He’s almost there, he’ll cross the stream, it’s always the same. He smokes a cigarette under the railway bridge: cupping it secretively in his hand, he leans against a concrete column. Water rushes over rocks and garbage, it stinks of the cemetery. Crushing the butt beneath his shoe, he listens intently for any noise that will betray the other, the watcher; he hears only cascading water, the predictable sounds of night and the city above him. Secure that he’s not observed, he crosses the stream, he scrambles directly to the entrance and with some difficulty slides the metal cover until there’s an opening big enough for him to slip through. Because it’s cramped inside, in fact there’s scarcely enough room for his crouching body, it’s hard to push the cover back into place. He has to brace himself against one wall, it’s not so much the weight, it’s the angle: it doesn’t matter how often he does it, how carefully he tries to remember the position that’s given him the angle, he has to rediscover it every time. Tonight, for some reason, he falls into it very quickly, it hardly takes him any time at all and although he’s not a superstitious man, he accepts it as an omen.
He twists to enter the conduit at his feet: it’s an almost perfect circle; at the beginning he’d thought it was a pipe, but it isn’t, it’s made of brick. Because it’s narrow, he’s perfected a slithering crawl that transports him, efficiently enough, up the incline to where it widens at the foot of their garden. But it fatigues him. He lies on his belly listening to his heart. It’s remarkably dry and there are dead leaves on the floor of the tunnel. Catching his breath, he discovers that he’s grinning in the pitch black; the sound of his heart does not frighten him. The garage, the catalpa are above him somewhere and the house is straight ahead: from here it’s wide enough for him to scrabble on his hands and knees to the foundation, it’s easy.
Once inside the walls, however, he must be careful. He inches from the basement to the ground floor and peers through tiny holes into the kitchen. The light on the table, reflected in the window, glows in an empty room heavy with shadow: the counters have been wiped clean, a dish cloth hangs from the faucet, and although it’s clear they’ve finished with this room for the night, he waits briefly to be sure. He’s seen too much in here, he’s seen them together, and alone, he’s watched them, Urquhart and her man, their child, as they eat: some nights he’s watched the two of them drinking with friends until the kitchen table’s covered with bottles and the room is stale with smoke. Infrequently they sing. More often they listen to sentimental music and talk defensively of friends, of ugly marriages and failure: Urquhart usually retires first, but there was an evening when her husband went first and Urquhart was left with a man he hadn’t seen before, an intense and animated man who’d apparently returned from some distant place, it had been difficult to hear because of the music. Can he be sure it actually happened? it’s impossible to know. Urquhart and her lover leaning together from opposite sides of the table, she talking uncontrollably, he can’t hear what she’s saying, the man holding both her hands in his, occasionally he reaches, he brushes the hair from her face, and once, she imprisons his hand against her shoulder with her mouth.
He moves easily, without noise, between their walls, he’s accustomed to it now: he’s observed them night after night and sometimes, usually on weekends, he’s remained all day in the structure of the house, moving from room to room collecting the minutiae of their lives. They don’t know he exists, containing their bodies’ history like a mirror. He tries to understand, it’s as if he doesn’t exist.
The child is asleep in its room, he can barely discern its body stretched out beneath a blow-up of the Beatles. One night he saw Urquhart and her man give the child a toy, it looked like a model gas station, perhaps it was an ocean liner. The child was asleep and after the baby sitter left they woke it up because they couldn’t wait until morning. Whatever it was had batteries because miniature lights glowed magically in the dark room and the child threw its arms about their necks, he could hear the excited voice, he watched them standing intimately above the child as it stared in wonderment.
Fumbling beneath his coat to find his fly he hears it, he knows it’s the dog, he knows it’s been hurt, it’s gone mad, it’s been injured: his feet on the frozen road, he’s supporting himself with both hands, the sound of his feet, the wind, its body crushed and struggling, white bone in its side, kill it to stop the noise! he can hear it, broken, the snow is black, he doesn’t understand, the noise, he tries to turn away, he falls . . .
