Army of the Brave and Accidental

by Alex Boyd

  We’d been to the Island of Arran for an impressive local music festival in Lochranza where the bus barrelled along the single road, and Oliver noted a packed group of riders enduring the experience by laughing uproariously as they were thrown around. On the way home, a skinny drunk man stood above Oliver with a cup of beer and Oliver turned to me as if to say, I’m going to have beer spilled on me. When the splatter of beer landed on his leather jacket, the man apologized and promptly licked it off. My favourite moment of the night, however, was the lights of the bus receding into the absolute darkness of the island; a set of Christmas lights on the wind as we stood with our hands locked together.

  As I lay with Oliver that night, I felt I had him and was with him, but couldn’t progress into his life. I could never meet his uncle or a former girlfriend. It wasn’t possible to run into someone on the street and have it trigger an old memory or story. I asked him about his childhood and there was a long pause until he finally said, “People think Canada is all snow but as a child the summer months would roll by like slow, iron railcars hot to the touch. June, July and August.” To name them ends them, but when he was a very young child they weren’t named. In the fall everything crumbled beautifully and then winter arrived to cover the world in sheets of snow, sometimes several feet deep, as though to offer the landscape a fresh start. At that time, Canada had it all and people didn’t even know it.

  Oliver said he felt most safe sleeping in the backseat of the car on the way home with his parents in the front and the waterfall sound of passing cars accompanying his sleep. There’s a certain irony in feeling safest on the road, but I told him I’d felt the same way nodding off on the route between Glasgow and Edinburgh, even though the trip took under an hour. A public servant and a professional arts organizer, my parents took pride in taking me to cultural events, particularly Edinburgh in August when all the festivals were happening and the population nearly doubled. My mother could organize an interesting, well-attended lecture and even show up with two pies to add to the food table.

  As always, I stayed with Oliver for a few days somewhere and we began to feel the need to go somewhere else. I started to think of Edinburgh as somewhere we might settle a while. It wouldn’t be my home city and we might make a fresh start there together. I thought we might find the right balance: sometimes the earth is too tight a net and I toss and worry, feel the heavy shift of everything, of too much at once. At other times the net is too loose and it’s as though I’m ungrounded, slipping away in the current of a river. I wanted Oliver, a new life and balance.

  28: Oliver

  We all know the basic landscape of memory: so much recedes into the background while other events, sometimes even meaningless ones, stand out like mountain ranges, winning out and becoming part of our identity simply because they survive. My greater sense is the sense of time lost, and yet I’m glad to own what I distinctly remember as it’s all I have.

  I told Calandra about our family driving every summer to visit my grandparents in St. Stephen, New Brunswick. Three children in the backseat trying not to complain of boredom or frustration, particularly as their mother was like some kind of magician, reaching down to produce a new book or toy whenever we did break down and complain. When we drove thirteen hours once, it was our mother who broke down suddenly, crying, “Thirteen hours!” Our father went from oblivious to startled, and within fifteen minutes had checked us into the first clean motel that came along. She’d been making polite comments that were ignored or brushed off. We all took our father’s support for granted, wolfing down hamburgers on the road and checking into rooms as simply the next thing, and the next.

  We stayed in a boldly painted green cottage that my grandparents owned—I can still hear the creak and clap of the screen door, see the handmade green steps down the cliff’s edge that took you to the beach and the slightly wobbly branch nailed up on two posts for a handrail. Digging for clams, building a fort on the beach with my brother because a pirate invasion was coming, sitting on the little screened-in front porch that never seemed small: it was perfect and it was enough. The year I was there for the last time I sat on a large rock that would be surrounded by the sea when the tide came in, and silently declared it mine, though of course I never returned. It wasn’t until years later my mother told me they weren’t necessarily pleased to go every summer, but that my grandparents expected it.

  But none of that matters now. Our bus carried us into the remarkable city of Edinburgh, and as we began to walk the streets, those memories only mattered as an exchange, as something that allowed us to feel closer and a reminder to be careful about our rituals. Edinburgh had statues everywhere, it seemed. We saw Greyfriars Kirkyard, a very old graveyard and home to John Gray and Bobby, his dog. John died in the nineteenth century and his dog reportedly slept on his grave for at least fourteen years. When the dog finally died, it was decided he deserved to be given a place of honour with his master, and there’s a small statue where the dog lays as well. Perhaps some rituals shouldn’t be questioned.

  We walked up the winding, spiral stairs of the Scott Monument, dedicated to Sir Walter Scott. The wind and cramped spaces almost goaded us on and discouraged us at the same time. It stands out on Princess Street like a cross between a ceremonial dagger and a layered cake. Stopping on the four levels, you see how imagination was made physical with tiny statues of Scott’s fictional characters all the way up. As the wind slapped at my legs, I imagined it was the hand of one of those characters.

  It’s an impressive view, but we soon longed for something more relaxing and found our way to a bench in the park, listening to the wind sing through the openings of our beer bottles. I felt a tap on top of my head and turned around to look back after a small roar of laughter could be heard.

  “Nice one, mate!” A boy gave the thumbs up and grinned wickedly as a group began to spill away. One of them had tossed a crumpled paper ball so it hit me on the top of my head. The anger trickled into me like fuel and ignited itself but I checked my impulse to get up and chase them. They’d only scatter like mice. “Bastards,” I said, but Calandra retorted, “They’re just boys.” “Yeah, but what else do they get up to?” I said.

  We sat for a long while, and later one of the boys came running along with a tall man after him. The boy was about to run right by me and would’ve been surprised if I suddenly grabbed him. I had a decision to make, and a second to make it. I did nothing. The boy raced by us and around the bench, easily eluding the man who gave up and came to a stop. A dishevelled older woman ambled over to us, slow as a plump cloud. I thought she was coming very close for someone who wanted to pass us, but then she sat down on our bench and asked for some of our baguette. “Of course,” Calandra said before tearing off a piece.

  “It’s lovely bread; it melts in your mouth,” the woman said quietly before asking, “Could I have a little more?” We all sat comfortably a while and agreed with her on the immortal Scottish saying, “It’s a wee bit nippy out.” Even as you’re a joke to one person, you’re an angel to someone else.

  29: Calandra

  I woke in the middle of the night when I felt the hideous tickle of an insect on my body and sat upright, instantly awake and flailing about like someone lost at sea, desperate to get the small creature off me. We’d stayed for a few nights at a hostel that put up to six people in a room, and I’d noticed the bugs before. Perhaps my body was sensitively waiting for the moment one of them found me. Our money was starting to run low and we walked Princess Street to find a coffee shop and sat griping at each other miserably. We answered ads, making calls through the morning to see if we could arrange somewhere to stay, though we’d also need to find work quickly and I felt that pressure constantly. As we made calls at a payphone I held the coins and tried not to think of them as our hope draining away.

  An art student named Alan sounded calm and reasonable through the receiver. We made an arrangement to meet but he wasn’t fr
ee until around four so we had most of the day to ourselves. “This way,” Oliver said, and as I suspected, he led me to the Museum of Childhood. He’d mentioned he wanted to see it and even if we had concerns about money, I thought it might lift our spirits. I stared for at least a few minutes at a shoe doll made for a girl in a poor family: a cloth dress wrapped around a shoe, the face made from tape on the bottom of the heel. I wanted the story of the person who made it to come out of the face, but the story refused to appear except to state the obvious: it was about sadness and about love. The first school uniforms, it would seem, were for schools founded by charitable organizations that ensured proper clothing and reminded children they were objects of charity. In a so-called horror box, a penny in a slot brought a small, carefully crafted house to life: a painting lit up, a man in a chair lifted his newspaper as if he heard a noise, a square-headed monster came partway through the door.

