Kaya
The next morning, you get up and get ready for school. Mom bustles in the kitchen, while Beth sits at the table, hair in her face, eating an oversized bowl of bran flakes and granola. After a bit, Mom goes to wait in the car. The drive to school is silent. You can feel Mom wanting to speak, to find the words that will keep you in school this day, and the next.
You feel sorry for her, almost, and when she pulls over in front of the school, you lean into the front seat and kiss her on her soft pink cheek. Her breath flies out of her in a whoosh, and her hand comes back around and grasps your head. You pull away, and the moment is over.
Beth is already standing outside the car by the time you get out, waving kind of awkwardly at Jane and Samantha, who are waiting on the school steps. She turns back to you before she waddles off. “You be here today at three,” she says. And if Beth can be fierce at all, she’s fierce now.
You grin. “When have I ever let you down?” you say, your voice bright and crisp.
She stares. You know she wants to say, Every day of your life, since the day you came. You imagine the tip of her tongue all bloody from where she’s biting it. She just can’t say something like that, no matter how much she longs to.
You drop the act. “I’ll be here,” you say. And you will be. You can’t go back downtown today anyway. Not without a bit of cash.
The day is long, though, and so is the next one. Michelle does not show up at school and you wonder about that. Has she gone back down there? If she has, is that all your fault?
Diana does show up at school, of course. Even though you have dropped the metalwork class, the two of you keep running into each other. And every time, acid swirls right up your throat. She seems to have the same reaction, because she turns away as fast as you do. The two of you dart all over the place to avoid each other.
The third night, you steal forty dollars from Mom’s wallet and twenty from Beth’s babysitting stash in her underwear drawer. She doesn’t babysit a whole lot, but she’s not good about getting her money into the bank, so she usually has some tucked away. You may have done some shoplifting last year, but you’ve never stolen from your family before. You’ve only ever taken a bit of change from Mom’s purse for the bus. And you have permission to do that.
After supper, you slip out the front door and run all the way to Tenth. This time, the bus cooperates. It ought to: you have the schedule all figured out. You’ll be at Sarah’s door at about seven. Who, you wonder, will be on its other side?
It turns out that you don’t have to go to her door at all. She’s getting out of a big white car as you get off the bus. It turns the corner and drives right past you, so you see the man behind the wheel. You see his tidy hair, his suit jacket. You see the child seat in the back. You feel sick.
You stand back and wait until after she turns down Princess Avenue. You don’t want her to know that you saw her get out of that car. You want to un-know it yourself.
“Sarah!” you say, jogging to catch up to her, hoping your voice sounds confident and grown-up.
She turns and looks at you. Her eyes seem a bit vacant somehow. It takes her a moment to focus. “You look familiar,” she says, “but I don’t …”
“I’m Kaya,” you say. “Remember?”
“Oh, yes. You’re that kid,” she says. She has come to a halt on the sidewalk. “I told you to go home and stay there.” She looks you over, pushes a hand back through her hair. “Come on. We’re going for a walk.”
She walks strong and tall, even though she’s actually pretty short. She seems oblivious to the fact that she’s wearing thigh-high boots with spike heels and a short skirt that shows some skin way up at the top of those boots. Everyone looks as you pass; even people slumped in doorways look. Often they call out hello. Sometimes the hello isn’t nice, but mostly it is. You wrestle with a mix of embarrassment and pride as you follow her. She takes you over a viaduct, eventually, a bridge over a railway that circles around and leads right into a great big park on the water. Street lights brighten the path ahead. Huge cranes tower in the harbour. Even in the dark, the slight drizzle, the water sparkles on your right. Downtown, all lit up, straight ahead.
Sarah leads you to the swings in the playground. No street lights here, so the playground equipment, dimly lit, feels lonely, abandoned.
You hesitate. How old does she think you are? But she plunks herself down on the middle swing. “Here,” she says, kicking a leg up toward you. “Pull. These things are killing me.”
You stare and then obey, pulling one long shiny boot from a leg, then the other, and dropping them on the grass beside her purse. She pumps back and forth, her legs strong, her body reaching for the sky.
“Come on,” she shouts. “It’s amazing!”
And you do, shaking the small puddle off the strip of rubber. You push off, lean back, straighten your legs, and forget the left-behind damp seeping through your jeans as you aim your face at the dark wet above. The two of you look at each other when you are both as high as you can go, flying. And you laugh, loud, together. Your chest expands with joy. Then she starts to slow herself down. Soon the two of you are weaving your swings back and forth, scuffing your feet in the damp sand.
“Why are you here?” she asks, her gaze intent on the ground.
“I can’t be at home,” you say, not pausing, just saying.
“Why not?”
“It’s horrible there,” you say, and your mind flashes to Mom’s loving hand in your hair, to Sybilla’s big furry body. Horrible?
She looks at you then, and you feel her see right inside you; you shrink under her gaze.
“I don’t belong there,” you say, too fast. “I belong here.”
“No, you don’t,” she says, and adds after a moment, “This is not a good place to be.”
“You’re here,” you say.
She is silent for a long, long time. Then she says, “Something bad happened to me. When I was little. And I never told my mom and dad. I should have. I really, really should have told. I should have stayed.”
“That’s not me,” you say, big and strong, and you stop scuffing the ground, start swinging again. You need to move. “That’s not me.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says. Then, “Look. Look at the cats.”
They are coming up from the beach: three, no, four, no, five cats, heading across the grass in the dark. They are silent, stealthy, like ghosts. Sarah laughs softly.
“Here, kitties,” she calls. “Here, kitties.”
You grunt and start pumping, driving yourself up into the air again, watching. Sarah goes quiet, watching too. You let yourself slow and come to a stop beside her.
The cats circle, not coming close enough to touch. Even in the dark, you can see the matted fur and bald patches on one, the jagged ear on another. A third meows, big and demanding—hungry—like no sound Coco has ever made in her life.
“We’ve got nothing for you, cats,” Sarah says. “On your way now.”
They obey, wandering away, across the park, and Sarah leans over to pull her boots back on. “Let’s go,” she says. “I’m putting you on a bus. Again.”
She leads the way back to the path, and stops in front of a big stone surrounded by bushes, lit by a tall lamp opposite. First you notice the candles and the flowers gathered in the wet dirt in front. Then your gaze travels upward to the words engraved in the stone.
THE HEART HAS
IN HONOR OF THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
MURDERED IN THE DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE.
MANY WERE WOMEN AND MANY WERE NATIVE
ABORIGINAL WOMEN. MANY OF THESE CASES
REMAIN UNSOLVED. ALL MY RELATIONS.
ITS OWN MEMORY
DEDICATED JULY 29, 1997
You read the words twice. A third time. Anger flutters inside you, along with fear and confusion. “Why are you showing me this?” you ask.
Sarah shrugs, gestures toward the words again.
You read them one more time.
At last she speaks. “Those women. They could be you. They could be me.” She digs around in her tiny purse, pulls out a lighter, leans down and lights one of the candles, positioning it under a plastic flower to protect it from the damp. Then she turns and leads the way up the path onto the viaduct. She doesn’t say much on the walk back to Princess. And neither do you.
With Hastings in sight, you pass the little grey house that Sarah pointed out to you. A man comes barrelling down the narrow path between that house and the next. He’s big, hunched over, kind of. And mad. Mad at Sarah.
“Where the hell you been?” he shouts as he approaches. He pauses, as if at a loss for other words. “Where the hell you been?” he repeats, and his hand shoots out and grabs Sarah around the upper arm.
“Hey!” she says sharply, and you pick up your pace, putting a few strides between yourself and the pair of them. “Let go of me, Charlie. I’ve just got one thing to do and I’ll be …”
He wrenches at her then, and she turns on him, yanking her arm free. “I said, I’ve just got one thing to do.” She strides after you, ignoring his repeated orders to “Get back here.”
“Who’s he?” you say, though you guess, of course.
“That’s just Charlie. He goes off the deep end now and again. Pay attention. We are going to get you on a bus. You’re going to go home, and you’re going to stay there. Do you understand?”
