Interference Read online

  By the hot dog vendor, in the lobby of the arena, there is always a kid playing on his iPad. Every Wednesday he’s there. Jude isn’t sure if he’s there because his mom is one of the players or if he’s there because he’s attached to the hot dog vendor in some way. He’s probably about seven years old but he acts like he’s about three. Jude avoids him. If Jude catches his eye the kid won’t stop talking to him. The hot dog vendor is a short, balding older man. He doesn’t speak English. All he can say is “hot dog” and then he points to the condiments with a quizzical look on his face.

  Tonight the white team is missing their best player and so they are floundering. A wave of white against a sea of angry red. Luckily their goalie is good. The defence works hard. One player ends up stuck in the corner and does a little pirouette to get out. The white team cheers. She bows. A red forward knocks her over. As if by accident, by mistake. But the white team boos anyway. The red player bends to help the white up. That’s new. Shame from the red team.

  Jude watches two women on the white bench talking to each other. They are paying no attention to the game, they have no idea that the other forwards are signalling to them to replace them on the ice. Jude watches their gloved hands move as they chat away, having a great conversation. They are laughing.

  “Trish, Jesus, get out here.”

  Trish skates out onto the ice. The white player who shouted to Trish heads onto the bench and continues the conversation Trish had been having with the woman standing there shuffling her feet back and forth in her skates. And then the shuffling woman is replaced by another skater and the two new women on the bench wave their arms and talk, as if continuing where the others left off. Jude wonders if they are talking about the same thing, or if they’ve started their own conversation about something completely different.

  In the fall when his mother was first getting radiation, Jude would skip high school and hang out at his old elementary school and watch the kids in the playground. He would watch them run in circles. Or stand around bored. Or throw leaves or skip rope or whatever they did. He wanted to remember being there. Jude wanted to feel what he felt like before he knew about things he doesn’t want to know about. What it felt like climbing the jungle gym. Running with a football. Talking to girls. His mother’s cancer has made him painfully aware of his body, of its limits and its end.

  Then he found this hockey and, besides, it’s too cold to stand outside the school anymore. It was minus fifteen today, minus twenty-five with the wind chill. Compared to that, it’s warm in the arena. Also, he was missing too many classes and he knows that soon the school would call his house and then his mother would start to ask questions. Jude doesn’t want anything else to worry her. He prefers the quiet mourning his mother is doing with him now. They do this in front of the TV. They sit silently, not saying anything. And Jude thinks of it as mourning her long before she is gone. As if they are having their own private funeral. Over and over. He wonders if they’ll do this for years.

  There has been an accident on the ice and the guy in the stands with the BlackBerry is standing up, holding his BlackBerry out and shouting, “Do you want me to call for anyone?”

  One of the players skated head-first into the boards. She has a helmet on, but still she looks woozy. Jude missed the action. He was thinking about his mother. Now he’s thinking about concussions. His mind wanders these days. He’s turning into his dad, who is always forgetting where he put the car keys, forgetting to pick up the takeout dinner he ordered on the way home from work, or forgetting his own name. (Jude heard him on the phone one day, “My name? It’s . . .” and his father went silent. Then he hung up. Quickly.)

  The woman is helped off the ice. The man with the BlackBerry leaves, tripping slightly as he walks down the steep stairs, his overcoat flapping behind him. Jude watches him appear below, near the change-room doors, and then he disappears into one of them, still holding out his BlackBerry as if it’s a flashlight. “I’ve got a phone,” he shouts. “I’m coming in.”

  The white team stands around on their skates and looks at each other. The referee blows the whistle and soon they are skating again — a little more timidly, wary of the hard boards. The women on the bench are even more animated now. Jude watches their actions, the way they talk through their face guards. He can see the glint of their white teeth. Something exciting has happened. They flap their arms.

  The thing is — they didn’t tell him. Or his sister, Caroline. They didn’t tell anyone — all spring, some of summer. Before the operation and the chemo Jude’s mom and dad knew that she had cancer, they knew what was coming, but they didn’t say anything for a couple of months.

