Fish Change Direction in Cold Weather (11 page)

I curled up in my dad’s spot, in ‘his’ armchair with ‘his’ remote. Before was before. I had to stop hoping he’d come back and that life would go on just like
it used to. I surfed through all the channels. On Le Canal Nouvelles all they talked about was the ice. It was perfect for them. But the problem with these non-stop news programmes is that they end
up repeating themselves. I heard the same thing over and over again so often that for a laugh – well, actually in order not to cry – I started multiplying. Seven hundred thousand
households without electricity times the number of evacuation centres, add a thousand volunteers and multiply by twenty-five millimetres of ice: what do you get?

‘
The cost of the storm could be devastating. Damage is already estimated in the tens of millions of dollars . . . And the ice has not stopped falling . . .
’

I was ashamed of what I’d done. If it had solved my problem, I wouldn’t have minded, but . . . it was all for nothing. I ran towards my room, angry, but before I got there I stopped
suddenly in the storage room.

‘Night, Mum.’

She wasn’t there. My gaze landed on the tray by the printer. On the bookkeeping sheet there were two columns, ‘you’ and ‘me’, and loads of numbers. I read,
‘video camera: one thousand dollars’. In the ‘you’ column was written, ‘five hundred dollars’. Same thing in the ‘me’ column. There was a comment in
the margin: ‘we were still together . . .’

It’s the thought that counts, not the present
. . . Easy to say.

Everything in the house was listed. I saw that my dad could keep the electronics but he had to give up the sofa and his precious leather armchair. What? The sofa was worth three thousand
dollars? My dad was keeping the television, six hundred dollars, but giving up the computer, eight hundred. There was a line marked ‘alimony: five hundred dollars’. It was spread over a
year. It looked like my dad wouldn’t be paying anything until April because my mum was getting the big double bed and the big dresser in the sitting room, which came to two thousand dollars.
And in the middle of all those figures, there I was like a piece of furniture. Hardly worth any more than the sofa.

I heard the toilet flush. I rushed to my bedroom before my mum was even out of the bathroom.
Slam!

The sky hadn’t done a thing for me; on the contrary, my situation was getting worse by the day, by the hour. I went to the window. I stared at the sky and shouted.

‘Stop it, you’re hurting me!’

Wednesday, 7 January 1998

BUSINESS IS BUSINESS

The first thing Julie saw when she woke up was the Hydro-Québec trucks doing a waltz. It was nine o’clock in the morning. She hadn’t woken up this early in
ages. She went into the sitting room: there was absolutely no doubt about it, this was no ordinary man. Every morning he came up with something new.

Boris was lying face down on the sofa, with one hand on the big sheet of cardboard covering the aquarium, which he had placed right next to him on the coffee table. The two cats, who’d
grudgingly given up their usual spot, were sitting on the coffee table, their noses up against the glass. Tails twitching, they watched attentively as the fish twisted and turned. Their obvious
intention, if Boris let his vigilance slip for so much as a nanosecond, was to revise his entire mathematical theory, to simplify his calculations by two units. Only Brutus, as loyal as can be, lay
purring on Boris’s back.

Julie went into the kitchen on tiptoes. She switched on her little radio. Not loudly, just enough to find out if, by some miracle, this might all continue.

‘Contrary to all expectations, the ice storm that has been raging for the last two days seems to be lessening in intensity. Hundreds of Hydro-Québec team workers are hard at it,
restoring power to as many households as possible. They estimate they will be able to reconnect close to three hundred thousand today.’

She just muttered, through clenched teeth, ‘Isn’t that typical Hydro-Québec? When you call them, they take forever to come, and when you don’t call them, they come
before they ought to.’

Julie sincerely hoped that every apartment in Quebec would soon have comfort and electricity . . . with one exception.

You don’t quit a job where you’re making five hundred dollars a night only to find yourself, the next morning, living with the fear that someone is going to leave.

Just then, Boris walked into the kitchen.

‘Morning!’

‘Morning.’

‘Is something wrong?’

‘No, no, everything’s fine . . .’

‘No, there’s something wrong, I can tell!’

When his fish were swimming happily around the tank, Boris’s life went swimmingly, too. There had been something handsome about him when he’d been sad and afraid. And now that he was
joyful, he was even more handsome. Yesterday he had told her about how he first came to Quebec, his short career in the junior hockey league. She thought it was terrible that he’d been let go
after his first inter-team match, after scoring four goals, three of which were during short-handed play. But Julie knew that Boris must be lying about his talent. She’d seen dozens of hockey
players at Sex Paradisio, and they always came in threes. Apparently it relaxed them, after a match, to go to a strip club, especially when they were in the NHL. She saw right away that Boris had
neither the build nor the eagle eye of a great champion.

‘I thought of something, this morning . . .’

‘Yes, Boris.’

‘Here, you have power, which is great. But it could stop at any time . . .’

‘Anything can stop at any time, you’re so right, Boris . . .’

‘Hold my arm, please.’

Some people view male chivalry as nothing more than a condescending attitude towards the weaker sex. Julie liked chivalry not only because she was fed up with slaps on the bum but above all
because there was a lot of ice and it really was slippery. From the moment they left the house, she did not let go of her knight’s arm. What astonished her was the way other men were looking
at them: in their eyes it was no longer, ‘God, I’d like to do her!’ that she saw, but, ‘What a lucky guy!’

As they walked, she thought again about the night before and the lovely, ordinary little meal they’d had, like a real couple. She’d cooked, he’d done the washing up, and
they’d talked about other things besides ice hockey.

‘I left Russia because I had no future there. Under communism, researchers were the elite of the country. They were offered big apartments, good salaries, good working conditions. But
after the collapse of the Soviet Union all those privileges disappeared. I shouldn’t tell you this, and you keep it to yourself, but not everything was so bad under communism . . .’

Julie had promised she wouldn’t tell a soul. But she didn’t tell him that as far as she was concerned, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire suited her
fine. For one thing, she was very happy that millions of people would now know what it was like to live in a democracy. But the most important thing was that, thanks to Gorbachev and his
perestroika, Boris had been able to leave the country and move in across the street.

Then Boris told her about the rationing that had been their daily bread until 1990, how you could only buy goods from the state shops, where poverty was rife.

‘It was awful, inhumane – just like Canada Dépôt!’

Seeing Boris so sad, as he recalled all the worst things about daily life under communism, Julie decided to suggest to her Russian a little trip together, to the very place where he had thrown
in the towel earlier.

Clinging to Boris’s arm like a mussel to its rock, Julie knew just what to do. She was better than anyone at defending an individual’s rights, since she herself had
so often suffered from a total disregard for her own rights.

‘Can you show me where it says that I can only buy two gas canisters?’

‘It doesn’t say so anywhere, Miss! It’s an order from the manager.’

‘I want to speak to the manager!’

‘There’s no point, he’ll only tell you the same thing.’

‘I want to speak to the manager!’

‘You have to take others into consideration . . .’

‘Well, we’ll see about that!’

While Boris looked on, stunned, Julie began to empty the shelf of gas canisters. She left the floor manager no option: he grabbed his walkie-talkie and now the entire store knew what was going
on.

‘I’ve got an emergency over in Camping Goods! Will the manager please come to Camping Goods!’

Boris, worried, rubbed the back of his neck and turned to Julie, who was still filling the shopping trolley.

‘Ten canisters should get us through the night . . .’

‘Don’t you start, you’re not in Russia any more!’

‘Now what?’

Boris turned and found himself face to face with the manager, who was looking around, disappointed not to have more of an audience. In fact, there was no audience at all.

‘You again! I thought I explained how things work here! So, you take two gas canisters, you go to the till, don’t forget your Canada Dépôt tokens, and you don’t
come back until tomorrow!’

Julie chose that moment to turn around.

‘Are you the store manager?’

