“Let’s go,” said Sam.
“Not yet,” said Murphy. “Wait till the last one.”
And so they waited in the dark kindergarten room. And while they waited, they drifted over to the big blocks and built a tower, and the tower became a castle, and soon they forgot why they were there. Murphy was defending the castle against the black knights who had begun an attack with their ally—a monstrous stuffed bear—when suddenly the light in the corridor snapped on and they just about jumped out of their skins.
Sam ran to the window and stared at the parking lot. He mouthed the word Empty. They hid in the corner of the classroom and waited.
They waited forever. And nothing happened.
And then … Wally walked slowly down the hall pushing a broom. They waited another five minutes. Then they went looking for him. But he had vanished.
Wally’s office is in the boiler room. Murphy used his key to open the boiler-room door. It was dark and gloomy in there. The ceiling was low and the corridor narrow. There were pipes everywhere—on the walls and on the ceiling. It was like a dungeon.
Murphy said, “Come on.”
Wally was sitting at his desk beside the boiler. He had his feet on a milk crate. He was eating a banana muffin. He had a stainless steel Thermos beside him.
They stood in the doorway for maybe a minute without saying anything. Wally didn’t see them at first. And then he must have sensed them staring at him, and he glanced up and saw the two of them standing there in the gloom.
The sight of them should have startled him, but after you spend twelve years hanging over the edge of high-rises day in and day out, you don’t startle easily.
Wally put his muffin down, pulled his feet off the milk crate and waved them in.
“Hello boys,” he said. “Was that you on the PA?”
Murphy nodded. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the key.
Murphy stepped forward, held out the key and said, “You’re free to go now.”
Wally looked stunned.
Murphy whispered to Sam, “It will take awhile for him to recover from the redundancy.”
“It’s okay,” said Murphy. “They’ve gone.”
“All of them?” asked Wally. “They’re not hanging around the doors?”
“All of them,” said Sam. “You’re safe. You can go.”
“About time,” said Wally, glancing at his watch.
He wanted to walk them home. But they went alone.
“We’re okay,” said Murphy.
“Did you see how fast he wanted to get out of there?” said Sam.
They were in Sam’s backyard, sitting at the picnic table again.
“Swear you’ll never tell,” said Murphy.
“I swear,” said Sam.
They shook hands.
Five minutes later Sam was pulling on his Spider-Man pyjamas when he froze in horror. The pile of laundry he had stuffed under his covers was piled neatly on his desk chair. He stared at his bed in the darkness. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
The lump in his bed moved. “Hi,” it said.
“Hi,” said Sam.
It was his father.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Then Sam said, “I can’t tell you what I have been doing.”
“You take an oath?” said Dave.
“Yes,” said Sam.
“Must have been very important to keep you up so late,” said Dave.
“Yes,” said Sam.
“Everything okay?” said Dave.
“Yes,” said Sam. “Everything’s fine.”
“Is everyone okay?” said Dave.
“Yes.”
“Is everyone at home? In bed?”
Dave was sitting on the edge of the bed staring at his son.
Sam said, “Soon.”
“I’ve been pretty worried,” said Dave.
Sam said, “Does Mom know?”
Dave said, “She is sound asleep.”
Sam exhaled slowly, and then he crawled into bed with his father.
They lay there in the darkness, and then Dave said, “Can you tell me anything?”
Sam smiled and said, “One thing.”
Sam reached out and pulled his father’s ear to his mouth. He whispered, “I have radioactive blood.”
Wally reappeared on day shift about a month later. The ongoing battle over the drain, not to mention a nasty wave of stomach flu, convinced the new janitor that early retirement wasn’t such a bad idea.
Wally came back. And the schoolyard drain is plugged solid again, just the way it should be.
Only a very select circle knows about Sam and Murphy’s night in the school; and how they saved Wally from redundancy.
Some boys say it’s not true, that they weren’t even there.
