Beach Reading

by Lorne Elliott

  But this wasn’t happening at all. In fact, as painful as it was, I had to admit that the way she was behaving could be explained only by her finding Rattray attractive. Which was simply impossible. I could not see how somebody so outwardly stunning could possibly be so mistaken. She could have anybody. Well, not anybody. I wouldn’t like that. To hell with everybody else. She could have me.

  And then, from the farthest point on earth from where I stood, the antipode a thousand miles off the southwest coast of Australia, a faint tremor, the far echo of an impossibility, reached me and once more registered its huge but distant vibration.

  My makeup had to be the problem. I must check.

  I went straight to the washroom, just as Rattray was coming out, and he grabbed the inside handle at the same time as I grabbed the one on the outside. He pulled, I pulled back, he pulled again, I let go, he opened and stepped outside and we stood face to face. Although he hadn’t looked at me before, preserving a contemptuous facade which ignored me completely, now he was forced to observe me directly.

  He yelped. “What the..?” he said, forgetting completely to give me hell about Priority Entry and Exit Regulations as outlined in the recent policy decision of the Department of Door-handle Manipulation. Instead he just looked me in the eye. I expected anger, but he seemed almost… curious, like he was seeing some new facet of me. It was uncomfortable. I pushed past him and he turned his head, still looking at me, as I entered the bathroom and the door behind me closed. I was alone. I looked at myself in the mirror.

  I yelped. The zombie’s idiot younger brother had apparently been trying to disguise himself as a transvestite by hiring the services of a spastic makeup artist. And it was not just my face that was an appalling assault on all that was good. My hair was like a primitive Frisbee constructed of straw, a nest built by one of the less-talented species of pack rat, a tangle of hemp and beach-wrack. Bits of sweet grass were stuck in it like an actress overdoing the part of mad Ophelia. My doctored shirt without the collar made me look like the minister’s son in some Appalachian snake-wrestling cult.

  I filled the sink with warm water and immersed my whole head in it, emerged and scrubbed my skull with my knuckles and wiped my face with paper towels. Then, I washed my face again. The swelling was going down somewhat on my bruises, but the colouring was still yellow and green. I was back to a somewhat less damaged Swamp Thing.

  It must’ve been the makeup that was putting Claire off, or my bruised face beneath it. I walked out of the washroom, went to her office, knocked, heard “Come in!” and entered.

  “Hi again,” I said.

  “Oh. Hi.” She seemed disappointed that it was me, and looked back down at her work.

  “My face isn’t usually like this.”

  “Oh?” But she didn’t even look.

  “It was just that, you know that fight I was telling you about? Down at the wharf? Not that I look for a fight, but sometimes you gotta… It’s just…I…My face isn’t usually like this.”

  “That’s good,” she said, stood up, came around the desk and passed me on the way out.

  Could she be avoiding me? I had to find out, so I followed her. She went through the door next to hers, into Rattray’s office. He was at his desk, blank paper in a square stack exactly at the centre, sitting as straight as the pencil aligned beside it. He looked up with an expression like he didn’t hold well to being interrupted, although he had obviously been doing nothing.

  “So, if I can get the funding, what do you say?” I said, as if I was continuing a conversation from out in the lobby.

  “What?” said Claire.

  “For the illustrations in my report?”

  “Excuse me…” said Rattray.

  “One second,” I said. “This is important.”

  Rattray straightened even further in his chair.

  “OK,” said Claire, turning to me finally. “I’ll talk about it later, but right now I want to talk to Barry.”

  For the first time, Rattray looked directly at her, and saw, looking back at him, her adoring eyes. He was puzzled, glanced at me and saw me staring at her with my adoring but desperate eyes. He was even more puzzled. He looked at her again, then back at me. There was a long pause as something rearranged itself in his brain. The wheels started moving, whirred, clicked into gear, and then Rattray settled back into his chair. He had figured out something, and what he had figured out could be worked to his advantage. Smug and superior, he grinned.

  What was so funny? What did he have to act smug and superior about? He looked from me to Claire and back once more. The room was vibrating with so many waves of attraction and repulsion it felt like it might explode.

  “I’ve gotta go,” he said, still grinning, standing up and scooping the truck keys from his desk, the coolest man on earth. “Nobody’s allowed in my room when I’m not here,” he said. We followed him out of his office, which he locked. Then he crossed the lobby and walked outside, Claire following him and me following Claire, to the parking lot, where he stopped and pointed at me.

  “You,” he said, like he was whistling for a dog. And I went over to him, hating that I did. “You can bring in the rest of those boxes from around back, can’t you?”

  “I will,” said Claire.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I would show her that I was man enough to withstand even this humiliation.

  “As long as it gets done,” said Rattray and went across the parking lot toward the truck. It was the first time I’d seen him happy, the prick. So desperate for power, and now having it fall into his lap, there was actually a swagger in his walk.

  “I’ll come with you if you want,” said Claire.

  “Sure,” said Rattray. Like one of the cool guys on TV.

  I was close to despair. Knowing as I spoke that it was pointless, I blurted out anyway, “Claire?”

  “I’m going with Barry now,” she said.

