He’d heard Nat was seeing a new guy, another American. He was glad. She deserved more than he’d ever given her, and a lot less of what he had. He’d never meant to hurt her, never wanted to, but after a bottle of Jack it was like the whole world turned red and black at the same time, red over black over red, until Jimmy couldn’t see straight, couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t even see kindness like what Nat had given him, all she’d ever given him no matter how much he took.
The envelope dug into his chest through shirt fabric. Heavy with cash, inadequate. The liquidation of everything he owned, which hadn’t been much, not nearly enough.
Jimmy pushed the door a little wider and stepped into the kitchen. The metal baseball bat crashing across his back was a surprise, as was the little noise from his own lips, a soft grunt disproportionate to the thunder of his spine crunching under the blow. Sprawled on his side on the chipped linoleum, Jimmy watched the man holding the bat flip the kitchen switch.
The guy stepped over, smacked him a couple more times, a whack to the kidney, one across the back of his skull. Not as hard as the first blow, but unnecessary, mean. Jimmy wanted to reach into his pocket, pull out the envelope full of cash, but his arm wouldn’t move. A soft white shape padded into his line of sight, a girl in a thin white T-shirt and a familiar pair of pink panties with blue stripes, somewhat faded now. “Jimmy?” she said.
The way she said his name, with the French lilt, pierced Jimmy to his gut. He tried again to reach for the envelope, failed. The guy with the bat was staring at Nathalie. “This is Jimmy?” he said. “That fuck who hurt you?”
After living in Montreal so long, the American accent sounded hard to Jimmy, rough and angry. Nathalie’s voice was so much softer, even her cries and shrieks as the American lifted his bat again and again to bring it crashing over Jimmy’s face, cartilage and bone splintering with each whack, blood turning the spun metal red and wet. He’d known a pathetic wad of cash wasn’t enough to make up for the pain he’d caused Nathalie, so maybe this was the real Step Two, making up for what he’d done, paying for it like he should.
The bat fell again across Jimmy’s face, shoving hard parts into soft, and Jimmy recognized the arrival of Step Three, coming sooner than he’d expected, and not in any of the hundred ways he’d tried to envision it, tried to figure and to plan for it to come.
His vision swam, and Nathalie’s cries faded in the rushing sound in his ears, and Step Three arrived and it was good. It was good.
A NOTHINGALE
Patrick Fleming
The new guy comes back from the storage room with a sign-in clipboard in one hand and Tara’s backpack in the other. He glances at the faded ID I’m holding and flips through the sheets until he finds her name on the shelter’s resident list.
“We almost lost hope,” he says. “Another day and you’d be looking for it in the dumpster.”
I take the clipboard and sign her name the way I’ve seen her do it. I’m not much of a forger, but it hardly matters. He doesn’t know Tara or what her writing looks like. He doesn’t know me, either; doesn’t realize I’m not her. Not even her sister, despite what everyone says. He’s too new to know anything about us, which makes what I’m doing here so much easier. As far as he’s concerned, I have blond hair like what’s on the ID and I look like I could use a break. Who else would I be, right?
“So, what was it?” he asks. “Picked up?” He means, was I held overnight and is that why I didn’t keep the spot they’d been holding for me? It’s a fair question but he makes it sound accusatory, like I should feel bad about not making it in until now.
But one thing about being a street kid is that you stop feeling bad about things you’ve done real quick. I hardly feel bad about anything these days, and that goes double for some unused shelter bed that has nothing to do with me in the first place. I’m only here because I promised Tara I’d do what I could, and this is where I thought to start: the place we always ended up when we had nowhere else to go.
“No, not picked up,” I mutter as I slide the clipboard back to him. I flash the admission bracelet on my left wrist and say, “Hospital.” Tara’s name is on it, if he bothers to look. I doubt the nurses realize it’s gone missing. Even if they have, they’ll probably assume it came off during her transfer to Palliative Care and get a clerk to do a new one.
