The following story appeared in Queen Street Quarterly (Spring 2002).
"'Where's Here'" © 2002 Meredith Quartermain
“Where’s here?”
– Not over there, kick it ya fool, Mr. Narrator muttered, C’mon move it. Off side. Off side.
Mr. and Mrs. Narrator had stopped their daily walk to stand on the avenue of trees to Little Mountain and watch the boys playing soccer on a frosty field. Some days crows and gulls roved here. But today there were boys running through the large wet flakes of sleet coming slantwise at the ground.
– C’mon mo-ove it. Quit dickin’ the ball around. (Mr. Narrator had played soccer in an English boarding school.) Gawr, ya call that soccer!
Mrs. Narrator had never played soccer, either as a Canadian school-girl or a Canadian woman. Blue stripes and yellow stripes, she thought. A boy puts them on and becomes with the others a blue and yellow team of stripes. Heart and lungs, liver and stomach in the stripes. Heads on a blue and yellow body pulsing hither and thither between the goal posts. Out on a January field.
“Where’s here?! Where’s here?!” the coach yelled. “What’re the rules?! Where’s here?!”
A yellow and blue boy stumbled in the winter mud, soaked with sleet. “Where’s here?!” His knees were just higher than the ball. He could barely step over it. Tripped. The heels of his hands in mud and stones. “What’re the rules?!”
Movement halted around a boy standing on the side line.
– He’s getting a throw-in, Mr. Narrator said.
– Why?
Because it went over the side line.
The boy held the ball above his head. In front of the others. Pushed ball up against the atmosphere. The bottom of a sea of sleet. Ball went up against tons of water.
– Now throw it ya dope before they get their act together, Mr. Narrator muttered. Go on throw it.
The ball fell. Bounced toward the others. Pink and mud knees banged soccer shoes. Arms, hands faces, grabbed at the ball. Banged the hard ground.
Mrs. Narrator saw another ball on the road-side – a whole orange globe of citrus in the muck at the curb. Like the onion her knife had cut through to rings within rings – to the green shoots growing between them.
“Where’s here? What’re the rules.”
Along the avenue, two Chinese men walked together in the grey sleet day, the younger holding an umbrella over the elder. Behind them loomed the slopes of Little Mountain that Mr. and Mrs. Narrator would climb.
A man and a girl walked past them toward the woods on the slope – toward an area of seepage where apples were softly rotting into the oblivion of the hill. She could be his daughter, Mrs. Narrator supposed. Like the girl helping her papa in the jeweler’s shop where they’d bought the watch battery. But this one was stooped and limped – Mr. Jeweler had the stolid legs and arms of a soccer player – this one had very thin legs in very thin pants. Trousers Mr. Narrator would call them. Pants were underwear. The skin hung gray on the face of the man with thin legs – a face grizzly with short beard hairs. And the girl who might be his daughter had long blond hair and drifted like an anchorless balloon ahead of him.
– So if it goes over the side line, the other side gets to throw it in.
– Yeah.
– With hands.
–Yeah, but your feet can’t leave the ground. If they do it goes to the other side.
The flower beds in the quarry pit had neat rows of frilly purple cabbages. Ahead of Mr. and Mrs. Narrator, a woman shuffled her feet along the icy walk in thin, pointed shoes.
Women wear such silly shoes, Mr. Narrator said in low tones.
She can’t straighten her knees, whispered Mrs. Narrator. The woman was barrel-chested. She seemed to have no hips.
It’s the elastic in her trousers, Mr. Narrator explained, It’s pulling her down to the stirrups under her feet.
The park keepers had sheared off the wintery lawn to a sharp line at the cabbage beds.
– But why doesn’t it lift her feet off the ground?
– Because she’d get a penalty.
As they overtook her, the woman’s dark eyes looked into Mrs. Narrator’s, and she scuttled off to one side of the path.
She looked afraid of us, Mrs. Narrator thought.
– What’s off side, she asked Mr. Narrator.
– It’s where a guy’s between the defense line and the goal.
– So there’s a line they can’t cross?
– Well the line moves up and down the field.
– But how would you know when you were off side?
– It depends on where the other players are.
A man came toward them with two collie dogs – the brown and white kind, like that dog on the TV program – Lassie – Lassie Come Home – like the collie dogs she’d had as a girl, but they were the pajama-bags. She had used to discuss all sorts of things with these collie dogs. Via mental telepathy. And they were both called Lassie.
He was a frumpy man – it was not polite to say that but everything about him seemed to bulge, unlike the dogs who were frisking about. His hair had the bowl-over-the-head cut that made her think of rural colonies of religious people.
