The following is an excerpt from A Week of This: A Novel in Seven Days, published by ECW Press in April, 2008. The novel, as is only right for a Canadian book, is about unhappy people in a small town, and all takes place over one week, just before winter. The following excerpt is from the first chapter – or “day” – which, for purely structural reasons, happens to be a Thursday.

Manda stood in the doorway of her stepbrother’s apartment, trying to locate the source of a smell. Marcus lived on the second floor, above a store, at the top of an outdoor flight of stairs. This smell, which hit her full in the face every time she came over, was like the building’s bad breath. It exhaled on her the minute she opened the door, and she’d have to take a step back. A plant stood beside her, just inside the kitchen, reaching up to her knees. She had bought it to bring some colour to Marcus’s life. Its leaves drooped, and the whole thing leaned forward like an exhausted child, embarrassed and wanting to go home.

“How does it stink so bad in here?” she called out.

She felt a little giddy all of a sudden – she sometimes found herself invigorated by failure, even the failure of the air to smell good. Her hair was wet from the rain; it slumped and made her look older than she was. She was only two years away from turning forty and nearly done shedding all resemblance to her younger self. In the last couple of years she had stopped letting her bleached dirty-blonde hair snake down her back, cutting it herself to just below her shoulders. It was almost a relief not to be girly anymore, to trim off that last connection. She had always felt hard, so now she looked hard.

“Marcus, it really stinks! What is it?”

There were empty cases of beer on the landing. Marcus hardly ever drank: they had been there since before he moved in. The boxes were faded, warped, and broken at the seams. Brown bottles leaned out of the split corners, their clear bellies full of cigarette butts. Nothing frustrated her more than this, this willful paralysis. She saw it in Marcus, she saw it in Patrick, she saw it in everybody she knew. She tried to hunt it down and kill it in herself, but it gripped her from the inside and slowed her down. She wanted to cough hard sometimes, to cough up this fog. Instead, she shouted it down.

“These are so gross, Marcus. You’re gonna have to get rid of them sometime. Get Patrick to help you.”

She walked through Marcus’s apartment into the living room, staying clear of the couch where Marcus lay, and of his long, pink feet pointing crookedly at the ceiling. It looked like he’d been on the couch all morning watching TV. It was almost noon; the fishing shows were starting. Manda walked deliberately in front of the TV to see if Marcus would object, to see if he was even watching it anymore. She kicked at a pair of socks that were mashed together on the floor and held her keys defensively out in front of her, as if ready for something to peel itself from the wall and fly at her. The air was like the inside of a scuba tank. Manda liked to make clear how awful she thought the place had become – how awful he’d let it become.

“This used to be a cool little apartment,” she’d tell him. She hardly ever came over anymore, and when she did, she couldn’t help but condemn it.

“This is why your mom doesn’t come around. She thinks it’s full of mold and doesn’t want to get sick from it.”

“She doesn’t like the stairs,” Marcus countered sleepily. “She doesn’t give a shit how the place smells – her house is like an ashtray, you know that. She just can’t get up the stairs easy. She almost went down on her back a couple times.”

Marcus’s hair flopped down over his forehead like an omelette. He didn’t get up.

“She told me that, too,” Manda said. She pulled at the living room window, and her fingernails crunched the baked corpses of wasps and flies. The window wouldn’t budge.

“It smells dead,” she added. “Do these windows even open?”

“Not usually.”

“Oh, but wait!” Manda said suddenly, and out she went while Marcus hid himself further under his blanket. He was sure she would bring in some new thing for her house, and he was so sick of looking at chairs and paint samples. Instead, she walked back in with her whole upper half magically transformed into a plant.

“Move all that,” she said from behind the thing’s leaves. She bent her knees in the direction of the trunk he used as a coffee table. Manda flopped the plant on the trunk and stepped back without taking her eyes of it. “For colour,” she said in a serious tone, as if colour were something he was being rewarded for, like bravery. “You need some green in here.”

