Double Talk

  double talk

  double talk

  A NOVEL

  PATRICK WARNER

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Warner, Patrick, 1963-

  Double Talk / Patrick Warner.

  ISBN 978-1-55081-347-0

  I. Title.

  PS8595.A7756D68 2011 C813'.6 C2011-900439-9

  * * *

  © 2011 Patrick Warner

  Cover Image: Michael Hitoshi

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  PRINTED IN CANADA.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.

  BREAKWATER BOOKS | www.breakwaterbooks.com

  To Rochelle

  Table of Contents

  I

  Violet Budd

  Baby Power

  II

  Violet Budd

  Baby Power

  III

  Violet Budd

  Baby Power

  IV

  Violet Budd

  Baby Power

  V

  Violet Budd

  Baby Power

  VI

  Violet Budd

  Baby Power

  Acknowledgements

  I

  Violet Budd

  Violet has almost finished the kitchen when she hears a gentle knock on the front door. She looks up, can’t believe it’s already dark outside. Her heart immediately begins to pound, but in a trippy, irregular pattern. She tries not to panic, tells herself it might not be him. It might be a courier delivery. There comes a more insistent knock on the living room window. She looks and sees the face of her one-time partner pressed against the storm glass, his nose tip flattened. She thinks of stocking masks and garden slugs on the underside of the patio table. She waves and walks towards him, noting as she does that with the windows stripped of their curtains and the lights on, she has been on display in her own home. Like one of those prostitutes in Amsterdam. In the back of her mind she hears Marta, her last counsellor, softly advising: Perhaps unconsciously you were feeling exposed all along. At the very least it would explain why she piled so many heavy boxes in the front porch, so many she has left no room for the door to swing in. She will have no choice but to hand him his stuff through the window.

  “Hi, Brian.”

  He looks the same, she thinks, only older. His hair is starting to show streaks of grey, though he still wears it long and swept back. He is dressed smartly, as always, that day wearing a hound’s-tooth blazer and wine-coloured straight-legged jeans. Doc Martens shoes have replaced Doc Martens boots, which sometime in the late eighties replaced his beloved desert boots. More recently, he has started to weave into his wardrobe some grunge elements, ditching his Indian cotton shirts for T-shirts sporting the names and artwork of local bands: Dog Meat BBQ is splashed across his chest in black ink. He still looks boyish, she thinks, although not in a good way. His clothes now tag him as one of an ever-expanding group of men who use the idea of counterculture as an excuse not to grow up. He is wearing a silver circle and cross earring, and she guesses from this that he is dating a younger woman. Later, on the phone with Nancy, she will imagine this mystery girl to be a graduate student, a young woman who has mistaken Brian’s laid-back ways as an endorsement of her feminism, while at the same time mistaking for love the degree to which he satisfies her repressed maternal instincts. Violet and Nancy will both cackle at this and for a few moments feel tight once again.

  Looking down at Brian where he stands on the sidewalk, Violet feels the pressure of the one memory she has been keeping at bay all that day: the afternoon, two years earlier, when it all fell apart for them. She doesn’t want to go there, but knows there are just some memories that walk into your life as if they own it.

  On the day in question, Brian had just finished a small web-design job for a sexual health store and was on his way out to collect payment — five hundred in cash, some of which he had promised to give Violet for Lucy’s school shopping. He was excited about the animation he’d done on the BenWa balls and was hoping he could parlay it into more design work. He told Violet he would be home by five, but then called and left a message to say he was going for a quick drink with Frank James. By midnight he still wasn’t home.

  Violet couldn’t say how long she lay awake that night, her bed a rotisserie in which she took star turns as the next Lorena Bobbitt. She didn’t remember falling asleep either, though she remembered waking up, startled by the sound of a body crashing down on the army cot in the office across the hall. She sat up in bed and peered through the half light at his open door. She could see a pair of green boots poking out the end of his bed — a puzzle because she knew Brian didn’t own cowboy boots. More curious than freaked out, she tiptoed to his room to find him lying on his back, snoring, the air already rank with the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke.

  Bastard. Goddamn bastard, she thought, as she pulled off his new pointy-toed boots, slipping the soft leather over his bony heels. Brian half woke up and in a pitiful voice thanked her.

  “Fuck you, Brian.”

  “Don’t be like that, Vi, honey.” He passed out again.

  Violet went downstairs and placed the boots in the middle of the kitchen table. She leaned against the counter, arms folded, and stared at them. One boot stood straight up, while the other, no matter how many times she set it straight, kept flopping over at the ankle. Bright green — rattlesnake skin, the inside label said — with peach-coloured satin lining and little silver toe-cap protectors. They had personality. Yes siree, she thought, they had low-life written all over them. At the same time, she could see they were well made, expensive. A quick look in the junk room turned up the shoe box where he had thrown it. She opened it up to find his old trainers and a receipt for $350 from Ron Pollard Shoes. The rest of the money, she guessed — and rightly as it turned out — had been pissed down a drain.

