by Carol Mason
‘At the airport! I came to get you. You’re on a bus on Granville Street? I’ve stood watching three flights come through the doors, and I asked all these Chinese people if they’d got off the flight from England, and then a stewardess told me the UK flight went through an age ago…’
‘Oh God! You’re at the airport?’ I swell with affection for my good friend. ‘You came to meet me? I don’t even remember telling you which day I was flying back.’
‘You didn’t. I rang Richard. When I got here the board said your flight had landed so I went to get a latte figuring you’d be at least half an hour.’
‘My bag was the first one out. I zipped through in minutes.’
‘Shit! Damn that latte… Richard was going to come meet you anyway, but I told him I wanted to.’
‘You were fighting over me? Argh. I’m really touched!’ Joking aside, I genuinely am. Now it doesn’t seem to matter so much that there was nobody there to meet me when I walked out of those double doors, pushing my luggage trolley, searching, stupidly for Jonathan’s face; force of habit. Sherrie was there. She was just buying a latte. And if she hadn’t been there, Richard would have.
‘Did you buy me one too?’
‘What?’
‘A latte.’
‘Kiss my ass.’
‘But you brought me flowers, right?’
‘Kiss it twice.’
I smile. The bus is jerking along South Granville, stopping and starting with the familiar clog of traffic. The sharp, black façade of a high-end deli has its flower stall spilling summer colours all over the pavement.
‘So what are you doing now?’ I ask her.
‘Paying my parking ticket and getting my car. Without my damned passenger.’
I titter. ‘Sorry!’
‘Yeah well. That’s the last time I’m gonna try surprising you.’
‘Well come over for a drink if you’d like. I’ve nothing in but we could always order something.’
I hear her grunting and then she screams at a driver. ‘Old people,’ she says. ‘They should only be let out after dark… What? Oh, I think I’ll pass. I have a date tonight, girl.’ I hear her blare on her horn. ‘Stop straddling the line, you octogenarian! …A second date as it happens. Look, can I just catch you later? I’m getting frustrated talking and driving. Do you mind?’
‘I’m heartbroken you’d pick a date over me.’
‘No you’re not,’ she chuckles. ‘Cow.’
‘Moo.’
I’m ready to hang up and she says, ‘Oh, by the way Ange, I’m glad to have my friend back.’
‘Which friend?’ I tease. ‘Oh, you mean me?’
~ * * * ~
Back.
I really am.
The same Vancouver streets I’ve walked many times before. Fashionable Robson Street, with its laid-back, West Coast, California-Rodeo-Drive feel, picturesquely hemmed in by mountains and ocean; where everybody, especially the young and cute, goes to shop. I drag my suitcase on its little wheels, cutting a path through people, as though I’m the only one walking against the flow, soaking Vancouver back into my system. How quickly you forget a holiday. If it weren’t for my tanned feet I’m not sure I’d know I’d been away.
Coming into my apartment, I’m hit with the reek of bad recycled air. Sunlight bleaches in the wall-to-wall windows, paling-out my rather dismal navy blue Ikea loveseat. There’s a layer of dust on my parquet floors that I could write my name in. The kitchen is barren except for a somewhat stinky tea-towel, a tea plate with crumbs on it—evidence of my last Melba toast supper—and a knife with some rancid butter on it.
I push open a window (one of those boot-box-sized ones that you can’t possibly top yourself from; your cat could barely top itself if it got a strong case of apartment-cat blues). A warm breeze wafts in, bringing with it rising street sounds—cars, screaming kids, the chilling crash of glass as the restaurant on the corner dumps its waste into a commercial recycle bin.
I open my fridge for some milk to make tea and find a bag of purplish pulp that may have once been an aubergine, cohabiting with half a can of green fuzz-covered tomatoes. Of course, no milk.
I pick up my phone but don’t have any messages. I don’t bother checking Email because I will have a lot of those, but ninety-percent will be junk. My pay cheque from work is in the handful of mail I’ve brought upstairs, reminding me that I have a job. But the good thing is I’m not due back for another two weeks.
Normally, the first thing I’d do after getting back from a trip home would be to call Mam and tell her I got back safely. But she’s not there, where she always is, at the end of the phone, waiting for my call; she’s in Greece, with a man, having a romance.
