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Authors: Nicolas Dickner
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with some hesitation, thrown off by the turn of events.
“A little? What do you mean,
a little?
You’ve sorted sardine cans at the IGA?”
Joyce scowls. No one gets away with insulting the great-great-granddaughter of Herménégilde Doucette! She is about to fling a Miscou lobster at his face and clear out when the second man puts down his cloth and walks up to her, hands on hips.
A silence worthy of a Sergio Leone film settles on the fish store.
With a commanding gesture, he has Joyce come around to the other side of the counter, pulls out a peculiar orange fish, lays it on the cutting board and draws a knife out of its sheath.
“Can you fillet this?”
Joyce has trouble believing that ten minutes after arriving in Montreal, here she is with her hands on a fish, hemmed in between two inquisitorial Latinos. She sighs, picks up the knife and tests the blade with her thumb. After that, everything happens very quickly. She slices off the head of the goatfish, amputates its pectoral and dorsal fins, makes a precise incision along its back, locates the spine with the tip of the knife and, as deftly as a samurai, cuts the fish open from end to end. The blade slides back and forth along the vertebrae. Joyce extracts the skeleton, a slimy jade jewel which she nonchalantly chucks into the garbage can.
Fifteen seconds by the clock.
The two men inspect the fillets, nodding their heads in approval.
“¡Vale!
Can you start tomorrow morning?”
Joyce leaves the Poissonnerie Shanahan with instructions to come back the next day at nine a.m. sharp. She crosses the street and, when she is certain no one is watching her, takes a whiff of the blood smell still clinging to the palm of her hand. With her eyes closed she can almost believe she is back in her father’s kitchen in Tête-à-la-Baleine.
A streak of blue and white jolts her out of her reverie.
A police car glides ahead of her with the quiet slowness of a shark. The driver turns his head in her direction, sunglasses covering his selachian gaze. A shiver travels through Joyce from her coccyx to the nape of her neck.
The car drives off going south. Joyce lets out a sigh of relief and looks at her watch, which tells her it is getting late. A red sign in the glass door of an old building attracts her attention.
For Rent—furnish 1 1/2 —heeting and electristy incl—now vacant see janitor in basemint.
She ventures down to the
basemint,
and wavers between the furnace room and an unmarked door. She knocks on both. The janitor, yawning, opens theunmarked door. A Kraft Dinner aroma drifts out from the apartment.
“I’m interested in the one-and-a-half,” Joyce tells him.
The janitor looks straight at her without speaking, and scratches the rim of his belly button. He leans against the door jamb, revealing nearly all of his tiny apartment: floor strewn with dirty clothes, piles of pizza boxes, closet filled with three rusted sinks, messy toolbox. And a TV set playing an old episode
of Miami Vice
at maximum volume.
“Do you have a job?” he finally mumbles, noisily raking his fingers over his three-day beard.
“At the Poissonnerie Shanahan, right across the street.”
He sniffs, grabs a heavy set of keys and, without a word, starts to climb the stairs ahead of Joyce.
They go up to the third floor and stop in front of apartment 34. The door is scarred with numerous gouges from a crowbar. The janitor peevishly sifts through his set of keys. He quickly loses patience and begins to try the keys one at a time. The lock finally responds, with a metallic click and the creaking of wood.
The inside looks exactly like the outside: half the cupboard handles have gone missing, a light bulb hangs out of its socket with its optic nerves exposed, some sickly lotuses are flowering around the window, the bathroom is cramped, the refrigerator wasmanufactured at about the same time as the first Apollo rockets, the walls are pocked with cigarette burns and, as for the carpet, its
“A little? What do you mean,
a little?
You’ve sorted sardine cans at the IGA?”
Joyce scowls. No one gets away with insulting the great-great-granddaughter of Herménégilde Doucette! She is about to fling a Miscou lobster at his face and clear out when the second man puts down his cloth and walks up to her, hands on hips.
A silence worthy of a Sergio Leone film settles on the fish store.
With a commanding gesture, he has Joyce come around to the other side of the counter, pulls out a peculiar orange fish, lays it on the cutting board and draws a knife out of its sheath.
“Can you fillet this?”
Joyce has trouble believing that ten minutes after arriving in Montreal, here she is with her hands on a fish, hemmed in between two inquisitorial Latinos. She sighs, picks up the knife and tests the blade with her thumb. After that, everything happens very quickly. She slices off the head of the goatfish, amputates its pectoral and dorsal fins, makes a precise incision along its back, locates the spine with the tip of the knife and, as deftly as a samurai, cuts the fish open from end to end. The blade slides back and forth along the vertebrae. Joyce extracts the skeleton, a slimy jade jewel which she nonchalantly chucks into the garbage can.
Fifteen seconds by the clock.
The two men inspect the fillets, nodding their heads in approval.
“¡Vale!
Can you start tomorrow morning?”
Joyce leaves the Poissonnerie Shanahan with instructions to come back the next day at nine a.m. sharp. She crosses the street and, when she is certain no one is watching her, takes a whiff of the blood smell still clinging to the palm of her hand. With her eyes closed she can almost believe she is back in her father’s kitchen in Tête-à-la-Baleine.
A streak of blue and white jolts her out of her reverie.
A police car glides ahead of her with the quiet slowness of a shark. The driver turns his head in her direction, sunglasses covering his selachian gaze. A shiver travels through Joyce from her coccyx to the nape of her neck.
The car drives off going south. Joyce lets out a sigh of relief and looks at her watch, which tells her it is getting late. A red sign in the glass door of an old building attracts her attention.
For Rent—furnish 1 1/2 —heeting and electristy incl—now vacant see janitor in basemint.
She ventures down to the
basemint,
and wavers between the furnace room and an unmarked door. She knocks on both. The janitor, yawning, opens theunmarked door. A Kraft Dinner aroma drifts out from the apartment.
“I’m interested in the one-and-a-half,” Joyce tells him.
The janitor looks straight at her without speaking, and scratches the rim of his belly button. He leans against the door jamb, revealing nearly all of his tiny apartment: floor strewn with dirty clothes, piles of pizza boxes, closet filled with three rusted sinks, messy toolbox. And a TV set playing an old episode
of Miami Vice
at maximum volume.
“Do you have a job?” he finally mumbles, noisily raking his fingers over his three-day beard.
“At the Poissonnerie Shanahan, right across the street.”
He sniffs, grabs a heavy set of keys and, without a word, starts to climb the stairs ahead of Joyce.
They go up to the third floor and stop in front of apartment 34. The door is scarred with numerous gouges from a crowbar. The janitor peevishly sifts through his set of keys. He quickly loses patience and begins to try the keys one at a time. The lock finally responds, with a metallic click and the creaking of wood.
The inside looks exactly like the outside: half the cupboard handles have gone missing, a light bulb hangs out of its socket with its optic nerves exposed, some sickly lotuses are flowering around the window, the bathroom is cramped, the refrigerator wasmanufactured at about the same time as the first Apollo rockets, the walls are pocked with cigarette burns and, as for the carpet, its
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