A Chill Rain in January (2 page)

“I take care of myself,” she said. “That's why I look well.”

“Yes. That's right. I know.”

“Drink your coffee,” Zoe said again.

Benjamin gazed around the living room. “It's a funny kind of place you live in.”

Zoe watched him, smiling a little, but wary. He'd always been secretive. So was she, of course. But Benjamin was also unpredictable, because he had absolutely no self-discipline.

“You like it here, don't you? In this funny little house, huddled against the rocks in this funny little town.”

“If I didn't like it, Benjamin,” she said, “I wouldn't be here.”

“It must be nice to know exactly what you want,” said Benjamin.

His face, she noticed, was barren. She had been expecting grievousness, or guile, but there was nothing there at all. She began to relax. Perhaps she wouldn't have to battle with him. Perhaps one more resolute “no” would do it.

“And to be able to afford to get it,” he went on. “That must be nice. And of course to keep it. That's nicer still.”

“It is, yes,” said Zoe. She began thinking about what she might like to have for lunch.

Benjamin sat back and picked up his coffee mug. He folded one leg over the other. “It's very serious business that's brought me here, Zoe,” he said.

She waited.

“Aren't you even curious?” said Benjamin, and he sighed and shook his head when she didn't respond. “I forget, you know, how eccentric you are.”

She turned her head slightly, so that she was facing him dead on, and looked straight into his eyes. He faltered, then.

“I'm afraid you have to leave now, Benjamin.”

He looked at her again, so bleak and defiant that she felt a trickle of apprehension.

“Right now,” she said. “Or you won't catch the next ferry.”

Benjamin looked out the big window at the stone-floored patio. “Oh my dear,” he said dully. “I can't catch the next ferry. We have far too much to talk about.”

“We have nothing to talk about,” said Zoe.

Suddenly she thought of her father. This happened sometimes: a strange, ephemeral compassion for one of her parents flickered through her brain, alien and superfluous.

“‘Shoes and ships and sealing wax…',” Benjamin intoned. He put his head back and closed his eyes. “Death,” he said. “And diaries. That's what we've got to talk about.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “And yes, Zoe, you're right. Money, of course.”

Z
OE
knew very early in her life that she was different. This confused her only briefly. Then, all sorts of things became clear
.

She also learned early that she had to tread carefully so as not to appear to be different, if she wanted to live her life with a minimum fuss.

She thought it unlikely that she could be the only person in the entire world who was different; but she was the only person she knew who was.

Eventually Zoe created an outside person; otherwise she would have been in trouble all the time.

She made up rules for this person, and then she felt a lot safer. When she got into trouble, she knew it was because she'd broken one of the rules.

Before the creation of her outside person, it seemed to Zoe that she couldn't say or do very much at all without getting somebody annoyed. Or worse.

It made her tired and worried, in the early part of her life
,
to realize that everybody else lived in a different way than she did. She decided she had to understand this difference somehow
.

She learned to do it by writing things down.

The first time was for school. In grade three, her class was told to write about what they'd done during their holidays. Zoe put it off and put it off, not wanting to do it, not even knowing how to do it. But every day her teacher hadn't forgotten about it. Every day she asked Zoe for her holiday story. Finally in exasperation Zoe asked her mother to help her.

They sat down together after dinner. Zoe had some paper and a pencil. Her mother said, “Tell me something you did in your holidays that you really enjoyed a lot.”

Zoe thought about that. She'd enjoyed sneaking into the basement of the Nelsons' house, next door, and poking around in an old trunk she'd found there. After a minute she shrugged her shoulders.

“What about when we went on the train to Banff?” said her mother.

“I liked it in the pool,” said Zoe, remembering. “Because the water was hot but the air was cool.”

“You could write about that, then.”

“That isn't much to say,” said Zoe doubtfully.

“I don't think Miss Warren wants you to say a whole lot. Maybe enough to fill up a page. You could write about the train ride and then about the hot springs.”

“What would I say about the train ride?”

“What do you remember about it?”

Zoe imagined herself putting her thoughts through a sieve. “I remember looking out the window at night,” she said. “Sometimes I couldn't see any lights anywhere. I thought all the bulbs in the world had got burned out at the same time.” She glanced at her mother, and saw that she was smiling.

“There, you see?” said Zoe's mother. “You have lots of things to write about.”

Zoe wrote those things and Miss Warren said what she had written was very good.

Zoe thought hard about this for a long time.

She decided that it was okay if she showed other people little tiny bits of what she thought and felt about things. But that it was really important to pick the right bits.

She started writing down things for herself. First just on loose pieces of paper, trying things out.

For example: Was it all right to say the thing she thought about Benjamin? she wondered on the paper.

Then she said them, to her mother.

Her mother became very upset and scolded her in a piercing voice and rushed from the room.

Zoe then said the same things to her father. For a minute his face looked as if it was caving in. Then he leaned forward until his arms were resting on his knees and he was staring at the rug.

“It's perfectly normal,” he said, “to get angry with your brother. He gets angry with you sometimes, too.”

He said a lot of other stuff, too, but Zoe wasn't listening anymore. There were many things that people didn't like to hear. When you said them they might pretend you didn't mean them, or they might try to persuade you not to mean them anymore, or they might just get mad. Either it was very boring or, if you got them mad, you could get yelled at, or slapped.

