Thalo Blue (62 page)

Dickie obviously got out of the predicament, lived on to torment his one and only little sister and to teach her and her brother how to drive a stick years later. Ron Kawalski, the birthday boy’s dad, hollered for everyone to “GET OWT THE WAY!”, dove in and yanked little Dickie’s foot free of the vent, letting him rise gently to the surface like a boiled egg. He was sent home with his party favours and a hunk of cake stabbed with a small striped candle. Sure, he had a bruised and swollen ankle, a sore throat from some swallowed water, and red eyes from the pee and chlorine cocktail but the adult men all gave a healthy chuckle and a “you’ll be fine, won’t ya son?” then a hearty open-palmed hair tousle before Big Ron dropped him off at the Garretty’s front door with his feet still squishing in wet sandals as he walked.

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There had been the relatively benign stuff: like helping mom pick winning numbers on the Western 49 when she won ten thousand dollars and change—which had come in very handy later on, she once told Hannah years past, after a few drinks. Hannah knew she would get a 99 percent on that Causation and Tort Law in Canada paper in her tenth grade Law class with Mr. Dunleavy—a week before he even looked at the thing. There had been rumors about Mr. Dunleavy before this. And she understood why after he handed the paper back without a mark on it except for the small “99” in pencil on the upper corner of the cover page. “Mr. Dunleavy? Where did I lose this one mark?” “You didn’t lose any marks. But I only give out perfect scores under very special circumstances.” Then his creepy wink.

There was that one time she thought her big brother Dan was going to have a burn in his lap, either by fire or some hot coffee. Turns out that he just got a minor case of VD from Dora Robertson. They had ‘hooked up,’ as Dave called it, after a bonfire down the beach from her parents’ place in the Saanich Peninsula, north of the Garretty house in Oak Bay.

But there were life-and-death Grasps too, ones that ended badly. That bad car accident on Kingsway in South Van when Hannah was seventeen was one. In her Grasp, she saw a thin wisp of smoke through a cracked windshield and a woman’s hand, wedding ring and all, gripping the tan colored dashboard of a car, fingers so strained and white they looked like icicles ready to snap off and shatter. Inside the vision, everything jerked like the woman’s head had come forward very suddenly and cracked across either the window or that dashboard. This Grasp came on a Friday evening while Hannah was looking up-close at her own eyeball in the mirror, a wide bauble of hair-fine veins, tracing her lower eyelid with eye liner, getting ready for her date and a night at the clubs.

Day after next, a Monday morning nearing two A.M., that car accident did happen—with her boyfriend D. in one car and those two nice folks in the other. It was bad enough to send all three of them to the hospital, the woman most serious of all.

D. had such an ego. He was such a show-off.

Drop that relationship onto the heap of successes, Beta would say if she knew all the squalid facts.

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Now. This moment. Hannah is twenty-eight again. Not seventeen, definitely not thirteen.

The movie’s over, it’s dark, and she’s rolling up to the big fuschia house in Oak Bay looking like a lottery winner who’s just lost the golden ticket. She’s exhausted, deflated. Ruined. The house is just a half block from the main strip of medical offices, travel agencies, the odd book shop, and a multitude of little antique and curio huts where old ladies whittle away at their savings accounts and fill up their drawing rooms. The fender is loose on the front of her VW and one end is dragging on the pavement, kicking sparks as she turns into the driveway at the front of the house, under the foliage: the giant oaks, a couple of cherry trees and the honeysuckles that are overgrown and taking charge of the yard.

Today was a grotesque one. First the stinging Grasp. Then the car accident. Then, the gutless dodge from the All Ways Bean Coffee Bar & Chocolatier in Colwood. A few hours ago she stood up Jean-Marc, the sailor from Quebec who undoubtedly waited for her, might still be waiting for her, might sit there till the place closes, for all she knows. He had told her he would be heading out on one of the boats to a stint in Afghanistan in just over a week, his first active tour, told her that he would love to spend his days with her until then, told her that he could think of nothing better before heading off into the unknown waters of the Middle East.

