Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives by Stephen Henighan

Author:Stephen Henighan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing
Published: 2017-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

eleven

bleak house

The next evening I returned to the village. When I woke in the morning to the gurgling of the rapids, I went downstairs and found a letter that had been mailed express sticking out from the ruck of morning mail. Milly, as always, was efficient. I opened the envelope and surveyed the points she wanted included. If he signed this agreement, her husband would receive a basic income that Milly reserved the right to terminate if he came within twenty-five kilometres of the city where she was working, or if he discussed her or their marriage in comments that were recorded on radio, television, or film, or were printed in a book, magazine, or newspaper.

I sat down at my desk. I turned on the computer

I had started to use for legal work a few years earlier. I began to cut and paste the set phrases of separation agreements, arrange them on the screen, and enter the details that Milly had given me. My stomach churned. The clauses I was editing made me ill. I was dismantling the foundations of my life, divorcing myself from my own existence. But I could not refuse Milly this favour. Even if she had not dangled the Order of Canada before my eyes, I would have provided this service with the enthusiasm of her most loyal servant—and, naturally, without sending her a bill.

Milly and I would always be in drag together: migrant fugitives dressed up to blend in, sharing the secrets of each other’s disguises. Yet she was so much more effortless and elegant than I, so much more ruthless, behind the smile she never allowed to falter, so much better at passing for a Canadian. I would never cease to worship and be intimidated by her. If she left, if she ceased to be securely bound in her marriage, the tensions that held us together in a force field in which we were never truly apart yet never became too close for comfort, in which titillation was eternal and jealousy was unknown, would rupture, spilling us apart like apples rolling off in opposite directions, getting bruised and battered on the way.

As the morning light climbed higher, casting shadows over the far side of the ravine through which the rapids ran, I saw that the dissolution of Milly’s marriage would explode the triangular tensions that held us together. I was not worried that she would fail to carry through on her promise of an Order of Canada. As I stared with a blank gaze at the screen of my computer, my malaise ran deeper. As a single woman, Milly would have no husband to bore and exasperate her, or to drive her to take refuge in my company. She might have affairs: precisely targeted affairs, I was certain, that would weld passion to ambition. These events would displace our tender understanding, our perfect, unending, never-to-be-consummated-yet-never-to-be-broken dalliance of mind and soul. I did not want her marriage, our marriage, to end. I did not want her to leave the village.

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