  Walking to meet Alan at his apartment, we carried the same bags we’d always carried but they felt heavy with an anxious feeling, a need to find a home. I tried not to voice it, but I wondered out loud the whole way over if his home would have bugs, leaving us adrift again. “There are no bugs,” Oliver said. I could tell he was trying to be patient but that he was becoming increasingly irritated as we reached Bread Street and the heavy black door. We took three floors of stone steps with a regular dip in the middle. Alan was tall, pleasant and calm, with a short mess of brown hair. Immediately I said, “Do you have any bugs?” He looked around nervously, one set of fingers resting on his chin. “Bugs? No, I don’t think so.”

  We had found a home and were grateful for Alan’s gentleness, though no home is a perfect one. Oliver was irritated with the fact that there was no shower in the bathroom, only a tub with a short hose attached to the faucet. “What the hell is this?” I heard him whisper to himself. But it was a small, remarkable pleasure to be able to put food in a fridge again and look out the window from the little kitchen on Edinburgh castle.

  30: Oliver

  We settled into a routine and began polishing the stone that made up those slightly slippery steps a little further every day with our coming and going. Calandra found work in an office where polite Scottish men would ask her to get them a coffee, and when she calmly and warmly replied, “I think you can get a coffee for yourself,” they’d say, “Oh, right!” I found work in the box office of a nearby theatre which showed independent and foreign films. The staff seemed a typical collection: one quiet man, one endlessly outgoing young man who seemed to transform to meet the needs of different people and a busybody who looked over my shoulder my entire first shift but eventually relaxed somewhat. I’d braced myself for the public to be terse and difficult, but people in Edinburgh were generally calmer and more appreciative than they were in Toronto. I had to tell one person after another we’d have the programs for the Edinburgh Film Festival next week, later than expected, and they all dropped some genuine expression of thanks, or even exclaimed surprisingly, “That’s magic.”

  A few weeks after we’d settled into the city, the local papers proclaimed an accidental death, the result of a section of brickwork breaking loose and falling forty feet where it barrelled through a glass canopy and hit a young man on the head as he served customers on a local patio. He’d apparently worked there for years and was originally from New Zealand. It stayed in my head for days. I felt distaste for the paper and its photo of scattered glass, the attention-grabbing headline about sudden death. But more than anything else, I thought of this man working there for years while brickwork slowly decayed. If he’d quit, called in sick that day or had merely been standing in a different spot, he’d have lived. If he’d never left New Zealand or decided to study somewhere else he’d be alive. But all those things fell into place and he died. Fate is our small word for the unlikely arrival of anything, and people are left forever baffled and angry at a pointless loss. The papers said the ongoing vibration of traffic can slowly unravel old buildings and suggested the whole city needed an overhaul, but I only saw work done on that building.

  “We’ve been here weeks and I still marvel at this place,” Calandra said. Edinburgh was like some kind of coherent Escher drawing that worked on various levels, and it continued to amaze me, too. Victoria Terrace runs along Victoria Street and looks down onto another street with a black iron railing running along it. There are narrow alleyways that run between buildings, so there are subtle shortcuts everywhere, some of them opening up to small squares with gardens or benches. The entire central core, or old town, is historical which is simply something we don’t have much of in Canada. People seemed to appreciate the value of a pleasant day so much that the whole population came out to Meadows Park whenever the clouds parted and the drizzle was banished.

  31: Calandra

  We settled into our lives and then it felt as though we turned around and found we had been there nearly a year. Like a person, a city takes time to get to know until it’s taken for granted, assumed to be there. And much like a person, it’s possible to find out things you’d rather not have known.

