Blackstrap Hawco (56 page)

The limousine dips through a tunnel. Resurfaces along the divided highway. Lanes on each side. Factories with logos Karen recognizes. Glowing high. The place where they manufacture things.

Eyes fixed on the foreign sights moving by. Beyond the window. So refreshing to see something. She does not recognize.

 

At the desk of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Karen is flabbergasted by the opulence of the open lobby.

The hotel clerk signals. Says something toward another desk. Where men in uniform wait.

Constable Pope nods, ‘
Oui, merci
,' then smiles back at Karen.

Away from the front desk. The elevator arrives. A man on there.
Bonjour
. And Constable Pope steps inside. Allowing Karen to enter first.
Bonjour.
The look of her. She says,
Bonjour.
Not exactly right. The bulge of her belly. The man glancing there before stepping on. He is with a woman. With an ugly face. Who whispers in his ear. The man is
attractive. Karen wonders what he sees in her. A white mink coat. A face impossible to make over.

When they arrive at their room. Karen is surprised by the plainness of it. Not impressive at all. Not as nice as expected. Having heard from her father. Years ago. That this was
the
place to stay. She recalls some of the French phrases. That he always repeated. Taking pride in his bilingualism. He worked for a security firm. Their head office in Montreal. And so visited the city regularly. Bringing back stories of gangsters. Bank robberies. Smoked meat. Delis. Fashions. Women. His hands at night. Stories in her ear. And his hands at night. In the dark. And more stories made up or not.

‘You want look around,' Constable Pope suggests. Standing by one of the beds. ‘See sights?' He turns on the television:
Couteau. Marteau. Scie.

‘Sure. Just…I have to use the bathroom.' In the bathroom with the door shut. She pees. Then stands. Looks at herself in the mirror. Beyond the door. The television:
Fou. Coup. Corde. Prenez garde.

A hotel room, she tells herself. A shudder going through her. For some other reason. She turns sideways, And smoothes her smock over her belly. Her dyed-blonde hair. Her plucked brows. Her fixed nose. Her teeth. Her contact lenses. She loves herself. Now. For once. She loves herself. Almost exactly enough.

Never. More natural. Never. More at ease.

Out in the room again. She finds Constable Pope stood by the window. Flipping through a magazine about Montreal. The television on. She moves in beside him. Closer to a bird's-eye view of the city. A wide street with solid grey buildings. To either side. People moving everywhere. She had noticed in the airport. And out on the street. The way people dressed. The men in sharp suits. Women in expensive fashions.

In the limousine. Constable Pope had asked the driver to cruise up St. Catherine Street. Wanting Karen to catch a view of the action. She had watched out the window. Seeing the clothing stores. The mannequins lifelike. Standing on their hard feet. Or hung. The deli windows. With meats. And cakes. And pickled peppers. Hanging. Businessmen coming out of doors. Tugging on raglans. Or holding
umbrellas. Chatting in a language foreign to her. They had passed a large building at their right. With a great expanse of grass in front. Constable Pope had pointed it out. Place des Arts. And had listed jazz musicians. He had seen there.

‘St. Laurent just up not far,' Constable Pope had indicated. Nodding his head toward the windshield. ‘
Prenez une droite
,' Constable Pope had called to the driver. The limo had turned right.

They had passed a fast food restaurant. A cinema with XXX. And then in the doorways of a variety of shops. She had seen women in tight skirts. With frizzy blonde hair. Done up with make-up. Too much. She had seen a black woman. With a red tube top. And black skirt and nylons. She had stared at the black woman. Stared. The black. Woman had watched. Her pass. Waving to the limousine. And laughing.

Karen had tried not to stare. But could not help herself.

‘Not very nice,' Constable Pope had said.
Putains.
Peeking a glance at her. Watching the whores. Smiling. She had felt a twinge of hatred. For him. Why had he come this way? On purpose. It had been on purpose.