You do not. Understand, that is. Even as Sarah is saying it, you are thinking about the money in your pocket. You are thinking about how soon you can come back. After all, you know where to come to now. You know where she lives. Charlie is a bit scary, but she seems to know how to handle him.
Less than a week passes before you get off another bus right at the corner of Princess and Hastings. You stand on the sidewalk for a moment in front of the house: 396 Princess Avenue. You gaze up at the boards on the windows, down at the dead weeds that crawl across the cracked cement steps, at the icy remnants of snow.
Uncertain, you creep round to the back, up half a dozen wooden steps onto a falling-down landing. Once again, it is seven o’clock. Dark. Everything sodden. Bits of grey snow cling to patches of earth and to the railing, but the snow doesn’t stick to the wet rotted boards beneath. Melt drips off the edge of the roof and collects in puddles on the expanse of gravel between the pair of small grey houses and the lane.
You stand on the landing, your hands at your sides. Eventually, you will raise one hand and knock. Eventually, you will. And when you do, maybe Sarah will answer. Maybe she will invite you in and be kind to you again.
Maybe she will not answer. Maybe that man will. That big crumbling man who grabbed her arm.
You raise your hand and knock. Three knocks. Silence. Four knocks. More silence. You force your fist to pound instead of knock. “Hello?” you call. “Hello!” you shout.
“Who’s there?” comes a voice through the wood. A man’s voice.
You could still run now, but you don’t. “It’s me, Kaya. Sarah’s friend,” you call back. Then you remember. “Blackie,” you add.
The door opens a crack, revealing a strip of face; an eye peers out, squinting into the dark. You can’t tell if the eye recognizes you, but the door opens, revealing the body attached to the eye. It’s that man, the one who grabbed.
You see no sign of Sarah, but you can’t very well turn and run now.
“Come on in,” he says. And you do.
“I’m, uh, I’m looking for Blackie,” you say.
“Yeah?”
It’s hard to know what to reply to that. You nod. And look around. You’re standing in what passes for a kitchen and you don’t like what you see. This mess, this brokenness, this dirt are not what you imagined for Sarah, the strong Sarah, the together Sarah. A mixing bowl lies on its side on the counter dribbling something that might be chocolate pudding onto the cracked linoleum. The window above the sink is boarded over, and the sink is half full of dishes not quite covered in scummy water. A scrawny kitten rubs itself against your leg. You start, and bend over in relief to run your hand along its bony spine.
“You can wait in there,” the man, whose name you can’t remember, says. He’s pointing into a room off the kitchen.
You look hopefully toward the other doorway, which must lead into the living room, but he is sending you into a bedroom instead.
“No,” you say, hating how weak your voice sounds. “I’ll …”
His voice grows stern, impatient. “You’ll wait in there or you’ll get out,” he says.
The better of the two choices is obvious, but you don’t take it. In the room, a man sprawls in a broken easy chair, head back, apparently unconscious. High, you guess. And a woman sits at a small desk, intent on what she’s doing. She does not look up. When you see what she has on the desk in front of her, something runs through you, skull to toes. It’s horror, you tell yourself, but you know it’s excitement, really.
The man—you remember his name now: it’s Charlie—is right behind you. “Sit. There,” he says, his hands pressing on your arms. And he plunks you on the edge of the bed, where you perch, rigid, and watch the woman’s every movement.
After a while, she looks up and meets Charlie’s eyes. He nods. “Hold out your arm,” she says to you.
You look out into the kitchen, where the door you came through remains closed. Still no sign of Sarah. You look up at Charlie, but he is fiddling with some things on the desk and does not glance your way. And you look at the woman. She waits, her hand extended.
“Your arm,” she says again.
The excitement takes you over then. Anticipation. Your arm and what she is about to do with it are keys to this place, this life, these people. Michelle couldn’t handle it, but you are stronger than she was. Sarah seems to manage just fine with this stuff. And you need it, whatever it is, not just to belong here, but to get away from there. Mom and Beth don’t understand you. Diana lurks at school, tainting the place. Michelle just makes you feel guilty. And everywhere at home, everywhere, are those memories. These people, here, have memories too. Here, pasts are understood with hardly a word spoken.
Besides, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to do it again.
You hold out your arm.
