She Walks in Shadows(2)

“No, not at all.”

The negation shot out before he could think.

“No.” He shrank back, appalled.

He had never ventured inside the building, not even when she was alive.

“Last night,” he blurted out, “the lights were left on? All the time, as per our instructions?”

“Everything was done to ensure her comfort,” the voice mechanically repeated.

“Of course. Yes. My Aunt Lillian will make the arrangements,” he said.

Afterwards, he went back upstairs to his small room. The news sank in at last. His hands shook. They had argued when they last met. He had been angry with her and she had wept. A harsh mechanical voice buzzed in his head. The distance they had struggled with all their lives was now made infinite by death. He took an old, brown and creased paper from his pocket. He hesitated. He examined the childish scrawls. Then he crumpled it and threw it in the bin.

He sat at his desk. He drew pen and paper towards him, and wrote. He wrote as tears blotted paper and blurred ink. He wrote with sudden and desperate furious intensity. He wrote as if words, mere inconsequential scribbles, could bridge the abyss between life and death.



“Supper!” Sarah squinted out the front door. “Come in, son.”

It was a bright, hot day, Summer 1910. The rooming house on Angell Street was far from the green shade of College Hill. The glare outside threatened to bring on one of her headaches.

She glanced at herself in the hall mirror, but was aghast at her reflection. She saw an ageing face with a wan prettiness that was fading fast. Her clothes were dowdy. Her hair was merely neat. Her hands, though, were still long and white. They, at least, were still beautiful. “If only I could have run a little business,” she said to her reflection, “I could have supported us.” A shiver ran down her spine at her own daring. She leant closer. “An interior decoration business,” she breathed. She was an accomplished painter, with an artist’s eye. She could turn any house into a stylish nest. The shiver became a frisson. She retreated in fright from herself.

Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man ….

She should have been born a boy. A man’s brain was figured differently. If she were a man, she could have taken charge of her inheritance instead of being sidelined by her sister Lillian. As it was, the money vanished when her father died, like a malignant conjuring trick. It was no use wishing. Lillian would never let her work for a living. She was more frightened of Lillian than dying.

She hesitated at the threshold, shading her eyes against the harsh light outside. A slow throb built behind her temples. What was the boy doing? He had such terrible nightmares when he overexerted himself. She had taken him out of school as study took its toll on his delicate health. If he had gone far in this heat, he would be sleepless for weeks.

Anger had bubbled in her ever since her father died and it was decided that only the sale of the house could give them anything on which to live. Now the knot of anger in her belly twisted tight, as though the boy’s absence were a purposeful insult. There was a straight line drawn between the boy and the grandfather, which gave distance and death equal weight. They had always had an understanding she could not fathom. In her traveling salesman husband’s absence — philanderer, snob, spineless, whore — her father had spoiled his grandson, told him stories, given the boy the black cat, then given it such a vulgar name.

She had never liked that cat. The one blessing out of all that loss was that the rooming house would not let them keep it. She arranged for it to be drowned, although she told her son it ran off.

She had married beneath her and got what she deserved. Her husband was absent to the end, locked away in Butler Hospital with that disgusting disease that she could not name, not even to herself and never to the boy. No, the son was told his father suffered from nervous exhaustion. The traveling salesman reaped the dirt he had sowed. He died a helpless paralytic, his brain tunnelled through and through by disease, as if by worms, the bones of his face crumbling and melting away.

She bit her lips down hard over the scream, shoved it down hard, but it bobbed right back up with redoubled force. It threatened to burst from her skin. “Your supper’s getting cold!” she called.

She took a few steps outside. Her son might have gone up to the observatory. The astronomers had made a pet of him. She was so proud. Why, he studied the stars. He told her he was going to be an astronomer when he grew up. He wrote charts and scrawled calculations that made her head ache with their strange patterns. She carefully preserved even the ones he abandoned and crumpled up.

She squinted up and down the street. Some children, walking home from school, looked at her and laughed. The mocking sound swung and skittered in the summer heat. It echoed in her hurting head. A cold chill squeezed her heart.

He hadn’t gone back? Not after she had forbidden him. The thought, the fear, was enough. She snatched up her hat and headed out, turning right. By the time she had walked the length of Angell Street to her father’s house, she was limp, but her fists were clenched. She didn’t clench them. The muscular spasm was brought on by something outside herself. She watched as her fine, white fingers gnarled and turned ugly, all of themselves. The knuckles showed red and taut and prominent. She dragged her eyes away. Her head pounded.

This spacious house, raised on a high green terrace, looks down upon grounds which are almost a park, with winding walks, arbours, trees, & a delightful fountain.