There was mist on the lake now, bats flung themselves around the light of their neighbour’s boathouse, swooping and squeaking.
“Bon, écoutez, les enfants,” Roger said, “il faut pas la laisser dormir. C’est dangereux. Il faut la réveiller.”
He unzipped his bermuda shorts and stepped out of them. In his underwear, he jumped off the dock and landed waist-high in the dark water.
Janine went crazy. “Il va la noyer!” she screamed, “il va la noyer. Claudine, il va la noyer.” Roger hoisted himself back on the dock and slapped her face. “Tu es hystérique,” he said, and she was quiet after that, tears streaming down her face.
Back in the water, Roger scooped some of it in his hands and splashed Odette’s body on the dock. Her eyelids twitched. Goosebumps rose on her flesh. “Odette,” he said, “the joke is over.” He was pleading now. He splashed her and splashed her, like a priest baptizing a newborn, speaking her name over and over.
“Maman,” Claudine said, “Maman, réveilles-toi.” The mist was breaking up. The wind came up from nowhere and shook the leaves of silver birches behind them. It sounded like rain.
Odette opened her eyes. And sat up. Her hair was wet, her face was wet, and she wiped the wetness with Claudine’s sweatshirt. Her shoulders shook from the cold. In a faint voice, she said, “I want to die.”
And then yelled it, I want to die, I want to die, yelled it from a place so dark that everything around her died.
“You should be ashame of yourself, Odette Beaulieu,” her father said, “ashame of yourself in front of the children. Tu fais ta Marilyn Monroe, hein? Ben t’es pas Marilyn Monroe, tu m’entends là, t’es pas Marilyn Monroe.”
“Mes bébées,” their mother said, “mes bébées,” and reached out to hold the girls in her arms.
Claudine looked at her, hard. And then she started to yawn. She couldn’t stop yawning. She was cold as ice.
ODETTE
~
August
F rom the bright sunlight, Odette steps into the pale electric light of the caves. Plaques on both sides of the entrance explain that the caves served as hiding places to the Arawak Indians, who were killed off by successive waves of conquerors, and to the Maroons, or runaway slaves, who were hunted down by the British with the help of wild dogs.
Odette turns away from the plaques. She knows this, has read this before. In The Gleaner. And she remembers reading something about the wild dogs, that they weren’t really dogs but an animal indigenous to the island. The Arawaks had hunted them once, and now both of them were extinct.
Odette’s heart is still pounding, as much from the steep walk uphill as from her encounter with Wesley, who already seems far away now, a paper ember, swept by the winds that have brought her here. The heat has erased him, but not the traces of rage that distorted her face, there on the dirt shoulder above Discovery Bay. Her fists are still clenched from wanting to pound his chest.
Stepping into the cave, past the needy eyes of a girl selling straw hats and coral earrings and necklaces, Odette makes herself open her hands. The voices are back. Voices that make her feel like a ventriloquist for someone else’s wrongs, someone else’s pain. I’ll kill you if you come near me. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you dead.
She is fighting the words that want to come out of her mouth with a clenched jaw, with whatever remains of the Valium coursing through her tired, rigid body.
A drink is what she needs. A nice cool drink. A tiny drink. Just one. She deserves it. Especially now. She really deserves it now. She would like to go right to the bar carved out of rock in the very heart of the cave, and have her complementary rum punch, but she knows that she has to go through the tour first, that it would look very bad to go right to the bar. Mustn’t ever look like I can’t do without. I need, I need, but I must never look like I need. Never.
For a moment, standing at the entrance, watching her lime green sandals on the smooth rock floor of the cave, Odette feels compelled to tell somebody, anybody, about what just happened. She wants to go up to the girl selling hats and say this man, this man who took me by taxi, he tried to do something to me, you’ve got to help me, but the girl would not know what to say, would not know what to do, and what if she dreamed it all, what if she imagined this, what if Wesley was not saying the things she thought he was saying, what if she hadn’t seen or heard properly. Her self is untrustworthy. She is untrustworthy. She imagines things, always has. You imagined it. You dreamed it.
