A History of Forgetting (18 page)

‘They used to,' said her mother, ‘but the men wrapped themselves up in them while they were waiting to get in. You know, to keep warm.'

She pictured a scene less forlorn than usual: tattered figures lit up like trees. ‘That would look nice.'

‘They wrapped them under their coats.'

‘Oh.' They drove in silence. ‘So,' Alison finally said, ‘what happened to Jeffy?'

‘He's had some trouble at school.'

‘He's been fighting?' She was surprised. He was too small for that pursuit.

‘He says he didn't start it. They were calling him names, he says.'

‘What names?'

Her mother's lips made a tight line. ‘He wouldn't tell me. The principal told me.'

‘What did he say?'

They stopped at a red light and her mother turned to her. ‘Don't tell Billy.'

‘I won't.'

‘Don't tell your father either.'

‘What names?'

The light changed and her mother sighed and drove on for a few more blocks. ‘I'll put it this way. There might be more than one hairdresser in this family.'

Alison stared, then Jeffy's out-of-bounds room came to
mind, the door and desk marred by stickers, the cast-off clothes. There was no scheme to his rock star posters or his mess. Also, his ears were always filthy and his nails gnawed down. His hair
stuck up. She laughed.

‘That's funny?'

No way was Jeffy gay. Not unless there were messy gays as well as neat gays, just like there were neat and messy Virgos. ‘Do you think it's true, or are they just being mean?'

‘I found eyeliner,' said her mother tersely.

‘Eyeliner? Where?'

‘In his room.'

‘You went in his room?
Anyway, eyeliner means nothing. Kurt Cobain wore eyeliner.'

‘Who's Kurt Cobain?'

‘The guy in the poster above Jeffy's dresser.'

‘That's eyeliner?'

‘What did you think?' asked Alison.

‘I thought it was dirt.'

They found a parking spot not far from the Mission, then each took a Santa's sack-sized bag of rolls. Along the edge of the syringe-strewn park, the gutter was awash with bilgy run-off and condoms like the shed skins of water snakes. They passed an alley where the sodden contents of the dumpster had been turned out, picked through and left to dissolve. A mattress unsprung, a sandwich bag filled with—she looked twice—blood? The reek was rot and urine.

‘Who was that kid over for dinner that time? When Billy and I were there.'

‘Kevin Milligan?'

‘It was him, wasn't it? He started calling Jeffy names.'

‘I don't know who it was,' said her mother.

Alison said, ‘It was him. You know what makes me mad? How people still say “faggot”. I mean, nobody would dare say “nigger” any more, or “chink.”'

The worst thing about the Mission was that it smelled of what she and Jeffy used to call ‘Wet Bums'. How sincere did ‘Merry Christmas' sound pronounced while breathing through the mouth? Alison pushed open the door, keeping
her eyes off the garish beacon of the cross; into the dining hall they trooped. The ones who had volunteered to lay the tables in order to get in early were listlessly unfolding paper tablecloths. Because all the years blended as one memory, Alison couldn't recall if last year they had looked so young. Probably in childhood her mind had taken as the template of the Wet Bum, Alistair Sim in fingerless gloves and a seedy muffler, then replicated and filled the hall with him; but now she saw it was not so. She saw a man of maybe thirty, with a Mohawk dyed neon green and army boots, conversing with himself in two distinct voices
and what he was saying was the farthest thing from, ‘I wish you a Merry Christmas!—No,
I
wish
you
a Merry Christmas!' No one said ‘Merry Christmas' at all except the kitchen help who had been born again and didn't have to sleep there.

Her mother took the bags into the kitchen, reappearing a few minutes later empty-handed. ‘Mission accomplished.' They went back out into the rain.

‘Pretty depressing,' said Alison.

‘I know. I always have a little cry on Christmas night. Your father thinks I'm crazy.'

‘Why do you do it then?' She and Jeffy had been raised agnostic. ‘Do you believe in God after all?'

‘No. I just add that extra letter,' said her mother. ‘I believe in Good.'

