Beach Reading

by Lorne Elliott

  A cheap Korean television was set up on the counter with the volume down, and two radios were tuned low to different stations. The phone from the parlour had been dragged through and placed on a milk stool by the wall and five different newspapers lay strewn across the tabletop, all three Island publications as well as The Chronicle Herald and The Globe and Mail. Next to them Robbie sat drawing on the stencils for a mimeograph machine and beside her, Melissa was sitting straight-backed and typing furiously, all ten fingers attacking the keys like sanderlings at the surf. A sheet of white plywood had been set up in the far corner and Bailey was writing on it with a lump of laundry blueing “Speaking Points”. The room was bounding with activity like the choppy waves at the mouth of the harbour. In direct contrast to my solitary poetic aloofness, here everybody was engaged with each other.

  “Make a note, Aiden,” Bailey was saying. “Buy real chalk. Also, a longer cord for the telephone. And typewriter ribbon. Then we should hide the van and rent a car. Wallace, you keep driving your pick-up truck. It makes you look like a Man of the People… ”

  “How the hell do you tie one of these things?” said Wallace, turning around from the mirror. The knot on his tie was a double granny, pulled tight enough that the sides of his neck bulged over it. He saw me in the doorway. “Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are!” he greeted me.

  “Quarter in the swear jar,” said Robbie.

  “It’s his name!” said Wallace.

  “No it’s not,” said Robbie. “Twenty-five cents.” She was efficient and formidable.

  Wallace took out a quarter from his pocket and put it in the jar. “Well it’s what I call him,” he protested.

  “You’re lousy with names,” said Robbie.

  “What’s wrong with ‘Hey, You’?”

  “Yeah. That’s much more personal.”

  “Well, I don’t know. How do those greeter and backslapper types do it, anyway?”

  “They take the time to be actually interested in the other person.”

  “That’s out of the question then,” said Wallace, then turned to look around the room. “Is somebody gonna help me with this, or what?”

  I was getting sucked into the energy of the room like flotsam into a rip-tide, but I walked over reluctantly, hoping my brooding poetic mood would at least be noticed, even as I felt it slip away. Wallace was clutching the miserable knot like a victim of a lynching. “Shit,” he said.

  “Quarter in the swear jar,” said Bailey.

  “Not again. Fuck!”

  “Fifty cents,” said Melissa.

  “Do we have to have a swearing jar?” he pleaded.

  “It works,” said Bailey. “Now. Fifty cents.”

  “I’m broke.”

  “Write an IOU then,” said Bailey. “Go through the motions. And don’t think we won’t collect. I don’t want your potty mouth giving some old lady in Barrisway a heart attack.”

  Wallace turned to me. “Can you help?” he said. I took the tie off him and tied a neat Windsor knot around my own neck, slipped it off and handed it back.

  “Good man, Christian,” said Bailey. “Now, sit down here and take a dictation.”

  I thought I owed it to the rapidly fading memory of the persona I had fashioned for myself that morning to state my own intentions for coming here.

  “I want to know how to write a poem,” I said.

  “You’ve come to the right person,” said Bailey.

  “Who? You?” said Melissa, still typing. “You can’t write poetry worth sh…” then she caught herself and stopped typing. Everybody looked at her. “…sh… Sheilah Cudmore, NDP Candidate for Barrisway riding.”

  “Good one,” said Robbie. They high-fived and bent back to work.

  “Don’t listen to her,” said Bailey. “I can tell you how to write poetry in one simple lesson. Here’s a pen. Sit down.”

  Surprised at the speed things were happening I said, “OK.”

  “To the Editor of The Guardian,” said Bailey.

  “What?”

  “Write, ‘To the Editor of The Guardian. Dear Sir.’ You getting this?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Write, ‘Let me add my voice to the growing number of people who seem to be responding positively to Wallace MacAkern’s straightforward plan to give money back to the taxpayers. Not only is it an eminently workable scheme and an effective protest of a failed system, it also shows great courage and fortitude on the part of Mr. MacAkern. Prince Edward Island needs more like him.

