THE ONLY PERSON SHE RECOGNIZED AT THE RAINBOW Steps was that Fox guy from last night. Oh shit! thought Maureen. Now what am I supposed to do? What about if he wants to do “it” again? Am I obliged because I did “it” last night with him? But then I’d be doing “it” with two different guys on the same night—the absolute height of slutdom. Though Maureen felt ashamed, she also felt kind of elated, because, after all, if she was going to leave virginity, holiness and goodness behind her, she might as well do it with a bang—two bangs in one night, actually, Maureen’s mind interjected.
She asked Fox to go upstairs and get Carleen for her.
“Can’t. She’s not there.”
“She’s gotta be there,” Maureen said.
“No, they’re gone up to Perry’s other bar up on Sherbrooke. Why don’t you sit down, take the weight off your feet and have a drink with me?”
What weight? Maureen thought. Was he calling her fat? God, he’d actually seen her actual gross body. Yuck.
“No, I’ve got to go. What’s the name of the bar?”
“Le Parc,” Fox said. “But sure, I can drive you up there after. Why don’t you . . .”
Maureen didn’t even reply, just tore out of The Rainbow Steps and practically ran up to Sherbrooke Street. She dashed back and forth, looking for the club. When she finally found it, the barman said that Perry and some little dolly had already left. Maureen ordered a drink. For a moment, it seemed the bartender was not going to serve her, or was going to ask for her ID, but the moment passed and he put a rye and ginger in front of her.
After a lot more to drink, Maureen ended up with two old farts from the bar, at a party in Westmount. Maureen had never seen a house in such a state: mouldering newspapers were piled up as high as a person, and when Maureen touched one of the drapes, it crumbled in her hands; it was rotted through. Everything here is rotted through, Maureen thought, or she just felt—she really wasn’t capable of thought anymore. She had so many feelings and they were bumping around, banging up against each other, and some of them were so big she thought she might explode if she didn’t . . . if she didn’t have another beer and . . . Oh my God, Carleen! Where was she? She’d left Carleen in trouble, in the arms of an old perverted wholesale pornographer who wanted to do it with the two of them—ugh, oh God. Then she was upstairs on some mouldy old bed, in the arms of some mouldy old guy who was lying on top of her and wheezing in his sleep.
WHEN THE BUS FROM THE AIRPORT DROPPED MAUREEN off at 17 Princess Street, the door was locked. She banged on it. Her mother came to the door, yelling, before she opened it.
“Jakey Young is at number 7.”
Jakey Young was the bootlegger. Princess Street used to be full of bootleggers one time, but now there was just the one left, just poor old Jakey, blind since he was ten from drinking moonshine from a Javex bottle.
“Mom, it’s me, Maureen!”
The Sarge opened the door. “Keep your voice down, for Christ sakes! Himself is passed out in the front room. Don’t you go upsettin’ that hornets’ nest today.”
Maureen tiptoed in, dragging her suitcase behind her. She stood there in the hall, looking at the Sarge.
“Well, can’t you even ask me how it went?”
“All right, I’ll play your foolish game. Let me ask you, Maureen, how did it go?”
“Jumpins, Mom.”
“Well, how was it?”
“All right, I suppose.”
“All right? Well it cost enough, you gallivanting around the world and leaving me here, dealing with that.” She pointed to Maureen’s father, who was sprawled across the chesterfield. “Not to mention Kathleen. And Raymond got me drove half-cracked. Go on up and see her—oh, she’s gonna have a fit when she sees ya. She knew you were comin’ home today. Oh, she’s a cruel fool, Kathleen. I told her, though, not to dare set foot out of that room till you got here or I’d cripple her.”
Maureen went up over the stairs and into the room she shared with her older sister Kathleen. Kathleen was twenty-five but she was retarded. “Retarded when it suits her,” their mom used to say. “She don’t miss a trick, and if crucifying and mesmerizing and old fuckery was any kind of skill that was worth anything at all, Kathleen would be worth a fortune. She’d be on the cover of the Fortune 500.”
Kathleen came lunging at Maureen. “I made it for you, Maureen. I made it, I made it, I made it myself, I made it for you. Here! Here! Here! I made it! I made it!”
“Okay, okay, that’s great! Thank you!”
It was a little tiny picture of some trees and a blue sky crayoned on the back of a butcher’s bill from Halliday’s Meat Market. They always got their meat from Halliday’s, including the T-bone roast they had every Sunday, which was “expensive but worth it,” Maureen’s mother used to say, because “it was quality and she knew quality.” She’d been a cook at the City Club and at the Newfoundland Hotel before she “threw her life away for that big drunken galoot and his pack of snot-nosed youngsters.”
“But we’re your youngsters too, Mommy! We’re your youngsters too!” Kathleen used to say when they were little.
“No, you’re not. You’ve got nothing to do with me. I don’t know what hole your father helped you crawl out of, but you never crawled outta me. You’re not mine, not even Raymond, who’s the best of ye. Come over, Raymond,” she said, pulling him down on her lap. “Mom’s little pet rabbit. What does he want to be? Mom’s pet rabbit, Mom’s pet hen or Mom’s pet trout?”
