“Gotta get glasses,” he said aloud.
He talked to himself because it comforted him. This was the time of night he didn’t like, when the city was dead or else living silently behind closed doors. This was the time you looked over your shoulder, you looked back to reassure yourself.
When he turned north on Avenue Road he heard the clock on the Soldiers’ Tower strike three. Bong bong bong. One for Geraldine. One for Marcie.
“One for me,” he said. There were only three but he kept imagining there was more. “One for Joey. One for Murillo. One for Johnny Heath.”
He stepped on the gas to get away from the clock. The car climbed the hill, past the boardinghouses and small shops, then the apartments getting swankier as the hill grew, then more shops, a better kind now.
And then St. Clair. It wasn’t until he was actually at the top of the hill that he realized he should have turned off three blocks down. He didn’t feel right up here on the top of the hill where Johnny Heath lived. Johnny Heath lived up here to the left, with his yellow roadster and his blind sister. Stevie had driven past the house once just for the hell of it.
He turned left, driving very slowly, not intending to stop but just to go past the house. The car stopped itself, so Stevie turned off the ignition and parked along the curb. He couldn’t see the Heaths’ house very well from the curb. He could only see a faint glow behind the trees.
He sat there for some time looking at the glow. There were no cars moving along the road that he could wave at. After three o’clock he always waved at cars because the very lateness of the hour and the darkness were bonds between him and the people in the cars.
Someone was walking, though. The steps were behind him, slow steps and heavy, like an old man’s.
Stevie opened the car window nearest to the curb, and when the old man was abreast of the car Stevie said, “Could I trouble you for a match?”
On the seat beside him he had a whole box of paper matches advertising the Club Joey, Toronto’s Smartest Nightclub, Cover Charge One-Fifty. But he had to talk to someone, someone who was awake in the sleeping city.
The steps paused.
“A match,” Stevie said.
“Ah?”
“A match. Could I trouble you...?”
“A match?” The man leaned down and looked inside the car window at Stevie. “Do you want a match?”
“No,” Stevie said hoarsely. “No, thanks.”
This was the corner Johnny Heath was behind, this was how he looked when you came upon him unawares, the skin sagging over his face, and this was how he sounded, like an old man with a thin cracked voice.
“I have a great many matches,” the man said. “It’s no trouble.”
“Guess I don’t need any,” Stevie said. “Look. I found a whole boxful.”
He held up the box and they both stared at it solemnly.
“So you have,” Mr. Heath said. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Heath.”
The face vanished, came back again.
“You know me? I’m sorry, I... One of my girls’ young men, are you? Sorry I don’t... Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” Stevie said again.
After a time the glow from behind the trees disappeared.
Chapter 7
Five minutes later Mr. Heath had already forgotten the young man in the car. Remembering was difficult for him and he was too tired to make the effort.
He turned off the hall light downstairs. Maurice had left it on for him. Maurice was the only one who knew that he went out like this at night when he couldn’t sleep and prowled through the dark city, heavy limbed and dull eyed like an aged lion.
When he reached the second floor he saw the light shining underneath Kelsey’s door but he noticed it only for a second, a moment of puzzlement, and then he passed on. Going from the second floor to the third he always used the back stairs that the servants used. He had never stopped to reason this out, only realizing vaguely that it had something to do with Isobel. Isobel had sent him up to the third floor. They had shared the front bedroom which was Kelsey’s now, but Isobel had always hated this convention of happy marriages. When she became ill she sent him up to the third floor where, properly, he belonged since he was no longer of any use to anyone. He could not help her pain or comfort her or support his children or give orders to the servants or even say anything that he had not already said a hundred times.
When Isobel died he hadn’t moved down to the second floor again. It was too much trouble and you couldn’t be sure that Isobel was really gone from the room, or if gone that she wouldn’t come back and shatter your sleep with her groans.
At the top of the stairs he turned and looked down, cupping his ear in his hand to catch a noise he thought he’d heard for an instant between the creakings of the stair treads. A padding noise like swift silent feet running over a carpet. It was gone now. It was not Isobel; perhaps it was the dog.
He went into his own room and undressed in the dark.
“Dark,” Kelsey said. “It’s dark, Alice. Come and help me, Alice!”
“I’m coming. Don’t be frightened. I’m coming.”
They were in a dark wood and the bleak and hungry trees stretched out their branches, quivering at the tips like the tentacles of an octopus, sucking out at Alice as she ran.
But Kelsey was running too, away from her, fleetly, as if she knew this dark wood well.
“I’m coming! Wait for me, Kelsey!”
She heard the soft laughing of birds from the branches, and a cry that throbbed into an echo. She came upon Kelsey lying on her face in the moss, and lifted her up. But it was too late. This face was dead.
It was Kelsey who had died, not the other girl. The other girl lived, blind, but this was Kelsey here dead, cuddled in the bruised and bloody moss.
She fingered the dead face, and the hungry tentacles of trees swooped down...
She woke groaning and fighting for her breath. The dark wood and the dead girl rolled off the stage. Only the soft derisive laughing of the birds remained, the clock saying, “Tut tut! Tut tut!”
Bong bong bong bong. One for Geraldine. One for Marcie. One for Stevie. And one for the pot.
Victoria College, the Soldiers’ Tower, the Parliament Buildings and Queen’s Park.
He hadn’t walked through Queen’s Park for over two years. The last time something had happened to him. He’d been walking with a girl, and the girl had talked in a low voice with her head bent down and half turned away as if she were ashamed of her words. But he could see that her eyes were shining and that she was happy, and he hadn’t said anything at all.
“Listen, Stevie. I thought I could tell you this better if we took a walk, you know, with people around so you won’t do anything like lose your temper. I mean, sometimes I’m kinda scared of you...”
He had never lost his temper with her, struck her or sworn at her, but he had been too shocked to reply. Maybe she saw through him and there were things in him to be afraid of. “Well, anyway, Stevie. I guess you know what it is. I’m not coming back to your place tonight. Margy is going up this afternoon to get my things. No, he hasn’t said anything about you-know-what. Only I saw his sisters on the street yesterday, Margy pointed them out. And I guess I just want to move out, Stevie. You know how it is. I guess I felt kinda funny when I saw his sisters, me sleeping with you all this time...”
“I hope Margy don’t forget my toothbrush.”
Charles Street. Maybe he’d go back to Mamie Rosen’s and get a drink. Mamie’s landlady wasn’t fussy. His own landlady was a terror. She was always tacking up signs, especially in the bathroom: