Travelling Light (14 page)

COMING
HOME

FIRE
STORIES

Shaun Breen told fire stories. He had come to Montreal from Newfoundland with his mother. She worked in the Snow Hill Coffee Shop at the corner of Queen Mary Road and Côte-des-Neiges but was always there to pick him up after school: a blonde woman puffing a cork-tipped cigarette, a ski jacket thrown over her waitress uniform.

Shaun was the smallest boy in our class. His clothes were covered with burns. There were black charred dots on the sleeves of his shirts, scorch marks on the seat of his pants. He told the fire stories at recess or while we waited in the cold mornings for the janitor to open the school doors.

His father had been a fireman who'd broken his back falling off a ladder trying to rescue a crippled boy trapped in the attic of a house on fire.

There'd been a blaze in a movie theatre in St. John's, Newfoundland, and one hundred children had been smothered by smoke or crushed by crowds rushing for the exits, while Shaun and his mother had escaped by sliding through a trap door that dropped them into the waters of the harbour.

There was a fire at their apartment on Côte-des-Neiges Road and Shaun had awakened smelling smoke, had run downstairs and across the street, in pyjamas, to smash the delicate glass on a telephone-pole fire alarm. Water from the fire hoses broke through the windows and ripped holes in the walls. Live wires, pulled down by the ice, snapped out blue tongues of flame upon the pavement.

Our school, St. Kevin's, was in Côte-des-Neiges, a neighbourhood composed of grid streets and plain brick apartment houses that hadn't existed before the war, when there had been only fields of snow and summer melons. It was the Catholic school closest to where my parents lived. That's why I went there instead of Roslyn School or Iona, which were nearer but administered by the Protestant school board. My mother drove me to school the first day in our Buick Century. I wore a grey flannel suit with short pants, a white shirt, a red necktie, brown oxfords, thick woollen socks. My grandmother sent the grey flannel suits from England. I hated them, but whenever I outgrew one, another would arrive in a brown paper parcel tied with string.

The fire stories always ended the same way, with Shaun's escape, while around him other victims, buildings, whole towns were consumed by fire's voracious appetite.

I was at St. Kevin's for five years before being dispatched to boarding school in the Eastern Townships. I was always first in my class. The other pupils at St. Kevin's were Italians, West Indians, poor Irish. There were only a few like me who came from streets on the slope of the mountain, whose mothers spoke good English and whose fathers came to Parents' Nights wearing business suits. Most of the parents were working people like Shaun's mother, who took whatever shifts she could get at the coffee shop and probably never attended a Parents' Night. Whenever I saw her, she was waiting for Shaun at the schoolyard fence. Even when it was below zero she was puffing a cigarette, shivering in her jacket and her half-undone, hurriedly-stepped-into snow boots. She took Shaun back to the coffee shop, where he would eat his supper at the counter, then do his homework in one of the booths until her shift was over.

Once there was a man in Newfoundland who had caught fire inside. He didn't realize it until smoke started coming out of his mouth. There was nothing anyone could do. The man was burned to a crisp.

Shaun left that school in the middle of the winter. It was the sort of district where people moved around a lot, where children were being shifted in and out of schools all the time, so it wasn't a big surprise when Shaun disappeared; half the class that had started in September wouldn't be there by June. The janitor came in and removed his desk, rearranging the others so there wouldn't be an empty space. Later a Trinidadian girl joined the class and the desks were rearranged again.

I forgot Shaun after a couple of weeks and I never saw him again. I left St. Kevin's, left all schools eventually, left the country. It was decades later that I remembered the fire stories.

My wife and I had come from California to spend Christmas with my parents. Jean had never been in Montreal, so I took her downtown on the day before Christmas to look around, to see if the streets were as I remembered them — cold, grey, crowded.

We had a bitter fight that started on a bus coming down Côte-des-Neiges Road. Jean ducked away from me at the entrance to the Guy Street Metro station and I went after her, down and down those long escalators. I waited until the train pulled out, hoping I would see her standing on the empty platform, but she had disappeared. I waited for the next train, trying to decide what to do. Finally I took the escalator back up and started walking along St. Catherine Street. It was brutally cold and people were wrapped up, hunched into the wind. I bought a copy of the
New York Times
at a newsstand. I felt like going home but I didn't want to turn up at my parents' without Jean. I didn't want them guessing we had had a fight.

