The Book of Living and Dying (20 page)

“The
Collins English Dictionary
is the only dictionary I reference,” Donna stated primly. She held the book up, running her hand seductively along the spine like a game show hostess. She read the copy off the jacket in a light, officious voice. “It’s the most comprehensive single-volume dictionary on
the market, with 170,000 references, 1,800 pages and 15,000 encyclopedic entries. The thumb index makes it especially easy to use, and it contains all my favourite lexicographical obscenities. Take this, for instance.” She thumped the book open on the table, made a dramatic show of using the thumb index, then licked her finger and leafed to the page she was seeking. “‘Fuck about,’” she said with school-marm prudishness. “‘Offensive taboo slang. 1. to act in a stupid or aimless manner. 2. to treat someone in an inconsiderate or selfish way.’”

“Interesting,” Sarah said. She threw a card on top of the pile. “Change it to diamonds.”

They were playing cards at the Queen’s. Donna’s idea to avoid doing her English homework. She had snagged Sarah on the street, seen her racing home from the cemetery and convinced her to come hang out. Reluctantly, Sarah had agreed, even though she was secretly grateful. Being with Donna was a relief after the incident at the cemetery. She still hadn’t mentioned the photograph; she would wait until the time was right. The extra codeine she had taken was doing its job, too. Making things easier.

Donna abandoned the dictionary and picked up her cards, inspecting them thoughtfully. Shuffling several around, she fanned the cards out neatly, selected one and tossed it onto the pile. “Spades.”

Sarah picked a card from the top of the deck, regarded it hopelessly and selected another. Queen of spades. “Pick up five,” she said with mild victory, tossing the card to the table.

Donna waved her cigarette dismissively. “I am undaunted.” She picked up five cards and threw one down. “Hearts.”

“Are you sure?” Sarah asked.

“As sure as death and taxes.”

Smiling for the first time, Sarah snapped her cards in a neat row on the table. Three sixes: a heart, a diamond and a club. “Book me out.”

Donna threw down her cards, sticking her tongue out in protest. Puffing on her cigarette, she eased back into her seat and stared clinically at Sarah through the smoke. “You look awful,” she announced.

Sarah smoothed her hair nervously. “I had a bad night—bad morning, too.”

“Maybe you need more rest.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Have you seen Peter lately?”

“Peter?” Sarah asked incredulously. “Why would I see Peter?”

“He’s still in love with you, you know.”

Sarah bit her tongue to keep from screaming. “It’s not my fault, Donna. I’ve done everything I can to pull away from him without hurting his feelings.”

Donna continued to smoke, her silence speaking volumes.

“I can’t love him any more. Why can’t he accept that?”

“I guess he doesn’t want to.”

Irritation elbowed Sarah sharply in the ribs. Why should Donna ask her about Peter, anyway? Was this a test, to catch her up, to see how things were going with Michael? Well, two could play that game, she thought. “I always felt you and Peter would make a good couple,” she said, manically.

“What? Me?” Donna exclaimed, as if the idea were totally absurd.

“Yeah, you. Come on, you’ve thought about it,” Sarah said, the resentment growing in her voice. “You guys would be great together. You like all the same things. You’re physically attracted to each other.” She gauged Donna’s reaction.

“I can’t believe you, Sarah,” Donna said, grinding her cigarette into the ashtray. “How’s Peter supposed to go out with me? Not just because he doesn’t want to, but because of the fact that every time he looks at me he thinks of you. How’s he supposed to heal and move on if he just keeps thinking of you?”

“I really don’t care,” Sarah snapped back. “Like moths to a flame, you know?”

“Okay,” Donna retorted, visibly hurt. “I just thought you would like to know.”

“I just don’t know why
you
care,” Sarah continued. “He’ a goof, Donna. I don’t know why you won’t admit that.” She mimicked Peter, pointing her finger at Donna and shooting it like a pistol. “Everything that comes out of his mouth is bullshit.”

She reached across the table for the dictionary, thumping it open to the
B
s. Turning through several pages, she ran her finger down the column of words. “‘Bullshit: taboo slang. Exaggerated or foolish talk; nonsense.’”

“Okay, fine,” Donna conceded angrily.

