Tuesday, 8 July 2014

Thirteen Crucifixions 14

It's been a long busy day and I'm too tired to write anything.  Have some more novel.

                                                     April 1984



            It was getting strip-searched that finished Carol.  Jail she had been prepared for.  She still hadn’t slept and it was almost noon.  Four hours ago they were released from the drunk tank, the only facility that could hold all of them.  They were demonstrating against the visiting U.S. secretary of state.  Then two of the younger males tried to break through the police cordon.  The ensuing pandemonium did not respond to Carol’s strident calls for restraint.  One thing led to another, but no one was injured.  Nuclear proliferation would accelerate until the earth was deader than Mars, a cold, dark cinder twirling alone in space.  She lay now on her bed-- a mattress on the floor--from where she stared up at her white, slightly cracked ceiling.  It wasn’t really cracked but a thin hairline fissure that ran across the paint like a mapped river.  Outside the jail this morning, Carol had to dodge some creepy looking journalists.  When she got home there were three more waiting outside for her.  A nice looking young man with an open face approached her.  She tried to extinguish her cigarette on his forehead.  As he shrank back Carol ran inside, bolted the door then ran up the stairs to her little suite on top.

For six years she had lived in this house, having lived for two years on each of its three storeys.  For two years she had shared the main floor with Stan her ex-husband.  They married each other more than six years ago for the convenience of getting generous student loans and bursaries.  They slept separately, and Carol had remained a virgin throughout.  She had always assumed that her husband, who was just leaving a sugar daddy of his when they first met, was gay, until he began seeing Suzanne, who lived with him now on the main floor of the house.  It was to the good Doctor Richard Bertholdt that Carol soon after offered up her maidenhood.  In the poorest slum of Vancouver he was practicing in a free clinic.  Now he was a medic in Nicaragua, dodging bullets and bombs while treating the injured Sandinistas and their families.  Carol had gone to live with him on the second floor of the house just as Suzanne was moving in to replace her on the first.  Now, in this beautiful room and kitchen on the top floor, Carol enjoyed an uneasy solitude with windows on three sides, a view, and cherry trees that reached past the roof.  Richard, last she had heard, had married a diplomat’s daughter in Managua, and was now the father of a little girl.

Carol had less than twenty-four hours to finish writing her speech. She was filling in for a certain nuclear-physicist turned anti-nuclear activist from Berkley, who’d just been refused entry into Canada.  When he phoned Carol to give her the highlights of his speech, the line went inexplicably dead.  She was going to mention this in her speech. 

Her hand brushed idly over her left breast.  She examined it by touch, then her right breast.  No lumps.  Two years ago, Carol’s mother lost her left breast in a radical mastectomy.  It ran in families.  Her father had lifted his ban on her in order to permit Carol to come back and take care of her mother.  She recovered well, and Carol learned that she was bottle-fed as a baby.  Her mother had never told her this before.  It wasn’t that she couldn’t, nor that she didn’t want to—Carol’s father had commanded it.  With his horror of things pertaining to the flesh, he was not going to countenance breast-feeding under his roof.  He had formerly been a Catholic priest, Carol’s father.  He saw the light and became a Baptist, and now he was a minister.  According to her mother, he was the real cause of her cancer. Carol was almost certain that her mother and father had never seen each other naked.

Richard had loved Carol’s breasts.  He called them perfection, comparing them to two delicate white kittens.  He left her the day after her mother’s mastectomy.  She started to cry.  Carol lay alone on her bed.  Always alone.  In the two years since Richard’s disappearance and the loss of her mother’s left breast Carol had remained alone, chaste and unloved.  She lived now like a nun, like a justice and peace anchoress, and now, all of a sudden,every cell in her body seemed to be screaming for Richard’s delicate touch. 

She slept.  She dreamed.  She was climbing a mountain, clinging to a sheer rock face with a thousand foot drop.  A golden eagle soared past her, slowly, for Carol to climb onto his back.  She was afraid, and clung tightly to the rock.  She woke and a flash of golden green light dazzled her from the teardrop crystal that hung in her window.  With her eyes she traced the profusion of shattered rainbows on the white wall and at the sepia wizened face of Gandhi that smiled serenely from the huge poster that her mentor, Doris Goldberg had given her.  Richard had given her the crystal one Christmas.  Carol was never in the habit of buying nice things for herself.  She wanted a cigarette, but didn’t feel like moving.  She struggled into an upright posture, swept her luxuriant dark blonde hair from her face and lit a cigarette.  She wanted badly to pee, but first that first critical rush of nicotine.

After a shower she toweled herself dry, her perfect breasts staring at her from the half-steamed mirror.  She always watched them, closely, for the first signs of sagging.  Even at age thirty-one they still had the buoyancy that had turned a number of male heads when she was eighteen—when she was thirteen!  At the age of twelve Carol already had the body of a young woman, for which reason her mother would dress her in shapeless and ugly clothes.  At her father’s insistence, Carol had grown to suspect.  Even though she did nothing to exploit this—she still seldom wore make-up—Carol had come to know that she was extraordinarily pretty.  Just over thirty, time still had done nothing to mark her.  Her skin was still a uniform creamy white, like the product of daily milk-baths.  Even as she waited for the nymph to give way to the matron, Carol had come to wonder if she might be one of those favoured ones whose physical beauty didn’t have an expiry date.  She had lost weight since Christmas, which did look good on her, though she also held the belief that any body and image manipulation was a bourgeois preoccupation unworthy of a woman who lived for world peace, social justice and the universal establishment of human rights.  But that was fifteen pounds ago.  She toweled her hair dry.  Later she would wind it into a tight knot, as always, which would give her face a severe, school-marmish aspect, sharpening her already prominent cheekbones.  The hairstyle did nothing for her.  Her penance for being beautiful.

