Stray Love (9 page)

I listened, trying to look intelligent by nodding a lot. I gathered that they were big on bartering. They would exchange a typewriter for a carton of cigarettes. They would perform a dance for a bowl of stew. Even though they were broke, they would do crazy things like paint their last few pound notes white.

It struck me that art was like a secret club and that being an artist earned you a ready-made identity. I wanted to fit in. I told a woman with pencil eyebrows and shiny red lips that I liked the square patterns on her shirt.

The woman grinned a gap-toothed smile.

I told a man: “I like the style of your trousers.”

The man looked down at his trousers, clearly moved.

The room grew more crowded and Pippa released my hand.

I began to feel more comfortable. When offered a glass of water I gulped it down. The adults were drinking wine from tumblers, empty mason jars, china cups, anything but wineglasses.

I imitated the clipped exclamations used by several of the German artists. “Jonas!” I shouted at a filmmaker. “Great name! I like saying that. Your tie! It’s very nice!”

Adults liked compliments.

I turned to Pippa and lifted my shoulders:
Am I doing well?
But she had drifted off. I glanced around the huge room, searching for her. Seeing that there was nowhere to hide, I tried not to panic. I waited a few minutes, then made my way around
the perimeter of the room. I walked with my hands behind my back in the manner of a man taking a thoughtful promenade, then managed another loop with hands in pockets. When I was done my third loop, I noticed clusters of people forming.

It turned out that “real party” actually meant major havoc. Everywhere I looked, there was something going on. There was a woman singing only with vowels and a man climbing a ladder while holding a large teapot of water in one hand. There was another man sitting at the top of a tall pillar, printing out cardboards signs that he handed down to people below. The messages said:
Talk to me. Ignore me.

I found Pippa sitting at a table wearing a headset and listening to a tape recorder. There must have been instructions on the recording, because every now and then she would stand on her chair or lift her leg or do something equally strange. She held out an extra headset for me. I put it on and listened to a woman’s voice saying: stand up and stomp the floor with your right foot twenty times. If your leg gets tired, slow down but continue.

Pippa soon wandered off and I was in mid-stomp when I noticed a skinny girl with shiny black hair walking across the room. She seemed right at home. She stopped to say something to the man on the ladder, who was now using his teapot to pour drops of water into a metal basin below.
Plink, plink.
It was possible that what she said to the man was
Why not pour it faster?
because suddenly there was a gush of water and the sound of heavy rain hitting a tin roof. He shook the teapot of the last drops. The girl nodded and stepped back. When he climbed back down, people milling around clapped as though he had finished something.

I set down my headset and when I looked up again, the girl
was standing next to me. I could see now that she was about my age.

“Enjoying yourself?” she said.

“It’s not too bad.”

“I’m Kiyomi.”

“I’m Marcel.”

I looked down and noticed she wasn’t wearing shoes. Her toes curled and uncurled.

“Is your mother doing something too?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Is your mother performing tonight?”

“I don’t have a mother.” I had never come right out and said that before.

There was a silence while she looked me over. I suddenly worried that I had ruined things by being so open, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“Who’s that, then?” she asked, pointing at Pippa in the corner.

I took a look. “That’s Pippa. She’s my guardian.”

We stood watching for a moment. Pippa was speaking to a rich-looking woman dressed in a beautiful Chinese coat. It was embroidered with golden bridges and rippling river scenes and glowed like metal in the light. Pippa touched the coat.

“She’s a window dresser,” I said, sitting down beside her at the edge of the table.

“All the men are staring at her but she doesn’t even notice. I think she’s very pretty, don’t you?”

I nodded and felt the heat rise in my face.

“She’s beautiful,” she continued, “but unhappy.”

I looked at Kiyomi. Who was this girl? What else had she noticed?

“Here,” she said, and reached into the pocket of her grey smocked dress and handed me a peppermint.

We carried on talking, with Kiyomi stating opinions and me agreeing with them, taken aback by her confidence.

“Natsumi will be on next. She’s my mum.”