The fight had actually been going on for a long time and had to do with all the pain of living together, the fact that we didn't have enough money, that Jean was unhappy with me and beginning to suspect my moods. We were living in Los Angeles, ten blocks back from Venice Beach, in a neighbourhood of drug dealers, murders, abandoned cars, sunshine. I can't remember what we thought we were trying to do there. I do remember riding the Super Shuttle from Venice out to
LAX
at the beginning of that Christmas trip and seeing a car, a
BMW
, on fire on Lincoln Boulevard — pulled over onto the median strip, flaming and casting up smoke in the December sunshine.

I went into a restaurant on St. Catherine to have a cup of coffee and read the paper. The
Times
was the only paper I could bear to read in those days. I'd been living in so many different cities that local papers didn't make sense to me. I loved the
Times
for the same reason I loved highway atlases and airports: it symbolized removal, success, escape.

I ordered coffee and toast and started reading news of the world. On the fourth page there was a feature article about parents who punished their children by forcing them to sit on hot stoves, searing their flesh with the tips of cigarettes, pressing electric irons against their buttocks.

I thought right away of Shaun Breen and the fire stories, surprised at how easily the details came back to me after twenty-five years. A tired-looking waitress kept refilling my cup. The manager was standing behind the cash, shaking hands with a customer. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood — the next day was Christmas. Montreal seemed like a cheerful small town.

I finally put on my overcoat, gloves, and scarf, left a tip on the counter, and pushed through the revolving door onto St. Catherine Street. Walking from Phillips Square to Guy Street and back again, cheeks hurting with the wind, I told myself I was searching for Jean, but I wasn't, not really. We'd always needed time to cool down after a fight. We wouldn't have had anything to say if we'd run into each other in those crowds doing last-minute shopping. I'd have ducked into a store to avoid her or crossed the street quickly against the light, and she'd have done the same.

If I'd happened to meet someone who recognized me, someone on St. Catherine Street who knew me from the old days, and if they had asked me how things were, I'd have told a fire story.

I would have described the dozens of winter bonfires that burned at night out on Venice Beach, the crowds of the homeless and crazy that gathered around the flames, and the sick smoke that hung across our neighbourhood in the morning. I would have admitted to an obsession I had been developing about the gas stove in our kitchen: checking the valve a dozen times a day; phoning the gas company almost every week; worrying that the thing would blow up while we slept, blow us from our bed, blow the whole ramshackle building into the sky. I might have told about the flaming
BMW
out on Lincoln Boulevard, how it had seared itself into my memory while so much else that was more important was being neglected, put aside, forgotten.

In the fire stories Shaun himself was always being rescued. He was never really in danger. Dogs would awaken him by licking his face, then lead him to safety through rooms packed with smoke. His father would take him by the hand and bring him to a window and, saying a Hail Mary, would finally pitch him outside. Shaun would fall slowly, tumbling and turning the way he had been especially trained, falling like an acrobat through the smoke, the flames, the cinders; bouncing on the rubbery net the men held out, bouncing so expertly he was high up in the air again, climbing slowly, slowly; down below they were cheering as once more he began his descent.

It was the middle of the night in Montreal, Christmas Eve, in the room that had been mine when I was a boy, and I was telling my wife, after we had made love, all that I remembered of the
New York Times
article and Shaun Breen. I was describing the pattern of concentric black rings that could only have been scorched onto the seat of his pants by an electric stove burner. Jean was so upset that she finally got out of bed and went to find a phone directory. She brought it back to the bedroom and started searching to see if a Shaun Breen was listed. She wanted me to find him, to telephone him in the morning.
Shaun, are you alive? Did you survive?

Luckily there were no Breens in the Montreal phone book. Then I remembered the reason Shaun had left St. Kevin's was that he and his mother were returning to Newfoundland. The rest of us learned where Newfoundland was by looking at a map of Canada the teacher unrolled over the blackboard. She described the long journey Shaun and his mother faced, by train, by bus, by ferry across the Cabot Strait in midwinter.

Everyone else in the house was asleep. After a while Jean slept, but she awoke after an hour, disturbed by my restlessness. Finally she switched on the light and started to read a Henry James novel that she'd picked up at the bookstore on the Venice boardwalk, near the café where we sometimes ate breakfast on Sundays, when the winter sky was clear and California sunlight sparked on the waves.

