The Age

  ALSO BY NANCY LEE

  Dead Girls

  Copyright © 2014 by Nancy Lee

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Lee, Nancy, 1970–

  The age / Nancy Lee.

  ISBN 978-0-7710-5254-5

  I. Title.

  PS8573.E34845A64 2013 C813′.6 C2012-906080-1

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters in this book and persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover image © Anthony Hatley/ Millennium Images, UK

  Book design by CS Richardson

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  A Penguin Random House Company

  One Toronto Street

  Suite 300

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For my mom and John

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgements

  THE DAY GOES DOWN IN FIRE. Sooty clouds crush the sun to a red stain at the horizon. The dwindling light plays tricks, douses the mountains in shellac, casts hedges and stretches of asphalt as mirrors. Gerry squints against the glare, her grip on the handlebars part sweat, part tack of peeling tape as she races her ten-speed away from a half-eaten Sunday dinner and her mom’s prying small talk, past split-levels and wide lawns.

  She crosses into the park and coasts, shakes out her arms, swallows the pulse in her throat, lets the gravel drag beneath her tires. Ahead on the path, old men in suspenders and rolled shirtsleeves stoop over bocce balls. They cluck their tongues at her approach. Grandpas hooked by trailing hair and drainpipe jeans, blind to her mud-splattered high-tops and frayed fatigue jacket. She pulls the cycling cap from her back pocket, twists her hair up and under. The old men moan, flap their hands in disappointment.

  Dusk rises from wet grass, mixes with the scummy stench of the nearby pond. Below the slope of the path, down beside the running track, BMX boys huddle under the long shadows of willow trees. Gerry slows to watch them. Bikes strewn, they guzzle beer from stubbies, pose muscled bodies like angry cutouts. Boys who have graduated but don’t have jobs, who cruise the park in acid-wash and storm-riders, smoke dope and stab at picnic tables with pocketknives. One of them hikes a middle finger in front of his Ray-Bans, shouts, “Take a picture, faggot, it lasts longer.” Greasy hair, open mouth, he reclines, knees spread in invitation.

  She guesses at distances: from each of them to their bikes, from her spot on the path to the park exit, works up speed, ready to sprint past. At the last second, she skids out her back tire, sprays them with a fan of gravel, listens to it hit like shrapnel as she rides away.

  “You’re dead, you little prick!” one of them shouts. Somewhere behind her, a beer bottle smashes into a tree.

  Under the fizz and tick of streetlights, she passes lit windows of houses where mothers tidy kitchens and fathers fold newspapers in front of the TV. She knows their daughters, bloodless girls who jostle her in the hallways at school, nick with warning glances. Preppy girls with chiselled bobs and frosted smiles like cotton candy over barbed wire. Rocker chicks with glazed eyes, who reek of cigarettes, Juicy Fruit, and Charlie, bitch-bags dripping feathers and rabbits’ feet. Barricaded in their bedrooms, armed with mousse cartridges and hairspray, their skulls rattle with Tic Tacs. They tie up phone lines, assemble mixed tapes, inflict handjobs on boyfriends before doing their homework.

  Always, it seems, Gerry’s mind is full of them, girls, flitting and hovering. At school, they swarm beside lockers, drawn to one another but not to her. She scolds herself to ignore them. When they see her face on the evening news, that’s when their gaping mouths will be worth imagining.

  Windows blur into smears of yellow. She pedals faster, begins a mental countdown, imagines the air-scrape of missiles, the end of neighbourhoods, houses lit like balsa wood, each particle an inferno. She speeds downhill, abandons the useless daughters, the sound of their burning.

  Apart from the TV’s blue strobe in the living-room window, Megan’s house sits dark. Gerry wonders if Megan’s father has fallen asleep in his chair again, suit rumpled, shoes shined. She rounds the bushes to the half-buried septic tank, pushes up her sleeves, feels the rusty surface for a hold that won’t cut her hand. She hoists herself, scrambles to kneel on the flexing metal, stretches to the window. Glass stucco grazes her arms. The ledge at her collarbone, she blinks, waits for her eyes to adjust to the dim of Megan’s bedroom.

