Thought You Were Dead

by Nick Craine

  Elaine wasn’t listening to his ultra-sensible advice, as per, and this after having asked for it, also as per. She had already moved onto the marketing angle.

  “Maybe you can sell it to CSIS.”

  “I wasn’t spying on you, darling. I wasn’t the one cruising by at 0.1 klicks while ogling Vaughn’s physique.”

  “Ah, Von Yawn.”

  “Drop dead, Chelly.”

  “I just might.” Chellis tried to snag a piece of cheese from the circulating Roomba, but the blasted thing shot to the other side of the room and got stuck under the couch. It began to whir pathetically and grind its little robotic brain. Elaine jumped up and walked over to free it. She repositioned the plate of cheese and crackers in the centre of the vacuum’s metallic flat top. The Roomba responded with a beep of gratitude and careered away to snorfle up a strategically positioned pile of Pinky fluff. It began to circle around and around, zeroing in on its prey. At least the Roomba was getting something to eat. Chellis had been invited to lunch with the Alpha couple, but had been finding the appetizers somewhat elusive.

  “Where is the famous physique anyway?”

  “Making lunch.”

  “Perfect.”

  On cue, as if drawn by the magnetic force of his personal adjective, Vaughn himself appeared. Chellis noted once again that Elaine’s mate gave much support to Eric Von Danekin’s theories about aliens kick-starting the evolutionary process.

  “You’re looking very clean today Vaughn,” he offered by way of a pleasantry. “Bright and shiny.”

  Elaine groaned, but Vaughn, ever the gentleman, responded with a wholly non-ironic smile. “Why, thank you Chellis. Care for a drink?”

  “Iwouldthanks.” Chellis’s response followed so hard upon the question that it sounded for a moment as if Vaughn had answered it himself. The ultimate in courtesy.

  “It’s only 11:30,” said Elaine. “A.M.”

  “Who are you, the Liquor Control Board?”

  “Ha, ha.” This was Vaughn. “You two.” Pause. “Mixed drink, Chellis? Imported beer? Wine? I have a lovely Châteauneuf-du-Pape decanted.”

  “Surprise me, Vaughan.”

  Vaughan did. “Oh look!” he said, after reaching down to flick a mote of imaginary dust off the arm of the chair in which Chellis was seated. An irregularity in the world’s order had caught his eye. “You seem to have something . . . ” his observation lumbered out, bottomheavy with concern, “er . . . on your . . . footwear, Chellis. I believe it’s . . . it’s . . . oatmeal.”

  All attention was then rivetted on the pointy toecap of Chellis’s Beatle boot.

  “You didn’t tell me you’d eaten today,” Elaine accused.

  “Breakfast, Laney. An old custom observed by the fortunate of the human race. Happened hours ago.” Actually, the porridge had been dinner the night before. What was good enough for Goldilocks was good enough for him.

  “Days ago by the looks of that glob.”

  “It’s not a glob. Globs have girth.” He tried getting rid of the offensive, slob-confirming evidence by rubbing the boot against the back of his pant leg, but the hardy Scottish comestible stuck fast, like cement.

  Vaughan, satisfied, announced, “Do excuse me for a sec, I best check on that ragout.” Before sweeping out of the room with a manly and purposeful stride, he added, “Isn’t Elaine’s newest invention, the full-body sun hat, simply brilliant?”

  They observed a moment of silence.

  “Nice guy,” Chellis finally said.

  “Yes, he is.” Elaine was taking this straight-up, no ice.

  “Very supportive.” Like a jockstrap.

  “Always.”

  “Is he, you know, interesting at all?”

  “Yes. Extremely.”

  “Doesn’t leave pubic hair embedded in the soap, I suppose?”

  “Never.”

  “I’ll be checking later, you realize.”

  “You’ll be sorry if you go snooping in the medicine cabinet.”

  “Packed with marbles again?”

  “Not telling.”

  “Your robot is leaving crop circles in the broadloom, by the way.”

  The Roomba, fixated on the now fluffless spot, was circling and circling like someone with an unresolved neurosis.

  “I wish it were mine. I’d work out the bugs, add a few more features, it’d be terrific. Vacuum, circulating hostess . . . .”

  “The floor’s the limit.”

  “Exactly.”

  Elaine walked over to the Roomba again and gave the machine a nudge with her shoe. It hurtled off and began to bounce erratically along the baseboard. The plate of cheese and crackers slid off the top and it was on them in a flash, sucking up every last crumb. Next it tried to inhale the plate. It began grinding away at this task, shortly made a distressed choking noise, beeped once, and shut itself off.

  “Greedy thing,” said Chellis. “That cheese must’ve gummed up the works.”

  “It’s sweet. It’s in love with Pinky. Follows her around everywhere.”

  “Where is the old fluffball, anyway?”

  This query occasioned another pause, a thoughtful one. “I don’t know, now that you mention it. Haven’t seen her all day.”

  They both gave the Roomba an appraising look.

  “You think?” asked Chellis.

  “Surely not.” Elaine continued to study the machine. “It’s not a bad idea, really.”

  “What? Having Pinky for lunch?” Chellis might dislike and resent Vaughan, and wish to send him back to his ancestral home in outer space, but he was exceedingly glad that reliable old V was the one in charge of the ragout. An invitation to dine with Chef Elaine was usually a traumatizing lab rat experience. How could he forget the bologna fried on her curling iron, the ‘tie’ food made of edible (not quite) string, the casserole composed of post-consumer, cheeselike, simulated-protein product? The grass?

  “That soap idea. Soap that ejects pubes. Icky, shed bits won’t stick to it.”

  “Don’t use oatmeal in it then.”

  Elaine was gone. She’d vanished into that mysterious, but bountifully equipped laboratory in her head. This shouldn’t take too long, he reasoned, soap not being of a high imaginative order. He sat back, drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. Vaughan materialized like a genie by his side, slid a glass of red wine into his hand, then tiptoed out of the room. Chellis gratefully guzzled half the glass – swell stuff – and looked around. A conventional hoity-toity living room rendered quirky with invention. It was more like Pee Wee’s playhouse. If, by way of his own experiment, he were to pour the rest of his wine onto the carpet, Ruggy would doubtless deal with it. Elaine had been working on an advanced Scotchguarding process not too long ago – now that was brilliant. It froze the spill on the spot and you then swept it up and tossed it away. Not that he would ever dream of tossing out frozen Châteauneuf-du-Pape spillage; he’d scoop it up and lick it like a flat pane of puddle ice. Slowly he tipped his glass and a fair measure of wine, more than he intended, splattered onto the rug with a crime-scene finesse. It soaked in. The rug was white. Emphasis on was.

  “Chellis,” snarled Elaine. “For Christ’s sake, no wonder you never get invited anywhere.”

  “I do too.”

  “What, you don’t approve of the vino? Not your usual proletarian plonk? I can find you a Margaret Knight and a bottle of Baby Duck if that would help.”

  Margaret Knight was the inventor of the square-bottomed paper bag. Elaine gave credit where credit was due – unlike Chellis.

  “Science, Laney. Experiment, right? Your sort of thing. I thought you’d treated the carpet with your . . . what did you call that gunk?”

  “You mean the ‘gunk’ I stopped working on because of someone’s big mouth?”

  “I didn’t know, c’mon be fair.”

  “Blab, blab, blab. It’s hard to get a patent if everyone already knows about the invention, isn’t it? Even supposedly secret details of the formula, which I�
��m amazed you even remembered. Dickhead.”

  “I was proud of you, that’s all.”

  “Keep it to yourself.”

  “Okay, okay. I said I was sorry, didn’t I? I bought you flowers.”

  “Mums. From ValuMart. On special. There was a big orange sticker on the plastic pot.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  No comment.

  “I’m glad you liked them.”

  Still no comment.

  “All is forgiven, then, eh?”

  “Not quite.”

  Shit. “No?”

  Elaine smiled, but it was not a smile to gladden Chellis’s heart.

  Shit. Not that.

  She raised the lid of the licorice red hassock in front of her, a Pandora’s Box decor feature, and pulled out a clipboard. This she waggled invitingly, if somewhat menacingly, at Chellis.

  No, no, no. “Not the Mall?”

  She nodded slowly, still smiling.

  Shit.

  4

  Mommie Dearest

  “SO, HUNT. YOUR HAIR?”

  “Got me, Chel. It was there twenty years ago. You’re the detective, you tell me.” Hunt raised his voice. “Eight feet, by ten, by eight.”

