1
How badly the audition goes correlates with how late Shauna comes home afterward and how many boutique bags hang off her slender arms by string handles. Todd has pointed out that most people spend money when they get the job, not the other way around, but this was received with a shriek and a hurling of the bags, so he keeps his logic to himself now. He doesn’t want her to be unhappy. He thinks she’s brilliant. Only last week they watched her in a rerun of a Canadian cop show bleeding in a crunched car. She delivered her one and only line, “Save my baby,” so convincingly that Todd had wept even though he knew the baby was a sound effect in the back seat.
He glances at the kitchen clock and, shaking his head, pours a capful of vinegar down the drain. It reacts with the baking soda, erupting in a white froth that connects the decades: sandbox volcano, beginner’s chemistry set, drain maintenance.
The kitchen floor is already dry, the whole condo shining, Todd standing on the dining-room table in his socks DustBusting the light fixture, when Shauna arrives. Looking down on her, he’s elated not to see bracelets of bags. But why the quivering lip and where the perfect smile?
“You’ll never guess who I saw.”
“Did you get the part?”
“Yes.”
“That’s amazing!”
She wrings her hands—one of those gestures that throws Todd off every time. Is she truly distressed or does she just want him to think she is?
“Guess,” she wails.
“You said I won’t ever.”
“Darcy Roach. From the Dunbar house. Remember?”
Does he remember? Todd has scars. “Where? At the audition?”
“On the street. I recognized him right away.”
Easy for Todd to imagine this fateful meeting. He helps her rehearse scenes all the time. Shauna clipping beautifully along, berating herself, Darcy Roach intersecting her path, smiling a white slash. But Shauna and Todd are married now. Shouldn’t that fact have exterminated Darcy Roach?
Todd’s thoughts turn white and bubble over.
“I’m sure it was him,” says Shauna. “It looked just like him. I think.”
2
Danny moves out of the house on Dunbar Street in May to join a coffee-picking brigade in Nicaragua. This is 1984 when they’re students at the University of British Columbia. Adios, Shauna thinks. Good riddance! Never has she been so cruelly treated in all her nineteen years. Now she’s anxious for someone else to move in and displace her humiliation because, until then, Danny’s empty room enshrines it.
She approaches Abby first. “Shouldn’t we get another housemate?”
A pneumatic sigh—the bus pulling into the stop directly in front of the house—but it could easily be coming from Abby who shrugs and shuffles off with her plate of toast and p.b. to read the Bible in her room. Incapable of lifting her feet, Abby moves from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom like a plastic table-hockey player negotiating the slots. Shauna has never met a person less engaged with life, and it disgusts her. “If we don’t,” she calls after Abby, “we’ll have to divide the rent three ways instead of four.”
“As long as it’s a woman,” says Todd when Shauna puts the same question to him.
“It should be a man. So it’s equal—men and women.” She writes the ad and posts it on the notice board at Stong’s where she’s bagging groceries for the summer. Available immediately, bedroom in shared student house with three dynamic housemates. Close to transit, UBC . . .
Todd was jealous of Danny. This is the reason he wants another woman, but Shauna isn’t about to fill a harem for him.
Todd is the first to have contact. “Actually,” he says on the phone, “we’re looking for a woman.”
“The ad I’ve got here in my hand says man.”
The mallet of a shiver plays up Todd’s spine. “That’s funny.”
That evening the voice on the phone comes to the house. Shauna volunteered to show him around but Todd, in his room marking lab reports for the class he TAs, joins the tour when he hears the flirty tone Shauna puts on at the door. An aspiring actress, Shauna can assume any character she wants. With Abby she’s the cruel younger sister, with Todd the puppeteer. This is closer to who she was with Danny, but with an edge to it. “Living room.” She sweeps a hand to take in their collegiate poverty: Sally Ann’s old couch, rabbity-eared black-and-white TV, carpet a slug-yellow, dirt-flecked shag.
“Here’s Todd.”
She doesn’t introduce him as her boyfriend! Todd’s chest constricts. According to the chore sheet it’s Shauna’s turn to vacuum. Then and there he decides not to cover for her this month.
“I’ll just go get Abby so you can meet her too.”
After Shauna leaves the room, Todd turns to Darcy. “Hi.”
Darcy glances through Todd. Darcys only see other Darcys. And Shaunas. Darcys have evolved retinas that make the breasts and genitals of Shaunas appear to glow bluely, like neon. Todds, however, can see Darcys and when they do, they usually swim to the other side of the tank. At the end of the summer, when the police ask for a description, Todd will be amazed by what the women say.
