Aubrey McKee

by Alex Pugsley

  “I got it—” said Katie. “From this boy in play-group that I know’s sister. She has a whole set. We traded. But guess what?”

  “What?”

  “This one time in play-group?” Sitting quickly upright, Katie pulled the ponytail holder from her hair and started spinning it on a finger. “A spider tried to get me.”

  “What kind of spider?”

  “Dandy Long Legs. I saw it and then—and then?” Katie blew some hair from her eyelash. “Then I didn’t.”

  I watched her draw another six-pointed star. “Why do you keep drawing that?”

  “I don’t know what these are. I don’t know what these spinky things are. My hand keeps drawing it but what if isn’t something?”

  I was reaching for a red marker when Katie shoved at my hand.

  “No!” she said. “You don’t know how to touch it.”

  I explained I was a pretty good drawer.

  “No!” Katie guarded the paper with both hands. “You’ll do it backwards. You’ll crackle it.”

  I looked again at what she was drawing. The six-pointed glyph I recognized from comic books. I would know it later as an asterisk—and once my uncle had explained its mechanism to me—but I’d forgotten what it did. It had something to do with swear words, I thought, and I told Katie it was a letter in a swear word.

  “Swear word?” Katie sneered. “No way. Because there’s big ones and little ones so why they are on the same page? And move over.”

  “Who said there’s big ones and little ones?”

  “Boba.”

  “How would Boba know anything?”

  “How would you know anything?” Katie stared at me, impatient. “And move over, I said.”

  I stood up, deciding to go and get a comic book, from my uncle’s collection in the room next door, to make my case. Limping back with a stack of X-Men, I returned to see the outside basement door wide open, a shuddering branch of a honeysuckle tree, and Katie dropping over the backyard fence.

  ~

  Are there two childhoods? I think there’s a Generalized Childhood shared with anyone who’s been a kid. Events like First Nosebleed, First Remembered Dream, First Diaper Blowout are probably pretty similar no matter what century you’re born. But there is also Specific Childhood which is unique to you and the circumstances of your space-time. I think Katie was still in the generalized first, because my God she was a random kid, chasing the memory of a firefly, the smell of a thunderstorm, two dimes in a rain puddle—she was like a pilgrim running after a religion still to be discovered—but I’d moved into the specified second and wondered at the whys and wherefores of the world. In fact, as Katie flees a neighbour’s backyard, her fuchsia blouse flashing past spring dandelions, let me relate a few specifics. Discerning readers may be wondering why I was home this Tuesday afternoon and limping around with comic books. Once I’d been a wild child. Like Stephen Leacock’s hero, I’d run madly off in all directions. But for the last three years I’d been suffering from the after-effects of Legg-Calvé-Perthes and, although I’d been cut out of my hip-to-toe casts, my legs had emerged pale and frail and dismal. I was supposed to adapt and recover using crutches but a kid at school named Biederman got big laughs when he stole one of my crutches, stripped off its foam underarm pad, and waggled it provocatively in front of his zipper. To avoid such gags, I left my crutches home. I hopped. I shuffled. I frowned at my classmates. There was concern about my lack-of-progress so I was sent to weekly physio where I struggled to improve my rotational flexion and my attitude toward my rehabilitation. Lousy at both, I started skipping appointments and sneaking home. I was sulky, I was glum. I think, like Katie, I was trying to find where my thoughts belonged—in what world, through which house or person—because often, no matter how many specific thoughts I had, it was rare they counted as much as everyone else’s.

  ~

  The house Katie was standing in front of was the Haunted Mansion. That’s what she called it. Everyone else knew it as the Pigeon Lady’s house. It was a dilapidated Second Empire place, once royal blue, now faded grey, and set back from the sidewalk by a circular driveway. The property was dark and noisome. Dozens of pigeons gathered here, roosted here, flapped and waddled here. Neighbourhood groups often moved to expel the flock, citing civic ordinances and health concerns, and these initiatives would work for a while, but a few birds were always present. This old house, with its slumping roofs, peeling shingles, with its rotting, sodden steps and rose bushes tangled wild through a ruined gazebo—and all of it splodgy with pigeon droppings—seemed to represent everything that was deranged and broken in the adult world and when passing by, even in the company of my older sisters, I crossed the street to avoid its creepy, decrepit energy.

  But Katie, I saw, was standing on its very front steps, gazing curious at a pigeon on a sagging eaves-trough. This was an intricate creature who with scarlet eyes was blinking Katie into abstraction. Katie, even on a good day, was prone to little absence seizures. “Churrs” my sister Carolyn called them—she and I had variations on these chills-and-shivers too—and I can explain them by saying they were a complex of response that mixed a sense of sound-and-colour with an internal emotional moment which anticipated a time in the future when you’d be remembering this selfsame multi-part experience. I didn’t like them because they seemed a very imperfect form of premonition. I don’t know what Katie thought of them—she gave herself over to seventeen other ways of thinking anyway—which might have been why she saw fit to carelessly push open the front door and advance into the darkness of the Pigeon Lady’s house.

  ~

  For some seconds, maybe a full panicking minute, I stared at the house. When Katie did not rematerialize, I hopped up the steps, rang the doorbell, and waited. Looking through the open door, I saw the windows were covered with taped-up garbage bags, the glow of daylight falling off into shadow, gloom, darkness. I called Katie’s name and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. Something seemed off in the house, as if I had walked into the after-echoes of an argument. My sense was not of fear but of weird—of wyrd, really—and obscure adult sorrow. Inside were a few sounds, a groaning radiator, a creaking door, the muffled bump of upstairs movement, I wasn’t sure. I’d never seen the Pigeon Lady. Rumour was she was an old woman slowly going crazy, someone who hated kids, and I was pressing on a push-button light-switch—and imagining children being pulled by their ankles and stuffed head-first into hampers—when Katie appeared, squinting from the sudden brightness and clutching a can of Orange Crush.

  “Katie, what’re you doing?”

  “It’s Boba.” Katie blinked her eyes, concerned. “He ran away.”

  “Where’d you get that pop?”

  “The people here—” She twitched with a shrug. “They give you Orange Crush.”

  “What people—the Pigeon Lady?”

  “Pidgy what?” Katie giggled. “No. But the lady here? She could fly once. But she kept bumping into telephone poles.”

  “That’s not even—Look, if we go right now, I’ll get you Pixy Stix.”

  She drank from the pop. “I want Fun Dip.”

  “Same thing.”

  “It’s called Fun Dip. With Lik-a-Stix.”

  “Okay. Fun Dip. Deal?”

  Placing the empty can on the floor, Katie slipped her bangs behind her ears. “If we find Boba or leave him a note then okay.”

  “And then we’re leaving. Then we’re leaving. Deal?”

  “Okay,” said Katie. “Deal.”

  She ran up the grand staircase two steps at a time.

  Pulling myself up the bannister, I saw the place was huge—an old, old residence of curving stairwells and winding hallways and parlors with furniture shrouded in bedsheets. At the top of the stairs, Katie stood beside a marble-topped table, investigating a single opened drawer. Inside were two silver matchbox holders, a floral pin-frog, an
d a View-Master, a plastic gadget that, when held to the light, was used to view colour slides on a removable cardboard reel.

  “Whoa,” said Katie, grabbing the View-Master and bringing it to her eyes. “Binonculars!”

  “Katie, you’re being a spaz. Put that back.”

  “I just—” She spun away from me, obstinate, not wanting to be touched. “I just want to see something.”

  “That’s some other kid’s toy. And there’s not even a thing in it.”

  “No—because—I’ll put you an example.” She directed the View-Master toward a door at the end of the hall. “This is the way to Castle Wackbirds.” Moving carelessly again, as if her mission somehow depended on carelessness, she clattered down the hall and up a second staircase.

  After a very impatient moment, a very try-me-one-more-time-and-you’ll-see-what-happens moment, I bumped the drawer shut and followed her into the attic. The third floor was fusty with the smell of clothes left too long in unaired rooms. Hanging from ceiling racks was a swarm of suits and coats, all on wooden coat-hangers, all sheathed in dry-cleaner plastic. I found Katie in a corner squinting into the empty View-Master, the device crooked on her face.