  “I was wondering if, later, you wanted to come see my tent.”

  “Your what?”

  “I’m living in a tent on the beach. I was wondering if you wanted to come see it.”

  “Sounds uncomfortable,” she said, and went around the other side of the truck. Rattray looked directly at me and smirked.

  “I thought we might go for a walk,” I said to her, louder. “I could show you some of the flora and fauna…”

  Rattray snorted, as if he was taking pity on me. She caught his eye. They seemed to agree on something. She looked at me from across the box of the pickup.

  “Look” she said, taking a deep breath in preparation to making what she was about to say absolutely clear. “I want to go with Barry. I don’t want to go to the beach with you. Now, don’t you have any work to do?”

  She got in and closed the door, and Rattray, still smirking, not about being with her, I thought, but with the idea that I was somehow now in his power too, got in the driver’s seat, started the truck and spun out of the parking lot. The truck pulled onto the pavement and up the road where I had once bounced on my bike with my heart like a horned lark. They drove over the hill and out of sight and the dust from the wheels settled over the parking lot, and over me.

  At the furthest point on earth from where I was standing, the continental plate lurched and the largest earthquake the world has ever known jolted the ocean floor. A tidal wave snapped out from its epicenter and swept over the planet, reached its widest circumference, then, rising in height as its aperture narrowed on this side of the globe, it closed in and towered above me where I stood in the parking lot of the Barrisway Park office. A hundred miles above my head, filled with the jumble of world civilizations it had destroyed and picked up, the waters closed together like a drawstring on a purse, hesitated, then crashed down, driving me and my world inside out and leaving me standing alone in a landscape of mud and smashed things, waterlogged garbage, shit and dea
d bodies.

  I walked inside, stiff and empty, went to my office and sat down behind my desk.

  I stared at nothing for half an hour.

  I picked up a piece of paper and started to write.

  “The Survival of Life on Earth depends upon competition for a mate, and morality has nothing to do with it. Winning is everything, no matter how vicious the battle or how destructive the forces unleashed. Love is Pain.

  These truisms are abundantly clear to anyone who has studied the fauna of Barrisway Park on Canada’s East Coast. The sanderlings eat the small organisms that feed off the detritus left at high tide, but they give little thought to the havoc they wreak in that community when they do so. It’s the immutable law of cruel Nature, red in tooth and claw. Victory goes not to the worthiest, but to the dirtiest fighter, and anybody who thinks differently will be chewed up and spat out, cast aside for a more worthless mate. Jungle Justice. It’s a battlefield out there. Don’t think it isn’t. Life sucks.

  Take, for example, the horned lark, which displays and nests in zone four of Barrisway Park. When he comes into sexual maturity, the male of the species first typically prepares not just one, but as many as six or more nesting areas for his prospective mate, which, if it so pleases her, she can choose from, while he, preening, singing and putting on aerial displays to make himself more desirable in her eyes, awaits her decision.

  And if she deems none of these abodes suitable, then without giving it another thought, even in some cases without examining the work he has so painstakingly achieved, she will from pure whim pass him over and make the devastating choice of some other mate. She doesn’t care. It’s not her concern. He can be left a hollow shell, emotionally crushed, but what’s that to her? And so the timeless breeding ritual continues. It starts with the attempt at attracting the mate, and ends with misery and waste.

  Why it is that the female almost always makes the most unsuitable choice is a problem best left to philosophers or poets and not humble naturalists such as myself. It is not my place to suggest that there is perhaps something missing in the mental equipment of the female of the species, as though the double X chromosome lacks any normal human sympathy, allowing her to so cold-heartedly reject those who love them most, even though the flaws of the mate they have chosen will almost certainly show themselves as time passes and his worthlessness becomes more apparent. But by then it will be too late. He will have moved on, as the female, more and more trapped by her ever-advancing age and decreasing allure, becomes more pitiful. How will she feel then, eh? Oh, mark my words, she will rue the day that she so blithely rejected he who was to be her one true love.

  And what’s the unsuccessful suitor supposed to do? Confront his rival in a mano to mano duel and pound his face into a bloody pulp? God knows he’d like to. Oh yes, indeed. Give him half the chance and nothing would feel better than delivering a few well-chosen and painful blows to his face, or one clipped uppercut to the jaw of his rival, sending him in a graceful arch backwards through the air to land on his neck.

  But we humans are civilized. We have laws, entitlements, social consciences, Bills of Rights and Freedoms which state, amongst other things that “…no law of Canada shall be construed or applied so as to (b) impose or authorize the imposition of cruel and unusual treatment or punishment;” Even though that document never states what exactly constitutes “punishment”? Eh? Or “cruel”? for that matter.

  Thrown away? Cast aside? Would that be “unusual”? (Oh no, all too usual by my findings!) But that is the Bill of Rights of Canada, and the female horned lark has a different law, doesn’t she? The destruction of the very spirit which makes life meaningful. And although it is not the mandate of the humble naturalist to quote poetry, a line from the anonymous folksong “Deep, Deep In My Heart” sums it up best.

