by Camilla Gibb
Praise for
THE PETTY DETAILS
OF SO-AND-SO’S LIFE
“Tragedy and comedy meet in a family saga that speaks to the misfit in us all. Camilla Gibb matches the monstrous with the poignant, enlivening an upside-down world with smarts and verve.”
—Catherine Bush, author of Minus Time and Rules of Engagement
“Camilla Gibb’s second novel plunges us into the midst of a brokenhearted family, revealing its strange scars to us in a story that is both harrowing and quite funny. No sophomore curse this, Petty Details makes more than good on the promise of Gibb’s first novel. This is a humane and moving work.”
—Michael Redhill, author of Martin Sloane and Fidelity
“The power of Gibb’s fiction … is such that one assumes nothing. Gibb is too intelligent an author to take the easy path.”
—The National Post
“Gibb tells the tale of Emma and Blue, a pair of damaged siblings struggling valiantly to rise above their twisted family background … It’s not a pretty picture. But thanks to Gibb’s darkly comic pen, it’s a fascinating one.… tart, biting prose … Petty Details does not disappoint. Catchy title, gripping read.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“Gibb has crafted another absorbing case study of a family in disrepair.… Gibb has an impressive gift for tart description.… Her depictions are seductive: each is so sordid you can’t help but be fascinated.… bursting with ideas and insight.”
—Vancouver Sun
“The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life burrows beneath the bruised and grotesqueries of family life in a style that is frank, funny and often haunting.”
—Elle Canada
“Gibb’s literary masterpiece inspires us to reflect on our own lives.”
—Hamilton Spectator
“Wry humour and Gibb’s simple, fluid style ensure that the book is effortlessly readable.”
—Time Out (London)
“The strength [of Gibb’s novel] comes from her psychological observations, especially her explorations of the sibling bond, which takes us into thoughtful, less-travelled terrain.”
—Eye Weekly
“Told with compassion and vigour.”
—The Daily Mail (UK)
“Sharp, vivid vignettes … Gibb uses words like knives … Expect success for this accomplished second outing.”
—NOW
“Gibb is a naturally sparky, engaging voice.”
—The Observer
“Gibb’s fiction is fresh and funny.”
—Maclean’s
“An excellent writer … Petty Details may even give you empathy for the person you just crossed the street to avoid.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“It’s cool and quirky. Luminous, in fact.”
—Elle UK
Also by Camilla Gibb
Mouthing the Words
Sweetness in the Belly
Copyright © Camilla Gibb 2002
Anchor Canada paperback edition 2003
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Gibb, Camilla, 1968–
The petty details of So-and-so’s life / Camilla Gibb.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37492-9
I. Title.
PS8563.I2437P48 2003 C813′.54 C2003-900633-6
PR9199.4.G53P48 2003
Parts of earlier drafts of this novel first appeared as the short stories “On All Fours in Brooklyn,” in Carnal Nation: Brave New Sex Fictions, and “ID Me,” in Canadian Forum.
Quotes from Rimbaud are taken from Arthur Rimbaud: Seasons in Hell, translated by Wallace Fowlie, Phoenix Books (University of Chicago Press), 1966.
The author wishes to thank the Toronto Arts Council for support.
Published in Canada by
Anchor Canada, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited
Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
The Extinction of the Question Mark
The Language of Home
Kiss
Seasons in Hell
Greetings
Boys and Girls
Bald
Caterpillar Princess
Beach
Anybody?
Bitter Trail
Bloated Boy
Family Portrait, Circa 1974
Salt Water
Trespassing
West
The Limits of Smell
Learning Japanese
Imagine
Somebody Else
Digging
The Invisible Sister
The Snake and the Butterfly
Gold
Strictly Leather
Big Bang Theory
Deadlock
Dirty Hands
Horizon in Her Eyes
Wings
Slipping
ID Me
Capital D
Wired
Far and Wise
Red Button
The Art of Being Alarming
Solder
Roadkill
Truth and Lies
Somebody’s Father
She Flies
Christmas
Deliverance
Grandpa Mel
Implication
Haunted
Dripping Faucet
Postcard from Hell
Acknowledgements
About the Author
“I will make gashes on my entire body and tattoo it.
I want to be as hideous as a Mongol.
You will see, I will howl in the streets.”
—Arthur Rimbaud, Seasons in Hell
The Extinction of the Question Mark
A photograph. A single photograph. White borders blackened with the grease of family fingers groping at the only remaining evidence of themselves: a picture of a man kneeling on all fours in the dirt. He is drunk, he is thin, he is tired. He is Oliver Taylor, a man gazing at a camera like a bewildered animal caught in headlights, looking feral and fetal and altogether strange. It’s the middle of winter, but he seems to have adapted to the bitter cold. A white shirt hangs off his otherwise naked frame like a vestigial remnant of some earlier evolutionary stage; a time when business meant business and men wore suits.