That’s what Mark Portnoy was saying at recess a few weeks ago.
Mark had Murphy pinned against the coatroom wall and was threatening to take his lunch when Wally came along, and Mark had to let Murphy go. Mark thought he would save face by asking Wally outright.
“He says he and snot-nose snuck in here one night and saved you from the recumbent people.”
Wally looked quizzically at Murphy and then at Sam, who was there too. Then he looked at Mark Portnoy and said, “As a matter of fact, those people would probably still be in the staff room making their plans if it weren’t for those two.”
Then he took Mark Portnoy down to his office and gave him a doughnut and some coffee from his Thermos, and Mark forgot about Murphy’s lunch. And truth be known, Mark has been treating both Sam and Murphy with what almost passes as respect ever since.
Dear Mr. McLean,
I understand that you travel across this great country with your show The Vinyl Cafe, so I assume you have seen many of the natural and man-made marvels that this country has to offer. With that in mind, I am wondering if you know where I might locate a porcelain hedgehog?
Yours truly,
Nigel
Dear Nigel,
Funny you should ask.
LONDON
The ticket arrived like Dorothy always arrives herself, unannounced. It landed, with a slap of presumption, along with the rest of the day’s mail, on the kitchen table. A return flight for Stephanie, to London, England, booked and paid for.
“But I just got home,” said Stephanie. “I don’t want to go away again.”
The ticket came in July, just as Stephanie was unpacking from two months of tree planting in the north. It came when she was looking forward to summertime at home—looking forward to reconnecting with her city friends at sidewalk cafés. Looking forward to spending time with her boyfriend, Tommy.
It’s time for Stephanie to see more of the world, wrote Dorothy in her abrupt note.
Maybe. But Stephanie took the plane ticket as an affront. What sensible young tree-planter wants to celebrate her return to civilization by spending two weeks with a geriatric aunt, even if that aunt happens to live where civilization’s heartbeat pumps like in few other places?
Morley said, “You have to go.”
Stephanie said, “Why do I have to go? It’s my life. What has Aunt Dorothy got to do with my life?”
The next evening Dave handed her a two-page typed list of places she had to see. The Ad Lib Club in Soho’s Ham Yard, where he had had a beer with George Harrison. Well, okay, George Harrison was at the next table over. Just before Dave got there.
There were also directions to where the Marquee Club used to be—the club where everyone except the Beatles played, where Jimi Hendrix gave his last performance.
“You want me to go to see where the club used to be?” said Stephanie, scanning her father’s list. She looked appalled.
“Everyone played there,” said Dave. “The Yardbirds, Manfred Mann, David Bowie, Cream, Pink Floyd, The Who.”
“But not the Beatles,” said Stephanie.
“No. I mean, yes,” said Dave. “That’s right. Not the Beatles. But everyone else.”
“And,” said Stephanie, “you want me to go to London so I can stand on the street where it used to be, and where the Beatles never were.”
“To see it,” said Dave.
“You mean not to see it,” said Stephanie. “I could go outside right now and not see it, and I wouldn’t have to leave home.”
When Stephanie, bleary-eyed and rumpled from the overnight flight, lumbered into the Arrivals area at Heathrow, she spotted Aunt Dorothy immediately. Dorothy, in her Clarks Wallabees, and wool skirt, and Marks & Spencer cardigan, was looking at her watch impatiently. “My word,” said Dorothy, pointing at Stephanie’s bulky suitcase. “Did you think you were coming for a month, dear?”
“Hi,” was all Stephanie could think to say in reply.
“Well, never mind,” said Dorothy, already on the move. She marched to the parking lot three steps ahead of Stephanie. When they got to her 1967 Vauxhall Viva, Dorothy wrenched Stephanie’s suitcase from her hand and hoisted it into the backseat. Then she was rocketing the car out of the parking spot as if there was a national emergency. On her way, she managed to bang into the cars that were both in front of and behind her—which set off the alarm she had installed to warn her when she was too close to the cars around her.
