Double Talk

by Patrick Warner

  “Tell me a story about growing up in Ireland,” Violet asked, as we began our walk into the wilderness. So I told her about six-foot-three Alice, from the old people’s home, who spent all her days walking back and forth to Bridgetown. Tall as Big Bird in her brilliant white sneakers, she wore a knitted hat and always carried under her arm an Aer Lingus sports bag. If the traffic prevented her from crossing the road to greet me, she would shout out over the noise of passing cars. Alice asked questions, and I answered. She then repeated my answers. In the months leading up to my departure from Bridgetown, we improvised on a familiar script:

  “Tell me now where you’re going again?”

  “To Newfoundland.”

  “To NewFOUNDland.”

  Or she gave me yesterday’s answers as questions, which I answered again, and then she repeated my answers, completing the loop.

  “And will you go to university there?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s right. And you’ll be studying marine biology there?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s right. And will you be staying with your Uncle Wallace?”

  “I will be.”

  “You will be. Isn’t he good to take you, your Uncle Wallace?”

  “He is.”

  “He is. And will you not be lonely?”

  “I won’t be.”

  “You won’t be. And will you come back again?”

  “I’ll come back to visit.’

  “You’ll come back for a visit.”

  “I will.”

  “Musha, God bless you.” Her talk was always a patting down, an attempt to make sure that everything was in its place.

  When I had finished I asked Violet to tell me a story about her life in Victoria, but she didn’t want to — she never did — telling me that my stories were so much more interesting. Flattered, I told Violet about lame Mickey Joe in his newsagent’s shop that was as murky as the inside of an old tin teapot. Enthroned on a stool behind the counter, wings of hair sticking out, a spot of orange-yellow egg yolk dotting his shirt-front, Mickey Joe gestured and gabbed. An ambidextrous smoker, his fingers and fingernails were mahoganied and ebonized from cupping and tapping sixty Benson & Hedges a day. His voice was a wheeze that expanded to a bray when he called out over the shop full of heads on Sunday morning: “Make way! Make way for young Baby Power!” I was never sure if he was being cruel or just teasing me. When the shop was empty, he was always nice. If anything, he seemed desperate to talk. Interested in everything, especially history and geography, he said he had been all over the world, and sometimes he would pull out atlases as if to prove his point, circling Moscow or Budapest or Lichtenstein with the yellow horn of his fingernail. I listened politely. I knew that Mickey Joe had lived all his life with his sister and that he had worked shunting rail cars for C.I.E. until most of his toes were clipped off by a passing express train. His walk since that day was part penguin’s rocking gait, part top-heavy metronome in motion, part doo-wop back-up singer. Hurrying to mass on a Sunday morning, he was a sight to see, under the lime trees’ shade and dapple. I thought of him whenever I smelled creosote or whenever I felt the bite of steel toe-caps.

  We walked and I talked, interrupted only once when a thin red fox, its tongue lolling, appeared on the road ahead of us. Purpose threading it from snout to furze-tail tip, it gave us one sidelong glance as it crossed the asphalt and disappeared back into the brush. It moved so quickly that we barely had time to register the thrill of seeing it before we were distracted by the hoarse barks of the dogs, a pack of beagles, which a minute later burst through the dusty roadside alders to snuffle the blacktop, turn pirouettes around a hub of scent. Flop-eared and harried as suburbanites in their white sweats, white shirts, white shoes and socks, with their black and tan sports jackets loosely slung over shoulders — their round brown eyes saw us, looked through us. We stamped our feet, shouted, stooped and pretended to pick up stones, but there was no distracting them. They spun clockwise across the road in a pack and burst a way through the spruce wall. We listened fearfully, half expecting to hear their excited yelps as they closed in, half expecting to hear the fox squeal as it was rendered limb from limb. But we heard no such thing.

  We walked on, still listening, until Violet broke the silence, shouting out, “Over there! Look.” I looked to where she pointed, towards the crest of the hill, and what seemed to be the triangular tip of a wooden structure. I broke into a half run, the straps of my knapsack cutting into my shoulders with renewed vigour.

