The Museum at the End of the World

by John Metcalf

  Forde raised a finger.

  “Steaks rare would not be requested saignant or bleu—or even ‘rare.’ They would be ordered in the Steakaramas, if at all, by those witty rascals in the cowboy hats with, ‘Honey, just saw off its horns and wipe its ass.’ And to accompany these burnt offerings—do you know what they eat? They eat iceberg lettuce slathered with a concoction called Creamy Cucumber Ranch.

  “You think I’m inventing this?

  “Nobody, my peardrop-smelling inamorata, nobody could invent this.

  “And they drink wine that comes in one-and-a-half litre bottles. It is called Mediterranean Warmth. That’s the carriage trade. The unwashed drink poisonous rye called Golden Wedding.”

  Forde uttered a kind of groan.

  “In Alberta,” he said, “there is nothing old. The buildings are brutal. The streets merely numbered. Bottle-openers are screwed to the headboards of hotel beds.”

  He stirred the pages of the Clarion with his toe cap.

  “There’s a drear museum in Calgary that about sums it all up,” he said. “Looks like a mothballed factory. Full—are you listening, my fruit of the loom?—full not of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. No, sir! No, siree! Not in Alberta. But furnished with fascinating old scythes and billhooks, patent medicine bottles, Louis Riel’s suspenders, pioneer buckets…”

  Forde paused.

  “Christ!” he whispered, as if broken. “Christ! The balls-withering boredom of it all.”

  *

  Forde ran his forefinger over the polyurethane on his desktop, hating it. He wished that he could afford an eighteenth-century desk or table. He thought it probable that if he had a beautiful desk it would induce a greater elegance in his writing. He did not necessarily want a piece from the workshop of Robert Adam or Chippendale or Gillow or Hepplewhite. He would have settled for a country piece in applewood or beech, a piece alive with the patina of years.

  Pogo clicked along the hall and padded in and subsided across Forde’s feet with a sigh, and, following the sigh, arising from the seeping beast, the silent stench of Chunky God! Alpo.

  And a Turcoman rug would warm the room, a Beshir or a Royal Bokhara. Or a small Persian tribal—his mind drifted on—Baluch or Heriz. He remembered being in London after the overthrow of the Shah when every carpet dealer in town seemed to have shoeboxes of Luristan bronzes for sale, horse bits, adzes, votive axe-heads, finials, harness bells. There had been rumours of sacked museums.

  Museums; he thought of the one in Calgary he’d described to Sheila. He’d stayed at a hotel close to that museum. The Palliser. He’d been doing something at the university, what he couldn’t now remember, but did remember standing on the front steps of the Palliser, the evening sun low, almost blinding, and a barefoot woman came running out of the sun, crossing the road to the sidewalk a yard in front of him. Her blouse had been completely open and her grimy breasts flopped. She ran past and disappeared into a nearby alley. He had stood there waiting, waiting for a pursuer, waiting for a sequel, a motive, a meaning.

  And in Edmonton he’d once booked into a hotel near the municipal airport. It was late at night, he remembered. Some disruption of travel plans, Vancouver, fog. The plane had been diverted. The desk clerk gave him a key. As he opened the door a man who was sitting in an armchair watching television turned an astonished head. He was naked except for a dove-grey Stetson and mauve ankle socks.

  But it was the foyer of the hotel that had stayed in his mind. There had been a small rectangular pool in the foyer all set about with tubs of ficus trees. A spattering of vomit rode the surface of the pool. In the elevator an empty beer bottle was rolling about on the floor.

  A sordid place. He had lain awake half the night, a revolving searchlight washing the ceiling.

  Forde wrote on his pad of yellow paper.

  “In the elevator an empty beer bottle rolled about on the floor.”

  Obviously it would be empty. He crossed the word out. The words “about on the floor” were stupidly redundant.

  Then he wrote:

  “In the elevator a beer bottle rolled.”

  Ending with “rolled” was pleasing, a strong ending you could hear.

  “Beer.”