“Darcy,” Darcy says now, and Todd shudders, the way he did on the phone. It sounds like Darcy is speaking from the very bottom of a deep, deep hole. Though he extends a hand, he’s still looking beyond Todd, watching for Shauna to come back.
The handshake feels clammy to Todd, an eczema sufferer. He notices that the nasty cut across Darcy’s index finger doesn’t affect his manly clamp. Darcy’s T-shirt is tight, too, enough to snug a pack of cigarettes against his bicep. “We’re actually a non-smoking house,” says Todd.
Shauna drags in Abby dressed in a frilly pyjama top and shorts, her white legs thick and doughy, one side of her face hideously scarred with pillow creases. “He smokes,” Todd tells them.
“He can do that outside. What are you studying, Darcy?”
“I’m doing my MBA,” Darcy says, using his gaze and Shauna’s body to pull himself out of the hole. “But I started this job.”
“What kind of job?”
“Sales. It’s going to be hard to go back.”
“I’m in Theatre,” says Shauna with a curtsy.
Todd doesn’t believe in the MBA. He doubts Darcy’s name ever even appeared on a high school diploma. “We’re looking for a student,” he says.
Darcy turns to Abby. “I had a girlfriend named Abigail. She broke my heart.”
Abby stares at him like he’s just stepped out of the dream Shauna woke her from.
“Who’s at the door?” Shauna calls from her room.
“Sears,” the man in coveralls tells Todd. He X’s where Todd must sign, then returns with the clipboard to the truck parked in the bus stop. A second man gets out of the driver’s side.
Shauna joins Todd at the door and the two of them watch, speechless, as the mattress in its protective plastic is carried up the walk. Vince, according to the appliqué on his coveralls, whips a pair of cloth booties from his pocket to slip over his shoes. Shauna still hasn’t vacuumed. Staticky bits of dirt cling all over the cloth.
Brad puts on his booties. “Where to?”
“Upstairs,” Shauna says. “The room on the left.”
“Excuse me?” Todd calls after them. “You’re parked in the bus stop?”
He can’t believe his eyes when the two go back for a box spring.
That night Todd lies curled around Shauna, awake in the perfumery of her hair, thinking, defensively, how he likes to be lying close like this on his three-quarter futon. Abby has a futon too. Danny used to sleep on a bright blue Ensolite pad. Darcy’s room is just across the hall from Shauna’s and, though Shauna never sleeps there on her foamie, Todd worries about her proximity to a superior nest. Todd is personally acquainted with people who have nowhere to lay their heads but the couches at the Grad Centre. Someone under thirty owning a real bed? Just what is Darcy trying to prove?
Thud.
He sits up, listening. When he hears it again, he gets up and pulls on his shorts. Protecting Shauna is his first thought, that he’d like credit for it his second.
The sound is coming from the front of the house. He creeps down the unlit hall, grit prickling the soft soles of his feet. Whatever the time of night it’s always dawn in the living room, the street light a substitute sun. He peeks out the sheers. A car is parked in the bus stop, trunk open, a man leaning inside. Darcy straightens with a box in his arms.
But it’s only the eighteenth! thinks Todd.
Darcy comes up the walk and drops the box beside the others before going back to slam the trunk. Already sweating over the bus, Todd begins to sweat over Shauna waking up. Darcy hauls a duffle bag out of the back seat, throws it on the sidewalk, drags another from the front. All this is nightmarishly illuminated by the yellowy street light, amplified by the quiet of the night. An occasional car goes by. How long until the bus comes and what if it has to stop?
Darcy starts up the walk lugging both bags. The key violates the lock and Darcy steps inside and flicks on the hall light, exposing the furtive, bare-chested Todd. “Hey, Tom. Give me a hand with these boxes.”
“Todd. You’ll wake everyone up.”
“It’s not even midnight,” says Darcy, thudding up the stairs.
Todd hops to it, because he’ll do it quietly. The boxes are identical and unmarked and, though the size of the proverbial breadbox, they weigh the proverbial ton.
Upstairs, he finds Darcy lying long on the queen mattress, a pillow of arm muscles behind his head. “Thanks, Tom.”
“Todd.”
“Over there.” Darcy points where Todd should set the box.
Todd carries up two more before he starts to feel used. “You’re not supposed to move in until June first,” he says.
“I’m just dropping off some stuff. Is there a phone jack in this room? I forgot to check.”
“Your car’s in the bus stop. You should move it.”
“Are you by any chance a fag, Tom?”
Todd takes an affronted step back. “No! I’m not!”