  We walked hand-in-hand downhill through a meadow heavy with summer flowers: daisies, yarrow, fireweed and loosestrife. My shoulders were raw. My lower back was aching. I had a headache. I was looking forward to dropping my stuff. But there was still one more obstacle to surmount. The obvious campsite was on the other side of the river, and there was no easy way to get across. We would have to get wet. No problem, I thought. And yet, as we stood surveying the river’s ripple and run, I began to feel a growing tension. I heard an unspoken request in Violet’s hesitance to commit to a plan of action. As well, she kept glancing coyly at me. It suddenly occurred to me she was expecting me to carry her across. Thundering Jesus! The mild resentment I had been biting back on all day — about having to carry the bulk of our gear — suddenly flared.

  I looked away, imagining what would happen if I turned the tables and asked her to carry me across. How often had she and Nancy professed women’s superiority, not only in terms of mental capacity, but also in body strength and stamina when it was measured pound for pound against a man’s? I imagined the look of shock on her face turning to anger. I imagined her lips tightening to a hen’s hole, as they always did when she was peeved. Once challenged, I knew she would not back down; how to carry out the task would become the only question. I would insist on riding on her back, but she would insist on cradling me, Pietà-like, in her arms as she stumbled across, her face getting purpler with each step. I imagined looking down and watching the current break into white foam against her shins. I imagined I could feel the force of it through her body, a thrum distinct from her laboured breathing, her racing pulse. I would maybe lighten the situation by making a joke: “You are my caddy,” I would say, as we stumbled ashore on the opposite bank. “I have just lifted a perfect seven iron to within inches of the hole.” Oh, but she wouldn’t be amused.

  “Earth to Brian, come in, Brian.”

  I snapped out of my reverie.

  “Man, you had the weirdest look on your face.”

  “Sorry, I’m just tired, still a bit hung-over from last night, maybe. Want me to give you a piggy-back across?”

  “Well, aren’t you the gentleman. But that’s okay. We can easily ford it here.” And with that she sat down on her backpack and began removing her running shoes and socks. “Besides, that cool water is going to feel great.”

  We had arrived. We lay on our stomachs on the green and looked across to where the water broke in sparkles over the shallows. The mill was nowhere to be seen — a fact those German hikers failed to mention — though a crumbling foundation near where the river deepened suggested the place where it might have once stood. After all our exertions, we felt slightly at a loss to be sitting still. If we were honest, we would have confessed unease about finding ourselves alone in the middle of nowhere, without distraction, with nothing to do but be together. We watched a jade green dragonfly hover and then alight on the tip of a single stalk that poked up from the water. A second green dragonfly arrived, circled around and then alighted in the same manner, about an inch lower down.

  “Look,” Violet said, “it’s like a submerged musical note.”

  “Or an old-fashioned key sticking up,” I said, not wanting to be outdone.

  Something went ping against my wrist — a stout. I watched it turn a little to the left then back to the right then left again, as if it were trying to crack a safe. Its eyes were like microphones, their multiple lenses giving off an iridesc
ent sheen.

  “Deer fly, on your arm.” She took a swipe, but the fly was too fast, zooming off across the river before her hand even made contact.

  “Did it bite you?”

  “No. Maybe.”

  “Want me to kiss it better?”

  “Yes.”

  When she leaned over to kiss my wrist, I noticed an elephantine mosquito prospecting on the back of her neck. It cast a sundial shadow.

  “A mossie,” I said, clamping my hand over it. “I’ll get the Skin So Soft.” Rooting in her rucksack, I thought about the afternoon we had used a whole bottle, rubbing it all over each other, and then rubbing our naked bodies together on the crumb-speckled mattress. I dug out the bottle and we slathered our arms, our necks and our faces, and then checked each other out for any exposed skin we had missed. Black flies were beginning to hover. When we had finished, our hands looked greasy grimy, our fingernails showing the dirt we had collected on our journey. These were midwives’ hands, lit by lamplight in a realist depiction of pioneer life.

