by John Niven
I looked at him. I didn’t know what he meant. Walt Disney? Like for wee kids? ‘I . . . naw. No really,’ I said.
‘Ach, c’mon.’ He leaned forward, clasping his hands together. ‘Everybody in the world is trying to get out of Saigon and your man De Niro not only gets in there but he manages to find his pal in that Russian roulette den no bother at all. Wee bit convenient, wasn’t it?’
I’d never had a conversation like this before, about a film. Beyond a teacher telling you what something was about or your pals all going ‘I liked the bit where . . .’ I didn’t know it at the time, I thought we were just talking about a film we’d seen, but I was having my first real critical conversation about a work of drama.
‘And what about your reading?’ Mr Cardew asked. ‘What are you reading in here?’
‘Jist the –’
‘Just.’
‘Eh?’
‘The word is “just”. Not “jist”.’
‘Aye, well, just the books they have in the library an that.’ The books they had in the prison library – Jim Hunter adventures, tattered James Herberts and Stephen Kings.
‘An that?’
‘Eh?’
‘Do you mean they have other things in addition to books in the library?’
‘Er, naw.’
‘No.’
‘No.’
‘Right. So you don’t need the “an that”. The sentence should end at “the books they have in the library”.’
I looked at him. I thought he was mental.
‘I can see I’ve got my work cut out here . . .’ Mr Cardew said.
‘Are you my teacher?’ I asked.
‘Your social worker, William,’ he said, reaching into his jacket pocket. He laid a paperback book on the desk in front of me. It was called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I didn’t know what that meant. ‘But there will also be teaching.’
* * *
I sat there for a long time, my eyes fixed on a point in the snow in the mid-distance. I hadn’t thought about Mr Cardew in many years. Before I knew what I was doing I had taken the desk keys from the ceramic Ramones mug and was sliding one into the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk, the one that was always kept locked.
Inside was a nickel-plated Ruger .32 automatic, a gift, an odd sort of house-warming present from Mike Rawls, Old Sam’s head of security. ‘Come on, Donnie, living out there in the ass end of nowhere? You’ll sleep better knowing you’ve got an equaliser tucked away somewhere.’ Mike took me out into the woods at the back of our property and gave me a little crash course, blasting at paper targets he’d tacked to tree trunks. Sammy disapproved of the gun and, for safety reasons, I kept the magazine in a separate locked drawer. Sometimes, sitting here during the day in the empty house, trying to work, I’d take the unloaded weapon out of the drawer and childishly point it around, aiming through the glass, zeroing in on rocks, trees and birds, squinting with one eye closed as I squeezed off imaginary rounds, enjoying the heft of 1.2 kilos of lethal metal and plastic in my fist.
I opened the drawer and took the gun out. I opened the other drawer and took the magazine out: eight fat brass slugs nestling in there. I slid the magazine into the butt of the pistol, enjoying the sound and feel of the metal ‘snick’ as perfectly machined parts locked into place. I put the loaded gun – slightly heavier now – back into the drawer and locked it.
I could not have told you exactly why I was doing this.
As I was running the spellcheck and getting ready to hit ‘Send’ on the review the doorbell rang. I hit ‘Save’ instead and wandered over to the nearest intercom. Irene’s image was fuzzy and blue-grey on the little video screen and she was looking around self-consciously, as people do when they know there is a camera on them. I thumbed the button and said, ‘Hi, Irene. Come on in,’ pressing the button to release the front door as I spoke. I wiped my eyes, took a deep breath, and headed for the kitchen.
Irene dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘That poor dog. That poor, poor dog,’ she said again in the syrupy Georgia accent Sammy thinks she exaggerates. ‘A wolf?’
‘Looks that way. Or maybe a vehicle hit him down on Tamora and he, you know, he got thrown a fair distance. Or crawled a bit, trying to make it home.’
‘Oh my.’ We were in the kitchen, the little TV still on quietly in the background. ‘Mind you, that could be right, Donnie. Sometimes at night I can hear those big trucks down on the main road just hurtling along. If he’d got down there in the early hours while it was still dark . . . with the roads a bit icy.’
‘Yeah. It’s just the . . . the way he was just, ripped up, Irene. It was awful.’
‘Oh God. He was such a sweet dog too.’
