The Age Read online

  They park across the street from Henry’s former house, a low, tidy bungalow in a neighbourhood of mansions with wrought-iron fences. An early spring drizzle scurries across the windshield as Gerry flips through a catalogue of spy equipment, infrared sunglasses, ashtray tape-recorders, microphones moulded into sun visors. Beside her, Henry presses binoculars to his face.

  “These are cool.” She holds up a page of men’s dress shoes outfitted with cameras.

  Henry snorts. “Prohibitively expensive is what they are. Nothing but junk in there.”

  His disapproval catches her off guard. She blinks at the catalogue pages. Despite their recent time together, he is difficult to please, erratic in his tastes and opinions. His seesaw moods leave her uncertain of when to argue, when to agree. She shoves the catalogue under her seat.

  She’d always known the stiff, inflectionless anchor on the cut-rate local station as her father’s father. For years, she associated the broadcaster’s cheap set, a cityscape silhouette dotted with skyscraper lights, with her father’s new life. The idea of contacting her grandfather took root in the hot, sticky boredom of summer holidays. She could always hang up on the old man, claim it a prank. The station receptionist connected her before she could finish saying his name. Henry answered on the second ring, and after she explained who she was, shouted, “Yes!” as if he’d been expecting her call. That same afternoon, he toured her around the newsroom, flip-flops slapping out her steps, held her shoulders and introduced her as “the granddaughter” while she craned to examine his face, tried to peel back the decades to see how her father might look.

  Henry shifts in his seat. “You haven’t mentioned your group in a while.”

  “It’s not a group, it’s just a few people.”

  “How do I know it isn’t some FLQ or Symbionese Liberation Army?” The teasing in his voice makes her smile. “I’m pretty sure your dad wouldn’t approve.”

  She welcomes her father’s disapproval, imagines most dads disapprove of daughters with ideas. It thrills her to think of her photograph on the evening news, her small gesture marking a fulcrum in history. She imagines the replacement wife begging him to stay as he rushes to catch a flight to Vancouver.

  “What if there’s a hostage situation? I hate to break it to you, but you’re no Patty Hearst. Police would as soon shoot you as negotiate your release.”

  Henry’s words turn her reverie inside out: policemen chuckling as they fondle their warm guns, poke at her bullet-ridden body. She shivers.

  “Door.” Henry tosses the binoculars into the backseat and slouches down. Gerry ducks. On the stoop, knotted into a tan raincoat, Henry’s third wife opens an umbrella. She strides down the path to the sidewalk, chin at a regal angle, folds into her grey Honda Civic, and drives away. Henry struggles with the gearshift, grips the steering wheel to follow. Fat drops of rain splatter the windshield.

  When they first met, Henry told Gerry he had only one thing to offer: provenance, a word he explained as a sense of her rightful place in the Cross line. Her grandmother, Henry’s first wife, Geraldine, had worked as a grade school teacher before marrying him. Petite and shrewd, a woman whose hobby was balancing their chequebook. Weakened by the shame of divorce, a phrase Henry muttered with a shake of his head, she died two years before Gerry was born. Gloria, a big-boned, opinionated painter, served as the second Mrs. Cross. Henry brightened with his descriptions of her walking around nude and enjoying a shot of vodka for breakfast, then practically shouted that she had moved to Fiji to live off her hefty alimony. Then there was Helen. The final descendant of a good family, she still lived in the house she and Henry once shared. She powders her face every morning, chooses her outfits the night before. She volunteers as a fundraiser and donates Henry’s monthly cheques to charity. The polished, well-postured woman Gerry has admired only through a windshield.

  They round a wide left onto King Edward. Gerry grips the plastic handle above the door, braces herself against the car’s sway. Her seatbelt squeezes like a metal bar, flinty pain in her ribs and back. “Where do you think she’s going?” The words hang pinched and dry in front of her lips.

  Henry knocks the wipers on at a frantic pace, fiddles with the defogger. He yanks a wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket and rubs an arc in the steamy glass. A car honks as he changes lanes without signalling. “Job would be good. Boyfriend would be better.” He cranes his neck to see around a minivan. The steering wanders with his gaze.

  “Henry.” She tries to correct him.

  He jerks the wheel.

