by Bill Gaston
“Well, we don’t know. The police report was very, was not very clear. A neighbour found him just as he was regaining —”
“My father won’t say what happened?”
The nurse eyes him anew. Her manner softens.
“I think you have to see him yourself. He won’t stop moving. He’s hallucinating.” The nurse has Richard by the arm, stopping him from going in quite yet. “I should warn you. There’s lots of swelling.”
His father is curtained off at the far end of the room. Sunlight enters such that Richard can see his father’s shadow projected onto the curtain. He is sitting on the edge of his bed, and his hands are busy.
Richard doesn’t pull the curtain aside but more quietly lifts and steps under. His father’s face is badly swollen on one side and an eye socket is puffed and blackened. His nose might be broken. Other than that, it’s his father, who has always looked old to him.
“Hi, Dad.”
It’s curious, his father’s response to this. His hands keep working away in front of him. He turns his head to Richard’s voice but his eyes stay down, keep staring at whatever it is his hands are working on. Turning in the sunlight, his face is cut hard with shadows.
“You feel okay?”
His father looks content enough. Nothing in his eyes suggests pain or suffering of any kind. He looks freshly cleaned, his hair combed. On his bedside table, an empty Dixie cup is torn into many pieces. A drinking straw with an accordion bend has been pulled straight and taut.
“Mom sends her love.”
He realizes he does feel repelled. Not by his appearance so much. It’s that his father still isn’t talking to him, still isn’t looking at him. His father who, sitting there, patiently working his hands, looks like a contented summary of himself.
Watching his father push whatever it is away, watching him nimbly combat the very air, Richard sees a perfect picture of futility. And he feels close to his father, as close as he ever has. He sees his father and knows himself: he lets no one in either.
Richard watches the hands. They are deft, and more articulate than his words ever were. They move, still, with delicacy and precision. Minutely pinching, pulling, sweeping. On second thought, he’s not fighting the air. He’s trying to clear it away. Not clear away — take apart.
THE KITE TRICK
This Tofino,” pronounced Uncle Phil, from his bed, first cigarette of the day bouncing unlit in his lips, “is a freakish place.”
It was warm and lovely out and the cause of his declaration, yesterday having been stormy and cold. “Hilariously cold,” he had said, not laughing. “Mid-May?” He’d also found it freakish that you could always hear the roar of waves, the constant roar of waves.
“Cheers, mate.”
Philip liked how his Uncle Phil thanked him. His uncle’s namesake, he had fetched the cigarettes from the condo’s living room, the kind of chore he’d been happily performing for two days, wanting to get to know his English uncle, his only uncle, whom he got to see once each year. Interesting, these notions of “relative” and “English.” And Uncle Phil was entertaining in ways Philip’s parents certainly weren’t. Those expressions of his, for instance the way he sighed and said under his breath, “Deep carnival,” pronouncing the second word like the French might. What did Uncle Phil mean by that?
From the doorsill Philip watched his uncle suck absently on his cigarette, take it out to discover its unlit end, then swear and lurch out of bed with more energy than he would show all day. Philip’s mother wouldn’t let Uncle Phil smoke inside the rented condo because of the children.
Uncle Phil still wore the bathing suit he’d worn last evening in the hot tub. He had the kind of body, Philip noted, that you expected of an English man, especially a musician, in that it was without defined muscle. Even his uncle’s tan seemed not very attached to its skin, and mismatched to the pale tone underneath. Philip had to agree with his mother, whom he’d overheard telling his father that “Your brother is two years younger and looks ten years older.” She’d said it accusingly, and Philip knew this had to do with his uncle’s lifestyle. Or, as she put it, “How your brother lives.”
“We did it backwards, darling,” Uncle Phil shouted again to Aunt Sally, who didn’t hear because she was out at the car “searching the boot” for sunscreen. By backwards he meant they shouldn’t have gone to Jamaica before Canada, because “the other way ’round wouldn’t have felt so freaking frigid. Next year we do cold then hot.” Uncle Phil said “freaking” a lot and slipped occasionally. At each slip Philip’s mother closed her eyes, and once took his father away for a hissing talk.
