Knife Fight and Other Struggles Read online

  “Dave!”

  “Shelly.” He kept hold of McGill. His tone was one that he thought was reasonable, but that she had told him more than once was a tone that was “goddamn scary.” Which was all right, she said; it made her feel safe, she said. Protected.

  His grip tightened on McGill’s arm. “This is bullshit.”

  McGill drew in a breath. His arm was hurting, and he was doing his best not to show it. But he wasn’t doing it very well, because she pointed out that he was hurting McGill and shamed him into letting go.

  “It’s all right,” McGill lied. “Your husband—Dave’s right. That is his boy in there, and it’s your boy too. If parents are okay with it, it’s better if it’s just me and the baby. But we can do this with one or both of you in there too. Or I could come back—”

  “No!” she said, too loudly, and then, too softly: “Don’t go, Mr. McGill.”

  Did McGill’s heart melt then? Did more than a decade of hope, of prayer, of dirty, dirty moments alone in his bed at the break of dawn . . . did all that draw together now, at the broken, pleading tone of her voice? Oh, how could it not? Was this not his dream, here before him, made flesh?

  If it didn’t melt—might it not soon shatter?

  “I’ll go in with you,” she said. “Dave will wait here in the kitchen. Right, Dave?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Dave. You promised.”

  And he had, and he knew it, and so that was that.

  When I arrived, the nursery was a cheery space. She had painted the walls little-boy blue, and dangled a mobile of friendly looking farm animals. The changing table was an antique in a tawdry way; it had been a little sheet-metal desk, just the size for a typewriter, an “In” box and a sheaf of paper. This she had painted a bright yellow, covered in terrycloth and stacked diapers and baby powder and a box of wipes. There was a toy box, filled with bric-a-brac from the baby shower, and a chest of drawers, stuffed with more shower swag: jumpers and bonnets and a little denim jacket for baby to wear, eventually. Adorable.

  McGill saw none of that.

  They had stripped the place bare, but for the bassinet. Nothing sharp, nothing heavy. Nothing that could suffocate, and nothing flammable.

  “That’s him,” he said, peering in.

  “That’s my baby.” She said it jauntily enough but she finished on the edge of bitter laughter.

  All business for the moment, McGill took no notice of it.

  He reached into his coat, and pulled out his Pentax, with its smeary lens and etched-in F-stops. He snapped two pictures through that vile instrument, and set it down on the floor. “Don’t touch it,” he said as she leaned to get it. “Please.”

  “All right,” she said.

  He leaned farther over the edge and stared at me. I didn’t look away. He shifted down to his knees and calmed his breathing. He blinked when I blinked. He breathed when I breathed. This went on for a while. How long? I can’t honestly say; this part of things, it’s easy to lose track of time, looking into the pale infinity of McGill’s baby-blues. . . .

  A girl could lose herself in there, don’t you think?

  “Aka Manah,” he said finally.

  “What?” She had been hovering by the door, and now she came closer. He just shook his head and continued—“Vassago . . . Furtur . . . Focalor.”—shaking his head again after each name.

  “Simon,” she said.

  “I know,” said McGill. “That’s the boy’s name. Looking for the . . . other one’s name.”

  “Do you just guess?”

  “Something like that,” said McGill. “Vepar. Mammon . . . Räum?”

  “Okay.”

  “Not that,” said McGill, “not him. Are you?”

  No, McGill, I’m not Räum.

  “Ah,” he said, and leaned away from the bassinet. He rubbed his hands together, and blew air out through his cheeks. Just what he was afraid of.

  “Gremory.”

  Aha!

  “He snapped his fingers!”

  “Did he?” said McGill. He was looking away.

  “He did,” she said. “Like a little Dean Martin.” She thought about that for a second. “Is it Gremory? Is that the right name?”

  “Think so.”

  A long breath. “How’d you guess it so fast?”

