Montreal

Windsor, Ontario, the birthplace of my mother, lies some six hundred miles southwest of here. It is a small hard-time city with few attractions other than being the Canadian little brother of Detroit, which is just across the river. Originally I had planned to go there alone while she visited an uncle in Gatineau, the last bastion of French Canada before the bridge to Ottawa. But after ten days down here I find myself increasingly reluctant to part with her company. So I pitch my new idea. She talks me down. We compromise – I’ll join her in Gatineau and go onto Windsor after two days, she will go back East.

Meantime Montreal is gripped by an unseasonal string of warm days- twenty degrees but hotter than that in spirit; I walk the streets as if it were summer. Its famous irreverence is on parade everywhere you look. Jugglers, flutists, comedians, transsexuals; the city flexes happily in the afternoon warmth. By night enormous spotlights crisscross the sky with erratic movements, more than twenty at my count, part of an art installation near the contemporary museum with which people can interact and create by jerking long levers this way and that. But I have worked hard to be here and contentedly pass those levers by, uncaring and content with her beside me. Like yupis we work on our laptops in silence or like poets our notebooks on her balcony or a Guatemalan hammock spread flat in the park.

When home, rarely do we engage with her flatmates. One is Anglophone, a 3D animator who sleeps by day and works by night. He is a nice enough guy but is more likely to emerge from his room in the daylight hours for food or something completely left field – the other day it was every last fork in the kitchen to play the role of fish in a project – than communicate with others. And while his dedicated introversion impresses me it is another thing entirely to be too insular to observe basic household courtesies; she regrets choosing him when the last girl left. The other two, both women from France, are lovely people but neither here nor there for me. One is much older and pregnant, the other from a tiny village near the German border who does not speak English and is shy as can be.