Here, p.12
Here, page 12
Smallwood is no different. This Colonial Monstrosity that is Canada House is no different.
His pace quickens as he approaches the doors, and with his fingers he feels the bones of the .22 calibre underneath its skin of clothes and duffel bag. Without even seeing him, Fred knows Smallwood is inside, he feels the little man’s sharp energy, the same barking bite that ejaculated through the radio waves. The same bark his father had when he came home from work. The front door is but twenty feet away, and Fred’s tunnel vision on its handle is tack sharp.
Until he hears a door creak open to the left, around the side of the house. He freezes in his tracks. Allows his vision to widen to survey the scene. He senses it’s a woman before he even sees her. She turns the corner of the house carrying a mop and pail in one hand and two dusters in the other. She is looking at the ground until a crow caws and she looks to the sky, and Fred is stabbed in the heart at the sight of her face. It has been ten years—a long ten years but only ten years—and her face is the same. Sharon. His full body softens. His expression melts, from steely and emotionless to fearful and sad. His heart throbs, not with fury, but something else. Pain. Regret. Love.
Her gaze drops from the sky straight to Fred and she freezes. Drops the pail and they are both frozen in their tracks. Fred is finally able to yank one foot out of the invisible wet concrete it’s been stuck in and take one step in the right direction. The step turns into a gait and Sharon has dropped the rest of her items and she’s running and they throw their arms around each other and she lays her cheek onto his chest and Fred’s heart pounds so loud that he’s almost embarrassed. She squeezes him tighter.
Fred lifts his face to a place in the sky that is brightening. A blue patch, with white clouds the texture of his mother’s homemade bread. He is a child again, lying on his back on the grass. The sun warms Fred’s face.
Midnight Toast
One day you will ask me which is more important?
My life or yours?
I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.
—Khalil Gibran
Hey, man, you believe in ghosts? Voice sedated, like soft jazz, the flowy-haired hippy from the apartment next door jangles her keys from her messenger bag and flips her auburn locks away from her eye.
Ben is a deer in headlights. He’s seen her around. In the hazy smoke of the student centre on campus, only half-real. Come and go from the main part of the house as he’s come and gone from the apartment around the side and up the stairs. He is embarrassingly heart eyed over her aura—floaty, half-present, there in body but part of her eternally blowing around with the autumn leaves and beyond, swirling with the cloud matter, ethereal.
But they’ve never exchanged words. He has always been too intimidated to make eye contact.
No, he says. But one day a fella over there—he nods towards Fleming Street, diagonal across the road—goes, Ya ever notice whenever there’s a ghost around, it smells like bacon?
Well, now. She purses her lips and looks sideways, coy, her gaze towards the clouds and then right at him. I’ve never heard of that before. She sniffs the air, her adorable small nose scrunching like a squirrel’s. I don’t smell bacon. Do you smell bacon?
He can only shake his head. She turns the key. Her white go-go boots all but glow under the December sun. Magical, electric-guitar snowflakes, fused with her being, carrying her around town.
I’m Delia, by the way, she says.
Ben. I’m Ben.
God. Her eyes. Lavender? Do lavender eyes exist?
Ben. We’re havin’ a New Year’s party on Friday. Bunch of folks from the Folklore Department, she says. Musicians. It’ll be groovy. Come by if you’re free.
She pushes the door open and sends a coy, flirtatious smile his way. Waves, her fingers fanning out before she clasps a fist and vanishes through the door.
Did that just happen?
He makes his way up the fire-escape steps, towards their apartment. Inside, Annie sits at the kitchen table, her glasses on the end of her nose, leaning over a biology textbook. As usual. Lab notes spread all over the table, some of them on the floor. She looks up briefly. Hi. Before looking at the notes, frowning.
He presses the button on the toaster. Midnight toast. They’ve been doing it every Thursday night since they moved into the apartment nearly a year ago. What once felt warm and nurturing now feels like just an action.
Annie and Ben met at the Alice Cooper concert at the Thomson Student Centre. Packed, shoulder to shoulder, the crowd thrashing together like a rogue wave. Ben banged into Annie’s shoulder, spilling beer all over her. He stiffened, anticipating a smack or a shove or a hard stare.
His inferiority complex runs deep. Constant requests to do more, more, more from his father. He felt like nothing more than a carbon copy. A reproduction. For his first junior high dance ever, he had taken great care selecting his outfit. He found a checkered blazer— bright-red and black—at the thrift shop in town. Bright-red bowtie. Matching shoes. The night came, and he readied himself, excited to present a piece of his true essence to the world.
The look on his father’s face when he entered the living room was a hack to his soul.
My Jesus, sure ya looks like a fuckin’ clown.
Ben was just shitbaked enough to even go to a dance in the first place, let alone be insulted by the one he should idolize. The dig planted a seed that sprouted into an inferiority complex that bloomed over and over again throughout Ben’s life. He withdrew emotionally from his girlfriends, leaving them in a puddle of what-just-happened? His relationships always started the same, full of hope, adoration, romance. He would shower them with affection, his eyes sparkling at how they made him feel, and then … weeks would pass, months if it was really special, years in one case, until his father’s words from that fateful day would creep from his subconscious into his conscience and he’d flatline. Go steely and withdraw. Stop trying. It happened over and over again. Hunky-dory, until the thought hit him, as it always did eventually: They’re only going to realize I’m a clown.
Until Annie. Things felt different with Annie.
You got me all wet! She laughed, that night at the Alice Cooper show. The relief nearly turned him to a puddle of what-just-happened?
Oh shit, I’m so sorry. I’ll get you another one.
He was tingly from head to toe.
They were glued at the hip for the rest of the night. After the show, they strolled downtown together, eventually ending up sitting on the grass in the middle of a ring of trees in Bannerman Park.
So, what do you be at all the time, Annie?
Well, I play volleyball. I go to classes. I’m doing a science degree. What about you?
He’d applied to university, and they made him take a course in how to speak proper English: it meant that you couldn’t even speak well enough yet to be in university. He didn’t even have to say anything for Annie to energetically sense the chop to his already-fragile confidence. She looked at him, soft and sympathetic, hopeful and expectant, not a hint of pity. And his insides softened.
Oh, I’m … still just trying to figure it out. Workin’ at Sobeys now, the one at the mall. He was conscious of his accent, trying to tame it from taking over.
Oh! Maybe that’s where I’ve seen you before. Rolling the baskets through the conveyer belt with the flappy doors for people to pick up. Dad and I love that one.
You and your dad close?
Best buds.
Oh yeah?
Yeah. She leaned her head on his shoulder and scooched closer to him on the grass. What about you? Are you close with your parents?
Somehow, it all spilled out of him that night. How he felt pressure to make them proud. First generation who could possibly go to university. Be educated, said Mom. Dad wanted him to stay home and carry on with the fishing trade. Mom worked at the plant, encouraged him to take the free tuition granted by Smallwood. We’re just so good as the rest of ’em, she had said, squeezing his shoulders, looking into his eyes. You got to take advantage of the opportunities you got. We never ’ad that.
His mother’s encouragement warmed him, made him feel valued. And so, despite Fadder’s grumbles, off he went to St. John’s. Found a spot in the apartment with a buddy who also wanted to do more with his life.
It was the first time he’d spoken about his feelings to another living soul.
Did you go to the student protests? she said, just before dawn.
Oh yeah, he said. Front and centre.
It was only the highlight of his life. He’d never felt more alive. In opposition to mandatory student fees, about fifteen hundred students gathered on campus in the Thomson centre, storming the Arts and Admin building, setting up “revolutionary headquarters” in the Little Theatre. They camped there for three nights. There were musical performances, an organized food service. It was a community of oneness, a group fighting peacefully for equality.
