Norman Bray, In the Performance of His Life by Trevor Cole

Author:Trevor Cole [Cole, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-2390-3
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2005-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Driving north on the two-lane strip of Highway 27 early Monday morning, Amy pushes a CD into her Jetta’s slot and lets the singer’s thin-boned candour define her mood. She has a bagel with cream cheese in the seat beside her, and a black coffee in its Styrofoam cup, both of them bought out of a sense of obligation – don’t drive on an empty stomach, Gillian once told her – and both untouched. She taps the wheel as she gets farther from the city and watches the short-haired fields and cowlick trees roll by.

Since the previous night, she’s been dwelling on the past, and on the things she may have missed. Obligations she may have neglected, duties she may have shirked. She has asked the question, Am I a coward? And some part of her has wondered whether saying no is simply a way to delay coming to terms with the facts. She has resolved, for the time being, to think the worst of herself, to see where that will lead.

Nothing could have been expected of her when her father left; she was only seven, after all. There were reverberations for a few years, uncomfortable visits sat through and long, angry telephone calls overheard. And during these she would watch game shows on television – The Price Is Right and sometimes, with a child’s grasp of irony, Family Feud – because it was the only time she could do so without being scolded. But never did she have the sense that she had left something undone.

Her mother’s death was different. She was the eldest child, by then a young woman with a career and a residence of her own; her mother was killed and it fell to her to be the clear-eyed one, to see the things that needed seeing, to ask the questions that had to be asked, even if asking some of them might have been considered a betrayal of who she knew her mother to be. It was here, undoubtedly, that she had failed.

Why this road, for instance? Why would her mother take this old so-called highway on a harsh, dark November night, instead of the faster Highway 400, if she really was trying to get to the dinner theatre in time to see the lights come up on Norman’s Cervantes? An easy question, surely – nothing too dangerous, unless you allowed it to lead you down a bleaker path. But then apparently, as Amy reminds herself, she is not so inclined.

Three years ago, late in November, two constables from the Toronto police, a man and a woman, came to her door at about 9:30 at night, asking if she was Amy Swain, daughter of Gillian Swain, to which she said yes, looking at their eyes. They were, they said – speaking slowly and evenly – very sorry to inform her that her mother had been killed in a car accident, “up on 27” near the town of Thornton, at approximately 7:55 p.m. They were very sorry, they repeated, their faces quite fixed.

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