Broke City Read online

  Once, her mother let her stay up late to watch the fireworks. Her hair was heavy; still wet from the bath and she stood on a vinyl and chrome chair to see the colour and light spray and pucker and shoot from what seemed to be as close as her own backyard.

  One winter day, Christine remembers asking her mother if she could change the channel on the TV. It was a funeral. The President of the United States.

  ‒ This is history, her mother said.

  Christine and her sister wheeled around the living room on toy horses made of fake fur and vinyl. She felt like a ghost, just like that president.

  Christine parks beside the house. It sits on a corner lot. The front door is actually a side door. No one seems to live on the street anymore. No one is going anywhere, no one is visible. The verandah has been closed in. The curtains hanging on the windows are a series of connected holes, variegated colours on each one. The windows are small. She turns into the alley, backs up, and drives around the block again.

  The fence around the green house is still the same, the gates are the same. The garage is still there, but the glass in the tiny window below the apex of the garage roof is gone. She painted on that garage years ago and now knows that stories and pictures she has created were first formed in this place. She has kept and repeated the words spoken by the ghosts in this house in many ways.

  Christine imagines her father with a carpenter’s pencil tucked behind his ear and a cigarette between his lips. He whistles when he’s shaving. He tries to make her laugh. He says he feels “bluer than a cross-eyed carpenter’s thumb.” Christine now thinks he meant it. Her mother did laundry and cleaned the house. She smoked and drank coffee. Her nerves were bad sometimes. Christine wants to go inside because once she lived here. She has pictures of herself taken in the backyard.

  epilogue

  Christine stood at the long, narrow window and looked out to the backyard. The grass and the dry brown ruts from those endless comings and goings seemed new to her. Who wore those deep lines in the dirt and when? Then in the next moment she realized they had always been there as long as she could remember and probably before. Jan was in his garden, digging at the foot of the huge old pine in the back corner of the yard. Nothing grew there. What was he digging for?

  She pressed her forehead lightly to the screen. The sun had just disappeared and in that instant she felt a faint touch, a coolness on her cheek. She closed her eyes. Had all of it really happened?

  Her breasts were sore and hot. The nurses had wanted to give her a needle.

  ‒ A shot to stop your milk from coming in, but she had said no. It was as if she already had been shot. Shot dead inside.

  ‒ We’ll have to bind you then dear, the older nurse said.

  She was the one with grey hair and thick ankles. Her wedding band cut into her finger. She spoke quietly and evenly and with sympathy in her eyes. Bind. Christine lifted her arms while the nurse wrapped her tightly with wide strips of cotton. Wrapped her like a mummy. Embalmed. Dry up her burning breasts. Empty of all fluids. Empty of everything. Her swaddled breasts. You swaddled babies. But it was Christine who was swaddled. Not a baby because, now, there was no baby. What would she take home with her? She had pictured her arms full holding a baby wrapped in a soft green blanket. The colour of leaves the colour of pine the colour of deep still water.

  Sleeping happily. Now there was nothing. Everything had taken so long. She must have made a mistake somehow. Done something wrong. It had taken so long.

  ‒ Almost there, she had heard voices saying the same thing.

  Everyone was saying that same thing.

  ‒ Almost there.

  People in masks coming in and out of the room. It was a nightmare of unidentifiable noises and masked people all in unison and moving with macabre purpose.

  ‒ Almost there.

  Then silence. Nothing. No sound. No crying. What’s wrong? She remembered saying that.

  ‒ What’s wrong? What’s wrong?

  The masks turned away from her. Gloved hands were moving quickly wrapping her baby.

  ‒ What’s wrong? Boy or girl? Let me see my baby. What’s wrong?

  No sound. No noise. No crying. Something over her mouth.

  ‒ No. Stop.

  She couldn’t move her tongue. It had been stuffed in her mouth and she couldn’t will it to move. No sound. No noise.

  Then colours in the sky.

  Stars exploding in the sky. The beginning of the world. The end of the world. This is what it must have been like when the world started. This is what it would be like at the end.

  ‒ Do I have to kiss the statue? Do I have to kiss it?

  ‒ No. Not if you don’t want to.

  Someone had thrown handfuls of glittering sand into the sky. Sand and ice. No sound.

  ‒ Give her to me. She’s just sleeping I can wake her up I can wake her up. Come on sweetheart wake up wake up for Mom there’s nothing to be scared of. See look she’s just sleeping. You weren’t holding her right. See. She’s beautiful. She’s perfect. Five fingers. Five toes. Wake up sweetheart.

