Sweet Life (2 page)

“Whose place is this?” Not enough sense to whisper.

“
Sh
!” And that’s all I say. Except for: “Get out.”

She looks at the window over her head. “Can’t see it happening.” At least she’s whispering. “Who lives here?”

I go to the door, crack it and listen. The two old guys who bought the house from Mom go out every Tuesday and Thursday and don’t get back until 10:30. My plan’s to get to the stairs, slip Kayla out the side door. But it’s not dark, yet, and someone might see. Although I can be out of the neighbourhood in ten seconds flat, I figure she’s too winded to do anything but get caught by cops.

And then it hits me. Take her along. Why not? Although I can’t imagine her afraid of anything, I hope there’ll be a couple of furry spiders under the stairs.

“This is where I come when I want to be alone. It’s where I used to live. With my parents.”

“Are you serious?”

“Want to see what happens next?”

And the chick hesitates. A pause big enough to drive an ambulance through.

“Sure.”

Now who’s in charge?

And it’s easy. She follows me in and I shut the door. So black under the stairs, you can’t see your nose, but I know where everything is. With my hand on her back, I give her a little push to a box overflowing with
National Geographic
magazines, tell her to sit on it. Of course the pile’s slippery and she’s close to tipping off, but she’s a sport, hangs on and doesn’t complain. What she can’t see is how I’m sitting comfy on a stool. More proof I’m not such a nice guy.

I expect her to start yapping, ask a bunch of questions while I play it cool and keep my mouth shut. But she isn’t talking. I can’t even hear her breathe. And pretty soon I forget she’s there and wait, like usual, for things to get unreal.

I’m not talking about some out-of-body experience or self-hypnosis or any other kind of weird stuff. It’s like falling asleep and dreaming. Leaving Jude Allan Black Sheep. Ditching any memories I want to leave behind.

I admit sneaking back to my old house and sitting under the stairs isn’t a brilliant move. If I’m caught, how do I explain that I’m only borrowing the room?

Greg gets it. He’s the only one I filled in about my old man. His old man is another winner; gave Greg the scar he hides behind long hair. Welfare sends him a cheque every month to keep him off the streets and finish high school. Greg tries going on and off. Mostly off. It sucks to be eighteen and have to sit in class with a bunch of grade nine losers.

One of the questions the hospital asked is if Greg ever acted strange before. What could I say? The guy has no furniture. Just two mattresses and a ripped beanbag chair someone left behind. A CD player. Signs nailed to the walls: CAUTION, DEAD END, SMOKING and, over the toilet: MEN WORKING. His closet is the bedroom floor. When he’s got money, he eats nothing but iced cinnamon buns. Is any of this strange?

“Does he do any sort of street drugs?”

Knew the answer to that one. He can’t, because even hash makes him too edgy. We stick to beer, though in a pinch we’ll toss back cheap wine. I bet one day Kayla will talk Greg out of booze and into rehab. Have him blubbering about being a bad boy and wanting to turn over a new leaf.

But what I tell the nurse is, “I never heard him talk about angels before.”

Greg did tell me once how the apartment building was crawling with mice and cockroaches. Then he said it again and again. Said it so many times I was getting seriously pissed off and told him enough already. He couldn’t understand why I was mad. You could call that a strange moment.

And now I’m under the basement stairs with his girlfriend. Yeah, just a bit unusual. And it hits me. She’s going to think I’m an even bigger freak than she probably already does.

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t – you know.”

“Tell anyone?”

“Yeah.”

“What I don’t get is...your dad was mean, right?”

Greg, you rat.

“So why do you want to come back? I mean, you must have bad memories of this place.”

“Not under the stairs.” My big mouth. No way I’m falling for Kayla’s
Talk to me and
you’ll feel so much better
bullshit. No one’s fixing me. I stop her with my own question. “Why did you follow me?”