  “We had better get to work,” Violet said. I volunteered to start a fire and wandered to the back of the green in search of kindling. Low, gnarled spruce formed an almost impenetrable mesh. I tried forcing my way in face first and then back first, but it was no good. I managed to gather only a handful of small sticks.

  “Over there,” shouted Violet, gesturing toward a pile of driftwood on the west side of the clearing, a deposit made by spring runoff. How had I missed it? There was enough wood in that pile for a week of fires. It was dry and hard, shiny and grey, the kind of assemblage a nature photographer would capture on silver nitrate film.

  “Ugh,” I grunted, returning with a mighty load. She nodded to the spot where I should throw it. I returned with a second load, then dragged back a birch log which I thought we could use for a bench.

  While I gathered fuel, Violet popped the two-man tent. “This is a Blacks tent,” she said, a note of awe in her voice. “Blacks make the world’s best tents. Where did you get it?”

  “I found it in the basement of the house. I noticed it when I was poking around the first week we moved in. It must belong to Peter.” I somehow equated Blacks with the All Blacks. She told me that she and her dad and her brothers often went camping, and that they had used the same Blacks tent year in and year out. I felt a small surge of warmth, recognizing the concession she was making in speaking about her mysterious childhood. I suddenly had a mental picture of her father, in court robes, fording a wild river with five-year-old Violet clinging like a monkey to his back.

  “They don’t make them like this anymore,” she said.

  They certainly don’t — I wanted to say — make them this heavy. But I held back because I had learned that Violet was sensitive to criticism. She was not used to anyone finding fault with her.

  She unrolled the mint green canvas tent and set about assembling it. She worked efficiently, almost too quickly, as if someone stood in the background with a stopwatch. Was everything a competition to her? She slipped the silver poles up inside the whistling canvas, pegged down a string, then went to the other end and pulled. The tent stood up. She pegged it all the way around and then piled the corner pegs with rocks. She shook out the length of plastic we intended to use in place of the missing fly sheet. She then placed something that looked like a sewing spool on each of the tent pole spikes, so when she pulled the plastic over top it would not touch the tent canvas. I was impressed. She pulled and tugged until the sheet of plastic stretched taut, then weighed it down with driftwood and a few rocks. She thwacked it with the back of her hand. It made a low flat thump like a bodhran.

  I suddenly felt inadequate. “What can I do?” I volunteered. “Do you want me to walk back out to the road and see if I can find a store and get some beer?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s fine. You’ve done enough. And besides, we brought enough rum, don’t you think?”

  I lay back on the grass and looked up at the clouds. Later, I knew, we would make love. I tried not to watch as she walked around the clearing. Every now and again there was a thump as she found a rock and threw it toward the centre of the green. Sometimes a thump was followed by a gentle clack where one rock clipped against another.

  “You’ve thrown a googly.”

  She said nothing, but looked up somewhat theatrically from under her eyelashes. I stood up and began to arrange the rocks into a fire circle.

  “Not there,” she said, “on the other side of the tent, downwind.”

  “Right,” I said, gathering up the rocks and moving them to the east side of the clearing where I built a perfectly round and symmetrical hearth: grey rock, white rock, grey rock. There were no other hearths, recent or old, in that perfect place. And not one of the rocks we found was fire-cracked or blackened. It struck me as unusual that such an ideal camping spot had never been used, but I decided not to say anything.

  While I worked on the fire pit, Violet unpacked her stuff. Socks and sweaters, an extra pair of shoes, rain gear, bacon, the frozen fish, a box of All Bran, but also cans of beans, a can of rice pudding, a pot, a cast iron skillet and a mason jar filled with raw eggs. Clearly her load had been much greater than I’d thought. From out of the roll of her sleeping bag she pulled a paraffin log that she had cut into slices and wrapped in newspaper and plastic. “For the fire,” she said, throwing me a couple of pieces.

  “You’re a genius.”

  The fire pit constructed, I lined it with dry grass and old man’s beard. I built a tepee of kindling and slipped slivers of fire log inside it. I struck a match. Jade and aquamarine flames darted up, and a heavy grey smoke began to drift out from the pyre then pull back in again. Soon beans and eggs were burning in the pot, while bacon lay blackening in the pan.

