The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life

by Camilla Gibb

  “I forgot,” Oliver said. “You’re not too bright, are you?”

  “No, I guess not,” Blue shrugged. He recovered just enough to ask, “So, where are you living, Dad?”

  “One of the warehouses around here. Great building. Masses of space. I do odd jobs in return for rent—painting, carpentry, that sort of thing. Nice arrangement. Gives me plenty of time and space to work on my inventions.”

  “So you’re still doing that?”

  “Still doing that? It’s my mission, Blue. You know, my calling. Fact is, your mother could never appreciate that. No, siree, she wanted my inventions to fail. In fact, she deliberately set out to sabotage them. If I’d built a fence, she would have been there with a pair of wire cutters in her pocket.”

  “She just worries a lot,” Blue said.

  “Well, that worry made her old. Old and ugly and a bitch,” Oliver said. “Does she ever talk about me?”

  “Uh, not really.”

  “Hmm.”

  “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t think about you, Dad.”

  Oliver flinched then. “Funny word, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Dad.”

  When Oliver left the coffee shop half an hour later he didn’t ask Blue to come with him.

  “Well, it was good to see you, Dad,” Blue said as Oliver threw four quarters down on the table and stood up.

  “Sure, you too,” Oliver said. He looked directly at his son then, making eye contact for the first time in their meeting and said, “Listen, you better not call me Dad any more, okay? You’re a little old for that. Besides,” he said, looking around at the other people in the restaurant and lowering his voice, “people might get the wrong idea.”

  “Sure,” Blue nodded, feeling hurt, and more than a little confused.

  “And it’s not Oliver,” Oliver whispered. “It’s Frank, okay?”

  “Frank,” Blue repeated.

  “See you then,” Oliver said, giving Blue an army salute.

  Blue was paralysed: stuck to red vinyl and trying not to cry. He wanted more, so much more, but he didn’t know what that more was. He’d felt closer to Oliver when he’d been on the receiving end of his soundless criticisms through a schoolyard fence. In the flesh, Oliver was an even more elusive entity whose words were even less intelligible.

  Faith silently refilled Blue’s coffee cup and patted him on the back. The tears plopped from his eyes right into his cup. He sat there with his head hung low for what must have been hours. He saw the sun move from the left side of the booth to the right but didn’t remember it ever passing over him. He watched the dust dance by the window and scraped dried egg off a knife with his thumbnail.

  Anybody?

  Blue went in search of more. Well into the winter he prowled around Cherry Beach with a tuque pulled down to his nose, wandering from warehouse to warehouse looking for a sign. It was weeks before he saw Oliver again. When he did, he found him in the entrance to a no-frills supermarket. But Oliver wasn’t grocery shopping. He was standing there trying to get warm. There was a great big German shepherd by his side.

  He looked embarrassed when he saw Blue and started yammering on about various things. Fragments. “Furnace in the building is shot … Worried the dog might get hypothermia …”

  Blue stared at his father who was wearing the sleeveless lining of a winter coat and Adidas running shoes. He looked rough, not the least bit equipped for winter. Blue took off his tuque and said, “Wrap your hands in this.” Oliver accepted, despite himself.

  A Pakistani family with four children came through the supermarket doors and the mother reached into her purse and tried to hand Oliver a two-dollar bill. Oliver spat at her, “I’m not a fucking beggar.” She muttered to God and put her arms around her two youngest children protectively, pushing them through the next set of doors. “Fucking immigrants,” Oliver cursed.

  It crushed Blue to see his dad looking humiliated. He’d seen a thousand other expressions, but never this. Oliver the Titanic, the giant overinflated ship that he was, was sinking, was sunk, and all Blue could think to do was tentatively hold out his arm. “Dad?” he said quietly. “Let’s go get a coffee or a drink or something, okay? Come on.” He reached out again, taking his father by the forearm.

  “Okay,” Oliver mumbled, allowing himself to be escorted out by his son. They shuffled side by side through grey snow and walked toward the coffee shop, the German shepherd limping sadly behind them.

  “What do you want to drink, Dad?”

  “Coffee.”