Then further ahead. Flashing lights. Police cars. A covered stretcher being wheeled from a doorway. The limousine around a corner. Gone.

Standing in the hotel room. She turns away from the window. Constable Pope watching her.

‘You are doing fine?' he asks. Nodding to answer for her.

‘Yes,' she says anyway. Glancing around the hotel room. Feeling like she should not be here. Why? She deserves it, she tells herself. It is like fear.
But I am good enough to be here.
And thinking of what Blackstrap might say about this place. Why Blackstrap? Why him always in her head now? From the television a covered stretcher being wheeled from a doorway. What they had seen. Out the window of the limousine. Police speaking in French. The falseness. The lack of character. The province Blackstrap hates. The French. Canadians.

‘We go.' Constable Pope. He holds up a finger. One minute, he means. Steps into the bathroom. His wallet on the dresser. Money stuffed in there. Next to change. Keys. The bathroom door locks. Karen stares at the money. Moves closer to count. The wallet in her hands. Opening it. The bills. Twenties and hundreds. So much money. It
makes her feel better. Puts her at ease. A credit card. Gold. She lifts it out to see. The numbers. The name: Pierre LaCrosse. Not Kevin. Not what she calls him. Not Kevin. It must be his name in French. The other credit card. The same name. His photo ID. The same name. Never has she looked inside before. His wallet.

The bathroom door unlocking. The wallet back where it was.

‘We go now,' Constable Pope says. ‘
Explorez
.' Coming out. Seeing her by the bed. He takes hold of her hand. His fingers joined with hers. Something Blackstrap would never do. Never. Hold her hand. Never touch her in public. No shows of affection. She hates him desperately. With a longing that makes her shake. Her head in a way barely seen. Why him?

‘What?' Constable Pope asks.

‘Nothing.' She fakes a little smile. Aware of her teeth. The cost of them. Kevin had paid for the contact lenses too.

‘We eat Greek tonight. Okay?'

‘Sure.'

Constable Pope takes his wallet. Does not think twice. Puts it in his pocket. Tilts his chin at her. Smiles charmingly.

Karen follows him to the door. The television left on. A woman's face from a picture. Another woman's face. From when she was living. Then another. And another. One photo. The face the same.
Disparu.

Reaching to open the door. But the door is locked. The chain put across. She watches Constable Pope check the knob. To see that it is unlocked.

No, locked.

Together she sees them. Hand in hand. Walking down the carpeted corridor. Toward the elevators. Arriving there. Constable Pope pushing the button. And staring at her face. Another woman's picture. And another…

‘You like it here?'

‘Yes,' Karen says. ‘Yes.' The elevator. But not the elevator.

The locked door. The hotel room. The hotel. The city. The province. The country.

Not who he said he was. His name in French. She tells herself.

‘
Putain
,' says the man.

Blindfolded on the bed. She is naked. Mouth crammed with cotton. Taped over. Arms tied above her head. Legs roped to footboard posts. Her body. An X. With a hump.

The scars around her breasts. The bruising. Constable Pope watches there. The scars. Around the rise of her belly. Not fully healed yet. The fat sucked out.

Constable Pope thinks:
Transformé en l'animal pour tuer.

She shakes her head. She.

He says. In English. For her. ‘Made into the animal to kill.'

She cannot see. Nothing of her. Of him.

‘
Boucherie.'

He reaches into her. He reaches deep into her. He reaches himself deep into her. He reaches himself deeper and deeper into her. Until his hand has hold. He takes the heartbeat.

Screaming. But not heard. Whose voice?

She read this in a book once. She saw it on television. A picture in a magazine. She read it in a headline.

A holiday.

She was beautiful. Done over. Dead.

She was made up nicely.

Screaming without sound.

Wasn't she? Dead. Or death pulled out of her.

My baby.

Mon bébé.

Moi.

 

In her adult years, Emily Hawco feared that something had not been right with her childhood. Her father had made veiled references to discrepancies throughout her lifetime. It was not until Alan Duncan was on his deathbed that Emily learned the truth, as it related to her, of why they had fled Liverpool.

