Philippe was at school. It was a lovely day in May, one of those days that make you think summer might finally be coming. Tomorrow, there was the chess tournament, and Philippe wanted to concentrate on his moves, not on the hair tickling the back of his neck like a swarm of small, famished mosquitoes. Days that were different from others were always like a time bomb for him. The anxiety eventually spread to me. It was contagious. No one ever tells you that you can catch madness from children, but you can. Parents have to keep their distance from it, people do say that. The distance that you need to put between you and another person’s pain. Pretty certain statements for such an imperfect world.
I left the house and got my bike. Maybe the phone wasn’t working. Maybe the salon was closed. I would know soon enough.
Winding through the neighbourhood’s oldest streets, I was struck by how tall and green the trees were. I had lived in this neighbourhood as a young girl, and there were no trees back then. As a child, that’s how I thought of the city: no trees, no water; plastic animals running along the sidewalks. The noise of planes taking off and landing at Dorval Airport. And the daily clash between the English and the French. The clash had become more complicated. The violence was palpable, child’s play no more. The planes still made life miserable in the summer, but the city was divided into two more distinct sections than before: the section for the very poor and the section for the middle class. The nouveau riche were starting to build houses west of the aerospace plant, and to the east ghettos were forming: children of immigrants from the West Indies who had left Côte-des-Neiges to live here.
The salon was in a sort of no man’s land: a curving street between the city’s two worlds, right near the metro station where it was becoming increasingly dangerous to venture. There was also a clothing store and a small café that played Jamaican music and served smoked carp and crab oil. Kimi had told me about it. I had never been. You had to have good reason to get a haircut at Salon Joli Coif. Or you went there for lack of options, like me. The storefront was practically in ruins, and the tired decor looked like something from the past. Two old hood dryers awaited somewhat dubious-looking customers. Harriet herself sported one of those backcombed do’s from the 1960s, her hair dyed a coppery blond. You could picture middle-aged women looking apprehensive under the hairdryers, and Harriet lifting the domes one after the other to check on hair rolled tight in curlers. Thankfully, Kimi was there, smiling, slender, barely five feet tall, hair cut short, amber brown skin, shining green eyes – a real beauty, completely of our time. She was also the only one who spoke decent French in the tiny world of the curving street. The language was losing ground again, particularly in the western part of the island of Montreal. So she was always the one who greeted us, Philippe and me. In fact, I think we were her only French-speaking customers. Harriet worked the next chair and listened without taking part in our conversation – otherwise she stayed in the back of the salon, apparently unavailable. But from what I understood, she and Kimi came from the same region, and it was what had drawn them together in spite of their differences. But Kimi looked as open, young and cheerful as Harriet did disillusioned.
When I got to Rue McDonald, I saw that yellow police tape had been stretched in front of the salon. I leaned my bike against the wall a little further along. I approached, slowly; I was afraid of what I would find, and at the same time I wasn’t surprised in the least. The sun was blinding, and to see anything I had to press my face up against the window, using both hands as a visor. The salon was empty. My phone call had probably cut through the silence that appeared to reign inside. It was even duller and greyer than usual in there.
I sat down on the sidewalk. I had to calm down. The street was deserted too. Where were the young men? Maybe they had been selling drugs and were arrested. That would explain why they stood guard in front of the salon, a little mafia basically, connected to a more powerful gang, like the one that ruled the metro station. And the lack of real interest in the hair salon . . . It was a front of some kind; Kimi mustn’t have known, but maybe she had been arrested too.
The local police station was practically next door on the boulevard. Should I go? Would Kimi come out and tell me what had happened?
No matter what had happened, I couldn’t go home. Not right away. How could I lie to Philippe if I didn’t even have the most meagre of answers when I faced him?
I got up and took a few steps.
Just then, I saw Harriet come around the corner. When she spotted me, she looked down. I wanted to tackle her before she could get away.
But she didn’t turn to go; she started to approach.
That’s when I first realized that something serious had happened.
Against all expectations, we went into the café together.
I knew it was going to be about Kimi; Harriet wouldn’t have been there otherwise, sitting across from me, her hands clamped to her face. But it took her a while to say something.
She lit a cigarette, thinking maybe she could disappear behind the smoke that she was exhaling in short, quick bursts.
And then she mired me in pointless details. It was as if it was more than she could do to put together a single meaningful sentence. I wasn’t trying to drag a confession out of her; I just wanted to know what had happened. And finally she told me: Kimi had hanged herself from the ceiling of the salon.
I wasn’t prepared for that.
I made her say it again. I needed explanations, and at the same time, I wouldn’t listen to them. I pushed away the idea of having foreseen even the outlines of such a tragedy, as if it were my fault, in some dark corner of reality, as if reality were now cloaked in a lie, as if the lie were not being told by Harriet but rather forged by my hearing it.
But it was true.
Two days before, Harriet had found Kimi when she got to work in the morning. She had done it during the night.
I started talking too loudly.
How could a girl who seemed as happy as Kimi take her own life, and in such a sordid way?
Harriet shrugged.
Maybe she thought it was a stupid question, maybe she wanted to spit in my face: is it really better to hang yourself in a chic hotel? That’s what I would have said if I were her.
We stayed quiet for a moment, watching one another.
Her face showed no emotion. But her body had lost the struggle. She was hunched and her hands fidgeted under the table.
I thought of Rudi in his hospital room, that little cube in a foreign place, and of the fact that it was always better to die at home.
‘The police don’t know yet whether it was suicide,’ she finally admitted.
Crazy as it sounds, the possibility of murder was almost a relief.
Harriet started to moan.
She wanted to be left alone. By the detective who had questioned her, by me, by everyone else.
I took her arm and squeezed it.
‘What detective, Harriet?’
Her expressionless face suddenly seemed drained, and a web of fine lines around her open mouth offered a glimpse of what she would look like older. It was a flash of a miserable future, a possibility that appeared for a quarter of a second. But it did not have to come true. Possibilities lie within us, and sometimes they hijack our facial expressions, like when you inadvertently glance in a store window. I once saw myself old and dour in a restaurant mirror. I saw a darker version of myself, with no way out, mired in hate. With Harriet, the vision was too real to erase completely.
She stopped talking, having nothing more to say.
And then she left the café, leaving me alone, a terror-stricken tourist in a city more hostile than I’d originally thought.