Redhill Bellevue Square

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-0-85730-268-7
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Winner of the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jean Mason has a doppelganger. She's never seen her, but others* swear they have. *others | noun. A peculiar collection of drug addicts, scam artists, philanthropists, philosophers and vagrants - the regulars of Bellevue Square. Jean lives in downtown Toronto with her husband and two kids. The proud owner of a thriving bookstore, she doesn't rattle easily - not like she used to. But after two of her customers insist they've seen her double, Jean decides to investigate. Curiosity grows to obsession and soon Jean's concerns shift from the identity of the woman, to her very own. Funny, dark and surprising, Bellevue Square takes readers down the existentialist rabbit hole and asks the question: what happens when the sense you've made of things stops making sense?

Michael Redhill is the author of nine novels including Consolation, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Martin Sloane, a finalist for the Giller Prize, Canada's most prestigious book award which he won with Bellevue Square. He's written a novel for young adults, four collections of poetry and two plays, including the internationally celebrated Goodness. He also writes a series of crime novels under the name Inger Ash Wolfe, one of which, The Calling, was made in to a feature film starring Susan Sarandon. Michael lives in Toronto.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Redhill, Michael

Leseproben

in the spring of 2014, I chose a location for Bookshop out on the revamped part of Dundas Street around the top of Trinity Bellwoods Park. I saw coffee shops springing up and decided to cast my lot. Now we have artisanal cheese shops, a pet store, and some good restaurants. And Ossington Avenue. Ten years ago the only nightlife on Ossington was drive-by shootings. Now you can get Italian shoes and chocolate for wine tastings.

We’re only in Toronto by a lucky stroke. If not for Ian having had some good fortune playing marijuana stocks on the TSE (husband: ‘Skill!’), I’d still be working at the college in Port Dundas; he’d still be in the Ontario Police Services. We’d all be back in that quiet, safe little town. But as my ex-cop likes to say, ‘I smelled the coffee on the wall.’ The country was going to legalize pot. He’d busted some growers in Westmuir so many times he’d become friends with them, and some were liquidating in the lead-up to legalization to buy stocks instead of plants. Ian didn’t warn me that he was retiring and putting all of our savings into stocks with names like Gemini Pharma and GreenCo. Luckily for him and us, it was a good bet, although I was furious not to be consulted.

Every place you live has its own rhythms, and it can take a while to get used to it or fit in. After two years, I was still decoding Toronto, and I certainly knew what Katerina was talking about – the friendly coldness of Torontonians – but many things about the city were becoming clearer. Torontonians wanted to get on with it, but they were generally courteous. If someone let you into a car lane, for instance, you were expected to wave with casual gratitude, like you expected it, but thank you anyway. Toronto’s panhandlers say thank you when you give money, and also when you say ‘Sorry.’ In fact ‘Sorry, thank you,’ may be the most common exchange between citizens. Toronto’s reputation when I lived outside it was that it was a steely, arrogant place without a heart, but now I see it likes outsiders and it draws on a deep spring of weirdness. Maybe that’s the source Katerina came from.

I dwelled for a while on these two encounters in my shop and then, to satisfy my curiosity (or to have my gullibility further tapped), one day mid-month I closed the store early and went down to the market. Apart from our move, nothing as interesting as Katerina and her Ingrid had happened to me in a long time. I planned to keep the whole thing to myself, because Ian is a worrier and this was only a lark. Who wouldn’t want to know what was going on? And a part of me was thinking: what if this turns out to be a good story?

May was on its way, thank god. We were getting inoculations of sun. Winter here arrives, stays, persists, goes away a little, then comes back and people start leaping off the bridges. That’s approximately March, when jumping is at its apogee, but even then, winter isn’t over. What it likes to do is go away for a week in April and then return for three days and finish grandpa off.

Katerina hadn’t said where she worked, but Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market was crowded with Mexican, Chilean, Middle Eastern, and Portuguese businesses. I looked for her in all of them. The last time I’d been in the market – years ago – its identity as a countercultural space had already been scrubbed clean. It was a hodgepodge now, but something was happening: it was young like it had once been, the coffee was excellent, and I saw a couple of restaurants I’d risk eating in. The smell of weed hung in the air, advertising the dozen or so medical marijuana dispensaries that had appeared since the Liberals were elected.

No matter your approach, once you crossed College Street or Spadina Avenue or Dundas, you were somewhere else when you entered Kensington Market. It’s like if I cross the Canadian border in my car, I know I’m in the United States. Even before the signs for Cracker Barrel come up, I’m feeling hustled. Kensington Market’s energy was hustle too, plus bustle, a lot of movement right in front of your eyes, and a shudder or rattle behind it. Countercultural, but bloody and raw. The organic butcher beside a row of dry-goods shops offered, in one window, white-and-red animal skulls with bulbous dead eyes, and in the other, closely trimmed racks of lamb and venison filets, displayed overlapping each other like roofing tiles. Then some stranger rustles past with blood on his cheeks.

