The Journey Prize Stories 27 (5 page)

It’s a full house at the Smeltersite Pub. A bare light bulb sheds its light on the ring: a thick strand of hairy rope strung between posts stuck into floorboards sprinkled with beer-soaked sawdust. Ghost-Mom’s by the referee and then over by Blumenkranz and then back to my father. She’s a dark shadow except for the red glow of her cigarette, which jitters about the crowd, fidgeting through men’s chests at lightning speed.

I step through the ropes and Pocahontas starts circling the ring, blowing fat kisses at the crowd. People are whistling and clinking their glasses together. Hooting wildly, they chant her name. Blumenkranz said I should pretend like I don’t care, I should check my nails or something. Maybe roll my eyes. But I feel like I’m deep in the powerhouse-chamber egg. Somehow, its cotton-ball silence has returned like a case of swimmer’s ear, a muffled silence that’s strangely comforting. My feet are wadded up in yoke and I can’t move. Somewhere by the counter, Blumenkranz starts taking bets.

Pocahontas comes at me. She’s a horror of wild hair, black eyes, and feathers. My heart’s hammering and there’s nothing, nothing in the world except this giant of a woman and her flaming red lips. Until Mom. Ghost-Mom throws her
fer shit sake stick
on the floor, flows right through Pocahontas and like water down a drain, twirls down my throat, legs kicking. I feel the back of my neck rise, an old carapace lifting plates of fossilized armour. I can hear the crowd cheer as I take the first
punch, the sound of fist on bone so much louder inside my own body than hearing one land long ago, the dull thud of the fight through the dressing-room wall, when my mother was in the ring. I can tell that the match will be nothing but a series of drop kicks and heart punches, and try as I might I will walk into a fist, probably over and over. I search the crowd for my father but he’s gone, I can’t see the living for the dead.

M
ischa and I met on the second day of grade nine when our French teacher mistook him for a girl because of his long dark hair and cheekbones like Kate Moss. Everyone giggled and Mischa flushed red down to his shirt collar. After class I found him in the hall and told him I was jealous of his curls. I also told him this story about when I was twelve and had a terrible mushroom cut. My mom took me to the Gap to buy a pair of velvet pants. The salesperson kept trying to steer us to the men’s section, away from all the leggings, until my frazzled mother eventually pointed at me and yelled, “She’s a
girl
!” After I told him this, Mischa gave me his special look, the one where his eyes squeeze shut like a smiling Buddha. Then he asked if I wanted to eat lunch with him and that was that.

Mischa and his mum live on the second floor of an old row house on Parliament. When I’m over there everything feels exotic. The smell of Mischa’s mother’s cigarettes sits heavily in the air. There are built-in bookshelves and coloured glass
bottles of foreign liquor. Mischa’s mother sometimes speaks to him in Russian and her words sound livid and impassioned. When I ask him to translate afterwards, it’s usually something mundane, like asking him to take out the recycling or clean out the litter box. I love the way she pronounces my name.
Claw-ra
, drawing it out like it’s something important and precious.

The two of them moved here from Moscow when Mischa was nine, and she is working on her doctoral dissertation, something complicated to do with physics. His dad was a radical Russian poet and left when Mischa was still a baby. His mum hasn’t dated anyone since. She’s always in the lab, working. When she’s out, Mischa and I pretend that the apartment is our own. We make fancy devilled eggs and drink loose-leaf tea in china cups. Or we put on a classical record and waltz around the tiny kitchen, taking turns to lead. Occasionally at night when we’re bored or stoned we watch porn on the laptop in Mischa’s bedroom. Mischa watches porn the same way he watches nature documentaries, his head angled to the side, a mixture of confusion and fascination settling over his face.

Luckily, my parents let us have sleepovers a lot. We like to stay up until the sun rises, playing Do, Marry, Die and dreaming about running away to Amsterdam to live on a houseboat. Mischa has just discovered French cinema, as he calls it. He watches
Breathless
basically on a loop. He says it makes him nostalgic for something he’s never experienced. He’s always saying that kind of stuff and I’m always rolling my eyes at him. Mischa’s mother says he’s an old soul. Sometimes, in the mornings, she makes us coffee in her French press, pushing the top down slowly with the flat of her palm.

