by Amy Spurway
Surprise, sur-fucking-prise. My mother drinks. She’s not the falling down wreck-yer-life kinda drunk, although she can get a little mean on a Saturday night if she gets off the gin and on to the white wine. I’m not even sure she’s what you’d call an alcoholic, especially around here. Not like her old man. Black Bernie Fortune was a notorious drunk, and Mama will be the first one to tell you that he’s the reason she picked up a bottle in the first place. He threatened to beat her if he ever caught her drinking, and even in her youth, nothing flipped Effie Fortune’s contrarian switch quicker than hypocritical authority. So when he said, “Stay away from the bottle,” Effie went straight to the nearest bootlegger. As promised, the Old Man beat the piss out of her, and she took it with pride. She made a point of holding herself and her liquor in a way Black Bernie never could. Still, she can’t sleep without a few drinks, she’s unfit to be behind the wheel of a car more nights of the week than not, and she’s burned a few bridges when she was in her cups. Figuratively speaking, of course.
Aunt Janice was the only one in our family who ever literally burned a bridge. But that’s another story.
“What?” Mama says when I give her and the flask the side eye. “Gin’s medicinal. No different from the dope you and Willy Gimp were smoking down at The Wharf.”
And before I can stammer out a half-assed denial of what Mama somehow knew, she’s headed down to the kitchen. There I find her, muttering an exasperated string of “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” into the depths of her tea kettle. It has been sitting on the back burner, steeping and simmering for hours. That’s the secret to Effie Fortune’s Stove Top Sludge. The generous splash of milk and four spoons of sugar that leave a syrup at the bottom of the cup are just fancy flourishes. The essence of the brew lies in keeping the kettle hot all day long, and tossing in a new bag with the old every time more water is added. But you can only boil the bejesus out of old tea bags so many times before one of them ruptures. So there’s Mama, cursing at the wayward clumps of tea leaves sullying her kettle.
“Opportunity for an upsell. A product add-on. Effie Fortune’s Stove Top Sludge Tincture, now with Fortune-Telling Tea Leaves.”
“Shush now, don’t be talking,” she says. “Old Black Agnes used to read the leaves. That’s where all the troubles started.”
Mama dumps the kettle contents into the sink and rinses it down the drain with a blast from the tap. But not before making a quick study of the remnants of the busted tea bag in the metal basin. I pretend I don’t see her stare a second too long and purse her lips. And Mama acts like it never happened.
“Well, c’mon then, if that’s what you’re wearing.”
[…]
The Middle Rear Road sits halfway between the picturesque village of Loch Bhreagh — a quaint little tourist trap on the other side of Ceilidh Mountain — and Town. Town is what us hicks from the sticks call the Northside and The Mines, and it is actually the amalgamation of a couple of OxyContin-ridden, call-centre-infested, coal-stripped craters that erupted in the armpit of the Island’s industrial end. It’s where both my parents were born and raised and most of their people still live. My doctor’s appointment is a good shot deeper into the heart of Industrial Cape Breton, which is out in Town, Town. When you say it twice, everybody knows you’re referring to our only half-assed crack at a city. A thirty thousand–person sputtering economic engine, with the beautiful BayFlower Mall, more cheap chain coffee shops than you can shake a stick at, and of course, the Regional Hospital. The Mines, the Northside, and the city itself all used to be boomtowns in their own right, back in the days of coal and steel. Nothing but busted now.
Mama curses under her breath every time Bessie’s tires plunk through another pothole on the crumbling kilometres of the Middle Rear Road, but she still laughs about the time she filled those holes with clumps of forget-me-nots that she dug up from the ditch at the bottom of our driveway. This was her way of protesting the negligence of the powers-that-be on the Mainland, who forget that rural Cape Breton even exists when it comes time to spend taxpayers’ dollars. When she was done, every hole had thick clusters of delicate, tenacious blue flowers filling the dangerous gaps in the collapsing pavement. A lovely way to make a point. Then old Mary Jessie MacRitchie ditched her truck swerving to avoid a pile of forget-me-nots, which she mistook for a dog. Mama doesn’t laugh at that part of the story.
“Mary Jessie was damn near ninety,” Mama snorts. “Shouldn’t have been driving in the first place.”
