Sourmouth (2 page)

Aside from the lackluster introduction to the island,
the duo found the drive inwards to be rather relaxing. While the car had no
modern accessories it did have an old cassette deck, which was broken and
automatically played an old Tom Waits tape whenever the car was started. The
player was also missing its operating panel, which meant that the tape couldn’t
be stopped, flipped or ejected. It would run to the end of its ribbon on the
one side, click, rewind and repeat. Happily it wasn’t disco that they had to
endure in a never-ending loop.

The island itself was undoubtedly beautiful with its
lush vistas and old world charm. The roads were a bumpy method of travel as the
pavement quickly gave away without warning to dirt roads and wooden bridges as
they travelled towards the North East of the island where they were booked to
stay in the
Olde
Cove Bed & Breakfast.

It was about a twenty minute drive from the docks
around the edge of the island and up a slight incline before they managed to
reach their intended destination. The hotel was a small brownstone house
overlooking a small bluff above the water. The
Olde
Cove was two stories tall plus a basement and an attic. It was a typical
converted home-to-business property that most likely still belonged to the
family that lived there. The front was decorated with hanging potted plants and
wrapped vines, making the house look fresher than its foundation told. Its name
was tackily perched above the doorway in large sundrenched red and blue
lettering that clashed with the otherwise naturalistic motif. By the design and
age of the thing it must have been put up sometime around the Second World War.

To the right of the hotel was an even quainter little
restaurant that possibly served as the breakfast portion of the B&B. To the
left was a small art gallery that had signage boasting about its Squamish
collection. Neither of the two were much in terms of being an island
attraction. But they figured that it was better to have something than nothing
at all.

The couple parked the car in the designated area to
the front of the hotel and stepped out onto the gravel to look at their
surroundings further.

“What do you think?” Violet asked, preparing herself
for his typical reaction of hating everything about anything.

“I have to admit that it’s not half bad,” he replied
to his wife’s shock. “That is if the ground doesn’t give way and drop us into
the Howe Sound I think I could actually grow to like it.”

She grinned as she gently prodded his ribs with her
sharp elbows, “Look at you being all flexible”.

Riley
swivelled
on the rocks
underneath his feet and swung his hand so that his palm slapped stingingly
across her left ass cheek, “Just you wait until we get into our hotel room and
I’ll show you a thing or two about being flexible”. And with that they
proceeded to haul their luggage up the creaking wooden steps.

The
Olde
Cove’s front door
was made of a heavy, dark wood with decorative glass which gave entry to the
equally ornate foyer. Surrounded by deep browns and shining silvers, the couple
felt like they had stepped into a miniature history museum rather than a bed
and breakfast. Fancy vases stood on faux marble columns, oak and leather chairs
lined up against the walls in alternating sequences of different shades, needlessly
complex candle holders sprinkled about on the walls with unlit candles half
melted inside. While the exterior went for a humble design, the inside strove
for elegant.

Violet felt particularly out of place with her
punk-rock styling as she stood almost helplessly waiting for something to
happen. While he might have felt almost as lost, Riley at least could have
passed as one of the townies. Just before either of them could attempt to call
out for some sort of service their silent request was answered.

“Welcome!” bellowed a deep voice from somewhere up
above.

Both of the
Tylers
were
surprised to find it coming from a portly woman in her 50s standing at the top
of the carpeted burgundy stairs just to the side of the entrance way.

“How may I help you this fine day?”

The woman was wearing what could only be described as
a flapper’s dress for the plus-sized woman. It was made of red satin with
dangling shiny silver tassels with black embroidered beads and fringe. In her
puffed up hair was a large white feather that seemed to dance as she made her
way slowly down the steps.

With a beaming smile that gave away her amusement
Violet spoke first, “Hi there...we’re here to check in. We’ve got a reservation
for the week under the name of ‘Tyler’”.

Upon hearing that informational tidbit the waitress’s
face contorted into a frown, her heavy makeup making her look a bit like a sad
clown, “I’m sorry, I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but I don’t believe
we have a reservation under that name. From what I’ve been told from our
regular front door concierge...we’re currently all booked up for the next three
days in the very least”.

Violet’s own face quickly tried to mimic that of the
nameless jester before her, “What do you mean that you don’t have any more reservations?
Can you please go and check to make sure? Maybe somebody put it under ‘Riley’
or ‘Violet’?”

The woman raised her hands up to her sides in either
exaggerated agitation or for balance as she swiftly waddled into a small side
parlour
. At a tall wooden podium she obtained a thin red
booklet that she opened up to the exact desired page with obvious expertise.

Riley walked forward and hovered over the woman as she
scanned the pages filled with names and dates, “I made the reservation weeks
ago myself. I was told by the woman on the phone that it was confirmed”.

The makeup drenched woman raised her right hand to her
temple and shook her head as if freeing herself of mental cobwebs, “I’m sorry,
but I’ve got no record of it. There must have been a mistake somewhere along
the lines. The booking must have gotten lost or cancelled since then. I’m
sorry, but there’s nothing I can do”.

The couple stared at each other in disbelief,
subconsciously both shifting their luggage in their hands, as if to say “I want
to put this down now”.

“This isn’t acceptable. We booked our room weeks ago.
We were told that all we had to do was show up and pay when we arrived,” Violet
bellowed.

The shaken woman just shook her head nervously, “I am
truly sorry but by now someone is already checked into whatever room you
supposedly booked and there isn’t another available”.

