The next morning, the colonel arrived as usual and drove them to the harbour. The boy’s mother and the colonel were very quiet. The boy ate his breakfast and didn’t say anything to anyone. After, he went to the beach with Georgina. They waded and held hands for a time and then went to the flat rock and Georgina smoked a cigarette.
‘We’re leaving today,’ she said, exhaling blue smoke.
‘I wish we were leaving today.’
‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘I love it here. I wish I could live here.’
‘My mother doesn’t like it here.’
‘Not from what I can see.’
The boy turned to look at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She seems to be having fun. The colonel likes her.’
‘I hate him. If I had my gun here, I’d kill him.’
Georgina stubbed out her cigarette. ‘He is a little, you know, creepy.’
‘I saw them kissing.’ The boy showed her the photo he’d taken the night before.
She took it in her fingers and looked at it. ‘That’s not kissing, silly.’ She leaned over and put her lips on his cheek. ‘That’s a kiss.’ She pointed to the photo. ‘This is called screwing.’
‘Don’t say that. It’s rude.’
‘That’s what it’s called. Screwing.’ She seemed to enjoy saying it. ‘They could have a baby, you know.’
The boy, who knew that men and women had babies together but did not know how it worked, felt suddenly very hot and light-headed.
‘I wouldn’t show this to your father, if I were you,’ said Georgina. ‘He might want to kill the colonel.’
The boy thought of the gun in the closet at home.
‘If your mother does have a baby, he would know. From the timing.’
The boy had no idea what the girl was talking about. But he did know that when his father got angry he was very scary. The boy had seen him smash things in the house and threaten his mother. If his father went and looked for the gun, he would see that three bullets were missing. And if he did kill the colonel, he might go to prison. The boy decided that when he got home, he would hide the gun and the bullets so that his father couldn’t find them and would think he’d lost them.
Georgina looked at the photo for a long time. ‘I never knew you could do it this way,’ she said.
‘Do what?’
‘Screw.’
The boy snatched the photograph from her hand. ‘Don’t say that.’
She took a puff on the cigarette, looked him in the eyes. ‘We should burn it,’ she said.
The boy nodded. She lit a match and they cupped their hands around the photograph to protect it from the wind. It burned fast, with a blue flame.
‘You have to keep this a secret,’ she said. ‘You can never tell anyone.’
‘I won’t if you don’t.’
March 5th. Somewhere over Greenland
I stuff the manuscript back into the seatback pocket and stare out of the window. Ten kilometres below, the cut and grid of the tamed prairie has given way to a wasteland of ruptured ice. My hands are shaking. I take a deep breath, hold it. Outside, the sky is clear and blue and the glaciers curve over the earth for as far as I can see. Sometimes I forget what a big place this planet actually is. Eight hours Calgary to London – it sounds so mundane. Imagine walking it.
After a time, I stop shaking, get up and walk to the front to ask the stewardess for a whisky and Coke. We chat for a while. She is pretty enough: long dark hair, brown eyes, a voice that warbles when she speaks. She is Vancouver-based, has a three-day layover in London. She smiles at me. Asks me whether I am going home. Not really sure where home is, I answer, immediately wishing I hadn’t. A man my age, saying something like that. I trudge back to my seat, the fury returning.
No one left. No one left. I slump into my seat, stare out at the ice. I can’t believe he wrote that. The self-pity – I would never have imagined that from him. I was right there with him just a few hours before he wrote that. He could have said it to me then, all of it. Did he think I wouldn’t have listened, that it was all too far gone between us? And if he did want me to find these stories and read them, how did he think it would make me feel, to read those words? Did he even consider it?
Well, all I can say, Dad, is if you felt like you were alone, it was your own goddamned fault.
I reread the third story, the one about the Caribbean island. He never told me he had a brother, that I had an uncle. Never mentioned it once. Neither did Mum. I wonder if he ever even told her. When I get home, I’ll do some checking, see if I can track him down.
