A History of Forgetting (19 page)

It sounded like Christian alive and braying.

‘. . . Though I can never
truly
express my deep regret at being unable to take
this,
your
treasured call,
I
pray
that at the sound of the tone you'll let me know I missed you.'

And in the pause she heard him, too—heavy in-breaths through his mouth.
He's there,
she thought.
He's there.

‘Dear friend, as you make your way through this
long day,
be it
blissful
or a
trial,
rest assured that I do, with all my heart, miss
you.'

‘It's like that when a friend goes,' was her mother's opinion. ‘If it's not someone you lived with, someone you saw every day, it takes a long time to sink in. When you get back to work, it will seem more real. Is there going to be a funeral?'

‘I don't know.'

‘There ought to be. You'll need one, especially in circumstances like those.'

On the third night she dreamed she met him. They were in front of Vitae after hours, the salon darkened, Christian searching his pockets for the key. People walking past were slowing and, whereas in waking life they would have stared at Christian, now they looked at Alison suspiciously. It made her nervous and she wished Christian would hurry and unlock the door.

No one could see Christian but her, she realized.

He went ahead to the gallery where he stood waiting for her, looking just like Christian in his chains and strategically ripped jeans. But he wasn't speaking and that, so out of character, began to make her feel afraid. Slowly, she walked towards him, Christian watching out of one eye, then the other, and when she was almost in front of him, when she could hear his clotted breathing, she reached out her hand for his.

Warm.
Though nothing else in the dream was hot or cold, his hand in hers gave off a palpable heat. He was alive, she understood. Alive, and she the only one who knew it.

They set to doing what they had come for. In the gallery, the floor was strewn with hair. No one had remembered to sweep up. Without speaking, Alison and Christian began gathering the hair, scooping it up in handfuls, filling their arms with it. And when she woke in the middle of the night, she lay there smiling in the dark. For the first time in her life she had dreamed a temperature.

 

When they came back, it was to a macabre barbershop, black ribbons wound around the outside columns—Amanda's idea. Too ostentatious, none of them liked it; it smacked of a business opportunity.

Thi brought two newspaper clippings. One article her husband had found when he had gone through their recyc
ling box. The headline none of them had noticed during the
holidays: SLAYING SIGNALS INTOLERANCE. ‘A victim
as yet unidentified . . .' it began. The second, from two days before, named Christian.

She hadn't expected the anger, or that half the talk would be, not about Christian, but the nameless, faceless person who had killed him. She had not herself thought about revenge. But listening to Robert list off his friends and acquaintances who had been beaten up or threatened, she understood at last what Christian had meant by enemies. The gentlest person she knew was Robert. Now he sat fingering the ring in his eyebrow and talking about hate.

A week with no dance track, just sibilance and hush—whispers, scissors snipping, Alison sweeping up the hair. Pushing the broom against the little door, she remembered her dream.

‘Can somebody please tell me where the hair goes?'

In the back room, her question went unanswered because it immediately prompted another one: does hair continue growing after death?

‘No,' said Malcolm.

Roxanne said she thought it did. ‘They know from when they unwrapped the mummies.'

That first week, if someone called for an appointment with Christian, and Thi was there, Alison would hand the phone to her, then duck outside and only come back when she saw through the window that Thi had hung up. It got so she didn't want to be alone up front.

‘I don't remember his name, but he permed me once and it lasted and looked good right to the end.'

‘Jamie?' she hoped. ‘Robert?'

‘He's kind of dwarfish.'

‘Oh. He's not here any more. Would you like to book another stylist?'

‘He was brilliant. Do you know where he is now?'

Good question, Alison thought. What it seemed like: that Christian had simply stepped away from their little circle so the rest of them had to draw in tighter to close the gap. No one complained about the back room being cramped any more; they huddled there between appointments and on breaks, ordering sandwiches from the deli to share. They gave each other back rubs and dried each other's tears. Except for Malcolm. They found it hard to look at him.

Donna told Alison she was sorry for all the times she'd been unkind. ‘Christian told me I was a bitch to you. I am a bitch. I just am. I'm sorry.' They hugged, Donna murmuring that life was too short to be mean. ‘Let's be friends.'

‘Friends,' Alison agreed.

The next week the memorial service was held in a packed chapel. Though Alison didn't see anyone who looked like family, his regular clients were all there paying the greatest tribute possible to a hairdresser: all of them, without exception, looked fantastic. Barbara, the pregnant one, told Alison as she offered tissues from a box, ‘You know, I'm seriously thinking of Christian for a name.' The deli man was there, too, but without his coat and cap Alison didn't recognize him until she saw the dimple. On the chapel steps, she threw her arms around his neck and sobbed.

How loved Christian had been. All the stories people got up to tell were about Christian the clown, the trouble and expense he would go to for a joke. In his own zany way, he had devoted himself to making the world a better place—by helping people feel good about how they looked, by making them laugh. And no one failed to point out that the brutality of Christian's death showed just how badly the world needed him.

After the service, they went back to Vitae where Roxanne announced she was going to shave her head.

Alison stopped kneading Donna's shoulders. ‘Why?'

‘Because I'm mourning.'

‘I think you should do what Christian would have wanted,' said Alison. ‘He wouldn't have wanted you to shave your head.' He would have wanted Roxanne to eat a square meal, Alison knew.

Her ribs like slats on a cradle, she hugged herself and began to rock. Jamie, taking Roxanne's arms, lifted her off the bench, slid in under her and resettled her in his lap with his scribbled arms around her. She looked like she was faring the worst of all of them, but maybe that was because black didn't become her and her lip was still swollen and her face full of metal.