1953

St. John's

The lunatic asylum and a father's death

The train ride from Cutland Junction to St. John's was an agitated blur. Emily tried watching out the window, her eyes registering the impression of ponds and forests, sights that would normally reassure her, yet her slack concentration disallowed appreciation. The news of her father's critical sickness had delivered Emily to the brink of new and sudden realization. Over the years, where her father had existed in a realm of madness, he had remained essentially unreal to her. However, the thought of his impending death, of his total abstraction, brought him to a fullness that was lacking for decades. What was there to erase if not a man?

Emily had tried reading the paperback novel that Isaac Tuttle had given her to take along for the journey, a book written by John O'Hara which described an alcoholic's pitiful decline from society's favour. Isaac always with a lesson to pass on. This one, no doubt, aimed at Jacob's fondness for drink. Isaac never touched a drop. She shifted her eyes from the words to the window. Isaac like a child, really, the thought of him prickling a sensation of fear and excitement through her. How could he seem to have existed from the time of her first memories in England? Those shadows of thoughts that were her constant dreams.

Travelling away from her home, on the miles of track through the wilderness toward uncertainty, she moved her eyes to the book to forget.
Although she was seeing the words, the corridors behind her eyes, through which the words usually made smooth passage to her mind, were broken in places so that the words often slipped through. The lulling tremor of the train made her sleepy despite her anxiety at what might meet her at the termination of her journey. She dozed into the vast openness that transported her off, yet would be jostled back to the closeness of the compartment and the stare of a young man in a shabby coat watching her chest from across the way.

Aware of the young man's stare, she felt her breasts ache with fullness. The thought of Blackstrap made her nipples leak and, so, she vied to keep her mind from him and the guilt she felt for leaving him in the care of Elizabeth Coffey, a young woman from Bareneed who had a new baby of her own. A wet nurse, she would be called, by Emily's mother. With a faint shake of her head, she studied her lap. The book open there. Where she was going was no place for a baby.

Since learning of her father's forthcoming and most certain demise from Dr. Frazier Murphy, the psychiatrist at the lunatic asylum who had sent the telegram, the world had come alive in a most painful manner.

At the station in St. John's, she disembarked the train and waited for the porter to retrieve her single case from the baggage car.

When the porter handed the case to her, she enquired: ‘Is there a streetcar running to…' She caught herself before stating the lunatic asylum, or the Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases, as it was properly named, adding, instead, while she pulled on her gloves, ‘Running west, along Water Street.'

‘Streetcars stopped running in '48, missus. There's a bus.' The porter pointed toward the front of the station where a number of travellers were already gathering across the street. Riding on the streetcars with her father and mother as a child in St. John's was one of her earliest memories, clear and complete unlike the muddle of what was left behind in England. Following their move to Bareneed, her mother would take a trip twice a year to St. John's to shop. During those excursions, they rode from one end of Water Street to the other to visit the select shops where her mother bought her a new dress or shoes, her outfits always distinguishing her from the other schoolchildren in Bareneed whose clothes were worn and tattered, handed down from brother to brother
or sister to sister in the long line of siblings that comprised the majority of outport families. Because the clothes distinguished her, they also made her an easy target when she left the one-room chilly schoolhouse each day for the boys' rock-throwing. Done with her downtown shopping, her mother would then hire a cab to visit with Mrs. Hickman, a friend of her mother's who had established a charity foundation in aid of the new St. Claire's hospital. Her mother would help out with plans in any way she was able, donating money as well.

Emily carried her bag and joined the others at the bus station across the road, avoiding the interest of a woman wearing a green bandanna and a shabby long black coat who stood near her and boldly eyed her up and down.

‘Wha's in da case?' asked the woman, her mouth filled with spaces where teeth were once lodged.

After a shunning moment of thought, Emily said, ‘Personal items.'

