Excerpt; Chapter One; A Fine Mess
The house was a shambles. It looked like the scene of a very serious crime. No crime had been committed there—at least, nothing of a serious nature. Not yet.
“Hey, Odie! You here?” That was Heather.
Odie was Heather’s uncle. That was the official story. There was no documentation or DNA evidence to support that claim, and apart from two nosy neighbors, no one seemed to care. As for the mess, Odie could only be held partially responsible. He was blind as a bat. Not so much as a blurry distant glow penetrated his cornea; his viewing apparatus had failed to form correctly in the womb. His eyes were duds. Odie had no idea what he was missing. To him, sight was a conjecture as abstract as the fourth dimension.
Odie hardly noticed the mess in his house unless he tripped over it—which he rarely did, and he possessed an almost psychic sense for obstacles. He knew exactly where everything was in his house, unless someone else moved it.
In his youth, Odie passed the hours by training his eyes to do tricks. He’d roll them in contradictory orbits, sending one eyeball north and the other simultaneously south, or bulge them nearly out of their sockets, jolt them with tremors that never failed to amuse other children and traumatize adults—and also justified, to him, the presence of those two otherwise pointless ovals that took up so much prime real estate on his face. He would have preferred that the space be used to accommodate a bigger nose or an extra ear, as a way of compensating for his singular sensory shortcoming. As it was, his sense of hearing and smell were keen, but any further advantage would have been well met.
Heather surveyed the familiar living room, making a desultory mental note that every remotely horizontal surface was strewn with precarious stacks of magazines and bundles of newspapers and empty milk cartons and small appliances. For reasons which were never satisfactorily explained to Heather, Odie had two of the three daily newspapers delivered to the house, and he also subscribed to dozens of magazines, including such esoteric titles as Ontario Farmer, Flipside Weekly, Newfoundland Downhomer and Western Catholic Reporter. As far as Heather knew, Odie wasn’t even Catholic, and he had never been as far east as Newfoundland. And the fact that he was blind didn’t seem to discourage him.
“They’re for the bathroom,” Odie said, whenever Heather asked about the reading material.
“You wipe your ass with all this paper?”
But Odie just laughed.
About the mess, Odie had this to say: “If I put things away, I never find them again. Cupboards are for people who can see.”
The disorder in the living room was merely the first impression of a theme that wove a modernist tapestry of clutter throughout the other rooms. Every item in the house had a proper place—a place that could be most easily defined as “wherever it happened to land,” and Heather was comfortable with the somewhat imprecise science of Odie’s organizational methods. No one had ever accused her of possessing unusually high standards in tidiness. It did not offend her in the least, for example, that the Pope’s venerated image, rendered in pious color on the cover of a popular magazine, was pierced by the short leg of the coffee table, bringing tangible stability to her life. The disarray was as cozy as a favorite childhood blanket, and over the years that she had lived with her uncle, she had come to appreciate the abstract nature of life at twenty-three Fuller Avenue.
The center of a five-unit row house, twenty-three Fuller was a little too close to Queen Street to make it civilized; every seven minutes a Queen Street trolley rattled the windowpanes and threatened to topple a stack of Georgian Bay Today. The row house was erected in the 1930s, at a time when proper materials for construction were in short supply, thanks to a worldwide economic recession. Unlike its Victorian neighbors, it was not built to last; it was never intended to stay upright for so many decades. It was a peeling, rotting clapboard structure that sagged ominously toward the center, toward Odie’s slice of home, gradually giving way to the inexorable forces of gravity. Every time it tried to collapse upon itself, an amateur handyman would prop it up again with a piece of used timber and a bit of tape.
Young couples making a double-barreled foray into wedlock and the real estate market had recently bought the two end units of the row house. The district of Parkdale was making the transition from a predominantly elderly and Polish neighborhood to a youthful English one. Children were appearing on the streets for the first time in decades, giving the area a poly-generational aspect it hadn’t known in forty years. Contractors’ vans blocked the sidewalks and Volvos appeared in driveways. And amid all this restoration and renovation, number twenty-three remained the local eyesore. Even the two Polish widows who persisted to survive on either side of Odie’s narrow slice of home kept their front walks swept and their yards tidy. Odie’s porch had lately taken a turn for the worse, listing ominously and destroying the illusion that the structure was sound.
“Is for needing fix, eh? You call Gaspar,” said the Widow Dopiewo, peering anxiously over the fence at the crumbling porch. Odie called her Dopey. She had lived in Canada for eighty years and still couldn’t speak English without brutalizing it. Gaspar was the local amateur handyman who propped up the old neighborhood with used timber and wads of duct tape. Old Gaspar rightfully earned his nickname: Gasbag.
