Blasted (2 page)

I stood there until the kettle screamed, poured water over the tea bag in my mug. If he were here now, maybe he'd be watching me do this. Maybe he'd come behind me, put his arms around me and lean his cheek on mine. We'd stand there together. Intimate, companionable. Maybe the Virgin Mary would phone and ask me to keep an eye on the Baby Jesus while she ran out for a pack of smokes.

This monument marks the site of the parish church of St. Mary the Virgin during the period 1859-1963. Fishermen and sailors from many ports found a spiritual haven within its hallowed walls. Near this spot is the burying place of Nancy Shanawdithit, very probably the last of the Beothuks, who died on June 6th, 1892.

Words stick if you gabble them enough times as a child, like the Lord's Prayer or O Canada. Words on a metal plaque, a stone monument. Were the stones from the original church? Had that been the churchyard where Shanawdithit was buried? The monument was surrounded by concrete paths in the shape of an Irish Cross. Atop it was the other. A stone cross, the size of a human head, its round halo intersecting the harsh finality of those two crossed lines with a grace only the Irish could have thought up. But that demolished parish church was Protestant, like the entire Southside Road. Maybe it was another of those unlikely marriages between faiths I'd barely noticed until coming to Ontario: my mother's sign of the Cross over her rising bread loaves, or my own invocations of the Trinity,
Jesus, Mary and Joseph
.

The phone! I careened through the apartment.

“Hello?” Damn, my voice quavered.

“Ruby. Where are you?”

It wasn't him. It wasn't him, he wasn't going to call. It was Jim.

“Jim,” I said.

“You were supposed to be at work half an hour ago.”

“Oh, shit, I'm on for noon, I could swear it…”

“No, we talked about this on Tuesday,
remember
?” I could hear his fingers drumming his desk.

“Sorry… I'll get there as soon as I can.”

“You'd better.”

Damn, the arsehole hung up before I could. I should have known it was Jim before I even picked up. The stench, for one thing. The phone emitted the Jim stench even before I answered it. And for another thing,
He isn't going to call you, Ruby!

I lurched around trying to get dressed and drink my tea and brush my teeth all at the same time. Got out the door, slammed it shut, realized I'd left both my cell and my motorcycle helmet inside, dug in my pocket for keys. I'd locked them in the apartment.

“Shit, shit, shit!!” My voice echoed through the stairwell. I punched the door and hurt my hand, hauled off and kicked it.

Right on cue, the vacuum seal of my neighbour's door opened, a swish and suck. “Everything okay?” Earl asked.

“Jesus Christ! What sort of stupid question is that?” I kicked my door again.

“Well, I was just asking.” Earl was a gaunt, beady-eyed man with a miserable adolescent beard. He did nothing all day but watch the hall through his peephole.

“Look, I'm late for work, and…” I trailed off. Earl blinked. “Stop sulking!”

“What? I'm not doing anything. Just trying to be helpful.” He sucked his cheeks in and regarded me. “Just trying to be friendly. Of course,
some
people don't know anything about being friendly.”

“Yeah, I'm a real bitch.”

He raised his eyes heavenward, martyred Saint Earl of Shaw Street, stuck full of verbal barbs. “If you
wanted
,” he said, staring at the ceiling, “I mean, if, you know, it wouldn't
offend
you, I could get Izzie to open your door while you're at work.” His eyes darted back to my face, a flush creeping up his neck.

“Good luck.” Our superintendent lived on the first floor of the house and drank like a fish. In fact, she looked like a fish. Her hair was dyed bright orange, and her bulbous eyes always seeped liquid.

“Jeeze, Ruby, someone certainly got out of…”

“… the wrong side of the bed this morning,” I finished for him, turning and clattering down the stairs. Halfway down I turned back and flashed him a smile. “That'd be great if you could get a key to my door, Earl. I'd really appreciate that.”

“Sure thing. Huh.” He withdrew and slammed his door, but not before I saw him duck his head, all pleased.

Neighbours are funny things in Toronto. If Earl weren't such a needy bugger, I'd probably never even talk to him. People here only deal with their neighbours when they have a conflict over their recycling boxes. Not like home, where everyone knows what time you shit. They even know things about you that you don't know yourself. Family secrets an open book to the whole crowd, up and down the road.

When I was a kid and there was still a fishery, my friend Juanita Cooper lost her dad and her older brother at sea. This left her mother with several dark-haired daughters and one spherical son, Willy. The sisters were all called things like Wendy and Wanda and Winona; Juanita (had they initially imagined it was spelled with a W?) was the youngest. “Brain,” they nicknamed her, because of her unaccountable fondness for reading books. Her family went on welfare after her dad died, and the mother kept all the girls' clothes in her own room, doling out outfits every morning. An immense woman with long hair, grey down to her ears and dyed black to the ends, she was always screaming, impossible to understand because she never put her teeth in. She rarely came down from her room, just sat there all day like a queen on her throne.

For my tenth birthday my grandmother made me a skirt. I loved that goddamned skirt. It was blue with little orange and yellow flowers on it, in three gathered tiers. I loaned it, once, to Juanita who had the lead in a school play. She kept it for weeks; one day she wore it to school and I got so mad I could have spit. When we were walking home, I confronted her.

“You wants it back?”

“Yes.”

“But I'm wearing it.”

“So take it off.”

She laughed. “Who's going to make me?”

“Me.”

“
Ye?
”

She was the bigger girl, but I grabbed her nipple, and told her that either she gave me that skirt right now or I'd twist it off. She grabbed my hair. I twisted her nipple. She tried to smash my face into the gravel.

“Give me my skirt, you welfare bitch,” I hissed.

She kicked me hard in the shins, I let go, and then she said, without heat, “Oh, okay, come on down to the house.”