My seventeenth birthday falls on the weekend before we start our last year of high school. It’s the end of a summer in which basically nothing has happened. Mischa and I started hanging out at this 24-hour Lebanese diner called The Lip. It’s actually called the Tulip but the
t
and the
u
have been burnt out for as long as I remember. If you order cold tea, they bring you a giant white teapot filled with Labatt 50. The owners have a son named Carl who works the night shift and silk screens his own T-shirts that say lewd things in Arabic. Carl’s a bodybuilder and he’s always sitting in a booth, loudly eating a cut of red meat, with his girlfriend, who wears white denim and has nodes on her vocal cords. Carl loves Mischa and me. Calls us his young thugs and even gave us one of his T-shirts for free. It was purple with gold writing that apparently spelled out the words
Bitch-Tit
.

For my birthday, Mischa takes me to a gay bar on Church Street with the fake IDs we had made in a basement downtown which say we’re twenty-year-olds from Michigan. But when we get to the door I’m too nervous, so instead we go sit on the swings at Riverdale Park. You can see the whole skyline spread out in front of you and pretend you’re sitting in a diorama of a city. The grid of condos and office buildings look like you could pluck them up and put them in your mouth. We decide to eat some mushrooms that Mischa bought from a white guy with dreadlocks at school, but nothing happens except stomach cramps.

“The CN Tower looks like a dick,” Mischa concludes, and we hop off the swings onto the grass below, rolling down the hill. Mischa does a cartwheel at the bottom and his shirt rides up, exposing a chest that’s so skinny it looks concave.

“Eat a fucking cheeseburger, Misch,” I call out to him. And he comes over to tackle me on the grass. Pretends to take a bite out of my forearm. He walks me home and, standing on my front porch, he digs around in his pocket and produces a flat rock. I look at it closer and it’s a fossil, the shape of a small butterfly encrusted on the cool stone.

“It’s a trilobite,” Mischa says. “I found it when Mum and I went up to the Bruce Peninsula last month.” He brushes the face of the rock with his thumb. “It’s Paleozoic. Old school. Happy birthday, Clara.”

I hold him tightly for a long time, listening to the cicadas pulse underneath the porch light.

On Monday, the first day of school, a girl shows up twenty minutes late to our Canadian history homeroom. Dark bangs in her eyes. Wearing a baseball shirt and Doc Martens, a black bear tattooed on her forearm. Mischa and I exchange a significant glance as the teacher explains that she’s a transfer student from Montreal. Her name is Renaude. The teacher mispronounces it, and Renaude softly corrects her, then shrugs. At lunch we go to the usual spot by the park. I pick up two cans of club soda from the Korean grocer and we sit on top of the picnic table, drinking them while Mischa rolls a joint. I curl one of his brown locks around my index finger and then let it go, watching it re-coil itself. We pretend to make fun of Renaude.

“She’s trying too hard,” I say, and Mischa nods with his eyes closed, sparking the joint.

He exhales and takes a sip from the can. “This stuff tastes like static-y sweaters,” he says. “And yeah. Maybe she’s just like, a pure aesthetic object.”

I laugh, but I can tell that we’re both already a little bit in love with her.

It only takes two days of thoughtful observation before we figure out how to intercept Renaude at lunch. She goes to a deli down the road from school. We wait for a few minutes before walking in one lunch hour to find her sitting in one of the cracked vinyl booths, drinking coffee and reading
Lolita
. I raise my eyebrows at Mischa and he smiles.

We ask if we can sit with her, and she nods and gestures toward the other side of the booth. We sidle in and order grilled cheese sandwiches. Renaude gets a side order of kosher dills, and we ask her questions about her life. She speaks in this frank, unapologetic way, gesturing a lot with her hands. Between her raspy smoker’s voice and Québécois accent, all her words have this fiery quality, curling at the ends like slow-burning paper. She tells us about how her mother died six months ago. Afterwards, her father needed to get away. He got a job here and sold their house in Mile End.

“And he’s already dating someone new. A Japanese painter with tiny tits.” She bites the skin around her thumbnail.

We ask her if she likes it here, and she looks up at the ceiling for a few minutes. “No.”

Before class we go behind the diner to smoke. Afterwards, Renaude re-applies her red lipstick in a way that makes my lower intestines quiver. She looks up at us.

“So. Are you guys together or what?” Mischa and I look at each other.

