Cricket in a Fist Read online

  A roll of white flesh poked out between the tiny red shirt and Jasmine’s jeans, and her chest was squashed, her nipples clearly visible through the fabric. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t fit.”

  “Show,” said Benna.

  “No,” said Jasmine, pulling the shirt back over her head. “I ain’t your ho.”

  That was no pimp they saw. There are creatures that slip into this world, that have human faces but that rightly belong to some other order of being. There were more of them when Jasmine was younger; they used to reveal themselves often, in barely perceptible flashes. Angels hovering whitely outside the window; the tooth fairy’s quick hand under a pillow; Elijah’s split-second sip of wine at Granny and Grandpa Winter’s Passover Seders. She didn’t believe in many of them anymore, but she was trying with all her might to believe in pimps. Tall men, thin-muscled and silent, with sparkly dark eyes that took everything in, scanning a room in seconds, scavenging for lost girls ripe for sexual slavery.

  For years, she had tried to look like a girl whose parents would search for her unremittingly if she was late home from school or swimming; though she was in fact that kind of girl, she was afraid a stranger might mistake her for the other kind. The kind that could slip, like a small animal under a door, into a different life where her parents would never be able to find her. But that was when she was little and afraid to be separated from her father’s side, as if the world was trying to drag her away from safety. Now she was older, in grade eight, and she could see that it was the other way round. Her family and her routines and her school — they were traps that she could escape only by violently wrenching herself free.

  Lara had recently shown Jasmine an article about pimps — it said an abductor might trail a girl for days waiting for the right moment. “These are calculating, manipulative people,” Lara explained over dinner, rubbing her corn over the lopsided, melty butter. “They prey on girls with no social network. Girls who seem lost and insecure.”

  So, walking in crowds, Jasmine hung back from her parents, trying to look abandoned and astray. When Lara and Dad took her back-to-school shopping at the Bay, they were distracted by a coat sale, and Jasmine wandered across the room into Ladies’ Apparel. The underwear section made Jasmine dizzy. Tam-Tam had worked in a ladies’ apparel department for years, and no wonder she exuded a superhuman femininity, even now — in the aisles of lacy bras, silky lingerie and black stockings, the air felt electric with womanliness. Trailing after Lara and Dad in the parking lot, Jasmine was ready for a hand to fall on her arm. His fingers would be long and white, his hair black, his cheekbones high. He’d have musky breath with an undercurrent of mint, because pimps always chewed gum. He’d grab her by the hand and pull her into a small, dark place. An alley, a car and finally an apartment and a bed with red sheets. And there she’d wake up, lean and wan, bright-eyed and addicted. She would wear lingerie and live with a lot of other sweet-smelling girls, and none of them would remember where they came from or where they’d been before they were whisked away. Occasionally she thought about the men. There would be men; she understood that. Naked men, maybe ugly. But that part of sex slavery hardly seemed real, hardly even entered her mind.

  The first time Jasmine ever skipped swimming after school, she stood outside the bus terminal for a long time before opening the door. Not in hesitation, but out of respect for the last moments of a way of life. It was the end of October, cool and sunny in a bright, brittle way. She watched the carwash next door, the one her father always used. When she was younger, she’d loved going through the carwash, how she couldn’t see or hear anything but the big brushes and soapy water battering the windows. The Volvo was a submarine under the ocean — a small pocket of airtight security. She loved the steady, engineless glide and her dad silent beside her; somehow, they both knew not to speak inside the carwash. They passed the massive blow-dryers that made little drops of water scatter, shrink and disappear, and then broke the surface into sunlight, and she was aware of everything at once — the sounds of cars driving by, people laughing and talking, bike bells and birds.

  Jasmine thought of never seeing that carwash again and remembered what it said in The Willing Amnesiac — that when you’re about to leave a place forever, things long taken for granted are suddenly precious. There’s always a moment, J. Virginia Morgan wrote, when the small details of the life you’re leaving behind seem to shimmer with unprecedented value.

  Jasmine stepped through the door and closed it behind her. She could still hear sounds from outside; she had half expected the door, like the one to her father’s lab at the university, to shut out all reminders of the outside world. She walked slowly from one end of the room to the other and nothing happened, except that a frizzyhaired middle-aged woman in a blue blazer smiled at her as she passed the Kingston sign.