They got into the car and her mother found her keys, but before she turned on the ignition, Alison reached out and stopped her hand. ‘What about Jeffy?'

‘What about him?'

‘Would you mind if he was?'

‘Gay?' Instantly, she cheered up. ‘They're very good to their mothers, I hear.'

 

As soon as they got back, everyone sat down at the table and popped their crackers. Her father rose to his feet, but instead of bellowing his usual crass grace, paused with a big hand on his swell where the new cardigan did not come together between the buttons—a gesture that really betrayed him as most other men would have made a declaration from the heart. ‘Now in his youth a man finds a gal and falls head over heels, as they say. At least, with your mother, she was able to coax me, ha ha. Time goes by, as everybody knows. It was all very satisfying in hindsight. I remember when Alison was born in the middle of the night. Then Jeffrey. You think it's going to be one way, but not at all. Not at all . . .

‘Now Ali seems to have pulled herself together, to her parents' great relief. Jeffy, on the other hand, has become exactly what his parents always feared: a teen. We can all
take some
comfort in the fact that Ali survived those years.'

Billy dropped his chin to his chest and began a mock snoring. Taking his cue, Alison clinked her knife against her glass. And her father, words tangling all around him, seemed relieved to get out of the snarl. ‘Who gives a damn? Everything works out in the end.' He patted his stomach. ‘Thank God supper's ready!'

‘Anybody make any sense of that?' asked their mother, filling the wine glasses.

Then Billy made a speech. ‘When I was a kid, I had three gerbils, Chico, Guy and Goober. One day Chico and Goober ganged up on Guy and chewed his tail off.'

He began acting out with skittering hands across the tablecloth the part of Guy on the run, forcing air out of his cheeks in a series of long shrill squeaks. Everyone laughed, even Jeffy. ‘I was deeply affected,' he said. ‘Poor Guy, rathood reduced to a stub. There were parallels in my own life, see? I was the kid who got trounced every day at recess for being small and brainy.'

Alison, who had never heard this story, wondered what names they had taunted Billy with.

Billy nudged Jeffy. ‘But they don't call me Stub any more. Ask your sister.'

 

The next day Alison and Billy were on a ferry to Vancouver Island in a steady drizzle. Alison stood out on the deck in her raincoat, looking up. ‘Please stop raining. Please let the sun come out.' The closest she ever came to praying was talking to the sky.

The white of the beach astonished her, a recompense for snow. They looked behind at their footprints, then Alison fell flat on her back and ploughed an angel with her limbs through
the wet sand. The second day it was no longer drizzling,
though a flannel cloth of cloud was still draped over the island.
Come afternoon, her skyward entreaty was accepted, twice.

At her feet, it was bigger than a dinner plate and burning orange. ‘A sun star,' said Billy.

No spots on the ten long rays, sun
stripes,
greyish purple. She crouched, put a finger on its gritty centre; it was cold. The tide had left it stranded. ‘Shouldn't we throw it back in?' she asked, afraid to pick it up herself. Billy carried it out in the shifting water to the limit of his boot tops, then tossed it. Going down, it ought to have blazed a fiery emanation, but it didn't, or even really splash. A wave tilted it and towed it under.

Minutes later, in a fairytale causality, the real sun came out. Alison shielded her eyes from the surprise. Everything seemed so perfect.

That night, making love, she opened her eyes to watch Billy. With so little light, just what streamed off the lamp above the motel office door outside, it took a minute for her eyes to adjust. As all white objects emerging from darkness seem to glow, his face was luminous, peaceful as in sleep, but also inspirited, though not in expression—underneath. Beautiful. He looked beautiful. Then she heard his accelerating breathing, saw how he grimaced nearing climax. Lips curling back, he showed his teeth.

Abruptly, she pulled herself off him. He opened his eyes, staring in a way she'd never seen—wildly, animal-like. ‘What are you doing!' he hissed. ‘Don't stop!' Then he came anyway with her sitting on his thighs, hugging herself.

‘I thought you were mad at me!' said Alison.

Quaking all over, he turned his head on the shining pillow, beautiful again. ‘I was,' he whispered. ‘Mad knowing in a second it was going to end.'