Now she makes me wait. And then I hear a car pull up the side drive. “We have to go.” I don’t know if the old guys are home early or not, but I’m sure as hell not sticking around to find out. I hustle her back to the other room, grab the window ledge, pull myself up to see if the coast’s clear and it is. “Give me your purse.” Get it shoved out and lean over to give Kayla a boost. We’re both thinking the same thing, because when she steps onto my hand, she says,

“Look up my skirt and I’ll scream.”

It’s not easy, but I hoist her up with my eyes shut. I’m used to hauling myself out. As we run for the back gate, I hear voices.

Way too close. We’re up the alley to the street and around a corner before we slow down. Sun’s all but gone. Kayla starts a lecture about how it’s my responsibility to help her find Greg’s health card. All I want is to get home. Use my key, sneak to my basement room and sleep for a hundred years.

“I’m beat.” Kayla stops and looks for somewhere to sit. “I wish I had money for a taxi.”

I pull out my wallet. “I’ve got some.”

“What!” She looks like she wants to clobber me with her purse.

“I’m used to walking.”

“Yeah, with your head up your ass. All we need now’s a phone. ”

And I say, in a very nice voice, “There’s a coffee shop two blocks this way.”

She gives me the cold shoulder the whole two blocks, which suits me. The place is mostly empty, but I tell her I’ll wait outside.

“Give me money for a couple of coffees. And don’t you dare take off.”

Oh, she thinks she’s got me figured. Well, I
was
planning on taking off, but I’ll show her she doesn’t know everything. After I pass her enough money for coffee and the cab, I sit on the step and wait. She doesn’t come outside until the cab shows. Shoves a coffee at me, and when I open the car door for her, doesn’t bother saying thank you. I get in. Don’t say a word for the whole fifteen minutes. Pretend I love drinking lukewarm coffee. I still don’t say anything when she pays the driver, and then shoves
my
change into her purse.

It’s totally dark, now. The usual nighttime crowd’s hanging
out and smoking up. The guys across the hall are having a se
rious party. Rap music bangs along the walls. When I open the door into Greg’s living room, the light’s still on and I half expect to see him on the mattress, staring at the bug squishes on the ceiling.

Kayla tosses her purse onto the mattress. “You look for the health card in the bedroom and I’ll start here.”

I look toward the bedroom and my boots won’t move. Kayla gives me one of her
Asshole
stares and stomps off.

There aren’t many places. I lift the mattress-slash-bed. Look under the CD player and beanbag chair. The racket from the neighbours’ takes off. No one in the building will sleep tonight, but I’m not sticking around, anyway. When Kayla finds Greg’s card, I’ll hand over enough money for her to take a cab to the hospital, and then to her place.

I head for the kitchen. She passes on her way to the bathroom. I flip on the kitchen light and holy shit if a cockroach big as my hand doesn’t tear across the floor. I can’t see where the thing goes, but I don’t care because sitting on the counter is the last Sleeman. Not cold, but not open. I take it back into the living room. Drop to the mattress.

I’ll drink this thing and get the hell out. Let Kayla search the whole place, if she wants. She can’t tell me what to do; she’s not my fucking
mother.

Not that my mom did a great job. Making me live with Alvin Black Sheep for twelve years like there was nothing wrong. Like it was okay he made our lives hell. And when the bastard gets locked up, she expects me to go with her to the pen and visit him? Nope. Not me. If he hadn’t dropped dead, she would’ve taken him back, too. Let the whacked pervert,
the rapist
,
back into our house.

And all this time I’ve wondered. About the difference between changing your name and changing your DNA. Because it’s not the same thing, right? But after I knock back a few beers or spend time in the dark under the stairs, I quit worrying.

And now my best friend could be seriously off his nut. Unlike my old man, Greg wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he did let me down by ratting to Kayla.