Just then, a woman walked out into the centre of the room. She stripped down until she was wearing a paper frock, then stood motionless. I thought she might be the most exhausted-looking woman I had ever seen, but then she spotted Kiyomi and her expression lifted. The chatter around us died down and I noticed the sound of paper being crumpled and torn coming from a set of speakers. I glanced around and tried to figure out what was going on. It was amazing how everyone just watched and listened, agreeing to go wherever the performance took them—no matter what it said or didn’t say.

I looked at Kiyomi. Her eyes peeked out from underneath long bangs and she seemed far-away. Even when her mother ripped open the side of her paper dress, revealing her naked backside, her expression stayed neutral. I had the sense that Kiyomi was waiting for the performance to be over. The second it ended, she turned to me, and sighed.

I didn’t know what to say about her mother’s performance so I said, “I’ve never met my father.”

“Well,” she said, “I guess we have that in common.”

She nudged me with her elbow and said, “Hey, don’t look so serious.” Then she slung her arm around my shoulder. “Don’t worry. I like you, Marcel. Even when you’re serious.”

After she sauntered off to find her mother, I was still charged by her presence. It was as though the mere act of sitting with her had tuned my senses. Someone went to open a window,
and the wind blew a spray of rainwater into the room. Beads of water sparkled in the light.

At some point I grew drowsy and drifted off to a corner to sleep. I don’t know how long I dozed, but when I finally awoke—jarred by a chair toppling over under the weight of too many coats—I looked down at my legs and saw that someone had placed a wool cape over me as a makeshift blanket.

A few minutes later I found Pippa standing by the entrance, talking to a very tall man with thick grey hair. He was taller than the door frame. His trousers hung on legs as long as stilts. He wore a badge that said
President of Maldeb.
I noticed a stick protruding from his right fist and asked him what he was holding in his hand. He unfurled it. A blank flag. He looked pleased and presidential.

“It’s very beautiful,” Pippa said. “He’s the President of Maldeb. That’s
Bedlam
spelled backwards.” She shared this information quietly, as if it were a delicate secret.

When I finally sank into bed that night, I was unable to sleep. I stared at my clock and wondered what Oliver was doing. I looked out the window at the sky and pictured Oliver looking at the same sky. I didn’t like the idea that Oliver was happier wherever he was, but I didn’t want him to be miserable either.

Pippa saw the light under my door and came in and lay down beside me.

“Can’t sleep?”

“No.”

“Are you thinking about Oliver?”

I nodded.

“I thought so. I miss him too.”

“We haven’t heard from him in almost a week.”

“True, but you shouldn’t worry.”

“No.”

“Sometimes he travels to places where he can’t call.”

“I know.”

The next morning, I awoke shivery and the flat was full of cold drafts. I heard Stasha gently scolding Pippa in the other room.

“You left the front door wide open when you came in last night. What were you thinking?”

“I guess I forgot.”

“Look at this place, Pip. Marcel needs some stability and order.”

Pippa said nothing.

Stasha then tidied up the flat while complaining aloud about Pippa’s erratic housekeeping.

The next day when I returned from school, Pippa was in the kitchen wearing a man’s shirt backwards, in smock fashion. She was pretending to be domestic, it seemed. There was a drinking glass with floppy buttercups in the middle of the table and she was cracking eggs into a slick of bacon grease. Her hair was pinned back, and her eyes seemed more alert.

“Come give a kiss,” she said, tilting her cheek towards me. “How was school today, darling?”

Later we sat outside on the front stoop and watched a man rebuild a garden wall at the edge of his yard. He replaced the rotting green bricks with new grey bricks, waiting for the first row to dry before starting on the next layer. When he was done, he lifted his hand and gave us a wave and we each waved back.

“So what do you think?” she said after the man had left. “You’ve been here for two months. Are you settled in?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good.”

I think that’s all she needed to hear. She didn’t have the strength to keep up the domestic act. After that brief exchange, she began to spend more time alone, wandering off whenever she felt like it.

I eavesdropped outside the kitchen one day and heard Stasha tell Pippa that she was tired of her behaving like a vagrant.

“I can’t keep track of you,” Stasha said, and Pippa muttered something about Stasha taking some time to do some strolling of her own. (“It might make you less tense.”)

After a few minutes, Stasha came out and went to the hallway. I watched her bang the mud and grass off Pippa’s shoes and pick bits of leaf from her coat. She seemed furious at first, grumbling under her breath, but gradually her tidying motions grew slower, and a little sadder.

