A by Andre Alexis Page B

raven.
    Raggedy Ann’s shrill voice interrupted Baddeley’s reverie.
    â€“ There’d be no publishing in this country if it weren’t for people like me, she said.
    And it was then that the sounds of the menagerie assaulted him: implements on porcelain, women’s laughter, the low laughter of their consorts and companions, the scraping of wood on wooden floors, and then coughing, shouting, and the clearing of throats. Here, faces came at him: Gowdy, Dewdney, Johnston, Lane. There, they settled back into the mire, anonymous again: Redhill, Crozier, Crosby, Toews. The lighting suddenly seemed sickly, the same colour as the excrescence from a garter snake. The hors d’oeuvres tasted of kerosene, and though the dinner was just starting, Baddeley had to leave.
    â€“ I’m going to be sick, he said.
    â€“ Well, don’t do it on me, said Davidoff. I just washed this sweater.
    Baddeley rose from the table and made as casual an exit as he could. He said nothing to anyone, leaving Davidoff to do any explaining that might be needed. He went down the stairs to the tea room, as if he were going out for a quick cigarette or something equally trivial. He imagined each and every patron in Fennel and Rue watching him as he retreated but, of course, not one of them noticed his departure.
    Outside, the sun had not quite set. Somewhere in the west — beyond Parkdale, beyond Brown’s Inlet — its reddish flash was almost gone. He was on Bloor Street near Christie. Looking east, the lights were bright and life seemed to quicken around Bathurst. Looking west, various shades of blue accumulated above the world, as if in a layered shot. To clear his mind, Baddeley decided to walk north to Dupont. He walked past Barton, Follis and Yarmouth. On one side of the street, Christie Pits, Fiesta Farms; on the other, Christie Station, and a mile’s complement of modest houses.
    It seemed to Baddeley that his soul caught up to him somewhere around Yarmouth. He looked over at the Spin Cycle Coin Laundry — above which, five irregularly spaced windows gave life to the red brick — and felt all of a sudden the solace that comes from being both somewhere and nowhere. He thought of Avery Andrews in the middle of Parkdale, — that is , in the middle of a neighbourhood to which he’d had no evident personal ties. “God,” it seemed, was a drug that made company hard to bear.



The months that followed were a time of unshakable ambivalence. Baddeley did what his publisher expected of him: two readings and a brief interview in which he tried, unsuccessfully, to say what his novel “actually” meant. He tried to use his inspiration to write poetry. But poetry, even bad poetry, was beyond him. No words meant for poetry would come. What came, despite his resistance to it, was yet another novel. To make matters worse, the novel that came seemed little more than a variation on Home is the Parakeet . This one, Over the Dark Hills , was set in the heart of an African conflict, its protagonist called upon to lead a herd of elephants over mine-infested ground to freedom.
    There was, of course, compensation. Writing while he was inspired was tonic. The hours would breeze by as he wrote about lands he’d never seen, animals he’d never touched, and people who brightly lived in the recesses of his psyche. While writing, he did not care what he was writing. Novel, fable, poem, recipe ... it was all the same. Disappointment came when he measured what he had written against his own ideals. First of all, there was, as far as Baddeley was concerned, the matter of fiction’s inherent inferiority. When he compared his work to the genuinely sublime (Goethe’s “Metamorphosis of Plants,” say, or “Canto 3” of the Inferno ), every word he’d written turned to ash.
    Some time during the writing of Over the Dark Hills , at a moment when he was tempted to go back to the