Crazy Lady (2 page)

Latent fear of the lane drives Janet blindly into a tight cul-de-sac, and she's taken a dozen steps before she realizes her blunder. She hesitates momentarily as she seeks an escape route, but Constable Montgomery is gaining ground and his bulky figure is already filling the narrow passageway behind her.

“Wait up,” he wheezes after the fleeing woman, but he's conscious that his words barely carry from his lips. However, the prospect of being outrun by a barefoot, middle-aged woman spurs him on, though his rain-sodden clothing and beer belly are weighing him down — so is the pack of Marlboros in his pocket. “I'm getting too old for this,” he gasps as he's forced to a walk by an iron band clamped around his chest, but the end of the alley is in sight and he has his quarry backed against a high brick wall.

I just want a few words, dear
, he is practising mentally as he advances slowly on the cornered woman, but five more paces and he's wading through treacle.
What's going on?
he questions when a pain as incisive as lightning courses up and down his left arm. Comprehension comes when the blade of a red-hot poker stabs through his chest and enters his heart.

“Help,” he cries, lurching to a halt and doubling in agony, but Janet takes advantage of the hiatus and tries to squeeze past in the gloom. Montgomery reaches out and gets a desperate hold on her coat.

“Vengeance is mine. I will repay,” screams Janet as she frees herself by scything the officer's hand with her fingernails.

Lights from the basement kitchen of the Mandarin Palace restaurant offer the ailing constable sanctuary as Janet runs off, but as he reaches for the banister of a steep iron staircase, the lights fade, and he knows that he is falling into an exceedingly deep hole.

“255 Arundel Crescent, Dewminster, Hampshire, England,” Janet reminds herself as she streaks back towards a busy road and charges into the path of a zippy Volkswagen Jetta.

“What the…?” questions the driver, Trina Button, as she spies the ghostly grey apparition through the murk and slams on her brakes. The car fishtails on the slick surface, and the fleeing woman throws herself to the ground to avoid the skidding vehicle.

Oblivious to the blaring of horns, Trina leaps from her car to aid the sprawled woman, but Janet sees only another persecutor and is quickly on her feet, readying to take off.

“Get thee behind me, Satan,” she cries out as Trina tries to grab her, but the young driver manages to snag the sleeve of the woman's raincoat.

“My Lord Saviour will protect me,” claims Janet as she slips out of her coat and runs.

“Rats,” says Trina as she drops the coat to take up the chase. The young homecare nurse may be fitter and fresher than the escapee, but Janet, wearing only a saturated night-dress, seems to have God on her shoulder as she flies fearlessly through three lanes of speeding traffic. Trina is more judicious and waits for the semblance of a gap before racing across the road in pursuit. Behind her, the abandoned Jetta is
clipped by a heavyweight truck and is spun into the path of a taxi. “Shit!” exclaims Trina at the
crunch
, and she dances in deliberation for a few moments before continuing the chase.

“What do you mean, you've lost the car again,” sighs Rick Button, Trina's husband, twenty minutes later when she phones breathlessly from a pay phone. “You were only taking the guinea pig to the vet.”

“Oh no. I forgot the guinea pig —” Trina is saying as Rick cuts her off to answer another call. Seconds later he's back with Trina.

“That was the police,” he says sternly. “They want you at the police station to talk to you about a pileup.”

“Oh dear…”

However, the multi-vehicle accident on Hastings Street has taken second place to the discovery of a body in the basement courtyard behind the Mandarin Palace.

Most of the patrons of the restaurant have no idea of the ruckus going on in the kitchen as Charley Cho, the head chef, together with the rest of the staff, clamours for a view out of the basement's condensation-misted window. Outside, the shabby yard is ablaze with emergency lights and jammed with officers readying to raise the body of Constable Roddick Montgomery from the giant fish tank into which he has crashed head first.

“He kill half the fish,” complains Cho bitterly as a rope is looped around Montgomery's ankles; two members of the police team, together with a burly fireman, stand in the laneway above, preparing to haul.

