A History of Forgetting (20 page)

‘Malcolm,' she whispered.

He looked up but didn't smile.

‘Thank you,' she told him, taking the seat next to him and smelling the familiar mothball odour coming off him, strangely comforting now. ‘Thank you for coming.'

‘Calling number
17
on the list, Vorst, in custody.'

The sheriff in the box opened the heavy metal door, glancing in a room they could not see into, then letting the door go with a slam.

‘Where's number
17
?' asked the judge.

‘They're pulling him,' said the sheriff.

In the pause, as they waited, Alison began to feel cold. She had just taken off her coat, but now she put it on again. For the first time since she came in, all the back-and-forth bustle ceased. It seemed that everyone was waiting, everyone suddenly interested, everyone looking at the box where the sheriff opened the big metal door once more.

He entered so rapidly, darted in and came up against the wall so fast, that he gave the impression of being about to vault right out of the box. With the startling vitality of an animal released from a cage, he was suddenly there, a chill coming up behind him.

‘Your Honour,' said the lawyer for the Crown, ‘this is Mr. Vorst.'

Despite his disarming attire, dull green pyjama-like prison shirt and pants over a white sweatshirt, he did not
seem like a Mr. or even a person with the pleasantry of a first name. He seemed like a Vorst. He was tall and, through the two loose layers of shirt, Malcolm could see the contours of a sculpted torso and arms hard-packed with muscle. Above his shirt collar, the Adam's apple could have been a fist. A blocky head and a face sullen and appallingly young and irredeemable. Then Vorst turned his blond close-cropped head to look back at his judge. The girl clutched Malcolm's arm; Malcolm, too, was shaken. In his long career he had seen his share of scalp afflictions—scales and shingles, baldness in patches, unhealed sores—but here, on this teenager's square skull, was a disease of an entirely different magnitude marked out in right angles with a razor.

‘The Crown is seeking Mr.
Vorst's continued detention,' the
Crown's lawyer said. He began his present-tense recitation. ‘On December
27
th at approximately
12
:
10
a.m., Mr.
Vorst,
in the company of his two co-accused, both minors, leaves the bar of the Princeton Hotel,
1
901
Powell Street East, with a prostitute. They drive her to the parking lot of New Brighton Park,
3000
-block Wall Street, where they avail themselves of her services, then refuse to drive her back to the Princeton. A dispute ensues, at which point a second car enters the parking lot. The prostitute gets out of Mr. Vorst's vehicle and proceeds on foot to Wall Street. The prostitute, who is serving here as a Crown witness, reports seeing a blond man in the second car.

‘At approximately
1
:
00
a.m., a second witness arrives on
the scene to find two empty vehicles in the parking lot, one
belonging to Mr. Vorst and the other to the deceased. This witness then leaves his car, enters the park and proceeds towards the public toilets. Nearing them, he becomes aware of a dispute within. A man, identified now as the deceased, Mr. Christian Weber of
1271
Nicola Street, is seen running from the toilets, followed by two assailants. The assailants catch Mr. Weber and commence their assault. Mr. Vorst then joins his two co-accused. Their weapon is later determined to be a golf club.

‘The witness particularly notes the savagery of the attack, its length, and how anti-homosexual epithets were chanted during it. At this point, fearing for himself, the witness leaves the scene. Based on DNA evidence collected from the recovered car, I surmise that Mr. Vorst and his two co-accused, having assaulted Mr. Weber to the point of unconsciousness, took his car.

‘At approximately
8
:
30
a.m. of the same day, a third witness, walking her dog on the scene, discovers Mr. Weber's body. She reports that she is, at first glance, unable to determine Mr. Weber's gender, so badly was he beaten.

‘Those are the circumstances of the charges, your Honour. Mr. Vorst does have a criminal record which includes several previous assault convictions and a charge of vandalism against a Sikh temple in Surrey for which he is scheduled to be tried in April. I'll show these to my friend. Needless to say, the Crown considers Mr. Vorst a danger and not likely to abide by parole conditions.'

He located a sheet in the file before him and carried it to the other lawyer who rose and showed the paper to Mr. Vorst. Mr. Vorst barely glanced at it before stepping back and, making a jerky, tic-like movement with his head.

The judge took the sheet, read it without expression, then looked up at the second lawyer.

‘We are seeking,' said the second lawyer, still on his feet, ‘Mr. Vorst's release.' His deposition was much shorter. He gave the boy's address, a suburban series of numerals that could almost be mistaken for a phone number, and the name of his employer. ‘All Mr. Vorst's convictions date from when he was a juvenile. He has been law-abiding for the last eleven months and in this time has even managed to finish his high-school certificate. We recommend that he be released upon conditions.'

The judge frowned for a moment. ‘I'm not impressed with Mr. Vorst's hairdo,' he said and Malcolm almost laughed out loud. ‘I am not impressed with Mr. Vorst at all. He may not have originally set out to “bash a gay”, as they say, but he seems ready for anything. What were you doing running around with a golf club, Mr. Vorst? You're not a golfer, I presume.'

In the box, Mr. Vorst smiled and this, the ability to recognize an ironic statement, evidence of an intelligence at work, distressed Malcolm all the more. Until that moment, he had taken him for a stupid brute.

‘You're detained,' said the judge. ‘We'll break for lunch, though Mr. Vorst has ruined my appetite.'

‘Clear the court,' the sheriff called from the bottom of the stairs, then climbed, making sweeping gestures with his hands.

 

He tried the door again, but the unsteadiness in his hands seemed to prevent him from fitting in the key. Desperate to get in off the street, he fumbled and dropped the key ring. Only when he stooped to pick it up did it occur to him that he didn't live there any more. He'd come to the wrong building, the one he'd lived in with Denis.

