He stood, unbuttoned his baggy shorts (a birthday present the year before, ordered from a cooperative, fair-trade cotton farm), and urinated on the door of the school, giggling, walking backwards to get away from the approaching stream. He felt guilty as he buttoned up and remembered Bill, the skinny old janitor who used to clean up after the children whenever they threw up or tracked mud through the school.
Another few blocks’ walk brought him back home, where he stood in front of the house, trying to appreciate that this would be the last night he slept here.
~
Stefan looked around his room. The walls were bare, except for the empty CD racks. He’d sold his collection the week before. He sized up the two huge duffel bags he’d packed, one blue, one green. He had to get these upstairs, but he still hadn’t spoken to his mother about his leaving. Well, now or never, he thought, and hoisted the bags, one held in front of him, one behind. He started up the stairs, but fell backward onto the green bag, the blue bag landing on top of him. He struggled back to his feet, and dragged one bag at a time up the stairs. How he was going to manage on the other end, he wasn’t sure. The rest of the cast would arrive in a week, and he hadn’t booked himself a place to stay.
He dragged the bags through the kitchen to the front room. He took his jacket from the coat rack and checked the inside pocket for his ticket, then dropped it on his bags. He tied up his shoes. Every little act was a delay tactic. His heart did a drum roll; he was sorely tempted to slip out the front door, but he’d promised Helen he would leave properly.
The sound of Cerise’s cello resonated from the study. Stefan went to the door and knocked. “Yes?” asked Cerise from within. Stefan opened the door.
“Sorry. Do you know where my mother is?”
“She’s not here,” she said, not looking up from the finger she traced along the sheet music on the stand in front of her.
Stefan’s heart sank. “But—”
“Stefan, do you think she wanted to be here? She knows.”
“But how?”
“Well,” she said, shifting her flowing patterned dress around the cello so she could turn and face him, “you said you were going somewhere. You’ve sold or thrown out all your things. You’ve been cagey all week. And she’s a smart woman.”
His mind and his feelings were jumbled. On one hand, he was upset: she’d stolen his thunder once again. On the other, he felt guilty that his plans were hurting her already. Maybe that was his original intention, but that had long passed.
Cerise put her cello to one side and picked up a small package from the old desk beside her. “She wanted you to have this.”
Stefan took it from her, a small, gift-wrapped cube. “What is it?” he asked.
“She said it was a Voice Box. I have no idea what that is, but she said you’re not to open it until you’ve had a change of heart.”
“Um, okay.”
A car horn sounded outside.
“Well, uh, goodbye,” he said. He moved to give Cerise a kiss or a hug or whatever would seem appropriate when he got close to her. But she flipped up a hand and turned her head away. “Don’t be good to me if you can’t be good to her.”
The taxi honked again.
“Okay,” said Stefan, “goodbye.” He took the box with him and, unzipping one loose corner of a duffel bag, stuffed it away. He opened the door and dragged his bags down the steps. The cabbie helped him lift them into the trunk, and they both got into the car.
As the cab pulled away, Stefan looked back at the house. The curtains in one of the upstairs windows moved, and he saw Delonia looking out. He pressed himself against the back window and waved. But the curtains closed.
The cab took him through the heart of town, then out onto the open expressway leading to the airport. He felt the gravity of the city pulling at him, but the cab was travelling fast enough to break away from it. The multicoloured glass buildings receded. The CN Tower pointed into the sky like a giant mechanical pencil. Stefan wondered what else it might have written for him there. But it was too late for that now.
He turned and looked at the road ahead. Cars jockeyed back and forth across the lanes at high speed. The cab passed under a green highway sign with a white airplane on it. He felt dizzy. Everything he knew was back in the city he’d just left. How did this all start? he wondered. He’d asked his father to save him. Did this, today, make sense in that context? He reached into his trouser pocket and took out the tiny newsprint letters he’d stuck between pieces of tape. EDINBURGH. What did that mean? He knew practically nothing about the place. He was very clear, though, about what he was leaving.
