Fauna (28 page)

She left to go shopping without thinking to ask what he and the others might like. Loblaws came close to defeating her, her mind a bright void as she wandered the aisles. In the end it was a chicken breast that saved her.
Fajitas
. She may have cried the actual word—several people looked round—or it may have been pure, unintelligible sound.

Strangely, everything seems to be going okay. They could be a family, and a modern one at that—Edal at the counter chopping garlic, Lily outside smoking, Stephen online in another room. Guy’s already set the table. He sits there reading, the book unknown to Edal, something about a pilgrim and a creek. Whatever the story, it holds his attention almost entirely.
Almost
. Earlier, while she was slicing the green peppers, she caught him watching. He met her look, held it briefly before returning his gaze to the page.

Now, as she crosses to the stove, she catches him in a moment of distraction again. This time, though, he looks toward the screen door, where Lily can be heard calling across the yard.

“Hey, Kate.”

At least Edal thinks it’s Kate, the single syllable muddied by Billy’s welcoming woof.
Kate
. It’s not a name she’s heard mentioned—but then, why would she? She’s only known him—them—for a few days. She scarcely knows them at all.

A second female voice now; Edal can’t quite make out the reply. She can make out the laughter, though—the first time she’s heard anything more than a snort from Lily. Bright, almost childish in tenor, it finds a counterpoint in the other,
sustained and warm. Edal becomes aware of the wooden spoon in her hand. She twists back to the stove and balances it against the hot lip of the pan.

When she turns back to face the room, Guy has laid his book face down on the table. The screen door is a portal, now empty, now holding a woman turned hazy by the fine steel mesh. Guy stands as she draws it open, coming clear.

First, there is her skin. The colour of caramel sauce, it glows against the ice cream white of her T-shirt, the black of her high-cut runner’s shorts. Then there’s her hair, far longer than Edal could ever grow hers, not a full blue-black but not what anyone would call brown either. Dark, most people would say. Long, dark hair. The high ponytail has swung forward to cover a shoulder, a breast. It lies there like a pelt, as though it might just as easily end in the sharp little face of a mink.

“Who’s this?” Guy says, as Lily and Billy follow the newcomer inside.

“This is Kate.” Lily looks at the floor. “I told her she could come and see the hawk.”

“If that’s okay.” Kate’s voice matches her laugh. The mouth it issues from is red and full. Edal feels herself swivel back to the spitting pan.

“Sure,” Guy says warmly. “Hey, Edal, come and meet Kate.”

She angles the spoon against the pan again, but it slips, splattering the stovetop, an oily spray. She hates herself for what she does next. She’s tucked her thin hair back to keep her face cooler as she cooks. Now she reaches up to free it. It falls in two flimsy curtains as she turns, hiding the flaw she’s come close to forgetting, her unfortunate little ears.

Something’s up. Guy may not have known many women, but unless he’s very much mistaken, something has rubbed Edal the wrong way. She’s not what you’d call a big talker in general, but tonight she hasn’t said word one—not even when he told her everything tasted great. It’s true, too. He’s had Mexican before, but never like this—the fresh green bite, the soft tortillas in their corn-scented steam. He helps himself to seconds, taking his time.

Too much time, it would seem. He’s still working on the last fragrant bite when she stands to take his plate.

“Uh-uh.” He swallows. “You cooked.”

She stands still, as though admonished. Cuts her eyes toward the door.

Kate balls up her paper-towel napkin and rises. “I’ll wash. You want to give me a hand clearing, Lily?”

Billy whines, and Lily slides down in her chair, bringing her nose to his. “Billy’s gotta go.”

“Maybe Stephen can take him.” Kate reaches across Guy and he gets a whiff of the runner’s sweat in her T-shirt. Honest sweat, Aunt Jan used to say.
You can always smell a phony, Guy. The pores don’t lie
.

“Come on, Lily,” she says. “You can dry.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Stephen stands and pats his thigh, drawing Billy after him to the door. Edal watches them go. She still hasn’t sat back down.