‘Aw,' the woman scoffed, staring directly into Emily's face, squinting and making up her mind. ‘Visit'n den, ye must be. Is dat it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where ye from?'

Emily was about to say England, something in her, perhaps an urge to dominate this woman and thus briskly silence her, reared up, but she restrained herself and politely said, ‘Bareneed.'

The woman gave a swift sharp shake of her head. ‘Nev'r 'erd of it,' she griped, as though her pronouncement did nothing short of obliterating Bareneed from the map. The woman then leaned back, studying Emily's hair and coat. ‘Lovely coat ya got dere, missus,' she said, no doubt, meaning for it to be taken as a compliment, but making it sound as though it were a criminal sentence.

‘Thank you.' Emily held her case in front of her waist, both hands gripping the wooden handle, and stared off into space.

The bus arrived fifteen minutes later.

As Emily boarded the bus, the woman followed in close pursuit. It would be a chore to avoid the woman now. She searched for a seat in which someone was already positioned by the window, so as to prevent the woman from sitting beside her. There was an old man with a pointy chin and salt and pepper cap, his thin hands placed meekly on his lap,
seated about halfway down the bus. She chose the space next to him and sat.

The old woman took position in the seat directly across the aisle and leaned across, patting Emily's shoulder to get her attention, and grinning as though their talk at the bus stop had set them up as fast friends.

‘Where ye off ta, me duckie?'

‘Just up the road.' Emily tilted her head in a forward direction.

The old woman gazed ahead. Done with her fruitless search, she faced Emily again and said, ‘Dat's anywhere sure.'

‘Bowering Park,' Emily admitted, which was directly across the street from the lunatic asylum.

‘Aw,' said the old woman, her eyes cast toward the case that sat on Emily's lap. ‘Ye 'av'n a picnic?'

‘Yes…I mean, no.'

‘Now, make up yer mind, maid. Which it be?'

‘No.'

The old woman leaned to gawk up into Emily's face. After much consideration and as the bus passed alongside the tan buildings which comprised Littledale Convent, the woman commented, ‘Yer not frum dat place ye said.'

Losing patience with the woman's enquiries, Emily looked at her.

‘Where ye say?'

‘Bareneed,' Emily said sternly.

‘Naw,' said the old woman, straightening in her seat with a huff and folding her arms. ‘Dat's nut'n but a wick'd crock o' lies.'

Emily regarded the woman who would no longer meet her eyes, which was fine with her. She sat in stillness, facing forward and considering the velvety texture of a woman's black hat in the seat ahead of her. A moment later, she felt the old man's thin hand slide over to rest on her knee while he watched through the window and commenced humming merrily, inclining his head one way as though to signify interest in a sight beyond the pane. The hand patted her knee as though in friendship. Not wanting to cause a scene, Emily gently shifted away as much as possible, toward the very edge of the seat, yet the old man's hand remained where it was. It did not budge another inch. It simply rested there, the warmth of it seeping into her flesh. She checked around
for a place to move, but the woman, seated half on and half off her seat with her boots in the aisle, was blocking the way.

Searching the windows on the other side of the bus, she found that the perimeter of Bowering Park was now visible. The rolling field and then the edge of the pond where a swan house had been erected.

‘I got a daughter,' the old woman professed, ‘ 'bout yer age. She were snooty like ye too. T'inks she's a princess. Royalty. Butter wouldn't melt in 'er mout'.'

Emily kept her eyes on the windows across the aisle as they passed the first set of gates for the park, then peeked at the old man's hand on her knee. The touch of that hand seemed to shrink every muscle in her body and set every nerve on edge. Yet she could not bring herself to look at the old man's face nor issue any sort of curt warning.

The bus would soon stop at the lunatic asylum.

‘She's in dere,' said the old woman.

Distracted, Emily looked at the old woman to see where she had indicated.

