The Age Page 5

  “Finally.” She pushes off the sofa.

  “And you can send that bike back where it came from.”

  Gerry pounds the stairs. Kicks her bedroom door closed, then kicks it again and again, until she’s too dizzy to stand.

  TO THE BOY, THE WOMAN IN THE SUNDRESS is no longer a woman but a girl, crying, everything between them levelled by disaster. Exhausted, they huddle on a patch of grass. Sirens wail. The noise punctures every thought. He rocks her, strokes her hair, surprised to find himself capable of offering comfort. She clings. Her fingernails dig into his arm. I’m so scared. She sobs. Even as he understands this fear, he feels above it, detached.

  He presses his face into her perfumed hair. The boy has long been terrified of exactly this moment, has imagined its ghastly unfolding, and now, while his rational mind overflows, a small, secret part of him feels absolved.

  It is not the present, he wants to tell her, but the future, that should frighten her. The coming illness: strangers spewing liquidous insides, loose teeth giving way to bloody gums that gnash at mouldy breadcrusts, rotten crabapples and, later, insects, dog flesh. The almost-dead pleading for food, desperate and crazed, burnt skin torn away in sheets, the blackened pits of open wounds. The tyranny of the well and capacitated. The marvel that many who survive will be without intelligence or compassion. Eternal night, invisible sun, perpetual cold. Thirst so maddening it will make people cry and foam, hysterical with the need to quench the body’s heat. Girls who continue to have babies, who parade inflated bodies on swollen, blistered feet, beg for extra food and water. Those who miscarry left to bury puddles of bloody tissue in hidden corners. While those who make it to term birth mutations, babies without eyes, without arms, legs fused in flapping primordial tails. Mothers who cling to mutant children, nurse them from empty breasts, swaddle them in blankets long after they are dead.

  The girl wipes her face but doesn’t lift her head from his chest. Across the street, two boys stand on the front lawn of a house, stare. To them, the boy and girl must look like lovers. On the corner, a deserted gas station, the doors to the store open wide. In the middle of the road, a yellow dog cowers under an abandoned truck.

  They should continue north, the boy thinks, try for the bridge. When the girl is ready, he will help her stand. Eventually, they will find people with instructions, people who have been trained for exactly this.

  The boy thinks of his mother. Knows the only thing she will do is look for him. He imagines her struggling south against the fleeing crowds, against warnings, back toward their house, into dust, into fire.

  I don’t know your name, the girl whispers.

  And suddenly, the boy is shaking. His body turns in on itself. He presses his open mouth against her scalp, squeezes his eyes shut.

  SIDE TWO OF Power, Corruption & Lies skips to a close. The pain, dulled overnight by Andri’s pot, returns in waves, a queasy, rolling ache through Gerry’s body. She starts the record over, eases herself to the floor, and feels under her bed. Her fingers close around the box, then her book. The box is hand-carved California redwood, her father’s last gift, a birthday she remembers only as a photograph, a paper crown slumped over her face as she bends to toward a fiery cake. Inside the box, her implements, Rizlas, tweezers, sewing scissors, a stainless steel lighter found at a bus stop, a dwindling baggie of faded weed. She draws a deep breath. Saliva pools at the tang of Ian’s mom’s hydroponic pot. Gerry pinches the scraps of buds into tiny pieces, rolls an anorexic joint. The smoke curls inside her, plummets to her belly as she opens the book, manoeuvres the small scissors around Andri’s article, pastes it onto a blank page. She stares at the satellite photo, wonders if it marks a beginning. Older clippings have started to yellow and tear at the edges. Computer Initiates DEFCON 5, Olympic Boycott Suggests War, Defense to Test Nerve Gas, Strontium 90 in Bones of Newborns. Each article triggers a low drone of panic. Time stutters ahead and she blinks, unsure of how long she’s been flipping pages. She closes the cover, only to pry it open again for one more glimpse of warship survey routes, armament statistics, maps of the Persian Gulf. She pushes the book back under the bed.

  The carpet tickles under her feet, a sea of loose threads. She stops outside her father’s study, tries the door. Her mom has it locked again. In her bedroom, she finds a ballpoint pen, twists it apart. She jabs the refill into the round doorknob until she hears the lock ping.

