Given (26 page)

Say Muh, best believe
, Rainy said. I'd never thought I would hear Rainy sounding like such a proud mother.

Rainy told us she had something else to brag about: she was about to become a grandmother. I studied the twins closely. Their bellies under their all-enveloping robes had swollen in unison, from zero to nine months, almost overnight.

On the seventh day the wind died though the rain continued to fall all through the weekend. I booked a space on the next scheduled sailing of the
Island Spirit
, which had been sitting at the dock for ten days due to gale-force winds in the straits.

To make ready for the journey the HE dressed in a white, musk-smelling robe and wrapped his face in a checkered red-and-white
kaffiyeh
to conceal his features. He wore a key as big as the care key Gracie had worn to activate Baby-Think-It-Over, on a chain around his neck. The rat, sensing the twin's hatred of him, stayed hidden inside the HE's robe.

Rainy did up her hair in a bongolock with a built-in zipper that opened to reveal a foot-long python. Say Muh (the name had stuck) lay in her coffin dressed in a floor-length skirt and long-sleeved blouse embroidered with the slogan, I Have Special Permission to Enter Heaven, but her no-name sister was nowhere to be seen. Rainy figured she had manifested herself into the python for the trip.
Be what the angry dead do.

“Women suicide bombers are especially desirable because, like stealth bombers, they are much less detectable. Women more easily conceal bombs under their clothes, passing themselves off as pregnant.” I listened to
Radio Peace and Love
as it faded in and out while I scrubbed the back of the hearse, where Al's body had taken its last ride, then slid one of the woven willow coffins onto the rollers — the HE and the twins, in their various manifestations, would have to share. I filled the space on either side of the rollers with pillows for Rainy and Frenchy. Rainy said she felt seasick already, remembering the last voyage we took, when they'd been stuck below deck in the dead-wagon. Rainy said when Frenchy'd told her we'd be going to an island in the Pacific she'd envisioned spending eternity under a palm tree drinking piña coladas, not under a “Chrimas” tree growing moss. I left a week's supply of food in the barn for Aged Orange, though I suspected the raccoons would eat what the peacocks didn't steal first.

“Drive Carefully: It Is Not Only a Car That Can be Recalled by Its Maker”, read the sign at the Christian vegetable stand, reminding me I was supposed to have made an appointment at Chubb's to have a brake job.

We boarded the
Spirit
after a short wait at the ferry terminal where we had to thread our way through a crowd of protesters calling themselves the Right to Turkey Lifers, whose cause it was to raise turkey-consciousness in the weeks leading up to Christmas. One of the demonstrators tapped on my window; I opened it, partially, to be polite, and she handed me a pamphlet. The Turkey Lifers intended to inject tainted blood into any Christmas turkey that made it onto Natural Lee's meat counter. The demonstrator said that persecuting these shy birds had become another unhealthy aggressive American tradition; she hoped to educate people and stop the “wholesale slaughter of turkeys,” and asked me to consider stuffing a vegetable marrow this year instead.

I didn't leave the car deck right away, but sat listening to the safety announcements. The world had become more preoccupied than ever with safety, and a part of me yearned for the freedom I had had, in comparison, when I was a hostage on Tranquilandia. The only people who spoke about safety on that lawless island were the drug barons, who equated safety with something found on a gun and advocated making the world a safer place for crime.

“We regret, no pets will be allowed above the car deck except guide dogs for the visually impaired,” the announcement continued. Rainy would only agree to leave her python in the car if the HE left his rat. I told them to work it out, and took the steep flight of stairs to the purser's office on the ship's main deck.

Rainy and Frenchy joined me shortly afterwards as I waited in line for the key to my cabin. The HE and Say Muh had gone to steal snacks in the ship's cafeteria, Frenchy said, and Rainy worried that they were up to no good. Frenchy said the HE wasn't about to blow anybody up, not if there wouldn't be enough casualties to justify wasting the explosives.

One day they gon kill us all down,
said Rainy, who didn't like the idea of her grandchild being used as a grenade before she had even popped out. On Tranquilandia, I recalled, it was considered the most efficient form of birth control — to kill guerrilleras while they were still in the womb.

I remembered what I'd heard on
Radio Peace and Love
, too, as I'd disinfected the hearse, earlier in the day. It had not occurred to me at the time that far from being pregnant, Say Muh had had, beneath her
jilbab
, enough explosives strapped to her body to blow us all out of the ocean.

When their offspring didn't return, even after an announcement that the ship's cafeteria was closing, Rainy and Frenchy and I left the cabin to look for them. The HE fought hard when Frenchy dragged him out from under a table where she found him going
glock-glock-glock
, preparing to detonate. In our cabin he locked himself in the bathroom, making machine-gun imitations until Frenchy became convinced he was going to flush himself down the toilet.

