"He's all right," says Constable Hunt, stepping forward with a battered cage. "I rescued him. You're lucky he wasn't flattened in the wreck. He's just a bit shaken up."
"Leaving the scene following an accident is a serious offence," cautions the sergeant as Trina lifts the shivering creature from the cage, but Trina launches at him boldly.
"I didn't leave after the accident," she protests. "You should get your facts straight before you accuse innocent people."
"But you dumped your car in the middle of Hastings Street."
"Give me a parking ticket then. Anyway, I only went to help the poor woman."
The question, "What woman?" leaves Trina without an answer. Janet's wraithlike figure somehow dissolved by the time the concerned nurse worked her way to the far side of the street and scoured the numerous laneways and potential hidey-holes.
"So you did have an accident then," persists the sergeant, once Trina has explained the incident.
"No. She was the one who had an accident. I didn't hit her," explains Trina precisely. "I just stopped to help her."
"Help who? No one mentioned a woman," continues the sergeant, and he turns to PC Hunt for backup. "Did anyone else report seeing a woman?"
"No, Sergeant."
"Sounds like a pretty convenient story if you ask me," the sergeant sneers, but Trina spits back in defence.
"She dropped her coat."
"OK. Now we're getting somewhere. Can you describe it? Where is it?"
Trina shakes her head. "It was raining… she was running… I'm not sure."
"According to the witnesses, the only person running was you," steps in PC Hunt. "They say you ditched the car and ran."
"But… the grey lady…"
"Precisely, Mrs. Button," mocks Sergeant Brougham. "A grey lady. Sounds like a bit of a ghost story to me."
Trina is still concerned about the missing woman as she prods Brougham with the guinea pig, insisting, "You've got to find her. She'll freeze to death. She's only wearing a nightie."
Rick steps in to rescue the animal as Brougham sarcastically explains. "One of my officers has been murdered, you've screwed up the downtown rush-hour traffic, and you want us to look for a nutcase in a nightdress."
"Yes."
"Stop wasting my time, lady," he says, turning away. "We've had no reports of a missing woman. Anyway, she obviously didn't want to be caught."
"In that case we have a responsibility to find her ourselves," proclaims Trina loftily and loudly as she snatches the guinea pig back from Rick. "This lot couldn't find the hole in a donut."
"Are you quite sure you saw a woman?" asks Rick once Sergeant Brougham has angrily ushered them outside, where they shelter under a dripping arbutus tree to await the arrival of the remnants of Trina's Volkswagen. "Only it was raining and almost dark. Perhaps it was a deer or a —"
"It was a woman," cuts in Trina defiantly. "She dropped her coat. She even said something about being saved by someone or other."
Janet Thurgood is still leaning on her Saviour for protection as she huddles from the cold dampness of the British Columbian autumn in a dark doorway. The lost coat should concern her, but she has sunk inside her mind, seeking answers from the past as well as the road that will lead her to the present. But there is a gaping hole in her memory — someone has ripped the centre out of her life's scrapbook — and the hole is growing, and has been growing for sometime.
"255 Arundel Crescent…"
I know that. I know where I used to live. But it's gone. Can't you see that? Everything's gone.
"What came after then?"
I can't remember.
"Think… think… think. First there was 255 Arundel Crescent…"
With Mummy and Daddy…
"Yes. Now go back. What do you remember?"
Daddy hated me.
"He wanted a boy. He would've liked that."
Joseph liked me.
"Yes… yes… yes. Now go deeper. Who was Joseph? What did he look like?"
I can't remem… was he… I can't remember. I can't remember.
"What's up, lady?"
Janet's eyes open in alarm. A bagman leaning over a loaded supermarket buggy waits for a reply.
It's nearly eight o'clock, and the homeless have taken over: ghostly cloaked figures drifting soundlessly through the alleyways of Vancouver as they scavenge the detritus for a bottle of nirvana. Janet scrunches herself further into the corner and watches several men — grey-bearded cadavers of men all similarly beaten into the same haggard, hunched form — wanting to question, "Are you Jesus?"
"I asked, like, who are you?" continues the bagman, then he drags a black garbage bag of clothing from his buggy. "Try these. They'll keep you warm."
"Are you Jesus?" she asks, peering deeply into his lifeless eyes. He grins — a single-toothed grin that turns him into a caricature of a leering maniac — then laughs at the alarm on Janet's face. There was a time… he thinks to himself, vaguely recalling an earlier life in a better world, but his memory is as clouded as Janet's and, as he shuffles away, his laughter turns to a harsh cough.
The clothes were a teenager's donation to Children's Aid until the vagrant did his daily round. Janet's withered frame doesn't overly stretch the modern garments, although the sight of a skinny sixty-one-year-old in baggy cargo pants, ripped Nike running shoes, and a T-shirt screaming "Eminem Fuckin' Raps" turns a few heads as Janet resumes her search.
The roadway to her past is there, she's certain, but her mind is as fuzzy as a blurred windshield and she sees only isolated visions — visions that are startlingly clear, frighteningly clear, and she's always running: running, terrified, from a perpetually angry father; on the run from her first Girl Guide camp after two tear-filled days and nights; running from schoolyard bullies; from unbelievers; from boys; from responsibilities. And at eighteen, running from her parents into the arms of a man — a married man. Then running back home in tears, pregnant, to a father who slammed the door in her face. On the run again, knocking on the door of a church — a church unsympathetic to harlots and home wreckers, and another door slammed in her face.
Nothing makes sense as Janet wanders the grimy side of Vancouver that is kept out of the tourist brochures and off the tour guides' schedules. If only she could find Mrs. Jenson's sweet shop or even St. Stephen's in the Vale parish church. But the twenty-first-century Canadian streets confuse her. The cars, quiet and fast, flow like a river of molten steel. Lights, bright and flashing, remind her of Christmas, and a store full of televisions mesmerizes her: movies, she assumes, though she's not seen one in nearly forty years — not a real one, not like the ones they showed at The Odeon in Dewminster Market Square in her youth.
"A window on Hell," Janet's mother told her whenever she protested that all her friends spent Saturday afternoons with Roy Rogers and Buster Keaton.
The nearest she came to a movie in those far-off days was when a church missionary set up a flimsy screen in front of the altar, annoying a crusty churchwarden who considered it sacrilegious to block God's view of His congregation, and showed grainy images from a 35-millimetre projector: little black boys wearing starched white shirts with ties, and skirted girls with spindly black legs and bright head scarves, their toothy grins showing delight as they marched down the aisle of a palm-roofed hut to signify their conversion to God. But which