Vital Signs Page 8

  I wondered what tiny Ibo or Luba children would make of these strange images from a different world. I burned them all.

  A large cupboard in the kitchen was chock-full of patent medicines, strange bottles with nineteenth-century-looking labels. Most of them were laxatives and purgatives, infusions of strange bark and pods, extract of prune, and numerous bottles of something called Slippery Elm.

  The only reminder in the house that my father had ever lived was a framed photograph of him, which stood on an occasional table in the sitting room. And that photograph, significantly, posed him with the mayor and alderman in their robes in the year he’d been mayor’s chaplain. The mayor was wearing his golden chain of office.

  All my father’s books, the books he’d written, his occasional writings, his sermons, not a thing remained. She’d managed to restore the home of her last years to the spinsterish order and purity of her dreams. Her bed was a single with a new eiderdown.

  Even with my mother dead and me a father in my forties, I still could not imagine them doing “that sort of thing.” could not imagine her thighs loosening or that angular body softening or hear her cry out in the dark bedroom. They still were giant figures on a glaring stage, their lives the myth of my life. I believed when a boy and believe now they did it twice. Me and my brother. And duty done, she—what? Something must have driven him to his eccentricities and silence. How could he be explained? He collected, in his last years, first editions of Conrad. Of all writers, Conrad. He remains a mystery.

  I can imagine her voice in their dark bedroom, a voice little more than a chill whisper.

  Or perhaps stolid silence.

  Silence.

  Silence.

  After I had given all her personal effects to Oxfam before my brother could return, after I’d signed tedious documents with a disapproving lawyer disinheriting myself in my brother’s favour, I found myself bored, irritable, and thinking insistently about Croydon. I still had time on my excursion ticket, so I made the journey.

  Croydon.

  Though I’ve often been pissed by lunch and sometimes on champagne, I never did shave off half my moustache or take a lobster for a walk, live in brothels, or cut my ear off. I’ve never had syphilis either. But I did become a writer of sorts; not the writer that I’d dreamed of becoming in my Croydon adolescence; the Muse hovers but does not ravish me. I write short stories, which are published in the little magazines and university journals. I have published two collections of these stories, one of which is still in print. Several stories have been anthologized. I wrote a novel about a boy’s growing up. He was a rebel. It was remaindered in Classics’ bookstores a year later for ninety-nine cents. Reviewers have described my work as “sensitive” and “finely tuned explorations of loneliness and self-discovery.” I have some small reputation in a minor genre in the parochial world of Canadian letters. Like many Canadian writers, I support myself by teaching in a university.

  In the calendar I am designated as:

  T.D. Moore (Ph.D.): Modern British Poetry (2003)

  Moore (Ph.D.): Contemporary Fiction (2001)

  In Croydon I walked around familiar streets. I looked at the exterior of my father’s old church. A notice outside stated the minister’s name and the hours of services and white, plastic letters asserted beneath:

  God So Loved The World That He Gave His Only Begotten Son.

  I went to the park where Helen and I had walked and held hands.

  I looked into the library.

  I tried to find a shop I’d loved as a boy, a shop that sold antique arms and armour, but the whole area had been torn down and, in its place, stood a complex of office space, Odeon cinema, and bowling alley.

  Tony and I had been smitten for a short time, perhaps between jazz and painting, with the idea of becoming diamond prospectors—pork-knockers they were called—in what was then British Guiana. We read Peter Fleming and Green Hell and all the books about Colonel Fawcett. We drew bold lines from Georgetown into the uncharted interior. Like Sir Richard Burton, we would write our names large on the map’s white spaces.

  I did not try to find Tony. I made no enquiries of his life.

  I wanted to remember him for always and ever as the boy who imagined sucking the hair in Eliska’s armpit.

  In my hotel room that night, lying on the bed with indigestion after eating something the hotel menu called Gooseberry Fool and drinking their coffee—I found my mind full of pictures of that Yorkshire manse where I’d pinned worms to crosses, full of memories of Mrs. Henderson, the Scarlet Woman, and Mr. Montague.