‘Bambi!’

Now the manager was looking left and right, relieved he didn’t have more of an audience. For a moment Julie stared at the gas bottles, then took one and jiggled it in her palm.

‘Tell me, Freddy, does your wife work here too?’

Freddy understood right away. You can be store manager at Canada Dépôt and like pretty girls. That’s not a crime; at worst, it might be a sin. But if the wife finds out,
it’s not a crime, it’s far worse than that.

‘So how are your fish doing?’

The cashier immediately recognised Boris and greeted him with a big smile and a wink. Julie did not appreciate such aquariophilic familiarity. The manager’s gaze was darting around the
shop, terrified. Was he afraid his wife might show up, or was it that a customer might notice he was allowing a massive sale that completely contradicted his grand speech about Quebecker
solidarity? Boris was like a kid, watching admiringly as the gas canisters piled up in his shopping bags. The cashier was jubilant.

‘Two plus two, plus two, plus two, plus two . . .’

‘That’s enough now, we get the point!’

In a moment of utter defeat, a manager rarely has any manners, so he picks on those who are weaker than he is.

‘Hurry up now! Good jobs are hard to come by these days!’

The cashier said no more, looked down, and finished totalling up in silence. But then she spoke, loud and clear.

‘That’s twenty-eight canisters at a dollar ninety-nine for a total of sixty-four dollars and nine cents. Cash or credit?’

‘Maybe you could give us a discount for buying in bulk?’

‘You’d do better to hold your horses, you Russian!’

‘Freddy! His name is Boris and I’d like you to give him a nice discount.’

The manager went up close to Julie. He really did not want anyone to overhear.

‘Okay, Bambi, you calm down right now.’

‘Actually, you never answered my question, about whether your wife works here?’

‘I would never have thought you could do something like this.’

‘Freddy, I’ll let you in on a secret . . . Neither did I!’

The manager stepped back, surprised. He turned to the cashier.

‘Ten per cent!’

‘I meant a big discount, honey!’

‘Twenty . . .’

The cashier, typing away, began to whistle as if everything were perfectly normal.

‘Fifty-one dollars and twenty-seven cents!’

Boris paid, beaming. The manager, on seeing the notes, moved closer to Julie again with a greedy expression on his face.

‘Well, I want my little discount tonight, too . . .’

‘Too late, I quit.’

‘Huh?’

Until this moment, the ice storm had been a gift of fate. The best sales ever in two days, better even than Boxing Day. And the little cherry on the cake was that he could lie to his wife with
impunity, using the pretext of long nights stocking shelves in order to go and relax at Sex Paradisio. Freddy turned to look at his staff. He saw the first cashier whispering to the next cashier,
who in turn went to whisper into the ear of yet another cashier. Intermittently they all turned to look at him. He put on his loud manager’s voice.

‘Are you going to go on staring at me like that until the spring sales? Go and serve your customers!’

In the end, a store manager’s true nature always prevails. After glaring defiantly at his staff of cashiers, some of whom could not stop laughing, Freddy walked past the empty shelves
where the gas canisters used to be. Satisfied, he rubbed his hands. The freezing rain had stopped falling this morning. He had a gigantic stock of gas canisters to sell. Twenty-eight in one go,
that really helps to empty out the stock room. And this evening at Sex Paradisio he’d find someone to replace Bambi soon enough. Come to think of it, Cassandra had big tits, too.

Business is business.

I WAS NO ONE NOW

‘Must be a really cool sofa!’

I should never have told Alex about my mum’s spreadsheet. Normally he never said anything about other people’s private lives. That’s what I liked about him. The only reason
I’d told him was because I didn’t expect him to say anything.

‘How else did you expect them to go about it?’

His matter-of-fact tone hurt.

‘When you split up, you have to share what you have, right?’

Maybe I hadn’t made myself clear that I felt like I was being compared to a sofa. My first thought was to get revenge. I looked at Alex, but the truth is that he hits too hard, so I only
said it in my head: