Keys of Babylon (11 page)

Yes, that was the longest year of my life. Christ, we were a shower. No bootlaces. Wooden bayonets. We'd barter bullets for cigarettes. There was a boy in our unit who could make rotgut vodka from potato peelings. We swapped this plastic drum of the stuff for a big piece of belly pork. The fat on that pork was the best food I had ever tasted. We put it on a spit made out of an axle and cut open an oil can and watched that golden juice dribble out of the meat. I can hear the hissing now. That crackling was better a million times than this oggy here.

And that's all it was. Hunger. Hunger and boredom. Except when we were afraid. So afraid we would piss ourselves. Hunger, boredom and fear. It wasn't my war but it was my turn. I could have avoided it, could have run off like lots of the others. But that was my quiet time. I was having problems making decisions and so someone made a decision for me.

But I never fired a shot. The only Chechens I saw gave us gifts. We were passing a cottage and an old man comes out and pours us glasses of this homemade beer. There was a sunflower he'd grown as tall as his roof. One of the boys was going to cut it down but we stopped him. See, we weren't so bad. And that's no lie. But try telling that to the black widows.

College hadn't worked out, and I'd wandered away from Drusk. We'd done it all there, we'd rebuilt the camp and the gang had split up. Funny how your time comes and then passes. Richard Manuel was dead before I heard a note he played. It was a kind of in-between period. The end of days. But the days wouldn't end. The empire was taking time to lie down and die.

I roll up the chip papers, stuff them in a bin and walk into the fairground. Little Rhian's on at one of the shies and she tells me I look thirsty and gives me a can of Tango, one of the prizes. Rhian's all right but when you get close you see she's not so young. Like me. She has this feeling of loneliness about her. This aura. I know she thinks I have it too. So I wink at her and give her back the empty and she puts her hands on her hips and laughs and then our meeting is over.

Most people, you see, know me by now. I work on the Blitz, weekend evenings, the busy period. Justin arranged that too. He said there were Poles in charge of the rides now, but really they're Lithuanian. Justin can't tell us apart. Tonight it's Petr and Virgilijs and they greet me gravely. Yes, I could be their father. So we talk and they explain how badly they are treated but how much money they're earning, and then I buy an ice cream half price and lick it carefully down to the cornet and then I strap myself into one of the carriages and we're away. Very slowly at first. Only inching forward.

It's not the falling I seek. The descents make me sick. It's the climb I love, my carriage climbing to the top of the frame, high
above the town. And then that moment at the summit, when the car is perched there trembling. When I know I cannot climb higher and everything is laid out as it should be. When the world is in its place and everywhere there is order. When the rider understands that the car ahead is already hurtling back towards earth and the car behind is still crawling to the apex. That this is the moment before the drop. The moment of stillness. The quiet moment, even though the girls are screaming and Virgilijs has More, More, More by Andrea True Connection louder than the rules say. Then I shut my eyes. Then the blackness roars. At the bottom I'm still holding the cornet and the ice cream has melted into the little crunchy squares of the rim.

By half nine it's getting dark. I walk down to the Point. A few cars are parked and I can see two people far out on the rocks. There's a long sunset tonight, the sky fiery even into the north, wrapping itself around the town.

Passing one of the cars I have to stop. It's a Mazda RX-8 and the registration is GAZ 101.

That boy, I think. The boy with blond streaks in his hair. On the dashboard is a pink scrunchy. It will be that boy over on the rocks, I decide. The boy and his girl friend. Her hair loose.

You bastard shit, he had called out at the world. Just a kid, as Roly said. Showing off. In the red light the car is shining. What polish it has. What expensive wax. But the boy doesn't polish it. His father does. I'd wager a week with Justin on that.

I would say they are a hundred yards away. Holding hands as the sea breaks at their feet. Or maybe his hand in her hair. And even as I look the sunset is fading, the sea turning violet, black.

Out of my jeans pocket I take an antique brass-headed mirror screw I picked up in the oldies' home today. You know, cleaning up. Because I'm always cleaning. Getting it right for Justin.