They sat eating breakfast quickly, Philip’s little sister and brother racing to lick jam off their toast before they were told to stop. Philip’s mother was impatient at the stove, waiting for the bacon to cook. Uncle Phil always wanted bacon, crispy bacon. Philip enjoyed the way his uncle defended his sins: earlier this morning, announcing that she was off to the resort store and what would people like for breakfast, his mother had startled at Uncle Phil’s, “Any deeply sustaining pork product!” booming from behind his closed bedroom door. There was something so English in what he said, sly like the book Winnie the Pooh was sly.
The idea this morning was that Philip’s mother and father and Aunt Sally would go whale-watching while Uncle Phil took the three kids to the main beach to enjoy the warm day. Twelve, Philip was old enough to appreciate the rather undramatic grey whales surfacing to breathe, but he got seasick even on calm water and in any case he had to help, as his father put it, “poor Uncle Phil look after the hordes.” Uncle Phil did look grateful that Philip was staying behind. He and Aunt Sally had no children — another side of Uncle Phil that seemed to rub his mother wrong.
Eating bacon, pretending to try to entice them away from whale-watching, Uncle Phil said, “You’re actually choosing the big grey blobs over ‘the kite trick’?” He refused to tell anyone what the trick was, though Aunt Sally nodded while she confirmed, “It’s a good one.”
After breakfast, his parents and Aunt Sally gone, Philip stood in the bedroom door again to watch his uncle pull a canvas hunting vest over a bright red long-sleeved T-shirt and clutch himself, saying, “Brrrr.” He enjoyed being watched. His hair was always wild, standing up in strands that shifted comically as he moved. He would stay the whole day in that hunting vest — it had bullet holders and was apparently the real thing. On its back was a big yin-yang symbol, though two shades of blue rather than the typical black and white. Philip knew what it meant — it meant opposites that made a whole. Though odd on a hunting vest it was one of the more sensible ornaments.
He hated it when people said ying-yang. He hated people who used “phenomena” as the singular even more.
Philip backed out of the room when his uncle found a lighter in a vest pocket. But the smell of smoke followed him, almost instantly it seemed, as he walked past his sister and brother to open a window and the door to the patio. Though he performed these acts of ventilation quietly he felt awkward, a sissy in his mother’s camp. Plus it was clear that these openings simply pulled the smoke more quickly out of Uncle Phil’s bedroom and on into everyone’s noses. No matter, Philip’s mother would smell it, and tonight there would be more hissing out in the parking lot.
“So,” said Uncle Phil, ambling out of the bedroom with cigarette blazing, unaware of his rebellion. “This famous ‘Long Beach.’ Will it have a mosh pit?”
“For sure.” Ever since his uncle found out that Philip knew what a mosh pit was, and that his mother and father didn’t, he talked this way. So does this famous “Grade 7” of yours have a mosh pit? So does this so-called “seafood restaurant” we’re off to have a mosh pit? Philip and his uncle refused to reveal to the others what a mosh pit was. Aunt Sally, who had tattoos, would just sit quietly smiling. Philip could tell she didn’t want to be here. Her eyes were steady with waiting. She was younger than Uncle Phil, and Philip knew they weren’t really married, though they had b
een together for as long as he could remember. Uncle Phil sometimes called her “Aunt Silly,” which made Sasha and Tommy laugh, especially when Aunt Silly pulled a face to match, but it also confused them, because their parents never made fun like that in front of children.
Leaving for the whale-watching, his mother had taken Philip aside, both his shoulders under her hands, steering him into the rhododendron grove bordering the parking lot.
“You are at a beach, with very, strong, undertow,” she’d said. “Adults drown there. Never let Tommy and Sasha out of your sight. Do not let them go in over their ankles. Today it’s sand-castles.” She looked over her glasses toward the condo and raised her eyebrows. “You are the boss.” She squeezed his shoulders and repeated, “You.”
