The Girl in the Wall (9 page)

By the time George came home, she had started peeling potatoes for supper. He joined her in the kitchen.

“I want people to like me, Georgie,” she said.

“Uh oh,” said George.

“What do you mean, uh oh?”

“Sorry. I didn't mean to say that out loud. I just mean I'm pretty sure I won't have any very good answers for you if you're going to ask me some difficult questions.”

He sat down at the kitchen table.

“Plus, you smell like Dad's whiskey.”

“Yes, I had some.”

George's full lips turned tight and straight, almost disappearing inside his face.

“He won't like that,” he said.

Mrs. Mortimer knew from George's look that he didn't like it either.

“I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would,” she said.

She told him about the man named Jim Coulthard.

“Hmm,” said George. “Do you want me to come with you when you go see him?”

“I don't think so.”

She covered the potatoes with cold water and set them on the stove.

“There are some Coulthards on Lloyd,” George said. “I wonder if he's one of them.”

“There are?”

“Yeah. They live in the Silk house. It's sort of a creepy place set back a ways from the street. I don't really know them, but I think there's a son. He's maybe between you and me in age.”

“What's a Silk house?”

“It's a house where a family named Silk used to live. Mr. Silk killed himself a long time ago and the rest of the family moved away.”

Mrs. Mortimer thought about the cool hedge yard, the one from a different season and time. She hadn't been back there and hadn't even thought about it again till now. It seemed like a long time ago. Everything before her picture taking seemed like a long time ago.

“Does it have a hedge?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Is that what makes it creepy?”

“Hmm, maybe. Or it might just be that Mr. Silk died there.”

Suddenly she remembered the woman, Mrs. Beresford, even her turn of phrase: “a man who died by his own hand.”

“Maybe it's a combination of the two,” she said.

“Possibly.”

“I don't think this guy lives there. I don't think he's from around here.”

“When are you meeting him?”

“After supper. At the Red Top.”

“I could drop by after you've been there a while and see how it's going, pretend like I just happened by.”

“Yeah. That might be good.”

“Don't drink any more whiskey, Mrs. Mortimer,” said George. “It's what happened to our mum.”

“'Kay, Georgie. I won't.”

A profound sense of dread accompanied Mrs. Mortimer to the restaurant.

Jim Coulthard was there already, sitting in the second booth. She slid in across from him and they both ordered coffee. Mrs. Mortimer also ordered a jam buster, just from habit; she wasn't at all hungry. Jim paid for both of them up front.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“On Lloyd Avenue.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

She was going to ask him next if he lived in the hedge house but she held back; she already knew the answer. A chill ran up her spine.

A young waitress whose name tag read “Colleen” was watching them. Mrs. Mortimer saw her watching and didn't mind. Colleen was always nice to her.

“I want to be your assistant,” Jim Coulthard said.

A buzzing started up in Mrs. Mortimer's temples and she couldn't tell if it was a sound or just a sensation. She wondered if anyone else could hear it — if the slippery-looking man could hear it.

“I…I work alone,” she said.

She forgot his name again.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, but I had this idea that maybe I could help. The work you do…it interests me and I'd like to join up with you in some way.”

“Don't you have a job?” she asked.

“Yeah, I do. I'm a yard man, but I thought maybe I could take this on as…well, part-time at first, while I learn from you, and then…” He spread his arms wide and knocked over his coffee.

Colleen scooted over with a wet rag.

“Everything okay over here?” she asked.

“Yeah, thanks,” said the man. “Sorry about the…the spillage.”

Mrs. Mortimer stared down at her unbitten jam buster. It was over. There might be a winding down of sorts, maybe a last simple job or two but the end was dead ahead. She had no fight in her — never had. It was over.

Colleen wiped things up, went behind the counter, rinsed her rag, came back, and wiped up some more.

“Are you all right, honey?” she asked.

Mrs. Mortimer stared downwards. She couldn't respond; her throat had closed up to such an extent that she could barely swallow, let alone talk.

“Colleen! Your order's up!” shouted one of the short order cooks.

“My dad has a movie camera, a Bell and Howell Zoomatic,” said the man.

Mrs. Mortimer began to shake.

“Okay, mister.” The waitress spoke quietly. “I think it's time for you to leave.”

She had a way about her and a good size to go with it, though she couldn't have been more than nineteen.

Jim Coulthard's face tightened along the jaw line.

“Gus!” she called, not taking her eyes off him.

Gus was one of the owners.

The place grew quiet and the man stood up quickly. He put his hand on Mrs. Mortimer's and whispered hot air into her ear.

