Charis’s duplex is a whole other story. Distant cousins should never die, thinks Tony; or if they do, they should never leave their money to kindly fools like Charis.
Because, now that Charis is no longer an ex-flower child and erstwhile dabbler in chicken-raising, living on day-old bread and cat food and God knows what else in a badly insulated summer cottage on the Island, facing an increasingly impoverished and eventually hypothermic old age and fighting off her grown-up Ottawa bureaucrat of a daughter’s attempts to move her into a facility; because Charis is no longer an old street bat in training but is worth solid cash, Billy has come back into her life as if teleported.
Not that the distant cousin left a regal fortune, but she’d left enough so that Charis could move off the Island. It was getting too genteel for her anyway, she said, what with the renovations and the snobby people moving in, and she no longer felt really accepted there. Enough to stave off the facility fate and the day-old bread. Enough to buy a house.
Charis could have chosen a detached home, but she was maybe losing track of things sometimes – that was how she put it, causing Tony to say, “No shit!” privately to Roz over the phone – and the concept was that she would live in one half of the duplex and rent the other half to someone who was, well, better with tools than she was, and she would trade that person lower rent for maintenance and repairs. Skill-trading was so much less mercenary than charging market value rent, didn’t Roz and Tony feel that?
They didn’t, but Charis had brushed their counsel aside and put an offer up on Craigslist, with (Tony thinks) maybe a little too much description of herself and her tastes, all of which (Roz thinks) amounted to an open invitation to an unscrupulous prick like Billy. And presto, all of a sudden, there he was.
Ouida does not like Billy. She growls at him. Which is some comfort, as Charis pays more attention to Ouida’s opinions now than to those of anyone else, including her two oldest friends.
It was Tony and Roz who’d given Ouida to Charis. Now that Charis is living in Parkdale – a location rapidly gentrifying, says Roz, who keeps an eye on real estate prices, and Charis will do well in the long run, but the gentrification is far from complete, and you never know what you might run into on the street, not to mention the drug dealers. Also, says Tony, Charis is such an innocent; she has no instinct for ambushes. And she doesn’t like to drive; she prefers to ramble about on foot in the wilder places of the city, ravines and High Park and such, communing with plant spirits. Or whatever the heck she thinks she’s doing, says Roz, and let’s just hope she doesn’t decide the Poison Ivy Fairy is her new best friend.
Neither of them wants to read about Charis in the paper. “Elderly Woman Mugged Under Bridge.” “Harmless Eccentric Found Battered.” A dog is a deterrent, and Ouida is a terrier blend, maybe with some border collie, a bright dog at any rate, they’d concluded as they were filling out the rescue dog papers. And with a little training …
Well, said Tony, after Ouida had been installed for a month. That was the weak link in the plan: Charis couldn’t train a banana. “But Ouida is very loyal,” said Roz. “I’d bet on Ouida in a pinch. She’s a good growler.”
“She growls at mosquitoes,” said Tony gloomily. As a historian, she has no faith in so-called predictable outcomes.
Ouida is named after a self-dramatizing novelist of the nineteenth century; she’d been a devoted lover of dogs, so what better name for Charis’s new pet? said Tony, who’d done the naming. Roz and Tony suspect that Charis sometimes thinks Ouida the dog actually is Ouida the self-dramatizing novelist, since Charis believes in recycling, not only for bottles and plastics but also for psychic entities. She once said defensively that Prime Minister Mackenzie King was convinced his dead mother had reincarnated in his Irish terrier, and nobody found that strange at the time. Tony refrained from commenting that nobody found it strange at the time because nobody knew about it at the time. But they’d found it plenty strange afterwards.
Once Roz gets home from their walk, she calls Tony on her cell. “What are we going to do?” she asks.
“About Zenia?” says Tony.
“About Billy. The man’s a psychopath. He murdered those chickens!”
“Chicken-murdering is a public service,” says Tony. “Somebody’s got to do it or we’d be six feet deep in hens.”
“Tony. Be serious.”
“What can we do?” says Tony. “She’s not underage, we’re not her mother. She’s already getting that moony woo-woo look.”
“Maybe I’ll hire a detective. See what kind of record Billy’s got. Before he buries her in the garden.”
“That house hasn’t got a garden,” says Tony. “Only a patio. He’ll have to use the cellar. Stake out the hardware store, see if he buys any pickaxes.”
“Charis is our friend!” says Roz. “Don’t make jokes about this!”
“I know,” says Tony. “I’m sorry. I only make jokes when I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t know what to do either,” says Roz.
“Pray to Ouida,” says Tony. “She’s our last line of defence.”
Their regular walks are on Saturdays, but this is a crisis, so Roz fixes lunch for Wednesday.
The three of them used to eat at the Toxique, back in the days of Zenia. Queen Street West was edgier then: more green hair, more black leather, more comic book stores. Now the midscale clothing chains have moved in, though there are still some residual tattoo joints and button shops, and the Condom Shack is soldiering on. The Toxique is long gone, however. Roz settles for the Queen Mother Café. A little elderly and battered, but comfy, like the three of them.
Or like the three of them used to be. Today, however, Charis is ill at ease. She fiddles with her vegetarian pad Thai and keeps looking out the window, where Ouida is impatiently waiting, roped to a bicycle stand.
“When’s the next vampire night?” says Roz. She’s just come from the dentist and is having trouble eating because of the freezing. Her teeth are going the way of her high-heeled shoes, and for the same reasons: crumbling and pain. And the expense! It’s like shovelling money into her open mouth. On the bright side, dentistry is far more pleasant than it used to be. Instead of writhing and sweating, Roz puts on dark glasses and earphones and listens to New Age dingle music, borne away on a wave of sedatives and analgesics.
“Well,” says Charis, “the thing is, vampire night was last night.” She sounds guilty.
“You didn’t tell us?” says Tony. “We would have come over. I bet it gave you bad dreams about Zenia.”
“That was the night before,” says Charis. “Zenia came and sat at the end of my bed and told me to watch out for this person … it was a name I didn’t know. It sounded like a woman. A Martian kind of name, you know, it began with a Y. This time, she was wearing fur.”
“What sort of fur?” says Tony. She’s guessing wolverine.
“I don’t know,” says Charis. “It was black and white.”
“Cripes,” says Roz. “And then you watched a vampire film by yourself! That was reckless!”
“I didn’t,” says Charis – now she’s gone pink – “watch it by myself.”
“Oh, crap,” says Roz. “Not Billy!”
“Did you have sex?” asks Tony. It’s an intrusive question, but she and Roz need to know exactly where the enemy stands.
“No!” says Charis, flustered. “It was just friendly! We talked! And I feel a lot better now, because how can you really forgive a person if they aren’t there?”
“Did he put his arm around you?” says Roz, feeling like her own mother. No: her grandmother.
Charis ducks this. “Billy thinks we should open an urban B&B,” she says. “As an investment. They’re the coming thing. In one-half of the duplex. He’d do the renovations, and then I’d do the baking.”
“And he’d be in charge of the money, right?” says Roz.
“The name Zenia told you. It wouldn’t by any chance be Yllib?” says Tony. Zenia had always been good at codes, and puzzles, and reflections.
“Trust me on this: forget it!” says Roz. “Billy’s a drainpipe. He’ll clean you out.”
“What does Ouida have to say about him?” Tony asks.
“Ouida’s a little jealous, I have to admit,” says Charis. “I had to … I had to sequester her.” She is definitely blushing now.
“Locked Ouida in the closet, is my guess,” says Tony to Roz on the phone.
“This is dire,” says Roz.