  The seats by the Toronto door were all empty, and they faced the coffee counter with its tiny, round tables — the infamous café Jasmine’s whole school had been warned against. At a recent assembly, the principal, Mr. Munro, had talked about the bus terminal lunch counter as though it were teeming with evil. As if its egg salad sandwiches could result only in certain death. Throughout the terminal’s condemnation, Jasmine had been sitting on the floor beside Benna, who laughed when Jasmine made a killer sandwich with her hands and made it bite Benna’s arm, whispering, “Attack of the baloney on rye.” Benna stretched out her legs in their ripped nylons and looked the gym teacher in the eye, giving him an obvious boner.

  A middle-aged woman in a blue blouse and a hairnet sat behind the terminal’s lunch counter, absorbed in a paperback, and the smell of egg salad made Jasmine think of her grandmother. Tam-Tam, her real grandmother, who had given birth to her biological mother. As far as Jasmine knew, egg salad, tuna and chopped liver were the only sandwich fillings Tam-Tam knew how to make, and that’s what she’d always given Jasmine and Agatha for lunch when Jasmine was little. Now Tam-Tam almost always ate restaurant food — the last time Jasmine saw her, they’d spent a Saturday afternoon shopping at the Rideau Centre and then had dinner at the fish restaurant in the market. Although she was usually allowed to take the bus by herself, Dad always dropped Jasmine off and picked her up at the mall when her grandmother was involved. Tam-Tam would be waiting, ladylike, hands clasped in her lap, on a bench near the makeup counters at the Bay. Her makeup was always perfect, and she usually wore a cashmere sweater with a silk scarf arranged perfectly around her neck. And not only did Tam-Tam always buy Jasmine new clothes, she told off salespeople for being too slow and even reprimanded one girl for trying to sell Jasmine a sweater that was clearly two sizes too big. “It certainly doesn’t look great,” TamTam said. “It looks terrible. Is something not working with your eyes?”

  Dad had explained to Jasmine that Tam-Tam sold clothes for years and had taken the job seriously — she had been diligent, tasteful and responsible about it. He asked Jasmine to try to understand how it must feel from Tam-Tam’s point of view when other people failed to make the same effort she had. Dad was always suggesting how things must feel from someone else’s point of view. It would be great to hear him say, for once, that someone was just a stupid jerk. Like Lara’s mother, Bev, for instance.

  Jasmine never used to think Tam-Tam was a stupid jerk; only recently had she begun to suspect that Tam-Tam, like everyone else, was keeping things, the most important things, secret. But she still liked how her grandmother always stood up for herself, gazing evenly at a man who tried to push past them on the escalator until he apologized, or asking a waitress for salt and pepper instead of getting the shakers from another table herself. She always walked down the middle of the sidewalk and the middle of the mall, ignoring people’s stares. Gorgeous people obviously must get used to being stared at, especially after seventy-something years. Jasmine wasn’t ashamed to be seen with Tam-Tam in public — kids from school who saw them together said, “That’s your grandmother? How old is she?”

  Dad said Tam-Tam was lonely, a
nd that spending time with Jasmine must mean a lot to her. He asked Jasmine to think about it: Tam-Tam had lost a lot of people. And though what Dad said made sense, it was just too hard to picture Tam-Tam being lonely. When she found out Jasmine was gone, she would surely be disgusted. Waiting for her abductor, Jasmine tried not to picture it — TamTam’s reaction to the stupidity of being kidnapped.

  The grey chairs across from the lunch counter looked disappointingly clean and unthreatening, but Jasmine sat in one of them and looked out the window as if she was waiting for someone coming on a bus. She got her Walkman out of her bag and put on the headphones. She’d found a stash of CDs and tapes in Agatha’s old room, now the “study,” and had spent two evenings making the best mixed CD ever. Jasmine sat cross-legged, her feet tucked under her thighs, chin in hand, elbow on knee, as though she’d arrived earlier in the day and didn’t know where to go, and turned the Agatha CD up loud. She tried to look as if no one cared about her, as if her family was far away and had kicked her out with only ten dollars and a backpack containing a geography textbook and a pencil case, a bathing suit, towel and shampoo. It had been a mistake, she realized, bringing the swimming gear — she should have left it at school. But her posture implied hours of travelling before arriving here in Ottawa, a city she’d never seen before. When she sensed someone watching her from the side, Jasmine didn’t look up, just let the sensation sink into her bones and leaned into her hand, rocking a bit in her seat. She was getting uncomfortable and having trouble maintaining the posture.

