Schmaltz Home Bakery

I spent a long time on the streets in downtown Toronto ducking and diving in various states of underemployment, homelessness and squalor. Now, I almost wish I could say there was a very good reason for it all. If you asked me then, it was a journey of living as radically as possible, questioning everything and meeting as many people on the fringes of society that I could. Does that constitute a defense of squatting, all-night boozecan parties, promiscuity, general carelessness about my health, welfare and appearance? Maybe, maybe not.

I'll never forget the summer, autumn and winter I worked for Faye Couillard in the Vienna Home Bakery on Queen West. I'd bunked up with a few mates down on Niagara near Tecumseth. The summer was groaning on, I had found a punk girl I liked who liked me back and who would come over to stare with me out the window at the abattoir down the road while we played cards and talked about philosophy. Something about J's crooked smile made me want to do a job that year that might play out a bit longer than panhandling, drugdealing or stealing. 


***


The time was November, late afternoon, and there were gloppy raindrops clinging to the frontage of Cafe Schmaltz on Queen West. Sun peeked in flashes through the big pane. Beams of light flew up cream-coloured walls lined with stubby coffee cups. Painted cabinets held pecan pie, milkshake paraphernalia. A ubiquitous grainy mirror confronted patrons opposite the swivel seats at the bar. I was there. Nobody else was in the place so I lolled and looked over the road. It was my break and I rested my chin on my elbow on the Formica counter top in fake depression, like all smokers do. Behind, the kitchen throbbed.

It would not be so hellish busy tonight on a wet Thursday, I thought. The usuals would come in, say hi to Faye. They'd shriek at how good her pastries are and hover over her coffee in some playing-out of a ritual of home. Who were these people? I knew a few of them and would give a little chat sometimes - smirking, being unnecessarily clattery with the dishes. Gawky, scrawny dishwasher.  It didn't bug me, but these weren't my types, old gallery owners and writers. They looked at me knowingly, which I hated. I felt like a spy among them. Their nice slices of pie and refined tastes overlaid my street as I knew it and which they were so oblivious to. If they thought they were the directors and screenplay writers of the film we were all watching, I had them there, because I had my own more real version going on behind as I watched them.

Tonight, I'd score some blow for sure after work; I had a solid connection and the money carefully folded in my front pocket. I span round on the stool as I thought about it. If I played my cards right, I could convince Cheri (Cheri, pronounced "sherry", the hot pin-up type who ran the vintage furniture business across the street and came in for takeaway soup every day, Cheri. THAT Cheri!) to come and meet me for a drink. She was way out of my league, but didn't she always reserve a cheeky smile for me on her way out? and man, she had those Japanese heart-shaped cheekbones and brocade dresses that showed off her hourglass figure. I was smitten. I'd even forgo the coke to have a date with her, I told myself. She was mature and dangerous, like opium, or bikers.

Faye unlocked the door and came in carrying a box full of bread and stuff. "Help me, John. Can you put all this away?". My reverie snapped and I jumped up to help. The great thing about manual labour jobs, you can do them in your sleep. Everything is kind of automatic. Seven o'clock melted into nine o'clock and the floor had already been mopped, which of course is the very last job, and you're out. We weren't busy, I scarfed a piece of chocolate cake for dinner - one that was crushed and left over. My man was due at 9:30 and I was wired from necking three coffees throughout the shift. The bone china cup rested on the top lip of my dish pit - I filled it with warm water from the long tap and drained it in two sips. 

The drizzle hadn't let up. Faye locked the door behind us both and looked at me quizzically. Maybe unsure whether to ask what I was doing, as I was not walking off, just hanging about with a floppy cigarette in my hand. "Good night, then!", "Good night. See you tomorrow Faye. Thanks.", "Are you alright?", "Yeah. No worries. See you tomorrow." I huddled under the awning as the roar of the evening took over from the sighing of the daytime traffic and trade. 

I could see Cheri clearly through the window of her shop, doing the daily receipts from the day, looking vacantly at a blotter paper. It was so interesting to see people when they didn't know you were staring at them, with their natural serious faces.

