“I thought Rick paid it,” Karen said, looking down at the smelly goo on her sneaker. Syd’s smell was suddenly still on her too, in spite of all the baths and showers she’d had in the interim. But there it unarguably was: the smell of lavender oil and alcohol and cheap cigarettes, intermingled with the smell of rotting papier mâché—a smell not entirely dissimilar to the smell of normally drying papier mâché but more sour, more vile, more loathsome, more Syd-like.
It was as if Syd’s hands were still under her shirt while she waited for Thelma to come home, while she waited for Syd to notice he was crazy and offensive and stop.
While she waited.
While the landlord stared at her, smelling that smell.
Karen finally said, “No, Rick didn’t give me the rent.” Greenies always said one shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about such bullshit, and the truth was, chronic divers were forever having their hydro cut off. Even in the rare instances when they had the money, they often forgot to pay.
Maybe welfare had found out she wasn’t at school much anymore. She’d been cut off and that was why there was no money for food. It wasn’t, as she’d thought, that Rick had spent it all on art supplies. Karen wasn’t sure. She stood there blankly looking at the landlord, just as she’d sat there blankly while Syd felt her up.
Neither moment had any intention of ending; worse yet, they were merging. Maybe they’d go away if she swore at them. Karen was tempted, but she didn’t. Both the landlord and Syd remained where they were. At least the landlord’s hands weren’t under her shirt.
The landlord stood staring at her goo-coated foot and then he turned around and shut the door on her in a final sort of way, more or less as she had done to her mother that night. Karen sat down on the unmade bed and cried. She was afraid of being charged with welfare fraud.
Perhaps she cried, then as now, because she hadn’t eaten or maybe because of the overpowering smell of mould and of Syd’s breath which still, even now, clung to her.
Mouldier even than the mould. They were given their eviction notice two days later.
Rick insisted Green Lady would fix things. She was magic, mistress of synchronicity, of providential solutions appearing as if out of nowhere to solve even seemingly insoluble problems.
“Why didn’t Lady help us before?” Karen dared to ask. “We’ve never seen her, not even once.” Green Lady was an aquatic goddess vision who appeared occasionally to divers. Rick and Karen had been waiting a long time. “Because we didn’t ask for her help before we dove,” Rick replied, the perfect logic of it creasing his face into a delighted elven grin.
Green Lady’s hair. There had been so much of it.
They’d gone walking after their dive, thinking they’d resurfaced and it was safe to do so, oddly not exhausted as was usual, and saw her hair emerging from the sewer grates. It was made of weeds. Living weeds, dead weeds, grass with clumps of mud in it, bits of stones and seashells and the tiny legs of crabs’ shed exoskeletons.
And really a lot of garbage.
Karen sat down on the street and plucked bits of broken glass and bits of Styrofoam, bits of plastic bags, bread tags and surprisingly many tiny oval fruit stickers out of the goddess’s hair. The Styrofoam was the worst. Of course it didn’t decompose, but why did it have to convert to pellet form? There were beads and beads and beads of it stuck in Green Lady’s rampant hair, flowing now, not just along the gutters but over the curb and along the street.
Karen sat there for what felt like hours, cleaning Lady’s hair. It felt like stringy mud in her fingers, muddy and slimy and maybe some of those clumps weren’t mud at all. Her hair was coming up, out of a storm grate, after all, and the recent storms had wreaked havoc with the city’s plumbing. Karen understood suddenly that the mould from the rotting carcass of orca and the smell of Syd’s breath and Syd putting his hands on her all stemmed from this simple undeniable fact: they hadn’t looked after Lady’s hair, hadn’t kept it clean.
Rick sat down beside her, crying and threading the condoms and syringes out of her hair, careful, so careful not to stick himself. In no time they had a big heap going. Rick doused it with lighter fluid. They burned it, burned all the garbage that had been stuck in Green Lady’s hair.
“Thank you for helping,” Karen said.
“I wouldn’t even have seen it, if you hadn’t pointed it out,” Rick said. “It was here all the time, her filthy hair. She was begging us to clean it for her. I’ve walked past it a million times and never even dreamt it was there. Maybe now my life can change.”
“How come we see the same thing at the same time, anyway?” Karen asked.
“That always happens on Green,” Rick said.
“But we resurfaced hours ago,” Karen said.
“Maybe this time it’s real,” Rick said, “Maybe it’s the next level.” He pointed at Lady’s hair, which, now it was clean, began to move, sparkling and shining and flowing down the sidewalk, an endless green wave, smelling of beauty and the sea.
They stood there, holding hands by the little fire of burning plastic that made a worse smell, Karen had to admit, than Syd’s breath and mouldy papier mâché put together. But at least they were getting rid of it at last, the pollution in Lady’s beautiful hair and in their own souls, it felt like. And then they heard sirens.
“Let’s go,” Rick said, and still holding hands they ran down alleyways only he knew. Hiding in the unused entryway of a brick building, they waited and waited for the cops to find them, but they didn’t.
The phone rang the second they got in the door to their basement flat. Rick talked for an hour. It was his friend Shadow, long distance from Toronto.
The Green thing was catching on. There were people who went dancing after they did Green. Green visionary art was needed to hang in the clubs. The sea creature sculptures were perfect. Shadow would introduce him to the club owners. But of course Rick was good. Shadow knew that. He’d always been talented. Those drawings he’d done in his binders at school instead of his chemistry; they’d been amazing: hauntingly beautiful and sad and masterfully drawn. “Greenstyle.” It was clothes too; maybe Karen could get into that, or she could work in Shadow’s gallery and clothing store, Green Magic. They could live upstairs.
Rick got off the phone and stared at Karen. “I told you so.”
“What, what, what?” Karen asked, and so Rick told her all of it.
“I told you Lady would fix it up,” he said, but not in a mean way, just as if he was a little boy who had finally met his fairy godmother.
My mother couldn’t take care of me properly. I couldn’t tell her about Syd. Thelma needed him too much and it was too weird, I just couldn’t voice it, and maybe Lady will be our mother now.
“It’s not even our mothers’ fault,” Rick said, “they did what they could, the world being what it is. Their own lives are so lost after all, lost from themselves, how could they mother us any better than they did?”
“You knew what I was thinking.”
“Lady makes that possible,” Rick said, it had to be admitted, a little smugly.
“I was so mad at Thelma for leaving me alone with him, for not noticing Syd was that kind of guy. She was so starved for anyone who’d be even a little nice to her. He rubbed her poor feet in real lavender oil,” and Karen started to cry.
“Yes, but now it doesn’t hurt so much anymore, does it?”
“That’s true,” Karen said, because it suddenly was. “Why?” she asked.
“Because we have a real mother now.”
All moments go on forever, Karen thought, not one of them ever ends, either the bad ones, or, more usefully, the good ones.