Annabel by Kathleen Winter Read Free Book Online Page A

pleasures of St. John’s: pyramids of oranges in Stokes Market; the slate roofs and chimney pots shining with rain and descending down, down from Lemarchant Road to the harbour; the fact that you could walk outside and see people you knew at any time, in the middle of their real lives; street life; children playing skipping rope; Emma Rhodenizer’s black cat, Spritzer, between her geranium and her lace curtains on the corner of Gower and Cathedral streets; and the steeples everywhere. All these things Jacinta held in an accessible place within herself; they were her most tangible memories. Even the pigeons who lived in the O of Bowring’s department store — she saw their purple necks, their iridescent collars of indigo, their movements fluid yet full of muscular jumps and starts — belonged to her still in Croydon Harbour. Monochromatic Croydon Harbour, where to see colour you had to learn to find red hiding deep inside green, orange hiding in blue. In the city the colour, the life, came shouting out. Human life. In Croydon Harbour human life came second to the life of the big land, and no one seemed to mind. No one minded being an extra in the land’s story.
    But among Jacinta’s memories of St. John’s, the cinema reigned. She had loved the red velvet rope that cordoned off the balcony, and the gold-painted pillars swirling with plaster curls, leaves, and Roman faces, with four lions at the top. Though it was only gilt paint and you could see the plaster where the paint had chipped, she had loved it. She had loved the red velvet curtain, and the fact that there was a guest book on a slender pedestal in the lobby, with a pen tied to a gold cord. She had loved the tall rectangular wagons with huge, delicate wheels that the ice cream and popcorn boys wheeled in slowly before the show, and she had loved the show, from the moment its light flickered behind the closed curtain, through every letter and comma of the title and credits, through the searing drama, lit from the side and the back and the front with floodlights that created planes of light and areas of shadowed mystery, and she had loved staring up close at the faces, the gestures, the emotions of the stars onscreen who had no idea that she, Jacinta Hayden, was there.
    In Croydon Harbour there was nowhere you could go to get out of the brightness of a winter day or a glaring summer day. There was nowhere you could sit in the shadows, hidden and secret, with your dreams. And if you ran out of dreams or you lost them, there was no silver screen to find them for you again or to whisper you in the direction of new ones. You were on your own in Croydon Harbour. In the realm of imagination you were left to your own devices, and this was what most people in Croyden Harbour wanted. This was why they came here, if they came from other places such as Scotland and England and even America; they came to leave behind the collective dreams of an old world and they came to glory in their own footprints on land that had been travelled only by aboriginal peoples and the wild caribou. And if you were one of the Innu or Inuit in those days, you had no need of cinema. Cinema was one of the white man’s illusions to compensate for his blindness. A white man, for instance, had no idea of the life within stones. Imagine that.
    But Jacinta craved the cinema. If she had to list the things she had lost when she made Labrador her home, the Majestic on Henry Street would have been at the top. Not the building, which outside was covered in ordinary blue clapboard and had small wooden windows, but the inside, elevated to Roman glory, and the screen, where the unanswered cries of the heart could live for a while in an element that understood them.
    When you came out of the Majestic and walked down Henry Street — one of the steep, friendly hills of St. John’s that open out onto Duckworth and onto the steps that lead to Water Street and the harbour, filled with trawlers and cargo boats and