The old woman was peering at the red-brick building. ‘She's in dere, in da Mental. Widt all da udders of her royalness.' Reaching up, the old woman's fingers curved over the rope and pulled down. A bell dinged. And the bus pulled over. The old woman was already on her feet and Emily, despite her reluctance, would need to exit at that stop as well and follow after her.

In haste, Emily stood, watching the old man's hand fall away and return to meekly rest atop his other. Flushed and addled, she turned and waited impatiently for the back doors to hiss and fold open. From her position behind the old woman, she could smell a scent of stale perfume off her. She thought she sensed something astir in the greasy strands of the old woman's long hair.

Out on the sidewalk, the old woman turned to face Emily who avoided her, instead gazing across the street. There was Bowering Park, with its expansive landscape featuring deep-green metal statues of moose, Peter Pan and a soldier from the First World War with his arm stretched back to pitch a grenade, rivers with waters cascading over rocks, a multitude of flower beds and shaded paths beneath imported trees. Emily continued watching that way, as though admiring the
prettiness of the park, until the eyes scrutinizing her through the bus windows were swept along by the vehicle's progression.

When the bus had taken a corner further along, Emily turned, hoping the old woman had stepped off. However, just like Emily, the old woman was facing the red-brick building, its construction angular and intimidating. The same daunting vision as when Emily had last seen it. Six years ago, she had left in tears, vowing never to return. Her father had said hurtful things to her, malicious and obscene. In his delusional state, he recognized her only as a little girl. The conditions in which he was living were unnatural. His wild, unkempt behaviour terrified her. She could not bring herself to see him again, the memory of his furious face, with its spittle-encrusted mouth, still haunted her.

‘Who ye got in dere?' asked the old voice.

Emily regarded the woman who was now tilting her head toward the building.

‘Pardon?'

‘No need ta pardon me. I ain't done nut'n.'

‘Oh.'

The old woman grinned. ‘T'were a joke, me duckie. I said, who ye got in dere? I knows ye got someone in dere. No need ta pretend udderwise. Yer fool'n no one, 'cept yerself with dat sort o' snotty foolishness.'

Emily would not say it. Could not say it. She could not manage the word.

‘Ye can tell me. Dere's no shame in dat. Dey're all no crazier den us.' With that, the old woman gave a peculiar giggle. ‘Tell us, g'wan. I wun't tell no liv'n' soul.'

‘My father,' Emily quietly admitted, tears of confession warming her eyes.

‘T'ought so,' said the old woman. ‘Ye got dat look about ye o' a fadderless child. Come on,' the old woman encouraged, taking hold of Emily's arm and pulling her along, only to stop dead in her tracks almost at once. With mouth agape, as though a realization had reared up to challenge her, she spun to contemplate Emily's face. ‘Ye sure ye've not got a room booked in dere fer yerself?' she asked with an overly concerned face that soon rounded out with impish laughter. Practically toothless was her grin, widely uncovering bald, gleaming gums.

Watching the old woman's expression, Emily found herself perplexed and then disburdened by a quick smile. However, any relief that she felt was short-lived, for treading toward the steps of the asylum, her knees began to tremble. She shifted her case from one hand to the other, yet this did nothing to vary her body's state of anxiety.

 

One of the women in uniform announced to Alan Duncan that a visitor was waiting outside the door. In a reasonable tone, indicative of her calling, the nurse assured him that the visitor was a woman, his daughter. Emily was her name, and she would cause him no harm.

‘Yes,' he muttered. ‘I know.' Although he did not know. Not exactly.

The visitor, the woman, entered the room with a case in her hand.

Alan Duncan had been expecting a child. Hopefully, he had been expecting. His cheerless eyes searched the woman's face until he found the inklings of a more youthful being. Younger than him, that was all. There was little left of her, but he was able to reconcile himself with the few collected traces.

‘Emily,' he said, desiring to know her more than his dwindled sense of recognition allowed. That name on his tongue. It came of its own volition. It was an intrigue. He was about to ask:
Did they take you?
but could not bring himself to do so.