  It was in the junk room that she confronted him nine hours later when he finally appeared, all sheepish and swollen-eyed, his cheek sporting the bedspread’s pattern. She promised herself she would remain calm. “Hey, mister. Tied one on, eh?”

  Brian looked at Violet as if he had seen her somewhere before.

  “These have got to go back.” She handed him the boots, which she had carefully cleaned and wrapped in crepe paper before placing them back in the box. “The receipt’s inside.”

  He scowled. His lips looked raw, blistered.

  “Brian, for Christ’s sake, that money was supposed to go towards Lucy’s school shopping.”

  “So?”

  “So I want you to take them back, get a goddamn refund. And when you’ve done that you can get the fuck out of this house. We don’t want you here anymore.” Things were not going according to script.

  Brian snapped awake: “Those are my boots, bought with my money. And this is my house. And those children are mine as much as yours — where are the children, by the way?” He suddenly looked confused and guilty, as though he had been looking after the children and had completely forgotten about them.

  “They’re at Nancy and Keppie’s.”

  He took a deep breath and when he spoke again his
voice was thin and papery as a wasp’s nest. Violet knew he was about to blow. “Just who the fuck are you to tell me what the fuck I can and can’t do? I’ll do what the fuck I like. And you’ve got another fucking think coming if you think I’m going to let a cunt like you take my children away from me.”

  Cunt stung a bit. It always did, no matter how hard she tried to hide it. Violet thinks it’s the ugliest word in the language. She felt a huge wave of sadness well up inside her.

  “Oh that’s it, go on, fucking cry.”

  He went to push past her, but she blocked the doorway. He tried again but she slumped against him, wedging one foot against the door frame. His face was that close to hers she could see an irritation on his left cornea, a bubbly patch of something that looked like raw egg white. Perhaps, she thought afterwards, this is what distracted her. She didn’t see the punch coming. She just remembers the shock of pain in her jaw, the room’s reverberation, the sudden sense of being in a vacuum. She lost her balance. He hit me, she remembers thinking. The asshole hit me. She couldn’t believe it. He’d outdone himself.

  Violet fell, banging against the wall, catching her ribs on the outlet, before crashing into a tower of empties. Beer bottles rained down with a far distant sound, spattering her with stale slops and soaked cigarette butts. What now? she wondered. She felt as if she were floating. She saw herself looking sidelong at him. She felt like a penned slaughter-house animal awaiting its awful turn. She saw Brian standing over her, his mouth opening and closing. She couldn’t think what to do.

  Help, when it arrived, came in the form of a mote, then a word, then a simple phrase moving from the horizon through to her inner eye, a phrase that had been her mantra during her women’s studies days: zero tolerance. She read it as a call to arms. And yet, for a while, she just lay there — playing possum, she told herself afterwards. She felt paralysed, movement only returning when she heard the front door slam. She got to her feet, walked into the kitchen and, dialling 411, got the operator who put her through to 911.

  Violet slides open the living room window. “Hi, Brian,” she says. “Sorry about the window. The front porch is blocked with stuff. Jeez, what a mess!” She doesn’t want to say that, had he taken the time to return her call, he could have avoided the indignity of having his possessions handed to him through the window.

  Brian doesn’t answer her, though he arches his left eyebrow ever so slightly. That raised eyebrow — she thought it was so sexy when they first met. Much to her surprise — her shame almost — she still finds it sexy. But how could it be otherwise? she counsels herself. They spent thirteen years together. He is the father of her children. He had once been her best friend. She should have expected time apart to refresh some things about him that years of living together had made stale. Even so, it doesn’t add up, she thinks, doesn’t explain her powerful urge to ask how he is doing, to invite him in for coffee, to have one last talk.

  But he is in no mood. In fact, it’s obvious he’s in zero tolerance mode. He glares past her, his eyes flicking from bare walls to boxes to plastic-covered couches, happy to rest anywhere but on her.

  “I’m sorry about the door,” she says again. There is a long, awkward pause.

  “You’ve spoken with the kids?”

  He nods.

  She hands the box to him and he very gently takes it from her, careful not to make contact with her hands. He then turns and walks away, without a word. Violet sticks her head out the window to watch him go.

  Fresh once more is the wound of their separation. Her voice, which can carry three city blocks, gathers to scream after him, but no words come to mind. It has all been said. And besides, she doesn’t have time.

  It took only twenty minutes for the cops to show up that morning. Violet was in the half-bathroom, examining her face in the mirror, when she heard the squabble of their radio outside. The red mark on the side of her face was beginning to fade, and she was worried that it would disappear.

  “I’m looking for a Ms. Budd. A Violet Budd?” said the young female officer.