“Christ he's heavy,” mutters the fireman and receives black looks from the others as the waterlogged body begins to rise from the tank. The blue-faced cadaver begins to slowly rotate as it's hoisted into the air, then a stupefied trout
slips out of the officer's tunic and plops back into the tank, making everyone jump.

Sergeant Dave Brougham's face falls as Trina Button rushes the inquiry desk at Vancouver's central police station.

“I might have guessed,” grumbles the officer, recognizing the bouncy homecare nurse from a previous encounter, but Trina recognizes him as well and grabs him by the lapels, demanding, “Where's my guinea pig? What have you done to him?”

“He's all right,” says Constable Hunt, stepping forward with a battered cage. “I rescued him. You're lucky he wasn't flattened in the wreck. He's just a bit shaken up.”

“Leaving the scene following an accident is a serious offence,” cautions the sergeant as Trina lifts the shivering creature from the cage, but Trina launches at him boldly.

“I didn't leave
after
the accident,” she protests. “You should get your facts straight before you accuse innocent people.”

“But you dumped your car in the middle of Hastings Street.”

“Give me a parking ticket then. Anyway, I only went to help the poor woman.”

The question, “What woman?” leaves Trina without an answer. Janet's wraithlike figure somehow dissolved by the time the concerned nurse worked her way to the far side of the street and scoured the numerous laneways and potential hidey-holes.

“So you did have an accident then,” persists the sergeant, once Trina has explained the incident.

“No. She was the one who had an accident. I didn't hit her,” explains Trina precisely. “I just stopped to help her.”

“Help who? No one mentioned a woman,” continues the sergeant, and he turns to PC Hunt for backup. “Did anyone else report seeing a woman?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“Sounds like a pretty convenient story if you ask me,” the sergeant sneers, but Trina spits back in defence.

“She dropped her coat.”

“OK. Now we're getting somewhere. Can you describe it? Where is it?”

Trina shakes her head. “It was raining… she was running… I'm not sure.”

“According to the witnesses, the only person running was you,” steps in PC Hunt. “They say you ditched the car and ran.”

“But… the grey lady…”

“Precisely, Mrs. Button,” mocks Sergeant Brougham. “A grey lady. Sounds like a bit of a ghost story to me.”

Trina is still concerned about the missing woman as she prods Brougham with the guinea pig, insisting, “You've got to find her. She'll freeze to death. She's only wearing a nightie.”

Rick steps in to rescue the animal as Brougham sarcastically explains. “One of my officers has been murdered, you've screwed up the downtown rush-hour traffic, and you want us to look for a nutcase in a nightdress.”

“Yes.”

“Stop wasting my time, lady,” he says, turning away. “We've had no reports of a missing woman. Anyway, she obviously didn't want to be caught.”

“In that case we have a responsibility to find her ourselves,” proclaims Trina loftily and loudly as she snatches the guinea pig back from Rick. “This lot couldn't find the hole in a donut.”

“Are you quite sure you saw a woman?” asks Rick once Sergeant Brougham has angrily ushered them outside, where they shelter under a dripping arbutus tree to await the arrival of the remnants of Trina's Volkswagen. “Only it was raining and almost dark. Perhaps it was a deer or a —”

“It was a woman,” cuts in Trina defiantly. “She dropped her coat. She even said something about being saved by someone or other.”

Janet Thurgood is still leaning on her Saviour for protection as she huddles from the cold dampness of the British Columbian autumn in a dark doorway. The lost coat should concern her, but she has sunk inside her mind, seeking answers from the past as well as the road that will lead her to the present. But there is a gaping hole in her memory — someone has ripped the centre out of her life's scrapbook — and the hole is growing, and has been growing for sometime.

“255 Arundel Crescent…”

I know that. I know where I used to live. But it's gone. Can't you see that? Everything's gone.

“What came after then?”

I can't remember.

“Think… think… think. First there was 255 Arundel Crescent…”

With Mummy and Daddy…

“Yes. Now go back. What do you remember?”

Daddy hated me.

“He wanted a boy. He would've liked that.”

Joseph liked me.

“Yes… yes… yes. Now go deeper. Who was Joseph? What did he look like?”

