Sparrow Nights (v5) (epub)

by David Gilmour

  I turned. A man in a bowler hat was standing right behind me, waiting to pass on the sidewalk. I hadn’t heard him come up.

  “Good heavens!” I said. “You frightened me!”

  He tipped his hat and stepped around me, a jaunty man in a long dark raincoat. I watched him get to the end of the bridge and disappear into the park.

  I kept walking up Spadina, up and down a hill, past the Russian consulate and into Forest Hill Village. Oh yes, there it was, the kitchenware shop where I’d once bought an especially sharp carving knife. But the knife was gone now, Emma had taken it. Curious how materialistic she’d been on the way out the door. She’d taken the cutlery, half the coffee mugs, even the duvet we’d slept under that whole winter. Yes, she’d paid for it, but still, an odd thing to want in her new apartment, if she wanted a new start. Did she at least have it dry cleaned? The night she came to fetch her possessions (months after the end) I’d left the house, I remember. I didn’t want to watch her get her things, her brother hovering protectively in the doorway as she went from room to room, opening drawers, looking under the bed, peering up into the cupboards. No, I certainly had no need to see that, the two of us chirping small talk, school, classes, eccentric mutual friends. What a horror that would have been. Worse than death. But no, one says that, worse than death, but in fact it wouldn’t be worse than death. It would be quite a bit better than the thing with the singed cowboy boots in the furnace. Now that was a horror. Anyway, when I came back that evening, the night she finally took away the last of her things—She had taken her underwear the first day, had wanted to spare me the weepy humiliation of plunging through the laundry basket at three in the morning just to find a trace of her … and I would have too. A considerate young lady. Almost a year after she’d gone I woke up in the middle of the night, it was winter, cold and still, the window frosted along its base, and I suddenly remembered the existence of a small chest of drawers, useless really, that I had set behind a glass sliding door in the guest room. And in the second drawer from the bottom I knew, I absolutely knew there was a piece of her clothing that I had seen her put there three, four years earlier. How perverse a brain I have, how sick of it I am; how dangerous a thing it is to have waited for so long, to have lulled me into a sense of false security, only to wake me up at the hour when one is most alone and least protected from one’s imagination, and to have sicced, like a dog, that foul image on me. I got up and went down the hall to the guest room and slid open the doors, crash, and yanked the blanket off the set of drawers and pulled open the second-from-last drawer, and there it was, the small white T-shirt with a hole under the arm. And that T-shirt seemed to contain the very spirit of her, her slimness, her dirty-mindedness, her infinite and forever gone desirability—so much so that I got dressed and took the T-shirt and went downstairs and out onto the still and snowy porch and lumbered across the street in my bedroom slippers into the park and dumped it in a garbage can and covered it with a newspaper. And the next day when I headed down to Bloor Street to do my shopping, I couldn’t help myself, I cut through the park and peeked into the garbage can with the trepidation of one who expected to see a coiled cobra there. The T-shirt was gone …

  But where was I? Oh yes, the night she took her things. I came back to my house after midnight and I saw in the light from the street the glint of her keys lying on the carpet just inside the door. She’d locked up and taken them off her key chain and dropped them through the mail chute. Lying there on the carpet, they were indeed the last of Emma. Keys I will no longer need in this life. I picked them up off the carpet, I looked at them, I even smelt them. But they were dead. They carried nothing of her.

  Anyway. Up in Forest Hill, the kitchenware store was still open and for a second I thought of going in and buying another paring knife. Perhaps not. Perhaps wandering the streets with a knife was not such a good idea after all. I moved on. I glanced inside a restaurant, but it was too empty, the waiters clustered in the corner, listless, too keen to pounce. Besides, waiters don’t like single diners on a Saturday night. I could imagine the tall one in the pressed white shirt snapping open my table napkin with a chilly politesse, assuming, already, that my table would yield little of remunerative interest. Perhaps he saw me as a lonely widower who wanted to chat. How dull for him.

  I went into a Japanese restaurant and sat at the bar between two couples, one my age, the other on a first date. I ordered a Kirin. It was lovely and went straight to my head, and then I ordered another and I could feel a sort of swagger coming on, as if my life and the events of the last twenty-four hours were assuming a mythological posture. As if I were a rare adventurer.

  I left the restaurant and, moving east, drifted through the darkness and the opulent lawns and the grand mansions and the living rooms in which families hovered like expensive goldfish, all the while conducting a conversation between myself and an imaginary companion whose grinning admiration egged me on … Really, it was quite insane, and I rather had a sense of it being insane, stopping, as I did, to pee in a giant mulberry bush. But still it kept on in my head, this histoire de moi, until I reached Yonge Street and something changed. There, under the naked lights and the slightly worn-out feel of the neighbourhood, a place that had peaked twenty years earlier, I experienced a twinge of worry, a tugging at my sleeve, a sense that I was walking on a very narrow ledge on either side of which lay some very bad things. I sped up my pace. It was a mild night, the sidewalks teemed with people, but the notion of running into someone I knew filled me with the most awful dread (even though it had been my hope for company, for distraction, that had drawn me out of the shadows) and I turned up a dark street. Like a reptile slipping into its pond I felt a momentary relief, a coolness. But I couldn’t slow things down. I cut across a dark park and as I neared a set of empty tennis courts I found myself, for the first time in many years, praying. I promised God that if he’d take away this sensation, this feeling of almost electrical urgency, I would … what? I cast about in my deepening inventory of suicidal vices—they all seemed suicidal at that moment—and grabbed the pot with the longest handle. I’d stop drinking. By the time I got to the end of the park I was almost running. By now I was talking to my mother, as the wounded and the dying do, I was begging for comfort, just this last once, this last time. Put your cool hand on my brow as you did when I was a little and had a fever and you came in the middle of the night and tucked me in. Sometimes she would take off all my blankets and then one by one waft them back over me; first the sheet, she’d lift it up again, and it would flutter down, so cool, so clean. How happy children can be in their beds.

  C H A P T E R 14

  My house was an inferno, but I didn’t dare turn off the furnace. I saw my salvation, my escape, in every second it roared. I closed the heating vents in my bedroom, shut the door and opened all the windows in the house. Outside in the back garden, the way one always catches sight of the macabre at a time when one can least cope with it, I saw my neighbour’s yellow cat with a mouse in its mouth; you could almost hear its tiny screams. Lord, what a world.

  The bathroom was windowless. I ran a bath for myself, the steam rising from the water, tricklets of sweat running down my chest as if I were in a tropical country. I turned out the overhead light and lit a candle; the odour of black cherries filled the overripe air. I slipped into the water and rested my feet on each side of the faucet. I inhaled deeply. I observed with more than a passing sense of irony that I had finally turned my own home into hell. Vous êtes enfin arrivé! I watched my chest rise and fall in the water, my heart thundering. We have to find a way to slow things down. Everything is bearable but not at this speed. I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty at night. Give it till one o’clock. There’s always last call. Have a quiet pint or two at a corner table. Attract no attention. Then, if the willies come in the night, there’s beer in the fridge. We can ease this thing down, we can. I took a deep breath. What is this? A trace of fatigue, a trace of letting go? What happens if we do nothing? W
hat happens if we just stay here in this—I looked about the room, the walls dripping with perspiration as if they themselves were sweating—greenhouse until sleep comes? Until sleep comes down like snow.

  I yawned. Heavens. Banished sleep sneaking in the side door? Perhaps my body will simply give up on its own. Merely a question of waiting it out. A siege of one’s own body, waiting for it, like that Scottish castle, to surrender, to run up a white flag, to say, He’s serious this time, boys, we’re not getting any more of anything. I got out of the tub, the squeak of my behind on the porcelain. Damp-footed through the house, opened the door and quickly slipped into my bedroom. Lit another candle. Listened to the night sounds. A boy bouncing a basketball in a side street …

  At three o’clock I woke up with a start. I looked at my watch. I had been dreaming about reading again, that I should put my book down before I rolled over and crushed it; and now it turned out I had been sleeping all along. I had been asleep! I had been to that foreign country! I rolled over. My pillow was damp; my sheets were damp. No matter, no matter. All that could be fixed. There was a sort of sensual pleasure in it all, and I began to summon up images of Emma. How safe an island that was now. How without pain the voyage was now. Emma in a movie theatre, her white hand under her skirt. Just a second, she whispers, staring straight ahead at the screen; even now she can’t take her eyes away. I have a little present for you, she says. There. Do you like that? Is that what you wanted? Now sit still and watch the movie. Emma! Emma!

  But wait. There was something wrong. It seemed to me that seconds before I woke up I had heard a click. Yes, definitely a click. But what was it? I lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling. The furnace. The furnace had stopped. Someone had reached a hand onto the thermostat and turned it sharply to the left. I opened my bedroom door and looked out. The house was cool and in the moonlight I made my way through the hall and into the living room. In the light from the street I saw the thermostat glow dully. But I had forgotten my glasses. I reached out a hand and touched the dial. I turned it ever so slowly to the right. Turning, turning, turning, waiting for the sound of the furnace going on below. The dial reached its apex with a soft click. Nothing. The furnace had run out of oil. How in God’s name was I going to fill it again? How could I have an oil truck come to my house in the last days of April without alerting the neighbours, without saying, in fact, I have a body in my furnace and he’s not quite done! Parsimonious prick that I am, always doing things in half measures (except Donny, of course, no half measure there). Skimping on oil, filling half the tank, paying half my bills, doing half a novel, half a poem, everything in unmatching halves. Like a bloody prop room for a little theatre company, my life was. Mismatched everythings. I went back to bed.

  When I woke up again it was grey daylight, and I hurried downstairs and looked out the front window. It was snowing. I went to the door. My eyes went involuntarily to the crack in the wood the same way that one watches Romeo and Juliet with the irrational hope, even though one has seen a hundred different productions, that this time out the Nurse’s message will arrive on time.

  This was no hallucination. It was indeed snowing. I could even smell it. An odd snowfall, too, tiny white balls, like spitballs, the kind kids blow through a straw, falling in a perpendicular line straight down to the earth. As if they were being poured from a huge basket. The snow gathered in the bows of the trees, on my front gate, on the lawn, and with it, it seemed as if God were handing me a break.

  I called the oil company. In a voice tremulous with emotion—perhaps they thought I was horrified by the weather—I complained that I’d run out of oil, the house was freezing. I even invented a child, yes, I have a child here, shivering over his cornflakes. Fine then, excellent, send your best man. You would have thought I was ordering fresh troops to the front.

  An hour later a fat, dirty oil truck stopped in front of my house amidst a scream of hydraulic brakes. I opened the door in my dressing gown and sent the driver around the side of the house. Soon one could smell the rich, comforting scent of fuel oil wafting up from the basement. I prepared my cheque book, wrote out the name of the company and waited patiently on the chesterfield. The doorbell rang and I went to answer it. While I was filling in the amount, I heard the driver come into the front hall.

  “Which door leads to the basement?” he asked.

  A hand clutched at my heart. “May I ask why you’re asking?”

  “You may ask,” he said, and truncated the sentence with the swiftness of chopping off an arm. A shot of electricity stiffened me. I opened my mouth and to my horror nothing came out. Tantamount to a confession. Christ, even the neighbours must have heard it, the sound of an axe severing the tendons in Donny’s shoulder. The oilman smiled a wide, rural smile, and I realized he was making a joke, not a terribly funny joke but the sort of thing a fireman might find amusing, although I can’t say why I thought of firemen specifically. He made a jumpy little motion with his hand as if he were brushing crumbs from an invisible table, a gesture that suggested we simply must excuse him, he was quite the “character.”

  “You were saying?”

  “I got to light the pilot. When you run out of oil, the pilot light goes out.”

  “So you need to do what exactly?”

  “Well, give me a match and I’ll show you.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me.”

  “It’ll be easier if I show you.”

  “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t want a stranger monkeying around in my house with a match and a full tank of oil. So tell me, what do you have to do?”

  “There’s a little gizmo on the side of the furnace—”

  “On the side, you say?”

  “You have to light it.”

  “From the side?”

  “Yes.”

  I softened my tone. “Okay then. I hope you don’t think I was being untoward.”

  “No problem. Lead the way.”

  Astonishing. A utility man without a chip on his shoulder. Remember to tip him. I led him through the kitchen, catching sight of a streak of dried blood six inches above the floorboard. How had I missed that? What else had I missed? I unbolted the door and heard him clump down the stairs behind me. I took him over to the furnace and stood in front of its door.

  “Do you have a light down here?” he said.

  “No, I’m sorry. I’m afraid it burned out.”

  “That’s okay,” he said cheerfully, almost gratefully, because it allowed him to pull a small flashlight from a shirt pocket. A thin beam bounced around the room, settling on the furnace door. “Hey, she’s an old one.”

  I didn’t budge. “Where did you say the pilot light was?”

  He went to the side of the furnace and opened a small portlette. Holding the flashlight in his teeth, he lit a cigarette lighter and held it in the hollow. A small whine ensued, like a propane lighter that hasn’t caught.

  “That should do her.”

  I had turned my back to him and started up the stairs when I heard a dreadful sound, the squeal of the furnace door opening.

  “What are you doing?” I cried. But it was too late. He was peering into the furnace.

  “Just checking to see she took.” He poked around with his penlight. “But what’s this?”

  I came up quietly behind him. “What is what?”

  He stuck a gloved hand in the hole and withdrew a black object. I couldn’t see what it was. A foot, a hand, a shrunken skull. He held it under the light.

  “It looks like a axe head.”

  He’d done this twice already, dropped the consonant before a vowel, and I wondered if he did it on purpose, if it was part of being “a character.”

  He turned the object over in his hand. “It is. It’s a axe head.” He showed it to me.

  “Do you do that on purpose?” I asked, referring to his grammar. But he appeared not to be listening.

  “Now how in the hell did that get in there?”

  “It’s
a old furnace,” I said.

  A small smile betrayed him. “You thought I was jerking you around, eh?”

  “Never. Never.”

  I followed him back up the stairs and into the front foyer. He looked at the door. Went over and fingered it.

  “Had a break-in?”