Annabel - Kathleen Winter [107]
He heard a Metrobus stop on Chalker’s Hill, the shout of a three-year-old boy running over the graves, his mother shouting, “Ashton! Ashton! Get out of that, come over here!” The whirr and scree of starlings. Houses petered out and bald grass banked the lake, studded with Coffee Crisp and Aero wrappers and Pepsi ring tops. There was the parking lot of Wayne’s building, featureless brick with its flat roof and rust stains running from the eavestroughs. There was a letter in his mailbox. His feet clacked on the plastic edges of the stairs. To open his door Wayne had to force it over the carpet. There was a bowl of egg congealing on his little half-table with its Formica top. He had intended to make an omelette. He put the letter on the table. His sheet and pillow lay under the living room window.
Wayne warmed his small glass salt shaker on the stove and lay down with it and pretended it was part of his lover’s body. But who was his lover? He closed his eyes and pushed the warm glass against the deeply hidden vagina that belonged to Annabel. This created an orgasm, deep inside, deeper by far than anything he had experienced with Gracie Watts. He shuddered and cried out for the lover who had done this to him, who had found Annabel’s body inside him, but he was alone. His phone was flashing. It was the previous tenant’s phone and had been flashing since he moved in. He looked out the kitchen window at the vinyl siding of a bungalow next door. The bit of sky over the bungalow roof was a piece of endlessness. Wayne felt he had randomly superimposed himself on a city that could have done equally well for itself with or without him. He lifted the receiver, pressed a couple of buttons, and listened. A man wanted Lucinda to pick up Clorets and reading glasses at Lawtons. The man had sat on his old ones in the car and broken them. Wayne erased the message and remembered the letter.
25
Economics
PEOPLE WILL NOTICE WHEN A neighbour is not herself but for a long time they will not intervene. Time is so sneaky that one minute you are thinking you have not seen such-and-such a person for a few days, perhaps you should phone them, and the next time you think that thought, spring has come. During the winter that Jacinta was alone, Joan Martin and Eliza Goudie had thought about her many times. Eliza clipped an article from January’s Chatelaine that described exactly how a woman could view her middle-aged husband with renewed romantic vigour, and she put it under the brass dolphin on her hall side table to give to Jacinta, but by spring it was still there. Joan phoned Jacinta’s number several times to say they had the old, traditional kind of sweet william in Vesey’s seed catalogue, because Jacinta had told her that was one flower she would take the trouble to send for by mail, but Jacinta had not answered the phone. Joan ordered an extra packet of seeds for Jacinta, but by April they had not arrived.
Treadway Blake did not often write a letter. His address, in ballpoint, was shaky and intimate but his letter was short and to the point. With it inside the envelope were two more letters: one from the department of motor vehicle registration and the other from MCP, which was the provincial medicare plan. The second one had been neatly opened with a knife. That was how Treadway opened letters.
Dear Wayne, Treadway had written. Here is your