Moments later, you are puking in the garbage can while Charlie grumbles.
“What are you, a first-timer?” he asks.
You’re in no condition to answer him, and couldn’t care less. A little vomit is a small price to pay for the glory that is you with that stuff in your veins. Happiness floods your whole body, happiness and strength and clarity. Later you’ll remember that you spent your first heroin trip lying on a filthy bed in a room full of strangers, reeking of your own puke, but while you’re on that trip, none of that matters. All your problems—all of them—have slipped away like smoke. Who cares what happened in the past? Who cares who’s dead and who’s alive? Who cares what anyone thinks about anything? Not you, that’s for sure.
Sometime later … you have no idea when … Sarah is there. “She’s just a kid,” she’s saying. “Why did you do this?
“I’m not a kid,” you mumble, but the words are hard to say. They come so slowly. Like molasses, you think, though really, you have never seen molasses, so how can you know how it comes? And, anyway, you don’t want to talk with Sarah. You just want to lie here and revel in what you’re feeling.
More time passes. The glory fades, not all at once, but eventually it is gone. Life feels flat. You turn onto your side on the bare mattress, and look down to find your nose inches from a stain that could be blood or puke or something even worse. Disgust worms into your belly and twists its way everywhere. You’re alone in the room, and you heave yourself to your feet, aim yourself at the door.
Behind the disgust, though, or riding it maybe, is knowledge: scary, precious, heady, dangerous knowledge. If you want to, you can feel that glory again.
Sarah sweeps back into the room then, Charlie right behind her. And she’s angry. Really angry. Why? you wonder. After all, she does this stuff every day. It’s her life: earning the money for it, doing it, earning the money for it, doing it. That life might not be all that she ever hoped for, but she has no business ordering you out of it.
It’s four o’clock in the morning, too late for buses. Charlie hustles you out of his room and shuts himself up inside. The others, the woman who ordered you to hold out your arm, and the man on the nod in the chair are gone. You stand in the kitchen, every bit of you lost. Sarah glares at you.
“This way,” she says finally, and ushers you to a room at the front of the house. “You can sleep in there. Lock the door behind you.”
And you do. You have no idea where she spends the night. You don’t sleep, though, at least not for a long time. The kitten scratches on the door after a bit. You let it in, and spend what feels like hours stroking it while you turn the darkness that is your life over and over inside your head.
In the morning, when you venture out of the room, Sarah’s there. She waits while you use the filthy bathroom to pee and then thrusts coins into your palm and virtually strong-arms you onto the bus.
But you go back. And back again.
And find Jim. After all, you can’t keep going to Sarah’s house. Jim doesn’t send you home. You hold out your arm, and he seems happy to shoot you full of drugs. Then, when you are nodding off blissfully on that filthy bed of his, he crawls on top of you. You come back to yourself later, leaning against the wall just like Michelle did, your pants on the floor, Jim a hump in the bed. But, unlike Michelle, no one is waiting to take you away. You creep from the bed, dress and look around for Jim’s wallet, but he is still wearing his pants, and it’s not like you can rifle through his pockets when they are still on his body.
Turns out, he expects you to do more than put up with him on top of you to earn your way.
And so.
The first time is a man in a room. He is big and old; his pale flesh jiggles; he sweats and he smells. And he pays Jim, not you. You hate them both, but you hate yourself more. You smile and shimmy and giggle and make jokes and all the other stuff that you somehow know is expected, and it’s like how they say people go out of their bodies when they are in hospital dying, how they look down on themselves. You watch yourself with the old fat man, and you are totally grossed out, but you’re doing it just the same. Like you were born to it or something.
Part of what grosses you out is how easy it is, how your body just does it, how nothing in you resists, despite your feelings. Born to do it. Bad, through and through.
The first time with that man, you watch his chest as he moves up and down above you. It is loose and wobbly, and sprouts long grey hairs. You look at every detail carefully, filing it away. You listen to the sounds he makes—grunts and pants, mostly. It seems to take a lot of effort.
As long as you keep your attention on the man, you can keep it off yourself.
You don’t stick with Jim for long, though.
