We had one once, in a big old house on an isolated street, near the river that dragged in fog day after day after day. The attic was a spooky place, a place I remember being only 7 or 8 years old. It was a time, a smell, a taste, a haunt of a memory of a child who shovelled into the snow drifts, high into the frozen curbs of real people. But I never dared go there, not even doubled-dogged dared, because up the climb towards the darkness, the Dunta waited and he was not supposed to be real.
My dad was real though, connected to the union hall that prestigiously aligned its docks on Front Street, with promises of wealth and prosperity and unionized banter, the river was the only income for a young man with a young family, and he was lured as any father would be, as his father was, and probably his father.
The ocean smells like seaweed and dad came home everyday feather-brushed in it, mixed with charcoal dust, and he brought white bars of soap and dirty sack of laundry for mom to tend to. We liked dad's work because they had company parties with hired clowns and hotdogs and ice-cream and I had an answer to "what does your dad do?" I proudly responded "my dad's a coalminer" because this is what I thought he did, after listening to all those country songs he played, I just assumed. I eventually would learn he worked at a shipping port that loaded coal onto huge ocean freighters, destined to far, far away places, like the attic upstairs.
Moody Street was a good street, even though there were vampires and zombies and dead people and ghosts and the Dunta. Gramma and Grampa lived nearby on Royal Avenue and we had dinner there every Sunday. Grampa had a lot of sawdust in his shed, which made for easy cleanups when we kids puked up after such opulence. Royal Avenue was also a good street. This is where we went to school, at John Robson Elementary, just a stone's throw away from Grampa's wood chips and Clayton's General Store. I grew up in a block that would have survived a nuclear blast, with all the necessities of life and rumours, and judgement, and food and water.
My friend, who was a boy, Reggie, also lived on Royal Avenue, in "Boy's Block" and had presented me with a trinket of half of a heart, the other half which he kept, thus binding us forever. His mom was there, admiring our cuteness, and I wasn't sure what to do, so I hugged her. I think I lost my half after recess the next day and was too embarrassed to play with him without his token of unity. After all, I had given his mom a contractual hug.
I never cared much for jewelry. I still don't. We kids would rather play near the firehall and sneak into the smokestack, a place where my memory still struggles to coagulate; a long chimney where bats hung and slept and nested, to scare the crap out of kids who broke into the ash stained bricked walls of ancient firepits and cremations of once people. We'd stand in the center of the chimney, gazing upwards towards a shrinking spiral of light, smaller, and smaller, until we were no longer brave enough to withstand the hisses of bat cries, and falling bat poop, and mother yells for dinner.
Boy's Block was like that, a fearful place of hisses and police sirens and men, and bad men who gazed out of window frames all day long, who watched children as they played. Today, my recollection is it was just an apartment complex for cheap rent for women, for single women with child, for men with men, for bad men on prisoner's promise. For bad women and once people. It was for anyone desperate enough to live in a place like this and it's long corridors of doors, which was only one step up from Hell. And to think we only lived up one block from them, divided only by a grand cherry tree.
Then I felt awful about losing Reggie's heart half, a fee that must have dug into a savings meant to take them out of poverty, but reserved momentarily to charm me. Reg just disappeared one day, as did our neighbours, the Wong Family, who had a live-in gramma who prepared dinner by chopping off a chicken's head in the backyard, and we'd watch it run around in circles for a long time, a headless, silent chicken, making us somewhat dizzy in it's death. Then she hung the damn thing up on the clothes line, along the drying towels and laundry, such bizarre things at the Wong House, really, really, Wong.
Sort of like Farmer's Market, where mom shopped for fresh fruit and vegetables, yet it stunk like the Wong house, like pig's pee on hay with the familiar smell of dead chickens wallowing in the air. I hated that place because no one spoke kid, no one spoke fun. Then we'd end up at Army and Navy, another sort of stink, like rotten moth balls and dead cloth, harbouring the old hotdog vending machine on the ground floor, spinning the same weiners over and over again, wrinkled and dehydrated in mothball air.
I honestly can't remember my mom shopping in nice smelling places. This was the worst floor to shop on, with fish tackle, and tents, and army boots. Or we'd end up on the top floor, with all the linens and fabrics and clothes patterns. Rarely, did my mom shop in the middle floors, the fun floors full of toys and gadgets and the soft icecream vending machine. But, in retrospect, we were the best dressed kids at school and never missed days due to samonella or ecoli poisoning.
