He tried to tell them things about the city, how tough his gang was and how tall the buildings, but they weren’t much
interested. Bet asked if he knew any movie stars and he told her he once saw Ginger Rogers getting into a taxi. “Really,” she said, her voice hushed and her eyes big, but she held on to it too long and he could tell she was mocking him. Later that day they locked him into an old shed during a game of spies and soldiers, a stick dropped into the hasp, and it took far too long for him to stop calling, to understand that they weren’t coming back. The Man Called X had been in a similar spot once and blasted the lock with his revolver, but all Alan could do was bang into the door over and over until the rusty screws gave way.
His shoulder was sore for days, a reminder of his stupidity, and when they came calling the next morning as usual he told Aunt Edie that he had a stomach ache, and the next day that he’d rather hang about on his own. After that it didn’t matter, because they all went away to a church camp. All except blind Pammy, who he sometimes saw walking down the main street, one finger hooked into the belt on her mother’s dress. Or sitting on her front porch at a little table, sorting buttons by size and the number of holes, a thing she liked to do. Bet had told him that when they were all sorted their mother dumped the buttons back into a big tin, and the next day told Pammy they were a new batch. When he said he thought that was cruel, she gave him a shove and said he was the stupidest boy ever.
Mrs. P. was a nosy old bat; Robbie and Edie called her The Hoover for the way she sucked up information, and then dumped it all on you like greasy, clinging dust. They said it in a laughing way, not a mean one, one of the jokes they had together, like the way they always said, “It’s another case for Nick Carter, Master Detective!” whenever someone knocked on the door. Not that
anyone knocked much in this town, they walked right in, even ones who didn’t belong. Like the smelly old tramp Alan found in the kitchen one morning, sitting straight in a chair with his hands folded in front of him on the table.
Alan had no idea what to do, but Aunt Edie was right behind him. She touched his shoulder as she moved past and said, “I’ll make you a sandwich, Rolly, but you’ll have to take it with you,” her voice sounding firmer, like a teacher’s. “The war,” she said, after the man had shuffled out, already cramming the bread into his nasty mouth. “The first one, I mean, poor thing. He used to be so dapper, and such a good dancer.” Even with all the windows open the whiff of him lasted for hours. “Did he sit?” Mrs. P. asked, when she came, and she gave the chair a good scrub.
That day she didn’t have much to report, just a girl who’d run off to be married, leaving a note on her pillow. She and Aunt Edie agreed that the tighter the leash, the harder the pulling to break free. Outside a steady, steamy rain was falling. There was nothing he felt like doing, and he was glad when they sent him up to the attic to fetch a box of old books for the church sale. It was stuffy up there and the light was dim when he pulled the chain, nothing to see through the dusty, small window but more rain, hissing through green leaves.
He poked around for a bit, after he’d dragged the books to the centre of the floor. There was a stained duffle bag in a corner where the roof sloped down, old letters inside and a jacket with dull brass buttons. He put it on, even though it smelled, and tried to imagine Uncle Robbie wearing it, sailing off to the war with two arms in its sleeves. Behind the bag was something wrapped in a grey blanket that he thought might be a rifle, but it turned out to be an old banjo, with curls of
broken strings. Everything else was just attic stuff, skis and poles with brittle bindings and boring board games in a pile, a set of dumbbells. Boxes labelled
Curtains
and two labelled
Christmas
, that he didn’t bother opening. He’d be long gone by then, back home, back at school, and with any luck there’d be a big storm or the car would break down and they wouldn’t have to go to the party at the hospital, with the pathetic tree and the streamers and tinsel, the horrible singing along to the banging piano. Sometimes, when Robbie and Edie were out, Alan opened the photo album and stared hard at the old pictures of the boy who was his father, when he was still a live wire, a joker. He had the same big ears, but otherwise he was as much of a stranger as those long-dead grandfathers and aunts, as the dead boy at the bottom of the cold lake.
His mother called on Tuesdays after supper; she said she knew it was an extravagance, but she needed to hear his voice. “It’s sweltering here,” she usually said. “You’re so lucky to be by the lake.” But after that there wasn’t much to talk about. She asked if he’d been swimming and what else he’d been doing and he said, “Not much.” Once she told him about a funny noise the car was making, and asked him what he thought it was. “Don’t know,” he said, “you should ask Uncle Robbie,” but she didn’t want to right then. He’d almost forgotten the annoying way she did that, asking him about the car or if he thought the furnace would make it through another winter, whether they should get a new armchair while the sales were on. As if he really was the man of the house, as she liked to say, as if he had any idea about any of it.
