by Wayne Grady
She makes a pot of Bora Bora tea, takes it and her favourite Chinese cup to the couch and sits cross-legged, the film script on her lap, and looks out across False Creek at the wall of high-rises that face her own nine-storey building. It’s like looking into a coal fire, a solid bank of lighted windows, each one harbouring a life no doubt identical to her own. Well, hopefully not identical. As unknowable as. She has surprised herself by becoming one of the runners who glide along the seawall. She never saw herself as athletic. But she’s still not a joiner. The essence of running is the enjoyment of solitude.
She thinks again about buying that property. There is obviously someone looking after the house: the unlocked doors, the food in the pantry, the absence of dust or cobwebs or mouse turds, the fact that the hot water was on—yes, they were solar tanks and yes, it was sunny, but when she did the dishes the hot water came through the tap almost immediately, as though someone else had just been using it. She speculates as to who the mysterious squatter might be. Is she reading the note she left on the table? She thinks it must be a woman. The place was so clean. The dishes washed and put away, the linen folded, the garden weeded. She wonders if Tom noticed; most men tend not to, they assume dishes and clothes and lives are all self-cleaning. Not Tom, no, not Tom.
A couple? Everything was in such good repair. The chisels in the workshop sharpened. Nails and screws sorted. All the doors opened and closed properly. She locked the old woman’s cabin, she would not let them have that, but the rest, as she’d said in the note, was all right with her. Whoever it was, they helped her convince Tom that the location was a good one. On the drive back he’d said, “The place has good feng shui.”
She looks around her own condo. Definitely not good feng shui. Not much chirality going on here at all, everything facing a different direction, chairs, sofa, bookcases. She pushed the dining table into a corner of the living area and uses it as a work surface, and usually eats her meals standing up at the counter or, if she’s working, shoves some of the stuff on the table out to the edge to make room beside the computer for the bowl. Coffee cups seem to multiply by themselves, who knew she had so many. Elinor would hate this place. No, not true, that’s the old Daphne talking. If Sandra and Elinor ever came out here to a conference, she’d invite them over for tea, and Elinor would quietly set about putting things in order, folding dishtowels, straightening chairs, and the new Daphne wouldn’t mind. Tom might do the same thing.
The sky above the buildings across from her is dark. No stars, no moon. Vancouver’s whole mountain/ocean thing strikes her as an attempt to divert attention away from the city’s essential grubbiness. Ah, Vancouver, people say, the mountains, the ocean. Never the crack houses, Railtown, the needle exchanges, the whole Downtown Eastside. She’s never felt at home here. The city seems so insubstantial, temporary, hastily thrown up and just as easily torn down, like a film set. The thin, uninsulated walls of the buildings, all this glass, the obsession with landscaping. One day you’re in a taxi going to the airport, passing ten houses in a row with realtors’ signs in front of them, and when you come back they’re gone and in their place is a sleek glass tower with curtains in the windows and lights behind them and flowerpots and bicycles on the balconies, as though people have been living in them for years. Across from her condo the city put up an apartment building for the homeless; the whole thing made from shipping containers, it went up in three months. How could anything that takes so little time to go up be expected to last? Maybe in an area as seismically unstable as Vancouver, nothing is meant to last. They put buildings up like tents in a desert, meant to shelter nomads for a day or a month, then easily taken down again or simply abandoned to the elements.
Thinking of nomads brings her back to the squatter. What if it’s a guy? Well, so what, really, but if she really is thinking of selling her condo and buying the property, and she’s not, because of course it would be absurd, but if even thinking about it were a yin, then the presence of a man hanging around in the woods, using the main house or one of the outbuildings, taking an occasional shower or whatever, is definitely a yang. If it’s a woman it wouldn’t be so bad, they might even come to some kind of accommodation, Daphne would live in the writer’s cabin and maybe they could both use the kitchen in the main building. A couple would be a problem, two against one, it never works, she went through that with her father and Elinor, it was always two against one. Usually Elinor and her father against her, even after rehab, but sometimes her and her father against Elinor, and occasionally, mostly later on, her and Elinor against her father. No combination worked well. So she would prefer it if the squatter was a woman, a younger woman, like the daughter in the movie, then it would be Daphne and the squatter against Tom. Assuming he was in the picture.