~
Stefan washed his hands in the airport bathroom sink. He ran them through his floppy hair, then put them under the hot air dryer. The lights in the room dimmed. Stefan looked up, then around the room. From the shadows in a corner stepped a man in a wide-brimmed hat and an unseasonably long and heavy black cloak. It was the creature who’d pushed Stefan down the steps of the Matholic church.
Stefan grabbed his ticket from the counter and moved toward the door. But the thing grabbed his hand, struggling to take his ticket. Stefan pulled back with all his might. The figure was strong. His other hand shot to Stefan’s throat and squeezed it hard. Stefan struggled against the grip of the two hands, flailing as he was lifted from his feet. The shadowy man slammed him into the metal doors of the cubicle.
His eyes were watering, closing, but in the mirrors he saw someone else: his father, spotlit in the middle of the room. Stefan went limp and closed his eyes. He felt the figure being pulled away from him, and he fell to the floor. Lying on the cold tile, he opened his eyes. There was no one else in the room.
Stefan picked his ticket up from the floor, grabbed the handles of his bags, and shuffled as quickly as he could from the bathroom out into the sunlight that blazed down from the slanted glass ceiling. The uniformed woman at the check-in counter was calm and polite, but Stefan could barely bring himself to speak to her, still shocked and frightened. He wanted to tell her what had happened, to have her call security, but he knew they’d find nothing.
Once he cleared customs, Stefan headed for the bar and sat in the most populated and brightly-lit area until his flight was called. He tottered down the jetway and poured himself into his seat. The woman next to him fussed with her seatbelt, took a motion sickness pill, and set out a stick of foil-wrapped gum in anticipation of pressure changes. She took the plastic film from a CD titled Fearless Flying and put the disk in her CD player. She turned to him and smiled, but she was clearly terrified. Stefan felt the opposite about the flight: he would be safer up in the air, away from whoever it was who wanted to stop him from leaving.
Ten
Short Run
The airport shuttle bus shuddered to a stop, and Stefan woke up. “City centre,” said the driver, rising to press a button over his head to adjust the destination sign. Stefan rubbed his face and sat up, taking a moment to understand what the man had said, since it sounded like “Sih-ee say-ah”. He felt horrible, not having slept on the airplane. Throughout the overnight flight, a pair of little boys had run up and down the aisle beside him, a baby cried at the changes in air pressure, and movies flickered on a large screen (even if he’d wanted to watch yet another combination of pretty, straight famous people fall in love despite their cute and quirky differences, he couldn’t use the headphones without being driven to distraction).
He collected his two giant duffel bags from a penned-in area at the front of the bus, lifting them with difficulty over the rails. He thanked the driver, and dragged his cargo from the bus.
His tiredness fell away as he looked at the sight before him. Slate spires and stone steeples pierced the sky like a deadly ancient jawbone. Walls opened at random intervals, revealing tiny staircases that wound away into shade. To his right, a grassy valley of a park stretched out, peopled with old couples, business lunchers, and shirtless young men lying in the sun, the whitest people he’d ever seen, d
rinking from cans of beer.
Stefan leaned forward and headed like a pack-mule toward the steepled Old Town. (He knew from his reading that this was what it was called, as opposed to the New Town, the newness of which predated most of Canada.) He knew there were a few hostels nearby; he would check into one and get himself established here.
