She took hold of his hands and moved them further down, the robe parting slightly so he was holding the soft drift of hair and wet flesh. ‘Oh,’ he said, as she pressed back harder against him, and he felt his knees loosen as he dipped his head and sucked on the small lobe of her ear, his tongue against a nub of scar tissue where a piercing had healed badly. She turned around in an awkward tangle of legs and fingers, and he lifted her onto the counter as she reached for the zipper of his jeans.
Her body had no overlay of memory for him; that one sad stoned trembling night had been too brief, too long ago. His head bending down to her, mouthing her dark pink nipple, this was now, this existed for itself. The salt slickness of her cunt. Not the body of a girl, but a woman at the end of her thirties – a woman who had never had children, who was strong and fit, but adult, aging, skin and muscle loosening. Immediate and real.
They lay down on her bed, exhausted. Her eyes were bloodshot, and he was nursing a cramp in his calf. Skin on skin, clammy with sweat in chill air, and he felt the heat from her flushed shoulders like a coil of wire.
‘I’m sorry I shouted at you,’ said Susie. ‘Back at the rainforest place.’
‘The Cloud Gardens. It’s okay. You had a point.’ Though he could not even clearly remember, right now, what they had said to each other. ‘It’s a very tiny rainforest,’ he said, spreading his hand over her ribs. ‘Like, in an elevator shaft. It’s the oddest thing.’
She kissed him again, and even the sour taste of her mouth was too much for him, he wanted to draw every bit of her inside him, into his blood. Over and over, she could break him down.
The light was fading already in mid-afternoon, and snow was still falling, soft and slow, the kind of snowfall that never seemed heavy at any one time but accumulated into thick billows and drifts, pressed down on the sidewalk by pedestrians and melted into shades of tan and deep brown by the cars on the road.
Alex sat on the floor of Susie’s living room, drinking coffee and staring at a newspaper, where a picture of the burned man dominated the lower part of the front page. The man was, as it turned out, neither Muslim nor Jewish but a Portuguese Catholic, and was described by his family as ‘odd.’ He thought of phoning Janice Carriere to see what was happening, if the man was still stable, if he was awake at all.
Susie came into the room, dressed now in a sweater and skirt, and sat down in an office chair at a worn wooden desk with a rather expensive laptop resting on it. Ikea bookshelves around the walls, and a large map of the city taped up near the desk, with annotations in green and red ink, a scatter of shelters and homeless communities – the Scott Mission, Seaton House, the cardboard neighbourhood under the arc of Bathurst where it rose, just past the Gardiner. Bastard Bridge, she had written here. A yellow post-it note read prelim interviews only, revisit. On the desk, a thick sheaf of papers, several different pens including some stolen from hotels, a glass paperweight with a sea urchin inside it. She looked up at the map.
‘That’s where he is, right?’ she asked. Alex stood up and looked where she was pointing.
‘Yeah. That’s it.’
‘There’d be much easier access from Bayview, wouldn’t there? I’ll try that next time.’
Alex frowned. ‘You’re going back?’
She looked up at him, surprised. ‘Not this minute. But yes. Of course I am.’
‘Do you think that really makes sense?’
She opened her mouth, then looked away quickly. ‘Well, it’s not like you have to come with me,’ she said.
‘That’s not what I meant. I’m just not sure it’s a good idea.’
She picked up her coffee cup with both hands and bent her head to drink. Her hair was wet and shining, the desk lamp picking out erratic highlights, a dark syrup stream. ‘That’s not your problem, is it?’
Alex tried not to feel as if he had just been punched in the stomach.
‘I don’t want you getting hurt is all,’ he said.
‘Schizophrenics are rarely violent. That’s a TV myth.’
‘I didn’t mean physically.’
‘I told you. It’s not your problem.’
He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling tension gathering in the air. This was bound to happen, he’d known that; the history and the hurt would come rushing back. They couldn’t talk about anything without the static in the way.
‘I’m sorry I involved you at all, okay?’ she said. ‘It wasn’t fair. I can deal with this myself, I always have.’
‘Susie-Sue. That’s really not what I meant.’
‘I know what you meant. You meant that I should just leave him there.’
‘Not exactly. No. I just don’t see why you have to go up there yourself. It’s too hard on you.’
‘And who the hell else do you think is going to? The prime minister? God? No one cares about him but me, Alex. No one else even tries.’
‘Okay, okay.’ He walked a few steps around the room, not sure where he was going, and stopped in front of a picture pinned to the back of the door, a child’s drawing, a stick person with strangely angled arms under a huge sun.
‘Miriam did that,’ said Susie. ‘Evvy’s little girl. Years ago, of course. It’s supposed to be me.’
‘I should think that’s an honour.’
‘Not really. Kids’ll draw anyone who passes by at the right moment.’
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I should go with you. You shouldn’t be alone.’
She shrugged. ‘That’s up to you. I’m all right on my own.’
‘You didn’t think so before.’
‘Yeah, well, that was stupid. I shouldn’t have asked you.’
‘Yes, you should. Of course you should.’
She sat under the desk lamp, broken reflections of light moving on the surface of her coffee, bright threads in her hair trailing down past her angular cheekbones. Her head turned away from him.
‘Maybe I should go home now,’ he said.
‘Maybe.’
‘I have to feed my cat.’
She nodded.
‘Will you tell me when you go to see Derek again?’
‘I suppose.’
‘I want to come. Really.’
‘Yeah, okay.’ She got up from the chair and hugged him. Her hair left a damp patch on his shirt.
‘I’ll talk to you soon,’ he said, his fingers digging into the fabric of her sweater.
‘Well, it’s all right. I should work for the rest of the weekend. I’m writing this paper for a journal.’
‘But soon.’
‘Sure. I’ll call you. Or you can call me. Whichever.’
Saturday evening on College Street, the sidewalks busy despite the snow, despite even the falling girls, people still determined to prove that they were the kind of people who went to College Street on Saturday night. The lights of the clubs and restaurants glowing against the cold as Alex sat on the streetcar, looking at the burned man’s face in a discarded newspaper. He thought again about phoning Janice, just to ask. Otherwise he might never know.