“Who knows? Maybe in time we could be partners.”

The waitress shoved him toward the door and he was outside before Gus made an appearance.

“Colleen! Order up!”

The shout broke the silence and people's words slowly began to fill the small restaurant again.

“I'll be right back, honey,” Colleen said.

All Mrs. Mortimer knew was that she had to get out of there before the waitress came back and hopefully after the life-wrecker had left the parking lot. She needed to get some air into her lungs. She stood up on wobbly legs, not forgetting the envelope of photographs that had been left behind, the pictures of the dead dad.

As she fumbled with the door George opened it from the other side.

“Georgie,” she croaked.

He sat her down on a little patch of dusty grass and loosely put his arm around her.

“Is that him?” George asked. He lifted his chin towards the man who stood twenty yards away at the curb under the giant mug of root beer that advertised the restaurant.

Mrs. Mortimer looked up and wished that the root beer could come to life, tip over, and drown him.

“Yes, that's him.”

“What did he want?”

“My life,” she said. “He wants my life.”

Colleen came out with a greasy little brown bag containing two jam busters. She placed them on the ground next to Mrs. Mortimer.

“Hi, George,” she said. “Just a little treat for your sister.”

“Hi, Colleen. Thanks.”

She started back inside.

“Colleen?” he said and she stopped mid-stride.

Mrs. Mortimer tensed up beside him and a small sound escaped her throat.

“Nothing,” George said. “Thanks, is all. Thanks for your kindness.”

Colleen slipped back inside.

Jim Coulthard walked away. He had a slight limp. As she watched him walk, Mrs. Mortimer remembered a long-ago day in Coronation Park when the boy named Frank Foote had saved her. The person who hurt her that day had the same broken walk as the one turning the corner now onto Highfield Street.

“The waitress scared him,” Mrs. Mortimer said.

“I guess so.” George smiled.

Her breaths were shallow for a while. When her breathing returned to normal, the two of them headed home to the house on Monck.

“He does live on Lloyd,” she said. “I thought for sure he was from somewhere else.”

They settled at the kitchen table.

“I guess he lives in that house you mentioned where the man died.”

“The Silk house.”

“Yes. I don't like that house,” said Mrs. Mortimer. “I've seen it.”

George began choosing lemons from the fruit bowl and setting them aside.

“What's a yard man?” she asked. “He said his job is being a yard man.”

“Someone who does yard work for people, I guess, kind of like a gardener. It's mostly rich people that have gardeners. People that live on Wellington Crescent and places like that.”

“Oh. That makes sense. I can picture him doing yard work.'

She envied him the access he would have to the grounds of those beautiful long low houses.

“He wasn't mean this time,” she went on. “It could be that he's not bad. It's just…he wants too much. He doesn't know what type of person I am. He talked about a movie camera that belonged to his dad. I don't want to make movies, Georgie, and he wants to make death movies with me.”

“What do you mean this time?” asked George. “When you said, ‘he wasn't mean this time.'”

“Nothing.”

George left it and she was grateful to him. She didn't want to go back there to the park and the gravelly hands and the broken glasses.

She slumped in her chair.

“There's no way you have to do anything you don't want to,” George said. “No way. You don't need to have any involvment with this Jim character. You never have to see him again.”

“I don't know if I'll be able not to. I've still got the pictures of his dad.”

George picked up the envelope from the kitchen table and propped it against the doorjamb that led to the back landing.

“I'll deliver them for you. I know where his house is.”

“He's ruined everything,” she said, “with wanting to be my assistant and with his stupid moving picture ideas. I'm pretty sure this is the end of my life.”

“Don't say that.”

George began squeezing lemons for lemonade.

“Why do you always tell me not to say things?”

He continued squeezing.

“I guess it's because I don't want to hear them,” he said. “To be honest, sometimes the things you say scare me.”

“Sorry.”

“No. Don't be sorry. You are who you are, Mrs. Mortimer.”

“The waitress was nice,” she said.

“Yeah. Colleen's great.”

The kitchen radio was on and tuned in to
CKRC
. The newsreader announced that the Ohio National Guard had opened fire that day on students at Kent State University. Four were dead. The students had been protesting the American escalation in the war in Vietnam.

George sat down and grew quiet.

Mrs. Mortimer wondered what kinds of expressions the dead students had on their faces as they were shot down.

Then she returned to thoughts of the waitress who had shown her real kindness, genuine, not the sort that wanted more than you had to give — certainly not the sort that wanted to be your assistant and end your life.