I got out of bed, telling her I was going downstairs to make some tea. We could read all night if we wanted to. We could sleep all the next day, which was Christmas.

I heard my father snoring as I passed my parents' bedroom. I went downstairs and into the kitchen, where I filled a kettle and set it on the stove. A full moon shone through the windows and there was no need to switch on any lights. After a couple of minutes the steam ripped out a high-pitched whistle and I recalled Shaun's oval, darkened face; his hair, cropped short by blunt scissors; his tense, nail-biting expression.

My parents' house smelled clean, dusted, polished, at peace, and I stood with my feet bare on linoleum while upstairs my wife waited for me, my parents slept, and Shaun repeated stories that possessed a terrifying power and were fixed, like dreams, with perfect detail. I was thinking of our marriage, our apartment in California, the Pacific Ocean, what it meant to have come this far and to be bending around now, falling backwards, returning.

FIONA THE
EMIGRANT

Alun did himself in with an overdose. Fiona always knew exactly what her father would say — “What'd you expect, getting involved with a fellow like that?” She didn't have an answer.

A few weeks later she quit Aberdeen University and her mother, who ran a bank branch, met her at a tearoom and gave her cash for a plane ticket to Canada and said, “You have to get away from this country.”

Fiona's parents had been emigrants. Fiona was born on Vancouver Island but her family had returned to Scotland when she was two. As a teenager she often dreamed of a deep green tossing sea and her father said this was a memory of the Pacific Coast, where he had endured a collapsed partnership and six different sales agent's jobs, hating them all, before swallowing his defeat and booking their passage home.

“Don't tell your father I gave you the money,” Fiona's mother declared.

Fiona flew from Prestwick to wintery Toronto, where her aunt and uncle met her at the airport and took her to their suburban home. Their living room looked over a golf course buried under snow. During the first couple of weeks in Toronto it snowed constantly, and the sidewalks in front of the house were scraped by a little diesel plow, pushing through the drifts while snow was still falling. Fiona fell into a pattern, rising early and helping her aunt get the older children ready for school, doing housework and minding the baby while her aunt went out shopping. There was a lot of shopping, a lot of eating. In Scotland she'd been a vegetarian. Here she wolfed it all down: hamburgers with ketchup for supper, cheese sandwiches for lunch, chocolate cereal in the morning, liquid diets from a tin, bowls of popcorn while watching films on television. The sidewalk plows with their scuttling engines and steel blades worked at night, scoring the concrete. Their noise made Fiona feel protected inside the house, cocooned.

Her aunt kept urging her to go downtown to see the sights. And one afternoon she set out, intending to take the subway to Queen Street, in the heart of the city, but she got no farther than the neighbourhood shopping strip a half-mile from her aunt's house. She was frozen; her feet felt raw; she had never been so cold. Instead of crossing the street to the subway station, she ducked into a café and ordered a cup of coffee. It was eleven o'clock in the morning and the café was empty. Her toes ached, she could barely move her fingers, and she was starting to hate Canada with a deep, active, personal resentment. As if the country were a stranger who'd crept up on her. It was like being knifed or beaten.

The white walls of the café was decorated with woven shawls in electric neon colours, and travel posters of jungle and beaches. The dark-haired man behind the cash register filled her cup and watched her sipping coffee. It was black and bitter. She'd been in Toronto for two weeks without once venturing from the suburb, but the day before she'd seen a flyer for a Jamaican dance club on Queen Street. Her aunt had never been that far downtown. Her uncle said Queen Street was where the gays lived.

Gays, Jamaicans — life. Fiona thought she might look for work down there. A waitressing job. A place of her own.

The dark man approached with the coffee pot. This wasn't downtown Toronto; this was still North York, and he wasn't Jamaican, but he did look somewhat dark, up here in the suburban snows.

“More coffee?”

“I've a buzz on already,” Fiona told him. “I don't think I could take another.”

His tight Calvin Klein jeans had been ironed and he wore a tightly fitted turtleneck sweater, baby blue.

“It's good coffee,” Fiona said.

“You think?”

He took a stained Xeroxed menu from the next table, where it was wedged between the salt and pepper and the paper napkin dispenser. He handed it to Fiona.

“Not hungry. Sorry.”

Most of the dishes —
pupusas
, black beans, tamales — were under ten dollars. The menu was in Spanish and English.

“No, no, but the menu, the style — what do you think? Okay, yes?”

