by John Niven
‘Cheers, wee man.’
‘Aye. Cheers, Banny.’
8
IN THE WEEKS after Herby died we were both more solicitous with Walt. His whims were catered to, his tantrums mollified, even though I sometimes thought we erred on the side of being overindulgent in this area. However, from the moment he was born, Sammy’s voice had always been dominant in anything to do with Walt’s development. Because she’d earned the role: the tower of parenting books on her bedside table (Listening to Your Child,A Mother’s Work), the open tabs on her laptop at any given time reading something like, ‘YOUR CHILD’S DIET’, ‘SLEEPING PATTERNS’, ‘REWARDS & PUNISHMENTS’.
And our life went on. Our life whose routines, still, sometimes, when I stepped outside of them and looked with the eyes of childhood, seemed fantastical to me.
The PTA meetings and bake sales. The dinner parties and school fund-raisers. (The last fund-raiser for Walt’s school, an auction, raised over forty thousand dollars towards a new library. From a little over a hundred couples – an average spend of a few hundred bucks a head. Sammy scribbled a cheque for two thousand dollars, the furled chequebook flattened on her knee. On the drive home I tried to imagine this happening at the school I went to. I did the mental arithmetic, trying to make sense of the sums: following the maxim – oft repeated to me by Sammy’s father – that, a non-hyper rate of inflation being allowed, money roughly halves in value every fifteen years or so, the two thousand Canadian dollars would have been worth a thousand back in the mid-nineties. Back in the late seventies it would have been around five hundred dollars, roughly two hundred pounds given the exchange rate at the time. I tried to imagine my parents writing a cheque to my school for two hundred pounds. This involved imagining my parents having a current account, picturing, say, my mother’s handwriting on the actual cheque, her random spelling, her childlike mixture of upper and lower cases – ‘TWO HunnDreD pouNDs OwNly’ – spilling across the lines. The incredible ceremony the procedure and the sum involved would have occasioned. I kept picturing other family members – uncles, aunts – standing solemnly around the table while the cheque was written, perhaps taking a photograph. I don’t often smile when I think about those days, but I smiled that night.)
At these events we mingled with other ‘heavy hitters’ from Regina and its suburbs. With Ray Glad, the newsreader from CBKT, and his lawyer wife Charlie. With the Becks, Alan, the CEO from Federated Co-op, the oil company, and his wife Hope, a ‘homemaker’. With the Saskatchewan Roughriders linebacker Jimmy Treme and his wife Gail. Sammy, with her editorship and a lifetime of her father’s money behind her, would float through these occasions, flattening a hand on her breastbone as she dipped her head to listen conspiratorially among the glassware and soft light. Covering her teeth as she laughed at an indiscretion or an aside. People knew who I was because of Sammy or, more rarely, because they recognised me from the postage-stamp-sized photograph that accompanied my byline every week. And they’d ask me things like ‘Hey, have you seen this-or-that movie yet?’ Or, ‘Man, I loved that show too.’ Occasionally someone would try and find out about a real estate deal Old Sam was rumoured to be planning (‘Hey, I’m hearing your father-in-law’s buying up land around North Central . . .’) but, basically, I’d be the guy in the corner eating all the dip. The guy nodding and saying ‘Really?’ and ‘Oh yeah’ and ‘Jeez!’
The guy wondering if they were all really thinking ‘Here comes the househusband. The homemaker.’
And the talk at these events, of the children. Always about the children: nannies and tutors and doctors. Medications and diet and, even, psychiatrists. Conversations about future colleges for our eight-year-olds.
The children who were chauffeured everywhere, perched high in heavy, burnished 4x4s, swathed in designer casuals, frowning at their BlackBerries and iPhones as they were driven to sleepovers, to their little league hockey games. To play dates and birthday parties at the imposing, remote houses scattered around Alarbus, or in the Crescents area of Regina, that wedge of affluence just north of Wascana Creek. Sometimes, at the birthday parties, the two groups combined: the children in the huge den or basement rec room with their video games, apps and websites, the adults in the kitchen with the Sauvignon Blanc, with the Pouilly-Fumé and the canapés. The kitchens and dens were all very like ours: vast expanses of reclaimed wood and local stone filled with gadgetry: the industrial dishwashers, the hidden Sub-Zeros, the taps that dispensed instant boiling water. All the things we didn’t know how we’d managed without. And not too much of that good white wine either – no one really drank. Everyone drove. Everyone had careers. Everyone had kids.