Abby peels her cheek off The Bondage of the Will. The night before, she had been reading Luther. There are two kingdoms. In His, Satan rules by holding captive those not saved by the Spirit of Christ. And now Someone is in the kitchen opening and closing all the cupboards.
She actually likes living here when Shauna is at Stong’s and Todd at UBC. Every morning she gets down on her knees and scrubs out the bathtub, fills it, then lolls there until the water cools. She takes a breath and slides under, though the same old Abby resurfaces each time. Afterward, she eats breakfast in her little piece of Creation: pear tree scabbed with lichen, foot-long grass, bindweed holding together the rotten fence. No one else sets foot off the deck except to get to the laundry room.
Today, Someone is in the kitchen. Deprived of her routine, she forgoes the bath and slips to and from the bathroom.
“Abby?”
Her reaction is seismic. The whole house trembles with His voice.
“Is there any coffee?”
“Um.” The strength drains from her legs. She grips the door handle for support. “Todd has coffee. Check his cupboard.” She’s very careful not to look at Him this time.
“Which is that?”
She ducks her head, squeezes past and, in the kitchen, shows Him where Todd keeps his food. She opens Danny’s old cupboard—trail mix, brown rice, Inka. “You can use this one. Just throw out what you don’t want.”
“Thanks, Abby,” Darcy calls after her, causing the framed paint-by-number picture of the racehorse to tilt on its nail in the hall.
She eats last night’s crusts off her plate. Also earlier crusts and the brown flesh left on the apple core. She shakes out the seeds and eats the cartilaginous inside of the core, washing it down with stale water. Just as she’s getting back into bed, He knocks.
What she will tell the police: He was so beautiful, I felt like throwing up. Eye colour? they’ll ask and she’ll start to weep.
Darcy looks in. “What do you take?”
“What?”
“Milk? Sugar? Are you busy?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, if you can spare five minutes, Abby, I’d like to show you something.”
“Have you always shopped here?” Shauna asks because she can’t remember seeing Darcy at Stong’s before.
“This is where I saw the ad for the house.” He smiles.
He had prominent canines, Shauna will tell them. His hair was dark blond. No. Light brown.
She puts the steak in a smaller bag before tucking it in with the produce. A frisson passes through her as she squeezes the cold meat. The Dunbar house is vegetarian. Danny, a vegan, insisted on it so the dishes would not become contaminated. Abby lives on apples and feces on toast. Todd is too cheap to buy meat. Periodically Shauna suffers cravings.
When she gets home from work Darcy is in the kitchen. When did he move in? the officer will ask. She won’t know exactly. Technically the first of June, but they gave him the key in exchange for his cheque.
Handles jut from the block. On the counter beside it is a cutting board made from the same reddish wood.
“Pull up a chair,” Darcy says.
One of the onions she bagged for him this morning waits on the board, stripped of its papery jacket. He draws a knife from the block, flashes both sides, scrapes his thumbprint across the blade. “Ooo, baby. This is seven and five-eighths inches of chef knife. Our Petit Chef. Recipient of the Cooking Club of the Americas’ Member Tested and Recommended Gold Seal-of-Approval. The blade—it’s stainless steel. The very highest chromium and carbon blend. Why? Let me tell you. To ensure both optimum corrosion resistance and—and!—a durable edge. Furthermore, Shauna, an extremely hard, thin coating of boron carbide gives it added protection.”
A silver arc. His hand blurs. The crisp whack causes Shauna to start. It happens a second and a third time while she blinks through the sparks.
Darcy steps back from the onion. “Damn.”
“Are you hurt?” She touches his shoulder, her first confirmation that he’s real. His body is hard under her hand, and cold.
He’s crying—vegetable tears.
Four perfect wedges tremble on the board.
We all must live in the kingdom of The Devil until the coming of the kingdom of God. More than any of them in the house, Abby understands this. Daily and steadfastly, the righteous must resist the allurements of the world and the whisperings of Satan. Evil wants us. It wants to rule us completely. Unlike those who freely do the bidding of The Devil, the righteous yearn for the other kingdom, the kingdom of truth and grace which will come to pass when we are ruled, not by sin, but only by Christ.
Darcy sits at her desk paging through her address book. She stands beside Him, close enough to get a noseful. It’s a burnt smell, cigarettes and brimstone. She’s never had a man in her room before, not even Todd.
“The most important part of the knife, Abby, is the blade. Who’s this Reverend Aden—How do you say it?”
“Adenauer. I used to go to his church.”
“Ours have the traditional high-gloss finish. Best time to call him?”
