CHAPTER SEVEN
STERN. SMUG. YOUNG. WHAT DID THEY KNOW? WELL, it wasn’t so much what they knew but what they could do. Three young men from the Office for Independent Living, ready to assess her ability to drive, manage her own money and live alone. She couldn’t help but think about how badly dressed they were. But she had to get a grip. Ivernia Beech absolutely had to concentrate.
Interrogator Number One stood to get a glass of water. His dress shirt was wrinkled and dislodged from his pants. What was he? Twenty-six? Young enough to be her great-grandson. He was saying something. This was not a court of law, he was saying, but it could make recommendations about her fitness for independent living. And now he was asking a question. Concentrate. Yes, she told him, she was aware of who she was and where she was at the time of the accident. He asked where, for the record, was that? Well, she said, it was directly outside the Lox and Bagel on Aberdeen Road, two blocks north of Ruddings Park. Snidely, foolishly, she added, This is in the city of Clarkson and country of Freedom State. He ignored her and asked, When exactly was the accident? Ivernia wanted to ask why he didn’t look it up in his stupid report. But that wouldn’t be politic, would it? So she just said that the accident took place yesterday at 9 a.m. He asked where she had been going. To the Lox and Bagel, she said.
Now it was the second interrogator’s turn. His shirt too was in need of ironing. What was it with twenty-something bureaucrats these days? Did no one teach them how to dress? Was a country’s wealth inversely proportional to the ability of its young men to don a pressed shirt in the morning? He asked about Ivernia’s son. Naturally, that got her wondering about the worst possible outcome. No matter that she was white in a country where that mattered, educated and well off. When you were over eighty and caused a car accident, you could lose it all. For starters, they could strip her of her driver’s licence. Permanently. They could tell the Office for Independent Living that Ivernia Beech was not fit for single living. This, of course, was exactly what her son, Jimmy, wanted: Termination of her driver’s licence. Forced eviction from her home. Power of attorney over her bank accounts. With a son like that, who needed enemies? Terrorists who blew up airplanes had nothing over an underemployed, twice-divorced son with nothing better to do than go after his mother’s assets. Any man over fifty who still went by the name of Jimmy was a man not to be trusted. Even if he was her son. Thank God Jimmy wasn’t in the room. Ivernia already had her hands full.
Now came the last interrogator’s turn.
“May I call you Ivernia?” he asked.
“I am three times your age, and you may call me Mrs. Beech,” she said.
“Well enough, Mrs. Beech. Could you tell us one more time, in your own words, what happened yesterday?”
Ivernia drew a long breath. Some twenty years ago, when she was in her sixties and still had relatively nimble fingers, she had taken up the classical guitar. If you played an instrument—something new, something you had never touched before—it was said to prevent your brain from rotting. The guitar instructor introduced her to the music of Fernando Sor and encouraged Ivernia to breathe while she played. She told him she had come to study music, not yoga. She had to abandon the instrument after it gave her tennis elbow. And now, as she ran once more through the events leading up to the accident, she exhaled slowly—just as the guitar teacher had taught her—and replayed in her mind the single moment of kindness and light in an otherwise all-around shitty day.
Ivernia had been driving south on Aberdeen Road. She had already passed Main Street. And Queen Street. Now she was entering the thick of The Village—the attractive section of Clarkson lined with cafés, shops, beauty salons and bookstores. Five blocks ahead were the Parliament Building on the left and the Freedom Building with offices for federal politicians on the right. Beyond them was the giant Ruddings Park, and beyond that the railway tracks, the formal end of the city, and after five kilometres of no man’s land, the sudden mushrooming of AfricTown. But Ivernia wasn’t going anywhere near that far. The Lox and Bagel was located right here, in the heart of The Village, and all Ivernia had to do was find a parking spot.
