Free A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence Page A

of his life here, but in a kind of secrecy, living alone in the rooms above the café. My father told me once that Lee Toy’s wife was still in China, still alive and living on the money he sent, but unable to come here, first because of our laws and then because of theirs. Maybe she is there yet, the woman he has not seen for more than forty years.
    Beside the Coca-Cola poster on the wall there hangs a painting, long and narrow like an unrolled scroll, done on grey silk – a mountain, and on the slope a solitary and splendidly plumaged tiger.
    I have to walk through the tight knot of teenagers. They don’t make way or part ranks. They remain clustered around the jukebox, boys with their arms around their girls, and the girls, also, each with their arms around some boy. Have I taught any of them, years ago? I don’t want to look directly at them to see who is recognizable and who is not.
    They take up all the space. A person can hardly squeeze inside the door. They’re everywhere. I wish I hadn’t come in. I don’t like having to shove past them, having to endure the confident dismissal of their eyes.
    At last I’ve got my cigarettes. As I’m reaching out for the change, I find myself glancing sideways and looking into the face of a girl. Lipstick a whitish pink like salve, softly shining skin with virtually no powder, and then everything lavished on the eyes – bluegreen like the sea, underneath, and greenblue lids above, with the lashes thickly black. She is staring at me. What do those plain eyes in their jewelled setting see? I don’t want to know. It doesn’t concern me, what she thinks. Why should it? What does it matter? Who does she think she is?
    “Hello, Miss Cameron.”
    “Oh – hello.” I don’t know her. Whoever she once was – that’s long gone. Some child I was drawn to, perhaps and may have shown it, and she remembers and can’t forgive it, for she detests now and would like to kill forever the little girl who believed it was really something if the teacher was pleased with the work she’d done.
    I must get out of here.
    Japonica Street. The days are longer now, and the light lasts into the evening, but Hector Jonas has turned on the neon sign.
Japonica Funeral Chapel.
It winks and beckons, and as I walk up the petunia-edged path, I see all at once how laughable it is, to live here, how funny lots of people must think it, how amusing, how hilarious.
    Oh stop. It’s a house. It’s decent. Mother wouldn’t feel at home anywhere else. You’d think she would want to leave but she doesn’t. She always let on to my father that she didn’t enjoy living here. She used to say “Your father’s so attached to this place,” and then sigh delicately. But if he had been able to move anywhere, I don’t suppose she would have gone.
    He really was attached to it, though. He had come here and settled in as soon as he got home from the First War. He must have been very young then. He never talked about that time in France, and when the Armistice Day parades were held, he never would go. Mother used to say, “Everyone goes, Niall – it looks so peculiar, for you not to.” He would agree to nearly anything, for quiet, but not to that. He would stay downstairs that day, with the silent company if there happened to be anyone in residence waiting burial, or else alone, and he wouldn’t come upstairs all that night, either, being unable to move sufficiently, I guess. What could have happened to him, all those years ago, to make him that way? When the Second World War came, the Cameron Highlanders marchedthrough the streets of Manawaka on their way off, because so many of the town boys were in that regiment. I was a child, and excited at it, because they bore our name. I came back and pounded on the door of his establishment, the only time I ever remember doing that. “Dad – come and see – they’ve got pipers, and they’re playing ‘The March of the Cameron Men.’” He stood in the doorway,