Ben was kicked out of the university shortly after the occupation ended. He couldn’t keep his grades up.
I was there, too, Annie said. Imagine, we could’ve met then.
Mmm.
We weren’t meant to meet until now, I guess.
They lay on the grass, fingers interlaced, until the sun came up.
Ben’s buddy moved out of the apartment a few months after that. He’d met up with a group of musicians.
It’s just easier to fit in jams if we’re livin’ together. You get it, right, man? We cool?
Oh yeah. No problem. I’ll just pay the full rent myself, I guess.
I think we could be roomies, couldn’t we? Annie’s eyes had sparkled up at him and warmed his insides. They’d only been together for three months, but it could’ve been thirty years. She felt, strangely, like the home he never knew. He didn’t know if he should trust it but somehow, he did.
For months, they lived in peace and harmony. He’d bring home the groceries, she’d do the dishes. They took turns cooking. She’d study, he’d play hockey with the boys. In the evenings they’d settle in to watch Get Smart or Doctor Who or Gilligan’s Island reruns on her father’s old Sony TV. It was a comfortable, stable existence.
But as he continued to work at Sobey’s, and nothing more, the air between them seemed to stiffen.
So … any thoughts about reapplying? she asked one day, over Hunt’s canned spaghetti and a side garden salad with iceberg lettuce and chunks of tomato, drenched in Kraft Thousand Island Dressing.
He rubbed the back of his neck. I just … I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be a teacher. Don’t want to do what I went in for.
The threat of disapproval began to rise in him, the familiar sick feeling more dreadful than usual. Was he becoming too dependent on her?
That’s okay, you’ll figure it out. She squeezed his shoulder, but he felt the air change. The threat of resentment.
She became more focused on her studies.
One day about a month ago, after he’d met her for lunch between classes at the Spanish Cafe, he kissed her goodbye and hung around for a while. Wandered around campus. Found himself in the Thomson Student Centre. Walked through the doors into the realm of peacoats and marijuana smoke. Droopy eyelidded arts students.
Hey, man. You look a little lost, said a tall, slim, giraffe-necked stoner wearing a Joe Cocker baseball tee.
Just … checkin’ the place out.
It’s good, it’s all good, man. Hey, Dr. Music’s playin’ here next week.
Holy shit, no way.
I do say, my man. I do say.
Ben walked to work that day on a cloud. The beginning of transcendence, although he didn’t recognize it as that at the time. A little piece of the next version of himself had been presented as he stepped through the Thomson centre vestibule, into the outside world, into the dreamlike vapour of academic rebellion.
* * *
Annie crunches the toast Ben lays in front of her.
So just now, he says, I ran into the woman who lives next door. She invited us to a New Year’s party.
Oh? Annie looks up. And you … wanna go?
Yeah … I think I do.
Well … the biology department head is having a party too. He lives further down on Circular. Towards the stadium.
In the rich end, ha.
We’re in the rich end, Ben.
Well, yeah … but the servants’ quarters is just across the road. We’re close enough.
Well … maybe we can do both?
Ben’s gut sinks. He doesn’t want to go to the biology party. Who needs to feel stupid? He’s spent most of his life feeling that way. But looking at Annie, sitting there with her books open, hair mussed, her glasses slipping down her nose … he still feels that same warmth of home and he yearns for it, the desperation to hang on. Acceptance. Possibility. Future. He wants it more than anything.
What if their love affair is ending? If it is, he doesn’t yet recognize his feelings as denial. The atmosphere around him carries the energies of those who came before and of those who will come after, knowing things he himself doesn’t yet know. Every pulse in their every vein, every nuance of their every emotion, every intention of genuine feelings that’s been shrouded by perceived manipulation, suffocating beautiful connections throughout time, floats in the air around him. Even if Ben doesn’t recognize that his love for Annie is actually just denial, the walls know the truth, waiting to seep through his skin when the time is right.
