This suburb is laid out on flat farmland, street by street, the result of farmers selling one field at a time and developers progressively setting down a staggered grid of parallel lines and right angles, 44A Avenue and 55th Street, 44th Avenue and 55A Street, which never intersect predictably, an Escher maze with overtones of Kafka, all the more sinister for the neat bungalows and the occasional passers-by, invariably pleasant but never able to suggest how you might get from where you are, lost, to where you want to go.
Beyond the houses are blueberry fields and expanses of potatoes with fragile white blossoms in the late spring. There are acres of corn and further away, closer to the airport, huge greenhouses for strawberries, millions of electric bulbs burning 24 hours a day, lighting up the midnight sky with their brilliance reflected off the low clouds. Because there are always low clouds.
People from the prairies, where my father lives, often speculate that they might move out here to the coast to get away from the cold and the snow. Then they visit and soon go back over the mountains to Alberta, to Carstairs or Drumheller. You can’t breathe out there on the coast, they tell their friends. The sky is down here, they say, indicating a level just under their chins.
I am just passing through and we don’t speak of the last weeks.
We speak of the friends to whose home we are invited for Christmas dinner. We speak of the Christmas decorations on the houses that we pass, walking in the gloom of three o’clock in the afternoon. I am pleased to see the cascades of fairy lights and the reindeer outlined in green and red, the motion-sensor Santas who ho ho at you as you come near. I for once am glad that Canadians don’t understand conservation of energy and light up their properties in such joyous fashion. It’s hydro energy, they tell me. Why turn it off? It’s just there. This begs the bigger questions but right now I don’t care.
I walk like an invalid, like the survivor of a car wreck where everyone could have died. I shy away from breathing deeply, like I’m afraid I might drown.
The friends are newlywed second-timers. He opens the door, a big man, buzz-cut and taut, a dress shirt tucked in, pants with a pleat. He could be a former Marine if Canada had those. There’s something a little wary in his eyes. He hunts, I will learn, and eats what he kills, a man who leaves tracks in the world.
His wife works at the sharp end of forensics. She is small, bright and blond, used to seeing the end of trajectories. She welcomes me with a gift, a tiny pink rosebud preserved in acrylic gel in a cylinder, a perfect little ‘real’ flower, the inverted commas on the box insist, that will last forever.
And since these welcoming people are second-timers, there are offspring: her daughter, a pretty teen who leaves at the end of the meal to see her ‘real’ dad who, I deduce, is pretty busy just keeping it real. He’s cool in the eyes of his daughter but, in my imagination, maybe chronically late with child-support payments. Our host’s son arrives, a paramedic in a bomber jacket, who kept his dad’s heart pumping for an hour in the snow last year on a hunting trip, and got him back to the hospital for a quadruple bypass. Another man leaving serious marks on the world.
I love these people. I am full of an irrational gratitude toward them for having their own problems, their own parameters of fear and grief and loss, for inviting me in to see how this plays out for them and for giving me a chance to reflect on the nature of these things: that there is the visible and there is the invisible. There are the dangers and the difficulties you summon up the courage to deal with physically, every day, in the lab or the forest, and then there are the blows that fall from the air, unseen, unpredictable, but nonetheless brutal and crippling. Confronting the real makes you a person of substance; fending off the invisible that always blindsides you makes you Chicken Little, hoping to absorb a little warmth from the lights on the tree.
Another thing I did not know about my sister: she is not a fan of the mobile telephone. She does have one. It resembles a brick and is somewhere in her car. I think the only hope she has of using it for communication purposes is to throw it at someone.
So it is that we do not hear of what has been happening in Okotoks until we walk home down the blazing enchanted streets and listen to the message on the answering machine.
Here is how it went then, back on the prairies.
