There were sores on the woman’s face. She was wearing lipstick all right, bright red and caked on her lips, like it was added to every morning without taking the old layer off. Deep cracks ran in all directions away from her mouth and the lipstick travelled those cracks, perhaps searching for somewhere else to be, in one instance settling in a scab to the left of the woman’s mouth.
“Mrs. Mortimer, is it?”
The oily chin wagged and quivered. The voice was ruined from the filterless cigarettes.
“Yes.”
She had to swallow and say it again, as no sound came out the first time.
“Yes.”
“I’m Mrs. Buckingham. Please come in.”
“Thank you.”
To Mrs. Mortimer’s relief, no hand was offered.
There was something familiar…
The gash.
When the lips were pulled back they revealed small, yellow teeth.
“You’re wearing lavender,” said the gash. “I wish you weren’t.”
Sometimes Mrs. Mortimer felt as though there were perhaps only five hundred or so people in the whole world and she kept seeing them over and over again in different situations, playing different roles.
“My Regina is dead,” said the gash. “My daughter.”
“Sorry.”
“Yes, well. Come along in spite of yourself and we’ll have a look.”
The air in the house was as cold as outdoors. There were no furnace sounds. At a first glance there seemed to be very little furniture, nowhere to sit while tying up your shoes. There was no deep carpet to sink your toes into and nothing on the walls but pale shapes where paintings used to hang.
Mrs. Mortimer followed the woman down a long hallway to the right of the large foyer. It was a hallway of closed doors. Mrs. Buckingham opened the last one on the left.
Through the open door Mrs. Mortimer saw a window looking out on to a yard that must have led to the river, but in the mist the river was invisible. The interior pane was pushed up and in the frame of the storm window there were three open holes the size of silver dollars. They let in the cold but they didn’t let anything out.
The next thing she saw was a sea-green wall. It reminded her for a second of her good night dream, the one with the aquarium and the chance of mermaids. But then she saw it wasn’t a wall at all — just a screen in front of more peeling paint and torn and faded wallpaper. On either side of the bed were plastic palm trees. It was a unconvincing attempt at an exotic ocean locale.
Finally, Mrs. Mortimer’s eyes sought the bed. Against her will, it seemed. There was a sheet covering the daughter in her entirety. It was the first time that she felt afraid when approaching death, unwilling to see what lay before her. She was familiar with the smell of dying; it was often present in the rooms she visited. But this wasn’t like that: this was simply the smell of excrement and she objected to having to experience it. The three small holes in the storm window didn’t stand a chance.
She hung back; she wanted to run.
The woman grasped her elbow with rough fingers, urging her forward. She pulled back the sheet.
“This is my Regina,” said the gash.
At first she didn’t let herself look. But then her eyes got away on her and lit on the bed. They saw the bruises on the arms and on the nose of all places. They saw the tongue: she’d know that tongue anywhere.
“Hello, Mrs. Mortimer.”
The familiar voice came from behind her.
She spun around to see Jim Coulthard standing by the door with a smirk pasted to his face.
“You,” she said. “What are you…? What am I doing here?”
The two people she feared most in the world spoke at once.
“You’re here to take pictures,” said Jim.
“You’re here to say goodbye,” said the gash, the same one that had screamed at her the day of the bad thing at the Women’s Pavilion.
They looked at each other then and began bickering. They sounded like the grackles that squawked outside Mrs. Mortimer’s bedroom window early some mornings. But they made less sense than the grackles.
She focused her eyes on the wooden frame of the window and the three holes that led to the mist. If she could make herself small for a second or two, she could slip through one of those holes and get away faster than if she went back through the front door. Get to George. She worried for a second that her camera wouldn’t be able to fit through the hole with her. Outside she could inhale all the clean oxygen in the world. She could go back to before all of it: before George’s sickness, before the bad thing and Jim Coulthard, before the tongue in the bed, mostly before George’s sickness. But no, there was too much to climb over. She would never get back far enough for anything at all to be okay again.
She turned back to the bed.
“You killed her, too,” she said.
That silenced them.
Mrs. Mortimer replaced the sheet. Two looks at the dead girl were way too many.
“Why?” she asked.
“She got too big for me,” the gash said.
“Ssh!” said Jim. It was a very loud sound.
“I couldn’t hide her anymore. Especially with all the trouble she was getting into.”
She looked at Jim then, accused him with her look.
Suddenly Mrs. Mortimer knew where the smothered baby had come from.
“Why did you have to hide her?” she asked.
Mrs. Buckingham sank into the only chair in the room. It was a lawn chair. She put her face in her hands and began to sob.
“Why…why, I was ashamed. I couldn’t do anything right, could I? Not even have a proper baby.”
Her skinny shoulders shook and when she looked up her mouth was a lopsided smear.
“We had to keep her a secret. Don’t you see?”
“No. Not really,” said Mrs. Mortimer.
“I couldn’t take it anymore.” The blubbing continued. “What was I supposed to do? It all got away on me after my husband died. He ruined my daddy’s business, saddled me with Regina, and then he up and died on me. I can’t be blamed.”
Mrs. Mortimer didn’t like hearing the word “daddy” from a grown woman of Mrs. Buckingham’s age. And she still didn’t know why she was there. They’d had vastly different answers to that question and she was unclear as to who was the boss of the situation.
“Mrs. Buckingham is very particular,” Jim broke in suddenly. “And you’re a better picture taker than me, Mrs. Mortimer. We want to create a family scene of some kind.”
“You’re not here to take pictures,” said the gash, getting her sobs under control.
“But I’ve set up,” Jim said, meaning the palm trees and backdrop, Mrs. Mortimer supposed.
“Shut up, you fool,” said the gash. She held her forearm to her forehead and gaped at the ceiling.
“Let’s phone someone,” Mrs. Mortimer said, but she said it with no heart.
Mrs. Buckingham stood up. She nudged Jim hard as though to get him moving.
“It’s not me you want,” Mrs. Mortimer said as she backed out of the room. “It can’t possibly be me that you want for any of your reasons.”
“I can’t let you live,” spat the gash. “Not after what you’ve seen. You should never have come snooping around.”
Jim reached out to stop Mrs. Mortimer and she pushed him away from her with all her strength. Mrs. Buckingham shoved him back at her like he was a puppet made from socks.
As she stumbled down the hall she heard the hissing of the gash.
“Don’t let her go,” it said. “It’s on you if she makes that phone call, Jim. You idiot!”
The front door had been left ajar.
Why hadn’t she taken the taxi driver up on his offer to wait? Clinging tightly to her camera, she ran, staying close to the houses to stay out of sight. There were no fences. She ran without looking back, grateful for the mist. There were some hedges and she fought her way through them and over them. She would not
allow him to catch her.
Of all the streets, of all the houses…
She ran till she came to Academy Road, where she crossed the Maryland Bridge to the Misericordia Hospital and a familiar bus stop.
Mrs. Buckingham meant to kill her. Literally kill her. She was pushing Jim Coulthard to do it for her. What did they intend? Another pillow over yet another face? The gash wanted to shut her up permanently like the bad guys did on Mannix.
How had these two found each other? How had they hooked up? Maybe evilness sought evilness without even trying and made itself stronger. It met its match and merged and grew.
What was she supposed to do with this? A regular person would go inside the hospital now and tell somebody something, but she couldn’t. She could not. All she wanted was out.
Mrs. Mortimer missed the taxi driver with the deep voice. He was a thin frayed thread back to where she had been before seeing Regina and she wanted at the very least to go back there.
She needed to talk to someone. She needed to talk to George. Anger welled up inside of her. Why did the disease have to land on him? Why not her? Useless muck-filled her. She would have welcomed it. Maybe George welcomed it too, she thought, but he would never admit to it, not in a million years.
There was a bus ticket in her pocket. She wished for tears as she stepped up onto the first bus that came along. It wended its way down Westminster Avenue to Osborne Street, where she transferred to a bus that would take her to George. There was no point in going to her own neighbourhood; there was nothing there.
Could it be that she’d made it up? Maybe nothing had really happened. She liked that idea, that version of things: an imaginary crime. She needed to lay eyes on her brother.
She got off the bus in front of the Princess Elizabeth Hospital.
George was asleep.
She stood by the side of his bed and put her hand underneath his, which lay on top of the covers. It was warm.
“He sleeps most of the time now,” said a voice behind her.
She couldn’t be bothered to turn around. It was one of the starchy nurses that came and went. They were all the same to Mrs. Mortimer.
“Georgie?” she said.
“Best let him be,” said the nurse.
Mrs. Mortimer was still until the nurse went away.
“Georgie?” she said again.
He didn’t open his eyes at first, but then he did.
There was a flash of recognition and a smile too weak to last more than a moment or two. His eyes closed.
She knew better than to bother him with words. Right now she wasn’t sure she knew any.
“Go home, Mrs. Mortimer,” he whispered.
His voice was nearly gone.
“I am home, Georgie,” she said. “You’re my only home.”
PART III
2006
24
“This is a sad house,” said Frank Foote, pausing in his work.
They were gutting a place on Lloyd Avenue in the Norwood Flats. It was small, just a storey and a half, built over a hundred years ago. The new owner’s name was Norm Featherstone and he had hired Frank and Jane to make the old house new again as a wedding present for his daughter and her husband-in-waiting.
The job at hand was tearing down the walls of the half-storey. Featherstone wanted to create an open space on this floor — to rid it of the warren of musty rooms and give it an airier feel.
“How do you mean?” asked Jane in response to Frank’s statement.
She stopped what she was doing, which was attaching a speaker bar to her iPod so she didn’t have to wear headphones to listen to her music. Frank had told her it was too dangerous. Really, he just didn’t want to have to visually get her attention every time he spoke to her; it was tiring. Plus, he thought listening devices were anti-social in company.