Eventually Zoe used her allowance to buy herself a scribbler, a notebook, where she could say things other people wouldn't want to hear. And gradually, with the help of the scribbler, she got things sorted out.

When she was little and had seen something she wanted very badly she had always just taken it, even when it belonged to somebody else. But this led to uproar and punishment. So she made a rule about it: “Don't steal anything unless you can be sure nobody's going to find out who did it.”

When people asked her questions, she was in the habit of saying whatever came into her head. A lot of times these were made-up things. This got her into trouble, too. So she wrote in the exercise book: “Don't say anything about anything unless you have to, and then try to say just a little bit, and make at least some of it true.”

When something made her angry she struck out at it, whether it was a person or a thing, because this used up the anger. She disliked being angry. It was a hot, tight feeling which was very uncomfortable. But hitting, it seemed, was even worse than stealing; especially when she broke things. So one of her rules said: “When you get angry go away where nobody can see you and hit things that won't break. And if your angriness still won't go away, figure out a way to get back at the person you're angry with so that nobody knows you did anything to her. Or him.”

She made up an outside Zoe who was able to live by these rules. This was Zoe Number Two.

Zoe Number One lived safe inside her head, and came out only when she was alone, and spoke aloud only in the scribblers.

“T
HERE'S
a car parked out by the Strachan woman's place,” said Sandy McAllister, tossing the day's mail on the counter. He was a small, wiry man of about forty who wore the postal worker's summer uniform of shorts and knee socks all year round. Today he had also donned the winter cape, hooded and waterproof.

“So what?” said Isabella Harbud from her desk.

“Took her some mail today.” He leaned over the counter, to watch Isabella type.

“That's your job, isn't it?”

“You're sure fast on that thing,” he said admiringly, scratching the back of his calf with the front of his other foot. “She's one of the few people in town, most days they don't get any. Makes you wonder.”

“You ought to mind your own business, Mr. Sandy McAllister, that's what you ought to do.” She whipped the paper from her typewriter and scrutinized it critically.

“Nice car it is, too. Not many people visit that one, I'll tell you,” said Sandy, hoisting the mailbag farther onto his shoulder.

“You stop your gossip and get on about your business,” said Isabella. She slapped the letter on top of a pile of completed correspondence and cranked another sheet of paper into the typewriter.

Sandy shrugged, hurt. “I'm just trying to make conversation. You got time for a coffee?”

Isabella shot him a disapproving look. “Of course I don't. What would my hubby think, if I were to go off for a coffee with the likes of you?”

“Hoo hoo hoo, he'd be plenty worried, all right.” He gave her a wink and headed for the door.

A small, furtive-looking woman darted into the reception area from the hall. She shook her head vigorously at Isabella and rushed outside, one step ahead of the mailman. Isabella looked after her and sighed. She glanced doubtfully over the counter at the woman who sat in the waiting area. “You're next,” she said, getting to her feet.

Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg of the Sechelt detachment, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, studied a list that lay upon the desk in front of him. He picked up a pencil and laboriously stroked through the first name that appeared on it. “Come,” he said when Isabella knocked on the door. She ushered the candidate in without looking at Alberg, and left quickly.

Alberg stared at the woman who had planted herself firmly in the middle of his office. She stood five feet one inch tall, weighed over two hundred pounds, and had very little hair.

“So,” he said finally, glancing down at his list. “Mrs.—Stratidakis, is it?”

“It's a good Greek name.”

“Greek, yes, that's what I thought it was. Tell me about yourself, Mrs. Stratidakis.”

“I brought up eight kids, looked after all their wants, and my man's, too.” Her small black eyes darted uneasily around the office. “I've never been in a police station before in my life. I'm a decent woman.”

“Do you do any cooking? Or just cleaning?”

“I do it for none, now, but my man and me. And I would do no cooking, no, sir.” Alberg noticed that the small amount of hair she possessed clung to her scalp in sparse outcroppings that looked rather like feathers. “And I would charge you considerable,” she said darkly, “for coming in here every day, to this police station.”

“It's not my office I want cleaned,” said Alberg. “It's my house. In Gibsons.” Gibsons Landing is a town about twenty miles south of Sechelt.

She gazed at him curiously. “You got no wife, huh?” She was perspiring a lot.

“I'm divorced,” said Alberg. Her face clouded instantly with suspicion. “Oh, well,” said Alberg to himself. He stood up. “I don't need to keep you any longer, Mrs. Stratidakis. Thank you for coming. Isabella will be in touch with you.”

He closed the door after her, counted to thirty, opened it, and thundered, “Isabella!” When she appeared he said, “What the hell happened to that woman's head?”

“I hadn't met her myself,” said Isabella. “She'd be a good hard worker, I'm told.”

“She doesn't like police officers,” he said sullenly. “She doesn't approve of divorced men.”

“My hubby gave me her name. He treated her son.” Isabella's husband was a chiropractor.

“Promise me, Isabella, that you won't usher in another single damn candidate unless you've seen her first with your own beautiful golden eyes.” He crumpled the list and tossed it in the wastepaper basket.

“You can trust me,” she said. Then, solemnly, she handed him a telephone message. She thrust some wayward strands of long auburn hair into the makeshift bun at the back of her head. “I heard she was back,” she said, nodding, and eased herself out of the office.

Alberg picked up the phone and dialed the library.