They know he came from elsewhere—emerged, devolved, transmuted from some earlier incarnation of himself—because they remember when he lived in a house with a wife, two children, and a cat, and ate roast beef on Sundays and rice pudding for dessert. His wife was called Elaine, the cat called Frosted Flake, and they were those children—Emma and Llewellyn—Em and Blue for short.
They liked their roast beef bloody and dripping, and Elaine made the rice pudding with rich, flesh-toned condensed milk because that’s what Oliver’s mother had done during the war. Which war, Elaine never told them, even though they always asked. “The war during which your granny”—that mysterious entity who lived on the other side of the ocean—“used condensed milk,” she’d answer obtusely.
Emma and Blue grew
up feeling as muddled about the history of the world as they did about their own ancestry. Having learned the futility of asking questions at such a young age, it’s a wonder the question mark didn’t become extinct. They fabricated answers to unasked questions in the rank and damp of the basement where they played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” They shared secrets and understanding as they crouched by the furnace with a face like a monster in the bowels of their house in Niagara Falls.
It was there that nine-year-old Blue pulled up his sleeve to show Emma the initials he’d carved into his arm with a homemade tattoo gun made from the broken needles of Elaine’s old Singer. Emma had turned away when he’d started to pull the needles downward through his skin the day before. She’d wanted to cry out but she didn’t dare because they were already in trouble. They often were. It was the middle of a Tuesday afternoon and they were hiding in a place infinitely superior to that space between a Formica-topped desk and a doll’s chair one was supposed to occupy in grades three and four.
Blue preferred wearing graffiti to scribbling it on bathroom walls. Emma preferred darkness to daylight. They both preferred being in the basement to most places above-ground, but it was there, on that day, that Emma stared at Blue’s baby-boy biceps and realized for the first time that she and her brother didn’t wear the same skin.
She’d thought they were identical. She’d thought they were both gap-toothed and lonely and saw all the same things, even though her eyes were grey and his green. She had no idea that while she was staring at the horizon like it was icing on a cake at the edge of the world, Blue was squinting in order to avoid staring directly at all that he saw.
But they had always been different. Emma was a round little pudgeball with the type of cheeks peculiar mothers fantasized about biting. She did somersaults on sticky sidewalks, pale limbs over paler skin; she was a tangled, translucent mass, a “Holy Christ, here she comes.” Her brother, on the other hand, was long and lean and getting longer every day, emerging from baby fat into boy-body with alarming speed. He had muscles as tough as straw, and was unconsciously troubled by his limitless potential for physical growth. He was cautious, doubly so, enough for both of them, his posture hunched and timid, his movements measured and deliberate against the clumsy backdrop of his sister tumbling head, belly, then knees over heels.
“It’s my first tattoo,” he declared proudly, speaking as if he’d just adopted the first strange animal in a bestiary he was planning on housing. Because theirs was a world without questions, Emma didn’t ask the obvious. She simply nodded and put her hand to his forehead to see if he had a temperature. She spent that night, and many nights that followed though, wondering if her little brother was afraid of forgetting his name. She wished she could forget hers. She was, after all, named after her mother’s childhood pet—not a movie star or a war hero or a favourite aunt, but a bouvier—a four-legged furry thing with a tail like a sawed-off carrot.
In secret defiance Emma had actually changed her name. She was Tabatha—daughter of the good witch Samantha—a pretty little blonde girl who lived in a happy suburban home where mischievous witches and warlocks turned up unannounced for tea and inadvertently distressed her poor mortal father with trickery designed to embarrass him in front of curtain-twitching neighbours.
She sensed Blue’s motivation to identify himself was different. Perhaps he was afraid of getting lost in the street. She pictured some kind stranger, a Jimmy Stewart look-alike in a suit and a white hat, approaching her brother and saying in a voice out of a black-and-white movie: “Why, you look lost, son. What’s your name, boy?” Blue would pull up his sleeve to consult his bicep then and the Jimmy Stewart look-alike would exclaim, “What the dickens?”
If it were the fear of being lost and not found that compelled him to etch a deep, dyslexic “LT” into his arm, she would have suggested a different set of initials. Ones that would lead you back to a house with a swimming pool, or a family with twelve kids, or a mother who would buy you skates and take you to hockey practice. Initials you might want to have monogrammed on a set of towels that belong in a house with a finished basement on some street with a name like Thackley Terrace.
