Names have been changed

A tall man with black hair down to his waist strode into the Major Crime lunchroom and paused, giving me an extremely dirty look. “Who the fuck is she?”

He had to be Cree, I figured. He was so good looking.

 Mike waved a hand. “Ah, she’s with us,” he said. Which was no kind of answer, but there I was, behind a locked door that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, sitting around the table with Mike, Lisa and Ranjit from Major Crime, Traynor, the RCMP helicopter pilot, and Alain, a visiting blood splatter expert, all of us with mugs in front of us.

“This is Danny,” Mike said to me, nodding. “He’s undercover. Does a lot of good work for us.”

I thought, should I know this? We weren’t a community with a lot of political activity, so my guess was he’d be infiltrating a drugs group or a gang.

“Danny, this is Zoë.”         

The undercover guy glanced at me, showing the whites of his eyes and poured himself a mug of coffee. He obviously thought I shouldn’t know what he did either. For sure, he didn’t want to hear I was a writer, researching a book. He’d hate me. As far as police were concerned, writers were scum. It’d taken me three years of asking questions and proving myself to persuade these officers to trust me.

Danny was in his early forties and wore a black leather vest and nice jeans. Now he flipped his hair back behind his shoulders, turned his body away from me, and sat beside Lisa. I knew she was really having a hard time with a rape they’d dealt with earlier in the week, off the West Coast on one of the remote islands. She’d told me some details as I was fixing my tea and I wished she hadn’t. Lisa was shaking her blonde head, her made-up eyes wide. “Never seen anything like it,” she said. “Just disgusting. The woman’s passed out, lying there on the street and [. . .] I mean honest to God, you wouldn’t treat a dog like that.”

There was a reason that long-serving officers, especially the women, got hard looks in their eyes. PTSD wasn’t talked about then. People see things they can never unsee. The woman who’d been raped was still in hospital. She’d be there for at least a month.

I watched Danny’s body language soften as he took in that whoever I was, the other members were relaxed with me. I’d been out flying with the helicopter pilot, finding marijuana grows on Crown land. I’d listened to the blood-spatter expert in court at a murder trial and was able to tell him he’d done a good job. Just by being in the lunchroom, I was being vouched for.

It was then I realized I felt more at home with this assortment of RCMP officers than I did in departmental meetings at the university where I was teaching. That was disconcerting. I was able to be myself. What did that make me around my academic colleagues, then?

At some point, watching the interchanges around the table, I found myself cracking a joke and going wow, what did I just do? At my university departmental meetings, I was a ghost. I’d been berating myself for being withdrawn, but now I realized at work, if I opened my mouth, the others, who were all senior to me, rode right over top of me with their important news. I’d been blaming myself for not being witty and charming, however apparently I had no difficulty speaking up here.

Danny, the undercover guy, also held his own in conversation. He was obviously well-known to everyone except the blood-spatter expert, in town to testify at a murder trial. The only thing I could see that Danny had in common with the rest of the cops was how clean he was. It was my guess that Danny, when he was hanging with lowlifes, would present himself in a lot scuzzier fashion. He’d dress for the role. Police officers, maybe as a reaction to what they deal with every day, throw up a protective screen by way of cleanliness. Shiny hair, trimmed fingernails, the plainclothes folks always wearing immaculate clothes; every one of them radiated the power of soap.

After the break, when I was washing my mug at the sink, Danny came up to me. In another life, he could have been a movie star. “Just so we’re clear,” he said. His voice was gentle. He gave me lots of personal space. “You don’t know me. You never met me. If you walk into the bar on Saturday or five years from now, and there I am, don’t you be saying, ‘Oh, your face is familiar, where do I know you from?’”

 I wondered what place he had in mind that he’d say “the bar,” like there was only one.

 He really was very masculine. Danny held a finger up to his face and pursed his mouth, miming someone concentrating with uncanny accuracy. I could even see he intended it to be a woman thinking. “And then you might go on and say, ‘Right, I met you at the lunchroom that time and you were with— Don’t you be doing it.”

That’s happened to him, I thought. He’s a striking man. He’s showing me how easy it is to slip.

 I looked up at Danny and smiled. “I don’t know you. I never met you. If I see you somewhere, I won’t say your name, I’ll walk right by and not stop.” The entire six years we’d lived in that town, I’d never been to a bar. But how was he to know? It was his life on the line.

Yet another story I’d never tell my colleagues. Their loss, I thought. And I laughed inside, knowing for the first time, I didn’t care.

Does this feeling of not fitting at work and yet fitting in somewhere completely different, echo with you? Tell me about it.