‘I hope you’re having fun, Mam.’ I say the words out loud, thinking the old post-visit-to-England thoughts: what if that’s the last time I ever see her? What if I heard she was ill, and there was a ten-hour flight between my getting to her? Now on top of this, I’m wondering if she thinks we had a good holiday. I’m regretting that we had to fight so much. It still all feels screwed up: us living at opposite ends of the earth. There’s this damned eight-hour time change. I am never the first person to wish my mother Happy New Year. When I ring her on her birthday, the day is almost over for her.
Fight it, Angela. Fight it. Don’t let homesickness get to you. Your mother is happy.
~ * * * ~
I spend the next couple of days just getting organised. Filling the fridge. Doing laundry. Answering emails, returning phone calls. Getting rid of dust.
‘You didn’t returned my call,’ Richard says to me, when I return his call.
‘Isn’t that what I’m doing now?’ I can hear the smile in my voice. ‘Sorry, Richard, I should have called you earlier…. I’ve just been…. Anyway, how are you?’
‘How are you? How was the holiday?’
‘Unusual,’ I say, after my mind ping-pongs between Georgios and Sean, then sticks, rather glumly, on a memory of Sean’s face.
‘Unusual good or unusual bad?’
I switch to Georgios. How he found my book. ‘Unusual good.’
‘I don’t have long to talk…’ He sighs. ‘I’m calling with bad news. Hester Elmtree died.’
It takes me moments to realise who he’s talking about, because I always knew her as Ms Elmtree. ‘She died?’
‘A week ago, Angie. She had a stroke.’
‘How do you know?’ Richard had only met her once or twice at gatherings at our house.
‘Keith, your old tenant phoned me. He was trying to get hold of you but your number’s not listed and he didn’t know where you’d moved to. So he remembered where Jonathan worked and called here.’
That was industrious of him. ‘I’m stunned, Richard. I just went to see her before England…’ I think of her telling me about seeing Jonathan sitting in his car. ‘She seemed fine then.’ Or maybe I hadn’t noticed she wasn’t. What was it she said about how she wasn’t painting any more? She never did say why. ‘I feel bad, Richard. Maybe there was more I could have done for her.’ I was aware of not wanting to make a mother out of anyone else. So I kept my distance.
‘She was ninety-one.’
‘Eh? She couldn’t have been!’ She looked at least fifteen years younger. ‘Good God. She was ancient…’ This somehow makes me feel guiltier.
‘I have to go into a meeting,’ he says. ‘Can we talk later?’
I quickly ask him when the funeral is.
He tells me it was four days ago.
~ * * * ~
I have a massive case of homesickness. It manifests itself in my reading Hello magazines. Instead of finishing the chores I started, I call in at the library, take out a year’s back-copies, and lay around on my sofa flipping through them, soaking British celebrities into my blood, the interiors of British homes, and British recipes, into my every pore. It depresses the hell out of me when there’s a new crop of celebrities I don’t recognise. Give me Michael Parkinson and newsreaders I know
, but when it’s fresh new faces and names I’ve never heard of, I feel a displacement akin to a weird form of early dementia. As though my Englishness and my very identity are somehow bound up in my knowing who Jordan is. Granted I have bigger things to worry about, but you’d never know it right now.
‘It’s obvious,’ Sherrie wags a fork at me when I let her persuade me to join her at a restaurant for some wine and oysters—particularly as she’s paying. ‘You’re still depressed.’
Sherrie tips an oyster down her throat. If you can imagine hair the colour of a carrot, that’s Sherrie’s. And long and squiggly, and wild, like carrots that have been peeled by a fancy peeler for the purpose of decorating an overpriced salad. Yet every freckle on her face has been bled out with heavy (but expensive and consequently invisible) make-up. Sherrie is tiny: less than five feet tall. Tiny and curvy. A pocket Venus. A pocket carrot. ‘Depression makes you tired. And the more tired you feel, the more depressed you get. That’s for sure what it is. You gotta go talk to somebody about it, Ange. A grief counsellor or someone.’
‘Oh, God, I’m not depressed Sherrie! I’ve just been on holiday. I don’t have any reason to feel depressed…’ This can’t be about Ms Elmtree dying. Granted, I’m sad about that, but it’s not like we were close. ‘I suppose I’m just realising that the holiday’s gone away, but the problems I had before I went on it haven’t. And now I must face them.’