She was driving her late husband’s 1999 Oldsmobile Intrigue. It was nineteen years old, not a speck of rust. Oversized, like a car fuelled with steroids, but it worked like a charm. Southbound traffic kept Ivernia to twenty kilometres an hour. It was a warm spring day. She had the windows down. Above the sound of traffic, she heard a man singing. Good voice. He had a lilting, foreign accent. And he was singing a country song. She glanced to her left. Nothing. To her right. There he was. A young black man was running as fast as her car. What a joy it must be, Ivernia thought, to move one’s body with that ease and speed. Like Ivernia, he was heading south on Aberdeen. She wondered why he was in the road, but then she noticed that pedestrians clogged the sidewalk. He was in his mid-twenties. As thin as a pencil. Strapped to his waistband was an iPod, and from it white wires ran up to the buds in his ears. Clearly, he had no idea how loud he was singing the country hit that had become as familiar as the national anthem.
I been running for you, baby
Running all the time
But you’re running for another heart
And the heart you want ain’t mine.
Ivernia had turned off the radio a good twenty times in the last year just to avoid hearing another note of that song, but it sounded funny and somehow touching coming from this strange runner. Traffic slowed. He ran by her door. His head was bobbing to the music, and yet his eyes were wide open. He caught her looking at him and smiled. She smiled too, and then she pulled ahead of him as the lane before her opened up. It was odd that a man moving that fast could sing as he ran.
She left him behind as she accelerated. Traffic moved quickly, and Ivernia caught two green lights in a row. There, up ahead just one block, was the Lox and Bagel. Parking on Aberdeen was murder. But just ahead of her, directly in front of the Lox and Bagel, a car pulled out. Ivernia slowed down. A space big enough for her Oldsmobile. No fire hydrant. No reason she couldn’t park there. She detested parallel parking, but there was no option. She pulled up beside a Jaguar, put the Olds into reverse and checked the rear-view mirror. Lots of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk, but there was nothing between her and the BMW parked behind her. She backed halfway in, turning the wheel clockwise to ease into the spot and then counterclockwise to straighten it out. She stopped midway to make sure she was fine. The Olds was such a big car. Everything looked okay. And then it happened. She was about to press down on the accelerator, ever so gently, to continue reversing, when a baby cried. Loudly. She had meant to jam her foot on the brake, but instead, she mashed it down on the accelerator. The Olds shot back like a spooked horse, and the next instant, Ivernia felt metal crumple and heard glass shatter. A woman began screaming. Ivernia couldn’t see the woman or the baby. Had she hit them? She flipped the gear into drive, pushed on the accelerator pedal again, and charged forward, catching and demolishing the back left end of the Jaguar. She put her car in park and turned off the ignition, then opened the door to more screaming.
Ivernia got out of the car. A woman on the sidewalk stood next to a stroller. The baby was in her arms.
“Did I hit you?” Ivernia asked.
“My car!”
“Are you hurt?” Ivernia asked.
“No, but almost. I was this close,” the woman said, holding her thumb and index finger apart, “when you smashed into my car. And here I was with my baby.”
“But are you okay?”
“This close!” the woman shouted.
Then the singing runner showed up. “Hello, ma’am,” he said to the young mother. “May I help?”
She looked grateful. The runner lifted the stroller back to the far side of the sidewalk. The woman had dropped a bag of groceries. He retrieved cans and bags, bending and straightening until he had stored them all in the stroller. The mother spoke to him reverently. It was hard to believe that such kindness could come from a mouth that mo
ments ago had been so harsh.
“That is so sweet of you,” she said.
“No worries.” The runner then saw Ivernia. Looked straight at her. “Ma’am, are you all right?”
“Yes, quite.” But she wasn’t all right at all, and he could see it in her eyes.
“Why don’t you sit down?” he said.
There was a bench at the edge of the sidewalk, in front of the Lox and Bagel. He led her to it, resting his fingertips on her shoulder. She tried to remember the last time anyone had touched any part of her body in a kind, solicitous way.
“Everything is going to be okay. Nobody is hurt, right?”
She nodded. He straightened, went to her car door, pulled out her purse and car keys and returned with them.
“Sit here. You will need your things. Are you okay, ma’am? Breathe a little.”
Ivernia stared at him with glassy eyes. The earbuds were strung over his shoulder. From them, she detected the tinny sound of country music.