  “Katie, we’re going right this minute—”

  “I saw someone in the window!”

  “Who—Boba?”

  “No. A ghost.”

  “What kind of ghost?”

  “A real ghost.” She clicked the View-Master lever. “Boba told me when he lived here in a dream.”

  “That’s not even—Katie, we have to go. Leave a note. That’s the deal.”

  “But my blue marker!”

  “Katie—” I stared at the splintery floor, familiar with this feeling of frustration, rising within me, for another kid’s attachment to their own specialness. “We had a deal. And you’re being a frigging little brat and I’m not even kidding—”

  “If I forgot my marker, how I can write a note?”

  I shook my head, furious, and in a spill of anger I told Katie she was a little liar and I didn’t believe her little lies or made-up stories about Boba or ghosts and I didn’t care if she told Mom and Dad because she wasn’t going to get any Fun Dip or Lik-a-Stix or anything and turning in the attic I ran slap into a withered figure, its face distorted through the hanging plastic, its fingers scraping at my face and closing around my head, and with a swoon of failure I knew I’d been captured by the creature of the house for finally I’d been fixed and trapped by the Pigeon Lady.

  ~

  Emlyn Elizabeth Mair was old, older even than the century. She was born in Halifax in 1894—exactly when I’m not sure—I never discovered her real birthday. Our visit coincided with the birthday of her older brother, Edwin Mair, although he hadn’t celebrated a birthday in more than fifty years, having died in 1917. The morning of his death, Edwin and Emlyn were visiting one of their father’s ships, the tern schooner Revenant Prince, which was loading hard pine on the south side of Pier Six. Recently engaged to a young man named Jollimore, Emlyn had dragooned her older brother into accompanying her to a meeting with the tern’s captain, who was soon to sail for Perth Amboy, and who was expected to return with fabric and dress materials from New York for Emlyn’s wedding. This was a few minutes before nine on the first Thursday in December, the weather bright and clear, in the sea-salt air a tang of coal smoke and frost-melt. On the other side of the harbour, about eleven boat-lengths away, an incoming French steamer was just then colliding with a Norwegian vessel, the grinding impact provoking a fire that would detonate the munitions in the hold of the steamer, resulting in the largest accident the world had ever known. In the moment of the Great Halifax Explosion, Emlyn Mair was moving first down the gangway of the Revenant Prince, holding the hand of her brother behind her. Both were flung into the air by the force of the blast, the pressure wave sending Emlyn pinwheeling into the sky past broken trees and spinning seagulls. She was found three miles away, hanging from the telegraph wires at the bottom of Barrington Street, blind in one eye, covered in soot, naked except for her boots. Following behind her, Edwin Mair was likewise sent flying—and dispatched to kingdom come. Thousands perished in the disaster, corpses were splattered all over the city, a final body located in the Halifax Exhibition Grounds as late as summer 1919, but Edwin’s body was never found. All that survived of Edwin Mair was a finger, his own wedding ring still on it, discovered in his sister’s fist when she awoke that afternoon in the temporary hospital at The Waegwoltic Club. Emlyn would have chunks of shrapnel, shards and slivers of glass, purply imbedded in the back of her neck and shoulders for the rest of her life. But she would live. For whatever reason, through whatever Grace or Fate or Fury, her life would extend beyond the morning of December 6, 1917. Ever since that day, because she had lived and her brother had not, because it had been her idea to visit the ship, and because she blamed herself for his death, Emlyn Mair would take Edwin’s birthday as hers, celebrating his life and receding from her own. For she would break off her engagement to the young man named Jollimore and move indoors for the rest of her life. The day Katie and I met her, she was seventy-six years old, a spinster perched and teetering in the high numbers of her old age, one of the city’s elderly curiosities, the Pigeon Lady, shell-shocked, extraneous, an infinite dowager in a bobbed wig and a crumbling house twelve times too big.