She cranks up whatever whiny old country singer she’s got jammed in the cassette deck as we turn onto the highway that will eventually lead to some semblance of civilization, and I close my eyes in a vain attempt to curtail a fresh round of pounding head and screwy vision. I can’t stomach the world as it rushes by the car window now, even if it is only swaths of stifled trees and clearings dotted with the derelict remnants of the Island’s assorted failures. A shuttered gas station here. A rundown Pott’s Coffee Shop there. The sad scrap of land that sits at the turnoff to the Halfway Road in The Mines, where Mama’s family’s shack once stood.
My uncle Gord sold the land when Black Bernie died. Everyone in the family was too broke to chip in on the burial, so Gord used most of the money from the property sale to pay for Black Bernie’s velveteen-lined casket, a grand Catholic wake and funeral, and a gleaming headstone engraved with the words “Beloved Father.” Mama was wild. Said they should have just pitched the old bastard’s corpse in the ocean and let the eels and sharks dispose of him for free. Gord sold the land to my father’s family, the Spensers, who planned to develop it as a gravel pit. The Spensers got the land for a song because nobody else in Town would dare buy it. Not after all that had happened there. Not with the earth still scarred from the night my great-grandmother Black Agnes went mad and burned her house and most of her family to the ground on the orders of a secret message she read in a tree’s bark. Not with the whispers of how Black Agnes and all her descendants were cursed by the evil eye of some Lebanese gypsies from up Ferris Hill because she was stealing their tea leaf–reading business.
The Spenser gravel pit never panned out, so they sold it to their buddies in the municipality for twice what they paid for it, making out like the well-heeled bandits they were. The bandits they still are, no doubt. The only thing that stands on that land now is a cracked wooden billboard with peeling paint that used to read, Welcome to The Mines. Rich in Coal and Hospitality. Those things are long gone now, too.
Still, as we drive by the site of the Fortune’s familial pain and undoing, Mama grumbles, “Never should’ve let Gordie sell that land. They ain’t making any more.”
“They should at least fix the sign,” I say. “Maybe to say, Welcome to The Mines. Rich in Drunks, Drugs, and Pogey Scams.”
“Watch it, missy,” Mama growls. “There, but for the grace of dumb luck, go you.”
Dumb luck? Did my mother not get the memo about her whole damn family, us Poor Unfortunate Fortunes? Her grandmother Black Agnes got us all hexed in an occult turf war. Mama’s father, Black Bernie, was the only one who survived the fire his mother set in her madness, and that’s only because he was given away to the nearest neighbours when he was a baby. Neighbours who, by the way, all perished in a mysterious house fire of their own when Black Bernie was a teenager, just as he turned old enough to take a job in the mines and inherit the land his birth family left him. Mama’s got eleven siblings, and those who are still alive are the epitome of ruin — largely due to some variation of the aforementioned drunks, drugs, and pogey scams. I’m thirty-eight years old, all of my cousins are already dead, and I’ve got inoperable brain tumours. Dumb luck, my arse.
[…]
My doctor’s appointment goes something like this: Blah blah blah, three tumours. Tricky type. Trickier locations. Operation, impossible. One step at a time. Blah blah blah, biopsy for cancer. Hole in your skull. Hollow needles in your brain. But don’t worry, we have robots. Blah blah blah, here’s a booklet. And a drawi
ng. Big words. Aren’t you warm in that plaid shirt?
Except imagine all that delivered in a crisp, soothing, smart-sounding Indian accent. And in full, coherent sentences. I don’t know what those coherent sentences actually were because I spaced out for most of the appointment. I smiled. I nodded. I said, “Okay,” even though it wasn’t. “Yes, I understand,” even though I didn’t. And “Thank you, Dr. Divyaratna” even though I wanted to tell her to shut up. Mama paid better attention, I hope.
On the drive home, Mama tries to talk to me. I try to answer, but I can’t stop staring at the handy little diagram Dr. Divyaratna drew for me. The type of tumour is written in all caps at the top of the sheet, yelling “ASTROCYTOMA.” There’s a sketch of a brain that looks more like a sad, lopsided cloud. Crooked arrows label the frontal, parietal, and occipital lobes, where the three tumours live. The tumours themselves are represented by smudged-ink stars. By the time we hit the stretch of highway where the nearby Chickenshit family farm perfumes the air, I manage to peel my eyes away from the paper, but end up staring out the window through the same numb zombie eyes. I can’t even bring myself to bitch about the stench for fear it will come out sounding like a sob.
