The Trout
Page 3
No more than a few minutes have elapsed. The guard, whose desk phone is probably patched through to a mobile device, could be anywhere in the grounds. He could be outside in the garden. Kay’s window is empty; the bare fence of the parking lot stands out starkly, cutting up into the black silky belly of the night.
She forces herself to sit. Part of her wonders if by any chance she has imagined the incident. The fact that she has always been superstitious, even as a child, seems highly relevant: she still watches horror movies through the slits of her fingers.
‘Mrs Smyth?’
Kay starts. A youngish man with a round face is standing at the door. He is wearing a dark uniform and cap and holding a night stick.
‘You okay, ma’am?’
‘I’m fine now, thank you.’
‘Want to tell me what happened?’
She relates, calmly, how she was standing by the water cooler and looked up at a man. ‘He was pressed right up against my window.’
The security guard is taking notes. Kay is not sure she has seen him before: security is contracted to a firm whose personnel seem to change regularly. She describes the man at the window as best she can, then asks, ‘Have you checked the grounds?’
‘Going to right now, ma’am. Wanted to make sure you were okay first.’
He looks at his notes.
‘You certain there was someone? You know, sometimes our eyes play tricks.’
‘I’m very sure, yes.’
‘I’ll write a report. You can see it when next you come in.’
She watches as he makes his way back down the corridor, checking each door. Her desk locked, she gathers her bag and keys, and then goes over to the water cooler. If she leans towards the window, like so, there is unquestionably a reflection. As she looks left, then right, the reflected image follows her. Kay sighs and wonders. She needs a vacation; it’s been three years since the last one. She leans in, pressing her forehead to the cold glass. She starts. This close, the image is pale and blurred. Kay straightens up, critical of herself. Down the hall, the security guard has checked the washrooms and is proceeding to the exit. Could it possibly have been him, Kay wonders, as she switches out her light? He could well have been out patrolling the gardens. Why did it take him so long to get to her? As she steps out of her office and is closing the door, she stares. Outside her window a man is looking in.
‘He’s there!’ she screams. ‘There!’
The guard hurries back to her. The window is empty.
‘He was just there! He’s outside!’
The guard dashes down the corridor, Kay behind him. Outside, as they round the end of the building, the distinct sound of an engine starting up can be heard.
‘Hell!’ the guard cries. ‘He’s taking off!’
He sprints ahead, flat out, to the parking lot, where a white Chevy pick-up is pulling out. The guard runs in front of it, his hands out, and the truck stops.
‘Stand back, ma’am!’
Kay is open-mouthed. The man climbing down from the truck is Larry White.
10
Some nights, when the day had not gone well, when a patient who should have lived had died, the doctor drank whiskey thirstily. On such nights he spoke in low, haranguing tones about the scourge of tuberculosis, the medical deficiencies he encountered on a daily basis, and about the widespread injustice of poverty.
I sat, not daring to leave. I was small, thin and inclined to get colds easily. At school, I was often picked on. My inability to thrive, the doctor said, was because I had lacked the breast.
As he spoke, my father’s jaw became rigid. More than once, he dashed his tumbler into the red coals of the fire grate. When the glass was full of whiskey, a ball of shimmering fire shot up the chimney.
Larry White is sitting in my chair. He’s drinking coffee. It’s eleven-thirty at night. Kay sits forward, hands in her lap, avoiding me. Larry is wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt that shows his arms are in good shape and he smells of aftershave. All at once, everything about him is physical.
‘Describe him again,’ Larry says.
‘Tall, pale.’ Kay takes a drink from her glass of hot whiskey. ‘Very pale, but that could have been the lights. Intense.’
‘How big was he? Big as me?’ Larry asks.
‘Maybe, although he was wearing a coat, so it’s hard to say.’
‘A coat?’ Larry says, making the garment immediately suspicious.
‘Maybe he was trying to hide the clothes he was wearing beneath it,’ Kay says.
‘Such as?’
‘I don’t know. A uniform? I don’t know.’
The west wind has got up again and is sighing softly in the loose roof shingles. From the lake comes the looping hoot of an owl.
‘It’s funny the way your mind plays tricks. For a moment, until the second appearance, I thought he might have been the security guard.’
At the dresser I pour myself another whiskey. Larry looks down at the notebook I now see lying in his lap. His presence annoys me, for although he trailed Kay’s car all the way home, just to be sure she was safe, as he put it, the fact that he has taken over the questioning here in my house makes me irritated.
‘Any idea what’s going on?’ he asks me quietly.
I look first to Kay. We have barely spoken in several days.
‘Me? No, I have no idea.’
‘Let’s try and have a look at him,’ Larry says and lifts the lid from a box.
Larry was in the hospital earlier, visiting a friend, he told me. A spotlight in our rafters shines on his face and I suddenly see how smooth the skin on one side of his jaw is, as if someone has layered it on there. He has taken strips consisting of lips and hairpieces, noses, eyes and eyebrows from his box, and is shuffling them around a stencilled head until a pale, round-chinned man with longish hair begins to appear.
