Bursting Bubbles

by Dyan Sheldon

  “My volunteer visitor.” Mrs Kilgour’s lips curl in what Georgiana takes for a smile. There is lipstick on her front teeth. “You mean as opposed to my involuntary visitor?”

  Georgiana has no idea what she’s talking about. “Your involuntary visitor?”

  It isn’t as hard to confuse a smile with a sneer as you might think.

  “Yes, dear. You know. The one who shows up because evil forces in the universe make her come here against her will.”

  She must be senile. She probably doesn’t even know where she is.

  “I come from the school. The high school? From Shell Harbour?”

  “This isn’t Shell Harbour,” snaps Mrs Kilgour. “We’re miles from Shell Harbour. What are you, lost?”

  So she does know where she is.

  “No, I’m not lost. I go to school in Shell Harbour, but I’m here for my community service. I’m your volunteer visitor.”

  Mrs Kilgour’s voice becomes high and childish. “Oh, you’re here for your community service. Aren’t you a Good Samaritan. Your parents must be very proud.”

  Georgiana has never been mocked by an octogenarian wearing a baseball cap before. “Yes, I… No, I mean…We do it as part of our curriculum. I—”

  “And that’s me, is it? I’m not a human being. I’m not flesh and blood and a beating heart? I’m a community service? Like picking up soda cans on the highway? Is that what I am, a rusting can of Coke?”

  “No, of course not. I—”

  “You want some advice? Never get old. This is what happens when you get old. Strangers barge in on you whenever they want, trying to stick you in a garbage bag because you’re no use to anybody any more.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t knock. I’m…” She takes a deep breath and tries again. “I’m Georgiana. Georgiana Shiller. I’m here to visit you. You know, to be a little company for you. Didn’t they tell you I was coming?”

  “Of course they told me.” She softens her voice, speaking in very much the same talking-to-a-small-child tone that Georgiana’s been using to her. “Ooh, Mrs Kilgour, you’re going to be having a visitor. A spoiled teenager who thinks life is a shopping mall. She’s from Shell Harbour, where the rich people live. Won’t that be nice? You’d like to see a rich person up close before you die, wouldn’t you?”

  “Mrs Kilgour—”

  “But that was weeks ago.” Her voice is normal again. Normal being brash and sarcastic. “What’d you do? Walk here via Tibet?” Then she shakes her head, arguing with herself. “No, that’s ridiculous. I doubt you could find Tibet even by accident. You were probably just busy on that Web thing, telling everybody what you had for lunch.”

  “Mrs Kil—”

  “Time may mean nothing to you, but I don’t have a lot of it left at my age. I gave up waiting. I figured you’d had a better offer or found some other poor soul to torment.” She eyes Georgiana’s right hand. “Or lost your phone and didn’t know how to get here.”

  There’s no use making up some excuse, since the old bag doesn’t listen. And anyway she wouldn’t believe her if she did listen; she has her mind made up. “I’m not here to torment you, Mrs Kilgour,” says Georgiana with a patience no one who knows her well would recognize. And loudly and slowly. “I’m here to help you. Be your friend.”

  “Help me? Be my friend? How could you be my friend? You’re not even old enough to vote.”

  Georgiana clamps her mouth shut. And you probably voted for Lincoln.

  “Look at you!” Mrs Kilgour jets on. “You couldn’t look more like a princess if you were wearing a crown.”

  Look at you! You couldn’t look more like an evil troll if you were hiding in a cave.

  “Princess La-di-dah. Clutching that damn contraption in your hand like a second of silence would kill you! And all dressed up like you’re going to a ball. You wouldn’t last five minutes in the jungle. Not five lousy minutes. What are you going to help me do? Shop? Pick out a pair of shoes? Throw a party?”

  Georgiana puts the hand holding the damn contraption behind her back. “Well, luckily for us, we’re not in the jungle, are we, Mrs Kilgour? So there are lots of things I can help you with. And shopping’s one of them. You know, if there’s anything you need.” A life … a personality… “Or if you want me to do something for you.”

  “Do something? Do something like what?”

  Georgiana pulls at her hair with her free hand. Like lock you in the closet, you old bat. And throw the key into the ocean.

  “Well … there must be lots of stuff you can’t do yourself.” See well, or climb a ladder, or remember what you had for breakfast… “I can help you. Like maybe if you need a needle threaded or—”

  “A needle threaded?” She sounds so indignant, you’d think Georgiana suggested teaching her to break dance. “Why would I want you to do that? I haven’t sewn a damn thing since nineteen eighty-five.”