  “We didn’t want to worry you until we had all the test results,” his mom said.

  Jude’s not convinced that was the best way to go about it. Sure he would have been worried for a couple of months while he waited for the results, but by not telling him his mother had no one to talk to about it. No one to mourn with besides his father. Because, now that he knows, he’s worried. He’s been worried since they told him. So they didn’t save him from anything. Jude knew there was something going on in the house, he could feel it in the air, he could see it in the way his mother held herself — she was straighter somehow and she kept her arms crossed in front of her chest as if always protecting herself. He could feel it in the way his father touched his mother whenever he left the room. He could hear it in the sounds of sniffing and nose-blowing coming from the bathroom.

  “We were protecting you,” his dad said.

  The woman who was hurt comes out of the locker room and heads back out onto the ice. Both teams, red and white, stop playing and watch her skate to the team bench. Then they all clap and cheer. Jude finds himself clapping too. He claps his hands in the pouch of his hoodie, hidden from view. Only he can hear the noise his hands make. The injured woman holds up her stick and then the whistle blows and the teams play.

  One day at the elementary school Jude noticed a kid was looking at him. He’d been fading out, staring at the brick wall of the school, hanging his hands over the wire fence, thinking about things, and then he felt something and saw this girl looking straight at him. He looked back. She took off. He went back to school. Checked himself in at the office — “Doctor appointment,” he said — and went back to English class. Learned about To Kill a Mockingbird, and thought that Atticus would be a great name for a dog.

  The next time he went to the elementary school that same kid was there staring at him. It gave him the creeps. She stood there, glaring. He hid in his hoodie. The girl called the teacher over and Jude took off down the street.

  His mother seems better now. The radiation is over and soon her hair will grow fully back. He is seeing it grow every day. Right now she has itchy peach fuzz. She’s taking Tamoxifen, she had Herceptin transfusions, but soon everything will end. She’s calmer now, almost spiritual. Like she’s come to grips with it all, like she can finally think of other things. As if she’s faced the devil and knows now she can fight him. Jude’s father still touches her whenever he comes and goes but there are times when the whole family almost, almost, almost forgets. Times. Small, tiny, miniscule times. Or at least it seems that way sometimes, that everyone but Jude forgets.

  He can still hear her sniffing in the bathroom.

  The pirouette woman has done another weird spin. She was once a figure skater or dancer, Jude is sure of it. She is graceful when she needs speed and force. She’s not a very good player. Then, suddenly, the injured woman skates out to play defence. There she is. Jude knows it’s her because her stick has pink tape wrapped around the blade. She lets out some sort of a war cry as she skates towards her own net, her head down like a bull running towards red. Her legs look wobbly and Jude closes his eyes because he can’t watch. The woman obviously has a concussion. Jude remembers a kid on his basketball team in grade seven who had a concussion — wobbly, woozy, wild and violent, then
sleepy — he remembers the kid collapsing in the change room after the game. The woman slides to a stop right before her own goalie and then, like a Victorian heroine, she faints. Melts into a puddle at the goalie’s skates.

  Everyone shouts at once.

  There is a pink stained-glass window in the hallway at Jude’s house. One of those windows that every house in his neighbourhood seems to have, pink with swirls. Some white circles and some pink swirls. The window at Jude’s house has a crack in it. Something small. No one would really notice. But Jude sees it and it seems to him as if the crack has gotten bigger lately, as if it has spread somehow. If he puts his lips to it he can taste the cold air coming in from outside even though there is a storm window blocking the flow. And this is kind of how he feels about his mother’s sickness. As if it’s a crack slowly getting bigger, as if someday it will break and everything will shatter and the cold air will be let in.

  The woman is taken off the ice on a stretcher. Two men who work at the arena and the hot dog vendor are on the ice in their running shoes. So is the guy with the BlackBerry. The weird kid is standing next to Jude. He appeared out of nowhere. He holds up his iPad to show Jude what he’s doing and Jude nods. The kid is making pottery — he uses two fingers to stretch the clay into a shape. Then he paints it with his fingers and different coloured blobs that float to where his fingers go.