It’s hard to think of my grandmother that way, how he describes her. I only saw her a few times. We were overseas, and she was back in Canada in some small, mist-shrouded hamlet on the coast of British Columbia. I remember she lived alone in a tiny log cabin on the edge of the forest. I got a handwritten letter from Dad a month after she’d died. One line. Your grandmother died last week. Thought you should know. That was it. Inside the envelope was an old black-and-white photograph, cracked and faded. A young man in a dark suit and tie, clean-shaven, dark hair, neatly parted to one side, emerging from the front door of a DC-3. He stands on the stairs and looks out, past the camera, out to his future. A lovely young woman stands behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other on the handrail. She is dressed in an elegant white dress, white shoes and gloves, and a white pillbox hat. She is smiling, excited. At the bottom of the photograph someone has written, Havana, Cuba. 1959. I still have it.
I get back up, get another whisky and Coke, talk to the stewardess again. I upgrade my estimation of her looks. Nice body. She asks me about London, about how I like living there. She smiles as she talks. Her eyes are dark. I like it fine, I tell her, still thinking about that island, about the uncle I never knew I had, my grandparents in Cuba. She starts telling me about her layover, what she has planned, but I’m not really listening. It’s all backdrop. I’m spinning.
Are you alright? she asks, reaching out and touching the cuff of my jacket.
I realise I probably look like shit, tired, unshaven, dressed in this old jacket, these faded jeans. I mumble something, turn back to my seat, realise that I’ve let an opportunity slide. A chance to be happy, perhaps. How can you ever know?
Rape
The summer after that Christmas at the Cay, the summer of the killing, a new family moved into the neighbourhood.
The boy and his brother hid in the bushes across the street and watched the moving van arrive and the men unloading the furniture. A few days later, the boy’s mother trooped them both down the street to welcome the newcomers.
They were dressed, at her insistence, in clean shorts and matching button-up shirts. She was carrying a basket containing a freshly baked loaf of bread and a jar of her homemade plum jam. As they walked, his mother told them that the woman who had just moved into the house on the corner was a divorcee, with two children. The boy could hear the stain of scandal in his mother’s voice. He knew what divorce was. One of the kids in his class had parents who’d divorced. Not long after, the kid – a small, quiet boy named Michael – stopped coming to school. They never saw him again.
The boy’s mother pushed open the rusted steel gate and made to step through the opening in the hedge into the garden. The boy stopped, pulled back on her hand.
‘No, Mum,’ he heard himself say. ‘Don’t go in there.’
The boy’s brother smirked.
‘What’s wrong, sweetheart?’ As she turned to face him, he saw her there in her light summer dress, her still-blonde hair done up in a thick blue ribbon, her face lit by the late-afternoon sun, silhouetted against the darkness.
‘Yeah, what’s wrong, War?’ said his brother. ‘Scared?’
The boy could feel his face burning. He’d always hated this house, with its dark shingled turret and cramped dormers, and the way the slate roof seemed to hang over the street like a rockslide waiting to crush a valley town. But what he hated most was the garden. S
urrounded by thick hedges and ancient, near-dead elms, it reminded him of an old church graveyard, the headstone engravings weathered away, dates and names obliterated forever. Every day on the way to school, he’d cross to the other side of the street as he walked by. And each time, that same shiver would spider its way from his shoulders to the tips of his fingers as he hurried to put the house as far behind him as he could. Even when old Mrs Simpkins – who’d lived there since long before the war – had finally died, and her spinster daughter, Maude, was taken to a special hospital, and the house had sat empty for more than a year, he’d still avoided it.
‘Stop being ridiculous,’ said his mother, clamping down on his hand and pulling him into the garden.
‘Scaredy cat,’ said his brother.
His mother led him by the hand along the overgrown garden path and up on to the veranda, the constriction of trespass rising in his chest. Glass crunched under their soles as they approached the big, arched front door.