“Take a seat,” Guy says.

She twists her hands together. “I thought I might get going.” She says it as though she’s a stranger among them. As though she doesn’t know what happens next.

“Don’t you want to hear tonight’s chapter?” He means to say it lightly.

“I’m tired.”

And he sees now that she is—not weary so much as sleepy. Somebody ought to pick her up and carry her to bed, tuck her in before she begins to cry. She would be easy to lift; he knows this in his arms, his chest.

“It’s ‘Letting in the Jungle’ tonight,” he says. “Mowgli gets his own back on the villagers.” Ever so slightly desperate. Even he can hear it, and still he keeps on. “I’ll give you a ride home after if you want.”

She tilts her head, as though she can’t quite make out his meaning. Then nods and resumes her seat—but not before grabbing a section of the
Star
from the table’s far end. Aunt Jan used to read in different ways for different reasons. When she opened the paper, it meant she’d rather be left alone.

Guy takes his time fetching the book, sitting down on the bed and reaching first for
Ring of Bright Water
. Should he take it out to show her? Something tells him no, at least not yet. He lets it fall open to a page he’s favoured. A man not much older than himself has fallen asleep in his chair. On his lap, a large, white-throated otter lies wide awake.

By the time Guy returns to the table, Edal’s set the paper aside, folded her arms into a pillow and laid down her head, her face turned away from his chair. The others sit quiet and alert. Guy eases into his place, slips his finger in behind the bookmark and begins.

Having learned to hate man, Mowgli’s back in the jungle, where he belongs. His friends counsel him to forget the village, but how can he when he knows Messua, his human mother, is to be put to death for having harboured him in her home?

Guy keeps his voice low to begin with, but allows himself to grow louder as Mowgli forms his plan. Louder still as that plan comes into effect.

Once Messua and her man have escaped, the jungle is free to do its worst. The wild pigs lead the way for every horned and hungry thing; soon the ripening crops are no more. With nowhere to graze, the village herds wander off to join up with their wild cousins. Ponies lie broken in the laneways, marked by a certain panther’s paw. In the end, Hathi the elephant and his sons run mad, plucking roofs off the little mud houses and kicking through crumbling walls.

In the midst of the havoc, Edal turns to lay the other temple down on the back of her wrist. He can see her face now, her eyes still closed, the lids bluish, soft.

“‘A month later,’” he reads, “‘the place was a dimpled mound, covered with soft, green young stuff; and by the end of the Rains there was the roaring Jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months before.’”

He leaves a pause before finishing with “Mowgli’s Song Against People.” When he falls silent, Edal makes a small sound in her throat, like the click of a CD reaching its end. She lifts her head and opens her eyes. Her cheeks are flushed.

“That was amazing, Guy,” Kate says, stretching her arms up over her head. “The dinner was great too, Edal. I only ever cook Indian, and I even cheat at that.”

“I love curry,” says Stephen.

“Yeah? I should make some for you guys.”

“You’re on,” Guy says. “How about tomorrow night?”

Edal rubs her eyes roughly and pushes up out of her chair. “Well, good night, everybody.”

She’s at the door before Guy can stand.

“Bye, Edal,” Stephen and Lily say together, and Billy huffs out a sigh.

“Nice to meet you,” Kate calls.

“You too.” She says it over her shoulder, not looking back.

Guy slips out after her. She’s walking fast, already coming alongside the trucks. “Hey, wait up.” She slows a little but doesn’t stop. He catches up to her at the gate. “What’re you going to do, scale it? Hold your horses.”

He feels for the chain at his neck and pulls up the key. Once he has it in hand, he finds that hand less than steady. Whatever’s upset her, it seems to be catching.

He busies his hands with the lock. “No bike tonight?”

“No.” She says it softly, almost sadly, her tone confusing him further.

“You want a ride?”

“No.”

