Warnings: Some period-appropriate pejorative terms for German and Japanese people are used briefly in this chapter. Let me know if you think this deserves a more specific warning.
Notes: The song Kate sings is God Bless the Child by Billie Holiday.
Disclaimer: All characters and environments belong to Michael Maclennan and Adrienne Mitchell/Shaw Media.
The workers of Red Shift are lining up as their shift matron inspects them. Blue Shift women call to the Reds, who have been able to listen to more than the initial announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor, imploring them for updates, death tolls, more information, more. Betty spots Hazel standing with her eyes fixed on the ground. She looks on the verge of tears. They used to be good mates, Hazel and Betty. Betty knows she should yell to her, ask if she's all right, but right now, all she can manage is to clutch Kate's hand and keep walking toward their street car stop.
The street car is packed when they climb on, with no spare seats, together or separately. Betty tries not to show her discomfort when people bump into her injured shoulder, but Kate is watching her like a hawk. Before Betty knows it, Kate is approaching two teenage boys and asking, "Excuse me, but my friend over there has a badly bruised shoulder, and I think she'd like to sit down."
The boys look where Kate is indicating, biting back grins. They could be taking in Betty's short hair and trousers, her furrowed brow and her conspicuous lack of a wedding ring. On the other hand, they could just be staring to be cheeky. Betty gets so tired of trying to work out the precise reasons why people are gawping at her.
"She's fine," says one boy, at the same time that his friend says, "You don't stand on your shoulder." Both boys seem to find this quip hilarious and start sniggering.
"It's a real comfort," Kate snaps, "knowing that the type of young men who are going to be defending our country in a year or two are also the type who won't give up their seat for a woman who was hurt building bombs to win this war. You must be pretty incredible if you think you're better than her. What, may I ask, did you do today that makes you so damn special?"
It is the first time Betty has ever heard Kate utter any kind of profanity. It doesn't come to her easily. Betty could see her working up to that word, willing herself to force it out.
Shamefaced, first one boy, then the other, move from their seats and push their way into the crowded aisle, trying to put as much distance between themselves and Kate as possible.
"I don't need a seat, it's her," Kate says in exasperation. "I wasn't trying to get myself a..." She trails off.
"Come on, you snagged us these plum seats. Might as well enjoy 'em." Betty has to pull Kate by the hand, to make her sit down.
Kate still smells like the yellow soap they use in the showers at work. She's scrubbed off her makeup, so they're as bare-faced as each other, for once. Betty likes Kate whether she's made up or not. Honestly, if she wasn't in love with her already, she'd be head over heels after that little display. People don't stick up for Betty all that often.
It's then that Betty notices. "Kate, you're shaking."
"I'm not very used to being angry," says Kate stiffly. "It doesn't agree with me."
"No-one would think it to watch you. Even I was a little afraid."
"You don't ever need to be afraid of me," Kate says absently, patting Betty's knee and gazing out the window. She says it as warmly as she's ever said anything, yet there is a tension in Kate's voice that tells Betty it would be best to pass the rest of their journey in silence.
When they arrive back at the rooming house, they slip inside their own bedrooms wordlessly. About twenty-five minutes later, there is a diffident knock at Betty's door. Kate's knock. Kate steps into the room, pulling the door shut behind her. "I thought I'd check on you before I left." Judging from her expression at the two cigarettes still sending up smoke from the ashtray, the blaring radio and the fifth of whiskey in Betty's hand, she seems to think this is not uncalled for.
Betty eyes Kate, who is freshly made up, her hair glowing after a vigorous combing. She remembers Kate's singing lesson with Leon ... remember that, for all intents and purposes, Kate asked her out on a date this morning. Presumably, it's a perfectly platonic drink between two close female friends, but it was so momentous for Betty that she wonders how on earth she could have forgotten.
"You look nice," Betty says cautiously.
"That's quite enough of that," says Kate, deftly switching off the radio.
"We've gotta keep listening to the updates. If the Americans got hit, we could be next. We could miss something important, like evacuation instructions."
"Don't think about that right now." Kate crosses to Betty's bed, in order to turn back the blankets and arrange the pillows. "You need to rest your shoulder."
"How is thinking too much gonna hurt my shoulder?"
Kate laughs, but she appears distracted. "You need to rest so you can heal."
Betty hesitates. "I was gonna come to your practice, though. I could use a drink, couldn't you?"