‘He used to drive me crazy phoning all the time. Sometimes I'd swear at him, you know, ‘cause he'd wake me up.'

‘When did he call?' asked Alison, thinking she meant the middle of the night, which would be when he wasn't on the phone with her.

‘I don't know. Nine or ten. I go to bed early. I like to turn out all the lights and curl up and not think. Now nobody calls.'

Alison nodded. Death had turned the ringer off.

‘He even called me,' said Thi, blowing her nose.

‘He came over to see me,' said Malcolm, ‘unannounced, of course.'

‘He had this uncanny habit of calling me when I was in bed with someone,' said Donna.

Jamie laughed. ‘Me, too!'

‘Babbling away on the machine right there. Like he was watching.'

‘I've been calling him just to listen to his voice,' said Alison. ‘It's so clear. It sounds just like he's there.'

Everyone looked at her, surprised, and Donna said, ‘Aren't you smart?'

Silently, they filed to the front, Alison, Jamie, Roxanne, Donna, Thi. ‘Greetings,
loved one . . .'
The receiver passed from hand to hand. ‘. . . You have reached three-three-one, zero-two-four-nine.' Robert and Malcolm came up last and Alison, handing Malcolm the phone, said ‘I used to think you didn't like him.'

‘. . . rest assured,' said Christian, ‘that I do, with all my
heart, miss
you.'

At home that night, Alison called one last time before she went to bed. Billy, lying on the couch waiting for her, said nothing. He'd been so sweet and tender with her these last ten days.

When the recording started, she suddenly remembered a moment during the holidays: standing on the white beach. Where she had stood it was sunny, but far out over the ocean a dark curtain was being pulled across at a slant. Hours later, at dusk, they walked back together to see the sunset. She'd expected as clear a distinction between day and night as raining and not raining, but even after the sun had sunk below the water, the sky shone yellow between where the clouds had broken up. It lasted a long time, fifteen or twenty pinkening minutes, the moon right behind them—the two halves of the day overlapping.

Rare, actually, to catch that earlier moment, to know precisely when something ends.

She had just caught it again.

‘I'm sorry. The number you have dialled is no longer in service. Please hang up and try your call again.'

 

 

 

2

 

The day after the memorial service, one of the police officers phoned Malcolm with some information for him to pass along. Malcolm took it to work with him, walked in announcing, ‘They have been caught.'

All of them stared, aghast.
‘They?'

‘Yes. Three strapping lads. They'll be making a court
appearance tomorrow. I do not intend to go.'

Ever since his trip to the morgue, he had found himself
continually battling a public display of weeping while, alone, in private, when crying might have restored him, he dried up completely. At Vitae, Malcolm watched them shed their tears unselfconsciously, comforting one another through their little cathar
tic moments, yet flinching when he came near, as if by taking on the dirty work he was in some way tainted or complicit.

Who would go then if not Malcolm? He heard them talking about it all day. Finally, the girl approached him.

‘I'm going to go,' she said. ‘Can you tell me where it is?'

He stared at her. He did not believe she was serious. All along she'd worn such a look of wide-eyed bafflement that he couldn't help but think she had not completely grasped what had happened to Christian. He kept wanting to take her hand and, patting it, tell her, ‘He's gone to heaven. Do you understand that, dear?'

Tomorrow she would understand. Tomorrow it would become quite clear.

 

Through the glass doors of the court house stood the second portal of a metal detector. Two giants in tan uniforms, sheriffs, she read on their shirtsleeves, were there to tell her what to do, one motioning to search her handbag, the other mechanically beckoning her through.

The courtroom was to the right, at the end of the lobby. Entering, she found herself teetering at the top of a large auditorium-like space, looking dizzily down the aisle of stairs between the rows of seating to a judge in the topmost tier of a platformed bench, Godlike in his robes. Below him, in the middle tier, were two young women, angel stenographers, and below them, two lawyers facing the judge with their sombre-suited backs to the room.

She took a seat close to the door and tried to make sense of what was going on. She'd arrived in the middle of one lawyer's submission. He was reading an account to the judge in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Mr. Mitchell then seizes the complainant by the back of the neck and squeezes. The complainant tells Mr. Mitchell that it is impossible to drive safely under such conditions.'

Mr. Mitchell, Alison guessed, was the man in the dirty blue ski jacket standing in the box to the left of the bench. He kept his head lowered, moving only to brush the lank hair off his face and, as he did, Alison saw that his cheekbones and forehead were oddly protuberant and that he could not seem to close his mouth. Meanwhile, there were constant comings and goings. At the far right of the bench was a door; another was just beside the box on the left. People criss-crossed the room, in one door and out the other, bearing briefcases and file folders. Each time they passed in front of the judge, they bobbed perfunctorily.

She looked at her watch then around at the scattering of people in the public seating. Across the aisle and a few rows ahead a young man and woman were whispering together. In front of them a middle-aged woman was taking notes. Alison was alone in her bank of seats except for a man with very dark hair directly ahead of her and closer to the front.

The lawyer concluded by recommending Mr. Mitchell's continued detention, then the second lawyer rose and began to speak on behalf of Mr. Mitchell, giving his address and record of employment and extolling his willingness to continue alcohol counselling. Then a gesture made by the dark-haired man sitting in a row toward the front caught Alison's eye; she saw his head bow and his hand reach for his face, so that even though she was looking at him from behind, she knew he was pressing his fingers to his eyes. She got up and clumped down the stairs to where he sat.