Beach Reading

by Lorne Elliott

  “Fergie,” I said to no one in particular. “He’s a drunk.”

  “He sure is,” said Wallace. “I like him though.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Rattray’s a pain in the ass, though.”

  “Got that right.”

  I felt expansive and willing to inform. “Did you know that there used to be walruses on the beach here?”

  “What a load of crap,” said Wallace.

  “Well, that’s what it says in one of the pamphlets I was reading, anyway. And there was an Indian settlement over by where the Ultramar station is now in Barrisway.”

  “Horseshit,” said Wallace. “That place has always been an Ultramar station.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” said Robbie, sitting down. “Tell me what the office is like.”

  “Hard to say. It’s not finished yet.”

  “Does the roof leak?” She looked pointedly at Wallace.

  “Of course their roof doesn’t leak!” said Wallace. “And who paid for it not to leak, eh? Us taxpayers, that’s who!”

  “When have you ever paid taxes?” said Robbie.

  Wallace ignored her and sucked down some more scotch. “John Q Average-Canadian, forking over more of our hard-earned cash so the government can steal land from people who’ve built it up with their blood sweat and tears. And where does that money go? Into the padded swivel chairs that cushion the fat arses of an already overblown government bureaucracy which the Liberals are enlarging even as we speak, though they swore they wouldn’t.”

  “The Conservatives are in power.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Well, you got a point there,” said Robbie.

  I remembered something. “Oh” I said, and I drew from my pocket and placed on the table the envelope Fergie had given me to deliver. “It’s an offer on your house and land. They told me to tell you that it was final.”

  Wallace picked up the corner of the envelope between his thumb and forefinger like he was handling a dead rat, and, wrinkling up his nose, he squinted at the address.

  “‘MacAckern is spelled wrong,” he said. “Typical.”

  “Oh, what’s the difference?” said Robbie.

  “M-A-C is how we spell it,” said Wallace. “‘M-C’ means you’re a Protestant bastard prick-faced pretender.”

  “Garbage,” said Robbie. “None of our family could spell worth shit. And since when are you a Catholic, anyway?”

  “Since always.”

  “Really? And when did you last actually go to church?”

  “It is true that I have successfully maintained my oath of non-attendance, in protest of certain so-called reforms by the Second Vatican Council.”

  “You’re just too lazy to get up on Sunday morning.”

  “That too.” Wallace turned to me and gestured with the envelope. “Now, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are. What have you heard around the office? What’s the scuttlebutt?”

  “Well,” I said. “Apparently somebody in Ottawa might be getting money from the Department of Heritage to preserve your house.”

  “Heritage…” said Wallace looking up. “I hadn’t thought of that angle. This house is heritage…”

  “It’s shit,” said Robbie.

  “Whoa whoa whoa!” Wallace turned to Robbie, took another stiff belt of scotch, breathed in sharply through clenched teeth and straightened in his seat like a man with something to say. “I will be the first to admit that this building has seen better days…”

  “Yeah. Like the Pleistocene Era.”

  “…But I’ll have you know it was Red Rory Angus MacAkern himself who laid the foundation, with stone he cut and brought from the quarry at Salvage Head down east of here…”

  “Here we go…” said Robbie, putting her elbows on the table and sighing.

  “…With a tripod crane he invented and fitted onto the deck of the boat he built with his own two hands, a boat with a shallow enough draft to come right into shore at high tide, but large enough to float the rocks he carried back. And after mooring down by where that Buick is now, he towed by windlass those rocks up to just under where you’re sitting.”

  “And a truly crappy job he did, too,” said Robbie.

  “And the porch was added by Little Johnny MacAckern and his wife Monique Taillefer…”

  “You paint a fascinating historical tableau.”

  “For little did we know that when the proud clan MacAkern left from Arisaig, Scotland…”

  “Oh Christ. We’ve started him…” said Robbie.

  “…that cold February morning, to cross the frigid north Atlantic with their borns in their arms…”

  “Borns?”

  “Wee ones. Children.”

  “Do you perhaps mean bairns?”

  “I was using the family pronounciation.”

  “Oh great. Can’t spell, and don’t know how to speak, either.”

  “…To cross the frigid North Atlantic, boat tossing in no less than three of the mightiest gales ever to blow, forced into exile from their ancestral home by those heartless English Protestant pricks, and commanded at gunpoint to leave their humble bothy…”

  “W-w-what’s a bothy?” said Brucie.

  “Gaelic for shithole,” said Robbie.

  “…Where we were living the simple life of the happy peasantry.”

  “Last time you told this story you said we were forced to leave the proud Castle MacAkern.”

  “We’d come down in the world since then, Robbie girl. Unfairly driven as we were from our ancestral seat where the great mountain Ben Nevis looks out on the Western Isles from the Highlands of Fife.”

  “Fife is in the Lowlands. And it’s on the east coast.”

  “Don’t interrupt. ‘Twas after the brave Scots fought to a standstill the English at the Battle of Boyne…”

  “The Battle of Boyne was in Ireland.”

