Heather O'Neill: Daydreams of Angels

Swooping down behind the Orphan, the Headmistress grabbed the back of her hair with her fist and forced the girl’s head right into the bucket of water. She yanked her up for a breath, and the Orphan’s body shook and she gasped uncontrollably. The Headmistress pushed her back under the water again. She let her up and the Orphan collapsed, writhing and puking on the floor. Lying prostrate, with her little finger splayed beneath her on the tiles, the Orphan knew that she could sink no further in this world. And so she slowly rose up, straightened her tiny spine and knew for the first time, and without a doubt, what dignity felt like.

That night, when the Orphan picked up the violin, she began to play a concerto by Mendelssohn. The priest looked up, surprised. He could not master such a tune. She was playing better than he had ever been able to. She was fourteen years old and she had surpassed him. Actually, her playing could even be described as miraculous, and everyone in the orphanage stopped what they were doing to marvel.

Realizing that the orphanage now had a soloist, the priest’s head was filled with plans. Their Charitable Children’s Orphan Orchestra would be able to play all over the country, and perhaps they might even be invited to perform for diplomats. They would surely be rewarded financially for delivering to the world a child who could create such sounds!

But this was not to be, because the very next morning the Orphan decided to run away. She put the suit and the violin at the bottom of a laundry basket filled with clean underwear that she was supposed to deliver. She carried the basket out the door and down the street, as if she was an ordinary woebegone orphan going about her godforsaken task. In any case, it wasn’t terribly hard to escape from an orphanage. All orphans who are the heroes of stories are able to escape from their orphanages.

She changed into the suit in an alleyway. Only a black cat saw her, but it was too busy saying witty things to alert anyone.

“By the time a child is eleven years old, it’s all too late,” said the black cat. “They’ve picked up character traits that will plague them like fleas for the rest of their lives.”

The Orphan pushed her hair back and then reached into a parked car and took a hat off the dashboard and pulled it down over her head at a jaunty angle. She put the violin under her arm, and when she stepped out into the street she was no longer an orphan, but a travelling Gypsy.

The Gypsy sat up, dumbfounded by the tale. He got out of bed and looked into the Orphan’s closet. There was his famous suit hanging from the coat hanger. He looked in the corner and there was a dark burgundy violin case, that was none other than his own.

Turning back, he saw that the Orphan was gone. The Gypsy avoided looking into the mirror, frightened of whose face he would actually see. The Gypsy knew something about himself now. He was only putting up a front to the world. He had to put a distance between himself and other people. It was because of his childhood that he couldn’t trust anybody. He had grown up relying on himself and being independent. He had never learned how to let other people into his life.

As the Gypsy walked up the stairs to his room, with his shoes in his hands and his belt buckle undone, he was overcome with empathy for the bear. It made him feel sad that the bear was up in his room, reading paperback novels and trying to put himself to sleep.

And of course the bear had been right. The Gypsy could never travel without him. And even though it was a monster, a beast that people had all sorts of preconceived notions about, the bear was really his own great big heart. The bear was who he would have been if he hadn’t had a difficult childhood. The bear was everything that was good and decent about the Gypsy, and it would follow him whether he liked it or not, everywhere he went. It would never let him just look at the world coldly. It would always magically make him notice that everything was full of wonder.

Jesus and I were pretty good friends, and after he disappeared from our neighbourhood and all those TV reporters started showing up on our street, I was a pretty hot property. My mom would freak out and call them vultures when they tried to ask me questions, but I’d try and chill her out. “Be cool,” I’d say, and it wasn’t just that I liked being on TV; I truly liked talking about Jesus. I still do, and to this day, people are always asking me to tell them everything I know about him.

Jesus and I were in Grade Six when we first met, and back then not everyone was allowed to hang out with me. A part of the reason was the way I dressed. I was the only girl in class who had a pair of high heels, and for my birthday my mother bought me a ton of black bracelets with studs on them. Other people’s parents said I looked like a whore, and they didn’t want their kids to get my whore cooties or something. But my attitude has always been to just be who you got to be. A part of this way of thinking comes from me, but a good part of it also comes from the stuff that Jesus taught me, but more on that later.

Jesus first showed up in the middle of the school year and sat at the back of the class. On that first day, when our chemistry teacher put on this movie about molecules, Jesus held his hands up in front of the projector and made a shadow puppet of a dove. That’s how I first noticed him.

It was about a week later when everybody started to notice Jesus. In moral ed. we had to give a presentation on a social concern, and Jesus did his on world hunger. He went up to the front of the classroom, without a loose-leaf paper or anything, and started going on about how there wasn’t such a thing as world hunger, which, as well as being a downright weird thing to say, was also factually incorrect. We had all seen pictures of Ethiopia on the news and those poor kids were definitely hungry. Jesus said that if God fed the sparrows and butterflies, then he would also feed humans.

The teacher pointed out that a lot of animals had gone extinct because the environment hadn’t provided for them, but Jesus shrugged and went back to his seat, so we all figured he was really stupid.

A lot of the kids in the class tended to not like Jesus very much. This, of course, was not helped by the fact the teachers thought he was nuts. I know teachers aren’t supposed to think stuff like that, but you just knew they were thinking it anyhow. Like when we went on a class field trip to the zoo, Jesus went over to the lion’s cage and stuck his hand through the bars. The teacher was still screaming at him the next day in class, going on about how not only could he have lost a hand, but he’d also have been forced to go from school to school, giving lectures about it.

“Why would you do something so stupid?” she demanded.

“I knew that the lion wouldn’t have bitten me,” Jesus said. “I could just feel it in my heart.”

You know he became the talk of the teachers’ lounge with that one.

But you’d think bravery like that would impress kids, right? Well, you’re half right. Feeding your hand to a lion is cool, no doubt, but it’s just that he was also relentlessly lame. So lame that it undid all of the good. For instance, once when we were all in the back of the schoolyard and Judas was explaining to us where babies came from, Jesus positively spazzed out.

Now I knew about all that baby stuff, even then, and I knew that Judas was fifty percent full of crap, but if I piped in with my corrections, he’d be all “ Excusez-moi, Professor Been-Around-The-Block,” so I made sure to keep my mouth shut.

But Jesus, on the other hand, started having a complete breakdown. He said that Judas was a liar and that if a woman hears someone whispering in her ear in the middle of the night and if she sits up and looks around and no one is there, she’ll be pregnant by the morning.