COMMERCE, AN OLD HABIT by Thomas Gough
I.
To enrich my inner life, I visit this city’s public gardens. In my shop, I weigh meat and can tell you the date, but each day I notice the open door and marauding wind, which I step outside to curse in person. And so, then, I am on the street, falling downhill toward my inner life, azaleas, the broken homeless on Princess.
The public gardens grow shadows, each stone terrace darker than the one above, so that as you descend you forget the sun and azaleas and find yourself plunging into your private gloom and lighting cigarettes, which everyone knows is a foolish thing to do. One day out in the public gardens I see a woman wearing open-toed shoes. She, too, is smoking, and certainly knows better. And I see, now that I have turned onto the path where she sits, she is older than me, maybe ten years, fifteen. And right here in the public gardens, this woman weeps.
“On this same bench, I too, have cried,” I tell her. And might have today, it comes to me, but now there is no chance. My sadness has not diminished: the matter is aesthetic. Two of us crying in the shade of the public gardens would be a laugh.
Back in my shop, I give tea and corn chips, which I can’t sell. The woman’s name is Wellwyn. Some people come in. You might think this gets in the way of Wellwyn’s story, but I weigh meat, tell the date, mumble over the headlines, and it hardly changes a thing. The subject everywhere is what we’re losing. Over there it’s ground and money, and here, in my shop, Wellwyn has lost her two-year-old daughter to the sovereign state of New Zealand. And some ground and money, too, it seems.
“No less than I deserve,” she says.
I would like to say no mother deserves to lose her own child, but then it occurs to me that Wellwyn is not ten years older than me, not fifteen, that this would be an impossible age for the mother of a two-year-old. The ruin of her face is from something other than time, and, noting this, I’m less sure what anyone deserves.
I give this woman a job. It’s the one thing, right? The idea is she’ll mind the store while I make the rounds of the city, sniff the wind, and read the new placards of the homeless. Each morning, I find them sitting under their awnings, staring deadpan at the lifeless steam grates. But when they see me, they stand, sometimes in rows, sometimes at attention. They won’t take my money, not at this hour of the day. What they want is for me to read. Sometimes I think they write their stories on cardboard only for me. And from one day to the next, the story is never the same.
One is orphan, one is immigrant, one was a tyrant in a small Caribbean island, which seems somehow likely, even desirable. I look at the giant brown hands of this ex‑tyrant. His wrinkles colored in like the cracks of tile. I think, Reinstate him! Put the people back to work in the fields, let him smoke his cigars in peace. Which is all very fine until I come to Noel’s paper kiosk on the corner of Princess and Victoria and I read the new, hardly-printable headlines. Then it’s, Let them rot, the Fathers of the world. Takers of other lives. But a moment later I see the Caribbean tyrant pissing behind the Starbucks, and I change my mind. Except for this one. Let him be.
“Where do they come from?” I ask Noel the paper man. “And where will they go? What do they do when the weather gets nasty? What are their names?”
“You mean how did it come to this. Humanity and such.”
“I guess I do.”
“Don’t know,” says Noel. “Two dollars.”
Back at my shop, the front door is open, the cage up, but Wellwyn is not present. Inside, there is money on the counter. Coins, some notes. A phone number on a business card. Under it, a list: 1 milk, 1 bread, 1 Coke, 1 donut, choco-rasp. For a moment I forget about the homeless, about Wellwyn. What I wonder over are the citizens of this city. In my absence, they are to be trusted. Inventory is taken. Commerce, an old habit, prevails.
At about six, just as I’m pulling the cage over the door, here is Wellwyn. From a hundred yards away, I know she is drunk. If I let her come in, she’ll make excuses, and cry some more and drink my tea. Then she’ll do it again tomorrow. Or I could fire her now and be done with it. Return to my inner life, the gardens, my two dollar papers.
“You’re fired,” I say. “Get out of here.” Then I yank hard on the cage to have something between us, but Wellwyn ducks underneath before it’s down. She stands in the tiny doorway beside me, leering hopefully. She ought to know she’s too old to get away with any of this, the leering, the cigarettes, her life, but I don’t mention it.
