The Girl in the Wall

by Alison Preston

  Colleen scooted over with a wet rag.

  “Everything okay over here?” she asked.

  “Yeah, thanks,” said the man. “Sorry about the…the spillage.”

  Mrs. Mortimer stared down at her unbitten jam buster. It was over. There might be a winding down of sorts, maybe a last simple job or two but the end was dead ahead. She had no fight in her — never had. It was over.

  Colleen wiped things up, went behind the counter, rinsed her rag, came back, and wiped up some more.

  “Are you all right, honey?” she asked.

  Mrs. Mortimer stared downwards. She couldn’t respond; her throat had closed up to such an extent that she could barely swallow, let alone talk.

  “Colleen! Your order’s up!” shouted one of the short order cooks.

  “My dad has a movie camera, a Bell and Howell Zoomatic,” said the man.

  Mrs. Mortimer began to shake.

  “Okay, mister.” The waitress spoke quietly. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  She had a way about her and a good size to go with it, though she couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

  Jim Coulthard’s face tightened along the jaw line.

  “Gus!” she called, not taking her eyes off him.

  Gus was one of the owners.

  The place grew quiet and the man stood up quickly. He put his hand on Mrs. Mortimer’s and whispered hot air into her ear.

  “Who knows? Maybe in time we could be partners.”

  The waitress shoved him toward the door and he was outside before Gus made an appearance.

  “Colleen! Order up!”

  The shout broke the silence and people’s words slowly began to fill the small restaurant again.

  “I’ll be right back, honey,” Colleen said.

  All Mrs. Mortimer knew was that she had to get out of there before the waitress came back and hopefully after the life-wrecker had left the parking lot. She needed to get some air into her lungs. She stood up on wobbly legs, not forgetting the envelope of photographs that had been left behind, the pictures of the dead dad.

  As she fumbled with the door George opened it from the other side.

  “Georgie,” she croaked.

  He sat her down on a little patch of dusty grass and loosely put his arm around her.

  “Is that him?” George asked. He lifted his chin towards the man who stood twenty yards away at the curb under the giant mug of root beer that advertised the restaurant.

  Mrs. Mortimer looked up and wished that the root beer could come to life, tip over, and drown him.

  “Yes, that’s him.”

  “What did he want?”

  “My life,” she said. “He wants my life.”

  Colleen came out with a greasy little brown bag containing two jam busters. She placed them on the ground next to Mrs. Mortimer.

  “Hi, George,” she said. “Just a little treat for your sister.”

  “Hi, Colleen. Thanks.”

  She started back inside.

  “Colleen?” he said and she stopped mid-stride.

  Mrs. Mortimer tensed up beside him and a small sound escaped her throat.

  “Nothing,” George said. “Thanks, is all. Thanks for your kindness.”

  Colleen slipped back inside.

  Jim Coulthard walked away. He had a slight limp. As she watched him walk, Mrs. Mortimer remembered a long-ago day in Coronation Park when the boy named Frank Foote had saved her. The person who hurt her that day had the same broken walk as the one turning the corner now onto Highfield Street.

  “The waitress scared him,” Mrs. Mortimer said.

  “I guess so.” George smiled.

  Her breaths were shallow for a while. When her breathing returned to normal, the two of them headed home to the house on Monck.

  “He does live on Lloyd,” she said. “I thought for sure he was from somewhere else.”

  They settled at the kitchen table.

  “I guess he lives in that house you mentioned where the man died.”

  “The Silk house.”

  “Yes. I don’t like that house,” said Mrs. Mortimer. “I’ve seen it.”

  George began choosing lemons from the fruit bowl and setting them aside.

  “What’s a yard man?” she asked. “He said his job is being a yard man.”

  “Someone who does yard work for people, I guess, kind of like a gardener. It’s mostly rich people that have gardeners. People that live on Wellington Crescent and places like that.”

  “Oh. That makes sense. I can picture him doing yard work.’

  She envied him the access he would have to the grounds of those beautiful long low houses.

  “He wasn’t mean this time,” she went on. “It could be that he’s not bad. It’s just…he wants too much. He doesn’t know what type of person I am. He talked about a movie camera that belonged to his dad. I don’t want to make movies, Georgie, and he wants to make death movies with me.”

  “What do you mean this time?” asked George. “When you said, ‘he wasn’t mean this time.’”

  “Nothing.”

  George left it and she was grateful to him. She didn’t want to go back there to the park and the gravelly hands and the broken glasses.

  She slumped in her chair.

  “There’s no way you have to do anything you don’t want to,” George said. “No way. You don’t need to have any involvment with this Jim character. You never have to see him again.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able not to. I’ve still got the pictures of his dad.”

  George picked up the envelope from the kitchen table and propped it against the doorjamb that led to the back landing.

  “I’ll deliver them for you. I know where his house is.”

  “He’s ruined everything,” she said, “with wanting to be my assistant and with his stupid moving picture ideas. I’m pretty sure this is the end of my life.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  George began squeezing lemons for lemonade.

  “Why do you always tell me not to say things?”

  He continued squeezing.

  “I guess it’s because I don’t want to hear them,” he said. “To be honest, sometimes the things you say scare me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No. Don’t be sorry. You are who you are, Mrs. Mortimer.”

  “The waitress was nice,” she said.

  “Yeah. Colleen’s great.”

  The kitchen radio was on and tuned in to CKRC. The newsreader announced that the Ohio National Guard had opened fire that day on students at Kent State University. Four were dead. The students had been protesting the American escalation in the war in Vietnam.

  George sat down and grew quiet.

  Mrs. Mortimer wondered what kinds of expressions the dead students had on their faces as they were shot down.

  Then she returned to thoughts of the waitress who had shown her real kindness, genuine, not the sort that wanted more than you had to give — certainly not the sort that wanted to be your assistant and end your life.

  George took the photographs with him the next day, saying he would drop them off at the Coulthard house on his way to the university. When he returned home after his classes were over he gave a full report to his sister at her request.

  “I didn’t want to knock on the door,” he said, “so I folded them ever-so-slightly and slid them through the mail slot.”

  “You didn’t wreck them, did you?” she asked.

  “No, of course not. They were only bent for a second. The Coulthards have a good-sized slot.”

  “So you didn’t see him?”

  “No. I didn’t see him. An older man came around the side of the house as I was leaving the yard but for sure it wasn’t him.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. If you hadn’t told me that his dad was dead I would have thought it was his dad.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No. We nodded at each other. I kep
t on walking. I wanted to get out of there without running into Jim or having to talk about anything.”

  “An uncle maybe?”

  “Maybe. It doesn’t matter. The pictures are delivered and hopefully that can be an end to it.”

  “Thanks for doing that, Georgie. Thanks for making it so I didn’t have to go to that house.”

  “My pleasure, Mrs. Mortimer.”

  22

  After her meeting with Jim Coulthard she didn’t sleep well anymore. She slept for precisely three hours and then woke up. Lying in her bed till morning was too difficult. She wanted to bang her head against the wall till she knocked herself out, but that would wake everyone up.

  So in the wee hours of the morning she got up and dressed and walked the streets till the first inklings of light showed in the east. Pookie followed her sometimes, but always stopped when they got to the first cross street. Then he sat down and watched her. She turned around every few steps to look at him till he disappeared into the darkness.

  Usually she was the only person out, but sometimes through a window she glimpsed someone reading by the light of a lamp or she smelled the delicious smoke from someone’s cigarette. Often she took her Belvederes with her and smoked while she wandered.

  One night, a week or so after George shoved the pictures through the mail slot, she walked far enough and late enough to see the lights go on in the bakery on Taché Avenue. She smelled the bread baking and as she got closer she heard quiet murmurs and the odd outburst of laughter. She imagined the faces of the laughing people inside.

  When she tried to imitate the laughter, she scared herself and began to shake.

  Pointing herself in the direction of home she walked on.

  Maybe her life didn’t have to be over; maybe she could survive this.

  She breathed in the air, didn’t want to let it go. Her body needed it; her head especially needed it, her limbs. So she held on and didn’t breathe out even though she knew that she had to in order to get more. It didn’t take long for her to lose consciousness.

  A few minutes later she woke up on the damp grass of Coronation Park. There were no witnesses to her faint. It might never have happened.

  When Mrs. Mortimer arrived home, the sun wasn’t quite up but the whole eastern sky was pink. The birds were chirping and the day looked to her as though it might just turn out okay. So what if she wasn’t any good at laughing and her career was over?

  She found George doubled up and on his knees in the kitchen. Her first inclination was to run like the woman who ran from her dying husband that day but she forced herself not to. She didn’t want another regret to add to all her smashed-down layers.

  “Georgie?”

  He didn’t answer her and she knelt down beside him, trying to get a look at his face. It was unrecognizable and drenched in sweat.

  Then she did run. Upstairs to the dad’s bedroom. They all three went to the hospital.

  It wasn’t kidney stones and it wasn’t appendicitis. It wasn’t any number of things. They sent him home with painkillers and the advice to not make a mountain out of a molehill.

  Two days later it happened in the night and the dad took George to the hospital again. This time he refused to take him home until they made a definite diagnosis. That meant an operation.

  “You know that scrub brush that Mrs. Campbell uses to clean our toilet?” George said to Mrs. Mortimer. “The one with the long handle?”

  He was settled back in his hospital room with enough drugs inside him to finally make a dent in the pain.

  “Yeah?”

  “It felt like someone took hold of one of those and was scrubbing hard on the inside of me.”

  George had pancreatic cancer.

  It was a painful type, as cancers go, and one they could do nothing about but try to manage the suffering. A poor job was done of that until his dad raised the roof in his anger and frustration and threatened to call in the troops, whoever they were.

  No one told Mrs. Mortimer that George was going to die. They thought they were protecting her, she supposed. Her dad and Mrs. Campbell talked in lighthearted voices about when George would come home from the hospital. You just had to look at him to know it wasn’t true.

  She was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to get along without him. Why couldn’t it be her mother or her father or Mrs. Campbell or herself who got the disease? She could handle any one of those people dying with George along to show her the way.

