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liked their roast beef bloody and dripping, and Elaine made
the rice pudding with rich, flesh-toned condensed milk because
that’s what Oliver’s mother had done during the war. Which
war, Elaine never told them, even though they always asked.
“The war during which your granny” — that mysterious entity
who lived on the other side of the ocean — “used condensed
milk,” she’d answer obtusely. |
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Emma and Blue grew up feeling as muddled about the history of
the world as they did about their own ancestry. Having learned
the futility of asking questions at such a young age, it’s a wonder
the question mark didn’t become extinct. They fabricated answers
to unasked questions in the rank and damp of the basement. They
shared secrets and understanding as they crouched by the furnace
with a face like a monster in the bowels of their house in Niagara
Falls.
It
was there that nine-year-old Blue pulled up his sleeve to show
Emma the initials he’d carved into his arm with a homemade tattoo
gun made from the broken needles of Elaine’s old Singer. Emma
had turned away when he’d started to pull the needles downward
through his skin the day before. She’d wanted to cry out but she
didn’t dare because they were already in trouble. They often were.
“It’s my first tattoo,” he declared proudly, speaking as if he’d
just adopted the first strange animal in a bestiary he was planning
on housing. Because theirs was a world without questions, Emma
didn’t ask the obvious. She simply nodded and put her hand to
his forehead to see if he had a temperature. She spent that night,
and many nights that followed though, wondering if her little
brother was afraid of forgetting his name. She wished she could
forget hers.
In
secret defiance Emma had actually changed her name. She was Tabatha
— daughter of the good witch Samantha — a pretty little blonde
girl who lived in a happy suburban home where mischievous witches
and warlocks turned up unannounced for tea and inadvertently distressed
her poor mortal father with trickery designed to embarrass him
in front of curtain-twitching neighbours.
She
sensed Blue’s motivation to identify himself was different. Perhaps
he was afraid of getting lost in the street. She pictured some
kind stranger, a Jimmy Stewart look-alike in a suit and a white
hat, approaching her brother and saying in a voice out of a black-and-white
movie: “Why, you look lost, son. What’s your name, boy?” Blue
would pull up his sleeve to consult his bicep then and the Jimmy
Stewart look-alike would exclaim, “What the dickens?”
If
it were the fear of being lost and not found that compelled him
to etch a deep, dyslexic “LT” into his arm, she would have suggested
a different set of initials. Ones that would lead you back to
a house with a swimming pool, or a mother who would buy you skates
and take you to hockey practice. Initials you might want to have
monogrammed on a set of towels that belong in a house with a finished
basement on some street with a name like Thackley Terrace.
Instead,
there they were with Elaine and Oliver, all crammed into a tiny
three-bedroom house in Niagara Falls, across the street from a
restaurant offering french fries and chow mein available twenty-four
hours. The house, a decrepit building that they’d bought for next
to nothing, stood on the tawdry main street, sandwiched between
a hardware store and a used-clothing store. In its previous incarnation,
their house had been a pet food store, evidenced by the basement
full of dog food that was part of the bargain. Before that, as
Elaine and Oliver deduced on the basis of what lay behind the
cheap drywall, it must have been a porn shop. The building was
apparently insulated with mouldy copies of Penthouse.
The
upstairs had obviously been a boarding house because each of the
bedrooms smelled like dead bodies and old cheese and there was
a fridge in one of them and a cooking element in the closet of
another. But Emma and Blue each had their own room for the first
time in their lives and this was better than anything that had
ever happened before. Even better still, Elaine allowed each of
them to choose a colour for their bedroom walls. Blue, of course,
chose his namesake, and Emma asked for the colour of the sun,
wherein a long debate ensued between Elaine and Oliver about just
what colour that was. In the end, Oliver painted Emma’s bedroom
a colour that turned out to be more custard than sunshine. Emma
helped her father, pointing out all the spots he’d missed and
getting underfoot and nattering on inanely while he strained his
neck to paint the ceiling.
“You’re
getting in the way,” he finally said, irritated. She opened the
door of the closet then and sat on the floor, out of Oliver’s
way. When she leaned back against the flimsy, fake-wood panelling
at the back of the closet, though, she discovered a hole the size
of a saucepan lid. Curious, she reached inside and wrapped her
fingers around a hard, mysterious object. She tugged and pulled
and finally yanked a grey bone longer than her leg out from the
noisy clatter behind the panelling.
“Daddy!
Look! A dinosaur bone!” she shrieked. “What on earth have you
got there?” he asked, puzzled.
“I
told you — a dinosaur bone!”
“Fancy
that,” mused Oliver, putting down his paintbrush. He crawled inside
the closet with her and said, “I wonder if the rest of its bones
are here.” He reached down into the hole and said, “Yup. There’s
definitely something here, all right.”
He
ripped the panelling down and there, amidst dust, used condoms,
and fossilized chocolate, were several large teeth. “Dinosaur
teeth!” Emma squealed in delight, picking them up in her hands.
Oliver chuckled and said, “Doubtful, but interesting nonetheless.”
Later that day he drilled a needle-sized hole through one of the
molars and strung it on a piece of string so that Emma could wear
it around her neck. She wore it proudly, even though a boy at
school called her a cave woman, in the hope that if she rubbed
it the right way, she would be teleported into a secret world
where animals larger than trucks ate clouds for breakfast. She
and her dad could travel back in time and discover lost cities
and people who spoke languages before English was ever invented.
Worlds far more interesting than Niagara Falls.
Excerpted
from The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life by Camilla Gibb
Copyright 2002 by Camilla Gibb. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday
Canada, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
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