Blasted (11 page)

“I'm glad you're here.”

I almost fell on the floor. “I'm glad I'm here, too.” I stirred the potatoes. “What time is the funeral tomorrow?”

“Two o'clock.”

We ate dinner in front of the TV. During a commercial Grandpa said abruptly, “Juanita Cooper sent a card and flowers.”

“Juanita!” I hadn't talked to her in years. “That's nice.”

Grandpa looked at me. “Nice,” he repeated dubiously.

“She straightened herself out after she had that kid,” I replied. She was a nurse now, and her kid – what was his name? – I couldn't remember. He'd be seven or eight by now, I thought with shock – Juanita'd had him the year after I'd left home, when she was seventeen. “Did you put an obit in the
Telegram
?” I changed the subject.

“Yes.”

We both got quite smashed. I couldn't say what we watched on TV that night. We sat on the couch and I held his hand; we sat like that for hours.

Cold. Earth pressing into me on all sides, filling my mouth. I can't breathe. A cave opens up, thousands of little voices gibbering around me, pulling me in, pulling me farther. Suddenly I am wrenched out. A man is shouting, a woman sobbing. And I am falling, falling. With a crash I hit cold water.

I awoke sitting bolt upright, my lungs filled with a great desperate breath. I hadn't had that dream for years. Shaking, I got up and pulled on the ugly old ‘seventies housecoat with the too-short sleeves still hanging in my closet. I went down into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. The night was so still, so still and I couldn't believe I was here now. That's the trouble with planes; you get places too fast to keep up.

The moon shone through the window, strange blue squares of light on the linoleum floor. I got the kettle on by moonlight, waited for it to boil.

I sat on the floor in one of the squares, my face raised up to the bright almost-circle in the indigo sky. As a kid I'd bathed in moonlight. I'm getting a moontan, I'd tell my parents. Mom thought this was ridiculous; Dad looked at me strangely, but then he always looked that way.

When I'd awoken from that drowning dream as a kid, I'd always been too scared to get out of bed or even move. I'd lie there, heart hammering and skin itching with the memory of those claw hands pulling me down, ears full of the angry shouting. I never told anyone about the nightmare. There wouldn't have been any point.

One summer night Dad sensed something was wrong – maybe I cried out. I woke with a great sobbing breath, and he was there, crouching by the bed. When he saw that I was awake, he murmured, “There, there,” and climbed onto the bed next to me. I burst into tears, clutched the front of his pajama shirt with one fist and cradled my head on his chest, feeling the soft skin of his neck, snot running down my nose and tears wetting my hair on one side of my face. He'd put his arms over me, gently, gently, and I howled into the hollow place over his collarbone, gripped his ears with my hands. Pawing at them to find purchase, taking them in my child's hands, trying to be gentle, holding on. I remembered the wild, musky scent of him, his ribcage so big and safe. The sounds of the summer night came through the window from the Hill.

If it had been winter, he never would have roused himself to take notice of me.

I came back to myself, to darkness, the moon sunk out of sight behind the overpass, the kettle screaming and rattling, near empty and boiling hot.

CHAPTER 8

I woke to the sound of Grandpa outside my room, coughing and banging around.

“Come in.” I glared at the bedside clock, ashamed to see it was after eleven. “You can just knock, you know.” I stuck a leg out of the covers and waved it around to test the temperature: cold.

Grandpa sidled in, took one glance at my leg and averted his eyes, muttering about
some
people wearing pajamas to bed. I hastily withdrew the offending limb; he carried a mug of steaming tea and I was instantly sorry I'd been cranky. “Jesus. Thanks, Grandpa.”

“Language!” He put the mug down on the bedside table with unnecessary force, spilling a little, and went over to my open window.

“Sorry.” I sat up and managed to grasp the tea with the exposure of only two fingers. “What's the day like?”

“R, D, F,” he said, pulling my window closed. Rain, drizzle and fog. “Shouldn't leave your window open nights.”

“I'll finish this tea, then give you a haircut, Grandpa.”

He left the room. “Get dressed first!” he hollered back.

“Naw, b'y, I thought I'd go to the funeral
naked
!” Flinging blankets aside I went to the window myself, tea in hand, shivering in the damp chill of the house. The raindrops on old glass panes spun the outside into a skein of green. I didn't want to go to the funeral. I hated funerals. Almost as bad as weddings, for Christ's sake. No one wanted me at the funeral anyway. They'd probably all be happier if I stayed away. I wouldn't go. Gramma wouldn't want me to go. Besides, I'd look like an idiot; I'd brought my one dress, black of course, but it was too big for me, and my skinny legs sticking out of it made it look like what it was – a thrift-store buy. I'd gotten it three years ago when a friend died of AIDS, and no one at that funeral really cared what I looked like; my friends had long ceased to expect appropriate fashion out of me. But family, that's another matter.

And I'd forgotten about shoes. All I had were my biker boots.

Suddenly I felt eyes upon me. I turned, automatically trying to cover my nakedness. The door stood half open, and I thought I saw a short, round figure passing in the hall. Her presence was palpable; I sensed her there, going down the stairs, or about to call me to breakfast, or come bustling in demanding why I'd left my window open all night.

One still moment, then I abandoned my tea and grabbed my housecoat, going out into the hall. Nothing. Their bedroom – ? I peered in. It was empty, the bed an even worse tangle than before I'd made it up last evening.

As I was about to leave, my eyes fell on the closet. The door was open a crack, inviting. Shoes, Gramma's shoes: her entire footwear collection lined up in a hanging shoe-holding contraption. It had a clear plastic front and opened with a zipper. Could I wear a pair of her shoes to the funeral?

