Lemon

by Cordelia Strube

  ‘I fell down.’

  She keeps staring at me with the eyeball that doesn’t wander, and tapping her pencil against the counter. You have to wonder what it can be like knowing you were inches from being shot or gassed along with the other six million.

  ‘You should be more careful,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘You must always look where you’re going.’ She touches my cheek, which she’s never done before. The gesture is so tender, so caring and all that, it makes me feel sorry for myself. I don’t want this. I jet out of there.

  Old Huff has us dipping into Twelfth Night, which is another one of the bard’s dumb-ass comedies about people falling in love before they’ve even had a conversation. He has me reading Viola, and Kirsten reading Olivia. I have to yammer about her beauty and how my master has the hots for her and all that. This proves torturous due to the fact that she has seen me upside down with a beer bottle up my snatch.

  ‘“I pity you,”’ I read.

  ‘“That’s a degree to love,”’ reads Kirsten.

  ‘“No, not a grize: for ’tis a vulgar proof “That very oft we pity enemies.”’

  Old Huff jumps in. ‘Is that true?’ he asks. Nobody asks, ‘Is what true?’ because nobody gives a toad’s arse. ‘Do we very oft pity our enemies?’ Huff demands.

  ‘Shit, no,’ Taylor in the dog collar says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re our enemies. Duh.’

  ‘Yes, but are they not flesh and blood, do they not suffer as we do?’

  ‘Shit, no.’

  ‘I pity them,’ Kirsten says, looking straight at me. ‘Because they’re ugly and stupid and nobody can stand them.’ There’s no question that if she could, she would wire me to a corpse and shove me in a river.

  ‘Why,’ I ask because I can’t read anymore, ‘is Viola so hot for the duke?’

  ‘That’s an interesting question,’ Huff says. ‘Why is Viola enamoured of Orsino?’

  The class thinks hard. Megan on Prozac says, ‘Because he’s the duke.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Huff asks.

  ‘She’s after his power.’

  ‘That is so cynical,’ Kirsten says. ‘She wants him because he’s sexy, that’s obvious.’

  ‘How is that obvious?’ I ask. ‘He lies around whining, bossing musicians around. What’s so sexy about him?’

  ‘He’s the duke,’ she says like this explains everything.

  ‘That’s what I said,’Megan persists. ‘She’s after his power.’

  Huff licks his fingers and starts turning pages, which means he’s about to get us to start reading again. I can’t handle this. ‘Maybe it’s the father thing,’ I say. ‘Her dad died at sea, she must miss him. Maybe the duke’s a father figure.’

  ‘She wouldn’t marry him if he was a father figure,’ Kirsten says.

  ‘Oh, so you think all those models marrying eighty-year-old billionaires are after their bodies?’

  ‘Okay, so she’s hot for his money,’ Megan concludes. ‘And power.’

  ‘You are sick,’ Kirsten tells her. Kirsten who made sure my friend got raped. While I was sitting around sucking on pretzels.

  She doesn’t answer the door. I know she’s in there, can hear the tv. ‘It’s me, Ross.’ I start pounding.

  She flings open the door. ‘Cool it,’ she says. She looks alright, just tired. No makeup. Baggy clothes for once.

  ‘Why didn’t you come to school?’ I ask.

  ‘Why do you think?’

  ‘They win if you don’t come to school.’

  ‘They win anyway.’

  Because I might be short a hymen, I’ve been thinking about Queen Elizabeth II checking Lady Di’s hymen. The old crow got a gyno in there and squinted down the speculum with him. No wonder Di stopped eating.

  ‘So that’s it?’ I ask. ‘You’re going to hide out for the rest of your life?’

  ‘They’re charging Doyle.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Jake and Larry.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘The golf club. That’s assault with a weapon.’

  ‘Not if he didn’t hit them. Did you see him hit them?’

  ‘I wasn’t exactly around for most of it.’ She stares at the tv.

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘It’s on Kirsten’s blog.’

  Must have been an update since I checked. ‘I can’t believe you’re still reading that. Stop reading that.’

  She flops face down on the couch. Super Sweet Sixteen is on, a reality show in which stinking rich Americans hold outrageously elaborate parties for their buxom daughters, and buy them Hummers and private planes or anything else their pride-and- joys fancy. I turn it off.