“It looks very good.”

“Businessman's lunch, you see? Good idea?”

“Probably.” She stood up. Buttoning her jacket she felt dizzy. Central heating forced stale air through steel ducts, and the taste, the flavour, of metal was everywhere in Canada, a metal country, hard and cold and buried deep. She stood gripping the back of a flimsy chair. She'd never seen anyone faint but knew she was about to.

He offered her a matchbook printed
Café Roberto Salvadoran Specialty
.

“I am Roberto. Would you meet my family?” He gestured towards the kitchen. She could hear a baby crying.

She didn't want to go downtown. She felt weak, chilled, without hope. She looked down at her boots, stained with salt from the mush on the sidewalks, then shut her eyes. She felt an impulse to undress. Strip off her pea jacket, pull off the woollen muffler and turtleneck jumper, kick free of her boots, step out of her too-tight jeans, and lie on the restaurant floor on her pile of clothes. Her white body padded with fat from all the junk food. Writhing on the floor while the restaurant owner watched, helpless, awed, disgusted.

Instead she followed him numbly to the kitchen. It was warm. Inside every room in Toronto there was a current of dried stuporous heat that made the Canadian wind seem demented when you had to face it. They scattered tons of gritty, salty sand on their roads, their days stank of sodium chloride.

Roberto, swarthy, smelled of aftershave. She disliked scent on men. Alun had smelled clean though he wore the same clothes from week to week. Liked to take hot showers but couldn't, not often, not in the Glasgow squat or the borrowed rooms in Aberdeen. He enjoyed shaving. A clean, soapy scent, like a baby fresh out of its bath, was one of the many innocences about him.

Two women and a baby in the kitchen. A television tuned to her aunt's favorite daytime show,
Wheel of Fortune
. Roberto introduced his teenaged sister, Isabel, wearing bright pink sweatpants and mopping the floor.

His mother barely nodded when Fiona was introduced. She spoke sharply to Roberto in Spanish, irritated about something.

No one was watching TV. Roberto found Fiona a stool, poured her another coffee. Another teenager, a boy, came in from the cold-storage locker carrying a crate of stubby green bananas.

“My brother, Franco.”

Roberto sent Franco out to the dining room to prep tables for lunch.

“The people — humans — are why I am in business,” Roberto said. “The exchange. I like to talk. I am fond of it. You believe this is a good locale for the restaurant business?”

”Don't ask me.”

“In Salvador I was teacher, then taxi driver and owner of garage. My ambition is, to be a dealer.”

“What sort of dealer?”

“Toyota!” He smiled. “I will earn a franchise. First a small garage, body shop. But I will be a big car dealer. You'll see.”

The baby was asleep in its cradle on the counter. Roberto rocked back on his wooden stool, a confident entrepreneur. He lit a Player's cigarette and blew smoke to the ceiling. Maybe the family had suffered in Central America, maybe he was a refugee, or maybe he was a retired policeman or soldier, even a war criminal. Why had he brought her in here? Clearly the women, mother and sister, believed that she was beneath their Roberto. He took the cigarette from his lips.

“The autos, they are the secrets of my success.”

His mother, recognizing the passion in her son's voice, smiled. The baby began crying. Isabel took him in her arms and started to jiggle him.

“What's the baby's name?”

“Miguel. The father, he is dead.”

Isabel was ignoring them and the baby was howling and Fiona suddenly knew if she were not present Isabel would be unbuttoning her blouse and nursing her son.

“What do I owe for coffee?”

“No, no, you are my guest.”

Roberto held open the swinging door and followed her out into the dining room. Franco was setting candles in coloured glass jars on every table. There were no customers. People in this suburban neighbourhood probably never went out for lunch, they stayed at home like Fiona's aunt, with the TV on, and made themselves grilled cheese sandwiches. Fiona wrapped her muffler around her neck and pulled her woollen watch cap down over her ears. Roberto grabbed a snow shovel and held open the plate-glass door then followed her outside, where all the warmth was sucked from her body within a moment or two, and she felt withered and aimless and frightened.

“Goodbye,” he called.

Despite the cold he was hatless and coatless. He started to scrape and hack at veins of snow and ice on the sidewalk. The bright sound of chopping and shovelling rang through the bitter air and followed her down the street and she knew it was, in some way, directed at her
—
he was celebrating her with the noise, teasing her, needing her attention.

Alun took the needle under his tongue. That was the quickest. He'd been telling everyone he was getting his act together and moving south to London to be a designer. No one believed him except the dealers he knew, who all had similar fantasies.

Alun's history. Father an army officer, shot dead in Belfast. Left school at sixteen, working as a ticket seller at British Rail, a job he got through an uncle. Quit and travelled overland to Turkey. A year on the beach at Goa in India, losing thirty pounds and nearly dying of dysentery. Return to Aberdeen. Drinking and fights in pubs. Mother remarried and moved to California. Older sister married to a scientist.

What did you expect?

Her father's question, with its neurotic calculus of love and death, came back to Fiona while she lay in bed in her aunt's house, boiling with midwinter flu. Her father's life had been a failure. Not so dramatic a failure as Alun's, not quite such a blowtorch of despair. Not at first, not on the surface. A religious family. A sober education. A position at the bank, where he met Fiona's mother. Then marriage and imigration to Canada, followed by three unsatisfactory years in Victoria, British Columbia, where he had finally disappeared into a hospital suffering what they called a “breakdown.” What they called “nerves.” They'd sailed home to Scotland afterwards and he'd never held a job again. At fifty he looked seventy, white-haired in his armchair, staring at news programs, World War II documentaries.

Her suitcase was underneath the bed. Inside was a manila envelope. Inside the envelope, negatives, contact sheets, photographs. Do-it-yourself porn, Alun called it. She'd let him persuade her. He could talk her into anything. No one else could.

Needing money for his heroin, he had already sold his TV, CD player, and
VCR,
most of her books, and all his clothes except the jeans and the leather jacket he was going to be buried in a couple of weeks after the pictures were taken.

The photographer had turned up at the funeral, sans camera. He and Alun had been mates at school, played Dinky cars together. He'd paid Alun fifty quid in advance hoping to sell the photos to a Dutch magazine. On the road outside the cemetery he took the manila envelope from his car and handed it to her. “That's the lot, burn it or keep it, it's all yours.”

What did you expect?

Fiona found Roberto inspecting avocados at a fruit-and-­vegetable store on Dufferin Street. He wore a pile-lined Levi's jacket with the collar turned up. When he saw her he seemed happy.

“I hoped I will see you again!”

“How's the restaurant?”

Fiona held a paper sack of oily banana chips. She was wearing a German military parka and snow boots.

He shrugged. “I am car guy, not restaurant guy.”

She waited behind him at the checkout while a young Chinese clerk sorted rapidly through his piles of vegetables and fruit.

“I am seeking a good buy, a good used car,” Roberto told her while the clerk's nimble fingers tapped at the electronic cash register. “I would like you to come along. Tomorrow. With me. To look for the car.”

Fiona handed over her sack of banana chips to be weighed. She'd put on eight pounds since coming to Toronto. She was addicted to banana chips.

“I'd be no use,” she said. “I don't know about cars.”

They left the shop headed in the same direction, into the scathing wind. She wished she could duck behind him, get some protection. Most pedestrians were going the other way, moving fast with the wind at their backs, the wind that had churned the sky clear, a glimmering violet sky. She noticed for the first time the hawkiness of his profile, his strident chin, beaked nose, and glittering eyes. Three pink scars were notched into his throat. He must have shaved a few hours earlier, but a shadow of dense black beard was already sprouting. She wondered why he didn't grow his beard to hide the scars. Perhaps he was proud of them. Maybe they were a mark of honour in the country that he came from. Or perhaps a beard wouldn't grow on the damaged seams of skin.

Three taxicabs stood in a rank at the corner, motors idling, white exhaust spitting from tailpipes. Three forlorn women stood in the middle of the road on the streetcar island. They wore skirts and stockings and stood apart, each with her back to the wind. They looked brittle, in agony. The wind was attacking from the north; Fiona heard a rattling, banging sound as a steel garbage can lid flew down the street and was crushed beneath the tires of an express van. The wind spat grains of sand and ice like diamonds.

“Auto body, good business,” Roberto shouted to her.

She never thought about sex or money. Or the future. Her aunt was happy to have her stay for as long as she wanted.

“Taxi,” Roberto said.

“Not for me,” she said, grimacing. It was painful to speak in the Canadian wind, useless to speak at all in this climate.

He glanced sideways at her. “Come.”

“Where?”

“To assist me to buy a car.”