Alligator - Lisa Moore [64]
She had a little wooden jewellery box that had been carved in Kenya, inlaid with shell, where she kept her dope, and sometimes they got stoned together.
He was unable to say why it couldn’t add up to much, except that they had become too comfortable too quickly. He’d never mentioned the relationship to his children. He wondered if Beverly Clark was still in the food court, waiting. Of course he had no intention of giving Colleen Clark’s vandalism another thought. He’d had his fun. He put his hand on his arm where Beverly had touched him. Maybe he could catch up with Beverly Clark.
MADELEINE
MADELEINE WAS WEARING her shiny red kimono and she’d just made a cappuccino. She cracked a brown egg on a pot of boiling water and the yolk tipped over the jagged shell in one plop. The egg white stretched itself into opaque skeins and transparent veils and broke away from the yolk and frothed over the sides of the pot and settled back down. She splashed some balsamic vinegar into the pot. Madeleine had cleaners coming, two women from Placentia Bay who left the condo smelling of the artificial pine scent they put in the vacuum and every surface smelled of Pledge and she would smell Windex for days after they left. The smells made her hopeful and slightly congested. She liked getting the place cleaned.
She’d gone down in the elevator and out onto the sidewalk in her bare feet to get the paper. The concrete was cold and damp and she half hopped and picked up the paper. It was a warm morning, already warm. A dog was barking in some-one’s backyard. She heard a reverberating clank that rang out over all the empty streets; someone had dropped the lid on a Dumpster. A truck revving its engine. The cars parked along the street had blotches of rain over the roofs and hoods and someone had drawn a heart in the condensation on her windshield.
She picked up the newspaper and saw the photograph on the front page, first through a running blotch of rainwater that had collected in the folds of plastic. The water spilled over the picture and magnified the naked figure and warped him so his shoulder stretched and the black hood smeared and she tore off the plastic but she hardly knew that she had done so. She was only half awake and when she came inside, the hallway looked dim after the bright street. The hallway dimmed as if on a dimmer switch and she turned over the paper and stood still. The plastic fell out of her hand onto the floor of the elevator and she didn’t notice.
The photograph was soft focus, a digital photograph that had an amateurish cast, a naked man in a hood standing on a platform. He stood with his cuffed hands over his genitals. One shoulder slouched, an almost girlishly coy slouch except for the hood that was large and black, and the brutal fact of his nakedness. The man’s nakedness shocked her deeply. The photograph was low resolution, and looked like it had passed through a variety of media and the image had been degraded in the process. The hues in the print were off, an almost imperceptible wrongness of hue and focus, sinister in its casual ineptitude. Madeleine leaned against the wall of the elevator. She brought the picture close to her face to see if she could see pixels, how the colour had been reproduced; she tried to understand the image. A blooming horror made her skin prickle; what was this photograph? It was a homemade joke about torture, folksy and kitsch, full of abject glee and hatred. She had left the egg boiling. The egg was boiling over. She went back to the kitchen and put the paper on the table. The shock of the photograph receded; shock smacks and recedes. She would not let herself think the word evil. The egg was rubbery. The photograph was evil.
Her screenplay came to her in a dream the next night, she’d woken streaming sweat. There was something heavy underneath her on the mattress and she wanted to throw it on the floor. She tried to lift it, whatever it was, but it was too heavy. All the while, the