  She can’t be more than in her late twenties, Violet thought. She noted how the woman held her peaked cap under her arm, how her uniform looked both tailored and slightly too big for her, like it was departmental policy to downplay the female form. The woman wore a thick black belt around her waist. There was a heavy-looking baton dangling from it and next to it an enormous bunch of keys. Despite these things, the officer still managed to come across as being friendly. Not threatening at all, Violet decided. The woman had wheat blond hair, which she wore tied back in a ponytail. Take off the uniform and put her in grey sweats and she would have been one of those girl jocks that Violet had gone out of her way to avoid in university, the kind who took notes in big loopy handwriting and underlined whole pages with yellow highlighter — If everything was that important, why underline at all? Violet remembers wondering. These same jockettes could be heard whooping and hollering in shooter bars on the weekends, knocking back sangria and B-52s until they were drunk enough to let themselves get dragged off. They were so lacking in irony, so not cool. Back then Violet couldn’t have imagined a day when she would find that kind of straightforwardness reassuring.

  “I’m Violet.”

  “Violet, I’m Constable Budgell and this is Constable Galloway,” she said, gesturing to the man standing next to her. He was overweight, his pants drooping under his belly. Constable Cruller, Violet thought, even as she chastised herself for thinking in clichés. She knew she was in no position to make fun of anyone. Still, she had to wonder how he’d ever catch a criminal he had to chase on foot.

  Violet nodded to him, but he made no greeting in return. She had the strong impression he would rather be anywhere else. He looked tired, she thought. Maybe he was on the last leg of a double shift, or perhaps he was attempting to play bad cop to Constable Budgell’s good cop. Or maybe he was on a diet.

  “We’re responding to a 911 call, a report of a domestic dispute made from this address. May we come in, please?”

  Violet showed them into the kitchen and offered to make them tea, which Constable Budgell accepted but Constable Cruller did not. Violet was determined to remain cool, as detached as possible, but faced with the task of placing a cup on a saucer, her hands began to shake. Much to her shame she started to blubber. Constable Budgell pulled out a travel pack of tissues, shaking a couple loose the way people used to shake cigarettes from a pack.

  Constable Budgell asked Violet to describe the events leading up to her placing the 911 call. Violet told her story, bringing to it as much detail as she could. Constable Budgell seemed particularly interested in the boots. She said her boyfriend liked snakeskin boots. Was she trying to be funny? Given what appeared to be her general lack of guile, Violet didn’t think so. She was probably just trying on a textbook technique for putting victims at ease. Constable Budgell wanted to know whether there was a history of violence between Violet and her husband. Violet told her there wasn’t, not physical violence anyway. Constable Budgell asked her to elaborate, but Violet couldn’t come up with an example at that moment. “No doubt,” said Constable Budgell, “you will think of one later.” Violet detected no trace of sarcasm in the remark. Constable Budgell wanted to know if Violet had children and whether they were present at the scene when the alleged assault took place. Violet pointed to pictures of Lucy and Joe on the fridge door. The female officer responded by showing Violet pictures of her twin nephews. Two fat and jolly looking babies dressed in RNC onesies. She said she hoped one day to have kids of her own, if she could ever get her hockey-crazed boyfriend to settle down.

  When she came to the end of her questions, Constable Budgell, or Mira, as Violet had agreed to call her, asked Violet to repeat her story from the beginning. A visibly upset Violet had to be reassured that they were just following procedure. Once they had run through it all a second time, Constable Budgell asked if Violet would like to be referred to the Women’s Crisis Centre. Visions of the old
clapboard mansion on Military Road flickered in Violet’s memory. She used to volunteer there. She could still smell the mildew, see the pink wallpaper in the entrance, the pictures of Judy Rebick, Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan in the staff room, and the tattered copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Violet remembered—with some discomfort—the solidarity she used to feel with the women who worked there.

  “Just one more thing,” said Constable Budgell, rising from the chair with a jangle of metal. “I need to see any injuries you may have incurred as a result of the assault, other than those already visible.” Constable Galloway made a show of averting his gaze when Violet lifted her shirt to show the scratches along her ribs. Constable Budgell leaned in and looked closely at them, touching their edges very gently as if trying to gauge how fresh they were. Violet winced. Constable Budgell got out her camera and took several snapshots.

  Satisfied, she announced briskly that she had enough evidence to prosecute a charge of assault against Violet’s husband.

  Violet hardly had time to let this information sink in before Constable Budgell asked if the abuser was still on the premises. Her question infuriated Violet. She wanted to ask the officer if it was normal for men who beat their wives to hang around the house afterwards, maybe napping to recover from their physical workout. But she didn’t. She told them simply that Brian had gone out. Constable Budgell wanted to know if Violet knew of his whereabouts, explaining that if they could easily locate him, it would save them from having to issue a warrant for his arrest. For the first time since the interview began Violet noticed Constable Galloway taking a keen interest. The idea of Brian being picked up in a public place, handcuffed and shoved into the back of an RNC cruiser filled Violet with perverse pleasure.

  But that was not how she felt five minutes later when, walking the two officers out, they met, head-on, her white-faced and soon to be ex-husband coming in the front door. Brian looked from his wife to the police officers and back to his wife again, his face the picture of guilt. “Has something happened?”