I found it difficult, moving among these men, with their talk of stocks and bonds, IPOs and gold prices. Their talk of margins and portfolios and returns. We had all this stuff, of course. We did all this stuff. Or, rather, Sammy did. Quarterly or so she’d attend meetings downtown at Baker and Kenning, the family accountants. Things would be moved around, tax positions strengthened, assets protected. She never talked to me about this stuff and I didn’t resent it. What did I have to contribute here? These were people who’d grown up with money. Who felt perfectly comfortable having lots of it and were perfectly sure that the money they had would only bring them lots more. What financial wisdom had I grown up with? I could remember my Uncle Bert, Bert with the tracheotomy, who had only vowels at his disposal, telling me once that ‘an ound in oor ocket is oor est end’. A pound in your pocket is your best friend. For me reading the financial pages was . . . Mandarin. Sanskrit.
So when, at these gatherings, amid the granite or solid oak kitchen worktops, when talk turned that way and the guys started saying, ‘You should really be thinking about this,’ or ‘You should get your guy to get you in on this,’ I’d nod along and sip my drink and say, ‘Yeah?’ or ‘Yeah.’ Or ‘Yeah, I heard about that.’ Or ‘Interesting.’ And then I’d quickly find an excuse to drift away, off to the side, to go and check on the kids, or nibble at the buffet. Yes, ‘margins’ was about right. On the margins. Always on the margins.
I loved Sammy and Walt with everything within me. But sometimes, watching them at one of these parent-and-kid gatherings, watching Sammy laughing a little too eagerly or noisily, watching Walt’s bored expression, his face glazed, coated with the grey glow from the screen of the phone or video game, I would have the ‘Once in a Lifetime’ moment (‘You may find yourself . . .’) and I would think to myself . . . what, exactly?
I read a passage in John Updike recently, in Rabbit at Rest, where Harry Angstrom is watching an aeroplane landing that contains his son and grandchildren. ‘He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn’t been on the plane himself . . .’
I had studied Updike on the American Literature module of my degree course and remembered buying the book in hardback when it came out in 1990. (The great, hesitant outlay of fourteen pounds in the student union bookshop. Just over thirty quid in today’s money by Old Sam’s . . .) I had certainly read these words before, in my early twenties. Rereading them twenty years later they sent a terrifying flash of recognition through me, the urge known to every family man in early-middle age, no matter how good the hand that has been dealt, how agreeable the life. Why this one? (‘How did I get here?’) And the accompanying urge – pale and transitory, never to be realised, but real all the same – to somehow wipe it all away and start again.
And, during those weeks, over November and into December, the winter was bearing down, sharpening every day, the temperature seeing its most severe fall of the year, dropping from around ten degrees at the end of October to minus fifteen by the beginning of December. The average snowfall for the area during the month of December was nearly two feet, and the
y were saying it was going to be a whole lot worse than that this year. Danny the gardener and handyman checked the winterising on all the outbuildings. He fitted the heavy snow chains onto our cars; Sammy’s Range Rover, my Audi. In the skies to the north you could see great grey knots twisting and flexing, could feel the air getting heavier and denser, like it was already made of snow, but you just couldn’t see it yet.
9
‘JESUS CHRIST, WALT, that’s enough!’ I said, slamming my palm against the steering wheel, surprising myself with the ferocity of the outburst. I knew without turning that Sammy’s eyes were already coolly upon me from the passenger seat. I felt Walt kick my seat from behind and I gripped the wheel tighter, keeping my eyes on the road, the black ribbon slicing through the white surrounding us on all sides, Alarbus high school coming up on our right now through the flaky, powdery snow. I glanced in the rear-view and could see Walt looking out the window, biting his lip, his large brown eyes luminous, shining with unreleased tears.
‘I said “we’ll see”, Walt,’ Sammy said quietly.
