Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page

by Stuart McLean

  So Dave put both envelopes in his coat pocket, and when he got back to the B and B he sat on his bed and opened the white one as Rhonda had told him. It was from Jimmy. Handwritten instructions.

  Take the train to Brockville, it said, and sprinkle them at the station. That was a sweet night. And I am glad for it. Lucky to have known you. Love you bro.

  So Dave changed his flight. Instead of going right home he went to Montreal and got on the train. And just before Brockville he got up and pretended to walk to the washroom. He looked around, and when he saw no one was watching, he went out into the vestibule and opened the top half of the door and scattered some of Jimmy Walker’s ashes out onto the tracks.

  “See you, Jimmy,” he said.

  A true bayman. And like all the baymen before him, blown away by the wind of these so-called modern times. A little bit of him here, and a little bit there. That’s how he had lived his life, and that’s how he was taking his leave. The rocks and the rails, the sea breeze and the train whistle were all mixed up now. A train clattering along the steel rails like surf on a stone beach, the train whistle blowing in the lonely night like a horn in a fog. Over and over, the foggy days and the long dark nights. Dave shut the door and stood there in the vestibule. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. That’s when it hit him. How much he would miss him.

  THE ONE AND ONLY MURPHY KRUGER

  The bank branch where Murphy had his account shut its doors. Although it wasn’t really his account. It was an account his parents had opened for him when he was born.

  When the notice arrived, Murphy withdrew his money—all of it: $74.58. And he and Sam headed off to the bank nearest their school. Murphy was going to open his first real account.

  The new branch was a bank of the old kind—on a corner, heavy of limestone—built back when money whispered instead of shouted.

  “I would like to see the manager,” said Murphy.

  People who work in banks are taught not to make assumptions. They are told apocryphal stories about clerks who have insulted shabby millionaires. About huge accounts that have walked in, and then, just as quickly, out of a branch.

  The lady at the desk inspected Murphy. It was possible the boy had an inheritance. One could never be certain. She pointed to a couch.

  The boys waited for ten minutes for the manager to appear.

  She was a stylish woman, more pearl than limestone.

  “My name is Moira,” she said, holding out her hand.

  “Murphy Kruger,” said Murphy. “Kruger with a K.”

  The manager smiled, but under force of habit, said nothing more. She stood there and waited for Murphy to speak. It was a power technique—you made your visitor speak first.

  But the silence was getting uncomfortable.

  “How can I help you?” she said at last, a little bewildered that the silence, which always compelled adults to talk, hadn’t compelled this odd-looking boy to anything.

  Murphy looked around diffidently.

  “Perhaps you would like to come to my office?” said the manager, who was both trying to regain control of the situation and avoid the curious eyes of her tellers.

  Murphy nodded, followed her, sat down, smiled, and got right to the point. “If I open an account in your branch and do my banking here, will you throw in a safety deposit box?”

  The manager blinked.

  She’d been trying to size Murphy up, something she was usually good at. She would not be occupying this office had she not a good eye for people. But there was something about this boy she couldn’t put her finger on. Something disarming.

  He was a little—she will almost say different when she tries to describe him to her assistant later in the day, though she will edit herself, consider odd instead, before finally settling on … wonderful.

  “He’s quite—wonderful,” she will say.

  But that will be later.

  Murphy was still sitting across from her, and had just asked for a free safety deposit box (something that no one had ever asked for before), and something about him, which the young woman can’t put her finger on, was making her want to give it to him.

  Murphy was peering at her through his black-framed glasses, his ears and his shirt-tail both sticking out.

  The manager said, “Why do you need a safety deposit box?”

  An obvious stall. And really none of her business.

  Murphy took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt-tail.

  “Do I need to tell you that?” he asked. “Are these not private matters?”

  The manager blinked again. She had lost control. To her credit, it amused rather than upset her.

  She shrugged and allowed the smallest of smiles.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Murphy nodded.

  The truth is that Murphy was unsure why he needed a safety deposit box. The truth is he’d just finished reading a book about an international jewel thief. There was a safety deposit box involved. Murphy wasn’t even certain he knew what a safety deposit box was.

  “I need a place for my stamp collection,” said Murphy. “And certain other valuables.”

  That he had only one stamp in his collection seemed unnecessary to bring up.

  As to the other valuables, they were as follows: a coin from the year he was born, a stone he found on a school trip in the shape of an arrowhead, his first pair of glasses, and a cheque from his grandfather for twenty-five dollars that he didn’t want to cash until he knew for certain his grandfather was solvent.

  “I don’t want him to be sent up river for cheque kiting,” he explained when Sam had asked about that.

  “Cheque kiting?” said Sam.

  “You know,” said Murphy, “paper hanging. Playing the float.”

  He wasn’t about to tell the manager about his sketchy grandfather, or about his arrowhead, so Murphy came up with the stamp thing and then sat there, like a jewel thief.