"If you wait here, I'll bring a bottle, and we can have a drink when I get back."
Betty supposes that's reasonable. They'll still get their drink, just the two of them. There will be other dates, friendly or otherwise. But somehow, she can't bring herself to just watch Kate leave. It's not because she's meeting Leon. It's because this has been the hardest day either of them has had in quite some time, and it's not even over yet.
"It doesn't feel that bad, honest," she insists. "Some fresh air would do us both good. I know the amatol's been getting to my head all day."
Something flashes in Kate's eyes. She sits on the bed and pats the space beside her. Betty sits down without question.
"I know how to get you to lie down," says Kate, her voice low and private. She puts her hand on Betty's waist, running her fingers down to Betty's hip. In all her twenty-eight years of living, Betty's never given much thought to her hip, as a body part, but it seems to be trying to make up for lost time. Every nerve ending in her body flees her extremities to cluster directly under Kate's palm. Suddenly, she's more aware of Kate's hand on her hip than of anything else in the room, like she's floating in endless space, anchored only by that slim-lined hand.
Betty is struck by the expression on her face. It's a … a knowing expression, that's the best way that Betty can describe it. Like Kate's effortlessly seen through everything Betty pretends to be, like she's amused that anyone's been taken in by Betty's dreadful impersonation of a woman who is too tough and ultra-sensible to feel things like other women do.
"How?" she croaks out. She's actually scared. It's idiotic, but she is. She's experienced such highs and lows since last night. It has never seemed more likely that Kate might return her feelings. They're finally alone, and now Betty is just … scared. Scared of how things might change. Scared that she'll make a fool of herself.
Staring straight into Betty's eyes, Kate starts to sing. "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose. So the Bible says, and it still is news. Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that's got his own, that's got his own..."
If anyone had told Betty, the day before Kate arrived, that someone would walk into her life whose singing would make her feel as though they were running their hands over the lines of her body, kissing the space directly over her heart … Betty would have laughed in their face. She would have said quite firmly that people like that didn't exist. Certainly not for her.
She feels so hopeless, listening to Kate sing. It is a wonderful, awful kind of hopelessness. Like she's dying, slowly and quickly, all at once, over and over. It robs Betty of all her words, strips away all her defences, until all that is left is a different Betty, one who doesn't even know words like queer or pervert. She imagines that Betty as the little girl she was almost twenty years ago; a scrawny, barefoot ragamuffin wearing a faded frock cut down from one of her mother's old ones, stammering out, "You sing real pretty, and I like your hair."
Betty doesn't want to feel hopeless any more. She just wants to turn to her and say straight out, "Kate, people might say I'm sick, feeling the way I feel about you, but I've never felt less sick in all my life. The only person whose opinion I care about is you. Please, please say it's okay for me to love you." Betty's lips move, but no sound comes out.
Without being especially loud, Kate's singing fills Betty's bedroom, the hallway, the rooming house, the whole world. The notes drift around Betty, touching her skin gently and reverberating off. When Kate lays her down, she offers no resistance. If people back home could see her now, Betty imagines they wouldn't even recognise her. Kate has wrought such a change in her.
Betty tries to keep breathing long and slow, so Kate will think she's asleep. But when Kate speaks, it's clear she isn't fooled. "I can't stop you from coming, Betty. I just need to be alone for a little while, to think. It would be nice to have you there, but I honestly think you should rest. I don't know. Truth is, the second I walk out of here, I'm going to wish you were with me. All these choices, it's hard to know what you really want. Just lie down for an hour, all right? I'll be back real soon." The door clicks shut behind her.
Betty truly means to keep her promise (not that she made one, but everything she does at Kate's insistence tends to feel like a solemn vow). She means to lie still, rest her bruised shoulder and wait patiently for Kate to return. But what Betty means to do and what she actually does are often two entirely different things. She finds herself getting up, switching on the radio and pacing the room. Betty takes a bottle of gin from her bureau drawer and has a drink. She has several. Taking this course of action – the radio, the pacing, and the alcohol – is not the cleverest idea she's ever had, but she can't stop herself. Sometimes it seems like that will be written on her headstone someday: Elizabeth "Betty" McRae, died a suspiciously butch spinster. She couldn't stop herself.
… What if Hitler wins? He can't. In all human reason, he can't. It's absolutely unthinkable. Yet it has never seemed more likely than it does right now. Betty is assaulted by visions of the Krauts marching straight into Toronto, the Japs firebombing the city into oblivion, of everyone Betty knows being sent to internment camps or even lined up and shot – of being unable to find Kate before the world ends.
