“That’s why I like cities. You know who you know. And who you don’t know, you don’t know. It’s simple. That wanking creep knew it was you he was watching.”
“Why does that make it worse? Morgan, there are people in the city, you see them for years, they have your coffee and muffin ready when you get off the subway because you’re a regular and you tip them at Christmas. They sell you a paper, a haircut, shoes. They nod to you in the hall, you pat their dog. They work in your office at unknown labours. On the street corner you give them a dollar once a week and miss them when they’re gone, maybe in rehab or dead, you don’t know. You know these people. You don’t know anything about them. We all live in villages. The difference is that in a village like this you know everyone’s name. You can be just as lonely.”
Miranda wasn’t sure why she had added the bit about loneliness. She wasn’t certain why being known made her more vulnerable, but it did, at least now, looking back.
“He wasn’t just looking,” said Morgan, turning her perspective around. “He was watching. There’s a difference. He was watching your life.”
“Or I was putting it out on display.”
“For goodness’ sake, Miranda. You said yourself he may have been there for years.”
“We used to gather crayfish in jam jars. I wonder if he saw us. Sometimes we didn’t come by the mill. You could cut across Mr. Naismith’s pasture from the village if the bull wasn’t out. He couldn’t always know we were here. Celia and me, we’d come out when we were only nine or ten, even younger, and we’d catch crayfish in the shallows.”
“What did you do with them?”
“We talked about taking them home to eat, but we let them go. I can work out how old we were by the sequence of gatherings. When we were really small, it was bits of driftwood and pebbles. Then we graduated to crayfish for a couple of summers. Then it was gathering flowers. We’d pick great bunches, and naturally they’d die. We’d pluck water hyacinths and lay them out in the mud like drowned things, and lilies with long, snaky stems. Then we got old enough and we’d come and just admire the flowers, wade out and smell them, and swim by the dam and lie in the sun. We wore bathing suits then. We were modest until we hit puberty. Celia was fully mature at twelve. I think we sunbathed naked after that, except we kept our panties on. I’m not sure why. It seems reckless now to strip down like that, even here, but we kept our underwear on, for periods I suppose, not propriety, and we read romances aloud, graduating year by year from the most romantic drivel with pastel covers to almost Jane Austen. By the time I was reading Jane Austen, Celia was married or close enough to it. Donny was all the romance she could handle, and I preferred Austen in solitude.”
She took a deep breath and glanced up at Morgan, who seemed to be listening, seemed to be waiting. Miranda felt under pressure, as if something were expected of her and she wasn’t sure what it was. “Perhaps he was our necessary witness,” she went on. “Scrunched up in his tower. Dreaming of his dead mother. We had him trapped there, Morgan. We kept him locked away day after day. Rapunzel, a bald-headed wanker. In all our innocence we had the power.”
“Not if you didn’t know he was there until later.”
“But maybe we did. I can’t remember. Sometimes there were pigeons, sometimes maybe there weren’t any pigeons.”
“Pigeons?”
“You know how kids play, as if there’s an unseen audience applauding, or being horrified. Kids play to ghosts, before they grow up and lose them.”
“They just lose them?”
“You were a kid, too, you know. We lose our familiars when we get big enough to know they can’t possibly exist. That’s what makes them go away. We stop unbelief.”
While she talked she wondered how she had avoided immediately connecting the green sports car in Rosedale with the car parked by the mill. No one in Waldron drove a Jaguar. She would have known. Would she have known it was him in the tower?
“No one would want to stay innocent forever,” she said. “But after the Fall, amnesia settles in. We forget what Eden was like.”
“No,” said Morgan. “We forget the Fall, not the Garden.” He paused. “Pre-lapsarian nostalgia,” he said, just to see if the words worked, out loud. Then he added, “When we start talking like televangelists, at least one of us is being evasive …”
“Maybe that’s what I want.”
“We came here to deal with things, Miranda. You brought me here.”
“It’s still beautiful, isn’t it? An interlude from the world.”
“A strange sanctuary.”
“Strange sanctuary,” she repeated, listening to the sounds echo deep in her mind.
“He was probably up there wanking all day.”
“Is that anatomically possible?”
“Only if he was really bad at it.”
“I imagine it was creepier than that,” said Miranda. “I mean, you wouldn’t come back day after day through the long hot summer to ejaculate in the shadows.”
“I don’t know.”
“Not for sex. It’s about needing to watch to prove you exist. Like taking photographs of Niagara Falls to confirm you’re there. Making connections.”
“The connection, of course, is illusion. Even for non-voyeurs. An orgasm is the most solitary act in all of creation.”
“Speak for yourself, Morgan. He must have loathed us, you know, in direct proportion to how much he despised himself. We’re lucky the bodily fluids being spilled weren’t blood. Not ‘we.’ The summer I was eighteen, Celia was getting legitimately laid. I was on my own.”
The car, she wondered, had Celia and she gossiped about the Jaguar? It was always there. It had seemed as if it had always been there. If they had known who had owned it, they had known he was older, an outsider, and rich. From another world. They were trespassing technically. It was his property. Perhaps they wouldn’t have given it much thought.
“We cooked some of them once — the crayfish. Celia said her friend Russell Livingstone used to roast them on a stick when they didn’t catch any trout, and the shiners weren’t worth bothering with. Russell was like Celia’s brother, but he moved away. It was like he died.”
“Did you eat them?”
“No. I don’t think so. We let them go. But don’t you see? We didn’t release them out of kindness. We were cruel. We just didn’t know what else to do with them.”
“You weren’t cruel. You were just kids.”
“Innocent?”
“Innocent. In Toronto we used to hunt along the ravines with slingshots and BB guns.”
“Did you ever kill anything?”
“Not even close. I had a friend who cut the tail off a road-kill raccoon and we took it to school as a trophy, but everyone knew it was road kill and that we’d get rabies or leprosy. The teacher made us throw it out in the big garbage bin and then wash our hands in boiling water and go home and change.”
“In boiling water?”
“Near enough. The teacher was really scared of dead things.”
“I can see Molly Bray as a girl catching crayfish,” said Miranda, changing the subject. “She’s wading in the shallows. You can see her. Scrunch up your eyes and stare into the sun.”
Morgan thought perhaps he could, by shielding his eyes from the light.
They