Road Ends (9 page)

“Is Cora here?” Megan said, loudly, to be heard over the music.

There was no way she could have known what the girl was going to say but she did know, nonetheless.

“Who?” the girl said.

“Cora Manning,” Megan said without hope. “She lives here.”

She was suddenly so tired she was afraid she might fall down.

“Are you from the United States?” the girl asked curiously.

From somewhere inside the house someone shouted over the music, “She moved.”

Megan leaned around the girl and shouted, “Where did she go? Do you know?”

Another girl appeared. She was tall and skinny and wore glasses so big she looked like a bug, but she looked nice, Megan thought, and not as dim-witted as the first girl.

“She left a couple of weeks ago,” the second girl said. She leaned against the wall beside the door. Behind her, two bicycles were leaning against the wall too, acting as coat racks. “You a friend of hers?”

The music thumped. The singer wanted satisfaction about something and apparently couldn’t get it.

“Yes,” Megan said. “She invited me to come over. From Canada. Have you seen a suitcase?”

The girl said, “What—you mean you’ve just arrived? From Canada? Just now?”

The first girl wandered off, twitching the tiny skirt in time with the music.

“This morning,” Megan said. She felt sick. Surely no one would have stolen it. Surely they wouldn’t. “I left my suitcase here. Right here, outside the door.”

“Probably got nicked,” the girl said. “Come in, we’ll ask the others.”

There were a surprising number of others, six or seven at least. They were in a spectacularly untidy room off the hall, squashed together on a battered sofa or sprawled on cushions on the floor, watching television through a haze of cigarette smoke. It was impossible to hear what the characters on the television were saying over the pounding of the music, but it didn’t seem to worry anyone. They all looked half-asleep.

“Has anyone seen a suitcase?” the girl with the glasses shouted. Several heads turned towards them.

“Dark brown,” Megan said desperately. “And very big. Has anyone seen it?”

“Hey!” one of the boys said, focusing on her with vague interest. “How’s the war going?”

“What war?” Megan said.

He laughed. “Nice one! ‘What war?’ The little one you lot got going in Vietnam.”

“Oh,” Megan said. “I don’t know. I’m not American.”

“What are you then?” he said, sounding annoyed.

“Leave her alone, Zack,” the girl in glasses said. “She’s just arrived and she’s lost her suitcase.”

“I wondered if anyone brought it in,” Megan said. “I left it on the doorstep.” She couldn’t remember ever feeling so close to despair.

All eyes were fixed on the television. They were watching a cartoon of a dog with a ribbon on its head. The music thudded on.

“Or does anyone know where Cora Manning is?” Megan said, with no hope whatsoever.

“France,” somebody said. “She had a fight with Seb, didn’t she, Seb? So she left. To be an au pair or something.”

The girl in glasses gave Megan a little shrug and a smile of sympathy. “Sorry,” she said.

Megan didn’t know if the thumping inside her chest came from the music or her heart. She said to the girl, “Do you know a cheap hotel? Nearby? One I could walk to?”

“You can stay here if you like,” the girl said cheerfully. “There are lots of mattresses.”

“That would be … that would be … wonderful,” Megan said. “Thank you. That would be … Just for tonight—I’ll find somewhere else in the morning.”

“No hurry,” the girl said leading the way along the hall. “Stay as long as you like.”

The mattress was one of four lying on the floor in a large cold room with a light bulb dangling from the ceiling and newspapers taped over the windows. There was a stained pillow with no pillowcase and a hard hairy blanket. No sheets. Megan took off her coat and boots and skirt, lay down and covered herself with the blanket and her coat. She was cold and her hot water bottle was in the suitcase. She was also exhausted beyond the hope of sleep, but such discomforts were nothing compared with the ache inside her. She thought it would help if she were able to cry, but she hadn’t cried since she was a child and couldn’t remember how to start.

The music continued to thump and wail. From time to time there was a shriek of laughter or a sharp argument from some other part of the house. After a long while, during which Megan lay unmoving, flat on her back, staring up at the dark, the door opened and two people came in, laughing. They turned on the light and one of them said, “Oops,” and turned it off again and Megan heard them lie down on another of the mattresses and begin unmistakably to make love.

For some reason that released the tears. She cried soundlessly, the tears running down into her ears and out of them again and down onto the pillow. She cried as she hadn’t cried since she was a small child and possibly not even then. She cried for the photographs. The other contents of her suitcase were nothing, but she didn’t see how she could manage without the photographs. She needed them: they were all she had of home; they told her who she was.