  The air in her father’s study hangs poached and warm. As she draws back the curtains, particles tumble a sandstorm in the column of light. Gerry loves the smallness of the room, how it enshrouds her, three walls of teak bookcases stacked with her father’s college textbooks, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, paperback spy novels, and old issues of National Geographic. The magazines impressed her with their baby animals until a story on gorillas eating their young gave her nightmares. The textbooks confounded her with coded graphs and diagrams, jackets dusty and brittle with age. She flattens her palms on her father’s desk, the varnish rough in patches, dust like fabric under her hands. She works her fingers past the lip of the drawer, wiggles it, the stiff, squeaky protest of wood on wood. The drawer opens enough for her to feel inside, roll pencils in their grooves, their ends flakey and chewed. She rubs a gritty eraser with her thumb. As always, there is the temptation to free these objects, lift them out and see them clearly, but she resists, preserves the drawer’s cramped mystery, its private smell of must and sour wood.

  She climbs over the desk to the sill. The sun presses a white circle through the overcast. She thumps the window’s handle with her palm. The hinges creak as the window swings open over the stretch of dirt below. Inside the massive rectangular pit, a grimy, unsecured aqua liner, edges drooping towards the centre. Flushed by rain, the shallow end looks reasonably clean, but the deep end, directly beneath the window, has filled with a sewerlike slosh of mud, water, and neighbourhood debris. It reminds her of the movie Poltergeist, people digging unwelcome holes. Her mom blames Expo 86, too many well-paying construction jobs elsewhere in the city. “A tragic tale of men and greener pastures,” her mom says each time she looks out the back door, a yielding smile, her eyes weary and defeated.

  A duck glides across the surface. Gerry considers the absurdity of a swimming pool in a city that gets ten months of rain each year. An attempt to mimeograph her father’s life. Margarine, saccharine, generic cola, faking it was enough for her mom. “You can invite your school friends over for pool parties!” The woman grew ecstatic over clueless possibilities. Gerry wouldn’t be caught dead in a bathing suit. Maybe if she could lace people’s drinks with acid, line them up at the study window to see who could leap as far as the pool, who would splatter on the concrete patio, a life-sized re-enactment of a girlhood ritual, throwing Barbie and Skipper out the window, then pitching a reluctant Ken after them. Ken always arrived too late. A funeral under the hydrangea bush, a shattered Ken weeping. She relished his climactic breakdown, the coldness she felt as he blubbered alone.

  A horn blares from the street. The duck paddles a lazy circle around a potato chip bag. Gerry pulls the window shut, closes the curtains, locks the door behind her. She crosses to her bedroom to wave to Henry but instead of his Audi finds a station wagon parked across the street. A man stands on the sidewalk. From the open door of a house, two children run toward him, bags and coats jiggling in their small arms. As the man bends to greet them, the children squeal. He gathers them up, swings them toward the sky.

  That evening, the old-timers take up Megan’s living room. To Gerry, they look younger than Clem, even with their worn faces and shaggy grey hair. Once a month, they sit with him in front of the TV, share a mickey of Lamb’s, a couple of joints. Gerry spies from the hallway, analyzes the swells of their laughter for a hint of Clem’s voice.

  Their visit gives Megan a night off from Clem. She drinks beer from a glass, leaves dirty dishes piled in the sink. She climbs onto the kitchen counter to grab an old Ouija board from a high cupboard and begs Ian to play it wi
th her. Gerry abandons the old-timers in favour of the game. Andri grumbles at the sight of the lacquered board printed with calligraphied letters and numbers, images of the sun and moon.

  In a fake mystic voice that makes Gerry giggle, Megan calls upon spirits to answer her questions. Michelle gasps when the pointer begins to crawl. Megan asks for a message for Andri. “Eat my shit,” the board replies. Then for Ian, “Ian fucks sheep.” The girls laugh.

  Gerry studies the glide of the pointer, the way it hovers over each letter only an instant before darting to the next, an agility that seems beyond human. Andri watches, eyes hard. Gerry wonders if his disapproval is genuine or part of the grumpiness he puts on.

  Ian pushes the pointer to GOODBYE, then stands up. “You were totally moving it.”

  “I swear, I wasn’t.” Megan grins. “Come on, someone else.”

  Gerry wants to feel the shared sensation of their fingers on the same object. “I’ll go.”

  “Don’t blame me if it gives you nightmares.” Ian leans against the fridge, chugs his beer, and crumples the can before opening the door for another.