  “Sure you don’t want something stronger?” he asked him. Oliver hesitated. “My treat,” said Blue, realizing Oliver probably didn’t have any money.

  The cheap whisky warmed him into conversation. “Ever heard of fibre optics?” Oliver asked. Blue shook his head. “Transmission of light through long thin, transparent fibres. Ingenious. Limitless potential. It’s the wave of the future,” he said, getting increasingly excited. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Thinking that’s what I should be investing in.”

  Blue looked at his father, trying to take him seriously, but he couldn’t picture Oliver calling up a broker and saying, “Take my million out of soya and put it into fibre optics.”

  “I’ve got some capital coming,” Oliver said, sensing Blue’s disbelief. “Couple of cheques in the mail.” Blue wondered, though, how Oliver was going to cash a cheque addressed to Frank when he didn’t have any ID. “I could throw in a few hundred for you, if you’d like, Blue. You’re working now, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I’m working. Sort of a stupid job. I don’t really have any spare change for investing just yet.”

  “Well, bear it in mind,” Oliver nodded.

  Sure, I’ll do that, thought Blue. Maybe I’ll consult my accountant.

  “Dad? Can I just ask you something? Are you feeling okay? You look a little rough.”

  “Ahh. It’s a bit of a rough winter,” Oliver admitted. “The heat in that building barely works and my asthma’s been troubling me. There’s a lot of sawdust around. And I’ve got a rotten blasted toothache.”

  “Could you see a dentist?”

  “We’ll see,” Oliver replied. “Things will improve. It’s all just around the corner.”

  “What is exactly?” Blue had to ask.

  Oliver didn’t answer him. He seemed to be searching for a word but unable to find it. All he could think of was fuck: I’ll fuck everybody and they’ll be sorry. In the powerlessness of his current existence, Oliver would find a way to exercise control. There were still people smaller than him in the world. He could still be a big man.

  Blue watched Oliver leave that day, then followed in his direction ten minutes later, eyes to the ground, stepping in the prints of Oliver’s running shoes. His tracks led to a long, yellow brick warehouse with dirty windows. The place was deserted, not a single car in sight and no lights on in the building. The footprints, man and dog, circled the entire building and stopped at a loading dock. Blue hoisted himself up onto the dock and rapped his knuckles against the metal door. “Dad,” Blue called out. “Oliv—Frank? Frank? You in there? It’s Blue!”

  He heard a scramble and then the metal door scraped opened a crack. “Shhh,” Oliver said. “Keep it down.”

  “Sorry,” Blue mumbled. “It’s just—you forgot your change,” he said, handing him a twenty-dollar bill through the door.

  “So I did,” said Oliver, taking the bill.

  “Can I come in, Dad? I’m freezing.”

  Oliver hesitated. “All right then,” he said, opening the door. “But keep your voice down, okay?”

  “I thought you lived here.”

  “I do.”

  “Why do you have to keep your voice down then?”

  “Because it’s not exactly legal.”

  He followed Oliver down a dark musty stairwell and through a wooden door leading to a damp basement running the entire length of the building. The floor was dirt and broken
concrete and there was a row of windows at ground level, all of which had been spray-painted with opaque green paint. Some of the windows were broken, letting snow into the room. The snow wasn’t melting.

  The low ceiling was a maze of pipes and in the middle of the room a single, weak yellow bulb hung from a wire. The bulb illuminated a pile of domestic debris: a camp cot, a blue tartan-lined sleeping bag, a row of empty vodka bottles, a bag of oranges, a bedside lamp that couldn’t be plugged in anywhere, and a stack of porno magazines. “Apart from the cold, it’s all right,” Oliver said with what appeared to be genuine enthusiasm.

  Blue was speechless, sick in fact, his stomach lurching with the thought of Oliver living here like an animal without fur or the ability to hibernate. “Sorry I’ve got nothing to offer you to drink,” Oliver said, as if he was greeting some business colleague who’d just dropped by unexpectedly on his way home from the golf course.

  “Dad? Are you really comfortable here?”

  “Sure. I come from hardy Scottish stock,” he said, slapping his palms against his chest.