She looked up and I waved. I was hopping from foot to foot in my thin hoodie, and she smiled and waved back. Where the hell was this guy, my coke guy? I didn't want to stand here like a tool all day. Five minutes to go, why hadn't I said somewhere that wasn't my work? 

"Eric?" The dude's lumber only changed once in my direction to acknowledge. 

"Walk with me." He had dreadlocks and a put-on deep voice. Classic, I thought and smiled to myself. Whatever, here goes.

We trudged along to the next corner. Queen and much of Toronto has a wide network of alley by-ways in behind the streets. I knew we were making for one of them.

"What's up?"

"It is what it is, homey." 

"Yeah. Fuckin' weather, man."

"You cool?"

"Yeah. Let's go."

We ambled over near where there was an ice fridge in front of a convenience store and feigned doing an elaborate fist bump greeting to do the deal. I don't know if it was him or me that botched it - the money safely changed hands but the baggy with the cocaine somehow landed on the ground. Not breaking the nonchalance of the second, I stepped on it firmly and pivoted on that foot.

"Well, nice seeing you."

He sucked his teeth and made a stupid laugh as he stepped backwards in his raggedy denim, "Yeah, gimme a buzz whenever, whatever." 

Jesus, I needed a beer. What about Cheri? I didn't even know if she did drugs or not. Fuck it. I needed to eat some real food. I shivered and bent over real slow like I was gonna tie my shoe and palmed the grit-covered packet. I looked up and down the street to make sure there was nobody watching me, and slinked back to Queen.

Cheri was locking up the shop and I jogged across to catch her at the right moment. She was fumbling around with keys and it ended up awkward.

"Alright?"

"Hey John. How are you?" She spun around keeping one hand on the door.

"Hey. Yeah. Good. How's things?"

She wrestled with the iron grill shutter thing and I was too awkward to try and help. She seemed to be an alien from another planet and my hands were buried deep in my hoodie pockets.

"Oh. Here." I made a feeble attempt to hold her bag.

"No. That's fine. I got it. It's good for my muscles. Ha!" The gate slammed down and she was figuring out the padlock.

"Anyway, see you tomorrow!" she said before I could do or say anything else. 

I tried, even though I was 100% in Loserville at this point. 

"You want to get a beer with me or something?"

She answered too fast, "Oh.. you know, I'm so tired. But maybe some other time."

I walked off too fast. "Okay, good night!", I almost yelled it over my shoulder. I'm not sure if I felt relief. I was desperately hungry and down to my last five bucks. Shit, how could I have paid for a beer with that? There were two more cigarettes banging together in my pack, and I could always roll butts if I had to. The coke would last me the night if my roommate could front the beer while we watched TV. Actually, we did audio overdubbings of Star Trek episodes and played them back while we were getting stoned. 

Mr.Pong's fast food Chinese was open. I bought a jumbo egg roll, asked for extra chili sauce and ate it right there standing up looking at the drizzle outside. The food sustained me enough to feel alive again. Noise of sirens and people got flatter as I trailed through them. 

All around, people had purpose. They were flitting to meetings with friends, drinking beer or coffee and talking so uninhibitedly. Yuppie scum - I really hated all those people. Why do people need to have their jobs, and buttony jackets and dogs and things? Why did we have to have things?

I'd postpone smoking until I got home and dry, enjoy it more in the comfort of a chair, I thought. The light reflected up from the puddles was as bleary as my eyes on the walk home. The dirty sidewalk guiding me, leading down to the muck of the Bathurst Street bridge.

Joseph's Ass

We've come a long way together down this road. I see he's struggling, the heaviness of his pack shows in his old face. Maybe my time is almost up too; I feel my hooves move placidly and interminably as we navigate the road in the outskirts of Bethlehem. He tenderly holds the shag of my grey mane but I realise it's as much to balance himself as it is to show me comfort. I don't mind the tug of his arm making my head sway.

We pass small alleys while the shadows lengthen on the eve of the day before the baby is due. The night is pregnant with things black and mysterious. Emerging stars offer no consolation or comfort. I hear the chatter of other beasts settling in their hay-beds on the other sides of the walls we pass.

