A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [27]
The night is a jet-black lake. A person could sink down and even disappear without a trace.
FOUR
Holidays are enticing only for the first week or so. After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do. I don’t really know what to do with myself these days. I invent duties and expeditions. I see the children from my last class, on the streets, and they are so busy running somewhere that they hardly notice me.
Already July smells of dust and dryness, and I hope we aren’t going to have one of those yellowing summers, with no rain, and the green seeping away from the grass and leaves.
River Street is almost empty this morning, only a few bicycles buzzing slowly like bluebottle flies, and the occasional kingfisher flash of a car driven by some impatient housewife bored with shopping. Outside the Parthenon Café, Miklos is sponging his windows dawdlingly, spinning the job out to last the morning while his wife waits stoically on the customers inside. The Flamingo Dancehall is shut tight and locked, blinds drawn, but tonight it will be all mauve and green shifting lights, and blare, and couples. In the summer there are dances every night here now. It used to be only once a week, Saturdays, when I was about seventeen. Sometimes I’d go with three or four other girls, scarcely wanting to, for the peril undertaken, the risk of no one asking a person to dance. But I dreaded not going even more – having to make up an excuse which anyone could see through. What a relief when one actually was asked to dance, no matter by whom. Except if it was Cluny Macpherson from the BA Garage, and then I used to want to get out of it, but couldn’t, being unable to say I’d promised the dance as it was obvious I hadn’t. He used to like to dance with me because he liked being a clown. I’ve often wondered how anyone could enjoy that. He was exceptionally short and broad, like a bulldog, and I was my full height then, and must have looked like some skinny poplar sapling. Naturally I’d falter or lose a step and he would croon to the band tune in his carrying voice so no one would miss the joke – Don’t watch your fee-eet, don’t watch your feet. Maybe he even thought he was doing me a kindness, teaching me to dance. He must have been thirty-five then. He’s in his fifties now. Probably he still goes to the dances at the Flamingo. What do the cool-eyed youngsters there now say to him? Has his foolery worn a little thin, even to himself, or does he still go on, unaware, or else compelled to be a card, a character, until he drops? What would he say if unexpectedly I turned up there one night? Perhaps we’d twist (is that still current?) for old times’ sake, two caricatures, dog out-reached to tree, the others’ laughter howling louder than the music.
I honestly do not know why I feel the daft sting of imagined embarrassments. The ones that occur are more than plenty, God knows. I must not let myself think like this. I don’t know why I do. Unless to visualize something infinitely worse than anything that could possibly happen, so that whatever happens may seem not so bad in comparison.
On the steps of the Queen Victoria Hotel a few old men sit, absorbing the sunlight through their grey buttoned-up sweaters and loose grey unpressed trousers, talking in thin voices. Perhaps if my father were alive, he’d be there with them. He’d be about that age by now, I guess. I hate