Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (5 page)

Sam was furious at his father.

“I don’t know what was wrong with the pajamas,” he said. “I don’t know why you had to throw her like that.”

Stephanie thought the whole thing was stupid.

Morley didn’t say what she thought. Not directly. She did ask pointedly about the wallpaper—more than once. Each time she did, the conversation ended badly.

I told you so
. That’s what Dave heard.
I told you so
. From all of them.

He threw in the towel. All he had to show for his months of patience was a sullen family and a resentful cat. He put the litter box back in the basement.

Galway began flushing the toilet again in the autumn. She didn’t
use
it, mind you. Wouldn’t even get on the seat. She would hop onto the bathtub and jump onto the sink. From there she could reach over with her front paw, push the lever on the toilet and stare at the water as it went around and around.

“She always liked that part,” said Dave.

Galway’s fascination with the flushing toilet seemed harmless enough—until Arthur started getting into the act. Arthur and the cat would get in the bathroom together, Galway would flush and Arthur would bark his approval.

Then the toilet started overflowing. They had the plumber in twice with his Roto-Rooter, but it kept clogging up.

Stephanie blamed Sam.

“It’s always after he uses it,” she said.

Sam blamed Stephanie.

Dave suspected them both. Until one night he went to brush his teeth and caught Galway red-handed. He watched her swat a sponge off the window ledge and into the toilet. Then she flushed, her head circling around and around following the sponge. Dave managed to scoop it out of the water at the last moment.

It explained both the clogged toilet and all the little things they were missing: bobby pins, toothpaste tops, a bottle of Aspirin.

He cleared off the top of the tank. And the window ledge. He instructed everyone not to leave anything on the edge of the sink.

Then Arthur became her accomplice—bringing her things. One night after supper Dave caught Arthur mooching toward the bathroom with the TV remote hidden in his jowls.

The family began closing the bathroom door. For a few weeks Galway sat and stared at the closed door in indignation. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would sit in front of it and yowl. But they didn’t give in.

Eventually she forgot about it.

So did everyone else.

Which is why no one thought to tell Dave’s cousin Brenda that she should keep the upstairs bathroom door shut the one night she slept in the house alone.

Like Dave, Brenda was born in the village of Big Narrows, Cape Breton. She came to Toronto in September, for the first time ever. Against her will.

Brenda and her father, Ralph, drive the one and only cab in The Narrows. Ralph drives the morning shift, Brenda takes over in the late afternoon and will answer calls all night. In Big Narrows that means her last call can come anywhere between eight in the evening and dawn—which doesn’t bother Brenda. When she doesn’t have a fare she goes home and watches TV—or plays bridge on the Internet. Everyone knows where to find her if they need a cab.

Brenda is famous in The Narrows because she played center on the town’s Bantam hockey team when she was in grade eight—something that no girl had ever done before. It was the last time the team had made it to the provincial championships in Antigonish.

Brenda could do all sorts of things that other girls couldn’t do. Of course the other girls didn’t have the advantage of having their mother skip town with a member of the Norwegian merchant marine, as Happy McDougall did when her daughter was eight years old. Certainly the other girls didn’t have the advantage of growing up under the baleful eyes of the three McDougall boys—Collum, Damon and Doug.

And so Brenda came to play hockey, and could put a worm on a hook with the ease most girls gave to tying shoes—reaching right into a can of worms with her whole hand. She knew about all sorts of boy things, like ball bearings and the difference between grease and oil.

When she was twelve Brenda discovered the Jumping Cliff behind the Macaulays’ farm. The moss-covered cliff face was at least twenty-five feet high. It was Brenda who worked out that if you stood at the top of the cliff you could grab the branches of any one of the hundreds of maple saplings that grew along the cliff base. And it was Brenda who discovered that if you grabbed on to one of the saplings and stepped off the granite rock, your body weight would tip the sapling over and you could ride it to the ground.

Brenda learned this by accident on a Saturday afternoon she and Collum had gone trouting at the Macaulays’ pond. On their way home Collum said he was going to cut off all her hair and she started to run through the woods to get away from him. When she came to the cliff face she did what Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did when they were cornered on a cliff in much the same predicament—she launched herself into space. She grabbed one of the saplings on the way past. It was more of an afterthought than anything—her only real thought was keeping herself, and her hair, out of Collum’s hands. She was amazed at how smoothly she rode the sapling to the base of the cliff. Collum, who watched her with equal amazement, tried to follow her down, unfortunately choosing a sapling that he thought looked like a safer bet—an older tree with a thicker trunk. Instead of bending gracefully under his weight and lowering him to the forest floor, Collum’s tree waved back and forth like a metronome and then returned to the upright, leaving him treed like a frightened cat—too far from the cliff to jump back and clutching branches that were too small to climb down. When Brenda appreciated Collum’s dilemma, she stopped running and walked back to the tree. She climbed onto a huge rock and listened to him bellow at her until she got bored. Then she went home and had lunch. She returned three hours later with a rope, only agreeing to chuck it to Collum and pull him back to the cliff after he had given his solemn promise to leave her hair alone.