  From behind his newspaper, Andri grunts. “Those things aren’t for playing with.”

  Michelle rolls her eyes, pats Gerry’s hand to urge her on.

  The pointer is smooth, cool polished wood. It wobbles side to side as Gerry rests her fingers.

  “Ready?” Megan rocks the pointer so Gerry will be able to tell what it feels like if she cheats. Gerry does the same, aware that the slightest pressure on her side will register against Megan’s fingers.

  Megan closes her eyes, calls to the spirits in a sad child’s voice. Gerry forces a laugh, though the voice frightens her a little.

  The pointer sits inert, and Gerry begins to wonder if it might not have been Ian moving it, his accusation a clever bluff. The pointer tilts under her fingers, begins a slow drag across the board. She has to remind herself not to be afraid, not to pull her hands away. The pointer swings through a series of figure-eights, curving so quickly Gerry has to lean in to keep up. She watches Megan’s arms and hands, her powdery pale skin for signs she’s leading, pushing, but Megan sits slouched back, her body moving at the whim of the pointer, even lagging behind. The expression on her face is one of mild alarm. “Crazy or what?”

  “Yeah.” Gerry tries to feel the energy cycling between them, senses it just at the fringes, a warmth that begins at the crown of her head and sweeps in arcs through her arms, then joins in a rush down her centre, thickens between her legs. The pointer makes an abrupt turn, slashes the board again and again in the shape of an X. Gerry squeals.

  Michelle tucks in close. “You better ask something before it freaks out.”

  Gerry can’t think of anything. “What’s my name?” The pointer glides through G-E-R-Y, and she feels her back turn cold.

  Michelle leans down. “Will our baby be a boy or a girl?”

  The pointers spells B-O-Y slowly, then swirls around to spell G-I-R-L. Andri snickers.

  “Who’s going to do the drop?” Gerry avoids Megan’s gaze, hopes the board holds some sway.

  The pointer doesn’t answer right away, meanders between YES and NO, then slowly spells I-A-N, rising to the YES after each letter.

  Ian knocks her shoulder with his hip. “Loser.”

  The question comes as a reflex, a habit of hitting back. “Does Ian have a girlfriend?” She feels him frozen in place behind her. The pointer travels a slow circle around the outside of the board. Megan stares at her as the pointer spells out L-A-R-K.

  “What’s a lark?” Michelle turns her body to examine the letters from a different angle.

  Andri shakes his newspaper. “A bird. Something you do for fun.”

  Megan’s eyes are calm and deep, her mouth a soft line. But the way she blinks gives her away, a flicker as she digs for strength. Gerry sees it then, the strain of knowing more than a person should, the effort behind the masterful control of her face, her body for a simple party trick.

  The back door closes, and Gerry knows without turning that Ian has left.

  “Fun and games?” Dennis, an old-timer with a habit of jangling keys and change in his pocket, lingers in the hallway. He catches Gerry looking at him and flinches. “Nice face.” As he steps into the light, his stubbly, sagging jowls and tatty sweater vest come clear. His pocketed hand continues to burrow, a muffled, frantic shaking as if he’s playing dice. Gerry tries not to stare, worried she’s watching something sexual without knowing it. “We’re putting him to bed.”

  Megan nods. “Can they do his pyjamas? Once he’s asleep, I can’t get him undressed.”

  “Hey, guys? Pyjamas, okay?” Dennis calls down the hallway. When he turns back, he tosses something onto the Ouija board. A used envelope, flap torn to reveal the coloured edges of fives, tens, and twenties, a thin stack of rumpled bills. “Not as much as we’d like this month. Karl’s waiting on insurance from his accident.”

  Megan smiles. “It all helps.”

  The man’s lips twitch. He rubs at the doorframe. His head tips side to side like a weighing scale. Gerry can tell by the blush under his stubble, his awkward stare, the way his teeth work at his lips, he would like to sleep with Megan. “Did my guy call you? The security camera thing?”

  “He did. Yes. Thank you.”

  “Good, good. I want to ask you so bad, you know? What’s cooking, what’s the big gig.” Dennis sighs.

  Andri folds his newspaper, raises his eyebrows at Megan.

