We waited for you, all of us, and we turned towards every person who came up the staircase, full of anticipation. Because it was like you to be the last to arrive, overbooked and hurrying from one assignation to another, your briefcase stuffed with music and overflowing, your long legs practically running because you knew you were late and didn’t want to be.
We waited for you, because it was still too soon to break this habit, to fully accept that you had died, that we had left your body behind in the hospital, that we were doing something you liked without you.
All the moons in a year have names. October is the harvest moon. May is the planting moon. January is the wolf moon. The December moon is known, across most cultures, as the cold moon, or the long night moon.
39
I’m in the West again, in Banff, on my way to Vancouver. I’m on a book tour and today is a layover day. I’m at the arts centre, a place where I’ve been before, both as a resident and to teach. It’s a place I always encouraged you to visit, but you never were able to organize a break from your busy working life.
You would love it here, Martin. The mountains are all around, ringing the town, so that wherever you look there is bare rock and trees, sheer cliffs, and snow on the summits. The mountains are jagged lines against the sky and look particularly spectacular at dusk.
There’s a small mountain by the arts centre, a big hill really, but nice to wander up. Usually when I’m here I walk up it every day, but right now there are three cougars living on it and it isn’t safe. There’s also been a grizzly spotted down by the river near town, so it’s not possible to walk there either. Apparently last week one of the cougars ate an elk on the lawn in front of the dining hall.
You always attached yourself romantically to anywhere you travelled, and came home wanting to move there. You travelled widely, but you only ever lived in three places—Toronto, Vancouver, and England. For all the opportunity you had to live abroad—an EU passport, the fact that music is its own language and you could have found work anywhere you went—you were never able to fulfill your dreams of living in Paris, or Prague, or Vienna.
I think we both thought of the place we had come from, Scarborough, as a place to leave. I moved there with Mum and Dad, straight off the boat from England, into a newly built suburban split-level on an unfenced, lawnless lot. Our parents put down grass, planted trees, made gardens. They planted a tree for each of us, although mine had to be pulled down quite early on as it had been positioned too close to the house and the roots had crawled under the foundation and interfered with the sewage system. Your tree is still there though, a huge red maple standing sentinel in the northwest corner of the backyard.
When we were growing up, the rural bones of the place still showed through. There were fields and ponds, an old barn down the road, an inn from the 1800s up the road. The William Wallace Inn was a dilapidated brick house by the time we arrived and was used for various strange business enterprises. There was always a German shepherd on guard and barking hoarsely from an upstairs window.
Once the inn was a Plexiglas factory and we could go up there at night and collect bits of the discarded Plexiglas from the big piles of sawdust out back. Before the building was an inn it was undoubtedly a family home for wealthy people and they would have owned the surrounding land, which included the land our suburban house had been built on.
An old pear tree stood outside the big brick inn, and for years after the house had been pulled down, I would collect pears from this tree on my way home from school. The tree was eventually torn down to make way for a new housing development.
But this was the landscape of our childhood, these bits of the old countryside—ancient fruit trees, ponds and streams, thickets of sumac, and fields of long grass. The people in the houses on our street used to dump their leaves and grass clippings at the edge of one of these fields, and periodically one boy or another would set them on fire.
We dug holes in this field to shelter in. For years we trod a path through it on the mile walk downhill to school. I remember the rabbit warrens in the banks, the worn dirt of the ground, smooth and slick in places as the leather in an old saddle.
We were always a mile from school, always the farthest away from both primary and secondary institutions. We walked together to school when we were young, sometimes trudging four miles a day if we were coming home for lunch. You started this walk earlier than me, because I was older and expected to look after you on the journey. You were probably walking that four miles from the age of six.
Across from the road to our primary school was a curving downhill trail called the cinder path, which led between the houses to the streets of the village that unwound a level below our suburban streets. This community was also a suburb, but had the name of a village. Our parents, having come from English villages, thought that because the suburb was called Guildwood Village it would resemble the villages they had known, and this made them decide to live there.
The cinder path led down to streets that, in turn, led to a park on the edge of the bluffs overlooking Lake Ontario, the feature that defined our particular patch of the world. The park is one of the few things in our old neighbourhood that is as it ever was, with its small copses of sumac trees and open meadow before the sheer three-hundred-foot drop to the beach below. The boiler of a sunken ship used to be visible from the top of the cliffs. Swimming out to it was a popular thing to do when we were teenagers.
The park was always a place to party. I remember being there one night with a group of older kids, when I was about fifteen, and seeing juddering lights moving through the darkness towards us, realizing, too late, that it was a police car driving over the bumpy ground of the field.
The bluffs are still spectacular. It’s exciting to stand as close to the edge as possible. Being up so high means that you look down on the seam where the water meets the sky, not across to it, and the two appear to be one fabric, as if there is no divide between lake and sky.
The moon looks amazing when seen from the top of the bluffs, and it’s hard not to believe that this was the place you imagined when you were writing your musical, when you were planning the lovers’ duet taking place on a clifftop.
