Alligator (25 page)

On the street the boy from next door was playing with a bubble wand. He pressed a lever in the handle and the wand opened out into a large diamond shape and bubble liquid shot up from the clear handle and coated the plastic diamond when he tipped it into the breeze and a giant bubble wobbled into the air and lifted from the wand, and it caught the reflection of the landlord’s Jaguar, which was parked outside the bed-sit and the black streaky gleaming car slithered on the curve of the oversized bubble.

The boy put out his hand to touch the bubble and it broke with a sun-sparkling mist and Frank started up the sidewalk and as he did he gouged his key into the side of the landlord’s Jaguar and dragged it from the taillight all the way to the headlight feeling the paint crust against the tip of his key.

COLLEEN

I’
M IN THE
Toronto airport with a connecting flight to Louisiana in a few hours and I am so hungry I could pass out. I go into Swiss Chalet and the waitress has a tag that says Veronica. She’s past middle age, perhaps forty, and she has her blond hair swept into a French twist and should I call Mom and tell her where I am? Not yet. Not yet. Veronica has a beauty mark on her cheek. I try to think who Veronica is in the Bible.

I know the boy in the kitchen, Veronica says, and I tell him you don’t have much time, so he does me a favour. Veronica has an accent I don’t recognize.

She winks at me and puts down the plate of chicken and a bowl of gravy and a finger bowl and I am so hungry. The chicken is moist and good.

Soon I’ll be sitting in the plane while it turns circles on the runway waiting for clearance to take off. They’ll turn off the cabin lights and the flight attendant will touch the overhead bins with her fingers all the way up the aisle. I can’t leave Swiss Chalet without paying because this is an airport and how easy it would be to get caught. But once I’m through customs I’m through and it’s so busy here, a table full of women in purdah, another table of five pilots, there’s a toddler screaming her head off. I could slide out the door pretty quick. I should be able to keep going for a while on Frank’s money, but it would be good not to have to pay for every meal. Swiss Chalet is a big chain, like probably part of some multinational. Veronica has her back turned. They’re busy as hell, she’s probably been on for hours already; she’s probably exhausted. There are two entrances, and if I went out the one next to the bathrooms I wouldn’t have to pass anybody. I could get out of here and it would take Veronica at least five minutes to see I’m gone.

MADELEINE

S
HE REMEMBERS A
luncheon in Sydney, Australia. Was she speaking about the art of documentary? Yes she was. She was speaking about how you could change the world with a good documentary. Earlier that week she had come close to drowning.

When she said
change the world
she thought of the sweat required to rev the engines of capital so you eventually got to say your piece. It took two years or more to browbeat the mucky-mucks and massage the concept and betray the concept, all the while remaining true. But if you displayed brazenness and fortitude, she had learned, you more or less got to say your piece. She was all for having your say.

She’d always start off a project by wanting to say a fairly simple thing, for instance: it was okay to kill baby seals, or wife battering was bad, or could we not help the people of Sudan before they all die in horrific, unimaginable ways? There were transvestites injecting gel into their chests so they would have tits and they were dying from it and this was bad. Cops carrying guns in St. John’s was bad. Whatever she said, she would want the pictures to carry the message, and yes, there bloody well would be a message if she were going to raise all that money. You bet there’d be a message.

This must have been what she was saying at the podium in Sydney, Australia. But she was thinking, while she spoke, of how she had gone for a swim at Bondi Beach earlier in the week and the tide had dragged her out. From the beach she would have been nothing more than a speck. She could see several bodies in black wetsuits, needle thin in the distance and sun struck. They were walking with their surfboards, which looked like wafers and she watched them wade into the water and lie on their boards and paddle out and then rise up and skim the crests of waves with their arms aloft. She thought about her green canvas sneakers on the sand. Her gold watch and hotel key were in the toe of one of her sneakers. She had wanted to go for a swim and she’d thought, If someone takes the watch, so what. I’ll get a new watch.

