Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

by Margaret Atwood

  Tap tap tap. Pause. “Wife kick you out?”

  “I left,” says Sam, as indifferently as he can manage. “Been working up to it.”

  “Matter of time,” says Ned. “Bound to happen.”

  Sam appreciates Ned’s seamless acceptance of what he must suspect is a fairly major alteration of the truth. “Yeah,” he says. “Sad. She’s taking it hard. But she’ll be okay. It’s not like she’s out on the street, she’s hardly starving.”

  “Right, right,” says Ned. He has so many tattoos up his forearms he looks upholstered. He never says much, having done time and concluded, rightly, that a zipped lip attracts no stilettos. He likes this job and is grateful for it, which is good for Sam because he won’t jeopardize it by asking questions. On the other hand, he stores incoming information like a data miner and disgorges it accurately when required.

  Sam extracts from him the news that a client dropped by late yesterday, no one Ned has seen before, guy in an expensive leather jacket. He’d examined all the desks. Funny he was out in the snowstorm, but some guys like the challenge. Nobody else in the store, which was no surprise. The handsome reproduction Directoire was the guy’s object of interest: he asked for a price, said he’d think about it. Wanted a reserve of two days, put down a deposit of a hundred dollars. Cash not credit. In the sealed envelope beside the register. Name’s inside it.

  Ned goes back to his chiselling. Sam strolls over to the counter, casually opens the envelope. In with the cash – in twenties – there’s slip of paper, which he extracts. There’s nothing written on it but an address and a number. He’s not fooling Ned, but they operate on a principle of maximum deniability: just assume everything’s bugged is Sam’s motto. He looks at the pencilled number, which is 56, files it in his brain, scrunches the paper, sticks it in a pocket. First toilet he encounters, down it will go.

  “Guess I’ll hit the auction,” he says. “See what I can pick up.”

  “Good luck with it,” says Ned.

  The auction is a storage-unit auction. Sam attends two or three of these a week, as many folks in the antiques business do – making the rounds of the storage emporia that ring the city and the neighbouring towns, located in this strip-mall wasteland or that. Sam’s on an email list-serv that automatically mails him all upcoming auctions in the province, tagged by postal code. He attends only the ones within reach: nothing farther away than a two-hour drive. Any longer and the returns wouldn’t justify the investment, or not on average. Though fortunes have been made by lucky bidders: who knows when a genuine old master may turn up, obscured by dust and varnish, or a boxful of love letters by a dead celebrity to his secret mistress, or a stash of paste jewels that turn out to be genuine? There’s been a recent vogue for reality shows that claim to catch people at the moment when they open up the space, then Bingo!, some spectacular life-changing find, with Ohs and Ahs all round.

  That’s never happened to Sam. Still, there’s something exciting about winning an auction, gaining the key to the locked unit, opening the door. Expecting treasures, since whatever junk is inside must have been treasures once or the people wouldn’t have bothered to store them.

  “Should be back by four,” says Sam. He always tells Ned his ETA: it’s part of that little plot-thread he can’t help spinning. He said he’d be back by four. No, he didn’t seem upset about anything. Though maybe he was anxious. Asked me about some strange guy who’d been in the store. Leather jacket. Interested in desks.

  “Text me when to send the van,” says Ned.

  “Let’s hope there’s something worth sending it for,” says Sam. The units have to be cleared out within twenty-four hours, you can’t just leave crap there if you don’t want it: you win it, you own it. The storage guys don’t crave the expense of carting your freshly bought trash to the dump.

  The story Sam and Ned wordlessly agree on is that Sam is angling for some decent furniture for Ned to enhance. And he is angling for that, because why not? Sam hopes he may score more in the furniture vein than the assortment of scraps he came back with last time: a busted guitar, a folding bridge table with only three legs, a giant stuffed teddy bear from a fun-fair rifle range, a wooden crokinole game. The game was the only thing with any value: some people collect ancient games.

  “Drive safe,” says Ned. He texted me to send the van. That was at 2:36, I know ‘cause I looked at the clock, the art deco one right over there, see? Keeps perfect time. Then, I dunno, he just vanished.

  Did he have any enemies?

  I just work here.

  Though he did say … yeah, told me there’d been a fight with his wife. That would be Gwyneth. Don’t know her that well myself. At breakfast, walked out on her. You could see it coming. Cramped his style, never gave him enough space. Yeah, jealous, possessive, he told me that. She thought the sun shone out his ass, couldn’t get enough of him. Would she, did she ever... Violent? Naw, he never said that. Except for the time she threw a wine bottle at him, empty one. But sometimes they just snap, women like that. Lose it. Go nuts.

  He entertains himself with the discovery of his own body. Naked or clothed? Inside or out? Knife or gun? Alone?

  The car starts this time, which Sam takes as a good omen. He zigzags down towards the Gardiner, which maybe won’t have fallen down yet – no, it hasn’t, maybe there’s a God – then heads west. The address in the envelope was that of a storage emporium in Mississauga, not too far away. The traffic is putrid. What is it about winter that causes people to drive as if their hands are feet?

  He gets to the site early, parks the car, goes to the main office, registers. Everything just as usual. Now he’ll have to hang around till the auction starts. He hates these blocks of dead space-time. He checks his phone for messages. This and that, this and that. And Gwyneth, texting: Meet tomorrow? Let’s get this finalized. He doesn’t reply, but he doesn’t delete. Let her wait. He’d like to nip outside for a smoke, but he resists the temptation, having officially quit five months ago for the fourth time.

  A couple more folks trickle in, hardly a crowd. Low attendance is good, it thins out the competition, keeps the bids low. Too cold for the tourists: there’s no atmosphere of summer antique-hunting, no glamorous TV reality-show buzz. Just a bunch of middle-range impatient bundled-up people standing around with their hands in their pockets or looking at their watches or phones.

  Couple of other dealers now, ones he knows: he nods at them, they nod back. He’s done business with both of them: stuff he’s won that didn’t fit his niche but did fit theirs. He doesn’t do much Victorian: it’s too big for condos. Or much wartime, too bulbous and maroon. He likes the pieces with cleaner lines. Lighter. Less ponderous.

  The auctioneer bustles in five minutes’ late with a takeout coffee and a bag of doughnut holes, casts an annoyed look at the scant turnout, and turns on his handheld mic – which he hardly needs, it’s not a football game, but most likely it makes him feel important. There are seven storage units on the block today, seven don’t-care no-show owners. Sam bids on five, wins four, lets the fifth one go because it’s more plausible that way. The one he really wants is the second, number 56 – that was the number in the envelope, that’s where the secret cargo will have been stashed – but he always tries for a cluster of units.

  After the event proper is over he settles up with the auctioneer, who hands him the keys to the four spaces. “Stuff has to be out in twenty-four hours,” the man says. “Sweep it clean, those are the rules.” Sam nods; he knows the rules, but there’s no point in saying that. Guy’s an asshole, in training for a prison guard or a politician or some other self-proclaimed dictator job. A non-asshole might offer Sam a doughnut hole – surely the guy isn’t going to eat the whole bag, he could benefit from some weight loss – but that philanthropic act does not take place.

  Sam walks across to the nearby mall, collar up against the rising wind, scarf over his chin, gets himself a Timmy’s double-double and his own sack of doughnut holes – chocolate-glazed –
and walks back to inspect his unit purchases at leisure. He likes to wait until the other bidders have cleared off: he doesn’t want people looking over his shoulder. He’ll leave number 56 till the last; everyone else will have gone by then.

  The first unit is stacked high with cardboard boxes. Sam looks inside a few: shit, it’s mostly books. He’s got no idea how to value books, so he’ll make a deal with a guy he knows, a book specialist; if there’s anything really special, Sam will get a cut. Author signatures in them are sometimes good, the guy says; on the other hand, sometimes not, if no one knows them. Dead authors are sometimes good, but not that often; they have to be famous as well as dead. Art books are usually good, depending on the condition. A lot of the time they’re rare.

  The next unit has nothing in it but an old scooter, one of those lightweight Italian quasi-tricycles. Sam has no use for it, but someone will. It can be stripped for parts if nothing else. He doesn’t linger. No sense freezing his balls off: these units aren’t heated, and the temperature’s dropping.

