Knife Fight and Other Struggles by David Nickle Read Free Book Online Page A

bubble out its nose and giggled. I kept my peace.

    Brannigan’s was a little pub a few blocks past the park. Nice and murky inside, it suited my tastes. But we didn’t stay there long. She manoeuvred the stroller around the bar to a door to a back patio. There, in the combined shelter of a maple tree and a great red umbrella, gathered two more strollers, and the mothers who pushed them.
    “Hey, Shell!’ shouted one of the mothers, standing up with her own baby in one arm and extending the other for a hug. The baby—a big bruiser, flabby and blond like its mother—regarded me with dull hostility from its perch. The other infant—a little girl, judging by the pink—stayed in her stroller seat for the second hug and would not meet my eye. Her mother was a wiry one, with enormous white teeth. She smelled of lawn cuttings.
    “How you been?” that one asked, and without leaving time for an answer, turned to me. “Look at him! He’s so big!”
    “Keep feeding ’em, bound to happen.”
    The two mothers laughed and laughed, and the flabby one pointed to an empty chair. She sat there, after tucking my stroller in between her and the blond baby’s stroller. Its mother set the infant back into its seat, and launched into a description of how big it was, and then a long talk about nutrition. I stopped paying attention.
    Her baby wouldn’t look away.
    It sat high in its seat, fidgeting with a little blue pacifier in its hands. It stared at me, an expression that might have been indignation on its face. I looked away, and when I looked back, it hadn’t moved.
    Did it see what she could not? That hidden in the soft skull of this one, was a being older than any here? That McGill’s exorcism had failed, and the thing inside was waiting like a barely irradiated tumour to re-emerge?
    Did it think there was something it could do about that?
    The waitress arrived, and it disappeared for a moment behind her muscular legs and tartan skirt as she took lunch orders. It took longer than it needed to, of course.
    “Hey,” she said when the waitress finally stepped away, “you remember a kid called McGill?”
    “Who?” said the skinny one, but the other waved a hand over the table: “McGill. From high school?” and the skinny one said, “Oh, with the. . . .” and waved her hand over her face.
    She nodded, reaching down to ruffle my hair. “With the acne,” she said, “that’s him.”
    “Weird kid.”
    “Yeah, wasn’t he always wearing black—”
    “—kind of goth—”
    “—but without the style.”
    “Right.”
    “I thought he was going to shoot the school up.”
    “Columbine our asses.”
    “Would have served us right.”
    “Shell!”
    “Well, we were total bitches.”
    “Speak for yourself, Shelly.”
    “Yeah. Speak for yourself. So what about McGill?”
    “He—came back into my life,” she said. In spite of myself, I grinned and bounced in my seat. She withdrew her hand, brought it into her lap.
    “Ooo,” said the flabby one, “that’s creepy.”
    “Not really. We hired him. To help with Simon.”
    “What, as a babysitter?”
    She shook her head. “He’s . . . a therapist now. Really, you wouldn’t recognize him. From before. His skin’s cleared up. He dresses better. And it’s like . . . he’s found purpose.”
    “A therapist? For Simon? Shell, is he okay?”
    “He’s fine now. McGill fixed him right up.”
    “Wow. McGill. A therapist.”
    She laughed, a little too lightly. “A behavioural therapist, yeah. Little Simon here . . . he was a handful.”
    I cooed. Under the table, she crossed her ankles, and uncrossed them. She was fidgeting—the way they do as the feelings take hold. She took a sip from a glass of spring water.
    “I gotta say, I’m surprised to hear that about McGill. He was such a mess back then.”
    “Teenage boys are a mess. They grow out of it.”
    “He had a lot to grow out of. Did you ever see his mom?”
    “I don’t remember.”
    “Yeah,