“I heard you singing, back there,” she said.
He smiled. “I sing when I train,” he said.
Train, she thought. What an interesting verb. It must have been inspired by the noun. To train. Meaning, to put oneself in motion, just like a train. She heard a siren. She looked up and saw the police vehicle two blocks away.
He said, “God bless, must run, take care. Don’t worry. Everything will be okay.”
Once more he touched her shoulder. Ivernia felt the calm spread through her body. Nobody was hurt. What was the worst that could happen?
“Wait,” she said. “What is your name?”
He hesitated, smiled once more and said, “Roger Bannister. Goodbye and good luck.” He set off running again, southbound on Aberdeen Road in the direction of Ruddings Park.
“Roger Bannister,” she mumbled to herself. She knew that name. The British runner. The first one to break the four-minute mile. He did it on May 6, 1954. Sixty-four years ago. She remembered. She was twenty-one years old, and it was the day that she and Ernie married. She wished that she had had time to tell that to the runner.
A hand was on her shoulder, a firm hand.
“Ma’am. Ma’am. Were you involved in the accident? Are you the owner of that Oldsmobile?”
She looked into the eyes of a square-jawed police officer whose expression seemed to say, You’ve gone and ruined my perfectly good day. Perhaps Ivernia should have waited for a lawyer. Or fought the charge. Or sought to plea bargain. She knew all about these things. But she was an old woman, and she had no mind for subtleties, so she just looked at him and said, “It all comes down to one thing, Officer. I screwed up. So can we get on with it?”
It was a day later now, and her licence was temporarily suspended, her car impounded, and she was feeling entirely suffocated in the meeting room of the Office for Independent Living. She was bursting with impatience. She wanted out. Whatever they were going to do to her, she wanted it to be over. So here she was telling her three inquisitors one more time that she realized the gravity of the situation but did not want a lawyer.
“Could we just get this done?” she asked, keeping her hands under the table so the three inquisitors could not see them shaking. When you reached the age of eighty-five, hands were simply not to be trusted. Ivernia tried to calm herself by thinking of the gentle face of the runner. The one who had stopped to help everybody, herself included. The runner was the only person who had said a kind word to her that entire day. She wondered where he was from. Zantoroland? From what Ivernia had read in the papers, the country was a mess. There were reports that the Zantoroland government had been torturing and executing members of its Faloo ethnic minority, so people were fleeing the country. But here in Freedom State, the government led by the Family Party kept deporting refugees back to Zantoroland.
Ivernia hoped the runner was not a refugee, or, if he was, that his life had not been too hard and that he would not be caught and deported like the others. She focused on her breathing and on good thoughts. Fernando Sor . . . the runner singing country music . . . marrying her husband on the same day that Roger Bannister ran the Miracle Mile in 3:59. Ernie had been good to her, from their first day together to their last.
Breathe, Ivernia. Breathe, keep breathing, and just answer their stupid questions.
CHAPTER EIGHT
YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO LIVE WITH A MOTHER OR A father or some sort of caregiver when you were fifteen years old, but John had been on his own for a while. His mother would surely make it back home eventually, when she was healthy, and John would welcome her. He tried to remind himself that his mother and he had been through this ordeal before and had always found their way back together. It would be good to live with her again in the half shipping container that they rented from Lula DiStefano, queen of AfricTown. But for now, at the start of his third term as a Grade 9 student at the Clarkson Academy for the Gifted, John was supervised by Lula but living alone in the container next to Water Tap 17 in the Bungalow Hill district of AfricTown. Some hundred thousand people lived in AfricTown, many of them—like John and his mother—paying rent money to Lula.
John had not seen his mother in two weeks. The last visit had not gone well. She was still in the secured area of the Wintergreen Psychiatric Institute, and she was still speechless and lying in a fetal position. He didn’t like having to play the role of parent and ask the nurses questions: were they bathing her enough, changing her clothes, brushing her teeth, and what about that big bed sore on her hip? He especially hadn’t enjoyed it when some power-tripping nurse tried to turn the tables and interrogate him about where he was living and who was taking care of him. What is your street address? she asked. There is no street address, he said, it’s AfricTown. Who is taking care of you? she said. Lula Brown, he said, lying. Where does she work? She has no job, John said. What is her telephone number? Again he lied: We don’t have telephone service. He got out of there before she could consult with her superiors or try to interrogate him further.