Dad has been to the neighbours’ for Christmas lunch and is delivered home for his nap, as planned. Sometime into his snooze, he is woken by the sound of glass shattering, the panes of the French windows in the rumpus room at the back of the house, on the level below him; then the sound of the timber surrounds being torn out of the doorframe. Voices, not cautious, normal conversational level, and the crunch of boots on broken glass.
He is frail and has not yet regained whatever form he possessed before the imposition of my mother’s calorie restrictions. He doesn’t realise this, however, and his mind has been returning at a gallop, fuelled by bananas and porridge, prunes and chicken and asparagus. In his heart, he’s twenty and bullet-proof.
He pushes the big red button on the top of his Supportline bracelet and from the speaker attachments now hooked up to every landline extension in the house, a loud voice calls from the hospital, miles away. Are you there? Are you safe, Sir? Are you injured? Speak clearly. We can hear everything. Help is on its way.
As my father struggles to swing his legs off the bed and get into his slippers, he hears a lot of F-words from downstairs. Shit, man, somebody yells, you said no alarm. More F-words.
Dad grasps his cane and stands. As he progresses down the hallway, trying out the F-word himself, he hears the roar of a car with a dodgy muffler, the whine of bad tyres spinning on the snow as the driver accelerates too fast. By the time he gets to the stairs and starts down, there is a knock at the door.
The Supportline contact at the hospital has phoned the list of neighbours we gave them, and here is the diminutive lady from two properties down, stamping snow off her mukluks and complaining about almost getting run down on the road by some hoons in a Pontiac. My sister will thank the universe for saving this lady from meeting burglars in a panic in a confined space. I am just glad her car was snowed in and she thought walking would be faster than digging it out.
When we speak to Dad, his voice is firm and he expresses the regret that he couldn’t get up fast enough to have at these weasels with his cane. We hear hammering in the background, the boys from the family who had him to lunch nailing sheets of plywood up over the broken windows downstairs. The police have been, the neighbours are there with leftovers, and the helper has arrived for her first shift.
We hang up and sit around the dining room table in silence. My sister’s partner looks grimly at the placemat in front of her, already set for tomorrow’s breakfast. I want to reassure her, to tell her that she will not again be left to run the business on her own while my sister flies to the rescue, that I understand how hard that could be.
My sister takes a deep breath and looks at me expectantly. No, I say. I’m not going back there. Neither are you. I have to be in Hong Kong for New Year’s, and you need to be here.
You reap what you sow. If Mum hadn’t broadcast to all of Southern Alberta that they were richer than the House of Rothschild, a serious exaggeration, the criminal fringe wouldn’t have decided that a Christmas break-in was a good idea.
Maybe, I say to her, you could look upon this episode as a sort of test run. All the work you did putting things in place has paid off: the system works, everything worked. The centre has held. Dad’s going to be fine.
Chapter 10
One of the more reasonable folk sayings holds that as you begin the New Year, so will you spend the coming twelve months. It makes sense then to try to be clear-eyed and calm at midnight on December 31st, not unconscious or legless, or trying to walk backwards down a hill in five-inch heels, or weeping inconsolably on a park bench. It should be a night of reflection, at best a night of marvels.
I am standing at the top of Mid-Levels, on a particular spot on Caine Road in
Hong Kong, as I have on New Year’s Eve at midnight for several years. From this place you can, on a clear evening, intuit the gentle curve of the earth, far to the north in the Middle Kingdom, way beyond the razzle and the dazzle of the jazziest harbour in the world laid out in the foreground for you. This view can settle your soul for the whole year.
When the fireworks start with a salvo of Dragon Eggs that crack the sky open and bang like gunshots before sparking all over creation, I stand with all the locals out doing as I am, leaning on the railing in the mild winter evening air that feels nothing like winter to someone from the prairies. Ah, we say in chorus, at each chrysanthemum burst of lime green and crimson, at each poignant end of a silver waterfall that starts so well, tumbling in a glittering sheet from the sky and then dying with heart-breaking grace. Ah, we exclaim at the whistle of the fuel strobing, at the profusion of dahlias and diadems, of peonies and bursts of blue popcorn in the corners.
