episode 11: Takara's Shop

Interlude

I am angry and sore, however much Master is pleased. Once this would have soothed all my hurts, but now... My shoulder stings where the hunter's teeth marked me.

My brothers hide on the other side of him. Seeing blood on my fur, they begin to fear the place, even while the loss of others in our Tribe has not.

Poor lost little mice.

So pleased is he that he does not notice that another of my brothers has failed to return. I scoff at my thoughts. He would not notice even if the Court were not dancing to his whims. Would care even less that Brokk comes back half-gutted and only just alive.

I notice, for I found him, left for dead, and carried him home.

I pick his dried blood from my fur.

"Thrall" the Caprinae's eldest called us, and some part of me begins to remember other wounds, other humiliations. When we were betrayed, forced into fealty.

My anger burns.

Takara's Shop

- David -

I closed the door and threw my bag down the hall. It landed on the floor beside a small bench with a thud, knocking a small selection of scarves, hats and other miscellany to the ground. I swore, then stomped over and pulled off my shoes, now smeared by cow shit from just a brief visit to the Royal Fair.

Sitting there, fuming and staring at the wall, I felt the urge to do something. So before I could think about it, I changed my shoes, and headed out to Kensington Market. The streetcar let me off at Spadina and Dundas. As I moved through Chinatown towards the Market, the frenetic chaos and energy reflected my mood. I squeezed past two elderly women and a disinterested young man perched on a cushion of cardboard held aloft by two over-turned milk crates. He was effortlessly making change for several customers while giving monosyllabic English responses to the grandmothers’ lengthy Chinese exhortations.

I sidestepped a small pile of trampled cabbage leaves and a chest-high stack of cardboard produce boxes. As the grandmother’s bickering faded behind me, I paused and took a breath. I was bathed in the sounds and smells of the busy city and I felt something in me loosen. Slowly, I left behind the frustration of my encounter with the Napiers and tried to immerse myself in the city I loved. One where the only magic was a few flakey vendors selling harmless trinkets to astrology aficionados, and did not involve strange gates to Faerie.

I focussed instead on the smell of fresh (along with the occasional whiff of rotted) produce and looked for a tasty purchase. My attention narrowed on a shop that seemed to have a particularly impressive display of seemingly ripe produce, surrounded by a swarm of families. I was never confident in my evaluation of fresh fruit, so rather than trying to figure it out, I sought a consensus opinion in Chinatown’s highly critical shoppers and took that as my cue. Rarely was I steered wrong. So I made a purchase — lychee, some cabbage and radish. Even if this was yet another foolish venture and Takara was in no mood to see me, the trip downtown would not have been a trip entirely in vain.

It took me a few tries to find her shop — I was following Takara’s landmark based instructions, remembered only vaguely after our drinks. Down the alleyway by the fish market, and then to your left, she’d said.

It wasn’t until I’d wandered past the fish market twice that I saw a laneway that, until then, I’d no idea existed. At the end of the end, a narrow courtyard lined by three or four shops built into the closely stacked, Victorian-era homes. They were all typical Kensington Market, that mixture of decayed gentility and slapdash additions. Most of the shop fronts in the market had converted these 19th century middle-class homes into elaborate warrens of plywood, planks and corrugated plastic — homemade garden sheds, taken to a new aesthetic, a naïve architecture, if you will. It should all have been quite hideous, instead it felt bohemian, gritty and a bit decadent.

Moving through the market was like shopping in an archaeological dig, layers of shops that had been there for decades interspersed with more recent generations. There were butchers with very specific recommendations, cheese shops where you were virtually strong-armed into trying something new every time you entered, and of course the shops with about a million varieties of dry beans into which I’m constantly tempted to plunge my hands to savour those smooth, glossy geometries. More recent iterations offered Asian, Mexican, Kosher and Halal foods, both the fully prepared and the raw ingredients. Kensington has always been a shifting sensorium; you’d pass by a bakery, sniffing at the sweet smell of cinnamon buns, then dodge a cluster of military surplus clothing hanging from an awning with the slightly stale scent of long stored fabric. Then something newer, a cafe, or a little gallery, or a hipster shop with cocktail accessories, and then a seemingly endless procession of ‘vintage’ shops. Brightly coloured 70s tie-dye competing with Victorian era frocks, all smelling faintly of age and camphor. And of course those shops that never seemed to fit into any comfortable category, offering a strange assemblage of goods ranging from spices labelled in foreign languages to statuary and the odd item of clothing.

Takara’s store seemed to fit into this last category, though the goods on display seemed more obscure than other stores, at least to me. She was working behind the counter, weighing out some strange-looking seed pods, and I momentarily forgot all about the reason for my visit. It had struck me, previously, that she was pretty, but my mind had been preoccupied, as well as swimming in several pints of beer. And I might have still missed it still, had I not stopped at home first. When I was waiting for the streetcar, I’d worried at my situation like a rosary, moving between beads of frustration and confusion, emotions arising both from my foray to my old home town, as well as the backyard I was avoiding. But the bustle of the street, and the search for her shop had loosened those anxieties, so that, in one sense, it was my first proper look at her. She was serving a customer, her hair caught up in a messy ponytail, the leather jacket replaced by a stained denim apron over a plaid shirt rolled to the elbow. I waited until she finished serving and then stepped forward.

"Hello," I said, feeling suddenly very self-conscious.

I was relieved at the quick flash of a smile. "Oh David, how lovely to see you again. So you risked a trip down into the guts of the market, eh?”

“I… Ah, yes." I stared, suddenly incoherent, before her gaze. She lifted an eyebrow, waiting. "I, uh, just got back from visiting those folks I mentioned. About that little problem with my fence we were discussing over drinks. I was wondering… Well, truthfully, I don’t know who else I can talk to about it without them thinking I was crazy."

She gave another little smile, encouraging me to continue. It was a charming smile. How had I missed just how charming her smile was?

"Anyway," I barged on, "you probably do think I am a bit nuts, but at least if I talk to you about it keeps the likelihood that I’ll end up in the asylum to a minimum."

"Maybe, I might need a bribe."

"Drinks? Dinner?" I asked.

"That’s the price of entry. I expect a good story."

I gave a little sigh. "That depends. Are you okay if it involves a little family drama?"

She gave a short, slightly harsh laugh. "Is there any other kind?"

There was a snort, and when I looked around, I noticed it came from an older woman wearing the same apron. There was a familial resemblance, but where Takara was tall and muscular, she was tiny and seemed a bundle of twigs. Still, there was a fierceness about her that I would not care to oppose. She was hustling around the store with a sense of ownership that made me think she must be Takara’s grandmother.

"Ahhhh," I began, not sure where to go with her comment. I felt a sudden tension that, it seemed to me, permeated the entire store, but failed to affect anyone’s activities. I got the feeling that this sort of scene had played out before with the same audience.

"I get off in a couple of hours," said Takara, "why don’t you drop by then, and I’ll show you my local."

"That would be great." I said, frankly relieved. As much as I found Takara captivating, I wasn’t exaggerating about a lack of people to talk to about this — my circle of friends were, like me, skeptics at heart and would likely just recommend me to counselling. I wasn’t sure they’d be wrong.