Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  He set the box in a corner by the back door. Galway spotted it at dinnertime. She stared at it for a full minute. Then she walked slowly across the kitchen, down the stairs and dumped on the floor where the litter box used to be. She stared deliberately up at Dave while she did it.

  “I was moving too fast,” said Dave. “I tried to take her too far too fast.”

  He took the litter box back downstairs, but not to its original position. He set it a couple of feet closer to the stairs.

  It took him two months to coax the box, and Galway, out of the basement, through the kitchen, up the stairs and into the upstairs bathroom. By April, Galway was doing her business in the cardboard litter box in the bathroom right outside Dave and Morley’s bedroom.

  The next step was to lift the box from the floor to the top of the toilet. If he could get Galway to use the box while it was perched on the toilet, Dave figured it would be nothing to cut a hole in the bottom and eventually get rid of it altogether.

  “No more kitty litter,” he said one night ebulliently. “This is actually going to work out.”

  He believed that.

  Not wanting to repeat his earlier mistake, Dave decided to move the box up to the level of the toilet seat by imperceptible degrees. Once he got it to the right level he could slide it over and onto the toilet. He chose May 1 as the day for the beginning of the ascent. On May 1 he balanced the litter box on a couple of books and waited to see what would happen.

  What happened was Galway looked at her litter box and then dumped in the bathtub.

  “You have to expect setbacks,” said Dave, the optimist.

  “Not in my bathtub I don’t,” said Morley.

  But Dave didn’t give up. By mid-June Galway had stopped over-grooming. By the end of the month most of her hair had grown back and, to everyone’s surprise, she was jumping, albeit resentfully, into her litter box, which by then Dave had perched on a stack of books, beside the toilet, at seat height.

  “We’re almost there,” he said one night. “On July 1, I’m going to tie the box onto the seat. I didn’t really believe we would get this far.”

  When July began, Dave had the box resting on the toilet seat with a hole cut in the middle and, to everyone’s amazement, Galway was climbing into the box and doing her business through the hole. She was also scratching the wallpaper off the wall next to the toilet.

  “It’s instinct,” Dave explained patiently one night to Morley. “She’s wired to cover up her business as soon as she’s through.”

  So Dave tried to be there for her—to be there to flush as soon as she was done. It seemed to be the least he could do. He tried to impress on everyone how important this was—to be there to flush when he couldn’t.

  Before long Galway stopped scratching the wall.

  Then one evening they were downstairs eating supper and the upstairs toilet flushed. Everyone stopped and looked at one another.

  Morley said, “Who was that?”

  Dave said, “Sweet Jesus,” dropped his cutlery and lurched upstairs. There was Galway, standing in her litter box with her head at the hole, watching the water swirling around in the toilet below her.

  Who would have believed it?

  Dave was ecstatic.

  He was home free.

  He would keep enlarging the hole and trimming the sides of the box until all that was left was a cardboard toilet seat cover. Eventually he could do away with that. Then maybe he would write a book. A bestseller. Get rich. Who would have guessed?

  Then, out of the blue, disaster struck.

  It struck at ten one night while Dave was watching the news on television. The toilet flushed and Dave looked around. Morley was beside him. Sam was in his room. Stephanie was out. The small smile that was tugging at the corner of Dave’s mouth widened.

  Pride before the fall.

  As Dave sat in front of the television feeling prideful a hideous shriek filled the house. It was a piercing shriek of desperation unlike anything Dave had heard in his life—a howling, yowling, wailing wall of terror. Morley reached over and gripped Dave’s arm. The shriek was so horrifyingly loud that it lifted the hair off both their necks. Dave thought, There’s a maniac loose upstairs hacking someone apart with an axe. Except it sounded worse than that, worse than murder. So desperately worse that it was no longer the sound of murder—it was murder itself. Murder was in his house and it sounded just like someone trying to flush a cat down the toilet.

  Dave said, “Oh my God.”

