Hair-Trigger by Trevor Clark Page A

Impaired. Let’s just catch a streetcar.”
    â€œA streetcar ?” She looked at him as if he was joking. “I haven’t been on the TTC in ten years.”
    â€œThen it’s high time.”
    The tracks ran by ice cream parlors, confectioneries, bars and restaurants with closed patios. The stores dealing in roller blades and wind surfing were probably dead in the daytime now that it was off-season for the beach and boardwalk. The tourists were gone. The nights continued to get cooler.
    There were only a few people on the streetcar. West, past Woodbine, the neighbourhood near the torn-down racetrack was fairly barren until the brief oasis of a mall and neon-lit kitchenware store renting out of a small building at the junction of Kingston Road, where the housing and businesses became increasingly poorer. They passed tattooists, hair stylists, donut shops, an adult video outlet, the odd used car lot, and fly-by-night operations with an occasional hand-painted sign.
    Sitting to the rear of the side doors, Rowe started kissing Bella. She still looked alright, but now he wasn’t sure why he’d thought she was younger. “How come I never saw you in that bar before?” she asked.
    â€œI haven’t been going there very long.”
    â€œIt’s not a bad place. Gone to bed with anybody there yet?”
    A trick question, but he was encouraged by her cockeyed expression. “Yeah, but it was a fluke. I bumped into this hammered woman I’d been talking to earlier, and said, ‘Shall we leave then?’ I was kidding, but she went, ‘All right,’ and we walked out the door.
    â€œShe lived in a building a little ways away, but when we got there she realized she didn’t have her keys. The front door was unlocked, but we spent about twenty minutes banging on her apartment for her twelve-year-old daughter to wake up and let us in. We were sitting on the stairs when the girl came in behind us. Turned out she had the keys, and was staying at a friend’s place where her mother was supposed to pick her up.”
    â€œGod.”
    â€œLater, I was lying in bed when she had to get up to go to the washroom. After she came back, the daughter—who hadn’t gone to sleep yet—stuck her head around the corner and saw me there, and started shouting, ‘Mother, I want to talk to you in the hall, right now ! Mother, come out here now .’ So she went out in her nightie, and I could hear the girl yelling, ‘Mother, what do you think you’re doing? You’re drunk, and you don’t even know him!’”
    â€œRoles were, like, reversed.”
    â€œYeah. She was still up watching TV at five when I had to sneak out past her.”
    â€œShit. You don’t have any kids, do you?”
    â€œâ€˜No. What about you?”
    â€œMarried twice, no kids.” Bella smiled, looking out the window. “Somehow I got away with writing children’s books, though. I was considered quite the freaking expert.”
    He put his arm around her. “How’d you get into that?”
    â€œA long time ago I got up the guts to take some stories I’d written to a publisher, and the vice president said, ‘These are the worst children’s stories I’ve ever read.’” She laughed. “I guess he figured I had talent but didn’t like the material, because he hired me to write this series on manners instead. I also wrote jacket copy and whatever else was required, you know, like this project called Questions Kids Ask , and then there was an encyclopedia . . . we had to sit around a boardroom and come up with over a thousand questions a five-year-old might ask, and would get pretty punchy late at night, starting out with, ‘Why is the grass green? Why is the sky blue?’ and end up with ‘Do chickens have lips?’ It was tough going in with a hangover and having to explain the mating habits of the duckbilled