The calls never lasted long; “Well, it’s almost time for
Nick Carter
,” she said, and he knew she must have timed it like that.
They used to listen together, although she often dozed off and woke with a start, asking what she’d missed and then he missed things too, trying to explain quickly. He could picture her, suddenly, settling down in the chair that had the lacy thing draped over the hole in the arm. Her heavy glasses on the little table beside her and the sore-looking marks by the bridge of her nose. “We miss you,” she always said, just before she hung up, and he wished she’d make up her mind. One minute he was supposed to be the man of the house, the next a little kid who believed his father could actually form a thought. “It’s not easy for your mother,” Aunt Edie said, as if she knew anything about it. He picked up the bowl of ice cream that was waiting for him, the first mouthful sliding cool and easing the burning in his throat.
The dead boy’s name was Stevie and there was a framed photograph of him on the mantel. “You have a bit of the look of him,” Mrs. P. said, “only he wasn’t so scrawny.” She said that poor Edie never got over it, well you wouldn’t, would you. “Maybe that’s when her trouble started,” Mrs. P. said, and Alan knew she meant the weeding and the times her eyes had a blurry look, as if she were peering up through water. He thought about how things can start, if you leave a crack open, and then there’s no stopping them, no matter how hard you try.
Alan didn’t see anything of himself in it, but the picture was a good one; it made you feel like you knew that boy, or had seen him somewhere. He’s nine or ten, just his head and shoulders, and he’s laughing so hard you can almost hear it, his hair a mess, standing up all over the place, and all kinds of mischief in his eyes. Mrs. P. said Robbie’s mother had taken it, as well as some others they had in the house. She’d been dead for
years, but a lot of people still remembered her, with her long skirts and her cameras, and they remembered seeing her, in all but the stormiest weather, a small, dark figure, walking by the shore. The photograph of Stevie had been taken the summer before he died, and you could tell he didn’t suspect a thing.
Uncle Robbie was a teacher but he still had things to do in the summer, and Aunt Edie went to teas and to meetings at the church when she remembered that she was supposed to. “I think I forgot that one on purpose,” she said to Alan, after someone had called to see where she’d been. They left him little jobs to do, cutting the grass and snicking the edges neat with the big shears, scraping the back porch ready for painting or washing the old car that got so dusty on the gravel roads around town. “We used to be quite a double act, didn’t we, Robbie,” she said, and she told Alan that when they had their first car, after the war, Robbie could steer just fine but she had to shift the gears for him. “People dove for cover when we were about,” she said, “and once we got stuck on the courthouse lawn.” They were both like that, telling him things about their younger days, what they thought of as adventures. He paid more attention after he’d been there for a while and knew the places they were talking about, had seen older versions of some of the people.
He was allowed to do what he liked, and in the hot afternoons he usually went down the winding path to the lake and walked the length of the crowded beach, spurts of fine sand flying out when he jammed his crooked stick down with each step. No one seemed to notice and he thought of the invisibility potion Aunt Edie had told him about, a story of her father’s that she’d really believed when she was small. Women lay on
patterned towels with their eyes closed, others stood down by the water with their children, holding hands and laughing as they ran backwards from the waves rolling in. The sun beat down and sparked off the pins in their hair and he felt it on his own head, the same heat, and the shrieking voices sliced through him.
Most days he walked on farther, right to the end and around the little point, and then it was better. A narrow curve of empty sand and all kinds of things washed up, fishing floats and water-smoothed glass, and tree trunks bleached pale and smooth, with huge tangles of roots washed clean. Aunt Edie had also told him that when she was a little girl she had the idea to put a message in a bottle and her father threw it far out in the lake, almost to the horizon, it seemed to her. Her father said that maybe it would come back and sure enough, a few days later a bottle was there, bobbing right near shore; she held up her skirts and fetched it, used a thin stick to fish out the roll of paper inside, and he read her the message. It was from a girl named Amy Jane, who lived deep in the forest on the other side of the lake, and she wanted to know what Edie’s favourite colour was. Aunt Edie told Alan that she never wondered how her bottle had ended up in the middle of a forest, and that in her memory she and Amy Jane sent messages back and forth all summer; she didn’t seem to mind a bit that it was all her parents playing a trick. Though it was just a silly story he kept his eyes open, on the shore, in case a real secret message came rolling in.
