“What?” A bright, brittle smile creases her face. “Certainly. Go join your father now. I’ll be back in a bit.”
Chapter Two
Moey Thorpe has never been in the Footstop Café. As his mustard Plymouth chortles over the ruts and bumps leading to Lynn Canyon, he wonders what it will be like within the café’s cottage-quaint interior. But the thought is only a vague, wispy one without enough curiosity to merit life, and it instantly melts away in the twilight.
Gravel crunches beneath worn Michelin tires as he pulls into the canyon’s parking lot. The smell of hot motor oil sours his nostrils as he climbs out of the car. Leaving the doors unlocked (no point in locking them; the rear window is just a sheet of plastic), Moey lumbers towards the bridge.
From the waist up, he is a big, hairy man, his hair the thick black sort that reminds most people of genitals. From the waist down, he’s as slim and tight as a delicate transvestite. In shape he resembles a snow cone.
Moey passes the park’s first headstone, a bronze plaque implanted in a large boulder. The boulder squats at the top of a flight of low, shallow stairs that leads towards the suspension bridge. The sombre words it bears bless the memory of a woman who was crushed to death by a similar boulder while sunbathing peacefully in the canyon.
Moey next passes three calf-high concrete pylons. Some time ago the District Council of North Vancouver saw fit to erect a large billboard that graphically depicted the various dangers lurking within the canyon. Sketches of bodies decaying in the foamy clutches of whirlpools, trapped beneath submerged logs, or impaled upon rocky protuberances were all realistically portrayed in hopes of decreasing the annual death toll.
Instead, the billboard merely caused a traffic jam of Japanese tourists upon the stairway, and teenagers continued to plunge lemming-like to their deaths. The billboard was therefore relocated to the parking lot. The three concrete pylons remain like an enigmatic sculpture in its original display spot.
Without so much as hesitating — a true local — Moey marches onto the bridge. It shudders and creaks beneath his weight, the entire length of it undulating gently. A cool autumn breeze redolent with dead leaves and rotting bark blows up from the canyon and into his bristle-brush hair. Far below, not yet engorged by rainfall, Lynn Creek runs like a thread of Christmas tinsel between cliffs and boulders.
As always, Moey stops in the middle of the bridge. He glances left, then right; at this time of night, at this time of year, all teenagers should be at home doing schoolwork or drugs. But still he makes sure he’s alone.
In the gathering gloom, both ends of the bridge gape black and empty at him. Good.
He takes off his ski jacket (a greasy relic from younger days) and from its left pocket extracts four silver discs that glint wickedly in the moonlight. Using his teeth and fingers, he works the elastic loops attached to each of the discs over his thumbs and middle fingers. From the right pocket of his ski jacket, he removes a length of cloth. It clanks like prison chains and glistens as metallically as the four discs gleaming on his fingers. His breath quickens.
Moey attaches the scarf-like, clinking cloth around his hips, then raises his hands above his head. The cool wind races up the gorge and caresses his body. His nipples harden against his plaid work shirt.
Then, with a flourish, Moey Thorpe begins to belly-dance.
Every culture in the Middle East claims ownership of this exotic dance. But much like religion, each country shares familiar aspects of the dance while at the same time making it wholly unique. The true origins of the dance have been lost in the sands of time.
The Greeks under Alexander the Great, the Turks in the Ottoman Empire, the Romans, and the Nubian dynasties of ancient Egypt all may have shared the crime of disseminating the dance throughout the Middle East. The only fact known with certainty is that the danse du ventre was introduced to North America in 1893 at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exhibition by a certain Sol Bloom.
Culture and history aside, however, there are three things essential to all belly dancers: skill, suppleness, and a costume. All else can be faked.
Ah, yes, the costume! Again many arguments exist about what constitutes genuine belly-dancing attire. Some adamantly claim that only the Gypsy look is authentic, with its many draping scarves, its colourful flared skirt, its jangling silver jewellery and flounced croptop. Others scornfully declare that a genuine belly dancer wears only gauzy harem pants and a coin-studded bra. But so much more exists! Beaded fringes, gold silk tassels, hip scarves, veils, armbands, headdresses, painted glitter, sequins, stretch lace, gauntlets, Beledi dresses, high heels, Moroccan slippers, bare feet, ankle bells, wigs, capes, turbans! The list goes on.
One thing and one thing alone is consistent (except in Lebanon, for reasons known only to the Lebanese): the zils, also called sagat. Be they bronze or tin, factory-made in Taiwan or hand-hammered in Egypt, the music of the finger cymbals accompanies the hip lifts and shoulder shimmies of every accomplished dancer. It is the music of these that now clamours bell-like through Lynn Canyon from Moey’s blunt fingertips.
The jiggling bridge always intensifies his shimmies and makes him feel buoyant. It is a feeling to which he is rapidly becoming addicted.
Although only brief, his dancing routine drenches him in sweat. Panting, grinning, Moey finishes his last ribcage slide and pelvic drop and triumphantly zaghareets. The canyon walls echo from his tongue-vibrating ululation. A raven screams back from the treetops.
Perspiring heavily, Moey removes his zils and coin belt, replaces them in their respective pockets, then shrugs back into his ski jacket. Exhilarated from the dance, he does a samiha to the far end of the bridge and begins to hike to the Ninety Foot Pool.
The Ninety Foot Pool is not, in fact, ninety feet deep. In the summer when bikini-clad babes and testosterone-laden hunks guzzle beer upon its rocky banks, the Ninety Foot Pool is actually about thirty feet deep. That doesn’t stop anyone who is trying to impress members of the opposite sex from leaping off the numerous surrounding cliffs into said pool.
Again in its wisdom, the North Vancouver District changed all the signposts within the park, thereby renaming the Ninety Foot Pool the Thirty Foot Pool (which was what it was originally christened back in 1912 when the canyon was first declared a park). This didn’t deter the cliff-jumpers one iota, nor did it stop the rising death count. And locals still refer to the pool as the Ninety.
By the time Moey reaches the pool, his olive-toned flesh has cooled and puckered. With each breath, wisps of white flutter from his mouth. He perches upon his favourite rock, folds his firm, slim legs to his burly chest, and gazes meditatively at the waters.
He loves this park. A native of the Saskatchewan wheat fields, he loves the canyon’s abundance of water and greenery, of buckled land and scoured rock, which differs so vastly from the staid, fundamentalist prairie. For him the exuberant life bursting within the forest represents all that he wants to be: natural, wild, strong, sensual. Everything a belly dancer embodies. Everything his parents despise.
Port and Gemma Thorpe are the prairies: stoic, seamed, hard-working, unemotional, and predictable. They expected all of their six sons to become either farmers, carpenters, or mechanics (though an able man, Port often drawls, is all three). Moey became none of these. The Saskatoon Heavyweight Championship belt hanging in his rented basement suite attests to this.
He throws another stick into the water. The ripples spread outward until they touch the far bank and lap against the hooves of a white stag. Moey blinks and sits up straighter.
The white stag snorts steam from flared nostrils and placidly stares back.
You always make things way worse!
How could a child say such a shattering thing to a mother? Karen’s guts shrivel like a disturbed slug contracting in on itself. She certainly never