Here Until August. Josephine Rowe
War and Peace, and the software never made it as far as an upload. Jody’s skis stayed vertical. There was talk of what to do once the roads thawed, working holidays we could take. In whose car? A bus, then, a train. Apples in the Okanagan? Apples was fall. Oranges, then. Or what comes first—asparagus? Jody looked disgusted. Down south it was strawberries.
Anyway, we never got away, winter held us close. We drank. We fucked. We downloaded old disaster movies from our childhoods and skipped straight to the quake, the volcano, the aftermath.
Coming back from the SAQ one Sunday we met Madame Ayliffe taking on the outside world. Reaching her little lavender-gloved paw out to be guided down the last few ice-glazed steps at the front of our building, where snow had obliterated the hessian grip our landlord cheapskated in place of rubber. Jody passed me the rye and ran up ahead, crooked his arm into a wing for Madame to hold on to. He led her down step for step, all southern charm, delivering her to where the sidewalk was freshly gritty with rat-bait-green salt. She grazed me with eyes blank as coat buttons, in that moment possessing no special knowledge about me, perhaps not knowing me at all. Unconcerned by thermoses, missing or otherwise. To Jody she gave no thanks in any language, just nodded her tiny marzipan head and tottered down towards the avenue. We watched after her a while, to make sure she remained upright. Her solid black shoes planted definite as small hooves.
By then I’d taken up Jody’s schedule, waking at ten or later, the sun already sliding through that colored glass. Hours too late for Kitchen Sink radio, though there would be other noises from Madame Ayliffe’s side of our shared wall, dish clatter or running water, sometimes wailing. I was alarmed at first, until I placed it: Cats. Cats in heat, whose yowlings always sound like maniacs doing bad impersonations of cats. Now and then a scrawny tabby appeared on Ayliffe’s windowsill, twitching its tail, ears flattened. I imagined the other cats huddled in a coven, at the apartment’s heart, gently rising and falling as one heap of multicolored fur.
Spring crept up on us. Bird noise then insect noise then cheers from the bars on Mont Royal as the Habs beat the Bruins in the second overtime. Stray cats lounging on stoops like sleazy little drunks. Sticky fiddleheads nudging up through the earth, unfurling to bright fronds within seconds.
Now: everything’s moving, everywhere you look. Squirrels rippling up telephone poles, laundry being cranked along antiquated pulley systems, someone flapping out a bright string hammock and anchoring it between railings. Down in the alleyway, winter’s hockey nets have been repurposed as soccer nets, and kids run back and forth between them, screaming a sweet patois. A woman in the building across from us is drying a load of dishes, bringing each cup, plate, bowl, fork to her back door and standing there half drunk with photosynthesis, rubbing meditatively with a nubby yellow tea towel.
I finish with Jody’s hair. There you go, I tell him, spring coat. Ruffling my hands through what’s left of the shaggy brindle. It isn’t a great job, but if I go any further I’ll just make it worse. He won’t care anyway. Or if he does, he won’t say so. Released, he bounds inside for beers, comes back with them already popped and sweating.
We’re just going to look at them a moment, he says, gone all reverent, laying them just out of reach. We’re just going to take a minute to appreciate that it’s really finally beer weather. Then he slides his icy fingers slow over my wrist, slow up to the inside of my elbow. Simple; like he’s undone a zipper. I could push him right off the balcony. But there are the voices next door, and I take my arm back, wanting to see her emerge: this woman whose radio I’ve stopped waking with. Her balcony door opens a crack and I wait for her to shuffle out, mentally polishing a few phrases I might use, witty responses to remarks about the weather—L’hiver ne nous a pas tué!
From our kitchen McTell begins singing tinnily through laptop speakers, of cold wide waters and lonesome journeys, and it makes a strange matinee of the whole operation.
They must’ve come through the front. We would have noticed them going in, otherwise. We guess it’s discretion they’re trying for now, discretion that has moved them to brave the spindly swizzle stick of the fire escape, instead of the straight-up-and-down of the front stairs. A couple of days ago, even yesterday, they might have gotten her out quietly, with no one but the stray cats to flick their ears at them. But now they have a whole amphitheater of us, gawking. That woman with the dishtowel holding it at limp half-mast. Down in the laneway the kids have stopped their game, are all shining the little moons of their faces up this way. By some kid instinct they know something’s up, and that it must be something wonderful, because a few of their parents are already trying and failing at calling them in.
The bag that is holding Madame lies on a stretcher borne by a stocky man and a tall thin woman, whose trouble is kept hidden under a thick ledge of bangs. They must be work, those bangs. A lot of heat and product. An effort that seems both noble and impractical given her profession.
I’m expecting the hand with its lavender glove, or perhaps a tuft of snowy hair, to be peeking out of the bag they’ve folded her into. Some confirmation that it’s her in there. But she’s zipped up tight, barely causing a crinkle in the stiff plastic strapped hard to the stretcher.
They have her tilted at a ridiculous angle. It won’t work; she’s going to slide right out, feet first, go barreling down that staircase like a sled in a luge run. The neighboring balconies have all turned opera boxes, everybody’s hands over everybody’s mouths, as the paramedics reverse back up the stairs. They’re giving up, we think. But no, they swing around, swap places. They try at a different tilt. Headfirst, I guess, with the tall woman backing down gingerly, iron railings under her thin rubber soles. When they finally get the stretcher to ground level, someone gives three short claps that ricochet around the courtyards. Someone else joins in. An awkward, open-mic-night smatter. The stocky man looks up, smiling sheepish as though he really might bow. The woman just shakes her head. The bangs don’t move, sprayed solid. The kids do what we all want to, trailing them out to the street to watch the stretcher being packed into the ambulance.
How long?
I’m thinking of the runtish apple Jody left to wither, his experiment to show just how the heating leaches the moisture from everything. I get a flash of gums shrinking away from teeth, taste iron, push the image away.
It’s only a few minutes later that the landlord emerges with a bulky orange tough bag. Sagging with cats—at least four or five of them, judging from the bulging sides of the bag, where you can see the knobby arcs of several spines showing though. And we realize: that long. It had let up weeks ago, all the yowling.
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