by Russel Smith
‘I can’t imagine being without Evelyn,’ he told Louise, unaware that she would, within a year abscond to France with yet another boyfriend, causing further months of worry and argument. ‘People aren’t perfect. But neither are you, and you love them even so, and even though you know it won’t ever change—’
‘It’ll probably get worse, in fact,’ Louise said.
A step too far.
‘I didn’t ask for an opinion and we’re supposed to be talking about you,’ he told her, speaking more loudly than before, as if to a larger audience. ‘Whatever you think, we are your parents, and we need to know who you are seeing and what is going on. This is our house and you are only sixteen and we don’t want—that kind of thing—happening in it, in our house I mean, is that clear? And I think this correspondence with the boy in Lancashire has to stop. And it would be very helpful if you apologized to your mother for all the worry you have caused.’
There was a long silence.
‘I’ll do that if you stop her from calling Andy’s parents,’ she said.
‘I’m not sure I can do that,’ he said. ‘I will try.’ Louise shrugged, stood, stretched.
‘I’m going to stay at Sandra’s,’ she said, and walked back to the house, leaving her mug on the path.
Evelyn was glaring at them from the kitchen window and he did not feel like going in. He just wanted the whole thing to be over. To enjoy the damn weekend! But best to get it over with.
‘Well?’ she asked as he braced himself on the doorframe and eased off his garden shoes.
‘I think she is sorry to have upset you … ’ Evelyn said nothing. She was wearing her apron and her hands were wet from the sink. ‘And I expect she’ll apologize. I did stress that she can’t just do whatever she wants in this respect.’ The kitchen tap, he noted, needed a new washer. It was drip-dripping into the stainless sink making a dull enervating plopping sound. He tried not to hear it, put his arm around Evelyn’s shoulders. She stood unyielding, her eyes on his face. ‘It’s been difficult and I think we should just see how things go from now on… As for calling the Smileys, let’s not. Not now. I really don’t think it will help.’
‘You are all the same,’ she said, pulling suddenly away.
‘What on earth do you mean?
‘All four of you, ganging up against me. No, don’t try and touch me!’ He stood in the kitchen, stunned, heard her rush upstairs and slam the bathroom door.
‘Don’t be so bloody stupid!’ he shouted, then flung the back door open and strode outside.
Most of the vegetable bed was sown or planted but he still had some double digging to do at the far end. He yanked the spade out of the earth, shoved his sleeves up and set to work on the next row. It was about fifteen feet across the width of the plot. He kicked the blade in hard with his heel, levered up the heavy spadeful, tipped the earth down next to the trench. A house full of bloody women! What the hell was he supposed to do now?
He dug on. It was dense soil, with patches of two kinds of sticky clay, one grey, another yellowish: remediable, and already far better than it used to be, but still hard work. Fat pink earthworms slithered through the clods of earth. Occasionally you found an old bit of pottery or a clay pipe. He pushed on, worked up a sweat. As the end of the row he switched to the fork and roughed up the compacted ground at the bottom of the trench. He threw in some compost, then began again, turned the new spadeful into the waiting trench. He worked steadily now and began to feel more like himself.
She could not help it. That was the thing. It was best to keep right and wrong out of the equation.
He finished the digging, hunted down a pair of secateurs and set off around the rest of the garden. He found some late daffodils, narcissi, tulips, cherry blossoms, and, in the circular bed at the back, roses about to open. He added some asparagus fern and some early peonies, which not only smelled wonderful, but were one of the consolations proposed in Keats’ Ode on Melancholy.
The flowers in one arm, he again pried off his boots at the kitchen door. Both it and the front door were locked, and the key under the brick was gone.
He’d worked on mines in the war, so it only took him half an hour with some strong wire and pliers. Even so.
The house, filled with a thick, unnatural silence, seemed to resist him as he arranged the flowers in a vase found under the sink, then set it on a tablemat on the dining room table. The house responded: So what? Upstairs, he tapped on the bedroom door, and hearing nothing, cracked it open. The curtains were closed. Evelyn was either asleep, or pretending to sleep; he wanted to lie beside her but he was filthy and it was in any case a bad idea.