His mother tutted, reached for the heavy brass knocker. ‘Old Mrs Simpkins really let this place go,’ she said. ‘People say she was never the same after her husband died.’
She let the knocker fall. It was a museum sound, metal doors and echoing marble.
The boy glanced at the places where cardboard had been fitted into the smashed window panes, and quickly looked away. ‘No one’s home,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Nonsense,’ said his mother. ‘The new family moved in two days ago.’
‘Part of a family,’ he said.
His mother glanced at him, her mouth set hard. They waited.
The boy swallowed. Just a few days ago, not long before the new people had moved in, his friend William had come up with a plan to sneak through the hedge and into the garden with a bag of stones he’d collected at the ravine. Darkness had come, and they had stood hidden in the night shadows near the big hedge that ran from the street, back past the crumbling garage and into the gloomy depths of the property.
‘I don’t want to do it,’ the boy had said to his friend. ‘I don’t like this place.’
‘All the more reason,’ Will had replied. ‘It’s only a house. It’s empty. It can’t hurt you.’
‘We could get into trouble.’
‘Don’t be such a pussy.’
The boy had heard people say ‘pussy’ before, in this way. Adults. William always used adult words like fuck and spliff and fag. The boy wasn’t sure what pussy meant, like this, just that it was vaguely derogatory, subtly effeminate and did not mean cat. He didn’t want to tell his friend the truth, that he didn’t know what these words meant, or that the reason he didn’t want to go near the house, then, and now with his mother, was that it was haunted.
Two years before, playing soldier in the neighbourhood, he’d chanced cutting through Mrs Simpkins’ back garden in an attempt to outflank the opposing army. The old woman’s view on children entering her yard was well known, her wrath legendary, but he was determined to overcome his fear. He’d just clambered over the fence and emerged from the hedge into the garden when the garage door opened. Maude had stopped dead, staring at him with those Muskoka summer eyes and her mouth open in a little ‘o’ of surprise. Her hair was tied up in a scarf, he remembered. She held a scrub brush in one hand and a pail in the other. Her patched and greying nightdress was wet at the knees. He was about to turn and run when she smiled. It was not at all what he had expected.
He smiled back.
She pointed to the house. ‘Mother made cookies this morning,’ she said. Her voice was oddly childlike, a helium whisper. ‘Do you want some?’
Remembering what his mother had always told him about being polite, and her kind disposition towards the old widow and her spinster daughter, the boy had agreed. Perhaps this way Maude wouldn’t tell the old lady that he’d been trespassing, and the report wouldn’t reach his mother. The boy followed her inside and sat at the kitchen table as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The old woman was standing at the counter. She turned as he entered, faced him. She was dressed all in black. Her silver hair was pulled back tight. Heavy eyebrows and thin, downcast lips seemed to tug open deep shadows under her eyes. It was the first time he’d seen her up close.
She pointed to a place at the table. He sat. The cookies were hard and tasted vaguely of mothballs, or cough syrup maybe, the milk warm and slightly sour. The boy ate, downed the milk as quickly as he could, shuddering through the aftertaste. Then the two women – Maude with her stringy, unwashed ash hair and nightdress and slippers, the old woman in her old-fashioned black dress buttoned to the neck – took him by the hand and started leading him up the stairs.
‘Where are we going?’ said the boy, pulling back.
‘To see Father,’ whispered Maude.
‘Father? Whose father?’
‘Mine, silly.’
‘I thought he…’
‘Come along, silly.’
They were at the top of the stairs, on the landing, the two women almost pulling him along now, leading him further into the darkness. As they reached the next flight, the boy dropped his weight and pushed his feet against the step. The women compensated. He could feel the strength of them, supporting almost his full weight now.
The old woman turned and stared at him. ‘What is the matter, young man?’
‘Please, I…’ he hesitated, unsure what to say. ‘I have to go.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the old woman.
