Heather O'Neill's Mystery in the Métro: 'Squished together like a strange creature with 50 hearts' (2024)

My name is Valentine. I am 23 years old and I work at a little store at Berri-UQAM métro. I am very ordinary looking and Barney, who works the same shift as me at the store, says I do not know how to dress. I have been working there for four years, and I have never missed a day. This is why sometimes I seem familiar to people, even though they can’t place me.

My parents died in a car crash when I was a baby. My grandmother said it was very common for children to die of the same ailments their parents suffered from when they got older. So it was very likely that I too would somehow be killed by a car. It was in my genes.

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This was her reason for not letting me out of the building to go onto the street. My grandmother was a very sedentary woman. When she stood up, it was as though she were on the deck of a moving ship. My grandmother stayed inside because she remembered an outside world that didn’t exist anymore.

We lived in a big building downtown. You could get into a tunnel filled with stores and the métro without going outside. So even though I wasn’t allowed outside, I was allowed to walk underground. I would go into the dépanneur to pick up food and cigarettes and a copy of the newspaper.

My earliest memories were getting newspapers for my grandmother. There were newspapers everywhere in our apartment. My grandmother would clip out articles and put the clippings in different piles. She never looked at the piles again. But they seemed important just the same.

Once she cut out an article about a statue of a Virgin Mary that was crying in Laval of all places. She said she was cutting it out not because a statue was crying, but because it had happened in Laval, which amused her. “The Lord has decided to come to Laval!” she couldn’t stop snickering.

My room was not really my own room. Because I had to share it with so much garbage: newspapers and magazines and old boxes of cereal and broken lamps and fans. I had to make place for the garbage, more than the garbage ever made place for me. I thought the garbage appeared the way mushrooms did in the forest, or flowers.

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I had a mattress in my room. But the garbage underneath the bed began to grow and grow. And the mattress rose up on it. And it was very close to the ceiling. I know because I was able to draw on it. I drew some stars in pencil.

My grandmother would yell at me that I was attracting the concierge’s attention too much. There was one year that I dressed up for Halloween as Zorro. I wore the black mask and cape almost every day for a month afterwards. I liked the feeling of doing handstands. But there was no wall in the apartment to do them against, so I would do them in the corridor.

That was one of the reasons she let me ride the métro. I would pack myself a lunch and bring along some of my magazines to read in a briefcase. It was nice to have somewhere to go during the day. I liked to ride around on the métro. It made me feel as though I was travelling across the whole city. I would see all the different people come in and out of the doors.

I used to believe there were trolls that lived in the subway tunnels. I would kneel on the seat with my nose pressed against the window trying to catch them moving about. Tiny men with long beards and tuques that children had lost on their way to school.

I was wary of taking the Yellow Line at first because it went underneath the river. This seemed dangerous to me. I thought I would look out the métro windows and see marine animals. I would like to see a school of belugas. And there might be an octopus moving its arms around like an operator at a switchboard. But it felt just like an ordinary métro ride in the end.

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I sometimes like a crowded subway. We are all squished together like a strange creature with 50 hearts. In the same way flies have so many eyes that nothing can swat them, no one can break this beast’s hearts. And it was so nice to be tucked in with all those bodies. Just like I belonged. My grandmother barely touched me.

I love when the métro stops running and stalls inside the tunnel. Everyone begins talking to one another. But they get so panicked. I don’t know why. They are only in a métro tunnel, whether the train is moving or not. It isn’t as though they have to hold their breath. But I complain and panic with them, speculating what could possibly be happening, as though I have anywhere to be.

Most people have a mind-your-own-business policy in the métro. It is rather amazing how much you can get away with on a métro without anyone saying anything. I once saw a man open a suitcase in the métro. He got undressed, and changed outfits in the middle of the crowd. I did not know which was stranger: a man changing his outfit in the subway, or the fact no one seemed to react or even notice it.

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It was shortly after my grandmother died that I got the job working at the convenience store in Berri-UQAM métro. There was a piece of paper and the words NOUS EMBAUCHONS written on it in black marker. All I wanted was to be around magazines and newspapers. I couldn’t believe I got the career I wanted. Who else in the world could say such a thing?

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The landlord said I could move into another apartment. He was going to fix up our old one and rent it for three times the price. The new apartment is on the 38th floor. It is so tiny, I am delighted. It is so cosy.

“Oh, you are here,” my co-worker Barney says when he arrives back from his break.

“Well, of course I am here,” I say. “It’s still my shift for another five minutes. Why would I leave the store unattended?”

“Were you not just standing on the platform downstairs?”

“No, I have not left my post since 9 o’clock this morning. You should try it yourself one day. It’s very rewarding.”

“I just saw someone who looks exactly like you.” He walks to the back of the store, which has a large window that looks onto the platform below. Barney puts his fingertip to the glass. “There you are,” he says.

I look down too. And there I was.

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Read the next instalment of Heather O’Neill’s Mystery in the Métro, with illustrations by Arizona O’Neill, here.

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