Free The Geranium Girls by Alison Preston Page A

What did you want to ask me?”
    “Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”
    “What do you mean nothing? You phoned me here. Now you come and interrupt my work for no good reason? What the frick, Beryl?”
    “‘Frick’ isn’t a word,” she said sadly. “Why can’t you just say fuck, like other people?”
    “Why are you being so nasty?” Dhani asked.
    “You’re the nasty one,” Beryl said, and her eyes filled with tears. She turned to leave.
    “Beryl, don’t go!”
    “You know what, Dhani?” she said over her shoulder, “Frick off.”
    She didn’t shout it, she just said it, and not very loudly. Probably Dhani was the only one to hear.
    “Beryl.” He looked crestfallen.
    Why couldn’t she manage to stay mad at this man for more than a few minutes at a time, she wondered. She came back. “I don’t even know where you live,” she said.
    “On Palmerston.”
    “Palmerston is one of my favourite streets.”
    “Is it?”
    “Yeah. Do you live on the river side?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “Oh, Dhani.”
    “What are you doing this coming weekend?” he asked. “Do you want to do something with me?”
    “Oh. I’m going to the folk festival.”
    She considered inviting him to go with her and Stan and the others. But she didn’t really want to. If he came with them she’d end up worrying about him, feeling responsible for him. And for sure they’d fight some more. She just wanted to go and enjoy herself for awhile and hopefully not worry about anything at all — forget about a few things if possible. Maybe not Dhani, but certain aspects of him for sure.
    “I’ll see you when I get back?” she said.
    “I hope so.”

Chapter 16
     
    When night begins to fall, Boyo removes the wiry grey wig from his head and places it on the dummy. In the dusky light of the bedroom he lifts the cotton dress over his head and places it, too, on the tall slender mannequin he took from a dumpster out behind the old Eaton’s store downtown. It isn’t stealing if it’s already garbage.
    The dress is due for a wash, he realizes as he straightens the collar; he can smell himself on it. It is an unpleasant smell that he knows comes from the bad part inside him, the geranium part. He unbuttons the flowery dress and throws it across his bedroom into the hall.
    There are no lights on upstairs; he moves about in the growing darkness. Turning back to the female figure, he runs his hands over the hips and the smooth part between the legs, nothing messy there to ruin it.
    Suddenly a street lamp flickers on outside and shines its light on the face of Auntie Hort. He runs his fingers over his own art work on the front of the head. It had needed more of a face than the boring bumps and slopes that the mannequin manufacturers had come up with. It needed Auntie Cunt’s face.
    He touches the eyebrows that are raised in a permanent look of surprise. And the wide-open black eyes that go along with them. Why the surprise all the time? What was so startling about the boring little life that they lived together? Was she surprised to see him rise from his bed on one more morning? Shocked that he made it home from school in one piece? Was it so amazing that he ate the food on his plate, cleaned up the dishes afterward and headed out to the garage, night after night after tedious night?
    And what was so puzzling and wrong about a young boy wanting…no, needing, a glass of water? It was just one more way that she could deny him
    No one on the planet could have been gladder of anything than he was of his Aunt Hortense’s death. He was just eighteen when it happened and he didn’t comprehend that her death, welcome as it was, cut his moorings out from under him. He was totally alone.
    Any feeble attempts that he had made at friendship over the years had turned out badly.
    Hort had discouraged friends, both male and female. She had none of her own and wouldn’t hear of Boyo bringing anyone home. “We don’t want people knowing our business,”