The Radiant City (7 page)

“I called the school this afternoon. They said you were not there.”

The way his eyes dart around the room, looking for a clue, an escape, gives him away.

“You shouldn’t check up on me. It is humiliating. I was there.”

“You want to add lying to your crimes?” He smells of cigarettes.

“What time did you call? I had to go to the pharmacy for aspirin. I had a terrible pain in my neck from sleeping on that couch. I might have stepped out and maybe that’s when you called.” He licks the mark on his lower lip. As he does whenever he lies.

“Stepped out?” Ramzi laughs. “The only pain in the neck around here is you!” He says it in English and looks pointedly in the direction of the Canadian. He uses a joking tone to diffuse the tension.

“What’s happening?” Elias looked from his son to his daughter to his grandson, but no one answers him.

“Who are you running with in the street?” Saida comes around the counter now and stands in front of Joseph. She barely comes up to his shoulder. Her son is tall, like Habib. Strong through the arms and chest like him, too, and now he crosses his arms, making the muscles bigger. Only his eyes are his mother’s. She stares into eyes so much like her own, dark-rimmed, but bright with anger. “What are you doing? Picking pockets on the metro? Smoking dope?”

“No!” he says.

“Where do you go—out to the
banlieue
? Your so-called friends are criminals?” Her hands fly like birds.

“My friends are my friends.”

“And your family? What are we?” Fingers spread wide as though she would take hold of him.

“Saida, keep your voice down,” says Ramzi, and flicks his eyes again toward the Canadian, whose own gaze is fixed firmly on his coffee cup. “You’re embarrassing our customer.”

“Oh, forgive me! God forbid! Of course, that’s more important than your nephew. Fine. You deal with him, this tough man, who skips school and lies.”

“You didn’t call the school.
You
lied,” says Joseph.

“Joseph! You will not call your mother a liar. Apologize. Now,” says Elias.

For a moment it is not clear if he will or not and his uncle glares at him. “Joseph,” he cautions.

“I’m sorry.”

“Take your grandfather to the doctor, Joseph. We will talk at home. Go right back there. Your grandfather will call me and tell me. You will stay with him. Do your homework. Do
some
homework.”

“What’s going on?” says Elias. “Am I going to the doctor? Why so much shouting? Joseph, you are a good boy, aren’t you?”

“Yes,
Jadd
. Don’t worry,” says Joseph and he goes over to the old man and kisses him. Saida’s heart burns in her chest.

“Sorry,” says Ramzi to Matthew. “The boy, he misses his father.”

“You think he misses his father?” says Saida.

“Well, Anatole.”

“That man is not his father! His father is dead,” says Saida, in Arabic. If there was a pot within reach, Saida might very well have tossed it at her brother. “Anatole was never his father. Don’t you dare say such a thing!” She glances at the Canadian and thinks it is to his credit that he says nothing.

“Have some tea with me,” says Elias and motions to the boy to sit down.

“Do I have time?” he says to his mother, this time in English.

“If you’re fast,” she says and turns to boil the water. She shrugs. “Dr. Allouche always keeps you waiting at least forty-five minutes.”

“Joseph, come and meet our new guest,” says Ramzi. “This is Mr. Matthew. He is from Canada. A reporter.”

They shake hands and Joseph is full of smiles. “Have you been to New York?”

“New York is not in Canada, Joseph,” says Ramzi and slaps him lightly on the arm.

“I know that, but it is close. I love New York. I want to go there one day. Have you been?”

“Yes. Many times.”

“Cool. Brooklyn Bridge. Time Square. Best rappers in the world come from Bronx.”

“All that,” says Matthew, nodding. “A lot of good jazz, too.”

“Yes, jazz is good music. American Black music. So, you’re a reporter. What kind of reporter?”

“Good question. I go where they send me. I report on conflicts.”

“On wars, then.
Les points chaudes
.”

“Yes.”

“What wars?”

“Drink your tea, Joseph. You have to go in a minute,” says Saida. “Don’t be so nosy.”

“It’s all right,” says Matthew. “I guess I’ve been to most of the wars in the past twenty years.”

“Cool.” The word is long, drawn out, and accompanied by head nodding.

“You think so, eh?”

“Sure. You get to be where history is making. See the truth of things.”

“I guess.”

“You in Iraq during the Desert Storm?”

“Yup.”

Matthew begins to talk about being in the Rashid Hotel, about the bombs that fell, the whining thunder they made, about the great fires in the desert. Saida does not listen to the words which, being about war, sound like obscenities to her ears. Instead, she watches the two. Saida likes the way Matthew talks to her son. As though he were an adult, an equal. And she can see from the look on Joseph’s face, the way he leans in to talk to the man, and listens attentively to his tales, that Joseph is basking in the attention. He does miss his father, she thinks—or at least
a
father.
Misses Anatole, does he? Misses the beatings. Misses the drunkenness. Misses being told he is good for nothing, useless, born only for the garbage dump. What is that to miss?

“Enough, Joseph,” she says at last. “It’s time.”

When her son and father have gone she goes into the open courtyard across which is the toilet. She scrubs the sink and mops the floor. The rain has stopped now and she takes a moment to pick weeds out of the potted plants. There are a few late roses on the vine and if she dead-heads the old, perhaps there will be a few more. She likes to be here, in the open, with the miniature garden. It is her thinking place.

