“So what happened at the Women’s Pavilion?” George asked.
“Nothing,” said Mrs. Mortimer.
She couldn’t tell it to George. He was too good for it.
Although she tried to let it go in the coming weeks, it was too big to let go of her. She was stuck with it, she supposed, forever, both in her night dreams and during her waking hours. It waited, as a kind of entity unto itself, biding its time until it was ready. She couldn’t imagine what it had planned for her, what it would do to her, but there would be something. She saw it as a kind of sharp edge to her life that would cut her and cause her to bleed out into the future.
20
One day in late April, not long after the bad thing happened, Mrs. Mortimer was sitting with an elderly man moments after she had completed taking pictures of his wife. She felt quite comfortable with him, so was brave enough to ask if he would be framing a photo and placing it on view in his home.
“Oh no,” he said. “This is just for me, not for anyone else.”
He smoothed the pure white hair back from his dead wife’s forehead.
“I may buy a little frame, I suppose,” he said. “A do-it-your-selfer frame. But this picture is only for me.”
She imagined the man gazing at the picture for varying periods of time, sometimes with another photo next to it, of his wife when she was alive, but most times on its own. She wondered how much satisfaction it would bring him, if any.
And that led her to her next idea.
It was the third day of May. She gauged the air in the room. It was shared by a dying middle-aged man, a young man who identified himself as the son, and her. It was the son who had called.
Gauging air wasn’t Mrs. Mortimer’s strong point, but she was pretty sure she didn’t feel anything disagreeable coming from either man. So far she had never felt a bad emanation from a dying person, only from someone close by who didn’t agree with her being there.
There was something about the young man, but it was more interesting than bad. He didn’t blink much, but that was okay; it was better than blinking too much. And he didn’t look to be sweating or shaking: two things that made Mrs. Mortimer nervous. When she was doing either of them herself she knew things were far from being all right, unless, of course, the sweat was caused by the weather.
She asked the son to step out into the hall with her; she didn’t want to speak in front of the dad even if he was past listening. Then she dove in and broached her idea of a series of pictures, beginning just before the subject died. She had become quite good at judging when the very last moments of life were slipping away and that was when she hoped to step in and start clicking. If there were minute changes on the face she would catch them — missing almost nothing, just the tiny moments between clicks. It would be an honest-to-goodness study of life passing into death, something she felt might give her customers more satisfaction than what she had provided them till now.
It was her hope that she had picked the right person to begin with. At the very first it seemed so. But a feeling of unease took her over as soon as she had spoken, a feeling that told her she might have said or done something wrong or, at the least, inappropriate. It was because of the way the man behaved. Of course, she didn’t know his usual way of being; this was the first time they had met as far as she knew, although there was something vaguely familiar about him. He was so quiet after she spoke, so very quiet. There was something coming from inside of him that she couldn’t recognize.
“I like your idea,” he said at last.
She realized then that he wasn’t much older than she was, early twenties at most.
He watched her work.
She could feel his eyes upon her instead of on the wasted father who was dead now, from a rare form of lymphoma, the man said. His stare frightened her a little and she had a glimpse of what it might have been like for the people she had stared at for so many years. Surely she hadn’t emitted this level of intensity. She couldn’t imagine what types of thoughts were behind the stare, where they stemmed from or where they were headed. It felt like they were just for her, barely connected to the man in the bed.
The boyish man nearly blinded her with the power of his gaze and Mrs. Mortimer prayed to Mama Right, her latest version of God, that the photographs would turn out well and she could be done with him.
A night nurse poked her head in and just as quickly withdrew, as though she had witnessed something so private she should be punished for intruding.
Mrs. Mortimer walked home through the night streets.
She regretted sharing her idea more than she could recall regretting anything else in her entire life. It was something she could have prevented, not like the situation she had fallen into at the Women’s Pavilion. It was totally on her. All she would have had to do was keep her huge mouth shut. Her past had been chock-full of regret, she mused, sometimes for no good reason.
Where did it all stem from? Were her mother’s regrets passed down to her and her grandmother’s through her mother and her great-grandmother’s, too? If so, it wasn’t fair. She hadn’t inherited their collective happinesses, if there were any. Maybe there weren’t any.
Her irritation grew as she thought about being cursed with added-up remorse if not with added-up happiness. That would be wrong and she clung to an idea that there was a right and a wrong that came into play in people’s lives — from somewhere outside. It was a vague idea that sometimes slipped away and she had to work at getting it back. That was where Mama Right came in.
Things only got worse on the walk home. By the time she climbed the steps to the front porch she was bent in two with wishing she could turn back the clock. The regret made her want to die. She hadn’t felt that way since before George had bought her her first camera.
She recalled a feeling she’d once had that she was remembering something before it happened with no idea what it was. That feeling came back to her now, free floating, attached to nothing she could name.