  He pried Morley’s hand free and flew up the stairs.

  Sam was on his way down. His eyes bulging.

  “THERE’S A HUGE SEWER RAT CLIMBING OUT OF THE TOILET,” he shouted as he pushed past his father.

  Dave threw himself through the bathroom door.

  He had to look twice to be sure it was Galway. The bottom of the cardboard litter box had given way just as the toilet had flushed. Galway had fallen into the toilet at its fullest. She had plugged the hole so the water in the bowl couldn’t escape. She was drenched, her wet, matted hair pressed to her rat-thin body. The toilet was slurping and sloshing and overflowing. Galway was yowling and clinging to the rim as the centrifugal force of the water slowly dragged her around the bowl.

  Dave watched her make one complete rotation, and then—without thinking—he reached down to pull her out.

  He had heard all the warnings about going near drowning people. He had missed the ones about drowning cats. When he reached into the toilet, Galway sank her claws into his wrists. Dave screamed and flung the cat over his head, launching her the length of the hall. She landed in a soggy and pathetic pile of wet fur in front of Sam’s bedroom door. She hit the ground running. They didn’t see her for another week.

  Sam was furious at his father.

  “I don’t know what was wrong with the pajamas,” he said. “I don’t know why you had to throw her like that.”

  Stephanie thought the whole thing was stupid.

  Morley didn’t say what she thought. Not directly. She did ask pointedly about the wallpaper—more than once. Each time she did, the conversation ended badly.

  I told you so. That’s what Dave heard. I told you so. From all of them.

  He threw in the towel. All he had to show for his months of patience was a sullen family and a resentful cat. He put the litter box back in the basement.

  Galway began flushing the toilet again in the autumn. She didn’t use it, mind you. Wouldn’t even get on the seat. She would hop onto the bathtub and jump onto the sink. From there she could reach over with her front paw, push the lever on the toilet and stare at the water as it went around and around.

  “She always liked that part,” said Dave.

  Galway’s fascination with the flushing toilet seemed harmless enough—until Arthur started getting into the act. Arthur and the cat would get in the bathroom together, Galway would flush and Arthur would bark his approval.

  Then the toilet started overflowing. They had the plumber in twice with his Roto-Rooter, but it kept clogging up.

  Stephanie blamed Sam.

  “It’s always after he uses it,” she said.

  Sam blamed Stephanie.

  Dave suspected them both. Until one night he went to brush his teeth and caught Galway red-handed. He watched her swat a sponge off the window ledge and into the toilet. Then she flushed, her head circling around and around following the sponge. Dave managed to scoop it out of the water at the last moment.

  It explained both the clogged toilet and all the little things they were missing: bobby pins, toothpaste tops, a bottle of Aspirin.

  He cleared off the top of the tank. And the window ledge. He instructed everyone not to leave anything on the edge of the sink.

  Then Arthur became her accomplice—bringing her things. One night after supper Dave caught Arthur mooching toward the bathroom with the TV remote hidden in his jowls.

  The family began closing the bathroom door. For a few weeks Galway sat and stared at the closed
door in indignation. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would sit in front of it and yowl. But they didn’t give in.

  Eventually she forgot about it.

  So did everyone else.

  Which is why no one thought to tell Dave’s cousin Brenda that she should keep the upstairs bathroom door shut the one night she slept in the house alone.

  Like Dave, Brenda was born in the village of Big Narrows, Cape Breton. She came to Toronto in September, for the first time ever. Against her will.

  Brenda and her father, Ralph, drive the one and only cab in The Narrows. Ralph drives the morning shift, Brenda takes over in the late afternoon and will answer calls all night. In Big Narrows that means her last call can come anywhere between eight in the evening and dawn—which doesn’t bother Brenda. When she doesn’t have a fare she goes home and watches TV—or plays bridge on the Internet. Everyone knows where to find her if they need a cab.

