LAC

french for lake

We were staying with Jo and John. Jo had hair dyed the colour of wet rust, and she maintained heavy eye contact. She looked at us like she wanted us to know she was there, from the moment we walked in with our bags, waving goodbye to our driver from the door as he drove away. She was thin, as though she didn’t have time for eating, and wore a cross studded with diamantes around her neck.

‘We’re so happy to have you stay with us!’ Her voice sang out above her partner’s as he helped us drag our bags into the living room, directing us to the best place to land them. ‘We’ve been so excited for you to arrive!’

‘Thanks so much for having us,’ Hetty replied, brightly.

‘Oh—your accent!’ Jo squealed. I reminded myself to talk as little as possible. Since I’d opened my mouth at the airport to say thank you to Passport Control, I’d been struck by how rural and peculiar the Australian accent sounded against the gentle wash of the Canadian. ‘It’s so amazing!’

‘Ha—thank you. It’s ridiculous.’ Hetty laughed and stretched her arms out in a way that told me she was relaxed.

‘Oh, no—it’s not ridiculous at all. No, no, no. I love it.’

Jo eyed us from where she stood next to the couch. John had sat and made himself comfortable. He had small eyes and a thick nose, and creases around his mouth that made it look like he was smiling even when he probably wasn’t. Big hands tucked neatly below a big belly, a shy shrub of hair planted at the neck of his shirt. I imagined Jo and John in bed together: stroking each other’s bodies, so different from their own. They were alien bodies when you looked at them together. I could already imagine that John kept Jo from spinning out into the night. She was eager to show us something—that she loved her life, that she was a happy person, that we were so welcome. She was humming with the effort of it. I wondered if Hetty could hear it too.

Jo showed us where we would sleep—a large room with curtains already drawn across the window. She stood at the door and asked us questions as we made ourselves comfortable. I wished so much that she would leave, so I could pull back the fabric and look out at Toronto.

‘It must be so different here to where you’re from, eh?’ Jo asked, leaning against the doorframe, eyes sad—as if we had come from a strange and distant planet and could only stay on Earth a short while.

‘Different to Australia?’ I said.

‘Yes, Australia.’ She said it in a way I had never heard before—sounding out each syllable like she was learning a new concept, a new word she didn’t yet understand.

I looked over at Hetty and saw her smile at Jo and then at the carpet. I was tired, and Jo itched at me with her energy. I wanted to lie with Hetty and stare at the Canadian ceiling, to talk about our hosts and see if she felt as loose as I did.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to it then, ladies!’ Jo said, her teeth smiling bigger than her mouth. She had started to massage her neck with one small, veined hand, and I remembered my own body as I watched her. I saw that Hetty was rubbing at her neck too.

As soon as Jo had shut the door behind her Hetty looked at me with wide eyes and I snuffled into my jumper sleeve.

‘Jesus.’

‘So intense!’ Hetty said.

‘Is it just me or did she not know that Australia exists?’

Hetty laughed and fell back onto the mattress. She told me she was too lazy to get undressed and I threw a pillow at her. Lying down on my back I felt the cotton beneath me.

‘I really thought we’d actually be sleeping on a couch,’ I said.

‘I’m going to keep that to myself and enjoy the bed,’ Hetty replied, yawning at the end. I heard her shuffle off her shoes, their plonk against the carpet, as I yawned back.

I lay on my temporary bed and felt myself fall into something just above dreams. I tried to think back to whether I had told Jo where we were from, whether she had known before we arrived that we were Australian. For some reason her lack of clarity made getting my footing here seem further away. I couldn’t recall our email exchange, and then I was sleeping.

We woke early the next morning after a stop-start sleep and crept around the kitchen trying to find a way to make coffee, until Jo came down in a short red dressing gown and fluffy slippers.

‘I’m an early riser,’ she told us, reaching up for something in the pantry and showing us her undies. ‘John sleeps as much as he possibly can, like a big old hibernating bear, even in summer!’

Jo laughed at this and I heard that when she laughed it sounded as if she was choking slightly and that it went on and on. So nervous was her laugh, and her presence in the kitchen, that I realised we would have to find somewhere to live pretty quickly, or I wouldn’t be able to keep laughing when she laughed and would end up offending her.

‘We’re going to go for a walk. Might see you later?’ I said, looking at Hetty as I did to try to make sure she didn’t ask Jo along.

Jo’s eyebrows knitted briefly, then she smiled, wishing us well, and suggesting we move towards one of the other neighbourhoods so we could start to understand Toronto. I had a map I’d printed back in Melbourne in my pocket, and I patted my jeans and pulled Hetty out the door.

On the street it was brisk and bright, and there were people walking by the apartment building in parkas with fluffy hoods. I didn’t have a winter coat and was wearing five layers of jumper. Hetty had a duffel that she’d put on over a skivvy.

We stood and looked at each other. Hetty was smiling and I felt something winged soar up towards my throat.

‘Where do you want to go first?’ I asked her.

She moved to my side and looped her arm through the circle of mine.

‘Wherever you think we should go, Nessy.’

I could see from my map that the area we were staying in was called the Financial District. Above us and to the left was a very tall tower with a bulb and a spike at its top. The map told me this was the CN Tower, from which you could see everything, and eat a tourist dinner. The people walking by in their parkas were carrying briefcases or shiny handbags, and had heels or dress pants on under the puff, but the buildings weren’t as high as they could have been. It looked as if we could walk away from here and quickly be in other parts of the city.

