Interference (14 page)

9

Before Jude came here, his father said to his mother, “Claire, I have always loved your hair.”

Now Jude is in the arena watching the women play hockey. Wednesday night. Dead of winter.

What he doesn't get, what doesn't make sense to him, is why his father would say that now. It's rubbing it in, pouring salt on the wound, kicking her when she's down. Jude knows his father didn't mean anything by it, he just said it. He told his fuzzy-headed wife that he has always loved her hair. It was something to say at the time.

“It is already growing back, Claire,” he said. “It's prickly.”

“Someday it'll be long again,” she said, rubbing her peach fuzz. “It's growing slower than I thought it would.” Jude watched his mother watch his sister leave the room. Dinner was over. Everyone sat around looking at each other and then his father said that about her hair and then, one at a time, they all left the room.

The team is getting better. And the silly shouts and whistles and “woo hoos” have almost stopped. The occasional one here and there, but mostly they are serious and busy out there on the ice. Jude thinks he might like watching women's hockey better than men's hockey. This white team in particular. There is something about the way they play, the way they hold themselves out there on ice, the way they have attitude but in a nice way. They don't fight on the ice and Jude likes that because there is enough violence in the world. In fact, they avoid a fight. Anytime an opposing player tries to smash someone into the boards, the white team backs away. They even help the other team up if they fall. Stop and put their hands out. Pull the player up from the ice. It seems to cause the opposite effect than you would think it would. The other team becomes more and more aggressive the nicer the white team is.

Jude knows that some of them are probably moms. His mother's age. When they are in their equipment they look like anyone — teenagers or college girls. Some of them even look like boys. Jude likes to imagine his mother, if she were healthy, playing hockey. This is why he keeps coming back. He gets his women's hockey fix every Wednesday. Imagining that when his mom gets better he'll bring her here and show her and encourage her to sign up to play. Lately he's the only one in the seats. Sometimes the women's husbands or kids or boyfriends show up to cheer them on, but now that it's really cold outside he seems to be the only fan. Sometimes there is only one other guy, the one always talking on his BlackBerry. Once there was someone's mother, a much older woman, and she carried one of those foam hands with the index finger up. The hand said, “#
1
Maple Leafs” on it. She waved it occasionally, but mostly she looked at the ground. She might have slept a little, nodded off.

By the hot dog vendor, in the lobby of the arena, there is always a kid playing on his iPad. Every Wednesday he's there. Jude isn't sure if he's there because his mom is one of the players or if he's there because he's attached to the hot dog vendor in some way. He's probably about seven years old but he acts like he's about three. Jude avoids him. If Jude catches his eye the kid won't stop talking to him. The hot dog vendor is a short, balding older man. He doesn't speak English. All he can say is “hot dog” and then he points to the condiments with a quizzical look on his face.

Tonight the white team is missing their best player and so they are floundering. A wave of white against a sea of angry red. Luckily their goalie is good. The defence works hard. One player ends up stuck in the corner and does a little pirouette to get out. The white team cheers. She bows. A red forward knocks her over. As if by accident, by mistake. But the white team boos anyway. The red player bends to help the white up. That's new. Shame from the red team.

Jude watches two women on the white bench talking to each other. They are paying no attention to the game, they have no idea that the other forwards are signalling to them to replace them on the ice. Jude watches their gloved hands move as they chat away, having a great conversation. They are laughing.

“Trish, Jesus, get out here.”

Trish skates out onto the ice. The white player who shouted to Trish heads onto the bench and continues the conversation Trish had been having with the woman standing there shuffling her feet back and forth in her skates. And then the shuffling woman is replaced by another skater and the two new women on the bench wave their arms and talk, as if continuing where the others left off. Jude wonders if they are talking about the same thing, or if they've started their own conversation about something completely different.

In the fall when his mother was first getting radiation, Jude would skip high school and hang out at his old elementary school and watch the kids in the playground. He would watch them run in circles. Or stand around bored. Or throw leaves or skip rope or whatever they did. He wanted to remember being there. Jude wanted to feel what he felt like before he knew about things he doesn't want to know about. What it felt like climbing the jungle gym. Running with a football. Talking to girls. His mother's cancer has made him painfully aware of his body, of its limits and its end.

Then he found this hockey and, besides, it's too cold to stand outside the school anymore. It was minus fifteen today, minus twenty-five with the wind chill. Compared to that, it's warm in the arena. Also, he was missing too many classes and he knows that soon the school would call his house and then his mother would start to ask questions. Jude doesn't want anything else to worry her. He prefers the quiet mourning his mother is doing with him now. They do this in front of the TV. They sit silently, not saying anything. And Jude thinks of it as mourning her long before she is gone. As if they are having their own private funeral. Over and over. He wonders if they'll do this for years.

There has been an accident on the ice and the guy in the stands with the BlackBerry is standing up, holding his BlackBerry out and shouting, “Do you want me to call for anyone?”

One of the players skated head-first into the boards. She has a helmet on, but still she looks woozy. Jude missed the action. He was thinking about his mother. Now he's thinking about concussions. His mind wanders these days. He's turning into his dad, who is always forgetting where he put the car keys, forgetting to pick up the takeout dinner he ordered on the way home from work, or forgetting his own name. (Jude heard him on the phone one day, “My name? It's . . .” and his father went silent. Then he hung up. Quickly.)

The woman is helped off the ice. The man with the BlackBerry leaves, tripping slightly as he walks down the steep stairs, his overcoat flapping behind him. Jude watches him appear below, near the change-room doors, and then he disappears into one of them, still holding out his BlackBerry as if it's a flashlight. “I've got a phone,” he shouts. “I'm coming in.”

The white team stands around on their skates and looks at each other. The referee blows the whistle and soon they are skating again — a little more timidly, wary of the hard boards. The women on the bench are even more animated now. Jude watches their actions, the way they talk through their face guards. He can see the glint of their white teeth. Something exciting has happened. They flap their arms.

The thing is — they didn't tell him. Or his sister, Caroline. They didn't tell anyone — all spring, some of summer. Before the operation and the chemo Jude's mom and dad knew that she had cancer, they knew what was coming, but they didn't say anything for a couple of months.

“We didn't want to worry you until we had all the test results,” his mom said.

Jude's not convinced that was the best way to go about it. Sure he would have been worried for a couple of months while he waited for the results, but by not telling him his mother had no one to talk to about it. No one to mourn with besides his father. Because, now that he knows, he's worried. He's been worried since they told him. So they didn't save him from anything. Jude knew there was something going on in the house, he could feel it in the air, he could see it in the way his mother held herself — she was straighter somehow and she kept her arms crossed in front of her chest as if always protecting herself. He could feel it in the way his father touched his mother whenever he left the room. He could hear it in the sounds of sniffing and nose-blowing coming from the bathroom.

“We were protecting you,” his dad said.

The woman who was hurt comes out of the locker room and heads back out onto the ice. Both teams, red and white, stop playing and watch her skate to the team bench. Then they all clap and cheer. Jude finds himself clapping too. He claps his hands in the pouch of his hoodie, hidden from view. Only he can hear the noise his hands make. The injured woman holds up her stick and then the whistle blows and the teams play.

One day at the elementary school Jude noticed a kid was looking at him. He'd been fading out, staring at the brick wall of the school, hanging his hands over the wire fence, thinking about things, and then he felt something and saw this girl looking straight at him. He looked back. She took off. He went back to school. Checked himself in at the office — “Doctor appointment,” he said — and went back to English class. Learned about
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and thought that Atticus would be a great name for a dog.

The next time he went to the elementary school that same kid was there staring at him. It gave him the creeps. She stood there, glaring. He hid in his hoodie. The girl called the teacher over and Jude took off down the street.