Had a good rest in the stable before our walk. I closed my eyes during most of the fight the two of them had had. In fact, Mary threw him out. She'd said, "Bring back some food or some fuel to burn you good-for-nothing!". Then, as she flung an empty urn, "I married a bin-sniffing dog. Or at least a dog would bring a scrap for his family! You would rather fondle the rejected goods of other men than be a husband and a father!" Joseph stalked out leading me by my tether and turning his thin silent cheek to her wail.

My master has not plied his craft for many months. He'd needed to diversify to make ends meet. Instead of selling his own handmade pieces to the men and women with purple gowns in the marketplace, he's had to resort to refurbishing what has been discarded and hawks them from my back door-to-door; a bench that lost a leg could be mended and resold, rough chair backs without seats repurposed as axe handles or small vessels. We've become salvagers, picking our way between the taverns, cess-pits and brothels to large unofficial midden heaps on the edge of the city where death stares men in the face and many men smile back at it.

His eye has become practiced at seeing value in the smallest bits of material, however charred or broken. The value he sees or is able to give has not translated into fortune for us, his family. As Joseph and Mary's prospects dwindle he's taken to going out more and more just to get out of the house, picking up the worn-out bits of wood and other fragments more out of bemusement than purpose. 

Where once other scavengers regarded Joseph as a colleague and competitor in the game of sifting for unknown treasure, they now see his decrepitude, how gingerly he walks and how few wares he has to sell. It's known that he and Mary are to have a child as well, and among the wicked jests that are said about him is perhaps they might eat the pauper-to-be to stave off the inevitable madness of winter. We have nothing to give an assailant apart from our last gasps, so what have we to fear as we trudge openly?

There, there was a body before us. A man had been mauled by something and partially eaten after having been thrown in the lane, his wretched body twisted in a few rags. Many pitiful creatures like ourselves lined the road, either begging or dying, but none took notice of this expired person that we had nearly tripped over. Joseph pulled back, recognising his face.

"Oh no. Aaron. Oh, my friend Aaron. What has happened? You must have owed. Oh damn. Come on then."

He managed to drape the dead body across my back.

"We must take him home." Joseph nudged me in a new direction and we sought the place that the friend Aaron had lived. 

Our progress was slow and in the darkness, the eyes of those who still lived around us picked out pricks of light as they groaned and lay in their insensible positions, paying no heed to our progress.

We found the door. No light could be seen from within. It was a hovel and Joseph tried to enter but the roof was near collapse and no one was there. Surely, Aaron's wife had either died or fled. As Joseph exited the hut, the door came away and dropped with a thud on the ground by me. It was a very good piece of solid oak. It had neither cracks nor was it warped. 

Joseph carried Aaron into the house which now was his tomb. As he did so, my master's back seemed straighter and stronger than before, or I was imagining things in my drowsy donkey's way. Feeling less tired suddenly and only able to attribute it to the lessening of my burden, I made a chatter to which some other beasts replied.

Joseph picked up the door and turned it over before loading it on my back. It wasn't heavy and I was glad that we would be returning with something for Mary. His hand reached for my neck and I leaned into it, aware that the strange touch of a human could be soothing to me although I didn't understand how.

We are returning now. We enter and I retreat to my far end of the stable after Joseph takes the wood from my back. Mary has not slept yet, but she is calm. All is calm. I eat what little grass there is in my corner placidly and close my eyes. I can hear the soft sounds of the two of them embrace. The baby will come the next day and I know that the oak door will be the little one's cradle.

mammoths on the moon

Niggling cough, roundabout way of talking.
An atomic clock, detects the small discomforts.
Hard edges in the cafe where we sit.
If I were to look into a rock pool at noon, 
it would be midnight then and we're 
already late, as it is.
Are we crazed by the devils of gravity?

Unfamiliar furniture roundabout the place.
Flannel wool bent up broken bits.
Ties in a dish, in a very shallow cup.
If I were to look at your face,
it wouldn't be where it is during -
It IS, during the day, as it is.
At last, the lurch of planet makes sense.

A soothing balm is your, our ever 
Calm way of moving.
Familiar covers, fuck, I'm glad we're lovers
If I were to close this door,
it wouldn't mean more than if
I hadn't, as it is. Here you are.
Have our molecules commanded?

She'll leave her crap roundabout the flat
In her ineffable glory of untidy
Leaves on shoes and glues unscrewed
If I were to hold her small hand,
it would be any day from the unsung
Past of the future.
Our stars are heroically branded.

Janine

Janine wore self-made gingham dresses and thin silver bangles that moved up and down her wrists. 

One day, when my parents were out, she turned up at my house with pizza and we talked about stuff. We got on to the subject of Mike and her partner Ed for a while. We talked about the previous summer when Mike and I had driven to Montreal to meet her when she was with Ed and Mike had really wanted to impress her. He really fancied her, despite the fact that Ed was there. 

He had brought along an expensive green liqueur of some kind in his small black Toyota, but things had not gone according to plan. I should tell you that Janine was of the same cultural group and age as Mike, but I'd had a sense that our drive to Quebec was doomed from the moment we set off.

Janine used my telephone to ring someone. I think it was her dad or her mum.

"Yeah. Okay. Just leave it and I'll deal with it tomorrow. I'm at a friend's house. Okay. Yep. Good night."

"Are you close to your family?" I asked, sitting awkwardly on the other side of the dining table. I tried to make my question sound casual.

"Dunno. What does close mean?" Her bangles moved around as she reached for the pizza box. I loved it when people asked questions about the meanings of words, so I sat back and observed. 

Janine had slightly dreaded hair and her eyes seemed not  to meet yours when you were talking to her. She sat a bit hunched - a compact sitter with her red gingham dress and Rajistani bag nearby with mirrors sewn into it. She was a cool dresser. 

"I guess we communicate alright." her ringed fingers fished for a slice, "but we don't always agree on stuff."

I admired her jewelry and poise. I thought she was as insolent with her parents as I was with mine. Did they fight? Were we alike? Was this a sign of our being of the same tribe? I trembled. Then the terrible reminder of our age differences crashed in on me. Did I seem tame to her? I don't know what I did, maybe squirmed and tried to maintain a smirk while she ate her pizza sphinx-like across the dining room table, all jaw and no eyes. 

"What do you want to do?" she said.

I was afraid to say. Words for initiating a sexual encounter escaped me, and I thought for a chilling moment that my inability to speak properly meant I was frozen. What the hell?! My parents weren't back for a while, but my insecurity willed them to be there. I wasn't ready. She was wearing Patchouli. 

"Uh."

"C'mon - let's drive to St. Jacobs."

"Uh, I'm not..."

"Come on, let's check out the millrace." 

She had a car of course, and that made me admire her ever more. The independence, the authority. I thought then of Ed, who seemed to be the master of all situations cool and hypothetical to me at that moment.

The summer before, Janine and Ed had done a cross-Canada drive which included the maritimes. They'd had to rough it at times, sleeping in the small blue Honda, eating just a loaf of bread. I imagined sleepy careless days, lots of hitch-hikers and adventure. The stuff adults did when they were old enough to get away with it, but young enough to enjoy the freedom. I wanted to be an Ed somehow.

So,the previous summer, the other guy Mike in his queer Gothy way had concocted the idea that Janine liked him. There once might have been something there, a date or two, I don't know. I didn't exactly trust his chain-smoking Goth logic which reeked of K-W. He was hell-bent on sweeping her off her feet and had proposed - it must have been one night we were listening to Nitzer Ebb in my room - that we rock up there unannounced and find her. 

He was stupidly infatuated. However, knowing this wasn't going to get in the way of a few days' partying in Montreal with a free ride thrown in, so I said yes. I'd guessed I'd keep Mike company - be his wing man, sort of.

When he picked me up in Waterloo Town Square parking lot, he already looked disheveled.

We listened to Ministry and Front 242 all the foggy way to Quebec. He kept turning it to full volume and relentlessly smoking, so we didn't talk too much and shared cigarettes as well as some of the driving.

This was my first time meeting Janine. When we got there, I was pleased that another extra person was around, a Montreal punk who skateboarded and we rapped for a bit. She had a fish living in her sink that was miraculously still alive after her and Ed's long trip. The flat was comfortable and I couldn't believe anyone lived a life like that.

