Mother spent her days in the kitchen or watching TV in the living room. The twins were in day camp, some kind of extended programme offered by the school. They’d been taken out of classes when we’d moved, and the day camp was designed to help them catch up. It was in Riverview, and there was bussing provided. They hated it, but came home exhausted every night.
At nights Mother read and reread pocket-books. James Bond, by Ian Fleming, and I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane. Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and characters like Matt Helm lived in her mind every night. Sly and suave, a match for my Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. I think boredom had driven her back to those books. She didn’t seem inclined to make any friends in the neighbourhood – one of the things that hadn’t changed with our move.
With the weather warm and the trees budding new leaves, I spent most of my days out of the house. I’d meet up with Jennifer on the road beyond my driveway, arrangements we made the time before – we never phoned each other. She hadn’t come for supper after all, running through a list of excuses until I took the hint. Her mother was still in the hospital. A relapse – into what I wasn’t sure. She never mentioned her father, getting evasive and then short-tempered the few times I’d asked about him.
I wasn’t that curious, in truth. Jennifer existed for me like an isolated island, a secret one. It had already occurred to me that my parents wouldn’t approve of her. She smoked, took and sold drugs, didn’t wear a bra, wore miniskirts sometimes and too much makeup. Clearly what Mother’d call a bad influence.
It would have been pointless to argue. I’d shared a joint and it did nothing for me. The only thing I liked about cigarettes was the taste they gave her mouth, the rich bite of her breath – and I knew that was a perverse thing, which made me like it all the more. But I didn’t plan on starting smoking. The truth was, I had stronger role models than Jennifer. Every heroic character in the books I read each night became my aspiration, and they were all I needed to balance things out.
I listened to the rotor tiller churning up dirt, thinking about the last time Jennifer and I had met. The farmhouse had warmed up – she’d taken off her t-shirt, slipped her hand into my pants while I played with her breasts. We went at it for what seemed like hours. I came so many times my crotch ached and by the end I felt completely used up. After a long while, it suddenly struck me that the whole thing had been incomplete. I wanted to even things out, do more for her, but I didn’t know where to start and she wouldn’t tell me. ‘It’s perfect right now, Owen,’ she’d told me.
Jennifer was visiting her mother today, then selling drugs to the high-schoolers behind the community centre in Riverview. Roland’s day was being spent helping his father plough up a quarter section. Lynk and his family had gone into the city to buy him a new minibike for his birthday.
There’d been too much going on at the Yacht Club the past couple of weeks, even during the weekdays. The parking lot seemed for ever full.
And beyond its ground, deep in the greening wood, the body waited, and waited. I wondered what it looked like now. The memory, while sharp, had slipped into a kind of dream world, where spring’s nasty thaw never ended, where the leaves never sprouted, where the beavers slept on and the crayfish never stopped feeding. A world of the past, and yet I knew it was out there still, a man lost to everyone but us.
In a way that made me feel responsible to him. He’d had a name once, and a life. He’d had dreams, fears, maybe even loves. Now, all that had been wiped away as completely as his own face. A man, a giant, a nobody. We owed him something – I wanted to give him back his face, his name, his history. I wanted to put him back in his rightful place. At the same time, he had come to exist only for us, and that made us more than what we’d been. He’d come to open our eyes, but they hadn’t been opened enough. Not yet. He had more to give us.
Even as I thought those thoughts, I felt uncertain, uneasy. We’d made a pact with a dead man – he could only speak to us with what he had left, and he now existed in each of us and like an infection he spread his silence through us, until we hardly ever spoke about him any more. And yet, I sensed that we all felt the words piling up behind that silence. One day the dam would break, I suspected.
I thought about working on my models, just to kill time. I looked at the ones I’d already completed, trying to work up some enthusiasm, but instead my eyes found the attic’s trapdoor.
The traps in the basement had killed two rats, but that had been all. Father told Mother that there’d probably been only those two, but of course I knew otherwise. There were more in the secret room above me.
You a suck, Owen?
