Looking for X

by Deborah Ellis

  LOOKING FOR X

  LOOKING FOR X

  DEBORAH ELLIS

  Copyright © 1999 by Deborah Ellis

  First published in the USA in 2000

  Reprinted 2000

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Reprography Collective), Toronto, Ontario.

  Groundwood Books / Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 500

  Toronto, Ontario M5S 2R4

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

  1700 Fourth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Ellis, Deborah, 1960-

  Looking for X

  A Groundwood book.

  ISBN 0-88899-378-1 (bound) ISBN 0-88899-382-X (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8559.L54L66 1999 jC813’.54 C99-931405-X

  PZ7.E44Lo 1999

  Cover illustration by Julia Bell

  Printed and bound in Canada by Webcom Ltd.

  To Rachael and Rebecca,

  with love and gratitude

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHO WE ARE

  Mom used to be a stripper.

  She quit when I came along. She calls it exotic dancing, which isn’t quite right. It is dancing, but exotic doesn’t mean dancing while you take your clothes off. Inuit dancing could be exotic, but that’s not what Mom did.

  She made good money at it, but it all sort of drained away. Before I was born, she was poor, and we’ve been poor ever since.

  A lot of people think that just because Mom used to be a stripper, her children are screwed up and will stay screwed up forever. Not so. My brothers would have been the way they are no matter how Mom paid her rent.

  If I’m screwed up when I become an adult, it will be my own fault. If I’m screwed up now — well, I’m not, so there’s nothing more to say about that.

  Sometimes strippers get to travel. I’d like that. Mom says, though, that in all her years of traveling as a dancer, all she saw of the world were two-bit Ontario towns and their two-bit taverns, and there’s more to the world than that.

  As if I need to be reminded.

  I asked Mom once if she thought being an exotic dancer would be a good career for me. She said definitely not.

  “It involves dressing up in frilly things, which you hate, and working in nightclubs full of cigarette smoke, which would be bad for your lungs.”

  She also said I’d have to deal with a lot of jerks. I wouldn’t mind that so much. I deal with a lot of jerks now. I’m pretty good at it, for an eleven-year-old.

  Anyway, I nixxed the idea of becoming an exotic dancer. For awhile I wanted to be a truck driver, then an airplane pilot, then a sailor. The problem, though, with all those careers, is that you have somebody telling you what to do, and you actually have to do work.

  I don’t like to work, and I certainly don’t like anybody telling me what to do.

  What I really like to do is wander around and look at things, and then think about them.

  It was Mom who first said I should be an explorer, and as soon as she said that, I knew it was true.

  I’m going to explore everything, all over the world, from the biggest country to the tiniest island. I already have my own atlases. I’ll see things no one else has ever seen, or ever will see. I’ll have a new adventure every half hour, and everybody else’s life will be really boring compared to mine.

  When I take a break in my explorations, I might, if I was begged, agree to give a lecture on what I’ve seen, but only if someone gives me a lot of money, treats me like a big shot and buys me a nice dinner.

  Mom’s name is Tammy, which means perfection. She reminds me of that whenever I disagree with her.

  She lets me call her Tammy, or Mom, or Mommy (although I only call her that when I’m not feeling well). She hates being called Tam. She says my father used to call her that when he wanted something, like, “Hey, Tam. Make me a sandwich.” She doesn’t like thinking about my father, even though she’s probably reminded of him every time she looks at me. I look like him.

  “You remind me of you,” Tammy said once, when I asked her about it. “Worry about something worth worrying about.”

  My brothers look like Tammy. I’m glad they don’t look like their father. I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me, and I was glad to see him leave when Tammy told him she was pregnant.

  My name is Khyber. It’s not the name I was given when I was born. That name is so unspeakably horrible that I shall never speak it, not even under torture.

  Khyber is the name I have given myself, and Khyber is what everybody calls me. Tammy even registered me at school that way.

  Tammy prefers my unspeakable name (naturally, since she chose it), but she understands about me using another name. When she was a dancer, she used a lot of other names. Sandy Sherlock is my favorite. She wore a Sherlock Holmes hat and held a big magnifying glass in her hand. It wasn’t a real magnifying glass, though. Those things cost a lot of money, at least the big ones do. I never saw her dance that way, of course, but I’ve heard the stories.

  Mom calls me Khyber. She used to call me the unspeakable name when she was angry with me, but I told her that wasn’t fair, so she doesn’t do it anymore.

  I call myself Khyber after the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan.

  The Khyber Pass is a wild, dangerous place, full of bandits and history. It’s a narrow valley that runs between high mountains, and I’m going to go there some day. I’ll stand in the middle of the valley, and everyone passing through will come up to me and ask, “What is your name?” and I’ll say, “My name is Khyber, and this is my Pass.” Maybe they’ll believe me and maybe they won’t, but they’ll go away thinking they’ve met someone who’s very important indeed.

