Everyone was tiptoeing around—trying not to disturb a thing, trying not to make a mess. And no one was trying harder than Dave.
“I’ll take the luggage to the bedrooms,” said Dave.
Soon enough the cake was decorated and in the fridge, and everyone was ready to go. The cake, however, was not. The cake had to chill for at least an hour, or better, two. “As long as possible,” said Mary.
But Mary was already supposed to be at the party.
Dave said, “You guys should go.”
Dave said, “I’ll stay here. I’ll bring the cake when it’s ready.”
Someone had to.
Morley wrote down the address of the banquet hall so Dave could take a taxi. Beneath the address she wrote: Please don’t touch anything. Then Morley and Bert and Mary left in Bert’s car. Once they were gone, Dave set off to see if he could find something to eat.
On any other day he might have slid down the majestically curving banister from the second floor to the foyer. Or gone for a dip in the indoor saltwater pool. He might have had a steam or toured the wine cellar. But this wasn’t any other day. He peeked in the wine cellar and stuck a finger in the pool. He touched one of the decanters of whisky and then fetched a towel and rubbed off his fingerprints. Dave was trying his best. Really.
The house had everything. Everything, that is, except a morsel of food. It was while he was looking for anything even remotely edible that Dave found the most amazing feature of the mansion: a wood-panelled elevator. It was the kind you might see in an old British hotel, about the size of a phone booth.
He opened what he thought was a cupboard door and there it was. It had brass fittings and a brass needle over the door to show which floor you were on.
He would have taken a ride, but he didn’t have time to waste. They were waiting for him at the hall.
He went downstairs and fetched the cake from the cooler. It was rather touching: the icing golf course, with the greens and flags, the marzipan golfers and the little buttercream shrubs all around the edge. He carried it carefully over to the counter.
He wasn’t going to mess this up.
Okay. He had everything. Wait a minute. No he didn’t. The address for the party was upstairs in his bedroom. He started up the stairs. Then he stopped dead. He shouldn’t leave the cake unattended. The house was so vast; there might be dogs or cats or any number of things wandering around that could get into it. He fetched the cake and started up again. Four floors. Wait a minute—the elevator. He should take the elevator. The elevator would be safer.
He went in backwards. The brass door accordioned behind him. It was like stepping back in time. To a dimmer time—just before electricity.
He stood there, in the dimness, the cake safely beside him on the floor. He grabbed the elevator handle and plunged it to the right. Nothing happened.
He brought the handle back to the centre, opened the door and shut it and tried again. This time there was a bang, and a shudder, and a sudden lurch. Then the elevator started to move. He could almost feel the chains hauling him up, as if there were two or three men at the top of this elevator, and not strong men either, huffing and puffing as they turned some rusty crank.
“Come on,” said Dave.
The elevator was moving in small, jerky increments. The shaft seemed to be too loose for the car. There was a lot of wobble.
And then there was no wobble at all. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
“Are we moving?” said Dave.
They weren’t moving—they being Dave and the cake. Not up, that is. But that didn’t mean there was no movement—there was still plenty of movement. The little car felt as if it were swinging back and forth, like a bucket on the end of a rope.
“Hello,” he called.
“Hello,” he called again. “Anybody? I am trapped in the elevator.”
There was no reply.
“Help,” he called. “I am in the elevator.”
He hit the walls with his hands. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. He sat on the floor. He stood up. He took a deep breath and reached out and put his hand on the door handle. He opened the elevator door.
He was staring at a wall of plaster lathing. There was a big 3 written on the lathing in red chalk. He felt a wave of claustrophobia. He felt as if he had been buried alive.
“Help,” he called, again.
He sat in the corner, with his head in his arms. He realized he might die in here. But really, what did that matter? If he didn’t get the cake to the hall on time, Mary would kill him anyway.
An hour went by. The party would be just beginning. Dave was still in the elevator. And he was still hungry. He was wondering whether, when you were starving to death, if you gnawed off and ate your own arm that would count as sustenance. Or if eating your own arm would be a zero-sum game.
Jean-Claude Van Damme wouldn’t eat off his arm. Jean-Claude Van Damme would haul himself out the emergency door in the ceiling and climb up the cable to safety. Dave glanced up at the ceiling. There was no emergency door. He felt a wave of relief. He would rather die in there than climb up a cable to safety.
He stared at the cake.
Surely Mary wouldn’t miss one of those little buttercream shrubs.
Mary, had, actually, only just missed Dave.
“Shouldn’t he be here by now?” said Mary to Bert. The guests were beginning to arrive. The party was getting going.
“He’ll be here,” said Bert, with more hope than conviction. “He is probably sitting in a taxi right now, with the cake in his lap.”
Morley, who was standing just within earshot, helped herself to a glass of wine. A large one.
Bert was half right. Dave was not in a taxi. But he did have the cake in his lap. He had eaten every second shrub.
Half an hour later the little golf course had shrunk from nine to seven holes, the marzipan foursome was a twosome and Dave was eyeing their little golf cart. And that was when he spotted the emergency phone. It didn’t fill him with hope. There was no dial. It was covered in dust. He picked it up and brought it to his ear.