Later I go into the little bathroom in the shop and take a bottle of whiskey out from under the sink and the two of us drink quietly by the sickly light of my cooler. We don’t chat or make excuses. We put the glasses to our mouths and swallow. After we’ve had enough to put us to sleep, I turn on the fluorescents. Why I can’t say. Maybe when I say goodnight, I want to see who it is I’m talking to. I don’t recall my mother ever putting this down as a rule, but it sounds like the sort of thing she would have liked. With the light on, I look in Wellwyn eyes, and when I do I nearly miss the white and blue of them, the pink and delicate threads of blood. What I notice is a beastly glimpse of time: the unfathomable depth or height of it, a well, a ledge, the stars and all the mute acres of space, piled like snow above us.
In the morning I wake with my head in the full sun. Down on the street someone is calling my name. In my mind, some portion of the inner life of sleep lingers. It’s fading fast, but there is Rupert Murdoch on a train at night, his face against the glass. He’s leaving us, I don’t know where. He won’t die, I feel sure of this, but he won’t be back, either. He’s broken through, found a way to escape, and he needs a shave.
Downstairs, I unlock the front door and then the cage. Jackie, the six-year-old daughter of my best friend, Harvey Letts, ducks and runs for the lolly aisle. “Get back here,” Harvey yells.
I say, “Quiet.”
“Open this thing up,” says Harvey. He is wearing a tie, which, on him, looks somehow suspicious.
“And why be quiet?” he wants to know.
I clang the cage into place over my head and now out of the store again is Jackie. Her jaws are working fast. Harvey steps into her personal space, palm up like he’s looking for a hand-out, and Jackie groans. After a second, she empties her pockets. I hold out my hand, and into it Harvey transfers a candy whistle, two strands of licorice, three milk bottles, already clotted with lint, and one packet of Pop Rocks, strawberry.
“Somebody is sleeping in there,” says Jackie. Looking at me, she says, “A lady.”
“I found her crying in the park,” I say. “She spent the night in a cot in the back of my shop.”
Harvey stirs his finger in the air. His head is sizes too large for this tie he’s chosen. Wide, black with crimson threads running through it. This tie of his unnerves me. It is not only criminal, I see now, but vaguely medieval.
“Is she,” Harvey says, “you know.”
I look over my shoulder. “Likely,” I say.
There’s a clock tower behind Harvey, and his head turns, not quite far enough to register the time, but I receive the message nonetheless. He’s in a hurry and I’m to watch Jackie for the day. Which is fine, I love Jackie. I’m her godfather. What I marvel at is communication itself: the shift of my friend’s head, the placards of the homeless, the women lounging, ten times the size of life, on the sides of the city’s buses.
Harvey kisses his daughter on the cheek. I follow him to the bus stop at the corner.
“She drinks,” I say.
Harvey looks, for a minute, like he’s going to step on my toes. “Everybody drinks,” he says. “Here’s the simple part: do you like this lady?”
Harvey knows I haven’t touched a woman in four years. Like most habits, this one is not exactly by choice, nor is it precisely out of my control. I say, “Not like you mean. But, yes. So what do I do?”
Harvey’s face and neck are blazing pink. He appears to be slowly suffocating. He says, “You’re asking me? Please don’t ask me. I’m about to get on this bus and ride out to Milford to grovel in front of some fat, rich prick for the chance to clean his pool and wax his tyres on the weekend. So do me this favour: don’t ask me.”
Now the bus, the Milford Line, falls out of heavy traffic and stops beside us. A woman is painted on the side of this bus. A giantess lying on her stomach, her head turned over her shoulder toward Harvey and me, toward the gaze of the city under which she is driven ever on, smiling, not quite comfortably, as all of us watch, helpless, petty voyeurs that we are. And we could save her, too, I’m sure of it. Could let her finally go home and take a long, hot bath. If only we buy more jewelry, drink more milk, sign up with the proper insurance.
