Just Some Stuff I Wrote Read online

  Gerald never forgot my birthday, she said out loud as she took up her knitting—a cashmere scarf to match her new spring coat. A bit late, she had told herself when she began it a week ago. Oh well, it will do when autumn comes. No, Gerald always remembered their anniversary, the boys’ birthdays, hers. It wasn’t too much to ask, surely.

  In the corner of her eye she saw the two urchins burst from the side door of the triplex. They scampered up the street in the gathering dusk, slowed to a walk, crossed and ambled along the sidewalk toward her house. They turned into Mrs. Perkins’s driveway and out of her line of sight.

  That does it, she muttered, dumping her knitting and struggling out of her chair. She threw on her cardigan and pulled open the front door. The boys were sitting close beside one another in the driveway, their backs against her house.

  You there! she said. You come with me. We’ll solve this once and for all.

  The boys reluctantly got to their feet.

  What are you gonna do? the older one asked.

  Come with me, she repeated.

  She marched them across the road and up the driveway to the side door of the triplex. She knocked firmly. No one appeared. Mrs. Perkins rapped again, harder. Behind her, she heard snivelling. The little one, she thought. Presently the door opened.

  She was dressed in a tattered flannel housecoat, her hair a tangle, a cigarette dangling from her lip. Mrs. Perkins was almost bowled over by the stench of whisky.

  What? the woman demanded. Then, seeing the boys behind Mrs. Perkins, What did they do now? What did you do? she shouted.

  Mrs. Perkins drew herself up, aware that the younger boy had tucked in behind her. Such people, she reminded herself, must be dealt with firmly. I’ve told them several times, she began, to stay out of my driveway. Three times they were there today. Now, I demand that you discipline them or I shall have no choice but to bring in the authorities. Do I make myself clear?

  The young woman cursed, reached behind Mrs. Perkins and snatched hold of the younger boy’s T-shirt. The two of you get in here! she shrilled. You’re nothin’ but trouble, both of you. She pushed them ahead of her into the hallway and slammed the door behind her.

  My gracious! Mrs. Perkins exclaimed, clutching her cardigan closed as she made her way across the street and onto her verandah to her door. She went inside, locked the door, and resumed her chair and took up her knitting. But she found it hard to concentrate on her work, and her eyes kept rising to the triplex across the way. The neighbours I’m blessed with! she thought. What’s happened to people? They used to be so civil, so polite. She sighed, looked at the clock. It was nine. Time for the news.

  I’ll wait until nine thirty, Simon, she said out loud. Until the news is over. But no longer.

  In her bedroom, moving slowly as if overcome by a lethargy she couldn’t explain, she pulled on her nightgown over her head. Sadie, she called. Here, Puss-puss-puss. The cat padded into the bedroom and curled up in her basket. Mrs. Perkins turned on her reading lamp at the side of the bed, set the alarm and pulled back the covers.

  The telephone rang.

  Happy birthday, Mother!

  Simon! Hello, dear! I’m so glad you called.

  Of course I called. It’s your birthday. Have I ever missed it? How was your day?

  No, you’ve never missed, she thought. How could I have doubted you?

  Oh, all right, I suppose, she replied.

  You sound a bit tired, Mother. I bet you’ve overdone the gardening again.

  Well, perhaps, just a little. A sudden, unexplained flash of anger. Simon, why did you call so late? I’ve been waiting—

  But it’s only seven o’clock, Mother. I got home a bit late today. End of the quarter, lots of accounts to clear up. You know how it is. Mother? Are you there?

  Seven o’clock, Mrs. Perkins thought. Of course! I forgot about the time zones! It’s only seven o’clock in Vancouver.

  Mrs. Perkins plumped her pillow, humming to herself, going over her plans for tomorrow’s gardening, looking forward to the day’s work. The weather report was promising—mild, with clear skies. She sat down on the bed and kicked off her slippers.

  A racing engine and the screech of tires startled her. Another screech, then the slamming of doors. Someone shouted. Such sounds, late at night, terrified her, alone in the house.

