He laid my arms across my chest, and covered my body from the chin down with a linen drape. He could barely believe I’d drowned as my face wasn’t bloated, nor my skin sullied. My high cheekbones and the shadows cast by the dim electric light gave the impression that I was smiling, and in that smile Laurent Tardieu sensed a secret, a hint of wisdom, or, more accurately, cynicism. It was this that prompted him to send his courier out with a letter for his nephew, an apprentice mouleur who worked in a model shop on the Left Bank that produced, among other things, death masks. His nephew had been failing to impress his master mouleurs and, though I wasn’t any sort of important person at all, Laurent Tardieu knew instinctively that my face – the smile, the beguilement, the youthfulness – was a good candidate for a striking mask. He also knew that, with every hour that passed, as the fluids in my body pooled with gravity, my face would sink deeper and deeper into the grotesque. He implored his courier to be quick.

39

Anouk

Toronto, 2000

Stories were easy enough to find in Toronto. And living with Nora after Red died, for the few months Anouk did live with Nora, hadn’t been so bad. There were trips to Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue on Sundays for dim sum. Coming home and snoozing together, while on TV the Blue Jays hit fly balls and spat brown geysers of chewing tobacco on to the dugout floor. The distant thwop of a baseball and the soporific voices of sports commentators.

There was the city dirt and the choke of exhaust and drivers getting nippy with each other. There was the woman with no teeth and eyes like snakebites who’d taken root in a pile of greasy sleeping bags in the recess of a garage door on Kingston Road. There were sleek glass buildings fingering the sky, buildings that burned at sunset, and there was the endless throng of Yonge Street, the head shops, Korean restaurants and Polish bakeries, and big trucks idling at red lights, and redundant corner stores and bargain book stores and squeegee kids in dirty sneakers, and hot chicken wings served with blue-cheese dip and celery sticks in wax-papered baskets at outdoor tables under the dapple of urban poplars, and in the parks downtown, amidst all of it, in the parks downtown, there were the tai chi people. Men and women, mostly Chinese, mostly old. In any weather. Swaying and firmly rooted like trees. There were open-air movies on towering inflatable screens in local parks on a summer Saturday night. Secret wine and takeaway pizza on picnic blankets. Toronto was good.

A white lilac tree grew in a neighbour’s front yard, across the street from Nora’s house. In the spring, Anouk and Nora made a stealth trip in the dark with sharp scissors and pilfered a few sprigs. Put them in a vase in the kitchen, and the whole house smelled of lilac until the blossoms browned and dropped to the table.