“Not on Sunday. Or Wednesday night.”
He doesn’t even write it down. He remembers everything, except the actual numbers, of course. Everyone who has warned her about Darcy, including Reverend Adenauer who periodically devotes an entire sermon to Him, has told her to expect Him to be whip smart.
“The wedge-lock handle ensures a non-slip grip. What’s Wednesday night?”
“Bible study.”
She lets Him take her address book after they’ve gone through it. He explains why He needs it. “When I call these people, I give your name. Because they know and trust you, they trust me. More importantly, they trust my product. You trust my product, don’t you Abby?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Your satisfaction means everything to me.”
That night, Darcy calls her into the living room where He and Shauna are watching TV—not the black-and-white one that was put out in the alley, but the big box of colour Darcy moved in with. “Hey! We’re watching Three’s Company. Come on.” Darcy has cable. He pats the place next to Him and smiles.
Abby would prefer not to sit beside Shauna, but she does, because this is where He asked her to sit. On either side of her Shauna and Darcy laugh at the program exactly where the unseen audience laughs. Abby doesn’t get it. It’s as if the program is in another language.
Out of the blue, Shauna grabs Abby’s wrist and shakes it. “Will you stop doing that?”
Doing what? Abby wonders. What was she doing?
Abby stops in the kitchen doorway after Three’s Company. Shauna smiles, very nearly caught in the act. She’s just taken the last scoop of Abby’s Skippy and scraped it into the garbage. Her hand is still in the fridge, replacing the empty jar. It’s for Abby’s own good. If she didn’t lie in bed all day eating peanut butter, she wouldn’t be so fat. Waddling up to Stong’s is the only exercise she gets.
Abby sways from foot to foot, patting her bangs, probably trying to decide whether or not to be in the same room as Shauna again. Her blonde hair is frizzy. When the light is right, it’s a wiry halo flaring round her impassive pudding face. Shauna sees the radiance now.
Abby turns and shuffles off.
The next morning Abby has to go to the store. With Abby out of the house, Shauna goes to her room, which is across from Todd’s, with the bathroom in between. She opens the door and steals a glance around at the unmade futon on the floor, the desk piled high with books and dirty plates. In the corner is an unmarked cardboard box.
Shauna goes straight back to Todd’s room. “Guess what. Abby bought knives.”
He plucks the earplugs out. “What?”
“Abby bought knives from Darcy.”
“Why? He left a set in the kitchen.”
“Exactly,” Shauna says.
Todd’s room was a den when a real family lived in the house. He shivers and, turning in his chair, sees Darcy standing at the sliding glass door that leads to the deck. Darcy’s trying to see in, hands bracketing his eyes, but because it’s brighter outside, Todd isn’t sure if Darcy knows he’s there.
He can’t believe it! Darcy tries the door! Outraged, Todd tears out his earplugs and leaps to open it. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Darcy steps inside. “I just wanted to see your space.” He picks up Todd’s graduation picture, chudders a finger along the spines of Todd’s books. “Fish Locomotion?”
“That’s my thesis topic. Fin action in Sebastes paucispinis. Listen. Your cheque came back NSF this morning.”
Darcy sits on Todd’s futon and tests it with a failed bounce. “You’ve got the best room, Tom.”
“My name is Todd.”
Darcy points at the Vaseline on the bedside table. It takes a moment for Todd to decode the leer. “What? It’s for my hands!”
“That’s what I thought.”
For the rest of the summer Todd will stew over this remark. He’ll peer again and again inside the black hole of Darcy’s laugh. If anything, it makes the skin on his hands flake faster.
“You better write another cheque,” Todd says.
Todd is unsecretly pleased that the cheque bounced; he’s smug. It means he was right about Darcy. Later, when Todd is stirfrying for himself and Shauna, Darcy comes to the kitchen with his cheque book. Todd tells him, “You can add on the five-dollar service charge.”
“I was just about to offer to do that. How do you like the knives?”
“What?”
“The knives.”
“They’re fine.”
“The majority of people don’t know how to sharpen a knife. They don’t want to know how. That’s what I especially like about this product, Tom. These are ceramic-coated blades. They never need it.”
“What?”
“Sharpening.”
“I added your name to the chore sheet last week,” Todd says. “We rotate chores monthly. Another thing, we have an informal system based on honour when communal supplies like toilet paper and dish detergent run out.”
“See? Now that’s a keen edge. But check this out.” Darcy digs in the front pocket of his jeans, wriggles out a fistful of pennies and places one on the cutting board. He disarms Todd of the knife.
The flash, the lightning strike of the blade, blinds Todd momentarily.
