When she brooded on this later, she wondered, if she had been more susceptible to atmospheres, more intuitive, the way Briony was (or at least thought she was), would she have bided her time, turned back, retraced her route to town for a few hours? If she had, how utterly different her life would have become.
But now Lydia pushes groundless fears from her mind as she steps through the curtain of trees. They’re irrational, a chance encounter, she thinks, drawing on her Victorian Identities course, with the pathetic fallacy. She would have leaves dancing, flowers nodding and rocks brooding next, for heaven’s sake.
She doesn’t see the sun reappear below the band of cloud. Her back’s to it. But her heart lifts at the effect. Light moves with arrow speed through the trees, gilding the leaves, bursting against the far cottage wall and blazing it. Everywhere is veiled in gold, the air, the trees, the grass. And—maybe the pathetic fallacy isn’t so bankrupt—life responds: Leaves dance in a sudden burst of breeze, the hollyhocks nod, the rocks … well, the rocks remain impassive, but Lydia’s sense of the ominous eases.
She rounds onto the front lawn, where shadows cut deep streaks into the golden lawn. Now she hears strains of music. Someone has the Victrola on. She sees through the dining room window a glimmer of light from deep in the cottage interior. Someone has the electrolier on. She smells wood smoke. The boys have started a fire in the Quebec stove. There is life, and life is good. She mounts the front steps.
The scratchy record continues as Lydia lets the screen door close behind her. She places the bag of groceries on the dining room table, noting the double doors to the living room are closed. Puzzled, but not perturbed, she moves to open them. They are almost always propped open by a pair of old flatirons, closed only on cool evenings to contain the heat of a fire in the stove (and it isn’t that cool this evening). The doors are wooden, but the top panel of each is glass, warped through some cheap manufacture, and light, low and mellow, trickles though them. Dorian and Paul have lit the gas lamps. Through the glass, she can see one of the lamps flickering on a stand by the far wall, dappling the room with shadow. The boys are there, they must be, though they are being oddly quiet.
Before turning the doorknob, Lydia angles her head to look deeper into the room. She should be able to see straight to the bank of east windows. She doesn’t. Something blocks the view. She sees, but she can’t take it in. Can’t take it in. Her mind can make no sense of what’s before her eyes. Paul is suspended in the air, back to her, hovering, victorious over gravity, a naked angel yet wingless, and he’s giving … a benediction? to someone … someone … who? … Dorian? She glimpses an outline of another figure (who else could it be?) kneeling—can he possibly be kneeling?—in the rocking chair. But it’s the electrolier shimmering like a crown above Paul’s head that now draws her gaze, upwards from the fantastical vision to … she can’t take it in. She takes it in. It’s … an apparatus. The fantastical vanishes and horror crashes over her in heart-pounding waves. She cries out. She must have cried out. Later, she can’t remember her screams splitting the air, her throwing open the doors, tearing across the floor. It all seems a mad succession of sight and sound, terrifying then, terrifying in memory: the door crashing against the sideboard, the rocking chair squeaking frantically, a weight descending before her eyes, a gargled grunt, a strangled cry, a soft snapping, a shriek—and, suddenly, Dorian, mouth gaping in a rictus of terror, eyes staring in a blaze of disbelief.
Can he be dying? How to account for the air turning white around him? He must be dying. Dorian feels himself founder, his legs buckle, his stomach heave, though some primal resolve keeps his bowels from loosening and fouling the floor. Lydia he sees as if through the small end of a telescope. What is she doing here? Why is her mouth opening and closing? Why can’t he hear her?
Lydia vanishes.
She is beside him with a knife. He feels her force as she pushes past him, and it is that force, auras touching, that sweeps away the fizzy stars and sends him hurtling back to the sharp-edged world. Someone’s legs are kicking frantically near his face. A horrible gurgling sounds from above. And Lydia is scrambling on the rocking chair, failing, screaming, screaming, screaming—he can hear her now—“Help me! Help me cut him down!” He stares up, past the heaving chest to the freakish crown slicing shadows in Paul’s scarlet face, along the distended eyes, on to the arms flailing, falling, flailing. The full horror tears into this consciousness. He pulls Lydia off the chair, yanks the top rail around for Paul’s feet to perch—as they had when they began—but the chair is heavy, unwieldy, Paul’s feet now jerking feebly, toes slipping past the berth. “The ladder!” Why didn’t he think of it? Sobbing now, sick with fright, Dorian stumbles across the room to the stepladder leaning against the corner clothes closet, drags it, thrashes at its bloody fucking unwieldiness, Lydia shaking, chanting, ohgod ohgod ohgod ohgod. “You!” he gestures vaguely toward the ladder and somehow Lydia understands as he scrambles back onto the rocking chair, finds a balance, and grasps Paul by his thighs, heaving the weight of him into the air, loosening his neck, oh, god, please god, from the noose. Lydia—Dorian can hear her crash up the metal steps, hear her keening now, sense her flailing at the clothesline above Paul’s head, oh, god, oh Christ, and he knows the knife is blunt, know it’s one of those fucking crap old knives from the kitchen, oh Jesus, hurry, hurry, hurry. The weight of Paul is awful. A wet sob rips from his throat. The weight of him was wonderful.
And suddenly, as if in a dream, Paul careens toward him, send them both flying off the chair and onto the cold, unforgiving linoleum.
“Wake up, wake up, please wake up.” Dorian’s eyes and nose run and leave their wet on the face waxen in the electrolier’s light. He presses his lips back on Paul’s, willing that they not be cooling, not be motionless, as he forces the breath of life into his lover’s throat. He knows nothing of proper mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. None of them do. None of them learned. None of them were offered lessons. Lydia tried the kiss of life, too. But she saw, where Dorian didn’t, that it was too late. It was too late even as she sawed and sawed and hacked at the rope.
“He’s gone,” she intones, feeling a great weariness come over her. She looks at the curve of Dorian’s back as he’s bent over Paul’s body, the buttons of his spine straining the skin. “Dorian.” She bends to brush his shoulder and repeats, “he’s gone.”
A hellish groan corrodes his throat. His face falls from Paul’s lips to his bruised neck, pressing against its waning warmth, his body wracked now with sobs. Lydia looks away, as if to allow private grief, looks up, at the ugly electrolier, around, at the gas lamps casting their shadows over the tables and chairs and books and pictures, back up to the frayed remains of rope hanging from the support beam, to the remains of rope loosely encircling a—what is it? an old tea towel?—around Paul’s neck. She is dry-eyed. It is shock. She senses this. She knows some convulsion of emotion will seize her, senses its inexorable advance. But not yet, not yet.
“Dorian, Dorian.” She is pulling at his shoulder now. He is pushing himself on top of Paul’s body, is already pressed chest to chest. “Dorian, please. Don’t!”
After a minute, Dorian drops his head, as if in supplication, then raises himself, peels himself from Paul’s flesh, turns his eyes from Paul’s to Lydia’s as he pushes himself to his feet, takes in her dazed stare. His jaws move, but nothing comes out. Together, as if their heads were pulled by invisible wires, they turn to look at this incomprehensible other, so frail and vulnerable and a word they can barely think, much less say: dead. The bird, expired only days ago in this very room, its glassy eyes staring, flits through Lydia’s mind. But Dorian jerks away suddenly. Lydia sees panic swell his eyes. He thrashes from the room. A door bangs open. Lydia hears the agonizing retch, the splash in the toilet, the ghastly groans.
And now here she is, abandoned to this. This horror. She has never seen a … (and now she must admit the word) … dead �
� body before. It horrifies her, confounds her: how can the difference from a sleeping body be so acute? He looks … dead. He is dead. Paul is dead. She turns her head away, her body trembles, her thoughts roil. Outside, shadows have nearly engulfed the trees and she more clearly sees the room—and her staring self—reflected darkly in the window glass.
