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archaeological speculation rather than fostering terrors and suspense.
    The cabinet! It had been placed over the sealed opening of the crypt; it had been bolted to the wall. Like an ostentatious padlock on a hidden door. It invited discovery, exposure of the secrets it purported to conceal. This was a flourish of the criminal mind, fiendishly confident, taunting posterity.
    Morgan had come full-circle: character and crime were inseparable.
    He was fully awake now, but not rested. After getting up for a pee, he settled back under the covers. It was a day off and a Saturday. The two didn’t always coincide. He thought he might walk over to the old neighbourhood later on, if the sidewalks were cleared. It had changed profoundly, yet it was still called Cabbagetown, and here and there he could see remnants of when it was a sprawling, working-class slum.
    On the margins it had degenerated into a needle park of prostitution and derelicts. But in the heart, among the designer townhouses transformed from dilapidated tenements, he could see a familiar wall or a window, and suddenly he would be back with his dad, walking him to the streetcar on the way to school, or racing around corners and churchyards with other kids, pretending they had bikes.
    Morgan smiled at the ceiling. He did not think of himself as having a deprived childhood. Fred and Darlene did what they could. They were in a subclass now known as “theworking poor.” His dad was employed at the Toronto Transit Commission streetcar yards and his mother picked up seasonal jobs, usually around Christmas when she could get work in restaurant kitchens, and in the summers when she did housecleaning for people in Rosedale away at their cottages.
    He did not actually know what his father did with the TTC. Whatever it was, it was the same job he started with forty-five years before retirement — the same job he so desperately missed for the following three years until he died. Some of his friends at his wake said that he died of a broken heart.
    He was not present at his own wake. Darlene waited until he was buried before she invited a bunch from the yards over for beer and sandwiches, along with their wives, most of whom she had never met.
    His mother had her own friends. They were denizens of Cabbagetown, like herself, proud of their British heritage, narrow-minded and loving. Children were the focus of their lives, and as the children grew up, the women grew fat and smoked as if tobacco were oxygen, and many of them drank. He shrank from his generalization, knowing how close it was to the truth.
    Morgan surprised his teachers and puzzled his parents by staying in school and by winning a scholarship to the University of Toronto, and even more by accepting. The only one not surprised was Morgan. At seventeen he knew he was smart. He knew his parents were smart as well, and that made him bitter. Whenever he purged himself of esoteric facts over dinner, they were indulgent, if sometimes baffled. But when he explained to them the most complex aspects of high-school science or the arcane intricacies of literature and history, they immediately understood.
    Not that they talked a lot, especially to each other. For the most part Darlene and Fred lived parallel lives in a meanenvironment and conversed mostly through their son. When I left, he thought, they had nothing to say.
    He moved into a grotty room on St. George Street close to campus. His most intimate associates were a band of mice whose presence he entertained with grudging congeniality. After catching one in something called the Mouse Motel and watching it lurch about, trying to free its feet from the gluey substance on the miniature floor, he abandoned all thoughts of extermination, kept his food securely stored, and occasionally bought the mice cat kibble for treats.
    In the summers he worked at high-paying roughneck jobs in the north, and while he visited his parents from time to time he never again stayed overnight. By