Blasted (35 page)

Blue gestured at me to sit down, and I squeezed onto the couch next to Coke-Bottle-Glasses Man, hoping I didn't reek of booze. He smiled at me and looked away, saying nothing. The others continued in whatever conversation they'd been engaged when I'd interrupted. I ate a grape. Still the man next to me said nothing. I cleared my throat and cast around for something to say. “So, are you a filmmaker?”

He peered at me, silent for a long time. Again I felt my dumb smile dying. I gulped and ate another grape, but it was soft and rotten on one side, and I hunched over and spit it out in my hand. “Sorry,” I said, just as he began to speak.

“No, I'm a…”

He stopped.

“No, sorry, go on, it's just the grape, it was…”

“Mmmmm,” he nodded and smiled. And fell silent. I wiped my grapey hand on a napkin and looked desperately for someone else to talk to, but the honey-hair woman was holding court with a story about working on some film.

“And then he yelled,
Bring on the white guys
!” Everyone was laughing. “I wish I'd been there to see it.” Blue wiped tears from his cheeks.

“I'm a writer,” a quiet, husky voice said in my ear, sounding like Marlon Brando from
The Godfather
.

“What? Oh, you're a writer?”

He nodded.

I cleared my throat.

“Um… what do you write?”

“And
then
the director hired all these Filipino guys because they had more
authentic hair
!”

More laughter.

“Novels.”

“Novels?”

“Novels.” He beamed.

“That's… great!” I said. Another silence between us undid me; I started babbling. “I don't do much of anything myself. I waitress sometimes, and sometimes I model. Not fashion modeling, God. It's for this painter friend, Blue knows him too.” I remembered that most people don't want to hear about life modeling; it generally makes them uncomfortable. “So, anyway, and that's all I do.”

“Mmmmm.” And he beamed at me again.

They kept talking, reminding me a little of how it is at home where everyone knows what everyone else ate for breakfast. I stayed around as long as I could bear how nice they were being to me (barring the actor) and then excused myself. I lay on my bed and, lulled into an almost-peace by the murmur of voices and laughter outside, fell into half-sleep.

Something stirred up in me, a longing. The golden light had played over their hands and faces; they looked like they belonged. What would that be like? To awaken in the morning and not have my first feeling be,
who am I one of? What am I for?
Did these people feel that? Had they fought through something and come out the other side, whole? And then I remembered the actor shifting in his chair; Blue acting straighter than I'd ever seen him; the woman who looked down at her stomach then tugged at her shirt to cover the soft roundness up.

And even if I went into that warmth, I would never be one of them.

I fell asleep feeling the air moving over my skin, like invisible hands, gently stripping the red ochre from me. Living alone in that household, she was the only one who knew that sleep and death weren't so very different. Sleep was a death.

CHAPTER 24

Around midnight they came for me again. Gil and Blue had long since gone to bed; I'd stayed up drinking what was left of my Wiser's, hoping that would make me sleep. Nothing on TV made any sense, and as for the drink, there was nothing Deluxe about it; it was all just liquid down my throat, belly burning and head growing fuzzy. Finally I grabbed the remote and cut off the TV in the middle of some pointless movie with nameless actors and a laughable script. Silence – even traffic from the street below was muted.

Then a sound from my bedroom: rhythmic, intermittent tapping, like the ticking of a broken clock. Start and then stop, start and stop. I huddled on the couch. There was a particularly long pause. It's only rain dripping off the roof, I told myself. Except there hadn't been rain for weeks – we were in the middle of one of the worst droughts in Ontario history. The tapping began again, a Morse Code behind my bedroom door, and then that unmistakable snapping, like dry bones cracking.

I wrenched the door open.

The bedroom was a sea of feathered bodies. Every head turned as light from the open door sliced into the room, every round eye fixed on me. But they didn't flap or panic; they stood there, unnatural. Staring. Then one bird, one only, stirred. It was perched at the foot of my bed, and opened its wings, revealing pale undersides, lavender edged with grey. It began marching up and down the footboard, tapping on the wood. That was the sound I'd heard. Tap tap tap-tap.