She knew she was being ridiculous, that photographs were only bits of paper, but the tears rolled on. The more they rolled the more there seemed to be to cry for. She cried for her incomprehensible father behind his closed door and for her mother, who once had been the whole and sufficient centre of her life. She cried for Patrick, who loved her more than she loved him, and for Adam, whose small round weight she could still feel in her arms. She cried because everything had gone wrong and it was her own fault and she was alone in this sodden, wretched country where she didn’t know one single soul. She cried because she had no clean underwear to put on in the morning and because the people here were so peculiar and wore such ridiculous clothes and because everyone thought she was American and blamed her for the war in Vietnam. She cried because six feet away two people were making love and she simply could not imagine anyone doing such a thing, knowingly, in front of someone else. And finally she cried because she
wanted to go home to Canada, where she belonged, and knew that she would not.

She cried herself to sleep, like a child, and in the morning, when she judged by the silence that the others had either left or were intending to sleep all day, she got up and washed her face and went out to have a Chelsea bun for breakfast and buy a toothbrush and some underwear and find herself a job.

CHAPTER FIVE

Struan, January 1969

I appear to have unleashed a ghost. Since hearing my father’s voice a week ago I cannot get rid of him. I keep seeing little snapshots of him, always in a rage. Last night I woke in the small hours certain that he was standing over my bed. I switched on the bedside light and of course there was no one, but there was no question of going back to sleep so I got up and went down to the kitchen (checking under the door that the light was not on, meaning Tom was not there) and sat unable to read or even to think while the hands on the kitchen clock inched around. I kept seeing his face. He had a vertical vein in the middle of his forehead that used to swell and go purple when he was angry. I was terrified of it when I was small; I thought it might burst. That was what I kept seeing last night. My father’s face; that vein, engorged with blood.

After an hour or so the cold drove me back to bed but that was the end of sleep for the night. And today at the bank, every time there was a lull in my activities, back he came.

This evening, in the hope that it might help vanquish his image if I replaced it with my mother’s, I got out what remains of
her diaries—the ones that survived the fire. I keep them in two box files in the cupboard in my study. I read the ones from her childhood after her death but I’ve never been able to bring myself to read the rest for fear of what I might find.

Strictly speaking, only the ones from her childhood are proper diaries—notebooks in the conventional dated form. The writings from her adulthood, of which only enough to fill a slim brown folder survived, seem to be her thoughts and fears over the course of many years, scribbled on scraps of paper and tied together with coarse brown string. At times paper must have been hard to come by because many are written on pages torn from other things—the margins of the
Daily Nugget
or the
Temiskaming Speaker
, for instance—and the entries are in such a cramped, hurried hand that they speak of desperation. In some cases she has written lines on top of one another so that they are impossible to decipher. I can only think she must have written them in the dark.

That is a disturbing image: my mother in her nightgown creeping out to the kitchen in the dead of night, groping in the darkness for the newspaper and pencil she would have put aside for the purpose, spreading the paper on the kitchen table, feeling for the edge of it, blindly positioning her pencil and then writing, writing, the words pouring out.

There is no point thinking about it. Much better just to stick to the childhood diaries; they are anything but grim.

She began writing a diary on her sixth birthday, which, coincidentally, was the day her family set out for the North. Her mother gave her a hardback notebook as a birthday present and suggested she start by keeping a record of the trip. I know that because the first entry says so, in my mother’s neat, childish hand. The spelling is suspiciously good, so I imagine she had some help with that.

She told me a little about that trip. Told me in person, I mean. I remember the occasion vividly because it was on my own sixth birthday and she had just presented me with a diary of my own. No doubt she hoped that I would find it a source of pleasure in the good times and a solace in the bad as she had done, but our family circumstances at the time and my feelings about them were beyond my ability to put into words, so the diary stayed blank. I suppose you could say I am keeping one now, though that wasn’t my intention when I started writing this. I was merely hoping that the discipline of putting words down on paper would help me sort out my thoughts. I’m using an old bank ledger. It seems appropriate, somehow. “Balancing the books.”

But back to my birthday. By some fluke, my siblings—I was the third of five at that stage—were either asleep or elsewhere and it was just the two of us, which was special in itself. Mother
was darning socks. I recall watching the swift, neat movements of her hands while she talked. Every now and then she would get up to check something on the stove and each time before sitting down again she would reach behind her and press both hands into the small of her back. I remember asking if her back was hurting and her smiling at me and saying, “It’s just this baby,” and in the morning I had another sister.

That day, though, it was just the two of us and she was telling me about her own sixth birthday. I remember trying to imagine her the same age as myself and finding it impossible.

As pioneer journeys go, theirs wasn’t particularly arduous. They moved from Southern Ontario to the North, a matter of four hundred miles or so, taking days rather than weeks. But moving all your worldly goods was quite a procedure back then, especially if those goods included livestock. Transportation, where there was any, was primitive. From my mother’s entries it appears that the journey involved three trains, a steamboat and several long hauls along bush roads by horse (or ox) and cart. The diary is low on fact—place names and the like—and I wish she had recorded more description of the route, but still it gives a picture. She seems to have been principally interested in the welfare of the livestock. The entry for the sixth of June 1901, for instance—day two of the trip, in the middle of which they evidently had to change trains—reads: