Читать книгу Still Waters - John Moss - Страница 8

Miranda left with the keys. Morgan could still feel the weight of her hand on the inside of his arm. Walking around to the front of the house, he descended the ramp from street level to the garage where the door was still open from the night before. He ducked under the yellow tape marking it a crime scene and entered a large vault with enough space for three or four cars. Only a classic Jaguar two-seater was parked there at the moment. He didn’t know the model; he had never developed an interest in cars. Growing up where buses, the subway, and trolleys were the alternatives to pedestrian transit, he had never known anyone who actually owned a car until university. Even then he wasn’t much interested in students who insinuated cars into the sanctuary of a campus with gardens and manicured lawns in the heart of the city. He didn’t learn to drive until after his degree, teaching himself on a rental automatic, using fake ID, graduating to standard shift a few weeks later.

Morgan had never worked traffic. His university specialization in the sociology of deviance got him into investigations from the start, so he didn’t work his way up from the streets. He liked to present himself as an academic bumbler, but as Miranda surmised, he had been a stellar student and might have pursued an academic career except he had an undisciplined imagination and too many enthusiasms. Though he majored in the human sciences, he preferred philosophy. Morgan was a Heideggerian, as he recalled, no longer sure what that meant.

He would have to learn about cars. There was a certain perversity in his sustained ignorance, however, that gave him the same kind of pleasure as not knowing about hockey. Only a fact junky can appreciate the pleasures of purposely not knowing. He could name complete rosters from the old National Hockey League before 1967 when there were only six teams and every player was a star. He had no idea what teams out of Tampa and Pittsburgh were called. He could name every player on the women’s Olympic team that won in Nagano. He was the only person in Canada who had never played hockey, according to Miranda, who used to play shinny on the Ice Pond outside Waldron — called that because ice had been harvested there long before she was born.

There were two doors from the heated garage into the house. Both were locked. The one he tried opened easily enough with a little persuasion. From an efficiently rectilinear space that smelled of machine oil, he stepped into a musty confusion of brick work and stone, muffled odours of other times, shadows converging, the air ominously still.

As he made his way among the convoluted inner foundations, he had the sense of walking outside the boundaries of history. The original structure of the house was virtually intact, though on the exterior it had been tarted up with Victorian turrets and verandahs and gingerbread trim. He knew he must be on the same level as the garden out back and the den, but this was a world apart.

Morgan stopped beside a great oak door with huge hand-forged hinges. He sat on a makeshift bench in the bleak light of bulbs strung sparingly between hand-hewn beams, their illumination barely extending through the darkness from one pool of light to the next. Here were remnants of a Toronto beyond his experience.

This city was his place of origin, his genetic source, not Ireland or Wales, as his name would suggest, or Scotland, where his mother’s people originated. He came from nowhere else. In the motley assemblage of clay brick, rough plaster, and stonework over a cobbled floor, in the adze marks gouged into the squared oak beams, the hammered ironwork on the door, he saw the residue of a past that was strangely familiar. Like discovering a fingerprint embedded in the surface of an ancient relic; it wasn’t someone else’s history he sensed, but his own.

His ancestors had built these walls, or maybe they had owned them. Class and money had a way of sideslipping in Canada every few generations. He was at home here, connected to cobwebs and dust, though there were surprisingly little of either. The echoes of dead artisans’ dreams resounded around him, and he rose to go about his silent business, moving by stealth, it would seem to a ghostly observer, to take in the emanations that might be clues to the mystery of their lives.

He returned to the oak door. Beside it was a control panel with a thermostat and humidistat, the keyboard to an alarm system, and a light switch. There was a small window in the door. When he peered through the glass, which was two layers thick with a space between, he realized the oak, despite its mighty appearance, was a facade for a thermal door. He flicked the switch, but the room remained dark. He could make out rows of bottle ends in a rack opposite the door, which was securely locked, though the alarm, oddly enough, was disarmed. This was what a real wine cellar was like.

Wandering through the subterranean maze, Morgan was surprised at the images that popped into his mind, some of them curiously macabre, some strangely erotic. He thought of his first encounter with sex, with Francine Cardarelli in the janitor’s closet near the end of grade eleven at Jarvis Collegiate. He thought of a severed head in a garbage container under a sink. Frankie married Vittorio Ciccone. They sent him a wedding present, but he was working homicide by then and returned it despite Lucy’s objection. Nothing was proven; the Ciccone family might not have been involved.

A strange underground concatenation of opposites, he thought — it was warm but cool on the skin, bone dry and musty, darkness striated with light, sounds reverberating in the hushed air, closed in and endless … endless. It was like walking through the inside of somebody’s brain, maybe Griffin’s, maybe his own, or the collective mind where disparates converged.

