Blasted (46 page)

Afterwards I thought that it was a good thing I was so drunk. It kept my body relaxed when I hit, and probably made me think I was going faster than I really was. Otherwise, at any real speed, without a helmet, the impact surely would have killed me. The parked car loomed before me, impossible and non-negotiable in the wet and dark, and all at once everything slowed down. No time to swerve. I hit my brakes, and at the same time said in a flat, calm tone, “Fuck.” Delicate last words Ruby, I had time to think, and notice that at last, the gibbering voices surrounding me screeched and went silent.

But by then my back wheel was skidding, I was slamming into the back of the car and things sped up again. It must have looked comical. I sailed up, over the handlebars, right up over the car. Oh, it's a cab I thought, seeing the glowing plastic bulge on top, orange like the japanese lanterns in the park with Brendan. I landed with my feet stuck straight out before me, right on my arse on top of the roof, bounced, and sailed forward, landing on my back on the road and skidding on wet leaves. I flung up my arm to protect my head, the shoulders of the jacket bunching with the force of the dragging. I didn't go far; my leg jammed under the tire of another parked car, wrenching at my groin, and I slewed around and my screaming stopped. I couldn't move. I tasted blood.

In the silence I heard a hiss, a faint thrum: the unmistakable sound of a bicycle whizzing at top speed on the sidewalk, fast as a gull soaring between the buildings. The bicycle passed me; brakes screeched and the rider came to a stop. Big orange boots on skinny legs scrambled to back up the bike until he was level with me. A pause, and then the bicycle dropped with a clatter. A man, head covered with a rubber cap as if swimming, bent and stared at me through big glasses almost like goggles, his long, pale, dirty raincoat swirling around his ankles.

Big hands went under me, gentle, pulling me out from under the car.

My bike lay abandoned, no motion, no force. I couldn't bear to leave her lying in the street like that; I wrenched myself away from the man and threw myself on her, trying to hold her. The signal arm had broken off.

My bike, I'd wrecked her, I shouldn't have been riding, it was my fault. I burnt my hand on her hot engine casing. The pavement was hard and cold.

I looked up at the branches of electric honeycomb leaves dripping high above me. Cradling my baby. I hadn't gotten through. I couldn't go fast enough to get through.

Gentle hands on me again, on my back. The strange man knelt next to me and I looked into his face. “Who are you?” I asked.

Instead of a voice to go with his touch, he shrieked. “Heigh-ho!” he said. “Escaped again, I see!”

The glasses he wore were like the plastic jokes Brendan had given me, minus the mustache and nose. His body seemed smaller, somehow rounder; he had a beaked nose and his eyes, I thought, were yellow. “Hey ho and who the hell are you?” I managed.

A look of deep concentration came across his face. He raised his hand up into the air, wiggled long, thin fingers like a maestro preparing to lead an orchestra, then gently brought his palm around to the back of my head. I tried to flinch away, but slowly, so slowly, he leaned toward me in a gentle embrace. My head nestled against his chest. We knelt together, then he let go and I almost fell. I thought I caught a wink from behind the glasses, then the Birdman leapt up and righted his bicycle with a deft kick of a foot, catching it and jumping on. He soared away, disappearing around a corner in the darkness.

One of my feet was bare. I managed to pick up my bike and wheel her to the sidewalk, then limped around until I found my boot in the dark. Cuts on my scalp, bleeding lip, jacket shoulder scraped and mostly on the street now, my shoulder bruised but no worse, arse killing me and bad bruising on my crotch. Lower back cut up and filthy, scraped raw. Where the hell was the cab driver? Where the hell was anyone? The street was empty, abandoned. I saw everything through a miasma, thick glass or electrical interference. I hadn't made it through.

I tried wheeling my bike along the sidewalk; her front fork was bent almost straight down with the force of the impact. Could I ride her? I got on, experimentally twitching the handlebars. It was like riding a trike, the wheel under the steering. I took a deep breath and started her, put her into gear and rolled gently onto the road.

Blue was awake when I fumbled my way through the door. He took one look at me and sprang to his feet. “I'm taking you to the hospital.”