He’s driving back down along the road they entered. Snowbanks on either side, he accelerates beneath the sky. It was dead when he revived, beside him, nestled against him, he’d been dreaming, he remembers a valley full of lilacs in summer rain, mauve and purple at the bottom of an eroded hill, he descends with difficulty because it’s steep, yellow mud sticks to his boots: there’s a stream at the bottom, he arrives at the bottom, the smell of lilacs bursting on him, the long grasses bend down behind him in a path.
In front of the set, her legs tucked beneath her on the sofa, Urquhart’s sitting in the noise of laughter and applause. Her husband comes in from the bedroom with an empty glass in his hand. There’s music now from the television. She looks at him, he doesn’t respond, he goes into the kitchen. She buries her face in her hands. His voice, when he calls from the other room, is matter-of-fact: “Do you want a drink?”
“I . . . I don’t think so.” She hesitates, she springs to her feet and shuts the television off. When the husband, ice ringing in his glass, passes through again, she’s standing with her back against the white wall, splay-fingered hands pressed against it at her sides. In order to get where he’ll be able to see into the livingroom, bedroom and bathroom with a minimum of movement, he’ll have to creep within two inches of her, he’s never been this close; she’s still there, he’s hardly moving now, does he imagine it, or can he smell the delicate perfume of her body? there’s a sudden movement, it’s happening! her hands bang against the wall, he hears her speak, he stares in time to see her march into the bedroom. Afraid that he’ll miss something, he scuttles to the corner, along to the bathroom and around it, and then, with practised agility, into the bedroom wall. They’re standing together at the window; on the other side of the window it is night. They’re reflected in the glass. Urquhart is behind her man, her arms are around him, her body rests against his body. Is she crying? The man turns to her uncertainly. A train is crossing the bridge as she speaks: “I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” He touches her face with the tips of his fingers, he brushes her forehead, her cheekbones, he slides his hand to the back of her neck and pulls her close to him, she rests her face wearily in his throat. She disengages herself and sits on the bed, he returns to the window. He leans against a supporting beam and waits. The room is almost dark and they are unwilling to move.
She speaks his name, she says “I don’t know anymore. I’m overwhelmed with a sense of exhaustion.” She talks in the shadows. The words are unrelated to her voice. “It happens every time. Like at the party . . . I was really horny. I’d have gone with anybody, I mean it, man or woman, it couldn’t have mattered less . . . ” Still she doesn’t move; the man, does he hear her? he’s standing with his reflection. “Maybe fifteen people . . . all old friends except for a few of us, we were strangers, almost strangers. It’s weird.” Her hand moves to push back strands of her hair: the white face is strangely delicate. “All of us in this guy’s house and the basic emotion was hatred, you must have felt it, you knew too . . . There wasn’t any reason, it just happened. Like, it could have been, you know, friendship . . . nostalgia, but it was hatred.”
“I’ve never encountered a situation in my own life where I could have behaved differently, everything that has happened, or not happened to me, because of me, all of it has been inescapable.”
“Just a minute . . . No matter how we tried, it had to break out somewhere.” The man comes to stand beside the bed. He speaks inaudibl
y and still she’s unresponsive, he speaks again. Her voice is matter-of-fact: “I don’t know why I did it . . . when he said goodnight I hit him across the mouth with my hand . . . why would I do that? I didn’t know him, I hadn’t even spoken to him . . . ” The man crouches before her: their shadows blend without detail, their two bodies separate, automatically their voices overlap, he’s seen this before, he strains to hear what the man is saying but he cannot hear. Urquhart stretches to the lamp on the bedside table, she turns it on: she stares intently into his upturned face and her voice silences him. “Why am I always attracted to empty men?” He lowers his bearded face to her lap, his hands are moving beneath her skirt. A train is crossing the bridge. How long do they remain like this? his hands groping at her thighs, his voice muffled by her body and she watching them in the mirror, she almost shouts: “It’s not me you know, it’s not us!” Her dark mouth remains slightly parted as she waits, he can see her teeth. A yellow cat appears in the doorway to his left, it leaps onto the bed and as it curls about itself on the pillow it reveals swollen dugs. Urquhart stretches her head back, staring emptily at her reflection, she runs her fingers through her hair. “What in hell’s happening to you guys?” On his knees the man rocks back so that his buttocks rest on his heels, he stares into her face and takes his hands from her body. Peering through rough plaster, he watches Urquhart light a cigarette; she’s impatient, even angry: “Will you get up for Chrissakes!” She lurches to her feet and goes into the bathroom.