  Nothing held me now in England; she was dead. My life was wholly in Canada with Mary and the children in Montreal—in what my brother, an historian of medieval matters, still calls the New World.

  He phoned me after our father’s funeral—some legal matter—and I invited him to visit us in Canada; I can hear his hesitant voice declining—family responsibilities, money, pressure of work—and then, “I really feel that the New World offers little that could engage my interests . . .”

  I was lonely in that hotel bedroom, unsettled, and those ghosts called me, beckoned to me across forty years. And so I struggled with the telephone system and British Railways—two institutions obdurately inefficient and unchanged since my youth, and arranged to journey to that northern town.

  It’s a common experience—all adults must remember particular school teachers and meet them after childhood to find them shrunken, mild-mannered, ordinary, ordinary. That huge manse where I’d hidden in alcoves and played on the vast expanse of polished landings, that mansion with its many rooms, turned out to be a seedy Victorian house, certainly not small, but not the monstrous pile that I remembered. I stood looking at it and thought of asking if I might go round into the back garden—to do what? Look at my crucifix plot? Open the coal-cellar door and peer down into the dark which had terrified me as a child? Little Pakistani children trundled up and down on their tricycles. I could not face the complexities of request or explanation.

  I did find the Scarlet Woman. She must have been sixty-five or so, but looked older. I felt foolish. She turned out to be a lonely old woman who drank too much gin too early in the day.

  “So you’re the vicar’s little boy!” she said, marvelling.

  “I remember you. Yes, I do. Picked all my daffodils, you did, and put horse manure through my letter box!”

  I confessed that it sounded like me.

  “Of course, the neighbourhood’s gone down,” she said, “what with those Pakis and their customs.”

  On every surface in her living room stood framed photographs of her husband. Wedding pictures. The pair of them windswept on a seaside pier. A young man in uniform. A posed group of soldiers grinning like embarrassed boys.

  He’d died in France, burned alive in his tank.

  “Eh,” she said, in that suddenly comfortable Yorkshire, “my Tom, he were a lovely lad.”

  We drank gin together all afternoon and I told her about a Canada I thought she might like to hear about, a Canada of skyscrapers, rivers wider than the eye could command, snow that buried cars in a single night, Red Indians, bears, and timber wolves.

  She cried when I had to leave, and I hugged her and was glad I’d made the journey. And as I bent to kiss her goodbye, she said,

  “Canada! Well, I never! Who’d a thowt it when tha was a little lad!”

  I winced at the clatter of cutlery, held my breath and was silent in that silent kitchen, waiting to hear movement from the bedroom. It was beginning to get light. I could see the bulk of our neighbour’s house, the whiteness of the white fence that I’d have to paint again in the summer. The water in the sink was brown and greasy; horrid soft things nudged my hands in the water.

  The glasses could go straight into the dishwasher.

  Mary’s life fascinates me; I love to observe all her drama and silline
ss. I often feel she’s more alive than I am; sometimes I even feel I live through her. Her political rages and feuds amuse me though I try to disguise my amusement. Mary genuinely believes in justice and being fair and the dignity of man. She reminds me of Peter and Jane at bedtime when one or the other says it isn’t fair! She accuses me of not caring about people and in the way she means it she’s quite right. All that was long ago burned out of me.

  “You’re cold,” she says. “You don’t care.”

  And she’s fiercely eccentric, too, in her own way, irrational, and I love that about her as well. She hasn’t spoken to our neighbour in the back for six years. She’s convinced he’s a peeping Tom. The story, according to her, is that when she was about eight months pregnant with Peter, she was sitting on the lavatory one evening and the frosted bathroom window, which looks out onto the back garden, was open about an inch. She suddenly felt uncomfortable and looked up and there, watching her, she saw a pair of eyes.

  How could she possibly identify our neighbour, I wanted to know.