It seemed sacrilegious, but the image of me at her funeral wearing biker boots seemed much worse. I unzipped the contraption and pulled out pair after pair. Gramma had liked shoes with heels because she was short.

Heels. Great. Blue shoes, beige shoes, white shoes (ugh), one green pair, and yes, three black pairs; I selected the ones with the lowest heels and found that I could just squeeze my feet into them. I shoved the others back into their cubby holes. I felt a pain inside my chest, and found I was patting myself on my sternum. There, there, dear. Have a nice cuppa tea. There, there.

Back in my room, I took my dress out of the backpack – it was hopelessly wrinkled – shook it out and laid it on the bed. Then I went downstairs and found Grandpa reading the paper in the living room.

“Haircut?” I said.

“Sure,” he said, not looking up, finger following along as he read. I looked hard at the back of his head, suddenly wanting to tell him I'd seen something, seen Gramma. I opened my mouth, flooded with tenderness and worry for the old man before me. How could he bear this? He looked up. “
Well
?”

I retreated into the kitchen, found the household haircutting scissors (also used on string, paper, tin foil and Saran Wrap) and the comb, and pulled a chair out on the linoleum floor.

“Come on, Grandpa!”

He came into the kitchen carrying his newspaper and sat down, snapped open the paper. I began to comb his hair. It was the most beautiful silver, sparkling as the comb went through, straight and fine. I gently tried to smooth the ruffled bit he always failed to tame on the right side of his head, the side he slept on. His right ear was flatter than the other, too. His skin was loose on his skull; I guess that happens when you're old.

“Let me take my shirt off, so it doesn't get all covered in hair,” he said, and unbuttoned so he sat in his undershirt.

“You warm enough in just that?” I asked.

“Yes.”

You could see how he'd had big shoulders – the frame of him, his bones, still marked him as a big man. But the muscle and flesh had melted down over the years.

He looked much better when I'd finished: younger and cleaner. I blew the strands off the back of his neck, and went up to the bathroom to get a razor to clean up the lines. I remembered that I'd have to shave my legs. I hate that. But it was still only quarter to twelve – lots of time until two. When I got back down with the razor, Grandpa folded his paper.

“We'd better get under way.”

“What? The funeral's at two, you said last night.”

“Funeral director said to be there at twelve-thirty.”

I shook the razor at him. “You didn't say that last night!”

“Well, I'm saying it now.” He started to get up.

“I'm not finished with you yet.” I pushed him back into his seat, and shook the razor some more. “Why,” I said in strangled tones, “do you always spring things on me? Why?”

“I have to get dressed.”

“First I am going to finish your haircut. And I can't do that until I've calmed down. So stay where you're to!”

Grandpa glared, then flourished his newspaper and pretended to read. I took deep, calming breaths, then wet the back of Grandpa's neck with a tea towel and shaved it.

“There. You are free to go.”

“We have to go over in ten minutes.”

“I will do my best to be ready in ten minutes.” I shot out of the kitchen.

I wasn't ready in ten minutes, or twenty, and ironed the dress with Grandpa standing over me like an avenging angel. My hair was a mess, the dress didn't fit, the shoes hurt. But when I came stepping gingerly down the staircase, Grandpa looked me over and grunted, by which I knew I looked well enough. His approval evaporated pretty fast when I put on my leather jacket, but I was damned if I was going to freeze to death for the sake of propriety, and I couldn't bring myself to wear one of Gramma's coats. He wore a dark suit I hadn't seen since my parents' funeral. He looked handsome, I thought. We left the house by the front door.

We had to walk to the funeral home, because Grandpa and Gramma had gotten rid of their car last year. I wondered if this meant they were hard up; I wondered how Grandpa was paying for the funeral; I wondered a lot of things about the last couple of years. It was quite a walk to the funeral home. I didn't bother suggesting a cab; Grandpa didn't believe in cabs.

Once down the rickety wooden steps to the street, my feet were hurting so badly I had to grit my teeth to keep from whimpering. By the time we approached the footbridge, I was plotting how to take them off and walk barefoot without Grandpa noticing. Gramma and Grandpa, Southsiders born and bred, always called going to the main city “going over,” as if we were denizens of another world. This unkempt wooden affair was all that was left of the lovely arc of Job's Bridge, demolished for the building of the synchrolift. As we skirted the humming little high voltage power station to get to the bridge, Grandpa pointed. “We used to skate there,” he said.

“In the power station?” Memories of those lurid films they used to show in elementary school rose before me, where the kid tries to retrieve a ball thrown over the power station fence and
dies horribly
.

“Not there. Sure, it wasn't there in those days anyway. Just down
that
way,” and he jerked his head down the road. “The school playground, across from the old church.”

“St. Mary's.”

A ghost of a smile glimmered around his eyes. “Only time them from up the road came down.
We
had the rink, you see. Oh, we had some grand times. And when the harbour froze over, now, that was more joy in an afternoon than Christmas and New Year's rolled into one.” He stopped walking, looking far away. “All gone now, all those houses below the bridge. Everyone relocated.”

“Where?” I asked softly, afraid of staunching this uncharacteristic flow.

“Craigmillar Avenue. Other places.”

“Did you go to the old church?”

“Yes.” His voice was sour. “Before they bulldozed it up.”

“And Shanawdithit,” I said.

“Who?”

I thought of her buried there, her bones unceremoniously torn up, torn up and scattered.

His feet had come to the threshold of the footbridge and he stopped talking, striding across so quickly I had to run to catch up. Halfway across I stopped, looking down into the still water. Was it fresh here, or salt? River or sea? I could see my silhouette reflected, head haloed by little flickering ripples dashing around my hair. They looked so real I waved my hand about my ears, half-expecting to brush something away.