Uncle Robbie was going to teach him how to swim but he hadn’t yet, and Aunt Edie made Alan promise to just wade near the shallow shore. That was all right, and when the water was calm he took his crooked stick, sharpened with Robbie’s penknife, and tried to spear the minnows that flashed around his
feet. A castaway on the empty beach, maybe a pirate captain, set adrift by a mutinous crew. He made a shelter, a scooped hole surrounded by bigger pieces of driftwood, and watched for the sails of a ship that could be friend or foe. Once he tried to start a signal fire, using matches he’d taken from the kitchen shelf, but the wood was sandy and water-logged and the breeze off the lake sent the trails of smoke right into his eyes, made tears run down his face. Sometimes he wondered how far he could walk out, before the bottom fell away and the water closed over his head.
Alan understood the joke about the Hoover, but Mrs. P. always reminded him more of a leaky tap. Sometimes trickling, sometimes gushing, but never completely shut off, making him think of the way dripping water could wear a hole in the hardest stone. She was always asking about his mother and father, where they met and when they’d married, and was it true what she’d heard, that they’d run off together and their families had disowned them. So hard it must be for his poor mother, Mrs. P. said, and did she ever talk about—well, she was still a young woman, wasn’t she, and it would be easier for her, wouldn’t it, if she could marry again.
Alan kept his mouth shut, like a POW would have, and though she kept on sneaking in her questions he knew that soon enough she’d get caught up in the flow of her own voice and move on. Mrs. P. knew everything about everyone, it seemed, and it was hard to keep things straight, the way she wandered off into the backgrounds of brothers and grandfathers and cousins. She wandered through time too, one minute talking about the unhappy English brides, with their accents and pale skin, then something about Uncle Robbie’s mother and a hotel.
What she’d read about Lana Turner that very morning, then back to dead Stevie and his brother, Rob, who was so wild for a time, and how Robbie and Edie hoped to travel out to meet their grandchildren before school started up again. She told him about Hook, the grocer, with his fat thumb on the scale unless you kept your eyes on him, a thing everyone knew. “Like his father before him,” she said, and that reminded her of another old scandal, Hook’s mother caught laying down poisoned meat, after dogs had been dying for years.
Mrs. P. had other stories that were more interesting, about spirits and hauntings, about curses that followed families for generations. She told Alan about the ghost train, of course, and about people who made nooses or blew their heads off. The ones who jumped from boats, or walked away into the snowy bush, and were later heard scratching at windows in the winter dark. The whole town full of suicides, it seemed, who had changed their minds and wanted to come back. “You’ll give the boy nightmares,” Aunt Edie said in a sharpish tone, if she overheard that kind of talk, or the old stories about the
brollachan
and the
doonies
, the
sluagh
. It was true that he thought about them, if he woke in the night. The shape-shifters and the unforgiven dead, always looking for a living body to slither into, and the stories about the changeling babies left by the fairies, who never belonged, never thrived. Mrs. P. said she didn’t believe it herself but some of the old people thought blind Pammy was one; how else to explain it, how different she looked, how she was.
Mostly, though, he didn’t wake in the night, and the dreams he used to have had gone quiet, along with the rage that left him limp in its wake, with an image of his father’s white fist as it pounded a thick puzzle piece that would never fit. He was
still changing, he knew that, but it seemed to be in a good way. After the first sunburns, which Aunt Edie soothed with a cool spread of Noxzema, his skin had turned brown and the soles of his bare feet had hardened; even his eyes looked different in his tanned face, when he stared into the mirror. Every night now, before he got into bed, he lifted the dumbbells he’d brought down from the attic and did push-ups on the floor Mrs. P. kept gleaming, and every other day he measured his biceps with the cloth tape he snuck from the sewing basket; a quarter of an inch already, he was sure. He thought of those pasty boys in the schoolyard back home, how they’d not dare mess with him now, and if they did he could knock them over with one hand tied behind his back. Uncle Robbie said that about things, though at first Alan didn’t know it was a joke.