‘The photos can be on the hard drive more or less instantly. You want me to print them out right now?’
‘That might be best.’ She shook her head. ‘Poor bugger.’
‘You know any more about what happened?’
‘You aren’t even going to believe this.’ Janice stretched out her hands and cracked her knuckles. ‘Apparently he was standing by the subway station talking to himself and carrying a sports bag, and a bunch of drunk teenagers decided he was the subway poisoner.’
‘Oh God, no.’
‘That’s what the police say. One of the kids also said the guy “looked Muslim,” though another one is apparently calling him “the Jewish guy.” So they’re pretty clear that they’re into hate crime, they just can’t decide who it is they hate.’
‘But, is he… what was in the bag?’
‘Dirty socks. Running shorts. I mean, I think he is a bit peculiar, talking to himself out loud and all, but…’ She rubbed the back of her neck. ‘It wouldn’t have been so bad except that while they were hitting him, they spilled their booze on him. So when the lighter came out it had an accelerant. It’s all just a mess. Anyway, if you can get the photos for the police, that’d be great.’
He went to his office, and while the photos were printing he put his head down on his folded arms, thinking about the burned man whose name he didn’t know, thinking about Susie on the bridge in the city’s hidden garden.
He felt nervous on the subway on the way home, anxious, as if someone were about to hit him in the back of the head or push him on the tracks. There was no reason for this, but it didn’t seem familiar any longer, the empty cars estranged from him. The platforms echoing and deserted at College as he left the train and transferred to the streetcar, though it was not yet close to midnight, and the station should have been full of people, coming home from restaurants and meetings and sports events, going out to late-night clubs and parties. A man was standing at the corner of College and Yonge holding what seemed to be some kind of protest sign, a large piece of brown cardboard on which he had scrawled GEORGE BUSH TEXAS NORTH MURDER MORON BASTARD AMPHIBIAN, WE ARE NOT A MORON AT ALL.
Alex rode the streetcar to Grace, got off and crossed the street, and the man being held hostage came down the street to meet him. ‘Sir, I hate to bother you, sir, you’re always so kind… ’
‘Sure. Okay.’ He took a two-dollar coin from his pocket and handed it over.
‘Thank you so much, sir. I wouldn’t ask… ’
‘Yeah. Whatever.’ He didn’t want to hear any more about this, about terrorists, or people falling from the sky, or blood coming out of the ears.
‘Oh, oh, and another thing, sir?’
‘Mmm?’ He kept walking towards his doorway.
‘The lady’s brother, sir. The man you were trying to find. I made some calls to the important people. I can tell you where he is now, sir.’
A woman walked down Woodbine Avenue, carrying a slice of pizza in a greasy paper bag, and singing ‘Life During Wartime’ under her breath, a love song about tapped phone lines and vans full of guns. A woman alone at night, hypervigilant, listening for footsteps behind her, she sang to herself about burning her notebooks. Outside a subway station, municipal workers cleaned away scraps of scorched cloth and skin, while the burned man lay in isolation, his heart stuttering and slowing as the nurses ran lines of fluid into his bloodstream, fighting off shock, pulling him upwards as his body plunged down.
Two slight figures in leather jackets and fingerless gloves stopped in an alleyway near King and Bay. While one of them watched the passing traffic for police cars, the other pulled a can of paint from a scuffed khaki backpack and sprayed FEAR on the wall in black letters. They caught the King streetcar three blocks away, rode it to Spadina, and stopped in front of a blocky old office building, once again spraying FEAR against the bricks.
Across the city, harmless bacteria passed between individuals, carried by airborne particles or traces of saliva or the touch of a hand, our lives marked always by the proximity of others. And on this night or some night quite close in time, a germ woke up and began to inhabit someone’s blood, in a way that was no longer innocent.
The girl who fell sat in her room in front of her laptop, frowning over an essay.
Lord of the Flies
contains numerous characters which are all young boys. William Golding uses the characters to present many themes and big ideas that give the reader a lot to think about. So each of these characters has a very distinct personality.
She leaned back from the keyboard, playing idly with a bangle on her wrist. On the bulletin board above her desk, beside a picture of last year’s basketball team, she had pinned a postcard from a peace group, something she’d picked up outside the Eaton Centre; you were supposed to sign it and mail it to the prime minister or someone, but she wanted to leave it where it was, the hard-edged sketch of a hand, Say No printed across it in red.
Simon is in the choir but helps out differently to the others.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement beyond her window. Someone was out there in the dark. She leaned closer to the glass, and for a moment she saw the two people in leather jackets, a boy and a girl, she thought, slipping between the posts of a fence and into the ravine. One of them carried a can of spray paint, and her hair had come loose from underneath her cap and swung down her back, dyed a startling green. She moved with quick precision over the stones at the edge of the slope.
What were they doing, those two, down in the ravine, those hidden, knowing people? The girl tried to imagine being out there in the dark, elusive and daring. The vivid figures, alone together, definite somehow in their mysterious task. She caught a vanishing glimpse of long green hair between the black branches of the trees.
This could never be her life. She could not be that kind of girl. She turned back to the laptop.
Simon is very good and pure. He meets up with a pig’s head skewered on a stick, which becomes known as the Lord of the Flies.
She didn’t much like this assignment. She didn’t want to think about this, poor Simon crawling from the jungle into the circle of boys. Boys did that kind of thing, tearing butterflies to pieces, stomping on each other. What girls did was different.
She wondered if there was a book about what girls did, how you could talk about it. She imagined starting to write that book, what you can do with fingernails, what you can do with secrets.
She looked out the window again to see if the people with the spray paint were still visible. Nothing moved in the darkness, but written across the bars of the fence she saw a single word, painted in thick fast strokes. FEAR.
Alex took the wooden footbridge over Rosedale Valley Road, walking level with the tops of the bare broken trees, and turned onto one of the winding streets of Rosedale. Small cedars lined the sloping walkway to the house, behind a stone wall landscaped with climbing vines; there were rosebushes by the door, and holly trees, sprinkled with tiny Christmas lights, which he feared might have been planted specifically for the season.
Susie had been right about the Filipina maids; one of them opened the door when he knocked, and took his coat before he could stop her, and another immediately tried to offer him a glass of wine, smiling with the faded intensity of someone who had been smiling for many hours.
‘I’m just here to pick someone up,’ he said, and she showed him through the hallway, past a Chinese stone horse, a crackle-glaze vase.