Blasted (32 page)

“Blasty… what?” Blue asked, sitting back with his tea, but his body was still, like I was a small animal he didn't want to frighten.

“Blasty boughs… dried spruce twigs, the needles dry and orange.”

“So she'd gotten these… twigs out of his head?”

“I think so. I was young, maybe I don't remember it right.” I thought for a moment. “Mom pulled feathers, and twigs
this size
out of the welt on Dad's head.” I held up my hand, fingers splayed to show the size of the things that had come out of him. Blue's eyes widened, then he dropped back into his careful listening. “And then she bandaged him up, just like you did me. She had me get the bandages and disinfectant from the bathroom upstairs, and I held the end of the gauze while she wrapped it around his head. To calm me down, and calm her down too I suppose. She told me that Dad had run into a tree in the dark.”

Not meeting Blue's eyes, I poured myself another whiskey. I stared at its amber surface, twirling the glass so it spiraled around. “I remember him saying,
It's been a long winter
, but it was the fall, he'd only left a few days before. He thought he'd been gone for months.” In the silence, smiling apologetically in Blue's direction and still not meeting his eyes, I drank up the whiskey in one long swallow. “He was all outdoors, his jacket smelt like the night.”

After a pause, Blue spoke. “And that was that? It was never spoken of again?”

“Oh, the next morning at breakfast there was blood welling through the gauze, seeping through, and I started screeching, thinking he was dying or something I suppose. But Dad said it was just blood, see? Only a bit of blood, cleansing the wound.”

“Yes. But I mean, didn't your parents discuss why they'd been so frightened, before you came into the room?”

“I don't suppose they realized I'd heard all that.”

“It sounds like they were terrified.”

I didn't feel much like talking after that. Blue tried to get me to talk more, and when that didn't work made me reassure him that no, I didn't feel dizzy, disoriented or abnormally sleepy. I bid him a subdued goodnight, and escaped into my little ship-room. I felt ashamed and vaguely angry as I climbed the ladder into the bedloft and crawled between the cool sheets. Why had I told him that stupid story? Who wants to hear stories about my weird family? I remembered the question he had asked me: wasn't it frightening, my father going off like that? Living in the house, knowing that at any moment he might leave us again? I started shivering, despite the heat; I rolled onto my side and pulled the sheet over my head.
Had
it been frightening? It had been the very air we breathed, part of the house, in every crack and shadow; his unpredictable moods, my mother's desperate anger, our bending obedience to his mute request that we not question him, his departures, his arrivals.

There was a fairy tale that I loved as a kid. I used to insist Dad read it to me with, no doubt, tiresome regularity. A prince is walking by the sea when he meets a mysterious and beautiful maiden with silver hair. He begs her to marry him and come live with him in his castle. She consents, but tells him he must never strike her. They marry, and of course the silly arse slaps her. She has this tendency to laugh at inappropriate moments: once at the funeral of his father, the king. He hits her to shut her up, and she says sadly, “Once.” And then tells him she saw his father happy in Heaven and that was why she laughed. Two more times this happens, I forget why – but I remember being so furious with that stupid prince, first for hitting the princess, and second for being too damn dumb to learn that if she laughs, she has a good reason. Well, of course he hits her three times, and she says, “Twice,” and “Thrice,” and she turns into a great silvery seal and dives back into the ocean, never to return.

It occurred to me now that I had loved that tale because it was about my parents. How
dare
my mother need Dad to be a normal father, a normal husband? And just as suddenly a little of the tangle around my heart loosened, the knot of feelings that I clenched around every memory of my parents. I'd been terrified that she'd strike him too many times, that he would go away for ever.

I guess he had.

They both had.

The next morning, when I stumbled out into the big room towards the bathroom, Blue was already up, drinking coffee and reading a paper.

“How's your head?”

I croaked unintelligibly and continued to the can. When I emerged Blue was rustling around in a leaving-soon sort of way. “I'm going to do some studio work,” he said, followed rather disconnectedly by, “Want some coffee?”

“Yuk, coffee puts me on the ceiling,” I said ungraciously. “Please say you have some tea.”

