Red Girl Rat Boy (3 page)

Blue Clouds

Often no one notices the problem,
the pattern till a man’s in his thirties or even forties. By then he’s had several—serious relationships, the comrades say. Serial monogamy, the coms say that too. If his teens were examined there’d be no surprise finding he’d favoured girlfriends with dear little sisters, but here at the hall people mostly arrive in their twenties. Their time before the movement is hidden, except what they pick to tell, and telling is cleaning.

Back up.

Such a man, when he falls for a woman she has a daughter. Maybe two. Could be sons also, but he’s not aiming for importance in the life of a small man. It’s the small woman he wants. Oh, not to rape, though maybe a hug she’ll remember on a birthday, or when she’s back from summer camp. No, he wants to implant his image, so if she thinks Man it’s him. He puts his arm round her mother, tongue-kisses, turns to smile.
This is how it’s done. Your mum likes this.

An offer to babysit—heard it, seen it. Smiling, the young mum goes off to her CR group. This guy really wants her to be liberated! He plays with the little girl, helps with homework, is fun with her friends, and if she’s in her teens lets her know sideways that boys haven’t much to offer. He and she chat about how immature they are, she deserves better.

Then, always, he’s suddenly charmed by a fresh girl/woman combo.

Break-up, stale mother alone again, seen that too. A child who misses him can be comforted, but a teen turns sour, specially to revolutionary mum.

Exceptions, yes. Roy’s a carpenter, in his late forties. On him, those years look good. He and Marion and her daughter came to Vancouver from the Calgary branch ten years ago. At the Friday suppers R and M are side by side at the big table. They dance, they picket and poster and go to conventions. Marion’s a lifer at the post office, friendly, considerate. Not much for theory. Jennifer just finished high school. Hasn’t joined the Youth. Comes to the Oct Rev and May Day banquets, that’s all. Sullen.

I asked the old one, “Who’s her dad?”

“None of your beeswax,” she told me.

The true sign of no nastiness with Roy? He and Marion and Jennifer don’t live together. To be under the same roof, that’s what the girl-hunters plot, but this mum and her daughter keep their own place.

Enough chit-chat.

The bathrooms at the movement hall are Monday. The Youth can’t manage booze, not only them either, so after every weekend there’s vomit. The divided bucket has cleaning solution one side, water the other, so hot it hurts. Dip mop, use the side-press wringer, repeat. Repeat. Disinfect the wheezing toilets. Rub abrasive cream on porcelain. Shake deodorizing powder on the floor, sweep.

Done, the bathrooms don’t look like ads, but they’re better than the Cavalier’s. Monday’s next job that is, down the street. Pub washrooms take twice as long to clean. Shovel, more like. Stinking loops of paper that never reached the bowl, condoms, underpants, butts, coke, bloody pads draped over the pedal-cans, smashed glass, the red crushed wax of lipstick.

N

The problem of the strong women is different.

The old one’s in her sixties. Pushy as hell to survive and support her girl (near forty now) and do the political. Husband? AWOL decades back, couldn’t manage her. Such a life, rebelling through Depression, War, Cold War, struggling for abortion and birth control. Still at it. Startled and happy to meet today’s young libbers. Hardworking beyond hardworking. Known to every lefty in the city, admired.

“No point any man sniffing around thank you very much. I like my independence.”

Used to be, her typewriter rattled on for hours. Arthritis now. Hates help.

Her daughter’s the opposite. When she comes round, not often, always for money, the old one’s sad after. Stays a long time in a bathroom to re-braid her hair, the tiara brown still with grey woven in. Out again. Slam. “Jake, you call this sink clean?”

Marion sometimes sits with her. Quiet talk. A hug round the shoulders.

Back
up
!

Women like the old one don’t mean harm. They’re just big. Breathing normally, they suck out all the oxygen. Beloveds can suffocate.

Enough.

Cleaner, that’s the job here at the hall. And handyman.