  Well, excuse meeee…

  “We could play a game…” Hide-and-seek. Georgiana could be back in her car before Mrs Grumbles counted to three. “Do you like games?” Not tennis, obviously. “Cards or board games?”

  The eyes behind the smudgy glasses look at her with new interest. “Poker? You play poker? Stud or Draw?”

  “No, no, I don’t play poker.” Georgiana’s only knowledge of poker comes from movies in which a bunch of overweight men sit around smoking, wisecracking and occasionally threatening each other’s life while they shove plastic chips into the middle of the table. Not a bunch of old ladies. “But I do play bridge.”

  “You play bridge. With two people you play bridge?” The interest is gone and the sarcasm is back. “And how does that work? Do we get dealt double hands? Do we have to keep switching our seats?”

  There are other people in the building, thinks Georgiana. Not that any of them would want to play with you. You miserable kvetch.

  Just as Robinson Crusoe, marooned on his island, continued to behave as a civilized man, Georgiana Shiller, stranded in Mrs Kilgour’s rudeness, continues to be polite. “Well, what about rummy? Do you play rummy?”

  “Animal rummy? Is that what you play? Do you play it on your genius phone?”

  “Or Scrabble.” Robinson Crusoe raised his crops, and built his house, and read his Bible. Georgiana smiles. “I’m pretty good at Scrabble. I could bring my set next time.”

  Mrs Kilgour smiles, too. “I’m sure that’s very kind of you, but to me that almost sounds like a threat.”

  Georgiana clamps her mouth shut for a second so the words that popped into her head – Don’t worry, you’ll know when I’m threatening you – don’t actually come out.

  “Well, if you don’t want to play a game we could go for a walk.” Georgiana would like to walk. She’d like to walk out. Just turn around and go home. Would she have to come back? Would she get into trouble? But what about Dr Kilpatiky? Would Georgiana lose the Brownie points she’s earned? Would Dr Kilpatiky give her a placement that’s even worse?

  “A walk?” A laugh is not always happy. “And what do you think that thing over there is?” The thing over there is a wheelchair. “Do you think if I could walk more than a few feet I’d have one of those?”

  “I meant that I’d walk, and push you.” Straight into traffic, if she could.

  “And where would we walk?” She waves towards the window at the concrete courtyard, dressed up today by a covering of colourful if dead leaves. “Out there in the prison yard? Or I suppose we could walk in the building – it depends on how fascinated you are by hallways.”

  “What about the common room Mr P showed me? There’ll be—”

  “Nothing to do but watch TV. Which I can do here. And which I’m going to do here. You can do what you want.” She turns towards the set. “And stop shouting at me,” she shouts. “I’m not deaf.”

  Georgiana can’t leave for another forty-five minutes. “So what am I supposed to do if you’re just going to watch TV?”

  “Maybe you could thread a needle.”<
br />
  She sticks out her tongue at Mrs Kilgour’s back and sits down on the edge of the bed. Gingerly. And turns on her phone.

  Chapter Eleven

  If You Won’t Embrace the Chaos, the Chaos Will Embrace You

  It’s starting to seem to Asher that there are more Saturdays in a week than there used to be. He barely survives one than another is looming up in front of him like a three-headed, fire-breathing monster wearing a necklace made from the skulls of its victims. The fact that Asher’s skull isn’t yet on the necklace is a testament to something, but he’s not sure what. Dumb luck maybe. A desire to prolong his suffering probably.

  Today it is already dark by the time Asher leaves the community centre and staggers to his car. “Goodnight, Asher,” Mrs Dunbar calls after him, loudly enough to have everyone with that name in the county look around. “See you next week!”

  Not if I see you first, thinks Asher.

  What really hurts – besides his back, his arms and his pride (the backed-up toilet was really disgusting and not a job for a future leader of the nation) – is that he used to love Saturdays. Saturdays were laid-back days – that pause in the week when not every minute of his time was accounted for. Sure, there was his kung-fu class first thing, but after that the day was pretty much his. He could go to brunch or lunch with Claudelia. Go to a game or throw a few baskets with Will. Play computer chess or do an hour of Mandarin online. Go for a swim. Work out. Some afternoons there would be a fencing competition. He might even do nothing for a whole hour, just sit in his room listening to music or catching up on the sudokus in the week’s newspapers. But not any more. Now his Saturdays belong to Mrs Dunbar and the Queen’s Park Community Centre. It’s as if he sold his soul to the Devil.