The headquarters of ProCor Security Inc. is not what you would expect if all you knew of them was their shiny web page. Their web page features pictures of high-rises, and fit men in well-fitting uniforms, and a dog leaping over a fence, and a control panel that looks like the command centre for a space flight.
The headquarters of ProCor Security is actually in the middle of a shabby industrial part of town, in a tiny cinderblock building with a flat roof and a peeling wooden sign. It looks more like the office of an auto repair shop than the headquarters of a security firm.
On Saturday evening, when Dave picked up the emergency phone, ProCor Security, the other end of that phone, and therefore Dave’s only salvation, was in the hands of a university student. The student, a part-time employee, was beginning his second-ever overnight shift. And he was stretched across three office chairs in front of the surveillance panel, so deeply asleep that he wasn’t only snoring, he was drooling. The hands that were holding Dave’s life were tucked under his head.
The student had been trained the previous night by the woman who had the shift before him. She had been in a hurry to leave. His training lasted less than fifteen minutes. She showed him the computer and said nothing about phones.
So when a phone began to ring, it took the student by complete surprise. He sat up with a jerk and looked around. He was so dopey with sleep he couldn’t figure out where the ringing was coming from.
When he finally opened the cupboard on the far side of the room, he almost fell over. There wasn’t a phone in there. There were fifty phones in there—all of them attached to the wall, all of them red, all of them missing their dials. They looked like the kind of phones you might use to launch a missile strike. Except for the dust. They were all covered in dust.
There were so many of them it was impossible to tell which one was ringing. The student started picking the phones up at random. Before he found the
right one, the ringing stopped. It took him awhile to get back to sleep after that.
About an hour passed before the phone rang again. This time he ran to the cupboard right away. This time he got the right phone on the fifth ring.
“Hello?” he said.
The student was as surprised as Dave to find someone on the other end of the line.
“Who are you?” the student asked.
“I am stuck in an elevator,” said Dave. Then just to be sure this person on the phone understood the severity of his situation, he added, “with Mary’s cake.”
“Where?” said the student.
“In the elevator,” said Dave. “I’m all alone in here.”
“Which elevator?” said the student.
“How many elevators are there?” said Dave.
“I don’t know,” said the student. “I’m new.”
Dave explained about the house on the mountain and the cake and the party.
“I know where I am going,” said Dave. “But I don’t where I am.”
The student said, “Is this like a test or something?”
An awful thought came over Dave. He wasn’t talking to a security guard in Montreal. He was talking to a call centre in Mumbai.
Dave said, “Are you in Mumbai?”
The student said, “Are you in Mumbai?”
Dave said, “I’m in Montreal. You’ve got to get me out of this elevator.”
The student said, “This is just my second shift. I’ve never done this before. I can’t roll trucks if I don’t know where you are. We get fined. Call me back when you know where you are.” And he hung up.
Dave stood in his elevator staring at the handset in disbelief.
He was so hungry he could barely think straight.
Desperate times require desperate measures.
He slid the cake so it was half off the tray and held it very carefully over his head. Then he reached up from the bottom and stuck his hand right into it. He pulled out a fistful of the truffle ganache filling.
Mary would never know.
He sat on the floor licking the icing off his fingers.
He picked up the phone again.
It rang ten times.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” said Dave.
“Me too,” said the student.
“Listen, I’m sorry I hung up,” said the student. “I am a little scared.”
“Me too,” said Dave. “What are you scared of?”
“I’m scared I might get fired if you die. Do you think I would have to put it on my resumé?”
It took them half an hour to figure it out. There was a number on the phone: 52. They were talking on phone 52. All the other phones had different numbers. The student found a binder with a legend, and in it an address that corresponded to each phone number.
“You are on Upper Walnut Crescent,” he said.
Back at the hotel, Mary was beside herself. The main course had been served and there was still no sign of Dave.
Bert said, “I’ll go. I’m sure everything is fine.”
But he wasn’t really sure.
Morley, now on her third glass of wine, was feigning interest in a conversation with a man just big enough to shield her entirely from Mary Turlington’s sight.
Mary stared at Bert. Mary said, “You stay here.”
When Mary’s taxi pulled up in front of the Gallivans’ house, the fire trucks had been there for about fifteen minutes. So Mary missed the part where they drove the axe through the red-oak front doors. But she was there when the elevator started to make whirring sounds and then began to drop smoothly. She was there when the brass doors opened onto the glass-strewn foyer. And she was there to see Dave, huddled over her cake like a raccoon huddled over a garbage can, his hands and face covered in icing.
He had been trying to smooth out the cake surface with his fingers. He held out the cake and smiled at her like a child handing in a class project.
“Safe and sound,” he said.
They both stared at the cake without saying a word, and as they did the lone marzipan golfer, standing by what was now the sixth and final hole, started to sink slowly—first to his knees and then to his waist, as the entire cake began to collapse into itself as if it were built on a giant sinkhole.