He reached a small roundabout. Thinking it clear, he started to cross, when a black taxi like a scarab beetle honked at him and flew across his path. Stefan caught his breath, startled: Wrong direction. Carefully now, he rushed across and headed down the street, then stepped into a small opening framed in a sandstone brick wall. Through it was a tiny staircase. His bags scraped against the walls and he hoisted them, bumping along behind him. Halfway up the staircase was an improbably-situated pub; further along, a barber. He reached the top, breathless, and found a street in front of him. Its shops and restaurants were modern, set into the carved faces of stone buildings. He walked up the steep, curved street, reaching an even older street, which was cobbled and open. He dragged his gear another hundred feet, then dropped it in a heap. Before him rose a great black cathedral with a steeple like a crown of rock. He turned around, taking in as much as he could. The age, weight, and artistry of it all was more than he could comprehend. It was an exact fit with the chalk drawing he’d seen on the blackboard bathroom walls after asking for his father’s help. Never before had he felt so sure he’d done the right thing. He cried with joy, unselfconscious, though the street was packed with tourists, buskers, and countless actors passing out handbills for their shows. For the moment, he wanted nothing more than to stand still and look. Everything was so different. He felt as though his senses had been peeled.
He spent the next five hours walking around the streets, up and down tiny staircases between the buildings, each of them named So-and-So’s Close or Such-and-Such Wynd. He walked along streets that spanned bridge-like over other parts of the city, then, somehow, found himself walking under the same street, staring up at its arched black underside.
The city seemed to move, an endless Escher drawing whose connections he couldn’t fathom. He couldn’t find the hostel, and the streets became even more confusing when the sun sank behind the pointed tops of the city and darkness set in. Eventually, he gave up, and curled up between his bags on the landing of a deserted close.
~
Stefan dreamt about a concert, with music made from the sound of rocks knocking, grinding together. He felt himself being passed over the crowd. When he awoke, he found himself lying on the doorstep of the hostel.
~
Stefan pulled the rough sheet and the corner of his sleeping bag up around his head, but he could still hear his roommates’ talking, laughing, and snorting drunkenly. None of them was over twenty-five, and Stefan found himself feeling decidedly old and cranky since he checked in the day before. Their Australian accents, with their elastic-band vowels, grated on his ears. He curled into a tighter ball, shifted sides, and made an over-loud, exasperated sigh. It went unnoticed. Half an hour later, someone turned on a radio, and Stefan finally sat up and asked them to be quiet.
“Oh, sorry mate,” replied one of them in a friendly, guileless way that made Stefan hate them more. Their talk continued in whispers and laughs, but he managed to fall asleep, despite the sunlight that crept into the room.
He awoke a few hours later and couldn’t fall asleep again. He tried, but knew that sleep isn’t something you can try to do. He stuffed his sleeping bag into its carry-sack and put it into a metal locker. The only remaining occupant of the room was someone new, a middle-aged Japanese man. He was better-prepared for the hostel experience, wearing earplugs and a sleep-mask. While Stefan looked at him, the man passed wind loudly, without shifting or reacting in any way. Stefan cringed and left the room to wander through the hostel’s narrow hallways, trying to find the kitchen.
As he entered the room, he was surprised to see the Australian boys, all very much awake, along with an equal number of young women. The boys said hello to him, and he responded by weakly flipping a hello hand as he shuffled to the refrigerator.
After he’d checked in the day before, he went for a stroll around the town, trying to make sense of its geometries, and failing, but happy nonetheless to walk about with his head arched back, taking in the shapes in the buildings’ masonry. He’d bought groceries on the way back to the hostel, then wandered, lost, for a few hours, until he finally arrived, and sleepily stuffed the whole bag into the fridge. He opened the bag now, and found that it had been looted.
He poured himself a bowl of granola, but all that came from the box was dust. His carton of soy-milk produced a tiny dollop, not even enough to dampen the granola-dust. From the bottom of the bag, he pulled a lone strip of bacon.
Stefan looked over at the Australians, trying to see what they were eating. They laughed and talked loudly with each other, and he resented them. He felt old and lonely.
He dumped the remains of his food into the rubbish bin, then went back to the dorm to collect his jacket and day-pack. The older man was snoring now. Stefan looked forward to the cast’s arriving in a week’s time. Then he’d be staying with them in the comfort of a hotel.
Thoughts of the cast reminded him of the advance work he had to do for the show. But first, he thought, breakfast.