  Traffic slows for a red light and Henry tries to hang back, but the lanes on either side have filled and they glide to a stop behind the Civic, Mrs. Cross’s eyes framed in the rectangle of her rear-view. Henry lowers his head. “Shit.”

  The Civic’s door swings open. Mrs. Cross emerges, umbrella in hand. Despite the rain, she leaves her door flung wide, strides past blinking taillights, through puffs of exhaust.

  “Shit, shit, shit, shit.” Henry cranks the volume on the radio. The cabin swells with a deafening overture.

  Mrs. Cross’s face looms in the streaky driver-side window, her silver pageboy, powdery skin, and mauve lipstick caught in abstract. She shouts, lips curled, teeth bare, arms flapping. Gerry can hear a few damns and fucks, but everything else gurgles beneath the music. Henry keeps his hand on the gearshift, stares straight ahead.

  The light turns green. Cars creep past, slow for the spectacle. From behind, a mob of horns. Mrs. Cross steps away from the car, glances around as if alarmed by her surroundings. Gerry feels the urge to rescue her, to leap out and round the car, pull open a door, and gather the woman in.

  Mrs. Cross lets loose with her umbrella. Both hands on the grip, she beats furiously at Henry’s window, wet fabric glomming to glass. Gerry rears in her seat. Henry flinches, as if taking the blows himself. With one last single-handed thwap, Mrs. Cross stalks back to her car, peels away.

  Henry reaches forward to turn down the music, rubs his hands on the steering wheel. Gerry struggles against a quake of nervous laughter. She coughs instead, spasms that splinter her insides.

  The honking dies off. In front of them, traffic seams together like a zipper. Drivers glare as they pass. Henry flips the bird to someone beyond Gerry’s window. “Family court has given me a date.”

  She nods, her voice coming back. “That’s good.” He often spoke about his “day in court,” but she assumed it was an expression, an imaginary reckoning, like St. Peter at the gates of heaven.

  “Tuesday next. A week today. Pre-hearing mediation in front of Judge Wilson Fennimore.” Henry pauses as if he might ask her along, but then pinches his thumb and finger at the bridge of his nose. “That rumour I told you? Co-anchor?” He closes his eyes. “Not a rumour.”

  Her mind hurries from the courtroom to the newsroom. “It’s not true?”

  “No, it is. It is true. God, would it kill you to listen for once?”

  She smiles to mask the sting of his words but feels her mouth fall lopsided, stares at the dash to keep her eyes dry.

  “I’m sorry.” He mumbles into his palm. “I’m an asshole. I’m sorry.”

  Her fingers play with the seatbelt buckle. The buckle pops open and the strap drags across her, eases the pressure in her chest. She sits for a while, tries to get comfortable, but misses the strap’s cinching hold. She tugs the belt and pushes the tab until the buckle snaps tight. Outside, the rain has stopped. Toward the west, clouds thin, leave a trail of blue sky. She feels Henry watching her, his heavy gaze an apology. She stares ahead until he turns away.

  “Looks like it might be a nice day after all. What I wouldn’t give to be you, gliding around on my bike, not a care in the world.”

  Saliva pools under her tongue, her throat aches. She feels flushed and feverish, wonders if she might have caught a chill walking home. “Bike’s gone.”

  Henry rubs at his eyes, then settles his hands in his lap, blinks. “Since when?”

  She
points to her face.

  “I see.” He squints at the windshield, takes a deep breath and puffs out his cheeks, blows a long, deflated sigh. “Well.” His hands clap together. When he turns to her, he’s smiling.

  BY THE TIME GERRY COASTS UP Megan’s walk, the shock of Henry’s extravagance has settled like sweetness in her mouth. She locks the bike to the back stairs and admires its silver paint. The bright white handlebar tape distracts her as she works out her story. She takes the steps slowly, waits on the back porch to hear what they talk about without her.

  “–that it doesn’t sound precise.”

  Though she hears Megan’s voice, Gerry can only see three of them at the table. Ian sits with his back to the door. Andri shakes his head, scribbles on a piece of paper as he talks. “You want precise? Take up archery.”

  “What about bigger, stronger?” Megan crosses to the table, pulls out a chair, and sits on it backward.

  “We said smoke and shattered glass.” Andri rubs the fabric dome of Michelle’s belly. “Not a body count.”