But Odie remained undaunted by the unpredictable angle of the porch’s floorboards. His so-called disability provided him with a sure-footedness that was uncommon among sighted people. And the perilous porch seemed to thwart the Jehovah’s Witnesses who prowled the street on Sunday afternoons. Unfortunately, the mailman was also wary of the porch’s structural integrity; he dropped the mail at the foot of the steps, where it could absorb the full impact of a slushy Toronto winter.
“The mail’s wet again…” Heather dropped the soggy envelopes on the floor in the front hall. “Move the goddamn mailbox off the porch, Odie! I’ve told you before!”
After crossing town through the December slush on her bicycle, Heather was as sodden as the telephone bill. She peeled off her damp leather coat and dropped it on the floor next to the wet mail. Beneath the leather she wore her usual uniform: black ankle boots, black tights, a pair of ragged cut-off jeans (black), and an over-size T-shirt that was, of course, black.
As she navigated the track through the living room, she began divesting herself of her clothing. The boots were kicked under the coffee table, where they sullied the Pope’s supportive visage. The shorts were tossed onto an armchair that hadn’t been used in years. The black tights and T-shirt were left in a heap on the floor, leaving her clad only in panties, which were, inexplicably, white. Modesty was of little concern to Heather, since Odie was blind and the drapes were never open (Odie had no use for sunlight, and Heather couldn’t be bothered). She found her uncle in the kitchen, stirring the contents of a pot that bubbled on the stove. The gas burner was set too high, so Heather turned it down.
“Give your uncle a kiss.” Odie seemed to know precisely where Heather was standing, and pursed his lips in anticipation.
Heather managed to avoid his lips and gave him a peck on the cheek. But Odie’s free hand found her bottom and gave it a squeeze before she could get away. She wrinkled her nose at the chicken soup that simmered on the stove. “You could have waited,” she said. “I told you I would make supper when I got home.” Heather was a vegetarian. She refused to eat anything that might have once had legs.
“No bother.” Odie shrugged, a weak apology. He was familiar with Heather’s cooking, which was why he’d gone ahead without her. There was never enough salt in the house for him to appreciate one of Heather’s legless entrées.
Odie’s true age was as ambiguous as his true relationship to Heather. When asked, he might say forty-two or fifty-six, depending on how he felt at the moment and who was asking. Vagueness was a trait he had picked up from Heather. The Polish widows who flanked him were the only two living souls, besides Heather, who remembered that his real name was Wilbur. Heather had long ago renamed him Odie, a more suitable moniker to reflect his odious tendency to grope her private bits. Odie willingly assumed the new identity, deeming it a fair trade. And anyway, it was an improvement over her original name for him, which was Uncle Dirty—a designation that, in Odie’s view, lacked subtlety.
In keeping with his agreeable disposition, Odie acknowledged that Heather took liberties when it came to her own personal data. He was fairly certain that her real name was Heather, but he was aware that she answered to such aliases as Priscilla and Mary Pat. Other names came and went with fashion, occasionally creating confusion when some boy would call on the telephone, asking for Veronica May or Moira. Odie would begin to tell them they had the wrong number, and then he would reconsider. He’d take the message and pass it on, without asking Heather too many questions. His own alias for Heather was Hazy Jean.
“How were things at the shop today?” asked Odie.
“Um-hum,” Heather sang as she swigged a gruesome blend of vegetable juices, called Beta Blast, right from the carton.
Odie had never had a job, but he had great respect for those who did. “You missed a wicked episode of As The World Spins today.” He spent the greater part of most days watching television.
Heather not only worked, she held down six jobs, to which she applied herself one day a week each. On Mondays she illustrated greeting cards. Tuesdays she worked as a photographer’s assistant. Wednesdays she took a shift with Beck Taxi. Thursdays she taught a class in calligraphy at George Brown College. Fridays she manned the till at the Xanadu Comic Warehouse. And Saturdays she worked a needle at Tattoo-U. She was disinclined to work full-time at any one company. The thought of going to the same office, day after day, made her feel claustrophobic. She preferred the variety that six jobs offered, and the nature of part-time work was casual enough that she never imagined that she was building any sort of career. A career was the last thing Heather wanted.
If Heather had ever considered pursuing a career, it surely would have been as an artist. She had a natural—though untrained—talent for painting. She instinctively understood the rudiments of color and composition and shading, and so on. It was an endowment she’d inherited from her father, John Saywell.
John Saywell spent thirty-five years as a corporate middle-manager before his increasingly unpredictable temperament compelled his wary supervisors to send him into early retirement. One day John discovered that he could no longer keep his opinions to himself, and quickly learned that his honest opinions were not welcome in the business world.
“I tried to tell them that I have Tourette’s syndrome,” John Saywell said to his family, after they learned he’d been sacked, “but that just seemed to close the case for those corporate monkeys.” He did not have Tourette’s syndrome, but he sometimes wished he did, because he frequently felt the urge to tell people exactly what he thought of them.
