Blasted (17 page)

I'd draw the car going out of its lane. A curving, black dotted line showed it swerving. Then I'd draw a crumpled red mass and the two people inside. I gave them X's for eyes to show they were dead.

In the accident my father was thrown free of the car, losing one shoe.

My mother, belted, stayed inside. Sometimes I got into a terrible state imagining that they suffered, were rushed to the hospital and died in pain.

Or that one of them died first, the other trying in vain to help. Sometimes, as the days and nights went on and I unfurled the roll of paper further and further, I'd draw the bodies in pieces, an arm here, a head here. But that was wrong, for my father at least. I'd seen him in the coffin, looking as young as in those wedding photos, younger even, not a blemish on him. My mother had a closed casket. Sometimes I drew red blood all over the road. Mostly I kept it simple. Black. Red. Like Shanawdithit had. Here's what happened. Here's a map of what happened.

I fell asleep trying to remember what I'd done with that roll of misery, wondering where it might be now.

The morning was grey and chilly, but Grandpa was still cheerful. He was downright energetic, whistling a tune as he came into the kitchen where I was frying eggs and bacon.

“Can't wait to get back at that wall.” He smiled at me and rubbed his hands together.

I looked at him suspiciously. I'd read somewhere that people dying of cancer are often filled with energy. His eyes were bright… so very bright. I was suddenly convinced Grandpa was riddled with tumours. I kept my eyes on him, looking for other signs as we ate – was he thinner, was his skin greying? – but not only did he look fine, he ate everything on his plate and actually thanked me for the meal, striding outside to work.

I did the dishes and grabbed my jacket. I watched for a while as he placed the slate, stone upon stone, using his legs so he wouldn't strain his back. He looked perfectly healthy. I rescued a bleeding heart from under a rock, pulled a couple of dandelions, and got under Grandpa's feet until he told me to get lost. “Go for a walk or something,” he said.

I sat back on my heels. The clouds looked like they might break up, although the wind was still cold. I could smell the sea, the salt in the air. Suddenly I longed to get up on the Hill. I decided to climb up, then circle around to visit the Shanawdithit monument. It was pretty boring unless you were a kid with a kite, but after last night I felt like visiting the monument. I just wouldn't look at the stump where the Irish Cross used to be; I'd never stopped feeling guilty for that.

There used to be a little path from the house up the Hill, but now the first part of the ascent was up an artificial slope created in the construction of the overpass. I tramped over strips of perpetually dying sod until I was above the house, then cut left onto the steep, tussocky slope. My back prickled as I picked my way over rock slides and the strange weedy craters left by the dynamiting done to build the highway; I hunched inside my leather jacket, feeling exposed. In my grandparents' and parents' days, adults used to climb up here just as much as children. They'd trek all the way to the other side, to Freshwater Bay, have picnics. But by my own childhood the Hill was a place for kids, except the impoverished old guy who used to pick blueberries up there and sell them door-to-door in large, white plastic buckets. Juanita'd told me he pissed in the berries, and I'd told her she was full of shit.

My boots scuffed at broken beer bottles and used condoms in the low bushes; that sheltering arch of concrete where the overpass met the Hill must make a perfect spot for a bit of fun. When I was a teenager we'd broken into the railway shed, infested with pigeons and rats, but that had long since been torn down.

I forged ahead, scrambling over a steep little cliff and sidling past the Arterial's buttresses and onto the open slopes beyond. Now I could breathe better. Lifting my head I could see the cheap, depressing houses on the Brow. Above me, though, it was still clear. I put my head down and climbed, veering east from the power lines. My legs began to protest and my lungs burned. Strange. As a little brat I had scrambled up these slopes like a monkey and never thought twice about it. I certainly hadn't inherited my father's metabolism: he was famous in the family for his love of walking, even though he was a bit lame from an accident when he was a teenager. How he'd loved to walk. I kept going, up and up, and at last I stopped, breathing heavily. Now I turned around to see how far I'd gone.