They flew down the motorway, heading for the village of Hawkhurst, about an hour to the southeast of the airport, Dorothy occasionally pounding on the dashboard in vain attempts to silence the alarm.
She barrelled fearlessly along in the fast lane, pounding, until, without any warning, and without much slowing, and certainly without signalling, she exited the motorway onto a one-lane road barely the width of her little car.
“Shortcut,” said Dorothy grimly as they crested a hill, actually leaving the ground in the process. She was flying between the hedgerows and around blind corners with no concern whatsoever that something might be coming toward her from the opposite direction.
Stephanie did not have time to be frightened. She was hanging on to the door handle, her eyes closed and her lips pressed tight, trying not to be carsick.
Just as she thought she had lost the battle, Dorothy’s car cleared a little hill, geared down, turned onto a small gravel road and rocked to a stop before a small country house. “I hope you’re hungry,” said Dorothy to her pale and shaking niece. “I have a little lunch going.”
“A little lunch,” it turned out, meant a cow’s tongue, simmering in a Crock-Pot with carrots and onions and cabbage.
Stephanie’s first text message to Tommy was frantic.
It looked like a tongue. It tasted like a tongue. And, worst of all, it felt like a tongue.
Tommy texted her right back. One word: Sweet.
After they had finished lunch, Stephanie, too excited to sleep during the long night flight over the Atlantic, fell into bed—exhausted and nauseated.
She woke the next morning sweating and disoriented.
She wandered into the kitchen and found Dorothy bent over the sink. She was scrubbing an empty Marmite jar with a vegetable brush.
“They’ve started selling Marmite in tubes,” said Dorothy. “Like toothpaste.”
This was clearly not something Dorothy thought of as progress.
Dorothy yanked open the cupboard under the sink. There was a box full of empty Marmite jars. She added the latest to her collection.
“I squeeze it out of the tubes into the jars,” said Dorothy. She shook her head. “Marmite shouldn’t come in tubes.”
It was after breakfast that the real purpose of Stephanie’s trip emerged. Stephanie was sitting at the kitchen table, stunned by the mallet of jet lag.
Dorothy was wiping a Mountbatten memorial teapot with a tea towel.
“I just have a few of these left,” she said, referring to her once-vast collection of royal china.
She held the teapot up. There was a piece of white adhesive tape on the bottom. She said, “I have written your name on this, dearie. While you’re here you can choose what else you want. And help me go through the rest of it.”
Dorothy, an only child, never married, and now alone and over seventy, was searching for the comfort of continuity. Dorothy was looking for someone to whom she could pass her life. She had settled on Stephanie.
Stephanie stared at the commemorative teapot, with its gold gilt, and then around the room. She spotted a collection of porcelain hedgehogs, a wire toast rack, an umbrella stand with the Queen Mother’s face carved into the front. She couldn’t see anything she was remotely interested in possessing. Nothing.
“Thank you,” she said, uncertainly.
“We’ll deal with my treasures later,” said Dorothy. “We have a lot to do. I have our itinerary here. We have to get going.”
Stephanie couldn’t imagine anything Dorothy might want to do that would interest her.
“I have a list of things my father wants me to see,” said Stephanie, lamely.
“Never mind that,” said Dorothy.
And thus began Stephanie’s British education—a tour of London that was more like a forced march. It turned out Dorothy wasn’t only concerned with passing along her things: She wanted to pass on the glorious wonder of Britain.
They drove into the city and took a small room on the third floor of the quirky and out-of-time Durrants Hotel, just off Marylebone High Street. They checked in, and then marched right out again—onto a series of red double-decker buses that they rode to Bunhill Fields. They stormed past the graves of Daniel Defoe and John Bunyon. They put pebbles on William Blake’s grave, in the Jewish tradition.
From Bunhill they headed for Hampstead Heath and the tottering and tangled eccentricity of Highgate Cemetery.