It needs a little force with my left hand to dig the screw in through the shell of wax and the coats of paint and the coats of primer on the Mazda. But in twenty seconds I have walked around the car and I finish my circuit at the bonnet insignia. Which is a tulip. Shaped like an M. My scratch runs all the way round. No, my
gouge
. Down to the metal. The bare steel.

When I reach the tulip the car alarm comes on. The indicators start flashing and there's a siren noise like the ghost train makes and the couple out on the rocks glance up. In the twilight they start to run this way. But I'm looking at the waves. It's funny really, this town. All the time I've spent here watching the tide. Because I still can't tell when the tide is going out. Or when it's coming in.

He was a big man now. Too big. But still a little man. His thighs chafed, his belly bulged. Once a week he'd ride the number three bus up 8 Street and was conscious he took up more than half a double seat. More than two thirds.

Never mind. What could he do? Anyway, most journeys the bus was empty. People were going the other way. Sometimes he'd see the driver looking at him in the mirror and he'd put the brown paper bag below seat level. In the bag was a hip flask and in the flask a pint of Bushmills. Eye-watering, throat-sandpapering Irish. At 27 Street the bus would start to turn west and he'd pull the bell chord and get off and walk up the road. The driver still looking.

It was an effort. His back hurt. The road led nowhere. It ended in a mound of bulldozed turf and rubble. There were sheets of plastic, Caterpillar tracks in the earth.

It wasn't the prairie. The prairie was somewhere else. But tonight it was the best the
b
ig
l
ittle
m
an could do. He stepped over the flattened wire and sat on the seat. Then took the whiskey out again.

There was a plaque on the seat. It read
In Memory of Walter and Ingrid McGovern
, who Loved this Place.

Strange people, he said to himself. For putting a seat here. A seat made from black recycled plastic. But if the developers didn't move it, the seat would survive until the next ice age. He thought about ice and he thought about the north, the north where the ice age still persisted. The ice age that would never end. The McGoverns had lived in Highland Place, off 8 Street. They would park their Fleetwood back on the road and totter out on to the prairie. Because this had been the real prairie then. Virgin land, never touched by plough or genetically modified canola. And the McGoverns would look up at the stars or at the northern lights, holding on to one other, the fat woman, the sticklike man in his ballcap and Levi's. They wouldn't speak. Just gaze out at the new world. The promised land where they had arrived and were about to die.

Eventually it was claimed, 27 Street would lead to the next mall the city was going to build. Another Safeway's. Another Sears. But everything was on hold. A bank in Toronto had gone bust. Tits up, people around here said. In Toronto, investors had queued along Yonge Street in the snow. Here they had lined up on 4 Street for news. The news was bad. So what? said the voice of exhaustion in the Big Little Man's heart.

The Big Little Man sat and held the whiskey under his nose. The day was ending. Another day ending. He looked north into nothing. Then his eyes grew accustomed to the light. The prairie now was pale with sage, the silver sage that seemed to reflect the starlight. Maybe there were coyotes out there, though he'd never heard one. Maybe the last of the wolverines. He'd read about those. The fiercest of creatures, not welcome now in the world of wire. Maybe a single wolverine still lingered in the grass.

Then he raised his sights. The stars burned so thickly they hurt his eyes. There was Mars, the Bushmills-yellow phantom that roamed the sky. There was Arcturus, a bonfire that never burned out. He knew if he looked long enough he'd see satellites passing in the dark, the red winglights of aeroplanes coming south from the pole. And maybe he'd see a craft. A saucer. An unidentified flying circus. Ha, ha, he thought. I've made a joke.

It was cold now. He couldn't stay long. But he kept looking skywards. Take me, the Big Little Man would whisper. He wanted to wave the flask but even in the darkness he was careful. Behaviour was everything. But again he whispered. Take me. Here I am. I'm waiting for you.

