Road Ends

by Mary Lawson

  “Thank you,” she said to the driver. He’d rolled down his window despite the cold and was looking expectant, fingers drumming on the outside of the door.

  Megan paused. “Do people tip over here?” she asked.

  “S’not a legal requirement,” the driver said morosely. “But if you can afford a taxi you can afford a tip, my opinion.”

  Megan dug some change out of her purse and held it out in her hand.

  “Take a reasonable tip,” she said. He looked honest, she thought, and in any case she was suddenly too tired to care.

  The driver picked through the change on her palm. “I’m takin’ ten percent,” he said, sounding markedly friendlier than before. “Fifteen percent’s normal but you’re foreign so we’ll make it ten. You want me to wait till you’re inside?”

  “Oh no,” Megan said. “I’ll be fine, thanks.”

  The driver nodded and drove off.

  Megan dragged her suitcase up the steps of number 31. There were three doorbells, which surprised her because the houses looked too small to be divided up, but she rang the top bell and waited, smiling in anticipation of seeing Cora. Would she have changed? It had been four years since they’d seen each other. Maybe she’d be wearing a tiny skirt—Megan almost laughed, imagining it. The two of them had been the “sensible ones” at school. Cora’s mother was blind, so Cora had had responsibilities at home like Megan did. But her aunt lived in England and when the Mannings moved over here the aunt had taken on Cora’s responsibilities, so Cora was finally free. Maybe freedom had changed her. Who knows? Megan thought, still smiling, maybe I’ll change too.

  There was no reply from the top bell, so she rang the next one, and then the third. No response. In the middle of the door there was a knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. Megan tapped it firmly; it was possible the bells didn’t work. Still no sound of movement inside the house. Tentatively, she tried the door handle but it was locked. She lifted the sodden doormat, wondering if Cora might have left her a key or a note, but there was nothing.

  She turned and surveyed the street. It was scarcely wider than people’s driveways at home, walled in with houses. There weren’t many cars. Across the road a door opened and a large black woman came out. She wore a woollen coat and sandals with socks bulging out of them and she carried a shopping bag. She set off down the road with a rolling gait, holding aloft an umbrella with two prongs sticking out. When she turned the corner the road was deserted again.

  Megan turned and rang the bells and hammered on the knocker once more. Silence. A small worm of anxiety stirred; she quelled it firmly. She sat down on her suitcase and thought. She removed her watch and set it to local time, which was now ten past nine. She wondered how she had failed to realize that this might happen—that Cora might not be home when she arrived. That in fact there might be no one home because it was a weekday and everyone would be at work.

  It was still raining. She hadn’t brought an umbrella on the grounds that it would take up too much room and she could get one when she arrived. Despite the fact that she was wearing a parka and snow boots capable of withstanding a Canadian winter she was becoming very cold. The cold was different here. It was wet. It was insidious in its wetness; she felt clammy inside her clothes. She stood up, pulled up the hood of her parka against the rain, went down the steps of number 31 and up the steps of number 29, rang all the doorbells (this time there were five) and hammered on the door. No reply. She went to number 27, then to 33 and 35. Then she went across the road and hammered on the doors of 26 to 36.

  She walked out into the middle of the road and looked up and down it in the hopes that she would see somewhere she could take refuge—a café, for preference; she was hungry. There was nothing. There weren’t even any cars going by. It was as if the entire street had died.

  She came back and sat on her suitcase again. Her bones ached, from cold or tiredness or both. The problem, of course, was the suitcase. It was too heavy to carry any distance but if she left it on the doorstep it might be stolen. The porch of the house was nothing like big enough to hide it. Why hadn’t she taken the taxi driver up on his offer to wait? She could have asked him to take her somewhere warm. This didn’t look to be the sort of road where you’d often see a taxi.

  Stop it, she said to herself. Just stop it. Concentrate.