Brenda waited two months before she showed the Jumping Cliff to anyone else. She spent hours there all alone—dropping gracefully from the cliff top to the forest floor. She learned by hard experience that if you chose a too-small tree you would crash to the ground as if you were riding an out-of-control elevator. And she learned that if you reached for a sapling that was growing too far from the base of the cliff and pulled it back and jumped, it would whiplash you like a catapult and you would fly through the air with alarming speed.

She found a beech sapling that was just far enough from the base, and one week she used it to launch every boy on her hockey team off the cliff—bringing them up there one by one and coaxing them onto the tree—
You aren’t chicken, are you?
Watching them shoot through the forest like screaming cannonballs.

She was furious at them because they had been too embarrassed to let her play in the provincial championships. She was their second-best center, good enough for games on the island, good enough to help win them a berth in the provincials, but they were too embarrassed to travel to Antigonish with a girl on their team, so she had to stay home. They lost every game, which served them right, but she wasn’t happy until she launched each and every one of them off that beech.

After she had got that out of her system, she used to go up there with gangs of boys every spring, when the trees were full of sap and flexible—Brenda and the boys climbing the cliff and flying through the forest like monkeys.

You couldn’t help loving a girl like that. Well, not love. No one ever tried to kiss her or anything. They liked her too much. It would be like kissing your best friend. Like kissing your sister.

She was accepted at two universities—Mount Allison and Dalhousie. She chose Mount Allison because Halifax was too big. Her father drove her to Sackville in the taxi. She got a small apartment not far from Mel’s Tea Room. She wrote to her father once a week and said she was happy. But she was home before Thanksgiving.

Her heart turned to stone on the morning of her first class—sitting in a cavernous lecture hall surrounded by a hundred people she didn’t know. It gave her the creeps. Back home she had rarely been in a room where there was
one
person she didn’t know. At least in The Narrows she knew who was decent and who was a jerk. It could take years to figure that out just for her English class. She went home and said university wasn’t for her, and she started driving the cab at night.

She wouldn’t have come to Toronto on her own accord. Brenda gets nervous whenever she has to go to
Halifax
. But she won a return ticket in the Elks’ meat raffle—it was third prize. First prize was a quarter side of beef dressed and freezer wrapped, second prize was a bottomless coffee cup at June’s Cafe. Just her luck to win
third prize
—a return flight to Toronto.

Whenever Brenda thought about going to Toronto, she started to sweat—all the traffic and people pushing around you. You could get swallowed up in a city like that and never be heard of again. Brenda imagined there were plenty of people from Cape Breton who had gone to Toronto for a visit and were now walking around aimlessly, looking for a way home. Too polite to ask directions.

One night she was lying in bed worrying, tossing and turning, and thinking of all the things that could go wrong, when the worst of all possible thoughts occurred to her. She phoned her father in a panic. “What if I like it?”

She wouldn’t have gone if she could have got out of it. But everyone knew she had won the ticket. She landed at Pearson Airport at nine in the morning, exhausted from the effort it took to get the plane off the ground. She had no idea flying was so tiring.

She arrived so exhausted that the next morning, a Saturday, when Dave and Morley announced they had planned an overnight trip to Stratford, to the theatre, Brenda asked if they would mind if she stayed home, alone.

She wasn’t crazy about the idea of being alone in the city, especially at night. But she wasn’t crazy about getting back into a car either. The drive from the airport had been fearsome. Cars and trucks hurtling at them from every direction. There were eighteen lanes of traffic.

“I’ll feed the cat,” she said. “I’ll walk the dog.”

Arthur had taken to her instantly—following her around from room to room, settling at her feet. When she said the magic
walk
word, Arthur cocked his ears and sighed, his tail bouncing off the floor. Brenda reached down and ran her hand down the back of his neck.

“Good dog,” she said. She found him comforting.

Galway, on the other hand, had given her a wide berth. Brenda had never been crazy about cats. The feeling seemed mutual.

She listened politely when Dave gave her directions to a neighborhood cafe.

“It has a patio,” said Dave. “It’s a perfect place to sit and watch the city go by.”