  ~

  “No one’s been up there in years,” said Emlyn at the dining room table. “Haven’t opened those rooms in years. Wings are closed off. Since before the war. Takes too much heat. But pass along the mint jelly, would you? That’s the chap. Are you sure you won’t have a lobster? No?” She made a kooky giggle and smiled as if she felt her personal charm was proving only deeply and irresistibly winning. She wore a wig of bobbed brown hair and often, when turning this way or that, the wig over-shifted, a curling lock spinning off her forehead and over her eye—but since this was her sightless eye I don’t think she noticed. The retina of her good eye was damaged, too, but functional, and she took pains to protect it—she could only fitfully regulate the size of its pupil—which is why she wore sunglasses indoors and kept the house darkened in perpetual twilight. Her nose was neatly aquiline—it would not have looked out of place on a Sitwell—and she wore a long pearl necklace loosely coiled around her neck like a flapper. Her dress was straight and loose, the colour of pale champagne, with spiraling bead work, a shawl collar, and tapered sleeve-cuffs. Her most marked characteristic was the curve of her left shoulder. Her scapula, broken in the explosion, had not properly mended, her left shoulder twisted sinister because of it, and this gave to her figure a crooked aspect, a slant extending even to the middle finger of her left hand which was warping now toward a glass of sherry on the dinner table. As her fingers closed around its stem, a wristwatch, which must have fit her once, popped from her dress-sleeve and drooped from the bones of her wrist like a bangle. “Please start, won’t you?” She brought the sherry to her lips and gurgled back a swallow. “Mint jelly?” She handed me the silver sauceboat. I dolloped out some mint jelly, thinking it was Jell-O, and passed it on to Katie who sat with the View-Master at the other end of the table, somewhat perplexed by the enormous plate of food in front of her—pork tenderloin and scalloped potatoes, jellied madrilène and Brussels sprouts, radicchio coleslaw and pearl onions, as well as a wedge of blue cheese.

  “Well now—” Emlyn jiggled her glass. There were only three of us at the table. A fourth place-setting had been prepared and, though no dinner had been served, there was a full glass of sherry. Emlyn clinked this glass with her own and turned to me. “To absent friends and present hearts. Cheers!” She clinked my water glass then turned toward Katie—who got up on her chair, leaned over the table’s flickering candles, and touched a new can of Orange Crush to Emlyn’s sherry glass.

  “Cheers!” repeated Katie, swigging from the pop. She placed the can beside the View-Master. And promptly belched.

  “
Ha!” Emlyn cackled—a single blurt of laughter—and lowered her sunglasses to gaze at Katie. “She’s a crackerjack find, that one.”

  “Excuse me,” said Katie, her lips quivering with a half-smile. Picking up an oyster fork, she jabbed at her Brussels sprouts. “This smells weird.”

  I was explaining my sister could be a picky eater when Emlyn raised a hand to silence the table. Chewing on a resilient piece of pork, she asked, “Did you hear the telephone?” She listened. “Someone keeps dialing this number. They ring it over and over. Why on earth?” Emlyn stared fixedly into the hallway, as if daring her enemies to emerge from its darkness. “Strangest thing.” She finished her sherry, picked up a fork, and contemplated the rest of her dinner. “This spot of cheese doesn’t agree with me.” She pushed a piece of blue cheese around her plate. “I don’t care for it, do you?” Emlyn called across the table to Katie. “Don’t eat the cheese. You’ll get the glotch!”

  “The glotch?” Katie glanced up from trying to balance her oyster fork on top of the View-Master.

  “Doesn’t do to get the glotch. And my God, is that the telephone?” Emlyn struck the table with the bottom of her fork. “Can you believe it?” She rose from the table, plucked a bottle of sherry from the mahogany credenza, and returned to her chair. “I wish to God they’d stop, don’t you?” She tittered at the absurdity, trying to seem vivacious, like an actress stage-laughing in a play. “Who are these people?”

  She refilled her glass. The sherry was making her tipsy and as Emlyn Mair became drunk, I felt her strange contradictions, the alcoholic movement between memory and spontaneity, between subjects past and objects visible.

  “What do you suppose this is?” She reached across the table and seized the View-Master. “Flimflam men coming to the door to sell one gimcrack thing or another. Now the Frigidaire I like. That’s very useful.” She dropped the View-Master to the table. “But I don’t go in for all these new fandangle things. Belongs to the boy of the house, I suppose.”