  Chellis dutifully wrote down the figures in Hunt’s spiral notebook, but awkwardly on account of the bandage. “No I’m not.”

  Hunt pressed the release on the tape measure and both men watched with delight as the tape zimmed back to home base, concluding with a decisive snap.

  “Your hand, what happened?”

  “Bathroom.”

  “What, your dong’s so weighty you pulled a muscle?”

  “Laney’s bathroom.”

  “Say no more.”

  “I don’t intend to.” Chellis walked over to the closet and peeked inside. It was empty except for a single dress hanging on a rusted wire hanger. The dress was a faded grey and brown polyester, pilled from wear, light as moulted snake skin. It exuded a stale, powdery, je ne sais quoi odour. “Ew.”

  “Yup, place smells. Let’s do the master bedroom.”

  “Small master.”

  “It’s a doll’s house.”

  “Timeless in design.”

  “Enduring in value.”

  “Charm to spare.”

  “Loads of character.”

  “Very unique!”

  “Fabulous opportunity!”

  “Hardwood floors!”

  “Genuine antique fixtures!”

  “Teeth in drawer!”

  “Yeah? The old lady’s dentures?” Hunt walked over to have a look.

  “Too tiny.” Chellis had opened the top drawer of the vanity. That and a three-quarter bed, stripped of covers, except for a cheap, yellowed mattress pad, were the only pieces of furniture remaining in the room. “Rat’s teeth.”

  “Baby teeth,” Hunt concluded. “But you’re not far wrong if they belong to Sonny Jim downstairs, swinging his biz deals even as we speak. Not too choked up. When was the last time he visited his poor old Ma? Eight, nine years ago, why, he can’t quite recall.”

  “He told you that?”

  “No shame.” They stared at the teeth scattered in the drawer, a baker’s dozen of misshapen, discoloured canines and incisors, the molars resembling dried corn kernels. “Neighbours finally twigged to the fact that her cat was hanging around for days outside, shredding the screen door and getting no joy.”

  Chellis reached out his bandaged hand, fingers protruding like roots sprouted from a potato. He was drawn to move the teeth around, stir them into a different configuration, interfere with their disorder. They wanted touching.

  “Don’t,” warned Hunt. “They might bite.”

  “Maybe she was an old meanie. Beat the kid stupid.”

  “Hope so.”

  “He’ll ask an arm and a leg for this dump, eh?”

  “Natch. He’s the type. Then gripe when it doesn’t sell. Switch agents, drop the price, same old, same old.”

  Arm and a leg, Chellis continued to riff on that. Such was the visceral price one had to pay to shelter the remaining bits of oneself after a realty siege. He wondered how much the filial ingrate downstairs got for his teeth way back when. Had he enriched himself even then, or did he carry a lifelong grudge for having sold himself so cheaply? Each miserable little artifact will have been attached to some memory for his mother: the string on the doorknob, the misfired Junior League hardball in the kisser, the dentition-defying rump roast. Her son’s gap-toothed, con artist smile. For her, these teeth may have still been rooted deeply in the past and alive – all, finally, that she had of him. Did unsentimental Rennie have a stash of suchlike relics? Vestiges of his younger self could be chattering away in some distant drawer of the archeological midden he called home. If he went on a dig, what would he find? As a boy, he had been aware, if dimly, that she had ever been on the lookout for his real mama, who she feared might one day appear at the door. This fabled woman, as unreal to him as the tooth fairy, come to snatch the warm, bloodied tooth from beneath his pillow and grab him as well. His worth? What would she leave Rennie as payment? A thin dime. As it turned out, the parental abduction arrived in a form that neither he nor Rennie had been expecting.

  “What happened to the cat?” he asked.

  “Mr. Nice Guy shipped it off to the pound.” Hunt quickly scanned the room, took in the urine-coloured water stains on the ancient wallpaper, the wow in the hardwood, the dearth of electrical outlets. Unmentionables that either made the potential buyer’s heart beat faster, your can-do fixer-upper personality, or induced a particular quality of silence in which one could almost hear the customers’ hearts quailing. He expected a surfeit of the latter. Viewings with an asphyxiating burden of dead air. “C’mon Chel, let’s get this done and get out of here. Treat you to lunch.”

  “My turn with the tape measure.”

