everyone suddenly interested, everyone looking at the box where the sheriff opened the big metal door once more.

  He entered so rapidly, darted in and came up against the wall so fast, that he gave the impression of being about to vault right out of the box. With the startling vitality of an animal released from a cage, he was suddenly there, a chill coming up behind him.

  ‘Your Honour,’ said the lawyer for the Crown, ‘this is Mr. Vorst.’

  Despite his disarming attire, dull green pyjama-like prison shirt and pants over a white sweatshirt, he did not seem like a Mr. or even a person with the pleasantry of a first name. He seemed like a Vorst. He was tall and, through the two loose layers of shirt, Malcolm could see the contours of a sculpted torso and arms hard-packed with muscle. Above his shirt collar, the Adam’s apple could have been a fist. A blocky head and a face sullen and appallingly young and irredeemable. Then Vorst turned his blond close-cropped head to look back at his judge. The girl clutched Malcolm’s arm; Malcolm, too, was shaken. In his long career he had seen his share of scalp afflictions—scales and shingles, baldness in patches, unhealed sores—but here, on this teenager’s square skull, was a disease of an entirely different magnitude marked out in right angles with a razor.

  ‘The Crown is seeking Mr. Vorst’s continued detention,’ the Crown’s lawyer said. He began his present-tense recitation. ‘On December 27th at approximately 12:10 a.m., Mr. Vorst, in the company of his two co-accused, both minors, leaves the bar of the Princeton Hotel, 1901 Powell Street East, with a prostitute. They drive her to the parking lot of New Brighton Park, 3000-block Wall Street, where they avail themselves of her services, then refuse to drive her back to the Princeton. A dispute ensues, at which point a second car enters the parking lot. The prostitute gets out of Mr. Vorst’s vehicle and proceeds on foot to Wall Street. The prostitute, who is serving here as a Crown witness, reports seeing a blond man in the second car.

  ‘At approximately 1:00 a.m., a second witness arrives on the scene to find two empty vehicles in the parking lot, one belonging to Mr. Vorst and the other to the deceased. This witness then leaves his car, enters the park and proceeds towards the public toilets. Nearing them, he becomes aware of a dispute within. A man, identified now as the deceased, Mr. Christian Weber of 1271 Nicola Street, is seen running from the toilets, followed by two assailants. The assailants catch Mr. Weber and commence their assault. Mr. Vorst then joins his two co-accused. Their weapon is later determined to be a golf club.

  ‘The witness particularly notes the savagery of the attack, its length, and how anti-homosexual epithets were chanted during it. At this point, fearing for himself, the witness leaves the scene. Based on DNA evidence collected from the recovered car, I surmise that Mr. Vorst and his two co-accused, having assaulted Mr. Weber to the point of unconsciousness, took his car.

  ‘At approximately 8:30 a.m. of the same day, a third witness, walking her dog on the scene, discovers Mr. Weber’s body. She reports that she is, at first glance, unable to determine Mr. Weber’s gender, so badly was he beaten.

  ‘Those are the circumstances of the charges, your Honour. Mr. Vorst does have a criminal record which includes several previous assault convictions and a charge of vandalism against a Sikh temple in Surrey for which he is scheduled to be tried in April. I’ll show these to my friend. Needless to say, the Crown considers Mr. Vorst a danger and not likely to abide by parole conditions.’

  He located a sheet in the file before him and carried it to the other lawyer who rose and showed the paper to Mr. Vorst. Mr. Vorst barely glanced at it before stepping back and, making a jerky, tic-like movement with his head.

  The judge took the sheet, read it without expression, then looked up at the second lawyer.

  ‘We are seeking,’ said the second lawyer, still on his feet, ‘Mr. Vorst’s release.’ His deposition was much shorter. He gave the boy’s address, a suburban series of numerals that could almost be mistaken for a phone number, and the name of his employer. ‘All Mr. Vorst’s convictions date from when he was a juvenile. He has been law-abiding for the last eleven months and in this time has even managed to finish his high-school certificate. We recommend that he be released upon conditions.’

  The judge frowned for a moment. ‘I’m not impressed with Mr. Vorst’s hairdo,’ he said and Malcolm almost laughed out loud. ‘I am not impressed with Mr. Vorst at all. He may not have originally set out to “bash a gay”, as they say, but he seems ready for anything. What were you doing running around with a golf club, Mr. Vorst? You’re not a golfer, I presume.’

  In the box, Mr. Vorst smiled and this, the ability to recognize an ironic statement, evidence of an intelligence at work, distressed Malcolm all the more. Until that moment, he had taken him for a stupid brute.

  ‘You’re detained,’ said the judge. ‘We’ll break for lunch, though Mr. Vorst has ruined my appetite.’

  ‘Clear the court,’ the sheriff called from the bottom of the stairs, then climbed, making sweeping gestures with his hands.

  He tried the door again, but the unsteadiness in his hands seemed to prevent him from fitting in the key. Desperate to get in off the street, he fumbled and dropped the key ring. Only when he stooped to pick it up did it occur to him that he didn’t live there any more. He’d come to the wrong building, the one he’d lived in with Denis.

  The cab had long gone. Numbly, he began the eight-bloc
k hike back to the avenue, to the glass door that stood between the bookstore and the Oriental carpet boutique. It opened onto a heap of unread flyers and a brown-carpeted stair. Even before he had reached the top, he could hear the dog. Did she yodel like this all day or were her hairy ears acute enough to pick up the sound of someone entering one floor below? Then, as he neared the end of the hall, her whimpering ceased. Either she recognized the tread of her master-by-proxy, or she smelled him. Malcolm thought she smelled him.

  He could smell himself.

  She was waiting there as usual when he opened the door, putting on that hopeful, gooey look. Malcolm sniffed the air, then pulled his cuff back and sniffed his wrist. Immediately, his head began to ache. It was the same smell that had been coming off Christian’s body, the smell of what they had done to him, all over Malcolm again, all over his clothes and skin. Stepping right over the dog, he undressed and put in a garbage bag the clothes belonging once to a brother of Miss Velve. Knotting it tight, he left it by the door to throw away next time he went out.

  Perhaps he only imagined the odour. It seemed impossible that it could be clinging to him still. Yet what other explanation was there for why, at Vitae, they all instinctively kept away?

  He was tainted.

  Disinfectingly hot, the shower. Afterward, rubbing a circle on the mirror, thinking about what he had heard in court, he saw narrowed eyes and—oh, the rejuvenating properties of hatred!—could actually make out the line of a clenched jaw. Denis had had a lot of trouble with these nasty mirrors. What Yvette had told Malcolm: that Denis no longer recognized himself. Now another explanation occurred to Malcolm: that Denis just didn’t like what he saw. It was not a pretty picture, after all.

  He found Grace by the bag of clothes, torn open now at the corner. She had pulled out a tuft of fabric and was sucking on it, looking guiltily at him, but not quitting her pleasure until he came over and prodded her ribs with his foot, too hard, for she yelped and backed away, her dishevelled little head cocked, eyes runny and pleading.