Philip resented his mother for standing in the way of him and Uncle Phil. It was becoming clear to him that you could have a special feeling for relatives, beyond seeing the play of genes. This year, Philip had come to understand that Uncle Phil visited each year not just to see his only brother but also, more and more, to see him too. The way he’d hugged him second at the airport, the way he said, “Hello, Namesake.”
Philip liked this about his uncle, this potential and blossoming uncle-ness. Though already familiar with the word, he had reviewed “avuncular” in his OED.
It was a twenty-minute drive to Long Beach and Uncle Phil did only one joke about driving on the wrong side of the road, veering over the double yellow line when there was no other car in sight, then a goofy “Oops!” and gently veering them back. Philip’s brother and sister were thrilled, though only Sasha, eight, had any sense of there being a left or a right side to anything.
“I can’t believe in one month you’ll be thirdeen.” Uncle Phil gave him a wink. “Thirdeen is when it begins, mate.”
Philip sat saying nothing. He smiled like his aunt smiled, tired and knowing. He knew what his uncle was on about. But he knew even better that, as far as “it” went, next year would be no different than this one.
“You have some fun but you keep up those famous straight A’s of yours. All right? Get all yer girlfriends to help ya?”
“Sure.”
“Promise?”
“Sure.”
“You really got one hundred percent in maths?”
“I guess.” Actually he’d got one hundred and five, this impossibility due to his teacher’s inane dangling of bonus points.
“And science?”
“I guess.”
“And wankology?”
Philip smiled and stared straight ahead. He really wanted to be praised for his reading, which was, of course, untestable.
“Cheers, mate.”
“Cheers.”
“Jesus, you know, you’re a loner just like your dad.” When Philip didn’t respond, Uncle Phil added, “Which is not a bad thing, not a bad thing at all.”
“What do you mean,” Philip asked, “when you say,‘deep carnival’? What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means” — Uncle Phil stared into the road and tried hard for his nephew — “It means, the strange and colourful activity of human meat. That’s what it means. ‘Exactly.’” He looked over at Philip. “Get it?”
“I guess.”
The parking lot was nearly empty of cars. Anyone on this beach that planed vastly off to the right was swallowed up in its sheer size. Philip could see what might be a beach umbrella a half-mile away. Someone in blue and yellow walked the haze and hard sand of low tide but you couldn’t tell if they were one person or two. Other than that, a small dog poked about the huge bleached logs that storms had tossed, over the years, at foot of the forest.
“This is brilliant,” said Uncle Phil, standing with hands on hips, taking it in, having almost to shout over the roar of surf. “There’s no one here! Look at this! You don’t get this where your father and I come from!” The breeze put his hair back, flat for once.
Sasha and Tommy sat anguished in the car. Tommy bounced. Uncle Phil finally understood their set faces.
“Yes! You can get out!” He raised his hands over his head, astounded that they would still be sitting there. “Out! Run off! It’s a beach!”
“Stay close!” Philip shouted at their backs. “Sasha — keep Tommy with you. We’ll catch up.”
Uncle Phil opened the trunk and emptied it of towels, lunch pack, kite. He asked Philip if they should bring the shovel and Philip told him how good it was for sand castles, how it let you build something sizable. He liked using words like “sizable” around Uncle Phil for the way they made him comically startle (hair jerking) and say something like, “My namesake’s a freaking intellectual.”
At the edge of the parking lot Uncle Phil stopped in the breeze to take in the scope of what he was about to enter. He seemed almost nervous. Something in his uncle’s hesitation made Philip proud that he lived in Canada: empty and powerful, and dangerous for that. Philip hadn’t been to Long Beach for two years and he liked it well enough, though the water was useless being so cold, like it had melted only seconds before. It numbed you completely.
“Your father didn’t tell me! This is brilliant!”
His father seemed critical of Uncle Phil too, though he smiled warmly when he spoke of his little brother. This was him yearning for England and his own boyhood — so Philip’s mother explained it to Philip. His father had left England for Canada at eighteen, had gone to university to become a civil servant with Canada Post. Uncle Phil had stayed in London and, as his father put it, never grown up. Philip recalled his mother’s face when, a few months ago, happening upon a reality show on TV, she studied a long-haired old guy stuttering his words. Then she declared with sarcastic revelation to Philip’s father, “Your brother wishes he were Ozzy Osbourne.”