“It isn’t ‘supposedly’, it simply is. And instead of
telling us that you are sorry you should be kicking out whoever is laying in
our fucking bed,” Violet roared, shaking her bag as she talked.

The woman vigorously shook her head again hard enough
that she risked pulling a muscle, coupled with the feather wiggling above the
choice of action made her look like she was an irritated chicken, “I’m sorry,
but I cannot. The people there and in every room have already paid and are
mostly made up of our regulars. At this time of year there’s only a few places
open to serve visitors, so if I turned away any of them, there’d be nowhere for
them to go. And next time they would choose not to do business with the
Olde
Cove. I’m sorry, but I cannot”.

Riley closed his eyes in order to try to calm himself.
There was one important tidbit of information in that barrage of excuses, “You
said that there would be nowhere for ‘them’ to go if you kicked them out? What
does that mean for us if they can’t find another hotel?”

At this point the painted flapper looked as if she
might start bawling at any moment, “Sir, without a reservation I doubt you will
find another place to stay...”

#

“Damn it all to hell!” Riley roared as they stormed
out of the hotel and down the creaking wooden steps to their car, “We need this
like we need sperm-
flavoured
ice cream. How can
everything go wrong for us within the span of two hours? Have we offended some
sort of god? Would everything suddenly look up if I slaughtered a goat?”

Violet tossed her luggage into the back of the rental
car, “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong. But I do know that not
everything has gone south. I guess. I mean, we both got here alright, didn’t
we?”

“I’m pretty sure that you vomited on a duck on the way
in,” Riley retorted.

“We got our rental car...” she continued before he was
able to interject further.

“Which will probably have its brakes fail just as
we’re coming down a winding road on the mountain. We’ll fly off the side and
end up in the ocean like we’re in an action movie”.

“Fuck. Ok...” she said in frustration as she slapped
her thighs with her hands, “we have each other. For what it’s worth, we’re
still together instead of suffering somewhere all alone”.

Now as much as he wanted to continue to vent, Riley
was stopped dead in his tracks with her sappiness, which honestly he saw as a
cheating way to try and calm him down.

“Did...did you want to grab a bite to eat? I think we
could both use something to help ease our nerves. And you don’t even have
anything left in your stomach anyway,” he said with a defeated huff.

Violet just nodded her head, first in acknowledgement
and then towards the eatery just to the side of the
Olde
Cove.

The restaurant was a novelty joint called The Red
Wolf’s Choice. It was essentially a small, rectangular shaped stone box that
looked like it fell out of a 1950s children’s cartoon. It seemed to be the type
of place that kids would have gone after school to get thick malted milkshakes
and break out in song and dance numbers. The worn walls were painted over with
an obnoxious bright yellow with thin red strips of lightning along the sides,
all of which pointed to just adjacent of the entrance at a large cartoon wolf
with a chunk of meat and bone between his jaws.

The name of the diner sat on top of the roof, jotting
outward to the right side with an old Christmas wreath hung over the letter “f”
in “wolf”, most likely a lucky toss from some bored teenager. The front windows
looked like they hadn’t been washed in a year and the glass in the entrance
door was starting to crack from the bottom up. Somehow the duo didn’t see the
meal coming from this place as the start of their tide turning.

But inward they went to find that the interior décor
was fashioned much like the kitschy exterior. The walls were painted a fainter
yellow than the outside was, as not to irritate the people who were tolerant
enough to sit inside and sip their coffee there. Along the walls were tightly
grouped booths for four with bright red pleather seats with what appeared to be
sparse plastic green trees strapped to the wall behind them in order to give
the appearance of people sitting in the woods. It clearly wasn’t working towards
what it was meant to but the owners couldn’t be
arsed
to care.

The couple couldn’t locate a “please wait to be
seated” sign so they opted to help themselves to a seat, even though it made
them look like entitled snobs just rushing to be served. But they figured that
was the better option instead of looking like fools just standing around for no
reason for someone who might never come.

Quickly though they were flanked by an older Caucasian
woman holding an unlit cigarette between her fingers and a pad of paper, “Hi
there folks, my name is Helen, I’ll be helping you today”.

The woman was a bit shorter than Violet and was
probably in her early-sixties. She was noticeably slim in her old grey Sunday
church dress that was miraculously wrinkle-free. She wore a set of gold and
silver rings on each of her hands, which gave away nothing in terms of clues as
to whether she was married. Her hair more white than grey and was worn high in
a bun behind her ears, still in curlers. As the waitress bent down to hand the
Tylers
their menus, Violet couldn’t help but notice the
tired smile plastered across her face that read how much she hated the job and
all of the people around her but had to pretend like she cared for the sake of
a
paycheque
.

The waitress started to rattle off special daily
options with as much zeal as her soul could manage having done it countless
times before, “Your specials today are the Canine Chowder, the Ravenous Retro
Burger, the-”

Violet interrupted with a small smile and sympathetic
eyes, “We’re fine without hearing the specials if you’d rather not bother”.

With a visible deflation the waitress’s arms fell to
her side, causing her to nearly drop her other menus to the ground, “Thank you.
If I need to read out these godforsaken specials one more time I’m going to
burn someone with my fag. Please let me know when you do actually need
anything”. And with that almost psychopathic confession she departed to take a
seat in a corner booth, with her head rested upon her crossed arms on the table
as she played with her cigarette.

“I remember being a waitress in high school. It’s one
of the worst jobs on this planet aside from the people who clean up crime
scenes and telemarketers,” Violet confessed as she laid her menu down on the
table without even bothering to open it.