Everything else seems so insignificant, now that the war might really be coming to Canada. Has Betty really spent the last few months hazing Gladys, getting drunk in the evenings, and pussyfooting around the woman she loves, timidly dropping hints about sleeping in the same bed and maybe sharing a house someday? She never would have imagined that would be how she'd spend her last few months. But then again, she never dreamed that she would meet someone as amazing as Kate. She doesn't have nearly as many regrets as she thought she would.
Betty drains her drink, stoops to her bedside drawer, and finds Kate's photos. Kate didn't ask for them back, so Betty's been keeping them safe for her. She's always assumed that Kate just wanted to put them out of her head, and forget that whole nasty episode. That's got to be the reason. But what if ... what if, on some level, Kate wanted Betty to be able to see her as a woman, to know what she looks like under her white work overalls and baggy cardigans and flowered dresses? To know that her body has other secrets to tell, quite apart from the marks her father left on her back?
After all, Betty thinks, mind attempting to reel through the alcoholic mire she's made of it, it's not like she pranced over to Gladys and handed her one of these as a remembrance of their happy times working at Vic Mu. I sure as hell wouldn't, if I got a bunch of cheesecake shots done.
Regardless of Kate's intentions, keeping the photos was not the stealthiest move Betty's ever made. Lots of women have snaps of their friends, but it takes a particular kind of woman to keep a sheaf of photos of their best friend in a skimpy bathing suit in their bedside drawer. If anyone found them, she'd be sunk.
Looking through these photos ought to make Betty feel like some dirty little schoolboy, sweating to the peak of pleasure over pinups of Ava Gardner or Veronica Lake. But it feels okay. To Betty, the caption at the bottom of the photo, "Kate Andrews, 24, from Toronto," is a laughably insufficient description, on a par with describing this war as "a big fight" or the whole world as "a rock in space with people on it."
She wants Kate, but she knows her, too. She knows that Kate believes in God, that she wears a little locket that says Marion, that her favourite drink is gin and tonic, that Billie Holiday is her idol. Betty knows that when the sky over the factory filled with black smoke and Marco came stumbling through the gates covered in blood, Kate went barrelling toward the test field as fast as anyone.
Betty knows Kate, but it's not enough any more, not if they don't have that much time left. I want you to know me too, she thinks.
She shuffles past photos of Kate preening, arching her back, tossing her beautiful hair, until she finds the one showing Kate from the shoulders up. "I love you," she says, and it's the first time she's said it aloud, to anyone, really. Betty should feel a lot dopier about this, confessing her feelings to a bloody photo, but the radio is drowning her out, and well, she has had rather a lot to drink.
Her head is filled with "I need you" and "Not Leon. Just someone" and "My heart stopped." Does Kate know? Does she feel the same? She has to. She's declared herself so many times, much more than Betty, who's been too damn scared.
People think she's some little shrinking violet, but she's not. She's a hell of a lot braver than me, Betty thinks ruefully. She voices her next thought to the empty room: "God, what am I waiting for, any more?"
Betty shoves the photos back into her bedside drawer. She gets to her feet, pulls on her coat and grabs her purse. She strides right out of her bedroom, down the stairs, past Jeannie and Phyllis, who are talking gravely, past Dolores, whose arm is around a crying Aggie. Someone yells that she just missed Kate, and Betty replies grimly, "I'll say."
She doesn't know what she'll do when she gets to Tangiers, whether she'll burst through the doors and shout, "Kate, I'm madly in love with you," or simply sit in the corner, smoking fiercely and not saying a word while Kate laughs with Leon. What Betty will do is irrelevant. All she knows is that she needs to be with Kate. If this is the last day of her life, if the dark that rolls in tonight never lifts again, Kate is the only thing that matters.
As she steps through the front doors, a chill wind races down the street and engulfs her. Betty gasps and then lets out a laugh, more from shock than anything else. Like some stupid kid, she's remembered her coat, but neglected a scarf or gloves.
She doesn't nip back inside the rooming house to fetch them, just shoves her hands deep into her pockets, tucks her chin into her chest and walks determinedly on, towards Tangiers, and Kate. She means to walk now as she intends to for the rest of her life. You don't ever get to turn back, when you're changing the course of history.