Then he smiled again to himself. Tonight the Big Little Man was not convinced by his own desperation. Making a joke in a foreign language is difficult. But he was good at it now. He had had a lot of practice.

When the Big Little Man first arrived in the city he was still a little man. There were hoardings everywhere. There were signs. We're building a mountain together, the signs said. That was a good omen. The Winter Olympics were coming to the province. But there were no slopes for the skiers. So the city was building its own mountain out of rubbish. All the city's rubbish for three years was to be piled on the prairie, then earth poured over it and grass seed sown. When the grass grew, the city would be ready. All it had to do was wait for winter and the snow.

In this city the snow always fell on the last day of October. The Big Little Man didn't understand that, but it was always predicted and it always occurred. By now, he was used to it. As on the evening of that day, he was accustomed to children knocking at his door. Children dressed as ghouls and ghosts, with black lipstick or ice hockey masks like Michael Myers. There were whole shops now in the city devoted to fancy dress.

For the first few years he had bought candies for these Halloween children. Recently he had stopped. The children had started to frighten him, the children in the corridors outside, whispering at the apartment doors. Meanwhile, the children's parents would huddle on the sidewalk, eating Halloween food. The parents came in case the children were invited inside. In case they disappeared.

Strange, he thought, in his dark room, listening to the children scratching like mice. Why are they so afraid? Afraid of disappearing? There was a story that had been in the news. A teenage girl had vanished. Maybe she was abducted. Witnesses swore they saw a light on the prairie, a beam like a ladder reaching to the ground. Perhaps the girl had climbed the ladder into the indigo sky.

Lucky girl, he thought, his back to the door where the children were whispering. If they stopped and listened instead they might have heard him breathing. He could picture them in their hoods. In their cloaks. On the other side of that door stood a four-foot Grim Reaper and a Star Wars trooper. In the street their moms were eating taffi. He hated taffi. It glued his teeth together. The first snow was falling and it shone in the women's hair under the streetlight, the women in their scarves and ski pants, their furry boots.

After a while the whispering would stop. But he would not switch on the lamp. Soon there would be another knock, another scratching. Freddy Krueger with a green face would be asking for a treat, and Freddy's mom would be standing in the snow in her black lycra. In her zips and buckles.

He pictured the mother's smile. Her teeth would be Arm & Hammer white, her belly, if he might miraculously glimpse her belly, would still be tanned, the colour of prairie earth. And flat as a dinnerplate. How he longed to rest his face there. His lips upon the knife slit of her navel. Someone had told him you might hear the heart through the belly. The belly beating with blood. Yes, such were the mothers now.
Toned
was the word. A word he had never used.

The Big Little Man wondered where the fathers were. In their offices, he imagined. Doing the things office people do. Talking on telephones, scrolling down, always scrolling down, towards the next financial cataclysm.

These mothers and fathers were tough people. They lived in a city without bends in the road. A city without curves. Which meant there was no mystery in this city. That made it a hard place to live. The mall too lacked mystery. It was a small mall and not many people visited. They wandered the forecourt looking bewildered, as if they had misplaced something. Some of them stood in front of the sports shop and studied the numbers on the hockey shirts. What would it be like to wear a number?

The Big Little Man worked at a noodle bar in the mall. He had been there fifteen years. Sometimes he had to cook, but generally he waited on tables in the concourse. There were twenty tables, four chairs immovable around each table. Two banqueting tables had six chairs.

The noodle bar was called the Prairie Wok and it offered Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese food. But all the food was made together in the tiny kitchen. The Big Little Man had no idea what people ate in Thailand and Vietnam. In China, in Ann Hui province, in the city of Huangshan, in his street which was the street of clapping doves, if they could afford it, they had eaten pigs. All of the pig, the trotters, the brains, the long pale bellies with the hairy teats. Yes, all of it. The valves, the vulva, the hooves, the heart, the veins, the bristles, the brisket, the fiery arsehole and all the glooms of the gut. But usually, they didn't. Eat pigs that is. Pigs were precious.