“This wallpaper, for instance,” he said. “Faded songbirds. It’s been here forever.”
He ran his hand over the wall and then cut into it to see what the next layer showed.
“Who lived here last?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” said Jane, “but Norm would know. I think it might have been an old woman on her own who couldn’t manage anymore.”
“See, that’s sad.”
“Yup. Sad, but inevitable.”
The music started.
“Is Patti Smith okay?” Jane asked. “The Horses album?”
“Sure,” said Frank. “I like Patti Smith.”
And he did, too. He was grateful that Jane stuck to older music when she was with him. It showed a certain considerateness on her part. He suspected when he wasn’t around she listened to some of the stuff Garth and Sadie were into, groups with names that he couldn’t pronounce. Sometimes the names didn’t even seem to be made up entirely of letters. He knew of one that had a dollar sign in it. He didn’t like that, didn’t know if it was a man or a woman and didn’t care to know. It pissed him off.
“Gloria” was playing now and that was just fine with him. He liked Patti Smith’s rendition. G-L-O-R-I-A.
“I don’t remember who lived here when I was a kid,” Frank said when the song ended. “I could tell you who lived in some of these houses, but this one doesn’t ring any bells. It’s so small and camouflaged by all the hedges and trees. I wonder if anyone ever kept it nice in the olden days.”
“Probably,” said Jane. “Probably somewhere along the way people loved this house and loved each other in it.”
She turned back to her own wall. Frank watched a splotch of red appear on the back of her neck. Jane was fair-skinned and she blushed easily, usually on account of her own words.
“I hope so,” said Frank.
“Didn’t you know everyone?” said Jane. “Everyone and their pets through the years? It seems like you did. How come you don’t know who lived in this house?”
“Well, Lloyd Avenue was a little different from the other streets over here. It’s just one away from St. Mary’s Road and it was almost as if it belonged somewhere else with its tiny old houses built so close together. It was separate somehow. I knew one or two kids who lived on Lloyd, but that’s it. People were more likely to come and go here and to rent rather than own. The houses on this street existed long before most of the others to the west of here.”
They worked away without speaking for a while: prying, banging, ripping, sawing, heaving debris down the stairs and out the open window. “Redondo Beach” played on the iPod — Patti Smith’s song about “sweet suicide.”
“I wonder if this could have been the Silks’ house,” Frank said.
“Who were the Silks?”
“They were a family who lived on Lloyd. There was a suicide when I was really young, too young to remember, really. I’ve just heard the stories. The dad, I believe it was — a man, anyway — killed himself in the basement or no, the garage. It was all kept very quiet in a loud sort of way. None of the mums and dads wanted the kids to know about it so they whispered and we listened as best we could. My mum was a really loud whisperer because my dad was a little bit deaf. I was only a toddler when it happened.”
Jane smiled.
“I wish I had known you when you were a toddler.”
She blushed again and Frank wondered if she was falling in love with him. He hoped not for at least two reasons: one, she was almost twenty years younger than he was and that would worry his daughters; and two, it would wreck their working relationship if she couldn’t manage to keep it under wraps. There was a third reason. He wasn’t falling in love with her. He could imagine growing very fond of her; he already was, but not in a blushing kind of way. There was no electricity. He worried that his electric days were over.
“How did he kill himself?” asked Jane.
“I’m not sure. I always pictured it as a hanging from a beam in the basement but I think I may have made that up. More likely it was carbon monoxide in the garage.”
“That always struck me as the easiest way,” said Jane. “If you own a gara
ge, that is. And if someone doesn’t find you after you’ve permanently damaged your brain but before you’ve died.”
“You sound like you’ve given it some thought,” said Frank.
“I have,” Jane said. “Not in an I’m-going-to-do-it sort of way, just in a what-if-I-have-a-no-hoper-disease kind of way.”
“Hmm,” said Frank. “I see.”
“Do you think houses hang on to their stories, Frank? Do you think thoughts and acts and feelings seep into the walls and stay there?”
“Maybe.”
“What about when the walls are torn down, like now? Do they escape then and dissipate into the atmosphere once and for all? Or do they stay, hovering, waiting for new walls to go up so they can reenter and make themselves at home again?”
“I don’t know, Jane. These sound like the kinds of questions Sadie’s always asking me. I find myself saying ‘I don’t know’ to her an awful lot.”
“Or if no new walls are built, then what?”
Frank took a long drink from his litre jug of water and went back to work. He figured he could get away without responding to that last question.
Behind the drywall were layers of mortar and cracked plaster covering wood lath. In some spots the lath had pulled away from the framing behind it. Someone had tried to repair it.
“I like this ripping-down phase,” said Frank.
“Not me,” said Jane. “It’s my least favourite part. I like getting to the stage when we start building new stuff.”
“Hey, wait a sec,” Frank said. “What’s this?”
His arm was out of sight up to his shoulder in a hollow space behind a destroyed sheet of dry wall.
The Girl in the Wall Page 10