Penny halves ricochet.
When did Abby choose The Devil’s kingdom? Not the day she voted for Darcy as a housemate, but back in January when they phoned her about the vacancy at the School of Theology residence. She’d been waiting since September to move there, but now she said no. All that fall Danny and Shauna’s noisy lovemaking had driven Todd and Abby out of the house for long rainy walks. Todd’s room was under Danny’s and he’d come and knock on Abby’s door.
A knock. She starts awake. “What?” Croaky, sleep-clogged.
“It’s Todd. Can we talk?”
Six months she’s been waiting for an explanation, but now she finds she doesn’t care. Todd opens the door. She draws her knees to her chest, staring straight ahead.
“What do you think of Darcy?” he asks the tangled top of her head.
Abby says nothing.
“I don’t think it’s working out,” Todd goes on. “His first cheque bounced.”
“He’s on the phone almost continually. Every night that TV of his is blaring. That’s got to bother you.”
Abby meets his eye. He dares make reference to her feelings? They held hands! When she went home for Christmas, Todd drove her to the airport and kissed her goodbye—on the lips! He called her in Saskatchewan twice, saying he missed their talks. “They’re driving me crazy,” he told her. “Earplugs,” she advised.
He had intentions. He did! He said, “Let me be frank, Abby. As a scientist, I can’t accept the Bible as a literal truth. But I could accept it on another level.” She’d had no illusions about bringing him to Christ. She wanted a boyfriend so badly.
He clears his throat. “So you don’t agree we should give him notice?”
“Does Shauna?”
Todd would have complained to Abby about Darcy’s undone chores too, but as Shauna has yet to get around to hers that would be disloyal. Last night Todd swept the kitchen for Shauna and found nine penny halves. And now that he’s seen the state of Abby’s room, the true state of Abby, he can no longer avoid the cold clutch of guilt. In a skewed act of contrition, he gets out the vacuum and runs it over the entire downstairs, except for Abby’s room. With a violent snapping and crackling, a month of dirt and dust and penny halves is sucked up, his own skin too, filling the vacuum bag to bursting.
He initials the chore sheet on Shauna’s behalf, grabs his wallet and walks the four blocks up Dunbar to Stong’s and Shauna in her forest green tunic. The open sides are secured by ties. Stong’s it reads. He’s still working up the nerve to ask her to bring it home.
Two packages of toilet paper, onions, carrots, green pepper, zucchini, a can of tomato sauce. The cashier rings it up. “Spaghetti tonight?” he says to Shauna, who puts it all in a bag. Her breasts are a gentle curve of green. The smock ends at the top of her slim thighs. He wants her to be naked under it. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
Shauna steps away from the checkout and covers Stong’s with folded arms. “What?”
“I want to give Darcy notice.”
“Why?”
“Are you serious? He’s been here a month and has yet to do a chore. Here I am buying toilet paper again.”
Shauna rolls her eyes.
“I don’t trust him. He sells knives.”
“You didn’t like Danny either.”
“Untrue! Maybe not at first, but after I got to know him I thought he was all right.”
Danny was President of the UBC Anarchist Club, an oxymoron if Todd has ever heard one. He called Todd’s attempts to organize the house “fascistic,” but after he broke up with Shauna, Todd had a lot to thank him for.
“You should get to know Darcy,” Shauna says.
“Have you gotten to know him?” Todd whimpers.
Shauna hopes Todd will be out when she gets home, but she knows she hopes in vain. He has no life apart from her and his precious fish.
“Shauna!” he calls the second she steps in the door.
She finds him on his knees in the bathroom fastening something to the wall with a screwdriver. Danny’s poster, still taped above the toilet, asks if their bathroom is breeding Bolsheviks. Looking at it now, Shauna barely feels pricked.
Todd’s handiwork: three toilet-paper holders labelled Todd, Darcy, Abby.
“What about me?” she asks.
“You’re with me.”
Shauna bolts upstairs. Across the hall the phone cord disappears under Darcy’s door. She hears him talking. Boron carbide. Corrosion resistance. A thin hard coating. Though the words mean nothing to her, she feels an almost irresistible persuasion in his tone. “I vacuumed for you!” Todd calls up the stairs. She slams her door and collapses onto her foamie, the way she learned in Stage Techniques.
Danny didn’t believe in deodorant, yet she preferred his BO to Todd’s soapy smell. Darcy smells like a brush fire. He speaks in the low rumble of a gathering storm while Todd’s voice peaks insecurely at the end of every sentence. Why is dirty sexier than clean? Bad sexier than good? Mean sexier than nice? She and Darcy have been watching TV together every night and if it weren’t for the thumb-twiddling lump of Abby between them, who knows what might already have happened?