  When Megan pauses, Gerry wonders if she’s thinking of Clem’s homeless man. “What I’m saying is if we’ve got two weeks, why not try to make it better?”

  Andri nods. “Okay. Room for improvement. Technically, we have eleven days, but, okay.”

  Ian props his boots on the counter as Gerry walks in. He sees her first, straightens in his seat. “What the fuck happened to you?” He sounds winded, empty.

  She walks to the fridge and reaches inside for a can of beer. “I got hit by a car.” She shrugs, cracks the top, and sucks the foam off the tab, fizz bitter on her tongue.

  After barely a glance at her, Andri goes back to his doodling. “I hope the driver didn’t report it. To. The. Cops.”

  Megan rises from her chair and circles Gerry. Her hands tilt Gerry’s head, lift her elbow, gather her hair to see the back of her neck. Gerry smiles, stares at the linoleum’s orange curlicues, self-conscious with the scrutiny. “I didn’t get the licence plate. It was too dark. It was just like, bam, and he was gone.”

  Megan steps back. “This happened last night?”

  “Did you hear me?” Andri asks.

  Gerry milks the details as she sips her beer: amber haze of streetlights, a green sedan making a faulty left turn, a swerve, the clip, an endless somersault. No cops, she assures Andri. By the end of the story, a beer buzz flickers behind her eyes. The room is silent. Megan grabs the wooden napkin holder from the counter and hurls it at Ian. The holder bounces off the side of his head and clatters to the floor, a trail of paper napkins flopping like dead birds. “I told you to drive her home!”

  “Jesus!” Ian touches his head. Gerry holds her breath.

  Megan picks up a glass mug, draws back.

  “That’s enough.” The sharpness of Michelle’s voice startles Gerry.

  Andri doesn’t look up from his paper but bobs his head in a fervent nod. “Yes, it is.”

  Megan drops the mug into the sink, where it thumps, then rolls. Gerry raises her chin, tries to show off her bruises, but no one is watching.

  “Come on.” Megan nods toward the bathroom. Gerry keeps her gaze on Ian. He winces as he touches the side of his head. For a second, he resembles his younger self: flitting eyes, a wounded half-grimace, stains of flushed skin that make him look either freshly slapped or on the verge of crying.

  Before she can turn away, he catches her stare, rubs his nose with his middle finger, a private fuck you.

  The bathroom is a cramped box of tiny pink tiles. Megan plants Gerry on the closed toilet seat. She fingers the matted plush of the toilet seat cover while Megan pulls bottles out of the medicine cabinet.

  “Shirt off.”

  Gerry twists the edge of her T-shirt, lets it curl and uncurl. She thinks of the paper-thin cups of her elastic bra, nothing like the moulded foam contraptions she’s seen strewn in Megan’s bedroom.

  Megan’s hand overflows with cotton balls. “It’s nothing I don’t have.”

  Thinking of what Megan does have only makes it worse. Gerry gets the shirt and bra over her head with one hard yank. Her muscles tremor with cold, strands of hair tickle across her shoulders. She bunches the clothes in a fist, shields her small breasts with her forearms.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Megan says it gently as she reaches down to lift Gerry’s elbow. She skims the inky patches across Gerry’s side. Her touch is warm and smooth, and Gerry wishes there was space enough in the bathroom to lie down and close her eyes.

  Megan starts with Gerry’s face, swabs raw scabs with a pungent liquid that stings. She cuts tiny strips of tape to close the dried split above Gerry’s eyebrow, traces Gerry’s swollen cheek with the pad of her thumb. Gerry jolts, the pressure like a knife in her eye.

  “That definitely needs ice.” Megan’s body sways, knees hard against the inside of Gerry’s thighs. Her stomach brushes Gerry’s face as she bends to a cut behind Gerry’s ear, her breasts weighty beneath the navy-and-white stripes of her top. Gerry imagines touching them, feeling the soft nubs of Megan’s nipples. Gerry own breasts cling slack and purposeless, half-filled water balloons. As Megan leans back, Gerry reaches to touch the line of studs that curve up and around Megan’s right ear, the silver cuff that bands the top. “Did these hurt?”

  “Not really.” Megan rubs a pungent ointment into each of Gerry’s bruises.

  Gerry’s eyes tear up.

