The Girl in the Wall (8 page)

When business was slow Mrs. Mortimer still travelled to the hospitals to see what she could scout out. One sunny April Sunday, she took a bus to the General Hospital on William Avenue. She had no luck there, but instead of going home she found herself sauntering over to the Women's Pavilion on Notre Dame. There were babies on her mind. She wasn't necessarily looking for work, but she had her camera around her neck and the air of professionalism that it gave her. She wandered the halls and tried not to stare.

Every now and then, she poked her head around a door as though she were looking for someone — her mother, perhaps, or an aunt suffering from something terrible that involved the sickening area between women's legs that George wouldn't let her talk about.

Today she feared what she might see behind those doors. She wondered why she was here. It didn't feel like a day for working. It felt more like a day for hanging around with George, who hadn't been feeling so good lately. She supposed he was with Pam right now, but maybe she could go home and insinuate herself into their activities if they weren't kissing.

The hallways were subdued, with only a skeleton staff working on a Sunday. She headed down a wing of mostly private rooms. There was a red exit light at the end of it; she could head out that way, down the stairs and away from here.

It was from one of those rooms that she heard the strange quiet sounds — something between squeaks and peeps. She opened the door to the room and saw something that she knew was bad. She also knew that she wasn't supposed to be seeing it. Nothing so far in her life had prepared her for such a moment and she wasn't sure how to react, so she did the only thing she could think of to do: she took a photograph, and then another, and another.

What Mrs. Mortimer saw was taking place on a single bed. There seemed to be an awful lot going on at once and it appeared to her as though in slow motion.

For one thing there was a girl in the bed with an odd look to her, like she wasn't quite right in her body, in her general appearance. The covers were pulled back to reveal her short limbs. Her tongue seemed bigger than normal tongues and it lolled out of her mouth. She gazed out the window through her upslanting eyes as though she were disconnected from the rest of it. Some of the squeaks came from her.

Next to the bed there was a thin woman in white pressing down on something with both hands. She appeared to be applying artificial respiration. Mrs. Mortimer had seen a film in health class many years ago that was supposed to teach her what to do if someone stopped breathing and she was left in charge. She had prayed to the god of grade sixers that she would never be the boss of such a situation because she knew with absolute certainty that she would not be able to pull it off.

Now she realized that she was watching the woman press down on a pillow. It was positioned beside the girl, at chest level, but the woman's movements didn't fit with helping someone to breathe. This was no nurse; she was wearing red pumps and her short white coat did a feeble job of covering up street clothes. And her pressing down actions, Mrs. Mortimer realized, were not on the up and up. They were nowhere near the up and up.

She heard one last peep escape from under the pillow. It was like the sound baby chicks made at Aunt Sally's Farm at the park. The squeaks and the peeps reminded her of the time Pookie had held a baby rabbit in his jaws. The bunny squeaked and Mrs. Mortimer had darted towards them with some thought of saving it if it hadn't already been wrecked. But Pookie wouldn't let her catch them; it was a game to him. There were squeaks and then there weren't. Mrs. Mortimer had quit the chase and gone inside the house.

This was a game for no one.

The skinny woman lifted up the pillow to check on what was underneath. It wasn't till after she'd done that that she noticed the whirs and clicks from the camera and turned toward the door. Her face was older than what her form and shoes had led Mrs. Mortimer to believe. Her horrible face had a red gash for a mouth and it shrieked at her.

“Who are you?”

“No one. I'm no one,” said Mrs. Mortimer.

“Get out! You saw nothing! Get out right now or I'll have you arrested! You stink! What's that ghastly smell?”

Mrs. Mortimer took one last picture, this one of the red gash and then she ran, holding tight to her camera, until she was out on the bright sidewalk in front of the hospital. Her thoughts chased each other inside her head till she shooed them away with exhaustion. Later, she thought. I'll visit them later when I'm at home making the pictures.

She tried for a few moments to wait for a bus but was unable to stand still. There was a man across the street on the steps of the Women's Pavilion. It seemed like he was watching her, but maybe not.

All she could think about on the long road home was that she wouldn't be able to tell George. He would encourage her, perhaps force her, to “do the right thing” and tell someone official about what she had seen. She couldn't face that. No one would believe her version of events and she would be the one to go jail or the mental hospital. She wasn't the perpetrator of the deed but everyone would think she was.

There was something about her. There was no fighting it; it was in her blood, in her bones: guilty.

She wondered why she hadn't darted forward like she had when the rabbit had been in danger. The only thing that made sense to her was that the woman in white had been a more formidable foe than Pookie.

What ghastly smell? she wondered. Her mother's lavender perfume, she supposed. Perhaps it wasn't to everyone's taste.