Back at my shop, Jackie has shown Wellwyn how to make origami. She learned from the book the two of us found at the library a few weeks back, and when I see her and Wellwyn folding the full-color flyers from the local dance troupe into cranes, frogs, and boats, I feel a certain amount of paternal pride. It seems my due. On this unmade cot of hers and in full view of the till, Wellwyn is wearing a thread-bare white t‑shirt and she stinks of whiskey, but everything is somehow fine. Jackie and Wellwyn both have opened three-dollar designer fruit juices and helped themselves to my donuts. Outside, the traffic is thundering. Were I to turn on the television, I would see the Saturday morning cartoons.
A customer comes into the shop. I stand by the till and take his money. I refill the cooler. In a gust, an origami boat does flips across my floor. Despite what my mother would say, were she alive, everything here strikes me as really quite normal.
A troop of school-age boys in blue uniforms enter my shop.
“I better get dressed,” says Wellwyn. For forty minutes, she has been lounging behind the till in her threadbare white t‑shirt, customers coming and going. The wind battering the posters on the bulletin board. Why now should she get dressed? Does she know something about the blue uniforms I do not?
“I like her,” says Jackie. “Do you like her?”
“Your father, too,” I say. “He asked me the same thing.”
The boys in the uniforms are queuing up in front of the ice cream, which means work for me. I scoop mint chocolate, orange mint chocolate, hokey-pokey, rainbow, maple fudge, and, for Jackie standing hopefully beside me, another hokey-pokey. When the boys are gone, Wellwyn emerges from the bathroom in a new dress.
I say, “Who were those boys, anyway?”
Jackie and Wellwyn smile. They settle back on the cot together. Now a pack of coloured pencils from the shop is open. A loaf of bread.
“Who were the kids? What were the uniforms?”
They aren’t answering. They’re eating up my merchandise, but they’re not talking to me. So I say, “Fine, forget the boys. I dreamt about Rupert Murdoch last night.”
“Oh yeah?” Wellwyn looks up from buttering a slice of multigrain. “What happened?”
“Not much,” I say. “He was riding a train, looking glum. He was heading away from us, from everybody I mean. From planet Earth.”
“Mmmm,” Wellwyn says. She takes a bite. Her mouth full, she says, “He could do that, too.”
Jackie is bent over a piece of ruled paper. With one hand she’s holding her ice cream, with the other she’s colouring. She must know us adults are talking, the same as always, but she doesn’t hear. Our world is irrelevant and impossibly far away from her, I know. Further away than Milford, further away than the other side of the Pacific, where I was born. She doesn’t pay any attention. Our world is drab and runs along such narrow tracks. It extends on and on and has nothing to do with her or the brilliance of her furious pencilled strokes.
II.
That evening Harvey returns without the tie. Jackie is in the toilet when he arrives, and he stands there, his face as large and pink and ruined as ever. By turns, he’s eyeing Wellwyn up and sneering at her, and it occurs to me how little difference there is between one look and the other. To her, he says, “You living here now?”
Wellwyn is sitting on a crate of lemons, eating a banana. The sun is full on her face, and she must have some sense of the way it highlights the spotty and wrinkled tissue of her skin.
She says, “Does it look to you like I’m living?”
“Peace, please,” says Harvey. “A simple query.”
The loo flushes, the tap runs for a perfunctory moment, and here is Jackie. Harvey kisses his daughter and takes her hand. To Wellwyn again, he says, “We got to get to Rangiora Street.” Distance, in general, is an affront to Harvey.
Once my goddaughter and her dad are gone, the light drains out of my shop. It leaks down the street and over the hill. Block by block, the demarcation of shade overtakes the city. The bloom of sunset sinks along the mirrored walls and all the fountains go dull as tin plates. A final blaze of colour bleeds west over the hills, a forest fire playing backwards, and now it is night.
Wellwyn, who has stood beside me watching everything, says why don’t we go for a walk? We could see the public gardens, the azaleas, the statue of the man with the sword. Which is exactly what I had in mind.
On the stroll over to the public gardens with this woman, I feel something. It’s not lust, at least not in any meaningful dose. Nor is it anything remotely romantic. It could be the beginning of friendship, my first in years. But then it could be the night itself. As we walk, I listen to the music pouring out of the open windows. Ska and hip-hop and idealistic death metal, but what I require on a night such as this, and what I will never hear in this city, is American jazz. The thin ache of some man’s horn sounding like an invitation to silence, which is louder and more heartbreaking each time I hear it.