Sagacious Ed came along and suggested we get a few flats of Laurentide, the low-cost tinned beer, and head out to a river to go swimming.

With the skater Guy, Ed and Janine, I was having the time of my life but Mike was starting to show signs of strain. He could see the chance of him sharing Chartreuse with the object of his affections in anything like a romantic setting waning fast.

The river was well away from the city, more in a suburban area that was very leafy. We all stripped down to our underwear except Mike who perched up on a rock like an indie gargoyle and watched us. I can't swim but tried to cross the river anyway and came back quickly. The beer went down fast, and we walked through some allotments to get back to her flat.

That night, Mike and I dossed on Janine's spare room floor. I could tell he wanted to leave asap. It had gone beyond goth and cigarettes - Mike's soul was falling out.

Next day, my buddy Mike sort of evaporated. He said he wanted to go somewhere and took off. I accompanied Janine to a second-hand shop where she bought an old treadle sewing machine and humped it into the back of her blue car. She was going to make her own clothes. None of this surprised me.

That night, Mike and I drove back to K-W, him smoking relentlessly and determined not to stop for any breaks. It was foggier than before and we had to crank the tunes to stay awake.

He dropped me off in Waterloo Town Square parking lot, dishevelment a permanent feature on him now. We didn't speak for a long time afterwards and I sensed that he was wounded.

Now I was walking with Janine along the towpath of St. Jacobs. When we walked, we walked neither close nor far away from each other. Once, we had hugged but never kissed. She had said then that I gave good hugs. I didn't know what that meant but I didn't think it meant we were going to have sex.

It was clear and bright from the moonlight as we picked and slid our way along. Joking about Mike, I felt a bit bad for my little betrayal. The blackness of the branches around seemed like a canopy. I was glad we were there and we were friends for that spontaneous moment.

As we ended up behind some sticks of shrubs and looked through into a well-lit clearing, we squatted and looked in silence - like two ice-fishermen, the light shining off the snow and I trusted her reticence. Just sat there like that for a long time without saying anything. I didn't need to be home yet.

the locked box

My uncle had a locked box which nobody had ever seen opened - not until the winter he went away for the second time. There wasn't any key hole in the box so all of us assumed that the simple, unpainted curiosity he had picked up on his stay in Madagascar had a trick to opening it and must have been designed by a genius craftsman. Two details of the plain-looking, mysterious object did give a small clue: an L-shaped chisel mark on one of its corners, and if you tipped it away from you, it gave out an odd echo of a knocking sound like there were living marbles inside. The box was as mysterious as our uncle.

I remember that ever since his return from that distant island, our father's brother had acquired an inexplicable air of tiredness about him. Whether it was winter or summer, he sweated and seemed withered. Strange because on the mantle piece in the living room, we had a photo, from a long time before, of him holding me up in a group shot of all of us and he looked altogether a different person, robust and healthy, standing beaming next to my parents. My mother asked him if he were ill, he shrugged off the question and bent back over the sewing machine, looking drained and hopeless. Our family made a living as tailors, you see.

I loved that uncle a great deal even though he was a consummate bachelor of a quiet disposition, in contrast to the raucousness of the rest of our family. He'd come back from Africa with a tanned papery quality to his skin, and a soft voice (inflected by another native language he'd learned) that became him. I often asked him to tell me about his journey to that remote place and in the right mood he would describe fabulous bazaars of riches and animals that I had maybe read or dreamed about. He was prone to wearing loose brown silk. Also, he couldn't use one eye, its vision lost in a shooting accident with my father that neither of them ever talked about.

His trip had originally been undertaken as a scouting operation for business. Having convinced my father to part with a chunk of the family's savings, the mission was treated as exploratory. He was away for a much longer time than expected and only relayed one letter to us in that period. It was a cryptic note saying that he had been detained there and that more news was forthcoming. 