In order to see into the bathroom he has to edge back, about six feet, to the corner and then to the mirror, he makes no noise. She’s brushing her hair. He sees black stubble in her armpit, he watches her tricep flexing beneath painfully white skin; she tilts her head, the hair falls free of her shoulder, her dark mouth is parted, he stares into her empty eyes. She leans her head to the left, she reaches to brush the other side, her breasts shift heavily, they’re marbled with miniature blue veins, she’s holding her lower lip between her teeth and now her eyes are closed. Abruptly she throws her trunk forward, her tumbling hair, a curtain between him and her body, she brushes and brushes. He hears the brush in her hair; he’s close enough to see, just before she straightens, the white scalp at her crown. There’s a tap on the door. Turning she shakes her hair into place, she unlocks the door and takes the drink. The man is just visible beyond her, he seems to be pressing against the door, his face is very close to hers: his mouth opens and closes as he speaks, her body prevents him from entering and still he’s talking while she resists, she manages to close the door, she latches it, her voice is very calm: “I’ll be out in a minute.” She returns to the mirror as if nothing has happened; as she drinks, her left hand absently fondles a breast. In a minute she’ll leave and the man will enter, it’s always the same: standing at the bedroom window, smoking and staring into the garden, he’s waiting until she opens the door. He’ll come into the bathroom and after putting his underpants in the laundry basket, he’ll pee noisily and with obvious satisfaction: then he fills the basin with hot water. He washes himself meticulously and always in the same order. First his hands, his arms to the elbow and then, standing on a towel, he soaps his armpits and, leaning over the basin, rinses them thoroughly: next, his crotch and between his buttocks with water dribbling down his thighs; when he’s finished that, he empties the basin and dries himself. It never varies. Bending close to the watcher in the mirror, their eyes are less than a foot apart, squeezing blackheads from his nose and forehead, brushing dandruff from his beard, he refills the basin, he scrubs his face and neck until the skin is red. Urquhart puts her glass beside the basin, she removes her brassiere and examines each breast as if searching for something, then she vigorously brushes her teeth. She spits into the basin and he’s startled to see the blood in her saliva. He concludes it’s from her gums.
That blue light on his hands, on his legs. The stairs, that door, the alley. Why does he do it? He moves with empty grace, his feet make no sound, he slides through under-brush, a path along the edge, he walks beside the road because sometimes there are others . . .
He stops under the railway bridge. He’s almost there, he’ll smoke a cigarette. Then he’ll cross the stream and climb to the pavement, the lights, their house. What will they be doing? what will he see them doing tonight? He hears water rushing against the concrete support, it stinks of the cemetery half-a-mile ahead: seeping among the graves it gathers in pools, he remembers the pools, it overflows and fed by the city becomes a stream that smells of bodies.
By the garage, excited because nobody knows he’s here, pressing himself into its shadow with catalpa leaves resting on his shoulders. There are lights in the apartment but nobody appears in the windows. Music from a radio, perhaps a record player, is playing somewhere. He doesn’t recognize the song. Noise from the traffic on Yonge Street is curiously soothing, like the sea, although he’s never heard the sea, or wind rushing across the land, some land, somewhere . . . Resting his face against the brick, he’s breathing easily because he’s in no hurry. In a minute he’ll climb onto the garage roof, using the fence and one limb of the catalpa tree, he’ll wriggle forward and lie unseen to watch them . . .
