Landing (12 page)

She was glad, suddenly, that it had been so long since she'd had sex with anyone but herself. Too long to be troubled by memories.
Must take of these pajamas,
she thought sleepily.
First times are crucial. Mustn't be wearing pajamas when I ravish her in some memorable way.
"Lordy," she murmured, "cold really makes you appreciate another body."

"There's a bit in the Bible about that, actually."

"Isn't there always?" she groaned.

Jude quoted it in her ear: "If two lie together, then they have heat, but how can one be warm alone?"

Síle lay still, planning a witty response to that, deciding on her moves.

But the next thing she knew, it was morning, and a gaudy yellow sun was setting their bed on fire.

Sun in their eyes, lemon yellow in the crooks of their knees and elbows. Jude shouldn't have worried. She and Síle knew what to do as if the information had been coded in their genes. There was startled breathing and shrieking. The two of them got so tangled up in'Síle's hair, she had to shake it back over the headboard. This was a lucky dip, a ten-course banquet, a fruit machine where—
ching, ching!
—coins kept spilling from slots.

They lay catching their breath, their fingers slotted together. "The first sap is the sweetest," Síle quoted.

Jude's laugh turned into a hacking cough. So unfair, that it was only when you gave up smoking that your lungs broke down. She played with the delicate gold chain around Síle's waist.

"Feels strange," Síle said; "nobody's touched it in a long time. It was my mother's; it's called an Aranjanam."

Jude repeated the syllables, Síle correcting her till she'd got it right. "Didn't Kathleen touch it?" she asked. There were always ghosts around a bed; you might as well invite them in, start trying to make peace with them.

Síle looked her in the eye. "Not in a few years."

Excellent!
But Jude only said that in her head, and she managed to keep her face straight. She thought of saying something like
That's terrible,
but it would be tacky to triumph over the fallen foe. "Do you ever take it off?"

Síle shook her head. "Though one of these years I may have to have it lengthened! The times I've been to Kerala, my relations tell me I look like Sunita reincarnated," she went on, "but I still feel like such an outsider there. If our Amma had lived to raise me and Orla I suppose we'd be cultural hybrids, but as it is we're just brown Irish. I've never even slept with anyone who wasn't white as paper. Have you?"

"Well, Rizla's half Mohawk—"

"Of course. I forget to count guys," said Síle with a self-mocking grin. "So, one thing troubles me: You know you say there've been no
serious
girlfriends—"

Jude shrugged. "It tends to start hot but dwindle into friendship, if anything. I don't think I'm scared of committing—"

"Clearly not! Your job, your hick village..."

"I'm pragmatic, I guess," Jude told her. "If it's not the big thing, I don't see the point in pretending it is." A pause. "And it's never been the big thing, till now."

Síle's eyes were dark orange.

"Uh-oh, is that too much, on a first date?"

For answer, Síle climbed on top of her and put her tongue behind Jude's earlobe. Things got sweaty and noisy again, and Jude forgot how much she'd been wanting a cigarette. At one point she felt sudden wet on the side of her neck, and had the crazy thought that she'd burst a blood vessel. But then Síle's face lifted, and it was blotted with tears. "What is it?" said Jude, appalled. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Síle sobbed. She licked her own salt water off Jude's collarbone. "Did you never have anyone weep all over you in bed?"

Jude shook her head.

"Young pup." Síle collapsed onto her back, her hair like a black vine spreading across Jude's chest. "So how do you like it, the big thing?" she asked after a minute.

"I wouldn't say I
like
it," said Jude. "It's like being Belgium."

"Belgium?" repeated Síle, shrilly.

"Wasn't Belgium always getting overrun by invading armies?"

"Ah. Ever the history buff."

"My life isn't my own anymore," said Jude, mock-belligerent.

"'Post-contact,' as you say in the trade." Síle giggled. "Don't blame me."

"I do. You and poor George L. Jackson."

Síle went up on one elbow. "I lit a candle for him the other day, in a Gothic church in Vienna."

"I'll always associate you with death now. In a good way," Jude added, when Síle made a face. "Memento mori, and all that. Did you know, they used to draw a skull at the bottom of a tankard, so when you'd drained it you'd be reminded you were going to die someday?"

"I can't see that catching on at Ikea."