  Oliver frequented a used bookshop a few doors down from us and though it was a small place, it had enough dim alcoves to allow the feeling that you could get lost in the shelves. The owner was a thin, older man with receding hair and ears that perched like little parachutes on the side of his head. Oliver always chatted happily with him. The owner had a calmness Oliver liked, and said he could tell Canadians from Americans, which certainly pleased Oliver, but he also leaned back with a certain satisfaction when talking, as though he felt it necessary to overcompensate for something. Maybe he felt conscious of being a mere bookstore owner. Oliver didn’t believe in this sort of hierarchy anyway.

  “My employee is a bit brown, but he could pass for a Paki,” the owner said, and Oliver and I both tensed. In Canada, “Paki” was too crude a word, a blanket term for anyone with brown skin. The bookstore owner seemed oblivious to our anxiety. We’d overheard “Paki bastard” on Edinburgh streets a few times and were saddened by it. The city of dreams had a darker underside which, in part, contained the idea that different kinds of employment and treatment waited for those with brown skin.

  It reached the point where we could take in Edinburgh and its great, stone history at a glance. We passed the stone toes of statues without looking up. No longer at all startled by our surroundings, we fell into the same mildly focused sleep so many of us know, the quiet and halfway-conscious collecting of moments and items, an idea I became somewhat fascinated by. For example, I overheard a woman on a patio say, “Manners are an act of faith.” A man has all the food he needs, a warm place to sleep every night, but still demands that a surly grocery clerk be fired. I overheard a man telling a friend, “I need a little music to tell me everything’s all right.” An unbalanced man lectured nobody in particular on a street corner, his hands spidering in the air, little classes of deaf, bubbled people in cars stopping next to him, lining up to look and leave, over and again.

  While in nursing school I also worked at a bookstore, and in particular at the information and special orders desk affectionately known as “special odours.” Nearly every day an elderly man arrived as regularly as the moon. He had something of a thick accent and was Russian, I think, though I never asked him. He was always buying and ordering books. When I was told to ask him for a deposit on an expensive hardcover, he looked at me with a hard, level gaze and said, “When I order, I buy.” We never asked him for another deposit. Slowly, he grew warmer and I grew to recognize his curiosity about the world was the reason for all the book orders. I suspected he couldn’t afford to travel much, and travelled instead through books. He would say, “Good morning,” and I would say, “Good morning” back. We had his fax number on file and once, accidentally, we sent him our sales reports for the day which he found very amusing.

  After that I went to work in the fiction section, or maybe it was around then he simply stopped coming in, I
can’t remember. But all these years later I suddenly remembered him. He’d be gone now. He was old even then but it occurs to me I was pleased to see him coming and his calm, civil way of doing things. At the time, I didn’t even note that I no longer saw him. How could that have happened?

  Oliver and I were both wounded but I think we’d found something in each other through circumstance and developed an unexpected generosity with each other. I only worried sometimes that he would someday be as lost to me as an elderly man who’d once greeted me every day as part of his morning ritual. Time is a sniper.

  32: Athena

  Waters assumed Oliver to be dead, or lost and miserable. Even if the evidence were recorded, there were no established laws for murder to draw on. The death becomes what always happened. Legally it was a new frontier. Sometimes Waters still placed his two hands on the wall on either side of the data ocean and leaned into it looking for Oliver as a submarine officer would stare through a periscope. But we’d lost the thread of his story, and only an unlikely chance would ever allow Waters to find him again. Unlikely but possible. Certainly, Waters never seemed to forget.

  I say if you need to track someone, use a dog. I already regret my choice of that particular word because Herman proved to be more real to me each time I resurrected my temporary, living messenger of bundled energy and memories. He was made of wind but smiled when given another chance at life. Perhaps his brief moments were each a lifetime to him. As before, he was assembled from the images and records of a businessman and father of two, but more and more data clung to him as more records and photographs were found. He wore a suit that swam with images: his daughters, his round-faced wife and the long drive of a family vacation. Again, his tall frame, dark eyes and sharp face were striking to me. I felt somewhat guilty at not giving him ongoing life and stood staring at him a moment. In that moment, he surprised me: turning without instruction, he vanished.