She didn't develop the film, but she couldn't throw it away. It lived at the back of a drawer in her dark room: a sleeping thing, a bad thing.

Mrs. Mortimer screamed in the night. She remembered the difficulty inside her dream of releasing the scream but she finally succeeded and then woke herself up with it.

George came running and she heard her mother's voice.

“Are you seeing to it, George?”

“Yeah, go back to sleep, Mum.”

George sat on the edge of her bed and she realized she was covered in sweat. Even her legs were damp. It was good that her mum wasn't there to see. She wouldn't have liked it; she found bodily fluids repugnant unless they were her own.

“Did you have a bad dream?” George asked.

“Yeah, I guess, but I don't remember it.”

“Don't even try then.”

He went to the bathroom, ran cool water over a washrag and gave it a squeeze. He took it in to his sister.

“Thanks, Georgie.” She ran the cool cloth over her face. “Don't tell Mum.”

“Don't tell her what?”

“I don't know.”

“Where's Pookie?” George asked.

Mrs. Mortimer turned on her bedside lamp. They looked around and saw the little white cat peering out from behind the closet door.

“I guess I scared him.”

“Here, Pooks,” George said.

Pookie didn't move.

“I think maybe I screamed because of what I saw in the Women's Pavilion,” Mrs. Mortimer said.

“What was that?”

“Something horrible.”

“Are you going to tell me about it? Do you want to go outside?”

“Yeah, let's.”

They put on their housecoats, crept down the back stairs and slipped out the side door to the porch, where they sat on the creaky old swing. Pookie came with them.

George lit a cigarette.

“May I have one of those, Georgie?”

“No. I don't think so.”

“Why?”

“I don't want to be responsible for you starting to smoke.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's bad for you.”

He held his stomach as he said this.

“Does your stomach hurt, Georgie?” Mrs. Mortimer asked.

“A little bit,” he said.

They sat very still on the swing so they wouldn't wake their parents with the back and forth of it.

Pookie leapt up and sat on George's lap. He never sat on Mrs. Mortimer. He slept at the end of her bed but he never snuggled with her.

“Next to you I think I love Pookie best,” she said. “I won't be able to stand it if he dies.”

“Don't worry,” said George. “He's not going to die for a long time yet.”

“When he does, I want to die too, at the very same moment, so I won't know that I'll never hear his little sounds again. I love the way he places his feet in front of him and the way his weight makes the floorboards creak. Mum wants me to clip his toenails. He won't let me and I don't blame him. He doesn't like Mum. Have you noticed that, Georgie?”

“Yes.”

“Actually, I don't think he likes me much either. He doesn't look at me very often and I know he doesn't like me touching him.”

Pookie purred up a storm on George's lap.

“May I please have a cigarette, Georgie?”

He sighed, handed her a Belvedere and took another one out for himself.

That was the night in 1970 when Mrs. Mortimer started to smoke. She never looked back, never quit, never took a break. She learned how to French inhale, how to blow smoke rings, how to smoke with no hands, never once taking the cigarette from her mouth. She became a professional.

“So what happened at the Women's Pavilion?” George asked.

“Nothing,” said Mrs. Mortimer.

She couldn't tell it to George. He was too good for it.

Although she tried to let it go in the coming weeks, it was too big to let go of her. She was stuck with it, she supposed, forever, both in her night dreams and during her waking hours. It waited, as a kind of entity unto itself, biding its time until it was ready. She couldn't imagine what it had planned for her, what it would do to her, but there would be something. She saw it as a kind of sharp edge to her life that would cut her and cause her to bleed out into the future.

One day in late April, not long after the bad thing happened, Mrs. Mortimer was sitting with an elderly man moments after she had completed taking pictures of his wife. She felt quite comfortable with him, so was brave enough to ask if he would be framing a photo and placing it on view in his home.

“Oh no,” he said. “This is just for me, not for anyone else.”

He smoothed the pure white hair back from his dead wife's forehead.

“I may buy a little frame, I suppose,” he said. “A do-it-your-selfer frame. But this picture is only for me.”

She imagined the man gazing at the picture for varying periods of time, sometimes with another photo next to it, of his wife when she was alive, but most times on its own. She wondered how much satisfaction it would bring him, if any.

And that led her to her next idea.

It was the third day of May. She gauged the air in the room. It was shared by a dying middle-aged man, a young man who identified himself as the son, and her. It was the son who had called.

Gauging air wasn't Mrs. Mortimer's strong point, but she was pretty sure she didn't feel anything disagreeable coming from either man. So far she had never felt a bad emanation from a dying person, only from someone close by who didn't agree with her being there.