There was no sight of Katerina on Baldwin Avenue, either. It had been about a week since she’d appeared in my store, and I wasn’t entirely sure I remembered what she looked like. I’ve had this problem before. When I first meet someone, my mind must be busy noting other details, because I don’t always register what they look like. Sometimes I even forget the faces of people I know. There have been times when I haven’t been able to bring my own sister’s face to mind. Not even if I look at one of the few pictures I have of her. I’ll look away from her image and close my eyes, but she won’t be there.

Katerina was not on the lower part of Augusta Avenue. I looped back and forth over the street, going into a fish and chips shop, a vegetarian wok spot, the coffee corner, and looking at the people behind the counters, sometimes searching their faces as if a person I spent ten minutes with not very long ago could change that much. On Augusta I crossed with throngs of every station back and forth and back over the street.

I found her at last, working a flattop in a Latin American food court. The only sign over the entrance said CHURROS CHURROS CHURROS. Seven or eight food stalls went back inside the narrow space. In the front window, an elderly man squirted batter into a decapitated three-gallon jerry can of boiling oil. Brand name Cajun Injector.

‘How are you!’ Katerina came around her counter to hug me. I stiffened in her embrace. ‘Are you okay? I worried about you, you know.’

‘About me?’

‘Of course! Come in the back, I make a coffee.’ She ushered me toward the rear of the food mall more quickly than necessary, I thought. I smelled coconut and coriander as we went past the stalls. ‘Miguel won’t be happy to see you after what you did.’

‘What I did?’

‘Yeah! Did you go to the doctor?’

She walked into my back.

‘Katerina,’ I said, ‘I’m Jean. Who do you think I am?’

‘Jean!’ she said. ‘So stupid of me. You are the other one!’ She admired me. ‘Incredible.’

‘I’m the other one now?’

‘I thought you didn’t believe.’

‘I don’t know what I’m not believing in. What did Ingrid do? Why did she have to see a doctor?’

Katerina showed me to the patio. ‘We talk out here. Are you hungry? I have to look busy a couple minutes.’

‘I’m not hungry. Just hurry.’

‘Go sit.’

I hesitated, or resisted, but then I obeyed. At the back of the building, a red rusted VW Bug stood on blocks, and behind it, in a garage partially closed off by tarps, I heard voices and smelled weed again.

In one of the chairs, my legs sprawled out in front of me, I laid my head back and closed my eyes. Now I felt stupid. I was almost certain that Katerina wasn’t a threat, but between her and Mr Ronan – who had not returned to the shop – I probably should have started to get a little suspicious. Something was definitely wrong, but what? When I opened my eyes, the clouds had amphibious underbellies and were ringed in a menacing shade of grey. I leaned forward and looked into the food mall, but it was too bright to see in.

I got up and left the patio. This was foolish. I walked partway back to Augusta Avenue along the alley and stopped. I stood with my back against the wall. I imagined I could feel the graffiti skirling out in twisted bands behind my shirt like tentacles of smoke.

‘You want to eat in the alley?’ Katerina said. She stood at the edge of the patio with a styrofoam plate of food in her hands. I returned to the table. I didn’t know it yet, but by returning to the patio instead of walking away, I had sealed Katerina’s fate.

She put the plate down in front of me with an orange Jarritos. There was an albino hamburger on the plate that smelled the way my grandmother’s kitchen sometimes smelled: of comfort. ‘This is called the pupusa,’ she told me. ‘You eat it with your hands. Like a sandwich. Go on,’ she said, ‘eat it.’ I tried to figure out how to pick it up. ‘And because you weren’t listening the first time, I will tell you again about the Llorona and the Sayona.’

‘It’s not necessary,’ I told her, but the moment I’d taken a bite of her pupusa, I didn’t care anymore. Its scent was how it tasted. The shell contained a mixture of avocado, white cheese, corn, and a greeny-brown salsa that tasted like roasted tomatoes and garlic. The shell was made of white cornflour; the hot and crispy-hard surface perfectly burnt in a few places, and it was warm and bready on the inside. Katerina grinned at my pleasure, and I concluded that, at the very worst, she was only a nuisance.

‘So,’ she said. ‘My mother has told me I was visited by a Llorona myself. When I was a baby. An old woman was coming to the house one night to ask for a cigarette. My mother gave her one. The old woman comes back two more times, and she doesn’t want to be rude, my mother, so she brings her into our house. She makes her tea and the old woman tells she has a daughter my mother’s age and my mother feels warm toward her. After that, she comes and visit from time...