When I was twenty-one Janet Cooley moved into the halfway house next door to us. Word on the street was that she’d served a year in a minimum-security prison for smothering her newborn baby in the gymnastics change room at the community centre. To me she was just this beautiful girl who I wanted.

For months I watched her chameleon-like movements over the fence. In the daytime she wore cut-off jeans and sandals, but at night she was transformed, becoming a shadowy sylph that moved across the grass, the shine of her white teeth and the reflection of her hair incandescent. Sometimes one of her boyfriends would pick her up in his Coupe de Ville and she’d appear on the steps wearing a sequined dress, a dew-wet tiger lily behind her ear. There was nothing murderous about her.

One afternoon I was riding the Bathurst bus reeking of all my indiscretions when a turquoise and inlaid opal bald-eagle buckle and the crotch of confident cowboy jeans stepped in my line of vision and just swayed there. There was an empty seat beside me.

"Mind?" he said as he sat down.

I was coming home from Honest Ed’s, the house of bargains, with a bag of cheap groceries, and a long baguette stuck out of the bag like a middle finger to all the dozing passengers. I could hear a voice at the back of the bus saying, "I ain’t done no drugs or alcohol for two years." A man had his feet propped on a TV wrapped in cords as he flicked through a Good News bible. Across from me two deaf mutes sat jiggling over the wheel seats having a tender-hearted conversation with their hands. Suddenly the air was perfumed by the green odor of marijuana.

Through the windows I watched the familiar streets slide by me. It had been three years since I’d been back in this city, and I was harder, more world-weary than when I’d left. But somehow each passing block was subtracting from the sum of my experience, and I was left feeling ten years old again, the latch-key kid with a grape-juice mustache and a very heavy heart. Being home had the strange effect of forcing my desires down to their lowest common denominator. I was on a mission. I was home to save my mother. Beside me the cowboy was shifting to adjust something in his pocket.

"Need?" he mumbled into his shirt collar.

"You’re Janet Cooley’s boyfriend," I said suddenly.

"Depends on who’s asking," he replied. "Dime bag?"

"I live next door to Janet," I explained quickly. "I’ve seen your Coupe de Ville."

He looked at me, his wolf-grey complexion slowly draining white.

"Need?" he repeated, and when I shook my head he got up, and began to slowly move away

It was the inlaid opal eyes of the bald-eagle belt that I was staring into when I heard him speak again. He sounded like he was on the verge of tears.

"Janet’s a slut," he whimpered. "So how could I be her boyfriend anyway?"

• • •

When Janet was with one of her boyfriends, there was something effortless about the way she moved. I guess the halfway house didn’t allow visitors because she always sat with them in a corner of the front yard, secretly drinking beer, smoking, and stretching out like a cat under the waning citronella candles. It was only when her boyfriends zoomed off in the early morning hours that the lost expression overtook her face again.

Meanwhile I’d started hanging out in all my old haunts again, moving spider-like through the pool halls and massage parlours, decrepit movie-houses and pawnshops. Meeting guys who bought drinks steadily and drove cars they would never fully own, used money clips and could never say just how they felt. Everything had fallen apart, but no one would ever see me out of the house without my roots done and wearing my lipstick and eyeliner. Pills make you radiate, too. At least for the first few weeks.

I kept obsessing about Janet’s body and the more I did, the more I wanted to fade myself out, because all my effort had become unrequited. When I saw my reflection in the pawnshop windows that I passed daily, all I felt was disgust, and at the same time, the desire to own something golden myself. I would see Janet leaving the halfway house in one of her tight dresses and imagine the baby that everyone said she’d done away with. It seemed such a strange equation, how Janet made a life just to end it when I was giving mine to keep one alive. There was nothing for me to do except to continue to carry the tray of soup and pills upstairs to the sick room.

• • •

The only time I ever brought Janet home, my mother knocked on my bedroom door and pulled me into the hallway.

"Who is that girl?" she rasped in the darkness, the white mouth of the open linen closet the only light. "I don’t like the look of that girl. She looks coarse."

"She’s my friend," I said, "And she’s sleeping here. She’s a chef and she’s going to make us pancakes for breakfast before she goes to work at the Best Western."

"I want her gone by 6 a.m," her voice seemed disembodied.

"But she’s making us pancakes," I insisted. "First thing in the morning."

"You’re going to do drugs with her. I know," my mother cried. "I can smell them already. You’re going down again like you did before."

• • •