  Yours Truly: A Citizen for Wallace MacAkern.’”

  I did as he said, but when I finished I protested, “I wanted to know how to write a poem.”

  “Just warming up. Now, Melissa? That letter is for Monday’s Guardian. For Tuesday, Christian, you can type this one up on the other typewriter.”

  “Why?”

  “To make it seem like somebody else is writing.”

  “But this isn’t poetry…”

  “Poetic fiction…of a sort…Well, OK, pure lies. But before you start writing poetry you should always prime the pump with a bit of prose. Now, ‘Dear etc etc… Date it tomorrow. Melissa, you can fill that in after Christian’s finished?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good girl. Now, take this down, Christian. ‘Who’s Wallace MacAkern think? He should be shot. Say the word and I’ll shoot him, that’s for sure and no questions asked. They shoulda done it with Hitler and they shoulda do it with him.’”

  “Hey!” said Wallace.

  “Don’t worry. Just setting up a lunatic tone to destroy its credibility. ‘If anybody falls for this they’re idiots. What are Islanders anyway? Brain-dead?’ Sign that ‘Anonymous’ and be sure to spell it wrong. And Melissa, I want that out for Tuesday. Now, take one more dictation, Christian.”

  I was starting to get interested.

  “‘It has come to my attention that the last letter in the growing Wallace MacAkern story is a set-up. If you check the stationary, you will see that it was sent from Robert Logan Head’s campaign office, a typical low trick from the Right Horrible MP and Conservative candidate, and is a good example of why we need more citizens to act with the courage of Mr. MacAkern and declare themselves as less corruptible Independent candidates.’”

  I finished typing. “What’s this got to do with poetry?” I said.

  “Nothing.

  “But you said…”

  “I know what I said.”

  “You lied.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “You led me to believe…”

  “Welcome to politics,” said Bailey, and everybody else in the room nodded and snorted. It was like a slap in the face, but, at the same time, it felt bracing.

  “I’m starting to see how Smooth Lennie did it,” said Wallace.

  “Don’t fool yourself,” said Bailey. “It’s how they all do it. How does Ward Morris put it? ‘Lie, deny, and never say die.’”

  “I’ll say this,” said Wallace. “That book may be shameless, but it does make you understand that type of character,”

  “What type of character?”

  “The politician.”

  “Like you, Wallace, you mean?”

  “I have the perfect answer to that accusation,” said Wallace.

  “What?”

  “I’m different..”

  “That is a circumlocutious tautology.”

  “And this is my middle finger.”

  Brucie came into the kitchen. “Rattray’s out of the hospital,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “It was nothing. Didn’t have to g-go anyway, the wimp. And he was brought there by a g-girl!”

  “Who?” I said.

  “That g-g-girl, what’s her name?”

  “Claire” I said. It physically hurt to say it. She didn’t
offer to bring me to the hospital when she saw me all bruised and battered. What was I? Nothing? Oh God. I am nothing…

  “Focus, people!” said Bailey. “Now, sign that lunatic moron letter. Who? Anybody? Who’s the most hated prick…”

  “Twenty-five cents!” said Wallace.

  “You didn’t let me finish…The most hated, prick-ly, irritable, and detested person on the Island?”

  “Rattray,” I said. Everybody looked at me. I forgot completely about poetry.

  “Perfect!” said Bailey. “Now go ahead and sign it.”

  “Barry Rattray,” I said as I typed. “Assistant Chief Warden, Parks Canada. I can get a park envelope to put it in, if you want.”

  “Better not. They might be able to trace it back to you.”

  I saw the way it was done. Harness your anger. Work with a vengeance, literally. Come out on top by whatever means, justified or not. Just like Ward Morris said. I had a brief memory-flash of my dream of the night before. Somebody, a man or a woman, I couldn’t tell who, was looking at me from the shore, but I shoved the thought away. It was not even a thought: a memory of a dream. This was the real world and it’s a battlefield. I felt angry and pure, waiting for a chance to strike out.

  “You’re going to need a sparring partner to practice for the debate,” said Bailey to Wallace.

  “I’ll do it,” said Melissa.

  “Somebody not stoned all the time, who is less likely to giggle.”

  “How about Whoever-The-Whatever-I’m-Supposed-To-Call-Him-Now?” said Wallace, cocking a thumb at me.

  “My name is Christian.”

  “See? Perfect,” said Wallace.

  But I was sick of his fooling. “Fuck off.”

  Everybody stopped. Wallace kept looking at me, but not offended, guessing, perhaps, what was wrong.

  “What’s up?” said Robbie. Nobody mentioned the swearing jar.

  “Nothing,” I said, and by that I meant Everything, but nothing they could do anything about. Somehow I had cornered myself, and all there was to do now was fight.

  “Come on,” said Wallace. “What’s wrong with me running for office?”

  “Go on Christian,” said Robbie. “We give him shit all the time.”

  So I said, “OK, then. First of all, the only reason you’re getting into politics is to stop the park.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “Well, what’s wrong with the park? You got something against letting other people enjoy this place? You’re just as bad as them. You just want what you’ve got and you’re manipulating the whole goddamn system to have it your way. I mean, Christ, you’ve got rusting hulks of cars in your yard, the dune is moving into the back of your house, Robbie is sleeping under a leak, and Brucie is running wild. You can’t even take care of your own household, for God sakes, let alone a constituency. You’re like everybody else, just some loser trying to spread it around.”

  “Is that all?” said Wallace.

  “No,” Robbie chipped in. “You’re also ugly.”

  Melissa giggled.

  But Bailey ignored the awkwardness of the moment. “Well done, Christian, although you didn’t observe the no swearing rule. The opponent has three minutes to respond.”

  “Well,” said Wallace. “First of all, I would like to thank my honourable opponent for his frank assessment, as he sees it, of my unsuitability as a candidate for office, and I agree with him that sadly we all in life do have private failures, some, as he points out, in the maintenance of a household, and for which I must take full responsibility, even though his critique is rather condescending to Robbie and Brucie, implying as it does that they are somehow underprivileged. But my point is that yes, we all, in one way or another, have failed. Some with money, some with family. Some with women.” He looked at me and I felt a shaft of loathing enter my heart. He wouldn’t dare. “However, I must protest as to the nature of his attack. It would be unworthy of me if I were to launch a scathing personal accusation of his failure with What’s-Her-Name at the park office, Daphne…”

  “You… prick!”

  “The incumbent will refrain from comment. And twenty-five cents in the jar, Christian,” said Bailey.

  “But…”

  “No more freebies. You will have a chance to defend yourself with your first rebuttal.”

  Wallace was smiling with annoying feigned innocence. “What is so galling in my honourable opponent’s remarks,” he said, “is his anti-democratic slant. Even if it were true that I am, as he claims, some sort of incompetent hick, we cannot degenerate into mere name-calling. Otherwise I would be justified in calling him, for example, a drunken little face-bashed rich boy. Or refer to his would-be girlfriend, what’s-her-name, Cecilia?”

  “Claire…Don’t you bring her into this!”

  “Whoa!” said Bailey. “Stop both of you right there. Now, back in your corners. You are going to have to learn to deflect criticism, no matter how close it is to you. If you try to think of it as just a game it might give you some emotional distance.”

