Stones (4 page)

Now, in the depths of winter, Stuart Bragg had just walked through the door and Minna—who was leaning down to place a cup of coffee and a plastic spoon beneath the vacant stare of one of the Moribund’s regular customers—felt the draught and looked up to see who might have entered.

There he was, and her body held its breath while her mind went racing.

A blizzard was going on outside and Bragg had brought it with him through the door. His hair was white with snow and he wore a long, black coat. The storm raged up against the plate glass window at his back and the way it blew, it looked as if it had pursued him, eager to engulf him.

Bragg had the look of one who bore a message—lost and uncertain as to whom the message must be given.

Me, said Minna’s mind.
He’s come here looking for me
.

But, of course, he hadn’t. He was just another stranger in from Queen Street and Minna was quickly reconciled to believing that was good enough. Strangers were her specialty and those who were pursued by storms and demons made the best strangers of all. She herself had once been pursued by storms and demons, and, even now, she was still in the process of firing at them over her shoulder—her aim perfected after many years of practice. Only three or four remained at her heels, and, of these, the most persistent were her love of dark red wine and her passion for the written word. This latter was a demon flashing sentences before her eyes with incomprehensible speed—and whose sibilant voice was lower than a man’s.

Bragg’s eyes searched the restaurant for someone he could trust. Minna was used to this look. She saw it every day, when strangers walked in and were confronted by the faces of the regulars—the rummies and the drugged-out kids, the schizoids and the dead-eyed retainers whose job it was to sweep the snow and rake the leaves at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre. Bragg evaded all these people—caught Minna’s eye and turned away from her.

Wait, she wanted to say to him.
I can help you
. Minna recognized the look in his eyes of unrequited sanity—the look of someone terrified of the light in a world lit up with stark bare bulbs. He even squinted, placing his hand along his forehead. Minna stepped forward—but Shirley was already marching down behind the counter.

“Yeah?” Shirley said to Bragg—using his dishrag, polishing the soiled Formica countertop, rearranging the packs of chewing gum piled beside the register. “What can I do you for?”

Minna listened, breathless.

Please don’t go away
, she was thinking.
Don’t go away before we’ve made contact
.

“I need to make a call,” said Bragg. “Have you got a telephone?”

“Sure I got a telephone,” said Shirley, “but it ain’t for public use. You wanta coffee instead?”

“Thank you, no,” said Bragg. “I really do need to make a call.” He was eyeing the telephone behind the counter just the way a man who is starving eyes the food on someone else’s plate.

“Sorry,” Shirley told him. “I got a policy here: no calls.”

“Where, then? Where can I find a telephone?”

“Cross the road in the Centre. Maybe there’s a pay phone there.”

“Thank you,” said Bragg. And he turned to go.

No, said Minna.
You mustn’t. We haven’t met
.

But he was out the door and the storm was about to have its way with him.

Minna closed her eyes. Why were the lost so beautiful? She couldn’t let him go.

“Wait!” she heard herself calling.

Shirley turned in her direction. “What the fuck’s with you?” he said to her. “Didn’t I tell you no one yells in the Morrison Cafe?”

But Minna was already reaching out for the handle of the door and barely heard him.

Out on the street she looked both ways and hurried to the corner.

“Wait!” she shouted. (What if her mother could see her now?)

Everything was white before her and blowing into her eyes. Peering through the snow, she saw the lights were about to change and she ran out, flat against the wind with her apron clinging to her legs like something desperate, begging to be rescued. Suddenly, there she was on the other side of Queen Street, blindly grabbing for the long, black sleeve of the departing stranger.

“Stop!” she yelled at him. “Stop!”

He turned, alarmed and tried to brush her off—but she dug her fingernails into the cloth and pulled up close to his arm.

The man was truly afraid of her; the look on his face was unmistakable and one she had seen a dozen times before. What had he done that she should have followed him—attacked him in such a panic?

“Please,” he said, attempting to be civilized. “Don’t.”