  And for reasons she didn’t fully understand, maybe it was simply that she found Murphy completely charming, the manager asked Murphy for his address and typed it into her computer.

  “This is a little out of the ordinary,” she said as she fished for something in her drawer.

  “I hear that a lot,” said Murphy.

  The manager found what she was looking for—an index card.

  “I need you to sign this,” she said.

  And she slid the card toward Murphy.

  Murphy’s heart began to pound.

  Suddenly Murphy was the one off stride.

  Murphy didn’t have a signature.

  An hour later Sam and Murphy were sitting at one of the cast-iron tables at the back of Harmon’s Fine Foods—back by the briny tubs of feta and olives, in the grocery store where Sam worked.

  They were drinking a coffee concoction that Sam had frapped in the blender and topped with whipped cream and caramel sauce.

  Murphy’s had the benefit of a tiny shot of grappa that he’d snuck from the bottle in Mr. Harmon’s desk drawer.

  The boys had been sitting at the table for half an hour. Murphy had not stopped talking.

  “I can’t believe I let this happen.”

  To be precise, he meant not happen. What he could not believe was that he had arrived at this stage of his life without a signature.

  “It is such an oversight,” he said.

  When the manager had pushed the little index card across her desk and asked him to sign it, Murphy had realized the significance of the moment right away.

  She wanted his official signature. And he didn’t have one. He had only ever printed his name. But he knew he couldn’t print it now. And he knew something else. Something earth-shatteringly important. The way he wrote his name on that little white card would stick with him for the rest of his life.

  He looked at the manager and then he looked at his watch.

  “Oh my goodness,” he said. “I have another appointment. I’ll come back and sign another day.”

  “I
t’s not our fault,” said Sam to Murphy. “They should have taught us in school.”

  “Signatures?” said Murphy.

  “Cursive,” said Sam.

  “They used to teach it,” said Murphy. “But they stopped.”

  “How come?” said Sam.

  “They use it when they’re writing about us.”

  It was the next morning. First period was social studies. Murphy was hanging over his notebook with his tongue poking out the side of his mouth—the picture of concentration. But Murphy wasn’t concentrating on social studies. Murphy was writing his name over and over on the back pages of his notebook. At recess Sam and Murphy examined what he’d done.

  He had hundreds of versions. He’d tried up-and-down lettering and slanted lettering—both forward and backward. He’d tried versions with his middle name and versions with just his initials. He had a page where all three of his names were joined to make one word and a page where they were broken into three.

  He had even played with the spelling.

  M-u-r-p-h-e-e.

  “It’s good,” said Sam.

  “I think it makes me look like a dog,” said Murphy.

  They both considered this for a moment.

  Sam nodded in agreement.

  “It does make you look like a dog.”

  Right away Murphy shot back, “What kind of dog?”

  And that, of course, was the nub of the problem, the whole mess of the matter.

  Because Murphy wasn’t just writing his name. If that was the case he could have put an X on that index card and been done with it. It was far more than writing his name.

  His signature was a declaration. His opportunity to tell the world who he was.

  The problem, of course, was that Murphy had no idea who he was.

  The next day they were in the library—in their favourite study room, the one at the far end of the corridor with the window that overlooks the park. They had set up camp.

  “Look at this one,” said Murphy. “I like the way it goes below the line.”

  Murphy had accidentally written a version where the tail of the y dove down and back like an underwater swimmer and underlined the whole of his first name, before it circled around—bisecting the bottom of the p on its way—and then swooped up and looped over the line again to begin the K.

  “It makes you look like a president,” said Sam.

  And there they were again, back at the heart of it. Was he a president? Or was he a dog?

  The problem with the opportunity of choice is that it affords you the opportunity of choosing wrong.

  “Then you change it,” said Sam, who was lying on his back, on the floor under the table.

  “You can’t just change it,” said Murphy, who was lying on the tabletop.

  “If you change your signature,” explained Murphy, rolling over and peering over the table’s edge, “you can be denied the necessities of life. Things like health care, even education.”

  The back pages of his notebooks were covered with all sorts of attempts—exuberant versions with swooping capitals and curlicue consonants. Modest lowercase versions worthy of a poet.

  “Look at this one,” said Murphy, sticking his open notebook over the table. “What do you think of this?”

  Sam, who was beginning to tire of the exercise, grunted.

  “I don’t know why this has to be so complicated,” he said.

  “What if I become famous?” said Murphy, dropping off the table. “What if I have to sign it over and over? What if people collect it?”

  “You can never read autographs,” said Sam. “If you get famous you can just scribble it. Like that one.” He was pointing to a black scribble on the corner of a page.

  “That one was if I decided to be a psychopath,” said Murphy.

  The next afternoon, at the end of last period, Murphy was standing by his desk shoving books into his backpack when Mrs. Bailey, the school secretary, came into their room.

  “Mr. Kennedy,” she said, “I need you to sign the attendance form.”

  Murphy stopped what he was doing and stared.