He was putting on boots. “On that shelf. What's here is yours.” We arranged to meet “at home” for dinner and he left money on the counter for me to buy groceries. I was, evidently, a kept woman, at least until I got myself on my feet again.

It seemed karmically appropriate to begin my sojourn as live-in maid by tackling Blue's fridge. Besides, my sense of order (I do have one) was offended by a fridge crammed to the brim, but in which there seemed to be no food. I poured myself a mug of tea, then started taking things out of the fridge and arranging them on the floor. What rapidly became evident was that the fridge was full of
condiments
. Salad dressings, bottles of soy sauce, uncountable jars of specialty jams, bottled cherries toxic and red, long-gone tomato sauces furred with mold, hard little wedges of ungrated parmesan cheese, and I couldn't even count the different kinds of expensive mustard. I threw things out and arranged what was left by colour: red things on the top shelf, yellow on the middle, and the rest (brown, green, and a small flask of blue gin my friend evidently liked to keep chilled) on the bottom. And lo! – there was room in the fridge at last. I dragged the garbage bag out into the stairwell and left it by the freight elevator; I had no idea when garbage day would be.

By the end of the week, I knew when garbage and recycling days were, had cleaned the bathroom twice and swept the entire zillion-square-foot floor once, cooked several rather fine meals, taken three leisurely and solitary baths, and been worried to death when Blue bathed (he was oblivious). My head wound had healed to a nasty black scab, and the boils on my back had almost disappeared. I suffered spasms of remorse whenever I thought of Blue shelling out money on me, and the intrusion I must be making on his life, but he never seemed anything but happy to see me. I didn't go out, except to buy groceries.

By the end of two weeks I knew Blue's schedule as well as he did, his agent treated me like a secretary when I answered the phone, my acne scars slowly faded from my face and back, Blue told me that if I apologized once more for my presence he would personally flay me, and I'd taken a somewhat scurrying shower when he was actually home. I still didn't venture out, and I didn't look for work.

One night as I lay in bed, unable to sleep for what seemed hours, a fluttering of wings above sent my eyelids flying open. I saw the night blankness of the skylight, the edges glowing sick orange in the city lights. Shadows flickered. A bird alighted on the slanted roof over my head. Its feet skittered on the glass, but it recovered and stalked off to the side. It settled on the roof over me, out of my sight. Good! The last thing I needed was some pigeon squatting and shitting on the skylight. I closed my eyes again, determined to sleep.

But there were more of the dry, snapping sounds of wings, and another pigeon flapped onto the roof. Another. And another. I sat up as more birds came and more, a veritable parliament. Soon the room filled with their moaning and keening. One marched straight across the window, its deformed, turned-in foot tick-
tock
-ticking on the glass, its feathered belly pale as a fish, one blank eye staring fixedly at me. One at a time, feathered heads jerked into view, fluttering and cooing, jerking and twitching like the last struggles of a strangled man. They closed in a ragged grouping around the window. Their horrid, monotonous cooing, the thin glass, the blue things standing in a circle, their lolling heads. One bird leaned in and pecked at the glass, another half-raised its wings and made feathered shadows dance. My back prickled. I couldn't wake Blue, I was alone. Alone.

I tore the sheet from me and leapt from the bed. The birds' cooing rose up, moaning and wheezing – alien feet skittered – I grabbed some clothes from the floor. The bird noise rose to a fever pitch; a soft
thump
overhead, and the shadows on the floor erupted into wings. Big dark wings. I took refuge in the kitchen. Hands shaking in the silence of the place, I put my clothes on and stayed there, awake, until dawn.

It was after sun-up that I came to myself, standing in front of the big living-room window, baking in the summer sun and staring at nothing. It took me a moment to realize what had brought me back: an insistent, repetitive sound. Someone was knocking at the front door.

Jason burst into the place like a shaggy cyclone. “Long time no see!

You've been hiding!”

His energy, his presence, felt as if it were coming at me from a long way off. With an effort I pulled myself together; what, normally, would I be saying to Jason? It was early, I remembered – Blue was sleeping – so I shushed him. “It's…” I looked into the kitchen for the digital clock on the oven, “…six o'clock? Are you nuts?”