I get Mama to drop me off at The Wharf, again, which is stupid because the August afternoon sun is now blazing. I am depressed and hungry. And dressed like a skater grunge lumberjack. Mama zips away, already late for her shift at the Greeting Gale. There is no one around. The water is more agitated than it was this morning, little whitecaps whipped up by the warm wind. The fractured light glinting and bouncing off the choppy surface is almost too much for my eyes. I close them, and smell roses, unsure if the scent is brought to me on the breeze from a nearby bush, or something dredged up by the astrocytoma tendrils that tickle my sensory cortex in mildly amusing ways. Frankly, I’d rather the smell of rotting seaweed and burning doobies. The smell of roses makes me nauseous. Dave the Douchebag ruined roses for me by having a dozen sent to my office every Monday morning for the twelve months we were engaged because “ladies deserve roses.” Apparently I wasn’t a lady for the six years before that, during the on-again-off-again game of My Fair Lady he called our “courtship.” And I’m sure as hell not one now.
There’s no need of me sitting here, baking in the heat like this. I should go back to the house, eat a cheese sandwich, take the laundry off the line, and curl up in bed. Start rehearsing for my future as a tumour-plagued shut-in. Instead, my jaw clenches, my eyes narrow, my spine is tugged up by an invisible thread of defiance. Or bravado. Or insanity. Or all three twisted together into something thicker than thread. A rope, hauling me upright.
“Fuck it. I’m going in,” I say out loud, to the water, to make it more real.
Next thing I know, my clothes are in a haphazard heap. I’m standing buck naked on the wharf, my pasty flesh bathed in the warm rays of my noonday lunacy. Then, I’m in a quick sprint toward the end of the long cement path, with no space for second thoughts. There’s no chance to chicken out when you’re charging to the edge of that concrete cliff and catapulting yourself into the air for the six-foot drop. A moment of terrifying freedom. No ground beneath my feet. Nothing holding me, and nothing for me to hold onto. Utter uncertainty. The closest I’ll ever come to flying.
The chilly, choppy water swallows me whole. A fast rush of bubbles flutters up and over my body. Minnows zip through the translucent blue-green, brackish fluidity that surrounds me. Eel grass brushes my toes as I reach the low point of the plunge. Then, a faint stinging sensation as jellyfish tentacles graze my arse on the way up. I bob to the surface. My head breaks the water’s tension and the sun burns my salted eyes. A split second of feeling faintly reborn is followed by a gasp of terror. Do I still know how to swim? Should have thought about that before I jumped. Should have checked for jellyfish. It is August, after all.
Not even halfway to shore, I’m breathless. Back when I was young and healthy, and when this water was a part of me, I could swim this distance with two arms tied behind my back. The good news is, I make it to where my feet can touch bottom. The bad news is, a cop car just rolled up. I’m thrown into the clutches of another memory. The time Char nearly drowned here.
On Labour Day weekend, just before the start of grade eleven, there was a massive party at The Wharf. The kind where kids from Loch Bhreagh, Town, and even Town, Town came out to get wrecked and camp on the beach. Unsurprisingly, somebody called the cops. Probably Peggy’s best friend, Shirl Short, because that’s what Shirl Short does best. Calls the cops and wrecks the fun every time she smells “the dope.” The cop car rolled up just after midnight. Sneaky bastards coasted down the road with the lights off until they were right at the edge of the crowd, then flipped on the red and blues. Two of them jumped out with their flashlights to nab anyone too trashed to bolt. Those of us who’d spent a few years drinking in the woods were pretty good at making cop escapes. Some of us had even become very skilled at jumping into various bodies of shallow-ish water to hide when parties got busted.
Me, Char, and Shirl Short’s beloved saint of a nephew, Duke, were standing at the far edge of the wharf, smoking a joint and staring at the stars when flashing lights and warning bellows of “Pigs! Run!” erupted from the shore. Char calmly turned around and jumped off the wharf, into the blackness below. Unbeknownst to me, not only was she on a hit of Paco Landry’s bathtub acid, but she also had thirty squares of it in her pocket. She was selling it for Paco Landry at the party because, fully beknownst to everyone, Char was sleeping with Paco Landry. Within seconds, she started splashing and yelling because she was tripping hard, and sinking fast. Char could barely swim at the best of times, and the knee-high Dr. Martens and hoodie she wore didn’t help.