  “You never lose the taste for it.” Dennis shuffles. “But I’m this close” – he pinches the air – “full pension.” He turns to Gerry as if she’s asked a question. “School librarian. Almost twenty-five years. Can you believe it?” His free hand is yellowed with nicotine stains, dirtier than Gerry would imagine for a librarian. She shrugs her disinterest.

  “If Clem hadn’t kept my name out of it, I wouldn’t be here. None of us would.”

  “It’s true. It’s much better to keep out of things.” Andri says it to Dennis but stares at Megan.

  “Yup. One in a lifetime, that’s all you get. No one’s lucky enough for twice.” Dennis nods but doesn’t leave his post. He points at Gerry. “You’re not using this one, are you? Kids are nothing but trouble.”

  “Tell me about it.” Ian’s voice carries in with a damp gust. The back door bangs shut. Gerry senses him behind her, jumps as he rests his cold hand against her neck.

  “No, I’m serious.” Dennis talks as if she isn’t in the room. “Don’t tell her anything.”

  Ian’s fingers drum against her skin, trace the divots of muscle and cartilage. He finds his spot and begins to squeeze. His party trick: just enough pressure to black her out, something she enjoyed once, strange reveries of circuses and running animals, the magic of waking on the floor. She reaches for his hand, tries to loosen it. They grab at each other, gouge and clench.

  “Thanks for coming by, Dennis.” Megan sounds tired.

  Dennis lolls for a moment longer, then slips back to the living room. Michelle breaks out laughing. “What a creep.”

  Andri returns to his newspaper.

  Megan drains her beer, folds the Ouija board, then carries it to the garbage can, crushes it down with her foot. She stalks out of the kitchen and slams her bedroom door.

  “What happened?” Michelle asks Andri.

  Ian wrenches his hand out of Gerry’s grip, cuffs her ear before he follows Megan. The pain is sharp but pulses away quickly. She rubs her head, her face burning. The ringing lingers like a bell in dream.

  “IS IT POSSIBLE YOU LOOK WORSE than last time?” Henry ducks to stare at her through the open passenger-side window. He himself isn’t looking top form, the knot of his tie loose and askew, his trousers without their finlike crease.

  “Anything’s possible.” Gerry leans down to give him a closer look.

  “Should I drop you at the airport so you can put on your peach robe and hand out flowers?”

  “Where were you ye
sterday?”

  “Are you suggesting I could have prevented your radical makeover?”

  “Take a picture, it lasts longer.”

  Henry smiles. “It suits you. Get in.”

  When they reach the house, there’s an open spot where Mrs. Cross’s Civic should be.

  “We missed her.” Gerry reclines her seat, wonders how long they’ll have to wait.

  Henry pats the steering wheel in a rhythm she can’t follow. He snaps the buckle of his seatbelt. Before she can ask where he’s going, he’s closed the door behind him.

  She struggles to sit up, get out of the car. Henry disappears down the path at the side of the house and she jogs to catch up.

  On the back porch, Henry stoops in front of a window, feels his way around its frame. She waits at the top of the stairs. The porch is small but tidy, a floral-printed welcome mat, a freshly painted garbage corral. She hops onto the porch rail, knocks her heels against the shiny garbage cans to hear them rattle.

  “Shh!” Henry turns, his face a scowl.

  Chastised, she hunches, feet crossed, concentrates on remaining still. Henry feeds a credit card up through the sash of the window, slides it back and forth until the latch pops from its seat. He jiggles the window, raises it slowly, then waves Gerry through.

  Kids at school bragged about B&Es all the time, but her worry is Henry, his job, how it might look for his divorce. She finds a drip trail in the porch rail’s finish, picks at it with her fingernail. The paint comes away in a thin brown tear. “She’s probably on her way home.”

  “Your father would be in there like a shot.”

  She shakes her head at the obvious manipulation. Henry rolls his eyes. “Just go. Make sure it’s clear. If she drives up, I’ll knock, shave-and-a-haircut.” He taps the rhythm on the windowframe.

  The opening is wide but shallow. She threads her right leg through. Her hip and chest throb as she flattens herself, ducks her head, legs stretched into splits before she huddles in the kitchen sink, hops carefully down. She slips off her sneakers and does a quick circuit of the main floor. The rooms smell like cold cream and roses. Back in the kitchen, she closes and locks the window, opens the door to let Henry in. His arms spread in a flourish. “Mi casa es su casa.” He leaves her to wander.