  “Whatever. Some fucking battle somewhere… And where we were unfairly outmanned ten to one by the English, not to mention the thousands of foreign mercenaries, like the Swiss. (Those bastards got a lot to answer for…) Where was I?”

  “We were leaving our non-existant homeland with a crew of kilted leprechauns on the Good Ship Lollipop with Captain Scaramouche and his Seven Dwarfs.”

  “Fuck off… On the good ship The Mary, named after Mary, Queen of Scots…”

  “Who was French. “

  “Don’t start… And it was a leaky scow with ship’s rats the only food.”

  “I thought you said it was a good ship.”

  “Manner of speaking…Tossing and turning, headed for Cape Breton…”

  “Which we missed.”

  “…Where we had family, a branch of MacAkerns who live there to this very day.”

  “Those bunch of inbreds”.

  “…but south of Newfoundland, lost in a fog as thick as soup, a storm came up. We were headed ashore, but the good skipper Sir Patrick Spens of the Clan Macrimmon took us straight out to sea directly into the teeth of it.”

  “Well, that wasn’t very bright of him, now, was it?”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But that’s because you obviously are not aware that in a sailing vessel in a storm, Robbie, it’s safer to get out to sea. Didn’t think of that now did you, Smart-ass?… And so we were blown to the North Shore of Prince Edward Island, or as we called it, New Arisaig. And the clan all said we must get back to Cape Breton, for there our family abides, and the head of the clan, Colin Ray The Dhu…”

  “I thought you said…

  “…Who was also y-clept Red Rory Angus MacAkern the Great…”

  “OK, then…”

  “…crouched down and took a handful of soil and said, ‘We will no longer roam. This land is good.’”

  “Didn’t know much about farming either then, did he? �
��Cause that beach is nothing but sand and rocks.”

  “And yet we built up the soil with seaweed and…and…manure, and worked it heroically by the sweat of our brows with our own hands, and sowed and reaped until it bore fruit. And so we came to this land and built the house whose walls have sheltered five generations of MacAkerns.”

  “Well, the roof sure hasn’t. It leaks like a sieve.”

  “And that is the tale of the Great Clan MacAkern and how we came to the new world. A noble tale. A tale of heroes. A tale of a giant race of men who though bloody were unbowed. And that is why I must reject this offer of the government. And if you have a problem with the roof, then fix it.”

  “You fix it. Or get Martin the Sore or one of your fictitious relatives. The eaves-troughs are full of leaves, and my room is right under the V, so it actually collects rain. A roof should keep you drier, not make you wetter. We should move, Wallace.”

  “I refuse.”

  “Are you even gonna look at that offer?”

  “No need to.”

  “I will, then.”

  “No you won’t. It was addressed to me.”

  “But…”

  “Don’t worry about it, Robbie. I’m just playing with their heads, tenderizing them up before I sweep in for the kill. Last offer I gave them a list of demands which they cannot possibly meet.”

  “What good will that do?”

  Wallace started shaking his head slowly from side to side and clucking his tongue. “Robbie Robbie Robbie. Poor, innocent, sweet, dim Robbie. What I am doing is establishing a negotiating position.”

  “Why don’t you just ask Fergie for what you want?”

  “Oh RobbieRobbieRobbieRobbieROBBIE. This is why we have to go on living here. If we sent you out into the world as you are now you’d be pulled apart limb from limb.” He sighed heavily. “I’ll try to explain.”

  “Oh, please do. And remember, no big words.”

  “If I just went and asked what I wanted, they might give us half, if we’re lucky.”

  “Still better than nothing.”

  “Not good enough. I’m asking for at least twice as much so I can get what I do want. Also I’m throwing in some rejectables amongst the deal-breakers.”

  “What amongst the what?”

  “In every negotiation, Robbie, you have items which you don’t care about which you throw in to let them drag out of you at the last moment amidst great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know really. That’s just the way it’s done.”

  “Amongst movers and shakers and world leaders such as yourself?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You might get fuck-all.”

  “Never.”

  “Look, Wallace. They make the rules.”

  “Only if you believe they do.”

  “Whether you believe it or not.”

  “I, for one, refuse to believe that.”

  “Then you, for one, are delusional.”

  “Ah then, lass. ‘Tis a fine madness.”

  “What?”

  “It was in a movie I saw. Look! I’m not asking for the moon!”

  “I thought you just said you were.”

  “Well, yes, those rejectables, but what we really want, it’s no sweat off their balls.”

  “What did you ask for?”

  “First, a salary of a hundred thousand a year until I die, and the same for you and Brucie, of course. Also, it goes without saying, alternate permanent accommodation within the province on comparable coastal acreage, and transportation of goods and possessions from here to our new place of residence, aforesaid acreage to be provided with enough arable land to feed our poor starveling family…”

  “‘Starveling’?”

  “…Who our sainted father left penniless (thanks to those pricks in Ottawa) to fend for ourselves, with only the soil beneath our feet to till.”

  “When have you ever tilled anything?”

  “Poetic license.”

  “Anyway, you don’t have a hope in hell of getting even half of that.”