  “Still,” Blue hesitated, “it’s a little rough. Have you thought about moving? Finding somewhere a little better?”

  “Nothing wrong with this place,” Oliver said defensively. “I don’t need much. Got all the essentials here.”

  “But where do you shower?”

  “The gas station,” said Oliver.

  “And you can’t cook here or anything?”

  “I’ve never liked cooking,” he shrugged. “Jesus, Llewellyn. I’ve never been one for middle-class pretensions.”

  “I’m not talking about pretensions,” Blue objected. “It’s just—”

  “Do you see me offering you advice about how to run your life, Blue?” Oliver said, raising his voice.

  Yes. All the time. Every day. Through the schoolyard fence and in my dreams and whenever I dare to stop and think.

  “This is my business. I didn’t invite you in here to start telling me how to run my life. Christ, that’s why I left your mother.”

  Blue had never quite seen it that way. Elaine maintained that she had thrown Oliver out. “I told him to clean up his act or get out,” Blue had heard her tell anyone who would listen. Although Blue knew it hadn’t quite happened that way, he thought Elaine’s version still made more sense.

  Blue muttered an apology. He left the warehouse and made his way to the bus station that night feeling bruised and confused. He didn’t have the heart to go back the following weekend. Instead, he called Faith at the coffee shop and asked her if she’d seen his father. She hadn’t. Not then or the following weekend. Worried, Blue worked up the nerve to go back to the warehouse two weeks later. He took peace offerings with him: a roast chicken, coleslaw, a six-pack of beer, and a forty-ouncer of vodka.

  Oliver didn’t respond when Blue knocked on the door and called out so he went straight in. He found his father in a poor state: shivering with fever under his sleeping bag. He didn’t recognize Blue at first, and his speech was disjointed and nonsensical. “But you were here yesterday,” Oliver whispered.

  “And here I am again,” Blue responded. “I think we need to get you to a doctor, Dad.”

  Oliver shook his head. “No doctor.”

  Blue could see he wasn’t going to be able to move him. He needed help, and Faith was good enough to respond to his call, bringing a bottle of codeine, a thermos of tea, a hot-water bottle, and several woollen blankets from her apartment later that night. Blue met her in her car by the loading dock and told her she was an angel.

  “You’re the angel,” she returned. “I don’t know if I could handle it if that were my father,” she said, passing him a pile of blankets. “Do you want me to help you carry them in?”

  Blue shook his head. No one should have to see what was inside. Especially a girl who didn’t know the whereabouts of her own dad. “I promise I’ll get this stuff back to you,” he said, thanking her.

  “Whenever,” she said, waving out the window as she peeled off into the grey night.

  Blue kept vigil that night. He put codeine on Oliver’s furry tongue every four hours and made him drink it down with lukewarm tea. “My dad used to boil the tea in milk,” Oliver reminisced in his delirium. Blue felt Oliver’s forehead with his palm and asked him if he was warm enough. Blue had wrapped himself in a Hudson’s Bay blanket that smelled of Faith. “It was warm by the fire in the kitchen,” Oliver muttered. “Dad was there. And Mum used to make scones and we’d dip them into the cream at the top of the milk bottle. Where are they, anyway?”

  Blue didn’t want to remind him that he’d never talked about his father and that his mother was dead. He and Emma had never met their elusive granny, the woman they’d simply known as Granny who sent them a box of home-made fudge every Christmas until she died. They’d never eaten any of her fudge—it was always green by the time it arrived, having been sent by surface mail.

  Oliver began to cry the hot, weak tears of fever.

  “Why are you crying, Dad?” Blue asked, his voice soft, gentle.

  “It’s just … I don’t know where anybody is,” he whimpered.

  “Well, I’m right here,” said Blue, trying to reassure him. As pathetic as it is, I’m right here, he repeated to himself. You might have fucked off, but I haven’t. You don’t know where anybody is because nobody knows where you are. You left everybody, remember? I wish it were so easy to leave you.

  “But the rest of them,” he muttered. “Where’s Elaine?” he asked Blue.

  “She’s at home—Niagara Falls. She’s working a lot.”