‘Older,’ Kay says. ‘Darker hair.’
‘Looks like a Halloween monster.’
We all look up. Tim, in pyjamas, has been sitting at the top of the stairs throughout our discussion.
‘Hey, little guy! You doin’ okay?’ Larry chuckles.
‘You should be in bed, Tim,’ I say.
‘May I please have a juice?’
‘No, go to bed.’
‘Please, Granddad . . .’
Kay’s head snaps upwards. ‘Will you for once do as you are told? Go to bed! Now!’
We sit in a pool of raw silence. Kay and I scarcely know each other anymore.
‘Let’s keep going,’ Larry says as Tim disappears. ‘I once did this a lot.’
My annoyance at Larry’s involvement is replaced all at once by a new fear: what if, staring up from the bits and pieces of human physiognomy, I see myself? This crazy thought has no basis in reason, yet it suddenly seems an appalling possibility. I’m perspiring and realise that Larry will not miss this fact. I want him out of my house.
‘I think we should get in touch with the police in Charlton,’ Kay says.
‘Okay.’ Larry nods. ‘I can make contact on an informal basis; ask the guys to run this composite through the system.’
I’ve seen the way he looks at Kay. We’ve joked about it: Hey, you know why these guys are called the Mounties?
‘It sounds to me like it was one of your patients,’ I say.
She looks at me coolly. ‘I know my patients.’
‘Someone who stopped seeing you, maybe years ago. He’s older, sicker. You wouldn’t recognize him, especially at night, through a window.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Surely it’s a possibility.’
‘How about you, Alex?’ Larry asks.
‘What about me?’
‘Do you recognize him?’
They’re both looking at me.
‘I have no idea who this person is,’ I say.
11
‘You have to get badness out,’ the doctor said as he explained why a seemingly healthy young woman had to undergo an operation. ‘It
may lie under a tooth, or under a toenail, or it may lurk deep down in your gut, but in the end it has to come out.’
‘Why, Daddy?’
‘Because that’s the nature of badness.’
One moment, as he drove, the doctor was telling me of the drugs they have in America that Ireland could not afford. A moment later we have driven onto the grass margin, he’s pulled on his waders and we’re walking down through a field of Friesian heifers.
‘When you come to a stretch of water for the first time, never rush at it. Take your time. Study the plants, the animals and the insects. This is their world and you’ve just invaded it.’
Upriver from Carrick, I sat on the riverbank, sucking bull’s-eyes, and watched him cast into a sluggish flow.
‘In rising water the fishes tend towards the middle of the stream, but, if water is falling, they hide under the banks or the bushes.’
The split-cane rod flexed and the doctor chortled. With graceful sideways movements, nearly up to his waist in water, he drew out a two-pounder, scooped the trout into the net, and laid him, flapping, on the grass bank. Dripping, the doctor put down the rod and turned to me with a grin. In his hand was a lead-tipped leather cosh.
‘You know what this lad is called, Alex?’
Before my astonished gape, with a single blow he killed the fish.
‘This,’ the doctor said as he straightened up and shook the cosh, ‘is the lad you need when someone is really sick. He’s called the priest.’
The first part of the road to Toronto twists around lake inlets and acres of naked black rock. I bought the car, an old Wolseley, just for its real leather seats with their bouquet of memory, and over one winter helped restore her with the owner of an auto repair shop in Charlton.
I was very good at teaching, at conveying the passion I felt for literature into the heads of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Yet, sometimes in front of a class, looking down at the rows of open, trusting faces, I was seized with shame for something I didn’t really understand, as if shame swam in my blood without the need to account for itself or explain its origin.
At Gravenhurst, I join the highway. I am relieved at being on my own, at not having to keep up pretences. My cell phone chimes as I near Toronto’s outer ring.
‘Hi. I’m nearly there.’
She likes me to call when I arrive.
‘Pull over, then call me back.’
‘Pull over?’
‘Just do it.’
She hangs up. My first thought is: Jerry has written to say he’s going to withdraw. But would he have done that if he knew I was coming to see him? There’s a slip road into a shopping mall. I sit, listening to the traffic on the highway, watching families at picnic tables outside a coffee shop. A man on an island of green throws a ball for his dog as the skyline of the city, somehow alien, looms. My cell phone rings.
‘Are you off the road?’
‘Yes, I am. I was just going to—’
‘Something’s going on.’
12
Within the brown envelope addressed to
Alex Smyth
Author
Bayport
Lake Muskoka
Ontario
I’d felt something knobby. I slit the seam, withdrew a sheet of folded tissue paper and opened it. What at first looked like a small, green insect with a black head, pale hackles and pink translucent wings lay there. Then I saw the tiny hook, curved and pointed, like a golden phallus.
The envelope and its contents are now in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet.
Clouds scud over, the traffic hums. I’ve sat for over thirty minutes, parked outside the highway coffee shop. The man throws the ball for the dog. Every time the dog jumps, the sun illuminates its fur.