“Karl Marx never even lived in Russia,” said Dorothy as they stood in front of the great philosopher’s tomb.
As evening fell, they wandered through the winding and hilly neighbourhood of Hampstead.
“That’s the house where de Gaulle lived during the war,” said Dorothy.
Stephanie had never heard of Charles de Gaulle. She wondered for a beat if this was something she could admit and was about to, but Dorothy was already pounding down the street. “Imagine,” said Dorothy as Stephanie scrambled to catch up, “imagine all those men and women waiting for their orders. All those poor boys on bikes.”
They were halfway down a hilly green street when Dorothy turned into a laneway.
“This is where John Keats lived,” she said.
Stephanie may never have heard of Charles de Gaulle, but she had studied John Keats. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “Ode to a Nightingale.”
“Some of the greatest poems of the English language,” said Dorothy, waving her arm in the air. “Written right here. In this very garden.”
That night, back in the hotel, Dorothy collapsed into the only armchair in their small room, her mouth hanging open, her head thrown back, snoring rhythmically. Stephanie texted Tommy: I went to Keats’s house. There was a lock of his hair.
Tommy wrote back immediately, two words: What colour?
The next morning Dorothy and Stephanie stood in front of a terraced row of Georgian houses not far from the Thames River. Dorothy said, “Has your father told you the story about Carlyle?”
It was chilly. Stephanie was staring glumly at the row of brick houses, wondering if Dorothy was going to drag her to every graveyard and house in London.
“Carl who?” said Stephanie.
“Haven’t they taught you anything?” said Dorothy. “It involves one of your ancestors.”
The idea that she had ancestors had never occurred to Stephanie. She knew her parents, and she knew her grandparents, but no one had ever said anything to her about ancestors.
“Mr. Carlyle was a friend of Mr. John Stuart Mill,” said Dorothy. Then she glanced at Stephanie.
Stephanie said, “The philosopher.”
Dorothy said, “Good, dearie.”
Then she said, “Carlyle took the manuscript of his History of the French Revolution to Mr. John Stuart Mill. H
e wanted him to read it before he sent it to his publisher. Mr. Mill put it down on his desk. The maid found it and thought it was garbage. So she burned it.”
“She burned it?” said Stephanie. “What happened?”
“Mr. Carlyle had to write it again. From the beginning.”
“And I’m related to John Stuart Mill?” said Stephanie.
“No, no,” said Dorothy. “Not Mr. Mill, love. We’re related to the maid.”
They walked and they walked, and everywhere they walked there was something to see and something to do.
“This is where Lord Byron was born.”
“This is the very spot where they executed Anne Boleyn. She was completely unafraid, they say.”
“And this is the church where Graham Greene used to confess adultery.”
They were standing in a little stone alcove to the right of the chancel. Stephanie was staring at all the flickering candles.
Dorothy said, “Would you like to light a candle?”
“What does it mean?” said Stephanie. “When you light one?”
“I don’t know,” said Dorothy, “but they look very pretty when they are burning.”
Dorothy picked up a taper and started to light candles randomly.
“I think you’re supposed to pay,” said Stephanie.
“I never pay,” said Dorothy. “The Catholics have plenty of money.”
They went to Westminster Abbey—to the south transept and the Poets’ Corner. A man from Lyons, France, asked Stephanie if she would take his picture standing beside the modest plaque that marked Charles Dickens’s grave.
Then they wound their way along the river.
“Everything is so old,” said Stephanie.
Dorothy snorted. “Old?” she said. “This was all built after the Norman invasion.”
They wandered past rows and rows of Georgian houses— the houses on one side of the street the mirror image of the houses on the other. Stephanie pointed to a faded S and an arrow, painted on one of the foundations.
“I saw one like that yesterday,” she said.
“That’s from the war, dearie,” said Dorothy. “When Mr. Hitler was dropping bombs on us. It showed you to the shelters.”
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