Her father thinks she should marry again. A nice Lebanese man this time, not a foreigner he said, as though they were not the ones who were foreign, as though it was not her father’s idea that a Frenchman, albeit a Corsican, would make them less strange here. They would integrate, become family here, her father had thought. Well, she has had enough of that. Besides, who would want a woman like her now, a widow
and
a divorcee with skin melted into shapes like pale mud over which many feet had walked? No, her son would have to be content with conversations with strangers, with a grandfather, with an uncle. This was why she moved back to her father and brother and not gone off with her son, somewhere else, somewhere where a woman alone was not always tied to the belt of the men in her family.

That night, when at last she can sit and talk to Joseph alone, she means to talk to him as well about the school he has skipped, about the boys he runs the street with, but it is a good moment between them, and instead she talks about the Canadian.

“I liked his stories, didn’t you?” she says.

Joseph shrugs. “They’re okay.”

He admits nothing to her, his mother. He falls asleep watching the television and she does not have the heart to wake him again. Tomorrow, she says to herself, putting the duvet over him, and a pillow under his head. When she kisses him, he smells sharp, but sweet as well, like cinnamon and dates.

That night Matthew returns home after consuming a great deal of beer at the Bok-Bok. He lies in bed and considers the Ferhat family. Saida is a pretty woman. Her dark eyes are arresting, one might even say haunting, lit with sorrow, yes, but also with dignity and intelligence. Good bones, as they say, although it’s obvious from the way she shields her scars that whatever happened to Saida has left her feeling unlovely, which is such a shame.

Matthew likes the boy, too, who is growing into his skin, pushing out to see where the limits of things are. It is a tough age, sixteen. Matthew knows that only too well. So many things can change, some irrevocably, others only feel that way. So many things cannot be changed.

Matthew’s own family lives in a carefully guarded compartment in his mind. It has been a long time since he has seen his father and brother, Bill, Jr. Bill has built a house on the same farm and lives there with his wife and three children. Matthew has never met his brother’s wife, nor his children, God help them. He has not seen a picture of them; has never heard their voice on the phone.

Matthew’s mother died two years after the barn burning. All her dreams of going to Halifax and studying to be a vet went up in smoke in that barn, as did her hope of a new life, away from her drunken, violent husband. She would not go so long as Matthew was still at home, but she had been planning. Saving a little here and there. Putting something aside for years, all the while trying to protect Matthew as best she could from her husband’s drunken rages. It was always Matthew. Never Bill, Jr., and the reason was simple enough: Bill, Jr. was the perfect clone of his father. However, with Matthew getting ready to go off to college, she had confided in him. Told him she was planning to leave, too. Somehow, her husband got wind of those plans.

The day after the barn burning, the town constable, the insurance man and the fire marshal came to poke around and ask some questions. They all said there was no sense to things like this. Just plain fool bad luck. The insurance man asked if there was any motive for his good friend Bill Bowles to burn down his own barn. Matthew held his breath and stared at the man real hard, so he would know that hell, yes, there was a motive and just give him a moment alone without his father around and he’d sure tell him what it was. But then the insurance man shrugged, said, “There’s just no figuring,” and the men all looked solemn. A little later they had a drink together, Bill and Bill, Jr., and the constable and the fire marshal and the insurance man, and then the three men got back in the constable’s car and went away, beeping the horn in a friendly way as they turned onto the main road.

Later the man from the county came to haul away the animal carcasses. The air was still thick with the smell of burned horseflesh; all his life Matthew would be haunted by the image of the black, bloated bodies hanging from a back leg as the knacker man winched them onto the back of his truck. And then the knacker man, too, was gone and the three Bowles men were left alone in the yard, amidst the smoulder and the stench.

Bill Bowles spit on the ground and then turned to look up at his wife’s ashen face, staring down at them from the upstairs window. “Nobody goes anywhere,” he said. “Not on my fucking watch.” And although it was not clear whether his mother could hear the words or not, the message was indisputably clear. Bill Bowles Senior held the reins of power and he was not going to give them up. The curtain fell and Matthew’s mother’s face disappeared.

After that, his mother remained in her room, mostly. She did what she was told and said little and cried not at all, not after that first night. The two or three friends she had from church came by from time to time, but his mother refused to see them, and so gradually the intervals between visits lengthened and then they stopped all together. His mother did not wash and she didn’t eat, or hardly anything, and then only when her husband threatened to force-feed her.

She was bent on dying. Had her mind set on getting out. One day she called Matthew into her room where she lay on the bed, a stick-doll under a faded quilt. “Get out now,” she said to him, trailing her finger along the most recent bruise colouring his face. “Don’t wait.”

But he could not, of course. Not as long as she was left behind.

It took her a long time to die.

A week after she had been laid in the ground Matthew packed his duffle bag and, closing the door softly behind him in the middle of the night, headed for Halifax and whatever fate he found, vowing he would spend his life pointing a finger at the brutal tyrants of the world. He would make people listen. He would make them see. He would make them do something.

And what has he done?

People see. People know. And so what? They do not care. They cannot care. It would rock their view of the world too much. People think that if it is true, what he and others like him have to say about the world, then the world is too horrible, too terrifying to continue living in. And so they look, but do not see. Hear, but do not listen. Know, but will not admit.
Admit
. To let in. To permit access to. Like light.

Matthew rolls over, buries his face in the pillow and weeps. He weeps for a long time, and when he is done he reaches for the sleeping pills he keeps handy and takes more than he should.

Matthew has developed a loose pattern to his days, one divided into blocks of time. He sleeps in the mornings, tries to write in the afternoons, and generally fails. Late afternoons are for Chez Elias, when he feels calm and friendly. Evenings are for the Bok-Bok. Unless he is in what he almost laughingly calls The Emotionally Hopeless Forest. Then it’s alone in his apartment with the phone off the hook. Now he is on his way to the Bok-Bok. Or at least he was, until the phone rang.