Uncle Phil used to play in bands — he was a bass player, mostly a session musician. His main claims to fame were his “jams” with certain rock stars Philip had actually heard of. Plus he’d been hearing the stories since he was born. Uncle Phil had been on stage with Elton John, once, and with Phil Collins for a whole European tour, and once with Denny Laine of Wings, formerly of Moody Blues. He’d played on two tracks of Charlie Watts’s solo album, though neither track made the final cut. He was on an entire Ian Drury live album and apparently you could see him on the cover. There were others his father could list, plus plenty more stories about musicians that weren’t about music. Phil “knew the first guy who found Hendrix in the morning.” He himself had “bodily saved a mature but severely pissed Richard Starkey from taking out an entire table loaded with pints.”
It had been twenty years since Uncle Phil had played. Since then he’d been “in production,” meaning he made the CDs, though Philip wasn’t clear exactly what his uncle did, other than know lots of musicians. If asked, he joked, “It’s music politics. I’m the party organizer.” Philip had just last week overheard his mother describing him to his father as an “elderly gopher,” and his father had shaken his head while agreeing. Lending the visit an air of illegality that Philip found thrilling, his mother had added, “He’d better not be bringing anything in from Jamaica.” His father assured her his brother wouldn’t. Philip loved hearing his father’s moderate English accent spice up whenever he talked about Uncle Phil. He could almost picture his father as a boy, having fun.
Another thing his father said about his brother, sounding English as could be, was, “I can tell he’s still fantastically lonely.”
They walked a fair way, Uncle Phil wanting to “go past any people.” So eager was he on this point that for a distance he carried Tommy and the basket at the same time, and when they arrived he was exhausted and he dropped both a bit abruptly. Tommy actually landed on his side and looked to Philip to see if he was supposed to cry.
Uncle Phil began immediately to unpack and assemble his kite. The breeze, he said, was brilliantly steady. Philip was sent up into the driftwood logs for a chunk of wood “the size of your own leg.” When he returned with one, Uncle Phil moved them from t
he soft sand down to the hard-packed, low-tide sand. Tommy proudly dragged the shovel.
“Is the tide coming in?” asked Sasha, gazing out at the froth of breakers, its roar and roiling mist.
“Yes,” Philip answered, trying to sound a warning, though he wasn’t sure. The sand was cold and damp on his feet, and as hard as a floor. “And it comes in quickly. When I say it’s time to move, we move.”
But Sasha only wanted to hear that it was coming in. “Save the Queen! We can play Save the Queen!”
A game they played with tides, it involved a queen — a stick or a shell or moulded sand — around which you built a sand castle and fortress walls and outer walls and moats, all in an effort to keep the rising tide from getting in and drowning her. When the first surging flat tongues reached the moats and filled them, and then licked at the walls, which then began to crumble, the inevitable was upon you and so was the wonderful frenzy and panic to heap as much sand as fast as possible to shore up breaching walls. Last year at a gentler beach Sasha had actually lain down and used her body to plug a crumbling wall, screaming in hopeless joy, because the water just came and came, eventually breaking through and washing up to the sand-queen’s feet — and down she came, dissolving — an outcome always known but always pretended against — otherwise there would be no reason to the game at all. Eventually they would simply give up and stand there breathing hard and, with open mouths and slack faces, stare at the dying.
“Just let me get my kite up and then we’ll save the freaking queen.”
The two smaller children were waiting for him. Still puffing from the walk, Uncle Phil sat down twice for a cigarette while he got his kite trick set up. From a Thermos he sipped what Philip knew to be gin. When little Tommy ran up to his uncle for a sip he was rebuffed with a laughing, “You don’t want any of this, luv.”
The kite was egg-shaped, with a Union Jack design on both sides. Against the monotones of sand and water, the colours of this design looked truly unnatural, bizarre even, and Philip fancied that high in the sky was the only place for it.
