Fall on Your Knees

  Later, when Teresa and Hector have gone and they’ve put the kids to bed, Adelaide says, not looking at him, “Don’t go to that place, Leo.”

  “I have to, baby.”

  “Then come right back, don’t linger.”

  “No desire to.”

  “Come here,” she says, looking at him.

  He smiles and obeys her.

  Ginger carries the crate up to the front door of Jameel’s speak. He hates this place. He can hear the usual party going on inside. He can smell the booze from out here and it smells like the raw material used to make vomit. He feels sorry for Jameel’s wife.

  On second thought, he’ll go round the back. Ginger dislikes using a back door, but in this case he’d rather enter unnoticed by the crowd that turns like one queasy beast every time someone walks in — never mind the floozie on piano, who smells like a sick baby. I should quit this job — see if I can get on at the steel plant. But Ginger knows there’s no work to be had there or anywhere else. Not even for white men.

  It’s like a blow to his stomach when Ginger walks into the cold storage room and sees the Girl Guide uniform filthy and strewn across the empty kegs, stockings, beret, the little pouch. He looks about instinctively for the nude body — this is what happens to little girls who aren’t looked after, I should have found out who she was, I should have given her a drive…. He calms down a little when he doesn’t see her. But that’s not to say she hasn’t been dragged outside by one of Jameel’s drunks and raped. Ginger is suddenly enraged — to be working for a man like Jameel, to be helping keep a place like this going in the very neighbourhood where his own daughters are growing up. Ginger pounds on the door. Boutros opens it and says, “Pa’s over there.”

  Ginger shoves his way through the crowd with his crate, past the tart on piano — “‘Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those peepers”’ — and finds Jameel. “Jameel, what happened to that little girl with the Guide uniform?”

  “That’s Mr Jameel to you, boy.”

  Ginger drops the crate and grabs Jameel by the collar.

  “Where is she, you devil?”

  A cold pain on the back of Ginger’s neck and he’s looking at Boutros’s shoes. Jameel is laughing down at him. “He wants it ba-ad!”

  A cold drop splashes onto Ginger’s forehead. He looks up. The prostitute in the orange wig is chug-a-lugging a bottle of ginger beer. He can see the white underside of her chin and her grime collar.

  “She’s right here, Leo b’y,” smirks Jameel. “Help yourself. Cash only.”

  She looks down at Ginger with serious green-brown eyes. Golden froth trickles out the corner of her smeary red mouth. He covers his eyes with his hands.

  “I’m quitting, I’m not driving any more,” is all Adelaide can get out of him twenty minutes later.

  He needs a good cry so let him. “You’ve been working too hard, let’s throttle back a bit, eh b’y?”

  All he can do is nod and sob against her until he falls asleep.

  Adelaide hugs him and counts five weeks since that last New York run. Something’s not right.

  In the morning it all seems like a bad dream. He tells Adelaide, “Jameel’s got a little girl hustling there.” Adelaide listens. “And it made me think of our own girls and what would happen if —”

  “I know, honey.” He’s too sensitive. “Why don’t you take it easy today?”

  “I’m all right, Addy, I feel fine.”

  And he climbs into his truck.

  He drives away and realizes he forgot to tell Adelaide the whole point of the story — that the child prostitute is the little Girl Guide who came into their yard that day, and that he’s seen her on the road and in the side mirror of his dream. But he forgot. And what was it Adelaide said about the Girl Guide that day? “That’s not a Girl Guide.” Well obviously not a real one, he knows that now.

  I’ll tell Adelaide tonight, he thinks, and turns onto the Shore Road.

  Harem Scarem

  At first, Frances wondered when Teresa was going to get back from her holiday or her illness or whatever it was. But this afternoon, as she walks the Shore Road to New Waterford, a horrible thought occurs to her. What if Teresa has been fired? What if Mahmoud pinned the thefts on her? He’d be crazy to — why, just yesterday Frances helped herself to a Royal Doulton shepherdess and a Chinese fisherman from the piano, and Teresa had been gone three days by then.