  “Stinging?”

  She lies, “It’s the smell,” looks around the room to keep her mind off the pain. On the far corner of the bathtub, a metal razor sits propped against canister of shaving cream. “Is that for your legs?”

  Megan looks over her shoulder. “No, that’s Clem’s. It’s easier to shave him while he’s in the tub.”

  Gerry pushes away thoughts of Clem naked, a plucked bird, a shrivelled nest. Electric hair clippers dangle from the hand towel loop beside the sink. A cord trails up to the light bulb above the medicine cabinet where it plugs into a socket she has to crane her neck to see. “You cut his hair too?”

  “My hair.” Megan crouches in front of Gerry, reaches her arm around to massage ointment into Gerry’s lower back. Gerry frees a hand from the tangle of her shirt, rubs her palm over Megan’s shorn head. The texture is soft, just as Gerry had hoped. “Maybe you could do mine.”

  “It doesn’t grow back overnight.” Megan grips the sink to hoist herself up.

  While Megan washes her hands, Gerry covers her nose and mouth with her fingers, breathes the sour apple smell of Megan’s scalp.

  “You’d look good with an undercut.”

  The new wave girls at school had undercuts, tucked their teased black hair behind their ears to show off shaved temples. “I’d want it all off.” Gerry shakes her head forward, gathers her hair to examine the dry, wavy strands, winds them around her finger, marvels at how artificial and wiglike they feel.

  “It suits you. It’s pretty.”

  “I don’t want to be pretty.”

  Megan smiles. “Boys won’t like it.”

  The only boys Gerry knows are at school, their scrawled notes shoved into her locker, illegible except for tits and cunt, anonymous, grabbing hands in the hallway, pocket bulges during square dance lessons in gym class. She shrugs. “Who cares.”

  Megan lifts the clippers from the towel loop, tosses them. They land heavy and cold in Gerry’s hands. She pushes the power switch and the clippers clack to life with a metallic purr. The machine buzzes in her fingers, numbs her, itches into her arm. She holds her breath and raises the clippers to her forehead.

  “Wait!” Megan shouts, her face wide with laughter. She shakes her head and holds out her hands. “That’s not how you want to do it.”

  Gerry follows Megan’s instructions, leaves her jeans in a heap on the floor, climbs into the empty bathtub, skin turning to gooseflesh against the icy enamel. Megan combs out Gerry’s hair, has her hold it in a mound above her head.

  The sound is a million angry insects chew
ing through straw. The vibration shimmies through her, ignites short, fiery glints of pain in her face. She can’t keep from grinning. Megan pulls away, holds up a hand mirror: a dark, velvety strip over Gerry’s right ear. Gerry touches it and feels heat rise from her scalp. She shakes her hair and watches the strip disappear, hands back the mirror. “All of it.”

  “You’re sure now?”

  Gerry nods. As the clippers continue, Gerry studies the skin on the underside of Megan’s arms, thin and delicate enough to allows wisps of veins to show through. Gerry’s body warms the bathtub, and she no longer feels the need to cover herself. “Why do you like Ian?”

  “Why do you like Andri?”

  Gerry bows her head to keep from blushing. “That’s not the same.”

  “He’s more than twice your age and about to be a father, but other than that, you’d make a great couple.”

  “Shut up.”

  The clippers lift away. “You don’t think Ian’s cute? Not even a little bit?”

  “Gross.” Gerry plucks a tail of hair from bottom of the bathtub, winds it tightly around her fingertip, waits for the thrum of blood.

  Megan shrugs. “He was always so nice to me when he delivered Clem’s medicine.”

  “He got fired from that job.”

  “It’s not his fault the pharmacist retired.”

  “Mr. McKenzie? Who got shot in the leg?” Gerry shakes her head. “Ian got fired way before that. Is that what he told you?”

  The clippers graze the bottom of Gerry’s neck. “He’s uncomplicated. He’s kind. I don’t know, I felt close to him the first time we met, like family.”

  “Like brother and sister?” Gerry tries not to think of Megan having sex with Ian. The idea, matched with her own nakedness, starts a low, syrupy heat inside her. She wraps her arms around her knees.

  “I mean, it’s just easy being together. He doesn’t expect anything from me.”

  “But why not have Andri as your boyfriend?”