The next week Todd hands Shauna an envelope from Sears. “Look who it’s addressed to. Who is Thomas Dickson?”
“They sent it to the wrong address.”
“What a coincidence!”
“Maybe it’s for one of the guys downstairs.” Two silent Chinese post-docs rent the subterranean downstairs suite.
Todd snatches the envelope back. “The bed. The TV. Then this scheme with knives. Now we find out he has an alias!”
“Give it here,” says Shauna, slipping on her sandals.
She clacks out the kitchen door and down the deck stairs to the basement entrance. It opens onto the mildewy laundry room they share with the post-docs, the air a potpourri of garlic, Tide and ginger. The one who answers Shauna’s knock wears a dress shirt buttoned to a choke. He nearly falls back when he sees her. She has this effect on people, which is why she thinks film is the better medium for her.
“I’m Shauna from upstairs.” She can tell he knows. He’s probably been watching her all this time. Men do. She hands him the envelope. “I’m just wondering if this is yours.”
No way is his name Dickson.
Perplexity lifts his glasses. He takes the envelope over to the window in the kitchen area. “No. Not mine.”
“What about your friend?”
He comes back, shaking his head. “Sorry.”
“Oh my God!”
Startled, he looks over his shoulder to see what is worthy of her gasp. Not the wok on the stove. The knife block on the counter.
That night Shauna comes into the living room where Darcy is warming up the set for Dallas. “My dad’s birthday is next month,” she says. “Will you take a cheque?”
“Cash, cheque, credit card, flesh. Let’s go upstairs, Shauna.”
Her whole body tingles when he says it.
This was Danny’s room. It used to be that whenever she came across something of his, which was several times a day—he left for Nicaragua with only what would fit into a backpack—she would take that ride again: shock, hurt, despair, rage. Danny: a Method actor’s motherlode.
All Darcy has for furniture is the bed, sheets slippery, oil black. There are no blankets. Doesn’t he get cold? He opens a box and lays out the knives. “The inclusion of the cutting board is a limited-time offer, Shauna, so you’re wise to purchase now.” Afterward, while he packs the box back up, she writes the cheque. It’s a lot of money, a big chunk of next semester’s tuition, but she’s always been a daddy’s girl.
“Write your SIN on the back, Shauna.”
She stares at him. “What?”
“Your social insurance number. Jot it on the back of the cheque if you don’t mind.” He pats the bed and Shauna sits, lowering her gaze. “I want to tell you something. Promise you won’t laugh.”
Not for a second does she believe he’s sincere. It’s as if they’re running lines together. “I promise.”
He caresses the cardboard box. “It may sound strange, but I feel a calling. I want to help. Sometimes I can’t sleep thinking of all the people who have only ever owned a cheap dull knife.”
Shauna thinks of Danny picking coffee so the Nicaraguans can take up arms and defend the revolution. She thinks of Abby praying on her knees. Even Todd claims that his research may one day have a practical application. All Shauna’s aspirations are self-serving.
“If you know of any others I can help, all I need are phone numbers.”
When he puts his hand on her arm, she seems to lose all feeling in it.
Being there with Darcy finally undoes Danny.
It may be that Shauna is cocooning her hygiene products in toilet paper before disposing of them, or that she’s one of those people who uses a metre when four or five squares would suffice, but Todd doesn’t really think it’s any fault of Shauna’s that he’s at the end of his roll already while Darcy’s is untouched. He’s also troubled, deeply troubled, by the Sears bill lying unopened on the hall table for a week. It could be that Sears made a mistake, but Todd knows this isn’t the case. He knows because Darcy is so obviously the criminal type. But if Darcy notices Todd has opened the bill the jig will be up, so Todd carefully steams it and uses one of Darcy’s knives to pry the seal apart.
Among the long list of items purchased under the name of Thomas Dickson are a Simmons Beautyrest mattress and box spring and the Sony Trinitron. So whom do they have under their roof, Darcy Roach or Thomas Dickson? Or someone else?
He picks up the phone to call Sears. “I’m sure they are dull,” says a woman’s voice.
“You can have them sharpened if you want to go to that trouble and expense, but the knives I’d like to show you, Mrs. Adenauer, never need sharpening. You deserve optimum corrosion resistance, Mrs. Adenauer. You deserve a durable edge. I have your address. I could come over.”
Every hair on Todd’s body rises as he replaces the receiver.
