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I was heading for a coffee date with Irene this morning. I had arranged it for 10, but I was already running late by waking late, and I was walking. Our favourite mutual haunting place is cash only, so I stopped at the BMO, the one that Athaira and I had visited at 1 am the week before, to pick up some cash again, thanking the vast international system of banking alliances for the advantages to me in doing so.
The BMO building, very probably their main branch in Ottawa, is a towering glass-and-steel behemoth fitting in perfectly with the landscape of the Slater Street area. Its designers, wanting to add some atmosphere of peace and grace to this symbol of the rushed financial world, had spared precious square metres of Central Business District real estate to give the Bank of Montreal a courtyard, paving a walkway with purplish-pink brick, building a barrier of yellow-flowered hedges to give the illusion of separating it from the driveway and from the street. A walkway meant for business-suited types to stroll down, into waiting Lexuses, discussing contracts with Hong Kong and Chicago.
I looked down. There was a black bra lying beside my foot on the walkway, a small padded bra, probably a B-cup, front-clasping and opened, the LaSenza logo on the band.
I will stop on the way back and check whether the street sweepers or BMO custodial staff had thrown away that fragment of that girl's life.
The BMO building, very probably their main branch in Ottawa, is a towering glass-and-steel behemoth fitting in perfectly with the landscape of the Slater Street area. Its designers, wanting to add some atmosphere of peace and grace to this symbol of the rushed financial world, had spared precious square metres of Central Business District real estate to give the Bank of Montreal a courtyard, paving a walkway with purplish-pink brick, building a barrier of yellow-flowered hedges to give the illusion of separating it from the driveway and from the street. A walkway meant for business-suited types to stroll down, into waiting Lexuses, discussing contracts with Hong Kong and Chicago.
I looked down. There was a black bra lying beside my foot on the walkway, a small padded bra, probably a B-cup, front-clasping and opened, the LaSenza logo on the band.
Near it lay a matching black thong; further along was a black-lace creation I surmised was a garter belt (I did not pick up many of the items; I have seen a few CSI episodes, enough to understand how fictional they are, but the pattern the things lay in told me something, and will tell those who know what they are doing still more). Scattered around the middle of the courtyard was a camo headband; a nail file coloured pink, yellow, and fuschia; a lip balm; a black mascara tube that had rolled further away from the other items; a lip pencil. The bottleneck on the dark pearly Maybelline nail polish had shattered on hitting the pavement, although the cap remained intact, and the polish was already drying. I could not even tell what the shards of pearly-gray plastic had been, until I turned the largest one over and recognized the spring of a hairclip.
Who is she, this girl whose purse contents, so intimate, were now scattered in front of one of the largest bank buildings in the Central Business District? My first instinct was that this had been an assault, a mugging in the middle of the night. Then I considered the theory of a purse snatching; the thief took the wallet and the purse itself, and chucked the belongings useless to him. However, the items were scattered in a pattern with a definite epicentre, with the floppy black underwear near it, the hard rolling makeup bottles farther away. I saw no spots of blood, no hair.
Yet I keep picturing this girl. I have no evidence for this, but in my mind's eye, she has dark skin and long black ringlets that she kept held back by the camo headband, or pinned up with that pearly-gray butterfly clip. Probably a student; the brands are resolutely middle-class; LaSenza had had a sale earlier this summer, and I recognized the items. This girl liked her pearly-gray lip pencil, too; it was worn down more than halfway. She knew what colours looked good on her, the dark nail polish, the mascara --- the black LaSenza bra and thong and lace. Small breasts the padded bra would helped with. Who had she meant to show the black lace to? Could it be the same person who had chucked all this?
I hope she is safe and filing a police report, and they catch the one who hurt her. Even if she has not been physically hurt, it is still so...violating to see the small inexpensive items that had been important enough to her personal life to keep in her purse, now tumbled and shattered around the pavement in front of the glass bank building. For a moment my life touched the life of a total stranger whom I will probably never see.
My own purse contents include a small notebook, where I wrote down what I saw, in a ballpoint pen whose ink ran out a quarter of the way in.
I used my card to enter the bank lobby, completed my business with the ATM and went on.
Who is she, this girl whose purse contents, so intimate, were now scattered in front of one of the largest bank buildings in the Central Business District? My first instinct was that this had been an assault, a mugging in the middle of the night. Then I considered the theory of a purse snatching; the thief took the wallet and the purse itself, and chucked the belongings useless to him. However, the items were scattered in a pattern with a definite epicentre, with the floppy black underwear near it, the hard rolling makeup bottles farther away. I saw no spots of blood, no hair.
Yet I keep picturing this girl. I have no evidence for this, but in my mind's eye, she has dark skin and long black ringlets that she kept held back by the camo headband, or pinned up with that pearly-gray butterfly clip. Probably a student; the brands are resolutely middle-class; LaSenza had had a sale earlier this summer, and I recognized the items. This girl liked her pearly-gray lip pencil, too; it was worn down more than halfway. She knew what colours looked good on her, the dark nail polish, the mascara --- the black LaSenza bra and thong and lace. Small breasts the padded bra would helped with. Who had she meant to show the black lace to? Could it be the same person who had chucked all this?
I hope she is safe and filing a police report, and they catch the one who hurt her. Even if she has not been physically hurt, it is still so...violating to see the small inexpensive items that had been important enough to her personal life to keep in her purse, now tumbled and shattered around the pavement in front of the glass bank building. For a moment my life touched the life of a total stranger whom I will probably never see.
My own purse contents include a small notebook, where I wrote down what I saw, in a ballpoint pen whose ink ran out a quarter of the way in.
I used my card to enter the bank lobby, completed my business with the ATM and went on.
I will stop on the way back and check whether the street sweepers or BMO custodial staff had thrown away that fragment of that girl's life.