Stunned in the half-light, Odette stands, shredded lipstick-stained kleenex in one hand, ticket in the other. She is stuck there at the entrance with a ticket she doesn’t remember buying. She must have bought it, before reading the plaques. On the other side of the girl selling hats a woman leans against the cave wall, watching her. She wears navy blue. She looks official.
Walking towards Odette, the woman says, “My name is Angela, I am your tour guide.” The way she says tour guide makes it sound like the most special thing in the world to be. Her voice is devoid of inflection, rinsed clean of any traces of patois. Angela is wearing a navy blue Dacron skirt, a white shirt and a red, white and blue polka-dot silk scarf around her neck.
Odette says, “Thank you very much, you are very kind,” and follows Angela into the cave.
The caves are pale orange in the electric light of the bulbs strung along their corridors and alcoves. The colour must have something to do with the iron in the rock. The red rock is streaked with pale green. All of the walls are moulded into smooth protruding shapes; years and years of trickling water created this.
It is like walking into the jaws of a domesticated animal to walk through this cave with Angela, stopping every few feet to look at the formations of stalactites dripping from the ceiling and stalagmites rising from the floor. Angela’s steel-tipped heels click on the smooth floor. She approaches every designated alcove with dignity, stands to the side of it and rattles off her rehearsed commentary.
“Notice,” she says now, “the formations to my right.” Odette looks, sees the intricate accretions of water and salt lit up by a single electric bulb. Odette waits politely. “Notice,” Angela says, in the flat voice of officialdom, “how the formations look like the three wise men, bearing gifts. Can you see the star of Bethlehem?”
Odette looks, sees nothing resembling three wise men. She sees three spear-like formations. “Yes,” she says. “I see.”
As she follows Angela to the next alcove, Odette thinks this is like doing the stations of the cross in church. Tastes come back to her, the taste of vinegar and blood, the imagined taste of the wooden rosaries of the brothers who walked the church, robes sweeping, wooden rosaries knocking against waxy-smelling pews. The taste of old olive pits, that’s what she imagined those rosaries would taste like, like the olives on the mount where Christ was crucified, drinking from a sponge of vinegar and water proffered by a centurion. She had stood at every station, feeling her lisle stockings bagging at the knees, the heavy cotton of her underwear bunching between her legs, stood and waited for the bright flash she had imagined revelation to be.
Angela turns on her heels, walks at a quick pace towards the next alcove. Odette follows her. They have turned a corner, left the light and heat of the entrance far behind. Odette is afraid now, in the dark of the cave, afraid of the sound of water drops falling in hidden pools, of the black flitting lines of bats overhead.
Sensing her fear, Angela says, “The bats are harmless.” Like a child, Odette repeats harmless, the bats are harmless. Her whole body is a limb that has gone to sleep, tingling, heavy, she can hardly feel the pressure of the rock on her feet. She must be floating away. She wants to say to Angela I feel faint. She is staring at a formation that looks like a robed man.
Her mother called the priest. That’s what her mother did, afterwards, after the girl she was had seen blue and red circles breaking in her tightly closed eyes. She had not
wanted to see the dark tornadoes coming out of his eyes, his mouth, so she closed her eyes. And her eyes stayed closed for a long time after that.
Angela keeps walking, and Odette follows her in a dream, stops at each alcove and listens as if her life depended on it. Buckingham Palace, Angela says, Santa Claus and his reindeer, she says, Bob Marley’s profile, with dreadlocks.
Her mother called the priest. That’s what her mother did, afterwards. Odette couldn’t open her eyes. She had closed her eyes not to see his face. She had left her body not to feel the pain between her five-year-old legs. She left her body and her thin spirit floated to the ceiling of that rooming house in Halifax, with the view of grey waves, with the sound of wind whistling through the cracked windowpanes.