It turns out he isn’t the type to hold on, to come after a girl. He kind of rolls along with things. Lucky for you. You wake on the edge of drug sickness late one afternoon to find yourself alone in that grubby bed in that tiny, stifling room.
You sit up, disgusted by your own skin, itchy and grey from neglect, by the taste in your mouth, sour, like dead things are rotting in your gut. You push the filthy quilt off the bed and look around, really look.
Imagine Beth seeing this. Smelling it. Or, even worse, Jane. Why would anyone live like this? Ever? they would say. And you. You. You have a home to go to. Beth would cry. Jane would sniff through her pointy little nose.
But.
There is something right about being here. About you being here. Maybe not right here in this room, but here in this place. Slowly, you slide from the bed, pull on clothes that have not been washed in days. How many days? A jolt runs through your body. Mom will be frantic. The jolt is followed by longing, deep and wide.
You stuff your few belongings into your purse, find a quarter in a puddle of beer on the battered table, run down the stairs, out the door, and stand blinking in the late-afternoon sun. Pay phones are rare in this neighbourhood, but you find one at last, plug in the quarter and pray that Mom and Beth will both be where they should be. Out.
You gasp at the sound of Mom’s voice, relieved that it’s canned, glad to hear it, and sad, so sad. “Hi, Mom,” you say. “I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. I’ll call again soon.”
There. That’s done.
So. You aren’t going home and you aren’t going back to Jim’s. You turn toward Princess Avenue, but that’s not right either. Sarah will just shove you onto the first bus that comes along.
“You look lost,” a voice says in your ear.
You jump, take a step away. Mom’s voice lingers in your head, overlaid with this woman’s words.
The woman is wearing a short skirt, heels and a tank top, with a ratty sweater overtop. Her dirty hair is kind of puffed up around her head, and her makeup looks like she shovelled it on in the dark. Her eyes are deep and black, and she’s jittery—that’s from the drugs, you know. You suspect she is much younger than she looks.
“I … I need to make some money,” you say. Really? Are you really going to do that? Stand on a corner? “And I don’t know which corners are okay.” Yes. Apparently you are.
“Did you just come in on the bus or something?”
“No,” you say. “I …”
She interrupts, her voice grown darker, raspier. “Well, you can’t work here.”
You blink hard against the tears that fill your eyes, back away, turn and start walking.
Home, you think. You could go home right this minute. You could.
As if in answer, a bus rumbles toward you. You watch it approach, roll to a stop, swallow three passengers, spit out two others and rumble away.
Two of the tears manage to get onto your cheeks; you grit your teeth and rub at your face. No. You are not going home.
Pushing your shoulders back, you collect your thoughts. You need a corner where no one will tell you to get lost. All you have to do is find one. And if you can get some money, you can get some drugs and you can feel good again, maybe not as good as that first time, but still. You can feel better, and you can get yourself a room of your own. You can get by without Jim. You can. On you walk, turning the next corner off Hastings, crossing Princess quickly when you come to it.
Twenty minutes later, you think you have found a spot, a corner on Cordova; there’s traffic, but it’s away from houses and apartments. Factories or some such all around. A fine drizzle is falling, like always in Vancouver in March. Sickness rises in your belly, a mix of withdrawal and fear.
You need money. You need a fix. You need a place to stay. You need a washing machine and a dryer. A shower. A meal.
You need a friend.
First order of business: cash. You hitch your skirt up high around your waist, nip your shirt in and tie a knot in it, sling your purse across your back and step up to the curb. The light on the next corner turns green and cars surge in your direction. Shimmy, you tell yourself, and you do. Just a bit. The cars roll on, and you have to leap back to avoid being splashed.
Next light, more cars. This time, a window slides down. “Whore!” you hear, just as you see the faces—teenage boys—and feel the sting as the pennies they throw strike your hip and your leg. You stand for a moment, empty. Not even angry.
The light changes again and you step up. You see the cars, leap once more out of the spray. You don’t see the car coming to a stop on the side street. The guy has to lean across the passenger seat and shout out the open window at you. “Hey! Need a ride?”
You almost call back no, before you realize what he means.
