Lemon (18 page)

‘We're all dying.'

‘Not right away.'

‘You're
not dying right away, are you? Do you want to play checkers?'

I leave them to do the rounds. Most of the kids are unconscious or watching
TV
. A few parents skulk about. The younger children can never understand why their parents don't take them home. It wrecks the parents every time the kid asks. They stop asking after a while.

I untangle the lines of a sleeping teen who reminds me of Faith who died of septic shock after a nipple piercing. Drew called a school assembly in her honour and everybody pretended they gave a buzzard's ass when the fact is Faith was low on the pecking order, Kirsten's errand girl. In elementary school Faith was the only person who didn't say it was retarded when I galloped around on my imaginary horse. I even told her my horse's name, Feodora, and colour, palamino. Faith imagined her own silver horse and called it Star. She galloped around with Feodora and me for about five minutes before she decided it was boring. She hitched Star to a parking sign and went chasing after the popular girls. Even then they were sending her on errands, telling her to give notes to so-and-so, or tell so-and-so ‘she's not my best friend anymore.' Faith sometimes made it to best friend for a day but it never lasted. Anyway, you have to wonder about the nipple piercing, if she did it because Kirsten told her to. Or because she thought it might turn on some yokel. Anyway, she's dead and forgotten. Except to her parents who must wonder how their beloved daughter could die from a nipple piercing. Unless, of course, she was driving them nuts. Dead, she can shrink back into the baby pictures, be forever adorable and free of piercings.

No action coming from Bradley's room. I push open the door a crack even though I know it will piss off the missus. She's unconscious on the armchair while old Bradley's working on his
IV
again. I gently take his hand and wrap it around a teething ring.

Vaughn and the two kids are kneeling on the floor. At first I think they're praying but then Wackoboy shouts, ‘Bug!'

‘What kind of bug?' I ask.

‘Tiny,' Molly says.

I kneel beside them and see nothing except specks in the linoleum until Molly points out the bug. It's less than crumbsized, grey with white spots. It's slowly, deliberately working its way around some building blocks. ‘How does it think it's going to get out of here?' I ask.

‘Bugs don't think,' Wackoboy declares.

‘Wrong again, son,' I say. ‘Ants have bigger brains in proportion to body size than humans. I bet this bug has a humongous brain.'

We watch it heading in one direction then being obstructed by a block and changing tactics.

‘It keeps going,' Vaughn says. ‘It'll keep going until it can't go anymore.'

‘Then what?' Molly asks.

‘It'll die.'

‘I don't want it to
die!'
she blurts with more emotion than I've ever heard from her.

‘We'll take it outside,' Vaughn says. ‘Set it free.'

‘The windows don't open,' I point out.

He finds a piece of scrap paper and waits patiently for the bug to crawl on it. He cups his hand around the paper and the bug and heads for the elevator. The kids scramble after him, dragging their poles, keeping their eyes on the bug. If Vaughn hadn't been here, they probably would have stomped on it.

‘I shall return,' he says, winking at me as the elevator doors close.

‘Talk to me,' he says. We're sitting in Tim Hortons, hoping for a fire. Beside us are two forty-something men who think they're sex gods. They check out every woman in the joint. ‘So this bank teller,' the paunchier one says, ‘asked me to go for a coffee.'

‘You're kidding,' the other Adonis responds. ‘She asked you for a coffee? Really? That's awesome.'

‘Why?'

‘That's the first step, I mean
coffee
, that's like the first move. After that, I mean, not that day but next time it's like,
showtime.'
Both sex gods are wearing leather bomber jackets to hide their Molson tumours.

Vaughn's still staring at me. He can stare all he wants. I snuck into icu. She didn't even look like Kadylak. Illness wipes out personality. You're just more diseased flesh. One of the Holocaust memoirs I read said that when you're dying of starvation, nothing matters except the next piece of bread. You don't even see the corpses around you, you step on them, chasing that next piece of bread. Cancer's like that. After a certain point nobody sees you anymore.

‘How's your friend?' Vaughn asks.

‘What friend?'

‘At the hospital. Drew says there's a girl there who calls you.'

‘She's in icu.'

‘I'm sorry,' he says and he actually looks it. Most people say
sorry
while they're thinking about what movie they're going to rent or something.

‘What'd she look like?' the sex god who wasn't invited out for coffee asks.

‘Brown hair, five-nine, which is short for me.'

‘You're kidding? Five-nine is short for you?'

‘She was all over me. Must've seen those cheques rolling in.'

‘Let's go,' I say. We
walk home and, I have to admit it's alright having a man around. You breathe easier and don't jump at every sound. Maybe women put up with crap from men because they want bodyguards. I'd like to get in touch with that bank teller, warn her that next time is Showtime.

Drew jumps up when she sees me. ‘I've been so worried,' she says. She hugs me which is completely weird since we don't hug. We're all jutting bones, jabbing each other.

‘It was pretty lame,' I say. ‘No Columbine.'

‘Thank God for that,' she says, which is pretty outrageous considering she's an atheist. ‘Do you want some tea or hot chocolate or anything?'

‘I'm pretty whacked.' I'm not up for sitting around being thankful that I'm alive. Kadylak's dying and I can do shit about it.

19

N
o one's returning my calls to the hospital. I could go down there again but Brenda, the catfish, will probably boot me out. Volunteers aren't supposed to get involved with the patients. I turn on the radio. Some fashion columnist is talking about what a crime it is that manufacturers produce knock-offs of designer clothes. You can buy a knock-off of an Yves Saint Laurent fourteen-thousand-dollar jacket for two hundred bucks. ‘It's a crime,' she keeps repeating. I want to be this woman, sweating about knock-offs and this season's skirt lengths. She says everybody's wearing wide belts –
everybody
– and fitted jackets with frayed edges. She describes a ‘fabulous skirt' she's planning to buy after the show. She talks as though this will be an accomplishment. Two seconds later some weary aid worker comes on to discuss impoverished women in India shoving wood and anything else they can find up their vaginas to plug their menstrual bleeding. If they're lucky enough to get work as labourers, they don't drink or eat all day because they can't shit or piss in front of the men. So they get urinary-tract and bladder infections and there are no antibiotics to treat them. ‘Women die from these easily treatable diseases,' the aid worker says. Meanwhile drug companies are raking in the dough. You'd think a couple of global corporations could spare a few million Kotex and a few million cheap pills. But hey, I shouldn't be thinking about this. I should be shopping for a fabulous skirt.

Clarissa's writing letters to her parents to beg for forgiveness. You have to wonder what kind of sick puppy Samuel Richardson was, writing a heroine who spends 24/7 praying or begging forgiveness from her abusers. Although I guess that's pretty standard, the persecuted seeking approval from their persecutors. All those Jews obeying the Germans, trying to please the borderliners so they wouldn't plug them with bullets. In one Holocaust memoir this baby, whose parents were plugged with bullets, was hidden by goy Poles. She was taken to the Poles' flooded basement. Waist-deep in sludge, the Pole's son held her to his chest. Years later he told her that his parents had instructed him to drown her in the sludge if she cried because if the Nazis found out the goys were hiding a Jew, they'd all be killed. She didn't cry and they took her to a convent where she lived till the war was over. Grown up and supposedly recovered in Canada, she couldn't remember anything about the convent or what had happened to her parents. Her daughter became a psychologist and took her mother back to Poland to the convent. It turned out a ninety-four-year-old nun remembered the woman as a child and had never stopped loving her or thinking about her in sixty-something years. The psychologist figured that her mother had been able to survive the horror of the war because she'd been loved unconditionally by the nun. Even though she'd blocked the nun out with all her other war trauma, the security that love produces stayed with her. After she'd been reunited with the nun and her childhood, she stopped having nightmares about the war. You have to wonder if all children were loved, I mean
really
loved not just owned, controlled, spoiled and gloated over, we'd have a better world.

It's party day. I'd pass but I'm worried about Rossi. I watch her apply five pounds of makeup. Mrs. Barnfield's constipated again and spending six hours on the toilet, which creates tensions over bathroom usage.

‘George II
died
trying to force a crap,' I whisper to Rossi. ‘Seriously, I'm worried about her. It's not healthy. And anyway, why's she trying to poop when she's hardly eating?'