You and I went to the bluffs many times. I remember walking there with you once late at night, in the middle of the night, and we sat on the curb in front of the park entrance, smoking cigarettes and talking about our parents. We used to look back at our childhood as a mystery that needed to be solved, when really it was just that we were no longer children, that our childhood selves were unrecognizable to the people we had become.
I remember the brands of the cigarettes we smoked—Player’s Light for you, Craven “A” for me (because I liked the word craven). I remember that you sat on my right on the curb, as later you sat on my right at the performance of South Pacific in New York. I remember we were wearing jeans and T-shirts, that the night was warm and expansive, that there were no sounds except for our voices, that the sky was full of stars, and that we looked at the stars often, heads tilted back, or lying down on our backs in the grass.
You walked down to that park when you were staying with Mum and Dad during the course of chemo. You had bought yourself a cap to wear in case you lost your hair (although you never did lose your hair) and one of your friends took a picture of you, standing on the edge of the bluffs, wearing that cap. Your face is skeletal in the photo, and when Mum wanted to include it in your memorial slideshow, I told her not to because it didn’t look like you. But really, it did look like you. It just looked like you dying.
I never thought we came from anywhere because the landscape we lived in as children changed all the time. Houses were built in the fields. Anything old was demolished. Ponds were filled in. Trees were chopped down. Most of the landmarks from our childhood have completely disappeared.
But now I see that where we came from is the space, not the individual objects. We came from the sprawl of the suburbs, where each back garden was half an acre and
each driveway was big enough for a full game of street hockey. We came from the long horizon of lake, and the dark summer sky, full of stars. We came from wide streets, from fields with grasses arcing taller than our heads, from creeks that frothed and raced after a spring rain, from the train trestles we used to run across, from all the trees we used to climb.
And that is what we carried with us into adulthood, this desire for space, for the empty horizon. When you drove across Canada, from Vancouver to Toronto, you took photos of the journey. Most of those photos are of the landscape—fields and lakes, open sky, train tracks, the long stretch of highway in front of your car. I know what the long view felt like to you, because it feels the same way to me. It feels like freedom. It feels like coming home.
40
In Vancouver, I go to your old apartment out in Burnaby. It’s a long and arduous journey by bus, and I get off in the wrong place and have to walk the steep part of the hill that I was trying to avoid.
There’s a FOR RENT sign on the front railing of the building, but a barbecue on your balcony, so it’s not your apartment that’s vacant. The cedar and bushes in front of the building have grown fast in the year and a half since I was last here. Another year and your balcony will be entirely screened in green, an oasis protected from the busy street. I can picture you walking out into a lush cave of vegetation to sit and have a break from practising. I can imagine your living room shimmering green in the sunlight.
I feel like I should say something to you at the apartment, but, as at the cemetery, that just seems stupid, so I don’t. I take a photo for Cathy and walk back down the hill, stopping every now and then to look south over the view of Vancouver that you liked so much. In the other direction, the line of mountains is obscured by clouds today, and I can’t see any part of them at all.
Cathy suggested going to have a coffee in your honour at the café down the street from your apartment, but I feel too miserable to do that, so I just get back on the bus and return to the hotel.
It’s hard to be in Vancouver. I go past places where you used to work, one right by where I’m staying, and this morning when I was on my way to the bus stop, there was piano music spilling out of an open upstairs window. That was, in fact, the last place you worked, and you were there that night, a few hours before you went into hospital. The very last time you played the piano was in that building.
I look for you in the places where you were, and of course, you’re not there. It’s no comfort to go to your apartment, but I go anyway. It’s not like I need to be reminded of you, like I don’t think of you all the time anyway. But it turns out that parts of the journey are so much about you that it does make me feel I was meant to ride that bus back to your apartment. The classical record shop on West Hastings with all the old piano recordings in the window, much of it music you have played. The sign on another building across the street that said, WHAT WAS ONCE, ALWAYS HAS BEEN, SOMEHOW NEVER AGAIN. The old stuffed koala bear in the junk shop that looked just like the stuffed koala you used to have when you were a little boy—when you slept in bed with all your stuffed animals, your favourites being two monkeys you named Jiffy and Jocko, who slept on either side of you, like guards.
I walk all the way down the hill and halfway up the next hill on my way home, and when I finally stop to catch the bus, I am standing directly opposite the funeral home where your body was taken after you died.
What I really hate about you being dead is that you’re not in your apartment, that you don’t come to the door when I ring the buzzer, that you don’t come out with me onto the streets of Burnaby, down to the coffee shop, that you don’t say, Let’s stop and have a coffee, that you aren’t with me on the bus (because that bus was the one that took you directly to work), and that I’m not waiting for you to finish work right now, listening to the sound of your piano fall from the open window above this street, that it’s just me doing these things in your name, that they feel useless, that you’re not there to sanction my activities, or argue with them. You’re not there to stop them from being necessary.
41
I’m back in Kingston again. For the first time, when I stepped through the door the new house felt like home, like somewhere I belonged. I find that I want to stay in this house. I don’t want to move, to keep moving, the way I have for all of my adult life. I want to stay here and fix this place up, spend money on it when I have some money to spend.