  Christine saw all the things that might have been appear before her and explode like small stars: first smile first tooth first step first word. No sound. Where was Fergal? Christine was so tired. She saw random flashes of time in front of her. Everything that happened from her first remembering anything to this moment. Objects presented themselves over and over sometimes small and sometimes large and loud. A long white balloon. Cigarettes. Smoke. Cigarettes. Sunlight illuminating scattered crayons on a grey floor. Yellow. Orange. Red. Green. Footprints disappearing on a shining wooden floor. The open mouth of a silver razor blade. Shining knives on grey velvet. Knives stabbing someone over and over. A movie on a drive-in big-screen. Not real. Her hands shaping small disks of putty imprinted with a feather. A little pine tree swinging from a rearview mirror. A pine tree growing in the backyard by the fence. Fergal. His face. His face. Oh so sad.

  ‒ Christine Chris Chris!

  Floating in water. Green. Calm. The moon. Disappearing behind red.

  Yet to her surprise here she was. Arms folded across her breasts. It seemed she could feel every pore on her skin. Feel the painful heat of her breasts. But even this was dissipating. She could change her story. Rewrite it from another perspective. Yes, she was the unreliable narrator of her own story. A liar. That was it. Somehow everything had gotten away from her. Somehow everything had escaped her. Christine would make her story turn out differently. Yes. She would do that. She wanted her story to be different.

  She saw Jan digging at the base of the pine tree. Shifting his weight on the spade. Kneeling at the foot of the tree and then lifting something out of the ground. How had he managed to bury anything in those spread-fingered roots of that tree? Why would he even bother? She could see what it was now. It was a box. He lifted the lid.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  John, you’ve been there through it all. Thank you for that.

  Thanks to my progeny, Eamon and Brendan. You were the making of me.

  Mom — thanks for introducing me to the magic of nursery rhymes and fairy tales. It stood me in good stead.

  Matt Bowes, Claire Kelly, and everyone at NeWest Press — thank you for your hard work on the Santa Rosa Trilogy. It’s a pleasure to work with all of you.

  Special thanks to Natalie Olsen whose vision for the design of Broke City — as well as Santa Rosa and North East — was transcendent.

  Finally, I would like to thank my editor, Doug Barbour, who has been a friend and mentor to me and a champion for my writing. (And thanks for the title of this book — it fits.)

  I would like to acknowledge Broke City’s invisible palimpsest — the books, music, and films referenced, specifically or obliquely, in this novel:

  Anschütz, Ernst. “O Tannenbaüm.” (based on a traditional German folk song). Published 1824.

  Clark, Barbara. “Toddle the Turtle.” We Are Neighbours — Revised Edition: The Ginn Basic Readers, edit
ed by Odille Ousley and David H. Russell, Ginn and Company, 1950, pp. 51–56.

  Cleopatra. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, performances by Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, 20th Century Fox, 1963.

  Crewe, Bob, and Bob Gaudio. “Silence is Golden.” (Performed by The Tremeloes). Silence is Golden, Epic Records, 1967.

  Desmond, Paul. “Take Five.” (Performed by the Dave Brubeck Quartet). Dave Brubeck’s Greatest Hits, Columbia, 1959.

  Gentry, Bobbie. “Ode to Billie Joe.” Ode to Bobbie Joe, Capitol Records, 1967.

  Haywood, Carolyn. “The Blue Dishes.” We Are Neighbours Revised Edition: The Ginn Basic Readers, edited by Odille Ousley and David H. Russell, Ginn and Company, 1950, pp. 9–98.

  Lindsay, Maud. “Fun for All.” We Are Neighbours — Revised Edition: The Ginn Basic Readers, edited by Odille Ousley and David H. Russell, Ginn and Company, 1950, pp. 117–120.

  Phillips, John, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” (Performed by Scott McKenzie). What’s the Difference, Columbia, 1967.

  The Family Way. Directed by Ray Boulting, performance by Hayley Mills, BLC Films, 1966.

  The Three Lives of Thomasina. Directed by Don Chaffey, Walt Disney Productions, 1964.

  ¶ This book was typeset in Dante MT, which was designed by Giovanni Mardersteig in 1954.

  Wendy McGrath’s most recent novel Broke City is the final book in her Santa Rosa Trilogy. Previous novels in the series are Santa Rosa and North East. Her most recent book of poetry, A Revision of Forward, was released in Fall 2015. McGrath works in multiple genres. Box (CD) 2017 is an adaptation of her long poem into spoken word/experimental jazz/noise by QUARTO & SOUND. MOVEMENT 1 from that CD was nominated for a 2018 Edmonton Music Award (Jazz Recording of the Year). She recently completed a collaborative manuscript of poems inspired by the photography of Danny Miles, drummer for July Talk and Tongue Helmet. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction has been widely published. McGrath lives in Edmonton, Alberta on Treaty 6 territory.