  “I’d know those eyes anywhere!” she declared.

  The other week the poor man was up on his roof in the ice and snow mending one of the wire stays of his TV aerial.

  “Just look at him!” she said indignantly. “He’ll do anything to peer in.”

  Gerry had spilled wine on the tablecloth and I decided to take it and the napkins downstairs and put them in the washing machine. The basement is finished as a large room for the kids, but a part of it is partitioned off to enclose the furnace and the washer and dryer, and a part of that partition is closed off again to afford me a tiny, dark room where I grade papers, read, and write my stories. Mary calls it my “study” but the word “study” or “office” is rather grandiose for what is as narrow as a stall; I generally call it my “room.” And there, with as much silence as I can get between the washing machine and kids and the rush of the bloody furnace, I write my stories of “loneliness and self-discovery.”

  I coiled the garden hose and hung it back on its rack; it’s Peter’s favourite toy, which he’s been told numberless times not to touch. Someone had knocked over the plastic sack of Diamond Green Combination Lawn Fertilizer. I dragged it upright and propped it up against the wall again. The huge box of Tide was empty and I had to rip the top off a new one. I made a mental note to speak to Peter about the hose.

  Truth to tell, I’m not all that interested in the kids. When they don’t irritate me, they bore me. Angela is now fourteen and sulky, Billy thirteen and apathetic. I’d have been content enough to leave it there but Mary decided she’d like more so we had Peter and Jane. I study Billy covertly. I assume that he must be as I was, that he lusts after girls and women and wanks himself senseless. But sometimes I have my doubts. As far as I can tell, he spends most of his time watching TV and, when he isn’t watching TV, he’s reading Mad Magazine. Perhaps he wanks while he watches. Angela spends most of her life behind a slammed bedroom door; other than play rock music, I don’t know what she does in there. They are both too interested in money and Billy deposits every cent he can get in his bank account. If he isn’t reading Mad Magazine or TV Guide, he’s reading his bank book. It is impossible to talk to Angela; she pouts, flaunts, and sulks. She is currently enraged that I have refused to have installed in her bedroom a Princess phone on a separate line. My considered desire is to flog the living daylights out of her but Mary says she’s going through a difficult time.

  They’re children from another world, a world in which I’m alien; the New World.

  I watch them sometimes on their bicycles, observe their play; Jane is almost fat. Sometimes I chauffeur Angela and even Billy to dances for God’s sake! and I think them lotus-eaters, children lacking any drive or purpose, softlings.

  And as for me, I come from the Pre-TV, the age which, in their ahistoric minds, followed the Bronze or Iron.

  I am probably as remote from them as my father was from me.

  Would I wish on them my history and its history?

  Sometimes, yes.

  On that trip to Yorkshire after I’d seen my mother buried, I made a sentimental excursion to Haworth Parsonage; my motivation wasn’t literary. My father had taken me there once when I was a small child. I enquired about a taxi in town and the man said:

  “Tha’s not American. Bus is nobbut a shilling.”

  The gravestones, slate and shining in the rain, crowd right up the sides of the Parsonage. The children were buried there one by one; the remaining sisters wrote among the ghosts. Emily’s fevered imagination, its mad intensity, reminds me of some quality in my own childhood; I read her book with recognition. It is the work of a virgin. Would she have written it, I wonder now, if she’d married, married and lived longer?

  I walked among the gravestones, pausing now and then to trace weathered lettering with my fingertips and then out and up onto the moors. The heather was wet and springy and I shivered in my light raincoat. I stood for a few minutes by an outcrop of rock where so many years ago I’d stood with my father.

  I, too, often feel I live my life among ghosts, that the stories I write are exorcisms. The dead are all around me. I am too much part of them.

  Wash yourself

  Dry yourself

  It’s as if I exhausted all my passion by the age of sixteen; nothing since has compared with the drama and intensity of that battle of wills, a titanic struggle fought against the backdrop of Hell.