Approaching what he estimated to be the back corner of the house closest to the garden wall, he came to another oak door. It, too, appeared to be elaborately bolted and locked. Backtracking to the near side of the labyrinth, he discovered two more massive doors. One had to lead into the den, perhaps through the hall where the bathroom was. It seemed to be bolted from the inside. The other was at the bottom of a further descent into the depths of the earth and, to his surprise, it swung open with a tentative touch.

Walking through he found himself in what looked like the inner workings of a submarine. There were pumps and pipes and tanks in profusion. A symphony of small motors and the muffled gurgle of water moving against smooth surfaces filled the room with the aura of inspired efficiency, like listening to Rimsky-Korsakov at low volume.

Morgan slid back the cover of one of the cylindrical chambers that narrowed to a cone at the bottom and observed a vortex of water with a pump-like contraption at the centre that seemed to filter particulates from the flow. He had read about filter systems when he took up virtual koi, but since he had no experience with real fish, he generally glossed over the details of polishing water to absolute purity.

Moving methodically about the room, he traced the flow from a series of three converging intake pipes coming through the outer wall below the frost line — these would be from the bottom drains in the formal pond — into the self-cleaning filter in the first vortex chamber and the other chambers, through a two-speed pump into a huge bead filter where little nubules devoured nitrites and ammonia from fish waste and released harmless nitrates back into the water, past a sequence of three ultraviolet lights enclosed in chrome tubes the size of torpedoes, and finally to an outtake pipe leading underground back to the pond.

There were various configurations of short pipes and shut-off valves whose purpose he couldn’t quite divine, a couple of tanks that looked like hot water heaters that were on a bypass, a completely separate smaller system to activate and flush out the skimmer, and an outlet accessed from the main line by a series of valves that led in the direction of the lower pond, perhaps to top it up if the natural system broke down.

Against the wall beside the door he had come through there was a computerized control console, and beneath the raised window that looked out through shrubs at ground level across the garden there was an old-fashioned concrete laundry tub. Draped over the brass waterspout, inconspicuous in its everyday utility, was a rag that on close examination might once have been lingerie.

A door leading to outside steps up into the garden was sealed. He had noticed the low window partially obscured by shrubbery the previous night but had assumed it accessed a closed-in crawl space. The cellar stairway outside must have been filled in. One could only get to this plumber’s fantasy through the den or the garage, which seemed a little inconvenient, though with everything run by computer and insulated from the winter cold, there would be no need to spend much time here. He expected the computer could be monitored from somewhere else in the house, probably the study on the second floor where he had noticed a daunting array of electronic paraphernalia that stood out from the shelves of books like zircons on a platinum ring.

Turning to leave the way he had come in, Morgan noticed a scrap of yellow notepaper pinned against the edge of a shelf above a workbench. He leaned over the small array of power tools and read slowly, finding it difficult to decipher the smudged script:

Jacques Lacan suggests language is an essential precondition to the development of the unconscious mind, without which there could be no consciousness, and therefore no sense of the self.

There were a couple of lines he couldn’t make out. He pulled the note from the pin and took it to the window, holding it slantwise into the light. Several sentences were intentionally obliterated, as if half-formed thoughts had been deleted, then it continued with a certain obstinate obscurity that Morgan found pompous and provocative:

It seems reasonable to suggest that in the evolution of the species it was the emergence of language that led to consciousness, and not the reverse. Signifieds in the environment had to separate from signifiers before signs became possible —

The text stopped abruptly, but the writer had found his ruminations worth keeping, if only impaled on a cellar shelf. Morgan folded the note neatly and stuffed it in his pocket to show Miranda.

As he turned back into the subterranean labyrinth he had come through, made somehow macabre by light bulbs dangling against shadows, the notion of this as a mausoleum for his anonymous forebears gave way to images of the catacombs beneath poppy fields outside the walls of Rome. He half expected burial niches in the walls, an illusion the play of light and shadow on the rough foundation reinforced.

Morgan remembered how eerie it was that, for all the desiccated corpses and piled bones he had seen in the crypts of Europe, he had felt a stronger presence of death from the absence of human remains in the catacombs. Meandering at the back of a guided tour, past gaping small tombs cut into the lava rock, he had been struck by their emptiness as a mockery of resurrection, their occupants dust inhaled by cadres of tourists. He had felt the cold impress of mortality then, despite the relative warmth of the place. And he felt it now, the familiar chill, yet given the nature of his work and why he was here, morbidity seemed appropriate.

He stopped again at the wine cellar and peered through the double glass window, regretting not having a flashlight. Only in movies did flashlights appear from nowhere as the plot demanded. If he were in a movie, he would be a younger Gene Hackman. When the credits appeared, his name wouldn’t be there. He would still be inside the story. Closure was only for actors and authors.

