All the Anxious Girls on Earth (5 page)

Lila didn’t understand earthquake proof, though. The things she loved were sprawling and messy and about to fall apart. Like this old house. The front porch sagged, all the paint had long ago flaked off, and a section of the roof was missing. It had been brought to its knees but was still grinning, its charred filigree trim like teeth spread wide.

Children trailing black balloons ran around screaming, mouths smeared with black icing from Lilas enormous coffin cake. She had organized this Black Birthday Party to protest the fact that the city was hedging on its promise to declare the eighty-year-old house a heritage property. Without that designation, the owner was free to tear it down and build yet another salmon-stucco sixplex. There had already been evidence of squatters and two fires had been set within the past month. The fire fighters had barely arrived in time, the historian told them.

“This Edwardian lady,” the historian said, the mike popping and sound system hissing, “is one of the last of her generation. Just as indicative of her time as an Erickson or an Henriquez is of ours.”

Now Lila was at the microphone, gripping its stem with emotion. “This is our past. This house is us.
Ich bin tin
Edwardian house!!” The small crowd of about two dozen people costumed like ghouls clapped and cheered. The light drizzle stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Lewis felt twitchy. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the owner pulled up in a tan Eldorado and swooped down on them with legal firearms to assert his rights. And really, what was his crime? That he failed to see the value of the past? Maybe he was onto something.

The protesters looked like older, more jovial versions of the Marilyn Manson fans who accidently heaved in the huge plate-glass window at A&B Sound the other night while trying to get a glimpse of their idol. Lewis had watched them on the news and thought they looked weirdly cowed as they were dispersed down Seymour
Street by the police, as if really shaken by the unexpected violence of their numbers. After all, these weren’t hockey fans out for blood, bladders bursting with Molson’s, but chubby suburban teenagers who just wanted the new Antichrist to autograph their freshly shaved heads with a black Sharpie. But watching them, Lewis thought she could understand their rumbling hunger for something authentic, something beyond garage bands, 7-Eleven parking lots and a disembodied future. “Excuse, excuse me,” one white-faced, black-lipped, elaborately pierced young woman had said, elbowing her way through the crowd towards a TV camera. “Excuse me, but can I say something? To all you people who have recently jumped on the Marilyn Manson bandwagon”—she paused dramatically—”I just want to say: Go back to your lives of conformity.”

She looked like someone who wrote intense graffiti on toilet stall doors. She looked like someone who might one day try to set herself on fire.

Behind her wavered a sea of young people, all white-faced, black-lipped and elaborately pierced.

“This cake is so good!” A middle-aged woman in black sweatpants, black flip-flops and black toenail polish beside Lewis licked her fingers with gusto and then stuck her tongue out. “Is my tongue blue?”

It was. And so were her teeth, which still had bits of cake stuck between them and something orange as well that the woman must have eaten earlier.

“Let me see yours.” The woman was one of those aggressively sociable types that often showed up at Lila’s causes. The kind that bullied people into participating.

“Come on, open up.” Lewis opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue, but only because she was afraid the woman would actually try to pry it open with a saliva-coated finger if she didn’t play along.

“Yours is blue, too!” The woman seemed genuinely delighted. Now they were sisters. Now they were of a tribe. All around them, people were sticking their tongues out at each other, blue tongues glistening in the sudden sunshine, and laughing loosely. What would be appropriate now, Lewis thought, would be to feel a surge of love for all these playful, well-meaning people. People who believed in saving things. Or at least in attending lawn parties with total strangers.

Lila appeared at her side and squeezed her shoulder. “I’m so glad you could come.” She made two little fists and danced around, jabbing at the air. “I think we’re really going to do it this time. I think we’re really going to beat the bastards.”

Unlike Lila, Lewis didn’t think you ever could really beat the bastards. You just got a chance to do some fancy footwork, get in a few punches, before you got KO’d. The problem was that you never really knew who the bastards were. Mostly you just fooled yourself into thinking they were over there somewhere. But Lewis suspected they were closer to home.
Ich bin ein
Bastard. Weren’t they all? A bunch of little bastards pretending everything rotten was someone else’s fault.