  When Asher gets home the lights of the Grossmans’ house burn brightly along the driveway, over the front porch and behind the living-room window and the upstairs hall, welcoming him home. Which makes them the only things that do welcome him home. Albert is in Brussels this week – or somewhere like Brussels – and Mrs Swedger, the Grossmans’ housekeeper, has weekends off. The lights are all on timers.

  But despite the lack of anyone to greet him, Asher is as glad to be home as Odysseus was when he finally arrived back in Ithaca after ten years of harrowing adventures. Partly he’s glad to be home because Will’s coming over to watch the Saturday game, something he’s been looking forward to all week; but mainly he’s glad because he would be glad to be anywhere that’s not the Queen’s Park Community Centre. Even a Greyhound bus, awash with germs and contagious diseases, would be better.

  He opens the door, turns off the alarm and steps inside, suddenly aware of how truly tired he is. The centre may be a falling-down hole-in-the-wall, but it’s a busy one. You’d think that people would drive right by it, assuming that any help it offered would be counter-productive, but they flock to it. Not just the ones getting free food, either. Besides the new mothers’ club, it has a youth club, a senior citizens’ club and a story hour for under-fives. It offers classes in English as a second language, and tutoring in reading and maths. It gives advice on your rights as both a citizen and a tenant, advice to women in abusive relationships, advice to parents with problem children, and help in filling out forms, applying for jobs, writing résumés and dealing with debt. According to Mrs Dunbar, they have to do so much because the government is doing next to nothing and cutting the funding it gives to the organizations that do try to do something. Also according to Mrs Dunbar, every week more people lose their jobs, their homes or both, while homeless and women’s shelters, libraries and programmes to help the desperate are forced to close.

  “Doesn’t the Bible say that God helps those who help themselves?” asked Asher.

  Mrs Dunbar said no. “The Bible doesn’t say anything like that.”

  That isn’t what Asher’s been told.

  “It was the Greeks. Check it yourself if you don’t believe me,” said Mrs Dunbar. “God doesn’t concern himself with the material world. It’s the government who helps those who help themselves. The bankers get bailed out and the unfortunate get thrown out. Jesus said you should love your neighbour as you love yourself, and, if you ask me, that doesn’t mean foreclosing on his house and making him and his family homeless.”

  There isn’t a Saturday that Asher isn’t as busy as a doctor in a war. Because everyone who works at the centre is a volunteer, most of them are over sixty-five, and there are limits to how much they can heave, haul or carry, and to how high they can climb and how low bend. Which makes Asher very much in demand. They all keep telling him how nice it is to have an able-bodied young man on the team. Though if he keeps this up, he won’t be able-bodied for long. Every time he finishes doing one thing, Mrs Dunbar – who always knows the second he stands still – pops up like some manic genie to give him another task. But even by the centre’s high standards of chaos, today was special. Today was a Saturday that was handmade in Hell. Handmade and gift-wrapped with a big bow on top.

  Someone threw a small stuffed pig into the toilet, causing it to back up and flood the bathroom. Today’s workshop was housing advice, and at one point there were three people in the waiting room crying. The woman who runs the story hour couldn’t get her car started. There was one epileptic fit, a violent drunk and a small child who fell down the basement stairs and had to be taken to the hospital. Mrs Dunbar dealt with the crying, the fit and the drunks, but the bathroom, story hour and the child were left to Asher. He’s never dealt with waste matter, read to small children or been in Emergency before – which doesn’t mean that any of them were experiences likely to make him a better person. On top of all that, they ran out of food boxes, which caused even more tears to fall.

  He goes upstairs to shower and change. Besides sewage, he smells like a combination of sweat and the musty, never-really-clean odour of the centre itself, and has a funny taste in his mouth from an unwise cup of coffee he took from the urn. Asher is still getting dressed when Will arrives. “I’ll be five minutes!” he calls, and tosses the keys to him from his bedroom window.

  The Grossmans’ family room features an enormous flat-screen TV, a top-end pool table (unlike the one at the centre that last saw better days in the nineteen-fifties), a ping-pong table, two oversized sofas and four matching armchairs. Looking at it, you would think that the family who uses it is a large one, not just two people – one of whom is rarely home. Will is on the sofa in front of the set, and leans back with a satisfied sigh as Asher comes in, carrying a tray of snacks and drinks.

