cree for lake
We arrived on a Tuesday, I can remember that. I can remember Hetty’s hand in mine as we moved slowly down the steps of the escalator, as if standing completely still would have been harder than moving. It was cold even in the airport: the first time I realised how cold can seep through. I remember Hetty’s hand was cold too, and that she felt tired next to me. We’d been in the sky breathing fake air for longer than a normal day and night. Hetty’s long body couldn’t fall asleep in an aeroplane chair, and the only movie we could both agree to watch together—with our separate plastic headphones—was a French film with lots of boring silent bits and close-ups of skinny faces.
It was a relief to stretch and stand, free and wide on the lino in the airport, and to feel like we were nearly where we had wanted to be for so long. I remember that the chewing gum in my mouth had lost all of its flavour, that my jaw hurt from moving up and down, but that I kept it in the corner of my mouth as the only familiar thing. I was standing on the edge of something, next to Hetty but a little bit alone, and it could have been a cliff or a diving board. The only difference was that I didn’t feel scared.
That crackling, swirling feeling of being somewhere completely new was in me as we waited for our bags. We’d tied red ribbons to our luggage so that we would recognise it among the grey and khaki and black, and it came quickly. We took everything as an omen back then, Hetty and I, and told each other as we walked to the taxi bay that it was a sign—our bags had arrived first because we were meant to be there. Hetty had her long dark hair pulled back and her face was clean and bright, even though she was wilting. I hadn’t looked in the mirror since we’d left Melbourne—I shrugged off grooming as if it was a waste of effort, and didn’t try to make myself look better. My thick eyebrows, the cross-over of my front teeth, the woolly hair that sat unbrushed against my shoulders: these were my messages to the world that I didn’t care, that I wasn’t the kind of person who worried about what others thought of them. I can see now that this was just a different type of vanity.
‘It doesn’t feel real,’ Hetty said. We were waiting for a taxi, breath coming out of our mouths in huffs. ‘It’s like we’re not actually here yet.’
I knew what she meant. Dark took away the edge of a place, and it was after midnight. The airport was busy but no one was looking at us, and I couldn’t hear anyone talking above a low murmur. I had been looking forward to hearing the Canadian accent all around me, but I’d heard nothing. There wasn’t anything yet to compare ourselves to, to stand separate from.
‘Maybe we’re not. No one actually said, Welcome to Canada.’
I crossed my eyes and poked out my tongue, and Hetty laughed and shivered in her coat, jumping up and down a little to warm herself. She was tall, Hetty, as I’ve said. I was medium, and Hetty was tall in the way that made strangers stop her on the street to see if she was wearing heels. She didn’t roll her eyes but preferred to smile and answer that no, no, she’d never played basketball. Didn’t like sport at all, really. Wasn’t good at it. Hetty was a peacemaker.
Inside the taxi it was close and warm and the driver smiled big at us in his rear-view mirror. We told him where we needed to go—to the house of a couple we’d found on a couch-sharing site offering a room and two beds—and he was so enthusiastic the air was thick with it, along with the candied scent of his air freshener hanging from the mirror in the shape of a red delicious.
‘I’m so happy to be able to drive you,’ he told us. He was a large man, with rolled-up shirt sleeves, salmon-coloured skin and the air of a new grandfather. He had a whiff of white hair at the top of his head and the skin around it was shining, even in the dark. I thought back to men like this who drove taxis in Melbourne. They never seemed happy to be able to drive me; rather they knew they had to, that they needed to, in order to make it through another work day. That had always felt right to me. I didn’t know how to smile enough to make it okay that this man was being so kind.
‘I’ve been driving this cab for twenty-seven years,’ he told us, rolling out the words carefully, with a smile at the tip of each of them, as if he loved us, which he couldn’t have, and we were important, which we weren’t. ‘I try to make each passenger feel a little better as they get out than when they got in.’
I decided to smile once more, then look out the window. I wanted to see the city—you could tell something about a place from the drive in to the guts of it from the airport. I didn’t want to miss anything. The driver’s enthusiasm made him seem malleable. I wondered if he had a wife, or a husband, and if they were bossy. Outside the cab, Toronto was rushing by: a hazy dark-green pan of tree leaves, verandahs and basement windows, almost hidden by the black air. I opened my eyes wider to try to see something.
Hetty was leaning against the window, managing to look as though she was comfortable, despite the turning and bumping and braking. A swell of gladness popped in my heart as I looked at her, reminding myself that she had agreed to come, that she must really love me.
The cab driver was humming, and as we slowed down along a narrow street that had come off a wider one I realised what the song was: ‘Killing Me Softly’. I wondered where he had heard it, where it had seeped into the pink of his brain. I wondered whether he knew the lyrics or just the tune. I tried not to hum along with him, above the gasp of the radio. I struggled with displays, of emotion or tenderness. I still do, though now I know how important they can be. Humans like to be shown. It has always been hard for me to take care of a stranger the way Hetty could.
We slowed down to a stop outside a squat apartment building. The driver smiled so wide in the rear-view mirror that I had to smile back, and this time the smiling made me feel excited. I reminded myself that we were here, in another country—really far away. This was what I had been waiting for. We paid the driver, who refused a tip and wished us such luck that it felt like he had handed us a heart. Outside the air was breath and spit.