Turbulent Wake
Page 26
When he was young, and for a long time, he had taken comfort in the permanence of these places. The long sweep of the beach at Karpasia with the rocky point and the dunes coming down to the sea and the steep wooded ridge, and beyond, the patchwork fields and ancient olive groves of the peninsula. The mossy trail up between the big, charred pines and the ancient cedars, so wide at the base that three people could link arms around the trunk, to the top of the island and the view out across the sound to the harbour and the city. The clearing suddenly filling with a herd of buffalo, hundreds of them, and then, emerging from the far trees, a family of elephants, babies following their mothers across the river and disappearing again into the trees. But now he knew that none of these good and perfect places was safe from the cutting and the mining and the plunder and the unceasing warming, and that in the world he would no longer inhabit, all would belong to the economy and so might be sacrificed to it. It was a good thing Helena was not still here to come to this same realisation. And the only parts of him that would live on, some element within his one surviving son and his one granddaughter, would have to find ways to come to terms with this new reality.
So, he had lived. Not well, perhaps. Imperfectly. He had made many errors. Regrets, too, haunted him. But he had lived. He’d fought. He had tried his best. He had tried hard not to be a cynic, to be honest and good. He had loved many good things and places. The mountains, the last big forests, the desert, too, especially on foot, alone or with Helena, sweating up a high pass or fording a deep, cool stream. Swimming in the sea, across a dark lake. Once, he swam the Nile, in the middle of Cairo, just for a laugh. He’d been caught in the current, swept far downstream, come to ground on a papyrus island. He’d hired a felucca to get back to the shore, missed his meeting. The water was so polluted he was sick for a week afterwards. He hadn’t known about the crocodiles. He was happy he’d done it. It would have been easy not to. This was part of how not to be a cynic. You also had to learn what to reject, what to fight against. But most importantly, you had to love. He’d always loved running, riding his bike, sport of all kinds. He loved rocks, reading outside in the sun, fighting, getting drunk, sleeping under canvas and the sound of rain on the roof at night. But everything you love, eventually, you lose. This was the truly hard thing.
He had failed Helena. The only woman he had ever truly loved, he had failed. It was worse than dying. Dying was easy, and he was no longer afraid. He did not care about dying. He could have died in that café in Sana’a. They had actually taken a table right at the front, but moved to the back only because it was too hot. He should have died on that river in Namibia. Either would have been a good death, not like this, just waiting. But failing her, this was the hardest thing of all.
Two months before he was told of his imminent death, the old man had joined a protest against the clearing of an area of protected woodland for the construction of a new highway. The protesters had been fighting the development for years, and for a time, it appeared that they had won. The Environment Agency has ruled that the development would cause unacceptable damage, and the project was killed. But a new government came to power, with a new agenda, and the decision was reversed. Now the work was going ahead. Suddenly, what was irreplaceable had become inconsequential. A few young men and several women chained themselves to bulldozers, took to the trees. The day the old man was arrested, the protesters had confronted police and broken through the fence that surrounded the work area. They’d managed to stop work for four hours before the government ordered the area cleared. Mounted police formed a cordon, the big horses advancing flank-to-flank into the crowd, pushing them back. The cops who led the old man away in handcuffs told him they were only doing their job. Three weeks later, he received a court summons. He wouldn’t make it to court, this time. He’d be dead by then.
And now he knew that he should have applied himself to his dreams sooner, long before his body started to rebel and began consuming itself. And now that it was too late, he wondered what might have happened if he had, and if things might perhaps have been different, and if he might have somehow found a way to say he was sorry to his son, and if perhaps he might have been graced with a few more years with Helena.
Helena. Helena.
Helena.
March 30th. Heart Mountain, Alberta
Last night, I received a call on my mobile from a young woman. She told me that she had got my number from the hospital records. Turns out she knew my old man. She’s a palliative-care nurse at the hospital, and was looking after him when he died. She said my old man had left her a key to the house and very precise instructions: the day he died she was to go to the house, find the manuscript, insert two stories on the top, and the other, the one called ‘All the Good Places’, right at the end. Like ‘First Snow’ and ‘Collapsing Infinity’, it was handwritten, on the back of his hospital report. There is even the graph, two curves, one black, one red, that cross at a point he has labelled ‘death’. At the bottom of the page he’d scrawled: ‘Calgary, February 2030’.
She asked me if I had read it. I told her I’d read it on the flight over. Good, she said. He was hoping you would.
I sat there a moment, not quite sure what I’d just heard.
I have it with me now, the whole manuscript. I’m pretty sure I came up here intending to bury it, but now I don’t know. I can’t decide what my old man would have wanted. I know now that it was some sort of test, but part of me thinks that he’d approve. Not that it matters. Not that anything that made him the man he was is left. Just some ashes that I threw into the river from that bridge where he and Mum first talked, and this. His thoughts, the stories of things he did and saw and tried to do.
Now here I am, sitting on the top of a mountain, scrawling this. It took me all morning to get up here. Started before dawn, watched the sun come up over the valley. From the parking lot, you can see how the mountain got its name, the two big mirror-image ridges that fold over and meet at a point in the valley. The view from up here is amazing. The air is so clear that I can see for miles, as far as there is, all the way to the farthest peaks. It’s been a warm winter here, but there are still a few patches of snow about, strewn in places the sunlight can’t get to. The cliffs shine bright grey in the sun, and even though they are far away they look very close and I can see every detail, all the cracks and the folds and the places where the rock has fallen away.
Being up here, I’m pretty sure my old man and my mum brought me and Adam here once. They took us everywhere. I can remember parts of the trail, this bit of ridge. It must have been that summer we came back to Canada, the summer Adam died. He was four. Four. That was all he had. Four years. I mean, Jesus wept, I can’t imagine it. I loved him so much. It hurts to think about him. I loved them all. I know that. Her, even him.
The old man’s house was worth a lot more than I’d thought. He bought it for nothing. The place wasn’t much but it was on three lots. They’ll probably just knock it down and build three infills, take out all those trees Mum and Dad planted.
Still, between that and the trust fund, I reckon I’m above water for the first time in years, just. I’ve decided that I’m going to buy a second-hand bike and ride out to the coast, find my grandmother’s cabin. I’ll buy some tools, maybe get some work as a carpenter. Do something useful for a change, rather than the shit I’ve wasted all these years on. I’ll explore the coast, fish some of the places my dad and grandfather used to take me. And then I’m going to work hard to make it up to my daughter. Maybe one day take her on a trip. Africa, maybe, when she’s a bit older, see the elephants before they’re all gone. Go to Cyprus. Show her where I grew up.
There is no plot. I know that now, can see it clearly. Sure, you make plans, and one thing may seem to lead to another, but life, if you think about it, is just a series of moments, of things that you do. Some are connected, but most aren’t, not in the way you’d like to believe, as if there were some kind of destiny, some plan God has for you. There’s just li
ving. Doing the best you can. Navigating this turbulent wake we all leave. Working for things that matter, as my mother said that day on the bridge. She taught my old man that, and it stayed with him right until the end. I’m glad about that.
Acknowledgements
If you’ve made it this far, dear reader, thanks. I hope you got something good out of the journey. A life. The only thing we have. Like life, writing is a journey. A tough one. The kind where you have moments where you don’t think that you’re going to be able to finish, where you question why you’re even there, on that steep, winding path through the rocks, or in the middle of that dark, windswept sea. It would just be so much easier to turn back and go home to where it’s safe and warm. Those are the journeys you can’t make on your own. And so thanks go to Karen and West and all at Orenda for encouraging me along this new journey into fiction that is more literary, and helping me when I stumbled. Your willingness to continue to back your authors as they change and grow, and hopefully improve, is amazing and so appreciated. Courage and honour. Two of my favourite nouns. Words that well suit Orenda.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Canadian Paul Hardisty has spent twenty-five years working all over the world as an engineer, hydrologist and environmental scientist. He has roughnecked on oil rigs in Texas, explored for gold in the Arctic, mapped geology in eastern Turkey (where he was befriended by PKK rebels), and rehabilitated water wells in the wilds of Africa. He was in Ethiopia in 1991 as the Mengistu regime fell, and was bumped from one of the last flights out of Addis Ababa by bureaucrats and their families fleeing the rebels. In 1993 he survived a bomb blast in a café in Sana’a, and was one of the last Westerners out of Yemen before the outbreak of the 1994 civil war. Paul is a university professor and CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). The first four novels in his Claymore Straker series, The Abrupt Physics of Dying, The Evolution of Fear, Reconciliation for the Dead and Absolution, all received great critical acclaim and The Abrupt Physics of Dying was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger. Paul is a sailor, a private pilot, keen outdoorsman, conservation volunteer, and lives in Western Australia. Follow him on Twitter @Hardisty_Paul.
Copyright
Orenda Books
16 Carson Road
West Dulwich
London SE21 8HU
www.orendabooks.co.uk
First published in the United Kingdom by Orenda Books 2019
Copyright © Paul E. Hardisty 2019
The story ‘Blue Nile’ was originally published in the anthology Sunshine Noir (White Sun Books, 2016).
Paul E. Hardisty has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–1–912374–71–7
eISBN 978–1–912374–72–4