The next time, instead of visiting the hospital, John would call and see if his mom was well enough to come to the phone on the psych ward. It was too upsetting to see his mother reverted to infancy. And he had a sudden, great responsibility on his shoulders and could not afford to screw up. He now had the fancy computer and video-recording equipment worth ten thousand dollars. Using his overall 95 percent average and his position as the third-highest-ranked student in all of Grade 9, John had won permission from his headmistress to spend his spring term filming the documentary about AfricTown and the fate of Zantorolanders in Freedom State. He was exempted from all but his Journalism in the Age of Apathy class, provided that he made up the other courses in the summer. He had much work to do, and he couldn’t afford to get caught up in a web of well-intentioned questions from nurses in his mom’s hospital. Questions like that could lead to nothing but bad results. In John’s opinion, well-intentioned adults were inordinately gifted at fucking up the lives of parentless teenagers who were perfectly capable of carrying on by themselves.
Clarkson Academy admitted thirty-five students in Grade 7 and kept them until graduation from Grade 12. Two years earlier, when John had written the entrance exams, he competed against thirteen hundred other students. He placed nineteenth, which was good enough to get in but not good enough for a full scholarship. You had to place in the top ten to get that. They offered him ten thousand dollars, far short of the fifty thousand he needed to attend. He was able to talk them up. Yes, he truly lived in AfricTown, he told them. Yes, he was truly a citizen of Freedom State, and here were his citizenship papers. Born and raised in the country. As was his mother. Yes, he was in fact the child who had written the entrance exams. They put him through more tests to be sure and then agreed to cover twenty-five thousand of his fees, plus his uniform, plus his books, plus hot meals at school. But he would have to find his own transportation to school, because it was considered unsafe to send a school bus to fetch him in AfricTown. And he would have to find sp
onsors to cover the remainder of his annual tuition fee.
So John had approached Lula DiStefano, who in addition to being his landlady, happened to own the infamous Bombay Booty brothel and the nightclub known as the Pit.
“Say what?” she said. “You? Puny little child of AfricTown? You telling me that little Mr. Falconer has a brain on fire?”
John said that he could attend the school if he could find the twenty-five thousand a year to pay the rest of his tuition.
“How will you get to school and back?” she asked.
“I’ll walk.”
“How far is it?”
“Five kilometres, one way.”
“You’ll wear out a pair of shoes every month.”
“I might need some help with that too.”
So Lula had provided twenty-five thousand the first year. He finished fourth in his class in Grade 7, and after that he was on full scholarship, but she still had to pay for books, uniforms, shoes and special outings, and she ended up giving him spending money for clothes and food, because his mother didn’t make much as a housecleaner, even when she wasn’t in the psych ward.
All of this was very good. Except for the ways that it was very bad. “I own you for life, child” was how Lula put it. She acted like she meant it too.
JOHN AWOKE WITH A START, AND WITH HIS BACK SOAKED IN sweat. He’d been having nightmares again. In his dreams, his mother had been pacing at night and getting into all sorts of trouble while he slept. But as he climbed out of bed, he reassured himself that all was fine: she was still in the hospital, and he was still alone at home.
It was a tiny living space, even when his mother was not there. Their one room, half a shipping container, rented for a hundred dollars a month, though Lula eased up on the payment obligations whenever John’s mother was too ill to work. In the room: a four-drawer dresser for all their clothes, two single Murphy beds that folded up against the wall when not occupied, one fold-up kitchen table that doubled as a homework desk, two chairs, a portable stove attached to a butane tank, a large cooler that with ice became a fridge, a transistor radio, several reading lamps with spare light bulbs and spare batteries, and four pots whose purposes were never interchangeable—a soup pot, a dishes pot, a wash pot and a chamber pot.