Beyond the walls, on New Year’s Eve, like every New Year’s Eve, in every house, under every sky of fireworks, the night holds menace and melancholy. With such high expectations for joy, how can it not set you up for failure? On New Year’s Eve, all the sadness of the world seems to well up in the air and burst out at the stroke of midnight. Every pent-up emotion, every fear, every suspicion gets yelled out, released in the guise of a Happy new year!
Like a good boy, Ben has zipped his khakis and tucked his polo shirt into his pants for the biology mixer. He looks at his watch and schedules in his mind how much time exactly he has to turn into a pumpkin. It’s 8 p.m. Surely, they won’t have to stay there beyond three hours? Surely, they’ll be back where they belong before midnight?
Ben, she says, leading him towards a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a striped wool turtleneck and tan cords. This is Professor Hawke, my thesis supervisor.
Hawke holds out his hand to shake Ben’s. His sturdy shake and intense eye are intended to make Ben feel threatened. It works.
Pleased to meet you, sir. You’re a lucky man, with such a gorgeous young genius by your side, Hawke says.
Yes, sir. He shakes his hand right back, staring into his eyes despite wanting to disintegrate but simultaneously feeling his jealousy bubble deep, desperately trying to suppress it. I am indeed lucky. When will she realize I’m not good enough? Maybe tonight.
As Annie mingles into the crowd, excited to see her classmates, pouring herself a generous glass of Mateus, her attempts to integrate Ben into the group melt away. Ben checks his watch regularly. To him, the conversation sounds like the murmels and warbles of Charlie Brown’s teacher. At nine fifteen he gently places a hand on the small of her back. Just going to the washroom, he whispers in her ear.
Zipping his fly, he thinks, She won’t notice if I slip away for a bit. He washes his hands and regards himself in the mirror. Stretches his mouth down, tilts back his head to make sure there’s no snot. There is a little one. He dabs it away with his index finger. Medium-brown hair. Straight. Cut neat. Blue eyes. Light scruff. Could never quite achieve a smooth shave. Lips, not too thin, not impressively full either. Chin, not weak, but not John Wayne strong. There’s nothing particularly wrong with his looks. He wouldn’t consider himself handsome either. He’s just a bay boy, that’s all. Exiting the bathroom, he weaves himself through the small house, packed with the science-minded, babbling with fervour, the intensity in the room something outside of Ben. He eyeballs Annie, absorbed in whatever Hawke is gesticulating about. He heads towards the front door, shucks his coat over his shoulders, clicks the doorknob and nips out into the crisp, mysterious night. Strides down Circular. When he approaches the house, he can already hear the bass thump from the speakers. The windows are dark, but red-and-blue party lights dance into the night.
The entire house seems to throb, harder and harder into his eardrums and his heart with each step closer. When he pushes the front door open and steps inside, it’s as if he has been suctioned through a tunnel to a different level of existence. The thudding speakers, the music, the voices, the smoke, the lights … The air alone makes him feel high.
Ben!
Delia.
She seems to float towards him, a Stevie Nicks slash Brigitte Bardot vibe, wearing a long, floral, translucent kimono. The go-go boots, a body-hugging black minidress—sleeveless with a mock turtleneck—giant, thick silver-hoop earrings. Lilac and silver cat eyes. She shimmers. Her arms outstretched, fluid, she sways from side to side until she reaches him. Her scent dives into his nostrils, swims up into his brain, front crawls and backstrokes around in his mind. She wraps her arms around his neck and pulls him in. Her hair smells like lavender.
I’m so glad you came! Here, let me take your coat. She holds out her arms while he shrugs it off his shoulders. He scans the lavish foyer. She tosses his coat at the foot of the stairs, nonchalant, and he glances at it there, on the floor, surprised at the casual discard. She throws her head back to release the most mellifluous laughter he has ever heard. You’ll find it again if you’re meant to. She winks. Maybe it’s the old coat of an old you. She lays a hand on his shoulder. Lemme give you the tour …