  In his truck, Ginger realizes that he’s been searching the Shore Road for the Girl Guide. He wants to talk to her, that’s all, but not at the speak. He wants to find out who her father is, where her people are, if she has any. And if she doesn’t, maybe he and Adelaide can help.

  Frances doesn’t look or stop walking when she hears the truck braking on the soft shoulder behind her.

  “Hey there.”

  She stops but does not turn.

  “Excuse me, little miss.”

  She turns and looks up at him leaning out the window of his cab. I was right, thinks Ginger, twelve at the most. She walks to the truck, steps up on the running-board and gets in beside him. She has already pegged him for a nice man … this may take some time.

  “What’s your name, dear, who’s your father?” as he pulls back onto the road.

  “My name is Frances Euphrasia Piper. My father is James Hiram Piper, my grandfather is Ibrahim Mahmoud. I don’t know his middle name.”

  Ginger doesn’t take his eyes off the road. He is shocked, can’t think what to say.

  “Is that right?” he says. “I knew your sister Kathleen.”

  “I know.”

  He glances at her. She’s looking him.

  “I used to drive her, you know, I’m Leo Taylor.”

  “I know.”

  Ginger sees a tree go by on his left. Then a rock. Another rock. He says the normal thing and feels as if he’s lying even though he isn’t. “It was a real shame her passing away like that so young, she was a really pretty gal.”

  “I know. I saw her.”

  “I guess you seen photographs, eh?”

  “I remember her perfectly well.”

  “But you wouldn’t’ve even been born yet.” He chuckles, which really is a lie.

  “I was going on six,” she says. “I remember everything.”

  Ginger brakes and pulls over, pebble by pebble.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I thought you were a child.”

  “You’re Teresa’s brother, eh?”

  “Yeah.” He feels a bit dizzy. It’s the driving, I can’t drive any more.

  “How come she’s not at my grandfather’s any more?”

  “She got fired. He said she stole but she didn’t.”

  “He’ll be sorry.”

  He sits up. “Look you, does your daddy know what you’re doing, and why are you doing it anyway when you got a good home and a family?”

  “Because I’m bad.”

  He looks at her. “No you’re not.”

  “How do you know?”

  Ginger takes a breath. His eyes water and he says, “I can tell by looking. In your eyes. You’re not bad … you’re just lost.”

  “I know exactly where I am.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re not lost.”

  He reaches out and cradles the side of her face in his hand. She’s got wise eyes. They make him feel so deep dry sad that something must be done. “I want you to come home with me and talk to my wife, she’s a good woman.”

  “Do you want to be my friend?”

  “I’d like to help you, honey.”

  “Then take me with you where you’re driving.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “You did it for my sister.”

  “I never took your sister halfway ’cross the continent.”

  “Where did you take her?”

  “School and back, what do you think?”

  “Little Ginger Man…. I need someone to look after me. I’m full-grown, but I’m just a little girl insid
e. I want you to find me ’cause I’m lost, I’m lost in a deep dark place, please, please, please, oh you smell nice.”

  He takes her hand away and pushes her, not roughly, to the far end of the seat. “Where do you want me to drop you?”

  “The Empire.”

  He guns into New Waterford and Frances hops down in front of the picture-house. It’s a talkie today, but Frances buys a ticket anyhow. She has some thinking to do. She knows now what it is she must accomplish for Lily. There remains, however, one piece of unfinished business.

  Camille has often imagined herself a widow. She would return home and look after Pa and he’d realize she was the only daughter who really loved him. It has weighed on her that he has been all alone in that big house since Mumma died with only a coloured woman to wait on him. Camille has cried over that. It’s the only thing she has cried over since the early days of her marriage, when she still had the energy to cry over herself. So now that Teresa is gone, Camille is in her element. Her one regret is that she is obliged to return home nights.

  Camille knows that Teresa is not a thief. The jewels that went missing from Ma’s rosewood box have reappeared at the speak, encrusting Frances’s fingers, dangling from her ears and glittering round her scrawny neck. The silver tail of a comb pokes out her Guide pouch. If Camille could incinerate Frances with her eyes, Frances would have been blown away by now, but Camille has a good reason for keeping mum about the jewels.