  When she imagined his death and its aftermath she didn’t get very far. It looked like black sometimes and other times it looked like white. There were no forms or even shadows.

  There was nothing to do but wait out his death and then she would see how things stood, see if she could manage. If she couldn’t…well, there were ways. For one, she could pull a Silk.

  23

  Jim Coulthard didn’t give up easily and each time he got in touch with her she lost a little more steam. He got nowhere with her and ended up setting himself up in competition. He called his business “Living with our Dead.” Mrs. Mortimer heard that his photographs were brash and brassy, his business phony, fancy, unreal. She visualized Las Vegas, pictures she’d seen in her dad’s Life magazine of that pretend city in the desert.

  There were those who thought she should have competed, but she didn’t have it in her. She let it all go.

  When the call came through, she hadn’t taken a photograph in over five months. She felt a childlike excitement when she heard the address recited over the phone. It was on Wellington Crescent.

  “I’ll need a lift,” she said and recited her own address back to the caller.

  “Please let it be one of the long low ones,” she said out loud after she had hung up. “Let it be a ranch house.”

  She loaded her camera and waited for her ride.

  It was a damp morning in November. The fog was so heavy it was like moving through a rain cloud. Mrs. Mortimer liked it this way. When she was younger and woke up to days like this she hurried to get outdoors, to be inside of it. But she never felt that the mist truly surrounded her. It always seemed to be a short distance away. If only she could watch herself from down the street, see her body looming out of the grey, then she would know it was real.

  A Moores taxi came to get her. She climbed into the back seat because she knew that was where she was supposed to sit. It always felt odd to her, sitting in the back, purposefully unfriendly, but it did make not talking easier.

  The driver made no attempt at conversation, so she settled back to enjoy the ride. She would be silent unless he asked her a particular question, which it turned out he didn’t. In addition to not wanting to talk she didn’t want to interfere with his driving skills; he didn’t seem to have many and there wasn’t much in the way of visibility beyond the windshield. He peered over the steering wheel, slowly making his way. He didn’t look old enough or big enough to drive but she supposed he must be qualified.

  Being inside a car in this weather wasn’t nearly as interesting as being on foot.

  Finally, in her excitement, she asked, “Do you know the house?”

  She thought he looked over his shoulder at her as though it was a stupid question and she supposed it was.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know the house.”

  It was such a deep voice that Mrs. Mortimer wondered for a moment where it came from. Surely not from the sideways chubby face resting on top of the barely visible shoulder.

  He slowed down and made a right turn off the crescent onto a circular driveway. It was late enough for the sun to be up somewhere behind the clouds but you’d never know it in the dimness. The house stood behind a solid wall of fog. Mrs. Mortimer squinted as they crept closer and saw that yes, it was what she had hoped for. Her heartbeat quickened when she saw the house stretching away into the mist in both directions.

  She paid the driver, including a good tip. Surely the woman who phoned would reimburse her.

  “Would you like me to wait for
you?” said that same deep voice.

  The idea of a driver waiting had never occurred to her before and she was both suspicious of it and grateful just in case he was being kind.

  “No,” she said. “But thanks.”

  He drove slowly away and she turned toward the house. As she moved closer she was disappointed to see there were no lights on. The air inside the windows looked no different from the air inside the house on Monck Avenue. It was the colour of nothing. With every step her feelings turned a little further aslant from where they had been when she first heard the address.

  The porch light went on and she forgot all about the colour of the air. The figure of a woman was framed in the open doorway. It was her woman, the one of her daydreams. Her hair was in a pageboy, just so. It was all there: she was sleek of form, wearing high heels. Mrs. Mortimer was still too far away to see lipstick but she knew it was there. Only the oven mitts were missing. But that was okay; she could live without the oven mitts. She couldn’t expect the woman to be baking peanut butter cookies under the circumstances, whatever they might be. It was the vaguest phone call she’d ever received. The address had kept her from asking her usual questions. The address was her dream.

  Each step closer took her further into a quagmire of confusion. The porch light was a single dim bulb; there was no tasteful fixture to soften the entranceway. And the paint on the doorframe was peeling badly. One section of the frame had pulled away from the house altogether. Mrs. Mortimer worried that no one was caring for this home.

  She looked again at the woman. The hair was black, too sleek. The print dress hung on pointy bones and made a mockery of Mrs. Mortimer’s imaginings. There were no curves, there was no comfy roundness. It was like a mean joke — the way this person looked.

  The whole package was wrong. The woman was smoking a filterless cigarette and she blew the smoke sideways out of the corner of her mouth. When Mrs. Mortimer came nearer she could see that the dark hair was greasy, filthy.

  On someone else the high-heeled shoes would have been beautiful. They had open toes and were made from a soft velvety material, but they revealed stockingless talons that looked as though they were fighting for air. And the feet reeked: there was no mistaking the odour that wafted up and spoiled the air in the clean misty morning. Mrs. Mortimer had noticed it often enough on her visits to deathbeds. She frequently wondered why people didn’t pay more attention to the feet of their loved ones. She would bathe George’s feet this very afternoon and every afternoon till he died unless he told her not to. And if she ever had another loved one in her unlikely future, she would tend to his feet too, and keep them clean.