Neither of them said anything for most of the long drive back to the party. At Dave’s suggestion, they stopped at an all-night grocery store and bought a replacement cake, the only cake left in the store. A My Little Pony cake.
The drive home the next day was even quieter—perhaps “steamier” captures it better—as was the rest of the autumn. It was the first time there was a noticeable strain between the neighbours. It was not actual unpleasantness, just a determined quiet, which was unpleasant enough in itself. And then one night, out of the blue, Bert called and invited Dave and Morley for dinner. They couldn’t have picked a worse night. It was Dave’s birthday. Dave and Morley had reservations at a little Italian place they favour.
“Cancel them,” said Morley.
And so Dave and Morley went next door, and dinner was not unbearable, though it was awkward. Mary was obviously trying to let bygones be bygones, but you could tell it was a struggle. And then it was time for dessert.
And out came a birthday cake.
A My Little Pony birthday cake.
Mary carried it to the table and set it down. Then she blew out the candles, picked up the cake and very carefully turned it over. She scooped a handful from the bottom of the cake and plopped it on Dave’s plate.
She said, “That’s the way you like it, right?”
Dave sat there, staring at his plate, not knowing what he should do, looking back and forth at Mary and his wife. It was Morley who started to giggle. Morley giggled. Mary smiled. And then Bert started laughing so hard he was pounding the table. They all laughed and laughed.
It was really their only choice. You swallow your pride and you laugh, or you fight. So they laughed. It’s what good neighbours do.
Dear Mr. McLean,
I have started to date a lovely woman who has a five-year-old son. I don’t think the boy likes me. Any advice?
Serge
Dear Serge,
Avoid ladders.
SPRING IN THE NARROWS
A few springs ago, when Dave’s mother, Margaret, was going through a bad spot, feeling old and overwhelmed, Dave flew home to Cape Breton Island for a weekend to give her a hand with the things that need a hand when the seasons are changing. He went on a Thursday night and stayed until Sunday afternoon.
While he was there, Dave took down the storm windows and put up the screens. He turned the garden, raked the twigs off the lawn and cleaned out the eaves. In the evenings, he walked with his mother into town to buy ice cream. He stopped in at the Maple Leaf Restaurant on Saturday morning and had breakfast with some childhood friends. And each night, he stretched out on his childhood bed in his old room at the top of the stairs, and he slept like a boy, deep and far away. When he left that Sunday, he left thinking that this was something he should have been doing for years.
Since that spring, Dave has made the flight home twice a year, once every April to lay things out, and then again in October to pack them away. It makes him feel useful; connected to things gone by and to the swing of the seasons. He knows his mother looks forward to these visits. He likes that too.
So Dave was surprised, to say the least, the spring he stepped out of his rented car onto his mother’s gravel driveway in the little town of Big Narrows, to see she had hired a man, and the two of them were working away at the windows without him.
The man, his white hair wispy and whipping in the wind, was up the old wooden ladder, with a bucket hooked on the top rung, washing the windows of Dave’s sister’s old bedroom. His mother, with a rag and bucket of her own, was working on a pile of storm windows propped against the front porch.
“David!” she said, as he stepped out of the car, her rag dangling by her side.
He had taken an early plane, and his sweet time on the drive from Sydney, choosing the old road along the St. Andrew’s Channel. He had stopped for a coffee and sandwich in Irish Bay, eating it outside even though it was uncomfortably windy for that.
“It’s David,” Margaret said to the man on the ladder, stomping toward Dave in her Wellingtons, big wet splotches on her olive-coloured pants.
It felt good to be out of the rental car, the wind on his face again. Dave hugged his mother.
“How was your flight?” she asked.
They walked away from the car together, instinctively heading toward the garden, which Dave was surprised to see had already been turned. He pointed at the cold frame, at the little tomato seedlings pumping away.
“You’ve been busy,” he said.
“Smith’s been helping,” said Margaret.
“Smith,” called Margaret, again, “it’s David.”
The man came down the ladder effortlessly, almost carelessly, as if he had been living on ladders all his life. It was hard to tell how old he was, but he was older up close than he was coming down the ladder, that’s for sure.
He was wearing a beige canvas jacket, with a grey fisherman’s sweater under it. The jacket was frayed at the cuffs and had clips instead of buttons. Dave was shaking the man’s hand, trying to remember where he had heard his name before, and coveting the jacket all at once.
“Nice of you to help out,” said Dave.
Then he remembered. This wasn’t a hired hand. This was the retired fire chief. This was the guy who had sealed up his mother’s laundry chute.
“Get your stuff out of the car,” said Margaret. “Supper is nearly ready. I have a chicken going.”
Dave took his suitcase upstairs, threw it onto his bed and walked to the window. With the trees still not in bud, he could see all the way down to the storefronts on Railroad Street— the steeple on the United Church at one end, and the tallest building in town, the clock tower on the town hall, at the other. He leaned into the window, letting his breath fog the glass. Everything was still the same. The view from the window was the same view he had had when he was a boy. There was no other place in the world where time had stopped like it had here.
Extreme Vinyl Café Page 3