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A PLACE
OF STRANGERS

Geoffrey Seed

Prol
o
gue

It will take Ella Virbalis an hour and forty minutes to get home from downtown
Winnipeg
where the skies are greyer than stone and there is ice in the air.

One hundred minutes. Not long. But time enough for a man to die an ugly death.

At 4 pm, Ella pulls on the green felt hat and thick woollen coat she bought last week and takes Mr Wilson’s letters – stamped with the Queen of England’s head – to Josie in the mail office then rides the clanking wire cage elevator to the showroom three floors below.        

She leaves by the store’s front entrance, waving goodbye to the salesmen amid their walnut bedroom suites and plush chesterfields, and walks head down against a biting prairie wind to the coach terminal on
Graham Avenue
.

There is still a moment to ring Yanis from the phone booth outside and tell him she is on her way. Yanis sounds happy enough, maybe a little tired after his shift at the railroad depot but he tells her he’s OK. See you soon. That is what he says. Those are his words.

Ella joins a queue of shoppers, all wrapped tight against the weather. The Grey Goose coach draws to the sidewalk. Ella hands her ticket to the driver. She sits on her own towards the back, counting her blessings. When all is said and done, they are not doing badly. Immigrants expect to work harder than most. But getting a job as a filing clerk, even for three days a week, means they can now afford the little luxuries they had done without before. They are even having a vacation at New Year, heading south across the border to the desert sunshine of
Phoenix
.  

She watches a few passengers leave at the Brunkild stop. Then the coach heads out along Highway 3, cutting through the unrelieved plain of wheat which bends and sways to the ends of the curving earth.

Ella gets off on
Main Street
in Carman - a woman of fifty winters with the blotched pudding face of a kulak on the make and running to fat. She passes working men coming home in heavy check shirts, parking their Buicks and Plymouths on asphalt drives where kids play ball and jays argue in the elms.

Yanis will be reading his Free Press by now…or making her coffee or digging over his vegetables in the back yard.
Rosa
should be home from school, too.

Ella walks up the wooden steps to her front porch, unlocks the white door, newly painted, and shouts to Yanis from the hall. He does not reply. There is no aroma of coffee brewing. And
Rosa
’s coat is not on her peg either, though it is coming six.

She fills the kettle and switches on the electric stove. There is no need but she re-arranges the plates on the shelf above then peers over the blue gingham curtains into the yard. Yanis is nowhere to be seen. His newspaper lies folded on the kitchen table. Angry Khrushchev Warns The West. The picture of his pig’s snout of a face fills her with all the fear she prayed they had escaped for ever.

Ella goes back into the hall and the connecting door to the garage. That is where Yanis must be - messing underneath the car, covered in oil, unable to hear.

The garage door is slightly open. The air comes cool to her face and smells…smells of gasoline, maple logs, paint. There is something else, too. Something unpleasant. Drains maybe. She cannot sure.

It is his slippers she sees first…her present to him last Christmas. Plaid slippers bought from Eatons. Imported all the way from
England
. Not cheap. Those are what she sees now - Yanis’s slippers, lying untidy on the floor by an overturned crate with empty bottles of
Whitehorse
beer half falling out.

Ella looks up as she knows she must. And there he is - Yanis in his socks and dirty overalls, turning slowly from a rope looped round a rafter and biting into the flesh of his red raw neck. His eyes are open but blank. Urine drips from his turn-ups. He has fouled himself like a terrified child.

Ella’s stomach heaves. Her hand goes to her mouth. She lurches back to the kitchen. The kettle hisses steam into the room. She pulls open a drawer and snatches the bread knife. She hurries back to the garage and forces herself to stand on the beer crate gallows. The body sways into her, heavy like a punch bag. His stiffening hand touches the inside of her leg with grotesque intimacy. He stinks of death and shit and she wants to vomit but has to stab and saw at the rope above his head till it frays and gives way and he crumples to the concrete like a puppet.

And in the unnatural silence of that moment she always feared might come, Ella Virbalis begins to shake uncontrollably. She is consumed by a single dread truth she must try to keep to herself like so much else in their lives.

Not in a thousand years would Yanis Virbalis have slipped a noose around his own neck. This was no suicide.

Never…never…never.

Chapte
r
One

‘Three minutes to air, studio. Three minutes.’

Even from the gallery above, McCall sensed everyone’s edginess that night – the floor manager counting down to transmission, the tech crew, the vision mixers in the director’s box.

A chill of unspoken menace had blown in from the slicked black streets outside with the men now watching from the wings, jackets unbuttoned and lumpy with guns. Only one person seemed unaffected – the Prime Minister herself.

Margaret Thatcher commanded the still, calm centre, waiting amid a serpent’s nest of camera cables for her cue to address the nation. Barely a day before, she had stepped defiant from the ruins of the hotel where she and her cabinet were meant to die by terrorist bomb. Here was Boudicca and Joan of Arc made flesh again, gazing into her place in history, a glorious imperatrix ranged between her people and the murdering enemies within.

‘Two minutes, everyone. Two minutes.’

McCall saw the Director General and two fawning BBC governors have their passes checked by the same unsmiling Special Branch cop he tried shmoozing earlier.

