Greedy Little Eyes (19 page)

Fern is reading the newspaper while she listens to the six o’clock news, dropping cracker crumbs on a picture of Martin Flash.

The Province
quotes him as saying, “Art is the ultimate question, it is the provocateur, and it is life itself. Protesting art is tantamount to embracing a totalitarian state. It is death. These are the same people who get exterminators in their homes to kill pigeons, mice, squirrels, roaches, whatever they can snuff out. These rats, at the pet shop—the majority are purchased to feed snakes.” His face in the paper is a black and white portrait of lonesome courage, Fern thinks.

When another news item comes on, Fern changes the channel. She catches the tail end of the Flash story on another channel. When it ends she continues to flip stations until she hears Middle Eastern music and a voice saying, “And just as in his dream Peter Bailey woke that night to a house in flames.”

A small bald man appears in an armchair and says, “If it weren’t for my dream I would not have gotten out alive.”

Fern checks the TV guide:
Dreams, Visions and Intuition.

The bald man continues. “Khalil Gibran said, ‘Trust in dreams for in them is the hidden gate to eternity.’”

Fern gawks at the screen and rubs her stomach, trying to calm the flutter.

The two birds chirp in her ears, breathless, but she understands them. Exhausted, their breasts heave. They have been building all day, laying eggs, one each.

Fern knows they are far too tired, there is barely anything left of them. They beg her to help, lay the third egg. She cries for them. She understands now. Three. Three is the magic number.

She is at Costco giving out samples of Melba toast with a new kind of peanut butter and she’s thinking to herself how she’s becoming like that girl in the Margaret Atwood
book,
The Edible Woman
, the one who found herself so repulsed by life she could eat nothing but bread and peanut butter. Except with her it’s crackers and cheese.

She can’t stand food or people or anything. She can’t even remember the last time she returned a friend’s call. Does this mean I don’t have friends any more? she wonders. The idea isn’t terribly troubling, and just as her eyebrows raise in curiosity at her own indifference, Molly MacRae walks right up to Fern’s peanut butter stand and pops a piece of Melba in her mouth.

“Long time no see, stranger,” she says to Fern, sputtering a few crumbs.

Fern wipes away the one crumb that’s landed on the back of her hand. “Yeah,” she says for lack of witty repartee.

Molly MacRae’s baby is parked in a stroller beside her and Molly absently jiggles her baby, who drools a small smile at anyone who will look. “Where the hell have you been, Ferny? Haven’t heard a peep out of you since Christ was a kid.”

Molly’s from Cape Breton and
Christ
and
hell
figure a lot in her conversation. Fern finds this particularly irksome right now for reasons she can’t quite place. Perhaps it’s the use of Jesus’ last name like that, as though he were prime minister. Or a serial killer. Fern tries to smile but thinks that for a bunch of Catholics, Cape Bretoners wouldn’t know something sacred if it bit them in the ass.

“So?” Molly stares wide-eyed at Fern. “What’s up?”

“I’m”—Fern looks away for two or three moments as though she might be going into a trance, then looks back at Molly—“going to have a baby.”

Molly gasps. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Fern! I didn’t even know you were seeing anybody. Wow! That’s great! Isn’t it?”

Fern smiles sheepishly, then beams. “Yeah, it’s pretty great. It’s what I’m meant to do. This baby is—This baby will complete the world.”

Molly lets go of the stroller and comes round to hug Fern. “Oh god, that’s terrific! That you’re happy and all, and, and who’s the proud pappy?” Then she whispers, “You didn’t run off and get married already, did you?” Fern shakes her head. “But you’re going to, right?”

“We haven’t decided yet.” Fern’s smile becomes smug.

Molly holds her at arm’s length. “Chrissake, Fern, you’re bringin’ a baby into the world. Get yourself married.”

“Why? Mary and Joseph weren’t married.”’

“What? Of course they were married! Jesus had brothers and sisters for god’s sake.”

“You’re just assuming that. And Jesus wasn’t married either.”

Molly lets her go, puts one hand on her hip, the other over her mouth and shakes her head as though wherever they just let this girl out of, there is no choice now but to take her right back.

After a moment she says, “Fern, Jesus never got married because He’s God. You know? He was a
virgin
. The man never so much as looked at a woman.”

Fern looks at her with pity. “Oh sure, he and Mary Magdalene were just
platonic.
”

The heat is on now and not just for Martin Flash—the whole town is suffocating in record temperatures. But it must be especially bad for him, Fern thinks, being on the lam and all with his rat. She thinks of the rat’s impending doom and feels a momentary sadness. But it is only through death that life can come.

Her eyes well at the thought as she rubs her hand in circles over her belly, round and full now with crackers and cheddar and jasmine tea. At least there’s only one more day to wait. Tomorrow Flash will show the masses a thing or two about a thing or two and Fern will be there. She’s already turned down two jobs for tomorrow and one of them would’ve paid double her usual salary. It involved dressing up like a bumblebee and giving out samples of tuna salad downtown. No matter: tomorrow she will be dressed in a manner befitting a mother-to-be and she will find him and take his hand and instantly he will know, live on camera, that she is
the one
. No one will ever forget Martin and Fern Flash.

At 3:30 p.m. the next day, Fern is making her way downtown. She is frustrated with herself because she’d meant to be there by now. She wanted to be standing right
beside the steamroller where she could smile into Martin Flash’s eyes as he turned the ignition. He would know her instantly and bring her into his light.

But instead, she’s stuck on the Burrard Bridge and traffic is at a standstill. A sunny Friday summer afternoon in this city and the whole place goes mad; they don’t know what else to do but run to their hopeful little Miatas that have been sitting with their miserable tops up for a month of soggy Fridays, jump in and peel off to somewhere blue and glinting, anywhere just to be seen in the sun by the water, looking breezy and blessed.

Fern smoothes her new dress and glances at herself in the rear-view mirror, noticing her eyes are a little baggy. She could hardly sleep last night, and as soon as the stores opened, she spent hours changing in and out of dresses. She wanted something gauzy and flowing and visited ten or twelve different shops in Kitsilano trying to find
it.
She would know
it
when she saw it, just the way she knew Martin when she saw him and the way he would know her. And she’d finally found it all right—this was the dress. She felt radiant just having it against her body. She looked down, patting her belly. “We’ll get there. We’ll get there because we’ll get there, that’s all.”

Robson Street is so packed with traffic, Fern is on the verge of abandoning her car smack in the middle of the road and walking the last couple blocks. She searches for an all-news radio station. Toward the end of the
dial, a female reporter quacks about an angry mob gathering in front of the art gallery. Martin Flash has yet to be seen.

Fern’s heart jumps through her new dress. She looks at her watch and screams out the window, “It’s five to four, you bastards. Move it!”

She manoeuvres and darts ahead, ignoring the honks and curses of surrounding drivers. If she has to, she will pull up onto the sidewalk and park, tow trucks be damned.

Coming up on Georgia Street, she can hear the crowd. She turns up the radio. The reporter’s voice bites through the airwaves. “ … and pockets of schoolchildren are chanting in unison, ‘
Free Shnooky
,
Free Shnooky
.’ As you may know, the black rat that Martin Flash will crush has been dubbed Shnooky by children across the city. They’ve climbed onto the steamroller parked here in front of the gallery, and the children vow they will put a stop to the rodent’s murder—Here he is! Martin Flash is coming down the steps of the gallery in a black and pink cape. Flash is smiling but he does not appear to have Shnooky the Rat on his person and—Oh no—Martin Flash has been hit! Someone from the crowd has struck Flash and he is on the ground—Police are moving in …”