One day in June, he crossed our threshold unannounced with a hessian bag over his shoulder. He didn't say much. Despite my father's interrogations, uncle only muttered that there was nothing to be gained from pursuing ventures in Africa and we should forget about it. In his bag, he had brought some trinkets for us little ones and a single bolt of second rate fabric. We were stunned. The locked box was at the bottom; he didn't refer to it initially and tried to hide it away. Father was furious and in the heat of the moment, seized it and flung it across the room as though to smash it. Uncle looked pained but not surprised, slouched to pick it up, and then disappeared into his chamber, his one good eye darting at us. From that time onward we noticed his diminished stature, his stooped gait - like a bird with clipped wings.

A few weeks after his return, I heard him humming in the backyard and went out to sit with him. He was whittling, as was his pastime. It was a crude version of one of the beasts he had told me about. 

"Chameleon's eyes move independently from each other." he said. He let me slide next to him on the bench as he worked, detailing the curve of the creature's back.

"How do they see then? Isn't it scrambled up?" I asked.

His face betrayed concentration as he turned out another ribbon of wood.

"One eye on the past and one eye on the future"

He squinted. I thought for a moment he was focusing directly on something, which didn't make sense because of his monocular vision. Handing the creature to me gently, he got up to brush the little chips off his shirt. It was a simple yet marvelous study. I marveled at the frontwards and backwards facing toes he had conjured with his penknife. I've read  that chameleons rock back and forth before each step they take. Perhaps it's to imitate the movement of their surroundings. 

Carving was a typical solitary preoccupation of my father's brother. I often felt that in some way he had become so Madagascan, so foreign,  that his returning to us is what led to what happened, as though he didn't belong in our house anymore and was as out of place an animal there as a chameleon would be. 

The end of the year was coming and mother had been doing the bookkeeping. The business was doing poorly. Everybody knew it. In the evening, there was a pall over our dinners. There should have been a buzz around the coming winter - my cousins and I usually expected full stockings and a pile of gifts. If it wasn't a train set for Jacob, it was a gun for me or one of the others. I loved the sight of the groaning table of food and the adults shedding inhibitions and putting the year behind them while we kids got away with unsupervised fun, hiding from each other, playing make-believe. This year was very different, I didn't have the courage to ask to go and play; I just sat eating quietly, waiting for my bed and privacy.

A sound started innocuously. It was like someone next door beating a carpet and it came and went. We might not have noticed anything if we hadn't been so sombre. My mother, who had been busy going over numbers on a spreadsheet while we ate, looked up. 

"Is that one of your windows left open, kids?" 

We all stopped and listened.

"I don't think so." I said.

"Go run and check."

I didn't need much provocation to leave the table and scampered out of my chair.

The thudding got louder as I reached the upstairs floor. At first, I had no idea what I was looking for, so I checked my room. The window was shut and the chameleon my uncle had carved sat there on the window ledge looking out at the blizzardy world. No, the beating noise was coming from across the hall. It had a hollowness that reminded me of the tok-tok of a piece of bamboo being hit with a hammer. I felt heart reach up in my throat. 

Crossing over to my uncle's door, I could hear voices from downstairs now in alarm. The beating was quite loud. As I laid a hand on the door handle, there was a sudden crack and then a smash and the drumming had ceased. Mustering my childish strength and courage I twisted the handle and leaned on the door swinging it open. Inside, the unusual box was lying broken in fragments on the floor with no obvious contents anywhere. The window was shattered and cold air was raging in with flecks of snow out of the grey. No sign of my uncle could be seen apart from his few things. A gust of cold thrust its fingers in my cheeks but I didn't move for a moment and just stared out the jagged window.

Later that same day, a couple of the neighbourhood boys reported seeing a small kingfisher flying around town and had tried to throw a snowball at it but it had flown away and wasn't seen again. I connected the event with my uncle's disappearance, but no one else did at the time. His name was Elazar, Lazar for short.

gunge

Hildy shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden stool in the science lab of her school. Her laboratory-mate Mateus sat next to her at the intensely polished sink/table. He was peering at the wide screen down at the end of the room over the grease-spiked-hairdo'ed heads of the other students in Classroom 5. They both had their right hands laid palms-up over their left hands in front of them, respectfully, as prescribed. The posture with the hands made Hildy think of a picture of the Buddha she had once seen in an encyclopedia - wouldn't it be hilarious to have those long droopy earlobes too?, she thought.