He stared at Mr. and Mrs. Narrator, then turned to a car driving past into the empty parking lot at the top of Little Mountain.
I see you like driving around in circles, he said, It’s not my fault you don’t like blacks or gays.
On the way to the Park they had looked for a place to buy a watch battery.
– We could try that one.
– Looks closed.
Paint was chipped off the sign, the windows smudged. They went in to an unlit room, jingling a bell. Two glass cases held pendants, earrings and bracelets. A ragged curtain and a window hatch led to the back quarters heaped with boxes, cupboards, rubbish. A young East Indian girl asked them what they wanted, then ran to papa behind the hatch, speaking in Hindu.
They peered into the display cases in the gloom, at gold and coloured birds, deep silver bracelets, cameos. The girl came back with the battery and Mr. Narrator paid her.
Mrs. Narrator asked about a globe pendant. It’s got all the continents on it, she said to Mr. Narrator.
The girl brought it out of the case. It had a slight warp.
– It looks like copper, Mrs. Narrator said.
– What’s it made of, he asked.
The girl asked papa in Hindu. He came out from behind the hatch, a round man, wearing thick jeweler’s glasses, and switched on the shop light.
– That is silver, he said.
– I’m not buying anything but how much is it, Mr. Narrator asked.
Papa took the pendant and slowly polished it with his thumb. Then handed it back. They all looked – Jeweler, Daughter, and Mr. and Mrs. Narrator – under the bright light of a goose-neck lamp, at the warped globe with its shiny patch of Africa where he’d rubbed it.
They said good-bye. As they left the shop, a man walked up the sidewalk ahead of them, his beard long to his waist, blowing out in the sleet and wind, in long trailing banners on either side of his body. Rumpelstiltskin, thought Mrs. Narrator.
– That’s the man that stands on street corners and hands out his books of poems, Mr. Narrator said.
What had happened to those Lassies? Did they go to the dump? Had someone found them and given them to another child?
What to send to the dump – that time when she and her sister were going through 40 years of their mother’s clothes. They rescued a dress with a wide round collar all the way round the front and back of the low neckline. Round. Round and round and round. It had a fitted bodice and a full gathered skirt. Very modern in 1956. Full of circular figurations in black filigree over a patchwork of turquoise and olive. Mrs. Narrator had worn it and now her sister was going to make it over for parties. It’s so retro, she said. Which was funny – they were both terrified of becoming the mother who never threw anything out.
– So you always have to check where you are in relation to the other players?
– Yeah, because if a guy from team B is down hanging around the goal of team A, he’s an idiot if the rest of his team is up at the other end of the field. He should be up there helping them.
– You always have to stick with your team.
– No. Not at all. You’ll have to look at a map. I can’t explain it without a map.
Mrs. Narrator pulled a pen and paper from her jacket pocket and drew a goal like a large staple biting a resistant page.
– Here, let me show you.
But she insisted on drawing the map herself. Staples for goals and small dots in front for players.
– Okay, draw X’s for the goals.
They stood in the middle of the parking lot at the top of Little Mountain. The half globe of the sky arched around them an over-turned bowl spilling its sleety flakes onto their coats, hands, blurring the ink on the paper.
– Put a player B over near the goal.
She marked down B and circled it.
– Now put some defense men in front of the goal.
She put in two A’s
– No. Not there. Why don’t you let me draw it?
– It’s my map.
She would not pass him the pen.
– Put the defense men on the other side of A. You see A cannot receive the ball when he’s in this position. They discovered right away that you had to have this rule, otherwise players would just hang around goal posts while the rest of the team was up at the other end.
He made her draw in the lines marking off the edge of the soccer field. Told her about corner kicks and goal kicks.
– You’ve got two linesmen running up and down to see whether the ball is out of bounds or a player off side.
They left the parking lot on top of the mountain and headed down the other side past the green smooth court of the lawn-bowling club, like a picture of frosted green looking up to the sky from an ornate frame of low walls, borders and benches.
In the field outside the miniature golf course, stood a man in beret and battle dress. He’d cordoned off an outpost of the field, encircling it with white canvas belting attached to the back of his truck – perhaps he would tow away the patch of ground he had staked. With his camouflage truck. In the meantime, while it was still attached to the park, he had stocked his territory with two spades, some gas cans, a portable table, and a Coleman stove complete with boiling billy can. And in the middle of this operation he’d erected a portable aerial.
To speak perhaps to the big aerial on the radio transmission tower on the far side of the field, rising from a concrete platform and bright blue jungle-gym bars, its needle disappearing high in the sleet and wind. An empty field. A soldier. A billy-can. And radio towers.
S.O.S.
Mayday.
S.O.S.
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