She sort of understood. When she was most blissful with
Billy, those were the times she was also most vulnerable to thoughts of his dying or leaving. If she thought of her life
before they were together, it seemed so bereft, though it hadn't
at the time. She hadn't known she lacked for anything. Now
though, now she would know. This fear of losing him almost made her wish she'd never met him.

Billy pulled her down on top of him, the warm puddle of his satisfaction squishing out between them. ‘Oh, no! Crazy cum! Now we're joined forever at the belly!'

Alison was crying.

‘Shh,' he said. ‘We'll manage somehow. We'll stay in bed forever.'

And when she had calmed, she slid off him and lay with the ball-joint of his shoulder in her cheek. He used her hair to wipe her face then, tenderly, raised her arm and bent her fingers back so the piece of glass on the ring hovered above them like an extinguished meteor.

‘What about this rock, eh?' he asked.

‘Your mom was disappointed.'

‘You're not, are you?'

‘What?'

‘Did you want to get married?'

‘Do you?' she asked, surprised.

‘No, but I want you to be happy.'

‘I'm happy!' she cried, throwing her arms around him. ‘I'm happy!'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THINGS

GET VICIOUS

 

 

 

 

1

 

L
ate
the first day after the holiday, Alison hurried through the gallery, past the glowering Senator, to the back room where Thi had already started on the coffee.

‘Sorry,' Alison told her. ‘I slept in and missed the bus. Here, I'll do that.'

‘The problem with holidays,' said Thi, passing her the
pouch of coffee, ‘is coming back to work.'

‘Did you have a good one?'

‘Mmm. You?'

Roxanne appeared just as Alison flicked on the coffee maker. ‘Well? What do you think?'

After the Christmas party Billy had made the comment that Roxanne would not be going anywhere far for the holidays since she could never have got through the metal detector at the airport. Now, in addition to her nipple and navel rings, her grommeted ears and studded tongue, a steel ring was wedded to her bottom lip.

‘Very pretty,' said Alison, deciding not to show her own
ring as she had planned. It was in her purse. The claws would catch in the hair if she wore it while shampooing. At lunch, she would take it out and show Christian and re-enact Billy's mock proposal.

‘Can you shampoo my client?' Roxanne asked.

Up front, a young man was waiting. ‘You belong to Roxanne, right? Come with me.' Alison led him through the columns to the changing room and, drawing back the curtain, handed him a smock. Then Malcolm came in wearing, of all things, an ascot.

‘Hi, Malcolm. Did you have a good holiday?'

‘I didn't have a holiday,' he said. ‘I moved.' But he had cele
brated the New Year in his own way—reviewing his bank statements over the remains of the bottle of plonk, then vomiting purple and crawling into bed by ten.
Should auld
acquaintance be forgot.
The morbid effects of this indulgence he continued to feel even now; he was still queasy from the bank statements.

‘Did you do anything for fun?'

He hung up his raincoat and began fussing with his cuffs. ‘I took the dog out,' he said at last, ‘if that's what you'd call fun.'

‘I didn't know you had a dog. What's his name?'

‘Her name. Her name is Grace.'

‘What kind of dog is she?'

‘Grace defies description.'

For the first time, it occurred to Alison that Malcolm might actually be a very funny man. She laughed, then asked, ‘How's your friend?' and by the startled way he looked at her, she guessed he'd forgotten what he told her at the Christmas party.

‘Worse,' he said, turning quickly away. ‘And worse.'

Roxanne's client stepped out from behind the curtain, so Alison only had time to say, ‘I'm sorry, Malcolm.'

She found the music getting on her nerves. They'd only got back last night on the late ferry. The soundtrack on the island had been the glottal glugging of ravens, the surf's boom and fizz, rain falling in an ambient shush and for the rest of the day dripping off the trees.

After the shampoo, she escorted Roxanne's client to her station, then went to the back room to get him a pot of tea. Crowded because Donna and Jamie had arrived and it was too cold to open the parking-lot extension, she felt as if she'd walked in on a group-therapy session, even Malcolm present, though in the corner he looked more trapped than participating.