  ‘We have to help him,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not reporting it. Forget it.’

  ‘Okay, let me get this straight. A guy who rescued you is going to go down for assault with a weapon and you don’t care?’

  ‘He didn’t rescue me. It was over.’

  ‘No it wasn’t. You know it wasn’t.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’

  ‘He was defending us, Ross.’

  ‘He was defending you. He’s got a thing about you.’

  ‘I guess that’s why he was so happy to drive me to the party.’

  ‘You’ve got smarts and you’re creative and you just keep shitting on yourself and it’s pathetic. He was only going with me because you ditched him.’

  ‘He was going with you because he thinks you’re hot.’

  ‘He was on the rebound, Lemon, get a grip. He doesn’t even like me.’

  ‘Oh, so I guess that’s why he’s so keen to go out with you.’

  ‘Fucking somebody has nothing to do with liking them.’

  I’ve never heard her talk like this. ‘What’s it got to do with then?’

  ‘Power, Lemon. Hello.’ She turns the tube back on. Some ancient tv star is talking about a skin cream made from sheep’s placenta keeping her looking young.

  ‘Like the plastic surgeon had nothing to do with it,’ Rossi grumbles.

  ‘Did you tell your mum?’

  ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘She’s worried about you.’

  ‘She’s always worried about me.’

  ‘It’s not too late to go to the police. The semen stays around for a couple of days.’

  ‘Shut up! That is so disgusting. Just shut up!’

  I sit on the couch beside her, want to hold her like Helen held Jane, keep her safe. ‘Please tell me you’re still on the pill.’

  ‘Like, how stupid do you think I am, Lemon?’

  ‘People forget to take them.’

  ‘I never forget.’ She surfs past car and cosmetic ads. ‘What did they do to you today?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing. Just ignored me.’

  ‘So you don’t know?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re charging you. Anyway, they’re trying to. A cushion’s not exactly a weapon.’

  On tv there are before-and-after shots of flabby women in bathing suits who’ve used a ‘firming’ gel. I stare hard at their puckered thighs.

  ‘If they charge you,’ Rossi says, ‘you’re going to have a criminal record. Forget university, pal.’

  I have a horrible feeling she’s pleased. Why? Because I wasn’t there for her? I can’t ask her this, can’t face this.

  She picks at a zit on her chin, which she never does because it only makes the zit worse. ‘Haven’t the cops been after you?’

  ‘Yeah. I haven’t talked to them, though. Just voice mail.’

  ‘Well, five guys say you hurt them. I don’t know what you were doing out there. Karate or something. Bone says you broke his nose.’

  None of this seems real. One of the flabby women in bathing suits says the firming gel changed her life. ‘My husband can’t keep his hands off me,’ she says.

  22

  I stare in Marty Millionaire’s window. Zipp
y’s talking to her ape-man boss, gripping a rag and rubbing furniture. When she finishes she looks up at him and he points at some other furniture which she starts rubbing. Another sex slave. I heard on the radio that there’s a sex-slave cult. The female members cook and clean and obey orders when it comes to sex. The ‘master’ recruits the women from chatrooms, says they have ‘a desire to serve.’ Zippy starts rubbing the legs of a coffee table near the window and sees me. She jumps up and down like one of those game-show winners, says something to the master and comes charging out. ‘Sweetie, pumpkin, what a wonderful surprise!’ She kisses and hugs me and this feels familiar. Everything else feels strange.

  ‘Can we go for coffee or something?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, it’s just me and Lloyd, honey. I can’t just take off. I had my lunch already.’

  I shouldn’t have come.

  ‘What is it, honeybunch? What happened to your face? Did somebody hit you?’

  ‘I fell down.’

  ‘Come and sit for a sec. Lloyd won’t mind if I take a few minutes.’ She pulls me inside and makes me sit on a bloated couch that smells like animal carcasses. Makes me think of those buffalo being ‘hazed’ to make room for ranchers’ cattle. In the twenty-first century we’re still slaughtering buffalo, mothers and babies with umbilical cords attached, gunned down, drowned, all in the name of the burger factory. The older buffalo form circles around the young, trying to protect them from the bullets.

  I don’t want to live here anymore.