He found his way to a curved, sloping street, unsure if it was the same one he’d been down before, until he saw that all the shops were different, and the street’s angle was reversed. Partway down, he walked into a cloud of pungent air outside a shop’s door. He turned to see that the shop was a cheesemonger’s. He laughed to himself at the word “cheesemonger”, and went inside. He decided that ten-thirty was late enough for lunch, and bought himself an assortment of sweet and savoury cheeses, olives, and sun-dried tomatoes, which the young man in the shop wrapped up in plastic tubs and paper for him. As the man spoke the total for the purchase, Stefan got lost in his voice. The words “Four fifty-three” had never sounded so pretty, with the flourish of a twirled R and a long, soft E in “three”. He found his throat and tongue moving in an attempt to silently replicate the sound himself. Three. Four fifty-three.
“Oh, sorry,” said Stefan, digging into his pocket for money, finding the sound of his own voice harsh by comparison. The young clerk was tall, with dark, curly hair and a pale, handsome face, his cheeks shot through with colour. Stefan wanted the exchange to go on longer, for the clerk to ask him where he was from—anything. He imagined telling his friends back in Toronto how he’d met this man, one of the first people he dealt with in Scotland. “I’ve only got a tenner,” said Stefan, proud of himself for knowing the term.
“At’s alright,” said the clerk, taking it. He counted out change, and placed it in Stefan’s palm, the five-pound note first, then the change on top of that. Stefan didn’t even get to feel the man’s fingertips. It was just a cheese transaction.
“Thanks,” said Stefan, hesitating, then waving as he turned away.
“Thank you,” said the cheesemonger-clerk. Yuu, repeated Stefan to himself.
He walked back up the street to a cemetery, where he wandered between the blackened headstones and monuments with their carved cherub faces and skulls-and-crossbones. The low wall of one family grave seemed inviting, with an overhanging tree. Stefan sat and admired the pair of angels carved into the space above the family’s names, though their faces were worn away by the elements. He unwrapped his lunch and ate, listening closely when he thought he heard a choir singing. He assumed that the voices came from the church on the cemetery grounds. He heard faint words, but they sounded like nonsense. Delonia and Robert never took him to church, so he figured it was probably another of those traditional things he didn’t understand.
Lifting his head as he put a corner of a sweet, white cheese into his mouth, he noticed a grim-looking gargoyle on the corner of a nearby mausoleum. He wondered why anyone would carve something like that into their family’s grave-site. The cheese dropped fr
om his hand and landed in the grass at his feet. He picked it up, blew on it, looked around, and popped it into his mouth. When he raised his head again, the gargoyle was gone. The stone was smooth, mossy, and black, featureless where a moment before he was sure he’d seen a detailed carving. He looked back at the pair of angels. They were still there. But the choral singing stopped.
~
Stefan stepped into the office of the Fringe Society, who were responsible for running the Edinburgh Fringe theatre festival. He wished Helen was with him to do this kind of front-line co-ordination. He said hello to the young woman working the desk. It wasn’t worthwhile explaining much to the first person he spoke to, he knew that. Usually one had to be handed around a bit before reaching someone who could help. In this case, he was given to the right person in just one hand-off.
The receptionist introduced Stefan to another woman. He liked something about her. She looked comfortable in her soft, casual clothes, yet strong and decisive, as if every piece of clothing she wore, down to her coloured metal earrings and the bangles on her wrist, was chosen for expressive reasons, or given to her by a real person who’d made them. She had the unshakable gravity of long-term exposure to the arts, with all the independent thought that entailed, along with the strength of surviving the constant struggle in a marketplace that questioned if her work was necessary at all.
“My name’s Stefan Mackechnie, and I’ve got a show in the Fringe this year.”
“Oh yes,” she said. Saying it made him feel important, but the woman reacted as if he’d informed her that he breathed air.
“I was just wondering—” he stammered. Why am I here? he asked himself. Everything had already been arranged from Canada. “Well, I just wanted to make sure that I’ve done everything I needed to do.”
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