‘Christ knows how Walt’s gonna take it.’
‘The poor thing. What are you going to tell him?’
‘I think we’ll just go with the hit-by-a-car thing. It’ll be better if he can think he didn’t suffer.’
‘Yes, absolutely. Oh, I have to say I don’t envy you that conversation.’
‘I know,’ I said, going to rise towards the kettle’s whistle.
‘No, Donnie, I’ll get it,’ she said, beating me to it. ‘The day you’ve had so far . . .’ She walked over to the stove and took the pluming kettle off the heat, then crossed to the fridge and got the milk out, closing the big brushed-steel door with her hip, already opening the drawer for the spoons. Irene knew where everything was, maybe better than Sammy did.
‘Walt and I, just the other day, we were throwing sticks for him over in my yard.’
‘I know. It’s just . . . horrible.’
‘Horrible.’ She was pouring boiling water into the coffee pot now.
Irene was in her early sixties, maybe a little younger. Big hair. Coppery red. A real Southern belle back in the day you’d imagine, but far from dainty, a big, strong old girl. You’d see her out front sometimes splitting logs, swinging that big axe. She ran four miles most days in spring and summer. She’d been renting the farmhouse next door for the last year or so, a widow, a painter who’d moved here for the landscapes. Though in truth, the idea of the lonely-old-widow-neighbour who we helped out was reversed: Irene was fiercely independent and did much more for us than we did for her. In addition to the frequent babysitting of Walt (for which she refused all payment), she often gave us extra logs when she split too many and she’d always ask if we needed anything from town if she was going down to Alarbus. She even dropped off a pie for us now and then when she’d been baking, something I thought only happened in the movies these days. She was a transplant just like me and had found the climate hard last winter, her first experience of the Canadian deep freeze.
She came back over, the twin funnels of the mugs trailing their steam across the sunlit kitchen. ‘Our dog got run over back home, when I was a little girl.’ She sat down opposite me at the big table. ‘It was terrible. I swear, I cried for days.’
‘Yeah. He’s going to take it very hard.’
We sipped our coffee. ‘How’s your winter preparations going by the way?’ I asked, wanting to talk about something beside the dog.
‘Better than last year, now I know what to expect. I mean, I knew it’d be cold of course. I just didn’t . . .’
‘Yeah, me too the first few years, Irene. Sammy, her family, they all think it’s normal. The weather they’ll drive through . . .’
‘I’ve got all the screens up. Plumber came out and checked all the pipes last week. Snow chains are already on the car. The weather channel says it’s going to start hitting week after next.’ She nodded towards the TV.
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh, while I remember, is Walt’s hockey game still on for Saturday? I told him I’d come cheer him on.’
‘Yep – 10 a.m. at the school.’
‘Grand. And do you still want me to babysit on . . . the fifth, wasn’t it?’
‘That’d be great. I won’t be late. Sammy’s going to stay in Regina.’
‘She said.
It’s her parents’ party thing, isn’t it?’
‘Yup,’ I sighed. ‘The royal summons before the King and Queen take their winter leave of absence.’
‘Oh to be that rich!’ Irene said.
We drank our coffee and looked out at the total white surrounding us, dazzling in the sunshine through the near 180-degree perspective the wrap-around glass wall of the kitchen afforded. ‘My,’ she said. ‘I can never get over how lovely the view is from in here. You’re so lucky, Donnie. I swear, I don’t know how you ever get any work done.’
Some of Irene’s expressions – those ‘Mys’ and ‘I swears’ prefacing her sentences – cracked us up, like stage-play Georgian. Blanche from Streetcar. Sammy thought the affectation was perhaps born out of homesickness, a loss of identity out here in the Saskatchewan nowhere.
‘Me neither. Oh,’ I looked at my watch. ‘Speaking of which, I do have a deadline actually.’
‘Gosh, of course. Sorry, Donnie. I’ll let you get back to it. And you’re sure there’s nothing I can do to help?’
‘No, but thanks anyway, Irene.’ We stood up. She was the same height as me, Irene.
‘Good luck with Walt tonight. Poor lamb.’
‘Yeah,’ I sighed. ‘Yeah.’
Later that night we told Walt that Herby had been hit by a car and killed and, for a moment, it looked like the lie was going to be a massive own goal. ‘But who did it, Daddy?!’ The boy was furious, almost yelling. ‘You have to catch them! Get the police! Get Grandpa to help!’ Finally, after we’d explained that it was just one of those things, a terrible accident, that the police couldn’t launch a manhunt for the hit-and-run killer of a Labrador, he seemed to absorb the fact, to move from anger to grief. He collapsed into Sammy’s chest, sobbing, as we sat either side of him, stroking his hair, Sammy crying too as we reminisced about what a good dog he’d been and how he’d be burying bones in doggie heaven now. (It’s not a very big lie, Walt.)
Later I carried him to bed in his Spider-Man pyjamas. Later still Sammy heard him crying again and went in. Walt was sitting up holding a photograph he’d found of him and Herby frolicking by the pool last summer.
‘Goddammit,’ Sammy said sadly as she came back to bed, handing me the photo. It was hard to look at, the dog gazing at the camera, his tongue lolling out playfully, so far removed from the way it had jutted between his teeth in death. Almost bitten off. The black holes where his eyes had been. I shrugged the image away, and other images that it was trying to bring on its heels, and pulled Sammy towards me in the warm bed, the keening wind just audible through the thick glass.
‘Is something wrong?’ she asked. ‘I mean, something else?’ I let the book I hadn’t been reading slide onto my chest and cleared my throat. I couldn’t tell her, not properly. I am Donald Miller.
‘I had some other bad news today,’ I said, not looking at her.
‘What?’
‘Oh, just a . . . an old tutor of mine, from university, I found out online he died a year or so ago.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Did you know him well?’
‘Not in years. At the time though, he . . . he was a good teacher. I hadn’t thought about him in a while and just googled his name today.’
‘What made you think of him?’
Childhood. The bloody pipe organ of the dog’s ribcage.
‘Nothing really. Just a stray thought.’
‘What a week,’ Sammy sighed, resting her head on my chest, her hair tucked under my chin. I patted her forearm.
‘Yeah.’
‘How did he die?’ Sammy asked, ever the reporter. Who? Where? How? Why?
‘Just, he was old,’ I said. (The word is ‘just’. Not ‘jist’.) ‘He was old.’
I lay awake for a long time. This had been the first serious inroad on our happiness in the time we’d been living here. The unsettling thing was that part of me felt like I’d been . . . expecting it. Not this exactly, but something. Some version of the other shoe dropping. It felt like I had been a trespasser in happiness and now my time was up. You landed on your feet. Won the lottery. The pools. Did you really think it could last? That karma would allow this to stand? But you don’t believe in karma. Nazi war criminals in their eighties slumber by the pool in South America while babies get hit by trucks. Stupid, late-night thoughts. Tired, overreacting to a pet being killed by some wild animals. What do you expect, living out here in the wilderness? I crawled down deep into the bed, as close to Sammy as I dared without waking her, feeling her warmth, the easy rhythm of her breathing. I held her hand gently while she slept, her coral-pink nail varnish seeming to glow in the moonlight.
An hour went by. I turned this way and that. No matter which side I lay on I could feel my heart beating against the sheets, could hear it in my chest. I got up and went to the kitchen. I craved liquor but instead made a mug of camomile tea which I sipped at the big oak table, looking out into dark, freezing night.
Outside – the wind, the snow and the darkness.
The current of fear.
Wolves in the pines.
* * *
It was what they’d now call ‘a drinking culture’. People drank. Everyone drank. There was the Christmas Eve my dad got so drunk he came home in the early hours of Christmas Day, stumbling into the living room where my mum had wrapped and laid out all the presents, and decided he ‘fancied a wee sweetie’ and started unwrapping presents to try and find a selection box – a collection of several different chocolate bars in a festive package, a staple in any Scottish child’s Christmas stocking. (I sometimes try to picture Sammy’s expression if she had to watch Walt munching his way through the tonnage of sugar that made up our diet.) We came downstairs a few hours later to find him unconscious underneath the tree; his face smeared with chocolate, unwrapped presents scattered all around him, the desecrated trays of the mangled, broken selection boxes and the splintered chocolate globe of a half-eaten Terry’s Chocolate Orange. Then I was crying and my mum was screaming at him, kicking him awake, bawling at each other as I ran upstairs.
