I decide that Toronto is as good a place as any to accelerate my Jewish food education so I make my way to Schmaltz Appetizing on Dupont Street. The bagels at the counter look tough as bricks. The waiter has at least the good grace not to react when I order nothing but plain latkes, lox and hamantashen.
‘Do you have gefilte fish?’ I ask, as though I am thoroughly versed in all things Jewish.
‘On its own?’
‘Um, maybe?’
He makes a face. ‘It’s not on offer today, but I can see if we have it off-menu? I’ll check with the kitchen,’ he says.
‘I think you might know my friend, Ted Levy,’ I tell the waiter in my coolest London accent. It’s almost like the lying doesn’t count, seeing as I’m someplace new.
‘Oh, right on,’ he says noncommittally. ‘I know Ted.’
‘Personally?’ This perks me up hugely.
‘Nah, just from TV, that supernatural thing,’ he says, clearing off a nearby table.It’s Eclipse Hollow, a voice inside my head wants to tell him.
Down the street from the restaurant is a Telus store, and it’s blessedly straightforward to buy a SIM card. Essie Marie has a whole new area code, and let me tell you, she’s delighted with herself.
Back in the quietude of the hotel, I realize that while I’m pushing thoughts of Johnny and the last year out ofmy mind, other thoughts and memories are coming, unbidden.
I am seven years old and have already realized that there is need in my life for drastic measures. I just want my dad to see me as something other than a nuisance. To show he cares, or maybe that he even loves me. There is one picture where he, at twenty-eight, is holding me as a newborn, and I look at it every day, squinting and peering and trying to relocate that man.
I want some attention, of the nice kind. Just the once. One time will do, and I’ll never ask again.
To get this, I decide– while Mum is deep into the onerous task that is making meatballs-from-a-can dinner– to lie at the bottom of the stairs and make it appear as if I fell down them. I rest my feet up the stairs and, to be fair to me, it looks like chaos, like I’ve been involved in a horrible accident.
I wait, face down in the hallway and sniffing the carpet as I’m splayed at the foot of the staircase, for what feels like the whole afternoon, but is probably only a few minutes in reality. When I hear the front door open, I stay stock-still, playing dead.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ I hear my dad say before he walks right into the kitchen. I feel the breeze on my ear as his shoes go straight past me. Cigarette ash has been flicked in front of my right eye. ‘Your child has been acting the bollix again out here.’
I hear my mum approach from the kitchen. ‘Esther?’ I can hear a slight tremble in her voice. I turn to show her, yes, I’m alive.
‘Sweet heavenly Jesus wept, stop messing around like that!’ she screeches, drying her hands on a tea towel andheading straight back to her casserole. ‘I haven’t got time for your stupid games today.’
But it wasn’t a game. I wanted to see what my dad would do if he thought for even half a second that I might be hurt, or even dead.
And now I know.
14
Layla has written an open letter to Ted and Alice on Twitter.
‘We’re not upset with you because you have found “love”,’ she writes. ‘But as a fan, I do feel a sense of betrayal, and I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling this. This is something happening in your life that was revealed by a media outlet, a third party, and not by you, to us. You have made us believe that you are one type of person, and yet all this new evidence points to the fact that you are not in fact that person at all. It’s been a rude awakening for us, your longstanding fans, to realize that you have probably been lying about who you really are at the heart of it all. Authenticity is very important to those of us who you would count as genuine fans.’
Layla has been retweeted on Twitter a number of times. ‘This stone-cold lunatic over here,’ someone has written underneath it. And another: ‘Leave the dude alone. He doesn’t need to explain himself to whack jobs like you.’
‘Wow,’ I write to her. ‘Fame at last, I guess. Do you think he has read it?’
‘I don’t care if he has, but I did need to get that off my chest,’ Layla writes. ‘He is such a bloody hypocrite.’
I can feel her hurt burning a small crater in the basement of her parents’ house in Arizona. ‘Are you OK?’
‘This isn’t even going to last!’ she texts back. ‘This bitch Alice goes through dick like some sort of bloody lawnmower. She will absolutely break his heart and, sorry, but I’m not having that. He needs to be protected. Hollywood is a bearpit.’
‘Good for you,’ I reply. I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced that Ted needs protecting from someone like Alice Andre, but Layla is absolutely off on one and I’m not inclined to get in the way of the helicopter blades over here.
Amid Layla’s anguish, I get a message from Violet.