  Megan’s body offers itself on full display: legs an open V, triangle thatch of pubic hair, half-moon arcs of breasts, her shaved head hidden beneath the window. Ian lies on his stomach, naked from the waist up, arms hooked around Megan’s thighs, face buried. Megan moves her hips in slow underwater circles that make Gerry shudder.

  She mimics Megan’s hips with her own, tosses her head as she imagines Megan doing. Low in Gerry’s belly, secret muscles twitch and tense. The grit under her sneaker shifts with her rocking. Her foot starts a slow, easy slip. She steps back to steady herself but finds only soft, yielding air. As she tips, her fingers snatch at the ledge, her hands flail out, a sting catches her wrist. The ground slams up against her back.

  She opens her eyes to dirty twilight, tall grass, and the bowed heads of dandelions. A sob burbles, then quells. She rolls onto her side and tries to breathe normally. When she can finally sit up, she finds blood, a dark dribble down the pale blade of her arm.

  MEGAN’S LIVING ROOM IS ALWAYS STUFFY, like a hand over Gerry’s face, heat that starts in the matted carpet beneath her socks, then rises to muddy the air. Gerry crouches in front of Clem, tries to catch his eye, holds up her wrist with its makeshift bandage, a wad of paper towel affixed with masking tape. She points to a small spot of blood leaking through. Her wounds are of no interest to him. He stares past her to the screen.

  Behind her, the TV clatters with the giant slots of The Joker’s Wild. She hates game shows, wishes she could watch the news, a second Soviet warship spotted in the North Atlantic, but Clem shouts at every channel change. Instead, Gerry studies the pits and lines of his skin. Some days his expression looks gouged out of clay or carved into leather; today it’s traced on paper. If she took an eraser to him, she could make him disappear.

  “Gerry Mouse!” Ian’s voice jolts her. He stands in the hallway, bare-chested, T-shirt in hand. His open belt buckle dangles. A thin line of hair starts at his belly button and burrows into his jeans, his half-nakedness an insult, a dare.

  She sniffs, unimpressed. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Guess it wa
s you making that racket.” He stretches the T-shirt over his elbows, flashes his shaggy armpits.

  Gerry cringes. “Surprised you could hear with your mouth full.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Lark will be.” The TV light cuts shapes in the dark of Clem’s eyes.

  “Fucking shut it about that, I’m not even kidding.” Ian kicks at the doorframe to make his point. She ignores him, waits for him to leave.

  No matter how hard she looks, she sees no trace of Clem’s younger self. Nothing like the photos in the library microfiche, yellowed newspapers lit from behind, the X-rayed past: a pointy-faced man in heavy glasses, curly hair combed to a peak at the front of his head. Clem, who served twenty-five years for the death of a homeless man sleeping under a contractor’s trailer at a dam site. The maximum because he refused to name other protesters, a detail that, in her mind, separates him from the toxic waste of adulthood.

  She wonders if the dead man haunted Clem, if that explained his white hair, his bewildered expression, or whether prison alone did that to a person, whether she herself might go to jail a young girl and leave a hobbled old woman.

  Soon Megan will move Clem to an old folks’ home. Even if Gerry had the courage to tell him, he wouldn’t understand. She presses her fingers to his papery wrist, holds her breath to feel his pulse.

  She finds the four of them gathered at the kitchen table, Andri recapping the weekend’s testing at Michelle’s family farm. Gerry slips into the chair beside him, draws her feet up onto the seat, tries to picture Andri and pregnant Michelle in lab coats and goggles, marking results on clipboards as they watch things explode. What things, Gerry isn’t sure. Andri fiddles with a tube of cough candy, peels the foil wrapper in short, exact tears, begins a mazelike explanation of trajectory effects, gravitational forces, momentum conservation. His rough Eastern European accent muffles in his beard. She follows the meaning of his words but not the message of them strung together.

