Newford Stories (4 page)

“But it happens so fast with them.”

Zia sits down beside her and they pore over
the pictures, munching on apples they found earlier in a cold
cellar in the basement.

Upstairs, a father wakes in his bed. He
stares at the ceiling, wondering what woke him. Nervous energy
crackles inside him like static electricity, a sudden spill of
adrenaline, but he doesn’t know why. He gets up and checks the
children’s rooms. They’re both asleep. He listens for intruders,
but the house is silent.

Stepping back into the hall, he walks to the
head of the stairs and looks down. He thinks he sees something in
the gloom, two dark-haired girls sitting on the sofa, looking
through a photo album. Their gazes lift to meet his and hold it.
The next thing he knows, he’s on the sofa himself, holding the
photo album in his hand. There are no strange girls sitting there
with him. The house seems quieter than it’s ever been, as though
the fridge, the furnace and every clock the family owns are holding
their breath along with him.

He sets the album down on the coffee table,
walks slowly back up the stairs and returns to his bed. He feels
like a stranger, misplaced. He doesn’t know this room, doesn’t know
the woman beside him. All he can think about is the first girl he
ever loved and his heart swells with a bittersweet sorrow. An ache
pushes against his ribs, makes it almost impossible to breathe.

What if, what if…

He turns on his side and looks at his wife.
For one moment her face blurs, becomes a morphing image that
encompasses both her features and those of his first true love. For
one moment it seems as though anything is possible, that for all
these years he could have been married to another woman, to that
girl who first held, then unwittingly, broke his heart.

“No,” he says.

His wife stirs, her features her own again.
She blinks sleepily at him.

“Wha…?” she mumbles.

He holds her close, heartbeat drumming, more
in love with her for being who she is than he has ever been
before.

Outside, the crow girls are lying on their
backs, making snow angels on his lawn, scissoring their arms and
legs, shaping skirts and wings. They break their apple cores in two
and give their angels eyes, then run off down the street, holding
hands. The snowdrifts are undisturbed by their weight. It’s as
though they, too, like the angels they’ve just made, have
wings.

* * *

“This is so cool,” Casey tells her mother.
“It really feels like Christmas. I mean, not like Christmases we’ve
had, but, you know, like really being part of Christmas.”

Heather nods. She’s glad she brought the
girls down to the soup kitchen to help Jilly and her friends serve
a Christmas dinner to those less fortunate than themselves. She’s
been worried about how her daughters would take the break from
tradition, but then realized, with Peter gone, tradition is already
broken. Better to begin all over again.

The girls had been dubious when she first
broached the subject with them—“I don’t want to spend Christmas
with
losers
,” had been Casey’s first comment. Heather hadn’t
argued with her. All she’d said was, “I want you to think about
what you just said.”

Casey’s response had been a sullen
look—there were more and more of these lately—but Heather knew her
own daughter well enough. Casey had stomped off to her room, but
then come back half an hour later and helped her explain to Janice
why it might not be the worst idea in the world.

She watches them now, Casey having rejoined
her sister where they are playing with the homeless children, and
knows a swell of pride. They’re such good kids, she thinks as she
takes another sip of her cider. After a couple of hours serving
coffee, tea and hot cider, she’d really needed to get off her feet
for a moment.

“Got something for you,” Jilly says, sitting
down on the bench beside her.

Heather accepts the small, brightly-wrapped
parcel with reluctance. “I thought we said we weren’t doing
Christmas presents.”

“It’s not really a Christmas present. It’s
more an everyday sort of a present that I just happen to be giving
you today.”

“Right.”

“So aren’t you going to open it?”

Heather peels back the paper and opens the
small box. Inside, nestled in a piece of folded Kleenex, are two
small silver earrings cast in the shapes of crows. Heather lifts
her gaze.

“They’re beautiful.”

“Got them at the craft show from a local
jeweler. Rory Crowther. See, his name’s on the card in the bottom
of the box. They’re to remind you—”

Heather smiles. “Of crow girls?”