‘All you need to know chum is I’m the guy who shoots the guy who shoots her. Now piss off, I’m working.’

The studio sparks glanced at the gallery clock then quickly adjusted his lighting rig. Sound wanted a final check on Thatcher’s microphone for level.

‘Prime Minister, would you care to say what you’ll be having for supper?’

‘A very large Scotch.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Another one, I expect.’

‘That’s excellent, Prime Minister. Thank you.’

McCall moved back to the control box. All the monitors displayed the same unforgiving close-up of Thatcher’s avian features…the raptor’s eyes, the turkey neck.

‘Quiet, studio. Going in thirty seconds…’

McCall knew serious
Westminster
watchers who thought Margaret Thatcher alluringly sexy. He didn’t get it. But then, McCall had no mother so couldn’t become

Oedipal. His confusions were not put to bed so readily.

‘…and cue Prime Minister.’

*

Bea was always uneasy about going into the attics of Garth Hall. The poorly lit rooms did not bother her any more than the steep stairs, though the frailties of age were taking their toll. It was more the feeling of entering a crypt, a chill reliquary where the paper remains of those long gone were slowly disintegrating into the dust of a past waiting to claim her, too. The buckets beneath the leaking roof had to be checked regularly or they would overflow and ruin the bedroom ceilings beneath. But the weather was turning dry and cold so she had nothing to empty. The gardener said they might be in for a white Christmas.

Bea paused before leaving. There was no sound save for the sigh of timbers shifting one against another under the imperceptible weight of time. Her eyes took in the silt of discarded possessions and all the pieces of furniture neither she nor Francis had wanted after they married. She opened the drawer of a heavy Edwardian sideboard and a hundred years and more of their family histories lay before her – copperplate letters of love and war, mutiny and trade, each full of hopes and plans and the scuttlebutt of daily existence. There were photographs, too, curled into tight little tubes. Bea flattened a few out, pictures of soldiers and sailors and those who would grieve when they did not come back.

But who these people were, what their lives had been, she had no notion any more. Even for her, they were just memories in the minds of those who had joined them since. Only Bea and Francis survived from their ancient lineages of warriors and adventurers and people who did their duty, whatever the cost.

After them – what? The days of their years, their passions and secrets…all this would slip from recall and there would be no trace of their passage to eternity.

She picked up one of the letters and its fibres fell to pieces as soft as snow. What had these ghosts left behind? Maybe a fingerprint of whoever had licked the pale red stamps in
Bombay
or
Benares
and posted their dreams across the world to the house where they were born and their spirits would return.

She thought of how little time was given, what little mark we make. Then she heard her husband shouting from downstairs.

‘Bea…Bea? Where are you? Someone’s stolen my keys.’

‘I won’t be long. Give me a moment.’

‘We must lock up or else someone’ll be breaking in.’

‘No, Francis. No one’s going to break in.’

*

The Prime Minister swept out of Lime Grove studios in a black Range Rover followed by another with tinted windows to hide the weaponry and field dressings inside.

A researcher suggested a drink. McCall said he was whacked. This had been a long day. They all were. But for reasons he could not fully explain, he felt an almost agoraphobic paranoia about being in a public place that night. It had struck him before, working in the tribal enclaves of
Northern Ireland
where all was tear gas and hatred and no one knew when the next car bomb would fill the gutters with blood and glass and waste. He wanted only to feel safe this night. And to lie with Evie.

He drove across
London
to the garden flat in Highgate he had not visited for weeks. Never phone, never ask, never tell – that was their arrangement. 

They had met in a bar, strangers adrift and remaindered for reasons the other did not need to know. He was not required to send flowers or give presents and Evie never questioned whether he had other such comfort women or not. Neither felt bad about using the other.

All life becomes a convenience eventually…something warm, something sweet, something to take away the bitterness of what happens. Everyone needs that. But how to keep it? That was a trick McCall had yet to learn.

He parked the Morgan and crossed the street. Evie’s light was on. He pictured her dresser and its blue and white plates, the antique sycamore table scrubbed till the grain stood proud. Her bed was brass and iron with a hard mattress and soft pillows. She answered his knock in her dressing gown. Her eyes took a moment to smile.

‘Well, well, well – ’

‘Hello, Evie.’

‘ – and there’s you fresh from consorting with the Prime Minister. I am honoured.’

‘You watched it, then?’

‘Of course. Thatcher’s a baleful old witch but she’s still a class act.’

McCall followed her indoors. She nodded to a campaign chair. He sat down as she went into the kitchen. A tape deck clicked on. Goldberg Variations. That brought back their first night. She had sat across him, hands clasped behind her head, baring breasts like bee stings and moaning till she came. He left before dawn next day, fading from her life like they’d never met, leaving no proof they ever had.

Evie returned with two heavy cut glass tumblers and a bottle of rare Bruichladdich. She poured the malt then folded herself into the corner of a low sofa.

‘So, McCall…looking for a bed for the night, are we?’

Both grinned across the bare expanse of varnished floorboards between them. Nothing more needed saying. It was possible McCall could get to love Evie’s smile – slightly asymmetrical but true and honest. Not all those who had smiled at him were that. But this was risky territory. It was safer to talk of terrorism.