There was something about the young man, but it was more interesting than bad. He didn't blink much, but that was okay; it was better than blinking too much. And he didn't look to be sweating or shaking: two things that made Mrs. Mortimer nervous. When she was doing either of them herself she knew things were far from being all right, unless, of course, the sweat was caused by the weather.

She asked the son to step out into the hall with her; she didn't want to speak in front of the dad even if he was past listening. Then she dove in and broached her idea of a series of pictures, beginning just before the subject died. She had become quite good at judging when the very last moments of life were slipping away and that was when she hoped to step in and start clicking. If there were minute changes on the face she would catch them — missing almost nothing, just the tiny moments between clicks. It would be an honest-to-goodness study of life passing into death, something she felt might give her customers more satisfaction than what she had provided them till now.

It was her hope that she had picked the right person to begin with. At the very first it seemed so. But a feeling of unease took her over as soon as she had spoken, a feeling that told her she might have said or done something wrong or, at the least, inappropriate. It was because of the way the man behaved. Of course, she didn't know his usual way of being; this was the first time they had met as far as she knew, although there was something vaguely familiar about him. He was so quiet after she spoke, so very quiet. There was something coming from inside of him that she couldn't recognize.

“I like your idea,” he said at last.

She realized then that he wasn't much older than she was, early twenties at most.

He watched her work.

She could feel his eyes upon her instead of on the wasted father who was dead now, from a rare form of lymphoma, the man said. His stare frightened her a little and she had a glimpse of what it might have been like for the people she had stared at for so many years. Surely she hadn't emitted this level of intensity. She couldn't imagine what types of thoughts were behind the stare, where they stemmed from or where they were headed. It felt like they were just for her, barely connected to the man in the bed.

The boyish man nearly blinded her with the power of his gaze and Mrs. Mortimer prayed to Mama Right, her latest version of God, that the photographs would turn out well and she could be done with him.

A night nurse poked her head in and just as quickly withdrew, as though she had witnessed something so private she should be punished for intruding.

Mrs. Mortimer walked home through the night streets.

She regretted sharing her idea more than she could recall regretting anything else in her entire life. It was something she could have prevented, not like the situation she had fallen into at the Women's Pavilion. It was totally on her. All she would have had to do was keep her huge mouth shut. Her past had been chock-full of regret, she mused, sometimes for no good reason.

Where did it all stem from? Were her mother's regrets passed down to her and her grandmother's through her mother and her great-grandmother's, too? If so, it wasn't fair. She hadn't inherited their collective happinesses, if there were any. Maybe there weren't any.

Her irritation grew as she thought about being cursed with added-up remorse if not with added-up happiness. That would be wrong and she clung to an idea that there was a right and a wrong that came into play in people's lives — from somewhere outside. It was a vague idea that sometimes slipped away and she had to work at getting it back. That was where Mama Right came in.

Things only got worse on the walk home. By the time she climbed the steps to the front porch she was bent in two with wishing she could turn back the clock. The regret made her want to die. She hadn't felt that way since before George had bought her her first camera.

She recalled a feeling she'd once had that she was remembering something before it happened with no idea what it was. That feeling came back to her now, free floating, attached to nothing she could name.

Mrs. Mortimer sat on her bed and stared into space till the sun came up.

Then she went to her darkroom in the cellar and worked on the pictures of the man with lymphoma and saw that they were good.

“Thanks, Mama Right,” she said.

But the regretful feeling didn't leave her.

The call came in the afternoon to arrange for a pickup time.

“The photographs turned out well,” she said.

“I knew they would,” he said. “I knew you would do a good job.”

Her bad feeling vanished for a moment or two. Maybe it was wrong; maybe she didn't need to want to die.

“Say, there's something I'd like to talk to you about,” he said. “I thought maybe we could go somewheres for coffee when I come to get the pictures.”

The clock on the wall in the house on Monck Avenue ticked off thirty seconds.

“Mrs. Mortimer?” he asked.

“Yes. I'm here,” she said.

He had said “somewheres.” That meant that he came from a poor part of town where they didn't talk right.

“What do you think?” he asked.

She didn't want him to come to her house and she didn't want to go somewheres for coffee but she knew that at least one of those things had to happen. She wished George were home. No one had ever made a suggestion like this to her before and she didn't know what to do with it. She didn't know where it belonged, if anywhere.

“I forget your name,” she said.

“It's Jim. Jim Coulthard.”

The clock ticked off twenty more seconds. It was louder than usual.

“Well? What do you think?” he asked. “Alls I wanna do is talk.”

He said “alls.” Alls and somewheres. She'd never known anyone up close who'd used those words, just heard them on the local news sometimes when a reporter interviewed a person something terrible had happened to. And once she'd heard a woman reporter say “liberry” instead of “library.” She had thought that was kind of funny. Alls and somewheres weren't funny.