“‘Bogus,’” Sarah barked, flipping several pages back. “‘Spurious or counterfeit; not genuine.’” She pointed her cigarette at Donna. “Admit that he’s full of shit.”

“I said okay, Wagner,” Donna yelled back. “I’m sorry I brought it up. What is with you these days anyway?”

Sarah clapped the dictionary shut with fierce triumph. “Like you don’t know.”

Donna froze in her seat, holding Sarah’s poisonous glare before shifting her eyes to the ashtray. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she quietly confessed.

“Didn’t mean to hurt me?” Sarah seethed, the rage barrelling down on her like a freight train. “What did you mean
to do, then? What could you have possibly meant to achieve by showing me that photo?”

“I don’t know,” Donna mumbled like a guilty child.

“You may as well have stabbed me with a knife!” Sarah said, her eyes burning with hatred, her cigarette poised, until all at once she crushed the glowing coal into her palm.

“Oh my God!” Donna shouted, jumping up and pulling the cigarette from Sarah’s hand.

Slumping over in her seat, anger spent, Sarah stared at her hands in bewilderment. Donna squeezed into the booth beside her, threw her arms around her shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Sarah,” she cried, burying her face in Sarah’s hair. “I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. I was jealous. I didn’t want you to go off with him. I wanted you for myself.”

Sarah walked up the hill to Michael’s, the burn on her hand throbbing, a neat, translucent blister forming where the coal had met her flesh. She’d left Donna back at the Queen’s. Insisted on it. Donna hadn’t given in easily, begging Sarah to stay with her. Brushing the whole thing off, Sarah had convinced Donna that she was all right. She just needed to be alone, she’d told her. But what she really needed was to see Michael, to feel him next to her. Her body ached to be with him if they were separated too long.

It was the worst part of being in the hospital: the constant fussing without the comfort of human contact. Hands touching without feeling. Performing duties. The needle pricks
and examinations pushing the memory of intimacy farther and farther below the skin, until it contracted completely and hid in a secret corner of the subconscious, to be realized only, and tantalizingly, in the liquid world of dreams.

“I can’t go home,” Sarah announced, standing on the threshold of Michael’s house. Michael pushed the door open and took her hand.

“Then don’t,” he said.

T
he nausea kicked her awake again. Running to the bathroom, Sarah opened the toilet lid with a crash, only to miss the toilet entirely and vomit on the green-tiled floor. Clinging to the bowl, pyjama knees wet with sick, she waited for the waves of nausea to stop. When the convulsions finally subsided, she dragged herself to her feet, using the towel rack to steady herself. She turned on the tap, and splashed her face, the water cold against her feverish skin, the ends of her long brown hair trailing limply in the sink. She rinsed her mouth too, washing away the acrid taste of vomit, allowing a small amount of water to trickle down her throat and settle in her ravaged stomach.

When she felt sure that she would not be sick again, she turned the water off and dried her face carefully on a towel, removed her pyjama bottoms and discarded them in a rumpled heap in a dry corner of the floor. Using an elastic from her cosmetic bag, she pulled her hair back so that it hung in a loose bun at the nape of her neck, then surveyed the bathroom. The vomit had splashed like watery yellow soup over most of the floor and up one side of the toilet bowl. She was
amazed at the amount of it, amazed that it had all come out of her and was now there, on the dingy mint-green tiles.

Reaching under the sink, Sarah pulled out a red bucket with an old rag and filled it with hot water from the tub. She squirted a stream of urine-coloured disinfectant into the steaming water and worked a pair of old orange rubber gloves onto her hands, the damp rubber resisting against her skin. The scent of lemons and antiseptic mingled with the smell of her sick as she began washing the floor. The nausea rose up again and she had to fight the urge to retch, dipping the rag into the scalding water and sloshing it onto the floor and over the toilet, wringing it into the bucket and wiping methodically until everything was clean. Cleaner than it was before. The toilet gurgled and flushed on its own as she poured the grey wash water into the bowl. After rinsing the bucket in the tub, Sarah returned it to its spot under the sink, the rag and gloves draped limply over its side.