Fumbling beneath his coat to find his fly he hears it, he knows it’s the dog, he knows it’s been hurt, it’s gone mad, it’s been injured: his feet on the frozen road, he’s supporting himself with both hands, the sound of his feet, the wind, its body crushed and struggling, white bone in its side, kill it to stop the noise! he can hear it, broken, the snow is black, he doesn’t understand, the noise, he tries to turn away, he falls . . .
He’s driving back down along the road they entered. Snowbanks on either side, he accelerates beneath the sky. It was dead when he revived, beside him, nestled against him, he’d been dreaming, he remembers a valley full of lilacs in summer rain, mauve and purple at the bottom of an eroded hill, he descends with difficulty because it’s steep, yellow mud sticks to his boots: there’s a stream at the bottom, he arrives at the bottom, the smell of lilacs bursting on him, the long grasses bend down behind him in a path.
He’s driving back down the road they entered, descending to the lake; he turns to the right, the heater is beginning to thrust warm air into the car, it isn’t enough. He’s icy to the core, his fingers are swollen and painful, his mouth is bruised: he almost welcomes the pain. He drives with one hand gingerly on the wheel, the other is pressed into his armpit beneath his clothing. He’s failed. He doesn’t understand. Why didn’t he do something, why didn’t? strangling there, the sound of his feet, why didn’t he kill it? with the jack handle, he could have, that’s something he could have done, he could have killed it in Toronto. The road rises and falls with the land, there are no cars, he passes houses without lights clustered at crossroads.
Driving south from winter, through Primrose, south to Camilla and still the highway’s empty, his hands still hurt, driving into Orangeville, turning left at the lights: stopping at the outskirts he turns on his wipers, with difficulty he climbs out of the car, he throws snow on the windshield to clean it, another handful, his body is bruised and stiff, he gets back in. He lights a cigarette. His hands are throbbing. He turns on the radio and sits smoking without hearing the voice. Then, forcing the butt out the no-draft, he accelerates onto the crown of the road.
Through Ballycroy on 9 with music on the radio, driving at night with fields of snow on either side. He believes he did this often as a boy. Driving in a sealed car, a winter night, smoking alone and listening to the radio, climbing into the Laurentian shield, driving for hours and sometimes with others, in the back seat perhaps, with a girl, taut bodied and sighing, their mouths dry, surely it happened to him as well, it must have: sharing Molson’s from a quart bottle, the taste of it in their mouths, young bodies, hands at his face, his belly inside his shirt, how can he know for sure? protesting mile after mile, I must get home, it’s late, oh please! reluctant thighs and hungry faces in the light of passing cars. An
d then, one night for the first time, it must have happened, a damp hand between his legs, such a long time ago, the noise of their breathing in the swaying car, the radio, he remembers a small hard nipple between his teeth.
The signal’s stronger as he turns south again: radio voices sing of peace, of love and snowbanks collapse upon themselves as he drives into Palgrave, its houses isolated along the road. A woman raped and murdered in her bedroom. He’s driving out of winter, away from the snow: black fields and the highway glistens in his lights. He’s very tired. He doesn’t think about the dog, not now, perhaps never. He’ll leave the car for Walters, that’s all. Music in a closed car driving very fast, he discovers it’s over: he’ll never work for that man again, the prick, Felix would have done something, he’d have helped the dog in some way. If he hadn’t fallen, if his body hadn’t betrayed him, it’s like a seizure, he doesn’t understand, like a fit of some kind, he doesn’t want to think about it. The inside of his mouth is dark and bruised, his fingers are like sausages. Radio voices sing of peace, of love. There was a girl with brown legs, he remembers her name: a young girl with blue underwear, they lay on the livingroom floor. She went away, he doesn’t know why she went away. Blond hair and gentle mouth, she lived with him for a week one summer and then returned to California. Music from the hi-fi, she danced in her bare feet, her lithe body and her laughter; she never answered his letters, she wouldn’t say anything on the telephone. He knows where she lives. Finally she sent him her picture. She must have had her reasons. Is it because they talked about love? he’s convinced they talked about love, they lay together on the livingroom floor: did she talk about her love for him then? It’s the usual thing to do. Her name, he recalls, is Morag.
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