A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [16]
“I am now in the world,” she had whispered to the squares of cement that were passing beneath her feet.
She found herself standing at an alley. On the brick wall to the left was a list of words, and some numbers had been painted in a rough hand. The name she was looking for was on this list along with a title or explanation that read “Conceptual Fragments.” Staring at the wall she was aware of herself in ways she had rarely been in the past, aware of how odd she must look in her good wool coat and her boots with the ring of fake fur at the ankles, aware of the old suitcase she was carrying, and the large black leather handbag she was clasping under her right elbow. Suddenly a young man with strangely coloured hair emerged from one of the doors partway down the alley and swung swiftly past her, turning left on the street with one quick glance back in her direction. “Hello, Mom,” he said, laughing, as he bolted down the street. She knew instinctively that he was not the young man she was looking for, but that, nevertheless, the young man she was looking for could quite possibly be of his kind.
After this thought, she lost the courage to enter the alley, at least for the time being. At any rate, she had a task to complete. She proceeded to walk down the street and when she found a mailbox, she took from her purse a stamped envelope addressed to her husband, an envelope that contained the keys to the car. On the back of the envelope she had written at the station in Belleville. Nothing more. She wondered how long it would take him to fetch the vehicle, having a car of his own. And it would not be his first concern. He would be frantic, she knew, would be arranging some kind of search. There might even be police involved and a suggestion that she was incapable of looking after herself, a suggestion that she was too fragile to survive in the outside world. But they wouldn’t find her for a while. She had told no one she was going. She had not even told Julia that she intended to take this journey.
When she returned to the alley she read the spray-painted words and numbers until she once again found the name she had been looking for. Then she peered into the passageway that she could now see was lined with a series of industrial-looking entrances and the odd, forbidding steel garage door. Each of these had a number on its surface along with a mass of coloured swirls and scrawls that she remembered from magazine articles was something called graffiti. She turned from this in a kind of confusion but did not leave the spot, and almost immediately she found herself focusing on the texture of peeling paint on the metal drainpipe attached to the wall near her shoulder. Several curls of dark blue, and a scattering of rust that, when she placed her gloved hand on it, covered the fingers like orange pollen. She remembered pollen from the woods, how once, long ago, the legs of her slacks had been dusted with it. “Anemone,” Andrew had said as she bent to brush the gold powder from the cotton. “You’re helping it to reproduce.”
Nearer the asphalt the paint was holding better, and yet layers emerged in small islands of colour. She was lost in this for some time, lost in looking at the patterns, until the idea of islands brought her back to herself. She was here because of an island. She was not going home. She began to walk forward, across the old, soiled patches of ice—islandlike themselves—that littered the ground leading to the