  “Sláinte,” Hunt raised his pint of Guinness.

  Chellis did likewise. “May the sauce be with you.” Being a cultural bastard, despite what his name might suggest, he couldn’t bring himself to appropriate the Celtic salutation. He’d feel like a dork. Hunt, bless him, had a dork immunity.

  “Looks good.” Hunt had flipped open the menu. “I like their motto – ‘Never trust anyone under thirty.’”

  They had decided to try out a new restaurant downtown called The Age Spot. It was run by a couple of greying and brindled Boomers, had a bracingly cranky ambience, and retro fare. The menu was heavy on the fried, the trans, the bleached, and the non-to-inorganic. There didn’t appear to be a speck of bran or a flaxseed in the whole place, and the offerings were rife with anti-antioxidants. The choice of drinks were highly sugared, caffeinated, or alcoholic. If you wanted bottled water they’d stomp off and fill up a brown stubby from the tap. True, smoking was not allowed, but there were ashtrays on all the tables filled with complementary candy cigs and it was not forbidden to reminisce fondly and with an unrequited ache about the nasty practice.

  An elderly waitress, definitely not a server, headed their way at a brisk clip. She had high, stiff orange hair, a squint that belied an advanced case of macular degeneration, and a name badge pinned to her pink smock that read ‘Bev.’ She slowed down when she bumped into their table, this causing the clerical collars of foam on their drinks to slosh over the glass rims and pool on the flecked arborite.

  “Youse ready?” she growled.

  “Aaah . . . Bev . . . Beverly, is it? ” Chellis stalled, cracking open the menu and performing a hasty scan.

  “Got that wrong.”

  “Oh?”

  “Name’s short for Beverage. Sister’s name is Brandy. Parents were drinkers.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course it’s Beverly, you tithead. Now whaddya want? Make it snappy.”

  “I’ll have the Heart Attack Special,” said Hunt.

  “Got it. You?” She stared hard at Chellis’s head, but misfired, puncturing a hole in his aura. He could feel it sagging onto his shoulders like a burst
balloon.

  “Okay, okay . . . I’ll try The Big C, no, wait . . . what’s this one? The DOA?”

  “Fried spam, instant mashed potatoes, boiled veg, side salad with brown iceburg lettuce, a dried carrot curl, and a dead tomato slice. Plus a pickle left over from the last guy’s lunch.”

  “Wow, Rennie’s own cuisine. That’s for me.”

  Bev gave a sharp nod and hurtled off, smacking tables and chairs that were in her way. Human pinball.

  “The tough love school of waitressing,” Hunt said.

  “Yeah, frightening. Bet she’ll make us sit here until we finish everything on our plates.”

  “Not a problem, Moe’s gotten over her homemaker phase. No more mac and cheese or marshmallow salad the way Mum used to make. You’ve heard of the Slow Food Movement? She’s into it. I can hear the stuff idling in the cupboard, lazing around, but it never seems to make it to the table.”

  Maureen was Hunt’s ex-wife and girlfriend, in that order. The divorce had been her idea, and the staying together afterward in post-matrimonial bliss had also been hers. She was the ideas person in their coupling and Hunt usually went along with the latest, as he regarded her notions, however crackpot or pointless, as the creative byproduct of a stable union. Besides, she shouldered an inordinate amount of the world’s happiness, and small though this was, it was yet a burden. He surely didn’t want her to unpack it. What preceded the divorce was her “affair” affair – her extramarital project. She had decided that their marriage, for the sake of its health and vibrancy, required some free range coition and had selflessly volunteered to do the dirty work. She planned the strategy and manoeuvres for this bit of hanky-panky, all the ins and outs, as it were, and then discussed them earnestly with the cuckold-to-be. Hunt wasn’t overly concerned because he knew that she would drive any auditioning adulterer and homebreaker nuts. The real problem was that no one would venture anywhere near her. Moe didn’t lack in looks, pulchritude, or social graces, but she gave off the wrong kind of pheromones – virtuous and clean as soap – and her zeal had a clinical, thrill-dispelling effect. The nuanced and grotty joys on offer in a truly sordid arrangement she simply did not get, nor would get. In a last ditch effort, Hunt had privately solicited the help of his pal, who, though protesting loyalty, was perhaps more ready to weigh in than he should have been.