In this state of mind, Wellwyn and I pass the abandoned stations of the homeless on Princess Street. There are signs of their daylight presence. Stains of ash on the cream-colour tiles of a storefront. A discarded placard, face-down. I pause and, for a second, consider turning over the piece of cardboard and reading its story, but an image of the Caribbean tyrant returns to me. I recall the urine stains on his blue work pants. The fray of his jean jacket collar, turned up and stuck on his neck. And so, in revulsion, and in shame, and also in a flush of anger, I change my mind, leave the placard face-down on the concrete and, like everyone else, I walk away.
Wellwyn and I follow the well-groomed paths of the public gardens to the statue of the man with a sword. He stands about 1.2 times the size of life. His face is as inhuman as anything I can imagine: empty eyes and a toothless mouth of bronze. I say, “I come to these gardens almost every day of my life, and I have no idea who that man is.”
Wellwyn reads out the words on the plaque and we walk through the azaleas. Two minutes later, I say, “I forget already. Who was the man with the sword?” Wellwyn can’t remember, either. It seems a terrible shame, but on we walk, leaving the man and his bronze sword behind us in the new dark, where he will stay forever.
We descend through the levels of the public garden. We seem to have no choice. We walk until we come to the bench where I found Wellwyn. When we sit, I feel something shift in my pocket. I reach inside and remove a candy whistle, two strands of licorice, three milk bottles, already clotted with lint, and one packet of Pop Rocks, strawberry.
So Wellwyn and I eat sweets. In the shadows around us, the locusts rave, the sound of their hissing is madly wavering up and down, and it calls to mind the barrel of rattlesnakes I once saw collected for the purpose of a mass barbeque. Wellwyn and I are quite occupied. Our mouths crackle. My cheeks are sticky with sugar, and I take a toot on the candy whistle. Wellwyn can’t help it. She laughs. In the upper levels of the gardens, you can hear the passing buses and smell the tide of fast food washing over the city, but down here, we have only the locusts and our sweets, our laughter, already past its peak and beginning to taper off.
Two doors down from my shop, Wellwyn and I walk into Grendal’s Bar. The effortless movement of our feet across the threshold is a kind of confession in and of itself, and we turn away from each other as we approach the bar. We mumble our drink orders into the black glass of the Grendal’s mirrors, hardly audible words that are spoken and heard on reflex. The drinks are set on the bar. The money passed back and forth. For all of the transaction, there is not a moment of eye contact, but neither is there judgement nor shame. Wellwyn, the barman, and I seem to have met here by accident on the way to somewhere else, but I wouldn’t want to try to get any one of us to say where.
We’re two or three whiskeys and a packet of cigarettes into it, before Wellwyn says, “I’m going to try and get my daughter back.”
“You should,” I say. Tilt my glass in her direction.
She says, “But it would help if I had an address. And a job.”
Wellwyn brushes back her bangs and drops her hand close to mine on the table, and it occurs to me that I know which address she has in mind, which job, too. This information settles like a finger on the back on my neck.
“Just until I find some other place,” she says. “You won’t have another problem with me.” She whispers this last part. I don’t think even she can bear to hear herself talking this way.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” I say, and Wellwyn gathers up her purse, the empty packet of cigarettes. She looks like she might run out of the bar, but then, I see, she might just as well sit across from me and weep.
“Don’t do that,” I say. I try handing her my cocktail napkin, but it’s soaking wet, and she smiles.
Back at the shop, I open the cage and Wellwyn steps inside. Once I have us locked inside and the light on, I see she’s standing off to one side of the aisle, hands folded. The fluorescent lights are blinking in her eyes. She follows me to the bathroom and she waits while I pour us each the one more we both knew was coming. We drink in silence, and the bottle cracks against the pipes when I put it back.
Up in my room I take off my clothes and stand in the dark listening to sirens. They’re coming from all quarters of the city, rising and falling and fading away in rapid succession. Down in the shop, the bathroom door opens. The water runs. The loo flushes. In the morning, my whiskey will be gone.