  ‘What is it, sweetness? Did something happen?’ She puts her arm around me and I lean into her, rest my head on her shoulder. She kisses my head and strokes my hair. ‘What is it, baby?’ I can’t tell her because I don’t even know, exactly. I just want her to make it better. Or offer to kill me. I want us to die together, we should have died together.

  ‘Do you ever try to kill yourself anymore?’ I ask.

  ‘Is that what you’re worried about? Aren’t you the sweetest girl. Of course not, honeybunch, and you know why? I’ve found Jesus. He loves me and He loves you, baby.’

  Where the hell did Jesus spring from? I don’t want Jesus between us. I want her like she was, wild-eyed, saying nobody gives a fuck. ‘Do you remember when you wanted us to die together?’

  ‘I do, honeybunch, and I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Jesus forgives me. And He’ll forgive you too, sweetheart, if you let Him.’

  ‘I don’t want forgiveness.’

  ‘We all want forgiveness, baby.’

  I’m so tired.

  ‘I hate to see you sad,’ she says. ‘Let’s think of the good old days. Do you remember puddles? You loved puddles. You’d stamp your foot right in the middle, rain boot or no rain boot. ’Plash, you’d say, big ’plash! Then we’d go home and make Rice Krispie squares, d’you remember that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were the most beautiful child.’

  A Holocaust survivor witnessed a mother pushing her children out a tenth-storey window before jumping herself. She was saving them like Zippy was trying to save me. Now she’s found Jesus.

  The ape man’s gesticulating at her, wants her back rubbing the furniture.

  ‘I better go,’ I say, hoping she’ll stop me.

  ‘I love you, baby.’ She’s already moving away from me, rag in hand.

  Bradley crawls around with iv lines attached, ignoring the central line in his chest. He shows everybody his shoes, hoping they’ll take him outside. I roll around on the floor with him and he tells me where his eyes are. Next he points to his nose. ‘Noth,’ he says. Then he pats his stomach. ‘Tumtum,’ he says. Brenda told me to feed him but every time I hand him something he hands it back, not because he doesn’t want it but because he thinks he’s giving me a present. I bought some grapes for Kadylak and try offering him one. He slobbers all over it before pushing it in my mouth.

  ‘Don’t you like grapes?’ I ask. I offer him another one, which he pushes in my mouth.

  ‘Okay, now it’s your turn,’ I say and try to push one in his mouth. He laughs big belly laughs. The grape tumbles to the floor and he scrambles after it before offering it to me again. ‘You eat it,’ I say. He pops it in his mouth, squirting juice, which makes him chortle even more. Then suddenly fatigue takes over and he lies still, keeping his big wise eyes on me. I slide over so I’m lying only a couple of feet from him. I roll a Nerf ball toward him. He bats it back. We keep this going for a while and I can tell he’s enjoying it. Distraction frees these kids of suffering. Mrs. Bradley shows up and doesn’t look too happy about us crawling around on the floor. When he sees her, Bradley gets so excited he starts full-body bouncing. She picks him up and kisses him about a thousand times. Her pain is excruciating, radiates off her. I close the door quietly behind me.

  The good news is that Tilly gets a job as a governess. The spoiled rich kids misbehave but she shows them tough love and they decide she’s fabulous. Kadylak loves this part, especially the descriptions of the finery in the mansion. The hitch is the lady of the house – who hasn’t allowed her husband to knock her boots since the last baby – finds out that the master’s been getting some on the side with another lady of a manor. She has a hissy fit, orders the servants to pack up a carriage and off she rolls to Mother’s, taking the rotten brats with her. Poor old Tilly’s out of a job again and has to go down the mine.

  ‘Why can’t she get some other job?’ Kadylak asks.

  ‘There aren’t any. Towns lived off the mine in those days. It’s kind of like where we’re headed with Walmart. Pretty soon the only job in town’s going to be in the blue smock.’

  I keep reading. Miners cough and spew and pass out. It’s dark when Tilly goes down the mine, dark when she comes out. Lunch is a crust of bread and hard cheese sprinkled with coal dust.

  ‘How could people do that to people?’ Kadylak asks.

  ‘To get rich.’

  ‘I don’t believe that. It’s just a story.’

