by Edward Riche
Also by Edward Riche
Easy to Like
The Nine Planets
Rare Birds
Today I Learned It Was You
edward riche
Copyright © 2016 Edward Riche
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Published in Canada in 2016 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Riche, Edward, author
Today I learned it was you / Edward Riche.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0057-8 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0058-5 (ePub)
I. Title.
PS8585.I198T63 2016 C813’.54 C2015-907621-8
C2015-907622-6
Book design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover image: © moopsi/Shutterstock
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
For Frances
Harry recalled the white spire, a dog’s tooth, and walls scalloped so they caught every which way of the light; a blue-bellied, tide-borne cathedral of ice.
He was in Newfoundland in the role of Doctor Bradman, for the final performances of an unfortunate touring production of Blithe Spirit. It was 1979 and then, as now, early June. Fog like mortar closed the airport at Torbay and three nights in St. John’s, Newfoundland, became four and then five.
There was a delicious dereliction about the town in the day. Even as the lilac- and canary-coloured clapboard was coming down round their ears, the local players were putting on shows. Song was a reflex.
Their ceaseless talk was in a mongrel accent, Elizabethan doused with fishy Irish.
None of them had a dime.
At dawn Harry had quit an itinerant party continuing aboard the Portuguese fishing trawler Jose Caçào. Down the gangplank, stepping tenderly along the apron, making for his bed in the Hotel Newfoundland, he saw that the great bank of mist had retreated in the night to unveil, at the harbour narrows, an iceberg as high as the hills. An iceberg! Of course Harry stayed on.
The natives didn’t realize it, but their isolation and logy progress meant the culture was a vestige of an inshore fishery from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Harry didn’t realize it, but outside the tight circle of “rubber boot radicals,” with whom he fast fell in, the desire to assimilate with modern, mainland Canada was general.
The locals loved easily. Harry’d never been as happy as he was with young, sweet-as-candy, ever-high Phillip. Later, with stolid Tony, “My Bayman Tony,” there wasn’t bliss but there was contentment.
Harry Davenant stayed on. Lived alone now; apartment with a rooster silhouette, a Gaulish cock, stencilled into the linoleum floor of what must have been the dining room before the building was divided, horsehair plaster walls painted with lead gloss, insulated with paperbacks, back of a house on Cochrane Street that listed toward the water.
Harry was now approaching his Lear years, getting older and no wiser, with change feeling strange and in reduced circumstances. But he was childless. You’d want the trials and joys of daughters to truly know Lear.
It was never going to happen.
There was less interest in stories in St. John’s these days. Mining was the rage. When the theatre closed and he’d gone in search of other work, there were positions in the extraction of ores and tars from the earth, but he was in possession of none of the requisite skills. At his age Harry imagined finding a job doing something like reshelving books in a library or helping out at a museum or archive, but they told him such occupations no longer existed and he must take a job serving coffee and donuts or, as it came to be after a perfunctory interview, as a security guard.
Lloyd Purcell, heartless film and telly prick that he was, taunted Harry with “RADA to nada in forty,” but Harry resolved he was going to make the best of it. He was eager to drive a car again. (He’d been so long without a valid driver’s licence he’d been obliged to take a written test.) His rounds took him to quarters of the boom town he’d still, after these thirty-five odd years, never seen. The early summer was unusually clement and Harry was out and about instead of behind a desk in the basement of the LSPU Hall Theatre. He was moving and in the daylight.
Harry turned the company car, a black Impala, in a lax loop round the parking lot of an unnamed strip mall in the west end. This was the city’s boundary when he’d first arrived; now there was more population beyond it than before.
The fluorescent lights seemed to have been mistakenly left on at Elite Dry Cleaning and there was no sign of life within. The offices of Atlantech Petroleum Services next door were dark. Chafe’s Suprette was shuttered. Harry’s supervisor said the convenience store had been held up so many times the operators threw in the towel.
Harry picked up the clipboard from the passenger seat to record that at 19:14 15/06/2013 all was in order when he noticed, at the westernmost side of the building, a cheap compact car, unmanned, its driver’s-side door open. He did not know enough to identify the vehicle’s make. He was going to have to work on that, get a picture book or something.
How to play it? Harry parked the Impala and got out.
He was in livery, black windbreaker with “SECURITY” across the back. The Sentry crest on his ball cap looked official, almost martial at a distance, but verged to costume on closer inspection, a theatrical rather than cinematic piece. A long and heavy Maglite worked as a prop cudgel.
His notion to let the flashlight swing was convincing. Though his last eleven years had been spent in theatre administration, he was still in possession of his craft. Rounding the corner of the building, heading for the alley behind, he was in control of his breathing and gait, keeping time, trying on a soldier’s swagger. He rationalized that the paunch stretching his coat lent him substance.
He would routinely vomit before going on stage and he felt queasy now.
