‘You’re very easy to impress.’
‘Maybe so. But that’s a choice too.’
A small child ran onto one of the light panels, screaming in delight as his father ran after him, dodging and chasing in the scattered darkness, and Alex stopped thinking in concepts as he raised the camera, his fingers moving as he shifted the pictures around, framing, needing, taking in the shapes of their play, before they went down again to the underground passageways.
Some of the corridors were suddenly full of people, walking north from Union Station and branching off to the east or west at different points along the route. They passed Yogen Früz stands, candy stores with piles of maple fudge in the windows, shops that sold bottles of vitamins, or silk scarves and mittens, shuttered and dark. Into another underground courtyard, white marble, with banks of ferns and violets and tiny willow trees, a small waterfall at one end with the twisted copper shapes of salmon leaping in front of it. His feet were starting to ache; he sat down on the small stairway between the ferns, thinking that if he were by himself he could take his shoes off.
‘Where else have you done this?’ asked Susie, sitting beside him.
‘Oh, everywhere.’ He wiggled his toes and rotated his ankles, keeping the circulation going. ‘I mostly concentrate on the downtown, but everywhere I can get to, really. People think urban photography is all big-eyed kids in housing projects. Which, I mean, yeah, housing projects are part of it too. And police stations and stuff. But so is this … ’ he waved his arm around, ‘… this whatever. Is this a hotel?’
‘I can’t even tell. It’s all much the same down here.’
They sat on the steps in silence for a few minutes.
‘How long were you in Vancouver?’ asked Alex.
Susie took a breath before she answered, and looked down. ‘A year? A year and a half, I think.’
‘Ah.’ He held his camera on his lap, fidgeting with the lens. And he knew that she was aware of the same thing, that she had been back in Toronto for over ten years, and she hadn’t talked to him. She talked to Adrian. Not to him.
He reached over and rubbed the leaf of the violet beside him, thinking he would find that it was plastic, but it wasn’t, it was real.
‘Adrian and Evvy got married, you know,’ Susie said at last.
It took him a minute to place the name – yes, Evelyn Sinclair, the very quiet and faintly mysterious theology student that Adrian had been with, in some uncertain way, all those years ago. ‘Huh.’ He hadn’t expected that. ‘Well, I’m glad things work out for some people. They have any kids?’
‘One.’ She looked over at Alex. ‘How about you? You married or anything?’
‘Nah.’ He rotated his ankles again. ‘Came close to it once, I guess. But it didn’t happen. Basically I stick with my cat.’
‘Not the same cat, surely.’
‘Oh yeah. She’s very old now, but she’s still around. She’s like my life partner. What about you? Married?’
‘Was for a bit. Not anymore. It wasn’t a good idea.’
‘Anyone I know?’
‘Nope.’
Alex stood up. ‘Okay. We’ve been in retail long enough. Let’s check out Metro Hall and call it done.’
This meant another series of corridors, and a brief emergence into the damp clatter of the St. Andrew subway station, before they reached an orange hallway where the air was indefinably different, where there were no shops on either side. In the corner two figures lay rolled up in dirty sleeping bags on the tile floor, food wrappers scattered around them.
‘See, this I understand,’ said Susie. ‘We’ve moved from retail space to civic space now. It’s a less censored environment. Inclusive.’
Alex lifted his camera. He shouldn’t do this, shouldn’t photograph homeless people who were asleep, helpless to give permission, but his cannibal eye demanded the picture, and he didn’t really try to resist. They walked into another hallway, a glass wall down the left side; he knew there was a sunken pool outside, surrounded by granite boulders and pine trees, a tiny replica of the Canadian Shield down below ground level, but at night there was nothing visible, only thick black beyond the glass. Up a spiral stairway, and another man in a small foyer just a few feet from the cold, asleep sitting up, a grey blanket draped over his shoulders. Susie shrugged on her coat and pushed the door open, and then they were out in the wind.
The snow had stopped, leaving a sugared dust drifting and whirling across the pavement as they stepped outside. Alex squeezed his eyes closed and opened them again, not quite able to move forward until he had grown used to the dark, hoping that Susie wouldn’t notice this.
‘So you’re finished?’
‘I guess so. Yeah.’
‘Did you get what you wanted?’
‘I’ll have to wait and see. I never know till the pictures are developed if they’re going to come out or not.’
They stood on King Street, awkward, putting off the moment of leaving, not so much because they wanted to be together exactly, but because they didn’t know how leaving was supposed to go. A few yards away, a man in a blue suit with a paper bag over his head was playing a guitar and singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ a light frosting of snow on the top of the bag and the shoulders of his jacket.
‘He’s actually not too bad,’ said Alex.
‘What do you suppose the paper bag is about?’
‘Gotta have a trademark of some kind.’
Susie started walking north, for no clear reason, into the featureless side streets, and Alex followed.
‘There was that guy who used to play the accordion down by the church on Bloor. And he had that nasty dog, the one that bit people. I don’t know what ever happened to him.’
‘I’m kind of hoping he got arrested,’ said Susie. ‘The Spits, though, they were the best buskers ever.’ She took her hat out of her pocket and pushed it onto her chestnut hair. ‘You remember the Spits?’
‘Of course. Of course I do.’
‘I was just thinking about them is all.’ She looked around at the dark windows, the warehouse doors of the small empty street. ‘So. Do you want to get a coffee someplace?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Let’s do that.’
They came out onto Queen Street, filled with light and crowds, and ended up at the Black Bull because it was later than he had thought, and the coffee shops were closing. He took the glucometer out of his camera bag to check his blood sugar, and decided that he could order a drink and a grilled cheese sandwich. The bar was loud and dark, the air thick with smoke and the wet smell of beer.
‘Whatever happened to the all-night doughnut stores? Do kids not stay up all night anymore?’ asked Susie, as she looked around at the crowd.
‘They must,’ said Alex, lifting his glass, the beer malty and pleasantly bitter. ‘I’m hoping they just go to places we don’t know about.’
He leaned back in his chair, feeling the warmth of the alcohol running through his limbs, and then noticed the TV above the bar, figures in white hazmat suits moving behind police tape at the Spadina subway station. ‘Christ, what now?’ he muttered, and stood up and walked over to where he could hear the newsreader explaining that the station