George took the photographs with him the next day, saying he would drop them off at the Coulthard house on his way to the university. When he returned home after his classes were over he gave a full report to his sister at her request.

“I didn't want to knock on the door,” he said, “so I folded them ever-so-slightly and slid them through the mail slot.”

“You didn't wreck them, did you?” she asked.

“No, of course not. They were only bent for a second. The Coulthards have a good-sized slot.”

“So you didn't see him?”

“No. I didn't see him. An older man came around the side of the house as I was leaving the yard but for sure it wasn't him.”

“Who was it?”

“I don't know. If you hadn't told me that his dad was dead I would have thought it was his dad.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No. We nodded at each other. I kept on walking. I wanted to get out of there without running into Jim or having to talk about anything.”

“An uncle maybe?”

“Maybe. It doesn't matter. The pictures are delivered and hopefully that can be an end to it.”

“Thanks for doing that, Georgie. Thanks for making it so I didn't have to go to that house.”

“My pleasure, Mrs. Mortimer.”

After her meeting with Jim Coulthard she didn't sleep well anymore. She slept for precisely three hours and then woke up. Lying in her bed till morning was too difficult. She wanted to bang her head against the wall till she knocked herself out, but that would wake everyone up.

So in the wee hours of the morning she got up and dressed and walked the streets till the first inklings of light showed in the east. Pookie followed her sometimes, but always stopped when they got to the first cross street. Then he sat down and watched her. She turned around every few steps to look at him till he disappeared into the darkness.

Usually she was the only person out, but sometimes through a window she glimpsed someone reading by the light of a lamp or she smelled the delicious smoke from someone's cigarette. Often she took her Belvederes with her and smoked while she wandered.

One night, a week or so after George shoved the pictures through the mail slot, she walked far enough and late enough to see the lights go on in the bakery on Taché Avenue. She smelled the bread baking and as she got closer she heard quiet murmurs and the odd outburst of laughter. She imagined the faces of the laughing people inside.

When she tried to imitate the laughter, she scared herself and began to shake.

Pointing herself in the direction of home she walked on.

Maybe her life didn't have to be over; maybe she could survive this.

She breathed in the air, didn't want to let it go. Her body needed it; her head especially needed it, her limbs. So she held on and didn't breathe out even though she knew that she had to in order to get more. It didn't take long for her to lose consciousness.

A few minutes later she woke up on the damp grass of Coronation Park. There were no witnesses to her faint. It might never have happened.

When Mrs. Mortimer arrived home, the sun wasn't quite up but the whole eastern sky was pink. The birds were chirping and the day looked to her as though it might just turn out okay. So what if she wasn't any good at laughing and her career was over?

She found George doubled up and on his knees in the kitchen. Her first inclination was to run like the woman who ran from her dying husband that day but she forced herself not to. She didn't want another regret to add to all her smashed-down layers.

“Georgie?”

He didn't answer her and she knelt down beside him, trying to get a look at his face. It was unrecognizable and drenched in sweat.

Then she did run. Upstairs to the dad's bedroom. They all three went to the hospital.

It wasn't kidney stones and it wasn't appendicitis. It wasn't any number of things. They sent him home with painkillers and the advice to not make a mountain out of a molehill.

Two days later it happened in the night and the dad took George to the hospital again. This time he refused to take him home until they made a definite diagnosis. That meant an operation.

“You know that scrub brush that Mrs. Campbell uses to clean our toilet?” George said to Mrs. Mortimer. “The one with the long handle?”

He was settled back in his hospital room with enough drugs inside him to finally make a dent in the pain.

“Yeah?”

“It felt like someone took hold of one of those and was scrubbing hard on the inside of me.”

George had pancreatic cancer.

It was a painful type, as cancers go, and one they could do nothing about but try to manage the suffering. A poor job was done of that until his dad raised the roof in his anger and frustration and threatened to call in the troops, whoever they were.

No one told Mrs. Mortimer that George was going to die. They thought they were protecting her, she supposed. Her dad and Mrs. Campbell talked in lighthearted voices about when George would come home from the hospital. You just had to look at him to know it wasn't true.

She was pretty sure she wouldn't be able to get along without him. Why couldn't it be her mother or her father or Mrs. Campbell or herself who got the disease? She could handle any one of those people dying with George along to show her the way.

When she imagined his death and its aftermath she didn't get very far. It looked like black sometimes and other times it looked like white. There were no forms or even shadows.

There was nothing to do but wait out his death and then she would see how things stood, see if she could manage. If she couldn't…well, there were ways. For one, she could pull a Silk.