“Now can I have my backpack, please?”
His eyes go a bit cold as he shoves the bag across the counter that separates us.
“Next time,” he says, “we won’t wait for you to wander in like this. Next time it’s gone the minute you don’t show up for check-in.”
I sling the pack over one shoulder and tell him there better not be any panties missing from my bag. It’s exactly the kind of talk that gets you a temporary ban, but so fucking what? Tara’s never coming back anyway.
There’s a park nearby that a lot of us guttersnipes go to when we want to get high. It has a concrete picnic table that’s nice when the sun is out. I head over to it and put the pack down so I can look through what’s inside. There isn’t much, considering it was everything she owned: some spare clothes, a toothbrush, her old Rudimentary Peni tape ( Cacophony), a plastic baggie with a few sticks of incense in it (sandalwood), some perfume sample vials (Dior Poison), and a black plastic lighter. Near the bottom, I find a book on the occult she apparently stole from the library. A few pieces of jewellery have settled underneath it, mostly rings and cheap bangles, along with three or four safety pins and a little sewing kit. That’s about it.
We shared a lot of this stuff when we ran around together, terrorizing the hangouts, being crazy. Like I said before, everyone called us sisters, and that kinship became a mythic thing for us. It tied us together, like conjoined twins. People acted like we were a force of nature. You could see it on their faces when we really got each other going.
I go back through the clothes in her pack and dig out a tattered black hoodie. It’s musty and reeks of cigarettes and old sweat, but her unmistakable sweetness is somewhere in there too. I bury my face in it and breathe deep, closing my eyes against the fabric and the tears that are suddenly welling up.
“Promise you’ll make her give it back to me,” she’d said when I last saw her. “Tell her I need it, tell her it’s mine.”
I said okay because I couldn’t stand to see her suffering like that. I didn’t think it was going to amount to much, so I just went with it. I had no idea who she was referring to or what any of it meant, but she seemed so grateful to hear me say I’d do it. She cried from relief, saying between sobs that she was sorry. For everything.
It was unreal how much she’d wasted away by then. “Failure to thrive,” a nurse had called it, although I got the feeling they weren’t sure what exactly was killing her. Cancer, maybe? Or was it the drugs? Had her PTSD finally hollowed her out? Nobody knew what it was, not even me. I was as clueless as the rest, couldn’t do anything about it but watch her get worse and worse until she was spectre-thin.
The picnic table is warm from the sun but I slip the hoodie on anyway. I zip it up and use the sleeve to dab at my eyes until I’m sure the tears are gone. Having it on makes me feel better, like she and I are communing in some small way. It’s intimate, and I hug myself to keep that feeling close, but something in one of the pockets is poking into my side and it distracts me. I dig around and eventually fish out a folded-up wad of paper. I flatten it on the picnic table and find myself staring at two prescriptions nested together, one for Valium and one for Darvon.
Both were written several months ago, prescribed by different doctors ( surprise surprise). Neither one is for a particularly high dosage, but if taken together… My heart breaks all over again. She kept these scripts secret, even from me; walked around with them tucked safely away in case she ever found herself in need of a surefire fatal interaction.
Ah, Tara. What happened to you? I don’t realize I’m crying again until I see droplets staining the tabletop.
Embarrasse
d, I glance around to make sure no one’s seen me. But of course you’re never quite alone these days, especially during low moments like this. I spy Jeremy not a hundred yards off, sitting on a bench with some other people I sort of recognize. He hasn’t seen me yet, but I know it’s only a matter of time before he comes over to see what’s up.
Jeremy comes off as nice, but he always wants to get real buddy-buddy with me, always wants to touch my clothes or share my cigarette when we’re hanging out. It never used to bother me much, but he got me alone at a party once and he…well, he wasn’t exactly taking no for an answer. That was the night I first met Tara, actually; she stormed in and nearly took his head off with a beer bottle.
Now she’s little more than a pile of bones on a gurney. The thought kills me all over again, and I feel myself getting frantic for someplace quiet and peaceful and safe where I can just be alone for a few minutes. Someplace where I can mourn my best friend without anybody coming up to me. Without worrying about the cops either hassling me to move on or else failing to show up when the creeps start sniffing around. Christ, what I wouldn’t give for a place to disappear to for a while.
I’m about to stuff the prescriptions back in the hoodie when I notice something funny about the one on top. Her basic info is printed out on one of those patient information labels. It shows her last name as Ragana, which is something I haven’t seen before. We usually coordinated that kind of thing so we didn’t accidentally fuck up each other’s little pharmacy scams. Not that I’m surprised she used a fake name to get these, mind you; it’s just that “Ragana” definitely isn’t ringing any bells with me. It makes me wonder what else she’s been using it for, and for how long.
There’s an address under her name as well. It has an apartment number and everything. It’s also new to me, and I feel another twinge of betrayal at the exclusion. So full of surprises today, sis, I think. So many secrets. I feel myself getting worked up about it but try to keep the anger from showing. Jeremy’s still too far away to see what I’m doing, but he gossips as much as everybody else, and they’re all dying to hear the latest sordid details about Tara’s condition and how it’s turning me into a bitter fucking hag. They’re all so concerned about me.
The address under Tara’s name is on Oke Street. Everyone knows that’s part of Suzerain Park, right in the middle of all that public housing war-zone shit. Not a great part of town, but right now I don’t have much else to go on. Hopefully I can steer clear of those SP Crew gangster assholes on my way to this mystery address of Tara’s.
I walk up Church Street until I get to Dundas. There’s a street-car stopped at the corner, and I have just enough time to scrounge an almost-expired transfer from the garbage. I flash it at the driver and get a lot of shit about this not being a valid transfer point. But neither one of us cares that much, so he closes the doors mid-argument and resumes his route east.
A drunk guy sitting near the front pats the empty seat beside him and tries talking to me. I ignore him as I head for the back, but he keeps going anyway, mostly slurred vowels and filthy hand gestures. He’s obviously been making everyone on board uncomfortable for some time, and his unwanted attention transfers their unease onto me.
He eventually gives up on the sweet nothings and resorts to just whistling at me. And I have to give it to him – he’s a pretty good whistler, in a birdcall kind of way. Maybe the missing teeth actually help in this case. He warbles on, stopping every now and then to laugh and nod at me. I pull out Tara’s library book in the hope that it’ll discourage him.
It’s a history book about witchcraft in the Baltics, with lots of old engravings reproduced throughout. We used to go through this kind of stuff a lot because we were obsessed with what we liked to call The Dark Shit of History. This must’ve been real dark if Tara was interested enough to actually steal it.
Stuck in about halfway through is a piece of scrap paper, probably what she was using for a bookmark. On the paper is a carefully drawn skull. A number of birds are flying out of it. Strong black lines attach their bodies to its empty eye sockets, making it look like the skull is tied to the birds and they’re dragging it. I assume she was using the book’s illustrations for a new tattoo, but I can’t find the original image on any of the pages I flip past.
The Parliament stop is announced and I push the drawing into my pocket while I wait for the rear doors to open. I want to keep it handy for further scrutiny, to see if I can figure out where it’s from or what it might’ve meant to her. If nothing else, I can think about where to put it on my own body, a kind of secret memorial to remember her by.
Oke Street is just a few blocks up. It opens directly onto the western edge of Suzerain Park, where a series of X-shaped buildings are spaced out evenly along a stretch of muddy “green space.” It’s not a proper street, really; more like a concrete path branching off Parliament in order to wind through the centre of the housing development.
As I leave the safety of the main streets behind, I hear music filtering down from the frayed mesh of a thousand loose window screens. Small groups of men are standing together here and there, spitting in the dirt and watching me as I search for the building number that’s printed on Tara’s prescriptions. I glance up and see a baby on a nearby balcony, naked except for its diaper and watching me with serious eyes. Behind it, the faint glow of a cigarette tells me someone else is up there too, out of sight but keeping tabs all the same.