  She stood and pulled on her housecoat. Furtively, she crept to the living-room window and moved the drape aside, just enough to see out. Two police cars were parked askew on the street, one with its front wheels on the sidewalk, roof lights flashing. An approaching siren wailed, further shattering her nerves. An ambulance swept into the triplex driveway. The doors flew open and two paramedics jumped out, pulled a stretcher from the rear and rushed through the triplex door.

  Mrs. Perkins stood rigid, one hand holding her dressing gown closed, the other clenching the drape.

  Presently, the paramedics returned. Mrs. Perkins caught sight of a small shape on the stretcher before they hoisted it into the ambulance. The siren whooped again as the vehicle pulled away, its lights blipping against the houses as it roared up the street.

  Then two policemen came out of the triplex, holding a third person between them. It was the boys’ mother, still in her housecoat. Her head was down, her hands behind her back. The police pushed her into the back seat of the cruiser, slammed the door and drove off.

  Moments later, a female officer came out, clutching the younger boy by the wrist, followed by a male officer. The urchin struggled and broke free and dashed down the street. Holding her breath, Mrs. Perkins watched as the male officer gave chase and caught the boy and dragged him kicking back to the remaining cruiser. She saw his profile in the rear window as the car pulled away.

  Mrs. Perkins unlocked her front door and stepped outside. She crossed the street. A man emerged from the front door of the triplex, stood in the driveway as if lost. It was the mattress man, in wrinkled trousers, sleeveless undershirt, broken-down bedroom slippers.

  I never seen anything like it, he said, his voice quavering, as Mrs. Perkins approached.

  What’s happened? she asked.

  I heard her screamin’ all night. You know, on and off, like, he said, lighting a cigarette. His hand trembled as he lowered the cigarette from his mouth. But I never, he went on, I never thought she’d—He shook his head. She threw him down the stairs, he cried. Her own kid. She beat him up and—

  Oh my Lord! Mrs. Perkins exclaimed. What an awful thing to do. Is he … is he badly hurt?

  The man brought his cigarette to his lips again, exhaled the smoke in a thin stream. You hear about these things, he said, as if he hadn’t heard her, but you never think—

  Well, they won’t be hers much longer, Mrs. Perkins pronounced. She’ll lose the two of them to Children’s Aid. And a good thing—

  What do you mean, the two of them? the man said. The kid’s dead.

  apollo and dionysos

  “Pathetic,” Daniel muttered as he glowered out the Airbus window at a bunch of olive-clad men pushing a wheeled staircase toward the taxiing jet. “The second-biggest city in the country and they don’t even have a proper air terminal.”

  The flight had been a three-and-a-half-hour misery. Inedible food, dry, stale air scraping away at his bronchial tubes, and a plane full of holiday-cheer types revelling at their escape from ice and snow.

  “We’re here!” his mother announced, running a comb though her hair.

  “Finally,” his father smiled. Daniel rolled his eyes. Yes, wonderful, he said to himself. Cuba. For two months.

  His parents, both doctors, were part of some kind of medical exchange program—Daniel didn’t know and couldn’t have cared less about the details—and would give talks and study and tour and “network” and do all the other academic things they were so fond of. Daniel, dragged along for his health as well as the “educational experience,” had not been allowed to stay home. His acceptance into the university’s classical music program had alr
eady been granted—two years earlier than normal. Missing forty days of school posed no threat.

  The plane lurched to a halt, and the tourists heaved themselves from their seats, jamming the aisle, reaching up to the overhead compartments for their cabin baggage, chattering excitedly about snorkelling, sunbathing, dance classes and Spanish lessons by the pool. Daniel waited until the clogged aisle began to clear, then retrieved his backpack and followed his parents to the door.

  A blaze of sunlight, violent in its intensity, greeted him at the top of the stairs. The air was thick with humidity and the odour of vegetation and diesel fuel. Squinting, Daniel walked across the tarmac, baked by the shimmering heat that rose in waves from the ground. Inside the terminal, an air-conditioning duct pumped damp, mouldy air into the room. Daniel could practically feel malignant microbes floating around him. He joined the line for the passport check, his mother’s forced good cheer as irritating as the thought of the forty-five-minute bus ride to the resort in Baconao National Park.

