Alligator - Lisa Moore [61]
A crowd of perhaps two hundred people came up Long’s Hill and gathered across the street from Frank’s bed-sit. The man leading them wore a pirate hat and a cape. The man held a torch and he raised his arm and pointed roughly in the direction of Frank’s window. All the people turned and were quiet and the guide began to lecture. He had tones, this guy, sonorous tones.
It was the Haunted Walk, all the sites of violent murder through the ages in old St. John’s, tourists from the cruise ship, and the guy charged five bucks and Frank wished he had thought of it first. He could never make out what the guide was saying.
Someone had been buried in the basement of one of these houses, slowly poisoned and hacked to pieces, a hundred years ago.
A murmur went through the crowd at the same time each evening, all summer long. Awe and titillation, and the worms hung on their invisible threads making the leaves curl tighter.
MADELEINE
SHE WAS MEETING Marty for lunch because she was going to make him cough up the money she needed to finish the film. She would beg, she would cry. She would bring up all they had been to each other and force him to hand over whatever he had. She didn’t care that he had a child on the way. That was his problem.
He had always been fastidious and this she enjoyed and despised. He had loved her for the thirty years that followed her leaving him, through a string of younger and younger girlfriends. He’d become more handsome with every passing year.
The women were all bursting with intellect, were earnest and buxom, the penultimate one had become a prominent architect in Toronto. They fell hard, but not hard enough to sabotage careers or to get knocked up. Until this last one, Gerry-Ann, whom Madeleine had never met.
She thought of her need to get out of the marriage by turns as a mild perversion and a bout of forgetfulness. Her need to get out was visited upon her and beyond her control and she tried to will it away. They had never been suited.
This is not true. She will not be untrue to how hard they worked and drove each other, and how they got up in the middle of the night to take care of the babies and had fast, fast sex in the laundry room when the children were watching cartoons, pasta boiling on the stove, he put his hand over her mouth.
Or sex in the living room, drinking wine, smoking dope, with the headlights of passing traffic sweeping the walls, they had tipped the great big leather couch over and broken a wooden strut in the back of it.
It was an enduring love; it had lasted all her adult life.
She never should have married him.
What was it that finally decided her? There was a leak in the flow of time and she found she could not account for all of it. Coming along Water Street, the sky over Signal Hill would be shaggy and darkness would come barrelling in off the ocean and she would realize it was November. This was November weather. She would look around her and see the pavement glassy, the world slithering askew, and put straight and ultra-clean with each sweep of the windshield wipers.
She’d had an appointment with the dentist and had forgotten it. She had left the children waiting for her in front of the school. They were soaking wet. She had left the oven on. She put her keys in the pocket with the hole in the lining and couldn’t find her keys.
Projects started to come her way. She did industrial films about safety belts in cars and fish processing and prosthetic limbs.
They cut off the heat because she had forgotten to pay the bill. She shot a triple bypass and the doctor winked at her, clicking the tiny scissors, once, twice, like castanets, before digging into the splayed-open chest.
She