Rossi doesn't respond, has that lean and hungry look she gets after she's been making herself puke. She's trying on toddler clothes. ‘Do I look fat? Honestly, do these jeans make my ass look fat?'

‘Try a wide belt and a frayed jacket,' I suggest.
‘Everybody
is wearing them this season.'

Mrs. Barnfield exits the washroom looking less tense, which is a good sign. Plus she starts cleaning her kitchen cabinets. She's one of those types who takes everything out and actually wipes the shelves. ‘You look beautiful, angel,' she says to Rossi. She's always telling Ross how great she looks. I get the feeling she loves her unconditionally, which makes it hard to understand why Rossi is so messed up. Unless it has to do with her dad being a video poker addict and all that. He was never around, which might explain Rossi's need to get attention from anything with a penis.

Mrs. Barnfield's all excited because Rossi got invited to a party finally. ‘I used to
love
parties,' she says. ‘I was a real party girl.'

‘Were you into disco?' I ask.

‘You bet. You should've seen me in my platform shoes.'

Rossi turns her back on her mother and sticks out her tongue like she's gagging.

‘What colour were they?' I ask.

‘Hot pink,' Mrs. Barnfield says. ‘With gold stars on the platforms.'

‘Wow,' I say. ‘They'd be worth serious coin these days, I bet.' I like Mrs. Barnfield and can't figure out why Rossi's so mean to her all the time.

‘We wore halters and bell-bottoms and sweated like pigs,' Mrs. Barnfield says.

‘Pigs don't sweat,' Rossi says.

‘And we drank sodas,' Mrs. Barnfield says. ‘And maybe a little rum and Coke but
no
drugs. Don't do drugs tonight, angel, okay? No E, isn't that what they're all doing? A girl had a heart attack taking E.'

Rossi leans into the bathroom mirror to line her lips.

‘You look absolutely gorgeous, honey. Do you need some money? Take a cab home, okay?' This is another thing that blows my mind about Mrs. Barnfield, she's always forcing cash on Rossi. Even when we were little and I was getting fifty cents a week, old Ross was walking around with a wad. ‘Do you know this boy she's going with?' Mrs. Barnfield asks me.

‘Doyle? Yeah.'

‘Is he nice?'

‘He's alright.'

‘He wasn't one of the boys responsible for the lockdown?'

‘Nope. I work with him at Dairy Dream.'

‘Oh really? He's got a job then, that's nice.'

‘His dad's a dentist.'

‘Really?' Mrs. Barnfield's eyes go all dreamy as she works out the daughter-married-to-dentist fantasy, the big house, the Mercs, the grandkiddies. Poor Mrs. Barnfield. ‘Well, I won't wait up,' she says. ‘I know you're a big girl now but please, angel, don't be too late. Give me a smooch.' Rossi allows her mother to kiss her cheek before she takes her cash.

Doyle's not too happy to see me. ‘What's
she
doing here?'

I lounge in the back seat. He just got his licence and drives around for hours in his dad's guzzler.

‘She was invited,' Rossi says. ‘We might as well give her a ride.'

‘You've done something different with
your hair,' I tell him. He ignores me, plays gangsta rap, bopping to the beat. I'm thinking about my depression because that's got to be what this is. Some psychologist is saying that King Harold was depressed
before
he lost the battle of Hastings to William, the Norman invader. They're saying being branded a heretic by Rome depressed Harold. He supposedly suffered intense feelings of guilt and loss, which was why he sucked as a leader.
I'm
suffering intense feelings of guilt and loss about everything – Kadylak, Mr. Paluska, my mothers. I even feel badly about duping Lund and Huff, and about not giving a goose's turd about anything that's going on around me. You're supposed to care about stuff in your immediate vicinity but I'm sitting around worrying about girls from Thailand being sold as cash crops, being shipped in airless containers to New York brothels. I worry about women being burned because their dowry money isn't enough, or because some hothead husband decides they've been unfaithful, or getting stoned to death for not wearing a burqa. But boys killing boys in my neighbourhood? A knifing in the school that's got everybody in a flap? It happens.