He frees the lock but keeps his other hand on the gate.
Never
. Aunt Jan’s voice like a buzzer deep inside his skull.
Never, ever bar a woman’s way
. It was mostly a joke, him blocking the office door that day, trying to keep his aunt from taking the call he wanted for himself. But he was taller than her by then, and it was anything but funny when she looked up at him with blazing eyes.

He steps back quickly, drawing the gate with him. Edal turns side-on to ease through the opening.

“You coming by tomorrow?” he blurts.

“I don’t think so.”

“Not a big curry fan?” He pauses, and when she doesn’t respond, he fills the silence again. “We don’t have to have—”

“It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I’d better be getting home.”

“I’ll walk you,” he says, a little too loudly. “If that’s okay.”

It takes her a moment to answer. “Yeah.” Her expression is impossible to read. “Okay.”

Despite her size, she’s a fair match for him in pace and stride. She swings her arms as she walks; he stuffs his hands in his pockets. They head east toward Broadview, silence stretching along the first short block. Guy searches his mind. There ought to be something he can say about the street where he grew up.

When was the last time he walked along it with a girl? It must’ve been grade seven, because he was still making his way to school most mornings. If he timed it right, there was a fair chance Shelley Tang would fall in beside him when he passed her house. She was a grade older, but still the right height to look him in the eye. Other Chinese girls wore their hair in ponytails or shiny, blunt-cut bobs, but Shelley preferred to shave away handfuls and bleach what was left behind. “It’s Shao-lin, actually,” she told him one wet spring morning. “My folks figured nobody’d notice I was a Chink if they wrote Shelley on the admissions form.” So far as Guy knew, he was the only one she’d ever told her real name. In turn he offered her the lost, hockey-great pronunciation of his own.

It can’t have been long afterwards that the sign showed up on Shao-lin’s narrow front yard.
For Sale
one week,
Sold
the next. “Richmond Hill, here we come,” she muttered on their
last morning together. The street was slick, the sky pearly. “No more cockroaches and fresh lychee for Shelley Tang.”

He hasn’t thought about Shao-lin in what feels like forever, despite the fact that he passes her old place every time he goes for a paper, or to the Rose for a sub. Now, coming alongside the little row house with Edal, he finds himself gesturing toward it. “A friend of mine used to live there.”

She slows for a moment, regarding its drooping porch. Not much of a response, but to be fair, he hasn’t given her much to respond to. He and Shao-lin used to point things out to each other as they walked: the yellowish, long-bottomed panties the old woman on Hamilton Street strung out along her line; the corner yard crowded with strollers—they counted nine of them, nine empty strollers catching rainwater and growing grey blankets of mould. On Broadview they charted the stains left by bleeding streetcar transfers, the vomit splatters outside the Lucky Lotus bar. Standing before shopfront stalls, they stooped over the bright, stinking bodies of dried shrimp, watched the pink-footed pigeons scramble over mounds of bok choy. The same stalls he passes with Edal now.

It comes to him as they turn onto Gerrard—maybe there is something he can show her after all. It’s not a sure bet, but a good one, given that it’s just gone dark. “Hey,” he says, a few doors along, “let’s go down here.”

She halts, framed in the alley’s mouth. “Here?”

“Uh-huh.”

She glances over her shoulder. “How come?”

“You’ll see.”

She hesitates for a moment before leading the way into the
relative gloom. They walk south along the Trinity Supermarket wall then turn with the alley and travel eastward again.

Over on Gerrard, the light is rich—shop signs in Christmas colours, restaurant windows showing neon creatures of the sea. Blades of crimson-edged gold and peony pink reach back to them along the narrows, but for the most part the laneway light is halved: dim and domestic from the line of backyards on their right; variable from the string of businesses on their left—here a sink of shadows, there a flood of greenish white from a propped-open kitchen door.

The first Dumpster they pass stands tank-like and quiet. Half a dozen industrial green bins alongside it show no sign of life. The second is more promising. Guy hears a low, squelching scuffle as they approach, catches sight of something waddling low.