‘If you talked it through with somebody, you might get some sort of clarity and focus.’
‘I don’t need clarity and focus!’
‘You don’t have to be defensive, hun.’
‘I’m not being defensive! I’m just stating a fact. And I’m not going to a grief counsellor. Certainly not two years after Jonathan died. They’ll commit me.’
I did actually go to a counsellor. Once. Jonathan’s mother sent her name to me from Toronto, in a small card. A funeral is a bit like Christmas day; once it’s over people tend to forget it’s ever been and move on with life. The friends had largely stopped calling. And I didn’t want to keep phoning to bleed all over my poor mother, when she’d just gone back to England because I’d convinced her I was fine. So I thought, ok Angela, give it a go...
I have an inbuilt loathing of people who believe that human beings are like cans of baked beans; they only come in so many varieties, and one can either has the sausages in it or it doesn’t. But I was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. She didn’t get off to a good start. For starters, she looked frigid, asexual, intellectual, whereas I was hoping for Lorraine Bracco from The Sopranos. She talked to me by looking off to the side of me.
‘Grief usually has a time span that is the equivalent to half the number of years you were married,’ she told me. ‘So what that means is, if you were married twenty years, you’d probably grieve for your partner for ten.’
Her tone made me feel like I was four years old and she was saying, If Billy has five eggs in the basket and Benny takes away two, Billy will have three left…
‘So, if you were married four years, like you and… (pause while she forgot my husband’s name) Jonathan were, you can be expected to grieve for two.’
I remember thinking it took longer to grow out my red highlights. Needless to say, it was as I’d expected: bollocks. I never went back.
But now I wonder was she really that far wrong? It’s been two years since Jonathan died, and while I have grieved for him every step of the way, I no longer feel that he’s the primary reason for my feeling—
‘Dislocated,’ Sherrie fills in the word, snapping me back to the present.
‘Huh?’
‘That’s what I think you are. You’re like a limb that’s become unattached from your body. You don’t work properly any more. To the passing observer, you might look like you’re all there, yet when you try to function properly, you can’t. You have this disability.’
‘Hang on, let me guess…. In the outer regions of eastern South America, the onyx-jibwies believe that—’
Her grin stops me.
‘Seriously Sherrie, thanks. I’m depressed and I’m going around like a handicapped person. That conjures up a lovely picture. There really is hope for me.’
I wonder though, now that she’s telling me I’m depressed, if a part of me is sad because I am letting go of Jonathan, if letting go is defined as not thinking of him every moment of every day. Maybe grief has become such a habit that I’m actually missing it. Can I possibly be grieving grief?
‘There is hope for you,’ Sherrie says, before tipping another oyster down her throat. ‘Because I have a solution for you, ma petite. Why don’t you go and join something? A cause. Do something to help people who’ve got far worse problems than your own.’
‘Join the Peace Corps you mean? Go build roads in central Africa?’
She narrows her eyes at me.
‘You know, Sherrie, me and charity don’t really see eye-to-eye… Did I ever tell you about that doctor I interviewed when I first came to Canada?’
She scowls.
‘I got a job reporting for a University rag. I was supposed to write an article on Doctors Without Borders. Some lovely, very overworked, planet-saving MD took two hours out of his busy day to let me interview him… The thing was, when I sat down to writing the piece, I was hopeless. I got so frustrated trying to make my article brilliant that I couldn’t string two sentences together… so I packed it in. I never went back to the paper, and the lovely doctor never got his story in the paper.’
‘Come on, that was a century ago! Besides, weren’t you supposed to be writing a speech for that homeless charity? What was it called? Raise the Roof?’
I’d almost forgotten. The speech. Poor old Raise the Roof—the only ‘project’ David had given me in the three months I’d worked at his company (mainly because it was the only project David had). I’d had great hope for it. ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s all written now. David would have pulled something together. He could write, albeit not very well. Raise the Roof was pretty much his one and only client, even if they were pro bono. I’m sure he wouldn’t have let them down.’