“Come on, open up, let’s see your tongue,” the flip-flop woman commanded Lila.

Lewis was distracted by the flash of something green
and familiar behind a broken basement window at the side of the house, beside the loose drainpipe. She turned her head so fast her neck burned viciously. Dry heat rose in waves off her skin. She was sure that if someone looked at her now, really
looked
at her, they would see the flames rising from her collarbone and licking her right ear.

A dragonfly zipped by, bottle blue and fat. The flip-flop woman said something about it sewing her lips shut, clapping her hand over her mouth and giggling that maybe there was really something to old wives’ tales. “Don’t I wish,” Lewis thought, looking right at her. She didn’t realize she’d said it out loud until the woman turned abruptly and stomped away, plastic sandals thwacking against her moist, pink heels, sending dandelion fluff spinning into the air.

The little green-haired girl ate slowly and with intense concentration. She had been at it since midmorning, licking each flat wooden paddle clean before moving on to the next vat. A few customers drifted through the store, lifting samples to their noses, dipping their pinkies into the face masks and creams. Raspberry Buffalo, a new one, seemed to be a particular favourite. But when they saw what the green-haired girl was doing, they made a big show of giving her a wide berth, as if her weird hunger was contagious, or that in her dreadlocked rapaciousness she might actually take a bite of their own clean, lightly perfumed flesh. They glanced to see if Lewis was looking and narrowed their eyes, inviting her censure. They wanted her to
do
something.

One older woman, with the blunt grey bangs and well-knit Cowichan sweater of a Point Grey matron—the kind of woman who could, no doubt, identify all the birds that arrived at the feeder on her back patio and had a handsome son studying geophysics at UBC, and a husband, faithful or not, who built their fireplace mantle by hand on weekends from granite they had quarried themselves
en famille
from Nelson Island, a place you could only arrive at by private boat—came up to Lewis at the counter.

“That young woman,” she motioned towards the green-haired girl, “is going to make herself sick.”

“You ate some.” Lewis made sure she smiled as she said this, a bravado smile flush with truth. And it was true. The woman had tried the Raspberry Buffalo. She had dunked her middle finger in quickly and then popped it into her mouth. And then went off into a reverie as if the taste reminded her of something but she wasn’t quite sure what. Happier times certainly.

“I
tasted
it. Even a little bit of Lysol won’t kill you.”

“She’s hungry.”

“Well, I’ll go get her a sandwich. I’ll get her something from the Bread Garden.” She was already reaching into her canvas shoulder bag and pulling out her wallet. Lewis didn’t want to argue with this woman who seemed so well-intentioned, but it struck her, as though through layers of cold air, that the green-haired girl was hers. Hers to save or not to save. She was the bird at Lewis’s feeder, and this woman couldn’t have her.

“She seems to prefer personal hygiene products.”

“I’d like to use your phone, please. I’d like to call an ambulance.” Lewis admired how matter-of-factly the woman said this. The veins in her neck didn’t tighten and she didn’t sound the least bit testy. There was something very Lila-like about her and Lewis felt like crawling up onto the counter and resting her flaming forehead against the woman’s thick-knit bosom, which would no doubt have the sweet hand-washed smell of Woolite or Zero. This was the thing you did when there was a problem you couldn’t handle. You picked up a telephone and you dialled 911. You didn’t make jokes. You didn’t laugh. You didn’t pick up used syringes from the ground while you waited for the bus and jab them into the grub-like blue veins under your tongue.

Lewis reached for the phone and was about to push it across the counter towards the woman. Then she pictured the green-haired girl in the stainless steel bathroom of a hospital ward desperately gulping generic shampoo from a litre bottle while she showered, or gnawing on bars of soap under the thin covers of her cot while the anorexic in the next bed quietly wept in her sleep, jerking at her IV so that the stand rattled against the floor. The shadow of the little man who thought he was a vacuum cleaner passed back and forth across the doorway of the room all night as he went up and down the hallway on his hands and knees, hoovering up any small debris the cleaner might have left behind, a cellophane candy wrapper catching in his throat and crackling loudly, like the loose corrugated metal sides of the shacks at a deserted research station on the tip of the
Antarctic crackled incessantly in the wind although there was no one there to hear them.