  “Beer?”

  He sat staring at the paper, mouthing the words; considered striking out “beer.”

  When he had been thinking about the pool in the foyer and the ficus trees in tubs, the words “all set about with ficus trees” had been in his mind, yes, “all set about with.” He could see the book’s shiny red cloth cover with the gold elephant’s head stamped on it, trunk curled up, the adored Just So Stories, and he could hear his mother’s voice reading, reading about the elephant’s child, a child of insatiable curiosity, the two of them waiting for the chanted refrain:

  The great, grey, greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees.

  On his last visit back to England he’d found his mother more stooped, slower. Her flat, though, was just the same. She had insisted on making him a cup of tea, no, no, he didn’t know where things were, and from the sitting room he heard her in the tiny kitchen talking to herself, nothing he could understand, a whispery drizzle of words. On the wall, the souvenir plate from Bavaria. On the occasional table, audio cassettes of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small. A ghastly Alpine scene on the wall above the mahogany bureau, a more than decent piece from the old house. He noticed she had knitted, in turquoise wool, a cover that fitted over the Kleenex box.

  She brought the tea to him on a doily-covered tray on which stood a floral cup and saucer, a small cut-glass milk jug, a matching floral bowl of sugar cubes with silver tongs beside.

  As the afternoon wore on she suggested they watch on television a programme for children, one of her favourites, none of the violence and goings-on and the things they showed these days. The programme was called Blue Peter. The presenter was a particularly nice young man. The co-presenter was a young woman who showed a group of little girls how to make a doll out of the cardboard core of a toilet-paper roll.

  Following this they watched a programme involving school teams answering general knowledge questions.

  Following this they watched a programme about the rescue of animals in distress and their subsequent treatment and recovery in what looked like a greenhouse.

  He had suggested to her that to save them both trouble he would stroll down to the High Street and bring back some fish and chips for dinner. He suggested this not only to forestall efforts on her part to cook, but also to escape from the flat for half an hour. It was not only the children’s television that weighed on him. It was her unceasing rehearsal of events in the lives of people he’d never heard of, members of her church, the man who ran the charity shop, the sister of her friend in Eastbourne, who had a little white dog called Penny that rode in a pram, the woman who came to the flat to do her hair, the husband of the woman who came to the flat to do her hair, who, until the accident to his arm in Sainsbury’s had had a garden, well, you could scarcely imagine the red runner beans…

  These unending stories oppressed him with a kind of mental pain, the same kind of pain—he cast about—the closest he could come to comparing the pain with any other kind of pain was possibly the pain felt if he were subjected to Lieder or folkfuckery by Benjamin Britten sung by (Oh, poignant Christ!) Peter fucking Pears.

  When he came back with the hot package, he heard her in the kitchen, cupboards closing, drawers opening, that same whisper of words. She came out into the sitting room and opened the bureau.

  She was looking, she said, for the cutlery canteen. It was a dark leather box. What cutlery, he had wanted to know. There was cutlery in the kitchen drawer. The fish knives and forks, she had said. He said they should use the ordinary forks.

  She ignored him and went back into the kitchen. Cupboards again. After a minute or two, an e
xclamation.

  The silver knives and forks were tarnished black and gold. Her eyesight too poor to notice. He rubbed the knife surreptitiously to see if the black came off. He employed the fork gingerly.

  “No fish forks, indeed!” she said. “Whatever is the world coming to!”

  *

  Photocopy

  Buy stamps

  LCBO—Sancerre

  Bank

  The man in front of him in the line looked to be about sixty years old but was wearing gaudy, unlaced shoes, which swirled in black, white, orange, and blue. Ruby reflectors twinkled on the heels. Forde no longer knew what to call such shoes. They seemed to be moulded, one-piece things made of rubber and canvas, or, for all he knew, of extruded protein, two words he’d once read in a magazine. At school in England, a simpler version of such things had been called tennis shoes or running shoes or sneakers. They had been worn only for sports. Mothers condemned them for daily wear as harmful to the growing foot. The times, thought Forde, condemned one to be cautious in the use of the word “mother.”

