C'pas facile d'être amoureux à Montréal
Le ciel est bas, la terre est grise, le fleuve est sale
Le Mont-Royal est mal à l'aise, y a l'air de trop
Westmount le tient serré dans un étau...
The Dept. of Self-Promotion at Autoliterate seems to working overtime these days. They wanted to remind you that Peter Behrens will be leading a writing workshop at Hollyhock on Cortes Island, British Columbia Oct 17-22. There are still a couple of spots open. Check the link for details. And PB will be reading/talking at a Storyfest evening in Hudson, Québec next week: 7:30 PM, October 14 at the Hudson Village Theatre. You can book tickets using the link.
Here's a piece from PB's last short story collection Travelling Light. Check the link if you'd like to pick up a copy of that book, e- or real editions.
Fire Stories
Shaun Breen told
fire stories. He had come to Montreal from Newfoundland with his mother. She
worked in the Snow Hill Coffee Shop at the corner of Queen Mary Road and Côte-des-Neiges
but was always there to pick him up after school: a blonde woman puffing a
cork-tipped cigarette, a ski jacket thrown over her waitress uniform.
Shaun was the
smallest boy in our class. His clothes were covered with burns. There were
black charred dots on the sleeves of his shirts, scorch marks on the seat of
his pants. He told the fire stories at recess or while we waited in the cold
mornings for the janitor to open the school doors.
His father had
been a fireman who’d broken his back falling off a ladder trying to rescue a
crippled boy trapped in the attic of a house on fire.
There’d been a blaze in a movie theatre in St.
John’s, Newfoundland, and one hundred children had been smothered by smoke or
crushed by crowds rushing for the exits, while Shaun and his mother had escaped
by sliding through a trapdoor that dropped them into the waters of the harbour.
There was a fire
at their apartment on Côte-des-Neiges Road and Shaun had awakened smelling
smoke, had run downstairs and across the street, in pyjamas, to smash the
delicate glass on a telephone-pole fire alarm. Water from the fire hoses broke
through the windows and ripped holes in the walls; live wires, pulled down by
the ice, snapped out blue tongues of flame upon the pavement.
Our school, St.
Kevin’s, was in Côte-des-Neiges, a neighbourhood composed of grid streets and
plain brick apartment houses that hadn’t existed before the war, when there had
been only fields of snow and summer melons. It was the Catholic school closest
to where my parents lived. That’s why I went there instead of Roslyn School or
Iona, which were nearer but administered by the Protestant school board. My
mother drove me to school the first day in our Buick Century. I wore a grey flannel
suit with short pants, a white shirt, a red necktie, brown oxfords, thick woollen
socks. My grandmother sent the grey flannel suits from England. I hated them,
but whenever I outgrew one, another would arrive in a brown paper parcel tied
with string.
The fire stories
always ended the same way, with Shaun’s escape, while around him other victims,
buildings, whole towns were consumed by fire’s voracious appetite.
I was at St.
Kevin’s for five years before being dispatched to boarding school in the
Eastern Townships. I was always first in my class. The other pupils at St. Kevin’s
were Italians, West Indians, poor Irish. There were only a few like me who came
from streets on the slope of the mountain, whose mothers spoke good English and
whose fathers came to Parents’ Nights wearing business suits. Most of the
parents were working people like Shaun’s mother, who took whatever shifts she
could get at the coffee shop and probably never attended a Parents’ Night.
Whenever I saw her, she was waiting for Shaun at the schoolyard fence. Even
when it was below zero she was puffing a cigarette, shivering in her jacket and
her half-undone, hurriedly-stepped-into snow boots. She took Shaun back to the
coffee shop, where he would eat his supper at the counter, then do his homework
in one of the booths until her shift was over.
Once there was a
man in Newfoundland who had caught fire inside. He didn’t realize it until
smoke started coming out of his mouth. There was nothing anyone could do. The
man was burned to a crisp.
Shaun left that
school in the middle of the winter. It was the sort of district where people
moved around a lot, where children were being shifted in and out of schools all
the time, so it wasn’t a big surprise when Shaun disappeared; half the class
that had started in September wouldn’t be there by June. The janitor came in
and removed his desk, rearranging the others so there wouldn’t be an empty
space. Later a Trinidadian girl joined the class and the desks were rearranged
again.
I forgot Shaun
after a couple of weeks and I never saw him again. I left St. Kevin’s, left all
schools eventually, left the country. It was decades later that I remembered
the fire stories.
My wife and I had
come from California to spend Christmas with my parents. Jean had never been in
Montreal, so I took her downtown on the day before Christmas to look around, to
see if the streets were as I remembered them — cold, grey, crowded.
We had a bitter
fight that started on a bus coming down Côte-des-Neiges Road. Jean ducked away
from me at the entrance to the Guy Street Metro station and I went after her,
down and down those long escalators. I waited until the train pulled out,
hoping I would see her standing on the empty platform, but she had disappeared.
I waited for the next train, trying to decide what to do. Finally I took the
escalator back up and started walking along St. Catherine Street. It was
brutally cold and people were wrapped up, hunched into the wind. I bought a
copy of the New York Times at a newsstand.
I felt like going home but I didn’t want to turn up at my parents’ without
Jean. I didn’t want them guessing we had had a fight.
