There had been numbing sluggishness to the prison behind her; a dangerousness, a dangerousness that was both routine and petrifying. That same sluggishness was in Jamal’s appearance at the visiting booth. It had been in the waiting room with the reception guard, who seemed chronically skeptical of all who entered; chronically hateful. Why Jamal put her through this, she didn’t know. Why, indeed, he put himself through it, let alone her.
She hurtled through the upscale region of High Park, the old British-style houses. The people who must inhabit these with their neat little lives made her sicker to her stomach than usual because she’d just left her brother. The cute expensive stores, the carapace of wealth, seemed unaffected by her lit body. The handlebars of the bike were like her own bones, and like her bones she bent the brace toward the park itself. Perhaps there she might burn off the pace of her legs up the inclines and through the trees. But she was out of the park before she knew it. The trees held nothing. The manicured circle of flowers, the false oasis of the park, only made her sicker. Before long she was out on Bloor Street again, speeding east toward the centre of the city, flinging herself through the lights at Keele and bending southward to the lake; the bellowing horn and pneumatic brake of an eighteen-wheeler flinched her sinuous back, but she didn’t stop for the trucker yelling curses at her. She left the drama of the shocked driver and skewered traffic behind. If she could stop, she would have, but she was light and light moves.
Her stomach always made a knot when Jamal was near. He was eighteen, for God’s sake. Why couldn’t he take care of himself yet? Why did he expect her to come to his rescue always? And why was there this uncontrollable urge in her, this frantic nervousness where he was concerned, as if she had to prevent him from falling, to look out for him as one would a baby with a baby’s recklessness?
She was suddenly aware of music. It confused her until she remembered that she had clamped the small earplugs of her CD player in her ears and turned it on as soon as she’d left the building. Oku had lent her Dizzy Gillespie’s “Take It as It Comes.” The zephyrs of trumpets and saxophones streamed into her at Dundas Street. Out of the horns she sensed the lake and sped down to Roncesvalles. Ordinarily the bike would bump across the streetcar lines, but today she didn’t feel them, she was slipping through the city on light. She rode along the shore, feeling translucent. The sun was on the lake, turning its usual muddiness to a pearly blue stretching south and wide. Carla raised her back from its hunch, felt a small hopeful breeze.
“How could you let other people handle you like that and run your life every minute of the day, Jamal?”
They’d been sitting uncomfortably across from each other, a Plexiglas wall separating them.
“Handle me? Nobody’s not handling me.” He had misunderstood her, thinking she’d meant sexually. “Ghost, them call me in here, you know, Carla! Ghost. You think me a batty man! Batty man in here ’fraid me, you know!”
He pulled the neck of his grey issue aside, showing her a rough, ugly branded G on his breast under his left shoulder blade. Not a tattoo, but a brand rising in an unhealed keloid. It was a furious-looking red, parts of it still oozing. She suppressed a gasp. His face formed the mask of the brother she did not know. The brother trying to be someone she could not recognize. She didn’t know why he insisted on speaking in this accent. Something he’d picked up with his friends on the street. He did it to assume badness. She was angry whenever he used it on her, as if she didn’t know him, as if she had not practically grown him.
“You don’t get it, you don’t get it at all, do you? What’s the point?”
“Cho to blow!” he said, trying to impress the fellow prisoner in the booth beside him. “Me nah ’fraid nutten, Carla!”
All their conversations in the last few years were conversations of deliberate misunderstanding, it seemed. She couldn’t speak to him clearly or reach him in any way, and he seemed to misunderstand her on purpose.
“Do you realize where you are again? And I can’t get you out this time. Carjacking, Jamal! What’s going to happen now? You tell me.” She knew she was pronouncing every word, denying his newfound accent. She wanted to bring him back from the dreamworld he seemed to be in. “They won’t let me bail you. And he’s not answering his phone. So now what?”
“Him pussy! Me ask he for anything?”
“He” was how they both referred to their father outside of his presence, ever since they were small. “She” for Nadine, though Nadine had in effect been Jamal’s mother. Carla referred to her as “she,” and Jamal, as he grew older,