“Partly. But more to remember that this—”
Jilly waves a hand that could be taking in the basement of St.
Vincent’s, could be taking in the whole world. “It’s not all we
get. There’s more. We can’t always see it, but it’s there.”

For a moment, Heather thinks she sees two
dark-haired slim figures standing on the far side of the basement,
but when she looks more closely they’re only a bag lady and
Geordie’s friend Tanya, talking.

For a moment, she thinks she hears the sound
of wings, but it’s only the murmur of conversation. Probably.

What she knows for sure is that the grey
landscape inside her chest is shrinking a little more every
day.

“Thank you,” she says.

She isn’t sure if she’s speaking to Jilly or
to crow girls she’s only ever seen once, but whose presence keeps
echoing through her life. Her new life. It isn’t necessarily a
better one. Not yet. But at least it’s on the way up from wherever
she’d been going, not down into a darker despair.

“Here,” Jilly says. “Let me help you put
them on.”

Twa Corbies

As I was walkin’ all alane

I heard twa corbies makin’ mane…

—from “Twa Corbies,” Scots traditional

Gerda couldn’t sleep again. She stood by the
upright piano, wedding picture in hand, marvelling at how
impossibly young she and Jan had been. Why, they were little more
than children. Imagine making so serious a commitment at such an
age, raising a family and all.

Her insomnia had become a regular visitor
over the past few years—often her only one. The older she got, the
less sleep she seemed to need. She went to bed late, got up early,
and the only weariness she carried through her waking hours was in
her heart. A loneliness that was stronger some nights than others.
But on those nights, the old four-poster double bed felt too big
for her. All that extra room spread over the map of the quilt like
unknown territories, encroaching on her ability to relax, even with
the cats lolling across the hills and vales of the bed’s
expanse.

It hadn’t always been that way. When Jan was
still alive—before the children were born, and after they’d moved
out to accept the responsibility of their own lives—she and Jan
could spend the whole day in bed, passing the time with long
conversations and silly little jokes, sharing tea and biscuits
while they read the paper, making slow and sweet love…

She sighed. But Jan was long gone and she
was an old woman with only her cats and piano to keep her company
now. This late at night, the piano could offer her no comfort—it
wouldn’t be fair to her neighbours. The building was like her, old
and worn. The sound of the piano would carry no matter how softly
she played. But the cats…

One of them was twining in and out against
her legs now—Swarte Meg, the youngest of the three. She was just a
year old, black as the night sky, as gangly and unruly as a pumpkin
vine. Unlike the other two, she still craved regular attention and
loved to be carried around in Gerda’s arms. It made even the
simplest of tasks difficult to attend to, but there was nothing in
Gerda’s life that required haste anymore.

Replacing the wedding picture on the top of
the piano, she picked Swarte Meg up and moved over to the window
that provided her with a view of the small, cobblestoned square
outside.

By day there was always someone to watch.
Mothers and nannies with their children, sitting on the bench and
chatting with each other while their charges slept in prams. Old
men smoking cigarettes, pouring coffee for each other out of a
thermos, playing checkers and dominoes. Neighbourhood gossips
standing by the river wall, exaggerating their news to give it the
desired impact. Tourists wandering into the square and looking
confused, having wandered too far from the more commercial
streets.

By this time of night, all that changed. Now
the small square was left to fend for itself. It seemed diminished,
shadows pooling deep against the buildings, held back only by the
solitary street lamp that rose up behind the wrought iron bench at
its base.

Except…

Gerda leaned closer to the windowpane.

What was this…?

- 2 -

Sophie’s always telling me to pace myself.
The trouble is, when I get absorbed in a piece, I can spend whole
days in front of the canvas, barely stopping to eat or rest until
the day’s work is done. My best times, though, are early in the
morning and late at night—morning for the light, the late hours for
the silence. The phone doesn’t ring, no one knocks on your door. I
usually seem to finish a piece at night. I know I have to see it
again in the morning light, so to stop myself from fiddling with
it, I go out walking—anywhere, really.

When the work’s gone well, I can feel a deep
thrumming build up inside me and I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I
wanted to, doesn’t matter how tired I might be. What I need then is
for the quiet streets of the city and the swell of the dark night
above them to pull me out of myself and my painting. To render calm
to my quickened pulse. Walking puts a peace in my soul that I
desperately need after having had my nose up close to a canvas for
far too long.

Any part of the city will do, but Old
Market’s the best. I love it here, especially at this time of
night. There’s a stillness in the air and even the houses and shops
seem to be holding their breath. All I can hear is the sound of my
boots on the cobblestones. One day I’m going to move into one of
the old brick buildings that line these streets—it doesn’t matter
which one; I love them all. As much for where they are, I suppose,
as for what they are.

Because Old Market’s a funny place. It’s
right downtown, but when you step into its narrow, cobblestoned
streets, it’s like you’ve stepped back in time to an older, other
place. The rhythms are different here. The sound of traffic seems
to disappear far more quickly than should be physically possible.
The air tastes cleaner and it still carries hints of baking bread,
Indonesian spices, cabbage soups, fish and sausages long after
midnight.

On a night like this I don’t even bother to
change. I just go out in my paint-stained clothes, the scent of my
turps and linseed trailing along behind me. I don’t worry about how
I look because there’s no one to see me. By now, all the cafés are
closed up and except for the odd cat, everybody’s in bed, or
checking out the nightlife downtown. Or almost everybody.

I hear the sound of their wings first—loud
in the stillness. Then I see them, a pair of large crows that swoop
down out of the sky to dart down a street no wider than an
alleyway, just ahead of me.

I didn’t think crows were nocturnal, but
then they’re a confusing sort of animal at the best of times. Just
consider all the superstitions associated with them. Good luck, bad
luck—it’s hard to work them all out.

Some say that seeing a crow heralds a
death.

Some say a death brings crows so that they
can ferry us on from this world to the next.

Some say it just means there’s a change
coming.

And then there’s that old rhyme: One for
sorrow, two for mirth…

It gets so you don’t know what to think when
you see one. But I do know it’s definitely oh-so-odd to see them at
this time of night. I can’t help but follow in their wake. I don’t
even have to consider it; I just go, the quickened scuff of my
boots not quite loud enough to envelop the sound of their
wings.

The crows lead me through the winding
streets, past the closed shops and cafés, past the houses with
their hidden gardens and occasional walkways overhead that join
separate buildings, one to the other, until we’re deep in Old
Market, following a steadily-narrowing lane that finally opens out
onto a small town square.

I know this place. Christy used to come here
and write sometimes, though I don’t think he’s done it for a while.
And he’s certainly not here tonight.

The square is surrounded on three sides by
tall brick buildings leaning against each other, cobblestones
underfoot. There’s an old-fashioned streetlight in the center of
the square with a wrought iron bench underneath, facing the river.
On the far side of the river I can barely see Butler Common, the
wooded hills beyond its lawns, and on the tops of the hills, a
constellation of twinkling house lights.

By the bench is an overturned shopping cart
with all sorts of junk spilling out of it. I can make out bundles
of clothes, bottles and cans, plastic shopping bags filled with who
knows what, but what holds my gaze is the man lying beside the
cart. I’ve seen him before, cadging spare change, pushing that cart
of his. He looks bigger than he probably is because of the layers
of baggy clothes, though I remember him as being portly anyway.
He’s got a tuque on his head and he’s wearing fingerless gloves and
mismatched shoes. His hairline is receding, but he still has plenty
of long, dirty-blond hair. His stubble is just this side of an
actual beard, greyer than his hair. He’s lying face-up, staring at
the sky.

At first I think he’s sleeping, then I think
he’s collapsed there. It’s when I see the ghost that I realize he’s
dead.