Sparrow Nights by David Gilmour Read Free Book Online Page A

tell by the light. There’s a lonely clarity to sunlight when it’s too early. He—I assumed it was a he—must have let the hounds out early, a kind of middle finger to whoever wrote the note. I went to the other end of my house and got into the bed in the guest room. I like the way the sheets smell in there; it’s comforting, like a hotel. Still, I didn’t get to sleep until I figured a course of action. Then I went under as if dropped overboard with an anchor around my ankles.
    I didn’t want to go to a hardware store in my neighbourhood, so I took the streetcar to Parkdale. I had a flat out there years ago, but my memory isn’t what it used to be and I got off at the wrong stop. Everything seemed moved around. Finally I found the place (next door to where that red-haired girl worked in the donut shop—what a foolish business that was) and waited in the paint section for the attendant to free himself. He was an effeminate black man, very good at his job and he knew it. I explained I had a rat in my basement; I wanted to dispatch him, painlessly if possible.
    “Shoot him,” the man said, “only watch out for the ricochet.”
    I had the impression he had said this before and I allowed myself a small riposte. “We don’t want to kill all the rats down there after all.”
    “Right,” he said, and laughed the way people do when they don’t follow you. Or don’t think you’re funny perhaps, although in this case I’m confident it was the former. He knew precisely what I wanted and where it was in the store, as I suspect he knew the whereabouts of everything. He led me to a shelf of small, chocolate-bar-sized packages in different colours, for ascending lethalness, I assumed. I bought the yellow pack, went to a butcher’s on Roncesvalles and bought a pound of fatty hamburger—fat makes the hamburger more flavourful—and came home, picking up some tenderizer at the corner.
    After putting my purchases on the kitchen counter, I locked the door and lowered the living-room blinds. I unwrapped the bar. It was a colourless wafer, very hard. I tried to snap it in half but couldn’t. My face reddened; the effort left white indentations in my fingers. Finally I sawed it in two with a serrated paring knife and grated it into a fine yellow powder. I scrubbed the grater myself afterwards in soapy hot water and rinsed it thoroughly. The notion of accidentally killing myself with a poisoned omelette made me smile. I wished I had someone to share the joke with. I thought of one of my students, Edmond, his plump legs lounged over the edge of a chair, high on God knows what, tapping his prominent Adam’s apple. Only the other day he asked me why I didn’t just quit, go off somewhere and write poetry. Really, sometimes I have a mind to throw him out of my office and tell him to come back in four years when he’s not so bloody naïve. But I think I’d rather miss him. Besides, he’s quite right: Thérèse Raquin is bullshit.
    Anyway, while drying the grater and hanging it back on its proper hook, I felt a kind of energized purpose, and I realized it had been some time since I’d felt it.
    Near five that afternoon I cooked up a pair of patties, rare, saignant even, but perhaps a little overspiced, and put them in a plastic bag. I pulled my car in front of my house and made a great production of “preparing to leave for the weekend.” I left the car doors open, Rachmaninov thundering on the radio while I trundled out a small suitcase and a half-dozen thick books, which I laid carefully in the back seat. A working weekend.
    My neighbour from across the street drifted out onto his patio and joined me on the sidewalk. He’s a lawyer now, but until recently he was a local politician, some say a bagman for the incumbent party, but I know nothing of these matters and besides, I couldn’t care less. In his socks and sandals and blue shorts he looked like a high school teacher. We exchanged pleasantries, but he kept throwing