Why can’t the TU comrades—revolutionary electricians, carpenters, fishermen, longshoremen—shim the filing cabinet, rewire the ceiling light, put a new ribbon in the Remington when the old one’s fingers won’t? Because they work. Or, in this period of intensifying struggle, they’re on strike. Locked out. A demo, flying picket, union meeting. Weekdays, they’re not here.

The men on staff, different. Before, they were students. Can’t put a handle on a pencil sharpener, let alone finesse the old Gestetner. Once the present Organizer took twenty minutes by the clock fussing over whether to phone Toronto Centre long-distance. (No.) The O swivels his chair about, reads, wouldn’t notice a mass uprising at the front door.

Last week the old one reamed him out when a still-meaty chicken carcass vanished from the fridge.

“There’s petty cash in this hall, too,” shouting. “Typewriters, easy to pawn. Open your eyes and ears, asshole!”

Back up back up
back up.

Girl-hunters, strong women—these are
types.
Learned to identify, over two decades of cleaning here. Others too.

The too-enthusiastic contact who toils at the hall night and day for months, then ceases. No word. “Here on a visit,” the coms state.

The misfits, so-called, those with a serious lack, a family it may be, looks, social ease, fluency in English, even a job. They want compensation.

So do those mourning a religion or a love. Mourning a baby, once, but after two years dying of grief she revived and left.

As for the nutcases, no one anywhere knows what to do about them. If forcibly removed in ambulances, such coms may return to throw furniture and rant.

Back
up
!

Roy too lives in the old low-rise near English Bay. The Sandringham. Good construction, not like now. Solid wood doors, brass carpet-rods on the stairs (tricky to clean), small delivery cupboards next to each apartment door. For milk, long ago. Horse-drawn cart no doubt. Roy’s on the top floor. Says Hello. Chats at the mailboxes, or in the laundry near the little basement suite. In exchange for interior maintenance, reduced rent. A deal. Ideal. Once Roy wisecracked about old mole Revolution, underground. Nothing to say occurred. The place in fact is bright.

Most tenants are elderly, female, alone. Some dodder.

Not Mrs. Wolfe. That Saturday she came to me. She’d been away a day or two on Bowen, lovely weather, and now feared for Miss Nugent above her, who did not answer door or phone.

“But I heard a tap on my ceiling.”

To the second floor. In Mrs. W’s bare spare kitchen, listening upwards to silence.

Then to the manager’s apartment. What a jeezly mess. Russell’s always sozzled since his wife died, couldn’t locate a key. Mrs. W’s eyebrows up to the hairline.

The stairs again, third floor, seeking Roy’s skill and strength. Rap rap.

Mrs. W pointing, “That milk cupboard. Could someone get through?”

Broad male shoulders the problem, not only Roy’s.

He said, “I’ll phone Marion. Jennifer might.”

Not long after, the two arrived. The girl slender as celery.

Roy broke open Miss N’s milk-door.

Mrs. Wolfe’s trill. “Emily! Emily?”

Nothing.

The girl’s arms, head, shoulders into the aperture, Marion lifting legs to help. Jennifer’s bum, compressed, wiggling through. Roy’s gaze. Savouring. A tumble, a scramble. The latch clicking open.

What was expected. Not dead but cold, one hip wrongly angled. Ugly breathing. The kitchen floor puddled. Been there two days anyway, the ambulance guessed.

Miss N taken, feet first as the saying goes, return unlikely. Siren fading. Mrs. W weepy, Roy and Jennifer slipping out, useless Russell barging in.

Marion. “A cup of tea, Mrs. Wolfe? Your place? Best to take your friend’s keys.” Poking through the shabby purse, more tears.

Left alone to clean up, also as expected. Floor soon clear, but Roy to be all rethought. Marion too. The girl didn’t arrive alone. Not allowed? Those separate apartments. How did they live in Calgary?

N

Each Monday, the quality of the previous
evening’s branch meeting is palpable in the hall.