In the ensuing week, he slept in Lily and Valerie’s old room with the geometric print wallpaper, slipped into the bedroom for fresh shirts and underwear while Evelyn was not occupying it, made his own toast for breakfast, and ate dinner before he caught the train home.
Downstairs, they were never in the same space unless passing through. He spoke to Evelyn whenever she appeared: he was very sorry for his part in the misunderstanding; could they sit down together and talk it over? Was there something he could do? She did not reply; acted, indeed, as if she neither saw nor heard him. It was, he felt, both magnificent and pathetic at the same time. Infuriating, too. Evelyn left him notes: Kindly wash your teacup. The gas bill has come. I am not doing your washing.
On the train to and from work he wrestled with a letter to her, struggling to move it beyond the stock phrases that first came to mind: I hate it when we are estranged. We should not let small differences come between us. No one could mean more to me than you do. I love you still as I always have …
On Friday, he left work early, stopping on the way to the station to buy a card to write it in. At home, he sat in his shirtsleeves in the dining room (the flowers had been moved from the table to the sideboard, and were all but dead), trying to read Winston Graham’s The Black Moon, when he heard Evelyn emerge from the living room to answer the phone.
‘Evelyn Miles speaking. Yes, I did, thank you for calling. Thank you. Yes I am still—’ He found it strange to hear her interrupted, but when she spoke again, her voice rang out proudly: ‘The grammar school. Including French. Shorthand and typing. Two years at a city legal firm, Willis and Smythe, and then over twenty years’ experience of running a household … ’ Again, she fell silent, and Harry sat at the table, motionless, listening with his entire body. ‘There have been some changes here, so I think it is time for me to move. Yes, a live-in position is exactly what I am looking for …’ Again, she fell silent. ‘It’s a fairly small household,’ she continued, her voice a little less confident. ‘Four … No experience of supervising staff, not as such, but it’s certainly something I could do—’
He understood immediately how on Monday she must have waited until the two of them had left the house before getting up. Still sick with rage, she had put on her sunglasses, walked to the newsagents and bought the copy of The Lady that he’d noticed on the phone table that night, and, next door at the baker’s, a croissant, something she never could resist. At home, she’d have searched the classifieds at the back. There were advertisements for housekeepers under ‘Help Wanted.’ She’d have chosen which vacancies to apply for on the basis of how soon they wanted someone and how much she liked the name of the house: Hartcourt Place, Withinden Manor, Somerset Court, then typed the letters of application on the portable she kept zipped up in its vinyl case in the spare room, signed them with her full name, Evelyn Anne Miles, and carried them to the postbox at the end of the road before making early dinner for herself.
‘I understand,’ he heard Evelyn say now. ‘Thank you.’ She could not bear to be slighted and he knew how her pulse must be thudding through her, that she could hear it when she closed her eyes. He heard the faint ping and the dull clunk of the hand set as she hung up. There was a new kind of silence, and then an awful moaning sound. He made his
way to the hall where she sat on the low chair by the phone, her hands fisted, weeping. It was the most terrible thing. He knelt on the parquet and took her in his arms.
‘What idiot was that?’ he said, ‘And why would you go away when I want you so much?’
And there, hanging on the wall behind her was the still life they had bought years ago in the local art sale. And on the phone table, the ‘Sunflowers’ notepad she used, open, blank, the pen ready next to it.
He knew she would not answer, and that they would never speak of this humiliation or of what had led to it. But he felt her relax just a little and let him take her weight.