  The streets of Santiago de Cuba, Daniel observed from the coach window, were narrow and dusty. There were no lawns around the small concrete houses, not much in the way of gardens. In the outskirts, scrawny goats and chickens stood behind makeshift fences of wire, board and cactus. At every intersection, it seemed, men and women and children stood chatting, apparently waiting for rides.

  Doesn’t anybody in this place have a job? Daniel asked himself.

  As the city dropped away behind the bus, the road twisted and turned through the foothills of the Sierra Maestras. Yellow earth, palms, banana trees; steep hillsides, rocky gullies, dry riverbeds; concrete shacks with corrugated iron roofs. Shoeless kids, mangy dogs, women leaning in doorways, looking out at the road.

  At last the ocean appeared. Mountains, purpled by haze, seemed to leap into the afternoon sky. With a chirp and a hiss of air brakes, the bus pulled into Club Los Amigos. Three-star rating. Out of a possible five.

  Daniel heaved a sigh.

  Daniel’s room was cramped and sparsely equipped. A small desk, on which his laptop sat open. A TV whose screen was smaller than his computer’s; nothing on anyway. The workers had removed one of the single beds and set up a table. It now held Daniel’s electronic keyboard; a sheet-music file arranged alphabetically by composer; his books, carefully aligned between two bookends; a stack of DVD movies, laid out in a clear plastic box in the order in which he intended to view them, having planned it so that he could watch one every three days until the ordeal of the trip was over; his CDs—data and music; his asthma puffers.

  In his closet he had hung his clothes, grouped by categories: T-shirts, short-sleeved shirts, long-sleeved shirts, trousers. His underwear and handkerchiefs were folded and stowed in drawers. His shoes were neatly arranged on the floor.

  He had his own bathroom, with a dripping tap, a shower stall with a torn plastic curtain, a sink with one glass shelf barely large enough to accommodate his medications and the stack of aromatic non-allergenic soap bars he had brought from home. Each morning someone made his bed, tidied, and shaped his towels into swans.

  Daniel’s parents were gone most of the day and sometimes evenings. They worked in Santiago, taking a taxi to and fro. Daniel practised in the mornings, read or did logic and math puzzles in his room, occasionally ventured onto the white sand beach, the only person there in long pants, long-sleeved shirt and wide-brimmed hat. His mother warned him each morning about the sun. “You’ll burn to a cinder in no time,” she predicted, always including a word on the virtues of sunblock.

  The resort consisted of a dozen two-storey buildings set around a pool and landscaped grounds with grass, palmettos and bougainvillea hedges tumbling with pink and purple blossoms. The shore was minutes away, offering a bit of shade under trees whose names Daniel could only guess at, assuming he was interested. The beach bar seemed always to be busy, the speakers hung under the thatched roof booming salsa music. Daniel hated salsa.

  The food at the buffet was terrible. Meat and more meat. Rice, with meat. Soup, with meat. Fish. Pasta, with meat sauce. A vegetarian, Daniel would have to subsist on bread and salads and omelettes.

  There were only a few people his age at the resort, mostly girls, all giggles and vanity. They strutted around, shoulders back, yearning to be ogled. The guys seemed intent on drinking and smoking as much as they could before they fell over.

  As he passed the beach volleyball net on his second day at Los Amigos, he was stopped by a woman’s voice. “Hey, man! You play?”

  All seven young men and women were tanned and toned, their limbs glowing with oil. Daniel, garbed from head to foot to keep away the sun, muttered, “No, thanks.”

  “Come on, man, we need a fourth,” insisted a sinewy black youth who tossed the ball casually from hand to hand. “Strip down and join us.”

  One of the other men said something in Spanish, and the women laughed. “I’m asthmatic. I don’t play sports,” Daniel said as he trudged through the deep sand. “Besides, I’ve got better things to do.”

  As if the Hades in which he was exiled for sixty days was not enough, Daniel found that each time he entered the gallery that led to his room, a blur streaked from beneath a rattan couch, snarling and snapping. A small, terrier-like dog with a patch of bare skin in the centre of its back would stalk him, its ears flat against its head, lips curled to reveal menacing teeth. Heart pounding, Daniel would walk backwards to his door and escape inside.

