Last Dance. David Russell W.

before I signed on the dotted line. Turns out there are all kinds of unscrupulous independent building inspectors too. I had almost made it through the campsite that had once been the building’s front foyer when a familiar though unpleasant voice rang out from the darkness. “Winston!” it barked.

      “Andrew,” I replied with as much coldness as I could muster. I’m a pretty fair musterer of cold. Andrew Senchek was the self-appointed manager of my condo building. He also had no job. Allegedly injured in an industrial accident some five years before, he now lived off the avails of the Workers Compensation Board — supported by all those folks, like myself, who contributed through deductions from their paycheques. Given his perennial disability claim, Andrew spent his days parading around our apartment building, supervising construction workers, annoying garbage collectors, and basically harassing fellow residents with complaints, queries, and general nosiness. He even limped around the premises with the support of a cane, though I was certain I had seen his limp occasionally change to the opposite leg. It wasn’t uncommon to see his cane hanging on the edge of a box of groceries as he hauled them in from his car. I had already vowed that when I had some spare time I would use my lawyerly prowess to look into his WCB claim and see if there wasn’t some way I could force his ass back to work.

      “Why weren’t you home this evening?” he demanded. Andrew asked a lot of ridiculous questions that I pretended were rhetorical. When I failed to respond, he pressed forward. “We wanted to get into your apartment.”

      “Why did you want into my apartment, and why would you think your desire to enter my premises would prompt me to grant you same?” Andrew paused to interpret the questions. Though he spoke with a thick Polish accent that belied his twenty years in Canada, I could not imagine he had to translate English into Polish in order to understand.

      “What?” he finally managed.

      “Exactly,” I replied, turning to unlock the lobby’s front door, though with the floor to ceiling window space next to the door covered only with a plastic orange tarp — a lovely complement to the green surrounding the rest of the building — a Swiss army knife would have been just as effective as a key.

      “We needed to do some drywall work around the living room area.”

      “Bummer,” I replied nonchalantly. “I guess we’ll have to do it next time.”

      “You know, you are not being very co-operative at allowing access for construction.” I could feel a lecture coming on.

      “If you give me a little bit of notice, I will happily provide access for the construction workers to enter the premises.”

      “It would be easier if you would just give me a key.” We had been down this road plenty of times.

      “Are you bonded?”

      “What?” International confusion again.

      “Exactly.” I planned my escape again, but Andrew followed me into the lobby. Maybe the third time I would be lucky.

      “Andrew, you cannot have a key to my apartment. It is private property, and you are among the last people I would give a key to.”

      “Why is that?”

      I resisted the urge to tell him that principally it was because I didn’t like him. In the years since we had both lived in this building, I had come to refer to him as “The Polish Sausage.” It sounds childish, but I worked around teenagers all day. Some of their immaturity was bound to rub off on me. Or vice versa. I settled for a much gentler “Good night, Andrew.” In movies and television, emphatically saying “good night” always seems to be a clear signal to people they are supposed to go away. I don’t think Andrew has cable.

      “But I need to talk to you.”

      “I said good night.” I had opted to forgo stopping at the row of mailboxes to pick up the mail, believing it would only give Andrew those few extra seconds to harp in my ear. The elevator door opened, and I stepped inside, reaching immediately for the third floor button, hoping his alleged limp would prevent him from reaching the elevator before the door closed.

      I knew that injury was a fake.

      “You know, there is no need for you to be hostile,” he told me as the door slid shut. I could think of many reasons to be hostile, not the least of which was that the green pepper from the sauce over the tortellini was starting to repeat on me. Though the condominium was relatively young, the elevator moved as though being powered by hamsters on spinning wheels.

      “Hmm, hmmm,” I muttered in response. I wished I had some mail to leaf through in order to look distracted.

      “We are only trying to get the repairs undertaken as quickly as possible. No one else in the building is being as difficult as you.”

      “No one else is as pretty as me either.” Would humour throw him off?

      “You are a prick,” he hissed, his poor attempts at friendliness completely dissipating. Did they not have comedy in Poland?

      “Now who’s getting hostile?”

      “You should stop being such an asshole and let me do my job.”

      “If you only had one.” I’ve never been one for taking the high road.

      By that time, I had arrived at my apartment door, unlocked it, and was closing it in Andrew’s face, assuring him I would contact the construction foreman to allow my apartment to be entered.

      Home sweet home. Maybe I could move in the summer when I didn’t have all this marking to do. And maybe by then the building wouldn’t look like a set piece from M*A*S*H.

      Chapter Four

      The advantage of working on what’s known as a linear timetable is that you see each of your classes every other day. Of course, if you have a bad class, you’re stuck with them all year, but at least there are little gaps between your times together. I was counting on that one day gap to avoid having to see my law class, when I would have to admit I had failed them miserably in my attempt to argue their case with the vice-principal. It would be quite reasonable for them to no longer consider me the coolest teacher at the school. To be perfectly accurate, they hadn’t actually labelled me as the coolest, but I refused to believe any of the teaching faculty could be any cooler. If I called in sick tomorrow, I would buy myself another couple of days. After three days, surely their teenaged attention spans would have forgotten all about our previous conversation. These thoughts had almost put a spring in my step as I rounded the corner of the second floor hallway leading to my classroom and saw Sara sitting on the floor outside.

      “So?” she asked as I walked up to the door, keys in hand, pretending not to have noticed her. “Mr. Patrick!” she demanded when she could stand my pitiful pretending no longer.

      “Good morning to you too,” I grumbled, trying to muster indignation from the depths of my embarrassment. “Where I come from, we open our requests for information with a polite salutation.”

      “You come from East Van like the rest of us, so cut the crap and get to the point. What did Owen say?” By this time I had entered the classroom and was involved in the daily ritual of emptying my pockets of wallet, keys — anything with a hint of value — and depositing them in my locking filing cabinet. The rule of thumb in most high schools is: if it isn’t locked or bolted down, they’ll steal it. As with Polish Sausage the night before, my attempts to engage myself in other activities in order to disengage my pursuer were not terribly successful.

      “I spoke with Mr. Owen.”

      “And?”

      “Mr. Owen feels that Tim’s date might not be appropriate for the school’s graduation dance.”

      Sara’s eyes rolled so emphatically I thought she might do herself an injury. Or she might be related to the vice-principal. “I already know that. I sent you there. How did you change his mind?” This was the moment in which my carefully cultivated nine-month journey to “cooldom”