What do they do now?
Dorian staggers back into the living room, glancing against the door, a fistful of tissues pressed to his mouth. He gapes at Lydia and at the fallen Paul as if he had come upon a wholly novel and astounding scene. Lydia takes in his full presence. She is Eve. She has eaten of the apple. She looks away. “Put some clothes on,” she says, her first words of instruction in what will be a terrifying night. Dorian looks down at himself. He is Adam. He burns with mortification. He retreats to the second bedroom, returns in a moment in T-shirt and shorts, Paul’s, Lydia sees but doesn’t query. It’s dark in there, he’s lost his mind. She has more urgent questions.
“What were you doing? I don’t understand.”
“We …” Dorian grips the edge of the sideboard to steady himself. Nausea attacks his stomach anew. “I don’t know, I don’t know…”
“Was he … were you … were you helping him to … kill himself?”
“No, no. It was a … game.”
Lydia’s eyes run to the ceiling, to the stub end of the rope disappearing into the darkness of the rafters. “A game…?”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.” Dorian can’t stand. He sinks down again the wall between the two bedrooms, covers his face. The early evening courses through his mind—Paul’s laughing command he absent himself to the Petit Trianon for a time, his own return to the cottage to find the noose in place, his own wondering questions, Paul’s tempting invitation, the allure, the transgression, the danger, the dope, the wine, the loss of fear, being out of control and not caring, the why-not. His life had been channelled by fear of what he wanted, of what he desired, by fear of punishment, of ostracization, of obliteration. He’d released himself from his safe place and now, and now …. He can’t bear to tell Lydia what they were doing.
But Lydia has an inkling. Such a thing was beyond her wildest imaginings a few moments ago, but now she finds herself in a new and stark world of strange appetites. She is struck by another thought: “But he’s your cousin.”
Dorian groans. He can hear the disgust in her voice. He pulls his hand down his face, rocks his head back and forth. “He’s not my cousin.”
“What?”
“He’s not my cousin. I picked him up hitchhiking coming back from Mom and Bob’s.”
“Why did you say…”
“I don’t know… I didn’t want anybody to think I …we …”
“Oh, God, Dorian.”
Lydia collapses onto the couch. What do they do now? She thinks of her parents, of their reaction to this … to this … she can’t find a word. Catastrophe? Abomination? Of their shock, horror, embarrassment ... anger. She can’t bear to think of her father’s anger. How a track of fear threaded through their young lives; fear of parents, of teachers, of authority, of getting into trouble, of getting caught out, of being punished. She recalls the fear she and Ross had when they broke the key. That was only a key. A key to this ramshackle cottage. The shame is unbearable. She’s ruined. They’re ruined. Their parents’ lives are ruined.
What do they do now? What is the protocol? One of them drives to the RCMP station in Gimli. What will they say? But there is no alternate story they can concoct. Paul didn’t just die. Young men don’t just die. Unless they’re in Vietnam or in a car crash or jump off a building high on acid. And the way Paul died is so appalling, so shocking, so sick. How will they explain it? Her eyes move helplessly to the body, to Paul’s beautiful body. It commands the room. She sees the bruising peeking above the thin towel along the neck. Her heart, fluttering less these last moments, leaps again and begins a new pounding at the scene that would follow. She imagines the face of authority, the questions, the skepticism, the disgust. Can’t this go away? Can we run this film backwards? We can’t.
“We have to get the police,” she says at last.
“No.”
“Dorian.”
“No!”
“What choice is there?”
“No. We can’t. We just … can’t. Dey … Nan … my mother. How…”
“And what about his mother? Oh, god, I can’t stand it. Get up and get a blanket from the cupboard. We have to cover him. And his eyes are open.”
