‘I don’t know. I guess most people just lie.’
‘Anyway,’ he saw dimly that she was lifting her hand and wiping her eyes, ‘that wasn’t the only thing. I just… Alex, my twin brother is schizophrenic.’
He bit his lip. ‘Yeah. And I have diabetes.’
‘Oh God, you don’t get it,’ she said, her voice choked. ‘Do you think I meant – ’
‘I don’t know what I think. I don’t think anything.’
‘It wasn’t like that, I wasn’t thinking about the, the child having it. I was thinking about me. I was thinking,’ and now she really was crying, he heard the small gasping sounds between her words, ‘I would lose my mind, I would go crazy like Derek, and I would have this baby, this poor little baby, and it would have to love me, it wouldn’t have a choice because babies don’t, and it would have to watch me lose my mind. Probably just when it was old enough to really – to have its life totally destroyed, and I could see it so clearly, I could see how I would fall apart, little by little, and I would, I would do awful things, I would hurt it, hurt it in all kinds of horrible ways, and it was so easy to picture, so easy… ’
‘But why… for God’s sake, why would you… ’
‘I was sitting in, in this chair, in this house in Vancouver, and there was this picture in my mind of putting a baby’s hand on the burner of the stove, and I thought, I will believe that I’m helping it. I will do this and I will think that I’m helping it. And I couldn’t, it wouldn’t go away, and I couldn’t get up from the damn chair, hours, a whole day, I don’t know how long. I would believe it was kindness.’ Her voice broke up completely, and she had to breathe fast and shallow for a minute before she could speak again. ‘Alex, it shouldn’t have been just Derek,’ she said, her voice faint and strained. ‘It should have been me. You didn’t grow up with us, you don’t understand, you think these things are far away, but they’re not far away, they’re close, God they’re close, there’s nothing there I don’t already own. It’s right here inside me, all of Derek’s sickness, it’s in me too, and maybe it won’t ever get me, maybe I’ll always escape, but it’s still there, it’s still mine.’
Alex sat with his head on his knees, trying pointlessly, stupidly, to remember if there had been a clinic in Vancouver back then or if she would have gone to a hospital. He hoped there had been a clinic, but he couldn’t remember. He hadn’t kept track of those details. He’d only taken pictures.
He imagined a past where he might have said different things. Where he might have said, I will love you, I will look after you, whoever you become and whatever you do. Where he might have said, Stay here. Stay with me. We are all of us mortally sick. Stay here. But it wouldn’t have been real. He wouldn’t have understood what he was saying.
‘I was a stupid scared kid, but I think I did love you sometimes,’ said Susie. ‘So fuck off out of my life, okay?’ She stood up, wiping her nose, and crossed the street, without looking back at Alex as he followed her.
They walked in silence down Pottery Road, into the darkness. The night-vision problem was worse. He could see very little. He remembered the day that he caught her as she fell from the railing, and the sudden feeling that was like a revelation. You are mine. He thought that, after all, it was nearly true, and that it was far more painful and complicated than the person he was could ever have dreamed.
Along the narrow shoulder of the highway, the lighting was unpredictable and sporadic, and the route seemed too precarious, the cars curving directly towards him, each missed step a waiting disaster. They crossed the Don River and he felt gravel under his feet along the curve of the road towards Bayview. An ambulance raced past them in the other direction, its light pulsating.
At the foot of the hill, she could not any longer pretend to be unaware that he was behind her. ‘I never invited you to come,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘What makes you think this is any of your business?’
He had nothing to say to that, so he simply shrugged. Susie turned away and began to climb, towards her brother, her magnetic north. He waited a few moments, leaving a distance between them, before he started up the slope himself.
But when they reached the top, above the streetlights, he was nearly blind. The ambient light that he remembered was useless to him now, his eyes unable to register it. He took an uncertain step forward, unbalanced, and reached out for something to put his hand against, but there was nothing there. He walked another unsteady pace and stopped.
‘I can’t see where the railway track is,’ he said.
Susie didn’t speak. He would not have been wholly surprised if she had left him there. He heard her moving in the darkness, the soft friction of boots in snow. Then her gloved fingers closed around his wrist.
‘This way,’ she murmured, and led him forward. ‘Now.’
He stepped out carefully and felt the track under his feet, stumbled across and stopped sharply at the other side, remembering that the steep downslope was very close. Susie let go of his wrist, and he shuffled downwards in a crouch, clinging to dry branches, until he saw a dull light to the left. Derek’s lantern. He could make out the shape of the tent by the concrete wall now, pick his way to level ground. Susie went ahead of him. ‘Derek?’ she called.
There was no answer from the tent.
‘Derek?’ She moved closer to the front flap. ‘It’s Susie-Paul. Are you there?’ Then frowned, tipped her head as if she heard something faint. ‘Hello? Derek, are you okay? Talk to me, Derek.’
Alex wasn’t aware of any sound except the distant traffic, but Susie leaned closer to the flap. ‘Hello? Please, Derek, answer me. Hello?’
Her hand moved out, and Alex caught his breath as she unzipped the tent flap. In the light that spilled from the opening, he could see her put a hand to her mouth, her eyes widening. ‘Derek, Jesus Christ, talk to me!’ She disappeared into the tent, and he was crouching and heading towards the entrance when she looked out.
‘Alex, come here,’ she said shakily. ‘He’s really sick. Physically sick.’
He got down on his hands and knees and crept into the tent, the cold nearly as bad inside, the wind crawling through small rips in the fabric. The rotting sweet smell of unwashed human, sticky acrid male smells of urine and semen and sweat, and something else, the swampy scent of illness. Derek was lying on the ground on his side, unmoving, and Alex realized now what Susie had heard, the rasp of hard breath. He had heard this before in the hospital. Not agonal, not the last breaths, not quite, but very bad.
She had moved to the side of the tent, deferring to his quasi-professional status. The lantern was inside, and he could see well enough. He didn’t want to touch this man, but there was a duty here, some elusive transfer of the medical oath to Alex, the next best thing.
He put a hand on Derek’s dirty forehead, and there was a trace of response, a twitch and a moan, consciousness.
‘He’s burning up.’ He tried to think what to do about fever. Derek’s mouth was open, the lips dry and puckered. ‘He’s extremely dehydrated.’ He looked around the tent, piles of ragged clothing, old books with foxed pages, rat droppings. There was a bottle of water in one corner. ‘He’s kind of semi-conscious. It’s possible I can get him to take some fluids.’