‘Well why don’t you volunteer—say once a week—to feed the homeless, or do something noble and un-self-centred that’ll get you out of the house and maybe help you get some perspective on things in your own life?’
‘My main concern is paying my bills, Sherrie. That’s the only perspective I’m interested in right now. I have about another six month’s rent in my bank account, and the ability—if I live very carefully—to exist without a job for that amount of time, then after that…’ I whistle. ‘It’ll be me lining up at Raise the Roof, and somebody feeding me slop from a tin can.’
Sherrie looks startled. ‘You’re not that desperate, surely?’
I never told her about how much money Jonathan lost, out of respect for his memory. Only Richard knew. I’m sure she’s often wondered how I can be so badly off, when we used to live so well, but she’s had the decency not to ask. ‘Ok, maybe I have a bit more than six months, but we’re not talking much more.’
Her jaw drops. Nobody ever believes it. Not when they think of the life I used to have.
‘Well you gotta turn that crap around girl!’ she says. ‘A lot can happen in six months Ange. But you gotta to get started on the right track. Right now you’re not on the track at all. You’re completely trackless my friend.’
I think about this. ‘Thanks,’ I tell her. ‘For your thoughts about volunteering… It might not be something I’m going to do, but it was a good idea.’ I have to say that; she’s buying dinner. Actually though, I think it’s a rather daft idea. I admire crusaders; I’m just not one of them. ‘But, Sherrie, right now I think my best strategy now is to get hired by a big advertising agency again. Then I can earn six figures, maybe buy a place, and who knows, maybe even bring my mother over here.’ I had a wild thought on the plane—that I should apply to sponsor her to live here, if she’d consider coming.
‘Anyway, Sher
rie, I certainly can’t face going back to that job and sitting on my boss’s couch for nine hours while he bores my ears off about his past and fantastic career, and not a single client ever walks through his door. It’s far too depressing.’ That might have been fine when I needed breaking in gently to the working world again… But I’m just about ready to take life by the horns again. I think.’
Am I? Right as I say it, I realise that I probably am.
‘But you hate the big agency life Ange! It practically put you in a psych ward. Imagine what Jonathan would say if he knew you’d gone back to that again.’
I push my plate across the table. ‘Yes, but he’s not here is he? And besides, Sherrie, you have to remember something. Advertising is all I know how to do.’
She picks up her glass, holds it mid-air, before she drinks. ‘Well, Ange, the way I see it, that’s not a good enough reason to repeat past mistakes.’
~ * * * ~
‘What about the idea you had of starting up your own business? Write Strategies?’ Richard’s hazel eyes fix me with an intent curiosity.
Seems nobody’s going to leave me alone to wallow in my own career mess are they?
‘Oh Richard!’ I look from my husband’s best friend, to Jessica, his wife, across their reclaimed teak kitchen table. ‘That was always more Jonathan’s idea than mine...’
‘Does it matter whose idea it was? It’s a good one, isn’t it?’ Jessica pipes up, sloshing white wine around in her big glass—something she does a lot before she sips. In this case, it’s expensive wine, so it’s probably worth the build up. ‘I don’t know why you’re not going for it,’ she adds, pissing me off, ever so slightly, because that sentiment is weird coming from somebody who until very recently couldn’t spell the word work.
I like sitting in their old, but modernised, kitchen, though, with its new granite countertops co-existing with a big, deep, old-fashioned sink where people used to wash their laundry. They’ve ordered sushi. Something they always do on a Friday night when they have me over. For about a year after Jonathan died we had a Friday night ritual. It was the ‘save Angela from herself’ invitation, which neither Jessica nor Richard would let me turn down. Well, Richard mainly, because it was always he who called to invite me. It was he who called me every day soon after Jonathan died. It was he who desperately tried to save me from losing my house. When I think of any point in my rocky road to getting over Jonathan, there was always Richard, propping me up and telling me which decisions were the pressing ones to make, which makes me study him now for a while, then say, ‘Let’s not talk about Write Strategies. Not tonight… I mean, let’s face it, it’s hard to get a business off the ground. I could be at it for a year or two and not make a bean. Plus it’s a load of work… Networking, building relationships, getting people to actually have confidence in you…’ I feel lame saying that, given that Jessica managed to get a business off the ground, even though I would have previously thought she’d not be capable of it.
