Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (13 page)

Dave shrank from the edge of the bed, out of Arthur’s reach.

And the phone kept ringing.

Dave wondered, as he groped in the darkness, why this should be so difficult. To answer a telephone in the night. As he struggled closer to consciousness, it occurred to him that whoever was calling at this time was unlikely to be calling with good news.

A spasm of anxiety gripped him as his hand landed on the phone.

He lifted the receiver.

The room was suddenly and dramatically quiet. Arthur was heading for the stairs, glancing nervously over his shoulder, on his way to check the sofa. Morley was awake and sitting up, leaning on her elbow.

Dave chirped cheerfully into the phone. He tried to sound as if everything was okay. As if all he had been doing at four in the morning was sitting around waiting for someone to call.

“Hi?” he chirped.

There was no one there.

Just the unmistakable hiss of a long-distance line.

“Hello?” said Dave, quieter, his heart sinking.

Something horrible, he thought, had happened in Cape Breton. Someone was calling from Cape Breton with horrible news. His mother?

“Dave?” said Morley, reaching out her hand.

And then there was a voice on the phone, a voice with a British accent. “Hello? Hello. Is anyone there? HELLO. I’m coming to town in three weeks. HELLO. I was hoping I could stay with you. HELL-OH.”

“Hello?” said Dave.

“I’m terribly sorry,” said the voice, “but I can’t hear a BLESSED word you’re saying.”

Dave said, “Who is this?” and the voice, which was a woman’s voice, said, “I CAN’T HEAR A BLESSED WORD.”

And the line went dead.

Dave hung up. He looked at Morley and he said, “I think cousin Dorothy is coming to visit.”

Cousin Dorothy, from the village of Hawkhurst, South Kent, England. Dorothy who shouts instead of speaks. Overweight and overbearing Dorothy.

Dorothy is the warden of South Kent. She has a desk on the second floor of the Hawkhurst Post Office, where she fields complaints from irate hikers about farmers who have let their crops overgrow the public footpaths. When a complaint lands on Dorothy’s desk she marches off to the offending field, and Lord pity the farmer who gets in her way.

“I sue farmers,” she says. “I’m a right bitch.”

Which is not completely true. Dorothy has
never
sued a farmer. She has never had to. The other wardens write letters to
their
farmers, and if the letters are ignored, initiate legal proceedings.

Dorothy has never needed to turn to the law, because Dorothy’s farmers are afraid of her.

Early in Dorothy’s tenure as warden, a farmer pastured his bull in an effort to discourage hikers from crossing his fields. Dorothy showed up after a few days, struggled over the stile in her wellies, marched up to the bull and clubbed it between the eyes with a cricket bat. The bull sank to its knees. Dorothy stood in the field, whacking it whenever it tried to get up. She stayed there until the stunned farmer appeared.

He looked at Dorothy and his cowering bull and said, “Wot’s this then?” And Dorothy told him he had twenty minutes to get his bull back in the barn or she’d be clubbing
him
. Word of that sort of thing tends to get around a farming community.

Dorothy has never married and lives in a flat beside the butcher’s. She is a fierce person, for whom the winds of passion eternally blow. A fervent monarchist, she began collecting royal china when she was a teenager. She specialized in Margaret. She amassed a mammoth collection of Margaret teacups, ashtrays and biscuit tins that became known in certain circles. Until Margaret divorced Lord Snowdon, and an indignant Dorothy sold her collection at auction.

She continued to defend the royals, however. When Mount-batten, her cat, died, she rushed out and bought two corgis. She named them Elizabeth and Philip. Then when the Camilla tapes were leaked, she washed herself clean of the lot of them. It was over in a weekend. She lugged her china to the dump, had her corgis put to sleep and began talking about Diana as if she were a potted plant.
If her IQ was ten points lower,
she was fond of saying,
they’ d have to water her
. To her credit she didn’t change her tune after the accident.

She filled the royal void by campaigning against the European Union and playing the soccer pools. She read all the football columnists in the
Daily Mirror
and subscribed to a number of dubious tip sheets.

She lost interest in football when she began ringing the bells at the village church. There were three other bell ringers in Hawkhurst. They practiced Wednesday nights and performed on alternating Sundays. In the evenings she wrote lengthy rebuttals to the vicar’s sermons, which she left on the pulpit each week after practice.

Dorothy was not technically Dave’s cousin, but she was the only relative he knew in Britain, and it seemed important to maintain the contact. He visited her in the early seventies when he was traveling with a disastrous James Brown European tour. She turned down his invitation to the show, sniffing when he offered. He took the train down from London, and they met for tea and sausage rolls. She made it abundantly clear that the idea of “America,” as she kept referring to Canada, held no interest for her whatsoever.

But Dave kept in touch, phoning whenever he was in England, and when he and Morley were to be married they sent her an invitation.

She didn’t reply, but three months after they were married, a package arrived from Kent, a royal teacup, smashed into three pieces. It crossed Dave’s mind that the cup might have been broken before it was mailed.

“I can’t imagine,” said Dave the morning after her call, “why she’d be coming.”

She arrived three weeks later, on the fourth of August, on a charter flight that landed at four-thirty in the morning.

Dave was at the airport to pick her up.