“The fuck you are,” I said, and limped to the tub, turning on the taps full blast.

“Did you get into a fight?”

“Yes.” I started peeling off layers of clothes. My jacket had fused to my shirt. My arms hurt so I could hardly get them out of my clothes. I gave up and started on my jeans.

“Oh, Lord, your bike.”

The waistband of my jeans had dried into the bloody mess of my back. I gritted my teeth, and pulled down with all my strength. A cry forced out of me, and I fell.

Blue's many fine personal qualities include an ability to distinguish a situation that demands action instead of questions. He came over at once and helped me get the jeans off. Then he peeled the jacket and shirt from my body. I got into the steaming bath, and he helped me pick gravel from my back. I came in and out of myself. Sometimes I thought Blue was an angel, a creature of light between me and the shadows.

When I awoke I was lying alone in Blue and Gil's bed, my body so sore and bruised I could hardly move. I managed to get to my feet and stepped out into the living room; Blue was alone, sitting on the couch – just sitting, not reading or watching the television – quiet. The room smelled of smoke, of sage. He came to me when he saw me.

I was tired of running, sick with my own fear of this thing that ran in my blood, that had pursued my father and his grandmother before him.

“I have to go home.”

No more than a day passed before they put me on the plane. They all contributed a little, and Gil found, incredibly, a seat sale to Newfoundland. I cried when they showed me the ticket.

“I thought you wanted to go home,” Blue said, bewildered.

“I do… I mean, I'm scared… but I mean, why are you all so nice to me?”

Gil piped up. “Well, Steve says he'll pay any price to get you out of Toronto before you ruin his chances with yet another woman.”

“He said that?” Blue wondered.

“Oh, yes. And he also said he hoped there's a good AA in St. John's.

And he also said…”

“Okay. I don't want to know what else Steve said.” I put my face into my hands. Red shone at the edges, like Brendan's paintings, bloody outlines around my hands and feet and head, the redness of the inner thighs. I could feel it now, thick hot blood in my palms, the soles of my feet, my forehead, between my legs. Unconsciously my hand went to the swelling on my lip, felt through my hair for the healing cuts on my scalp.

“Stop picking.” Gil gently moved my hand from my head. He handed me the smooth paper envelope. “Take it.”

Blue drove me to the airport. Rain slanted down, cold and grey. My hand gripped the door handle as if I thought I could open it and let myself out, free. Up another ramp, into the sudden darkness under a bridge. Something glimmered white in the shadows – a gull? As we passed by I saw the cyclist, long thin legs pumping madly in the gloom, dirty white raincoat flying out behind him like plastic wings, madman's goggles on his face, a leather First World War flying cap on his head. He grinned maniacally as we passed. The car shot out from under the bridge, and I turned my head to keep the Birdman in sight; it seemed that he lifted off the ground. His knees bent to the sides. He let go the handlebars and flapped his arms madly. I laughed, I could see him laughing, glimmering in the gloomy sky. And then we went under another bridge and he was gone.

“What's so funny?”

“I think I have a guardian angel.”

Blank faces with holes for mouths and eyes, dough people – the airport was full of them, blurry, empty. Sometimes a face would turn toward me – a man driving one of the little trains through the building, the woman at the ticket counter – and the eyes in their soft faces would glitter. Strange, wrong. Everything around me kept opening up, cracking apart at the joints.

Blue held me close for a long time before seeing me through the gate.

I clung to him. I couldn't get on a plane with those awful blank people. “I'm falling apart,” I said. The world wasn't real any more.

“Hang on to this place,” he said. “Don't leave us yet, okay?”

CHAPTER 34

My plane landed. I stumbled down the steps to the tarmac and started walking. I could see things out of the corners of my eyes. Blue-suited men filed out of the plane behind me, around me. My heels burned. In the air I had clung to the white glimmering I could see out the window as we flew, flickering in and out: he was there, my crazy guardian bicycle man, flying with us. But on the ground at the airport, I was alone. I walked into the cold, clear night beneath an empty sky.