  Jude watches awhile and then starts to walk away.

  The boy mumbles sadly to his iPad.

  The woman is taken off the ice.

  The teams are milling about their benches, the referees talking to them. Helmets come off and Jude sees sweaty wet hair, long hair, lots of hair. Jude’s father said, “I have always loved your hair,” to Jude’s mother.

  Jude leaves the arena, his hands tucked tight in his hoodie pocket, his coat over his hoodie. He’s just a short walk from home. He decides to run. He runs hard, avoiding the ever-deepening cracks in the snow-dusted sidewalk, chasing the shadow of himself through the cold night.

  Pedophile Ring in Parkville

  John Standon

  Staff writer

  Thursday afternoon Parkville Police and several RCMP officers raided a rooming house on Braithwaite Drive. Although fairly close to the Abernackie Men’s Shelter, a shelter previously mentioned in this newspaper for the demonstrations against it by the neighbours on Braithwaite Drive, this rooming house is in a separate building and is not affiliated with the men’s shelter in any way. The rooming house consists of paroled men serving out sentences for everything from rape, B&E and burglary to domestic abuse. There are also some homeless men living there off and on. The house consists of 10 bedrooms, two floors. Police say the sweep was carried out after an informant mentioned photography equipment, computers and printed material of a sexual nature. Police are searching for the man in whose room this material was found. He is described as short in stature (approximately 5'4") and balding. He often wears brown suits. He talks with a tic and a bit of a stutter. He was last seen on Tuesday. Anyone with information, please call the police.

  10

  It isn’t where Claire’s husband, Ralph, usually puts it. His hat. And his keys are gone too. The front hall table looks odd without his pile of things. Claire has maybe cleaned up again? But that’s the way it is these days. One minute he has a grasp on things, the next minute nothing makes sense. Of course Ralph won’t say anything about this to anyone. It is okay to worry about going crazy, losing things, missing things, but to admit it aloud is something that would make him horribly uncomfortable. Ralph needs his family to believe that he has some sort of control. Especially now with Claire’s cancer. Someone needs to take control. Even if it is fake.

  “Why are you standing there staring at the table?” Claire moves into Ralph’s line of vision. On her head is a furry hat. It looks like something a baby would wear. Pink, fuzzy. It must be one of the three she got from that weird driver, the older woman who drove her to radiation that time in the fall. Jude wears his hat too, but Caroline won’t go near hers. She kept complaining about lice and other things that might be mixed in with the wool. Jude and Claire just stared at her, calmly, wearing their hats. “I like my hat,” Jude said, smiling, his orange-sparkly hat balanced on his head. Ralph remembers Claire laughing wildly, full-throated, her head thrown back, the veins in her neck prominent against the white pallor of her skin, her bones showing. So much weight she’s lost. So much skin almost. Ralph can’t figure it out. Now her skin is paper stretched tight over bone.

  Ralph can’t bear to look at Claire some days. The ache he feels is akin to indigestion or acid reflux — a deep splintering pain in his chest radiating up to his jaw, the feeling of no control. She is still beautiful without her hair but because of her thinness and baldness and sharpened features he feels he can see her skeleton. He sees right through her skin to what she will look like when she is dead. And this frightens him to the point of distraction. In fact, maybe that’s his problem. Maybe he is losing things, forgetting things, because he’s so worried about Claire? That’s a very real possibility. Stress can make you forget things.

  “I’m going out,” Ralph says. “Do you need anything?”

  Claire shakes her head. Her pink hat moves down a bit and covers the place her eyebrows would be, the place they are slowly growing in. “You’re standing there staring at the table as if it’s going to bite you, Ralph.” She laughs. “Sleepwalking?”

  “Just trying to remember what I need at the store,” he says. He pats her on her fuzzy-hatted head and walks out the door. “Nice hat.”

  She smiles. “Gift from that weird woman who drove me to radiation. The Brussels sprouts woman.”