  At his school they’d always been called plimsolls. Though, come to think of it, he didn’t know why. The Plimsoll Line man? He recalled the almost military inspection of the plimsolls before each gym class, the canvas blancoed to chalky perfection. Gould had been his name. Sergeant Gould. Now, in England, they called such things “trainers.”

  Forde disliked the technicolour vulgarity of the man’s shoes intensely and especially so on a man well past middle age. They were a part of what he thought of as an increasing infantilism, shoes with Velcro tabs instead of laces as though laces had become too complicated to tie, T-shirts with writing and pictures on them. Nursery clothes. Obesity. Saggy sweatpants with elasticized waistbands. No ties, T-shirts, tattooed tits. He deplored this flight from formality. On irritable days, half the people he saw on the streets suggested to him the populations of clinics, mental hospitals, and sheltered workshops.

  Forde knew that something had broken. He felt that the world he’d inherited was disappearing. This shift in the world, this slide, had been slow, unremarkable, almost invisible at first, and he, like the frog in cold water brought to the boil, motionless, unaware. He lived now, he often felt, in wreckage, treading water, straining for the feeble cries of other survivors.

  Forde was aware of his crankiness. He put it on a bit to amuse himself and to irritate and amuse Sheila but, even if exaggerated, caricatured, at base it represented the way he really felt.

  The woman at the teller facing him was conducting an endless transaction; he could tell by the bend of her leg, by the relaxation of her body against the counter, that she was settling in for aeons more of it; probably, thought Forde, cashing in 1945 Victory Bonds.

  His attention drifted away. The sentence was wrong; definitely wrong. “Beer” had to come out. It weakened the sentence, fudging, blunting. It defeated delivery of the right sound.

  “In the elevator a bottle rolled.”

  His eye lighted on a large poster high on the wall behind the tellers. The poster was red and white and looked professionally printed rather than stencilled or hand-lettered. This suggested that the posters were probably on display in other branches all over Ottawa and possibly in branches of the Bank of Nova Scotia all across Canada.

  TRANSFER YOUR MORTGAGE

  THE 5% ADVANTAGE

  And diagonally across the top left-hand corner:

  NO FEE’S

  When his turn at last arrived, he said, pointing at the poster, “Why the apostrophe?”

  “Apostrophe?” she echoed.

  “Where it says ‘No Fee’s.’”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Pointing, he said, “Look! Top left.”

  One of the supervisors seated some way behind her at a desk got up and came to the counter.

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Oh, there’s no problem,” he said. “I’m just pointing out that the apostrophe in ‘No Fee’s’ is incorrect.”

  She looked up at the poster.

  “Incorrect how do you mean?”

  “An apostrophe,” he said, “indicates either possession or omission. But ‘Fee’s’, you see, doesn’t. Doesn’t fit either of those uses.”

  She considered this.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “this is a financial meaning.”

  Forde pursed his lips, shaking his head slightly.

  A hectic flush started up her neck.

  “The only thing to do,” she said, “you’ll have to see a Personal Banking Officer.”

  She opened the wicket and clacked across the marble to a doorless cubicle, in which sat a Personal Banking Officer.

  “This gentleman,” said the supervisor, “has a complaint.”

  “More of an observation, really.”

  The Personal Banking Officer was short and had a ginger crew cut. A little, bulbous nose. He looked just like Josef Lada’s line drawings of the Good Soldier Švejk.

  The three of them stood in front of his cubicle.

  “You see? The top left corner. Says ‘No Fee’s.’”

  The Officer nodded slowly and, after a long pause, said, “So what’s your problem?”

  Forde launched into it again.

  “… and therefore it’s simply incorrect.”

  The Officer frowned.

  “That poster,” said Forde, “must have been seen by dozens of people before it was actually printed.”

  He shook his head to convey sorrowful amazement at this state of affairs.

