Significance (2 page)

She feels emboldened by curiosity, by the fact she is a stranger here. She takes a cigarette from the packet in her bag, positions it between two fingers, steps even closer to him.

‘Excuse me? Do you have a light?'

She could have struggled to ask the question in French, but she wants to be certain he knows that she is English.

Her words, like her shadow, do not register. He blinks, but maybe this has nothing to do with any of her assaults on his senses – he does not see, or hear, or feel, or smell her. Touch is all that is left. But touch is so intimate, so risky if he is mad. If he is a mad, crazed boy held in some dark soundless prison, then a sudden touch, a gentle hand on his forearm might scare him into pulling a knife from his waistband and plunging it blindly into her heart.

‘He won't answer you.'

A man is standing next to her. She turns quickly; tries to conceal how startled she feels, how guilty. He is tall and thin, with blue eyes not dissimilar to the staring boy
-
man. He speaks English, but with an accent, American perhaps.

‘He's my brother,' the man says. ‘He's not…' He hesitates here as if searching for a word, but gives up, doesn't finish the sentence.

‘Oh,' she says. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘What are you sorry for?' he asks, bluntly. It is as if he is accusing her of something. ‘Here,' he says and reaches into his trouser pocket, pulls out a book of matches, tosses them at her.

She catches it, opens it, finds none of the matches yet used.

‘Oh,' she says, retrieving the packet of Lucky Strikes. ‘Do you want a…'

He pulls a face to show his distaste. She wonders why he has matches in his pocket if he doesn't smoke. Something in her would rather not smoke now in front of him, it feels as dirty as rolling up her sleeve, finding a vein and inserting a thrice
-
used needle. But too late, she's committed. She lights the cigarette, turns her head to blow the smoke away from his face.

‘Why does he stand there like that?' she asks.

‘Because he can.'

His answers are annoying, aggressive. They are brothers though, so maybe something runs in the family. Maybe this one, the older one, just seems more normal, but underneath is just as disturbed and strange as the other.

‘Where are you from?' she asks, and he jerks his head to indicate a house behind him with lemon
-
yellow shutters.

‘No,' she says. ‘Your accent…'

‘Canada.'

‘Ah.'

He looks at his watch, then at his brother. Avoids her gaze.

‘I'm from the UK,' she says, though he hasn't asked.

There is a silence then. The sort of silence that hovers between strangers. Human strangers in particular perhaps. If they were apes she might have crept forward and begun to companionably pick parasites out of his hair. Or maybe he'd have screamed, pulled back his lips to reveal sharp teeth, then charged at her with wild eyes and flared nostrils.

She does not know why she is thinking this. Nor why she is lingering there at all.

‘Why are you angry?' he asks her suddenly.

‘What?'

‘You look angry. Is it my brother? Does he offend you?'

‘No, no. Of course not. Why should he? I just…'

‘Okay, fine,' he says. The words are clean and clipped, as if he is snapping sounds out of the air and leaving mysterious and meaningful shapes behind. Like the chalk marks describing where the victim of sudden death had fallen.

He turns to his brother. ‘Aaron! OK. It's time to come in now!' He is unnecessarily gruff, she thinks. She expected more pleading, a gentle coaxing, not these sharp orders. And he asked why
she
was angry! ‘Aaron,' he barks.

His brother turns his head slowly at the sound, then blinks at the speaker. She reads sorrow in his expression, the cowed look of a dog that's been beaten once too often.

‘Don't talk to him like that,' she says, knowing she shouldn't. Something in her wants to provoke him.

‘Now!' the man says, ignoring her.

Aaron seems at last to come to life, he lifts his hand from the road sign as if he were ungluing it. His eyes move vaguely over the two people looking at him; the female stranger and his brother.
His brother
. You could see the recognition suddenly register in the sharpening of his eyes.

He began to move forward, trudging his feet not so much reluctantly as wearily, as if they were heavy, as if gravity was increasing its hold just in the places where his shoes met the earth's surface.

Lucy saw now that she had been wrong to speak out. That it was none of her business.

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘For what?'

‘For you. For your brother. It must be hard…'

The younger man had drawn level with them. His face was slack, the eyes dull, and yet you couldn't fail to notice how perfect his bone structure was, how achingly attractive he would be if he were wholly alive. She was surprised to find herself mourning the loss of what should have been a potentially vivid and fully functional human being.

‘I'm sorry for you too,' he said.

His words had their intended effect. She could not answer.

She watched them go. The two brothers, the younger one shuffling like an old man, the other stiff – almost bristling with anger. She wanted to know more. Wanted to understand the barely suppressed rage that was directed towards her. To know also where she had gone so wrong.

Domestic Interior with Three Figures

Marilyn's brother
-
in
-
law was standing facing the closed door. ‘Brother
-
in
-
law' was not a term that suited him. When she thought about a brother
-
in
-
law what came to mind was a man very like her husband: self
-
assured, intelligent, good looking and passionate about life.

Instead there was Aaron.

Poor Aaron.

Standing there staring at the blank face of the door, stepping slowly from one foot to the other and, judging from the insistent movement of his jutting
-
out elbows, doing something strange with his hands.

Scott was sitting near the window reading a book, oblivious.

‘What's he doing?' Marilyn said.

Scott glanced quickly at his brother, then shrugged and shook his head as if to say did she really think he would have any better idea of what went on in Aaron's head?