She went looking for some water for the plant, expecting to find evidence of a week’s worth of meals in the kitchen and maybe a few dark things running under the fridge, but Marcus had obviously just done the dishes. There was just one plate and a knife in the sink. The cupboard doors were all closed.

“Has Kelly been over?” she asked through the door.

“She’s in the shower right now,” came the answer."

Manda came back fast into the living room. “Is she? Why didn’t you tell me? I almost walked in there.”

Marcus only gave her a sarcastic look.

“Oh shut up,” she said.

“Well, as if I wouldn’t have said anything.”

“You probably wouldn’t have. I only asked because it’s so clean in your kitchen,” she said. “It’s a miracle.”

Marcus had been seeing a woman for a few months now, a little blonde. Manda was surprised at first at the difference in their ages – he was thirty-six; Kelly looked at least ten years younger. The only real problem with Kelly was that she had a kid, a little boy whose father had fucked off long ago. Manda tried to hold her tongue – she wanted Marcus to be happy; he hadn’t been in a serious relationship since just after high school – but she just couldn’t do it.

“Can this go somewhere else?” Marcus asked, pointing at the plant. It looked pathetic sitting there, as if waiting to be thrown out the window.

“Oh, you’re so friggin helpless,” Manda said and lifted the plant again. She carried it to the bathroom. “You’re sure Kelly’s not here now,” she shouted over her shoulder. Marcus threw his hand up to give her the finger, but just let his arm drop back down without following through. On the TV a man in a camouflage hunting jacket had just landed a huge bass that kicked water at the camera with its tail. “Nothing to it,” the man said, the whole heavy fish hooked by the gill onto one of his fat fingers. By the time Manda returned he had thrown it back in the water.

“So keep it somewhere where there’s lots of light.”

“How about outside?”

“You’re funny.”

Manda had her jacket on, and looked ready to go, but she made no move to leave. She was still holding her keys in her hand. She looked almost as though she’d forgotten the way back out.

“Are you supposed to be working?”

Manda lay her palms flat against her forehead. “Oh fuck, when am I not?” she said.

“So what’s going on with Ken?” Marcus asked her through a yawn. “He doesn’t like his new place?”

Manda had her keys out again and almost dropped them. “What? You were talking to him? When? He isn’t calling me back.”

“I saw him yesterday – no: Tuesday. He was in a weird mood.” Not that you could tell, he wanted to add. Manda’s brother was more than a little fucked up. The whole side of his face had been burned when he was a kid, and he was a little slow in the head. Not quite fully retarded, but unable to get his brain moving sometimes. He spoke and acted like someone who’d just been fished out from under the ice: his head was half-frozen all the time.

“Where’d you see him?”

“Somewhere. Downtown. I asked him about the new place, and he told me he hated it. Wasn’t he all excited to move before?”

“He hates moving, but he had to get out of the last place so bad. Oh christ, Marcus, you remember all that.” Manda’s eyes went wide. “Well look, if you see him again, tell him to fucking call me back. It’s stupid. Anyway, I have to get going.”

On the fishing show they were doing a quick montage of strikes that made the whole thing look more exciting than fishing had ever been, ever. Tails kept thrashing at the water and slapping against the side of the boat. The camera’s lens got beaded up with water in all the commotion. The water looked like some kind of frothy oil. Manda had never been on a boat in her life. She refused. Seeing the kinds of things they were pulling out of the water just confirmed it: huge and sleek, with stretched, grimacing mouths. She couldn’t watch any more.

“Don’t let that plant die,” she yelled from the kitchen. “Get Kelly to take care of it or something – she can use all her mothering skills.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Marcus asked, trying to see where she had gone, but she was already out the door and down the stairs.

All Manda had on was her windbreaker – she never wore enough when it got cold. She’d push the sleeves up hard to the elbows as if ready to dig in and start kneading the cold air with her bare fingers. She wanted to grapple with it, to get the better of it. Manda opened up in the fall, it revived her. When everybody was feeling the chill, she was out in her backyard in a sweatshirt, cheerfully hacking down the last of her small garden, dragging the dead stems into piles and pushing the whole thing into the giant composter at the back of the yard. It looked big enough to curl up and sleep in. That black box seethed with warmth and activity the entire winter. Even in a long cold snap, in the most desperate stretch of February, Manda knew there was a warm, humid heart beating slowly at the centre of all those densely packed carrot peelings and bread crusts and coffee grounds. There were colonies of tiny creatures in there, living in highways of slick mulch, waiting for the sun and waiting for her to come and lift the lid and set them all loose into free soil. She had no kids and no pets, but back there she was a mother to millions.

The call-centre where Manda worked sat above a bridal store that never seemed to be open. There was dust on the shoulders and heads of the mannequins, the dead-eyed brides and frozen flower girls. Manda hadn’t worn a dress like any of the ones in the window when she married Patrick, so it always pleased her to see them looking rotten. Many of the stores along Dunbridge’s main strip were like this, dark and quiet. There was a whole stretch of pawn shops near the old movie theatre. And they and the dollar stores were thriving – the mall and the new Wal-Mart having sucked everything else out to the highway. The movie theatre itself was sealed up and being used as storage for an army surplus store.

With a chocolate bar and a can of Diet Coke she’d bought to get her through the afternoon, Manda started up the stairs to the office. Cheryl and Lana, two of the women she worked with, were coming down at the same time. All three made half-hearted jokes about having to squeeze past each other, though they all knew Cheryl was the reason. Manda had never been thin, and Lana had put on weight since she quit smoking, but Cheryl was just huge. When Lana walked with her, she looked like her trainer, as if Cheryl were about to mount a unicycle and ride around in circles. Manda had to press against the wall while the other two went down single-file.

“I’m not that late, am I?” Manda asked when she got above the other two. “Who’s on the phones?”

“Just Jessica,” Cheryl said, and made a face that showed how well she thought the new girl was doing on her own.

“So Sean’s having a shit-fit?”

The other two were already at the door and didn’t hear Manda’s question over the sound of traffic.

The office was just one big, open room with a small kitchen in the front and an enclosed room in the back that Sean, the manager, used as his own office. The room had been the sewing and repair room for the bridal store; there were still rectangular outlines of the machines on the floor and holes where they’d been bolted in. In the gaps between the wooden slats were millions of tiny pins. Sometimes Manda had to pull them out of the soles of her shoes when she got home at night.

Once inside, Manda could hear Jessica trying to complete a reservation, but couldn’t see the girl behind her cubicle wall. The new girl kept trying to confirm a credit card number: she would slowly recite it, then pause to be told that she’d again got it wrong. She sounded as if she were giving coordinates or trying to break a code. Sean came out of his office just as Manda was walking by, and they both stood there for a while, staring toward Jessica’s cubicle, from which came again the sound of the same nine numbers being read out in slightly different order. Sean looked at Manda, curled his lips back over his teeth, and soundlessly strangled the empty air in front of him.

“Then why’d you friggin hire her?” Manda muttered after he had gone back into his office. The answer likely involved a combination of his love of stupid young women and Dunbridge’s laughably shallow labour pool – he probably hired the first person who could work a computer. The people Manda saw when she came for her own interview looked less than a generation away from the tractor. The woman who had waited next to her admitted she couldn’t make any sense of the company’s want ad, though she assumed that computers were somehow involved. “I just figure they’ll show me what they need me to do and that’ll be it,” the woman told her with a nervous laugh. Manda had been in Dunbridge almost two-thirds of her life, but she still felt sometimes like she was living in some kind of pilgrim village.

Manda had her headset on and was about to start taking reservations when she realized she was still wearing her damp windbreaker.

Jessica was just finishing her call when she heard someone swear. She stood up to see who was around, but Manda had already disappeared. The new girl sat down more slowly than she had stood up, looking with dull panic at the red light flashing on her phone.