I left my room, went downstairs to find a flashlight, the spare traps and a hammer. The war I’d promised weeks ago was finally going to begin.
* * *
I removed the nails in the panel, working slowly, methodically, making enough noise to let them know I was coming. I wanted them hiding while I set the traps.
The panel came away and I moved it to one side. The room beyond was lit by the two windows – as it was still morning most of the light streamed through the window facing the river. I saw no rats. I saw much more.
A desk sat against the half-circle window to my left, all in its own alcove. It was large, the wood dark, and on its dusty surface sat a pen-stand and a kerosene lamp. There was no chair. On the wall opposite me rose bookcases, crowded with books and chewed-up nests of paper.
More than I’d expected, less than I’d hoped. I stepped into the room. The floor under my sneakers – thick with dust and the leavings of rats – consisted of stained planks running lengthways, seeming to stretch the distance between the windows. The light coming in was diffuse, tinted by stained glass and a yellowy layer of dust. I forgot all about my war on the rats.
I approached the desk. The pen-stand was an old-fashioned one, its smooth wood black and unadorned, its inkwell empty. The fountain pen felt heavy in my hand. Its nib was dull gold-coloured and looked worn with use.
The lamp was about half full, I discovered once I wiped the dust from the globe. I checked the desk’s drawers, but the only thing in them was a few sheets of yellowed stationery with the words ex libris on them.
The air felt close and hot. I checked to see if the windows opened. They didn’t.
In here, I told myself as I looked around, a man might write Tarzan of the Apes, or Treasure Island.
I went to the bookcases. A Short History of the World, by H. G. Wells. I’d read his science fiction books, of course, but I had no idea he’d written other stuff. The pages were mostly gone, but the leather binding, chewed at the corners, still held what was left of them. I scanned the other titles. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volumes I, II and III. The Golden Bough, The Elder Edda, Aeschylus in Translation, The Oresteia, Plutarch’s Histories, the Koran – at least that was what I concluded after pulling it down and studying it. The pages were made with the same kind of paper as the Bible, thin as onion peel, edged in gold. And the writing was Arabic.
I need pen and paper. I need to make a list.
Only when those thoughts raced through my mind did I realise that I was planning on reading copies of every book in here. There were about twenty in all, and the titles, as I pulled one out after another, left me breathless, my imagination conjuring up adventure and discovery. The Prophet, The Art of War, Kubla Khan – a poem, and the same for the next one – Gilgamesh, from the Sumerian and Urdite tablets, Bulfinch’s Mythology, The Once and Future King, Lord of the Flies, Nostromo, The Man Who Was Thursday, We the Living.
I needed pen and paper.
Someone had left me a gift of their life. Reading these books, I believed, would tell me about who that person had been. For reasons I couldn’t at first understand, I wanted to cry.
Another secret place, but not one I needed to pretend was secret. This place had been so for someone else, too. Here on the top floor, with a river passing ceaselessly below, someone’s mind had walked the world. I vowed to d
o the same. I vowed it with all my heart.
One book was untouched by the rats, hidden as it’d been under the others. It was small, leather-bound, its title inlaid in gold. I carried it over to the south window and sat down in the warm, dusty sunlight.
Before opening it, I looked out of the window, rubbed the dust away to reveal the river’s brown surface. Here, everything but the body. Downstream, nothing but the body. Will you take this life, this one I’m about to discover? Maybe you won’t have to stay faceless after all.
The book felt warm in my hands. I brushed it off and read the title on the binding. Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo, translated from the French.
Will this do?
I began to read.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I
‘Christ, mom, why don’t we just go.’ Jennifer fidgeted, walking around the bed to the window.
Elouise watched her dully. She’d been given a painkiller this morning. It left things hazy and blunted, but since they’d lowered the dosage she didn’t feel tired or dizzy. She looked down at the clothes Jennifer had brought her. They hung loose, too big for what she’d become.
‘Why don’t we just take the bus?’ Jennifer asked. ‘This is stupid. He’s waiting at home. What do you think is going to happen?’
Elouise wasn’t sure. Dr Roulston had insisted on driving them home. He wanted to make sure of the situation there. Sten was sober, Jennifer had said – at least when she’d left the house that morning. Sober and looking scared.
‘I wish you could talk,’ her daughter continued. ‘This is the shits. Who does Roulston think he is, anyway? He should be keeping you here.’
Elouise shook her head, but Jennifer still stood at the window, her gaze on the parking lot below. The girl looked older, and Elouise felt she had missed something these past five weeks, as if in that time Jennifer had unfolded in some way. Still, so young. She shouldn’t have to be this way. Not yet. She should have her freedom a while longer.
The door opened and Dr Roulston entered. ‘Are you two ready?’ he asked brightly.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Jennifer breathed.
Roulston’s tone hardened. ‘I intend to make sure your mother is not entering a situation that endangers her health.’
‘What do you plan to do, live in our basement?’
‘If your mother had consented to criminal charges against her husband, we wouldn’t be in this predicament.’
‘Predicament?’ Jennifer’s face was red. ‘Is that what you call it? Christ.’ She walked over to the suitcase beside the bed and picked it up, glaring at Roulston. ‘Fine, let’s go.’
* * *
Roulston started the car. ‘The charge is assault, and it’s a serious one. He’ll be arrested and thrown in jail.’
Elouise, sitting in the back seat, shook her head, but again neither the doctor nor Jennifer – who was in the front seat – saw her. Not in jail. People will hear.
They pulled out of the parking lot. ‘Yeah, right,’ Jennifer snapped. ‘What’s a little more humiliation for the Louper family, eh? Why don’t you just brand our foreheads while you’re at it? Fucking doctors.’
‘That’s quite a mouth you have there, Jennifer. I understand you’re feeling vulnerable right now, but I have my patient to consider—’
‘My mother,’ Jennifer said, looking out of the window.
They turned on to the highway. The car picked up speed.
Roulston sighed. ‘We share the same concerns, then, Jennifer.’
‘We don’t share a fuckin’ thing, Doctor.’
‘I don’t understand what you expect me to do!’
Jennifer’s laugh was harsh. ‘You idiot. There’s nothing you can do. That’s the whole point.’
Roulston slowed the car and turned it on to their road. ‘He needs help. He has to be convinced of that.’
‘Put a gun to his head and he’ll agree with anything.’
‘I won’t do that.’
‘You already are, asshole. He’s very smooth when he has to be.’
‘I’m not easily fooled.’
They turned into the driveway. Feeling a need to escape, Elouise was the first to open the door and climb out. The garden, she saw immediately, was in bad shape, choked with weeds, the earth unturned. The dogs barked in their kennel. Roulston and Jennifer got out of the car, her daughter pulling the suitcase away from the doctor and walking towards the front door.
It opened before she got there and Sten stepped outside, dressed in his Sunday best, his hair slicked back. He looked pale, shaky, and his eyes shied from Elouise’s after the briefest contact.
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ he said, taking a few steps and reaching for the suitcase in Jennifer’s hand.
‘Yeah, right,’ she said, pushing past him and heading inside.
Sten smiled, shrugged. ‘She’s that age, isn’t she?’ he said to Roulston.
‘When did you last have a drink?’ the doctor asked coolly.
‘Eight days ago,’ Sten replied proudly.
‘That’s a start,’ Roulston said. ‘Shall we go inside?’
‘Good idea.’ Sten approached Elouise. He smiled timidly. ‘Hello, dear. I’m so sorry for all of this. Can you talk? No, I guess not.’ He made a move as if to hug her, then shrugged. ‘I’ve made tea. I stocked up on soups, too. You’ve lost weight. Looks good. Come on.’
She followed him inside, Roulston at her elbow.
The house had been cleaned. Except for the worn fabric of the rugs and the upholstery, it could have been featured in some country cottage magazine. Elouise could smell the cleaner, and something else, faint, something deeper – sweet, cloying, as if slightly off. She’d never smelled it before, and it disturbed her.