Donna was venting. ‘I mean, we had plans! I waited till, I don't know, seven. Seven! We're talking
New Year's Eve
here, and still he didn't call!'

‘He's ready,' Alison whispered to Roxanne who was drinking black coffee through a straw. She put the teapot of water in the microwave and, while it heated, leaned against the counter to listen, too.

‘It was humiliating waiting by the phone!'

‘Fucker,' said Jamie. ‘What a fucker.'

‘That's what I called him when finally he phoned.'

‘When was that?' Thi asked.

‘New Year's Day!'

Everybody groaned.

‘So you stayed home?' asked Roxanne. The pained sound in her voice, Alison realized, was more than sympathy; the straw was because her lip hurt. She shuddered at the same time the microwave started beeping.

‘Of course not. I had an alternative. My point is the humiliation!'

Alison brought Roxanne's client his tea just as the phone up front began to ring. When she got there to answer it, she found three clients waiting. ‘Vitae. Can you hold, please?' She covered the receiver, apologized to those there in body, then got back on the line and booked a cut.

‘Mrs. Leonard is here for Malcolm. Who are you waiting for?' she asked the other two.

‘Christian,' they chorused. Alison sighed. ‘Not again.'

 

What Malcolm thought was that Christian was too embarrassed to face him after he had stood him up, that that was why he didn't show up for work. It was a ludicrous notion, of course. Christian was no blusher.

By mid-morning Thi and the girl began to call him. They left a series of messages filled with the vibrato of concern. Then came a flurry of rescheduling.

‘He isn't in today. Can you change your afternoon appointment?' Again and again, Malcolm overheard, ‘I don't know. I don't know where he is.'

Jamie, on his lunch break, drove downtown with Thi to knock on his door, just in case he simply wasn't answering the phone.

‘He's not there,' he said when they got back. ‘We got the super to let us in.'

‘Did it look like he'd gone away? Like he'd packed or anything?' asked Donna.

‘No,' said Thi. ‘Everything looked normal and, you know, neat as a pin.'

They were in the back room. Alison sank down on the bench beside Malcolm and, with her face in her hands, asked, ‘Do you think we should—?'

‘What?' asked Malcolm.

She whispered it. ‘Call the police?'

As soon as she said it, it was understood that something had happened to him.

‘No,' said Roxanne, and she teetered angrily out of the room, back to her client.

‘Did anyone check the deli?' Robert asked, trying to make a joke.

Who finally called, or when, Malcolm didn't know, but the next morning there they were. Normally no one would have noticed their entrance, people came and went all the time, but Alison shut off the music so they all looked up and, seeing the two in blue, froze—all but Malcolm, who had closed his eyes. What a relief not to hear that beat pounding out like a pneumatic drill! Savouring the silence, he lowered the dryer onto Mrs. Creighton's curler-armoured head, loath to turn it on and spoil the moment. Then, catching sight of them in the mirror, he swung around. Everyone was looking at him. The police saw everyone looking at him, so towards Malcolm they came—slowly, the long length of the gallery. Had Christian been there, he would have squealed with delight.

It seemed to take a week for them to reach him. All that time Malcolm wondered why. Why were they coming for him? What did they think? That he was the owner?

‘Sir,' one of them said. ‘May we have a word with you?'

They stepped into the back room. Strangely, Malcolm couldn't seem to hear a word they said. It was as if he were holding a seashell to both ears; a muted roar, the surge of his own blood in his skull. It's not fair, he was thinking. They had not drawn straws or, from the top tray of the Senator's trolley, names on paper slips. The fair-haired one, he noticed, was in need of a moustache trim.

From their gestures, he understood that he was going to leave with them. He led the way, stopping briefly where Mrs. Creighton was still waiting under the dryer. ‘I'm sorry,' he told her. ‘Alison will have to finish you today.'

She grabbed his hand. ‘But Malcolm, tell me what you've done!'

In the police car, the radio issued intermittent bursts of static and cryptic dispatches. Mostly they did not speak; now and then the two officers exchanged a comment in low tones. Then the one not driving turned and asked Malcolm, ‘How long did you know him for?'