‘See? What is there to see?’ I said. ‘He’s completely irresponsible with things.’
That morning I’d been walking through the kitchen when I noticed Walt’s smartphone, a Samsung Android, lying on top of his jacket on one of the stools by the breakfast counter. The screen was smashed, crystallised into a honeycomb. It was the second phone in less than a year to have gone this way. ‘Walt.’ I held the phone up. ‘What happened this time?’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’Walt countered automatically. He was bent over his huge red-and-white kitbag, packing in pads, ice skates, his hockey stick leaning against the glass windows behind him.
‘It’s never your fault,’ I said. ‘What happened?’ I was holding the phone now, tracing the pad of my thumb across the screen. It still seemed to work.
‘Danny pushed me in the play—’
‘Well, you’re just gonna have to live with this, Walt.’
‘I can upgrade to a new phone next month anyway.’
Something in me protested, kicked out, at an eight-year-old using the word ‘upgrade’. At the casual entitlement of the way that ‘anyway’ was tossed out. ‘For free?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. Well, no. It . . . it’ll cost maybe a hundred dollars.’
‘Then that’s too bad, buddy,’ I said. ‘You’re going to keep this one for at least another year.’
‘But Mom said –’
‘I don’t care wh—’
Sammy came into the kitchen at this point.
‘Have you seen this?’ I said, holding the phone up. Sammy sighed, nodding. ‘This is the second phone in six months. Well, he’s just going to have to live with it.’
‘The screen’s cracked, Donnie, he’ll cut himself.’
I had, indeed, just pricked my thumb with a tiny shard of glass, a pinhead of blood forming. ‘We’ve got some clear tape somewhere,’ I said. ‘We’ll just tape the screen up.’
‘Mom!’ Walt whined.
‘Or there’s an old Nokia of mine in my office somewhere. He can put his SIM card in that and use it till –’
‘A Nokia?’ Walt said.
‘Look, we’re going to be late for the game,’ Sammy said. ‘Can we please discuss this later?’
But I didn’t. I kept right at it in the car until I wound up shouting and banging my fist off the steering wheel. We pulled into the parking lot and Walt had the door open and slammed behind him and was running off to meet his friends before I’d even turned the engine off. All around us parents were unloading their eight-year-olds, the boys clambering out of Benzes, Audis and BMW 4x4s laden with kitbags and hockey sticks. I was aware that my heart was pounding.
‘What’s your problem?’ Sammy said, the instant the door closed.
‘My problem?’ I said. ‘You’re kidding me, right? That fucking phone cost four hundred dollars. He hasn’t even had it a year. He’s got to learn a . . . a sense of responsibility.’
‘He’s eight, Donnie.’
‘Exactly. I don’t even know why an eight-year-old needs a fucking phone like that. He –’
Sammy sighed. This was old ground.
She had recently told me a story about one of Walt’s school friends, a fat, freckled kid called Grady. A few months back Grady had gone over his thirty-dollar-a-month cellphone call plan by six hundred dollars. The parents had read him the riot act and the dad had taken him off the call plan and put him onto a pay-as-you-go contract. The kid had complained to the mum that he was forever running out of credit and couldn’t make calls and what if an emergency came up and he couldn’t call them and all the usual bullshit. So, without telling the dad, the mum had put him back on the call plan. The kid had promptly gone nuts with the websites and the chat rooms and Christ knows what and had run up a seven-hundred-dollar bill.
‘Seven hundred dollars in a month?’ I’d asked.
‘Yep,’ Sammy had laughed.
I’d tried. I’d really tried to picture my dad’s reaction to this news. His face as he was told he’d have to find four-hundred-odd pounds to cover a phone bill his eight-year-old kid had run up. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t even conceive of the scenario. ‘So what happened?’ I’d asked Sammy. She’d just shrugged in what-can-you-do fashion.
Sammy sat for a moment looking out the window at the other cars, at the exhaust fumes billowing in the freezing air, kids jumping down with their kit. ‘We haven’t got time for this now,’ she said, tugging the door handle. It closed with a heavy, expensive thunk behind her. I sighed and followed.