I’m pretty far into the housing units before I start to hear whistles bouncing from one building to the next. They’re quick little chirps, probably meant to alert people that a stranger is walking through. The buildings are too close and the path is too winding for me to tell if I’m being followed or not, so I just keep moving forward. As long as I don’t hit a dead end, I reason, I’m fine. It’s pretty clear that getting back out won’t be nearly as easy as getting in.
Up ahead, I see a woman standing off to the side of the path. She’s dark-skinned and so thin I can’t help but think of Tara. They could be sisters, I say to myself. She looks like she’s waiting for me, and the realization fills me with unease. There can’t possibly be any good news for anyone in this place.
“Ten-fifty?” I say as I approach, but she doesn’t seem to hear me.
“Is this ten-fifty? Ten-fifty Oke?” I point at the building and then hold up Tara’s scripts, but she still doesn’t respond.
“I can’t find ten-fifty,” I say, speaking slower this time. I reach out to touch her arm but stop when I see a tear spilling down her cheek. She turns her head just enough to indicate that I should keep walking east.
“Ten-fifty is over there,” she says. I follow her gaze and see that the housing development continues on the other side of River Street. There are a few very tall buildings over there, easily twenty storeys apiece.
“Tell them Eshu needs to see you,” she says. “Tell them until they take you.”
I nod my head, trying hard to keep my confusion from showing. Am I supposed to know who that is?
A tear rolls down her other cheek.
“Don’t go with them to any other buildings, no matter what they say.”
She stops talking, and we both stand there looking at each other for what feels like a long time. Her mouth is moving like she wants to tell me something else, but no more words come out. Uncomfortable with her odd silence, I say thanks and move on, my legs suddenly heavy with dread. What the fuck have I gotten myself into? The question has me knotted up inside. I reach the intersection of Oke and River and take a quick look back when the traffic light changes. She’s still standing there, watching me cross the street.
There’s a little white sign by the sidewalk with the words “Suzerain Mews” printed in the standard Community Housing style. I keep on the sidewalk as it curves past the sign and find that it leads to the space between the three immense buildings.
Despite the size of the monoliths around me, the sun has managed to slip in and cast most of the inner square in a comfo
rting glow. The covered entrances to the buildings still cast shadows, but a soothing light falls on the middle part of the square, where an empty public fountain languishes in disrepair. It looms up from a wide circular basin, its central spire supporting wide bowls that get smaller as they go up. People have obviously been climbing into them or trying to knock the whole thing over, because the bowls are lopsided and the main spire leans over to one side. Time and exposure to the elements have coated it in a dusty, green-blue tarnish.
There’s garbage everywhere, and the benches near the fountain look busted and filthy. I pick out a low concrete wall to sit on instead and slip off my backpack, taking in the eerie silence around me. While it’s quiet, I pull out Tara’s drawing of the skull. I want to study it some more, but end up staring at that massive fountain instead. It was built to match the size of the apartment buildings, so it’s huge as well – at least twenty feet tall.
The colour and shape of it reminds me of a gigantic flower, and the thought gives the whole place a kind of bizarro fairytale vibe. Sitting on my concrete perch, I feel like I’ve found a few outsized headstones hidden away in a remote clearing. The strangeness of it all is so rich it’s almost intoxicating. There’s a dreaminess to it that makes everything feel suspended, like this place has been waiting patiently for me to arrive.
Eventually, a shape detaches from the darkness inside one of the buildings and steps out into the square. It’s a young guy in baggy clothes and work boots, still barely more than a shadow beyond that, even when he passes through the afternoon light on his way toward me. When he gets close, he puts his hands in his pockets and mumbles something I don’t quite catch. It’s a single word, spoken like a question. It sounds like Want? , maybe. Or maybe So? or even just a grunt to let me know I should explain what I’m here for.
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