Lewis kept her hand on the receiver. “I’ll take care of it. She’s my friend.”

She liked the sound of that.
My little green-haired friend
. As if she had a pal from Mars.

Everyone knew that too little oxygen could be dangerous. When you were oxygen deprived your nose bled and when you reached dizzying altitudes the blood vessels in your eyes started to pop. But what about too much oxygen? Maybe at a certain point the health benefits peaked and began to tip into the red. At sea level, surrounded by so many trees, maybe they were all overdosing, Lewis thought. She felt heavier and heavier every day. She had this obscene sense of gravity.

Up in the Entercom building, though, she felt lighter, as if the air was truly thinner seventeen storeys above sea level. If she pressed herself flat against the big living-room window, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts, so flat that her breasts pancaked out like during a mammogram, so flat that her eyeballs were almost touching the glass and her breath fogged the surface in a wreath around her head, it seemed as if she was actually floating in the air over the inlet, over the Taiwanese tankers filled with Polish sailors, over the glowing heaps of slag and lime and sawdust, over the whole twinkling mess down there where everyone seemed to be trying so hard to prove they could be something if only someone else would give them a chance.

If she pressed herself flat like that, when the nine o’clock gun went off in Stanley Park she could feel the cannon shot reverberate through her body. And after that, she could sleep. In clean, white sheets, surrounded by gallons and gallons of filtered, mineralized water, the fire extinguisher on the wall in the kitchen a sentinel over her dreams, its nozzle, in shadow, like a little beak.

McSpadden Park was almost empty. Two guys in jeans and rubber boots played hockey on the cracked asphalt tennis court in the distance, having a very good time too, it seemed, throwing themselves against the wire fencing to see how far they would bounce back and hooting every time the puck tore another hole in the already tattered net or almost nailed a squirrel. Lewis sat on a bench, drilling the tips of her shoes into the dirt, waiting for Lila who wanted to show her something at the old house. Lewis watched a few dog men, as she had come to call them, circle the park picking up after their pets. They were nondescript men, neither young nor old, who could be spotted here in the early evenings, eyes to the ground, used bread bags in their hands. There seemed to be more and more of them lately. Lonely men circling the park with their plastic bags of steaming turds, their dogs romping off ahead of them and then looking back as if to say,
don’t worry, I won’t desert you
. Lewis tried envisioning the stories of their lives and gave up, deciding she couldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt, that their lives, at best, would have the makings of an Anita Brookner novel, an exquisitely wrought—but
banal—tale of loneliness, false hopes, and inevitable failure. They wouldn’t even try to dodge the sucker punch, wouldn’t see it coming.

“Lewis!”

In front of her stood Guy Gregory, the golden boy of her film-school class. Even now, after almost ten years, he seemed to radiate that same weird glow that had made everyone want to throw themselves at his feet. People carried his lighting kits, gave up their editing suites for him, offered him free drugs, threw off their clothes. Even when he indulged these favours, he cultivated an air of asceticism that allowed him to hover slightly above the fray. When he looked right at a person, beamed his light on them, he could make them feel they were the most important person in the world. People basked in that glow. Then, just as abruptly, he would turn away and they’d be left in the shade, shivering. Lewis shivered now, remembering that although she had never belonged to his inner sanctum of groupies, she had once washed his feet.

Guy Gregory was the kind of person who was always called by both his first and last names.

“Guy Gregory,” Lewis said, and then wondered what else there was to say.

“Lewis, Lewis,” he said, standing in front of her, blocking the last remnants of the evening sun. She noticed that she felt cold, and was surprised. Where was the warmth? There Guy Gregory was, beaming his light on her, and she sat on a bench in McSpadden Park shivering while a couple of morons played court hockey in
the distance and the dog men shuffled along, dejected but ever conscientious. She wished he would either sit down or leave, but he just stood there.