Later that evening Todd leaves his door open while he studies. The women are with Darcy, drawn like dumb animals to the canned laughter and flashing lights. Though the sound of The Cosby Show makes concentrating difficult, he doesn’t put in earplugs. He can’t concentrate anyway so he closes his book and begins to peel tiny strips of skin off his hands, half enjoying the sting. Tiny beads of blood well up. He licks them off.
Darcy finally goes to the bathroom. Todd gets up from his desk and waits. “Thomas?” he calls as Darcy heads back to the living room. Darcy walks right past!
Todd unclenches his hands and sees the bloody mess he’s made.
That night, a strange sound. Though softer and coming closer together, it reminds Todd of the thud he heard the night Darcy moved in. In the hall, he hears it as a rhythmic thumping coming from Abby’s room. He pictures Abby beating her forehead against her desk, but it just goes on and on, Todd standing in the dark, listening, trying to figure it out, his heart racing to match the pace.
A different sound, a long inhuman groan.
“Abby,” he whispers at her door. “It’s me, Todd. Are you all right?” He thinks about asking her to go for a walk, but doubts she’d accept. It’s three in the morning.
A tiny voice: “Yes.”
The officer will take Todd aside and ask if he knew what was going on. Todd will feel like a louse.
The light wakes then blinds Shauna. She sits up blinking. “What are you doing?”
“My eczema’s flared up.”
The malady is less annoying to Shauna than his pronunciation of it. EC-zema. Also, his name ends in two d’s.
Todd scoops Vaseline out of the jar, smears his hands. He wriggles into the buttercup-coloured gloves, flexes fingers, shuts off the bedside lamp. “Sorry I woke you,” he says, laying a cold rubber hand on her waist.
Shauna shrieks.
“Sorry!”
“I’m sleeping in my own bed!”
She grabs Todd’s shirt off the floor by mistake—a good thing because she meets a satyr on the stairs. She’s at the bottom, a hand on the banister, about to climb, when his form unmerges from the darkness. She can’t see his face; her eyes haven’t adjusted. He’s a shadow cinching up his robe. Gasping, she tugs down the T-shirt hem to cover her pertinent parts.
“Going up?” Darcy asks.
He fills the stairwell as she passes. She teeters, grabs his arm and for a moment has no idea where she is. It’s as though they’re suspended together in an amoral void.
“What are you doing up?”
“What are you?”
Poised on the middle stairs, neither answers. He lets her by but, like smoke, follows closely. On the landing, he rubs against her. “Shauna. Let me tell you, I’m no Petit Chef.” She can feel it for herself, hard against her back, seven and five-eighths inches, plus.
What stopped her? she will wonder later. How did she summon the self-control? She says good night and closes her door. Just as easily she could have crossed the Stygian hall.
Abby saved her. Rather, Shauna worrying what Abby would think. Abby is God’s proxy. With her around there is an account. If Shauna succumbed that night, she would have known every man in the house in the Biblical sense—except the post-docs.
At breakfast the next morning Todd keeps his sulky gaze on her while he mashes a banana in his bowl. Shauna refuses to meet his eye. She has nothing to feel guilty about. To the contrary.
At last he speaks. “I can’t find my wallet. Do you know where it is?”
Shauna says, “I think we should be allowed to kiss other people.” She decided this as she tossed in the flames the night before.
His look as he rises from the table, his staggering retreat—the losing duellist. The phone starts to ring as the front door slams, so she can’t go after him.
“Did you give my phone number to someone?”
In the background, the wails of Shauna’s infant niece.
“Rosie?”
“Did you?”
“Why would you think that?”
“A guy phoned here and said so. I never buy anything over the phone. He started arguing with me, so I hung up. He called again. He called seven times. He said he was a friend of yours.”
Darcy appears in the doorway and Shauna knows he heard what she said to Todd. She’s stunned to see the whole door frame filled, the top of his head grazing the arch, shoulders pressing either side. Is it possible that he’s grown?
“Rosie, I’m late for work. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.”
Darcy takes the phone and drops it in its cradle. He backs her against the counter. She doesn’t even try to resist. She’s the one responsible for this beast. “Shauna,” he says, singeing her with his breath. “This is a limited-time offer.”
The kiss cracks her head against the cupboard. A metallic tang fills her mouth in advance of his tongue. Member Tested and Recommended. A durable edge. She’s gagging by the time he lets her go.
There’s Abby, transfixed in the doorway. “Hey babe,” Darcy says, wiping his mouth with the hairy back of his hand.
“Oh, Abby,” says Shauna. “It’s not what you think.”