All of this splendour in the sky, this first marvel, would be enough – but wait, there’s more.
The second marvel is that this place is not strange to me, that I am at home in the neighbourhood to the west where my son lives, and where people occasionally greet me, Goodnight, mother, although we have never been introduced. No magic is involved. He is the only Westerner living locally and towering over them on the sidewalks. Who else could I be? Nonetheless.
Third marvel of the evening. My son, whose job it is to swim with aplomb in the dark currents of Hong Kong by night and to organise festivities for the privileged, has stolen half an hour from his busiest night of the year to wolf down a pizza in Soho with his mother. He tells me some surprising things, economically, across the din of excitement in this little restaurant packed with revellers under the streamers and the disco balls.
He tells me he feels we can close down the whole nature–nurture debate once and for all, through my agency. With your family history, he says, peering at me to see if I am going to take this the wrong way, with your parents – if nurture calls the shots, logically you should be a serial killer. You’re not, he adds reassuringly. You’re a good person. You must have arrived that way, triple-plated.
Ergo, he says, folding a whole triangle of pizza into his mouth at once, and looking at his watch. His mobile is chiming like the bells of St Mary’s.
Just for the record, he says, hugging me as he gets up to leave, I don’t think you should go to Canada any more. It makes you sad.
I watch him jog across Hollywood Road and up Cochrane Street toward his club, threading his way through party people two heads shorter than he is, shaking hands and kissing girls, the man of the hour who will wizard chaos into fun for them all, and my heart wishes fervently that he may avoid the shoals and prosper.
So here I am now, ten past midnight, on Caine Road. Aah, I say in unison with the others as an increasingly frenetic display tops off the fireworks, a this-is-as-good-as-it-gets, show-me-the-money kind of pyrotechnic last stand with just a barely discernible edge of hysteria. The sky is brocade, girls squeal and mobiles flash around me, fixing the moment.
The next day, as my flight to Sydney barrels down the runway for take-off, shimmying and rattling, panting and humming and whining and trying really hard, the great big airship that could, I ponder the appropriateness of saying a plane lifts off, as though it were a weightless walk-on-water bug that floats effortlessly through the air and lands on gossamer legs without making a ripple. This is just plain hard work.
Some people live and die within miles of where they were born, and then there are members of my gene pool, wrenched from the surface of the earth and thrust up into the heavens in rockets to fall like bright filaments of spider fireworks in the sky, landing somewhere unlikely, who knows where, but none of us are in Kansas anymore.
And my son could be right about Canada although he is wrong in thinking, bless him, that going there makes me sad. I was sad already.
This most recent trip I will now try to recover from in the quiet of my Sydney suburb where people think I am normal has a positive bottom line nonetheless. My father is not dead. This result is delightful for me to contemplate and unexpected, given the way my previous trip had unfolded.
Come back in time with me to eighteen months before this New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong, to my little green mailbox in Sydney beside which I stand, looking at a yellow envelope that has arrived with the bills. It has Canadian stamps and is addressed in a crabbed, geriatric hand that puzzles me. I turn the envelope over and read my parents’ rural box number on the back, still puzzled because the hand that wrote this is not recognisable as my father’s, whose slim, slanted writing brings to mind someone trying to get close to the ground in order to be a less obvious target, or my mother’s, all confident pointed flourishes, a martial art weapons script.
It is my mother, however. She who has not written to me since well before our last face-time fifteen years earlier is sending me a thank-you note.
Your father wanted me to thank you for the Christmas gift, she writes.
It’s June, Mum, I say out loud. And you never thank me.
He can’t write any more, she goes on. If you want to see him, the time would be now. Signed, your Mother.