“Please shut them,” Dorian whimpers, struggling to his feet. He pulls a purple blanket from the pile. Oh, not that one, Lydia thinks. The others blankets, ill-piled, tumble to the cupboard floor.
“You shut them.”
“Please.” The blanket slips from Dorian’s hand to fall at Paul’s feet. “Oh, god … I can’t believe it.”
“Close his eyes, Dorian. Do it.”
“Oh god,” Dorian says again, sinking to his knees, reaching for Paul’s eyes, recoiling from the soft-hard of the sclera along his fingertips. Averting his glance, he presses the lids closed. His stomach lurches.
“And now the blanket.” It doesn’t matter which one it is. “Cover him. Cover his face at least.”
Dorian obeys, staggers back, hits the library table. The gas light shudders, throwing spikey shadows over the room, over the shrouded shape on the floor.
“If he’s not your cousin, then who is his family? Who is his mother?”
“I don’t know. Not really. Some people in Toronto. He told us, remember? A mother, his father’s d—… gone. He has a stepfather. Oh, god, oh god.” The horror shoots along his nerves and he sinks again to his knees.
“If only he’d gone to the Maritimes,” Lydia intones hollowly. “Why didn’t he go to the Maritimes? I forget.”
“Changed his mind at the last minute.” Dorian struggles to stop his voice slipping into a keening. “I don’t know, what does it matter?”
Lydia lets this seep into her mind. She lets it rest there where it begins to work like a yeast. “So …” she says slowly, staring across the room at Dorian, at him in pathetic huddle, his face grotesque, red and puffy, now burrowing into folded arms. She is revolted. She is filled with pity. She wants to flee. She cannot leave him. Their lives are over. Their lives cannot be over.
“So …” she begins again, “his parents didn’t know he came west…”
“No.”
“… no one knows he came this way.”
“A few truck drivers on the Trans-Canada, maybe.”
“And he didn’t call home from your grandparents’.”
“No.” Dorian’s arms muffle his voice.
“No?”
“Yes, no.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, we never left the house.”
“And he never used one of the payphones in Gimli.”
“No.” Dorian lifts his head, his eyes pleading. “We were only in town once. Lydia, what diff—? Paul is dead. What are we going to do, what are we going do? Please, please, tell me what we’re going to do.”
The blackbird once again flies into Lydia’s imagination, only this time with a force greater than those in dreams.
34
Some on the Morningstar Cove set notice a difference in Dorian Grant from the summer before—a deeper webbing in the skin below his eyes, the whites of which look like parchment sometimes, a droop in his jawline—as if he had aged more than one winter. (Rumour has it he turns sixty this year, though Wikipedia says fifty-seven.) His smile is at times watery, his glance preoccupied, his hair, when he arrived in Winnipeg Beach to resume shooting Morningstar Cove, brittle, flat black from a bad dye job, which had to be restored to its natural white. Roberta Schreiber, the director of photography, a veteran of the trade, has seen it all, and she would say Dorian Grant has
been enjoying a drink or two—which is his business—but if it creeps into his work then it isn’t. And it is creeping into his work. He is less well prepared, flubs a line more often than before, and is, at turns, short with the crew. Truth is, he’s becoming less of a pleasure to work with.
More truth: Dorian feels hollowed out. His nerves are raw. He wonders at times if he isn’t going batty. Sara Hindle, his old Toronto pal who plays his silver-set love interest, knows he’s drinking secretly though he accepts only Pellegrino in her company.
Perhaps, he thinks, not for the first time, as he cleans off his makeup, he shouldn’t have signed on again for this fakakta kiddie show. No one forced him. (Well, except his pugnacious agent, Charmaine, with her eyes on the money.) His character could have been written out of the series. But he felt his choice was again Hobson’s. He had to come back here, to this navel of his little world. The almighty Internet has failed him—and Lydia—and there is something he is desperate to know. He couldn’t bear another month of waiting.
Paul Is Dead Page 27