Now, this wasn't exactly what I'd had in mind. Truth be told, her family scared me. The house always stank, and the bottom floor was so wrecked they only lived in the kitchen, and even that had a huge hole ripped out of one corner of the floor, right through the linoleum and boards; draughts howled in winter and rats scrabbled below. The house had been built by the great cod merchants; in Toronto the whole street would have been yuppified in five seconds. Here, its merchant founders turned in their graves while families like Juanita's, in a sort of economic poetic justice, gradually destroyed it with their misery and their poverty. Not that I cared about any of that
then
; I just wanted my skirt back. My grandmother had sewn a sparkly red button on the waistband: red for Ruby.

So down the road we went. We walked up the pitted, perpetually damp gravel driveway to the back door and I trailed after her into the ruined kitchen. One of the sisters – Wilma or Walda or wha' – reclined on an old maroon couch on the good part of the floor. She half-turned as she heard us come in, but her smile darkened to a scowl when she recognized us.

“Get the fuck out of ‘er, I'm expecting a
visitor
!” I hardly knew where to look. She had practically nothing on, just a red bra and some underwear, and what I as a little kid (as opposed to someone of the venerable age of ten) had called “lady's polish shoes” – patent-leather stilettos. She wore tons of makeup, and I could see bruises along the insides of her thighs and arms.

“Fuck you,” Juanita retorted.

“You little fucker, I'll tear your eyes out!” As an only child, and a lonely child, I sometimes wished for brothers and sisters: then I'd remember Juanita's family.

We scuttled out crab-like and went up the staircase to the second floor, skipping the broken ninth step. As we approached the closed door of the mother's room, I could hear her screaming in her harpy voice. Up and down it wavered, drones and shrieks. Juanita looked at me, her eyes blank. The voice went on. Then, without taking her eyes from mine, she knocked.

The screaming checked itself. Juanita opened the door and walked in.

There was no one else there; her mother had been talking to nobody. She sat in the exact centre of the room in a big armchair with stuffing coming out of it, an endless unmade bed behind her. She wore a shapeless brown polyester dress and resembled a huge, flaccid, malevolent spider. Her legs stuck out, melted candles with pink slippers stuck on the ends. Over the ruined marble mantelpiece hung a lurid print of an Aryan Nation Jesus with His hands together and His eyes rolled up to Heaven, lime green swirling muddily behind Him. The wardrobe where the woman kept all her girls' clothes loomed dark in one corner.

I kept my eyes on Jesus.

Juanita told her mother about the skirt. The woman heaved herself out of her chair and surged to the wardrobe, rummaged through it, and threw a pair of pants at Juanita's head. Not looking at me, head down, Juanita stripped silently out of my skirt and put on the pants. Her mother stood there, staring. I scooped the skirt off the floor, burning, and we fled.

She took me out the front door; no one
ever
used the front door. But there was a man's voice in the kitchen now. Outside, a couple of Portuguese sailors lounged against the dilapidated fence, waiting.

When I got home, I saw that the skirt was faded from numerous washings, and the waistband was stretched out of shape because of Juanita being a bigger girl than I was. And the red sparkly button was gone. I guess it had popped off.

I didn't tell my mother or my grandmother. I threw the skirt into the dust and shadows under my bed, then took off over the Hill, running and tripping over tussocks, getting up and running some more, until I reached the Fairy Rock. I fell to my knees, pressed my face to cold stone, tears wetting the rock. I wished
she
were there. But I'd only seen her that one time. Just the once. I cried on, alone.

CHAPTER 2

The subway made everything worse. I glimpsed the transfer-machine clock as I dove into the tunnel – almost seven – my shift at the restaurant had started at six –
shit, shit, shit
. It was a rotten job. I hated it, and Jim the owner hated me. I'd hate me, too; I was a lousy waitress. Cranky. Usually got the orders wrong. I hated being at the beck and call of arseholes who wouldn't know a good meal if it shot them in the face. I hated being crammed into a train with a crowd of people all going to jobs they hated too. I hated this city, and I hated myself. I liked to think I was independent – hence the motorcycle. I loved her. She would be a heap pissed off that I had left her at home today; she was very vain, and we looked good together.

Now here I was in the shiny metal cattle cars just like everyone else, rubbing up against strangers. A short, heavy-eyed woman was jammed in front of me; her head kept banging my tits. I had to hold my head at an unnatural angle to avoid the prodigious yawns of a man with crypt-breath. Even I could smell the booze coming out of my pores. It wasn't fair, it wasn't
fair
. Bad enough to arrive late at work to be sneered at by Jim – roaring in on my bike might have salvaged something from the whole situation. The subway slowed and creaked to a dispiriting halt. Heavy Eyes' head rocked on her neck, hammering my breasts, and Mr. Halitosis yawned so widely that saliva spurted from his mouth. I could see my face reflected in the subway window, dark hair tangled over my shoulders, eyes wide. They'd surrounded me. I'd let them get to me and there wasn't a thing I could do about it.

I'd learned young to keep myself apart – I was a freak, and the other kids sensed it. I was ten years old when I really saw it; it was my first Hallowe'en. I had never been out on that night of nights. There was always some excuse: she's too young, it's too cold, remember that boy Farley who fell off the rocks and got swept out to sea. It was some “Jones” thing, at least that's how Gramma represented it to my mother. Gramma had this way of calling my mother by her maiden name as a topper in any argument: “And that's just the way it is,
Mrs.
Blanchard!”

But this year my mother gathered me into her arms and whispered in my hair, “Let's make you a costume, dearie,” and my heart leapt into my mouth, I was so glad. I told her what I wanted, she got to work on it and I helped; it was the best costume ever. Feathers in my braided hair, a brown fringed dress, sneakers covered in brown cloth to look like moccasins, and best of all, a
bow.
With arrows.