Free Extreme Vinyl Café by Stuart Mclean

sitting at the kitchen table, stunned by the mallet of jet lag.
    Dorothy was wiping a Mountbatten memorial teapot with a tea towel.
    “I just have a few of these left,” she said, referring to her once-vast collection of royal china.
    She held the teapot up. There was a piece of white adhesive tape on the bottom. She said, “I have written your name on this, dearie. While you’re here you can choose what else you want. And help me go through the rest of it.”
    Dorothy, an only child, never married, and now alone and over seventy, was searching for the comfort of continuity. Dorothy was looking for someone to whom she could pass her life. She had settled on Stephanie.
    Stephanie stared at the commemorative teapot, with its gold gilt, and then around the room. She spotted a collection of porcelain hedgehogs, a wire toast rack, an umbrella stand with the Queen Mother’s face carved into the front. She couldn’t see anything she was remotely interested in possessing. Nothing.
    “Thank you,” she said, uncertainly.
    “We’ll deal with my treasures later,” said Dorothy. “We have a lot to do. I have our itinerary here. We have to get going.”
    Stephanie couldn’t imagine anything Dorothy might want to do that would interest her.
    “I have a list of things my father wants me to see,” said Stephanie, lamely.
    “Never mind that,” said Dorothy.
    And thus began Stephanie’s British education—a tour of London that was more like a forced march. It turned out Dorothy wasn’t only concerned with passing along her things : She wanted to pass on the glorious wonder of Britain.
    They drove into the city and took a small room on the third floor of the quirky and out-of-time Durrants Hotel, just off Marylebone High Street. They checked in, and then marched right out again—onto a series of red double-decker buses that they rode to Bunhill Fields. They stormed past the graves of Daniel Defoe and John Bunyon. They put pebbles on William Blake’s grave, in the Jewish tradition.
    From Bunhill they headed for Hampstead Heath and the tottering and tangled eccentricity of Highgate Cemetery.
    “Karl Marx never even lived in Russia,” said Dorothy as they stood in front of the great philosopher’s tomb.
    As evening fell, they wandered through the winding and hilly neighbourhood of Hampstead.
    “That’s the house where de Gaulle lived during the war,” said Dorothy.
    Stephanie had never heard of Charles de Gaulle. She wondered for a beat if this was something she could admit and was about to, but Dorothy was already pounding down the street. “Imagine,” said Dorothy as Stephanie scrambled to catch up, “imagine all those men and women waiting for their orders. All those poor boys on bikes.”
    They were halfway down a hilly green street when Dorothy turned into a laneway.
    “This is where John Keats lived,” she said.
    Stephanie may never have heard of Charles de Gaulle, but she had studied John Keats. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “Ode to a Nightingale.”
    “Some of the greatest poems of the English language,” said Dorothy, waving her arm in the air. “Written right here. In this very garden.”
    That night, back in the hotel, Dorothy collapsed into the only armchair in their small room, her mouth hanging open, her head thrown back, snoring rhythmically. Stephanie texted Tommy: I went to Keats’s house. There was a lock of his hair .
    Tommy wrote back immediately, two words: What colour?
    The next morning Dorothy and Stephanie stood in front of a terraced row of Georgian houses not far from the Thames River. Dorothy said, “Has your father told you the story about Carlyle?”
    It was chilly. Stephanie was staring glumly at the row of brick houses, wondering if Dorothy was going to drag her to every graveyard and house in London.
    “Carl who?” said Stephanie.
    “Haven’t they taught you anything?” said Dorothy. “It involves one of your ancestors.”
    The idea that she had ancestors had never occurred