  “For how to rise and forward go

  My boat drifts from the shore

  Now all my sails are slack and slow

  and meaning means no more”

  Which just about says it all, don’t you think?

  I wrote it in one draft, the words roaring out of me like from a flamethrower, and on re-reading I found it excellent. I had said what I wanted to say, I had told the truth. I was aware that it was not couched in the normal scientific language expected in a paper like this, but that simply meant that they would now have to change the rules for what constituted normal scientific language. This was better.

  I worked all the rest of the morning and the words kept pouring onto the paper. I heard trucks arrive and people go into their offices, and like the discordant drones whining behind everything in “Softening Shades,” my thoughts kept telling me that Life Was Unfair.

  Was it me? What did Rattray have that I didn’t? A uniform? Where could I order one? How soon could it get here? Perhaps I could buy one in Barrisway.

  I stayed in my office until quitting time and when I thought I heard that everyone was gone, I left the filled notebook on my desk and walked out of my office, wondering if I should wait till Fergie got back so that it wouldn’t be left unattended. Then I thought the words “Fuck it” and felt the happy rebellious release of expressing myself naughtily. Fuck it fuck it fuck it I said, but feeling each time less of a thrill, that negative excitement which passes for joy amongst we the damned and loveless.

  The door to Fergie’s office was open. “Oh,” he said as I passed. “You off?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll close her down, then. But first I think I’ll have me some more vodka. I mean, I’ll have some vodka. Wouldn’t want anybody to think that I drink vodka during the day. Nossir. This job is far too riveting to make you want to go down that path, drinking at work. But now that the workday is over I think I will have some. Would you like a shot?”

  “No thanks. I gotta go to Barrisway.”

  “Of course you do. Shouldn’t’ve offered it to you in the first place. OK then. See you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “So it is! No wonder I’m drinking, or, excuse me, will be drinking. Well, well…Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about anything. Be joyful and live life easily, I say. See you Monday.”

  “OK.”

  I walked out and got on my bike and pedalled to Barrisway, purposefully and maturely all the way into town, obeying all the rules of the road stringently, tight-lipped and steady.

  The man behind the counter at the hardware store seemed better disposed to me now that my spirit had been crushed. I was one of his brotherhood now. He had only been trying to warn me, I hadn’t listened, and now I had seen for myself. He showed me to the back of the store where, no, they didn’t have any uniforms, but perhaps these matching work greens with severe creases in them made from material as stiff as cardboard would do. Who cared? Mark it up as yet another of my failures. My brogues, unorthodox when worn with checked pants and pyjama tops, would now fit in with my new more conservative look.

  I bought a tie and knotted it like a noose around my neck under the collar of my new shirt. I looked in the mirror, and with my lightening bruises and sad damaged pout, I now resembled a ward of the state, some work-farm inmate whom the guards had taken out back and unofficially convinced to give them no more trouble. But my hair was still definitely wrong. Since I had washed out the pack-rats’ nest, it had resumed its usual goddamn fluffy curls, which jarred with the rest of the Society’s Victim look I was going for. I had a small set of scissors in my Swiss Army knife, but before I left the store I also bought a metal camping mirror and a Hair Whiz (“As advertised on TV”) with which they claimed you could create “The Latest Teenage Razor Cuts.” I didn’t want that, but the picture on the box of the sorry-looking bastard they’d roped into modeling it reflected the attitude I was going for exactly. I walked out of the store wearing everything I had just bought and carrying my old clothes in a bag.

  I got on my absurd bicycle, which
was now completely unsuitable for the complicated brooding man I had become, and which I would have to throw away or sell. Perhaps with my first paycheck I could put a down-payment on a car, something either stodgy and practical, or dark and menacing, anything but joyful or fun. I could work on the engine in MacAkern’s yard, drop the block and rework the sparkplugs or manifold or whatever the hell you reworked on a car. The point is, I’d renovate it myself. Or “repair” or whatever it was called by people who did that sort of thing. It occurred to me that I didn’t know anything about cars: another of my failures. Rattray probably regularly changed entire engines, the prick. I might also have to take some lessons in martial arts as it might come to combat between me and him, and if it did, I must remember that he was bigger, so the best strategy might be to clip him from behind when he wasn’t looking. All’s fair in love and war, a phrase which wasn’t actually in the Canadian Bill of Rights, but should be. Grim thoughts of violent revenge powered my pedals all the way back. At the vegetable stand I paid what I owed from before, so I wouldn’t be beholden to anybody.

  Back at the beach, the sea was grey and brooding, the sky threatening rain, and I didn’t give a shit where the tide was. I set up my mirror on a piece of driftwood and I snipped at my hair randomly till I had reduced it to a manageable mass, but the scissors that came with the Swiss Army knife could remove only one small lock of hair at a time, and the result was uneven. I couldn’t see the back of my head with only the one mirror, so I just took wild grabs at what felt like the longer locks back there until I nicked myself and stopped. I took the Hair Whiz out of the box and without reading the instructions, tried to even out what I had done so far, and the first swipe cut a bald spot on the side of my head which made me look like a brain-surgery patient prepped by drunken orderlies. Also, the Hair Whiz hurt like a bastard. Good. I deserved it.