There was a quiet as everyone waited for the instructor to say something. It was so you could hear some of the younger kids breathing, with drooly mouths and sniffling runny noses. She was friends with Dora, who sat at the front, and hated Peter who sat behind and who you could hear whispering bad words and sometimes whipped gobbed up bits of paper at the girls' hair.

She thought as she glanced at him with disdain for his childish full lips and mouth ajar, what a suck-up Mateus was. She reckoned he was the type of boy that sometimes ate his own earwax. Observing little boys' fingers could lead to these nasty deductions. Weren't they all so horrible? Why couldn't they at least trim those hideous, snot-scraper nails of theirs? Boys were awful! Awful!

The weird, gross part of the lesson was about to begin, so she bit her lip. Last time, they had inverted a grasshopper to see it's stomach sac. The whirring mechanisms behind the chute off to the side of their desk that conveyed the specimens hadn't started yet. When they did, it put her teeth on edge.

Instead of letting the anticipation bother her, she let her mind wander and stared vacantly over at another pair of pupils alongside the two of them. One, a girl she didn't know well in a moth-eaten wool skirt, was picking spots on her neck solicitously. The boy adjacent was well-known and made-fun-of for only owning two shirts which he turned inside out and alternated wearing one on top of the other to put the dirtiest side furthest away from him every few days. His hands were not in the prescribed position either, they were on his knees and the fronts of his trousers showed streaky deposits of hand-grease. Boys were disgusting and hideous! Hildy's old-fashioned tortoise-shell glasses were smeary too she knew, but she smiled knowing it meant that you couldn't easily always see where she was really looking, especially if she tilted her head away from you.

In the course of her star-gazey assessment of the other children and the long, narrow classroom in which they were arranged like bowling pins, or shampoo bottles, she spotted something like a sort of gunge on the side of the sink. It was nearest to Mateus, but facing her, and she had never noticed it before. The gunge was an odd colour to describe. At first she thought black, and then noticed green streaks which then seemed blue. It was weird. Her eyes widened as she became hypnotised by the strange stuff. It wasn't just a smear, it had a form and a body. It seemed to have a life of its own. She stopped thinking about the puerile habits of her classmates and focussed on this glistening, pulsing mass.

Suddenly, the gunge spoke.

"Hildegard, where is your lunch?" Hildy scrunched up her face. "I threw it over the school fence because I hate that awful tuna sandwich."

"What will you eat for lunch then?" Hildy ran a tongue over her teeth. "Dora lets me have some of her packed lunch - I don't mind just an apple."

"Which boy do you like?" Hildy bared her teeth at the question. "None of them. THEY'RE ALL AWFUL."

The gunge was not perturbed by her vehemence. It went on.

"Which boy is the most awful?" Hildy smiled. "Peter, naturally. He's absolutely horrible and horribly horribly hideously awful. He plays with himself at lunch, and he, he swears. He says all the awful words. The other girls say he smells too."

There was something happening on the screen now up at the front and she was aware that in the periphery of her vision, Mateus was fidgeting. She willed the strange conversation on regardless.

"What would you most like to be doing?" asked the gunge. Hildy paused to consider. "I just like looking at people. I love just imagining what everybody's thinking, and what they might be doing even after I've stopped looking at them."

The gunge then ceased to be an object and became a small portal for her to look through. Inside a tiny spot in it, she saw the heads of the students in their rows and sat properly at their desks. She saw them all including herself, and they were all watching the screen, and not minding being looked at by her. This experience had been getting more and more absorbing, so Hildy found she had stopped holding her hands in the prescribed manner and had leaned forward on the desk, her glasses moving down her nose a bit.

Then the whiring started and she looked up and saw Mateus perched expectantly and the spell was broken.

"Frog today" he said matter-of-factly, and a glass dish with a belly-up dead frog rattled out of the chute. "We're gonna do a frog today" and he wiped his bottom lip with a yellowy finger and a quick intake of breath, not looking at her.

Hildy smirked. "Let's get to work then, Mateus" she said.