"So whenever I think of how we met, I'm reminded to seize the day."

"Or the Irishwoman."

"Exactly." Jude worked her hands around Síle's waist and tightened like a snake.

"You realize this is doomed?" said Síle in an indecently hopeful voice.

"What, you mean the living five thousand kilometres apart?"

"Oh dear, that sounds even worse than three thousand miles."

"I thought Ireland was metric."

"Well, in theory, but we still talk in miles and pints," Síle explained. "But yes, the distance, and also the little matter of fourteen years..."

"
That
shouldn't matter," said Jude. "People are always telling me I've got an old head on young shoulders."

Síle grinned. "It's two generations, musically and demographically: I'm a tail-end Boomer and you're Gen Y."

"I'd like to say in my defense that I can play 'Scarborough Fair.' Couldn't we just pretend I was born in the sixties?"

"Play it on what?"

"Guitar," said Jude. "What could be more sixties than that?" Síle let out an exasperated breath. "How could you not have mentioned that you play the guitar?"

"I'm not that good."

"You're good enough to play 'Scarborough Fair,' which makes it a big fat lie of omission." She reached for Jude's fingertips and rubbed them. "Calluses; of course, I should have guessed," she said under her breath.

"Sorry, did they—"

"I like them," Síle told her, grinning. "So what else don't I know about you?"

"A quarter-century's worth, at least."

Much later, when Síle was in the shower, Jude let her head dangle off the mattress. Her whole body felt swollen, sodden. She was woozy; she was high as a kite. She had a little headache, from nicotine withdrawal, she supposed. (Gwen had suggested patches, but Jude preferred to do this kind of thing on her own.) She rolled onto her stomach and looked under the bed. There were dust balls, and a pencil, and a pair of delicate high-heeled suede shoes with tide marks on them.

Downstairs, she dabbed the worst of the stains off with desalting fluid. She had carried the shoes halfway up the staircase when Síle appeared at the top in a towel.

"C'mere, gorgeous," said Síle, descending.

Jude shook her head, backing down. "Bad luck to cross on the stairs."

"Not another one!"

"You can call it superstition, or you can call it sense."

"And there I was thinking you just couldn't take your eyes off me."

"That too," said Jude, finding and kissing Síle's dark nipples one after the other.

Síle put on a brown suede skirt, a silk sweater, and an angora shrug—a word Jude had never learned till today, and couldn't imagine using in conversation. From the Aladdin's cave of her suitcase she took out a quantity of gold jewelry; on anyone else, it might have looked too much. Feeling Jude's eyes on her, she said, "Nomads always wear their wealth. Do you even own any jewelry? I've never met anyone who wears fewer items. Shirt, jeans, knickers..."

Jude looked down at herself. "Belt, socks ... That's about all I need."

"You'd definitely lose at strip poker." Síle examined the Swiss Army knife hanging from a belt loop. "Did you know the average buyer loses theirs in three days?"

She laughed. "I got mine from my uncle Frank for my eighth birthday."

The next kiss lasted long enough that Jude thought she might fall down.

"Feed me!" Síle roared in her ear like a bear.

They had the Hungryman's Breakfast at the Garage, where Jude introduced Síle to Lynda the waitress, Johan the dentist, and Marcy the town's travel agent and desktop publisher—"had to diversify when her bakery went bust," Jude muttered in Síle's ear. Lucian and Hugo from the Old Station Guesthouse had their ferret Daphne on a harness and wanted to know how Síle was enjoying "Her Majesty's Dominion."

"Glad to see you're not the only queer in town," she murmured to Jude across the table. "All this hand-shaking and inquiries after health and happiness, it's so Old World! It must take half the day to get down the street. In Dublin we mostly just nod and mutter 'howarya.' Oh look, a pious papist," she commented as a pregnant girl pushed into the café wearing an Our Lady Peace T-shirt over a bulging sweatshirt.

"Actually that's a band," Jude told her, amused. More loudly: "Hey Tasmin. Síle, this is my friend Gwen's niece..." When the girl had gone out with her coffee and doughnuts, Jude added: "Unemployed, bulimic, and due in July. Her parents are going out of their minds."

At the next table, farmers were debating whether late feeds helped avoid night lambing: Síle was agog.

Jude paid at the counter. "All righty, see you later," said tiny, wrinkled Mrs. Leung.

"That's one idiom I find charming," Síle remarked when they were out the door. "The way it implies everybody's going to get together again before the afternoon's over. She's from China?"

"Hong Kong."

"I remember that feeling of being the only ethnics in town," said Síle with a little shudder. "You couldn't so much as pick your nose in case the neighbours jumped to the conclusion that
all you people pick your noses.
"

She walked sexily, Jude thought, even in an old pair of Rachel Turner's snow boots that had somehow escaped the purge.
Síle O'Shaughnessy's here on Main Street,
she told herself, incredulous,
right here, right now.

The snowdrifts were translucent with sunlight at the edges, and gutters and eaves dripped musically. "This was the Petersons' surgery, before they retired," said Jude, stopping at a two-story limestone house; "when Dad's furniture business collapsed, they took Mom on as their receptionist, even though she had no experience. After school I used to read in the waiting room."

"I can just picture you, swinging your little legs," said Síle. "Dungarees?"

"Always."

She took Síle into the museum's office first. "Archivists have this principle called
respect des fonds,
" she told her from the top of a set of rickety library steps, "meaning you should respect something's provenance—where it's from."

Síle's forehead crinkled. "Such as?"

"Here, for instance." Jude climbed down with a carton and unwound the string. "Miss Anabella Gurd's journal. This is one of my favourite holdings."

"Wow," murmured Síle, bending over the brittle pages.

"See this clipping about the craze for crinolines?" It had been pasted in carelessly; the paper rippled. "Provenance means you don't rip it out and stick it in a file marked Fashion. You leave it here, because it tells us that Miss Gurd of Ireland, Ontario, was worrying about her underwear on 13 December 1857."

"Context is all," suggested Síle.

"Exactly!"

Outside the schoolhouse, Jude wrestled with the padlock. "The first time I saw inside was when me and some boys broke in, in grade seven. It was totally derelict and smelled like death."

"Well it's gorgeous, now," said Síle, stepping in and craning up at the polished beams and the blown-up photos on the whitewashed walls, letting her fingers trail along the back of a desk. "'The area where you stand was a million acres of trackless wilderness probably first inhabited by the Fluted Point People (95008200 C.E.),'" she read aloud from a wall panel. "C.E.?"

"P.C. speak for B.C."

She examined farm tools and kitchenware, clothes hung on invisible threads from the rafters. "I was afraid there might be sinister mannequins."

"Ugh! The bane of small museums. No, I prefer real things. Like—can you guess what this is?" Jude held up an iron pincer.

"An instrument of torture?"

She grinned. "Catholic! It's a nipper, for breaking bits of sugar off a cone. But listen, I can't give you the full tour or we'll waste your last day." Ever since they'd left the house, she'd heard the hours ticking away.

She drove them out to a conservation area near Stratford. Leaving Ireland, they passed a filthy red pickup, and Síle asked, "What's that about?"

"What?"

"You nodded at them, and lifted two fingers off the wheel."

Jude hadn't even noticed. "Oh, it's the local wave."

"What if they're not local, what if you don't recognize the car?"

"Then we scowl murderously," said Jude, straight-faced.

She scanned the white-blotted fields as if with an outsider's eye: What would Síle be seeing? They passed orchards of low, twisted apple trees, tense with the anticipation of blossom, and tall houses with stately porches, sheltered by stands of cedars, that seemed to disdain any connection with the soil. A gap-toothed barn disintegrating in a riot of silvery gray; a big red one with a roof that read CROWLEY FARM CELEBRATING 150 YEARS, and another that said, unusually, VAN HOPPER AND DAUGHTER.

"It's so flat," Síle commented. "No wonder they had to use unimaginative names like 13 Mile Road or—" she craned to read the next small sign—"Line 28!"

"This road we're on, a hero of mine, Colonel Van Egmond, built it through the bush, all the way to Lake Huron," Jude told her. "He talked families into setting up inns so travelers could get their beef tallow and crust coffee, and he brought all the settlers' complaints back to his bosses."

"Bet they didn't promote him."

"Afraid not: He joined the 1837 Rebellion and died in jail." She slid her right hand into Síle's waterfall of hair and held on.