Yes there would be a strong message, she was telling them. But this is what she promised on the way. They’d get a story they weren’t expecting. They would belly laugh at least once. They would not be exactly as they had been before. She was saying something of the sort at the podium. She was counting the promises off on her fingers. She was popping her
p
’s on the microphone.

The ocean wanted her, really, really wanted her. She discovered in herself a willingness to give up. Why not take the easy way out for once. When she thought of the sneakers on the beach she saw it as a shot, veils of sand blowing over them, half burying them, but it would have to be a quick shot or it would be cheesy. Why not cheesy, she thought. What’s wrong with a little cheese? I’m dying here, after all.

She’d made a documentary about the cops carrying guns in St. John’s, she was telling them by way of example, and the question had been would she be able to get the security guard who had gone into a public bathroom and sat down and laid his pistol on the back of the toilet and walked out again to talk on camera.

Who was she talking to anyway? Older women with hats. There were some grey-haired, frail-looking men. She didn’t care who they were, she had almost drowned. Know your audience, she told them.

She was trying to keep it short because there was an elderly poet supposed to talk next and he had leaned over during the break and was trembling and had difficulty speaking, but his mouth was open and his eyes were earnestly trying to communicate his intent. He had to make fists with both his hands to wring out of his withered body what he needed to say and it was that he would die before the end of the luncheon if she dragged her talk on too long. He fought to go first but she was slotted to go first and she wouldn’t give up her slot. Let the old geezer croak, she had thought.

A guy in one of those black rubber suits whipped past her on a yellow board. He nearly knocked her brains out and the board twisted in the air. He was flung into the sky with a blast of white surf and the board smacked down and he smacked down on top of the board. Then a wave curled over him, a fiery green wall of light and rainbow and mist. He was riding toward her through a narrow tunnel. The tunnel was clenching behind him, closing like a fist, and getting narrower in front and he had to crouch and she didn’t have long left because there was no strength in her arms and anyway, it had been a good life. Then he was engulfed and oh well, that was that, but, the surfboard, which bobbed up quite close to her was tied to his ankle and he managed to get her on the board, never mind where his hands grabbed and pinched and how ungainly and squashed and unromantic and snot-covered and fat she was. Lady, he’d said.

He’d said, Lady, lady, lady. In that accent they have down there. He raised a fist in the air, flung the water from his hair, and made a whooping noise. She had nearly been swallowed by malevolent death to leave no remains, but instead — she could not believe. Here was a man, muscled, lean, young, everything she loved, and he was paddling them back to shore. She didn’t get off the board until her dragging feet touched the sandy bottom and she was knee-deep in water. She saw he was winded but pleased with himself and they made arrangements for dinner because he had saved her life.

Later she sat in front of a big window looking onto Bondi Beach waiting for him. People were still surfing though it was dark but there was a moon and big lamps like those in ballparks. She drank her wine and waited and he didn’t show up. How simply he had shown up before, and now, with comparatively few impediments, he did not make it at all.

She decided to call Trevor Barker upstairs and see if he felt like going to a play on the weekend. There was a new production at the Hall and she had tickets. And if the evening was still warm they could walk along the harbourfront afterwards. Maybe get invited on the cruise ship for a look.

BEVERLY

S
UNLIGHT BOUNCED THROUGH
the patio windows onto the high polish of Beverly’s cherry-wood dining table. There was a white crocheted doily in the centre of the table. She placed the portable phone on her napkin. She was waiting for the phone to ring.

Helen French had made the doily — a high-school friend who specialized in christening gowns. Helen had sold christening gowns — it said on the tags that came with each purchase — to royalty in Germany and Malta. Colleen had worn one of Helen’s gowns when Beverly had her christened at Corpus Christi, seventeen years before, by Father O’Brien. The backs of his pale, bony hands were covered in warts.

Beverly touched the cod with her fork and a flake fell away from the fillet. She’d put salsa on her plate in the kitchen, unable to stand jars on the table. She’d turned off the radio before sitting down, and the house became utterly silent. She braced against the silence the way a downhill skier might draw a breath before starting down a hill. She found silence both frightening and thrilling, and lately, more luxury than deprivation.