Maybe, she thinks, looking at the script in her lap, the father is dying of something and the daughter stays to look after him, and then stays on after he dies, and then Jimmy Crimson comes back to turn the place into a resort and finds her. Except in this case it would be Daphne who buys the place and goes there to what? To heal, to feel, to experience the sense of belonging and wellness she has never felt anywhere, especially since her father’s death, and to keep the place out of Jimmy Crimson’s hands. And then it’s Daphne who finds the daughter, she’s one of the commune-people who couldn’t bear to leave the island and so just stayed on. And is now looking after the place.
* * *
—
That would be weird, but she can’t see herself living there by herself.
The next weekend, as she and Tom are on their way back to Cortes for a second look, Tom seems agitated. He’s spent the week grappling with the production team from Snakejack, fielding questions about the location that he couldn’t answer.
“I told them I thought the location would work,” he says as they drive, “but they wanted to know things like when high and low tides were. I told them they could get that online. How high does it get? they asked. Pretty high, I said, but I was guessing. The tide comes in around the north and south ends of Vancouver Island, right? and meets at that spot in the Discoveries. Extra-high tides. Then they wanted to know what time of day the sun clears the trees above the point, and when it sinks behind the trees by the workshop.”
“The camera crew need to know those things, I guess,” Daphne says.
“I know, I know. But I just wanted approval in principle. They said, if we can’t drive in, can a barge tie up at the dock at low tide? And what’s in the village? Anything we might need if there’s an emergency? Like tarpaulins if it rains, or batteries or halogen bulbs? Generators if the power goes out? Is there a drugstore? What about a hospital or walk-in clinic? The insurance guys will want to know that.”
She knows all this, but listens anyway. He made a list of their questions and emailed it to her. She called the property managers, but they didn’t know, and so she called Janet. Janet thought maybe the Co-op sold tarps and batteries. Daphne called the Co-op and talked to someone named Caroline. People generally got all that in Campbell River, Caroline told her. The Co-op mainly sells vegetables, fresh meat, baked goods, you know, local produce. Some tools. Jewellery. Jewellery? Yeah, lots of people on the island make jewellery. And pottery. And soap. Garden gnomes. “It’s a co-op,” Caroline explained.
“The team isn’t impressed,” Tom says. “They say they won’t be needing a lot of garden gnomes. I said we’d take another look. They want something closer. Somewhere not on an island. Somewhere they can put trailers on. And lots of power to run the klieg lights.”
“Klieg lights? Does anyone even still make klieg lights?”
“Nope. We’re not dealing with reality here.”
She watches the suburban wasteland go by, identical houses and pop-up shopping malls and box stores: Walmart, Best Buy, Home Depot, Boston Pizza, Winners, Pet World. Parking lots full of empty cars, but she doesn’t see many actual people. Everything she thought she was escaping by tak
ing drugs, still here, still flourishing.
“Why do you want me along?” she asks. “I mean, I don’t mind.” Apart from anything else, there’s a fee in it for her if Snakejack takes the place. “But why?”
He shrugs. “You know how to talk to the locals,” he says, and then, because they both know that isn’t the real reason, or even true, he says, “And because you get this place. I don’t have to explain it to you.”
She looks at him. He feels the connection, too. Some of the directors she’s worked with seemed to want to look like superannuated child prodigies, ball caps on backwards, faded rock-band T-shirts, bed hair, thin as drug addicts, living on coffee and doughnuts. She imagined them riding their skateboards to work. Tom takes his time. He shaved this morning. His shirt is pressed, probably dry-cleaned. The car isn’t littered with takeout boxes and Starbucks cup lids. And he isn’t driving with half a brain, he’s paying attention to the road. She likes that. But her main thought is to get to the house before he does, in case the note is still there on the table.
* * *
—
Just before the ferry lands, however, Tom tells her he’ll drop her off in the village, Manson’s Landing, to check out what supplies are available and what they’d have to build or barge in. He’ll continue on to the property to measure tidelines and take light readings. He says he’ll come back to pick her up in two hours. She tells him she’ll buy groceries for supper, and he can come to pick them up, but she wants to run back. She has her gear in her bag.
“Are you kidding? It’s six kilometres.”
“Six point eight,” she says. “No sweat.”
In the script, the father and daughter get along well with the villagers. Everyone on the island is eccentric in some way, and the father is no odder than most, and decidedly less odd than some. When she’s old enough to drive, the daughter sells their produce at the farmers’ market and works in the library on weekends. She is, of course, everyone’s sweetheart. The village scenes have her buying her first bra and tampons at the general store, the female clerks kind and considerate in a gruff sort of way. This part is like a CBC mini-series, a hybrid of Corner Gas and The Beachcombers, and when Daphne goes into the Co-op it’s as though she’s stepped onto the set. She feels like Maggie Muggins, and the woman behind the cash by the door is Mrs. McGarrity, who calls her “dear” and tells her the cinnamon buns are fresh that morning and to die for. She half expects to see the daughter trying on a hoodie in the clothing aisle. She shows her list to Mr. Greenjeans in hardware and he says he has halogens and tarps and most of the other things they’ll need, and he can order battery packs and a generator and have them there in two days. Mrs. McGarrity tells her there’s no health clinic on the island, but there’s a medevac helicopter that can get her to the hospital in Campbell River between her first and second contractions, if that’s what she’s worried about.
Daphne thanks her.
“You and your husband planning on buying Channel Rock?” the woman asks. Daphne grew up in a small town and is not surprised that this woman knows who she is and where she’s been.
“Are you Caroline?” she asks the woman.
“No, dear, Caroline’s in the back. I can call her if you want.”
“No, it’s okay.” She places a few things on the counter for their dinner, for herself and this man who is not her husband, a frozen spinach-and-mushroom pie, a head of lettuce, a jar of homemade honey-garlic dressing, and two of the cinnamon buns. She fingers a pair of earrings that hangs from a display card beside the cash register. Fourteen-karat hooks with a knot of trade beads and yellow feathers with black dots. They look like tiny dream catchers. Twenty dollars. She adds them to her purchases.
“Channel Rock,” she says. “Is that what it’s called?”
“The old Douglas place.”
“He’s not my husband, he’s my boss,” she says.
“We don’t ask, we don’t tell.”
“But I thought it was the old hippie place.”
“Well, the holy rollers had it for a while, but Gilean Douglas lived there for forty years, and we still call it the Douglas place.”
“What was she like?”
“Gilean? How long you got? She was like a lot of things. Which ones do you want to know about?”
“She was a writer?”
“She was a writer. She was a photographer. She was a tree hugger and a women’s libber. She was married four times, and none of them lasted more than a month before the men took off, I don’t know what she did that scared men off like that, but I sure wish I did. She was head of the Women’s Auxiliary here on Cortes.”
“We’re not thinking of buying,” Daphne says. “Just checking it out. My boss works for a film company.”
“You going to make a movie out there?”
“Maybe.”
“Better keep that under your hat, dear,” advises the woman, “or you’ll have every unemployed misfit on the island hanging around the place calling themselves extras.”
“We’re looking at a lot of places,” Daphne says.
* * *
—
“Well,” says Tom when they’re back at Channel Rock, “what’s the scoop on Manson’s Landing?”
The run was fantastic. She has showered and put on a dress and feels totally recharged. A hundred percent.
“There’s no farmers’ market,” she tells him, “so you’ll have to make one or use the Co-op. And there’s no library. But there’s a bookstore, quite a good one, run by a very nice lady. You could have the daughter working in that.”
He nods. He left the paper bag of groceries on the kitchen table. She takes the dream catchers out and puts them in her ears. “What do you think?” she asks him. He looks at her blankly. “The earrings,” she says. “I bought them at the Co-op.”
“Oh. Nice,” he says.
He doesn’t say anything about the note, but Daphne sees that it’s gone from the kitchen table. After putting the groceries away, she checks the garbage pail. Nothing there. She looks in the wood stove, and outside in the compost bin. She smiles. Taking her backpack and some ground coffee, she heads to Gilean Douglas’s cabin, where she intends to spend the night. She unlocks the door and goes in, sits immediately in the chair at the desk and inhales the smell that has permeated the walls and curtains and books. Nothing has changed since the last time, nothing at all. The sheet of paper with her name on it is still in the typewriter. Daphne. Dad.
If Tom didn’t take the note, then who did? She has two crazy ideas. It’s either the daughter from the film script, or else it’s Gilean Douglas’s ghost. No, “ghost” is the wrong word. Her spirit, her energy. She fingers the feathers dangling from her earrings. What if Gilean Douglas wasn’t evacuated to the hospital in Campbell River but died here, in her cabin, alone, and after she died one of her husbands came and found her body and took it away to be buried, or more likely cremated, but her energy remained here, in this place that she loved? Loves. The woman at the Co-op told her that when Douglas sold the property to the hippies, just before she died, she placed covenants on it, which is why it hasn’t sold. No electricity or running water allowed, the hundred and forty acres can never be divided up, and no road can be built in to the site. So, in a real sense, her will still has power over this place.
As for the daughter, well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? The father kills her. Probably by accident. He tries to prevent her from running off with Jimmy Crimson, maybe he grabs her as she’s getting into Crimson’s boat and she slips and falls into the water and drowns. Crimson jumps in to save her but it’s no use, she’s caught in the undertow that whips around Channel Rock. The father pulls Crimson out just in time. The two men stare at each other for several beats, then Crimson gets into his boat and goes back to his wife and child in Manson’s Landing. Or maybe the daughter throws herself into the sea because her father won’t let
her run away with Jimmy Crimson. The father is watching from the house, sees her standing at the end of the dock, looks away for a second, and when he looks back there’s just the empty dock, and by the time he runs down to save her it’s too late. He stands at the end of the dock, staring helplessly into the unforgiving water. Fade to black and credits. Either way, the body isn’t recovered, so maybe she survived. Maybe she’s still here. Daphne has the script with her. She leaves it on the desk, planning to come back later, make some coffee and finish reading it tonight, in the cabin, before going to bed.
After dinner, she tidies up the kitchen while Tom finishes a bottle of wine. Quail’s Gate; he must have brought it with him. Her father liked that label, talked about ending their tour at that bodega in Kelowna, at the bottom of Mission Hill. Tom offers her a glass but she isn’t even tempted, is actually repelled by the smell of it. She’s still amazed and a bit worried by how easy it was to go cold turkey. It was as though she closed a door and locked it and swallowed the key. Sandra and Elinor and her dad helped her stay off drugs, but she’s pretty sure she’d still be clean anyway.
She says goodnight and takes a flashlight from one of the cupboards and makes her way back to the cabin. A wind has risen high in the trees, the Douglas-firs sigh and shuffle above her head, and gusts of rain angle down from the canopy. The tide is in, too, the surf roaring and splashing against the small dock attached to the shore. In the cabin she lights a lamp, starts the wood stove and puts the kettle on to boil, then sits at the desk reading the script. When the coffee’s ready she pours a cup, undresses, and slips into bed, adjusts the pillow so she can sit up to read. The wind and rain continue to batter on the door and rattle the windows, but the cabin is as tightly sealed as a good ship, the candle flame doesn’t even flicker. She cradles the coffee mug in her hand to keep her fingers warm. She loves this place.