  And none of it now means anything I can understand; I no longer believe in the fire and ice of Hell and sex is what happens on Saturdays.

  I watch Angela and her friends who lounge on our balcony and lawn in the summer. I observe the loveliness of their young bodies. Mary’s breasts are fallen, disfigured with stretch-marks, her nipples like plugs. I wonder what is going to happen to Angela, how her story will unfold.

  “Young girls with little tender tits.”

  Foals in an autumn field.

  The wash was thumping about in the machine, water sloshing. My hangover was getting worse as I knew it would. Something vital in the washing-machine needed oiling. I groped through its rhythm and the pounding in my head for the rest of those lines, something I’d been teaching, “Young girls with little tender tits,” teaching the term before, tried to remember the line that rhymed, remember . . .

  Remember, imbeciles and wits

  Sots and ascetics, fair and foul,

  Young girls with little tender tits,

  that Death is written over all

  I sat and waited in my room.

  A year or so ago I was wandering about near Craig Street in an unfamiliar part of Montreal searching for a stationer’s that was reputed to carry a make of fountain pen I wished to buy. Down a side street, I found a store that was a cross between an army surplus and a chandler’s. On some strange impulse, I bought a sextant. It was expensive and the moment I’d paid for it I felt silly and went to some trouble to smuggle it into the house. I hide it under papers in a drawer in my room.

  As the washing machine changed rhythm and the water drained away I took the sextant out. It sits in a mahogany box, the brass and glass nestled in green baize. I looked at it, at its telescope, index mirror, and horizon glass. I turned the clamp screw and the tangent screw, enjoying the feel of the milled edges. I’m not quite sure how it’s supposed to work.

  THE LADY WHO

  SOLD FURNITURE

  Purple. Purpleness with a zigzag line of black. A zigzag line of black stitching. Peter pushed the bedspread down from his face and moved his head on the pillow. He expected for a second to see above his head the raftered darkness of the barn and to hear the clatter of sabots on the cobbles, the every-morning shout of Monsieur Anglais! But the only sounds were sparrows on the windowsill and the distant rattle of the milkman’s van.

  Sunlight lay over the floorboards and the worn carpet. His boots and rucksack lay
where he’d dropped them the night before. The sole of one boot was grey with caked mud except where the tips of the steel cleats glinted in the sunshine.

  Peter stretched and arched his back. He flexed the muscles in his shoulders and then eased himself over in the bed until the sunlight was across his face. The long weeks of labour in the Channel Islands, the hoeing, the tomato and potato picking, the clearing of vines and heaving of sheaves in the fields of the Maison Village de Philippe were finished, and three weeks of idleness remained.

  The house was silent. It seemed strange to see the room empty, the other bed stripped down to the springs and piled with folded blankets. It seemed strange not to see Nick sprawled asleep across heaps of novels and crumpled paper and not to hear whistling, a typewriter, people shouting outside the bathroom door. He heard Anna stumping up the stairs, the chessmen rattling in their wooden box, and closed his eyes. She opened the door quietly and he sensed her approaching over the frayed carpet. He could hear the soft snuffle of her breathing, louder as she bent to peer at his face. When he felt her breath warm on his cheek, his eyelids fluttered.

  Her voice barely above a breath, she said, “Are you asleep, Peter?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  She squealed and pinched his nose and he grabbed her, swinging her up onto the bed. He held her struggling in the air and said in his gruff voice, “Anna! Are you still my girlfriend?”

  “Do you want to play chess?” she said.

  “Where’s your mummy?”

  “She said to tell her if you were awake.”

  Anna jumped down and ran out to the head of the stairs shouting, “Mummy! Mummy!” and then ran back and scrambled onto the bed. She opened the chessboard and said, “David and me are learning how to swim.” She held out clenched fists and he tapped the hand that held the black pawn. “I start!” she yelled. “And do you know what? We have rubber waterwings and go on the bus.” She tipped out the men onto the bedspread and slowly placed them on the board. “Peter? We go on the bus alone.”