Whatever, she thinks as she yawns, gets out of the car, and walks past the limp bumper without even a glance. She’s spent. Her run-in with Mr. Mean Man after her long day stays with her. Oh yes, and the Grasp she had, that’s still ticking around in her head, too. Thinking about the romantic comedy she’s just finished, she wonders, Why can’t I find my Mr. Right, have my beautiful children, move into that big stone house up by Craigdorroch Castle and live the life I’ve always dreamed of?

Hannah doesn’t even bother fishing for her house key—which Beta had dabbed with fuschia nail polish. As usual, the doors aren’t locked. As Hannah goes inside, heads up the stairs to her attic retreat, switches on the light of her bedroom and flops on the duvet, she reflects on what she really wants. A man. A good job with stability and challenge. She’s turned into the modern woman’s sticky cliché, she thinks, as her eyelids feel the tug of gravity. She wants it all but has none of it, and no prospect of getting any of it. Another yawn. Forget cliché. She’s the modern woman’s waning paradox. Never happy, always wanting. Still another yawn.

Then she’s out cold.

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Beta’s not home. None of the girls are. No stereo, not even the T.V. making noise. No one was gathered round the table for a chat or sitting cross-legged on the living room rug with a pile of stuff, a stack of rolling papers and a flat Diet Coke. The house was a vacuum of quiet and this was unusual.

Beta’s probably taken Simma and Feyet and little Tan downtown to a club, or one of those health food places on Douglas, where they have their drumming sessions with girls named Engenu and Libra Doon, and then eat greens and nuts and seeds and sip chai tea with mint leaves until the sky starts turning pink in the east. The day that Hannah moved in Beta gave strict guidelines about what could be kept in the fridge next to her tofu and soy products. No meat, you can get your own fridge upstairs if you want to keep dead animals in the house. No real dairy, cows don’t have tits so you take what Mother Nature intended for baby cows.

“Attic is all yours,” Beta had said. “Last space in the house that isn’t already rented.” For Hannah, this was good news: her own floor and her own bathroom. She likes her privacy, likes her long, languid baths with plenty of bubbles, candles, and a dream of who to share them with. Plus, she temporarily converts it to a dark room when she’s developing her own pictures. She remembers running her hands over the rippled wall paper as Beta tipped a water bottle back and said, “Forced air heat. Bad for the complexion. Have lots of moisturizer on hand and drink plenty of water.”

The house is a big fuchsia three-storey in Oak Bay just a half block south from the main drag, Oak Bay Avenue. Lovingly catalogued among the myriad of homes Hannah has lived in, this one–-at least in Hannah’s mind—goes by the name of the Fuschia House, a big lumbering, turn-of-the-century beast painted like candy and tucked away from the bustle of the strip. It’s a bright, ungodly colour, pink, with bright yellow trim. And Beta—the boss-lady of the manor—saw to it that her color treatment would be the historically-accurate Victorian Style, instead of the neighbors’ dull tans and dismal greens and browns. Walking down a proper street in ol’ England a hundred and fifty years ago would have been like heading down the aisle at a candy store. Pinks, yellows, bright reds, peppermint greens, a lot of purple and shades of mauve. And if ever someone is foolish enough to ask her, “Why pink and yellow?” she will provide not only a history lesson but an impromptu quiz on domestic and Victorian architecture.

Hannah suspects that it’s actually Beta’s daddy that owns this million-dollar behemoth. Beta has had three minimum wage-style jobs in the ten months or so since Hannah has lived with her. The pink paint is chipping now, the bushes are never pruned neat, the pipes rattle, the water runs occasionally brown before it clears, and the furnace leaks a peep of natural gas.

Beta belongs to a number of political groups and lifestyle groups. She calls herself an activist so, naturally she’s on numerous mailing lists and the mailbox is always stuffed. She attends a lot of meetings, a lot of rallies. Two or three times a week, Hannah will come home to find a pack of strangers gathered for a meal or sitting in a circle in the backyard smoking weed and making speeches. And it wouldn’t be odd to see Beta in a requisite group of twenty-something equals sitting cross-legged in front of the Legislative buildings downtown, singing, playing guitar, or chanting at the windows of the sprawling office buildings. It wouldn’t be out of the question to see her roaming Douglas Street with a petition and a pen, stopping tourists and asking them to sign.