They are walking again, Angela is heading her to another alcove.
Don’t tell. Not supposed to tell. You will die if you tell. Tu vas mourir. “I am,” Odette says.
Angela looks up. “Please follow me,” she says, “we will now go down to the underground pool.”
“I,” Odette says. “I can’t.” But her voice is drowned out by Angela’s clicking heels.
Afterwards Mum cut up a piece of cotton and put it between her legs and called the priest. The priest sprinkled holy water on her body, talked Latin to her limbs. Later there was blood on the cotton, rusty brown, the colour of scabbed knees.
On the train from Halifax to Montreal, she had a fever. The cows grazing outside had dancing spots, her heart was wanting to come out of her mouth when she threw up in the swaying toilet of the train. Her sisters ate cinnamon hearts out of paper bags at the railway stations. They stayed behind. Her hands turned red holding on to her cinnamon hearts.
When they got to the city, her mother put her to bed in the house that smelled of cats and lemon oil. They put her to bed and talked, Granny Mattie, Grandpa Stephen, Mum. She heard them talking. She knew she was bad. Her mother never said anything. She left the next morning. She left her there all alone. Mum. Stop crying, they said, stop crying, stop crying.
She follows Angela down the steps to the underground pool. Angela takes her hand so she can step into the yellow rubber dinghy that will take them into another part of the cave. Odette sits down and cries.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” Angela says.
“My mother,” Odette says.
“A recent bereavement, ma’am?”
“My mother. I would like to talk to my mother.”
“It is good to cry,” Angela says. “Good to cry, ma’am, grief need crying like earth need rain.” Her paddling echoes in the dimly lit cave.
Odette brings her hands to her face, sees her mother’s face, her fierce blue eyes, so beleaguered and alive. What else could her mother have done? There was no one then, no one. If she had not brought her to Montreal, he would have done it again. She had no money, no place to go. She must have threatened him so he wouldn’t do it to the others, must have found a way. There was no divorce, the priests had seen to that. So she did the only thing she could do, she took her away to a safe place, and went back, and hoped she would forget.
And she had forgotten. All that time with this inside her. Is it possible? Are such things possible? And her mother, all those years saying I did my best, and then looking at her with guilty eyes. Odette had never understood those eyes, the eyes of a woman who bleached and ironed her clothes, who laid out everything for her with infinite care, who said I do my best, I did my best, eyes that said nothing I can ever do will be good enough. How angry Odette had been at her, for no reason she could tell.
Odette wipes her face with a kleenex from her purse. She has always known it, but never known it. His crime, not hers. His crime. All this time, carrying his crime.
They have gone over to the other side of the cave, in a lagoon lit from above by a natural skylight. The water is pale green. Odette grazes it with her hand, and then tastes it.
“Not quite fresh,” Angela says. “Brackish water.”
CLAUDINE
~
August
The key turns soft as butter in the lock. Claudine picks up her suitcase and walks into the loft.
Colin is standing at the round table with a fly swatter in his hand. He turns. A dead fly sticks to the yellow plastic. The round table is clean, with a pot of yellow chrysanthemums in the centre.
“Sorry,” he says, “the place is full of flies.” And so it is, full of bluebottle flies buzzing around the flowers, bouncing off the glass of the windows overlooking the lighted billboards over the Spadina bridge. “I don’t know where they came from. It’s like they’re hatching in here.”
“I didn’t expect you to be here,” she says.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she says. It’s only ten o’clock, the mauve sky through the windows is just beginning to darken, but she’s suddenly very tired. She would like to unpack, to make everything tidy, but she’s always found it impossible to do the simplest things with Colin around. It’s like there’s a current coming from him that she has to attend to. So she stands there by her suitcase, like a character in a badly directed play who can speak only while standing still. “I don’t know,” she says. “On the train, I kept thinking of coming in here and finding a note, one of your cryptic poem notes, you know. You’d be gone and I’d …”
“Burn the note?”
