Consumption (43 page)

Johanna was sitting in Penny’s empty apartment, looking out her living-room window. The days had grown long. The sun was setting in the west like fresh-cut char: pink and red and strands of orange. The snow glimmered pastel beneath all this and Johanna wondered where Penny had died, whether she had got as far as the Thelon River where they had camped. She wondered what that place looked like, frozen and snow-covered.

Johanna had heard that the new teacher had been hired and heard his family was moving in here, but—she still had not been asked for Penny’s keys. She thought that once there was a family in here, with children running around, Penny would be gone forever. When she heard a knock on the door, her first thought was, Oh my God, we’ve all leapt to a horrible conclusion. Her next thought was, Why would she knock on her own apartment door? Johanna got up and opened it.

Doug.

“You weren’t in your place and so I figured you might be here.”

“…”

“They weren’t very interested in giving me any more time off work.”

“Uh… How… did you persuade them?”

“I told them if they didn’t I’d quit.”

“Oh, good.” And she held her arms out and he walked into them and she squeezed him so hard he could scarcely breathe. She began
crying quietly, but he did not seem to hear this and she wiped her face on his arm so he would not see her tears. Norbert looked up from beneath the apartment window and wagged his tail carefully. He then settled his head on his paws to watch this strange man, and tried to understand the agitating effect he had on his new mistress.

“You miss her, huh?”

“I miss you.”

“Me too.”

“Can you stay for a little while?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“Too many ghosts?”

“Too many bad examples.”

They went back to her apartment. He had set down his bags in her kitchen. Nine of them. Rucksacks, duffle bags, and enormous suitcases, stacked in a pyramid.

“I’m surprised they let you on the plane with all that,” she said.

“There was a substantial service charge.”

“What’s in them?”

“Everything I could think of and everything I couldn’t throw out.”

She looked at him. She felt like she was standing on the edge of a high building, and the fear centred itself in her liver and spread across her abdomen. “Did you bring me any food?” she asked.

“I brought coconut milk,” he said.

“That’s good,” she nodded.

“And fresh coriander and Pouilly-Fuissé, ginger marmalade, Calvados, reggiano parmigiano, lemon grass, pine nuts, a braid of garlic, maple syrup, chipotle peppers, lox, smoked goldeye, kimchee, Roquefort, tarragon, balsamic vinegar, salami.”

“Wow.”

“And seeds for rosemary, thyme, eight kinds of basil, cucumbers, garden peas, butternut squash, carrots, and sage. I have a case of Wolf Blass shiraz, and chevre and Worcestershire sauce.”

“What have you been doing down there?”

“Not what you think.”

“So it appears.”

“You can’t stay up here without decent food, among other things.” She finally got up the nerve to ask. “What did you mean, ‘everything you couldn’t throw out’?”

Johanna sat at her kitchen table as he made Thai curry. She watched him. The earlier conversation was held suspended in the air, tendrils of discussion floating frozen and still, while they both concentrated on trying to breathe. He was chopping the lemon grass. “I don’t really know anything about this, you know,” he said. “I just buy the things the man in the shop tells me are good. Try to make the food look like it does in the pictures in the recipe books.” Out of breath, he turned back to the lemon grass.

“It’s pretty much all anyone does.”

He resumed chopping. “It seems to me that the Italians and the Thais understand something about it.”

“Or did once.”

“Shh. Don’t say that.”

“We’re all so hungry for the authentic.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Pause.

“Did she say anything to you before she left?”

“Not much. She told me she was going out on the land for a little while. I was surprised, because I hadn’t thought the principal would give her any more time off. She asked me to water the plants. At work everyone was as surprised as I was. I covered her class as well as my own for a couple of weeks and then the school board flew in a substitute teacher.”

“Had she thought it out, taking off like that?”

“She’d thought it out, I think.”

TWENTY-TWO

MARIE SAT ON THE EDGE OF HER BED
on three west, one of the in-patient paediatric wards of the Children’s Hospital of Winnipeg. The resident and the intern had already been in to see her, she had had more bloodwork, and then this
tube
was put in her nose and now she was being fed through it. When she closed her eyes the humiliation of the scene only got worse. They didn’t want her even to shut her door. And she couldn’t wear her own clothes, had to give them to the nurse and put on this awful hospital gown and she was cold in it, and there was no one she knew and they wouldn’t even let her play her music until she got headphones and, and, this is what the world does to people like her, who no one looks out for, her mother still at home and her sister only ever embarrassed by her and her brother who hadn’t noticed her in ten years, and she had thought up there that she couldn’t possibly feel more lonely, but she was wrong. She could. And she could with a tube shoved in her nose.

A young woman knocked on her door and came in. “Hi, I’m Carol James. I’m a dietician and your doctors have asked me to come talk to you about your eating habits.”