It was sunny today and I took the dogs out to the fields. They ran through the grass, splashed across the muddy river, rolled in something dead. I yelled at them and they paid no attention. On leash, returning to the car, they practically yanked my arms out of their sockets.
It’s good to be home.
My hair has grown longer during my travels. It got tangled today by the wind and the walk. On the way back to the house, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror. My windblown hair, dark and curly, looked exactly like your hair, Martin. There was a full moment where I didn’t know if it was you I saw in the car mirror, or me.
When the dogs are together sometimes they pee at exactly the same second, or react identically to an outside interest or threat. They are so alike in those moments that it is as though they share the same brain. Maybe that is what it is to be siblings, the similarities are buried so deep in the cells that they aren’t questioned or acknowledged—they just are.
The first thing I want to do to my house is to level the crooked floors, to shore up the beams in the basement, and to bring the timbers of the building back into alignment. I want the structure of the house to be as it was when it was built.
42
We each remember you most clearly from when you most belonged to us. Mum thinks of you when you were a baby and little boy. I remember you when we were both teenagers and young adults. Cathy recalls the time you came home to live for a while and you and she were the only children in the house. Your old girlfriends think of when they were together with you. Death makes you ours again, even if it’s only in memory.
This is what we’re left with—memory, your music, and the physical objects that remain from your life.
I finally open one of the boxes I brought back from your Vancouver apartment, the one with the items that were beside your bed.
There are several books. There is my novel, with a 7-Eleven phone card as the bookmark on page 54. There are two books about New York that you bought when we were there together on that last trip. I’m sure you hadn’t started either, but meant to read both. One is a historical atlas of the city, and the other is a collection of photographs, portraits of men and women who work in vanishing professions—mannequin maker, television repairman among them. The explanation of each job is on the facing page to the photograph.
The last book is a Russian science-fiction story that is also a political allegory about Stalin’s dictatorship. The Fatal Eggs is the tale of a scientist whose experiments go wrong and, instead of creating a utopian world, he creates a nightmare scenario of plagues and violence. You had only got to page 10 in this book, but I know you were enjoying it because I remember you talking about it.
On page 10, the professor is just starting his experiments. Nothing is out of control yet.
The piece of paper that you used to mark where you were in the book is a map to one of the dance schools you played at. On the back of it you have written a list of things to do: RAD money, invoice school board, Mum, call real estate agent, bills. I’m always trying to decide if these lists you made, of which there were many, were written before you knew you were dying, or afterwards. I don’t know why this is important, but it is. And this list, I think, judging by the note to call the real estate agent, was written just before you were diagnosed, when you were trying to sell your house in Toronto in order to move back to the West, before you gave up on that idea and rented your house out instead.
Your lists are often written in light pencil and are maddeningly hard to read. But these were lists meant only for you, and you wouldn
’t care that they’re hard to read or incomplete. On one loose sheet of paper are the barely legible thoughts: Maybe people aren’t sometimes lonely, so much as alone, and, Whether or not it is entirely accurate, it is better to think good of things, people, the world etc.
Some of the items that were beside your bed have already been dispensed with—the pile of loose change, your cell phone and charger, the puddle of clothes that you had stepped out of at the end of your last real day on earth. You were in such pain when the ambulance came that you couldn’t even put your pants on. You just went to hospital in what you were sleeping in—a T-shirt and underwear, with a long coat thrown overtop for decency’s sake.
The box also contains things that I took from your apartment. There are CDs from your collection, programs from your recitals. There are two beer coasters with the words Marty’s Bar on them, which someone must have given you. There’s the obituary, carefully cut out of the newspaper, for your elementary school classmate who died at the age of thirty-eight from a heart problem he didn’t know he had—the first of your peers to die. And there are various pieces of your identification that I couldn’t part with, either because they had photos of you (your work identity badges, a transit pass), or because they were from an earlier, sweeter time (your university student card, your Surrey County library card from when you lived in England). The photo on the transit pass shows you with a full beard. The photo on your work identity badge from the last day of work that you did has you in the red T-shirt that I wear all the time now because it still smells, faintly, of you. In that photo you look gaunt. In that photo you are just weeks away from being dead.
After you died, I flew home to Kingston. We buried you, Christmas came and went, uncelebrated, and then I gathered my strength and went back to the coast in January to clear out your apartment. I took the train instead of flying because I wanted to feel every inch of the countryside that had existed between us all those years we lived in different places; because I didn’t really want to arrive, didn’t want to have to face your life without you in it; because you had driven across the country when you journeyed from Vancouver to Toronto, and I wanted to see what you had seen. It was winter, so I couldn’t make the drive myself. The conditions would have been too dangerous, too unpredictable. But from the train window—seeing the snow, the sky, the trees, the endless prairie—I felt the distance, watched the countryside open and close. The slowness and deliberateness of the journey felt like the only way to move towards the task I was dreading.
Nocturne Page 10