  Wallace put the fingers of one hand to his heart and adopted an expression like I once saw on a frontispiece to a volume of poems by Shelley. “My only wish is to live in my beloved home with my beloved family, until my demise, when such time comes that I am, (as well as you, sweet child, when comes your time) to be buried in the family graveyard of Glen Mochrie.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Out this side of the point.”

  “The dump?”

  “The same.”

  “Why would I want to be buried in a dump, and since when is that dump Glen Anything.”

  “Glen Mochrie. It’s what our family have always called it.”

  “No we haven’t. We’ve always called it the dump.”

  “Yes well, best not to bring that up now, is it? With negotiations already in progress, and them all afire about heritage? We’re trying to talk it up, Robbie, not down. So it’s Glen Mochrie from now on, and right next to that is the Vale of Bethmeer…”

  “That bog with the Pontiac in it?”

  “Once again, best to soft-pedal all this bog chat. It is henceforth the Vale of Bethmeer named after our Aunt Beth, the old bat, just on the other side of the wee fen…”

  “The swamp?”

  “Correct. But call it the wee fen.”

  “And that’s where you want to be buried?”

  “When comes my time,” said Wallace, tilting his head up and gazing off heroically at the wallpaper. “There I shall be laid to rest with the scent of wild thyme wafting through the air and the music of the surf in my ears, accompanied by a hundred pipers playing ‘As Softening Shades of Evening Fall.’”

  “It’ll have to be a hell of a surf to be heard over that racket. Why would you want that at your funeral?” said Robbie.

  “It’ll give the mourners something to cry about. And I won’t have to hear it, because I’ll be dead.” He seemed quite pleased at his cleverness.

  “So you agree!”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then why…?”

  “That’s one of my rejectables. And since there is no way they’ll guarantee to that condition, it should hold up things handily.”

  “Oh yeah. You got every angle covered.”

  “I like to think so.”

  “But what’s all this about the second offer? You never told us you got a first.”

  “Oh. That. Well. You’d just try and stop me from doing what I was going to do anyway, which would be very frustrating for you. That sort of pressure could be very unhealthy for you, Robbie, what with the stress of sleeping under a leaky roof and all.”

  “What did you do with the first offer?”

  “Don’t worry. I showed it to Bernie Panting at the bank, who loaned me a thousand bucks on the strength of it.”

  Robbie absorbed this information. “So….why then did you make like you didn’t have any money for that big blowout last night?”

  “A penny saved is a penny earned. You should make a note of that, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are.”

  “So you got Christian here to finance your drunk?”

  “Amongst other things,” said Wallace mysteriously.

  Robbie stopped again and thought for a bit. “So that’s why you were acting so strange at the bar. With those signatures…”

  When she said that, a dim memory swam out of the blur of last night and through the blur of tonight’s aspirin and scotch, a memory of Wallace walking from table to table in the bar, getting people to sign something, then signaling to me with a big questioning smile while pointing to the person who was signing. I had signaled back Yes to whatever it was, happy to be in agreement with everybody. Then, after signing, the waitres
s would arrive and deliver beer to that person, Wallace would slap their backs and move on to the next.

  “Well, I was fairly drunk at the time…” said Wallace, but you could see he was waffling.

  “And when I asked what you were doing getting everybody to sign something,” said Robbie, “you said it was some sort of drinking game. And when I asked later who won the game, you pretended you were too drunk to know what I was talking about.”

  “Like I say, I was a bit tipsy…”

  “What were the signatures for, Wallace?”

  “A petition to let us stay on our land.”

  “You used him,” said Robbie, pointing to me.

  “How?”

  “He was paying for it.”

  “So.”

  “So?”

  “Oh…I see. You’re accusing me of tricking him into bankrolling the alcohol I had to buy to procure the signatures I needed?”

  “No. I’m accusing you of being a lying dickhead.”

  “Well, that’s a given. But Whoever-The-Hell-He-Is doesn’t mind, do you, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are?”

  The warmth I was feeling had settled into a humming and vibrant bonhomie. “No problem,” I said.

  “See? And isn’t he, right now, enjoying the scotch I took the initiative to buy from the bartender there?”

  “Yeah. And put on his tab.”

  “Certainly.”

  “What would he do without you?”

  4

  Next day, I fell in love.

  In the morning I woke up suddenly, walked down to the ocean, shaved, and just in case there might be any lingering effects of the scotch, I drank a lot of sea water and stuck my fingers down my throat to vomit, making up a new word which I uttered as I spewed: “Aueackh!” It sounded Gaelic. But the rear-guard treatment of water and aspirin administered by Robbie had worked. I did not have a hangover, and I thought: You should always listen to women. There are of course a few Lady MacBeths, but all else being equal, they know best.

  I spent most of the day at the park office, avoiding Rattray and looking up everything I could about tides, sanderlings and shoreline micro-fauna. I was starting to see how it all might be connected. At mid-afternoon coffee break I asked Fergie if I could take the rest of the day off to bike to Barrisway and do some banking. He said, “Fine.”