As a devoted weekend painter, John Saywell had over the years produced hundreds of paintings, and once he was put out to pasture by the business world, his output increased dramatically.
That he was a good artist could not be denied. Whether or not he was a great artist was a matter of opinion that did not interest John Saywell any more than his own opinions had mattered to the corporate monkeys. He didn’t care what other people thought. He just painted and painted…and had an occasional run-in with the police, due to his inexplicable and recurring proclivity for puttering around his yard without a stitch of clothing on. It turns out the police are even less receptive than the corporate monkeys to the Tourette’s ploy.
It’s here noted that Heather was possibly a better artist than her father, though she was aimless and unmotivated, and even more prone to offer unsolicited opinions than her father. She had never studied art formally, and never developed a so-called plan for becoming an artist. But she was able to use her raw talent to sustain a hand-to-mouth existence.
“I want to be a hobo when I grow up,” she had said to her parents, when she was twelve.
Her mother was appalled. Darlene Saywell sold Mary Kay cosmetics and had the pink Cadillac to prove it. She was the only one in the house, she often reflected, with an ounce of good sense. “You most certainly do not!” she said. “Why would you want to be a bum?”
“Hobos aren’t bums, mama. Just because they ride around in boxcars doesn’t make them bums.”
“Yes, it does,” said Darlene. “It most certainly does. Honestly! With an imagination like yours, you should become an actress or a writer. You can be anything you want.”
Heather pushed the macaroni around on her plate until she had formed a satisfactory rendering of Abraham Lincoln. “Naw. I still think I want to be a hobo.”
“Sounds good to me, honey,” said John Saywell, unhelpfully.
On the day of her sixteenth birthday, Heather left home for good.
It was a fairly typical argument with her mother, relating to the use of makeup (which Heather eschewed), that started things off badly. Darlene Saywell could not begin to understand how her daughter could reject so completely the most fundamental aspects of femininity, and was in the habit of reminding her that an even foundation and a light touch of eye shadow can make all the difference in presenting a good first-impression.
Heather was indignant. “Who the hell do I want to impress?”
“Don’t take that tone with me, young lady. Sooner or later, you’ll need to impress someone, believe me,” said Darlene. “If you’d just wear a dress once in a while—”
“There’s nothing wrong with my clothes.”
Darlene sighed. “Honey, I swear you’re actually trying to make yourself unattractive. Don’t you want to look pretty?”
“Makeup is for whores,” Heather said—a declaration from which Darlene recoiled as if she’d been struck. Heather escaped to her room and locked herself in for the afternoon. Some hours later, a somber détente was struck, and was maintained tenuously until Heather’s sole guest arrived for the birthday dinner.
Dave was an affable forty-year-old deadbeat who was almost but not quite Heather’s boyfriend. He still lived at home with his mother (which was just one of the many reasons Darlene disapproved of him) and appeared in no hurry to move out. He was cheerful and good-natured, largely because he had never had a job, had never attempted to get a job, and showed no signs of ever considering the possibility of getting a job. Darlene Saywell’s ongoing concern that Heather wasn’t interested in making herself ‘pretty’ was insignificant next to her morbid fear that Heather might actually marry Dave, or someone like Dave.
For her part, Heather had never considered anything so foolish as marrying Dave—or anyone else for that matter. She liked Dave because he was cheerful and good-natured, and because he often had his mother’s car at his disposal, which was cool. But she couldn’t bring herself to take him seriously.
Dave, on the other hand, felt that his relationship with young Heather Saywell was meaningful, inasmuch as he liked to hang around with her, drive her around in his mother’s car, and fool around with her in the back seat, if Heather was game.
If only Darlene Saywell hadn’t once again raised the dicey subject of Dave’s age, and also the fact that he didn’t appear to have any ambition in life, things might have turned out differently. As it was, Heather unleashed her full repertoire of profanities upon her mother, and then stormed out of the house.
“See ya later, mom,” said Dave, waving a cheerful hand over his shoulder as he followed Heather out.
The couple accelerated away from the bucolic charm of Cornwall, and headed west to start a new life together. They had no real plan, but Dave had somehow gotten the idea that they were eloping. The error in that assumption became clear to him twenty minutes after they’d arrived in downtown Toronto, when, as they idled at a red light, Heather unexpectedly jumped out of the passenger seat and disappeared around a corner without so much as a backward glance.
Soon after arriving in Toronto, Heather caught up with her long lost uncle.
Odie liked the novelty of having someone around the house, not to mention having an ass to grab now and again. A small inheritance kept a leaky roof over his head, and the few dollars that Heather contributed to the household permitted him the luxury of a brand new Sony Trinitron television. He listened to it all day long, speculating on the mysteries of a picture tube. It was a theory he found dubious.
