Bodily Harm Read Free Page B

springolator pumps, tiger-stripe pedal pushers, formals with jutting tits and layers of spangles and tulle.
    Jocasta was five foot nine, with the cheekbones of an ex-model. She went in for fake leopard-skin shortie coats. The women who hung out at Ripped Off were half Jocasta’s age and wore a lot of black leather. They had hair dyed green or bright red, or they shaved their heads with an Iroquois fringe running down the middle. Some of them had safety pins in their ears. They looked up to Jocasta, who was right over the edge in the creative sleaze line and could carry it off, too. In her display window she made arrangements that she called Junk Punk: a stuffed lizard copulating with a mink collar in a child’s rocking chair, motorized, a cairn of false teeth with a born-again tract propped against it: “How Can I BeSaved?” Once she hung a coat tree with blown-up condoms sprayed with red enamel and a sign: NATIONAL LOVE A REFUGEE WEEK .
    Of course it’s gross, said Jocasta. But so’s the world, you know what I mean? Me, I’m relaxed. A little deep breathing, mantras of one syllable, bran for breakfast. Can I help it if I’m the wave of the future?
    Jocasta wasn’t Jocasta’s name: her real name was Joanne. She changed it when she was thirty-eight because, as she said, what can you do with a name like Joanne? Too nice. She didn’t dye her hair green or wear a safety pin in her ear but calling herself Jocasta was the equivalent. Good taste kills, said Jocasta.
    Rennie met Jocasta when she was doing a piece on the Queen Street renaissance for
Toronto Life
, all about the conversion of hardware stores and wholesale fabric outlets into French restaurants and trendy boutiques. She did not necessarily believe that a trendy boutique was any improvement over a wholesale fabric outlet, but she knew enough to avoid such negative value judgements in print. At first she thought Jocasta was a lesbian, because of the way she dressed, but later she decided Jocasta was merely bizarre. Rennie liked Jocasta because Jocasta was much more bizarre than Rennie felt she herself could ever be. Partly she admired this quality, partly she felt it was dangerous, and partly, being from Griswold after all, she had a certain contempt for it.
    Jocasta wore drain chains because she was miserly and they were cheap. She hadn’t even bought her chains, she’d raided the sinks of neighbouring restaurants for them: “All I did was take the plug off with a pair of pliers, and
voilà.”
But sometimes Rennie liked to write pieces about trends that didn’t really exist, to see if she could make them exist by writing about them. Six to one she’d see at least ten women with bathplug chains looped around their necks two weeks after the piece came out. Successes of this kind gave her an oddpleasure, half gleeful, half sour: people would do anything not to be thought outmoded.
    Usually her articles on fake trends were just as plausible as the ones on real trends; sometimes more so, because she tried harder with them. Even the editors were taken in, and when they weren’t they’d go along anyway, half-believing that what Rennie had to say on subjects like this would eventually come true, even if it wasn’t true at the moment. When she wasn’t fooling around she was uncanny, they told each other: as if she could see into the future.
    If I could see into the future, Rennie said to one of them (a man, who kept suggesting that they should have drinks sometime soon), do you think I’d waste my time on this sort of thing? The colour of women’s lipstick, the length of their skirts, the height of their heels, what bits of plastic or gilt junk they choose to stick on themselves? I see into the present, that’s all. Surfaces. There’s not a whole lot to it.
    Rennie became a quick expert on surfaces when she first moved away from Griswold. (On a university scholarship: the only other respectable way out of Griswold for a young single woman, she used to say,