“Oh!” I gasped out. The city spread in an arc beneath me. The harbour was a glassy green mirror beneath the fog-shrouded Signal Hill. I could see the Basilica and St. Andrew's, the ruins of the Grace Hospital where I'd been born, St. Patrick's green spire, Victoria Park standing out among the crazy-quilt buildings. Grandpa's house, all the Southside houses, looked like squat toys. I turned to my right, and there it was, imprinting itself on my mind, bulldozing over my childhood map: the great crater that they were digging out of the Hill, the sewage treatment plant. I sat down on the tussocky grass, my knees giving way. The great machines looked, from here, like children's toys.

I gulped in lungfuls of chill air until the burning in my chest eased off, the taste of salt in my mouth. Changing, so much was changing on me.

Did Dad go this way on the long treks he used to take, disappearing up over the Hill for days with only the clothes on his back? I never saw him go. He'd even leave his wedding ring behind, so he wouldn't lose it I suppose; I used to play with it while he was gone, spin the gold circle around my child's finger, or jam it down onto my thumb where it would almost, not quite, stay. He'd returned from one of his treks wearing only one shoe.

I turned and continued up, getting a bit lost as I left the city behind. Stands of small, branchy laburnum had sprung up everywhere, and grass had overgrown the places I remembered as prime berry-pickings. I stopped looking for landmarks and simply walked, over and up, instinct guiding me. I wanted to find the wild rose bushes that grew in a circle, if they were still there. My special place. In the centre was the round, dark-grey rock mottled with black and acid-green lichens, the rock that stayed cool even in summer sun, the Fairy Rock. I thought of icebergs, with only a tenth of their ice above water, the vast, terrifying mass beneath the surface, like a deep-rooted tooth. Like that rock, with its deep roots.

My feet had stopped moving. The Fairy Rock had been demolished to make way for the Arterial. I knew that; I was getting confused. I shook my head like a dog, blinking, and looked over my shoulder to where I had left the city. I had gone too far. Only waving yellow grass in that direction, wet and rotted from the long winter. Ahead of me loomed a stand of tall, straight trees. Someone must have planted these, I thought, because there were no such trees on the Hill when I was a kid – only spruce and squat alders grew on this exposed slope, at this height.

I walked towards them. The grove was farther away than it looked. I had never seen trees like these. They were so
tall
. And they had leaves, leaves like poplar trees, rustling and gleaming and whispering in the breeze. Strange colours too. The tree trunks seemed grey at first, but now I could perceive subtle, ever-shifting hues of mauve, pale yellow, alien greens on the smooth bark. The leaves flipped about weirdly, showing themselves at first deep burgundy, then blue-green, scarlet, then gold. They were the broad, flat leaves of midsummer, not the new leaves of June. What kind of trees were these? My breath hissed from my lungs. At my feet, bone-white knuckles of rock thrust through the turf, unfolding into bulky fingers, an avenue of uneven pillars my height and taller leading to the grove ahead of me. Always, always ahead of me. The air seemed hazy and pink. The rock pillars led me:
this way, this way.

No seagulls cried. There was no wind.

My heart began jumping like a bird trapped in my ribcage. Don't panic, I told myself. You're lost. You're just lost. My ears filled with the sound of my heart, my mouth stretched wide, panting in the thick, sweet air. I turned, as if in deep water, away from the grove. All I could see was the pink haze. I clapped my hands over my eyes, willing the mist to dissipate. Oh Christ, oh sweet Jesus, I'm panicking. Have I lost my mind? I'm panicking. Running. Gabbling a saying of my grandfather's over and over:
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, look down upon us this blessed day and night. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, look down upon us this blessed day and night. Jesus, Mary and Joseph…

My foot caught. I fell flat on the ground, knocking the wind out of myself. I lay there for what seemed like a long time, eyes squeezed tight, face pressed to the prickly growth, fingers clutching at the small bushes and bits of grass, finding my breath again. Gradually I became aware that something was digging painfully into my hip bone, something hard. My cell phone? Keeping my eyes closed I fumbled with numb fingers at the zippered jacket pocket, found an unyielding oblong. Not my phone – I didn't carry it on me here. It felt suspiciously like a cake of hard-tack. How the – oh. Grandpa.