  Across from her, Ian glares, leans back in his chair, and wiggles a spastic squeak out of its metal joints. She avoids his gaze by watching Megan fold laundry, her long fingers pinching the seams of Clem’s shirts. Megan’s profile reminds Gerry of old statues she’s seen in books at school, hard marble angles that taper into the pillowy curve of her lips. Her shorn head is a constant temptation, like a nap of fur. Gerry rubs her hands against her jeans, soothed by the friction.

  As Andri speaks, Michelle nods in agreement. Her pregnancy makes Gerry feel both protected and protective. At times, she admires Michelle’s peaceful reserve, so opposite to the frenzy Gerry feels as she waits for a chance to speak. Other times, Michelle’s placid face makes Gerry sad, especially when she thinks of Michelle’s family: her crazy brother alone on a farm, collecting guns, believing in flying saucers and people who live at the centre of the earth, their parents dead in a car accident before she graduated high school.

  Ian belches, a deep, yawning echo.

  Andri continues to talk, scrawls on the sheet of paper in front of him, equations and a diagram of the building, the street, arrows pointing off in different directions. Under Andri’s trampled parka, the edges of his shirts and sweaters overlap. Gerry admires his weirdness, his fear of cold, his different-coloured eyes, arbitrary patterns in his thin, patchy beard. She loves his smell, the perfume of mentholated lozenges clicking against his crooked teeth. Lemons, but not sickly and artificial, green and sharp, like unripe fruit. His gruffness makes him seem an old man trapped in a younger man’s body. In his home country, he had trained as an electrical engineer, perhaps that was what made him so serious. She studies the smooth stretches of skin above his beard and collar and wishes she could touch them, work out his true age.

  Andri called the device “a cinch” when Megan first asked if he could build one. Gerry collects these snippets, joins their mismatched sides together whenever she’s asked to leave the room. Twice, Ian has told her to stop coming around. She wears them out, climbs in through the windows, rises up from the basement, sits on the back porch and pounds her heels into the stairs. She tries to make herself indispensable by helping with Clem.

  Andri catches her stare and smiles. She blinks at the table. He clasps her wrist, his grip warm and meaty. His thumb grazes the stained bandage. “Killing yourself?”

  She snatches her hand into her lap, seesaws between pride and embarrassment, being thought capable, then incapable of suicide, shakes her head.

  “Too bad.”

  “Andri!” Megan’s disapproval prickles a flush into Gerry’s face.

  “What? When I was her age, we were always trying to kill ourselves. It was a gesture.”

  Gerry studies the creases around Andri’s eyes. Ian is three years older than she is, Megan and Michelle will turn twenty-nine in the same month, but Andri remains a puzzle. “When were you my age?”

  Andri feigns being hit by a bullet and collapses onto the table. Everyone laughs. Gerry smiles, uncertain in the wake of her accidental joke.

  “Such cruelty,” Andri says as he sits up.

  Megan rises from the table to put the kettle on for Clem’s tea and medicine. “What about the route?”

  Ian’s chair drops with a thud. A pressure settles over Gerry’s foot. Ian’s heel grinds down, pins her, his gaze taunts her to rat him out. “Done,” he says.

  “You’ve mapped it? Marked it? Timed it from beginning to end?”

  “Well, duh.” Ian says.

  Gerry suckles the inside of her cheek, tries not to wince.

  “Anyway.” He lifts his chin. “Who cares about the route if we can’t get into the building?” His boot eases off. Gerry curls her toes against a cramp.

  Megan stares at him. “I’m still working on access. Maybe something tonight.”

  Ian’s mouth flattens.

  Andri snorts and chuckles, as if another joke has been told. His coolness makes Gerry want to reach under the table and squeeze his hand.

  Ian and Megan stay in the kitchen to argue. The kettle whistles its own complaint. Gerry waits on the couch, hopes Ian will storm out, leave her to talk to Megan alone. With her stockpile of overheard facts, it’s easy to cast herself in their plan. She has been to the building, stared into it from the sidewalk, peered through glass walls to the darkened lobby, where an empty security console hulked in front of two rows of elevators. The word revenue makes her wonder if they keep money there.