  “And what about Emma?”

  “Emma? Well, she’s … I don’t know. She thinks she’s in love with this guy and she’s living with him in his parents’ house.”

  “She’s left you two?”

  “Yeah, Dad. She’s left. You know, just like you did. She’s a lot like you actually.”

  Oliver looked confused.

  “Dad. Whatever it is—don’t worry about it. You’re sick. Everything will be okay.”

  After the wretchedness of that night, Oliver showed some signs of improvement. He ate a little chicken and sat up for the first time in what might have been several days. “You look like you could use a bath,” Blue said to him.

  “Can’t remember the last time I had a bath,” Oliver smiled weakly.

  “Let me see what I can do,” Blue said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Faith gave him the key to her place and said he’d find clean towels under the bed. He couldn’t thank her enough, and promised to be in and out quickly and not make a mess. “As long as you’re out of there before my boyfriend gets home from work, it’s cool,” she said.

  Oliver looked about two shades lighter after lying in the bath for forty minutes. An oily film lay across the surface of the water.

  “Is this your girlfriend’s place?” Oliver yelled from the bathroom.

  “Nah. Just a friend.”

  “You’re not screwing her?”

  “Dad,” Blue protested.

  “Come on, you can tell your old man.”

  “No,” Blue lied.

  “You’re not queer, are you?”

  The hairs on the back of Blue’s neck stood on end. It was only during the recent night spent between the freckled thighs of a woman he barely knew that he’d recovered that piece of himself that he’d lost in the schoolyard. He felt rage now—enough to storm into the bathroom and shout, “Look! I’m not a fucking faggot!”

  “Hey!” Oliver said, raising his palms defensively. “Just teasing you. Good-looking boy like you should have plenty of women, that’s all. You know, my old man took me to a prostitute when I was fourteen so I could get properly laid. I still see a prostitute now and then.” Blue stared at the man lying naked in the bathtub: skinny and drawn, big boorish talk coming from his helpless, pathetic body. “If I had the money, I’d do the same for you. Best thing for a boy your age,” Oliver went on.

  Blue left the room
, suppressing anger and sadness. He wondered if Elaine had ever heard this story about the prostitute. He knew Emma would want to hurl a brick at her father’s head if she ever did. Blue wasn’t sure how to react. Maybe this was normal: maybe most fathers found prostitutes for their sons. Maybe that was what male bonding was all about. He didn’t have a clue, and there was no one he would ever dare ask.

  Blue spent most of the following week lying on his bedroom floor, high as a kite, calling in sick to work. Oliver called him from a payphone at the end of the week to tell him he had a job interview. “All sorts of perks. Even a company car!” Oliver enthused. “Thing is, Blue,” he said, with some degree of embarrassment, “I haven’t got a clean shirt to wear.”

  “I’ll bring you a couple of my white shirts when I come on Saturday,” Blue said in a voice as grey as February. “Anything else?”

  “Well, I don’t really have any shoes.”

  “What size are your feet?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “You’ll fit into my dress shoes. I hardly ever wear them. What kind of job is it?”

  “Sales manager.”

  “I’ll see you on Saturday.”

  Oliver was in fine spirits that weekend, rattling on about pensions and benefits and a company car. Blue didn’t have the heart to burst his bubble, but he wondered how realistic his father was being. He nevertheless handed him a bag containing two white shirts, a silk tie, a razor, and a pair of shiny burgundy shoes.

  “Thanks, Blue. You’re a sport,” he said, slapping his son on the shoulder. “You know, I’m starving. I could really eat a steak about now. You?”

  “Sure, Dad. Maybe you could even shave and wear one of those shirts. You could think of it as practice.” At being of the world, being human, Blue meant.

  “Great idea,” Oliver laughed.

  Blue couldn’t help but feel proud standing beside his clean-shaven father in a white shirt at the entrance to a Finnish diner downtown. Oliver was perhaps a little too flirtatious with the waitress but Blue was glad to see him in such good spirits. Their conversation flowed easily enough at first, but in the process of drinking three gin and tonics in quick succession, his father’s enthusiasm mutated, becoming progressively more aggressive.