Gradually my breathing quieted. I sat up, and keeping my eyes closed brought the cake to my mouth and started gnawing on the hard-tack, working away on it with my molars, hard flakes of it cracking off between my teeth. The familiar chalky taste brought saliva rushing into my mouth; I ate until I thought I could open my eyes.

Everything was as it should be. I was further east on the Hill than I'd imagined, but I could hear the squealing seagulls, the monotonous hum of traffic, the clink and muffled roar of heavy machinery from the dockyard and the sewage plant construction. The city was where it always was, the air was grey and clear, and behind me there was no strange grove of trees. Only the Hill, and the everlastingly overcast sky.

I was high above the last of the houses on the Southside. Shakily I rose to my feet, wincing at the bruise on my hip where I'd fallen. The slope was steep here. I stumbled down sideways in a loping gait, riding little rock slides, skidded into a clump of alder bushes, and had to grab ahold of them with my hands to stop. I looked to see if anyone was around, still unsure if I was in this world or another. There was no one, no visible construction workers, not even a kid on a bicycle. To my right yawned the pit of the sewage treatment site. The Shanawdithit monument, the only marker for the old church of St. Mary's and her grave, was obliterated. There was no strange, terraced lawn any more, no emerald grass, no stone monument or plaque, nothing. I leaned against the side of the last house on the Southside Road and slid down until I was sitting, my face to the pit. The Hill rose above me, perfectly ordinary, looking like it always did.

I ate the rest of the hard-tack in the shadow of the house, then wandered home along the road, a short trek past houses where my brat friends used to live. I wondered if I knew anyone there now. Smells of old food and diapers wafted out of some of them, and the sound of squalling children. Others were like pictures, perfectly painted with little gardens and fences. I got to our house – between the two extremes – and trudged up

the stairs. There was Grandpa, crouched down, still laying his stones. He looked around at me.

“Have a nice walk?”

“Shanawdithit's gone.”

I found myself crouching next to him, arms twined around him, crying. He went stiff, then managed to free one arm and pat my shoulder awkwardly. “There, there,” he said. “There, there.”

CHAPTER 11

I didn't sleep that night, and I didn't get out of bed until noon either. Then I lay around the house all day in my dressing gown.

Around five Juanita phoned me about our date that night. We arranged to meet for dinner at some restaurant called “The Jolly Roger.” Any place named “The Jolly Roger” fails to get my vote, but Juanita liked it, so that's where we were damn well going to go. I got dressed – man, was I getting sick of the one pair of jeans and the two shirts I'd brought – and then just kind of stood around in the middle of my room. Lost. That's what that feeling was.

Juanita had always been an interesting girl. In grade five, just after the incident at the Shanawdithit monument, the school gave us IQ tests; she was, it turned out, a genius. The year after, the family broke up. Her mother was diagnosed with a mental illness and institutionalized, and her sisters scattered. Juanita went to live with a younger sister of her dead father. This aunt had made it big; she'd married a mainlander, an engineer, and they lived out in the ‘burbs near the Bally Haly Golf Club. The aunt was, perhaps understandably, fanatically protective of Juanita. She was given a whole new wardrobe and new shoes. And two junior-high-school summers in a row she was sent to what she called “boot camp,” a sort of social reconditioning retreat for troubled teens, on the mainland. She wasn't allowed out of her room past nine o'clock at night, and no boys were allowed up onto the second floor of the house at any time. Consequently she became an adept liar, and could creep in and out of her second-storey bedroom window with the agility of a cat. She was much, much badder than I was. She smoked more, she drank like a fish, was higher than high; she fucked more guys, in situations with less regard for her own personal safety, than anyone else. There was only one bad thing that I did first, only one bad thing that I did bigger and better: I got pregnant.