  She cast about in her mind for a solution. None presented itself. You can freeze to death or you can risk losing the suitcase, she told herself. Those are your options. She stood up and manoeuvred the case up against the front door. Maybe a potential thief would think she’d just let herself into the house and would be back for it in a second. Her valuables were in her purse—passport, money, ticket—with uncharacteristic generosity her father had bought her a return ticket. The thought of it was a comfort; if the worst came to the worst she could go home tomorrow. Provided you can find a taxi, she reminded herself. She tucked her purse under her arm and set off.

  It was a quarter of an hour before she found what she was looking for: a row of shops, people in the streets. Squashed between a barbershop and a laundromat there was a bakery with tables and chairs along one wall.

  Megan went in and the warmth and the rich sweet smell of bread engulfed her—a wonderful smell; it made her almost lightheaded. At the rear of the shop she saw a table with a cushioned bench seat against the wall; it reminded her of Harper’s, so she made for it, pushing back her soaking hood and undoing her coat as she went.

  The waitress—there was only one—came over to her, a tiny notebook in her hand. She was about fifty, Megan decided, with a fuzz of permed hair and a bright orange smear of lipstick. Her eyebrows had been plucked naked and then drawn in with thin black pencil lines half an inch higher than the originals. They gave her a startled look.

  “Coffee?” she said.

  “Yes. Thank you,” Megan said. “And one of those.” She pointed at a tray of pastries sitting on the counter.

  “The Chelsea buns?” the waitress asked. She had a white apron wrapped around her middle making her look like a pig-in-a-blanket.

  “I guess so,” Megan said. “The ones that are all packed together.”

  “Chelsea buns,” the waitress said. She scribbled on her tiny pad, tore off the sheet, set it on the table in front of Megan and smacked a salt shaker down on top of it.

  “Which part of the States you from?” she asked, raising the already raised eyebrows.

  “I’m Canadian.”

  The waitress frowned. “That the one with the snow?”

  “Well … yes,” Megan said. “In winter.”

  The waitress made her way back to the counter. She was wearing slippers with no backs to them and pale pink puffballs on the toes.

  Two large women in woollen coats and head scarves were at the table next to Megan’s. They were leaning over their coffee cups, whispering to each other. Their eyes flickered curiously over at Megan from time to time. At the front of the shop a younger woman and a little boy sat at a table in the window, staring out at the rain.

  Megan stared out at it too. She wondered if her suitcase had been stolen yet. No one will steal it, she told herself. It’s too heavy. She thought about Cora instead. Assuming she didn’t get home until six, there were still more than eight hours to fill. A daunting thought, but once she’d warmed up she would ask the waitress where she could spend the day. There was bound to be somewhere.

  The coffee, when it arrived, tasted nothing like coffee, but at least it was hot. And the Chelsea bun was fresh and warm and unexpectedly delicious. Not pastry, Megan thought. More of a bread; it’ll have yeast. You’d roll it out in a rectangle and sprinkle on the raisins and the sugar and cinnamon and then roll it up like a carpet and cut thick slices and pack them side by side in a baking tin. Wouldn’t take ten minutes.

  She considered having another. She could feel warmth and comfort spreading out from her core to her extremities. Maybe she could stay here for the day, eating one Chelsea bun after another. But the caf�
� was too small for her to take up a table all day—three more women had just come in and were arranging themselves and their bundles. She closed her eyes for a moment, listening to the murmuring of the women at the next table, the shuffle of the waitress moving back and forth on pink-slippered feet. Into her mind’s eye floated the doorstep of number 31 Lansdown Terrace. Empty. Devoid of suitcase. Stop it !

  “More coffee?” the waitress asked and Megan jumped and opened her eyes.

  “Um, yes, thank you,” she said. “I wonder … do you know if there’s anywhere that I could go and just … sit for the day? Anywhere warm and sort of … public?”

  “Public?” the waitress asked, her eyebrows approaching her hairline.

  “Yes,” Megan said. “I’ve … I’ve been locked out of my house and I need to find someplace where I can wait until someone gets home. So I wondered if there was somewhere around here where they wouldn’t mind if I waited.”

  The waitress pursed her lips in thought.