A Day With
Cyrus Mair
Alex Pugsley
All my life I’ve been thinking about Halifax—generally as it is expressed by its families, somewhat specifically by the Mair family of Tower Road, and super-specifically by Cyrus Mair, a friend and rival whom I met one afternoon when I was exactly five years and two days old. Of course the old Mair house on Tower Road is no longer there. The remains were demolished long ago to make way for two apartment buildings. But the final ruination of the family was set in motion years before, on the day I met Cyrus Mair, when his father’s body was found floating in Halifax Harbour, on this side of McNabs Island, the first in a series of bizarre events that would conclude with a house fire on the snowiest night in a century. But what of Cyrus Mair—whiz kid, scamp, mutant, contrarian pipsqueak, philosopher prince, pretender fink, boy vertiginous, koan incarnate—where was his matter and how was he formed? Cyrus Mair came into my life on the afternoon of my sister’s ninth birthday, on a day of gifts and escapes and inventions, the drama beginning with me ringing and ringing at my own front door, waiting to be let in, idly probing with my tongue a front tooth newly loosened. Inside, my sister Bonnie came to the door in her sparkle dress—I could see her distorted through the stained glass of the door’s windowpanes—to ask what I wanted. Now Bonnie was smart. She knew how many seconds there were in a year, that blue and yellow made green, and she could count up to forty in French. Once we’d been happy allies, the two of us venturing nude and hatless into our parents’ cocktail parties, but in the past months a coolness had prevailed between us, and now that she was nine she assumed an officious attitude toward younger kids, acting as their de facto guardian, and in these moments she became the Big Sister who wiped your nose and reminded you to use the basement door—which is what she was doing now, her eyes scolding, her finger circling. By parental decree, children were supposed to use the back or basement door unless there were special circumstances—but I was special circumstances. I understood we could use the front door on our birthdays, and a mere two days earlier, when it had been my birthday, I’d proposed the idea of moving my front-door privileges from my birthday to any other day in the year—and I was choosing today. Bonnie, I saw, had conveniently forgotten this amendment. But I was used to being misunderstood. I was something of an exceptional child, to tell the truth, and from the age of four and a half on I had the uncanny and somewhat underappreciated ability to repeat the “Witch Doctor” song for hours at a time without stopping. My performances didn’t win over all my audiences, true, but nonetheless I persevered—just as I persevered now in ringing the front doorbell. Bonnie appeared again, this time with my oldest sister, Carolyn, both holding helium birthday balloons, and in a burst of tandem head-shaking and hand-waving, they conveyed the instruction to go around to the basement door. I stood on the porch, furious, knowing that many of the world’s mysteries eluded me but starting to understand better and better that my older sisters wanted to destroy everything I held to be important. Slamming my fist against the glass of the door, and perhaps not really knowing exactly what I wanted, I left off ringing the doorbell and ran in madness to the end of the block, where, contrary to family rules, I ran across Victoria Road. Farther up the street, past the crazy Pigeon Lady’s house, and safely away from all birthday festivities, my shoulders relaxed and I shifted into another of my personas, which was Aubrey McKee, Boy Detective. I started memorizing passing license plates for possible future reference and attempted what was known in my trade as a forward tail. This was a sidewalk surveillance technique that involved tracking a subject who was actually behind the operative. I’d noticed, for example, on the other side of the street an unknown, fair-haired kid, and as he went about his way, following a single sheet of coloured paper down Tower Road, absorbed in the little world a child has, I was giving him enough time to draw alongside me. But looking across the street now, the boy in question was gone, the sidewalk empty save for a few recent puddles, so I simply proceeded toward South Street and the Halifax School for the Blind. This was an enormous stone building, a remnant from another century, and setting foot in this territory was always iffy because it meant one might encounter, as my sister Bonnie described them, “a bunch of blind albino kids from P.E.I.” I’d sometimes seen sightless children waiting on the school’s front steps, and one winter afternoon I’d heard floating out of open windows the sound of piano lessons, but I’d never seen a blind albino kid—not even from any province. All the same, as I snuck toward the school’s playground, I was mindful of Bonnie’s cautions and, panicked that I would be randomly chased by creatures with pink gogs of bloodied flesh where their eyes should be, I slinked myself under the black wrought-iron fence and into the green and sun of the playground. Once inside, I resumed my maneuvers. Some weeks before, I’d lost a Hot Wheels Batmobile in this playground and since then I tended to line-search under the swings, kick at dirt clumps in the sandbox, and scowl at any happy kids playing on the teeter-totter. The playground’s perimeter I investigated with the mindset still of a Boy Detective, planning to work my way into the center as I went, but this idea I promptly abandoned in favour of the monkey bars, from the top of which I was soon hanging by my knees—my head low-drooping—and noting the traces of sun on the nearby Victoria General hospital, the wrinkle pattern of the crumbling black asphalt at the edge of its parking lot, and a deep puddle directly below the monkey bars superb in its facility to reflect the upside-down sky. Turning the other way, I noticed a yellow-and-green seed pod, from a maple tree, spinning in the wind, and I was staring at it some moments before I saw, out of focus in the distance, the fair-haired boy I’d seen earlier. He was waving from a softly rotating merry-go-round. I’d not seen him come into the playground, and it was as if he’d somehow sprung out of the blue or teleported from coordinates elsewhere in the galaxy. He looked about five years old, his hair was corn-silk blond, and he was costumed miscellaneously. He wore a silk pajama top—pale blue with navy trim on the collar and cuffs—and over this was an adult’s black dress belt, so big it went round him three times, cinched very tight, causing the pajama top to flare out like a skirt below the waist. Completing the ensemble were grey jodhpurs and Oxford shoes, untied with no socks. All this he sported without a trace of self-consciousness, not for a moment considering that his clothes were anything but regulation. He was shy, forward, joyously alert, and within his blue eyes—a blue so bright as to seem slightly radioactive—shimmered a quick originality. He was an inquisitive sort, happily idiosyncratic, blinking and thinking and holding his breath at three minutes after four o’clock on a September afternoon. I’d never seen the kid before—and I knew a lot of people from nursery school, the bookmobile library, and even the Public Gardens—and asked where he was from. He made no answer, still holding his breath, his head tilted philosophically—and I was wondering if he were one of those semi-autistic kids who stare for hours at a green eraser—when he finally exhaled to say, “I’m not even here!” His eyebrows, I noticed, were sun-bleached to whiteness. “I’m supposed to be somewhere else but I’m not there either because—” His voice rose. “Because I’m an escape artist!” He was English. Or at least spoke with an English accent. In later years, when I remembered this moment, I would think of him as one of those hyper-articulate British schoolchildren, one of those blond choirboys wh
ose accent is so fluty, and whose syllables are so precisely enunciated, you want to thump them in the head with a rubber fish. I ran to the merry-go-round and grabbed the handrail closest to me. Giving it an almighty heave, I spun the boy as fast as I could. The contraption revolved twice and I timed my next push for maximum acceleration. After a few unstable rotations, the boy jumped off, woozying a few steps and bringing his fingertips to his eyes. “Oh my lumbago,” he said, falling to the grass. An eyedropper bottle tumbled out of his pajama pocket. The boy picked it up, wiped away some grime, and showed it to me. “This is my newest invention,” he said. “A potion of many ingredients!” He gave me the bottle. I held it to the sun. Inside its blue glass were a few types of liquid, a small key of some kind—as if from a lady’s jewelry box—as well as some shifting blobs of oil. “All I need to complete it,” said the boy, taking back the bottle and looking at me wildly, “is a drop of human blood.”
I asked why he needed the potion.
“I’m making it,” he said, shaking the bottle, “in case a sea pirate comes home to find that I’ve been abducted by a goliath. This is the potion that can bring you back to life. This is the potion that can grant you one wish!” He looked at me, conspiratorial. “I’ve also invented a word—shropter.”
I asked what it meant.
“I don’t know yet.” He searched for something in the front pocket of his jodhpurs. “My very first invention was a treasure map of many escape routes.” He brought out the sheet of coloured paper I’d seen him chase along the sidewalk. It was marked up with scribbles of all kinds. I liked it straight away and immediately wished it were mine. “Probably it will fall to me to escape. But it may do for my father as well. Do you have a father? I have a father. I’ve only met him twice. But I’m going to see him again, I should expect. That’s why I’ve become interested in inventions. And you?”
I had four sisters, I told him, and made a shrugging reference to Bonnie’s birthday party, adding that I didn’t much want to go.