Say Muh had disappeared. Rainy thought she might have gone back to the car deck to keep her twin company, and said she'd look there next if I would check the outer deck — she didn't want to go outside and have a hair wreck. We left Frenchy, her lips at a crack in the bathroom door, listing off large calibre sniper rifles, and went in opposite directions: Rainy took the elevator to the car deck and I climbed more steps to the solarium where families who hadn't reserved cabins were staking out little nests. An old man, naked except for a pair of happy face boxer shorts, called out as I passed, “there'll be a high tide tonight.” I nodded to him and carried on past two blonde twins cross-dressing their Barbies, a man in a T-shirt that said “Will Work for Beer” munching his way through a bald head of lettuce, and a gang of teenagers on their way to a Marilyn Manson concert in Vancouver. But nowhere did I see a ghost in white robes embroidered with, I Have Special Permission to Enter Heaven.

As I searched for Say Muh I thought of the sign outside the Clínica Desaguadero
,
the bronze statue of a slave, his naked legs and arms breaking free of his chains.
No tenemos que pedir permiso para ser libres.
We do not need to ask permission to be free. I remembered, too, the attempt I had made to free myself, permanently, by taking my own life, when I was sixteen and my parents had refused to let me travel to Vancouver to see the Beatles in concert. My father found me before the pills took effect. Because of him I had missed my chance to become a teen suicide.

Since that time my body had stubbornly pre-empted every attempt I'd made to shortcut my journey from birth to death. Some, like Frenchy, would argue that the most valuable thing you could do with your life was to end it. But suicide required that you not only wished to die, but that you wished to kill, and be killed, also. While I had often wished for two out of three, I'd never had homicidal inclinations, despite what Vernal maintained, that those who do not wish to kill anyone often wished they were able.

I searched the outside deck but found no trace of Say Muh, and was on my way back to our cabin when I heard a familiar yelp. Toop leapt out from under a seat where he had been lying in ambush. He wrapped his front legs around me and covered my face with dog drool. “He remembers you,” Hooker said.

I stooped to pat the dog, who had slithered back under the chair, the familiar ‘W' creasing his forehead. “I told him if he didn't lay low he'd get himself busted and sentenced to a night on the car deck,” Hooker said. He reached down and rubbed his dog's ears. Our hands touched, and I drew mine back, as if I'd been shocked. Hooker had that effect on me. I couldn't hide my pleasure in seeing him again, even though that pleasure was now tainted by fear — about what he might have done to Al and the role I had played in helping him dispose of the body.

Grace lay stretched out across three chairs, clutching the headless body of Baby-Think-It-Over and the Moses basket she'd woven for her baby, stuffed to overflowing with baby clothes. She still wore, I saw, the pouch containing the ultra-sound photo, around her neck. She opened her eyes for a moment, then rolled them up into her head the way Frenchy did when it got too bright in my room. For a moment I thought she was going into labour, but she looked so frail now I wondered if that would even be possible. Grace seemed almost transparent, as if at any moment she might dissolve, leaving a baby in her place.

“She hasn't been doing so good lately,” Hooker said. “I'm taking her off-island to get her away for a while.”

I said I was sorry, and asked if I could help in any way. Grace opened her eyes again at the sound of my voice, hoisted herself up from her bed of chairs, and clutching Baby-Think-It-Over, headed in the direction of the washroom.

“If they would let her keep her kid . . .
that
might help,” Hooker said, reiterating what Agnes had told me, once Grace was out of earshot. Social Services still insisted she had to give him up, but they would have to drug her and cut him out of her if they wanted to take him away. “If they think she's going to let him go without some kind of a fight, they don't know Gracie.”

I told Hooker I had a cabin, and if Grace would be more comfortable there, she could have the bottom bunk. He didn't speak again until she reappeared making a bed for Baby-Think-It-Over in the Moses basket amongst the baby clothes. “You look sick,” he said.

“Then don't look at me,” she snapped. Her red hair hung over her face in greasy ropes; her pupils, black, unfocussed, had sucked up all the beauty from her eyes, making them look as if she'd left behind whatever happiness she'd known, on Kliminawhit.

Hooker told her I'd offered her a bed. “It hurts when I move,” she said. “You take the bed. I'll be okay, I'll sleep here with Toop.” She spread herself out over the three seats, resting her head next to the Moses basket.

Hooker covered her with his jacket and touched her cheek with the back of his palm. He told Toop to stay; Toop put his head down between his paws, his eyes full of that “I promise you I'm not going to do anything I shouldn't do” look.

“There'll be a high tide tonight,” the old man, still in his boxer shorts, proclaimed, as we made our way back through the rows of sleeping passengers.

“Thanks for the head's up, captain,” Hooker said.

When I opened our cabin door I saw Frenchy dangling Rainy by her ankles over the edge of the upper bunk. She dropped her when I switched on the overhead light, and Rainy landed, laughing, on top of Say Muh, who transformed herself back into a fine red mist. Rainy said she had found Say Muh in the children's play area, helping decorate a tree with snake's mirrors, her name for tinsel.