Cousin Dorothy, now in her seventies. Tweed jacket, ivory blouse, wool skirt, sensible shoes. Wearing a pair of Mountie earrings. She was coming to Canada to attend a convention, a worldwide get-together for fans of the Canadian television show
Due South
.

They were meeting for four days at a downtown hotel.

“I didn’t know they got that show in Britain,” said Morley.

The first thing Dorothy said to Dave, as she stormed past the airport security guards, was not
Hello
or
It was good of you to meet me at the airport, in the middle of the night
—the first words she uttered when they met on the arrivals level at five-ten on that Tuesday morning in August were “After lunch we’re going to meet the deaf wolf.”

In
Due South,
the Mountie hero, Constable Benton Fraser, has a deaf, junk-food-eating pet wolf—played by a husky.

Dorothy was still talking about the wolf ten minutes later, after they had talked their way past the security guards and back into the luggage area to fetch her suitcase.

“His name is DIEFENBAKER,” said Dorothy.

They were standing beside the carousel, waiting for her suitcase. GREEN, she had said.

“That one?” asked Dave, pointing hopefully at a small green suitcase rounding the corner.

Dorothy shook her head. No.

“DIEFENBAKER is his TELEVISION name,” said Dorothy. “The crew calls him O.T.”

“What?” said Dave.

“O.T.,” said Dorothy. “That’s what the crew calls the wolf. The dog, actually.”

“What about that one?” said Dave, pointing at the next green bag.

Dorothy shook her head again.

“O.T. is short for Overtime,” said Dorothy.

Then she interrupted herself. “THERE,” she barked. “THAT ONE!” She was pointing at a huge
red
suitcase coming toward them. It was hanging half off the conveyor.

“THAT ONE,” she said again, bouncing up and down.

“I thought you said green,” said Dave.

“I know my own suitcase,” said Dorothy, punching Dave’s shoulder as the bag rolled by them. “GET IT.”

Dave grabbed the bag and jerked it off the belt. It landed at his feet with a thud.

“Careful,” said Dorothy.

When he tried to pick it up, he swayed unsteadily.

“Which way?” said Dorothy over her shoulder. She was already walking. Barrelling off in the wrong direction, heading back toward her plane.

Dave got her turned around and they set off for the car, Dorothy two steps ahead and going maniacally on about the dog, Dave struggling along, his left arm extended from his body like a tightwire artist’s, counterbalancing the heavy bag that was bouncing off his right calf with each step.

“The production crew gave him the nickname,” said Dorothy.

They were halfway up a flight of stairs that seemed to stretch forever. Dave was paying more attention to the alarming acceleration of his heart than he was to Dorothy. He could feel the blood surging through his ears. He was wondering if he should stop and rest.

“O.T.,” said Dorothy, “is short for Overtime. The husky they used for the first two seasons was so dumb it bungled every stunt. So they were always doing extra takes. Which meant lots of overtime for them. Let me take that.”

She plucked the bag from Dave and swung it effortlessly up the rest of the staircase.

“Where’s the car?” she asked at the top.

Registration for the four-day Friends of Due South convention didn’t begin until that afternoon. It was only seven when Dave and Dorothy arrived home.

Morley said, “I’ll fix tea.”

Dave said, “I’ll show you your room.”

Stephanie was sleeping with Sam for the duration of Dorothy’s ten-day visit.

“WE ARE GOING TO MEET THE DEAF WOLF AT LUNCH,” said Dorothy to Stephanie as she dropped onto her bed.

“Oh,” said Stephanie, who had given up her bedroom under protest.

Fifteen minutes later everyone was sitting around the breakfast table.

“I WANT TO GO SHOPPING FIRST,” said Dorothy, who, unlike Dave, didn’t seem any worse the wear from the night’s flight.

When Morley set the mug of tea in front of Dorothy, bag in, Dorothy pointed at it in horror.

“What’s that little bag?” she said. “What’s THAT?”

“It’s a tea bag,” said Morley.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said Dorothy. “Tea doesn’t come in bags. Tea comes in a tea caddy.”

“A tea caddy,” said Morley. “What’s a tea caddy?”

“A thing you put TEA leaves in,” said Dorothy, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms.

Dave went to the corner store to buy loose tea. Morley went to the basement in search of an old Brown Betty.

“And a tea cozy,” said Dorothy after Morley. “We’ll need a tea cozy.”

“And a cup and saucer,” she added, more to herself than to anyone else.

Then she looked up and smiled at Sam and Stephanie.

“I want to get one of those hats that Canadian snowboarder wore at the Olympics,” she said.

“He was disqualified,” said Sam. “For drugs.”

“For
marijuana,
” corrected Dorothy, reaching for a piece of dry toast. “Marijuana would
not
have helped his performance
one bit
.”

Stephanie smiled at her aunt for the first time. “I’ll take you shopping,” she said.

When they were on the subway, Stephanie asked, “What is a tea caddy anyway?”

“It’s a metal tin with a hinged lid,” said Dorothy. “And a little silver spoon that says Best Wishes from Skegness.”

An hour later Dorothy and Stephanie were standing in front of a mirror in a downtown clothing store. They each had a Canadian Olympic team hat pulled tightly down on their head. There was a bulge of red skin, like a rim, protruding from under Dorothy’s hat and running across her forehead.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Great,” said Stephanie.

Dorothy was scowling. She was alternately fiddling with the angle of the hat and the angle of the mirror.