by Eva Crocker
“Yes we did, we used a condom. You walked over to the shelf, you got it off the shelf, remember?” I said, the ceiling swooping back and forth above me.
“Never mind, go back to sleep,” he said.
In the morning I walked to my apartment above the laundromat, still queasily drunk. I felt something soupy slide out of me. In the apartment my books were slumped on the shelves because Dan had come by to pick up his books while I was out. The sofa was gone. I took my underwear off in the living room and saw a thick white smear on the crotch. There was something cracked and shiny, like dried egg whites, on the inside of my thighs. It took me a moment to understand. No one had ever come inside me before. Thankfully I started my period later that day, a spot of red-brown luck.
hi vivian,
Constable Joe Michaels here. I work in the communications department at the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary. I saw the post you tagged our department in last night and wanted to reach out. I wanted to say that I would be happy to chat with your friend about her experience. At this juncture, I’m reaching out not as a member of the rnc but as just another human being. Please tell your friend she is welcome to message me here.
“She needs to delete that post, fucking immediately,” I said. I pulled a T-shirt over my head.
“If he’s communications he should contact you on behalf of the RNC. What’s this touchy-feely ‘fellow human being’ bullshit? Where was that when they searched your house?” Kris said.
“Give me my phone, I’m going to call Viv and tell her to delete it.”
“Okay.” Kris put the phone down beside her. “Just think about what you want before you do it. Like, you should definitely keep the screenshot of that message he sent, just in case things escalate. You can use it in your complaint if you decide you want to do one. There’s no way he’s allowed to do that.”
“I’ll keep the screenshot but I want the post deleted.”
“Okay, here’s the thing,” Kris said. “I’m worried deleting it could make you look bad, guilty. You really need to talk to a lawyer, this whole situation is so fucked up.”
She held the phone out to me.
“I have to get ready for work,” I said.
“Don’t let him get away with this,” Kris said, kicking the covers off. “Nail that fucker.”
I left the room. My body was vibrating with anger. I wasn’t ready to speak to Viv. I didn’t want to hear her justification for it.
I was doing box office for a matinee performance of a children’s puppet show. I went up the steep stairs to flick on the lights in the theatre, willing my great-great-grandfather to protect me from the nastier ghosts that might be lurking up there. The marionettes were laid out on the stage, the strings that controlled them stretched in straight lines from the crossed pieces of wood above their heads to their limbs.
There were six farm animals, and a human farm girl in a gingham dress with a white apron and a white bonnet. The faces and hands were made of hand-carved, painted wood. There was a rooster with hundreds of rust-coloured feathers sewn to its body and a sheep covered in tufts of unprocessed wool.
The farm girl had strips of lashes stuck above and below her big blue eyes. She had two braids with a stiff gingham bow at the bottom of each one. The braids looked like they were made of real hair — I knew I shouldn’t touch them but I picked a braid off her chest and rubbed it between my fingers. It didn’t feel like plastic. Maybe horse hair. At that moment the side door of the theatre banged open, letting in a blast of sunlight. I dropped the braid and the bow untied. The puppeteer walked in with a fat tote bag under each arm and a knapsack on her back.
“I was just up here turning on the lights for you,” I said, stepping away from the puppets.
“Thanks.” She dropped her bags on the stage and wiped sweat off her forehead.
“I should get back to the box office,” I said, fleeing the loose bow.
On the way down the stairs I heard the phone ringing. I raced to the box office and pulled the receiver from its cradle.
“The Theatre on Victoria,” I huffed into the phone.
“Hi there, this is Constable Joe Michaels from the RNC. I’m looking for Stacey Power.”
Outside, an elderly woman was walking towards the entrance, reaching for the button that made the automated door open. I hung up the phone and went to hold the door for her.
“Have you still got tickets to the matinee? I’m taking my granddaughter this afternoon, she’s four, is it appropriate for a four-year-old? Could a four-year-old enjoy it?”
“Let me see what’s left.” I slid behind the desk, my hands were shaking.
I tried not to look at the phone. I took the woman’s payment for one senior and one child. How did they know where I worked? From reading my emails. Or maybe I’d said when they interviewed me on the day they searched the house. I felt a rush like tipping backwards on the swings: they knew everything about me. Maybe he’d even checked my work schedule.
I took my phone out and found Constable Joe Michaels’s Facebook profile. I tried to remember if he had been there the day of the search but I couldn’t picture any of their faces besides Hamlyn’s. This guy looked about thirty-five, his teeth were crowded together, the two front ones overlapping. There was acne around his temples, bright red welts with dark yellow pinpricks at their apex. I clicked through photos of him at some cop barbeque.
He didn’t call back. Every time the phone rang my stomach cramped, but he didn’t call back all afternoon.
Kris and I had planned to go to a movie when I got off. She parked outside and waited while I did off the cash and locked the float in the closet. When I got in the car she passed me a Tupperware of the fancy boxed macaroni we liked, mixed with kale and frozen peas.
“There’s a clean fork in the cup holder,” she said, putting the car in reverse. “I think we can make it, we might miss the previews.”
I peeled the lid off the plastic container, steam rising off the gluey meal. This was her apology and it worked. I was starving and the noodles were creamy and salty.
“How was your day?” she asked.
For a moment I considered not telling her. It seemed like the sort of thing that could maybe be undone if you never ever mentioned it to another person.
“He called me.”
“Who?”
“The cop, the communications guy. On the work phone.”
“What? What the fuck? Are they allowed to do that?”
“I don’t know what they’re allowed to do, whatever the fuck they want I guess,” I said through a lump of masticated macaroni.
“What did he say?”
“Just that he was looking for me, and I hung up.”
“Imagine if someone else answered — that could get you fired.”
“He knows everything about me, where I work, where I live. He’s probably seen naked photos of me.”
“Stacey, you have to do a complaint.”
I put another forkful of food in my mouth.
“Stacey? Are you going to do it?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to do it.”
My phone buzzed with a message from Viv: Did you get that screenshot?? I put my phone in my knapsack without answering.
* * *
I typed the complaint on the theatre computer during my box office shift the following night. I was expected to wait a half hour after the show started to do off the cash, in case of latecomers. The person on bar was supposed to stay for the length of the show to serve drinks afterwards.
I downloaded the form from an incredibly shitty-looking website and printed it in the office. It was one page: at the top you filled in your information and the date of the incident, the names of the officer(s) involved. I didn’t know the names of the officers involved. There were about five empty line
s in the middle of the page for you to fill with a description of what happened. Then a space for your signature. I decided to type my description up on a separate sheet and staple it to the back of the form.
I struggled with the tone. I wanted to sound formal but also capture how disturbing the morning had been. I wrote “I was wearing pyjamas.” It’s hard to feel credible in your pyjamas, especially when the people condemning you are wearing matching uniforms. I wanted to write “I wasn’t wearing a bra” but that felt too informal. Even though I’d hated that they could see my nipples through my shirt. It was like the nightmare of finding yourself naked in front of the class. I deleted “I was wearing pyjamas” and wrote “I didn’t have a chance to get dressed.”
Joanna was on bar that night. She wandered over to the box office and peeled open a Tupperware of squares. Beads of condensation sat on the cookies’ smooth chocolate top layer.
“Nanaimo bars, do you want one? What are you working on? I didn’t know you write.”
I took a square from the container, a mess of golden crumbs fell on the counter. I wanted to finish the complaint so I could print it off and take it home with me.
“Did you make these?” I said.
“Is that a script?”
“No.”
“Are you back in school?” Joanna asked.
“No. It’s kind of a personal account.” I minimized the document.
“Like creative non-fiction?” Joanna Spencer’s hair was in a big bun on top of her head. She laid the open Tupperware on the counter and started eating a square. “I’m thinking of writing a play about my open relationship.”
“Cool.”
“Non-monogamy is all about respect, you just have to be honest and open with each other.”
I finished the cookie and sucked the creamy chocolate off my fingers. Joanna was eating hers in small bites, leaving impressions of her front teeth in the chocolate.
“Anyway, I think I told you this before but there’s a role in my new film I think you’d be perfect for. I’m going to ask you to read the script if you have time.”
“I’d love that.” For the past month I’d been trying to think of a way to bring the film up to Joanna every time I saw her, but I was so close to finishing the complaint.
Joanna leaned over and looked at my screen. “Oh, eight-thirty, you’re done. I’ll let you get to the cash.”
I realized she wanted to use the box office computer.
“There’s actually a lot of tickets that haven’t been picked up, I might wait a bit.” I looked purposefully at the computer screen until she took her container back to the bar.
I stood in front of the printer as it pushed my account out line by line — a single, double-sided sheet. I didn’t want to have to sit with Constable Bradley in the windowless conference room again. I didn’t want there to be another reason for my name to pop up in the cop database when they did searches for files on child porn or credit card theft or whatever “illegal digital material” meant. A part of me even felt guilty that someone might get a talking-to from their boss — when I get the wrong dish in a restaurant I don’t send it back for the same reason. Probably a moot concern, though — probably they all agree everyone was just doing their job. So they were a little overzealous. Mistakes happen. When cops make a mistake, suddenly mistakes are allowed to happen. Suddenly we’re all just humans doing our best to make a go of it. I put the complaint inside a magazine to keep it from wrinkling. I’d packed the magazine in my bookbag for that purpose before leaving the house. I leaned into the bar and waved goodbye to Joanna.