I sit down on the grass. I think it’s reading this too near the mailbox that is making the sky wheel around me like a Mick Jagger video clip, with bits of my life that would threaten my standing as a normal rate-payer in the neighbourhood flashing in front of me. Including why I take the mail from a little green metal mailbox on a steel pole and not from the nice roomy one made of the same bricks as my house that was here when I moved in.
Do you want this digression? It would be awfully long and take us far away from here, so maybe later. For now, suffice it to say the brick mailbox was mowed down in a gratuitous act of postal violence by the father of my children as he backed at speed out of my driveway, calling out to me cheerfully as he sped off that it was going to fall down anyway. It had ants.
Never mind the mailbox.
Over the last decade and a half my sister and I have tried to maintain contact with our parents, each in her own way. I send a parcel at Christmas, launching it into the December postal fray with about the same amount of hope and engagement that I would feel throwing a bottle with a message for Santa, or God, into the surf at Curl Curl. It’s a ritual.
My sister has been more engaged, still believing that the people who begat us harbour a longing for family. She and her partner have gone so far as to offer to move close to our parents, to build a house near them and to help them when they come to need it. My mother has received this offer with fighting words, suggesting any trespassing anywhere near them would be answered with a Kalashnikov.
Faced with messages of this clarity, I tend not to go back for seconds. Somehow though, this shaky missive from the House of Loony worries me, calling up the thought of my father ill and alone. I phone and phone until my mother gives up and answers, and I ask to speak to Dad. He’s out in the barn, she says. He’s not here. His hearing aid isn’t working. He can’t come to the phone just now.
I try another day, and another, and she says the same things.
I don’t believe her.
I’m going to have to go check, because my sister and I have long worried that a person snared in a situation like my father’s might do a Peabody. Let me explain.
This expression derives from the untimely end of a stroppy peacock dumped on the Okotoks property some years before by an irate owner, and adopted by my father. In summer, Peabody strutted his stuff, snapping his Arabian Nights tail-feathers into a splendid fan, lecturing raucously and nipping at the cats. In winter, he was confined to the barn, and after a couple of winters locked up like that, according to my sister, he just couldn’t take it any more.
One day when my father went to feed him, Peabody rushed the door and flew up onto a bare branch where no one could reach him, free again. Nothing could entice him from his perch. He stayed out all night in temperatures well below f
reezing, deaf to my father’s pleas, and by morning he was frozen on the bough. I imagine his talons rotating on the icy branch until he hangs head down in the pale ice-blue dawn, frosty and as stiff as laundry frozen on the clothesline, before plummeting into the snowbank beneath him without a sound.
Chapter 11
Here we are then, in the back story, a year and a half before my mother collapses on the kitchen floor, her hip in powder.
Since receiving my mother’s little thank-you note announcing my father’s impending demise, I have carried an image in my head, a Prairie Gothic portrait, posed like the painting: my father, in the barn with the dust motes of summer dancing in the golden air around him, afternoon sunlight slanting through the rafters. He is sitting on one of his selection of ride-on mowers bought to deal with the acres of rolling lawn and replaced with a new one as soon as anything went wrong. There is a line of machines parked in there, like a John Deere showroom.
He sits straight of back and as dead as his hopes for a quiet life, his flesh sinking inward and desiccating like an apple from last year’s harvest, a cadaver’s grin on his face and his hands at ten to two on the steering wheel of the mower. My mother stands beside him, her hand on his shoulder and smiling slightly, going for the Mona Lisa effect.
Her eyes look straight at me. You wanted to see your father? Here you are. Is this what you wanted?
So here we are then, up to where I am planning a trip in the face of surprising and sudden opposition from everybody I know. The heat is off a bit since I have actually spoken once to my father as a result of my telephone harassment initiative, and I know now that he is not dead, only almost – vague and uncommunicative and audibly panicked by the idea that I might come to see him. I heard the click when my mother picked up the receiver in the other room and so did he. We can hear her breathing. He is only deaf when he chooses.
The Erratics Page 5