Attacking the bathrooms, even a humble contact—a man who’s never joined, never paid dues, invented a party-name, raised a hand, spoken his word, taken to the streets, held a banner, waved a leaflet, a man who only cleans for statutory hours as he cleans all the rental spaces in this building, offices, storage rooms, cubbies for solo notaries accountants psychics—even that man can sense last night’s doings. Fear sometimes. Anger, agitation. The tang of power.

To sense.

Long long ago, a so-called friend of the mum whispered she hadn’t wanted this baby. Tried to have it out, failed. Illegal then, still. This heard at thirteen, approx. Why that whisper? Mean. A child’s word, and correct. Rancid with meanness. Much thought given to that. Life alone with the mum, scanty hard rough, tempers lost voices raised but never an unwanted feel, not even with the school troubles,
abc
and
xyz
and all between. She wasn’t a big person, either. Plenty of air. Though large when gone.

Years later, recognition: that tale-teller’s envy of the mum who had her failure by her side. Warmth ran all the way back through the shared time.

N

Back up
back up.

The hall, one morning. Like sniffing leftovers, when the nose dictates
On the turn
. Irrevocable. Trouble.

At big tables the coms fold, staple, lick stamps, smoke, say little. No printing sounds from the back room, the monster’s on the fritz. This week’s forum leaflet, a purplish ditto. Nobody’s pleased. Papers all over the O’s office, wastebasket slopping. His plaid shirt stiff with sweat. What a reek. The worker daily handling dirt grime scum cum dust rot grit mould ooze shit pee grease slime puke scuzz—fresh overalls contain his clean body.

On such a day, routine sustains. Ammonia. Baking soda. Wet-mop snaking over lino. The power of bleach. New rubber gloves. The chrome, where not pitted, shines.

Tired.

The old one, not talking, sternly brings Jake’s coffee.

Not enough sugar. After twenty years she should know.

All else done at last, check the stuck Gestetner. Ink can’t get through. Roller? Drum? Something inside, invisible, and no time now to take it apart.

Tired. A nap on the fold-out cot? Better to exit this bad atmosphere. The Cavalier’s dirt, a relief.

N

Late afternoon, same day. going home.

Mrs. Wolfe outside the Chinese grocery, holding a turnip. “Jake, that Jennifer is in the building.”

Clarification. Mrs. W has gone up to air out Miss N’s place, launder the lonely teatowel and undies in the wicker hamper. Saw the girl.

“I’ve never liked that man’s looks. Trouble coming.”

In she goes, to pay for her vegetable.

She too sees types.

If she met the old one?

Scorn, first, for both. Prim proper, tough coarse. But they’d find links. Hard work, care for others, disapproval. Mrs. W used to be a crack typist.

Looking up at Roy’s windows. That girl in his bed, bum and all. The mother alone.

Telling should have happened then, right then. A word to the old one. To the women’s fraction leader, not that Ms. Loose Tits ever notices a cleaner’s work. To the O, even. Should, should. Telling is cleaning, but. But she was under The Sandringham’s roof, night after night. Close by.

Wake, sense her. Once, up the carpeted stairs. Silence. Moon backlighting stained glass. The corridor still, by Roy’s. No vibrations.

Some days later, he’s in the laundry room. Cross. Shoving sheets into the dryer.

“Nothing but meddling old women here.”

The couple find somewhere else. At night, the building’s different.

N

On Wednesday, tension coats the off-smell
at the hall, tension like before a demo, or a bitter forum where everyone knows the TU coms will haul some yelling sectarian out. What though? There’s been no announcement.

Kitchen today.

After the big Friday suppers it’s late when the coms clean up, all are tired, the fluorescents cast distorting shadows. Mondays, bathrooms. Wednesdays: degrease. Sharp liquids force soft fats to huddle into little orbs, while hard ones slide off like scabs from counters, sinks, oven racks, shelving, baking pans, soup-kettles.