Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (32 page)

Her son looks frightened.

We're in a restaurant in this scene, we're in Toronto in a restaurant off Bay Street. The wine steward is tripping over his own feet with obsequious nervousness in Sita's presence. She orders a bottle of something French, the price of which makes me gulp once or twice, and brushes him away.

“So.” She picks at her smoked salmon with a fork, nibbles a flowerlet of parsley. “What do you hear from Joey about Ravi?”

“Well, you know,” I say nervously. “Grade 12 and Grade 10, they're different countries. It's only during basketball season …” I feel ill at ease for being so ordinary: still living in a small town, still married, still on speaking – even on hugging – terms with my children.

“A place like that,” she says. “People talk all the time. Everyone knows everyone's business.”

“But I never pay attention … You know I can't stand that sort of …” I have no intention of telling her the rumours. What can you expect, people say, of a kid with a mother who
…
? It's a town that disapproves of the unusual. (There are people who claim to have seen Sita on lower Yonge Street. Late at night, they say, walking up and down and wearing skin-tight leather pants. People will say anything.) Ravi, in fact, is often at our house since his father joined a law firm in Calgary. Ravi sort of camps around. But there's too much in the past for me to tell her any of this. There's the business of the kidnapping, for example, and of Ravi and Prem running away again to their father – or perhaps simply back to the known circle of school friends. Anyway, just too much past. “Ravi's okay,” I say. “He's an okay kid. He's an
interesting
kid, Sita. Give him time, he'll come to cherish the fact he has an extraordinary mother.”

With her fork, she has divided the smoked salmon into multiple thin strips, none of which she has eaten. “Prem writes,” she says. “He has to do it secretly. He has to sneak out to the Calgary post office. He wants me to get him away from his father.”

With great concentration, I break a dinner roll apart and butter it.

“I had a reading done last month,” she says. “Some U of T student wife. Guess what card came up?”

“Queen of Pentacles, I imagine. I can't believe you still go in for that stuff.”

“Queen of Pentacles, too, for what that's worth.”

“Worth plenty, apparently. Remember I predicted fame and fortune way back? How does it feel to be made a partner?”

“To be the token woman and token black in the company, you mean? I drive them crazy. They can't stand it that I crochet in board meetings.”

I try to imagine this. I see a circle of pinstriped men, a flash of smoke and vermilion sparks, a little dervish of crochet twisting and turning on the boardroom table. Sita plays on her snake-charmer's pipes. There is a drowsy smell of incense and the men with silver hair and combed moustaches begin to sway and rise like cobras with the wisp of crochet. Sita keeps time with her ivory needle, hooking, hooking.

“I'm bored out of my mind in strategy meetings,” she says vehemently. “All these people who can only do one thing at a time. I have to listen to their minds crawling along, clunk, clunk, clunk. I'm going to have to move on, find something with more bite to it. Do you ever get the feeling when you wake in the morning that you just want to sink your teeth into the day, and suck at it and suck at it? And it never
ever
has enough juice to make it worthwhile?”

“Sita, you can't just … Can't you see that you're
programming
yourself for … I mean, this obsession with the Nine of Swords. And inauspicious birth, for God's sake! You've got a terribly self-destructive –”

“Ah,” she says cuttingly. “Psychology. The Canadian form of the occult.”

“You worry me. You haven't eaten a thing.”

“I'm ravenous.
Ravenous!”
she says.

Sergeant Decker is ill at ease. “I can't figure this lady. I just can't figure her. Appreciate your coming all this way.” He goes to a file cabinet, rifles through a drawer, pulls out a blue manila folder. “Long drive. How was the 401?”

“Uh … so-so.” But I cannot remember what the traffic was like. I cannot remember getting here at all.

He is shaking his head. “Third time in as many months. Little twist to this one, though. This time she's not at the receiving end. No smashed-up lip, no bruises.” His eyebrows lift. “You didn't know about that ?”

For some reason, I notice there is a slat missing in the Venetian blind on the window above his desk. Third from the top.

“She gave you as next-of-kin. She – ah – married to a relative or something? Well, none of my business.” He looks through the folder. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. She has a taste for violent johns.”