I looked up at the skylight to see how they'd gotten in. It was closed; there was a screen anyway. This was impossible.

I slammed the bedroom door and ran out of the apartment.

I fled south to find the comfort of my Islander dawn, but it was one in the morning and everything at the ferry was locked up. My forehead pressed against the bars of the gate, the steel cold against my palms. The massive concrete city loomed chill and empty this late summer night. No one, no human, was here at night; this area of town was only lived in during the day. No birds either. The night sky was empty. If I'd had a gun I would have shot them, I told myself. My father had – they were the only thing I'd ever seen him hunt. A memory surfaced painful and bright, a BB gun, down to the railway warehouse in the warming spring night. The only time I saw him with a gun. When I'd asked him why, he'd said they steal babies, and I'd started to cry. My mother got angry at him, told him to stop frightening me with fairy stories. She'd taunted him for his vendetta against the birds, putting on an American accent,
Pigeon huntin', Cuzzin Billy? – But his name's Neil, Mom,
I'd said.

A streetcar squealed past on the tracks, sounding like a baby's cry. I stared up at the night sky – nothing, not even a star. I heard the squeal again, the strange almost-crying. Was it –? I turned, began to walk up the street, then ran, but the streetcar fled, its metal trail gleaming behind it in the night. No baby. Only silence.

And then I heard another thin cry threading up a dark alley. I followed. The alley became an underground concourse, taking me up past Union Station. From there I didn't know which way I went: bridges and buildings and culverts all the same, shadows everywhere and me afraid of the open sky. The crying. Moans and squeals of machines that sounded like crying, or crying that sounded like machines, babies that flew like birds, away from me. Always away.

I crept back into the apartment only when the east began to lighten.

My bedroom door stood open – hadn't I slammed it shut? The sun wasn't high, but there was light enough to see the room was empty. I moved through the apartment – no birds, no feathers or stench or pigeon shit. No open windows; there was no place they could have escaped. At last I stepped into my room. The skylight was closed, just as I'd seen it last night.

I must have imagined the birds. I'd fallen asleep on the couch and woken, confused and drunk, from a nightmare. I couldn't sleep alone, I couldn't spend another night alone. I went to the phone and dialed Jason's number.

I woke him, but he was happy to hear from me. Sure, he'd love to see me tonight. He was getting together with Judith and Tad, but they'd love to see me too. Sure, he'd pick me up around six.

“And now my stepmother's sister is offended because we didn't invite her.” Judith, Tad, Jason and I sat around a table in a funky new independent-brewery-slash-restaurant. Judith looked, if it were possible, almost haggard; the strain of organizing the wedding was beginning to tell on her, and it was only August. Tad hunched in his chair, nodding at everything Judith said. “I mean, I've met this person maybe four times in my life. And apparently she's in tears because she didn't receive an invitation.”

“Judith, I can't believe you keep hurting people this way,” I said. “You're so cruel.” Jason sat next to me, leaning toward me. I drank to quell any guilty thought that I was using him.

“Yes,” said Judith. “Why
do
I keep hurting people with my wedding? What a bitch.”

“Stop it. Think of your stepmother's sister, woman.”

“God, I don't even remember her name.” She started snorting through her nose, which in any other woman would be an embarrassing laugh, but when she laughed that way I felt that if only
I
were to snort through my nose, men would fall at my feet.

“And then there's my aunt,” Tad put in, “who won't come to the wedding because it's on Hallowe'en. Says it's disrespectful.”

“Well, it is kind of weird,” I said, but he went on.

“It's hard to believe that woman is Brendan's
sister
. She's the most interfering, sanctimonious, wretched…”

“Why don't you elope?” Jason put in.

“What?” Tad said, and Judith said, “Don't think I haven't considered it.”

The three of them continued their wedding talk, while I drained my beer and perused the menu. I was starving, but I couldn't afford this stuff. Maybe Jason would pick up my bill? Then he'd really think we were on a date. Hadn't I engineered this as a date entirely to avoid another night alone in that apartment, in that room?

“What's the matter?” Jason was asking me.

“Just looking at the chickpea whatssit here,” I lied. A waitress came up, paper pad at the ready. “You don't have, well, hamburgers, do you?” I whined.

She stared. “It's a vegan restaurant.”

“Oh. I mean, it's not really my business what the cow ate before dying a brutal and pointless death to provide me with a meal, is it? If the cow chose to be vegan…”

“Ruby,” Tad and Judith said.

“I mean, all the more power to it, right? I mean.”

“I'll have the tabouleh salad,” Judith put in, her order quickly followed by Tad's and Jason's. I had to be content with a chickpea burger. “And could I have another beer?”

As the dinner went on I began to suspect that Jason looked on the whole evening as a couples' night, bringing me out to view the soon-to-be wedded bliss of Judith and Tad so as to put ideas in my head. Well, it wouldn't work. All I wanted from him was a warm body in a bed.

After dinner (which Jason paid for) we drifted to another bar; then the Happy Couple said they had to be off home. Jason and I hung about on the sidewalk, awkward. Now that I was faced with him, the casual seduction didn't seem quite so easy. What does one do? Grab the ex by the balls? He looked at me, not nearly as drunk as I, unhappy but hopeful in his perennially irritating way. “Let's go for a walk,” I suggested.

We wandered west, past clothing shops and miniscule independent art galleries, all closed for the night; the mental institution; a renovated hotel, now pulsing with light, the sidewalks blocked with the limos of successful musicians. “My place, my van I mean, it's parked just a little further,” Jason remarked. “I've got a show on in the Gladstone and they've let me park in the lot across the way.”

So we were near his place. “Remember when this was the seediest dive ever?” I blurted, gesturing at the hotel. I'd used to like coming to some of the bars around here; you could drink for cheap. “I wonder where the seedy bars go?” I ran ahead a couple of steps. “Where have all the seedy bars gone,” I sang, badly. “Long time passing, I wanna know…”

“Why are you so nervous?”

He was on to me. “Who, me, nervous? Let's sit down or something.” I saw a park bench across the road and swerved, crossing recklessly, nearly getting hit by a truck. I flung myself upon the bench to wait for Jason, who was crossing in a more conventional manner.

“I hate weddings.”

Music blared from a nearby bar. Jason sat next to me, heavy, making the bench creak. He smiled lopsidedly. “What brought that on?”

“I don't know. I don't want to be all ungracious or anything, but Jesus – wedding, wedding, wedding. It's eating their lives.”

We sat a while in silence. This was what I had always liked about Jason, his understanding that silence could be companionable; in fact, he was a lot better off when he didn't talk. I thought about kissing him, when all of a sudden he said, “Why?”

“What?” I snapped, then realized what he was referring to. “Don't ask me.”

“Well, if I don't ask
you
what you meant, who then?”

After a strangled silence I burst out, “They're going to have
children
.” “Probably,” Jason agreed. “What's wrong with that?”

Nothing
, of course, is the correct answer. For Judith and Tad it was natural. But I couldn't explain the coldness that surged in the pit of my stomach. Other people could unfold their lives with words, plans – marriage, a child – no, something wrong, so much danger in the face of it. I folded my arms across my chest, grit my teeth. The taste of beer soured in my mouth, and although my head still spun I knew I was starting to sober up. Aunt Queenie had told me about my grandfather, swiping his son from the woodpile in fright. Gramma's rage. But I knew that in that moment, my grandfather hadn't known who the small figure was, hissing at him. Hostility, no recognition at all in that creature. I shivered, then felt Jason's hand hot on my shoulder. With a start I realized he'd been speaking to me. His face was earnest; he was looking out into the night, as if what he had to say was difficult and important.