There she was with her hand on his arm—a perfect stranger, standing in a blizzard out on Queen Street, wearing nothing but an apron over a magenta uniform—and Minna traced in thread across the pocket at her breast. And her hair was blowing across her face and he thought: she’s mad as a hatter—
and beautiful as anyone I’ve ever seen
.

“All right,” he said—giving in because it was so evident she wouldn’t let go until she’d had her way. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Your name,” she shouted at him—each word blown away in the wind. “Tell me your bloody name.”

“What?” he shouted back at her. “What?”

Several people, fully cognizant of where they were and what they might be witnessing out in front of the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, huddled on the corner waiting for a streetcar. The way this man and woman were holding on to one another, they looked as if they were locked in a deadly struggle. But she was only waiting for his answer and he was only trying to prevent her from being swept away in the Queen Street traffic.

“Please,” she shouted at him—right into his ear. “I have to know who you are!”

Bragg stepped back and stared at her as best he could through the storm. She was holding back the strands of her flowing hair and it was only then that he saw that she was smiling; laughing at her own audacity.

“Oh,” he said. “I see.”

Very slowly, he grinned, and three months later they were married.

By the time Minna died, the marriage had lasted just over twelve years. During the final months they had lived apart; Bragg in Toronto, Minna in Australia:
just about as far apart as a person can get, my dear
, she had said.
A gift of mercy for us both
.

Later, she had written in one of her final letters that it was more than likely fate was playing one of its better tricks when it devised this ending: terminating events before the thirteenth anniversary of their meeting on Queen Street.
What do people give each other after thirteen years?
she had written.
A baker’s dozen of silver cups; one for each year they’ve remained on speaking terms? How do they celebrate? A game of Russian roulette? Thirteen guns and only one of them loaded? Yours or mine, Bragg? Yours or mine? We’ll never know, for which I’m glad
.

One afternoon, after Bragg and Minna had been married for seven years and were living on Collier Street, Bragg came home and found a stranger in Minna’s bed. This was in February of 1983.

Bragg had just gone into the bathroom where he was soaping his hands when he heard somebody cough. At first, he paid no attention, assuming it was Minna. But when the coughing continued, and began to take on the characteristic sounds of someone who was choking, Bragg shut off the taps.

Instantly, there was silence—broken only by the last of the water curling down the drain. Bragg closed his eyes in order to concentrate. There had been too much of this, recently; too many phantom coughers—too much offstage laughter—too many voices behind his back. At its worst, this paranoia prompted him to wonder if Minna was trying to disrupt his life in order to gain some sort of mastery over him.

Pondering why Minna wanted to harm him always brought him back to his senses. No one had loved him more in all his life.
Still, people do the strangest things for love
, he would think, when he lay awake at four o’clock in the morning.
People have killed and people have died for love, though I’d rather not do either
…

Bragg began to dry his fingers, one by one, with a Laura Ashley towel that Minna had given him for Christmas; a double set to go with the Bembridge paper in the bathroom—burgundy pearl-drop flowers with sprigs of dark blue leaves. Bragg would never have spent the money to buy such expensive towels—but Minna would, and had, and Bragg was secretly glad. He loved all things that had to do with water—bathrooms, bathtubs, basins; taps and showers and toilets. He loved the accoutrement of shaving gear and brushes—glass-stoppered bottles of cologne—soap that smelled of pine and cedar—steamy windows—toothbrush glasses…

Bragg was looking in the mirror the way most people do who don’t really want to see themselves—eyes askance, afraid of meeting other eyes. He was just about to duck his head and turn the taps back on to wash away the film of soap in the sink when the second bout of coughing began. Leaving the taps to do their work, Bragg went and stood in the hallway, drying his wrists and listening intently.

This time, the coughing did not abate.

The door to Bragg’s own room stood ajar beside him, opposite the bathroom. He could see the comforting shapes of the cats where they lay asleep on his pillows: Morphine and Opium, named for their mother, Poppy, who had died on Queen Street. He could also see his wicker chair with its pile of folded laundry—the shirts and pyjamas he had ironed that morning.

Down at the end of the hall, where Minna’s bedroom door was closed against a green satin shoe, the coughing became more violent.

Bragg stepped forward.

