Alligator - Lisa Moore [6]
While he sat there he decided he would buy a waterbed. He had always imagined owning a waterbed when he was successful, but now it struck him that getting the bed might invoke the man he wanted to become. You bought a waterbed and so became the sort of man who owned a waterbed.
Frank had waited until his mother was dead to give her landlord notice. He kept up the belief that she might get well as long as she was alive out of a sort of respect and faithfulness, though he had given up hope of getting the money together to send her to the Mayo Clinic. He talked every day, during his hospital visits, about the airfares he was checking into and the medical advancements the clinic offered that were superior to anything she could hope for in Newfoundland. But his mother’s cancer had progressed so far by the time it was diagnosed that there had been no hope, even if he’d had the money for the Mayo Clinic.
The police knocked on the Inuit guy’s door several times. Then one of them came back down to Carol’s to borrow a butter knife and they used it to jimmy the door. Frank stepped out onto the landing and listened with Carol. They both stood, Frank staring at Carol’s fluffy pink slippers and her peach toe-nail polish, and they heard an utterance. It was not a shout but not muffled either, it was a human noise that expressed surprise and awfulness at the same time and it came from the cop’s gut. Frank heard him say, He’s after hanging himself in here, Greg.
Frank dragged his eyes up from the floor and Carol had covered her mouth with her hand, and her eyes looked watery behind her glasses and her fingernails were painted the same colour as her toes. They hadn’t decided to stand on the landing but they found themselves there. The Inuit boy was twentyone, two years older than Frank, and he had arrived three months before Frank and drank continuously and kept to himself, except one morning when he and Frank had shovelled the walk together.
Frank heard a thump and this must have been the body being lowered from whatever kind of noose. The police were speaking quietly to each other. They sounded respectful and upset. Frank and Carol stood, almost unable to move, because they’d both felt a dread building in them all through the week before Christmas without ever talking about it.
On Christmas Eve, Frank had knocked on Carol’s door and given her a box of chocolates and she said she had something for him. He told her not to bother but she said, Come in, come in. He saw her place was bigger but he stayed just inside the door while she opened and slammed drawers in her bedroom and took a long time, and he heard tape.
He stood waiting and finally she came out and handed him the present, blowing the hair out of her eyes as if she were winded. He opened the present and it was a bottle of Avon cologne for men. The bottle was in the shape of a stallion, one hoof pawing the air. Half the cologne had already been used.
Carol asked him did he want to come in and have a glass of Scotch with her if he were old enough to drink and then the bagpipes started from the Kirk across the street and Frank had said that maybe they should call the police about the guy on the third floor. He was holding the glass horse in his hand and the balled-up wrapping paper.
Carol was shorter than Frank and she wore bifocals. The lower half of her lenses magnified the soft pouches under her eyes, which were pale white and delicately veined; her eyelashes were almost transparent. She gripped the edge of the door frame and looked up at him and her eyes snapped several times while she decided