Then he settles himself into his chair and leans across his desk. “What really blows our minds,” he says, and I note the proprietary cast to his voice. He likes to talk about her. His case. “Turns out she's a big wheel on Bay Street. Well, of course you know. I check it out because of the too fancy car, which I assume is her pimp's and probably stolen. Trail leads to this glitzy building. I step out of the elevator on the sixteenth floor and she's standing there in this grey suit with a red silk thing around her neck. Looking like the ice princess herself. You could've knocked me over with a feather. Course,” he says. “Coloureds. You never know, do you?”

He tosses a sheet of paper in front of me. “Arrest, this time. Shoplifting. Has to appear in court on the 14th.”

“Now –” He leans forward, resting his chin on his clasped hands. “That lady must make two, three times what I make. Something weird is going on here.”

I nod. I feel a little sick. The missing slat in the Venetian blind seems to have ominous importance. I swallow, I mentally rehearse words, I form the question in my mind. But do I want to know? Decker goes on as though I have asked anyway.

“Woolworths. Fifteen, twenty dollars worth of junk. Yarn. Silk thread. The kind of stuff ladies do embroidery with. Crochet hooks. You willing to take her with you?”

I nod.

When she is brought out, I see the way he gets nervous. Oh Decker, I think. You too. He rushes her a little with awkward courtesies: returning her labelled possessions, handing her his pen for the signature. A policewoman takes her into the next room for photographs. Decker shakes his head, fondly possessive. “Just can't figure her,” he says. “Crazy Paki.”

“Sita,” I say in the restaurant across from the police station. “I'm taking you home with me.”

“Not there,” she says with a shudder. “I couldn't ever go back there. That was the worst place, the worst place of all.”

“But Sita, they were good years. Those years when the children were little –”

She looks me directly in the eyes and I feel glib. “You weren't me,” she says. She fiddles in her bag and pulls out her ivory hook and a ball of silk. She begins to crochet by instinct, without looking at the work in her hands. “I've got friends who have a cottage north of Barrie,” she says. “Tamils. I'll go there for a while. Can you drop me at the Voyageur terminal?”

“No, I'm not going to do that. At least I'll take you home for your car.”

“I can't
stand
the car. It's so … nothing
happens
in the car. Will you take me to Dundas Street, or do I have to get a cab?”

At the bus terminal, I catch hold of her arm. “Sita, I'm afraid to leave you.”

For just the merest second, she permits herself to be held. She butts her forehead against mine. “Don't blame yourself,” she says. “No one could have done anything.” She clears her throat. “Tell Ravi …” Then she shakes me off. “Listen,” she says. “I don't want you hanging around.”

But I do hang around. I stand shivering out on Dundas Street, watching through the grimy glass doors of the waiting room, as she sits there crocheting feverishly. I watch right up until a man with a shaved head and a tattoo on his arm saunters over and puts his foot on the chair next to hers. He leans toward her. His boot is close to her thigh. There is something about his swagger that I don't like, I don't like at all. But she smiles up at him and begins to stuff her crochet work into her drawstring bag.

A week later Decker calls.

A Little Night Music

He was an eleventh-hour passenger. Lucy, watching from her window seat, saw the caterpillar-like entrance tunnel begin to draw away from the plane's side, then pause and quiver as though it sensed danger through its furry pleats. In Seat 8A, she was close enough to observe the activity up front, the cockpit door opening and then closing, the steward glued to his transmitter, the mild flurry to unbolt the exit door again. Outside, the caterpillar sniffed at empty space, quested blindly about for a moment, then nosed back toward the aircraft's side. Next thing, the late passenger was stowing a carry-on and a trench coat into the locker above 8B. The carry-on was a maroon sports tote with a white Esprit logo on its side.

Damn,
Lucy thought, though in spite of herself she felt interest. The late passenger's face was vaguely familiar. An actor? A singer? At any rate, a space invader. It was a night flight, the London-Frankfurt-Singapore leg, and when the door had been sealed earlier she'd realised with relief that she'd be able to push the armrest up, curl her legs onto the second seat, and get some proper sleep. Then Darwin, then Brisbane – the longest way home, but she'd had no choice. And now sitting upright. She beamed her chagrin at the late passenger's profile.