And then, by New Year, just a week later, at a neighbour’s party, the whole episode already recast as comedy. My dad ‘pure steamboats’, ‘fires intae the wean’s sweeties’. ‘He’s no real so he’s no!’ Everyone laughing. My mum, drunk too, already gazing half affectionately at him as he shrugged under the indulgent laughter of his pals. ‘Steamboats’ ‘foaming’, ‘para’, ‘pished’. The incredible misdeeds excused by the invocation of one of these words. (Again, today, I make the inevitable comparisons and picture the consequences if one of our friends came home on Christmas Eve having drunk ten pints of lager and half a bottle of whisky and proceeded to wreck the living room and open half the kids’ presents. The expensive month in rehab that would follow. The tearful, twice-weekly psychologist’s appointments for parents and children. The trial separation.)
It was drink too that had made my friendship with Banny and Tommy possible. Banny had battered me on one of our first encounters. I say ‘battered’, it wasn’t a real kicking, nothing like the ones I would routinely see him dole out after we became friends. He just walked past me in the corridor during break time one morning in first year and I made the mistake of looking at him. The inevitable exchange: ‘Whit ye fucking looking at, wee man?’
‘Nothing.’
Bam. He punched me in the stomach, driving all breath out, crumpling me to the floor. ‘Don’t be fucken cheeky,’ he said over his shoulder as he walked off. Then, the following year, we were thirteen now, at Craig Hamilton’s party. He was in the year above us and he had an ‘empty’, his parents having rashly gone on holiday and left a fourteen-year-old in charge of the house. Thirty or forty teenagers. Litre bottles of Merrydown cider and cans of beer and quarter-bottles of Whyte & Mackay and Smirnoff. I’d drunk three cans of white-and-gold Skol, was drunk for the first time in my life really, and a few of us were in the garden when we saw the bobbing light and heard the whirr of the spokes – a bicycle coming along the path tow
ards the house. ‘Check it oot,’ someone, maybe Tommy, said. ‘It’s that fanny Kenny Morrison.’ A kid from another school. I didn’t know him, but I saw from Banny’s slowly spreading leer as he watched the approach of the bike that he didn’t like this kid. ‘Let’s pelt the cunt wi cans,’ Banny said, crushing an empty green Kestrel tin in his fist. There was a small vegetable bed beside where we were standing, drinking and smoking. Bamboo rods had been placed in rows to support runner beans or something. In a flash of inspiration I pulled one of the rods out of the soil. As the bike drew level the others began their hail of abuse and empty beer cans. Morrison realised at the last moment what was happening. He stood up in the saddle and pumped the pedals, turning the handlebars to the right, looking to accelerate away from us. I stepped forward, drew the bamboo rod back behind my shoulder like a javelin and hurled it at his front wheel just as Morrison started to shout back, ‘GET IT RIGHT FUCKEN UP YE –’ It was a one in a hundred shot – right through the spokes, splintering, the bike stopping as hard as if it had hit a brick wall, Kenny Morrison – the ‘Y’ in ‘YESE’ still hanging on his lips – getting thrown right over the handlebars of the big purple Chopper, thrown several yards through the air, smashing down onto the concrete pavement, the bike clattering along behind.
The roar of laughter that erupted behind me.
Everyone was pissing themselves. Everyone. But no one more than Banny. Banny was doubled over, gasping for breath, tears streaming down his cheeks. ‘Did . . . did ye see the cunt’s face?’ Banny coming up and putting his arm around my shoulder. ‘Fuck sake, wee man. That wiz no real! A fucken belter!’ Morrison now, limping away into the night, pushing his bike, shouting back over his shoulder: ‘Youse are aw fucking deed, man!’
Big Banny’s arm. Around my shoulder.
Today, nearly thirty years later, I still sometimes find myself wondering how things might have been, how differently it might have gone for me, if that bamboo pole had missed its mark. If it had flown harmlessly in front of the bike, or clattered uselessly onto the concrete a few yards behind it. If I’d stumbled home alone that night, instead of going into the brightly lit kitchen, into the grey fug of cigarette smoke and music, to drink the green can of Kestrel Banny presented me with from his own personal carry-out.