  Wallace regarded me with an unbearably smug look on his face. I wanted to smash it…

  But it’s best not to describe that whole debate, which was after all only a rehearsal for the main event. Enough to say that I needed it. White hot at first, like a son blaming a father for bringing him into the world and accusing him for everything wrong in it, I attacked Wallace with all the force of somebody railing against the global tragedy his life had become. Wallace easily countered with needling and mockery, and Bailey calmly and persistently reined me in, redirecting me away from what was driving my anger, and steering me back to the points I was trying to make, the arguments themselves, and not just my coded personal torment. Anger lost ground but reason regained it. And gradually by focussing my thoughts on these more exterior challenges, I found that, temporarily at least, I could distance myself from my own deeper pain and sidestep my humiliation and confusion. When I thought about what had happened it still made me wince, but at least I could now think of other things. After the tsunami which had engulfed me, the re-formed earth was starting to harden into something I could walk steadily on.

  Afterwards on the porch I felt cleansed and happy. The sun was down and I could hear the tide lapping on the shore. Everything was blue and dark and beautiful. I could see why Wallace didn’t want to leave here.

  “No hard feelings?” he said.

  “No hard feelings,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked into the darkness. “Girls!” he said. “They’ll drive you nuts.” Then he added, “I was married once.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yep. And I loved her.”

  “What happened?”

  “She didn’t love me. Broke my heart.”

  And that’s the last I ever heard about it.

  Bailey came out of the kitchen. “Sorry, Christian,” he said. “We gotta get through this election first, then we’ll do that poetry thing, I promise.”

  “Politics is more fun,” I said. More engaging, I should have said. More obsessive.

  “Watch it,” said Bailey. “You gotta be able to switch it off.” He exhaled mightily. “Now, where’s that scotch?” He reached for the bottle and said with a sigh to nobody in particular, “It’s never the booze or the pot or the swearing that’s dangerous. It’s the power.”

  8

  During the next week, time seemed to speed up. I went to work and hid out in my office avoiding Claire, not that she noticed. Only part of me wanted her not to notice, but the other part, because I knew she was not noticing, galled me.

  She was indifferent. I tried to fool myself that since being indifferent to her was what she seemed to have found attractive in Rattray, I was on the right track, and I even practiced in my mind my lack of emotion towards her, imagining the scen
e where she came into my office to see me. “Could you check these reports, Christian?” she might ask, and I would look up from my work, accommodating and efficient but mildly bored. “Sure,” I’d say. And that was only one of the hundreds of romantic dialogues I had devised to woo her back with my lack of caring.

  It was hopeless. I walked past her open door with my best purposeful stride, as though focussing on the task I was pretending to have to do, hoping to make an impression with how unimpressed I was with her, but she didn’t even look up. I hung a sign on my door which said, “Do Not Disturb.” She didn’t.

  So, I tried to lose myself in my work. I closed my door and sat behind my desk from nine to five reading reference volumes and working up my notes. Then, from five-thirty to eight, I went back to sit on the beach with my binoculars, ferociously identifying birds. “Come on,” I admonished all of nature. “Is that the best you can do? A Black-Backed Gull? That’s three this week for God’s sakes. Oh, what? A Gannet. Could you make it any easier?…You gotta do better than that…”

  The morning of the third day I wrote up an argument on a sheet of paper and went into Fergie’s office to gave it to him.

  “What’s this?”

  “A new schedule I’ve worked out.”

  “Oh yeah? Why?”

  “For after work. I’ve been doing a bird count and making some tidal readings.”

  “And you’re doing this on your own time?”

  “Yes.”

  “We got ourselves a keener,” said Fergie to whomever he imagined he was talking to. Then to me he said, “No need to go overboard, though. Why don’t you just do the field-work during office hours?”

  “I thought I had to hang around here.”

  “I don’t see why.” It was the best news I’d had for a while. “Look, Christian, I don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing here…Frankly, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing here, if it comes to that…” He drifted off for a while as his lips kept moving. “…Well, they also serve who only stand and wait,” he said out loud, “Boy, you can tell it was a bureaucrat who wrote that one, that’s for sure…” Then he seemed to recognize me again and snapped back. “Like I was saying…What was I saying?”