  The Officer seemed to inflate himself and said, “I have no idea what you’re telling me here. Why don’t you cut to the chase, fella?”

  “I am attempting,” said Forde slowly, and with insulting pantomimed patience—deep breaths, slow hand movements—“to explain to you why your poster is illiterate.”

  Again the Officer frowned.

  “… a very bad impression,” Forde concluded.

  And because he resented being addressed as “fella” by a little ginger prick, added, “You’re one of the country’s major banks. People—not I, of course—but some might think that if you can’t punctuate you might not be able to add and subtract either.”

  “Listen, fella,” said the Officer, turning back into his cubicle, “I go with what I’m given.”

  Forde rejoined the line. The Victory Bonds woman was still slumped against the counter. At the next wicket another woman was exchanging rolled coins for notes and paying some complex bills. An old man had forgotten his PIN number and lost his bank card and kept opening and closing his wallet in a distraught manner. The man with a business deposit had a cell phone that chirruped The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.

  Forde did not feel like working—Sheila in her bathrobe, the radio, Pogo seeping, the dailyness of his ugly desk, the draining effort that had gone into Chamber Music. He decided on a stroll. He stopped at the corner of Waverly Street to read the densely printed poster in the window of the Nutri-Chem Pharmacy. The store had recently changed hands. Previously it had been an ordinary pharmacy stocking aspirin and Contac-C and toothpaste but now it had been made over into a Centre for Holistic Medicine. They sold elixirs, tinctures, infusions, extracts, and laxatives all derived from leaves and twigs and bulbs and bark.

  The poster’s headline asked:

  WHERE HAS ALL THE GOOD BACTERIA GONE?

  Forde considered all the little bottles and boxes and the bundles of twigs and a saucer of cocoa seeds and some leaves gone brown and a big pod. He wondered who would be rash enough to swallow something called Slippery Elm on the advice of people unable to distinguish singular from plural. He thought of going in and trying to make this point to the girl behind the counter, but the ochre hair and the cluster of stainless-steel surgical clamps climbing the cartilage of her right ear dissuaded him.

  He
paged through some magazines in Magazines International.

  He browsed in the bookstore.

  He strolled on up Elgin towards Sparks Street. Outside the restaurants the chalkboards advertising daily specials offered the customary mangling of the words Omelette, Spaghetti, and Caesar. The chalkboards were also spattered with quotation marks, dishes being described as “famous,” “delicious,” “hot,” and “juicy,” daily examples of the conviction of the semi-literate that inverted commas act as intensifiers.

  At the entrance to the Sparks Street Mall reared some fifteen feet high a sheet-metal grizzly bear, its mouth agape, just about to crunch the fish, presumably a salmon, held in its left paw. This travesty of sculpture always caused Forde both anger and cringing embarrassment.

  Behind the sheet-metal grizzly bear hung an elaborately framed sign which read:

  SPARKS STREET MALL

  Great Shops—Services—Parking

  ON CANADA’S MOST UNIQUE STREET

  Forde thought, with great weariness of spirit, of trying to explain to urban planners, to representatives of community associations, to aldermen, to city councillors, to streetscape specialists, urban renewal specialists, Heritage specialists, specialists in acceptable and non-conforming signage, that the word “Unique” cannot be used with comparatives, that the word means that there is only one of something, that there cannot be more or less of singleness, that “Unique” comes via French from the Latin “unicus,” single, akin to “unus” meaning “one.”

  Overcome by the need for a beer, Forde seated himself in the small outdoor café situated between the sheet-metal grizzly on one side and another monstrosity on the other, a naked and seemingly anorexic family group capering in welded copper and entitled Joy.

  The waitress offered him the Sandwich of the Day. Forde shrugged and then nodded. The sandwiches, he noted, were kept in a cooler. He read its packaging. It was a Chicken Tikha sandwich and contained, among many other things, gum arabic, sundry citrates, and Stabilizers E 412, E 415, and E 410. It was soggy and tasted faintly of chutney.