I lie down on the bed. I’ve brushed my teeth, but my mouth is still coated in booze and sugar, the latter of which reminds me of childhood. When I close my eyes, I see myself holding toy figures. The figures are fighting, and I’m pretending a plane is about to crash into a hangar full of people. Then I’m eating a Sugar Daddy under a railroad bridge and my pants are black with soot. In a moment, I know I’ll begin counting my change as I cross an enormous parking lot back toward the store. In this memory, I can feel the sun overhead. It’s dazzling white and the parking lot I’m crossing seems endless. It seems more empty than anything else in the world. It’s a black canvas, its corners bright and pale in the noon sun. In my hand I hold forty-five cents in small hot coins.
The next morning is rain. A tidal line of rubbish runs down the sidewalks. The alleys are lakes and, under their umbrellas, I notice that everyone has started smoking again. Wellwyn drags the gas heaters from the cupboards and I unlock the back room. This back room is thick with dead mice and pebbles of dried‑up poison. I have never kept food in there, but somehow it stinks of rotted steak. The non-slip rubber mat I move from this room to the door leaves a red track behind it, and a clutch of bottle flies that has been waiting under the awnings turns into my shop and begins to swarm.
So I kill flies and Wellwyn talks. What she tells me, her life’s story, is mostly about men, with women playing some hideous and minor roles, and she tries to lighten it up, but it’s the unbearable parts she laughs at or lingers over, and the ordinary lapses between catastrophes that trip her up. When she tells me of living safely with her aunt Gladys long after her uncle was tried for what he’d done to her, off and on, for three and a half years, when she gets to the part where she is no longer in peril and her aunt cooks her wholesome chicken dinners from free-range hens and takes her into the empty paddock behind the house to enumerate the stars of the southern hemisphere, when she comes to this part, Wellwyn’s voice breaks and she loses it, and I end up on the cot beside her, where we sit and slowly rock to the splatter of the rain.
As I sit there beside this woman, this stranger, it occurs to me that in the matter of my inner life, I have failed. My inner life is listless and crowded with remembering my debts. Mostly I walk in the public gardens and think about what’s past. Except on the subject of my goddaughter Jackie, when I think of the future, I imagine it as an Olympic-sized swimming pool emptied of water, and I see myself standing alone in the haze of blue space. This thought, coming to me at this moment, appalls me. Here is this woman. She is hurt, and I have nothing to give her, not a word to say. She wants to change her life, to overcome everything that she must know is so much a part of her now it is as inescapable as her own reflection.
What’s more, I believe there are people who, in this same situation, would know the proper thing to say to Wellwyn. People who would offer hope, assistance, reassurance. When I try to imagine who these people might be, I think of the mothers with small children whom I often see in the public gardens. These mothers don’t talk to me, other than a nod and a greeting, but sometimes I watch them pushing their prams along the duck pond. I see them stoop and help a child to cross a puddle. I see them carrying beach balls under their arms and nursing in the afternoon sun. Their shoulders are bare, freckled. Their children are shouting in the grass. On their benches, they watch. They do not hunch or bite their nails or light one cigarette after another.
What I also know is that everything is fine. All is quite normal. Every day, the buses carry their monstrous women up and down the city blocks and people step into this shop. They mention the weather, deliberate over donuts. Their wallets open, they nod and smile. Grab a paper at the last moment. Look up from the headlines and take back their change. The bread truck parks outside and the street fills with exhaust. It pulls away and the sun returns. The routine miracles endure.
But I don’t seem to be able to say a word of this to Wellwyn. What I do is hold her until we both have had enough of it, and then I stand and go and take my place at the till. I’m feeling used up and wordless, but the story of Wellwyn’s life does not seem to stay in one place. Already it is running like ink in the rain. The kind aunt’s face, which seemed so clear, has begun to fade, and gruesome abstractions are percolating in my memory, such as injustice. I can’t seem to stop myself from turning Wellwyn’s suffering into something else. Then there is also the fact that I’m tired of the rain and of the bottle flies and the mice in my back room.