  Everything going on around him faded from his awareness—all the kids, all the clatter—until all there was was Mrs. Bailey walking in front of the chalkboard, holding the attendance record in front of her, and Mr. Kennedy picking up his pen. Everything was moving in slow motion, until Mr. Kennedy signed. He wrote with a flourish. Did it take a second? Maybe less. No more. The pen hit the paper, things speeded up—a wave of his arm, and it was done.

  Murphy caught up to Sam by his locker.

  “Did you see that?” he said. “Did you see that? I hadn’t even thought of it. It never occurred to me.”

  Sam said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  It wasn’t only what you wrote, it was how you wrote it. It wasn’t your official signature unless you could do it at the speed of light.

  That night after supper, Murphy asked his mother.

  “Do you have an autograph?” he said.

  His mother was doing the dishes, but he had a paper, and a pen, and he made her sign—her wet hands dripping.

  “Can you sign your name?” he asked his dad a moment later.

  Both of his parents went fast. Everyone went fast. And something else. Everyone was messy.

  It was far more complicated than Murphy had ever realized. He was never going to figure it out. He would never have a signature.

  “I don’t understand the big deal,” said Sam.

  They were walking through the park, not sure where they were actually going, vaguely toward Harmon’s, or maybe the arena.

  “I want it to be clear,” said Murphy. “Yet I want it to have a certain …” His voice trailed off.

  “A certain what?” said Sam, who was becoming impatient with the way Murphy wasn’t finishing his thoughts.

  “A certain mess,” said Murphy. “Plus I have to be able to do it fast, and I have to be able to repeat it perfectly every time, and also it has to have something … something …”

  There it was again.

  “Something what?” said Sam.

  “Something special,” said Murphy.

  “Because you are so special,” said Sam, landing it halfway between a question and sarcasm.

  “No,” said Murphy. “Not because I’m special. Because … Because …” He started lost, but then he pounced—like a cat landing on a fly. Like he’d just had some important insight.

  “Not because I’m special,” he said. “But because I am the only Murphy Kruger.”

  “Mr. Caverhill,” said Murphy. It was the next afternoon. It was the end of the day again. Mr. Caverhill teaches English. The classroom was empty. Murphy had lingered.

  “Mr. Caverhill, when a person signs his name to something, like an autograph, or on a bank form or something, do they just move their fingers and their hand? Or are they supposed to hold the fingers still and move their whole arm?”

  Two weeks had passed since Murphy’s first visit to the bank.

  It was Saturday afternoon.

  He called Sam.

  “I’m coming over,” he said.

  He sounded panicked.

  They went up to Sam’s room.

  “Shut the door,” said Murphy. “I want to show you something.”

  Murphy sat on the bed and held out his hand.

  There was a lump, just before the first knuckle on his middle finger. A lump, and a valley, and then another lump.

  “It’s where I hold the pen,” said Murphy. “I think I’ve given myself a tumour.”

  It went on like this for weeks.

  “What about this one?” said Murphy.

  “It looks like a girl’s,” said Sam.

  “Okay, this one.”

  It was like looking at paint chips. After a while everything seemed the same—everything equally good or bad. And it was impossible to tell one from the other.

  There was the signature, for instance, where the K was in the s
hape of a star.

  And the one with a smiley face in the head of the p.

  There was the one Murphy copied from his father.

  And the ones that came from nowhere at all.

  And then, out of the blue, there was one that was perfect.

  “This is it,” said Murphy.

  Until he turned up the next morning and pointed out the fatal flaw.

  “It’s impossible to forge,” he said.

  “Isn’t that what you’d want?” said Sam.

  “If you only think of yourself,” said Murphy dismissively. “I have to think of others. I have to consider my unborn children.”

  “Good point,” said Sam.

  Murphy was back at square one.

  But Murphy finally got it. He went back to the bank on a Tuesday, this time by himself. He appeared at the manager’s office and stood by the door.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  The manager smiled and pointed at the chair. She’d thought she wasn’t going to see him again.

  They talked for a while, and then she opened her desk drawer and got out an index card again. Murphy reached into his pocket and pulled out an old fountain pen he’d found in his father’s desk. He’d bought a new package of cartridges for the occasion. Peacock blue.

  “I’ve been practising my signature,” he said. He inhaled, closed his eyes, and then opened them. He signed on the exhale.

  Truth be told, it was a piece of graphological thievery. He’d stolen the M from his mother and the K from his dad. He’d taken the p from an author’s signature he’d seen on the web. The y was his—the swooping tail that swam back and underlined everything, the one that came by accident in math class.

  Murphy signed, and then sat back, looking at what he’d done. It wasn’t his best. He’d done better at home. He wanted to ask for another card so that he could do it again, but before he could, the manager reached out, picked up the card, and said,

  “That’s a very nice signature.”

  “I know,” said Murphy.

  Murphy kept practising, and the more he practised, the faster he got.