  “Man, this is the life,” says Will. “You don’t know how lucky you are not to have sisters. The house to ourselves and football. Heaven couldn’t be any better than this.”

  “Yeah, it’s cool.” Cool but sometimes a little lonely. Will’s sisters are pretty high-maintenance, but there are times when Asher would prefer any company to none. Asher’s father is away so much that Asher has the house to himself more often than not; when Albert is home he’s usually busy. And Mrs Swedger wasn’t hired as a mother substitute, not even when Asher was younger; she was hired to keep the house running smoothly. She works a set number of hours a day, has her evenings off as well as weekends and has her own apartment over the garage. But Asher doesn’t say anything about being lonely to himself, never mind to Will. What he says is, “Don’t start pulling out the tears and violins, Lundquist. You don’t have it that bad. Your sisters do have friends. And some of them are pretty all right.”

  “And what good does that do me?” demands Will. “You don’t seriously think I could go out with one of my sisters’ friends, do you? Trust me, dude, they’ve all seen that picture of me pissing on the side of the car when I was three. None of them thinks that highly of me. And even if I did date one of them, you can bet my sisters would tell her stuff about me even I don’t know. Every time I belched or farted they’d be on the phone telling her how loud or how much it stank.”

  “Oh, man…” Asher laughs. “They’d take pictures of you sl
eeping, with your mouth open and drooling. And pictures of your room with your dirty boxers piled up on the floor and all those plates under the bed.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I keep my door locked at all times.” He pats Dunkin, sleeping loudly beside him. “And why I’m glad I have my guard dog here.”

  Asher sets the tray down on the coffee table and drops onto the sofa next to Will. “You’re quite a team. He’s hardly ever awake and you never stop eating.”

  “We’ll ignore that unkind jibe, won’t we, Dunk? Because we know you don’t really mean it.”

  Asher winks. “You believe what you want.”

  Will reaches for a handful of chips and stuffs them into his mouth, sprinkling crumbs all over himself and the sofa. “So how was it today at the salt mines of Queen’s Park? Drain any lakes? Feed the multitude with a couple of packages of hot dogs and a bag of rolls? Have anybody puke all over you?”

  “Hahaha,” says Asher.

  Will thinks it’s hilarious that Asher Grossman, the boy who was born wearing a suit and shoes with a spit shine, is doing menial tasks and manual labour. He has said – repeatedly – that he’d give a hundred bucks for a picture of Asher with a mop.

  “I know this’ll be a big disappointment, but there weren’t any major floods or barfing babies like on my first day.”

  “You see?” Will punches him in the arm. “What’d I tell you? It’s getting better, isn’t it?”

  “It depends what you call better. I did have to spend half a lifetime sitting in Emergency with a kid with a broken arm. And unblock the toilet and clean up the crap.”

  “Eww…” Will wrinkles his face in distaste. “You don’t mean that literally, do you?”

  “Oh yes, I do,” says Asher. “We don’t deal with metaphors at the centre.” They just deal with hopelessness and despair.

  “So it’s not getting better?”

  “It’s never going to get better. The most you can hope for is different.” Every day a new crisis; every week a fresh disaster. “I know you think I’m exaggerating. Because I’m me.” Someone who thinks civilization is collapsing if a fuse blows or his flight is delayed. “But I’m not. That place is total chaos. And if you think that there’s any order in chaos, I can tell you straight up that there isn’t. Not a subatomic particle of the stuff.” Asher also takes some chips, but, unlike Will, he sets his down on a napkin. He’s a neat eater. “There are always at least four things going on at the same time, and everybody running around like they’re in a disaster movie.” Which, if he’s honest, they technically are. The disaster movie of life. “When anybody bothers to show up.” Asher’s father is right. No matter what Mrs Dunbar or the Bible says about loving your neighbour (he did check it out, she was right about God not helping the ambitious), without the profit motive, very little gets done. Either people don’t come at all, or they come and achieve less than the paint on the walls – which, at the centre, at least is peeling. “And every five minutes something goes wrong. The power’s always going out. There’s always a partition collapsing.” Though his theory is that Mrs Dunbar knocks down the partitions. Graceful as a bulldozer. “Today, besides the sewer taking over the bathroom, we had an angry ex-husband stinking of beer looking for his wife and threatening to set us on fire. I’m not even going to get into the rest of it.”