I waited for Duke to jump in after her, since he was close to sober. And a provincial swim team champ. And a lifeguard. And also sleeping with Char. But the smarmy little prick didn’t. Instead, he mumbled, “Shitty time if she drowns,” before he jogged down the wharf and off into the woods. So into the water I went, getting close enough for Char to hear me, but not so close that she could pull me under with her panic. I talked her into treading water, then helped her doggie paddle over to the rusted iron ladder on the side of the wharf. Even the darkness, the chaos, the few sips of lemon gin, and the solid hit of THC were no match for what my body knew about navigating these waters. We clung to the ladder until we heard somebody yell, “All clear. Party on!”
The ladder is not there anymore. If it was, I’d be on the by wharf now, putting my clothes back on and wringing out my hair. Instead, I’m wading in increasingly shallow water, dragging my bare, jellyfish-stung ass to shore. Once there, I’ll have to scoot over a patch of rocky beach, climb a little grassy hill, and walk another dozen metres on the wharf to where my clothes lie in a rumpled heap. In full view of the cop sitting in the squad car that’s now parked a few metres in front of me. I should make some sort of attempt to cover myself. Feign a modicum of modesty, because Mama will kill me if word gets around that I was skinny dipping down at The Wharf, strutting my naked, shameless stuff in broad daylight when the cops showed up.
But what would Stacey Fortune do? She’d take a deep breath, smile wide, and revel in the power of her brazen big-city cougar glory. Give the poor small-town clown a story to remember. This is a moment to strut naked and shameless, while I still can. I throw my shoulders back, stick my B-cup boobs out, and give my saltwater-soaked hair a casual flip as I keep moving. Calm, cool, collected.
The officer gets out of his car and saunters toward me. I feel a flicker of pride when I see my reflection in the mirror of his sunglasses as he approaches the water’s edge. Until a slow smile of recognition creeps across his mug, and he takes off the sunglasses, revealing just how hard he’s leering at my tits.
“Crow Fortune?” Despite the intonation, it is not a question. He knows it’s me. Constable Duke the Puke Clarke grins with a phoney incredulousness. “Nice to see ya. Again.” His voice lingers too long on the word again, ju
st as his eyes linger too long on my body. None too subtle reminders that he has seen this all before. Me. Naked.
I cross my arms over my chest, and let out a shiver. As if a chill from the summer breeze is the reason I’m suddenly trying to cover up. “Hey, grab my clothes off the wharf and toss them down, would ya?”
“Nah, don’t think so.”
Gone are the proud Fuck It attitude and Stacey Fortune sexy cougar swagger I had donned only moments ago. Utterly swept away by the surging memory of how this slut-shaming, reputation-wrecking arsehole helped drive me out of this place over twenty years ago. How Crow Fortune’s story went from bad to worse at the tail end of high school, all because of one naked night with Duke the Puke.
A dangerous amount of Jack Daniel’s at the post-prom bash at Loch Bhreagh River bridge seemed like a reasonable way to ease the despair of having been dumped by Weasel Tobin a week before prom. Who among us would not — under such circumstances — have felt flattered when the much-adored high school star athlete extended an invitation to “listen to some music” in his car?
I woke up in Duke’s car the morning after the prom with a surprisingly clear recollection of what had happened during the night. We smoked cigarettes and listened to shitty gangsta rap. He complained about his girlfriend Angie, and how she was so jealous. He told me I had the cutest, perkiest little tits he’d ever seen, and wanted to get a closer look. Piece by piece, compliment by compliment, my clothes came off. I ignored the fact that I found him kind of revolting. That his skin was too greasy, his eyes too close together, his hands too rough and too pushy. I ignored the fact that I had heard he screwed Char and Allie and a couple of the metalhead skid girls, and that Angie once ripped a chunk of hair out of another chick’s scalp in a fight. I ignored the fact that we didn’t have a condom and that the aim of his thrusts was one orifice off more often than not. He ignored me when I said ow, stop, and please.