Aban's Accension

Chapter 5: The House on Greenwood

Chapter 5: THE HOUSE ON GREENWOOD

by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

She stands at the side of the busy street, wondering how to catch a cab. Back home, she simply rings for Eddie. Suddenly, she realises a green-and-orange car with a lit sign on top and a painted name on its side has sidled up to her. She opens the back door and slides onto the worn grey vinyl seat, her knees almost knocking up against the back of the seat in front of her, the air pungent and stuffy. A throw made of big beige and brown beads covers the driver’s seat, overlapping the sides and top underneath the head rest, and some sort of doll swings from the mirror. He addresses the windshield: “Where to?”

“Uh,” she digs first one hand then the other into first one pocket and then the other until she finds the will. She unfolds it and squints at the wrinkled paper as she searches for the house address. “Uh,” she stalls again.

The driver twists around and barks, “Where to miss?”

“Two eighty-five Greenwood Avenue.”

The driver shifts the car into gear with a crunch and lurches forward, squeals a U-turn, pushing her into the door, and stops abruptly at the light she'd been standing near. It's red. She decides a seatbelt would be a good idea. She pulls and tugs at the belt until, with a massive jerk that sends her almost sprawling across the seat, she gets it to stretch the right length . She rights herself and digs into the grimy seat where it meets the back, looking for the clip, and just then the cabbie leaps the car forward and brakes hard, lurching her forward and half off the seat, her grip on the belt keeping her on. She shoves herself back onto the seat properly and hastily digs down again and yanks free the clip. The cabbie accelerates again, his car's tires jouncing over tracks, but she retains her seat and her grip. With a huffing click, she puts buckle in clip and sits back with relief.

At that point, she sees the counter.

Her mouth opens silently. She’s never seen such a high charge for a cab at the beginning of a ride. That’s what Eddie charges her for a whole trip to the grocery store and back when she has to do the big shop for the family. With a jerk, the cab brakes and accelerates forward once more, flinging her head back against the seat. She pushes her hand deep down into her left front pocket, searching for the money she put there. She fingers the slippery texture of the bills. Reassured, she leaves her hand there and watches buildings fly by: a cathedral set back from the road with a large garden flowing from its side with trees and flowers so lush they look like they have a secret source of water; a stone building with straight, flat columns book-ending tall windows; brick-fronted little shops. It’s too much. She brings her eyes back into the cab, and that's when she notices the tiny TV above the front seat in front of her, like a miniature buddha version of what she has seen in shop windows. In a cab. She cannot comprehend the idea of a TV in a cab with commands to touch here. She lowers her eyes and finds rest in the sign in front of her, the one draped over the back of the seat telling her who her cabbie is and all the rules. There are so many rules and rights for her as a passenger, it’s boring to read them all. She looks out the window again, and the cab seems to shift as if something is making it move from side to side. This goes on for awhile. Suddenly, the cab veers to the right, throwing her to the left, and for a moment she’s looking out the front window. Rails snake into the distance in front of them; the cab is riding next to them, then with a lurch he’s on them and speeding faster. She’s about to move back into her seat properly when she sees they’re going up an incline towards another main street and a bridge with a curving, verdigris sign, declaring something or other. She flops back as they zoom up and underneath it.

She slouches down in the seat as much as the belt will allow, shoving her right hand into her pants’ pocket. She wonders why she is going to see the house. It’s not as if she’s going to move to Toronto. Mom is right; Toronto is big and noisy and smelly. And stifling. And she’s going to die in this cab. The buildings are shorter on the street here, not like those tall things back where she started, but they look so rundown with faded windows, barred windows, and scruffy people leaning against the walls in front of shop after shop. She knows the homeless are victims -- she’s heard so much about how Toronto is full of them, poor people too, about how you’re supposed to pity them -- but she feels apprehensive, shut away from them in this cab. Mom will say, “I told you so,” when she gets home. And she’ll be right. What is she thinking?

She’s thinking, that’s the problem.

The driver makes a sharp left turn. The belt grabs her right shoulder hard, the pain blanking out her thoughts, her confusion, her questioning.

They’re flying uphill now as the sky darkens with clouds, the rundown shops having turned into scruffy houses. She stares at those clouds. This summer has been long, dry, and hot. Mom had said it would rain soon, and those clouds seem to say she’s right. Aban hadn’t brought her rain slicker. She’ll arrive home wet too. Mom will say, “I told you so.” She jams her hands deeper into her pockets.

The cab veers into the curb and stops. Hard. She rocks to the left and forward, the belt grabbing her shoulder, trapping her hands in her pockets. The driver says nothing.

“How much?” Aban asks him.

He gestures impatiently to the trip counter. She looks to where he’s pointing. Thirty dollars! She peers out her window, seeking the house numbers in the dark. “Where is two eighty-five?” He points to his left. She turns her head to follow his finger and examines the quiet street. She doesn’t see any cabs.

“Um, can you wait?”

“Wait?”

“Yeah, wait,” she says with a spurt of assertiveness.

“Pay me first.”

“I’m not going to be long. I just want to look at the house before I get my bus.” She goes to open the door and can’t. She panics, “Open the door!”

“Pay me first.”

Uncharacteristically and from somewhere deep inside, she does-not-know-where, she warns, “I’ll scream.”

“Go ahead, scream. You’re not getting out till you pay me.”

She opens her mouth, inhales strongly, and the door lock pops up. She shoves at the door and stumbles out into the swirling, hot air. Tufts of garbage spiral along the dirty sidewalk. She walks forward to the front of the cab and stares across the street until she finds her number.

At first, the red-painted brick house seems huge, like some worn dollhouse grown giant. Then she realises it’s two houses stuck together. Three stories high it rises; a gable window graces the brown-tiled roof; and two chimneys, one behind the other, sit on the side. Two windows cut out rectangles on the second floor, and the first-floor window is partially hidden by the front porch. Black metal, like some sort of metal table leg from the local pizza parlour Mom let them go to five years ago, holds up the two far-apart corners of the sagging porch roof. The whole is mirror-imaged on the right. Thin slats painted white and fastened together separate the porches of the two houses, yet the divider doesn’t seem to provide any support to the roof at all. In her town, people talk to each other, well, not her too much, but here it seems that even when you share a house, people don’t want to know the others exist.

Aban leans to her left slightly to peer down the narrow alley that runs along the length of Grandma’s -- no her -- house, separating it from a squat two-storey house beside it. The brick on the house’s left edge is dirty brown. The house is old but not nice-old like Mom and Dad’s. She shoves her hands back into her pockets.

She can’t see the grass in front. Or whatever is growing there, for a white unsteady picket fence runs along the entire front edge, sequestering the lawn from the sidewalk. It’s so small, that patch between the fence and porch, and the gate looks saggy. Dad would never let anything get so rundown. What kind of person was Grandma?

But something pulls her towards this old house. She takes a step onto the road.

What is she doing?

She yanks her foot back onto the sidewalk. She has to go home; that yucky cab driver will run her down if she crosses the road. She takes her hands out of her pants and steps backwards until she bruises her right heel on something short and hard. She doesn’t turn to look at the littered garden right behind her; instead she stumbles to the cab, yanks open the door, slides in, and barks, “Bus station,” before she slouches down and shoves her hands into her pockets. The driver clicks the gear lever down and shoots the car forward and downward under the railway bridge then upward, making her slide further down the seat. She makes no move for the seatbelt this time.