The Killing Circle

have bad dreams.'

'That’s fine. Perhaps you could just share your name with us?'

'William,” he says, his voice rising slightly. 'My name is William.'

My turn.

I say my name aloud. The sound of those elementary syllables allows me to string together the point form brief on Patrick Rush. Father of a smart little boy lucky enough to take his mother’s looks. A journalist who has always felt that something was missing from his writing. (I almost say 'life” instead of 'writing', a near-slip that is as telling as one might think). A man who isn’t sure if he has something to say but who now feels he has to find out once and for all.

'Very good,” Conrad White says, a note of relief in his voice. 'I appreciate your being so frank. All of you. Under the circumstances, I think it only fair that I share with you who I am as well.'

Conrad White tells us that he has recently 'returned from exile'. A novelist and poet who was publishing in Toronto, back just before the cultural explosion of the late sixties that gave rise to a viable national literature. Or, as Conrad White puts it evenly (though no less bitterly), 'The days when writing in this country was practiced by unaffiliated individuals, before it took a turn toward the closed door, the favoured few, the tribalistic.' He carried on with his work, increasingly feeling like an outsider while some of his contemporaries did what was unimaginable among Canadian writers up to that point: they became famous. The same hippie poets and novelists that were in his classes at UofT and reading in the same coffee houses were now being published internationally, appearing as 'celebrity guests” on CBC quiz shows, receiving government grants.

But not Conrad White. He was working on a different animal altogether. Something he knew would not dovetail neatly with the preferred subject matters and stylistic modes of his successful cohorts. A novel of 'ugly revelations” that, once published, proved even more controversial than he’d anticipated. The writing community (as it had begun to regard itself) turned its back on him. Though he responded with critical counter-attacks in any journal or pamphlet that would have him, the rejection left him more brokenhearted than livid. It prompted his decision to live abroad. England, at first, before moving on to India, southeast Asia, Morocco. He had only returned to Toronto in the last year. Now he conducted writing workshops such as these to pay his rent.

'I say ’workshops’, but it would be more accurate to speak of them in the singular,” Conrad White says. 'For this is my first.'

Outside, the snow has stopped falling. Beneath our feet the bass thud from The Fukhouse’s speakers has begun to rattle the windows in their frames. From somewhere in the streets of the market, a madman screams.

Conrad White passes a bowl around to collect our weekly fee. Then he gives us our assignment for next week. A page of a work-in-progress. It needn’t be polished, it needn’t be the beginning. Just a page of something.

Class dismissed.

I fish around for my boots by the door. None of us speak on the way out. It’s like whatever has passed between us in the preceding hour never happened at all.

When I get to the street I start homeward without a glance back at the others, and in my head, there’s the conviction that I won’t return. And yet, even as I have this thought, I know that I will. Whether the Kensington Circle can help me find my story, or whether the story is the Kensington Circle itself, I have to know how it turns out.

3

Emmie has Wednesday mornings off, so it’s my day to work from home and look after Sam on my own. Just four years old and he sits up at the breakfast table, perusing the Business and Real Estate and International News sections right along with me. Though he can hardly understand a word of it, he puts on a stern face—just like his old man—as he licks his thumb to turn the grim pages.

As for me, I comb the classifieds to see if Conrad White’s ad is still running, but can’t find it anywhere. Perhaps he’s decided that the one group who assembled in his apartment the night before will be all that he can handle.

Sam pushes the Mutual Funds Special Report away from him with a rueful sigh.

'Dad? Can I watch TV?'

'Ten minutes.'

Sam retreats from the table and turns on a Japanimation robot laser war. I’m about to ask if he wouldn’t mind turning it down when a short piece in the City section catches my attention.

A missing person story. The victim (is one a 'victim” when only missing?) being one Carol Ulrich, who is presumed to have been forcibly taken from a neighbourhood playground. There were no witnesses to the abduction—including the woman’s son, who was on the swings at the time. Residents have been advised to be alert to any strangers 'acting in a stalking or otherwise suspicious manner'. While authorities continue their search for the woman, they admit to having no leads in the case. The story ends ominously with the police spokesperson stating that 'activity of this kind has been shown to indicate intent of repeated actions of a similar nature in the future'.

It’s the sort of creepy but sadly common item I would normally pass over. But what makes me read on to the end is that the neighbourhood in question is the one we live in. The playground where the woman was taken the same one where I take Sam.

'What are you doing, Daddy?'

Sam is standing at my side. That I’m also standing is something of a surprise. I look down to see my hands on the handle of the living room’s sliding door.

'I’m locking the door.'

'But we never lock that door.'

'We don’t?'

I peer through the glass at our snow-covered garden. Checking for footprints.

'Show’s over,” Sam says, pulling on my pant leg and pointing at the TV.

'Ten more minutes.'

As Sam runs off, I pull the dictaphone out of my pocket.

'Note to self,” I whisper. 'Buy padlock for back gate.'

It’s the weekend already, and Tuesday’s deadline requiring a page from my nonexistent workin-progress is fast approaching. I’ve made a couple stabs at something during the week, but the surroundings of either the Crypt at home or the cubicle at work have spooked any inspiration that might be waiting to show itself. I need to find the right space. A laptop of one’s own.

Once Tamara’s out-of-town sister, Stacey, has come by to take Sam and his cousins to see the dinosaurs at the museum, I hit the Starbucks around the corner. It’s a sunny Saturday, which means that, after noon, Queen Street will be clogged with shoppers and gawkers. But it’s only just turned ten, and the line-up isn’t yet out the door. I secure a table, pop the lid on my computer, and stare at a freshly created word-processing file. Except for the blinking cursor, a virgin screen of grey. Its purity stops me from touching the keys. The idea of typing a word on to it seems as crude as stepping outside and pissing into a snowbank. And the dentist office grind of the cappuccino machine is starting to get on my nerves. Not to mention the orders shouted back and forth between the barista kids behind the counter. Who wouldn’t raise their head to see what sort of person orders a venti decaf cap with half skim, half soy and extra whipped cream?

I pack up and walk crosstown to the Reference Library on Yonge. The main floor entrance is crowded, as it