His voice was young. And he sounded as though he liked her. She wasn't used to feeling as though someone liked her. For sure it was a trap.

She was aware that people appreciated her skills as a photographer and her punctuality and her no-nonsense attitude toward death, but liking had nothing to do with it.

There were also those who thought that what she did was wrong, who stood outside homes and hospital rooms saying things like “The very idea!” and “Who does she think she is!”, in an effort to override the wishes of the person who had called her, the person who was one notch closer to the deceased in terms of being the boss of the situation.

One woman even called the police, figuring that what she was doing must be against a law written somewhere, a law belonging to God if need be. The police came, but they were nice to Mrs. Mortimer and told the troublemaker to back off. It was a sister-in-law and she finally did back down, but not before causing many tears. Mrs. Mortimer had sat quietly and waited for the trouble to pass so she could get back to work.

People appreciated her calm manner when she was on the job, but again, liking had nothing to do with it.

This felt different from appreciation and it scared her more than a little. It was possible that the sense of liking she received over the telephone wasn't a trap. Another possibility was that it was all in her imagination; she didn't know whether to believe in it. If it was real, was it directed to her specifically or did this man like in general? She had seen people who were friendly to everybody; no one could escape their backslapping ways. But he didn't seem like one of those.

Also, what if the liking was there one minute and gone the next? When quietness had taken him over at the hospital she had worried that it'd had something to do with her. She knew now that it had, but it had been a thinking quietness and maybe it was okay; maybe it was safe. But then the hot staring had taken over and that hadn't been okay. It hadn't been safe. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name. For the first time she doubted the new name she had given herself.

Her head ached. She gave it a shake and it hurt even more, as though something was trying to escape from behind her eyeballs. Maybe one of them would pop out and she could go back and present it to Miss Horning.

“Yes,” she said.

Jim Coulthard laughed.

Mrs. Mortimer didn't know what kind of a laugh it was. She didn't do much laughing. She had smiled at the word “liberry” but not laughed out loud.

“Coffee would be fine,” she said. “We could go to the Red Top.”

She had to give him the pictures, and better at the Red Top than here at the house.

They made a date and Mrs. Mortimer hung up the phone. She needed to sit down and do some thinking on the verandah with her cigarettes and maybe a glass of her dad's whiskey. That's what he did when he announced that he wanted to have a good think and would like to be left alone.

She set herself up with her drink and her Belvederes. Her mum was in bed, her dad was at work, and George was at the university. It was her first taste of whiskey: she added a little water like she had watched her dad do and swirled it around in the glass. She was careful with her first sip. It tasted like nothing she had ever experienced before: not good like chocolate cake or fried chicken, but not bad like Brussel sprouts. It was in a class by itself. She drank slowly and it lasted a good long time.

Mrs. Mortimer realized that she wanted someone to like her. The feeling of thinking that it might happen was a good one. No one had liked her so far: she knew that and didn't question it. No one but George, that is, and he was her brother. It was his job to like her, but she believed he truly did. That kept her alive: that, taking pictures of the dead, and daydreams of her long low home. Sometimes night dreams could be good, too, but she didn't add that to the list of things that kept her alive. A good sleep wasn't a good enough reason to live.

In one of her recurring night dreams there was a rumpus room done up in blues and greens: ocean colours. Fish swam amongst wavy vines inside an aquarium. Even the fish were vibrant blues and greens inside their bubbly water world.

There was a small pool with a fountain creating water sounds behind soft music piped in from a hidden source. “White Silver Sands” was the song.

Under the water were secret caverns and smooth rocks for mermaids to lounge on and comb their hair. The mermaids never came, but they could have if they'd wanted.

Ladies in high-heeled shoes danced with men in suits and smoked cigarettes at the same time. Sometimes they drank cocktails from delicate glasses tinted greenish-blue.

Two young, well-scrubbed children, a boy and a girl, sat at the top of the basement stairs watching. They wore sleepers, those pajamas with feet. If the adults saw them, they didn't let on.

Mrs. Mortimer pondered her night dream and didn't let her thoughts go back to the Jim person and his interest in her. It was easier to stay away.

Again she thought about ruing so many of the actions she had and had not taken in her life and she was suddenly certain that she would never have any children. It had to do with her new idea of regret piling up through the generations. She couldn't bear the idea of her son — she pictured a little boy with a pointed chin — crippled under the weight of things he had or hadn't done. In her mind he wore a heavy cloth coat that dragged him down and down further, to the ground, where he began to crawl and then finally stopped to lay his head down in the dirt. No. There would be no children for Mrs. Mortimer.