Knife Fight and Other Struggles (6 page)

Six days she searched in vain. On the morning of the seventh, she picked up the phone.

I could tell it was not McGill she called by her bright and easy tone. “Hey, you!” she said, and after a pause, “Yeah, things are better now.” And another pause, as the phone chirped brightly in her ear. “I know!” And more chirping. “Yeah! Right?” She nodded, her smile brighter than I believe I’d ever seen it. “So it’s okay if I come? You sure?”

And finally: “Great!”

She switched off her phone and leaned over the bassinet.

“Guess where we’re going, Simon?” she cooed. “Can you say ‘Brannigan’s’?”

The infant blew a snot bubble out its nose and giggled. I kept my peace.

Brannigan’s was a little pub a few blocks past the park. Nice and murky inside, it suited my tastes. But we didn’t stay there long. She manoeuvred the stroller around the bar to a door to a back patio. There, in the combined shelter of a maple tree and a great red umbrella, gathered two more strollers, and the mothers who pushed them.

“Hey, Shell!’ shouted one of the mothers, standing up with her own baby in one arm and extending the other for a hug. The baby—a big bruiser, flabby and blond like its mother—regarded me with dull hostility from its perch. The other infant—a little girl, judging by the pink—stayed in her stroller seat for the second hug and would not meet my eye. Her mother was a wiry one, with enormous white teeth. She smelled of lawn cuttings.

“How you been?” that one asked, and without leaving time for an answer, turned to me. “Look at him! He’s so big!”

“Keep feeding ’em, bound to happen.”

The two mothers laughed and laughed, and the flabby one pointed to an empty chair.
She
sat there, after tucking my stroller in between her and the blond baby’s stroller. Its mother set the infant back into its seat, and launched into a description of how big it was, and then a long talk about nutrition. I stopped paying attention.

Her baby wouldn’t look away.

It sat high in its seat, fidgeting with a little blue pacifier in its hands. It stared at me, an expression that might have been indignation on its face. I looked away, and when I looked back, it hadn’t moved.

Did it see what
she
could not? That hidden in the soft skull of this one, was a being older than any here? That McGill’s exorcism had failed, and the thing inside was waiting like a barely irradiated tumour to re-emerge?

Did it think there was something it could do about that?

The waitress arrived, and it disappeared for a moment behind her muscular legs and tartan skirt as she took lunch orders. It took longer than it needed to, of course.

“Hey,” she said when the waitress finally stepped away, “you remember a kid called McGill?”

“Who?” said the skinny one, but the other waved a hand over the table: “McGill. From high school?” and the skinny one said, “Oh, with the. . . .” and waved her hand over her face.

She nodded, reaching down to ruffle my hair. “With the acne,” she said, “that’s him.”

“Weird kid.”

“Yeah, wasn’t he always wearing black—”

“—kind of goth—”

“—but without the style.”

“Right.”

“I thought he was going to shoot the school up.”

“Columbine our asses.”

“Would have served us right.”

“Shell!”

“Well, we were total bitches.”

“Speak for yourself, Shelly.”

“Yeah. Speak for yourself. So what about McGill?”

“He—came back into my life,” she said. In spite of myself, I grinned and bounced in my seat. She withdrew her hand, brought it into her lap.

“Ooo,” said the flabby one, “that’s creepy.”

“Not really. We hired him. To help with Simon.”

“What, as a babysitter?”

She shook her head. “He’s . . . a therapist now. Really, you wouldn’t recognize him. From before. His skin’s cleared up. He dresses better. And it’s like . . . he’s found purpose.”

“A therapist? For Simon? Shell, is he okay?”

“He’s fine now. McGill fixed him right up.”

“Wow. McGill. A therapist.”

She laughed, a little too lightly. “A behavioural therapist, yeah. Little Simon here . . . he was a handful.”

I cooed. Under the table, she crossed her ankles, and uncrossed them. She was fidgeting—the way they do as the feelings take hold. She took a sip from a glass of spring water.

“I gotta say, I’m surprised to hear that about McGill. He was such a mess back then.”

“Teenage boys are a mess. They grow out of it.”

“He had a lot to grow out of. Did you ever see his mom?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t have seen her much. You never went on that trip to Ottawa.”

“I had the flu. Did McGill’s mother go on that?”

“Not exactly. McGill was going to go. He made it all the way to the bus. He had this suit jacket, and this crazy old trunk with him that was way too big. He got it into the luggage compartment somehow—I think Mr. Evans had to help him with it. And just before we were going to leave, she pulls up.”

“His mother?”