Finally, there is this pocket of cold in my stomach. A hunk of ice about the size of a billiard ball. I do not know when it first appeared in my body, but I did not carry it with me as a child. Now I have this pocket of cold and it will never leave me, I’m sure of it. Day by day, I feel it trying to grow, and I do my best not to nurture it, but when I think of Wellwyn, of her getting back her daughter and starting her life over, this pocket quivers and my intestines are lined with a chill I feel too weak to fight. Standing there feeling my own body begin to freeze, a ruthless but expedient thought occurs to me: Why can’t she just give up? I chase the idea away and feel a wave of disgust. Still, the question came to me easily enough, and for the split second that I entertained it, I felt a numbing power rush into my spine.
III.
The next day I return from my stroll through the public gardens and Wellwyn is minding the store, as she promised she would be. Only she is not alone. On Wellwyn’s unmade cot are Harvey and Jackie and a small collection of lolly wrappers. Harvey’s not wearing the tie, which puts me a little more at ease, but when he sees me he looks down at his open hands. Wellwyn, too, can’t look at me. It’s only Jackie who seems capable of holding an adult conversation.
She says, “I’m going to stay with you this afternoon. Just for a little while.”
Harvey stands now. He hovers beside Wellwyn. I say, “You two going somewhere?”
When Wellwyn looks back at me, I feel like a fool. Like a little boy.
“I appreciate it,” says Harvey. “For the lollies.” He stacks up a couple coins on the counter.
Jackie touches my sleeve. I’m following Harvey and Wellwyn across the shop with my eyes, and I miss what Jackie says. Something about crayons, colouring the city. Wellwyn and Harvey step out of my shop. They stand just outside and look up and down the street, lost and careless as tourists. A woman is jay-walking with a pram, and it occurs to me that the young mothers wouldn’t have been able to help Wellwyn after all. If they had come upon her in the lowest ring of the public gardens, they would have turned around and gone the other way.
I turn and look at Jackie, whom I have been ignoring.
“I said,” she says, “If you use blue-tack and paper and crayons and glue you can make a city.”
“Is that so?”
“I can even make your shop,” she says. She is holding in her arms all the merchandise she’s just mentioned. Clutching each item to her chest as if she had salvaged it from a wreck upon the beach. She can make cranes, frogs, boats, now cities. I wonder what else she knows. What else she will be learning soon enough.
While Wellwyn and Harvey are out, Jackie and I cut rectangles for walls and roofs and the doors of our paper city. As I cut I find that I am at once furious and relieved, and the mixture of these feelings is disastrous for the concentration. I squash a church steeple, foul up a marquee and cut two red doors in half, one after another.
Sometimes I get up to wait on a customer, who, seeing what I’m up to, smiles at me or makes a comment. They watch the two of us, and they’ve got nothing but goodwill. They drop their change in the array of collection cups on the counter and point out that we’ve made the Victoria Theatre the wrong colour or they tell us what we’re making is marvellous. It could pass for the real thing. All that’s missing is the litter.
One woman says, “You must be proud.”
I don’t tell her Jackie isn’t mine. The fact is, I am proud, which is beginning to gain ground on the subsiding fury and alternating relief. Jackie trusts me and so does her father. So, too, do the homeless on Princess. This morning when I passed, the Caribbean tyrant ran to catch up with me. On his placard the message was a joke: Family kidnapped by ninja. Need money to learn kung-fu. We laughed, and he told me he copied it from a guy over on Whangato Street. Then he stood there for a second, smile set on his lips like he’d been caught stealing it from somebody else, and I handed him what was in my pocket. Our palms touched. I don’t know what mine felt like, but his was smooth and finely-grained as driftwood.
At five, Jackie calls her house. There’s no answer, but I tell her not to worry about it. I’ve known Harvey since long before she was born, and he’s merely having himself a good time at our expense. What I don’t say is that Harvey and I met back in the days when we were both dating Pearl, Jackie’s mother. It was glorious then, but this is the past, where time occurs at such vertiginous rates that I can hardly stand and think about it at the same time. So I tell Jackie there’s no reason we can’t have a little fun of our own.
I close the shop and we go upstairs to my apartment. We’ve built our replica city on the bottom of a flattened shipping box, and I carry it carefully to my kitchen. Set it on the table in front of the open window, where it can be compared to the real thing at our leisure.