“Mom’s pet rabbit,” Raymond would say. Maureen could still feel her heart come up in her throat and her eyes begin to fill up with tears of rage at that. God, Maureen hated Raymond. He got away with everything because the Sarge loved him. They were all the Sarge’s, every last one of them. There was only Maureen and Raymond and Kathleen left home now. The rest of them were living away, in the army, down in the States, up in Ontario, so there was just the Sarge, Raymond, Kathleen, Maureen and, of course, Maureen’s old man, who was now in passed out on the chesterfield. William “Bill” Brennan, worked Longshore. At one point, he told Maureen, everyone in the middle of town worked Longshore. Now the union members were dwindling, machines were off-loading cargo and he said he felt like a dying breed. Shure the city had already torn out half the centre of town, torn down Tank Lane, half of Carter’s Hill, Brazil Square gone, a lot of New Gower, even the other half of Princess Street. Though Bill was the union steward, he complained often that his heart wasn’t in it and cursed the day he’d left the silversmith his mother had gotten him apprenticed to when he was thirteen, for the paltry sum of one dollar a month. He was young then and wanted more money, and he knew he could get it working Longshore or shipping out on the salt fish and rum trade boats. Bill told Maureen that in the old days in the centre of town, the men would go down to the harbour at six in the morning and come home, walking up over the hillsides, for a second breakfast at nine o’clock, and you could watch them if you were up on Long’s Hill or Cabot Street, a wave of working men, a steady stream, watch them climb the hills, climb up from the harbour to their breakfast. But that was all gone, Bill said, and it wouldn’t come back again. Bill still had the traditional big khaki-coloured Longshoreman’s winter coat with the special pockets that the Sarge had sewn in so that he could bring home “found” items from the wharf: loose tea, dishes, good biscuits, car wax, sometimes pockets full of fresh crab. Lots of times, his big rubber boots would be loaded up with flasks of rum.
Bill never said much except when he was loaded, and then he wouldn’t shut up. The Sarge had no time for Bill and treated him even worse than she treated the youngsters. She knocked him around, hit him, smacked him. A couple of times, she took his shoes and burned them. She just generally treated him like dirt, and Maureen, Raymond and the rest of his youngsters followed suit. One time, the Sarge burned Bill’s one good suit of clothes when he made the mistake of going down to the Ritz Tavern after she told him not to go. Maureen and Raymond were outraged, but they didn’t say anything—they didn’t want the Sarge to turn on them. For days, they couldn’t even look at their father, they felt so bad, but they never did say anything—they didn’t want to be caught out loving such an obvious loser. That time, even Kathleen seemed leery of listening to her father or even of being in the same room with him when he started going on about rounding the Cape of Good Hope, or saying, “I’ve been everywhere . . . Mozambique, fuck it, Madagascar, fuck it, there’s no place like Newfoundland.” Seventeen Princess Street was a house divided, with most of the house living in fear over on the Sarge’s side and Bill left standing all by himself on the other.
Oh, but Maureen loved her father. She knew he was boring and old and drunk and useless and a dirty big bastard and no good for nothing and an old fool—all the things that the Sarge called him—but there was a picture of him when he was young and in the Merchant Navy, and he’d been heart-stoppingly handsome. Even though she was careful not to be caught talking to him when he started in on one of his all-night stories, a part of her longed to know the full story of the time the Captain gave Bill and the crew a quarter of a bottle of rum as they were rounding the Horn—“One tot per day per man”—and about the time he ended up on a Greek tramper because he got drunk and missed his boat in the Mediterranean and he was six months at sea and nobody else on board spoke anything but Greek. But she never let on that she felt that way, because she’d never want to face the Sarge’s scorn.
Her mother roared out at her up over the stairs, “Sister Catherine called. You’re thrown out of the choir. I knew that was gonna happen. See, I said that. Shure you can’t sing. You can’t sing for Christ sakes. Anne was the only one of ye crowd who could carry a tune, and shure that was only when she was drunk.”
As her mother walked into the room with Maureen and Kathleen, she added that Sister Catherine had said that Maureen was lucky to be just thrown out of the choir and that she’d only made it into the choir by the skin of her teeth.
“Sister said your behaviour in Montreal was shocking. What did you do?”
“Nothing. I never did nothing. Shure Carleen, she never even came home.”
“I never asked you what Carleen did; I asked you what you did.”
“Nothing. I stayed out late one night. That’s it.”
“You got thrown out of the choir for that?”
“Yea, you know what the nuns are like.”
“They wouldn’t throw you out of the choir for nothing.”
“Mom, the nuns? Remember? Suck up and kick down? If I lived up on Circular Road and not down here on Princess Street, I’d still be in the shaggin’ choir. You know that! You know what they’re like!”
“You always got an answer for everything, don’t ya,” the Sarge spat at her, but Maureen could see that she’d gotten to her. She’d seen her face darken at the mention of the suck-up-and-kick-down Sisters of Mercy.
“Well, you’re as good as any of that crowd on Circular Road,” the Sarge muttered as she walked out of Maureen’s room. “Hurry up and get unpacked out of it.”