What happens next is up to Paul Quarrington, author of Chapter 2 of our serialized story, which will run for eight weeks. The final instalment will be chosen from submissions from readers — watch for details as the story unfolds.
Vida Ash's life is at a crossroads: Her mother's death has left her without a home, and her sister's place in Parkdale is dark, unwelcoming, even creepy. Where to go next? And who's that mysterious stranger? And, wait a minute ..... what did he just do?
DARK HOUSE
Six weeks after her mother's death, Vida Ash threw her belongings into the back of her car, closed up the Hamilton bungalow where she'd nursed her dying mother for two years, and, wearing one of her three new pairs of red shoes, flew down the highway to Toronto. The night before her death, her mother had pointed to the small metal trunk beneath her bed and said there would be money in it to last Vida quite a while and more money to come, to be shared with her sister, even though Cora had not been the one to look after their mother on her deathbed, but so it went in families. You'll be free to do what you want, their mother said, her gaunt hands resting weakly on her coverlet, and now, in a sense, Vida was.
But what did she want exactly?
She had never wanted money and now she had it. She wanted a home, but what sort of home? Anything but the shuttered, loss-soaked bungalow, for a start. Home could be a room, the light at the end of a street, an open road. She wanted love, but what sort of love, she mused, as she said goodbye to Maurice, the gardener, who'd tended her tenderly all the while she'd been tending her mother. She told him she'd be back, but didn't say when — a month, a year, a lifetime?
She was going to stay with Cora and her husband, Ivan, in Parkdale. Cora had said that Vida could live in her attic as long as she wanted. This was Cora's way of being generous.
When Vida arrived, Cora met her at the door, dressed all in black, which Vida presumed was a lingering sign of mourning. Venn, their large black poodle, stood beside her. Cora led Vida through the dim house, past the living room with its marble fireplace, and up two flights of stairs, at the top of which she pulled a small key out of her pocket and opened the attic door.
Inside was a desk, a set of barbells, a single bed, and not much else. Square, uncurtained windows faced east and west. "It's private," Cora said, as if this was the most important thing, before handing over the key. Vida didn't mind the attic's spareness. She had always wanted to live in an attic, which seemed to her a way of feeling airborne.
Every morning she descended the slippery wooden stairs from the attic to the second floor, and the Berber-carpeted stairs from second floor to first, to have breakfast with Cora and Ivan, although breakfast for Cora consisted of nothing but a flagon of black coffee and for Ivan of two slices of toast so charred they looked like charcoal and filled the house with the persistent odour of something burning. Each morning, Vida entered the kitchen through a cloud of smoke.
After breakfast, after Cora and Ivan, both doctors, had driven off to their respective hospitals, Vida herself set out. She did not as yet have great plans. One day she went and bought another pair of red shoes, with silver buckles this time. She stopped to talk to women in Tibetan dress, as they wheeled their shopping carts along Queen Street. She gave money to panhandlers and left trails of pennies behind her as she walked, retracing her steps later to see how many had been picked up. Some afternoons, she took Venn for walks in High Park, where once she spied a bagpiper in a grove, leaves falling around him as he serenaded a tree with his sick, sad song, a song that made her heart clang a little. Other afternoons, she went to bars and Polish restaurants on Roncesvalles, hoping for adventure, but there remained a mournful knot inside her. At night she and Cora would sometimes huddle together on the sofa and cry over their dead mother, who had not always been loveable but had proved undeniably generous in the end, and over their long-lost father. Before bed, at least on Sundays, Vida would compose an e-mail to Maurice.