  When Jasmine had paced the living room, hands on her hips, asserting in Mr. Munro’s no-nonsense voice that the terminal was “no place for youngsters — one hundred per cent out of bounds,” Dad had smiled and Bev even clapped, but Lara said it was no laughing matter.

  “It’s true, actually,” Lara said. “Bus terminals are prime hangouts for pimps. They wait when the buses come, looking for runaways.”

  “Oh, come now,” said Bev.

  But Lara said a pimp could spot a runaway girl at a glance. Desperation and confusion created a glowing aura around a young girl that only he could see, and the eyes of a pimp hypnotized like the eyes of a cobra. That’s when Jasmine decided to believe Lara, to give it a chance to be true, despite what seemed realistic. Like when she decided at the age of ten to believe in Santa Claus again, even though her parents had admitted two years earlier that it was all made up. The pimp would offer her a place to stay, but it would be a trap; he would buy her nice things and make her take drugs, and then she would be unable to go back. Drugs Jasmine imagined as brightly coloured pills: once they touched her tongue, she would know things she had never imagined, but the drugs would also deliver darkness into her heart and she would forever belong to a different world. She’d pictured the bus terminal as dirty and dark, with nooks and corners perfect for pimps to hide in and girls to disappear into. The place was clean, open and bright. The few people inside seemed so harmless. Pulling the threads at the cuff of her jeans, Jasmine tolerated the sensation of someone staring at her until she couldn’t stand it anymore and then glanced over her left shoulder, just with her eyes. She was ready for anything, but it was the woman with the navy blazer, standing right there. Jasmine pulled off her headphones. “Are you all right, dear?” the woman said.

  “Yeah. Yes. I’m just about to.” She hurried straight to the door without looking back. Half a block down Catherine Street, she spun around in her speed-walk, ready to confront her pursuer. Fists clenched, ready to attack, she faced an empty sidewalk. Half a block away, a teenaged boy glanced up at her and looked away.

  She had only been in the terminal for ten minutes. She could still make it to the pool for at least an hour, and though she didn’t feel like going through the hassle of changing and showering for just a few laps, she couldn’t go straight home. Then she’d have to explain why she wasn’t swimming. As she walked towards Bronson Avenue, trying to decide what to do, Jasmine turned to see a city bus coming towards her, and, in a moment, she made her decision, already running for the bus stop. She took the bus past her school and all the way to the Rideau Centre. She only had to wait for ten minutes to catch the bus to Aylmer, and the short wait seemed like a sign — she’d been planning this for weeks, and had looked up the bus number and memorized it, waiting for the right day.

  It was rush hour, and the bus was full. Jasmine squeezed into a window seat at the back, grateful that she didn’t have to stand. The tightly packed passengers were dressed mostly in business clothes and smelled strongly of perfume and sandwiches. The forty-something, curly-haired woman at Jasmine’s side was wearing a lot of blue eyeshadow and had been smoking; Jasmine tried to breathe through the inch of open window.

  She’d never been across the bridge to Quebec by herself, only with Dad and Lara for hikes in the Gatineau hills. The embassies along the river’s bank and then the island and boats below made her think of picnics and sneakers and the smell of moist leaves, but when the bus turned onto the Boulevard de l’Outaouais, the French signs and the brightly coloured trees at the sides of the highway were as weird as something in another country. It was so easy to leave everything familiar, to insert herself into this crowd of strangers who didn’t notice or care that she was out of place. No one was looking at her, concerned; none of these bus people saw her as a lost little girl. She started her CD again from the beginning. The terminal had been nothing but a big, empty room. She should never have gone there; she should have known not to look something magical in the face — that it would only crumble, turn out to be nothing. Like the whole Santa Claus thing. She’d stayed up all night that Christmas, hiding inside the bowl-chair’s wooden frame, watching the chimney, waiting to prove everyone wrong. Instead, Dad came down the stairs in his pyjamas, and she hollered as he shoved a new sketchpad and two tangerines into her stocking. He’d felt so bad. Helping her out from under the chair, he looked almost as close to tears as she felt.

  Shortly after that Christmas, Jasmine had insisted on going to church one Sunday with her Catholic step-aunt, Hilary. Christians, Dad said, were much too focused on God and godly figures. “They’re always looking for something bigger and better than the world we’ve been given.” As far as Jasmine knew, Dad didn’t believe in God at all, and she knew he hadn’t meant his description of Christianity as a compliment, but bigger and better appealed to Jasmine and she wanted to see it for herself.

  The priest at Aunt Hilary’s church talked, like a boring teacher, about a woman who found a wallet containing a winning lottery ticket. When she returned the wallet to its owner he gave her half the money. The preacher said the lost wallet with the winning ticket was a test from God, that the woman who found the wallet and the man who shared his winnings were inspired by the Good Book. It was clear to Jasmine, with a heavy, sickening disappointment, that if there was a God, he wouldn’t give a damn about lottery tickets. A winning ticket, a lost wallet: those things happened because of chance and luck and even statistical probability, but they were not magical, spiritual or transcendent. Jasmine watched Aunt Hilary and the rest of the congregation take communion as if they were eating a snack. No one’s eyes rolled back in their heads when Christ’s body touched their tongues and throats and settled into their bellies. She saw no sign of God in the church, felt no goose bumps at the back of her neck, witnessed no miracles of any kind, and she came away from the experience a confirmed non-believer. Dad and Lara had always told her religion was just superstition, and she saw now that it really was made up, tacked onto things in the fakest, most obvious ways.

  The bus turned onto a residential street and stopped, and three business people got off. They lived here, in rows of identical houses, steps away from the highway. She tried to imagine it. There was no corner store nearby, even. Most people’s lives were so boring, just like J. Virginia Morgan said. Life was so fucking boring. And now the world’s latest promise of magic had failed to take effect in the way it was supposed to. Pimps were supposed to be different. They
didn’t squeeze through chimneys but came into the world through the public washrooms of bus stations and malls. They weren’t depicted in stained glass, but in newspaper articles. They didn’t leave presents under pillows or in stockings and they didn’t care about naughty or nice. They divided children into lost and loved instead and scooped the lost ones into their clutches. They were bad men, a real danger. But what if it was true about that man in the mall? That he really was a pimp and those girls really were what Benna said they were? They hadn’t even been pretty and they’d talked loudly, sounding stupid.

  Jasmine knew the house was coming a moment before it came into view; she knew it with a physical jolt, like waking a second before the alarm clock goes off. It was a small wooden house on the corner, boarded up with thick, dark planks, out of place on a street featuring mostly aluminum siding. The haunted house. Abruptly, she could see her big sister, hair pulled back in a ponytail, pointing and squealing, “I saw something in there. I saw a ghost, Minnie, did you see it?” Agatha’s best friend, Helena, had often been there, too, on the other side of Jasmine, smelling like suntan lotion. There’d often been a smell of chlorine, and always cherry Chap Stick. Cherry Chap Stick was the smell of Jasmine’s mother.

  And then everything was familiar, in a vague, gut-wrenching way. The corner of a certain light blue house disappearing behind shrubs, the bend of a particular maple tree. Some of the houses seemed new and were a relief to see. An entire development of identical townhouses covered a hill Jasmine was sure had been a vast yellow field of goldenrod that used to make Mama sneeze and sneeze whenever they drove past it. Jasmine remembered the tone and force of her mother’s sneezes, and how it had always seemed as if Mama was annoyed with everyone in the car for letting the yellow field exist at all. As if Jasmine, Agatha and Dad had planted it there just to make Mama’s life difficult. The distant past had been this close all along, a twenty-minute, two-dollar bus ride. It was the craziest thing, all of a sudden, the vivid memory of Mama turning in the front seat, her long hair falling over her shoulders, her crooked nose perfect on her face. With each stop, the bus crowd thinned out, and Jasmine waited to see her old street. It was called Chemin d’Arthur, she knew that, but she had no idea where it was in relation to other streets. She promised herself she’d e-mail Agatha about it, as soon as she got home, and concentrated on memorizing the name of each chemin and rue the bus passed, so she could figure out later how close she’d come.