The cab had long gone. Numbly, he began the eight-block hike back to the avenue, to the glass door that stood between the bookstore and the Oriental carpet boutique. It opened onto a heap of unread flyers and a brown-carpeted stair. Even before he had reached the top, he could hear the dog. Did she yodel like this all day or were her hairy ears acute enough to pick up the sound of someone entering one floor below? Then, as he neared the end of the hall, her whimpering ceased. Either she recognized the tread of her master-by-proxy, or she smelled him. Malcolm thought she smelled him.

He could smell himself.

She was waiting there as usual when he opened the door, putting on that hopeful, gooey look. Malcolm sniffed the air, then pulled his cuff back and sniffed his wrist. Immediately, his head began to ache. It was the same smell that had been coming off Christian's body, the smell of what they had done to him, all over Malcolm again, all over his clothes and skin. Stepping right over the dog, he undressed and put in a garbage bag the clothes belonging once to a brother of Miss Velve. Knotting it tight, he left it by the door to throw away next time he went out.

Perhaps he only imagined the odour. It seemed impossible that it could be clinging to him still. Yet what other explanation was there for why, at Vitae, they all instinctively kept away?

He was
tainted.

Disinfectingly hot, the shower. Afterward, rubbing a circle on the mirror, thinking about what he had heard in court, he saw narrowed eyes and—oh, the rejuvenating properties of hatred!—could actually make out the line of a clenched jaw. Denis had had a lot of trouble with these nasty mirrors. What Yvette had told Malcolm: that Denis no longer recognized himself. Now another explanation occurred to Malcolm: that Denis just didn't like what he saw. It was not a pretty picture, after all.

He found Grace by the bag of clothes, torn open now at
the corner. She had pulled out a tuft of fabric and was sucking on it, looking guiltily at him, but not quitting her pleasure until he came over and prodded her ribs with his foot, too hard, for she yelped and backed away, her dishevelled little head cocked, eyes runny and pleading.

Malcolm felt awful. Squatting to her level, he extended an apologetic hand. Immediately, her stump began to twitch and she turned a fawning circle, licking around her thin black lips. She kept her head down as she approached, submissive, dribbling, and when she was near enough for him to touch her, she paused to whine below his outstretched hand. She raised her thankful snout—those were tears of joy in her eyes, not glandular secretions—and her damp nose touched his fingers.

Abruptly, he stood up and walked off, leaving her there obsequious and squirming. He could have given her away, he realized then, but she was Denis' dog. He didn't want her to be happy.

 

Alison thought she was sick, that she was coming down with something. When the cab dropped her off, she hurried up the walk, came straight in without removing her shoes or coat and, in the bathroom, sank to her knees and vomited. She had not eaten all day so had to labour to bring something up. All at once she began to shiver, like she had in court. Icy, her trembling fingers. In the mirror, her lips were blue. She ran a hot bath and for a long time soaked herself, but as soon as she got out, she felt the same numbing chill.

At the courthouse that morning she hadn't been able to stop sobbing. Malcolm was probably waiting in the lobby for her but she hadn't been able to come out of the washroom. Several women came in and a few knocked on the door of the cubicle she was sitting in and asked if she was okay. ‘Leave me alone,' she had told them between gasps.

Billy came home from work and found her still curled
up in bed. She hadn't slept, had just lain there as the room
grew dark. All afternoon the phone kept ringing, but she had not got up to answer it. Neither had she imagined it might be Christian calling; that fantasy was finished. They were phoning from Vitae to find out what she'd seen.

‘Was it bad?' Billy asked, turning on the light.

She winced in the sudden, interrogating glare.

‘You shouldn't have gone alone. I would have gone with you.'

‘What was he doing there?' she asked.

‘Who?'

‘Christian. In that park so late at night.'

‘He was having an assignation, I suppose.'

‘I know, but why? Everybody loved him. Why did he have to do it?'

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he started to explain—instincts and impulses, aggression. Rat talk again. The pink-
eyed rat in the poster stared unblinking from the ceiling, the glow off its domed eyes and the pink transparent skin of its paws and ears making it look as if it were lit from within by a miniature furnace. Even when Alison closed her eyes, she still felt its stare. Nothing more dangerous, Billy told her, than a male of any species in its sexual prime. ‘Except a lactating female protecting her young.'

‘In other words,' said Alison, remembering their love-making on the Island and the hideous face she'd seen him make, ‘nothing is more dangerous than love. He should have stayed home.'

‘Why?'

‘I just don't want him to be dead!' she cried.

‘I'm sure that he doesn't want to be dead either.' He put his hand on her forehead. ‘You're hot.'

‘No, I'm freezing.'

He shrugged. ‘What do you want for dinner?' She said she couldn't eat.

‘I'll order myself a pizza then,' he said and left her on her own.

Was she blaming Christian? She gagged on the thought, threw off the covers, got up and staggered down the hall. It was there, in the bathroom, after retching into the sink, the muscles around her ribs and stomach straining as she heaved, that she raised her eyes and, in the mirror, saw herself as selfish. Her face was crimson, eyes and nose streaming. In the white of the sink, a green worm dribbled.

‘Are you okay?' Billy asked, appearing in the doorway.

‘No,' she told him. ‘I'm not okay.'

 

 

 

3

 

She hurried in, head down, hair like blinkers, her wordless passing through the gallery leaving them all blanched and looking like the busts. Everyone followed, crowding in the back room. ‘Well?' asked Donna. ‘Well?' She took Alison by
the shoulders as if to shake an answer out.

‘He was in a park,' Alison began dully. ‘Late. There were three
of them, like Malcolm said. They've moved them all to adult
court. One was nineteen, but the other two were underaged.'