“His mother. Bat-shit crazy. She was driving this old Lincoln or something like it. Pulled it up right in front of the bus, so it was blocked in. She got out—huge woman. Not fat—but big like a linebacker. Her hair was white—she wore a big black fake-fur coat like it was winter. She climbed onto the bus, and pointed at McGill, and she yelled: “I Revoke my Permission! Return my Son to me!”

“Jesus.”

“Poor McGill.”

“Yeah, well he knew what was good for him. He got up and said he couldn’t go to Ottawa any more, and got off the bus. Into his mom’s car. Didn’t even stop to get his trunk out of the luggage area. Had to collect it when we got back.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah. But you know something, Shell?” The flabby blonde leaned across the table. “I think he was kind of relieved.”

“How’s that?”

“You weren’t there,” she said. “And it was pretty easy to tell . . . McGill was more interested in you than he was in the Houses of Parliament.”

Quiet for just a moment, before the three of them broke into a braying round of laughter. The waitress returned with some salads, drinks, and a plate of fried yams. Trickier job this time; she had to sneak in between strollers and the two rattan chairs that’d been displaced to make room for us. She didn’t quite pull it off, and several pieces of cutlery slid off her tray. She promised to get more, bent to grab the ones she could find, and hurried off back into the bar.

“I barely knew he was alive,” she said.

“Well, he sure knew you were alive.”

“Stop fucking—messing with Shelly’s head. Stop messing with her head.”

“One for the swear jar?”

“No, really. He was a sweet, quiet kid. With, you know, unfortunate skin. If he had a crush on Shelly—well, everybody had a crush on Shelly. Look—” the skinny one with the teeth pointed at her with her fork “—you’re making her blush.”

She laughed. “Well, he’s turned out all right now.”

“It’s nice to know that boys turn into men, eh?”

“To boys turning into men!” The blonde one raised a glass of spring water, and the others joined the toast. I let myself giggle and clap, and looked right at her as she glanced down. Things were going well, I thought. And at first, I had no idea why her face fell the way it did.

She nearly dropped her glass as she bent and lunged over me, filling my face for a moment with her sweet-smelling tit. To my side, there was a scream—and I looked over just in time to see her pluck a gleaming blade from the big baby’s little hand.

He had gotten out of his stroller. He had crawled around beneath the table unseen—by any of us—and he had located a steak-knife the waitress had dropped. And then, the little worm . . . he found his legs.

He had carried the knife three glorious steps, from his mother’s feet to the edge of my stroller. It appeared as though the fat little tyke had been about to plunge the knife deep into my left eye.

This kind of event is rare; usually, it happens with a family pet . . . dogs, to be sure, but more perilously, cats. They’ve a fine sense of smell, they do. And that’s why, when I arrive in a new vessel, that’s the first thing I do.

I make sure the cat is dead.

But you know all about that.

The first time McGill and I met after all was over the carcass of a cat.

Remember that place? Squalid little rooms near the very top of a crumbling old apartment building filled with whores and addicts and murderers. Cheap wallpaper peeling off the entry hall. No doors on the kitchen cabinets. No father either. What was it that McGill’s mother had said when she first visited the little girl and her overwhelmed, demon-beset mother?

Slattern?

It hadn’t gone over well with the mother. I watched from the back of the sofa, where I made the brat I inhabited squat and growl. What, she wanted to know, did McGill’s mother have over her, to pass judgement? Could McGill’s mother keep a man any better, who didn’t want to stay? By the empty divot in her ring finger, she guessed not. That hit a nerve, it did. And so it was that she turned on her heel and strode out of there, and left the poor woman to me.

McGill was the one who finally faced me. His mother had no idea. He came up the next day, on his own, in uniform: a tatty old Nirvana T-shirt, too-loose black jeans and that pustule of a face. He wasn’t ready. That was obvious. But for whatever reason, he didn’t feel right about disturbing his mother with the contrite phone message, begging her to return because
My God, it’s killed the cat!

I’d done more than that. I’d smashed windows in the bedroom, caved in the ceiling over the door to the balcony, overturned the sofa and caused the television tube to implode. I caused the slattern’s neighbour, a man who carried a gun in his trouser-band and dabbled in the narcotics trade to, if not love, then lust for her in an overly solicitous way.

I was, I admit, not pleased when McGill’s mother left in such a rage. I wanted her back. To finish things.

McGill found me in the bathtub. The cat, who had been the child’s dearest friend, was there too—laid out in the doorframe, its head turned hard back, so it looked at its own tail. I saw to it that it wasn’t moved. I wanted McGill’s mother to see it. So she’d know who she was dealing with.