  He finds his next unit, slips the key into the lock. Third time lucky: what if it’s a treasure trove? He can still get excited over the possibility, even though he knows it’s like believing in the tooth fairy. He rolls up the door, switches the light on.

  Right at the front there’s a white wedding dress with a skirt like an enormous bell and big puffed sleeves. It’s swathed in a clear plastic zip bag, as if it just came from the store. It doesn’t even look worn. There’s a pair of new-looking white satin shoes tucked into the bottom of the bag. There are white elbow-length buttoned gloves pinned to the sleeves. They look creepy: they underscore the absence of a head; though there’s a white veil, he sees now, wrapped around the shoulders of the dress like a stole, with a chaplet of white artificial flowers and seed pearls attached to it.

  Who’d put their wedding dress into a storage unit? Sam wonders. That isn’t what women do. Maybe they’d stash it in a closet, or in a trunk or something, but not a storage unit. Where does Gwyneth keep her own wedding dress, come to think of it? He doesn’t know. Not that it was as elaborate as this one. They hadn’t done the whole hog, not the big church wedding: Gwyneth said those were really for the parents, and hers were dead, as were Sam’s, or so he’d told her. No sense in letting his mother yap on to Gwyneth about the amusing ups and downs and the not so amusing ins and outs of his earlier life, it only would have confused her. She would have had to choose between two realities, his reality and his mother’s, and that kind of situation was toxic to a romantic atmosphere.

  So they’d just done the city hall routine, and then Sam had swept Gwyneth off to a dream honeymoon on the Cayman Islands. Into the sea, out of the sea, roll around in the sand, watch the moon. Flowers on the breakfast table. Sunset again, holding hands at the bar, filling her up with frozen daiquiris, that’s what she liked to drink. Sex in the morning, kissing his way up her like a slug on a lettuce, beginning with the toes.

  Oh Sam! This is so … I never thought …

  Just relax. That’s it. Put your hand here.

  It wasn’t hard to take. He could afford all of that then, the beaches, the daiquiris, he was flush. The cash wave ebbs and flows, such is its nature, but he’s a believer in spending it while you have it. Was that when he’d covered Gwyneth with hundred-dollar bills – on their honeymoon? No, he pulled that one later.

  He moves the wedding-dress skirt to the side. It’s stiff, it rustles, it crackles. There’s more wedding stuff in here: a little night table, and on it a huge bouquet, tied with pink stain ribbon. It’s mostly roses, but it’s dry as a bone. On the other side, in behind the white skirt, there’s the matching night table, holding a giant cake, underneath one of those domed covers they have in bakeries. It’s got white icing, pink and white roses made of sugar, and a tiny bride and groom on the top. It hasn’t been cut.

  He’s getting a very weird feeling. He squeezes in past the dress. If what he’s thinking is right, there ought to be some champagne: there’s always champagne for weddings. Sure enough, here it is, three crates of it, unopened. It’s a miracle it hasn’t frozen and burst. Beside it are several boxes of champagne flutes, also unopened: glass ones, not plastic, good quality. And some boxes of white china plates, and a big box of white napkins, cloth, not paper. Someone has stored their entire wedding in here. A big-ticket wedding.

  Behind the cardboard boxes there’s some luggage – brand-new luggage, a matched set, cherry red in colour.

  And behind that, in the farthest, darkest corner, is the groom.

  “Crap,” says Sam out loud. His breath unfurls in a white plume because of the cold; maybe it’s the cold that accounts for the lack of smell. Now that he notices, there is in fact a faint odour, a little sweet – though that could be the cake – and a little like dirty socks, with an undertone of dog food that’s been around too long.

  Sam wraps his scarf across his nose. He’s feeling slightly nauseous. This is crazy. Whoever parked the groom in here must be a dangerous loony, some kind of sick fetishist. He should leave right now. He should call the cops No, he shouldn’t. He wouldn’t want them looking into his final unit, number 56 – the one he hasn’t opened yet.

  The groom’s wearing the full uniform: the black formal suit, the white shirt, the cravat, a withered carnation in the buttonhole. Is there a top hat? Not that Sam can see, but he guesses it must be somewhere – in the luggage, he bets – because whoever did this went for the complete set.

  Except the bride: there isn’t any bride.

  The man’s face looks desiccated, as if the guy has dried out like a mummy. He’s enclosed in several layers of clear plastic; garment bags, maybe, like the one containing the dress. Yes, there are the zippers: packing tape has been applied carefully along the seams. Inside the clear layers the groom has a wavery look, as if he’s underwater. The eyes are shut, for which Sam is grateful. How was that done? Aren’t corpse eyes always open? Krazy Glue? Scotch tape? He has the odd sense that this man is familiar, like someone he knows, but that can’t possibly be true.

  Sam backs carefully out of the storage unit, slides the door down, locks it. Then he stands in front of it holding the key. What the shit is he supposed to do now? With the dried-out bridegroom. He can’t leave him here, locked inside the unit. He bought this wedding, it’s his, he’s responsible for removing it. He can’t have Ned send the van for it, not unless Ned himself drives – he could be trusted not to say anything. But Ned never drives the van, they use a service.

  And suppose he asks Ned to rent a van from a different outfit and drive here, and suppose he waits until Ned arrives, standing outside the unit because he wouldn’t want anyone else messing around with this; suppose he stays right here, freezing in what will soon become the dark, and then suppose they load the whole wedding into the van and take it back to the shop – suppose all that, what then? They take the poor shrivelled-up sucker out to a field somewhere and bury him? Throw him into Lake Ontario, making their way over the shore ice, which won’t crack and sink them, fat chance? Even if they could manage that, he’d be sure to float. Mummified groom mystifies crime unit. Suspicious circumstances surrounding freak member of the wedding. Nuptial shocker: she married a zombie.

  Failure to report a dead body: isn’t that a felony? Worse: the guy must have been murdered. You don’t find yourself encased in several layers of plastic with tape on the zippers, wearing formal wedding fancy dress, without getting murdered first.

  As Sam’s reviewing his options, a tall woman rounds the corner. She’s wearing one of those sheepskin coats with the wool side in, its hood up over her blond hair. She’s almost running. Now she’s right up to him. She looks anxious, though trying to conceal it.

  So, he thinks. The missing bride.

  She touches his arm. “Excuse me,” she says. “Did you just buy the contents of this unit? At the auction?”

  He smiles at her, opens wide his big blue eyes. Drops his gaze to her mouth, flicks it up again. She’s ab
out his height. Strong enough to have lugged the groom into the unit by herself, even if he wasn’t yet dried out. “That’s me,” he says. “I plead guilty.”

  “But you haven’t unlocked it yet?”

  Here’s the moment of decision. He could hand her the key, say, I’ve seen the mess you made, clean it up yourself. He could say, Yes I have, and I’m calling the cops. He could say, I took a quick look, it seems to be a wedding. Yours?

  “No,” he says. “Not yet. I bought a couple of other units too. I was just about to open up this one.”

  “Whatever you paid, I’ll double it,” she says. “I didn’t want it sold, but there was a mistake, the cheque got lost in the mail, and I was away on business, I didn’t get the notification soon enough, and then I took the first plane I could, but then I was stuck in Chicago for six hours because of the storm. It was so snowed in! And then the traffic from the airport, it was terrible!” She ends with a nervous giggle. She must have rehearsed this: it comes out of her on one long phrase, like ticker tape.

  “I heard about the storm,” he says. “In Chicago. That’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear you were delayed.” He doesn’t respond to her financial offer. It hangs in the air between them, like their two breaths.

  “That storm’s heading here next,” she says. “It’s a serious blizzard. They always travel east. If you don’t want to get stuck here, you should hit the road. I’ll speed this up for us – I’ll pay cash.”

  “Thanks,” he says. “I’m considering. What’s in there, anyway? It must be something valuable, to be so important to you.” He’s curious to see what she’ll say.

  “Just family things,” she says. “Things I inherited. You know, crystal, china, from my grandmother. A few pieces of costume jewellery. Sentimental value. You couldn’t sell them for much.”

  “Family things?” he says. “Any furniture?”