Mrs. Mortimer sat on her bed and stared into space till the sun came up.
Then she went to her darkroom in the cellar and worked on the pictures of the man with lymphoma and saw that they were good.
“Thanks, Mama Right,” she said.
But the regretful feeling didn’t leave her.
The call came in the afternoon to arrange for a pickup time.
“The photographs turned out well,” she said.
“I knew they would,” he said. “I knew you would do a good job.”
Her bad feeling vanished for a moment or two. Maybe it was wrong; maybe she didn’t need to want to die.
“Say, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about,” he said. “I thought maybe we could go somewheres for coffee when I come to get the pictures.”
The clock on the wall in the house on Monck Avenue ticked off thirty seconds.
“Mrs. Mortimer?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m here,” she said.
He had said “somewheres.” That meant that he came from a poor part of town where they didn’t talk right.
“What do you think?” he asked.
She didn’t want him to come to her house and she didn’t want to go somewheres for coffee but she knew that at least one of those things had to happen. She wished George were home. No one had ever made a suggestion like this to her before and she didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t know where it belonged, if anywhere.
“I forget your name,” she said.
“It’s Jim. Jim Coulthard.”
The clock ticked off twenty more seconds. It was louder than usual.
“Well? What do you think?” he asked. “Alls I wanna do is talk.”
He said “alls.” Alls and somewheres. She’d never known anyone up close who’d used those words, just heard them on the local news sometimes when a reporter interviewed a person something terrible had happened to. And once she’d heard a woman reporter say “liberry” instead of “library.” She had thought that was ki
nd of funny. Alls and somewheres weren’t funny.
His voice was young. And he sounded as though he liked her. She wasn’t used to feeling as though someone liked her. For sure it was a trap.
She was aware that people appreciated her skills as a photographer and her punctuality and her no-nonsense attitude toward death, but liking had nothing to do with it.
There were also those who thought that what she did was wrong, who stood outside homes and hospital rooms saying things like “The very idea!” and “Who does she think she is!”, in an effort to override the wishes of the person who had called her, the person who was one notch closer to the deceased in terms of being the boss of the situation.
One woman even called the police, figuring that what she was doing must be against a law written somewhere, a law belonging to God if need be. The police came, but they were nice to Mrs. Mortimer and told the troublemaker to back off. It was a sister-in-law and she finally did back down, but not before causing many tears. Mrs. Mortimer had sat quietly and waited for the trouble to pass so she could get back to work.
People appreciated her calm manner when she was on the job, but again, liking had nothing to do with it.
This felt different from appreciation and it scared her more than a little. It was possible that the sense of liking she received over the telephone wasn’t a trap. Another possibility was that it was all in her imagination; she didn’t know whether to believe in it. If it was real, was it directed to her specifically or did this man like in general? She had seen people who were friendly to everybody; no one could escape their backslapping ways. But he didn’t seem like one of those.
Also, what if the liking was there one minute and gone the next? When quietness had taken him over at the hospital she had worried that it’d had something to do with her. She knew now that it had, but it had been a thinking quietness and maybe it was okay; maybe it was safe. But then the hot staring had taken over and that hadn’t been okay. It hadn’t been safe. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name. For the first time she doubted the new name she had given herself.
Her head ached. She gave it a shake and it hurt even more, as though something was trying to escape from behind her eyeballs. Maybe one of them would pop out and she could go back and present it to Miss Horning.
“Yes,” she said.
Jim Coulthard laughed.
Mrs. Mortimer didn’t know what kind of a laugh it was. She didn’t do much laughing. She had smiled at the word “liberry” but not laughed out loud.
“Coffee would be fine,” she said. “We could go to the Red Top.”
She had to give him the pictures, and better at the Red Top than here at the house.
They made a date and Mrs. Mortimer hung up the phone. She needed to sit down and do some thinking on the verandah with her cigarettes and maybe a glass of her dad’s whiskey. That’s what he did when he announced that he wanted to have a good think and would like to be left alone.
She set herself up with her drink and her Belvederes. Her mum was in bed, her dad was at work, and George was at the university. It was her first taste of whiskey: she added a little water like she had watched her dad do and swirled it around in the glass. She was careful with her first sip. It tasted like nothing she had ever experienced before: not good like chocolate cake or fried chicken, but not bad like Brussel sprouts. It was in a class by itself. She drank slowly and it lasted a good long time.
Mrs. Mortimer realized that she wanted someone to like her. The feeling of thinking that it might happen was a good one. No one had liked her so far: she knew that and didn’t question it. No one but George, that is, and he was her brother. It was his job to like her, but she believed he truly did. That kept her alive: that, taking pictures of the dead, and daydreams of her long low home. Sometimes night dreams could be good, too, but she didn’t add that to the list of things that kept her alive. A good sleep wasn’t a good enough reason to live.
In one of her recurring night dreams there was a rumpus room done up in blues and greens: ocean colours. Fish swam amongst wavy vines inside an aquarium. Even the fish were vibrant blues and greens inside their bubbly water world.
There was a small pool with a fountain creating water sounds behind soft music piped in from a hidden source. “White Silver Sands” was the song.
Under the water were secret caverns and smooth rocks for mermaids to lounge on and comb their hair. The mermaids never came, but they could have if they’d wanted.
Ladies in high-heeled shoes danced with men in suits and smoked cigarettes at the same time. Sometimes they drank cocktails from delicate glasses tinted greenish-blue.
Two young, well-scrubbed children, a boy and a girl, sat at the top of the basement stairs watching. They wore sleepers, those pajamas with feet. If the adults saw them, they didn’t let on.
Mrs. Mortimer pondered her night dream and didn’t let her thoughts go back to the Jim person and his interest in her. It was easier to stay away.
Again she thought about ruing so many of the actions she had and had not taken in her life and she was suddenly certain that she would never have any children. It had to do with her new idea of regret piling up through the generations. She couldn’t bear the idea of her son — she pictured a little boy with a pointed chin — crippled under the weight of things he had or hadn’t done. In her mind he wore a heavy cloth coat that dragged him down and down further, to the ground, where he began to crawl and then finally stopped to lay his head down in the dirt. No. There would be no children for Mrs. Mortimer.
21
By the time George came home, she had started peeling potatoes for supper. He joined her in the kitchen.
“I want people to like me, Georgie,” she said.
“Uh oh,” said George.
“What do you mean, uh oh?”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that out loud. I just mean I’m pretty sure I won’t have any very good answers for you if you’re going to ask me some difficult questions.”
He sat down at the kitchen table.
“Plus, you smell like Dad’s whiskey.”
“Yes, I had some.”
George’s full lips turned tight and straight, almost disappearing inside his face.
“He won’t like that,” he said.
Mrs. Mortimer knew from George’s look that he didn’t like it either.
“I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would,” she said.
She told him about the man named Jim Coulthard.
“Hmm,” said George. “Do you want me to come with you when you go see him?”
“I don’t think so.”
She covered the potatoes with cold water and set them on the stove.
“There are some Coulthards on Lloyd,” George said. “I wonder if he’s one of them.”
“There are?”
“Yeah. They live in the Silk house. It’s sort of a creepy place set back a ways from the street. I don’t really know them, but I think there’s a son. He’s maybe between you and me in age.”
“What’s a Silk house?”
“It’s a house where a family named Silk used to live. Mr. Silk killed himself a long time ago and the rest of the family moved away.”
Mrs. Mortimer thought about the cool hedge yard, the one from a different season and time. She hadn’t been back there and hadn’t even thought about it again till now. It seemed like a long time ago. Everything before her picture taking seemed like a long time ago.
“Does it have a hedge?” she asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Is that what makes it creepy?”
“Hmm, maybe. Or it might just be that Mr. Silk died there.”
Suddenly she remembered the woman, Mrs. Beresford, even her turn of phrase: “a man who died by his own hand.”
“Maybe it’s a combination of the two,” she said.
“Possibly.”
“I don’t think this guy lives there. I don’t think he’s from around here.”
“After supper. At the Red Top.”
“I could drop by after you’ve been there a while and see how it’s going, pretend like I just happened by.”
“Yeah. That might be good.”
“Don’t drink any more whiskey, Mrs. Mortimer,” said George. “It’s what happened to our mum.”
“’Kay, Georgie. I won’t.”
A profound sense of dread accompanied Mrs. Mortimer to the restaurant.
Jim Coulthard was there already, sitting in the second booth. She slid in across from him and they both ordered coffee. Mrs. Mortimer also ordered a jam buster, just from habit; she wasn’t at all hungry. Jim paid for both of them up front.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“On Lloyd Avenue.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
She was going to ask him next if he lived in the hedge house but she held back; she already knew the answer. A chill ran up her spine.
A young waitress whose name tag read “Colleen” was watching them. Mrs. Mortimer saw her watching and didn’t mind. Colleen was always nice to her.
“I want to be your assistant,” Jim Coulthard said.
A buzzing started up in Mrs. Mortimer’s temples and she couldn’t tell if it was a sound or just a sensation. She wondered if anyone else could hear it — if the slippery-looking man could hear it.
“I…I work alone,” she said.
She forgot his name again.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, but I had this idea that maybe I could help. The work you do…it interests me and I’d like to join up with you in some way.”
“Don’t you have a job?” she asked.
“Yeah, I do. I’m a yard man, but I thought maybe I could take this on as…well, part-time at first, while I learn from you, and then…” He spread his arms wide and knocked over his coffee.
The Girl in the Wall Page 8