He was very pale, that was the next thing she noticed; pale in spite of dark hair and dark eyes and what presumably should have been olive skin. It was as though he'd been without sun for a long time, been hibernating, living in a basement or something.

“You look familiar,” she said. “Aren't you famous?”

He appeared not to hear. Twice, fumbling with the seat belt, he failed to get the buckle to snap shut. He swore softly, not in a language Lucy recognised. His hand shook.

Well, that was understandable. All day long, Lucy (and no doubt the entire world population of airport and transit-lounge sojourners) had been mentally reciting statistics: Safer than driving on an expressway. Safer than writing novels that offend the faithful. Safer than mixing one valium with a double whisky, which she'd done barely an hour earlier in order to get herself onto the plane.

Nothing worked very well. Not even Mozart coming through her headphones could silence the other voice, the rogue channel.
Coincidence, synchronicity, fate,
the rogue channel thrummed.
Why me? it
asked, running heavy interference with
Eine Kleine Nacht- musik.
If the missed connection meant anything at all, the message was surely deliverance. But what future obligations might such deliverance entail?

She offered the late passenger, by way of fellow feeling: “Would you believe I was supposed to be on last night's flight? We had air traffic control foul-ups in Toronto. Got to London six hours late – fuming, naturally – and missed the fateful connection. Gives you a really weird feeling.”

He grunted, twisting about awkwardly, and his seat buckle snapped shut at last. But he'd managed to get the belt caught under hers and when he straightened up she felt a jerk like a tourniquet around her stomach. “Ugh!” she gasped, winded, and he started violently. “Hey,” – instinctively she put her hand on his – “hey, it's okay. Everyone feels the same. I had to dope myself just to get through the gate.” His hand was icy, and lay like inert matter under hers. “Though logically,” she babbled on, “I should feel invulnerable, shouldn't I? A charmed life, one of the chosen.” She laughed, too brightly. “Hey, you're safe next to me. I'm a lightning rod of miraculous intervention. Airlines alter their schedules and dislocate hundreds of connections on my account.”

He swivelled, jerking her belt again, and looked at her, a stare that went on too long. “I'm sorry,” he said when she lowered her eyes, and she could not tell if he was apologising for the stare or for something else. His accent was unplaceable.

“That's okay.” One little lunatic, two little lunatics, a whole planeful of crazies, she thought. We're all regressing into infant panic and serves us right for half a century of hubris, flapping through clouds as though Icarus had never fallen from the sky. Nevertheless, white knuckle to white knuckle, they survived take-off.

“Drink before dinner, ma'am?” the stewardess asked.

“God, yes.” Lucy breathed deeply, more relaxed now, expansive. “A double shot of whisky, please. On the rocks.” She couldn't stop herself: “Do you know I was supposed to be on last night's flight?”
(Idiot. Like old women discussing their operations.)

“Don't talk about it,” the stewardess said. “I swapped with someone, it was on my schedule … You can't think about stuff like that, you can't afford to. And for you, Sir?”

It was as though he had to translate slowly first. Or as though the words came at him from a very great distance, and he had to wait for the sound to settle. It was as though he were a very old man, hard of hearing, slow of speech, yet he must have been around Lucy's age. Late twenties, she figured. He couldn't be more. Had he been scheduled for last night too?

“A whisky, perhaps?” the stewardess coaxed, and he frowned, trying to decode this, then nodded.

But he didn't drink it, Lucy noticed. He accepted the meal tray, but didn't touch his food. Lucy herself, having successfully defied gravity and fate one more time, was ravenous. The late passenger watched her eat. Lucy laughed a little, embarrassed. “My mother used to say:
starve a fever, feed nerves.”

He went on staring.

“Last night …” she ventured. “You too? Were you … ?” She might have bruised him. He flinched, and then he reached over and put his hand on her forearm. The frayed shirt cuff and the sleeve of his sport jacket pulled back and she saw the livid bracelet scar at his wrist. “My God,” she said. “What happened?” His hand was cold as ice. Probably, she thought, the nerves had been severed. And not so long ago.