  Daniel alternated between his preference for Mozart (“So serene,” he told his father once) and Bach (“So logical”). One morning, he was practising a piano version of Mozart’s Adagio from the Clarinet Concerto in A. He wore earphones, but the drone of the air conditioner intruded like a bad smell. He was interrupted by a knock on the door.

  “It’s me, dear.”

  Daniel rose and unlocked the door. “What are you doing back so soon?” he asked his mother.

  “The hosts at the university have laid on a tour of Santiago for us,” she complained. “One of those social obligations. They insisted that you come along. Your father is waiting for us in Céspedes Park, in front of the cathedral.”

  “I’m not really—”

  “You have to go,” she cut in. “It would be rude not to. Besides,” she added without conviction, “it’s a very historic city.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well, with hundreds of years to work on it, they must have come up with something interesting,” she said.

  Four hours later, having suffered the ancient casa in Céspedes Park, the cathedral (where Daniel and his parents muttered about superstition and ignorance), three museums, an art gallery, two plazas baking under the afternoon sun, the rum distillery, a factory where men and women sat behind tables rolling cigars while a woman on a stool read stories to them over a loudspeaker—after consuming a number of large bottles of agua mineral, Daniel followed his parents and the guide from the university to a graveyard.

  The Santa Ifigenia cemetery was, Daniel’s father promised, their last stop. Daniel trailed behind his parents and their host, Dr. Mendez, past a pond in the shape of a cross. Narrow sidewalks flanked by flower beds ran between marble graves adorned with statuary angels, crosses and saints and surrounded by wrought-iron fences. The sturdy monuments had been built aboveground. The thought of being literally surrounded by decaying corpses made Daniel wince. In spite of himself, he shuddered as a phrase he had once heard slipped into his mind: city of the dead. But he caught himself. Stupid, he thought. Unreasonable.

  “And this way,” Dr. Mendez rambled on, “is the tomb of one of our national heroes, José Martí.” He led Daniel’s parents toward a large octagonal mausoleum.

  Daniel hung back. The others were soon out of sight behind the graves. He took a path toward an area where the tombs were less overpowering—simple structures skirted with clean gravel, a few ornamented with baskets of flowers. He found himself by a low iron fence marking the cemetery’s border. On the other side, dry brow
n grass patched the bare ground between thorny shrubs. Cicadas thrummed rhythmically in the hot, still air.

  Below the cicadas’ song, Daniel heard someone keening tunelessly. He scanned the desolate area beyond the fence. Almost out of sight behind a bush, a figure knelt, her back to him, before a fire of paper trash and twigs. Daniel heard a faint ching-ching along with the chanting. The figure moved, tossing something into the flames. Ching-ching. She wore a soiled white shirt. Bare soles poked out from beneath a dark skirt.

  Her voice was thin and dry. He didn’t understand the words, but knew they were not Spanish. The singer poured something onto the fire and the flames brightened. She repeated a single word five or six times, then fell silent.

  “More superstition,” Daniel muttered. “Stupid nonsense.”

  The chanter’s shoulders stiffened. Her back straightened. She rose slowly and, just as slowly, turned to face Daniel.

  She was old, rail thin, her skin like coal. A red bandana covered her head, and brass hoops hung from earlobes that framed a skeletal face, the skin taut over her cheekbones. Copper bracelets adorned skinny wrists. In her claw-like hands she held a leather pouch.

  Her piercing black eyes smouldered malevolently. Daniel felt an icy finger jab his spine as she bared her teeth. He took a step back as she reached into the bag—ching-ching—and withdrew it, then, with an almost casual flick of her wrist—ching!—flung something at him.

  Too late, Daniel threw up a hand. Something sharp pinched the soft hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. He sucked in his breath. He took a step back, stumbled on the edge of the sidewalk, and fell. He scrambled to his feet. Like a crow, the small dark figure drifted away through the trees, leaving the fire burning. Daniel’s hand rose to his throat, felt something hard there, stuck in his skin. He pulled it away, crying out at the burning pain. It looked like a claw, no larger than the end of his little finger. Shreds of fur clung to the base. Disgusted, he threw it aside. He spit on his hands, rubbed them together, dried them on his trousers. He rubbed his throat with his handkerchief. It came away with only a tiny smear of blood.