Hair-Trigger by Trevor Clark Page B

platypus or whatever. I knew I could make up almost anything and have kids believe me if I wrote it with authority.”
    â€œYou still write?”
    â€œNo . . . I went freelance after that for a while since the job had been just for the manners thing. They didn’t have any in-house writers.”
    Rowe hadn’t counted on an intellectual. “I guess they could tell you had breeding, to pick you to do manners.”
    â€œYeah. I turned into a fucking manners expert ,” she said. “After that I saw this ad in the paper for someone to teach etiquette classes for children, and phoned to tell them about these books I’d written, and got the job. It was at this institute that’d been started by these women who were already running a modeling agency. They decided to expand the courses to include subjects like, um . . . ‘Lifestyle Teaching.’
    â€œOne student’s mother was a columnist for the Sun , and thought my class was interesting enough to write about, and then another reporter followed up with a big story a few weeks later. I said that I’d come by my social graces early; while other parents were reading the usual bedtime stories to their kids, my mother was instructing us from, like, Emily Post. I said the class filled a gap in today’s society when you thought about all the families with two jobs, where the parents didn’t have time to teach their kids the ins and outs of etiquette, but still wanted them to know how to behave. Oh—and I told how there was this little girl who was always making fun of another kid’s hair, I think it was, so I took her aside and explained why it wasn’t nice to mock the way anyone looked. So, like, she was gazing into my face so attentively during my spiel, and when I asked her if she had any questions, she wanted to know why I had so many grey things in my teeth.”
    â€œPriceless.”
    â€œCan you believe it? So then this radio station in L.A. somehow picked up the story. They got my number from the second writer and called for an interview. A news service broadcast it across Canada, the States, Australia and New Zealand, and I started getting calls from radio stations all over North America. I remember this uptight asshole with a British accent from a Victoria station asking me, ‘How do the children respond to you as an etiquette expert? Are they intimidated by you at all?’
    â€œâ€˜No, not really,’ I said. ‘Once they realize I’m not some old biddy with a pickle up my posterior, they’re okay.’ He didn’t seem to like that, and broke for a commercial.
    â€œCalgary gave me a hard time. The guy was nice enough to me pre-interview during the sound check, but as soon as he got me on the air live he tried to burn me, saying, ‘You certainly don’t sound like an etiquette expert.’
    â€œI shot back, ‘I guess you could say that Doctor Ruth Westheimer doesn’t look like a sex expert.’ That shut him up. There was dead air for five or ten seconds, then he sort of warmed up a bit.”
    Rowe said, “You’re famous, then.”
    â€œNo . . . I didn’t have a book or anything to plug to compensate for my time, so the novelty started wearing thin after a while. When I moved I got an unlisted number. A couple of months later, Channel Nine tracked me down through the institute and asked me to be on a show about kids and manners, but I turned it down.”
    As the streetcar approached the downtown core, Bella looked out the window at the dingy, two-bit businesses and the flotsam and jetsam from a mission who were hanging around the corner of Sherbourne or lying in the park across the street. “I haven’t been on the TTC in ten years,” she repeated. “Hey, what did you say your name was again?”
    They got off at Yonge and went down into the subway, passing a kid panhandling at the bottom of the stairs. Rowe slid their