Parkdale was straight ahead in one direction, and I wanted to see how different it was to the Parkdale on the outskirts of Melbourne—a broad, flat place of houses and car parks. As we walked, Hetty’s step a little longer than mine so that I had to move fast, I watched the breath from people’s mouths like tiny parts of them escaping, and remembered: these people are Canadian. It seemed strange that we were here, among them.

‘We’re in Canada,’ I said, and nudged Hetty’s ribs with my elbow. ‘Canada!’

‘And so far it looks quite a lot like Melbourne.’ She laughed.

I agreed. I saw a broad, calm, halcyon city with buildings of various heights, mostly pale and wet from the damp wind. I looked up again, this time to the clouds, and couldn’t see any. Instead there was a sort of white smoke against a grey blue. I hoped there would be clouds later in the day: white, slow, bloated ones that I could linger on.

I pictured what we might look like to those who passed us—a tall girl in a maroon duffle coat a little too small for her, her long arms pulling at the skivvy underneath to keep her fingers warm, and her smaller friend with hair like a black scribble and some kind of body beneath all the layers, walking at a pace that suited neither, almost limping, almost falling. We were still only worth a quick, half-curious glance. I was happy with that.

I decided to keep the map in my pocket for a while and walk without knowing where, heading west. We popped up onto Queen Street, a wide thoroughfare with red trams running along its middle, and confident shops playing music.

‘This is great,’ Hetty breathed.

I pointed at a pile of dirty soft ice that sat beside the open door of an Urban Outfitters store, where a tall, broad bodyguard stood, eyes forward, back straight. We stopped to inspect it.

‘So that’s what snow becomes.’

We had talked about snow so much before we’d arrived that it seemed strange to have our first sighting outside an Urban Outfitters in April, when it was more of a brown mess than a white carpet. I had never imagined where the snow might go when the weather turned. Apparently it didn’t go anywhere for quite a while, and the city kept on moving around it so that it lost its clarity and its power, and became just like everything else.

‘Snow without make-up,’ I said, to make Hetty laugh. She made a noise like a seal, and rubbed her arms.

‘I still think it’s beautiful,’ she said.

‘Of course you do, Het,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘Of course you do.’

I slipped my arm through hers to keep us moving.

We giggled our way down Queen Street past a vast park and restaurant after restaurant, until we turned and began a slow walk up the incline of a street called Ossington. There were a few Vietnamese cafes dotted between stores that seemed to sell clothes no one would wear, and an ice-cream place with a line, despite the hour and the chill. We kept walking up and found a little bakery with plastic chairs inside, and piles of sweet pastries and bready things that looked both familiar and different at once. It was a Portuguese bakery—said so in big red capital letters above the narrow eave.

Inside it was warm and doughy and the few customers looked as if they had been sitting there forever, baked and sweetened by their surroundings. A large woman with a small chest and floury hands greeted us at the counter. Hetty chose a cupcake-shaped parcel called an empada de pato. I picked a tiny bacon pudding and a slice of honey cake. There was sugardonut dust on our table, and before we sat the woman came to wipe it off. She told us where the bathroom was, though we hadn’t asked, and placed a large key between us. After we’d finished eating, Hetty told me she had never tasted anything so delicious, and thanked the woman over and over until we were out the door and on the street again, our mouths slick with fat.

‘Let’s go down to the water?’ Hetty asked.

Hetty loved water, and had already told me all about Lake Ontario: how it was so big you couldn’t see what lay on the other side; how, despite this, it was the smallest of the Great Lakes, and the most polluted, because its sister and brother lakes swam into it, and brought their mess with them. She’d read so much about it before we left that she’d become obsessed, and would talk to me about how she imagined we would love it, how it wasn’t like the ocean but was still big and wide and cold, and how she wondered what it would be like to swim in it.

We started walking until we were back near where we had started on Spadina Avenue, having moved the opposite way along the broadness of Queen, and could soon see the greeny blue of Lake Ontario a little below. Toronto dipped down towards the water, and the wind I felt on my face was now connected to the texture I could see in the distance.

I’d never really thought about why Hetty loved water so much. She would lie in the bath for hours when we lived together in a one-bedroom flat in Brunswick above a charcoal-chicken shop, filling it up with a little more hot every so often, wiping her wet, wrinkled fingers on a towel to turn the dry pages of her book. I’d brush my teeth, do a wee, swish mouthwash at the sink while she lay there. She always looked serene, and so skinny. Hetty would rather swim in the ocean or run out into the rain or do laps of the local swimming pool than anything else. When it was stormy I would find her staring out at the puddles forming, the sky fountain. I wondered if someone who usually stood just above the world found it easier to move in water.

The wind got higher and swooped at us as we crossed the last road before the Harbourfront. There were people enjoying themselves down here, or trying to despite the weather. Hetty pulled me towards the edge of the walkway where there was a man selling tiny coloured flags on long sticks among little kids and dogs chasing each other. It didn’t smell like salt but the air was wet: a pleasing, fresh kind of wet that helped me remember I was breathing.

We stood at the edge of the short stone wall and watched out over the blue and green and black water that moved gently, like a sleeping animal. Hetty inhaled deeply and moved closer to me, putting her silky head on my shoulder.

‘It must be the ocean. It feels like it is,’ she said softly, sleepily, as though she had just woken up.

‘If you say it’s the ocean, then it is,’ I replied.

‘It’s the ocean,’ she said, and lifted her head up to smile at me.

We stood there a long time looking out at the lake, trying to see something beyond the water. We stood until the sound of the children and animals around us died down to nothing, their small and pretty Canadian noises just wind. I shivered inside my jumpers and stood in the moment.