This morning, Tim and Pierre went into Bayport to return a DVD, Kay told me. As they were walking home, uphill from the lake, about a hundred yards from our house a pick-up truck was pulled in. The man behind the wheel turned around when the boys came level, then started up and drove away. Tim says he’s the man in Larry’s box.
What would it be like if I disappeared? People do so the whole time. Author Disappears. Would Jerry be happy or annoyed? When I called him and told him I couldn’t make it today, he sounded acutely displeased.
13
For my seventh birthday, the doctor gave me a finely bound copy of Robinson Crusoe. Although I tried to read it, the print was small and the gist of the story, which I had previously seen in coloured storybooks, dense and impenetrable. What I much preferred were comics, with cowboys, or coaches that were ambushed by highwaymen. The doctor did not approve of comics and refused to let me buy them, but a boy in my class, Seán Phelan, gave me his when he had finished them and I smuggled them home in my lunch box.
After a few pages, I put down Robinson Crusoe and lay back, thinking about places we had visited that day, such as the Clonmel tenements that lay in rows beneath the high wall of the industrial school. The windows in the building above the wall were made fast with iron bars, and the shouts of the boys locked in there drifted up into the hazy day.
As night falls, Kay sits at the kitchen table with a stack of files.
‘Would you care for tea?’ I ask.
‘Tea would be good.’
It pains me to see her put to the trouble of reliving her past encounters with patients in order to bridge the unbridgeable. And yet, like a gambler down to his final long shot, I can imagine her jumping to her feet, a file in her hands, and crying, I think this is him!
Kay called Larry when Tim told her about the man in the pick-up. Larry was nearby, so he came over and spoke to the cops in Charlton. However, as no crime has been committed and since the image from Larry’s Identikit has not been cross-referenced to a known criminal, their interest is understandably low-key.
‘I want to apologise,’ I say. ‘I behaved badly the other day. I said things I shouldn’t have said and which I didn’t mean. I am very sorry.’
Kay nods slowly. ‘Thank you.’
‘I know you were only trying to help.’
‘Yes, I was.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘About…’
‘The man at my office window,’ she says. ‘The same man Tim says was sitting outside on the road.’
‘Tim is just a kid. He’s only seven.’
‘He’s got a photographic memory, Alex.’
‘Okay. Let’s say it is the same man.’
Kay bites her lip. ‘This is probably silly, but do you think it could be Larry?’
I stare at her. ‘Larry?’
‘Two incidents, and both times Larry shows up immediately afterwards.’
‘You called him—the second time.’
‘And he shows up in, like, two minutes?’
‘You mean, he could be…’
‘Stalking me, yes.’
‘Jesus.’
We sit looking at one another, as if we’ve just opened the door and let something alien into the room.
‘I’ve seen the way he looks at me,’ she says.
‘Larry… was a cop.’
‘He says he was. What do we know about him? Nothing. He could be sick, he could be… anyone. Believe me, I know what goes on in some people’s heads. It’s terrifying.’
I can see Larry’s face, under the spotlight: he’s had surgery that makes his cheekbone shine.
‘He comes across as clean and upright,’ Kay says, ‘but he’s a loner. I’m sure he’s hiding something.’
I’m assailed by a sudden series of images, stretching over an arc of years, beginning with a dark, tousled head on an Irish summer’s day and ending with Larry White’s face.
14
The boiling water hisses. My hand is steady as I pour.
‘I don’t know who Larry White is,’ I say. ‘He got here—what? Five months ago? Six?’
‘You sure you never met him before? I mean, way back?’
‘I’m not sure of anything.’
She likes her tea weak so I pour her cup first.
‘Kay, I’m going to try and explain something.’
She’s looking at me calmly.
‘A long time ago, when I was a child, things happened that I’ve been burying ever since. It involved another boy… my age.’
‘When you say, things happened…’
I must concentrate on each word. ‘I think I murdered someone.’
Kay doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move. We sit without speaking for so long, I wonder if she’s still there, even though I can see her.
‘I see,’ she says eventually. ‘Want to tell me about that?’
‘I can’t tell you because I don’t remember. I’ve tried but I can’t. It’s like there are big holes in my brain.’
‘But you murdered someone.’
‘It’s more a feeling than a real memory. Layers and layers… I know I did it, yet I don’t know why I know it.’
Once, on a plane heading west, my first sight of the North American landfall made me weep with gratitude.
‘Who did you murder, Alex?’
‘I don’t know.’
Kay makes a point of drinking her tea.
‘You mentioned there was another boy. Did you murder him?’
‘No, definitely not.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Terence.’ It’s been nearly fifty years since I’ve said his name. ‘Terence.’
‘Terence who?’
‘I don’t know. I never knew his second name.’
‘You weren’t in school with him?’
‘No.’
‘What happened to Terence? Afterwards?’
‘He… went away, I think.’
Her expression indicates that she’s trying to understand. ‘So you think he could be the person at my window? The man who was sitting outside our house?’