Chandelier, page 3
Georgia heard her beer hit the tile and watched it spill across the poured concrete. She started laughing too, even as she saw the badge on the cop’s hat. She leaned back and dropped her joint into the grass.
They were charged with underage possession. They got the lecture about dangers of drug use, respect to private property and the general evil of being young. There’d been several complaints from tenants about noise, the illegal use of their pool and dumped detritus. A stern lecture was issued on the temptation to return. In early September, when they did, an eight-foot-high fence had been erected. “Secret pool” was history.
The incident supplied more evidence to Georgia’s parents that Natalie was a bad scene and should be banished from her vicinity. Weeks later, while Georgia and her father had one of their infrequent coffees, he started again.
“It was just some fun,” Georgia defended.
“You need to grow up.”
“That’s what I’m doing. Currently struggling through the late teen phase, by the way.”
But “secret pool” had raised the stakes. After its demise, Natalie insisted they really get away, go somewhere real, another place entirely. Global mischief. “We can teach English,” she said. She had pamphlets and brochures. Schools were looking for people in Japan and Korea.
“Travel’s covered. You live in an apartment and get paid. We can just go,” she said, flinging her hand at the dark street like salvation was out there past the trees and suburban neighbourhoods. The next summer, she told Georgia, she was writing an application. “It has to happen.”
“What does?”
“It. Whatever it is. When it starts, we’ll find out.”
* * *
It had been more than three years now since the paramedics had reported no vital signs.
There’d been a house party off Leitrim Road. A fridge full of beer. Vodka. Rye mixed with Pepsi. And shrooms. Celebrations for the end of grade twelve. Or the beginning of summer. It was a party, in any case. No reason was needed. The mixed bag of teenagers convened mostly in the basement. Then the party shifted outside, through sliding doors onto a square deck that faced an undersized backyard. Fields stretched out behind it where a dirt road had been bulldozed. The reflective letters of a developer’s notice signalled the fabricated, evolving neighbourhood out in the darkness.
The stereo thundered with pop hits and a plan developed to get some live music going. It was mostly Natalie’s idea. She wanted to make some noise but all that was available was a tambourine and an acoustic guitar with dead nylon strings.
“Let’s get our gear,” she said to Georgia.
Georgia was splayed in a lawn chair balancing a vodka 7 on her thigh.
“Too far. I’m not going anywhere.”
She couldn’t remember when Natalie left but she never saw her again. When they’d pulled her from the car, she was dead.
Two days later, Georgia went to Natalie’s parents’ house. Natalie’s mother answered the door and held it open emptily. Her face was strained, played out to a pallid zombie state. Red bruises smudged her skin from incessantly wiped tears. She took Georgia to Natalie’s room, sitting her on the side of the bed while she went to get some tea. The bed was neatly made. Natalie’s clothes were folded on a chair and lined up in the heart-breaking closet. Georgia had never seen it so tidy. A desperate order was being maintained in the chaos of the inexpressible. Georgia sat there, numb. Natalie’s “Ramones” comforter was tucked painstakingly over the bed corners, a crocheted shawl spread at the bottom. She looked at Natalie’s things. Her desk. Her shelves. A few tattoo magazines, receipts, a beeswax candle shaped like an owl, her studded wristband: the things she touched, treasured and ignored, all saturated with meaning now. A clown nose, red and round, fitted over the head of a Chewbacca action figure. There were the more successful attempts at origami: a few cranes, a star, a marijuana leaf. Natalie’s remnants. Her holy junk.
“Be careful, it’s hot,” Nat’s mother said when she handed Georgia the mug.
They were silent, sagging on the saggy bed.
“I’m so sorry,” was all Georgia could say. “I can’t . . .”
Her eyes searched the ceiling for respite from the pain that surrounded the objects in the room. The window, the yard, the school, the people still going about their lives. How dare it all go on?
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. We were at the party and she left.”
The police forensics determined she’d skidded once, tried to right herself, and the car went over. Then rolled over twice more. The roof was punched flat.
“Do you want anything?” Natalie’s mother asked. “All this stuff.”
The question startled her. Georgia studied the woman’s face. Blank, raw, washed out.
There was a sock monkey on the nightstand. A button was pinned on its chest that said The Past Starts Here.
Georgia picked up a travel guide to Korea lying next to it. She flipped through the pages. There were circles around some entries, and places boxed with blue marker. Georgia took a sip of tea. The heat was a numbing chamomile. She gulped half the cup and looked at Nat’s mother, who was staring through the half-opened curtains at a branch with green leaves. When would Georgia come into this room again? Why would she? She watched Nat’s mother’s face. At their most intimate moment, they were starting to move away from its centre.
She took the leather wristband and put it on, the three snaps making it snug but not tight. Natalie would laugh at her. Crappy sentiment. But she took the clown nose and the button and the travel guide and she slipped them into her messenger bag.
Outside, she dropped her skateboard on the driveway and had just placed her foot on the deck when the door of the family’s camping trailer creaked open. Natalie’s family had bought it four summers ago, but rarely moved it beyond the property. Mostly it seemed permanently parked on the side of their driveway, used as a summer bedroom or a place to smoke and drink. Georgia and Natalie would have little barbeques, play board games or cards, listen to the shortwave transmissions of new punk and trance music throughout the night. US college stations in Michigan and Vermont, Syracuse and Ithaca. It was necessary to know the bands no one else had heard of, no matter how bad, bland or ridiculous. The music failed or was excellent, but first dibs on discovery was important. Some were not worthy of broadcast. “Sketchy,” Nat would say as the chords faded. “Definitely sketchy.”
* * *
It was Nat’s brother who appeared from the trailer door now. He gripped a dustpan and looked at Georgia without expression.
“Hi Matthew,” she said. It was all she usually said to him. He was two years younger than her. A lifetime.
“Hi.”
“I can’t believe it,” she said, which was the truth, and the way of saying something.
He clenched his jaw. She could see the muscles move, tighten and shift. He looked down at his hand holding the dustpan, glanced back inside the half-open trailer door, then looked at Georgia again. He picked something off the dustpan and held it out.
“Do you want this?” he said.
It was an old joint, dry and brittle, like ancient papyrus. Probably rolled months ago.
“I found it between some cushions,” Matthew said.
Maybe Nat had rolled this one and then lost it. Maybe that’s what Matthew was thinking too, though his face showed no trace of his thoughts. He was a quiet kid, Georgia thought, but kind of cool for a younger brother. His hands looked strong. He was on the swim team.
He held it between his fingers, and then he flicked it into the tall grass across the fence. Georgia didn’t say anything after that. She didn’t know why. She wasn’t speechless exactly. But something. Something else. Like embarrassment. There was an edge of exposure to all of it. Vulnerability. Death and youth and pain. The mess or tidying up. And the sudden formality of being alive.
She turned and pushed her board down the driveway.
6
She didn’t want a cellphone. She ditched her laptop. She’d closed her Facebook account and posted a Gone Fishing meme on her Instagram. She wanted nothing virtual anymore, just a split from her past and a whirling vacuum ahead. She was here to attend the present. She let her cell service lapse. She would check email at the middle school on a limited basis, send letters and make the occasional call. She wanted to isolate her life and harvest all the loneliness, rage and the fear with it, and that would be a gift too.
And besides, she had no money and the data rates were going to kill her.
But Ray had a point. “That’s very romantic, George. But how’m I gonna reach you besides dropping by?”
“Land line, okay? Installed next week.”
“Brilliant,” he said, like it was innovation. “You’re the new old.”
She waited another week to give the number to her mother.
“There you are,” her mother said. “I thought you’d fallen off the planet. I tried calling you at school but no one understood what I was saying.”
“I’m in Korea.”
“Yes.”
“They speak Korean here.”
“Don’t be a smartass. It’s not attractive.”
* * *
Weeks passed. Georgia coasted through an economy routine of school and reading. Buses downtown. Lotteria burgers for lunch. It cost nothing to wander the city, to poke her head through some doors, spelunk the underground intersections. She’d fill herself up on a big lunch at the school cafeteria, free as part of her contract, and then snack on rice and seaweed or soup at night. There were things she still needed—a kettle, some blankets—but it would have to wait until she got paid. Mr. Yung dropped by one morning at eight a.m. with a used iron and an ominous canister of bug spray, shaking it while he raised his eyebrows and positioning it on a nearby eye-level shelf.
She didn’t have hot water yet. No pillow either, just rolled-up T-shirts she wrapped in a fuzzy towel. Her bed was a single mattress on the floor. She’d splurged for a fitted sheet, which snapped perfectly into place on the corners. She had the equivalent of thirty-five Canadian dollars in won for the rest of the month.
Mr. Yung arrived unexpectedly the next afternoon, rapping on the door. He explained why there was no hot water and why the stove wouldn’t work. “No oil.” He pointed to her fuel tank. He said a delivery would be coming in the next thirty minutes, so she should be ready for them.
“It will cost you four hundred thousand won,” he said. “Please pay them right away.”
She wasn’t sure if she heard right. “Mr. Yung, I don’t have it.”
“Can you go to the bank, please?”
“But I don’t have any money,” she was mortified to admit. There was a frozen, perplexed look behind his thick glasses followed by a series of shallow nods of his head.
“I see,” he said. He took out his wallet and counted out a handful of large bills, then gave them to her. “I will lend it to you. The school will reverse the money.”
“Reimburse?”
“Yes, exactly,” he said, and tapped her on the shoulder. Stepping through the door onto the terrace, he added, “They will deliver soon.”
Forty minutes later a buzzer rang. The neighbours’ dogs went apeshit, barking and snarling, metal clangs and creaks, crazy growling in crescendos. Her landlady, who she now called “grandmother,” came charging up the steps with two men dressed in green trousers and yellow vests. Grandmother was explaining that they’d come to deliver oil for her tank. She pointed to the thick hose the men heaved in their wake. She guided them across the terrace to a small shed attached to Georgia’s kitchen. The grandmother kept talking and pointing. Georgia nodded. It was all pretty clear, though the accompanying mime saved her. So far, she’d only mastered “hello,” “goodbye,” “thank you,” and “grandmother.”
The delivery guys were using numbers now, but Georgia couldn’t follow, so they pulled out some paper and wrote the won sign and seven hundred and forty thousand beside it. Georgia gasped. She showed them the four hundred thousand Mr. Yung had given her and held out her hands in the luckless universal gesture of “I have nothing else; I’m cleaned out.” They asked her questions she couldn’t understand. Grandmother was telling them something, then told Georgia something. The men were discussing the oil and looking back wistfully at the hose they’d dragged through the gate, up the concrete steps, and along the terrace, as if all was for naught. They looked suspiciously at the inadequate cash Georgia offered them, tsking and head-shaking. They were at a stalemate of incomprehension. The ensuing events were a great mystery to them all. They stared and shifted their feet. They stood around hoping for a solution to the riddle of the oil, fraught with a language barrier and the insufficient payment.
Finally, Georgia motioned to the school, miming herself running over there and returning. So, she ran over and returned empty-handed after finding the classes and offices empty. This seemed deeply baffling to them, but she was on the right track and pointed to the cellphone in the delivery man’s hand. She called Mr. Yung. His wife answered, or maybe it was his daughter, but a woman’s voice was either telling Georgia that Mr. Yung wasn’t home, or she didn’t know what Georgia wanted, or the whole moon landing was a hoax, for that matter, because Georgia couldn’t understand a single thing she was saying. The oil guy took the phone. They had a long discussion. Grandmother listened nearby, nodding in concern. The oil man hung up and gestured that they’d be back the next day.
And then they were gone.
* * *
Grandmother continued to hurriedly talk to Georgia, pulling her into the kitchen and pointing at the gas stove. While she spoke, the blankets strapped to her back shifted a little and made a tiny noise. Through the swaddle, Georgia realized, a baby was blinking its eyes. Grandmother was a grandmother, or more likely a great-grandmother. Georgia guessed she must have been in her eighties or nineties. Georgia looked at her face while the ancient woman gestured and pointed, bombarding her with incomprehensible instructions. Deep, noble wrinkles circled her eyes and contoured her broad forehead. Lines sagged, V-shaped, at the corners of her mouth. She could have lived through the war, Georgia thought. Her mind must have carried countless memories; her steady eyes rinsed with images of pain and hunger Georgia couldn’t even imagine.
7
On the last day of the month, the ESL teachers were all summoned to the immigration office to fill out “alien registration” cards. Then they were driven to the education office. There was a speech by the Minister of Something. They were being thanked for their dedication to teaching. Georgia didn’t feel dedicated. She still felt disorganized and overwhelmed. She felt like she’d just bungee jumped out of a window and the cord was still unravelling. But she stood in a row and shook hands with the officials, and a secretary handed the teachers thick envelopes after they signed their initials on a columned sheet.
Then they were in the parking lot.
“It’s a whack of dosh,” Ray said. They all ripped the envelopes open and thumbed the pile of Korean bills arranged neatly inside. The school board had paid their first month in cash because no one had a bank account yet.
Georgia counted out what she owed Ray and handed it to him.
“Lose a bet?” Becca said.
It was the end of September. They stood in the sunshine.
“What now?” Georgia said.
“Dinner?”
“Drinks, definitely.”
Mick had already been studying his Korean, so once in a taxi, he started showing off and talking to the driver, asking him questions. The driver understood and was impressed. Georgia felt jealous, inadequate and unconnected.
Mick turned to everyone in the taxi with a big grin slathered across his mug.
“Okay kids, the driver’s going to take us to a really good Korean restaurant. I asked him for something special. Special, yeah?” he said to the driver.
The driver gave them a thumbs-up and said, “Teuk-byeol-han.”
“That means special.”
The restaurant was marked with a wood-carved sign above a bamboo archway. It served bulgogi. The marinated beef came to the table in strips. There were fat cloves of garlic. Everything was grilled at the table, where the group sat on low wooden benches.
The beer and soju went around. Georgia abstained, sipping juice.
“There’s close to three million won in there,” Ray said, gesturing to his school folder, where he’d put his envelope. He made a quick conversion in his head. “Between the four of us, we’re sitting here with something like seven thousand pounds.”
“Twelve thousand dollars,” Georgia said.
“It’s a fucking heist,” Mick said. “Dinner’s on me. You lot get the beers later.”
The bill arrived on a bamboo tray, weighed down by four peppermints. Mick threw down a fistful of cash.
They felt stupid in their work clothes. They were a shabby squad of blazers, dress shirts, heels and matching skirts.
“It’s not right,” Becca said. “How do I cut loose in this clobber?”
They’d moved on to a hof bar. Georgia walked with Becca. They talked about their first weeks at school. The different classes. The good students. The “little shits” Becca said affectionately.
Georgia could hear Ray telling Mick the story of their drink-and-dash: “And we’re legging it down the street, the woman’s come outside, screaming at us. I’m looking around like, what just happened . . .?”
They were all laughing, but she could see Ray was anxious about something. Standing at the bar, Georgia thanked him again for the money he’d lent her.
“Listen, are you pissed at me?” she said.