Jackie says she’d like to make sandwiches, and this is what we do. Meat and cheese and lettuce and – this, she tells me, is her father’s secret weapon – bean sprouts. I pop downstairs and gather up two packets of chips, two bottles of the designer juice. After Jackie and I eat, I suggest a walk in the public gardens. By the time we get back, Harvey and Wellwyn will be home.
So we walk the public gardens, each of us lost in our own thoughts. As for me, I’m past anger. I don’t know what Wellwyn deserves, but she could do worse than Harvey. He’s sweet and mostly even-tempered. A fantastic dad, by all accounts. Decent enough, so long as you don’t count the drinking, and who am I to do that? Jackie and I descend down to the lowest level, where I tell her about Wellwyn and me eating sweets the day before. I tell her about the rattlesnakes in a barrel, too, and about riding a horse in a parade down the main street of a little town in Oklahoma.
Jackie sits back on the bench and takes in the penumbras of the canopy. After a while, she says, “What was it like growing up in America?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “About the same as here.”
“But nothing is the same,” she says. “You always complain about it.”
She’s right, of course. In my pocket, these foreign coins are too heavy, and wherever I go my accent hangs on my neck like a dog tag. There are street names I cannot pronounce, whole towns and regions that never pass my tongue.
When we get back to my shop, Wellwyn and her father are not there. A few hours later, Jackie is tucked into my bed. I’ve opened a toothbrush from the shop and a souvenir t‑shirt, which she is wearing in lieu of pajamas.
Sitting in bed, she says, “When are you going to call the police?”
“I’m not going to call the police,” I say. I kiss Jackie’s cheek. “The truth is the two of them are being rude, but that’s all there is to it. Your dad doesn’t get out much. He’s making it count.”
“Which means he’ll be drunk,” says Jackie.
When Harvey calls me at quarter to twelve he is, in fact, drunk. “One thing led to another,” he says. “We’re across town. We’re coming home. Half hour. How’s Jackie?”
After I hang up, Jackie meets me in the door to my bedroom. I tell her that her father and Wellwyn are fine. They’ll be home soon. I tuck her back in.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
In the dark, Jackie holds onto my sleeve. She says, “No it’s not.”
“They’re across town,” I say. “They’ll be home in a few minutes,” but the truth is I know exactly what she means.
At two-thirty, I pull off the sheets on Wellwyn’s cot and lie down on the bare mattress. Outside, there are sirens, voices on the street and music from Grendal’s Bar. My cooler percolates and spits. Someone is breaking glass in the alley. Someone is always breaking glass in the alley. Tonight, it scatters and tinkles on the concrete like a song from a music box.
I’m feeling exhausted and flattened out. Jackie’s voice, the turns and patterns of its rising and falling are stuck in my head. They weave like a road through hills, but the hills won’t lead me to the higher ground of sleep. They keep emerging on the plains where the cities are blinking and thundering and wailing with sirens.
When I wake up again, the time on the till says 5:30. The cage on the door is rattling. In the stairway is a small figure. She says, “It’s my dad.” I unlock the cage, and Harvey comes pushing inside. He kneels on the non-stick rubber mat and holds onto Jackie for a moment. When he lets go, she says, “Where’s Wellwyn?”
Harvey gets to his feet, waving off the hand I’ve offered. “She’ll be along,” he tells me. “She’s fine.” To Jackie he says, “Get dressed. There’s a 5:50 on the Gifford line.”
While Jackie’s upstairs, I try to talk to Harvey, but he’s too tired to make much sense. His face is green, his eyes pink. Some part of this has to do with the light coming off my cooler. I say, “Where is she, Harvey?”
“I told you, she’s fine,” he says. He paces over behind the till and looks at me. For a second, I think he’s going to rob me. With his daughter upstairs, he’s going to hold me up and flee on the 5:50 Gifford Line. Then he turns away from the till and walks to the staircase. Calls up for Jackie to step on it.
“We got into a row,” he says. He holds out his finger at me and I see I’m being accused. “She’s fucking rocky.”
“Everybody’s rocky.”
“I been drinking coffee for an hour. My head’s clear,” Harvey says. He kicks the doorframe to the stairs and comes out from behind the till. “And you know what? She ought to have that kid kept away from her.”
