Pacifique, page 1
Pacifique
Sarah L. Taggart
Coach House Books, Toronto
copyright © Sarah L. Taggart, 2022
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Pacifique / Sarah L. Taggart.
Names: Taggart, Sarah L., author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220199442 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220199450 | ISBN 9781552454473 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770567320 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781770567337 (PDF)
Classification: LCC PS8639.A325 P33 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Pacifique is available as an ebook: ISBN 9781770567320 (EPUB), 978177056733 7 (PDF)
Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email sales@chbooks.com with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)
This book is dedicated to my uncle Douglas Murray (1948–2013), my advocate, my biggest fan, and to all the inmates – past, present, and future – of the Eric Martin Pavilion and places like it. May you find peace.
Prologue
Names for things come in fits. Light. No light. Light. Sky. Blue. The sky is blue. Sun. A twig at the corner of her vision. A branch. A tree. Overhead. A self, a body. Her. On her back, looking at the sky. Another twig. No. A pole, a metal pole, a street lamp. A street.
A man. Wearing dark blue. Navy. A uniform. A thick moustache, a mouthful of clean white teeth. And the eyes: determined, certain. Not friendly, not someone she knows. But safe.
‘Oh shit oh shit.’
Words tumble out, an unfamiliar staccato in her ears. Then, other sounds. Mumbling. An engine rumbling. The smell of it. Diesel.
‘Oh shit. Sorry.’
Not a cloud in that unending blue above her, just a slew of them in her brain. Where her brain should be. Real words don’t come.
‘Oh shit. Sorry. Sorry I’m swearing.’
Something. What. What happened?
‘Be still, miss. You’ve had an accident.’
Gravity pulls on her as Moustache Man heaves. She’s on a board. The board is rising into the air. A second person, unseen, lifts at her feet. A chill breeze tickles behind her ear. Into the rumbling van. An ambulance. Warm. Her temple hits the plastic encasing her head.
– thinking back later, she’ll think she thought, This is what dying feels like. Am I dying? Have I died? Then she’ll remember there was no thinking, no thoughts in her brain, her brain instead a cavern so big and so wide and so dark that nothing could get in or out of it –
Who. Where. Where is she?
‘Where’s Pacifique?’
They slide the board out from under her. She’s on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance. The other uniformed entity comes into view, a woman, blond ponytail high and glossy, swinging like a child’s.
Moustache fiddles with something out of sight. ‘Pardon, sweetheart?’
‘Pacifique. I was with Pacifique.’
Her lover. Her feet pressing pedals. A bicycle. Laughter behind her. Pacifique on another bike. The memory spirals into obscurity. She chases it. Everything above her neck starts to ache.
‘Pacifique.’
‘I’m sorry, dear, I’m not sure.’ He looks across the stretcher at Ponytail.
The van rocks as the paramedic steps onto the asphalt.
‘I think you’ve got a broken bone in that shoulder,’ says the man. ‘You hit your head pretty good so I’ve got you immobilized. They’ll X-ray you at the hospital.’
The words make sense individually, but the story is lost on her.
‘You’ll be all right,’ he says, as if he understands her confusion. He pats her thigh –
– thinking back, she’ll put a memory here: when she was six she broke her collarbone for the first time. She had barely started school, late summer, early frost on the big playground reserved for the upper grades. At recess, she fell. Off the slanting bridge, two squared-off two-by-fours glued together, two chains wrapped in thick plastic for handrails, the whole thing in retrospect an accident waiting to happen, and it did, she slipped and fell onto the bridge, stomach pressed into the cold wood, staring at the gravel below. If I don’t move, I’ll be fine, she thought, and she didn’t move until she did, thanks to gravity, and hit the earth shoulder-neck first. She doesn’t remember making contact or even the pain that happened after. Someone came to help, she doesn’t remember who. Then she was in Mr. Carrot’s office sitting on a hard wooden chair like they have in schools from the past, both arms straight at her sides, locked at the elbow, holding the bottom of the chair, the only way to pause the pain. Mr. Carrot’s name wasn’t Carrot, it was Kerrick, but with a name like that you were asking to be called Mr. Carrot and some kids couldn’t pronounce names right anyway. She sat immobile and straight-armed until her mom came. She doesn’t remember that part either, it could have been her dad, she doesn’t remember the drive to the hospital, maybe it hurt too much. She does remember her father helping her dress in the mornings, the button-up shirts, each arm slowly guided through the sleeves, and then in reverse at bedtime, the stiff lying back in bed –
‘I asked but no, nobody. Nobody else was here,’ says a voice near her feet. Ponytail.