There was a man back there, holding open or caught closing his trousers. Seeing Harry, the man ducked behind a dumpster.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Harry. Deference was all wrong, he thought. He walked on, recalling hard men in Hackney pubs. “Oi! Get here.”
The undernourished, middle-aged fellow buttoned his tan cords. He was wearing a hoodie with the logo of a local hockey team, the St. John’s “IceCaps.”
“Just taking a leak,” he lied.
“Piss at the Dairy Queen,” said Harry, still moving forward and gratified to see the man shuffling in retreat.
“Didn’t want to buy anything so . . .”
“Next time treat yourself to a Blizzard. Move on.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry.” The man seemed to be considering whether he should go all the way around the building to get back to his car but finally scurried, eyes averted, past Harry.
Six days on the job and this was his first confrontation. Hearing the door of the unidentified car slam and its tires crackling over degenerating pavement, Harry thought Security Guard was a role h
e could play in a long run.
At Harry’s feet were the foamy filters from cigarettes, irregular beads of glass — emerald and amber — and a plastic comb. Further along was a discarded fleshy-pink condom elementally related to the bits of chewing gum stomped into the ground around it. The plastic lids of take-away coffees were as fallen leaves. The backstage of enterprise. The storefronts tried to say “All is well, you are prosperous, we have what you need to go forward.” It was a performance too. Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats, thought Harry, the show is always about to begin.
Next stop was Bowring Park. Lovely that, he thought.
Harry had grown despondent as the funding for the theatre was trimmed and again trimmed, the budget eventually cut to a point where the place could no longer operate. But he was beginning to see that his time labouring there was a sentence as much as a sinecure. Fortune was kinder than it first seemed. As long as he put in these late shifts, he made more money as a security guard than he ever had as an artistic director. It was funny really. But Chekov-funny, sad-funny.
He steered from the parking lot into traffic and headed south, noticing that his hands were unsteady.
Near the park entrance Harry pulled the Impala over and turned off the engine. Families and couples and dog-walkers were taking their time leaving via the front gate. The stone bridge and the pavement were dappled as the sun descended behind an irregular ridge of horse chestnuts and copper beeches.
He craved a smoke like he hadn’t in years. A straight job was marked by punching in and out with stipulated breaks. Running the theatre, directing shows, was unremitting anxiety. When he would awaken in the night, the worries of his harried day invariably rushed in. No longer. He’d given too much of himself and with scant thanks in the end. For whom had he even quit smoking? It was for his bayman Tony, and Tony was gone.
A young family passed. Three small children were being herded to a car, the father and mother sniping at one another, she with a hand up to deflect and mute his complaints. Merely unhappy in their own way? No, there was more, there was flight in their stride. Harry stepped out of his vehicle and put on his cap.
“Is everything all right?”
The father spoke. “You with security?”
“Sentry.”
“You’d better go down there. Fucking skeets drinking in the park.”
“Language, Jesus, Brian,” said the mother, buckling her children into the back seat of a sedan Harry did know to be a Volkswagen of some sort.
“Not like they didn’t hear worse today,” said the father to Harry.
“I’ll see to it,” said Harry, thinking the model of car might be an Altima.
“You should . . . maybe you should call . . . the police,” said the father.
“Let me check it out. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.”
A band of maroon low in the sky reminded Harry to carry his hefty flashlight.
Immediately after the gate, the Waterford River was diverted to make an ornamental pond for swans and too many ducks. There was something amiss with the large milk-coloured bird sailing closest to him; a wing was trailing in the water and the animal was preening its breast with annoyance. Harry needed a closer look but could not think how one beckoned such a creature. And were not swans notoriously peevish birds? Want to give you a nip. He would mention it to park staff when he saw them.
There was solvent on the air, nail polish? Harry turned and looked up. Paint, aerosol: a hot blot of chromium yellow sprayed on the crotch of Peter Pan was trickling stickily, drying heavier than honey, molten and metallic.
The ageless boy was in bronze, atop a plinth featuring woodland creatures — rabbits and squirrels — in relief. There was a fairy, caped in translucent wings, who might have been Tinkerbell.
Harry knew the statue’s London double. Kensington Garden. He recalled his hand in his mother’s: “Peter!”
Harry could not see or hear the vandals, so set off for a bridge under which, he recalled from a briefing, teenage louts took cover.
Almost halfway there, Harry nosed a ribbon of marijuana smoke coming through a hedge of rhododendron, its red blooms losing their colour in the dusk. Trailing the scent, six paces on he found a pathway, tricked out with uneven stones, that he knew led to a memorial for soldiers lost in the Great War.
The hooligans had congregated in a hollow defined by a wall of remembrance and a rise crowned by another bronze, that of a buck caribou. This statue was of a series, the other monuments in France and Belgium — at Beaumont Hamel, Gueudecourt, Masnières, Monchy-le-Preux, and Kortrijk — where the best of a generation of Newfoundlanders died for the King of England.
They were in and out of shadow, seven eight nine of them. There was a tall one with a bluish-complexion that must have been Sudanese. Two girls both in stretchy summer tops; one wore a tiny skirt, the other pyjama bottoms patterned with death-heads and, he noticed, orange plastic dollar-store flip-flops. Rest of them were the sort of pasty-faced corner boys whose role it was to make what trouble they couldn’t find in St. John’s.
“The Lost B’ys.” All these years and Harry still couldn’t do the accent.
An emptied spray-paint can bounced across the cobble, the plastic pea within making a sound like a baby’s rattle.
“Mall cop,” one of them said.
The pack was shifting, whether to surround him or flee Harry could not tell.
“Clear out, Skipper.” A boy-a man-an ape, sixteen or seventeen years, pushed off his perch on the ground at the metal caribou’s front hooves to drop and land in front of Harry.
The ruffian’s T-shirt was sizes too big and billowed, but his arms were like hawsers taut from the pull of a ship. He had a wide mouth and raven hair.
“Go now,” said Harry. “Leave the park. That’ll give you a lead on the police.”
“Fuck off.” The boy blew the words into Harry’s face, into his mouth.
How did it go? “Met so near with their lips that their breaths embraced”? Harry’s one and only Iago, the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, never really pulling it off. If he had his time back . . .
A missile of some sort, a stone he supposed, hit Harry behind his right ear, drawing wet. He turned in the direction from which it was launched and saw the tag on the wall. More spray paint, in a nonsensical bulbous script. The same sick-making yellow pigment defiling the names of the brave, a streak of bile offending the memory marked there of Mr. Edgecombe and Mr. Porter and Mr. Richardson.
“How dare you?” Harry said softly. They cackled. Someone spit.
He spun around, putting his flashlight-baton in the widest arc. The black-haired boy was quick but Harry caught his hand, shattering the glass eye of the lantern on something bony. The boy howled.
A pole, a branch maybe, bounced off Harry’s windpipe.
A force came in from behind, powerful enough to feel like it was passing through him laying track. A heel on his spine sent Harry face forward.
He heard their leader again, yelping and yipping.
Blast. Tremor. Rupture.
One
The temptation always existed, now that tablets had replaced paper files, to go online and surf the Web during the Monday city council meetings. Matt Olford knew that the high back of the mayor’s chair precluded anyone in the gallery from seeing what it was he was reading. The city councillors of St. John’s bellied up to a large horseshoe-shaped table facing him and saw only that he was looking at his screen. With Councillor Wally O’Neill on his feet, Matt succumbed and found Puck Daddy under his “favorites.” Matt now enjoyed reading about hockey more than watching it. There seemed to be twice as many games as necessary played by men twice as big and thrice as fast on a surface half its former size. Accounts he read ran in his head at the easier pace he’d played the game.
Matt saw that Ron Hextall was denying yet another rumour tha
t he was going to leave Philly and his post as general manager of the Flyers. Matt always read the stories about Hextall. The big goalkeeper had come close to single-handedly defeating the Edmonton Oilers in the 1987 Stanley Cup final and denying Matt his providential championship ring. They gave Hextall, the goalie on the losing side, the Conn Smythe Trophy for most valuable player that year. Hextall earned it losing to a squad led by the best to ever play the game. Won it in losing. Was that somehow, with the passage of time, a greater achievement than victory itself?
“. . . swam in it, fished in it, drank it . . . ” Wally was addressing a report critical of the water quality of a stream in his ward.
Matt had taken two half-assed shots on Hextall in the series, both easily kicked away. Hextall surrounded himself with a force field of will and Matt couldn’t get near enough to pose a threat. Matt was on the fourth line, up from the AHL farm team in Halifax to replace an injured player, and was given little ice time, a fact for which he was then secretly grateful.
“. . . everything runs downhill sure, and ya knows what dat means . . .”
Matt deserved the ring. They called on him five times in that series to take critical faceoffs. Five-for-five, one an assist. Five-for-five in the finals. That was something. He answered the call and that made him champion. And certainly mayor of St. John’s, Newfoundland. He deserved the ring.
“. . . stuff didn’t come from outer space, did it? Everything, if you looks at it, is ‘natural,’ comes from here, a different mixture das all. Oil is natural, comes out of the ground. Metals might be heavy but if we dug ’em up dey must be organic, right? Sure what are PCPs but —?”
“PCBs Councillor O’Neill. PCP is the drug, I think,” Matt said so that it appeared he’d been paying attention.
“Wha?” said Wally.
“PCP is the drug,” said Ward 2 councillor Cy Jardine, “Horse trank.”
“Wha?” said Wally again.
“The toxin we are concerned with, present in Grates Brook, is PCB, polychlorinated biphenyl.” Councillor Alessandra Cappello stood to speak. “You’re confusing it with PCP, the street drug. I’m not certain what the letters in PCP stand for. I think they used to call it Angel Dust.”