I’ve seen Harvey punch a man in the head until he didn’t stand up. Once, the two of us shattered the windscreen on a car we thought belonged to a boyfriend of Pearl’s. What I’m trying to say is that Harvey’s the closest thing to a friend I’ve got, but I somehow have never brought myself to trust him. Now I see I may not like him, either. No wonder he can’t get hired to clean any fat, rich prick’s pool. The fact is, I’m getting some awful thoughts in my head, and I’m close to putting a few of them into words when Jackie comes down the steps and walks between the two of us.
She looks from her father to me and sees what must be plain enough for a child to understand. She says, “Is Wellwyn all right?”
“She’s okay,” I say. I look over at Harvey. “She’s fine, isn’t she?”
“Don’t worry about it,” says Harvey. He takes his daughter’s hand and they start toward the door. At the threshold, Jackie breaks free from Harvey’s hand.
She says, “I want to wait for her.”
“We can’t wait,” says Harvey. He twitches his head back toward the clock tower, a reflex, which even he doesn’t notice. Then he crosses to the lights and flicks them on. Starts looking around for a place to sit. He isn’t going anywhere. Which means Wellwyn must be fine. He expects her to return.
The fluorescents blink on this pink-faced, large-headed middle-aged man while my stomach is numbing up to my ribs. What I want is for both of them to go away. For Wellwyn never to return. What I want is my inner life back.
“I’ll be upstairs,” I say.
“What’ll we do if a customer comes in?” Jackie is standing at the bottom of the stairs. She’s wearing the clothes she showed up in, but under her blouse, I see the bottom of the souvenir t‑shirt she slept in. Harvey is over in the dry goods aisle where the shoplifters lurk. He’s hacking up a lung and pacing to distract himself.
“You think you can run the till?” I say.
“I can add and subtract to 100,” she says. “I know my one through fives in the multiplication tables. Some fractions. Long division is hard, but I’m learning.”
“You might be overqualified,” I say. Jackie frowns. This is something she wants to do.
“Fine,” I say. “Open for business. Get your dad to make some coffee.”
“He’s had enough,” she says. She peeks over the counter to the far corner of the shop. “Anyway, he’s asleep.”
In my room, I take off my clothes and lie for a while in the dark. I want a drink, but there’s no use checking. I know Wellwyn’s finished off what was in the toilet cupboard almost twenty-four hours ago. At any rate, I’ve decided not to go back downstairs. Jackie either figures out the till or she doesn’t. The shop can stay closed for all I care. People will buy their donuts someplace else.
I can’t sleep. I walk into my kitchen and pull out a chair. The storefronts below are black and white right-angles, as if the city were done in x‑ray. The street is clad in shadowy pedestrians, and there’s a chill like rain in the air. I pull my chair to the window and look. These pedestrians do not carry umbrellas. They’re not wearing knee-length raincoats or running to catch a bus. They’re drifting, heads down, stooping in the gutters, meandering, zigzagging, bumping softly into each other like sticks in the current.
Over the hill, a train sounds. At the sound of it, one of the drifters holds back his head and covers his ears, as if in pain. A general scrambling prevails. When headlights turn on the sidewalk a moment later, there is no one left to see. The doorways are empty. The alcoves are heaped with loose newspapers. The day has now begun. Here, too, in our replica city, it’s dawn. The Victoria Theatre is lit by the breaking sun, and in this intensity of light, the marquee is blank. The sun rises to a gap between the buildings outside and the paper walls and paper doors go transparent. For a moment, I can see everything, the empty rooms and vacant streets, and the sun shifts, and the walls return, shadows fall back in place.
If she’s awake out there, Wellwyn can hear the same train the drifters did. It’s coming from out on the city’s edge, the cargo line. Each morning it heads north at this hour. North to dairyland, to sheep country, and in ten minutes more Rupert Murdoch will be long gone. He’ll be far from the gray light of this city, rolling on, away from my shop, moving into regions whose names I might not be able to pronounce.
Thomas Gough is the pen name of Thom Conroy. His fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Nimrod and Connecticut Review.