The fight had
actually been going on for a long time and had to do with all the pain of
living together, the fact that we didn’t have enough money, that Jean was
unhappy with me and beginning to suspect my moods. We were living in Los
Angeles, ten blocks back from Venice Beach, in a neighbourhood of drug dealers,
murders, abandoned cars, sunshine. I can’t remember what we thought we were
trying to do there. I do remember riding the Super Shuttle from Venice out to
LAX at the beginning of that Christmas trip and seeing a car, a BMW, on fire on
Lincoln Boulevard — pulled over onto the median strip, flaming and casting up
smoke in the December sunshine.
I went into a
restaurant on St. Catherine to have a cup of coffee and read the paper. The Times was the only paper I could bear to
read in those days. I’d been living in so many different cities that local
papers didn’t make sense to me. I loved the Times
for the same reason I loved highway atlases and airports: it symbolized
removal, success, escape.
I ordered coffee
and toast and started reading news of the world. On the fourth page there was a
feature article about parents who punished their children by forcing them to
sit on hot stoves, searing their flesh with the tips of cigarettes, pressing
electric irons against their buttocks.
I thought right
away of Shaun Breen and the fire stories, surprised at how easily the details
came back to me after twenty-five years. A tired-looking waitress kept
refilling my cup. The manager was standing behind the cash, shaking hands with
a customer. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood — the next day was Christmas.
Montreal seemed like a cheerful small town.
I finally put on
my overcoat, gloves, and scarf, left a tip on the counter, and pushed through
the revolving door onto St. Catherine Street. Walking from Phillips Square to
Guy Street and back again, cheeks hurting with the wind, I told myself I was
searching for Jean, but I wasn’t, not really. We’d always needed time to cool
down after a fight. We wouldn’t have had anything to say if we’d run into each
other in those crowds doing last-minute shopping. I’d have ducked into a store
to avoid her or crossed the street quickly against the light, and she’d have
done the same.
If I’d happened to
meet someone who recognized me, someone on St. Catherine Street who knew me
from the old days, and if they had asked me how things were, I’d have told a
fire story.
I would have
described the dozens of winter bonfires that burned at night out on Venice
Beach, the crowds of the homeless and crazy that gathered around the flames,
and the sick smoke that hung across our neighbourhood in the morning. I would
have admitted to an obsession I had been developing about the gas stove in our
kitchen: checking the valve a dozen times a day; phoning the gas company almost
every week; worrying that the thing would blow up while we slept, blow us from
our bed, blow the whole ramshackle building into the sky. I might have told
about the flaming BMW out on Lincoln Boulevard, how it had seared itself into
my memory while so much else that was more important was being neglected, put
aside, forgotten.
In the fire
stories Shaun himself was always being rescued. He was never really in danger.
Dogs would awaken him by licking his face, then lead him to safety through
rooms packed with smoke. His father would take him by the hand and bring him to
a window and, saying a Hail Mary, would finally pitch him outside. Shaun would
fall slowly, tumbling and turning the way he had been especially trained,
falling like an acrobat through the smoke, the flames, the cinders; bouncing on
the rubbery net the men held out, bouncing so expertly he was high up in the
air again, climbing slowly, slowly; down below they were cheering as once more
he began his descent.
It was the middle
of the night in Montreal, Christmas Eve, in the room that had been mine when I
was a boy, and I was telling my wife, after we had made love, all that I
remembered of the New York Times
article and Shaun Breen. I was describing the pattern of concentric black rings
that could only have been scorched onto the seat of his pants by an electric
stove burner. Jean was so upset that she finally got out of bed and went to
find a phone directory. She brought it back to the bedroom and started
searching to see if a Shaun Breen was listed. She wanted me to find him, to
telephone him in the morning. Shaun, are
you alive? Did you survive?
Luckily there were
no Breens in the Montreal phonebook. Then I remembered the reason Shaun had
left St. Kevin’s was that he and his mother were returning to Newfoundland. The
rest of us learned where Newfoundland was by looking at a map of Canada the
teacher unrolled over the blackboard. She described the long journey Shaun and
his mother faced, by train, by bus, by ferry across the Cabot Strait in midwinter.
Everyone else in
the house was asleep. After a while Jean slept, but she awoke after an hour,
disturbed by my restlessness. Finally she switched on the light and started to
read a Henry James novel that she’d picked up at the bookstore on the Venice
boardwalk, near the café where we sometimes ate breakfast on Sundays, when the
winter sky was clear and California sunlight sparked on the waves.
I got out of bed,
telling her I was going downstairs to make some tea. We could read all night if
we wanted to. We could sleep all the next day, which was Christmas.
I heard my father
snoring as I passed my parents’ bedroom. I went downstairs and into the
kitchen, where I filled a kettle and set it on the stove. A full moon shone
through the windows and there was no need to switch on any lights. After a couple
of minutes the steam ripped out a high-pitched whistle and I recalled Shaun’s oval,
darkened face; his hair, cropped short by blunt scissors; his tense,
nail-biting expression.
My parents’ house
smelled clean, dusted, polished, at peace, and I stood with my feet bare on
linoleum while upstairs my wife waited for me, my parents slept, and Shaun
repeated stories that possessed a terrifying power and were fixed, like dreams,
with perfect detail. I was thinking of our marriage, our apartment in
California, the Pacific Ocean, what it meant to have come this far and to be
bending around now, falling backwards, returning.
fin.
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