Whatever it was, he could not speak of it. Not knowing what else to do, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. It was the kind of comfort that a mother gives a child who is afraid of the dark, but it seemed to flick a switch. He caught hold of her arm and returned the kiss passionately, his tongue almost choking her, his good hand sliding under her blouse, skin to skin, his fingers kneading her breasts, thumb against nipple. (How cold his hands were!) It must have been the valium, or else the whisky, or else the simple need for primal comfort. Whatever it was, she responded. These things happen, sometimes, between total strangers on long flights. Or in times of fear.

The stewardess came to take their trays and they broke apart.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“That's okay.”

It was gone now, that mad moment, and they both felt embarrassed. Lucy hunched up under an airline blanket, a pillow propped into the crook of seatback and wall.

“I'm sorry,” he said again, wretchedly. He seemed to be in agony. He wanted absolution for something other than the kissing, she thought.

“That's okay.” She patted his icy hand. He withdrew it.

Concert above the Clouds
circled through Vivaldi and Beethoven and Liszt, and looped back to Mozart. A little night music, a little light music, a little light, such a tiny amount of light and a long long night; her tongue was tying itself in knots and she slid into sleep.

There was a tunnel which she didn't want to enter, but somebody pushed her. It was black as pitch, black as velvet, and she could feel the pleats of its caterpillar side breathing in and out. The floor heaved. Things
touched
her. She wanted to scream. Somebody hummed a little night music in her ear, and she crawled forward on her hands and knees, trying not to sob, trying to keep her eyes on an infinitely distant wavering dot of light. There was a sudden rush of cold air. Incredibly she was there, at the end of the tunnel. Someone waved a hurricane lantern, spelling semaphore warnings. It was the late passenger. “Don't look down,” he wrote with his little light music, but she did. Sheer cliffs fell away into terror, there were updrafts of icy air. Giddiness seized her, she swayed, she clutched at the late passenger and screamed.

“I'm sorry,” he was murmuring. “I'm sorry.” He picked her blanket up off the floor and tucked it around her. His kiss was like the kiss of mist. She slid down his gentleness into sleep again, back into the very same tunnel, the very same clifftop.

She dreamed that he set the hurricane lantern on a rock and took her violently and rammed his mouth against hers. She dreamed that he spelled
Against the wall
with the hurricane lantern, that he wrote in light:
The shock of history.
She dreamed that they fell over the cliff, entangled, and that his voice fell with them like an echo:
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

“Relax!” the stewardess said. “Relax. Thought I'd never get you awake. You slept right through Frankfurt.” Picking up blanket and pillows, a bringer of order. “We had an hour, but security was so tight they didn't even let transit passengers off the plane. A few disembarkments, that's all.” She was pouring orange juice, removing foil from a steaming omelette. “Funny. You
know
lightning never strikes twice and all that. But I felt safe once we'd got beyond Frankfurt.” She popped the cork from a mini bottle of champagne. “We're serving bubbly with breakfast to celebrate.”

Lucy noticed that 8B was empty. Bathroom? Or one of those who had disembarked?

“Would you like to see
Die Welt?”
the stewardess asked. “It's all over the front page. They know who did it.”

By the light of orange juice and champagne, Lucy turned to
Die Welt
and muddled her way through the German. There was a grainy photograph, unclear, one of those prints that newspapers around the world keep using until certain famous faces seem both familiar and strange in the way that distant relatives in family albums are both known and not known. The plastic explosive, Interpol said, had been smuggled on board in an Esprit sports bag. And the perpetrator, a veteran of terrorist offensives, was a young man with the kind of tragic family history that never failed to breed bloody politics. In a recent bomb blast in Beirut, he had lost a hand. He had boarded the flight in London and his remains were identified in the charred wreckage. Heathrow has the best security in the world, Mrs Thatcher said, but plastic explosives are inordinately difficult to …

Lucy pushed the call button for the stewardess. “The late passenger,” she asked a little frantically. “Did he get off in Frankfurt?”

“The late passenger?”

“You know, the man who was sitting next to me.”

The stewardess raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I don't remember anyone sitting next to you,” she said. “Would you like more champagne?”