The Testaments(34)

“I’ll turn my back,” said Ada. There was no change room. I wriggled out of my school uniform and put on my new used clothes. My movements felt very slowed down. What if she was abducting me? I thought groggily. Abducting. It was what happened to girls who were smuggled and made into sex slaves—we’d learned about that at school. But girls like me didn’t get abducted, except sometimes by men posing as real estate salesmen who kept them locked in the basement. Sometimes men like that had women helping them. Was Ada one of those? What if her story about Melanie and Neil being blown up was a trick? Right now the two of them might be frantic because I hadn’t turned up. They might be calling the school or even the police, useless though they considered them.

Ada still had her back to me, but I sensed that if I even thought about making a break for it—out the side door of the Meeting House, for instance—she would know about it in advance. And supposing I ran, where could I go? The only place I wanted to go was home, but if Ada was telling the truth I shouldn’t go there. Anyway, if Ada was telling the truth it would no longer be my home because Melanie and Neil wouldn’t be in it. What would I do all by myself in an empty house?

“I’m done,” I said.

Ada turned around. “Not bad,” she said. She took off her black jacket and stuffed it into a carry bag, then put on a green jacket that was on the rack. Then she pinned up her hair and added sunglasses. “Hair down,” she told me, so I pulled off my scrunchie and shook my hair out. She found a pair of sunglasses for me: orange mirror ones. She handed me a lipstick, and I made myself a new red mouth.

“Look like a thug,” she said.

I didn’t know how, but I tried. I scowled, and pouted my lips that were covered in red wax.

“There,” she said. “You’d never know. Our secret is safe with us.”

What was our secret? That I no longer officially existed? Something like that.





22


We got into the grey van and drove for a while, with Ada paying close attention to the traffic behind us. Then we threaded through a maze of side streets, and pulled into a drive in front of a big old brownstone mansion. In the semicircle that might once have been a flower garden and even now had the remains of some tulips among the uncut grass and dandelions, there was a sign with a picture of a condo building.

“Where is this?” I said.

“Parkdale,” said Ada. I’d never been to Parkdale before, but I’d heard about it: some of the drug-head kids at school thought it was cool, which was what they said about decaying urban areas that were now re-gentrifying. There were a couple of trendy nightclubs in it, for those who wanted to lie about their age.

The mansion sat on a large scruffy lot with a couple of huge trees. Nobody had cleaned up the fallen leaves for a long time; a few stray rags of coloured plastic, red and silver, shone out from the drift of mulch.

Ada headed towards the house, glancing back to make sure I was following. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I felt a little dizzy. I walked behind her over the uneven paving; it felt spongy, as if my foot could go through it at any moment. The world was no longer solid and dependable, it was porous and deceptive. Anything could disappear. At the same time, everything I looked at was very clear. It was like one of those surrealist paintings we’d studied in school the year before. Melted clocks in the desert, solid but unreal.

Heavy stone steps led up to the front porch. It was framed by a stone archway with a name carved into it in the Celtic lettering you sometimes see on older buildings in Toronto—CARNARVON—surrounded by stone leaves and elvish faces; they were probably meant to be mischievous, but I found them malignant. Everything seemed malignant to me right then.

The porch smelled of cat piss. The door was wide and heavy, studded with black nailheads. The graffiti artists had been at work on it in red paint: that pointy writing they do, and another more legible word that might have been BARF.

Despite the slummy look of the door, the lock worked with a magnetic key fob. Inside was an old maroon hall carpet and a flight of broad stairs winding upwards, with beautiful curved banisters.

“It was a rooming house for a while,” said Ada. “Now it’s furnished apartments.”

“What was it at first?” I was leaning against the wall.

“A summer house,” said Ada. “Rich people. Let’s get you upstairs, you need to lie down.”

“What’s ‘Carnarvon’?” I was having a little trouble getting up the stairs.

“Welsh place,” said Ada. “Somebody must’ve been homesick.” She took my arm. “Come on, count the steps.” Home, I thought. I was going to start sniffling again. I tried not to.

We got to the top of the stairs. There was another heavy door, another fob lock. Inside was a front room with a sofa and two easy chairs and a coffee table and a dining table.

“There’s a bedroom for you,” said Ada, but I had no urge to see it. I fell onto the sofa. All of a sudden I had no strength; I didn’t think I could get up.

“You’re shivering again,” said Ada. “I’ll turn down the AC.” She brought a duvet from one of the bedrooms, a new one, white.

Everything in the room was realer than real. There was some kind of houseplant on the table, though it might have been plastic; it had rubbery, shiny leaves. The walls were covered with rose-coloured paper, with a darker design of trees. There were nail holes where there must have been pictures once. These details were so vivid they were almost shimmering, as if they were lit from behind.