Laura and I used to visit here. We were brought by Reenie, who thought the visiting of family graves was somehow good for children, and later we came by ourselves: it was a pious and therefore acceptable excuse for escape. When she was little, Laura used to say the angels were meant to be us, the two of us. I told her this couldn't be true, because the angels were put there by our grandmother before we were born. But Laura never paid much attention to that kind of reasoning. She was more interested in forms-in what things were in themselves, not what they weren't. She wanted essences.
Over the years I've made a practice of coming here at least twice a year, to tidy up, if for no other reason. Once I drove, but no longer: my eyes are too bad for that. I bent over painfully and gathered up the withered flowers that had accumulated there, left by Laura's anonymous admirers, and stuffed them into my plastic shopping bag. There are fewer of these tributes than there used to be, though still more than enough. Today some were quite fresh. Once in a while I've found sticks of incense, and candles too, as if Laura were being invoked.
After I'd dealt with the bouquets I walked around the monument, reading through the roll call of defunct Chases engraved on the sides of the cube. Benjamin Chase and his Beloved Wife Adelia; Norval Chase and his Beloved Wife Liliana. Edgar and Percival, They Shall Not Grow Old As We Who Are Left Grow Old.
And Laura, as much as she is anywhere. Her essence.
Meat dust.
There was a picture of her in the local paper last week, along with a write-up about the prize-the standard picture, the one from the book jacket, the only one that ever got printed because it's the only one I gave them. It's a studio portrait, the upper body turned away from the photographer, then the head turned back to give a graceful curve to the neck. A little more, now look up, towards me, that's my girl, now let's see that smile. Her long hair is blonde, as mine was then-pale, white almost, as if the red undertones had been washed away-the iron, the copper, all the hard metals. A straight nose; a heart-shaped face; large, luminous, guileless eyes; the eyebrows arched, with a perplexed upwards turning at the inner edges. A tinge of stubbornness in the jaw, but you wouldn't see it unless you knew. No makeup to speak of, which gives the face an oddly naked appearance: when you look at the mouth, you're aware you're looking at flesh.
Pretty; beautiful even; touchingly untouched. An advertisement for soap, all natural ingredients. The face looks deaf: it has that vacant, posed imperviousness of all well-brought-up girls of the time. A tabula rasa, not waiting to write, but to be written on.
It's only the book that makes her memorable now.
Laura came back in a small silver-coloured box, like a cigarette box. I knew what the town had to say about that, as much as if I'd been eavesdropping. Course it's not really her, just the ashes. You wouldn't have thought the Chases would be cremators, they never were before, they wouldn't have stooped to it in their heyday, but it sounds like they might as well just have gone ahead and finished the job off, seeing as she was more or less burnt up already. Still, I guess they felt she should be with family. They'd want her at that big monument thing of theirs with the two angels. Nobody else has two, but that was when the money was burning a hole in their pockets. They liked to show off back then, make a splash; take the lead, you could say. Play the big cheese. They sure did spread it around here once.
I always hear such things in Reenie's voice. She was our town interpreter, mine and Laura's. Who else did we have to fall back on?
Around behind the monument there's some empty space. I think of it as a reserved seat-permanently reserved, as Richard used to arrange at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. That's my spot; that's where I'll go to earth.
Poor Aimee is in Toronto, in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, alongside the Griffens-with Richard and Winifred and their gaudy polished-granite megalith. Winifred saw to that-she staked her claim to Richard and Aimee by barging in right away and ordering their coffins. She who pays the undertaker calls the tune. She'd have barred me from their funerals if she could.
But Laura was the first of them, so Winifred hadn't got her body-snatching routine perfected yet. I said, "She's going home," and that was that. I scattered the ashes over the ground, but kept the silver box. Lucky I didn't bury it: some fan would have pinched it by now. They'll nick anything, those people. A year ago I caught one of them with a jam jar and a trowel, scraping up dirt from the grave.
I wonder about Sabrina-where she'll end up. She's the last of us. I assume she's still on this earth: I haven't heard anything different. It remains to be seen which side of the family she'll choose to be buried with, or whether she'll put herself off in a corner, away from the lot of us. I wouldn't blame her.
The first time she ran away, when she was thirteen, Winifred phoned in a cold rage, accusing me of aiding and abetting, although she didn't go so far as to saykidnapping. She demanded to know if Sabrina had come to me.
"I don't believe I'm obliged to tell you, " I said, to torment her. Fair is fair: most of the chances for tormenting had so far been hers. She used to send my cards and letters and birthday presents for Sabrina back to me, Return to Sender printed on them in her chunky tyrant's handwriting. "Anyway I'm her grandmother. She can always come to me when she wants to. She's always welcome."
"I need hardly remind you that I am her legal guardian."
"If you need hardly remind me, then why are you reminding me?"
Sabrina didn't come to me, though. She never did. It's not hard to guess why. God knows what she'd been told about me. Nothing good.
The Button Factory
The summer heat has come in earnest, settling down over the town like cream soup. Malarial weather, it would have been once; cholera weather. The trees I walk beneath are wilting umbrellas, the paper is damp under my fingers, the words I write feather at the edges like lipstick on an aging mouth. Just climbing the stairs I sprout a thin moustache of sweat.
I shouldn't walk in such heat, it makes my heart beat harder. I notice this with malice. I shouldn't put my heart to such tests, now that I've been informed of its imperfections; yet I take a perverse delight in doing this, as if I am a bully and it is a small whining child whose weaknesses I despise.
In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge. I get up to pee, go back to bed, lie twisting in the damp sheets, listening to the monotonous whirring of the fan. Myra says I should get air conditioning, but I don't want it. Also I can't afford it. "Who would pay for such a thing?" I say to her. She must believe I have a diamond hidden in my forehead, like the toads in fairy tales.
The goal for my walk today was The Button Factory, where I intended to have morning coffee. The doctor has warned me about coffee, but he's only fifty-he goes jogging in shorts, making a spectacle of his hairy legs. He doesn't know everything, though that would be news to him. If coffee doesn't kill me, something else will.
Erie Street was languid with tourists, middle-aged for the most part, poking their noses into the souvenir shops, finicking around in the bookstore, at loose ends before driving off after lunch to the nearby summer theatre festival for a few relaxing hours of treachery, sadism, adultery and murder. Some of them were heading in the same direction I was-to The Button Factory, to see what chintzy curios they might acquire in commemoration of their overnight vacation from the twentieth century. Dust-catchers, Reenie would have called such items. She would have applied the same term to the tourists themselves.