  Out on the street, Andri’s Chevette splutters. Gerry pulls an elastic through her hair. The band snaps back in her fingers and the sting makes her curse. She apologizes to Clem as she tucks stray wisps of hair under her cap.

  “Ian’ll drive you.” Megan leans in the doorway, arms crossed.

  “I’m gonna ride,” Gerry says. She sidesteps to avoid a shove as Ian passes.

  Megan shakes her head. “It’s late. Make sure she gets home.”

  Ian yanks open the front door. A moustached man in a paisley shirt stands on the stoop, a case of beer under his arm, his hand poised to knock. Ian wrenches the doorknob back and forth. The metal clacking grates at Gerry. Night air drifts in and settles cold against her face. The man on the stoop smiles without blinking.

  “Close the goddamn door!” Clem’s voice is surprisingly loud.

  Megan giggles.

  Gerry grins, wishes she had turned in time to see his lips move.

  They dodge awkwardly at the door. Ian and Gerry shuffle out, the man slips in.

  On the grass, Ian foot-dribbles an invisible soccer ball. “Who do you think that was?”

  “Magnum P.I.?” The dials of her bike lock jam under her fingers.

  Ian snickers. “Yeah, it did sort of look like him, didn’t it? Fuck.” He steps backward to the sidewalk and cranes to see into the living-room window. “Here.” He claps his hands together. “I’ll give you a boost and you tell me what they’re doing.” His agitation makes the world seem temporarily fair.

  “What do you care?” Gerry backs her bike away from the house. “You’ve got L
ark.”

  “So I do.”

  As she passes, he wings his shoulder into her. She ducks and elbows him, catches a patch of softness under his ribs.

  “Jesus!” The strain in his voice pleases her.

  From the sidewalk they watch the window. The glowing rectangle exposes only the TV’s boxy back, a hazy ceiling light, the top edge of a far wall. Ian rocks on his heels. “What the hell is up with you, anyway? You’re like a bitchy twelve-year-old. You finally get your period or what?”

  “At least I’m not some stuck-up private school skeeze. She’s like, my age, you know.” Gerry drags the bike, wheels juddering over the curb.

  He follows her onto the road. “Eat your heart out, Gerry Mouse. She’s a year older and about ten years more mature.” He holds the rim of her bike seat; his arm jerks, piston enough to push or pull her at will. “I’ve been babysitting you since kindergarten and that don’t exactly pay dividends, if you get my drift.”

  “Then tell Megan about her.”

  His head sways back in exaggerated reaction. She wants to slap him, watch the shock blossom on his face.

  “The little mascot has no idea what she’s talking about right now.”

  “Fuck you.” Her voice repeats tinny and off-key in her head. She sounds childish, even to herself.

  “Come on.” The words stretch, a whining complaint. He taps the seat post, points to his car. “Let’s live to fight another day.”

  She steps hard and slow on the pedals, balances her weight, and turns a tight circle. “I’m going.”

  “I’m not chasing you.”

  “No shit.” She sprints away, limbs fizzing.

  Around the park’s perimeter streetlights smoulder, but cutting through will get her home faster. Gravel pops, smooths to grass, then pops again as Gerry rights herself on the unlit path. The sky a moonless shield, she pedals blind, night air thick and silky, velour against her face and arms.

  She is not afraid of the dark, she tells herself. She is afraid of spiders, of dying a virgin, of the new virus, detonators and plutonium, warships in the Persian Gulf. She is afraid of airplane sounds, the shape of certain cloud formations, gas masks, submarines, the electric squeal of the emergency broadcast system, farmers’ fields that open to mile-deep silos. She is afraid of generals and admirals, and old white presidents. Of seeing her father, and never seeing him, of radiation sickness, and reincarnation, being vaporized only to return to an annihilated world. She tries not to think of Ian cruising home, stereo cranked, the coddling heat of his car.