She laughs. “I didn’t get that far.” She had gone far, but not in that direction.
“I’m here,” he says. “Have a seat, grab a beer. You look like Lot’s wife. How was it, anyway?”
“It was awful. It was what it always was. But I saw it for the first time.”
“Saw what?”
“That it had nothing to do with me.”
“What?”
“Just that.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Talk about it.”
“That’s how you …”
“What?”
“Get me.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
There’s something different in him, something proprietorial. He started to live here while she was gone. That’s what it is. All of a sudden, it’s like she’s visiting him. She walks slowly to the kitchen area and puts the kettle on. Takes her sandals off and savours the wooden floor under her feet. It is nice to touch the floor, nice to touch the pink cup she puts a teabag in.
“Everybody,” he says, “is saying it had nothing to do with me.”
“I didn’t say it had nothing to do with you. Who’s everybody, anyway?”
“Janine, she said something like that.”
“Oh.”
“Marie-Ange got sick, she asked me to help, I went over and she had a terrible fever.” The fly swatter is sticking right up like a flag in his hand. His hand is starting to shake a little, even though his voice has grown deeper with some fond remembrance of altruism.
“When was that?”
“Last night.”
“Really? That’s weird. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“What?”
“That she’d call you.”
“No. Jim was out of town. You know how scared she gets about things.”
“Last night, I tried to …”
“What?”
She wants to say call and call, and you made me go crazy. But she can’t be bothered. She looks at him. He doesn’t look like the monster who makes her crazy, who pushes her to those awful places. He looks like a boy with a fly swatter who has nowhere else to go. Claudine sees the just now in it. He has nowhere else to go just now, and what he builds around this moment she’ll have to carry, because he will have tried, will have said the things he thinks she needs to hear, will say them until someone else comes along, fresh with promise, fresh as untracked snow.
Sh
e sees all this, waiting for the kettle to boil on the red-hot burner. And what’s more, she sees the hope she’s always carried, the hope that he would change. It tastes bitter now.
“I’m tired,” she says.
“It’s so tiring living with a bastard. That’s what my mother used to say. And you know, she was right. He was an asshole, and I’m an asshole. I know that. I know I don’t deserve to live.” He’s smiling. He’s spotted a fly on the table. He brings the swatter down. “And neither does he, the little fucker.”
The kettle boils.
“It’s not my job,” she shouts, “to figure out whether you deserve to live or not.” She scrunches the teabag against the side of the cup and flicks it into the garbage. She opens the fridge, finds some milk beside a twelve-pack of beer, pours some in the cup, and slams the fridge door. She stands by the kitchen counter.
“I did some shopping,” he says. “I bought that milk, I bought some groceries, I carried two bags of groceries up here. I even got you flowers. Maybe I deserve to live a little bit.” He’s smiling, a big wide smile.
“I didn’t say you didn’t deserve to live,” she says. And takes a sip of tea. It scalds her tongue. “Did I get any mail?”
“This isn’t interesting. You’ve gotten dull, do you know that, Claudine? You’ve gotten really dull.”
“Good,” she says. “Now you can pack your stuff and find yourself something interesting. Maybe my sister. Maybe you’ll find that interesting. There’s a husband, there’s a child, she’s related to me. There’s lots of complications that you’ll find interesting.”
“Your sister didn’t do anything wrong,” he says.
“I’m sure she didn’t. She’s too good, she’s too nice to do anything wrong.” Claudine puts her tea down on the floor and kneels to unzip her suitcase, then sits down cross-legged in her jeans. Fingers tight on her clothes, she sorts through them to make a laundry pile. “She probably told you I wrecked her life, that’s what she tells everybody.” She flings a bunch of T-shirts in a pile. “She’s always tried to wreck anything I had by making me feel guilty. I made myself so small I almost disappeared.” She can’t even see what she’s doing now, the piles she’s making have no rhyme or reason. “I’m so sick of wearing black, look at this stuff, it’s all black.”
Voice-Over Page 21