It was in Europe that he had decided against graduate school, though he had tried it briefly when he came back. He went over for two and a half years, crossing both ways on the Stefan Batory, one of the last passenger ships not flaunting itself for the carriage trade. He hadn’t taken out student loans, having been on a scholarship and working in the north each summer, one year building a spur line into a mine, two years on road crew, and one year, the toughest and most lucrative, planting trees. Unlike his middle-class contemporaries, he finished university with money in the bank.

Trees paid his way through Europe. He was a high-baller, sometimes planting three thousand trees a day, and his savings, subsidized by illegal bar-tending jobs in London and for a while on Ibiza, meant he came home broke but debt-free.

In graduate school he felt distant from other students who had gone directly into their programs, and had little in common with the older students who were making meaningful career changes. He hadn’t picked up his graduate fellowship cheque by the end of the first week, so he just walked away. At the end of the next week he was enrolled in criminology at George Brown College. It had never occurred to him to join the police; it just happened.

His first autumn in London he met the woman he should have married. Susan. He married Lucy.

From the beginning, when Susan answered the door next to his, after he moved into a shabbily genteel bedsitter in Beaufort Gardens on the fifth floor of one of the last unreclaimed buildings in Knightsbridge, he called her Sue.

“Very Canadian,” she told him. “In England it’s with two syllables.”

She was amused, however, and agreed to join him for a Guinness at The Bunch of Grapes on Brompton Road.

He had never before had a friend like her, someone so emotionally complete. Through the long, wet autumn, winter, and spring, when he wasn’t working, they spent weeknight evenings in his room, which was smaller than hers and easier to heat. They were relatively impoverished — London was expensive and wages were low — but they talked their way through the seasons and hardly noticed. He realized, more than two decades later, he must have done most of the talking, while Sue listened with cheerful forbearance, filling gaps in his rambling narrative with self-deprecating anecdotes and funny explanations about the fine points of being English.

On the weekends she went home and Morgan wandered London. Some Saturday evenings he returned to his garret so exhausted by the miles he had walked that he fell asleep across the top of his lumpy single bed without undressing, pulling his thick Canadian coat around him, shoes still on for warmth. He slept until dawn, got up, peed in the rickety sink, splashed water on his face from the single faucet, brewed a quick cup of tea on his hot plate, and ventured out into the pale green spaces of Hyde Park to watch early arrivals, even in the dreariest weather, taking their morning constitutionals. Then he wandered for the rest of the day, and by afternoon began to anticipate Sue’s return so he could tell her about London.

They didn’t have a storybook romance; they didn’t fall in love with each other at the same time. He was in love with her now, though his memories of her had merged with Miranda. Sue was patiently in love for at least part of that year before he took off to the Continent. With her coppery red hair and refined complexion, gentle good humour, and patiently inquiring intelligence, she had been remarkably lovely. But Morgan had constructed his personality as someone astonished by the adventures that lay before him, desperately self-reliant and determinedly unattainable. He wanted to explode at the centre of the universe, while Susan remained generous and serene.

On and off, Morgan worked behind a bar most of the time he was in London, and Susan, as he now thought of her, held a demanding secretarial position with a boss called Nigel and a friend called Fiona, names that seemed eerily exotic. Class, the English pestilence, was never an issue between them. He was educated; Susan was elegant. Neither could place the other in a social hierarchy that made any sense. They had never been good lovers; both of them were relative novices. He was selfish and she was gracious, a bad combination. Their time together was defined more by warmth than by passion. He encouraged her to visit Canada, and she invited him to meet her parents. When Morgan was engaged to be married, he had dreamed Susan would turn up in Toronto. She did, briefly, but the timing was off. He had known even she couldn’t rescue him then.

Morgan became aware that he was comfortably ensconced on the bench opposite the wine cellar. He didn’t remember sitting down, but he was absorbed in the atmosphere of the place and it didn’t bother him that he had lost track of time. He forgot about Susan and London. They faded from consciousness like the particles of a dream.

“What is it, Morgan?” Miranda would say. “Where have you been?”

But he seldom answered. It didn’t seem important to sort out recollections from the swarming of information careening through the sometimes unfamiliar places in his mind. He wasn’t unstable, but wary of being too much himself.

The oak door leading toward the den opened this time when he gave it a vigorous shove, and he found himself in a short hallway with the small bathroom to one side. The door at the far end of the corridor leading into the den stood ajar. It was an exterior door made of steel, painted and panelled to look like wood. He had noticed the night before that it had a large lock with a dead bolt, which didn’t strike him as unusual, given that it probably led in from the garage. There was a patina of dents and scratches on the corridor side that advertised its serviceability.

Availing himself of the bathroom convenience, Morgan admired the absolute simplicity of the room. It was like being inside a tiled box — even the ceiling was tiled — and the toilet and sink were built in. The shower head draped like a pewter sunflower from high on a wall, and the shower stall area was defined only by a standing drain and a ridge in the tile on the floor. There was no mirror, there were no shelves, no pictures, nothing to intrude on the mind or distract the eye, and yet the overall effect was pleasing. Still, it didn’t encourage lingering. Maybe that was the point — a small architectural joke by Robert Griffin, perhaps not shared by anyone else.

The thought of Griffin made Morgan uncomfortable. This was the first point of connection he had felt with the victim. The passion for koi, he understood, and the books and the carpets, but comprehending the facts of a person’s existence was different from recognition of their secret whims. What other secrets were in this place hidden by the obvious? He stood and pressed a plunger panel that was flush to the wall over the toilet and walked away from the swirling noise, washing his hands and leaving the room without glancing back.

Morgan settled down in the den on what, from the comforting way the cushion met the weight of his body, he was sure would have been the favourite chair of the dearly departed, sustaining him through long hours of contemplation about koi and linguistics. Gazing out across the garden and lawn, Morgan could see, beyond the trunks of the giant silver maples, intimations of the city he loved like an old family home. This made him feel closer to the house surrounding him, as if it were the mantle of what might have been. Here, but for the grace of God and a lot of money, and the random perversity of genetic progression … his thoughts were outpaced by emotion.

There was something very sensual and vaguely distressing about letting his feelings run free. Morgan was used to the effects of an unbridled intellect, but sensibility, open and indiscriminate, took him by surprise. It was knowing about wine, not tasting, that enthralled him.

He shut his eyes and tried to envision Susan as she might be now. She looked like Miranda. He tried to focus, and the name Donna came to mind, preceding an image of someone he had forgotten he had known.

Susan was his first love. But his first “affair” was Donna. Not with Donna, but Donna herself. She was the affair. Donna didn’t haunt him the way Susan did. She didn’t remind him of Miranda. But Donna had helped shaped who he was.

She had worked as a waitress in a Jarvis Street diner on the edge of Cabbagetown in a nondescript building squeezed between two former mansions. He had wandered in one night on the way back to his room near the university after one of his rare visits with Fred and Darlene. He and his dad had been sitting on the stoop all evening, drinking beer. His mom was out with her friends. She had been drinking, too. When she came back, they had a raucous three-way quarrel. He couldn’t remember why. The important part of his recollection wasn’t the fight, but meeting Donna.

“Coffee?” she had asked in the diner.

“Please,” he answered in a slurred voice, leaning over his elbows on the grey Formica table, head in his hands.

She brought him the coffee. “You okay?”

He remembered looking up with tears in his eyes, even though he couldn’t remember why he was crying. Maybe it was something his mother had said, and suddenly he was confronted with childhood’s end. Maybe his father had made a crack about the effete life of a student. Or it might have been the fight itself — being drawn into domestic squalor that he wanted desperately to put behind him.

The waitress placed her hand over his. “This one’s on me.”

Instead of saying “what” or “thank you,” he asked, “Why?”

“Because you’re drunk, you’re not a drinker, you need coffee.”

“Must be lots of drunks come in here.”

“Yeah.”

She smiled as he stared at her face, bringing her eyes into focus. They were bright blue, sparkling in the fluorescent light. Her lipstick was a thick red, and her dark roots made her hair radiate like a platinum halo around her head. In spite of her garish makeup, she was young. They were about the same age.

He smiled back. “Thanks. He glanced around and realized he was the only customer, then announced in a significant tone, “I’m a virgin.”

“Good. I’m glad there’s one left.”

“One what?”

“Virgin.”

“I’m a virgin. Technically. You know what I mean.”

“I can imagine. You’re drunk. But very pretty.”

Morgan was bewildered. No one had called him pretty before. He didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. He decided flattery was preferable. “You’re very pretty, too. Do you want to take me home?”

She did, and that was the beginning of Morgan’s first affair, which after ten days burned out because they had nothing to say to each other. She taught him about a woman’s body as if she were much older, and he felt secure enough that he learned with awkward enthusiasm more than he could have imagined and far less than he needed to be a good lover. It didn’t occur to him to resent her experience.

Their last night together, after she finished the late shift and before he went to his morning class, they both knew their relationship had run its course. In a gesture to make the finality of their parting less certain, he invited her to a lecture he would be giving in two months.

“What are you talking about?” she asked him.

“It’s by invitation. My philosophy prof asked me to speak at a graduate seminar. It’s a big deal. They don’t usually let undergraduates speak.”