and his head rose like a cobra’s as he tried to stare into the eyes of the ginger female. Slowly he began his upward climb, each step a calculated movement, each movement a flowing forward of lithe rippling muscle and taut shivering ganglions, the head seeming separated from the crouching flowing body beneath.
Peanuts gave a strange cry and hissed at him, but as if knowing that it was only female coquetry and invitation the big tom let his body flow on to the floor of the porch, where he stood in momentary indecision, showing his independence by glancing over the garden once again. Peanuts began a series of guttural cries, far different than any noises she had ever made in the house.
Grace stared at the gaunt tomcat with a fascination that was almost mesmeric in its intensity, her fingers digging into the wood of the windowsill and her mouth hanging open. Now that she could see the tom from a distance of a few feet she was aware of the strength and maleness of him, of the sexual concentration that was apparent in his unblinking eyes and quivering haunches. As she watched he mewed piteously, making the sound of a woman in pain. He was answered by a cry from Peanuts that started deep down in her throat and rose to a hysterical pitch of quavering trills.
“Hurry up, hurry up!” Grace pleaded with him. He advanced across the porch towards the female, moving himself a section at a time. His head disappeared from view behind a corner of the window, and she stared at his shivering hindquarters and his fiercely lashing tail. Both cats were now crying to each other, their voices sometimes raised in thin feline screams and at other times muted as they talked in tones of unbearable sadness. Suddenly, almost too quick to see, the tom disappeared completely in the direction of the doorway, and the door rattled on its lock as they met against it.
Grace heard her cat give one long-drawn-out cry and then they tumbled into view, the tom gripping Peanuts around her belly with his forepaws while he searched for a tooth-hold on the back of her neck. The yellow cat was trying to drag herself toward the steps, but the full weight of the tom pressed her hindquarters to the floor. She strained with her front legs as her back legs dragged behind her elongated body, and the back legs of the tom tried to find a grip on the smooth board floor. Neither cat was crying now, their full efforts being concentrated on their straining purpose. Grace pushed herself against the windowsill until it bit into her middle through her girdle, and she clenched her teeth on her tongue.
Suddenly from upstairs came the sound of running water, then with a swoosh and clatter the ancient toilet flushed and gurgled as it emptied noisily down the pipe that lay hidden in the wall behind the kitchen sink. The tomcat loosed his precarious grip upon the ginger female and swung his eyes toward the house, crouched now for a hasty spring away from the startling noise. Peanuts in a few quick bounds reached the fence at the north side of the garden and clawed her way to the top of it, where she stood poised for a moment surveying the yard beyond.
With a lithe bound the tomcat reached the grass and threw himself upon the fence a split second after Peanuts had left it. In a moment both cats had disappeared into the maze of gardens, backyards, and laneways that stretched a full block between the rear of the houses on Adford and the next street, Bemiral Road.
Grace Hill let her hands relax from the windowsill, wiped her mouth with the back of one hand, and glanced up at the ceiling.
“You crazy Russian!” she shouted, knowing that it was Sophia Karpluk who had flushed the toilet. “You dirty Russian schlampe!”
Then she collapsed on a chair, staring with unseeing eyes at the pattern of the linoleum at her feet.
Later on she hurried into her bedroom and pulled an old shoebox from beneath her bed. She carried it into the kitchen, took a pair of scissors, a bottle of India ink, and a lettering pen from a cabinet drawer. Cutting one end off the shoebox, and using the pen and ink that had belonged to a former roomer, she began lettering a new sign for the bathroom. With tongue between teeth she wrote, dont flush toilet exept is neccesery. g. gill.
She sat back and surveyed her handiwork. That should fix that stuck-up Russian.
After a few minutes she heard the front door open and the creak of the stairs leading to the upper floors. It was almost seven. That would be Paul Laramée coming home from his job with the city parks department. She gazed up at the cuckoo clock above the table, waiting for the bright-painted little bird to spring through the door and make its double-voiced iteration to the movement of the earth in relation to the sun. Though she was expecting it, the sudden appearance of the bird and its noise startled her momentarily, as it always did.
She had brought the clock with her to Canada in 1929, and through the depression and the years of her subsequent unhappy marriage to Clarence Hill she had cherished it as a tie with her family and childhood in Bad Kissingen. In 1942 she had run away from Clarence, a Montreal tool-and-die maker, and had come to this city where she had lived ever since.
There had been rumours in the neighbourhood that a syndicate was going to buy all the houses in the block on the west side of Adford, from Berther to Lownard Avenues, and replace them with a high-rise apartment project. Her house, number 120, was spang in the middle of the block, and she had already made up her mind to sell. With the money she would take a trip to Germany to see her aging mother, then return and open a nature farm.
There was a heavy authoritative knock on the door leading to the downstairs hall, and she recognized it as Gordon Lightfoot’s. She pushed herself to her feet, feeling a twinge of the lumbago that had been bothering her for several months. She mustn’t forget to get herself another bottle of pills on her way home tonight.
She opened the door and faced Gordon, her longest current tenant and certainly the most drunken of any roomer in the neighbourhood. Gordon was fully dressed, a condition that had become a rarity over the past two weeks. His sparse grey hair was carefully combed, his shoes shined, and his expensive suit cleaned and pressed.
“Guten Tag, Liebchen,” he said, raising a hand that held a bottle of Rhine wine. “I have brought you a drink from your native country. May I come in?”
She opened the door and he walked in with the exaggerated steadiness of the very drunk. Placing the bottle on the table he sat down in her usual chair, being very careful to hitch the press of his trousers over his knees.
“Haven’t you bought a corkscrew yet?” she asked him. She knew that his visit had not come about because he wanted to share his wine with her, but because he had no means of removing the cork. For a person whose alcoholic tastes were as constant and catholic as his were, the non-ownership of a corkscrew was a foolish oversight.
“You may not believe this, sweetheart,” he said, “but I have never owned a corkscrew.”
Though his flushed face was in repose and he seemed in a good humour, she had learned to be wary of his quick drunken changes of mood. He had frightened her half to death one time when he had first moved into the house.
He had owed her two weeks’ rent, and she hadn’t been able to catch him out of his room for several days. He had insisted on doing his own housekeeping when he took the room, and she had not found any legitimate excuse to enter his room. However, one afternoon she had walked along the hall and knocked on his door. There was no answer, so she had repeated her knock again and again, growing angrier by the minute. Finally she had heard the bedspring grumble, his drunken fumblings for the catch on the door, and then the door was flung open and he faced her.
Except for his necktie and shoes he was fully dressed, his coat and trousers wrinkled and stained, his shirt collar unbelievably dirty and bent, and his lint-covered socks hanging over the ends of his toes, He stared at her angrily from a face that hadn’t been shaved in days, from beneath hair that stuck up in sweat-sticky disarray. His teeth were yellow from neglect and there were salty