A few weeks had passed since I had met Kiyomi at the warehouse event, but I found myself thinking of her constantly. I finally mentioned her name to Pippa, and asked if she would help me track her down. She made a few calls and discovered that Kiyomi lived fairly near us with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.

Another week went by and then one day the doorbell rang and there was Kiyomi, standing on the doorstep beside her mother. She was wearing plain tweed trousers and an argyle vest. Her bangs lay flat against her forehead, the left side of her hair mashed upwards from sleep.

Kiyomi’s mother was beaming at me. She grabbed me by the shoulders. “Marcel,” she said. “I’ve been hearing all about you. I’m Natsumi.”

Kiyomi grimaced, then pointed. “Let’s go inside.”

I gave Kiyomi a tour of the flat while Natsumi and Pippa chatted in the kitchen. We made our way through every room, with Kiyomi gazing admiringly at Pippa’s various collections, the colourful pieces of fabric everywhere, and me gazing admiringly at her.

When we ran out of things to look at, I showed her my sketchbooks.

The next time she visited she came alone, carrying her own oversized notebook under her arm. “Go on,” she said, urging me to take a peek.

I hesitated, steeling myself for what I might find. Seeing me pause, she opened the book herself and leafed through the first few pages—a girl holding a swan with two heads, a man walking a giraffe across an ocean, another girl shooting butterflies with a bow and arrow. It took me a moment to absorb what she was showing me.

“Wait,” I said, putting my hand on her wrist.

I looked through the rest of the book slowly. Some pages were completely mapped with complex webs: tree branches, root systems, leaf veins. Elaborate flowering things. I looked back at her, in awe.

Kiyomi started coming over regularly. We passed much of the spring and summer together—talking, listening to records and drawing. She lined up her coloured pencils on the floor and drew while lying on her tummy. I sat at my desk. We shared a taste for tidy, detailed renderings, though hers tended to be a bit stranger than mine. When we showed our work to Pippa and her friends, they admired our efforts but encouraged more mess, more active spattering. They didn’t see why we were so hung up on making pictures
of things.
Confirming their suspicions, we arranged still-lifes: fruit, flowers, dead birds.

“They don’t understand, Marcel. You and I have our own way,” she said. Whenever she said things like that, it made me feel incredibly good, as if we were destined to be together, safe in our secret place of knowing.

When Kiyomi didn’t want to draw, we found other ways to occupy ourselves. One day, when we were “playing house,” she pointed at the bed and said, “Why don’t you lie down there?”

So I did and she got into bed beside me, pressing her back right against my chest. “Pretend we’re sleeping,” she whispered.

She took my arm and wrapped it around her waist; I had never held anyone so close before. I could feel her breathing, her heart beating,
dun, dun, dun,
thick and slow. And then, when it seemed she was deeply asleep and I had almost nodded off, she jumped up and down on the bed, shouting, “Up you get, you’ll be late for work!”

I did not see it at the time, of course, but all we wanted was a normal life. Surrounded by artists who shunned anything traditional, and separated by circumstance from others our age, we were becoming odd counter-revolutionary children.

I kept reminding myself how lucky I was to have Oliver and Pippa in my life. Whenever I would get a letter from Oliver I would feel embarrassed about my pettiness, my quest for an ordinary family. I had no business complaining. There I was wishing that some Belgian artist hadn’t finished the last of the milk, while children my age in other countries were really suffering.

I have since met journalists who do what Oliver did, who find anonymity in airports and oblivion in crumbling hotels and
serenity in room service, who watch one country vanish into another. To some detractors, they are disaster cattle—a migratory herd eternally searching for a new grazing patch. They thrive in the gap—arriving after the tourists and foreign residents have fled and before the missionaries and relief workers descend. Unlike the latter, they offer little in the way of aid or solid assistance. They come with different purposes, some professional (to shine a spotlight, influence public opinion) and some more personal (to feel needed and alive, to outrun their feelings or families). They travel with different tricks: cigarette filters in the nostrils to keep out the stench of death, a dummy notebook to share with officials, pockets full of hard candies to stave off hunger.