She’d picked up the phone once and checked the dial tone. The dial tone was loud. She hung up and put it down. Afraid she had not hung up properly she picked it up again and it was off and she turned it on. She turned it on to make sure the battery wasn’t low. She turned it off and put it next to her plate. She was certain Colleen would phone. There had been a message three days before: Mom, I’m in some Louisiana backwater, heading for New Orleans, and I love you and I’m sorry for always letting you down.

She picked up her fork with the flake of cod but was transfixed by the garden. She had put out the sprinkler while the carrots were boiling. She watched as the water from the sprinkler lifted itself out of the shade of the maple tree, straight into the air, pattering the leaves for a moment before it began to topple over. The fan of spray stretched into the sunlight beyond the maple and became a semi-transparent, shimmering veil lowering itself gently over the grass and Beverly thought about how loving required a knack.

You had to have a knack for it, she thought. Without the knack it was exhausting. Love couldn’t be forced. She had loved David. It was her greatest achievement, that effortless love, she thought, and the sprinkler raised its sun-flickered fan upward again, pattering loudly against the leaves of the maple like applause.

Colleen was an effort. She was an effort, but the love was definitive and instinctual and full of fear and need and the sprinkler tipped into the shade and stained the bark of the tree.

The grass had been mowed that afternoon while she was at work but it had not been raked. She could smell the wet, mowed grass from the open patio window. Closer to the glass she could see a swarm of gnats or mosquitoes or flies rising in a tornado of fuzzy chaos. The sun was setting, a red ball between the two bungalows that were behind her garden.

She’d had the thought falling asleep last night: a knack. She spoke the word out loud because it occurred to her that it might not be a word.

Knack, she said. But she was entirely unaware that she had spoken.

Colleen’s christening had taken place on a Monday afternoon in late March. The snow had been creeping back off the sidewalks; crocuses pushing up through the wet earth like an army of bayonets on the banks of the Waterford River, ragged ice tumbling in the current. The streams spilling over the cliffs of the South Side Hills were still frozen, covering the rock like candle wax on the sides of a wine bottle.

The cod was poached. It was supposed to be poached in champagne but Beverly had used water. There was fresh parsley on her plate, and three wedges of lemon.

Beverly had worn a raw silk, bubblegum-pink miniskirt and matching jacket to the christening. She bought it at Bowring’s and had paid a lot and was proud of her legs, but Father O’Brien made an unpleasant comment about the length.

That skirt is not an appropriate garment for a new mother, especially in the house of the Lord, he’d said.

He took off his heavy, black-rimmed glasses and screwed his eyes shut, and moved the smudged glasses in concentric circles outward, outward elucidating the pedantic, inevitable feelings of the church, the positions they held, how they must be firm, now more than ever, the churches in Latin America breaking away, the evils of birth control. Then he put his glasses back on, opened his eyes and blinked, as though he had been an unwilling vessel for the nasty message and he was just coming back to himself. He put a warty hand on Beverly’s shoulder and pushed her into the dark coolness of the church.

The snug cap that went with the christening gown — Beverly’s favourite part of the outfit — was covered in mother-of-pearl beads, the beads so tightly bunched that the cap was as hard as a helmet, and the gown’s train was spread over the hard-wood floor around Beverly’s high heels. Madeleine and Marty were Colleen’s godparents even though they were atheists. David stood beside Beverly, holding a bottle full of expressed breast milk. She had wanted Colleen christened because she believed in ceremony and in God. She believed welcoming a child into the world required enlisting the sacred — incense and prayers.

Beverly had packed a picnic of Kentucky Fried Chicken and potato salad and wine they were going to enjoy at Bowring Park with plastic utensils and paper cups, but the weather had changed while they were inside the church — lightning had cracked and there was a roll of thunder in the distance — and they ended up eating in the car while rain drilled the roof. They passed the bucket of chicken back and forth over the front seat, wiping the grease off their faces with paper napkins while the baby slept.