‘I think he's got something.'

Scott lifted his head to study the figure by the door more carefully.

They always had to look out for stuff like this; Aaron had a habit of picking up small objects and worrying away at them until they broke. Or if the object didn't break then after a time he lost interest and dropped the thing wherever he happened to be, so that jewellery, coins, keys and so on had to be closely watched or kept locked up. Four years ago Marilyn had left her engagement ring on the shelf above the bathroom sink in Scott and Aaron's parents' house and, after searching all over, they'd finally found it in the toilet bowl in the outhouse. At the time she thought that Aaron had done it deliberately. That he was sending her a clear message about what he thought of her.

‘You're being ridiculous,' Scott had said. ‘I wish my brother was capable of such clarity, such clear signs of possessiveness and emotion. It's not personal, believe me. Forget it. You're wasting your tears.'

She found that last phrase troubling. ‘Wasting your tears' indeed – as if tears were precious and had to be carefully guarded, saved for the rarest of occasions. Scott was one of those men who was profoundly discomforted by tears, especially women's tears. And Marilyn had always cried easily and helplessly from both sorrow and joy.

She watched Scott as he put the dog
-
eared and yellowing copy of
The Handmaid's Tale
on the chair and crept towards his brother. When he drew close enough he peered over Aaron's shoulder and said gently, ‘Hey, whatcha got there, buddy? You wanna show me?'

Aaron did not want to show him. He began to groan softly in protest and to rock from one foot to the other with more emphasis.

‘You gonna show me, huh? Come on, show me,' Scott grabbed Aaron's wrists and the groaning noise went up in pitch and volume.

‘Don't hurt him,' Marilyn said.

‘I'm not hurting him. Now come on, give it to me. Let go! Let go, damn you!'

The noise coming out of Aaron's mouth was awful – like that of a tortured animal.

‘You're hurting him!'

‘I'm not hurting him. For Christ's sake, Marilyn, shut up. Come here.'

She moved across the room so that she was next to them. She could see that although Scott had a firm grip on both of Aaron's wrists he was being measured and careful about the level of force he used.

‘Open his fingers,' Scott said.

Marilyn hesitated, then reluctantly did as she was told, discovering, as she pried Aaron's fingers up, that he gave only the barest resistance. His left hand in particular opened as easily as a flower and there in the centre of his palm, resting in the crease of his heart line, was a round white button, smaller than a pea.

‘What is it?' Scott asked.

‘A button.'

Aaron wailed.

‘It's mine,' she said. She had recognised it straightaway as belonging to one of the few dresses she possessed that still fitted comfortably; a flowery print frock she'd bought in a vintage store in Ottawa eight years ago. It had struck her then as a very romantic dress with its row of tiny pearl buttons down the front. She had felt feminine and beautiful in it, like a woman from another age. Scott called it her Emily Dickinson frock, and she was never entirely sure if that was meant as a compliment or not.

Exasperated, Scott sighed loudly, ‘Okay. Okay. Here have this.' He let go of Aaron's wrists and reached into his pocket, pulled out his sunglasses' case and removed the glasses. Aaron didn't move his hands once they were released, but stood posed with upraised hands as if he were a saint displaying his stigmata. Scott put the empty case in one of Aaron's open hands, but the fingers didn't close around it and it fell to the floor.

‘Do you want milk? Nice milk and cookies?' Scott coaxed.

Aaron was quiet for a moment, then he turned and began trudging in the direction of the kitchen. Scott watched him go, then turned to Marilyn and slowly shook his head.

‘What?' Marilyn said.

‘How could you say that?'

‘What?'

‘That I was hurting him.'

‘I'm sorry. I didn't think. I know you'd never hurt him deliberately, I just…' The look on Scott's face silenced her.

‘You didn't think? Yeah. No one else does either.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Okay, forget it.'

Scott followed Aaron into the kitchen and got the cookie tin from the cupboard.

‘Okay, buddy. Nice milk and cookies? Yeah, you like that, eh? Yeah?'

Aaron drank deeply from the glass, then lowered it to reveal a white moustache of milk on his upper lip. He blinked and crammed a whole ginger biscuit into his mouth. His eyes were glazed over with concentration and his left knee bounced up and down in rhythm with his jaw. Scott stood to one side with the cookie jar resting in the crook of his arm, waiting for Aaron to finish the biscuit he was eating before allowing him another.

Marilyn stood watching them. Her hand moved to her belly and rested there for a moment, then remembering herself, she hastily took it away again. She did not want Scott to see her in that clichéd pose, to recognise the gesture for what it was; that of an expectant mother gracing her swelling womb with an exploratory and protective hand.

Busying herself, she got the dress that had lost the button from the laundry basket where it was waiting to be ironed, sat down on a rustic milking stool in the corner of the living room and, like a penitent in a reformatory, stitched the tiny button back on.

Creatures of Habit

For the third night in a row Lucy is drawn to La Coquille Bleue. There she is, smiling at her old friend Madame Gallo as she seats herself at a table near the bar. And while she looks at the menu, she's sipping milky
-
white
Pastis
and remembering the bullet
-
hard aniseed balls she sometimes ate as a kid.

Tonight she orders steak with salad, refuses potatoes when asked. Nods thoughtlessly when the waitress asks if she wants the steak
bleu
. Nods vigorously when she asked if she wants
vin rouge
.