  My brothers’ names are David and Daniel. We call them David and Daniel. Sometimes people call them Davy and Danny, but I don’t like it, and I don’t think they do, either.

  They’re twins. Most people can’t tell them apart, but most people aren’t as smart as Tammy and me.

  I don’t know if they have other names for themselves or not. They hardly ever talk. They’re five years old, so everyone thinks they should be talking, but I figure they have nothing much to say just now. Besides, I talk so much that when they’re around me, they never have a chance to get a word in.

  The twins have autism.

  Nobody knows what causes autism, but what it means is that my brothers are more often inside their heads than out of them. That makes it hard for them to learn anything, because to learn something, you have to stop thinking your own thoughts long enough for the new information to reach your brain.

  Mom reads a lot of books on autism, looking for ways to get the boys out of their heads. When she isn’t reading about autism, she reads about every thing else. She says she’s trying to decide what she wants to be when she grows up. She thinks she’s funny.

  Sometimes I let her think so.

  The only thing I don’t like about the twins being autistic is that they’re still in diapers. I don’t like changing diapers. Tammy does it most of the time, but sometimes she gets too busy, and then I have to do it. I hate that.

  We live in the Regent Park section of Toronto. Regent Park is one of those Cape of Good Hope names. The Cape of Good Hope is the name of that bi
t of water off the southern tip of Africa. It used to be called the Cape of Storms, because it’s always stormy there. The name was changed to Cape of Good Hope so it wouldn’t frighten the sailors. I’ll bet, though, that not a single sailor going around the Cape of Good Hope was fooled by the change of name.

  A regent is someone who rules a country until the real queen or king grows up. A regent is very rich. Everyone in Regent Park is poor.

  “They should have called it Pauper Park,” I said once to Tammy.

  “No one would want to live here then,” she replied.

  “Hardly anyone wants to live here now,” I answered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE STRANGER AT THE TABLE

  I love coming home from school. A lot of kids don’t, but I do. Tammy is always glad to see me. She doesn’t make a big fuss about it, but I know she’s glad. I think she’d be glad to see me even if I didn’t take one of the twins off her hands.

  I always know what to expect when I get home.

  We live on the top floor of a three-story redbrick apartment building, right on the corner of Parliament and Gerrard. It’s a perfect corner. The library is right across the street, and there’s a little park across from that. The grocery store is a short way up Parliament Street (although it seems like a long way when I’m carrying bags of groceries home), and the Goodwill used clothing store is on the other corner.

  The apartment faces west, so by the time school’s out, it’s filled with warm light. Mom’s usually there with the twins, unless they have a doctor’s appointment. When I walk through the door, she’ll be hanging out with them in the living room, and one of her Monkees records will be playing on the record player.

  Tammy’s a big Monkees fan. I think she named David after Davy Jones, one of the Monkees, but she denies it. I’m the only kid my age in the whole universe who knows the words to every single Monkees song. Unfortunately, this kind of thing never comes up on exams.

  After I grab a snack and complain to Tammy about school, I take one of the twins out with me — David one day, Daniel the next. Mom says it helps her because she uses the time to work with whichever brother stays home, and it helps the twin I take out because he gets extra exercise, which helps him sleep at night, which helps all of us sleep at night. It helps me, too, because after sitting all day in school, I just have to get out.

  For awhile, Tammy made me go to after-school clubs, but now that I’m eleven, I don’t have to anymore. They’re good for some things, but I have to get along with people all day in school. The strain of it gets to be too much. Some people are all right, but on the whole, I prefer my own company.

  That’s handy, for an explorer. We explorers are solitary figures. We prefer to be where the crowd isn’t.

  It was a warm fall day, that time in October after Thanksgiving but before Hallowe’en. I shuffled along in the dead leaves in the gutter on my way home.

  My friend X was sitting in the little park across from my building.

  I don’t have a whole lot of friends, but the ones I have really are friends. Some girls reel off a long list of kids they call their friends, but most of them are just names to invite to a birthday party. They’re nobody special.

  My friends are special. X is certainly special.

  I never know when she’ll turn up. I don’t know where she goes when she’s not with me. I don’t even know her real name. I call her X because X sounds mysterious, and my friend is mysterious. She won’t tell me her real name, or anything about her life. She’s afraid of the secret police.

  “Which secret police?” I asked her once.

  “All of them,” she replied, which is an awful lot to be frightened of.

  I walked right past the park, pretending not to see her, and she pretended not to see me, just in case the secret police were watching.

  I have my own set of keys, one for the apartment and one for the outside door. I keep them around my neck on a cow-colored shoelace Tammy found at the dollar store. I usually wear it under my shirt, so that some creep won’t get the idea that I’m alone in the apartment sometimes. It’s a safety thing.

  The teenagers hanging around the entrance ignored me as I unlocked the building door. They’re too cool to bother with a kid like me. They’re too cool to bother with anything. They’re probably too cool even to breathe. They always hang around the entrance, draped over each other. Now and then I check them out to see if moss is growing on them.