‘Please,’ he said, squirrels running wild in his stomach. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘Are you afraid of seeing Father?’
He imagined an invalid, an old man everyone had thought was dead, locked away for years, perhaps hideously wounded still, propped up in bed, his beard long and grey, a side table covered in medicine bottles and empty plates, stacks of books, and perhaps, because he was a soldier, a loaded revolver on the bedcovers. The boy nodded, holding back tears. ‘I want to go home, please,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for coming into your yard.’
Mrs Simpkins frowned, glanced at her daughter. Then she pushed back the brim of the plastic army helmet the boy was wearing. ‘You want to be a soldier, don’t you?’
The boy nodded. Every night he watched the war on TV and dreamed that one day, he too, might do those things.
‘Then you must be brave.’ She tightened her grip on his wrist. ‘How can you be a soldier if you are not brave? Now come along. Father wants to meet you.’
The boy shook his head, wiped away his tears. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘You’re hurting me.’
‘Father was a soldier,’ said Maude. Her voice was barely audible, a whisper. ‘He can teach you how to be brave.’
The place was dark, smelled like a museum – old carpets and dust and polish and all manners of things long since dead. Wooden floors creaked under thick-weave carpets as they walked. Heavy felt curtains held back the day. As they penetrated deeper into the upper reaches of the house, he became aware of a depth to the darkness. Faces stared out at him from dark, gilt-framed portraits. Pale silhouettes drifted past, severed heads in pale stone, wreathed bust-works on marble plinths. And the deeper they went, the quieter the women became, so that by the time they reached the big oak door at the far end of the corridor, they spoke only in whispers.
‘Please,’ said the boy. ‘I want to go home. My mother is expecting me.’ His heart was beating so hard he thought this might be what a heart attack felt like. He tried to think of a lie. ‘I have swimming lessons.’
He turned to go, but Maude held him fast.
‘This is Father’s room,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘I’ve told him about you.’
The old lady opened the door and Maude led him inside. The darkness was complete.
‘I’m scared,’ said the boy. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Don’t worry, young man,’ whispered the old lady. It sounded like the blade of a shovel scraping ice.
He heard the rasp of a match being struck, the flare of a flame, the woman’s face
lit red for an instant, and then the hiss of a kerosene lamp. As the mantle took, the room materialised. A glass case covered the length of one wall. Inside were photographs, some framed, others spread over the dark wood shelving, a uniform jacket, brass button and cap badges, a handwritten letter, what looked like a bible, a revolver. Beyond, on the adjacent wall, a door half ajar, darkness beyond.
The two women faced an empty fireplace with a huge stone mantelpiece and looked up. A full-sized portrait of a man in uniform looked down at them. It was an old-fashioned uniform, khaki with a brown belt and boots and red lapel tabs. The man was handsome and had a big moustache narrowed off into fine points. His eyes burned with a strange darkness, like black stars. He held a stick in one hand, his officer’s cap tucked under the other arm.
‘Father,’ said the old lady in her scraping wheeze, ‘this young man wanted to meet you. He, too, wants to be a soldier.’
After a moment, the woman nodded. ‘Yes, that is a good idea,’ she said. ‘Maude, show him Father’s decorations.’
The daughter pulled the boy to the far end of the room, let go of his wrist, unlocked a chest of drawers and pulled open the top one. A rack of medals shone against a black velvet background, a dozen at least, tiled one upon the other, their ribbons in every shade of the rainbow, the obverses polished silver coins, stars and crosses in brass and gold.
The boy reached out to touch. Maude slapped his hand away with a loud hiss.
‘You can’t do that,’ she whispered, clutching the sides of her nightdress. She turned towards the portrait. ‘Sorry, Father,’ she whispered. ‘Yes, I will tell him.’
She faced the boy. ‘You cannot touch them,’ she said. ‘If you do he will be very angry.’
Turbulent Wake Page 4