Sliding into the passenger seat and pulling the door shut against the racket and the rain, you find yourself in an almost-silent space, heavy with the smell of stale cigarette smoke. You take one look at the man—grey-haired, glasses, eyes vague and sad, and maybe sort of kind; he’s dressed for an office job of some sort—and fix your eyes on your lap.
The silence grows. Then, a little breath, a huff. Annoyance?
“So,” he says, “where to and how much?”
You shrink into the seat, shoulders rounding forward, and force your eyes up to meet his once again. He doesn’t look sad or vague now. And certainly not kind. He looks angry. And you, you have not one single idea what to say.
“Wherever you usually go,” you mumble finally. “And thirty dollars.”
The rest of the conversation, though it only lasts a few seconds, actually hurts, like it hacks off bloody chunks of you. But you get through it. He puts the car in drive. And off you go.
He slows down half a block away, turns into an alley, stops and puts the car in park. Then he takes money out of his wallet, puts it in the cup-holder between you and unzips himself. He gives another impatient huffing breath as you sit, still frozen, looking at him sideways. Then his right hand comes up, grabs your head and pulls you toward him. With his other hand, he pulls his penis out of his pants.
His is not your first, not at all. It’s not the first time you’ve felt an insistent hand in your hair. But something about this moment gathers all those other moments up in your mind. Revulsion rumbles through you, starting deep, deep down. Bile gushes up into your throat, and you retch. Instantly, his hand flees your scalp. He leans away, scrabbling at his crotch. In one movement you turn away, open the door and half roll out of the car. Hands against the nearby wall, you vomit. Behind you, you hear him swear, you hear the car door slam shut, you hear the car drive away.
And there you are, alone, in an alley, in the rain, your pockets still empty and your stomach still emptier. The vomiting has cleared your mind, though the nausea will not leave you until you get yourself a fix. That is what all this is for, you remind yourself, that and a roof over your head that is not Jim’s. Or your mother’s. You can do this.
You straighten your back and start off, stepping up to the curb whenever a car passes. Within half an hour you have slid into your second car of the day. This time you keep your head up, you speak first, you even raise your price. And you do not gag. Not once.
You end the day with enough money for that fix and for a meal, and you pay a woman the few dollars you have left to sleep on the floor of her room. You lie there, wrapped in a dirty blanket, listening to drunken shouting, doors banging and endless traffic, and feel withdrawal easing its way back into your system, taking hold. You’ll wake up sick. And out you will go to do it all again.
That woman helps you out, though, the next day, and others do too, in exchange for some of your money. You mention keeping an eye out for Jim, and “I started off with Jim too,” a scraggly young woman tells you, sneering as she speaks. She coughs hard before she goes on. “He can be rough, but he’s not the sort to come after you. A lot of them do. Once they’ve got you, you’re stuck.”
These women aren’t always nice about it, but they show you the ropes, how to work the street, where to stand, how to keep off others’ toes. They don’t ask a lot of questions, and you are grateful.
Sarah is different. Sarah won’t let you work her corner, but not because she’s guarding her turf. She seems to be protecting you. Or trying to. If Sarah had her way, you wouldn’t work at all. “Go home, kid,” she says to you every time she sets eyes on you.
You still like seeing her, though, even though you ignore her advice.
Most days, “Hi, Blackie,” you call out, grinning, using her nickname, lifted up by her energy, the gorgeous boots, the wide smile in the perfectly made-up face.
“Hey, kid, I’m working here,” Sarah replies, but there’s no meanness in her voice. “Get a move on.”
One afternoon in spring, as you walk away down Princess, you find yourself turning and looking back just in time to see Sarah’s foot disappear into a slick silver car. You make a mental note of the look of the car, though you’re at the wrong angle to see the plate. A car like that could mean a good haul, you think. It’s been a while since you had a john with real money, but you are having a good day.
You wander through Oppenheimer Park in the sunshine, heels clicking on the cement, hips swishing just like those other girls’, insides gathering together into something strong, something fabulous, something everybody wants. You light a cigarette to complete the picture, cough a little on the first puff, watch the smoke whoosh into the air.
You suck in deep on the cigarette as you turn into a lane. The ball of fabulousness in your gut softens. You feel a bit like puking. But on you go.