Catch-Hanger's
brother, Felix, was a travelling furniture designer. The VUE struck him when
he was travelling on a subway train in Toronto, which he pronounced Ter'ono so
that customs officials on the US border took him for a local and ceased to
search his luggage for the feathers that he imported to plump up his sofas.
The subway train driver was killed by the
VUE, and Felix was trapped for twelve hours without lights beneath Lake Ontario.
As a consequence he was apprehensive of the smell of leather in the dark, a
professionally debilitating experience.
Felix was sure he'd twice bumped into his
missing brother-in-law. Both times it wasn't a facial recognition. The first
time was at a furniture auction in the house of a musician outside Nice, where
Felix heard and recognised a repetitious tune being played on a broken piano.
When Felix investigated, the pianist had gone. The second chance meeting was in
a drug store at Frere-Jacques, Delaware. Felix had queued behind a man wearing
earphones who had filled in and then abandoned a customs declaration form,
copying an address with difficulty from a printed envelope. The address was Catch-Hanger's.
The man later bought a postcard of the Frere-Jacques Municipal Bandstand and a
tape cassette of bird song of the Great Lakes. These items in due course turned
up the fourteenth time Catch-Hanger
celebrated her fifth wedding anniversary.