Mom was multi-talented, like Bewitched, but for real. She could whip up a blazer and pant combo on her sewing machine, have meat in the oven, and still prepare bath time, and laundry time, and once upon a time in the quiet of Moody Street, despite the lingering door to the attic. I knew it was there, it was just a matter of time.
And one day I did go there.
Sabrina grasped her daddy's neck in death grip, hard. She clung on, shivering in the dampness of August's last breath. Like summer had given up and forgotten there were children still playing in the park. Daddy walked her across the street towards her room of dolls and light, towards the safety and comfort and warm bath of mommy.
Something was wrong. She knew something was terribly, terribly wrong.
She was afraid to look. Her pupils avoided looking at us, as she attempted to steer them left, then right, then left, then up and down. She didn't want to go there anymore, to the neighbour's house for daycare. Sabrina's only 6 years old and doesn't know how to be afraid, she never lived near a smokestack, or lived near a Boy's Block. She doesn't know how to say, "my dad's a coalminer".
She can't communicate her being. Not like me, not like when I was six and knew every corner of Moody Street and how to survive it.
The doctors think it's phycological. One doctor went as far as to assess it was my fault because I had dropped her on her head when she was a baby. Another doctor concluded it was a nervous reaction to her being fondled and touched in her privates, and it's a natural, nervous reaction to not use your eyes anymore, to avoid seeing what happened.
No, but that's not what they called it at court. Or at the police station where we videotape her testimony, the one where I inconspicuously stand there and watch through a see-through mirror, like in the god-damned fucking movies, except, my little blonde haired girl is on the other side with the bad fucking guys, showing the undercover fucking cops where he touched her cunt.
And I can't breath anymore, the smoke stack has swallowed me up, taken me to the once people. They called it sexual touching or sexual interference, they can't make up their fucking minds what to call it. And I'm hoping Sabrina doesn't describe her private as a "cunt". Because I've used that word so many times before, please, oh please, Sabrina, remember to call it a vagina. It's a vagina. A vagina.
Sabrina remembers pretending to be like starfish. He asked her to spread her arms and legs and pose like one, and it only cost the removal of his sister from the room for 10 minutes, for 10 dollars.
And the sister would lie, protecting her stink of a teenaged brother with such conviction of family, a unity where the kids had to hide extra food under their beds, where the parents hid extra vodka shots from repeating guests. Their children knew how to avoid the attic, even when there wasn't one.
I tip-toe up the stairs. It's not dark, but it's not light either. The Dunta's up there, I know he is, and he's waiting to be captured. And I'm the only person on Earth who knows he needs to be caught, because if I didn't, there wouldn't be the safety of Sabrina's mom. There wouldn't be the safety of Sabrina's gramma, or grampa, or a happy ending, or a happy beginning, or a middle shopping floor. There would have been just stupid things of another person's stupid being.
Stupid things that just takes one breath, one pause, one step, one step at a time. Step back and breath deep, and drink, and drink and let the emptiness fill up with fog. Fog is good sometimes, especially the ones that recirculate onto itself.
I remember fog being a really good thing when I didn't have the answer and could fall asleep into denial and let the cherry tree defend me, or the sawdust cleanse me, or when I didn't have to be brave enough because they said Sabrina would forget all about it, being as young as she was.
I would awaken to tree full of presents, Christmas presents stuffing the living room, so full of all our heart's desires and dolls, and tea-sets and bicycles. And it's all in black and white, but I remember, I remember the glee and screams, as my sister and brother awoke to Christmas Day. Santa had come again, overnight, then disappeared into another a room, into the attic full of your beautiful art.
Full of mountain poses. You painted canvasses of sunrises, sunfalls, sunscapes, and rivers, trees, fallen skies, and hazel mists, rainbows, and ancient logs, happy streams, and happy colours, and lots of landscapes, and mountains.
Sabrina will eventually be diagnosed with an eye disease that come on by universal chance, a hereditary glitch, not by the suffering of her parent's injustices and sins. It just happens sometimes. It didn't happen because I made her eat hotdogs at the Army and Navy, or because I said swears, or because she was taken by a once people.
You see, the child who offended her, is now a once person to me....a nothing. And the doctors who treated her are nothing, the ones who pandered eight months of her life away to finally figuring out what was happening. That it wasn't in her mind, or her mom's mind, that doctor's are just people, not super humans, not even half-hearted caring ones, like Reggie.
They are far, far less than the monsters I once knew, and the ghosts and the vampires and dead people I was so afraid of, and the Dunta on Moody Street.
They are nothing,
and up in the secret attic, there's....
and I hope Sabrina forgets, because it seems I remember so much.