She jerks and doesn’t get anywhere, everything strapped. She shrieks as a knife blade of pain rips through her shoulder.
‘Careful!’ Moustache lays an arm across her torso, pressing her back into the stretcher. ‘You were alone, sweetheart. The person who called us, she says you were alone.’
Part 1
Chapter 1
They met in February. One day mid-month, after daffodils had already appeared on lawns, it grew cold. Colder than it had been in many winters. It rarely snowed in this temperate and coastal British Columbian city. People stayed home, scared of the ice and the wet snow that locked itself around car tires, weighed down power lines.
One Tuesday night the transformer at the corner of Tia’s block blew. The light disappeared all at once and the power shut off with a soft pop. Surrounded by the sudden silence that comes with an outage, Tia chose not to dig out candles and instead ventured out into the hushed, frozen night. Her neighbours scurried about in their living rooms, huge shadow puppets huddled around kitchen tables set with small flames. She could barely make out the prints her shoes made in the snow, couldn’t discern where sidewalk became boulevard, where boulevard became street. She looked for the moon. A sense of it blurred behind the tall maples that lined the road. It glowed small, a tiny crescent obscured by heavy clouds. Nothing to light the path ahead of her save for memory and, eventually, the rods in her eyes working overtime in the darkness. She didn’t know where she was going. She was supposed to stay in, study massage therapy texts, memorize names: scalene, trapezoid, pectoralis minor. A body of fibres, sinew, and bone taking shape and making sense under her hands. She knew she wasn’t dressed right, curled her toes in her sneakers against the numbness seeping in despite wool socks.
She was headed toward the ocean; in this part of Victoria, the sea encroached on three sides. She thought frozen even though the better part of her brain knew the harbour wouldn’t flatten into a skating rink at a few degrees below zero.
Power returned sporadically after a few blocks. Street lights cast a hesitant glow that did not reach the sidewalk. Each one ringed by a halo of frozen air, a row of moon dogs parading down the street. The businesses below remained dark. Some restaurants were serving by candlelight. The few people exploring the streets were indiscernible. Tia looked for someone familiar, waiting for a smile she could return. Each face lay in shadow. She looked away and watched her step. Shivered.
She arrived at Bastion Square around eight. The square slanted on its journey toward Wharf Street, and the stones were slick. She slowed as she approached the stairs and the plaza below, where in the summer the man with the acoustic guitar played the same cover songs over and over. Tonight, it was empty. No music. Only the dim clatter of forks on plates from the Italian restaurant on the northwest corner of the square. Distracted, Tia squinted at the restaurant, wondering if they had electricity to cook pasta. The thought of warm noodles made her stomach grumble. She reached for the railing, found nothing, and slipped. The impact reverberated up her spine. Her skull tingled. Something about childhood spankings living forever in memory, the violation of being struck on the backside. Shame laced its rosy heat across her cheeks; disorientation threaded fog through her brain. She remembered the old woman who fell on these steps the summer before, the pattern of blood on her white hair. Tia reached for the back of her skull.
A hand in a white glove. Clear and bright in that otherwise fuzzy, gauzy space. A glove of creamy leather, mother-of-pearl buttons from base of thumb to wrist.
Tia would remember the buttons. This strange, snowy evening would become but a distant, dizzying dream and, weeks later, she would go searching for the gloves, quizzing shopkeepers, trying to find the store that sold them.
The woman wearing the glove kneeled and looked into Tia’s face, her eyes wide and almost purple in the faded orange light of the square.
‘Here,’ she said. The r not a hard Canadian r, something softer, the word falling off at the end. She gestured with the outstretched hand and Tia took it. She placed her other glove against Tia’s lower back, a firm, unselfconscious pillar for Tia to lean against as she scrabbled to her feet.
She brushed snow from the backs of her legs with one hand and clutched the stranger’s with the other.
The woman’s bare head was piled with thick, dark curls, pinned at the crown and falling long over her shoulders and down her back. She wore all black: coat, stockings, heeled boots wholly impractical in this weather, although she was as solid on her feet as Tia wasn’t. All black save for an ivory scarf – silk? – snug around her throat, and the gloves.
Tia tried to voice a thank you. A sly and invisible hand dipped into her jeans. A tickling along inner thigh, heat burgeoning between her legs. Her balance faltered, again. The woman would not look away. Her skin smooth and untouched, her age unknowable, cheeks lightly flushed. From cold? A suggestion of a smile twitched at one corner of the lipsticked mouth. Red like Okanagan cherries, the colour of a fresh bruise. Lids enhanced with liner – no, kohl, the edges smudged. One brow a boomerang, the eyes still fairy-tale purple in the obscurity of night.
Nothing about her obscured, Tia will recall later. Her face as well-lit as if she’d been standing in full moonlight.
‘Let’s get a drink. I know a place,’ said the woman.
‘Yes,’ Tia said, before the woman’s words were properly formed in the snow-speckled air.
‘Do you need a hand with the stairs?’
Tia realized she’d fallen on the cobblestones leading to the steps. She hadn’t even made it to the treacherous part.
‘I think I do,’ she said with a small laugh. Her solar plexus relaxed.
The stranger offered her glove and Tia took it. Heat leached into her fingers as if the leather flowed with the woman’s own blood. Tia stole a glance from her companion to find the railing, and together they descended. The square echoed with their steps, Tia’s breath, the rasp of her denimed thighs meeting, the sound of a heart pumping, fast like a train gathering speed.
She watched her feet cut a swath through the soggy snow, tunnel vision collapsing her world into a tiny space where only she and the stranger existed. She felt her hand grow hot in the mitt locked in the glove. The woman pulled left and they descended a dark staircase toward a soft neon glow blinking at the bottom.
The neon was a sign burning over a towering, sleek black door untouched by a doorknob, a window, or any markings. Nightclub blazed, on and off, in luminescent blue. Ahead, a sidewalk snaked along the side of the building. Several dozen people appeared to materialize on the pavement, waiting in line in the shadows. Tia stepped closer to her guide. They didn’t join the queue; instead, the woman led her past the looming bouncer with a light wave of her white glove and pushed open the door.
Tia was pulled through the doorway. Darkness and the booming bass of electronic music fell over them like a shroud.
The plain exterior and small, hidden staircase belied a cavernous space. Tia felt like she was floating, surrounded by so much blackness. Ceilings at least thirty feet high, a catwalk along the perimeter. Dark walls, ceiling, floor, everything, as far as Tia could tell in the low, strobing light.
Why have I never been here? she wondered.
The woman put a gloved finger to her lips. With the same finger, she pointed to a trio of figures under spotlights. They stood on a raised platform at the far end of the club and wore period costumes – two women in gowns with generous bustles, a man in breeches. Tia caught snatches of their conversation as they approached. No, not a conversation, their lines. A play.
‘A creature of the night, madam,’ shouted the man over the music. His velvet pants fit snugly over lean glutes, bulky quadriceps. His forehead shone with sweat. ‘A vampire. That is what I am.’
The women tittered.
Tia’s companion looked over her shoulder. ‘I’ve seen this one,’ she said in a stage whisper, grinning wide. Her lipstick looked black in the steep shadow cast by the stage lights.
All of a sudden, Tia felt herself float away. She saw the woman’s bright teeth, tinged purple by the black light, and the slightly stooped blond woman who was herself, the pair of them beautiful here in this moment. The grinning woman turned away, back to the play, and the dizzying moment passed. Tia was once again in her body, which tingled with nerves and moisture in the close, warm room.
‘Sir, we’re ignorant ladies,’ said a woman onstage, stepping forward. ‘We know not what a vampire is. A creature of the night. Won’t you… show us?’
This time the audience tittered.
The second woman glided to her friend. The bustle of her periwinkle-blue dress bobbed behind her. ‘Yes, won’t you?’
A man in the audience let out a deep, rumbling chortle; the woman winked in his direction. The lights dropped. The spectators erupted in applause, a contagious enthusiasm. Tia brought two fingers to her mouth and whistled.
In the next moment, pounding bass returned to the quiet corner, dispersing the crowd. They milled around Tia, cutting her off from the person who’d brought her here. A woman with black-and-red dreads sprouting from her head like vines, a man wearing only pleather shorts and running shoes, a towering drag queen in four-inch heels. Her bare bicep brushed Tia’s shoulder. Tia was startled by the damp heat of it.
The dark-haired stranger darted through the throng and grabbed Tia’s mittened hand. ‘That’s one of my favourites. You’ll have to see the whole thing sometime.’
She led Tia through the crowd into the opposite corner of the club, where a steep steel staircase better suited to a construction site climbed toward the catwalk. The steps shuddered, the rough surface digging into the soft soles of Tia’s sneakers. The catwalk hovered some twenty feet above the dance floor. The din faded by a handful of decibels; the bodies below pulsed as a single entity, staccato in the flickering light.
The woman let go of Tia and, without a word, disappeared. Tia stopped, spun around. The catwalk leading back to the stairs was empty. Had she fallen? Tia peered over the edge of the railing, then swiftly pulled back, the nausea of vertigo crawling up her throat. She turned around again. No one. Then, emerging from the wall, the white glove. Tia grabbed it.
The woman pulled her through a gap in the wall, a doorway, and then a curtain of heavy velvet. The music fell away into a distant, muted bass line. They stood in an empty, better-lit room. Persian rugs hung on the walls. The carpet was soft, plush, deep carmine. A black leather bench ran along the walls on all four sides.
‘It’s a bit of a silly room,’ said the woman.
Yes, that was the word for it. Silly.
‘But it’s quiet.’
The woman, finally visible in the steadier light of the silly room, turned to Tia and took off her right glove.
‘I’m Pacifique,’ she said, holding out a hand.
‘Pacifique,’ Tia repeated, imagining the unending expanse of the ocean. She took the offered hand.
Pacifique held Tia’s wrist and with her other hand removed the mitten. She pulled Tia’s fingers to her mouth and pressed her lips to Tia’s knuckles. Left them there for a moment.
Before she pulled away, something flashed, peeking under the edge of her scarf: bright white skin, mottled, where the neck curved into shoulder. Then gone. A trick of the light.
Let me take a look at you, Tia wanted to whisper. Should she? Is this a date? Tia didn’t know what a date with a woman was supposed to feel like. She’d certainly never been on a date like this.
‘Let’s sit,’ Tia suggested. As soon as she sat she regretted it; the leather benches proved firmer than they appeared and a lightning strike of pain travelled from coccyx to skull.
‘You must have hit the ground pretty hard,’ said Pacifique. That same soft smile played at the corner of her mouth.
At first glance, Pacifique was a beautiful woman. On second, maybe a shade too different to be beautiful. Stunning. The quality that gets you on movie screens, in magazines, makes people turn in the street. It wasn’t just her face. It was that tiny figure, maybe five feet, though her spike heels made it hard to be sure, and those raven curls. A surprising constellation of orange freckles speckled her nose.