Always loud, always argumentative, you can hear Beta on any floor of the house, in any room. Beta talks about revolution, talks about it like it’s coming. She’s against the stripping of our natural resources for mindless capital gain; against softwood lumber tariffs; against selling energy south of the border; against deporting international refugees; against the systematic downsizing of domestic corporations and outsourcing of jobs; against armed forces moving to occupy a foreign people. She bellyaches about a balanced, vegetarian diet. She complains about petroleum consumption levels in North America and what it’s doing to middle-eastern economies. She won’t ever shave, there are black bushes growing out of her pits, and one prominent fuzz patch visible against her endless wardrobe of see-through housedresses and ethnic tunics. She’s part Korean, she says, but not all. There’s at least one dark figure in her ancestry, as her skin browns to a deep chocolate as soon as spring time comes and the lines of cherry trees on the lanes sprout their femininely pink wiles. Her hair is in dirty coiling dreadlocks like she’s living on the beach in Bali and they’re usually bunched up on the top of her head by an after-bath band of terrycloth. Her face, always without makeup, sometimes slathered in some kind of moisturizer, is always grinning. Even when she’s dishing dirt, or slapping you with a criticism. (What are you eating? God, what died in here? Aren’t you aware of the apartheid minions who are profiting from that?)

The converse to Beta is Tannis, the youngest of the girls, only twenty-one while the rest are creeping up on thirty. When Hannah met young Tan, she was slurping up a forkful of sauce-less spaghetti from a clear glass bowl. The girl dropped her fork into the bowl with a clang, let out a twitter, and said, “Hannah! That’s so cool. Your name is a perfect palindrome!”

“What?”

“H-A-N-N-A-H. A palindrome. Exact same forwards and backwards.” And when Hannah started moving her stuff in, Tan was so impressed by her new housemate’s photography she let out a big squeal of delight. “I think these are so AWE-SOME!” Now Hannah has prints all over her walls in the attic, and, after the glowing review, even let Tan hang some of her favorites in her room. Tan is the girl who really listens. She’s always ready to give you a big hug, to make herself look bad so you can look good, to go without dinner if you’re hungry after work. Hannah would confess: she really loves her, this girlish-girl, one who has no idea how much time she really spends in the bathroom while you’re waiting. Tan likes every song on the radio, she shops the mall for ‘cute tops’ and to look at boys. She still decorates her walls with posters. She still thinks romance is a bottle of champagne and roses. She would be the type to have a long term high school friend see her blossom one summer at the lake, give her his jacket and a promise ring and spend the next year writing her love letters from university out east. She would never dream of letting a boy stay over if someone else was home. She’s a girl who has to really be in love to make love.

Hannah would never confess—not to anyone, ever—of a nighttime dream she once had in which the starring role had been played by dear youthful Tannis, all doe-eyed and voluptuous. This was not one of Hannah’s foreboding snatches of sight, definitely not one of her Grasps. And it was not a sex dream, either, nothing like that.

It had been a fleeting image on a boisterous night of alcohol and second-hand pot smoke when Beta had thrown one of her drumming parties before disappearing into her bedroom with Benny where the banging of her headboard will carry up the forced air heat ducts with the pot smoke until four. The part with Tannis, it was now so long past that she can only remember the gist of it. And the gist is this: She and Tannis were a little older yet basically the same. Each still beautiful, each still able to pick out fashions like they can now. They had a daughter, toddler age. It was Hannah’s but—and this was very clear for no apparent reason—Tannis was also the baby’s mother. They were parents together. Alone together. And happy. Blissfully happy.

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A fitful sleep; dreams. Voices. Through two rows of seething dirty yellow teeth, one of them black and diseased: “Drive Careful.”

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Awake. Busting awake, like breaking glass. Out of it and not sure where she is for a second or two. Strange because she’s lived here for nearly eleven months. And it does feel like home—for the first time since the Garretty house before, near here in Ross Bay, the house with that shoddy intercom system for upstairs to downstairs.

It’s dark when she wakes. There are scattered scraps of light on walls and across furniture. Her heart is beating fast. She’s dreamed. But of what? In the corner, close to the bathroom door, partially ajar, near the hamper with its lid open and her peach-colored tank-top hanging out, it’s a man. Standing still, features in shadow, watching her sleep. Knowing she’s awake now. It’s Mr. Mean Man.