  Brenda is famous in The Narrows because she played center on the town’s Bantam hockey team when she was in grade eight—something that no girl had ever done before. It was the last time the team had made it to the provincial championships in Antigonish.

  Brenda could do all sorts of things that other girls couldn’t do. Of course the other girls didn’t have the advantage of having their mother skip town with a member of the Norwegian merchant marine, as Happy McDougall did when her daughter was eight years old. Certainly the other girls didn’t have the advantage of growing up under the baleful eyes of the three McDougall boys—Collum, Damon and Doug.

  And so Brenda came to play hockey, and could put a worm on a hook with the ease most girls gave to tying shoes—reaching right into a can of worms with her whole hand. She knew about all sorts of boy things, like ball bearings and the difference between grease and oil.

  When she was twelve Brenda discovered the Jumping Cliff behind the Macaulays’ farm. The moss-covered cliff face was at least twenty-five feet high. It was Brenda who worked out that if you stood at the top of the cliff you could grab the branches of any one of the hundreds of maple saplings that grew along the cliff base. And it was Brenda who discovered that if you grabbed on to one of the saplings and stepped off the granite rock, your body weight would tip the sapling over and you could ride it to the ground.

  Brenda learned this by accident on a Saturday afternoon she and Collum had gone trouting at the Macaulays’ pond. On their way home Collum said he was going to cut off all her hair and she started to run through the woods to get away from him. When she came to the cliff face she did what Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did when they were cornered on a cliff in much the same predicament—she launched herself into space. She grabbed one of the saplings on the way past. It was more of an afterthought than anything—her only real thought was keeping herself, and her hair, out of Collum’s hands. She was amazed at how smoothly she rode the sapling to the base of the cliff. Collum, who watched her with equal amazement, tried to follow her down, unfortunately choosing a sapling that he thought looked like a safer bet—an older tree with a thicker trunk. Instead of bending gracefully under his weight and lowering him to the forest floor, Collum’s tree waved back and forth like a metronome and then returned to the upright, leaving him treed like a frightened cat—too far from the cliff to jump back and clutching branches that were too small to climb down. When Brenda appreciated Collum’s dilemma, she stopped running and walked back to the tree. She climbed onto a huge rock and listened to him bellow at her until she got bored. Then she went home and had lunch. She returned three hours later with a rope, only agreeing to chuck it to Collum and pull him back to the cliff after he had given his solemn promise to leave her hair alone.

  Brenda waited two months before she showed the Jumping Cliff to anyone else. She spent hours there all alone—dropping gracefully from the cliff top to the forest floor. She learned by hard experience that if you chose a too-small tree you would crash to the ground as if you were riding an out-of-control elevator. And she learned that if you reached for a sapling that was growing too far from the base of the cliff and pulled it back and jumped, it would whiplash you like a catapult and you would fly through the air with alarming speed.

  She found a beech sapling that was just far enough from the base, and one week she used it to launch every boy on her hockey team off the cliff—bringing them up there one by one and coaxing them onto the tree—You aren’t chicken, are you? Watching them shoot through the forest like screaming cannonballs.

  She was furious at them because they had been too embarrassed to let her play in the provincial championships. She was their second-best center, good enough for games on the island, good enough to help win them a berth in the provincials, but they were too embarrassed to travel to Antigonish with a girl on their team, so she had to stay home. They lost every game, which served them right, but she wasn’t happy until she launched each and every one of them off that beech.

  After she had got that out of her system, she used to go up there with gangs of boys every spring, when the trees were full of sap and flexible—Brenda and the boys climbing the cliff and flying through the forest like monkeys.

  You couldn’t help loving a girl like that. Well, not love. No one ever tried to kiss her or anything. They liked her too much. It would be like kissing your best friend. Like kissing your sister.

  She was accepted at two universities—Mount Allison and Dalhousie. She chose Mount Allison because Halifax was too big. Her father drove her to Sackville in the taxi. She got a small apartment not far from Mel’s Tea Room. She wrote to her father once a week and said she was happy. But she was home before Thanksgiving.