‘About a year and a half.' It was a brilliantly sunny day and they were driving along parallel to the railway track.

‘Where are we going?'

‘To the morgue.'

‘Oh, the morgue.' He pressed his eyes and for no reason said, ‘It's the same word in French.'

The one driving said, ‘I guess a lot of words are the same.'

‘The pronunciation's different,' the other added sagely.

Then Malcolm found himself being ushered into a cold room where, on a gurney, a curiously shaped object lay under a sheet. He had understood that they were going to show him Christian's body, but whatever was under the sheet seemed too small. A sudden battering headache—from the chemicals, Malcolm thought. As he pressed his fingers to his eyes again, it occurred to him that he was dreaming. That was what he had been telling himself for the last six years. And when the sheet was drawn back, though he didn't recognize Christian, he didn't say, ‘I don't know this person.' He asked instead, ‘Is this a person?'

Why had they picked him? It seemed especially cruel after all that he had been through. Now, along with the memory of Denis' disease, there would be the memory of looking down on this obliterated face.

‘May I touch him?' he asked. ‘I can't tell unless I do. He'll have a certain callous.' He showed them his own on his thumb and finger. ‘From the scissors.'

The sheet was lifted at one side to expose a lifeless hand, but Malcolm didn't have to touch him after all. ‘Yes, it's him,' he told them. He knew by how small a hand it was.

They were kind enough to drive him home. Again, no one really spoke. Malcolm, for his part, was thinking about how trivial his complaints had actually been before today. Visiting Denis, he sometimes met spouses of the other patients, people whom he would spend a few moments commiserating with. A retired roofer, a retired lawyer, a housewife, a retired poofter, they made an unlikely group, but Malcolm nonetheless considered them his peers. All of them had seen their loved ones become different people. Denis had become demanding and unlikeable, hate-filled, a person who had to have butterscotch pudding thick over everything he ate. It tormented Malcolm wondering which Denis was real, the gentle man he had seemed to be up until his illness, or who he was now. Yet his situation was hardly unique. The roofer and the lawyer and the housewife, they wondered the same thing. In essence, their pain was even commonplace: their lovers had abandoned them and so they grieved. Who, after all, had that not happened to?

He had seen Christian lying on a morgue gurney. Nothing would ever be as bad as what his face had looked like under the sheet.

And now he noticed that a peculiar odour had followed them into the car. Smelling it, Malcolm hoped he would not start to weep. When they dropped him off, they said that they would be in touch. Malcolm thanked them with a wince.

 

He didn't come back to the salon. They were all waiting, expecting him, growing more and more edgy by the hour. Before closing, Alison finally phoned. She saw the crossed-out address in the Rolodex and the same number as before. It took a long time for him to answer, and when he did, he sounded as if he'd been asleep.

‘What?' he asked.‘What do you want?'

‘We have to know what happened!' she cried.

‘If you're all so curious, why didn't one of you go instead?'

She had nothing to say to that. She simply sat there clinging to the receiver, not looking at the drawn faces of the rest of them gathered in the reception area. After a long pause, Malcolm exhaled and said, ‘He's dead.'

‘No,' said Alison.

‘I saw him!'
he fairly screamed.

 

Amanda closed the salon for three days, but even then Alison didn't completely believe that Christian wasn't going to come back with the rest of them. The only other person Alison had
known who'd died was her grandmother, when Alison was twelve. But she'd been old, white barbs of whiskers on her
chin. After a series of strokes leading up to the one that finally killed her, she hadn't known who Alison was, or even Alison's mother, her own daughter. It was natural that she died. Christian had been thirty.

Three strange, suspended days. ‘My friend is dead,' she told everyone she met. ‘My friend was killed.' Hearing herself say it, she would begin to cry; but if she wasn't talking about him, she didn't feel a thing.

The telephone was partly to blame. When she called Christian, this was what she heard: ‘Greetings,
loved one,
you have reached three-three-one, zero-two-four-nine . . .'