  “Lucky.” McGill came back and looked at me. His lips were drawn thin. His eyelids were too. He reached out with his right hand, fingers spread. They trembled as they rested on the baby’s skull.

  “What’re you going to do?” she asked, and he brought his left forefinger to his lips. “Okay, I’ll hush,” she said, and his right hand tightened, at the little finger and thumb, like forceps behind the ears. His middle finger danced over the back of the skull, until it stopped, and dithered. It didn’t last long, though; like a wedding ring spinning round a sink drain, it soon disappeared inside.

  I had him to the second knuckle.

  What does McGill see? What I wouldn’t give to know. I know what I see; his eyelids, flickering like a hummingbird’s wings, his mouth hanging open as he mumbles commands, sweat running down the side of his nose, staining his collar. But him? When he looks on me, does he see an obsidian woman, naked and shining, breasts suckling six crows, wormy cunny dripping amarone-scented menses into the deathly loam of Golgotha? Does he cower at my magnificent obscenity?

  Does he wish for his mummy?

  I cannot tell. All the times we have met, he has never said.

  “You need to leave the baby.”

  No, McGill. I don’t.

  He said the baby’s name.

  That means shit to me, McGill.

  “It is the owner of that form.”

  No. It’s nothing. Unbaptized. Belongs to me.

  “You got no claim. You are Gremory. You trespass here. Go on back to where you dwell.”

  I am who I am. I dwell where I am and I am here. You go back.

  “I cast you out. I cast you out.” He said some of those words that his mummy taught him. I let him go on for a dozen of them before I said anything.

  Your heart’s not in it, McGill. What’s the matter now?

  “You got to leave.” He uttered another stanza.

  You have to want it. You don’t want it, do you?

  “Git. Go on.” He paused. His hand gripped the baby’s skull tighter. If it were a baseball, he’d have been making ready to throw a curve. “Fuck out of here, you.”

  You’re in such a hurry, McGill. You’re missing steps; really, you’re far from your usual professional self. Your mother would never have stood for that kind of thing. Never mind the language.

  Oh, that got him. McGill’s mother . . . what of her, hey? I hear she has been out of the game for some eight years now. She taught him everything he knows, and now everything she knows rests in McGill’s unlovely skull. And she and her knowledge were formidable. Truly: None of us could best her like the Alzheimer’s did. Now . . . she wouldn’t know herself reflected in a mirror, would she?

  He told me to fuck right off and called me hell-spawn. He told me I had “no fucking right.” Me? I squirted moist feces into my diaper and chortled.

  Mothers get them every time.

  Eventually he ran himself down. I waited to make sure before continuing.

  You haven’t asked me what I want.

  “You want to leave.”

  You haven’t asked me why I chose this one.

  He paused. “Why did you choose this one?”

  The answer to both is the same. McGill, I want you to be happy.

  His pause stretched into a silence. I let it sit. I didn’t wish to insult McGill’s intelligence.

  She was so lovely, still; it had been less than a decade since he’d first seen her in Grade 10’s History of Europe class. She was a mother now, a wife—but did her skin still not glow with the light of youth?
She was a freckle-faced girl then, and those freckles had faded over the years, as they do sometimes. But wasn’t her mouth just as thick with girlish eroticism now, as it was as he watched her laugh by her locker in the G-section downstairs—the locker that McGill made a point of passing by, even when his next class was at the far end of the school. . . .

  “You knew,” he said finally.

  I knew. You wear it on your sleeve, McGill.

  And of course, that was when he gathered the last of his strength. “You can’t tempt me,” he said. “Begone!”

  Oh, McGill. I know I can’t tempt you. That’s why I think I’ll stay here for now. You begone, for a little while. Think about what I said.

  He staggered back, ectoplasm dribbling from his middle finger to make a stain down his pant leg, that had she not been standing there, watching, staring, working it out herself, he would never have been able to explain.

  The baby started to cry. I did nothing to calm it.

