Alligator - Lisa Moore [84]
Yet, she had taken his money, and that’s the way of it.
That is the way of money.
Frank put on a fresh T-shirt and picked up his keys and decided to walk down Duckworth Street to see if he could find Colleen. He’d get his money back.
On the street the boy from next door was playing with a bubble wand. He pressed a lever in the handle and the wand opened out into a large diamond shape and bubble liquid shot up from the clear handle and coated the plastic diamond when he tipped it into the breeze and a giant bubble wobbled into the air and lifted from the wand, and it caught the reflection of the landlord’s Jaguar, which was parked outside the bed-sit and the black streaky gleaming car slithered on the curve of the oversized bubble.
The boy put out his hand to touch the bubble and it broke with a sun-sparkling mist and Frank started up the sidewalk and as he did he gouged his key into the side of the landlord’s Jaguar and dragged it from the taillight all the way to the headlight feeling the paint crust against the tip of his key.
COLLEEN
I’M IN THE Toronto airport with a connecting flight to Louisiana in a few hours and I am so hungry I could pass out. I go into Swiss Chalet and the waitress has a tag that says Veronica. She’s past middle age, perhaps forty, and she has her blond hair swept into a French twist and should I call Mom and tell her where I am? Not yet. Not yet. Veronica has a beauty mark on her cheek. I try to think who Veronica is in the Bible.
I know the boy in the kitchen, Veronica says, and I tell him you don’t have much time, so he does me a favour. Veronica has an accent I don’t recognize.
She winks at me and puts down the plate of chicken and a bowl of gravy and a finger bowl and I am so hungry. The chicken is moist and good.
Soon I’ll be sitting in the plane while it turns circles on the runway waiting for clearance to take off. They’ll turn off the cabin lights and the flight attendant will touch the overhead bins with her fingers all the way up the aisle. I can’t leave Swiss Chalet without paying because this is an airport and how easy it would be to get caught. But once I’m through customs I’m through and it’s so busy here, a table full of women in purdah, another table of five pilots, there’s a toddler screaming her head off. I could slide out the door pretty quick. I should be able to keep going for a while on Frank’s money, but it would be good not to have to pay for every meal. Swiss Chalet is a big chain, like probably part of some multinational. Veronica has her back turned. They’re busy as hell, she’s probably been on for hours already; she’s probably exhausted. There are two entrances, and if I went out the one next to the bathrooms I wouldn’t have to pass anybody. I could get out of here and it would take Veronica at least five minutes to see I’m gone.
MADELEINE
SHE REMEMBERS A luncheon in Sydney, Australia. Was she speaking about the art of documentary? Yes she was. She was speaking about how you could change the world with a good documentary. Earlier that week she had come close to drowning.
When she said change the world she thought of the sweat required to rev the engines of capital so you eventually got to say your piece. It took two years or more to browbeat the mucky-mucks and massage the concept and betray the concept, all the while remaining true. But if you displayed brazenness and fortitude, she had learned, you more or less got to say your piece. She was all for having your say.
She’d always start off a project by wanting to say a fairly simple thing, for instance: