The End of Music Page 9

  Isabelle is on her knees, holding Sam by both shoulders. “Teagan doesn’t want a hug right now, okay? It’s sweet. But I think the party has her a little upset.”

  Teagan’s mother rushes in with a cake, and strikes up a hasty “Happy Birthday” chorus. Teagan’s dad circles the table, dropping loot bags in front of each child. “Sorry,” he says, and begins piling gifts into a garbage bag. “Supposed to be out of here by three.”

  “I emailed Will,” says Carter. “Will who used to be in the band. I’m going over this week to talk to him and hear some of the stuff.”

  “I expected as much,” Isabelle replies. “But we shouldn’t talk about it around…” She points down, where Sam is giving her legs the hug that Teagan wouldn’t accept. “All that cancer and divorce.”

  A boy pulls a T-shirt over his head and walks blindly into a wall, falling down and getting the biggest laugh of the day. He’s about to do it again when his mother snags him by the wrist and pulls him away. “Natural performer,” she says, shaking her head.

  //////

  Driving home from the mall, Carter asks whether it might be emotionally difficult for Shelley, to be visiting around Valentine’s Day. Isabelle’s response—“No, I don’t think so,” and a quick lane change—reminds him to leave well enough alone.

  After Ronnie died, the police came around. Apologies, miss, but you were the last one to see him alive. It was dark when I got out of the house, Isabelle told them. Herb picked me up and we drove back here and called 911. I should have called sooner. I was scared. I wasn’t really thinking. She didn’t mention the French movie, nor did Carter.

  When the police left, Carter said, “Well done.”

  Isabelle shrugged. “All I did was tell the truth.”

  He started waking in the middle of the night, counting the minutes and hours. The drive from Ronnie’s, in rush-hour traffic. Then 109 minutes for the movie, plus previews and ads. What about in between? How long did they walk before the French film? What did they talk about on that walk? What did he think about?

  Carter waited until spring that year, then asked Isabelle if they could talk about Ronnie, and what happened. Just the two of them, just to clear the air.

  “This is the toughest year of my life,” she replied. “If this is the relationship we both want, and I really believe it is, I have to have your full support right now.” Then she asked him to move in. Offered to call the super and ask for an extra storage locker in the basement. There’s a fee for an extra one, she said. But let’s see if he’ll waive it.

  He might have let the whole thing go, if not for that strange old movie. The grubby little French town, everyone singing. The girl and boy are in love until he leaves, then it ends on both sides, not for any reason except separation. The film was absolutely convincing in depicting this.

  //////

  The bay girl calls Monday afternoon, as promised. “That complaint you heard about. It was nothing.”

  “That’s good. Can I call down there now?”

  “Maybe after lunch? This morning we took them out to Deadman’s Pond,” she says. “You never saw a happier bunch. And Joyce had a grand time.”

  “Wouldn’t it be getting a bit cool this time of year, down around the pond?”

  “Oh, they’re never off the bus. It’s just a drive. They love to be on the move, our ladies. The men are a bit more stay-put, I must say. They do enjoy their pub night, though. No alcohol, of course. A few games and what have you. Of course on paper we maintain a strict policy of all activities open to all residents, regardless of gender or mobility issues or what have you. But between you and me we’re still giving the men their pub night to themselves. We’ll hope the feminists don’t get wind of it. Don’t want them down here on a protest march, eh?”

  She’s elusive, like his father. You get them on topic for a bit. Then a story or a joke, and they’re off again. You’re left grasping at nothing.

  “They love to get together and tell the old stories, you know,” says Melissa Ryan. “Old Billy George told a wonderful story the other night about his father going down to the whale factory in South Dildo every year. They’d drive the whales ashore, hundreds of them. Blood and guts, up to their necks in it. And at the end of it his father would bring home a big box of whale meat and fry it up with onions. Best feed he ever had, Billy says. So wonderful to hear the old stories.”

  “My mother was never really one for reminiscing.” It was Carter’s father who venerated the past with repeated anecdotes. Hauling the well water up the hill on washday. Aunt Blanche shearing the sheep and spinning the wool. Old Skipper Max, who never took a drop except on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Eve he’d be legless. The night before Carter left for Toronto, his father had called him into the bedroom, pulled the oxygen tube from under his nose, and started talking about how all the boys in the cove used to split herring at two dollars a barrel. They’d go to school with the scales clinging to their boots and the smell coming on thick as the wood stove got going.

  He pushed himself up in the bed, forearms quivering with the effort, and said, “Did I ever tell you about my first night in the tower, and we had the bomb scare? A DC-4 it was, Maritime Central en route to Vienna. Watching the boys talk her down, and my son I tell you that was nervous times. And here was me, a raw rookie. Didn’t know but the whole town might be blown to smithereens.”

  The airport tale was more animated, with hands sweeping across the bed covers to suggest the expanse of the tarmac, and an arm raised to indicate a brilliant blue sky crossed with vapour trails. The striped pyjamas flopping around his shrunken frame.

  Art Carter measured his life by the blurred acceleration of the twentieth century, from the fish-smelling schoolhouse to the control tower. He had been born into a world where it seemed nothing would ever change. Then the future was invented, and once he caught its slipstream he was pulled along to the end.

  “Can I ask you something?” says Carter. “While we’re talking about reminiscing.”

  “Of course,” says Melissa Ryan.

  “Back in the days when you used to come see my band.”

  “Yes?”

  “Was everyone expecting us to release another CD?”

  “Oh my goodness, yes! Or cassette or whatever. We were beside ourselves over it.”

  “So we left a lot of people disappointed.”

  “I remember everyone talking about it. But after that I was done grad school and I started my first job and of course everything’s changing in your life by then. But I still have wonderful memories from those days.”

  6

  The English girl bent her head to light a cigarette. Hunched to shelter the flame as if from a draught. Couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty. Maybe even younger, with those knee-high socks and turned-in toes. The boxy jacket handed down from a broad-shouldered aunt or sister.

  Joyce waved. But there were too many people milling about, and the girl kept her head down. Joyce came around the counter and picked her way past the crowd huddled with their coffee and yesterday’s ham sandwiches, and the nuns picking postcards at the novelty booth. Wove through a crowd of soldiers sprawled across the floor, looking more like schoolboys on an outing in their oversized fatigues, playing cards or sleeping against their duffel bags. Stepped around a handsome, olive-skinned man snoring on a bench, his stocking feet propped in the lap of his wife, who did the crossword.

  The English girl had taken the farthest end of the farthest bench.

  “Excuse me, Miss Peckford?”

  The girl looked up, startled. Her lips pulled back around grey, crooked teeth.

  Joyce sat next to her. “We’ve got your connection sorted out as far as Toronto.”

  “Toronto?” The word meant nothing to the girl. Joyce should have brought a map. She slowed her voice, as if addressing an especially thick child.

  “
Toronto is between here and Edmonton. You’ll fly there, and they’ll get you on your flight to Edmonton.”

  “Oh,” said the girl. She buried the cigarette in the sand of the ashtray and tucked her hair behind each ear. Reached for her purse and clutched it with both hands.

  “I will phone ahead to Toronto. I’ll let them know you’re coming. They’ll arrange to get you on to Edmonton.”

  “Only, they won’t ask for money?”

  For God’s sake. They had been through this. “Your passage to Edmonton is booked and paid for,” said Joyce, in what she hoped was a firm but patient voice. “You will get a hot breakfast on board and dinner as well, after you leave Toronto.”

  Talk of in-flight meals didn’t help. The girl went tight, and a crack in her bottom lip showed blood. Joyce guessed that she had made ample use of the sickness bag on the flight from Heathrow. It had been a bad night for turbulence, with every overseas arrival adding to the mountain of used bags in the trash bins behind the control tower. Late flights and missed connections had everyone scrambling to rebook. On cigarette breaks, the agents huddled in the restaurant or retreated to the baggage hold, cursing the arrogant Yanks and pushy Wops and the Frogs who carried on “like their shit don’t stink,” as Mose Whitehead put it.

  Joyce escorted the English girl to the other end of the lounge, in view of the departure door. “You’ll go through here when the flight is called, in about forty minutes.” She held out the boarding pass. The girl looked at it but didn’t make a move. Both hands on her purse.

  “You’ll need this,” said Joyce. “Don’t look for your bags in Toronto. They’re checked through to Edmonton.”

  “I see,” said the girl, who didn’t see at all. Though she finally took the boarding pass. Held it tight until Joyce took the hand and guided it into her purse.

  “Tuck it away until you need it. I’ll come back and we’ll get you on. Do you still have the toiletry kit?”

  “Oh,” gasped the girl, bringing her fingers to her lips. “But I brushed my teeth. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine. Just keep it handy.” Complimentary toiletries were for First Class only. But Joyce was indiscriminate with them. “You’ll want to freshen up. You’re in for a long day.”

  “Do they know if he’s there?”

  “Well, he’s the one bought your ticket, so he knows your arrival…” Joyce stopped. Who was she to say whether the poor thing’s fiancé would be waiting in Edmonton as promised? The girl had shown his photo earlier this morning. A puffy-faced soldier with sparse brown hair and a wide smile. Older than her by a decade or more. Overdue to settle down and fatten up on roast beef dinners and lemon meringue pie.

  “We’ll call Toronto,” said Joyce. “And Edmonton. Don’t worry.”

  “I believe she’s expecting,” said Mary, when Joyce resumed her place behind the ticket counter. They could see the girl, both hands on her purse. Grimacing. Probably holding her pee.

  “No,” said Joyce.

  Mary narrowed her eyes. Her glasses were new, with a caramel-coloured frame and a diamond shape on each earpiece. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something in how she carries herself.”

  A pregnancy didn’t jibe with the girl’s story as told to Joyce. It had been a wartime romance. But her father said she was too young to marry, and she had given up hope when her soldier went home to Canada. Then after several years of silence he initiated an exchange of letters, the most recent of which had proposed marriage. Her family opposed the union until he sent the fare. Heathrow to Edmonton was four hundred dollars or more. A serious commitment.

  “I’d say you could rob every house on her shabby little street and not come away with four hundred dollars,” said Mary.

  “Her man doesn’t look like much,” said Joyce. “Not from his picture.”

  “She doesn’t look like much herself. But she won the jackpot. Putting an ocean between herself and Mummy. Every English girl’s dream.”

  “Is it so bad over there?” Mary’s husband was English, and had taken her and the kids home to Coventry for a visit in the spring.

  “The rationing is awful,” she said. “And Joe’s sister, she never had the sense to get out. She’s stuck now. Mother got her worn down to the bone. There’s another one.”

  A hollow-eyed young woman limped past, one shoulder tilted with the weight of an overstuffed bag. Taller and thinner than the Peckford girl, but with the same glazed look.

  “On the run from dear old Mum,” said Mary. “Couldn’t even afford a decent pair of stockings for the trip. You can bet there’s some young buck waiting wherever she’s going, ready to fill her up with babies.”

  //////

  Joyce had always known she would leave Cape St. Rose. She didn’t make a fantasy of it. She didn’t imagine herself at Parisian cafés or New York ballrooms, the way the other girls did when they flipped through their magazines. She just wanted to get out.

  It was the death of her mother that set her in motion. Joyce had helped Mrs. Stoodley and her daughter wash the body and lay it out. Then she inherited the kitchen. Spent three solid days in there, while her father and Marty brushed off their Sunday clothes and faced the tide of mourners. Marty threw himself into it, gripping every hand and holding every hug, returning every blessing. He never stopped, not even for a drink. A drop of rum was good for Marty. Slowed him down and settled his nerves. Made him think a bit. But since his disappointment with the girl from Branch, he had given it up altogether.

  Nothing changed after the funeral. Joyce replaced her mother everywhere except her father’s bed. She was eighteen years old, and not so foolish as to imagine a radically different life. But even an ugly husband would be a more welcome sight than Marty, stomping through the door at the end of his shift and calling for his dinner. Always complaining about the gravy. Can’t you do a gravy, girl? It’s right bitter. From her mother she had learned how to clean and cook in anger, slamming dinner plates down on the table. But she wanted to slam them on her own table. For that, she had to leave.

  Gloria had sent a mass card and letter, apologizing for not making the funeral. She sent a postcard as well, a map of the world with Gander, Newfoundland, in the middle. There were lines curving from the middle like red ribbons, connecting Gander to Europe and America.

  Joyce showed the postcard to Father Coles, who said a little town had some gall to place itself at the centre of all humanity, and to Mrs. Pine at the school, who said the map ought to tell the glory of the British Empire. After that she kept it to herself, under her mattress. It was illicit, like the dirty picture she had found when she was sweeping Marty’s room. A girl in nothing but her small clothes, bent over to point her bottom at the viewer, her head turned to show a shameless smile on her painted face.

  Joyce’s father was still a young man, younger than Marty in many ways. He would be fine without her. Wasn’t Bridge Fallon already at his heels? Stopping him outside the church, just to mention she had been up to the hill that very morning. “…Oh, no trouble at all. Was up there anyway to see to Mom…. You got to watch the new graves especially. Gone right to dandelion if they get half the chance.”

  When the arrangements were made in Gander, Gloria sent the train fare. Joyce said nothing until two days before. I never would have thought, her father said. Of course he wouldn’t. Marty was away, hunting bull birds down in the mouth of the Chute. But when he got wind of it he was back. He hauled her into his room and threw her on the bed, slapping at her with big meaty palms and scratchy calluses. Don’t you go near that train, he shouted. From her back, Joyce raised her legs. He grabbed them, but she kicked until she saw an opening and got him good in the stomach. Felt her heel sink into his belly, which was harder then it looked. He sprayed her with spit, and doubled over gasping. Joyce was shaking. Smelled what she thought was blood, though there was no blood. Ready to lay in another boot, if he made a move to come
back at her. Instead he gathered himself and walked out.

  //////

  Joyce had to wait for a seat at the lunch bar, and her tomato soup took forever. The woman on the next stool introduced herself as Alice Henley from central laundry.

  “Awful mess coming off the overnight flights,” she said. “The linens and uniforms.”

  “You do the laundry for the airlines?”

  “Everything. Airlines, hotels. That serviette in your lap, that’ll be through the wash by dinner.”

  Alice had a creamy complexion and healthy figure, hefty arms straining the short sleeves of her starched white uniform. She joined and twisted her hands, quick eyes taking in the crowd around them.

  “Funny smell off the Europeans, eh?” she whispered.

  “Sometimes,” said Joyce. A rush of deplaning passengers arrived on a gust of fresh air, with undercurrents of bad breath, fuel exhaust and boiled vegetables. A passing whiff of vomit and toilets as the service crew got to work. The boys on the crew claimed to have a nose for every airline. The English and Irish smelled of old water. The French of their pungent, sweet cigarettes. Italians were spicy, Germans greasy, and so on. Joyce suspected it was all just talk, just men on their noisy smoke breaks. But one night a crowd of Greek soldiers came through, carrying a wonderful, toasty smell of sugared pastry on their billowing white costumes. Mary said she’d run away with any one of them, sight unseen.

  “Awful smell off the stuff from the Russians,” said Alice. “You don’t want to even open the bag. Right cabbagey. And God only knows what they’re up to here, with everything the Rosenbergs told them.”

  “Who told them?” asked Joyce.

  “The Atom Bomb spies. Don’t you read the paper? Sent to the chair, and it took two extra shocks to kill Ethel. Smoke coming off her. That’s how nasty she was.”

  Joyce didn’t read the paper. But there had been much talk of spies.