She wore a teal cardigan pulled tightly across her narrow frame and her manner was simultaneously halting and impetuous. Marie looked at the woman blankly. Good God in heaven, there was a
tube in her nose—surely she had drawn some conclusions about her eating habits.

“You’re looking a little bowled over. I understand. Most of the girls do when they come in the first time. A big part of what I do is education. And the best way to start that is to talk about what you eat. Can you tell me about when your eating habits started to change? Was there something that happened about the time you started worrying about your weight?”

Her words rushed on, undaunted by Marie’s determined blankness. “Hey, it’s gonna be okay, honey. They tell me you’re from the Arctic. We’ve never had an Inuit girl here before in the eating disorder unit, everyone thinks that’s really interesting. You know, I should tell you, if you have any dietary preferences, like char or caribou or something, we could get some flown down for you, no problem. We do it all the time for the older folks. Do you think you’d like that? Not sure? Well let us know if you would, it would be easy for us. I suppose you might just want to tie into some hamburgers and fries, or something else you can’t find up there, anyway. Feel free. I mean it: feel
free
.

“You know, I’ve always been interested in the Inuit. It seems incredible to me that you people ever lived up there without wood, making a living just from the tundra. I think it’s inspiring, really. The things humans are capable of—we live down here in such a soft environment and you know, no one here really knows what it is like to struggle. I’ll bet you, or your people anyway, do. Winter ten months a year, raw seal and caribou—heavens. Maybe to you it just seems normal, like how everyone lives. You know what? It
isn’t
. You people are so strong. We southerners couldn’t last an hour and a half up there. Though I suppose there might be some ways about living down here that strike you as difficult, or crazy anyway.

“Have you ever been to Winnipeg before? It must seem so busy and crowded to you. You get used to it pretty quickly, though. There’s great shopping over at Portage Place. I’ll bet someone here would take you when you’re feeling better.

“You just don’t feel much like talking, do you? That’s okay, I’ll come back later.”

At shift change for the nurses, Marie waited for the din rising from the staff room to peak. Then she got out of bed and walked to the elevators beside the nursing station. There was a worried-looking parent-couple just stepping off and she swung in behind them into the elevator car. When the door closed she pulled the tube out of her stomach, gagging and choking as she did so. She rode the elevator down to the main floor and walked quickly out into the lobby. She looked around the empty building until she found the reception desk.

“Where is the lost and found, please?”

The man sitting there, pushing eighty and wearing a bright red button that said
Volunteers Make the World Go ’Round
, stood up slowly and pulled out a box the size of a tabletop and heaved it onto the desk.

“Great, there’s my sweater, and pants and jacket,” Marie said for the benefit of the smiling man. “How did I lose those?” He nodded, and she walked into the women’s washroom off the atrium.

In Kat’s room later that night Amanda, Beth, Lewis, and Kat all tried to sleep in a space that seemed scarcely large enough to stand in. They had come here to blow a spliff and eat the pizza they had stolen from an inattentive Domino’s driver, who had left a car window ajar while making an apartment delivery. They were all nodding off halfway through the pepperoni and double-cheese thick crust.

Amanda had never seen where Kat lived, and was curious. His room was the size of the largest of her parents’ washrooms, and in it was a bed and a hot plate and almost nothing else. A green plastic garbage bag of dirty T-shirts and jeans, another of clean. On the wall were drawings he had made of Japanese swords and symbols he had been moved by. Also, a few efforts at anime drawings, and
the sentiment of these surprised her. These were children, however armoured and sexualized, and he had drawn them with innocence apparent upon their faces. Of all of them it was Kat she worried most about—he seemed to her more lost and troubled than the others, or herself. Her parents would have been puzzled by this distinction she drew. He displayed no outward evidence of distress, and never complained or even revealed much about where he was from, or where his family was, but the extent that he had drawn into himself, reaching backward in time to Saturday morning cartoons and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, moved her. He sees his own future, she thought, and pushes it out of his mind.

Kat and Beth lay down on his bed, and Lewis and Amanda curled up on the floor beside them. They wrapped a thin and spotted blanket Kat had offered them around themselves and used their jackets as pillows. The floor was hard but the day had induced in them a tolerance for discomfort.

When Kat and Beth began fucking, Lewis had been snoring for most of an hour. Amanda heard him wake at Beth’s soft cries, and stir, rolling toward her. She was aroused as well and she turned and pressed herself into him. The single window emitted a pale green streetlight glow that lit up Beth’s bony frame and the muscles of Kat’s narrow back. Kindly, the light pressed less insistently on Amanda and Lewis. As he rolled on to her and entered her, she gasped, and saw Beth turn her head to see where the sound had come from. After a moment of the faint sliding, sucking sound of their passion, Beth turned away again and looked at her own lover. It had not been clear to Amanda that Beth and Kat had been seeing each other except within their group, but from the way they moved together, from the ratio of hunger to tentativeness and fear, it was clear that they had. She wondered why this would have been kept a secret and she wondered which of them had wanted it to be.