Instead, there they were with Elaine and Oliver, all crammed into a tiny three-bedroom house in Niagara Falls, across the street from a restaurant offering french fries and chow mein available twenty-four hours, even though a big CLOSED sign hung across the door at night because of lack of business. The house, a decrepit building that they’d bought for next to nothing, stood on the tawdry main street, sandwiched between a hardware store and a used-clothing store. In its previous incarnation, their house had been a pet food store, evidenced by the basement full of dog food that was part of the bargain. Before that, as Elaine and Oliver deduced on the basis of what lay behind the cheap drywall, it must have been a porn shop. The building was apparently insulated with mouldy copies of Penthouse.
Oliver painted the storeroom window over with red paint, until Elaine pointed out the obvious—it looked like they were advertising themselves as a whorehouse when they turned the living room light on at night. He remedied this by covering the red paint over with thick lashings of industrial grey, creating the feeling that the world outside was perpetually overcast. Oliver liked it that way because it reminded him of his childhood spent in a grungy two-up two-down with windows clouded over with bacon grease on one of Glasgow’s dodgiest streets—where that mysterious entity called Granny still lived.
In the porn-pet-shop-cum-house, there were three tiny bedrooms lined up in a row off a narrow corridor, at the end of which was a damp brown bathroom. The upstairs had obviously been a boarding house because each of the bedrooms smelled like dead bodies and old cheese and there was a fridge in one of them and a cooking element in the closet of another. But Emma and Blue each had their own room for the first time in their lives and this was better than anything that had ever happened before. Even better still, Elaine allowed each of them to choose a colour for their bedroom walls. Blue, of course, chose his namesake, and Emma asked for the colour of the sun, wherein a long debate ensued between Elaine and Oliver about just what colour that was. In the end, Oliver painted Emma’s bedroom a colour that turned out to be more custard than sunshine. Emma helped her father, pointing out all the spots he’d missed and getting underfoot and nattering on inanely while he strained his neck to paint the ceiling.
“You’re getting in the way,” he finally said, irritated.
She opened the door of the closet then and sat on the floor, out of Oliver’s way, but still in full view of the change of seasons. When she leaned back against the flimsy, fake-wood panelling at the back of the closet, though, she discovered a hole the size of a saucepan lid. Curious, she reached inside and wrapped her fingers around a hard, mysterious object. She tugged and pulled and finally yanked a grey bone longer than her leg out from the noisy clatter behind the panelling.
“Daddy! Look! A dinosaur bone!” she shrieked.
“What on earth have you got there?” he asked, puzzled.
“I told you—a dinosaur bone!”
“Fancy that,” mused Oliver, putting down his paintbrush. He crawled inside the closet with her and said, “I wonder if the rest of its bones are here.” He reached down into the hole and said, “Yup. There’s definitely something here, all right,” and told her to wait while he went to the basement to get a crowbar.
He ripped the panelling down and there, amidst dust, used condoms, and fossilized chocolate, were several large teeth. “Dinosaur teeth!” Emma squealed in delight, picking them up in her hands.
Oliver chuckled and said, “Doubtful, but interesting nonetheless.” Later that day he drilled a needle-sized hole through one of the molars and strung it on a piece of string so that Emma could wear it around her neck. She wore it proudly, even though a boy at school called her a cave woman, in the hope that if she rubbed it the right way, she would be teleported into a secret world where animals larger than trucks ate cl
ouds for breakfast. She and her dad could travel back in time and discover lost cities and people who spoke languages before English was ever invented. Worlds far more interesting than Niagara Falls.
They had moved to Niagara Falls in 1974 because Oliver had lost his job as an architect in Montreal the year before. Something about him losing sight of the third dimension. He’d sneezed so hard on his way to work one morning that the world in front of him had suddenly collapsed. It was flatter than anyone before Copernicus had ever even imagined: far too flat to even consider continuing on his way to the office.
“Oliver? Don’t you think it’s a little arrogant to think you have the power to change the shape of the earth?” Elaine had to ask when he showed up at home only an hour after he’d left. He just shrugged and went to bed for the next six weeks.
Perhaps that was the beginning of the end, it’s always been hard for Elaine to say, because ends by definition shouldn’t have beginnings. Something definitely changed from that day on, though. She’d long ceased imagining him as a lover, but an architect missing a third dimension was really pushing the limits of shared reality.
What Oliver didn’t confide was that in place of the third, he’d discovered an altogether different dimension. Fair enough, he’d never be able to design buildings according to other people’s conceptions of space any more, but his new sight brought him the remarkable ability to see things lurking in places where other people didn’t see them. A gift. Superior insight, he congratulated himself with a smug grin.
“Elaine, my real talents were wasted there,” he declared when he woke up after his six-week nap.
“Really,” she droned sarcastically. “And how might they be more meaningfully employed?”
“As an inventor,” he said.
“You’re not serious.”
“Damn right, I am.”
“And what, exactly, are you planning on inventing?”
“Don’t worry, Elaine. You always worry. There’s divinity in these hands,” he said, raising his palms in front of her face. “I’ll let them guide me.”