  “Nice day,” I said.

  “Huh?” one of them grunted, almost collapsing from the effort.

  I laughed and went inside. I’ll be a teenager soon, but I won’t be like them. I couldn’t bear to stand still for that long.

  Glad the school day was over, I opened our apartment door.

  A strange woman was sitting at our kitchen table. The Monkees were not singing.

  The twins were in the kitchen, too. David was on his knees by the cupboards, in his favorite rocking position. There was a pillow on the floor in front of him so he wouldn’t hurt his head if he rocked too hard. Daniel was hopping in one place, flapping his arms like he was a baby bird trying to fly. I gave them each a hug, although I knew they wouldn’t hug me back.

  There was a heavy feeling in the apartment, and I felt I had just walked in on something very bad.

  “I’m home,” I said to Mom, which was a dumb thing to say, since I was standing right in front of her.

  Mom barely glanced at me. Her face had that tight, pinched look it gets when she’s trying not to cry. I’ve seen it on her face when we’re out in public, the twins are acting up, and she’s tired, or when she gets angry at someone who says something stupid. She says when she gets angry she feels like crying, but doesn’t want to cry. She didn’t look angry today, though, just sad.

  The strange woman smiled at me and said, “You must be (unmentionable name).” I saw the briefcase at her feet. The only people who come to Regent Park with briefcases are social workers. I started to ignore her.

  Tammy cleared her throat. It was her we-are-polite-to-guests-in-this-house noise. I mumbled hello. That was as polite as I was going to get.

  The twins’ button collection was all over the floor. They can play with their buttons for hours. They look at them, spin them and let them drop like water through their fingers. Mom says it’s part of their autism, to play like that for hours on end. She keeps trying to get them to do other things, like use crayons, but I don’t think it’s such a bad thing for them to play with buttons. They could spend their time doing worse things, like trigonometry, or building bombs that would destroy places I haven’t explored yet.

  “No buttons in your mouth,” I said to Daniel, fishing it out. I rinsed it in the sink and dropped it back on the pile.

  “My friend is waiting for me,” I said to Tammy as I made X a peanut butter and corn syrup sandwich. X likes my sandwiches. I’ve never seen her eat anything else. She worries that her food could be poisoned by the secret police.

  The social worker had spread her papers all over our kitchen table. I considered pouring corn syrup on them, but then there would be none left for sandwiches.

  I wrapped the sandwich in a piece of newspaper and put it in my shoulder bag, then fetched David’s jacket and started to put it on him.

  “David’s going to stay here this afternoon,” Mom said.

  “It’s his turn, I took Daniel out yesterday.”

  “Daniel’s staying here, too.”

  “But I always take one of the twins out after school.”

  “Well, today you don’t,” Tammy snapped, then immediately looked embarrassed. It took me a moment to realize she was embarrassed because the social worker was there.

  It made me mad that this strange woman with the briefcase could make Mom feel bad.

  It made me livid to then see the social worker put an ugly, claw-like hand on Mom’s arm, as if to comfort her, and Mom let her do it! If any social worker did that to me, I’d slug her. I’d be in horrible trouble, but it wo
uld be worth it.

  “You have the afternoon to yourself,” Mom said, in a voice that was a little too loud and a little too cheerful. I could tell they wanted me to leave.

  Naturally, that made me want to stay.

  If X hadn’t been waiting for me, I would have pulled up a chair, just to make them angry. But I couldn’t let X down.

  Without saying goodbye, I left.

  “I’ll show her,” I muttered, closing the apartment door as noisily as I could without actually slamming it. Slamming the door would get me in trouble. “See if I ever take the twins out again.”

  But that was just grumbling. Of course I’d take the twins out again. I liked taking them out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A TREE FROM BRAZIL AND A WOMAN FROM NOWHERE

  X was gone, but I knew she would be. I also knew where to find her. She’d be sitting on a bench in Allan Gardens, the big park down the street.

  Allan Gardens is not full of people named Allan. It’s full of trees and squirrels and people who sleep on park benches. They may all be named Allan, but I doubt it. Anyway, anybody can use the park, no matter what their name is.

  I didn’t see X on any of our usual benches, so I headed into the giant greenhouse in the center of the park. She was sitting on a bench in the huge entrance room, hunched into her gray trench coat, as usual, looking down at her feet instead of at the plants around her. Her blue suitcase was on the ground, tight between her feet.

  X is pretty old. She has short white hair, and her face is full of wrinkles.

  I sat down on the other end of the bench and put the sandwich between us. Slowly she reached out and pulled the sandwich toward her. While she ate, I talked.

  X is like the twins. She listens to everything I say, but hardly ever says anything herself. Sometimes she answers a direct question, but it makes her look so uncomfortable that I don’t ask them very often.