She pulled from her old fridge a jar of natural peanut butter and a loaf of multigrain bread. She peeled a ripe banana, its brown spots suggesting the forearm of an aging woman.  Then, remembering that peanut butter sandwiches deep-fried in a pound of butter had been a favourite comfort food of Elvis Presley, she nearly lost her appetite.  While growing up Carol had never known the music of Elvis, nor the Beatles, and certainly not the Rolling Stones.  All but the most strictly devotional hymns had been forbidden in her father’s household. At eighteen, when Carol escaped to Victoria where she could wear whatever the hell she wanted she completely immersed herself in the music of her lost youth.  Elvis, neither Presley nor Costello, never did quite take with her.


“Am I speaking to Carol Harley-Atkinson?” asked a young male on the phone.

“You are…”

“Derek  Merkeley.  I’m with the Sun—”

“And you would like me to make a statement.”

“Only the women were strip-searched?”

“Was that you standing outside my house this morning?”

“I was, as a matter of fact.”

“And you’re about five foot ten?”

“Six feet, actually.”

“You have short dark hair and hazel-green eyes?’

“You have an excellent memory.”

“And you were wearing jeans and a Harris Tweed jacket.”

“I’m still wearing them.”

“And I tried to extinguish my cigarette on your forehead.  Well, Derek, let me tell you something.  Next time, the lit end of my cigarette goes straight into your eye.”  She hung up on him. She was shaking.  Carol ignored her half-eaten sandwich and reached for a cigarette.  She phoned Doris.

“Carol.  Are you all right, darling?  I saw everything on TV.”

            “I think I’ll live.”

            “Don’t do the speech if you’re not feeling up to it.”

            “I think I can pull it off.”

            “It’s not a priority.”

            Carol silently railed against this genteel challenge to her sense of indispensability.  “Are the banners finished?” she said.

            “They are, but Carol, please get some rest.”

            “What about the speech?”

            “It isn’t a priority, dear.  Perhaps you might take things easy for a while.”

            “I have every intention of being there tomorrow.”

            “You know that you don’t have to.”

            “I want to.  And I will be giving the speech.”

            “That is very wonderful of you, Carol.  I just want to assure you that you don’t have to. That you needn’t feel indispensable.”

            “It isn’t about being indispensable.  It has absolutely nothing to do with feeling indispensable.  But I want to honour my commitment.”

            “Are you getting flack from any journalists, Carol?”

            “Yes.  They were standing right here in front of my house this morning.  Just after I escaped a bunch of others at the jailhouse.  Fuck—I mean, pardon my language, please.

            “It’s all right, dear, you’ve been under a lot of stress.  Were you treated all right?”

            “All the women were strip-searched.  All of us.  Just the women.”

            “Carol, get some rest.  Please.”

            “I’m still doing the speech.”

            “By all means, dear, by all means. But in the meantime rest.  I’m going to speak to our lawyer about the strip-search.”

            “Like a lot of good that’ll do.”

            “Carol, please get some rest.  You’ve been having an awful time.”

            “I will, Doris.”

            “Promise me?”

            “I promise.”

            “Oh, and Carol.  There is one journalist that I would like you to beware of.  His name is Derek Merkeley.”

            “He just phone me a minute ago.”

            “Tell him nothing. Whatever you do.  He is very dangerous.  Alice has been having a dreadful time with him lately.”

            “Alice?”

            “McItyre.  Glen’s mother—oh, that’s right, you two haven’t met.  But Carol, do be careful of Derek.  He has been known to be very abusive towards women.  And while we’re on the subject of Glen McIntyre, Alice’s son, I think that he would be an ideal candidate for viewing those writings of Richard’s.”

            “Really?”

            "Glen is a type of mystic, shall we say?  I have known him since he was a boy.  If there’s anyone to unlock the riddle of those writings, I believe that he could do it.”

            “If you say so.”

            “As a matter of fact, he is here sitting right now in my livingroom.  Do have a word with him if you will.”

            “Right now?”

            “He is interested in volunteering with the Peace Coalition.  I was going to have him phone you anyway.”

            “Okay.”

            “Hello?” said a young male voice.

            “Hi, Glen?”

            “Yes.  And you’re Carol?”

            “That’s right.  Doris tells me that you’re interested in volunteering with us.”

            “Yes, I am.”

            “Well, are you any good at folding things?  We have tonnes of leaflets that need to be gotten ready for the Walk For Peace tomorrow.  Interested?”

            “I am, actually.”

“Good.  Well, let’s meet somewhere, shall we?  Do you know the Sun Ray Café?”

“On Seventeenth and Cambie?  Didn’t you used to work there?”

            “I was a waitress there last year.  Meet me there at four thirty.  Five is better.”


            It was Doris Goldberg who had created for Carol her job at the Peace Coalition.  When Carol moved to Vancouver from Victoria and enrolled at Langara College, Doris was her English Lit instructor.  She had been recently widowed by the death of her husband, a renowned Holocaust survivor.  Doris was already in her sixties, a Quaker as well as a Jew who had devoted much of her life to trying to build bridges of reconciliation and peace between Palestinians and Israelis.  She had also become Carol’s surest and most reliable friend, once Carol had got over her initial terror of this woman.  She still wasn’t sure exactly what her duties were at the Peace Coalition.  She supposed that justice and peace had become her vocation.

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