  Her heart turned to stone on the morning of her first class—sitting in a cavernous lecture hall surrounded by a hundred people she didn’t know. It gave her the creeps. Back home she had rarely been in a room where there was one person she didn’t know. At least in The Narrows she knew who was decent and who was a jerk. It could take years to figure that out just for her English class. She went home and said university wasn’t for her, and she started driving the cab at night.

  She wouldn’t have come to Toronto on her own accord. Brenda gets nervous whenever she has to go to Halifax. But she won a return ticket in the Elks’ meat raffle—it was third prize. First prize was a quarter side of beef dressed and freezer wrapped, second prize was a bottomless coffee cup at June’s Cafe. Just her luck to win third prize—a return flight to Toronto.

  Whenever Brenda thought about going to Toronto, she started to sweat—all the traffic and people pushing around you. You could get swallowed up in a city like that and never be heard of again. Brenda imagined there were plenty of people from Cape Breton who had gone to Toronto for a visit and were now walking around aimlessly, looking for a way home. Too polite to ask directions.

  One night she was lying in bed worrying, tossing and turning, and thinking of all the things that could go wrong, when the worst of all possible thoughts occurred to her. She phoned her father in a panic. “What if I like it?”

  She wouldn’t have gone if she could have got out of it. But everyone knew she had won the ticket. She landed at Pearson Airport at nine in the morning, exhausted from the effort it took to get the plane off the ground. She had no idea flying was so tiring.

  She arrived so exhausted that the next morning, a Saturday, when Dave and Morley announced they had planned an overnight trip to Stratford, to the theatre, Brenda asked if they would mind if she stayed home, alone.

  She wasn’t crazy about the idea of being alone in the city, especially at night. But she wasn’t crazy about getting back into a car either. The drive from the airport had been fearsome. Cars and trucks hurtling at them from every direction. There were eighteen lanes of traffic.

  “I’ll feed the cat,” she said. “I’ll walk the dog.”

  Arthur had taken to her instantly—following her around from room to room, settling at her feet. When she said the magic walk word, Arthur cocked his ears and sighed, his tail bouncing
off the floor. Brenda reached down and ran her hand down the back of his neck.

  “Good dog,” she said. She found him comforting.

  Galway, on the other hand, had given her a wide berth. Brenda had never been crazy about cats. The feeling seemed mutual.

  She listened politely when Dave gave her directions to a neighborhood cafe.

  “It has a patio,” said Dave. “It’s a perfect place to sit and watch the city go by.”

  Yeah sure. Like she was going to go out at night alone.

  As soon as everyone left, which was two in the afternoon, Brenda locked the doors and checked the windows. She made her supper—Kraft Dinner—and went to bed at nine o’clock, which was really ten o’clock her time.

  It was unseasonably warm for late September. It all seemed surreal to Brenda—the leaves were gold and orange, the days short, yet the air in the bedroom was almost clammy. She got up to open the window, but as she stood in front of it with her hand on the latch she stopped and shook her head. Who knew what might happen if you did that? She went downstairs and made sure the stove was off. She got up a half-hour later to check the back door and then she lay in the stuffy bedroom with her eyes screwed shut and her fists clenched, following each police siren to see if it was heading her way, monitoring all the strange noises of this strange house.

  She fell into a restless half-sleep shortly after eleven. Just after midnight she woke up with a start, her heart pounding, when—the toilet flushed!

  Brenda had read how some burglars leave unspeakable things behind them before they flee the crime scene. She had never read about burglars who used the toilet before they began. Just her luck to get a weird one.

  She lay in bed motionless—so rigid she was barely touching the mattress anymore. Maybe he would go away. Maybe he didn’t know she was there. If he came in her room she would start snoring. She would try to sound like a man.

  The toilet flushed again.