Twenty-Six (13 page)

Meta opened her mouth to scream, but her throat had dried up and all that came out was a dull croak. Willy heard the croak and called to her. “Meta!” he said. The floodlights had switched on his day vision and now he was blind in the dark. She heard him stumbling into things.

“Meta!” For some reason he was whispering, as though his whereabouts were still unknown to someone. “Meta! For Christ’s sake, turn on a light!”

“Willy Donat, you arsehole,” she said. “Get the hell out of my house.” She wrapped the bedsheet around her, tucking it in at the front.

“If you turn on a light, I’ll be able to find the goddamned door.”

Meta knelt on the bed and began fumbling around on the shelf above the headboard.

“I will, like hell,” she said. She found the handle of her tennis racquet and swung it at Willy’s silhouette.

The nylon mesh boinged off the crown of his head. “What the hell was that?” Willy said. She could see him more clearly now. He was stooped over at the foot of the bed, both hands on the edge of the mattress for balance while he waited for his eyes to adjust. She turned the racquet sideways in her palm so that the wooden frame would be what made contact this time, and let go with a forehand where she thought the top of his neck would be.

A deep sound came out of him and there was a thump as he landed on the floor. Footsteps pounded up the stairs and the bedroom door burst open. Two Albion Mines police officers burst in, guns drawn. In the light from the lamp in the hallway, Meta saw Willy Donat sitting on the floor at the foot of her bed. He held both hands to his head. Blood trickled from his left ear.

“Put your hands up,” one of the police officers said.

“For Christ’s sake,” Willy said. “I’m unarmed. This crazy bitch just whacked me.”

The second officer looked at the racquet in Meta’s hand, then back to the bleeding man on the floor. “Fifteen-love,” he said, and both officers began to laugh.

It seemed odd to Meta when she heard young women in her university residence complaining about noise, or about how the
building lacked security, even when the main entrance was locked at midnight. People could turn up the stereos and drink beer until 2:00 a.m. three nights a week and blast the
TV
in the lounge. For Meta, not having people inflicting hospitalizing injuries on each other on the other side of the wall, not having a pursued criminal fumbling through her bedroom in the dark, these were signs that her life had reached a sort of tranquility she’d never known, but always suspected was possible.

Her roommate was a Celtic Studies major from Ottawa, a thin-faced girl with pale skin and legs that seemed to reach up to her armpits. She’d grown up in the Glebe, an old Ottawa neighbourhood. Her parents had moved there from Cape Breton to work for the government.

Julia had dark, soft hair that she brushed one hundred strokes every night before she went to bed. She’d spent years doing competitive Highland dancing and kept her kilts and blouses and dancing shoes hanging at one end of the closet as though she might need them in an emergency. When they’d be drinking on the weekends, she’d sometimes rush back to their room from whatever part of the building they were in, put on her kilt and her dancing shoes, and go dancing about the building, throwing her long arms over her head in graceful arcs, leaping and kicking higher than seemed possible.

Julia said she was a virgin, and she was fascinated by Meta’s relationship with Ziv. Meta told her everything. What did she care? The most surprising thing about sex, she said, was how messy it was. Sperm got all over everything, and a vagina secreted a shocking amount of liquid. These were things you didn’t get an inkling of from books or movies. If you wanted to have sex, Meta
told her roommate, you had to have access to soap, running water, and some good absorbent towels.

One night after a lot of drinks at the campus bar, Meta had had to help Julia walk back to their residence room. The two had stumbled across the campus with their arms around each other, singing and yelling and hooting.

When they got inside the room, Meta had dropped Julia onto her bed, where she landed with a thump. Meta tripped over the leg of the bed in the dark, and found herself lying on top of Julia. Before Meta had a chance to move, Julia’s hand came up and pulled Meta’s face down to hers. She kissed Meta solidly on the lips, a deep, passionate kiss. Meta was surprised at the kiss, but even more surprised that her own mouth opened in response. She lowered herself to Julia’s mouth and they kissed slowly and deeply for a few moments. When they paused for a breath, Meta said, “I’ve got to get to sleep.” She fell onto her own bed and passed out instantly. Afterward, neither of them spoke about what had happened.

T
he baby was asleep. Thank God for that. Arvel sat on the couch in front of the
TV
and finished the third cup of his second pot of tea for the day. By the time he’d drunk this much tea, he was not enjoying it any more. He only tasted the bitterness now, no matter how much milk he diluted it with. But tea was all he dared drink, and he gulped it compulsively, as though he were trying to get drunk quickly from it. Last week Jackie had come home early from her shift at the store to find him drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon. She’d threatened him then. The threat had not been of anything specific, but Jackie had a way of making herself clear. In high school she’d got high marks in English.

“Don’t threaten me,” Arvel had said.

“I’m not threatening you.”

“What the hell are you doing, then?”

“I was stating a fact: I will not be married to a drunk.”

“What do you mean, ‘You won’t be married …’ You’re married to me, and whatever the hell I am, that’s what you’re married to.”

“A drunk is not the only thing I won’t be married to. But don’t worry. I’ll always let you know what you’re turning into.”

He emptied the teapot into the cup and went to the window. The apartment was on the second floor, and because the building was positioned at the top of a hill, he could see out over the weed-ridden field, and could take in almost the whole Red Row at a glance. The sky was overcast, tingeing everything with a chill greyness. Grey branches of leafless elms and poplars and maples stuck up from between houses in a tangled mesh that hung in the lifeless air like a haze. Smoke rose in columns from the chimneys of the houses that used wood heat. For a moment, he could not bear to turn around and look at the shabby, half-furnished apartment he was living in. When he was younger, he never dreamed he’d look at a Red Row house and envy the people who lived in it. He’d always assumed he was headed right out of there and into something better.

The building they lived in was a converted school. When he had been growing up, it had been empty for several years, since the first phase of the new elementary school had been built. People his age had called the building the Catholic School, and the wide pathway, actually an old street that had never been paved and had been closed off to traffic, they called the Catholic School Path. Both school and path hearkened back to the days of parochial education in Nova Scotia. His parents, for some reason, had gone to the Catholic schools in Lourdes, at the other end of the Red Row, and people of their generation called this building St. Bridget’s.

There was a sense in which living in St. Bridget’s was an improvement over living in a Red Row house. Since the building had been completely renovated less than ten years ago, the walls were of convenient drywall, instead of the brittle, old crack-prone plaster of the Red Row houses. Walls and floors and corners were all square and true, making wallpaper easy and hanging pictures a snap.

Hasty workmanship to begin with and years of settling onto stone foundations had left the floors of the old houses wowed and bent, the walls all out of plumb. To make a picture look straight on a wall, you had to hang it exactly as crooked as the nearest adjacent corner, a tricky procedure that might take the better part of an afternoon to get right.

The house Arvel had grown up in was small and stuffed with a clutter of accumulated furniture and objects. There were moments when he looked upon the scarcity in his new apartment as something desirable. But mostly he saw it as another sign of squalor in his squalid life.

The previous spring, more than a year and a half ago, Arvel had graduated from Pictou Regional Vocational School with a certificate in electrical construction. He’d done well in the course, both in the theoretical and practical assignments. His teachers had praised his flair for understanding and designing circuitry, and had written him glowing reference letters. But 1981 had been a bad year. And 1982 had turned out to be worse. Everyone was saying it. You could see it in the headlines, you could hear people talking about it every night on the news. Unemployment was at its highest level since the thirties. Just last night Arvel had watched an hour-long
TV
special comparing the
eighties to the thirties. The conclusion the show reached was that people in the eighties were materially better-off. Clothing was cheaper than it had been in the thirties, food was more readily available, the social safety net kept people from crashing as hard as they once had. But morally and psychologically, the thirties had been an easier time to get by. Families had not yet disintegrated, human relationships had been closer in a society that was still largely based on agriculture. Part of the show featured a panel discussion on youth unemployment in which a group of young unemployed people discussed the difficulties they were facing. When it came time to field questions from the audience, one of the first to speak was a short, white-haired man with little deep-set eyes and a white moustache. His face turned red as he spoke. His voice trembled with emotion.

“If you ask me, you’re all just a bunch of crybabies,” he said. “Why I remember the hungry thirties. My mother had to make do once with a loaf of bread and a few home-grown radishes. For a whole week, that’s what she fed five hungry kids. You people know nothing of real hardship! Just look at your shoes!” The camera panned down and across the well-shod feet of the panellists. “When we were kids, we had to go to the junkyard and cut the treads off of old rubber tires to make our own shoes!”

Arvel’s fingers clutched the arms of the chair he was sitting in. His breath choked with pent-up rage at what the man was saying. He got so upset that he had to turn his back on the television for a few moments, go into the kitchen, and drink a glass of cold water.

A person certified in electrical construction was directly qualified for a range of jobs, including wiring new building sites, upgrading
existing systems, and troubleshooting in small and large appliances and electrical equipment. Arvel had tried everything since his graduation. He’d filled out applications for work from Canso to Halifax. He’d gone through the North Eastern and Halifax phone books, both Yellow and White Pages, and called the number of any company with a name that sounded like it might have something to do with wiring or running electrical equipment. In his English course at the vocational school, he’d had to write his resumé and cover letters and practise job-interviewing skills, but in the year and a half since he’d graduated, he had not been called in for an interview, or even heard back with any acknowledgment that his applications had been received.

Arvel turned away from the window and faced into the apartment. There was a whole list of things he should be doing today, none of which he’d even started yet. There was a stack of dirty dishes piled on the counter by the sink. A corner of the bedroom was heaped with dirty laundry. The carpets needed hoovering, and he wanted to look through the classifieds in the
Chronicle-Herald
.

The baby had been silent for a long time, so he went into the bedroom to check on her.

The apartment faced north, and with the curtains drawn on the tiny window in the bedroom, it was like night in there. Arvel drew back one side of the curtain. The white rails of the crib glowed in the room like a religious relic. It was the only new piece of furniture in the apartment, the only piece of furniture he would not have tossed directly into the garbage without giving it a second thought. Inside the crib, curled up on her side in a tangle of receiving blankets, lay Kate, his three-month-old daughter. She’d been born with a full head of dark hair, but it had gradually thinned out so that now she was all but bald. And what little hair
she had was a reddish-blond fuzz above her ears and at the top of her neck.

He looked at her now and hoped she would not awaken. He hated the innocence of her wide-open eyes upon him.

The toxic buzz of the building intercom shot through the apartment. The baby stirred at the sound of it. Arvel tightened up and cringed. He knew who it would be. He considered the possibility of not answering it, but Alec Morrison would not take no answer for an answer. He knew Arvel would be in here – where else would he be? – and repeated ringing of the buzzer would wake the baby for sure.

Arvel closed the bedroom door and rushed to the intercom before Morrison rang it again.