Abby about-faces.
Making the best of an embarrassing moment, Shauna leaves for Stong’s. She works all morning, sweaty with apprehension, putting the things other people buy into bags. Her mouth feels like banana mash. Then she remembers her granny who lives alone and defenceless in a little house in East Van. She makes the panicked call on her lunch break.
“Gran, it’s me.”
“Who? Rosie?”
“Shauna.”
“Shauna! What a surprise!”
“How are you, Gran?”
“I’m fine.”
“Oh, good. I’m just phoning to check—”
“Shauna, darling, I really can’t talk just this minute. There’s a young man here showing me the most marvellous knives.”
The power of The Devil is not as great as it appears to be, Abby remembers as she scrubs out the tub. If He had full power to rage as He pleased, no one would be left alive. There is still more good in the world than bad. Only a very small part is actually subjected to the power of The Devil. He is compelled, after all, to leave the fish in the sea, the birds in the air and men in their cities.
She rinses the blue wash of Comet off the tub’s sides, stoppers the drain.
Yet He is capable of causing great disturbances. He brings kingdoms into conflict with each other and throws provinces and households into confusion. She who submissively serves The Devil abets this end and will suffer much for it, especially, most especially, in her conscience. Shauna clearly doesn’t know this.
As for Abby, she’s changing sides.
Todd isn’t in his room when Shauna gets home from work. He hasn’t come back from UBC yet. Probably Shauna is panicking for no reason. Why be alarmed? She kissed Darcy. So what? But when she lifts the phone receiver, the dial tone chills her to the bone.
She goes upstairs and knocks on Darcy’s door, opens it and sees the big bed stripped to the mattress and not a single cardboard box. She goes back downstairs to the living room where the TV used to be. He’s gone! Hallelujah, she thinks.
In the kitchen the knife block stands on the counter, one slot empty.
Shauna tries the bathroom door and, finding it locked, quails. She remembers Abby this morning. It wasn’t the first time Shauna has seen her pain. Is Abby in the bathroom with the Petit Chef? Shauna closes her eyes. She sees through the door to what she imagines all this has led to and, even in her horror, marvels at how considerate Abby is to keep it all contained in the tub. If Shauna had done this to herself, she’d have made an unholy mess, purely for effect. Shauna would do it naked. In her mind’s eye Shauna sees Abby lying in the tub in her pyjamas, her face, drained of colour, the same white as the frills around her neck. All her colour is in the water.
The Dunbar house is old. There are still skeleton keys in some of the locks. Shauna opens Abby’s door to get the key from inside and use it to unlock the bathroom. The cutting board and knife block sit on Abby’s cluttered desk. The empty box is on the bed. Abby is filling it with books.
“Ah!” says Shauna. “What are you doing?”
“Because of Darcy?”
Abby lifts her face. What a look. Shauna will feel judged for the rest of her life.
“Who’s in the bathroom?” she asks.
Of course Todd never expected his relationship with Shauna to last. Six months ago he answered her tap at his door, thinking it was Abby. Tearful, Shauna asked if they could talk. Todd let her in and closed the door, hoping Abby hadn’t heard the knock.
Danny broke up with her. “He says I’m bourgeois,” Shauna told Todd.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I’ve got blood on my hands according to Danny.”
To Todd her hands were small nude animals, defenceless and pink. Impulsively, he lifted one and kissed it. Shauna wanted to make Danny jealous, that was why she started sleeping with him.
Todd removes the cloth he’s pressing hard against his forearm. The letters immediately write themselves in red—S-H-A-U—and dribble down the side of the basin. He feels woozy, but takes up the knife again, braces his arm on the sink, grateful he can do the N in three quick cuts and won’t have to hack out another curve in his flesh.
Todd will heal, but he’ll never wear short sleeves again.
The next day a police officer will come. Abby will call when she discovers that her bank account has been cleaned out and she can’t get back to Saskatchewan.
“Let me get this straight. You wrote him cheques?” the officer will say.
“For the knives,” Abby will confess. “And to cover the rent. He said he’d pay me back.”
“And your arm, mate?” The officer points to Todd’s bandaged forearm. “He have anything to do with that?”
“No,” Shauna will cry, moved to love again by Todd’s sacrifice. Todd and Shauna won’t find out till the next day that they’re penniless. “That was my fault. It’s all my fault.”
Todd will always consider himself blameless. He even volunteers to identify the villain once they’ve rounded him up.
But after every knife is drawn from the block and the blades and handles are dusted for fingerprints, the officer will turn to them and say, “Sorry, kids. These knives are clean.”