And here she is, all happy and waving something at me. “Found the card. In the kitchen.” Then she stops. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

Oh, she can’t leave it alone, can she? I know what she wants, why she’s been chasing me. Maybe it’s the heat. Or the beer. But when I try to get up and out the door, my legs don’t work. Next thing, my head’s on my knees and I’m bawling. When she touches my hair, I let her.

That
Buchanan Woman

When a battery of treatments failed
to halt the cancer creeping like fleshy ivy over Bert Buchanan’s organs, he refused to die at home. His pain increased and so did his aggrieved exasperation whenever he spoke to his wife, Angie.
Why me?
his tone implied.
Why not you?

He’d accomplished much in his forty-five years; she’d accomplished nothing. Not only hadn’t she provided him with a Bert Jr. to weep at his graveside, she hadn’t managed to mature into loveliness the way her mother once assured Bert she would.

Whenever he slipped into drug-imposed sleep, Angie took the bag hidden beneath her chair and continued knitting the bed jacket she would donate to the hospital gift shop. She was accustomed to solitary knitting. Like Madame DeFarge hunched over her yarn in

Dickens’
A Tale of Two Cities
, and knitted the roll of the doomed, purled their names and sins. Angie, however, decided against bitterness. When the time came, she would bury her resentments.

Socially Bert had behaved aristocratically, generously giving his time and money to local charities, doing whatever would raise his profile in the neighbourhood. He foresaw the way the market would go and bought up property before land values on Vancouver Island skyrocketed, and then quit his job at the bank to sell real estate from home. This was a two-story house fifty meters from the shoreline where steps led down the cliff side to a rocky shore. There, where waves cast up occasional dead debris and greasy weeds, he presented Angie with an engagement ring. An hour later, he coaxed her into allowing him the attention required for the continuation of the Buchanan clan.

And now while he suffered, Angie wished she had the courage to lean over his shrinking form and tell him she loved him. What better last gift? Easier to knit
I love you
across one shoulder of the bed jacket: purl one row, knit the next. She didn’t do that, either.

She hadn’t fallen for Bert; she’d fallen for the idea of marriage and sank into it with the same languid indifference she entered her bath. During Bert’s courting, her mother asked if Angie had a better alternative than marrying a fine man who would provide well. Angie couldn’t think of anything at the time. She worked at a bowling alley and read voraciously, especially the English classics, but her mother assured her she couldn’t support herself by handing out shoes and reading fiction.

The only books Bert read were the kind that told you how to pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps and get-rich-quick. Quickly was how he accomplished any task. It was his dying that took forever.

Death at last dragged him away in early October while Angie dozed in a chair. A nurse shook her awake. When she opened her eyes, she knew and grabbed the nurse’s wrist. The nurse said
I’m sorry
, taking the words right out of Angie’s mouth.

The manager of the bank, who once employed Bert and now managed his investments, called and declared how the entire staff stood behind her in her loss. He would personally attend the funeral, provided it didn’t take place on Saturday.

Angie’s sister, Bernice, and her husband, Michael, went along to help with the funeral arrangements. Bernice took charge, filling the vacuum of Angie’s silence while Michael tapped his knee with his wide fingers and stared out the window.

Bert’s private nickname for him had been “Mick Mouse.” Not because of his long

nose and furry moustache or because of his placid nature, but because he didn’t have enough gumption to risk taking out a loan and starting his own carpentry business. Bert’s late father had had not only enough gumption to manage his own cab company, but enough to later shoot himself after it went into receivership.

Johnny, the only one left in Bert’s family, owned a bakeshop in Scotland. He flew in from Glasgow the day before the funeral, spending the night with Michael and Bernice. This was his second trip to Vancouver Island, the first being for his brother’s wedding when Angie was a shy and reserved nineteen-year-old. Knowing little of her at the time and too much about Bert, Johnny decided their marriage wouldn’t last beyond three years. It embarrassed him to hear Bert flaunt the thirteen-year difference between his and Angie’s ages, see him preen like a Boy Scout who’d earned a merit badge.