  I don’t tell her that millions of kids still work in mines, and explosives and arms factories, fattening some ceo’s bonus. Mrs. Freeman told us that in some countries it’s legal to whip, stone or amputate the limbs of children who fail to do their jobs. You’d like to think the execs on the golf course are ignorant of such practices, but then you figure if Mrs. Freeman knows about it, it ain’t top secret. Kirsten said she thought it was awesome that movie stars are adopting African babies. Mrs. Freeman said it would be more helpful if the movie stars drew attention to the fact that pharmaceutical companies perform drug trials on Africans. Whenever there’s an outbreak of meningitis or some freaky disease, the drug companies get all excited and test drugs they wouldn’t test on their dogs on all these desperate Africans. Mothers line up for days to get their kids treated with White Man’s medicine. If the kids die or get crippled from the drug, nobody can prove it. Nobody’s keeping count of dead Africans.

  I straighten Kadylak’s head scarf. ‘Do you want me to keep reading or should we take a grape break?’

  ‘Grape break,’ she says. I wish I could find her a happy novel. The thing is, all this Tilly trauma works on her the way the Nerf ball works on Bradley.

  Brenda marches through the doors. ‘Lemon, can I speak to you for a minute?’

  This doesn’t sound good. I give Kadylak the grapes and follow the mistress out.

  They’re the same cops who showed up at Dairy Dream. pc Wigglesworth with the ’stache doesn’t look too excited about investigating a girl for assaulting five football players. The catfish tells us to conduct our business elsewhere. I suggest Tim Hortons but they don’t go for it, act like they’ve never eaten a doughnut in their lives. They haul me to the station in a patrol car that stinks of criminals. ‘How did you know I was at the hospital?’ I ask through the plastic barrier.

  ‘Your mother.’

  ‘She’s not my mother.’ I hate her for ratting on me.

  ‘What is she?’

  ‘My stepmother once removed.’

  Th
e coppers put me in a little room with a chair and a table bolted to the floor. A tiny window on the door slides open and shut from the outside so they can keep an eye on me. Wigglesworth brings in a chair and sits on it but pc Ramku-mar stands around taking notes.

  ‘A fella says you broke his nose,’ Wigglesworth says, and I get the feeling he’s one of those losers who manipulate sex toys via the Net, fingering his mouse in Toronto to make some harlot come in Vegas.

  ‘Yeah, well, he was grabbing at me,’ I say.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I don’t know, just grabbing at me.’

  ‘Where? You see, Limone, my problem is I can’t see any defensive wounds. Just looks like you smacked your head into the guy.’

  I stare at the bolts on the table legs. No way I’m saying anything that might lead them to Rossi.

  ‘Larry Bone says you kicked him in the face on another occasion.’

  ‘You believe a junkie?’

  A guy with big glasses slides the door window open and peers in. He slides it shut again and enters.

  ‘This is Detective Sergeant Weech,’ Wigglesworth says, giving him the chair. Weech sits, spreading his legs and resting his Molson tumour on his thighs. Wigglesworth summarizes what I’ve told him. Detective Sergeant Weech doesn’t look too impressed.

  ‘Now why would a girl like yourself,’ he says, ‘with no history of violence, attack a bunch of football players?’

  ‘I was defending myself.’

  ‘From what? Did something else happen? Boys can get pretty wild at parties.’

  ‘I need to pee,’ I lie. Ramkumar leads the way. I sit on the toilet lid in a stall. Maybe I’ll stay here for a few hours. Women come and go, some hooker talking loudly to herself about how much she hates cops. I unzip my pants. The bruising’s spreading like some kind of cancer. Jane Eyre’s in my head again, taking all that bull from Rochester. ‘I live to serve you, sir,’ she tells him. She’d make a good sex slave. I don’t get why that book’s been in print for almost two hundred years. Maybe because there’s a whole bunch of women out there who desire to serve the likes of Rochester. Rossi, for example, she’d bend over for a Rochester in a heartbeat. Why’s everybody always feeling sorry for the numbnuts when he’s stinking rich and has locked his wife in the attic? He only takes his head out of his ass after he’s been blinded, so you have to ask yourself what’s a book that’s been in print for almost two hundred years telling us? Love a disabled man because a fully functioning one is a self-absorbed asshole? You can only trust him when he’s blind? Women can only become equal with the maimed?