It was a long walk from the airport to my house. It was near dawn, maybe, and only the odd orange cab went by. My legs kept moving. My back crawled. I was almost home, crossing the old railway yard under the overpass. The pigeons huddled above me, furrows of their droppings frozen under each buttress of the bridge. It was much colder here than in Toronto, one of those unpredictable, windy, iron-cold days. I let it into me. Nearly out from under the overpass now, past the old railway building, tall and grey with hard, green rippled plastic blanking all the windows. Letters in relief on the front, at the top:

1931
NEWFOUNDLAND RAILWAY

The sky lay heavy over the Hill, the Hill. The salt and rot of the harbour air, the scent of tar and approaching winter. My feet slowed as I approached the footbridge; I watched seagulls pale and ghostly against the darkness of cliffs. The river was still, reflecting the overcast sky. As the gulls circled, they came in and out of the CN freight lights, blue with night-shadow, orange with electric light, around and around. I stepped onto the bridge.

The gulls silenced, disappeared. The night took a breath, and came to a standstill. Balanced on a point, pausing in the swing, nowhere time.

Then the black, still surface of the river gurgled, heaved and rushed. I was facing the harbour, and I saw it. The tide, high tide, coming in from the North Atlantic, salt water coming up the sweet river in a low, heavy wave, steady and inexorable. It approached the bridge, it surged, went under me. The night faltered, a stumble in time. Clean salt scents mixed with the rot: a scent like caves, like the white roots of trees, kelp, wild things. The wave passed beneath me and went on up the river, an unseen beast reversing the flow of the current, swamping the sweet domestic water.

And still I didn't move. My home – Grandpa's house – lay at the other end of this bridge, but the sky looked strange. No cars passed overhead, grating on the overpass. I could feel blood beating in my chest, throbbing in my temples. Some bird moaned. And another. Strange, mewling sounds, odd for pigeons, wailing, tiny cries. Not birds – a person. A small person, someone scared, in pain, on the other side of the river, the Southside, my side. Where? I moved forward, peering into the gloom. “Hello?”

In the pre-dawn gloom I thought I saw a small dark figure huddled on the ground. The crying, how could I have thought it was a bird? It was clearly a child. “Hello? Hello, sweet, are you lost?” I tried to make my voice gentle. The crying tore at me. Nothing in the world sounds like an abandoned child. “Hello?”

The figure suddenly surged, frightened, away from me.

“I won't hurt you. I promise.” It
was
a child, very small. A girl, eyes huge and startlingly black in her pale face. Dark hair. I crouched down, keeping my distance. “Are you lost?”

The child didn't take her eyes off me, but brought up one sleeve to wipe her nose. “Yes, lost.” She tasted the “s-es” on her tongue. “Lost.”

“Where do you live?” She pointed at the Southside Road. “So do I.” I thought she looked familiar. “I live right here. Do you live up the road?” and I pointed. Her face crumpled, she started crying again. “Shush now, you don't need to cry. Is your mother at home?”

More cries, louder now.

“Is there anyone home? We'll go to my house, phone your mom. Do you know your phone number?”

The wailing got louder.

“Don't you know your phone number?”

Deep breaths, ragged, one after another, working herself up. Her cries split the night.

“I'll take you home myself, then!” I shouted.

The screams stopped. She smiled.

I stood and reached out, took her hand. It was cold. “My name is Ruby. What's yours?”

“Ruby. Can you carry me? I'm tired.”

“Carry you? Well, you're a pretty big girl. Let's walk a little.”

We started off, her hanging onto two of my fingers, little legs moving fast to keep up with my stride. I looked up as we passed Grandpa's house, longing tugging at me. Had someone tried to meet my plane at the airport? I'd called him, told him I was coming home, and Blue had spoken to him for a while too, after I went to lie down again, exhausted from the shortest of conversations. Telling Grandpa how crazy I was, I supposed. The lights inside were on, as late – or as early – as it was. Cosy, warm, golden light. “That's my house,” I said to the child, but she didn't look, just hummed to herself. When I looked again, the lights were gone, the house dark. I had probably imagined the lights. No one had come to meet me. They didn't care. My fingers were cold where the child held them; her humming got louder.