  “I thought so.”

  And then, as he turns away from her, “Milk,” Claire says. “And bananas.”

  “Right.”

  “No Brussels sprouts. Ha ha.”

  Ralph smiles at Claire.

  The steps are icy and Ralph holds tight to the railing. Jude was supposed to shovel last weekend, but he forgot and then the weather warmed slightly and the snow on the steps turned into solid ice. No matter how much sand Ralph sprinkles on it, it doesn’t seem to matter. Teenagers, Ralph thinks. Absent-minded. Even worse than he is. You could look Jude right in the eye, make him agree that he heard you, and the next minute ask him again what you said — he wouldn’t know. Their minds are occupied with sex, Ralph reasons. At least his boy. His daughter, Caroline is probably thinking about boys. Not sex with boys. Just the boys. But take a boy and a girl and what do you get? Sex. So, in fact, she’s thinking about sex. Just indirectly.

  But how is he to know? How is Ralph to know what his teenage kids think about? He can’t even remember, from one minute to the next, what he’s thinking about. He can’t even remember what it was like to be a teenager. And why is it that when you are a teenager you can forget things without thinking you have Alzheimer’s? As soon as you hit fifty if you say, “I can’t remember,” everyone looks at you with sympathy.

  Down the slippery steps and onto the sidewalk. Ralph stands there, scratching his uncovered head. He reaches into his pocket for his keys, remembers he can’t find his keys, but finds his hat there instead. He puts his hat on his head and begins to walk towards town. Better for him anyway, not taking the car. Safer, perhaps, with the way his concentration is lately. Maybe his keys are in the car? He’ll check on that later.

  His head down against the slight wind, Ralph walks forward to his destination. Not once does he look back to where he knows Claire will be watching from the front window. Always there. When Ralph comes home from work she is standing there in the dark staring out. What else has she got these days but the ability to stand in a window and look out into the world? Ralph finds it unbearable. Although he understands it. Claire just wants to feel part of something, he guesses, even if it’s really part of nothing. Part of watching the world go by. Sometimes Ralph wishes they lived on a
busier street, that way Claire would have more to look at. As it is, the occasional dog walker/snow shoveller/mail delivery doesn’t seem enough to occupy her. But still, every day she’s there. Watching.

  At the corner Ralph turns right. He wonders if maybe he’s had a stroke. Maybe that’s the problem. Like now, for instance, he turned right, away from downtown, when he’s supposed to be running errands. It’s as if his feet have a destination he knows nothing about. But then he isn’t quite sure what he was getting downtown anyway. Claire mentioned two things. Cereal? Wouldn’t he know if he had a stroke? Wouldn’t he have fallen down or fainted or something? Ralph knows that on TV they play that commercial where they list the signs of stroke but, for the life of him, he can’t remember what they are. Dizziness? Heartache? Indigestion? Confusion? Memory loss? Blackouts? Sadness?

  Up ahead there are kids on the street. Standing there in the snow and cold. Talking. For a minute Ralph thinks they should be in school, but then he remembers it is Saturday. If it were a school day, Ralph reasons, he’d be at work. The kids are looking at him strangely, but Ralph merely nods as he walks past, his feet crunching in the snow.

  His feet. Crunching. Cold feet. Ralph looks down. That’s what they are looking at. Ralph is wearing his house slippers. In the snow. He can feel the heat move up across his face and then down his back. He shivers. What an ape. His red velvet house slippers. The silly ones Claire got him for Christmas two years ago. A matching red velvet bathrobe to go with them. He’s never worn it but he liked the slippers. “You’ll look like Hugh Hefner,” she had said and he had laughed and Jude had said, “Who’s Hugh Hefner?” Ralph forgot to put on his boots. Ralph looks at his slippers but doesn’t stop his pace. No need to let these kids know he didn’t wear his slippers on purpose. Maybe that’s what all men his age do. How would these kids know differently? Maybe their own fathers walk around on Saturday in their slippers in the snow. Maybe they forget things all the time. Maybe Ralph is no different.