  Its mother looked at it in wonder. Did she think she could tell—that her child was returned to her, that the miraculous laying-on-of-hands by McGill had done the trick? Oh, why even ask the question. Of course she did. A mother can tell when her child is wailing, and when something else—some otherworldly thing, perhaps—is manipulating its tiny larynx, making it gargle out blasphemes that only she can hear. . . .

  She scooped the child up in her arms, and held it close. Its tears subsided, and it began to coo. McGill, meanwhile, steadied himself against the doorjamb. He wasn’t in a position to do much else; I’d cast him out, good and proper. A man doesn’t just walk away from something like that.

  She looked at McGill, and he looked back at her. There was something different in her look, and McGill picked up on it. A hint of recognition, perhaps? Gratitude, certainly. Yes, certainly that—McGill could see that it in her eye.

  After all, I had put it there.

  He drew a shaking breath, and nodded, and might have summoned the will to say something. He scarcely had a chance to, though, because as he straightened, her husband was in the doorway with him. He stood staring at her, hands in unconscious fists—a question in his eye too.

  “He’s back,” she said, wonderingly. “Simon’s back, Dave. Whatever he did—worked.”

  Her husband looked at McGill, at that trouser-stain, at McGill’s face, pale and drawn.

  “That so, mister?” he asked.

  McGill had not yet recovered his words. He gulped air and nodded. Her husband clapped him on the shoulder, and strode into the nursery. He leaned over me—over the baby—and reached out with a tentative finger, to touch its chin. She let him take the baby. It clung to him, as I cooed in his ear.

  “It’s . . . too soon,” said McGill finally, and gasped again, “to say . . . for sure.”

  Eventually, even a specimen like McGill gets his wind back.

  When he did, she saw him to the door, while her husband put the baby down. They paused in the kitchen. She put a hand on his arm. This time, McGill didn’t try to worm away. She said something softly to him. A question, yes. Do I know you, from elsewhere? I feel . . . I don’t know, it’s silly.

  That’s the question. I can tell by the way he shuffled, and looked away before looking back.

  She glanced away too—to the nursery, where she saw that her husband was properly distracted. Then she looked back, and leaned closer, and whispered something else.

  McGill nodded, and looked to the nursery himself where he saw the baby, head at its father’s shoulder, looking right back at him.

  “Keep in touch, Mrs. Reesor,” he said, finally loud enough for all to hear. “In case . . . you know.”

  She looked at him with such intensity then—turning away only as her husband turned.

  “So he’s fine?” he said.

  McGill nodded, and chin down, headed for the door.

  “I gave him the cheque,” she said when McGill had left, and her husband tried to look her in the eye.

  “As long as you’re okay now,” he said.

  Oh, she was fine. Better than the day that I arrived in that house, that’s for certain. She had been such a melancholic one, that day that I crawled from the dishwater, and slithered on my belly across the kitchen and up and around her leg, to the breast where the infant fussed and suckled. He would not sleep. He kicked and squalled. She was chained to him, that’s how she felt. And when I entered him, through the pinhole door in his skull, and had him bite down—he made her shriek. Might she’ve killed him? Mothers do, sometimes. Their hearts harden. They see the lay of the barren years ahead, serving hand and foot to their child, and its father now grown cold to the touch.

  How many times have I been called up by a neglected husband who’d found my name in a grimoire, and begged me on the strength of my reputation, to irrigate the drying slits of their fading brides?

  Ah, it would have been the easiest thing for me, to turn her pearl as she looked on her husband—to whisper and suggest—to indicate and to remind her, of what joys the old hunger brings.

  But that wasn’t why I came to that house. So I held my peace, until McGill came. His aching hunger was nothing I had to tweak.

  All I had to do was lay her before him, and reaching into her as McGill reached into me, tweak her heart so, and set her on her course.

  Her husband made her dinner.