Junior hockey was huge in the province. Kids learned to skate not long after they could walk. Today Walt’s team, the Alarbus Eagles, were playing the Saskatoon Blades. A league game. We filed into the hockey auditorium at the back of the high school. There were already dozens of parents crowded into the bleachers on each side of the rink, wearing North Face jackets in black, red and navy. Gore-tex and Timberland boots. It wasn’t much warmer in here than it was outside and the steam rose from their mouths, from their styrofoam coffee cups, misting in the air above them.
There were coolers packed with sandwiches, lite beers and potato chips. Parents stood chatting in groups and Sammy and I returned waves and hellos as we made our way to our seats on the home side, next to Jan Franklin, the Marshes and the Krugers. On the ice the boys were already warming up, testing the surface, streaking back and forth. The wet slap of stick on puck. ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ rising and falling idiotically in the background.
We’d had an ice rink in our town, at the Leisure Centre, a huge edifice of white-painted corrugated steel that also housed a swimming pool, indoor bowling greens and basketball and squash courts. A cinema too. It was built near the harbour in the late seventies, when I was around Walt’s age. I never learned to skate though; I’d hobble round the side, clinging onto the barrier, my rented plastic skates – Purple Panthers we called them – splaying and juttering out from under me as the harder, older boys screamed by on their Bauer Huggers, sending icy jets of water spraying at those of us clinging on, the music booming, deafeningly loud in the huge, cold space: ELO’s ‘Mr Blue Sky’ and Elvis Costello’s ‘Oliver’s Army’. Slush Puppies and Space Invaders and Asteroids.
Banny was among the skaters, although I only knew him by reputation then. A hard kid in a hard town. I remember watching him speeding past, skating backwards sometimes as he talked to girls, building up speed before twirling to a halt and body-checking some kid, sending them tumbling across the freezing wet ice. I looked out across the bleachers, at the sea of Abercrombie & Fitch. Of Ralph Lauren and Hollister. I couldn’t help but think of all the tribes that roamed the halls of my school, back before everyone looked the same.
Mods. Punks. Rockers. Skins. The heavy metallers with their denim waistcoats over their biker jackets. Their patches that said Judas Priest, Saxon and Iron Maiden, Eddie’s skeletal features sometimes skilfully emblazoned on the back. The reek of patchouli oil. Goth hadn’t
really hit our school yet, though there were a couple of kids in the fifth year with black clothes and spiked dyed black hair, their canvas knapsacks emblazoned with strange band names like Bauhaus, the Birthday Party and Alien Sex Fiend. Having younger parents Banny had more interest in fashion than me or Tommy. He’d been somewhere between mod and skin when we first met. A parka, but with close-cropped hair, rather than the Weller crop. Desert boots with Sta-Prest trousers. More recently he was veering towards what we called ‘casual’: waffle sweaters, slip-on shoes with white socks, stonewashed jeans, Harrington jacket and his hair starting to fall into a wedge that hung over his right eye. He’d blow the hair up out of his face when he talked to you.
I realised someone was speaking to me.
‘Uh? Sorry . . .’
I turned and looked up to see Irene. Sammy was standing, talking to the Krugers behind us. ‘Hi, Donnie.’
‘Oh, hi, Irene. Sorry – miles away.’
‘Is this OK?’ She was gesturing to the empty seat beside me. ‘Of course, here . . .’ I moved our coats and scarves and Irene sat down, untying her scarf and slipping off her parka, her thick red hair spilling out. Irene was always very precisely made up – foundation, mascara, lipstick and hair just so – and perfumed. Her scent was filling the cold air around me now. She often came to Walt’s home games, a gesture of local support and solidarity that, I suspected, was more due to simple loneliness: a widow with an entire weekend stretching emptily ahead of her.
‘Brrr,’ she said, rubbing her hands together. ‘Where’s our boy then?’ I pointed Walt out. ‘Everything OK?’ Irene asked. ‘You seem a bit distracted.’
‘Oh, I’m fine, just . . .’ I glanced to my right; Sammy’s ass was a few feet from my face, she was deep in conversation with Stephanie Kruger about something. ‘I don’t know, Irene. Kids these days . . . they seem to think they can have anything they –’ I stopped myself. ‘Kids these days? Christ, listen to me.’
