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.