  She frisks her father’s house top to bottom to find the breach where the pest has got in. Down in the cellar she glimpses the guilty crack of light framing the swing-trap at the top of the coal chute. She nails a board across it for now and goes upstairs to the front hall, where she telephones the hardware store.

  Frances waits patiently inside the closet until Camille gets off the phone and returns to the kitchen, then she bounds soundlessly upstairs two at a time into the master bedroom, where she prepares for tonight’s performance. Her last on this stage.

  Camille has sealed up the rat-hole but she doesn’t breathe a word about the rat. If Pa found out that it wasn’t Teresa who stole, then he would hire her back and send Camille home to her husband.

  Mahmoud has spent the day at his store as usual, sitting out front, carving soapstone and playing checkers with the other old fellas while his sons run things. They have expanded the business and now they are a major Maritime import/export company with a big warehouse in Sydney and headquarters in Halifax. Shipping is next. Mahmoud never played the stock market, never bought on credit, and it has paid off. The world economy lies in ruins, but the family business is expanding. The Mahmoud boys honour their father by allowing him to feel that he is still the boss, hence “Sure Pa, whatever you say,” before going ahead and doing what they know is best.

  Mahmoud has passed an agreeable day growling at his grandsons and watching the street go by. Everybody knows him, everybody respects him. He wears a plaid shirt and a dove-grey jacket and tie just as he did every day of his working life. Today is Wednesday, so on his way home he looks forward to stuffed koosa the way Teresa makes it. He’s been forgetting like this lately. It’s not so bad if he remembers before he opens the front door. Then he can prepare himself for her absence. But if he makes it all the way to the kitchen, and over to the stove to taste what’s in the covered dish — “Teresa!” he calls in disbelief at how she has murdered her specialty with salt — only to turn and see Camille at the top of the cellar steps.

  “What is it, Pa?”

  “Nothing.”

  He does not blame Camille. The best cook of the family is not quite as good as Teresa, and Camille is the only bad cook. Another effect of her wrong marriage — an unhappily married woman is necessarily a bad cook — and therefore his own fault, as well he knows. Just as it’s his fault she’s a thief. Well, why shouldn’t she have her mother’s pretty things? She has little else, not even a talent for food. He forgives her.

  “Are you starved, Pa?”

  He grunts and shuffles away. He doesn’t want to see her sallow smile, she makes him feel tired. He’ll just have a snooze before attempting supper, which will taste, as usual, like the Dead Sea. He forgives her because he does not love her.

  He comforts himself with the thought of his other daughters whom he does love — please God the one with grown children will be widowed soon and deliver me from Camille, God forgive me I didn’t mean that.

  After supper, Mahmoud drinks a big glass of water and falls asleep in his mauve satin chair in the front room. Nothing quenches his thirst or his fatigue these days. He thinks a lot about Giselle. Not in the ordinary way, as of the dear departed, but as though she had just stepped from the room. And for the first time in thirty-two years he admits the memory of Materia. She appears with her black braids and mischievous smile. He is unaware of the smile on his own lips — la hown, ya Helwi. She looked like her mother and she ran off at about the same age Giselle was when Mahmoud married her, but that was different, oh very. That was in the Old Country where they had everything in common.

  The Old Country was part of Syria then and a lot of people were emigrating to America. He and Giselle ended up in Cape Breton because of the lying mongrel of a sea captain who took their money, then dumped them on this barren rock. Days of peering at the horizon waiting for land and finally — land! Waiting to see the Statue of Liberty loom up, to dock at Ellis Island before ferrying to the blessed isle of Manhattan. They dropped anchor in Sydney and the captain turfed them out — “What’s the difference, it’s an island, ain’t it?”