He threw a bag down on the sofa and flung himself after it, arms behind his head, grinning.

“Make yourself comfortable,” I said.

“I am.”

“Want something to drink?” I whispered as a righteous example.

“Juice?”

“Blue's a juice fanatic,” I said, heading for the kitchen. My feet almost had to feel for the floor, and I felt dizzy, as if drunk. “We even have a juicer, I could make something fresh.”

Chopping the fruit brought me back, anchored me in the world again, and Jason was such an oblivious person I figured he probably wouldn't notice the effort it was to me to appear normal. He chattered on about the last couple of years, the traveling he'd done and photography shows he'd had on the road, and made disapproving noises about juicers wasting fruit pulp. I worked the juicer out in the hall for quiet's sake, and pointed out that he slurped back the results pretty damn fast. He laughed and held out his glass for more. I'd made my favourite, green apple and kiwi – the greenest, freshest taste, made me feel like I was going to shoot up like a spear of grass in the springtime. I was beginning to feel like myself again, but sleepy. I hoped he wouldn't hang around for long.

“You're only wearing one sandal,” Jason said. My feet were up on the coffee table, and I looked at them.

“You're right,” I said. I wiggled my toes, then took the single sandal off and tossed it in the general direction of my room. I could feel Jason staring at me, and I studiously slurped my juice until he gave up and sat back with a big, head-shaking sigh.

“Wanna see some of my work? I brought some of the ones I took out in B. C. last winter for you to see.”

I groaned inwardly. “Oh, sure.”

He blustered away while he opened his bag, his voice rising again until I shushed him. Why was he being so awkward? Did he actually feel shy about showing me his work? The back of his neck was red – that was it, he was blustering to try and cover his agitation. I felt guilty for being so callous. But Jesus, how long had we gone out: two weeks or something? If you could call it going out. I'd thought of it as killing time with this guy breezing through town, an unambitious photographer Blue knew from somewhere or other and to whom he had offered space in a group show. Sure, he was nice, like a big, friendly dog that gets mud all over you with his big, hard paws and continually shoves his nose into your crotch.

“Here they are… well, some of them anyway… these are just a few I printed.” I took the sheaf of photos from his hand, curious in spite of myself.

A strange, snakey tree loomed light in the foreground, reaching curved and crooked arms up to a sky churning with sunlit cloud. Behind it, blurred, obscure, stood other trees, less alien, dark pines and shadowy rock silhouetting the naked creature with a surface like a woman's pale flesh, an indentation where her navel would be, dancing. I looked at the next photo, and the next. All were of this creature, or ones like her, her sisters. In one they stood in a circle, photographed from above, from a soft, rocky cliff, tussocks of light grass like water within their roots. A chill went down my spine. Their skin looked vulnerable, strips of darker bark hung off them, their branches held up thick, fleshy leaves. “Didn't you say you took these in winter?” I asked.

“Yup. Last January.”

“But there's no snow. And the trees have leaves.”

“In B.C., dummy. Vancouver Island, on the coast.”

“It snows in B.C.,” I said, tearing my eyes from the pictures.

“Not on the coast of the island, it doesn't.”

“Okay, okay.” I looked back at the photos. Glassy water reflected obsidian behind a row of the creatures, and white sea birds floated suspended against a grey sky. “Is that a lake?” I asked, pointing.

“No, the ocean. Pacific.”

“But it's so calm.”

“It's very protected there, enclosed. It's like green glass.”

“Did you take any colour pictures?”

Jason sighed at my Philistine request. “Yeah. But I was more interested in form here, shape. And shade. See how the foreground is white, the background more dense?” He came over and sat on the arm of my chair, pointing out the photos where a single massive tree dominated the front, a luminous beam of soft light. He explained how he'd been interested in ancient Chinese painting, how they used darker colours to indicate distance, where “the Western tradition uses density and dark to indicate the
foreground
of a picture. I wanted to see if I could learn to see in a new way.”