  “There’s the library,” one of the women at the next table said, leaning towards them across the aisle. “That’s where the vagrants go, this weather.”

  “Not just vagrants,” her companion said. “People who read books go there too.” She smiled brightly at Megan. “You could pretend to be reading a book, then they wouldn’t mind if you sat there.”

  “It’s just around the corner,” the first woman said. “Out the door, turn left, turn left again, there it is.”

  The library had a vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows and a stone floor decorated with pictures made up of tiny tiles the like of which Megan had never seen. Better still, under one of the windows there were two comfortable-looking upholstered chairs with a small table between them.

  There was a woman sitting behind a desk near the door. She glanced up as Megan came in and then went on stamping books. Megan looked around. Over to the left there was an area marked FICTION. She headed for it and began walking up and down the rows, searching for something that would help pass the time. She’d never been much of a reader. Tom was the one who always had his head in a book.

  And there, suddenly, sitting right at eye level as if Fate had been listening in to her thoughts, was The Catcher in the Rye. Back when they were both still in high school Tom had raved about it. He’d said it was the one book she had to read if she never read anything else in her life. She remembered snapping at him, saying, “Fine, you get supper and do the dishes and that way I’ll have time to sit and read books!”

  But she would read it now. It would help to pass the time, and then in a day or two she would write to Tom and tell him how much she’d enjoyed it, thus demonstrating that it genuinely had been only lack of time that prevented her from reading it—or anything else—before.

  She settled herself in one of the comfortable-looking chairs and began reading. Holden Caulfield, the hero’s name was. She didn’t like him very much. He went on and on about everyone being phony. He was a wallower, she decided. Like Gary, the younger twin; Gary harped on about things too. She had no patience with either of them.

  But maybe she wasn’t giving Holden Caulfield a fair chance because the truth was she wasn’t concentrating. Despite her best efforts the image of her suitcase—or rather, the doorstep of number 31 without her suitcase—kept pushing its way to the front of her mind. She closed the book and put it on the small table beside the chair.

  It’s only clothes, she said to herself, studying the mosaic on the floor. But it wasn’t only clothes. The photos of her family were in the suitcase.

  After a while the librarian came over to her. Megan thought she was going to tell her to leave, but she didn’t. She merely asked if Megan needed any help.

  Megan said, “I’ve been locked out of my house. Is it okay if I sit here?”

  The librarian looked her up and down and then said she didn’t see why not and went back to her desk. Megan sat.

  At one o’clock she braved the rain and went back to the bakery and ordered a cup of tea and something called a ham salad bap, which she ate without tasting it. She returned to the library and her comfortable chair, dizzy with fatigue, and tried to ward off the feeling of dread that seemed to have overtaken her. You’re just tired, she told herself, but the dread remained. She must have fallen asleep then, sitting upright in the chair, because she seemed to be having a conversation with someone, and then she realized that the librarian was bending over her and saying gently that it was half past five and the library was closing.

  It was pouring rain and dark as midnight outside, but when she was still some distance away she saw that there were lights on in number 31 Lansdown Terrace. Relief rushed through her. The doorstep was empty but surely that meant someone had taken the suitcase inside. Maybe it was Cora, Megan thought. Maybe she’d got home before the others and had seen the luggage label and given a shriek of laughter, knowing it was Megan’s. She’d be in the kitchen now, preparing supper for the two of them.

  As she got closer she heard music thudding out from the house, very loud. Maybe that was what caused the dread to seep back into her. She went up the steps to the front door and stood for a moment, her heart thumping the way it had earlier in the day. Then she knocked. For a minute there was no response, and then she heard footsteps and the clicking of a lock and the door was opened by a girl with white lipstick and huge feathery eyelashes. She was smoking a tiny cigarette and wearing one of those infinitesimally small skirts. She took the cigarette out of her mouth and said, “Yes?”

  “Is Cora here?” Megan said, loudly, to be heard over the music.

  There was no way she could have known what the girl was going to say but she did know, nonetheless.

  “Who?” the girl said.

  “Cora Manning,” Megan said without hope. “She lives here.”