The green satin toe obtruded into the hallway, giving the impression someone was lurking there behind the door. “Hello?” he said. No one answered. The coughing stopped.

Bragg screwed up his courage and—watching Minna’s door as if he expected it to wield a knife—he approached it, holding his breath, until he was toe to toe with the green satin shoe.

He could see that no one was there—and he gave the door a push with his fingertips.

Lying on Minna’s bed, more or less beneath the duvet—one foot and both hands sticking out—there was a tiny figure. It was small enough to be a child.

Bragg could not reconcile the dreadful coughing he had heard with what he saw. Two-Ton Tessie might have coughed like that. But not a child.

The room was lit with curtained light, and since the afternoon was drawing to a close, there was little enough of that to filter through the cotton drapes. The warm intensity of Minna’s perfume greeted him briefly—riding past him on the draught from the open door. As soon as he moved into the room, however, he was overcome with the stench of someone exhaling gin and sweating nicotine.

To his left, the shape of Minna’s blue Boston rocker stood between him and the windows. The coughing had altogether stopped—and had been replaced with the sound of laboured breathing. Bragg went over and opened the drapes and then—despite the February cold—he also opened the windows.

Turning towards the bed, he was able now to see that the shape he had thought might be that of a child was in fact the angular, sunken figure of someone very small and very old. Matted hair was spread across the pillows. Both hands, fisted, were raised above the figure’s head. Halfway down the bed, the extruded foot was clothed in a filthy ankle sock.

Bragg went and stood as close to the bed as he could bear and he looked down into the face of a woman who was old and toothless.

Two small eyes looked up at him: terrified. Instantly, the fists descended and drew the duvet over the face—and a wailing sound began to rise from beneath the feathers.

“Help! Help! Man!” Bragg heard. Then; “Man! Man! Help!”

Bragg turned around and fled—not even stopping to close the door.

Standing outside the bathroom, he prayed the voice would go away before the neighbours called the police.

And indeed, it faded—though it did not stop.

Bragg leaned in against the wall.

“Oh, God,” he muttered. “Please, not this again…”

Conjuring up the woman’s face—smelling the memory of gin and urine—hearing the woman’s muffled voice—Bragg went into the bathroom, where he discovered, to his fury, he had not turned off the taps.

Banging them shut, he remained for a desperate moment, clutching the silver faucets. Then he let go and sighed. He looked up, helpless and resigned, met his own eyes in the mirror and smiled against his will.

“Better find somewhere to hide,” he said out loud. “Minna has started another crusade on Queen Street.”

They had lived on Queen Street long before then, in rooms above a restaurant. The restaurant was not the Morrison Cafe, but of another kind entirely: run by homosexuals and catering exclusively to gays. The clientele that hung about their doorstep was a trial at times. The very young were very beautiful and Bragg would turn away and walk around the block, attempting to gain control of himself.

For the most part, however, their life above the restaurant was centred on themselves—their love for one another and their work. While Bragg was busy writing in their dreadful little kitchen, Minna spent hours with her notebook, leaning along the window-sill, staring down at all the people walking in the street. Always, these people seemed to be inadequately dressed. Always, there seemed to be an inadequate number of umbrellas; was everyone, as always, mistaking April for spring?

Minna was not a waitress, now. That phase was over and the married phase had begun. Demon Number Two was hard at work in her and she was writing every day in her cloth-bound notebook. Bragg of the blizzard and the long, black coat had turned out to be a budding writer, whose stories had already garnered him a name and a reputation for excellence. They were living on Queen Street not because Bragg had chosen it or even approved of the locale—but only because it seemed to be where Minna Joyce belonged.

Sometimes, early of a morning, the man across the street would come to his window and fling it up—and stand there shaking his fist and shouting obscenities every time a streetcar passed. One day, Minna had brought her notebook and her coffee to the window-sill, when she saw this man take off his clothes and fling them, item by item, onto the top of a streetcar stalled below him. What he wanted, so it seemed, was to get the streetcar’s attention—but even now, with it stopped defenceless at his doorstep, the streetcar and its occupants remained oblivious.