“Well, Clara likes girls,” he says, pointing a thumb in my direction.

“And Mischa likes girls,” I say, pointing a thumb at him.
Renaude smiles at this and nods, twisting the lipstick back into its tube.

That night I go over to Mischa’s. After watching
Fight Club
for like the sixth time, he throws a sock at my head and says: “Okay. You gotta fuck one, marry one, kill one: Tyler Durden, Taylor Swift, and Renaude.”

“I’d fuck Renaude, marry Tyler Durden, and kill Taylor Swift. Easy.”

Mischa looks at me and curls a strand of hair behind his ear. “I love you, Clara.”

I give his clammy hand a squeeze.

On Friday night, Renaude invites us over to her father’s house. He and his girlfriend are supposedly out at a dinner party. They live in an old chewing gum factory that’s been converted into lofts. It’s a cavernous, raw space. A lot of stuff is still in boxes and a gigantic projector screen takes up an entire wall. Renaude’s bed is separated from the rest of the room by one of those flimsy Japanese dividers. She’s wearing a flapper dress and a porkpie hat and cracks open a bottle of her dad’s Prosecco as soon as we walk in the door. I feel immediately homesick for the soft domestic clutter of my own home, where my mum and dad chop onions for soup while listening to the CBC.

After the Prosecco, Renaude pours us fingers of vodka from a bottle in the freezer and starts sifting through some records that are stacked in a milk crate beside a turntable in the corner. She pulls out a copy of
Histoire de Melody Nelson
.

“I love Serge Gainsbourg. He’s so sexy.” She droops her eyelids and puffs out her bottom lip, pulling a cigarette out of her pack.

“Tu t’appelles comment?”
she whispers huskily, brushing the edge of my jaw with her fingers. Then she laughs and carefully lowers the record onto the turntable. She does a strange-looking interpretive dance to the music as Mischa and I hover clumsily around her.

We smoke cigarettes on the fire escape, their lit tips dangling between the wrought iron rails. Renaude sits in the middle of us. An arm slung across each of our shoulders. There’s a moon and I’m about to ask whether anyone knows if it’s waxing or waning when I hear the sound of the front door being unlocked.

It must be Renaude’s dad and his girlfriend, home early. Their voices are raucous, speaking half in French and half in English. Suddenly, Renaude’s dad calls out her name and she puts her finger to her lips, glaring at Mischa and me as though she thought we were about to give her away. We hear her dad’s girlfriend say, “Thank God” loudly, and then the sound of the freezer being opened, ice clinking into glasses. High-pitched laughter and singing and then the soft, wet sound of two people kissing. I look over at Renaude with alarm, hoping she will offer some kind of way out, but her face is stoic. At one point her dad says, “We have to hurry, I don’t know when she’s coming home.” It’s the first time I’ve heard people have sex in real life and it doesn’t sound nearly as loud or as showy as it does in the porn that Mischa and I watch. In fact, there are a lot of uncomfortable sounds, like boxers during a particularly brutal round. At the very end, Renaude’s dad sounds almost whimpery and I hunch my shoulders up around my ears, but then all of a sudden it’s over.

When I look over at Renaude, she has this creepy half-smile on her face, her fists clenched into white knuckle balls. The alcohol has burned through me and I’m left with a dull throbbing in my left temple. I want to go home to bed. Renaude suddenly points down, to where a long black ladder unhooks and connects the fire escape to the ground below. Mischa and I look at each other, and nod. He begins shimmying down the side of the ladder, and I wonder whether Renaude is going to follow us, but when I look back to the grated platform she’s still sitting there, knees pulled into her chest, tapping a cigarette out of her pack.

We catch the Dundas streetcar and walk the four blocks to my house. My mum is waiting up for me. I can see her reading the paper on the living room couch, with Oscar curled up on her stomach. When we walk through the door she stands up to give us both a big hug and I squeeze her back for much longer than usual. She’s wearing a nightgown with a pattern of moose wearing cross-country skis trotting across it.

“How was the movie?” she asks, stroking my hair. Mischa shrugs. “Not great.”

We make hot chocolate and take it downstairs to the basement, where we lie side by side on the futon. Mischa flicks on the television. A re-run of
Trading Spaces
. He lies back down, and I curl my body around the soft parabola of his spine, thinking of how few ways there are for bodies to fit together.