  She was suddenly so tired she was afraid she might fall down.

  “Are you from the United States?” the girl asked curiously.

  From somewhere inside the house someone shouted over the music, “She moved.”

  Megan leaned around the girl and shouted, “Where did she go? Do you know?”

  Another girl appeared. She was tall and skinny and wore glasses so big she looked like a bug, but she looked nice, Megan thought, and not as dim-witted as the first girl.

  “She left a couple of weeks ago,” the second girl said. She leaned against the wall beside the door. Behind her, two bicycles were leaning against the wall too, acting as coat racks. “You a friend of hers?”

  The music thumped. The singer wanted satisfaction about something and apparently couldn’t get it.

  “Yes,” Megan said. “She invited me to come over. From Canada. Have you seen a suitcase?”

  The girl said, “What—you mean you’ve just arrived? From Canada? Just now?”

  The first girl wandered off, twitching the tiny skirt in time with the music.

  “This morning,” Megan said. She felt sick. Surely no one would have stolen it. Surely they wouldn’t. “I left my suitcase here. Right here, outside the door.”

  “Probably got nicked,” the girl said. “Come in, we’ll ask the others.”

  There were a surprising number of others, six or seven at least. They were in a spectacularly untidy room off the hall, squashed together on a battered sofa or sprawled on cushions on the floor, watching television through a haze of cigarette smoke. It was impossible to hear what the characters on the television were saying over the pounding of the music, but it didn’t seem to worry anyone. They all looked half-asleep.

  “Has anyone seen a suitcase?” the girl with the glasses shouted. Several heads turned towards them.

  “Dark brown,” Megan said desperately. “And very big. Has anyone seen it?”

  “Hey!” one of the boys said, focusing on her with vague interest. “How’s the war going?”

  “What war?” Megan said.

  He laughed. “Nice one! ‘What war?’ The little one you lot got going in Vietnam.”

 
; “Oh,” Megan said. “I don’t know. I’m not American.”

  “What are you then?” he said, sounding annoyed.

  “Leave her alone, Zack,” the girl in glasses said. “She’s just arrived and she’s lost her suitcase.”

  “I wondered if anyone brought it in,” Megan said. “I left it on the doorstep.” She couldn’t remember ever feeling so close to despair.

  All eyes were fixed on the television. They were watching a cartoon of a dog with a ribbon on its head. The music thudded on.

  “Or does anyone know where Cora Manning is?” Megan said, with no hope whatsoever.

  “France,” somebody said. “She had a fight with Seb, didn’t she, Seb? So she left. To be an au pair or something.”

  The girl in glasses gave Megan a little shrug and a smile of sympathy. “Sorry,” she said.

  Megan didn’t know if the thumping inside her chest came from the music or her heart. She said to the girl, “Do you know a cheap hotel? Nearby? One I could walk to?”

  “You can stay here if you like,” the girl said cheerfully. “There are lots of mattresses.”

  “That would be … that would be … wonderful,” Megan said. “Thank you. That would be … Just for tonight—I’ll find somewhere else in the morning.”

  “No hurry,” the girl said leading the way along the hall. “Stay as long as you like.”

  The mattress was one of four lying on the floor in a large cold room with a light bulb dangling from the ceiling and newspapers taped over the windows. There was a stained pillow with no pillowcase and a hard hairy blanket. No sheets. Megan took off her coat and boots and skirt, lay down and covered herself with the blanket and her coat. She was cold and her hot water bottle was in the suitcase. She was also exhausted beyond the hope of sleep, but such discomforts were nothing compared with the ache inside her. She thought it would help if she were able to cry, but she hadn’t cried since she was a child and couldn’t remember how to start.

  The music continued to thump and wail. From time to time there was a shriek of laughter or a sharp argument from some other part of the house. After a long while, during which Megan lay unmoving, flat on her back, staring up at the dark, the door opened and two people came in, laughing. They turned on the light and one of them said, “Oops,” and turned it off again and Megan heard them lie down on another of the mattresses and begin unmistakably to make love.