  It involved shrimp and couscous and dried fruit, some curry flakes and fish stock to round it out. He understood it to be a favourite of hers. She did nothing to correct the misapprehension. She washed up, and saw to the baby, and joined him in bed. When he asked if everything was all right, she said yes. When he touched her, she made a noise that he understood to mean no.

  In the deep night, I awoke to find her over my crib.

  The next morning, after he left for work, she took me out for the second outdoor excursion since I arrived. As she had that first time, she installed me in a great blue stroller, with thick rubber tires, multiple straps to hold me tight and a pouch behind my head filled with the mysterious tools of the mothering trade. It was warmer out of doors than that first time. She wore a red-and-white cotton dress; I, a tiny blue terrycloth jumper.

  We made it quite a way—well past the bank building at the corner of the street where things had gone so badly that last time—along past a filling station—and across another street, to a park with a playground and some benches in the shade of thick, blossoming maple trees. She stopped in front of one of these benches, and looked at me and it, and finally she did sit, and turned the stroller around so that I faced her, and she looked at me again—and it dawned on me that she wasn’t looking at me . . . she was searching for me, in the empty stare of her little son’s eye.

  Searching for some pretext, perhaps, to call?

  Six days she searched in vain. On the morning of the seventh, she picked up the phone.

  I could tell it was not McGill she called by her bright and easy tone. “Hey, you!” she said, and after a pause, “Yeah, things are better now.” And another pause, as the phone chirped brightly in her ear. “I know!” And more chirping. “Yeah! Right?” She nodded, her smile brighter than I believe I’d ever seen it. “So it’s okay if I come? You sure?”

  And finally: “Great!”

  She switched off her phone and leaned over the bassinet.

  “Guess where we’re going, Simon?” she cooed. “Can you say ‘Brannigan’s’?”

  The infant blew a snot bubble out its nose and giggled. I kept my peace.

  Brannigan’s was a little pub a few blocks past the park. Nice and murky inside, it suited my tastes. But we didn’t stay there long. She manoeuvred the stroller around the bar to a door to a back patio. There, in the combined shelter of a maple tree and a great red umbrella, gathered two more strollers, and the mothers who pushed them.

  “Hey, Shell!’ shouted one of the mothers, standing up with her own baby in one arm and
extending the other for a hug. The baby—a big bruiser, flabby and blond like its mother—regarded me with dull hostility from its perch. The other infant—a little girl, judging by the pink—stayed in her stroller seat for the second hug and would not meet my eye. Her mother was a wiry one, with enormous white teeth. She smelled of lawn cuttings.

  “How you been?” that one asked, and without leaving time for an answer, turned to me. “Look at him! He’s so big!”

  “Keep feeding ’em, bound to happen.”

  The two mothers laughed and laughed, and the flabby one pointed to an empty chair. She sat there, after tucking my stroller in between her and the blond baby’s stroller. Its mother set the infant back into its seat, and launched into a description of how big it was, and then a long talk about nutrition. I stopped paying attention.

  Her baby wouldn’t look away.

  It sat high in its seat, fidgeting with a little blue pacifier in its hands. It stared at me, an expression that might have been indignation on its face. I looked away, and when I looked back, it hadn’t moved.

  Did it see what she could not? That hidden in the soft skull of this one, was a being older than any here? That McGill’s exorcism had failed, and the thing inside was waiting like a barely irradiated tumour to re-emerge?

  Did it think there was something it could do about that?

  The waitress arrived, and it disappeared for a moment behind her muscular legs and tartan skirt as she took lunch orders. It took longer than it needed to, of course.

  “Hey,” she said when the waitress finally stepped away, “you remember a kid called McGill?”

  “Who?” said the skinny one, but the other waved a hand over the table: “McGill. From high school?” and the skinny one said, “Oh, with the. . . .” and waved her hand over her face.

  She nodded, reaching down to ruffle my hair. “With the acne,” she said, “that’s him.”

  “Weird kid.”

  “Yeah, wasn’t he always wearing black—”

  “—kind of goth—”

  “—but without the style.”