I can't remem… was he… I can't remember. I can't remember.

“What's up, lady?”

Janet's eyes open in alarm. A bagman leaning over a loaded supermarket buggy waits for a reply.

It's nearly eight o'clock, and the homeless have taken over: ghostly cloaked figures drifting soundlessly through the alleyways of Vancouver as they scavenge the
detritus for a bottle of nirvana. Janet scrunches herself further into the corner and watches several men — grey-bearded cadavers of men all similarly beaten into the same haggard, hunched form — wanting to question, “Are you Jesus?”

“I asked, like, who are you?” continues the bagman, then he drags a black garbage bag of clothing from his buggy. “Try these. They'll keep you warm.”

“Are you Jesus?” she asks, peering deeply into his lifeless eyes. He grins — a single-toothed grin that turns him into a caricature of a leering maniac — then laughs at the alarm on Janet's face.
There was a time…
he thinks to himself, vaguely recalling an earlier life in a better world, but his memory is as clouded as Janet's and, as he shuffles away, his laughter turns to a harsh cough.

The clothes were a teenager's donation to Children's Aid until the vagrant did his daily round. Janet's withered frame doesn't overly stretch the modern garments, although the sight of a skinny sixty-one-year-old in baggy cargo pants, ripped Nike running shoes, and a T-shirt screaming “Eminem Fuckin' Raps” turns a few heads as Janet resumes her search.

The roadway to her past is there, she's certain, but her mind is as fuzzy as a blurred windshield and she sees only isolated visions — visions that are startlingly clear, frighteningly clear, and she's always running: running, terrified, from a perpetually angry father; on the run from her first Girl Guide camp after two tear-filled days and nights; running from schoolyard bullies; from unbelievers; from boys; from responsibilities. And at eighteen, running from her parents into the arms of a man — a married man. Then running back home in tears, pregnant, to a father who slammed the door in her face. On the run again, knocking on the door of a church — a church unsympathetic to harlots and home wreckers, and another door slammed in her face.

Nothing makes sense as Janet wanders the grimy side of Vancouver that is kept out of the tourist brochures and off the tour guides' schedules. If only she could find Mrs. Jenson's sweet shop or even St. Stephen's in the Vale parish church. But the twenty-first-century Canadian streets confuse her. The cars, quiet and fast, flow like a river of molten steel. Lights, bright and flashing, remind her of Christmas, and a store full of televisions mesmerizes her: movies, she assumes, though she's not seen one in nearly forty years — not a real one, not like the ones they showed at The Odeon in Dewminster Market Square in her youth.

“A window on Hell,” Janet's mother told her whenever she protested that all her friends spent Saturday afternoons with Roy Rogers and Buster Keaton.

The nearest she came to a movie in those far-off days was when a church missionary set up a flimsy screen in front of the altar, annoying a crusty churchwarden who considered it sacrilegious to block God's view of His congregation, and showed grainy images from a 35-millimetre projector: little black boys wearing starched white shirts with ties, and skirted girls with spindly black legs and bright head scarves, their toothy grins showing delight as they marched down the aisle of a palm-roofed hut to signify their conversion to God. But which God? Whose God?

“Why doesn't God like seeing girls' hair?” earned Janet a rap on the knuckles from Mr. Gibbons, the Sunday school teacher, and she seriously considered becoming a Roman Catholic until she discovered that their God seemed to have a similar aversion.

Janet spots her reflection in the television store window and instinctively checks her head scarf. “Thank God,” she murmurs, though she questions the identity of the waiflike woman wearing it. “Who are you?” she asks and is surprised to see the woman's lips moving in unison. “Mother?” she questions.

In many ways, Janet has become her mother, a fearful woman devoted to God but lost to the world who slaved in the service of a man as required by her marriage vows.

“Listen to your father… Do what your father says… Your father knows best… He must be obeyed,” Janet's mother always said, using the same words her mother drilled into her as a child, and her mother's mother before her. And then: “Listen to your husband… Do what your husband says… Your husband knows best… He must be obeyed.”