Lucy Cloud

by Anne Lévesque

Thirty minutes later she is dipping her feet in a pool of steaming water. Perspiration runs down her bare breasts and flanks, drips onto the ancient stone on which she is sitting and into the waters, becoming part of the steamy air. In these subterranean rooms the women are free. Glistening bodies bare, they loll on the stone benches, sit side by side talking and laughing, get pummelled by the cheerful masseuse (when Lucy walks by her she slaps one of her buttocks: too white, too skinny, perhaps), traipse from one dark cavern to the next, accompanied, some of them, by small children of both genders. Wendy would love this, she thinks.

  Her mother lives on Manitoulin Island now, in a little cottage on the grounds of an inn that is closed in the winter. It’s quiet, she says, meaning she can smoke a joint on the porch and turn on the stereo full blast. She moved there because of a man she met online. The relationship didn’t survive but it was worth it, she says. ‘I would have never moved here otherwise. There’s a reason for everything.’ There is another man, someone she met at Tai Chi, but they don’t live together. So maybe it will last. She works at the front desk of the inn six months a year and gets employment insurance in the winter.

  ‘Perfect,’ she says. ‘I could go to Tobago every winter if I wanted.’ But that’s unlikely now that she and Nelson have finally called it quits. For years he had filled the gaps. And then there was the fact that you can’t collect employment insurance benefits when you’re out of the country. She had tried that once and had to pay back ‘a lot of dough, plus a penalty.’ But Joe (Tai Chi Joe, a big-bellied guy who wears black t-shirts and shaves his already bald head) says that Nicaragua is cheap, maybe they’ll check it out next winter. She has begun to worry about her health. She stopped smoking since moving to Manitoulin and uses a vaporizer for the weed. Every time Lucy sees her she tells her about some new vitamin or herbal supplement. Krill oil. Essiac. Four thieves’ oil. This time it’s something called coconut pulling.

  ‘What does it do?’

  ‘It gets rid of the gunk in your mouth. All the germs and stuff.’ And she will only drink bottled water.

  ‘Mom. That’s crazy. It’s a scam. Most of the time it’s city water anyway. You’re giving all that money to Nestlé and Coke.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ She singsongs, ‘They’re going to kill those poor children …’

  ‘You’re impossible. You know that?’

  Then there’s Eckhart Tolle. Wendy and Joe are big fans of his spiritual writings. ‘Live in the now,’ she says.

  And this Lucy has to agree with.

  Leaving the hamam she feels light, cleansed of her journey. Back in the apartment she resists lying on the bed except to adjust the floor-fan, which she hopes will scatter the lighter insects while she sleeps. Three hours to go. She unpacks, leans the empty backpack in a corner. It topples onto the floor. Looks under the bed and decides to sweep up. Has a cup of hot water and the granola bar she bought at the Montréal airport. Two hours to go. She opens the back door to the enclosed terrace. It’s a place where a woman can come out with no hijab, hang laundry on a clothesline, pump water, sit on the little bench and raise her face to the sun. Hear and smell the life of her neighbourhood. The smell of garlic and chilis frying. The splash of water on stone. Music. An electric water pump whines and shudders to a stop. Starts up again, drowning out the cries and calls of children, the voices of men and women, a television. Or is it a radio?

  What would Ryan think of this place? How would he be? How would they be?

  After he finished paying his student loan he asked her to go to Cuba with him to celebrate.

  ‘I can’t go to a resort,’ she said. She told him what she had seen happen in Tea Hill. The water shortages at the standpipes. The armed guards keeping locals off the beach. The place turned into a village of waiters and cleaners.

  ‘Okay-okay,’ he said, putting his hands up, laughing. They went to Varadero but stayed in a state-run hotel on the main street, just across from the white and turquoise beach. The room was small and dowdy but downstairs the bar was old-school swank and full of Cubans, not Canadians. The bartender made the mojitos from scratch. They were doubles and after the third one they were drunk.

  They decided that they wanted to live together.

  The next time Ryan came home from Fort Mac he moved in to her house. He plans to till Alec and John A’s old garden, build a greenhouse. They want to grow vegetables. Get laying hens. Find some kind of way to make a living there.

  She wakes with a start. Strange that they still use a cannon to announce the end of the fast. There are precise timetables now, watches and even cellphone apps. But the sound of the cannon is part of the ritual, signalling the beginning of the nightly festivities. The families gathering to eat, and, those who can afford it, to feast.

  Looking up she sees a fat centipede crawling across the ceiling. Sometime during the night it will fall on her. But she’ll be ready. Will wake as soon as it lands, will brush it off and fall back to sleep. She’s only been bitten once.

  Tomorrow she will go for a long walk. It’s the prep walk, the getting-the-feel-of-the-place walk. It may not be necessary but she doesn’t want to leave it out, for all she knows it may be integral to the process. She has no illusions about what she’s doing. It’s a flimsy Band-Aid at most. The benefits are mostly psychological. But psychological is good, Mohammed says. (‘What am I saying? You’re the psychologist.’) A reprieve is better than nothing at all.

  Always, she is drawn to the children. Their hard feet kicking a football made of rags. Their hard hips jutting out to carry babies. Their hard heads plying water jugs. Their soft, soft eyes. They will be the first to perceive the change. Right after the animals, the birds, which begin to fly erratically, become eerily silent or chirp at odd times.

  The second or maybe third day. Even before they wake the adults will feel it. An intimation of heaviness, a forgotten languor. A memory buried far beneath hope. In the dawnlight they get up from the mat, the charpoy, the rug on the earthen floor, and walk to the wasteland or the railroad track to squat. And while they wait for their bowels to empty, while their dark urine rolls on the baked ground, they feel the coming rain. Later that same day or the next the first cloud will appear. Diaphanous, almost invisible, the pale second-cousin of a cloud, but a covenant nevertheless.

  Lucy MacLeod walks on the dusty streets of the parched land, summoning the forces of moisture, the potential of clouds, the sky’s blessing.