  Later, contentedly sipping amber rum from our mugs, we sat hip to hip and watched the darkness begin its journey inward from the horizon. Night came more quickly than we had expected. Where the river was visible only a few minutes before, we could now locate it only by sound. We piled the fire high. Heat and flames funnelled cinders and white ash skyward. We cuddled close. I pulled a sleeping bag around our backs. We looked up into the night sky. Low cloud obscured the moon, but higher up the stars were visible. There were so many that in places they formed a kind of milky haze. “The Milky Way,” I slurred, as much from fatigue as from drunkenness. We finished off the Coke, and I began to sip straight from the rum bottle. The more I drank the more at home I felt. Warmth spread through my limbs, replacing soreness, making me oblivious to the hardness of the log. I embraced numbness in all its forms. Soon it became impossible to think of that place as being anything other than the most perfect place in the world. I imagined looking down on our camp from a thousand feet. There was our bright fire, a dancing circle, a tiny statement against the surrounding darkness. I felt a sense of purpose that I was sure was not just rum purpose. I turned to kiss Violet, thinking to myself, As prisoners mark out their days in fives on soft plaster walls, so in my black, foolscap planner I have marked out the number of times that we have had sex. But those days are over, I promised myself; there would be no more cataloguing of carnality. We would not have sex; we would make love. No more would she solely be the object of my pleasure.

  As though she had read my thoughts Violet suddenly pulled away from me and fell forward into a sprinter’s first starting position.

  “Shush,” she whispered, “there’s something there.”

  “I was just going to make a similar metaphysical observation.”

  “I’m serious. There’s something over there. I’m sure I saw something.” She moved backwards and pressed herself against me. “Listen!”

  I listened, but could hear only the sound of the river running hard on its pebble bed. The heat from the fire was starting to make my face feel toasted.

  “I’ll have a look,” I said, getting up and taking a few steps towards the river. “Maybe it’s a moose.”

  “Brian, honey, over there.
” I looked and at just about the same moment heard a heavily accented voice say something I could not pick out. Keppie, you bastard, I thought, but then realized that it couldn’t be him, unless he had followed us. A powerful flashlight cut through the pall of smoke above the fire and swept across us. The beam was too focussed to take in both of us at the one time, so whoever was holding it kept shifting the beam back and forth between us. When it fell on Violet, I could see that her face was white and streaked with soot. Her legs looked extraordinarily naked. Once the flashlight was off me for a few moments I could see three people on the opposite bank, one of whom was holding what I guessed was a shotgun in the crook of his arm. I was too drunk to be afraid. Oddly, I remembered what it was like to take part in a school play, the glare of the spotlight spilling over into the wings where I stood waiting my turn to go on. I decided to walk down to the river. The flashlight beam pushed against me. “Hello,” I shouted, as I neared the water. Again I heard the guttural voice, only now it was even more muted. Where I was standing, the river ran so shallow over pebbles that it sounded like a bottle being kicked over gravel. Though I was closer to the men, no more than fifty feet from where they stood, it was even harder to hear them. “Hello. We’re just camping for the night,” I shouted.

  I could tell immediately from the way the torchlight flickered around me that they had heard. The hairs prickled on the back of my neck as I waited for one of them to answer. A man spoke, but again all I could hear was a series of harsh vowel sounds. The heavy-browed early humans of Quest for Fire came to mind. Maybe these were a lost group of Homo neanderthalensis out to steal our fire.

  “We didn’t know,” I heard Violet call out.

  We didn’t know what, I wondered, shielding my eyes from the glare of the torch. That we were on private property, on park land? She had stepped a little away from the fire, but was still visible in its orange glare. The man shouted again. This time I was able to pick out from his grunts the phrase “look, b’ys” followed by the word “missus” and then “Humphrey.” Violet recoiled, her face showing a look of utter disbelief. She suddenly looked cornered. She stooped as though she was going to turn and run into the tent, but instead she picked up the sleeping bag that was lying at her feet and wrapped it tightly around her. The three men began to make hooting noises. Then it sounded like one of them was singing. I started to feel afraid.