Jennifer was already in the living room, sitting in the easy chair and smoking a cigarette. Sten gestured Elouise and Roulston towards the sofa.
‘I’ll get the tea,’ he said, heading into the kitchen.
Dr Roulston looked searchingly at Elouise. ‘How does this feel?’ he asked.
She shrugged.
‘Hopeful?’
‘Give me a break,’ said Jennifer.
Roulston’s blue eyes fixed on her. ‘Has he been drinking lately?’ he asked.
‘What do you think? What’s your informed opinion, Mr Expert?’
‘He seems sincere. He’s trying his best. The last few days must have been very difficult. The body’s need for alcohol is devastating once deprived. You’ve been here all this time, Jennifer. Has he been sick? Shaking?’
‘DTs? He’s always sick. What do you think I’ve been doing, following him around?’
Sten returned from the kitchen, carrying a tray. ‘Everyone settled? Good.’ He set the tray down and poured the tea. After a moment he collected his own cup, dumped in three spoons of sugar, then sat down in the chair opposite the sofa. ‘Help yourselves.’ He smiled at Roulston. ‘I’m beating this, Doctor. I really am.’
‘Have you attended an AA meeting?’
‘I can do it all on my own. I’m doing it right now, right? Don’t worry. All that’s over with. Never again, I swear it. I get scared just thinking back on how it was for me. For all of us, that is. It’s not the way to live, is it? No, there’s not a drop left in the house. You can look if you want.’
Elouise saw her husband and the doctor studying each other. Sten’s eyes were bright, almost challenging. A hint of a smile played at the corners of his mouth.
‘Well,’ said Roulston, ‘that won’t be necessary. Your wife and daughter have been given clear instructions. If you start drinking again they’re to call me – day or night.’
Sten smiled tightly. ‘That sounds more than professional interest, Doctor. Is this level of involvement approved by your medical association?’
Roulston’s eyes widened slightly. ‘Pardon me?’
‘Well,’ Sten continued, ‘I mean, my wife’s been discharged from your care, hasn’t she? I don’t mean anything by it. I mean, there’s nothing you hav
e to worry about. But I’m curious. Is this a new programme backed by the hospital?’
‘No, Mr Louper. To put the record straight, while your wife has been discharged from the hospital, she’s still in my care. She’s my patient, and I take my responsibility to her very seriously. Are we understood?’
‘So long as she decides to keep you as her doctor, you’ll continue to feel responsible. That makes sense, I suppose. Part of the job description, huh? I’m sure you’ve got loyal patients – exceptional service and all that, so long as the file’s still open, eh?’ He smiled again. ‘Your tea’s getting cold.’
Roulston stood. ‘Your wife will need a straw to drink hers,’ he said.
‘Crack!’ Jennifer said. ‘So much for perfection, eh, Daddy?’
‘I’ll be coming by periodically,’ the doctor said to Elouise, ‘to check on your progress. Remember to come by the office every Wednesday morning, nine a.m., for adjustment. If you feel the wires have stretched, or a screw seems loose, have your daughter phone right away. The same if the fever returns, or any burning sensation, numbness or sharp pain.’ He glanced at Jennifer. ‘That’s not an easy addiction to get rid of, Jennifer. You’re smoking a lot and very hard for someone so young. You’ll pay for it later.’
‘Go stuff yourself. You’re not my doctor, Doctor.’
‘She’s that age, isn’t she?’ Sten said.
Roulston ignored him, still looking at Jennifer. ‘No, you’re not my patient. But you might be, someday soon.’
Jennifer paled. ‘Hear that, Daddy? He wasn’t fooled.’
Roulston turned bright red.
Elouise looked away. She felt very tired, and that faint smell frightened her. It seemed to be coming from the floor.
‘I was speaking of your addiction, not his,’ Roulston said stiffly. ‘Now, I’ll be on my way.’ He turned and gripped Elouise’s shoulder, his hand firm and strong. He opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind and just smiled. He straightened. ‘I’ll make my own way out.’