His mother seems better now. The radiation is over and soon her hair will grow fully back. He is seeing it grow every day. Right now she has itchy peach fuzz. She's taking Tamoxifen, she had Herceptin transfusions, but soon everything will end. She's calmer now, almost spiritual. Like she's come to grips with it all, like she can finally think of other things. As if she's faced the devil and knows now she can fight him. Jude's father still touches her whenever he comes and goes but there are times when the whole family almost, almost, almost forgets. Times. Small, tiny, miniscule times. Or at least it seems that way sometimes, that everyone but Jude forgets.

He can still hear her sniffing in the bathroom.

The pirouette woman has done another weird spin. She was once a figure skater or dancer, Jude is sure of it. She is graceful when she needs speed and force. She's not a very good player. Then, suddenly, the injured woman skates out to play defence. There she is. Jude knows it's her because her stick has pink tape wrapped around the blade. She lets out some sort of a war cry as she skates towards her own net, her head down like a bull running towards red. Her legs look wobbly and Jude closes his eyes because he can't watch. The woman obviously has a concussion. Jude remembers a kid on his basketball team in grade seven who had a concussion — wobbly, woozy, wild and violent, then sleepy — he remembers the kid collapsing in the change room after the game. The woman slides to a stop right before her own goalie and then, like a Victorian heroine, she faints. Melts into a puddle at the goalie's skates.

Everyone shouts at once.

There is a pink stained-glass window in the hallway at Jude's house. One of those windows that every house in his neighbourhood seems to have, pink with swirls. Some white circles and some pink swirls. The window at Jude's house has a crack in it. Something small. No one would really notice. But Jude sees it and it seems to him as if the crack has gotten bigger lately, as if it has spread somehow. If he puts his lips to it he can taste the cold air coming in from outside even though there is a storm window blocking the flow. And this is kind of how he feels about his mother's sickness. As if it's a crack slowly getting bigger, as if someday it will break and everything will shatter and the cold air will be let in.

The woman is taken off the ice on a stretcher. Two men who work at the arena and the hot dog vendor are on the ice in their running shoes. So is the guy with the BlackBerry. The weird kid is standing next to Jude. He appeared out of nowhere. He holds up his iPad to show Jude what he's doing and Jude nods. The kid is making pottery — he uses two fingers to stretch the clay into a shape. Then he paints it with his fingers and different coloured blobs that float to where his fingers go.

Jude watches awhile and then starts to walk away.

The boy mumbles sadly to his iPad.

The woman is taken off the ice.

The teams are milling about their benches, the referees talking to them. Helmets come off and Jude sees sweaty wet hair, long hair, lots of hair. Jude's father said, “I have always loved your hair,” to Jude's mother.

Jude leaves the arena, his hands tucked tight in his hoodie pocket, his coat over his hoodie. He's just a short walk from home. He decides to run. He runs hard, avoiding the ever-deepening cracks in the snow-dusted sidewalk, chasing the shadow of himself through the cold night.

Pedophile Ring in Parkville

John Standon

Staff writer

Thursday afternoon Parkville Police and several RCMP officers raided a rooming house on Braithwaite Drive. Although fairly close to the Abernackie Men's Shelter, a shelter previously mentioned in this newspaper for the demonstrations against it by the neighbours on Braithwaite Drive, this rooming house is in a separate building and is not affiliated with the men's shelter in any way. The rooming house consists of paroled men serving out sentences for everything from rape, B&E and burglary to domestic abuse. There are also some homeless men living there off and on. The house consists of 10 bedrooms, two floors. Police say the sweep was carried out after an informant mentioned photography equipment, computers and printed material of a sexual nature. Police are searching for the man in whose room this material was found. He is described as short in stature (approximately 5'4") and balding. He often wears brown suits. He talks with a tic and a bit of a stutter. He was last seen on Tuesday. Anyone with information, please call the police.