Then I walked to the Battery to make a wish. The whole way up there I recited the complaint in my head, thinking about my word choice.
A couple were smoking in their station wagon with the nose pointed at the harbour. A hand reached out the passenger window and ashed into the snow. I stood on the thigh-high rock wall that surrounds the cannon; on the other side of the ledge, a steep hill and then ocean. Fleetwood Mac was playing in the car behind me. I hoped the couple didn’t think I was going to kill myself — people went up there to do that. The radio announcer’s voice cut in. Sometimes tourists walked towards the lip of the cliff with their cameras out and were lifted over the edge by the wind.
My plan had been to wish that nothing bad came of the complaint but instead I found myself wishing for a part in Joanna’s film. Then wishing away the awful hope that there was still time to get a role good enough to change the direction of my life. Hope, I knew, should be dwindling every day but was actually getting more and more acute. Every time I got a phone call or an email, hope and dread rushed through me. When it was just a mailing list I’d signed up for or a late notice from the library a swill of disappointment mixed with relief sloshed around inside me because it wasn’t an opportunity or a rejection.
I hopped off the wall and started walking home through wet snow in my new boots. Relishing the dryness of my socks. I took out my phone and called Viv.
“What are you doing?” I asked when she picked up.
“You’re upset with me.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why would you post that?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. Do you want me to delete it?”
“Kris said deleting it now would make me look guilty or something. You see how fucked up and complicated this is? It’s my private business.”
“Stacey, I’m really sorry. It was stupid of me.”
I kicked a boulder of hard snow the plow had made.
“Are you outside? I hear the wind,” Viv said.
“I’m walking in the Battery.”
“I miss you.”
“I know, I miss you too,” I told her.
* * *
It took two weeks for the cops to respond to my complaint. I got a call from Constable Michelle Pike. “The first step in the complaint process is that we’ll try to resolve things verbally, by having you come in and speak with Constable Bradley,” she said.
“What if things aren’t resolved verbally?”
“There’ll be further review. Would Thursday next week work for you? In the afternoon?”
On Thursday afternoon, I walked to the police station. There was a different front desk cop this time. A young guy with a thick seventies moustache; if I’d seen him out of uniform I would have assumed the moustache was ironic. Maybe he thought his whole career was ironic. I handed him my ID and he led me through the hallway to the same boardroom I’d been in before. This time it was empty.
“Constable Bradley is running late, he’ll be right with you.” The front desk cop closed the door. I wanted to check to see if he’d locked me in but I resisted the impulse. I sat in the same chair as last time, two down from the head of the table, and waited.
Constable Bradley arrived with sweat on his forehead and above his lip. Again I was struck by how tall he was. I wondered if he’d been bullied about it when he was a kid.
He had on the same kind of pale suit he’d been wearing the first time we met and a messenger bag over one shoulder. He pulled out the wheelie chair at the head of the table.
“Okay, thank you for coming in, I just need a moment to get situated.”
I didn’t say anything. He started taking piles of paper out of the bag and laying them on the table. A photocopy of my complaint form sat on top of one pile; I recognized my own signature at the bottom of the page.
He patted the three stacks of paperwork and then looked up at me. “So today we’re here to try and resolve things verbally. I’ve reviewed your file and first of all I just want to say, I understand why you were upset. You know I have a mother, a wife and a daughter. I don’t like the idea of this happening to them — I can see why you would be scared. It’s unpleasant, right?”
He waited for me to answer but I didn’t say anything.
/>
“You know what, the other night my son came home from hockey early, I wasn’t expecting it, I was alone in the house and it really gave me a fright — me, a big man, a police officer. It’s unpleasant to be startled. Nobody likes that.”
Again he paused and waited for me to say something.
“Do you want some water?” he asked.
“No thanks.” I was thirsty but I didn’t want to slow things down.
“I listened to the recording of the incident and you sounded very distraught. So I want to acknowledge this was an unpleasant experience for you.”
“Recording?”
“One of the officers was wearing an audio recorder, that’s normal.”
“No one told me that.”
The second wave of cops coming through the back door, being told to sit on the couch, going upstairs to look for the lease, the young cop taking in the mess of tissues around my bed, being read the warrant, the questioning, the small talk as they left. He’d heard all of it. I couldn’t look at him.
“They didn’t have to go through my computer.” My voice came out quiet. “It’s a violation of my privacy.”
“The officers who reviewed your hard drive are trained professionals. They’re looking for evidence of illegal activity. Believe me, they’re not interested in your private life. You know what’s most disappointing about this case? The bad guy got away. We hate that. You went through all this unpleasantness and we didn’t get the bad guy.”
“What do you mean?”
“The suspect left the province. We’ve had to close the case: there’s no new evidence, it’s a small unit, they have to move on to more pressing concerns.”
“So it’s done? I’m not connected to this anymore?”