  Jameel’s father was on that boat too. Mahmoud had no way of knowing that Jameel senior was fleeing creditors in Syria, because he said he was fleeing the Turks and the Druses like everyone else. And when asked for his own story, Mahmoud replied, “the godforsaken Muslim devils.” In fact, he and Giselle left because her family was set to arrest him and stick her in a convent. But it was different from what happened with Materia and the enklese bastard — for one thing, he and Giselle were both from the same race, culture, language and faith. Although Giselle’s family did not see it that way. They were doctors and lawyers, spoke more French than Arabic, considered themselves more Mediterranean, even European. They were from Beirut. He was an Arab from the south. He had returned to Lebanon, land of his birth, having spent his boyhood picking cotton in Egypt. Don’t tell me what it is to work.

  He took Giselle to a better place across the ocean and gave her everything her own family would have and more. As soon as he could, he forbade her to work, even though, being the good woman she was, she resisted at first. He honoured her, never laid a hand on her in anger — never had to. He gave her a beautiful house, servants, jewels each anniversary. A silk négligée from Beirut to make up for the fact she’d never had a wedding gown; three shades of Mediterranean blue and a veil with a fringe of real pearls. The veil was purely for fun, of course, a romantic joke. The sight of her in this outfit was unimaginably exciting.

  If only her arrogant family could have seen what Mahmoud achieved in the New World.

  “Pa? … Pa.”

  He wakes with half a moan to see Camille. She’s got her coat on and the room is dark.

  “I’m going home now, Pa.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  He’s speaking Arabic but she replies in English to help him back to his senses, “Wake up, Pa, do you want something before I go, a nice cuppa tea?”

  Oh. What? It’s time for bed, where’s Ter —? Oh. “No, no, no, I’m going to bed.”

  Camille goes to help him but he casually swats her away as he rises.

  “I’ll turn the light on for you, Pa.”

  “No, no, go home, Camille.” Oh, his life — what has become of his life?

  There is nothing more for Camille to do: she has laid out his pajamas, he doesn’t want the light. Mahmoud reaches the foot of the stairs and with a slight wave of his hand he says without turning, “Thank you, Camille.”

  If his other daughters could h
ear Pa saying thank you — “He never says thank you to me.” “Me neither, dear.” “He’s never said anything to me except ‘Close your legs.’” Mahmoud thanks Camille because he does not love her.

  Camille watches him slowly mount the stairs until he disappears into the darkness of the landing. Then she leaves, although she knows it’s a sin to leave an old man alone in that big house all night even if he does insist. “Am I the only one who cares?” she wonders.

  But he is not alone. There is someone else who cares enough to keep him company through the long lonely night.

  Mahmoud awakens smiling a few hours later to the sound of an Arabic comedy routine. A husband and wife chiding each other about faithfulness. Then they break into a love song. He had this record and many others brought over from Beirut. He and Giselle used to sit side by side on the sofa and never tire of laughing at the same jokes. Then she would dance for him and he for her. But only when the children were out. And only sometimes. But what precious times….

  His smile dies upon his lips when the impossibility of what he is hearing hits him. What, is he dead? Is there a thief in the house? Playing his scratchy old records? Why?

  He puts on his velvet robe, ties the cord around his waist and creeps down the stairs. He is dead. He must be. There is Giselle.

  Beyond the archway, the front room is aglow with candle-light and three shades of Mediterranean blue. Swirling and swaying and quarter-turning, hips beckoning, fingers twining in air, wrists caressing one another above her head, the pearls of her veil swinging to the rhythm of the reeds, the drums and the wailing voices of the love song.

  Mahmoud is filled with desire and his heart hurts, stirring again after such a long period of inactivity, never having been particularly athletic. She has seen him and now she is luring him into the dance. Ohhh. He travels through the archway, he does not know how. She bends forward in her circle of firelight, the blue silk wafts open at her breasts in shadow — come closer, the better to see me, Habibi. Her eyes are full of fun above the veil and her fingers tickle the emptiness between her and her beloved, closer, closer. “Giselle,” he whispers, reaching out to her. She giggles and he laughs too, not knowing what’s funny, “Giselle,” he whispers, “Habibti.”