In the bedroom, Sarah pushed her dirty pyjamas in a pile beside her dresser. She made her way toward the bed, vertigo almost toppling her as her foot hit something hard and sent it sliding across the floor. It skidded to a stop beside the milk crate. Sarah looked at it warily, the whole room slightly off register. It was
The Book of Living and Dying.
It had lain forgotten beside the dresser since the ritual. Now the pages unfurled to a section on tarot. Suspicious, Sarah hovered over it before picking the book up and crawling into bed. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she trained her eyes on the pages with great effort and found herself reading about the Fool.

He was on a journey. He had met the Magician. But the Magician was a trickster. He knew the answer to the future yet he kept it secret. The Fool continued along the path,
meeting the Emperor with all his earthly trappings, and the Lovers in their tentative embrace. The Fool longed to stay with the Lovers but he could not. He had to embark upon a strange course through a desolate land. It was there that he encountered the black-armoured skeleton on a white horse, rising with the sun.

“Rising with the sun.” Sarah woke to the sound of her own voice. Forcing herself to stay awake, she began scouring the book for the rest of the story. She had to know what happened to the Fool. But the story simply stopped. The tears welled in her eyes as she stared at the page. Would she ever know the answer to the Fool’s riddle?

“Perhaps death is always with us,”
a sympathetic voice broke through her thoughts,
“as much a part of daily life as the rising sun.”

It was John, sitting on the edge of the bed. Sarah clamped her eyes shut, thought to throw the book at him except that the codeine and her exhaustion wouldn’t allow it. Opening her eyes drowsily, she prayed that John would be gone but found him still sitting there. “Please go away,” she whispered, as the darkness engulfed her.

The tree in her dream was getting closer. That she was sure of. There had been times when it seemed just a bush on the horizon, an unidentifiable sort of tree shape off in the distance. But now it stood in front of her, so close she could make out the texture of the bark. The oddest thing about the tree, though, was that it was the only one in the forest that
still had all its leaves. She was acutely aware of this and puzzled over the phenomenon even though she knew that she was dreaming. She heard the branches creak as they swayed in time with a faint tune carried on the wind.
Hush, little baby.
The woman began to cry, the light strains of a guitar filtering through her sobs. Sarah reached up to touch one of the leaves but found herself back in bed. Looking up, she saw Peter staring down at her, a bouquet of orange chrysanthemums in one hand. He smiled, holding a finger to his lips.

“How did you get in here?” she asked.

He shook his head mutely.

“You have to leave,” she ordered. She reached for the light but he stopped her midway with his hand.

Placing the flowers beside the bed, he began pulling his shirt over his head. Sarah watched as he stripped down to his socks, his body lean and muscular. He lifted one edge of the covers to climb in next to her.

“The socks,” she said, pointing to his feet.

He peeled them off and crept stealthily into the bed. Retrieving the flowers, he rubbed them playfully under her chin then discarded them to one side and began tugging on the ties of her gown. Sarah fumbled obediently with the ties even though she didn’t really want to be with Peter. She was Michael’s girl now. But Peter was so persistent. And she felt guilty for the love she couldn’t return.
One last time, to say goodbye,
she told herself as she pulled the gown up to her shoulders and worked it over her head. He coaxed it the rest of way, tossing it wantonly across the room so that it drooped like an exhausted ghost in one corner. For some reason this made her giggle. Peter found her mouth in the darkness and kissed her hard, his breathing heavy with passion. He moved so that he was on top of her, the bedsprings
creaking in protest, the bouquet of orange chrysanthemums tumbling recklessly to the floor.

Sarah couldn’t breathe. His hands gripped her throat, squeezing. She clawed at his face, her lips turning purple, then blue, eyes bulging, his hands pressing with increasing force until the strength left her and she could do little more than batter listlessly at the air.
He’s killing me,
she thought, as she burst into consciousness to find him sitting calmly next to her on the bed. She couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t avert her eyes, or demand to know what he wanted. She just prayed silently to God to save her, to take him away. And John magically complied, getting up from the side of the bed and leaving the room.

There was something knocking in the house. She was sure it was him, trying to get in. But it was only Donna, tapping on the bedroom window, her earnest face pressed against the glass.

“Sarah. It’s Donna.”

Sarah sat up, the pain mushrooming in her head.