by Don Hunter
Annabelle tried to get the reporter’s attention, but Cameron sidestepped her and went to Karlsson.
For the next day’s edition of The Tidal Times, Cameron wrote a profile of Karlsson under the heading “New Faces,” in which the new Swede talked about the fascinating life history of his great-great-uncle, which he had discovered when he unearthed a will and a pile of almost legible notes at the bottom of a chest under a heap of used chainsaw files. The will had been witnessed by “Jimmy Plummer, Chief, First Nations Lands temporarily known as Spinner’s Inlet.”
In his regular news roundup, Cameron noted that the question of the stop sign and crosswalk at the seniors complex remained unresolved due to time constraints.
Barely There
“What optional?” Samson Spinner asked.
“Clothing, it says. Clothing optional. You can wear something, or not.”
“On his beach?”
“He calls it au natural,” young Jillian Clements replied. “He has it on a sign. With drawings. He says it’s very common in Sweden.”
“Says they are very open-minded there,” her brother Alun added.
“Get in the pickup,” Samson said.
Indeed, Erik Karlsson, the new Swede and great-great-nephew of the late Svensen, had posted a sign on his property line in front of the shack he had inherited from the Swede: “THIS BEACH IS CLOTHING OPTIONAL, AS OF THIS WEEKEND” In the bottom corner—“$5 PER PERSON.” He had drawn two cartoon figures, one a man in an approximation of a Speedo, back to the viewer, the other a woman in her birthday gear, face on.
“Christ,” Samson said.
Erik emerged from his cabin, grinning.
“What y’think, Samson, eh? You gonna take a dip, without … y’know?” and he mimed getting undressed. “Just like you came into the world, so should you swim.”
Samson asked if Erik thought maybe he was in Vancouver, where “that stuff might be all right.” And after a second added, “It’s against the bylaws.”
“Show me those,” Karlsson said.
By the time Samson returned, after a fruitless search for anything resembling bylaws at the mayor’s house, a couple fresh off the ferry was parading, sans cover, along the strip of sand and pebbles. They looked to be maybe in their fifties and with shapes that suggested their occupations away from the beach were of a sedentary nature.
“Flopping around like that, can’t they see themselves?” remarked Rachel Spinner, who had followed Samson to the site. “Isn’t there a law or something?”
Beside her, RCMP Constable Ravina Sidhu said, “Hmmm, well …”
Ravina had been alerted by both Samson—who had suggested an offence against public decency was underway—and by Erik Karlsson who had claimed that his constitutional rights to have whomever he wanted to do whatever they wanted to on his beach, were under threat from Samson and “a gang,” which now included the Clements kids, keen on having a second look, councillors Finbar O’Toole, Randolph Champion, and Annabelle Bell-Atkinson, and the geeks.
Behind this lot, on the track down to Karlsson’s beach, trundled a growing trail of Inlet citizens who had somehow been alerted to the goings-on. Among these were Cameron Girard, with his digital camera gear, much of the population of the seniors centre, and the curious Aila and Ali Hanif.
“I think we would not have this kind of thing in Kabul,” Ali explained to the reporter.
“You think?” his wife asked.
The nude pair seemed to be unaware of their audience. They were involved in a number of what seemed to be dance movements, their gazes focused first on the far horizon and then to the heavens, as their bodies came gradually closer together.
“Oh, oh,” one of the geeks observed.
“Oh, boy,” Randolph chuckled.
“Would you look at that, now!” Finbar said.
“Some people!” Rachel declared, and Finbar grunted, “Right you are,” and kept staring.
“Close your eyes,” Annabelle to the geeks. “And turn away.”
The geeks obeyed, collided, and denounced one another’s clumsiness.
Annabelle turned to Ravina. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“What are you going to do? They’re guilty of indecent exposure on a public beach.”
“Private beach.” Erik Karlsson, beside her.
Ravina was busy on her tablet. “Just a sec.”
“And they’re not exposed anymore.” Erik pointed.
The couple was almost submerged, just their heads now visible. They were very close together as they bobbed along in a rhythm either of their own devising or to blend with that of the gently incoming tide.
“I think he just kissed her,” Jillian Clements said.
“Or something,” her brother suggested.
“If this catches on …” Samson warned, but to deaf ears.
Two of the seniors, Hyacinth Jakes and Willard Starling, who had recently formed an attachment, began edging toward the sand. Hyacinth pointed to Karlsson’s board and asked if there was a seniors rate.
Rachel told them to grow up and go home.
By this time Julie Clements had arrived. She pointed at the children. “Home. Now.” Then she glared at Samson and said, “Some example you are,” and departed.
Samson called after her, “What did I do?” Then, “Christ.”
Ravina looked up. “Here’s something.”
She beckoned to Erik, and when he reached her she indicated her tablet. “It’s about property boundaries and briefly it says that your property extends to the high-tide mark. The land below that belongs to the provincial government, that is, the Crown.”
She indicated the two nature lovers who were emerging from the waves.
“They are on Crown land. Your cabin is about five feet away from the high-tide mark. Nobody is going to want to go starkers in front of your place with you ogling them …”
Erik raised a hand to object. Ravina said, “Be quiet,” then, “I hope that wasn’t your intent, Mr. Karlsson, to charge people for taking their clothes off in front of your windows. There may be no law against it, but it seems a bit weird to me.”
She looked around for confirmation and received nods. She glared at Cameron Girard, who suddenly found he had no use for his fancy camera.
Rachel picked up the pile of clothes and held them out to the approaching nudists. “You’ll need these on the ferry,” she said. She showed them her wristwatch. “And hurry or you’re going to be late.”
Samson took a small pry bar from his belt. “Help you with the sign, Erik.”
Randolph on the Job
Randolph Champion was sensing changes in the air around his family.
The Toronto-born Randolph was an unrelenting supporter of the underdog, self-proclaimed member of the downtrodden, and persistent opponent of the controlling upper classes, which included just about everyone who did not share his views on paid labour—that it was an abuse of the lower classes, including himself, and thus to be avoided. (The fact that those in charge of the provincial welfare program, with its handy direct-deposit system to the Spinner’s Inlet Community Credit Union comprised a paid workforce, he considered just and fitting.)
So the revelation that his thirteen-year-old son, Michael, had taken a job stacking shelves and sweeping up at Gilbert’s Groceries after school and on weekends for five dollars an hour, was unsettling.
“Gilbert Chen is exploiting you,” Randolph warned. “That is not even minimum wage.”
“And I’m not old enough legally to be employed,” Michael said, “So that makes us about even. Anyway, Constable Sidhu knows about it and she’s not bothered. She comes in and asks me to move the freshest milk to the front from the back where Gilbert stacks it.”
The next day Randolph appeared twi
ce at busy times at the store and watched Michael work, which the boy seemed to manage without too much duress. In fact, both times Gilbert ordered the boy to take a break, go sit down for a bit, and gave him a couple of oatmeal-chocolate cookies and a bottle of juice of his choice from the cooler.
At home, Randolph told his wife, Storm, “I’m going to keep a watch on that situation.”
Their other son, Billy, was also a cause for concern. At fifteen, he had taken to that most bourgeois of activities: golf. It had started with his being shown by industrious and profit-minded Inlet youth how to earn cash by hunting for golf balls in the rough and selling them back to players. He had then exceeded the usual practice of discovering and picking up abandoned balls, by stealthily following playing groups and finding “lost” balls before their owners could, thus increasing his inventory.
“Working for a faction of elite country club members,” Randolph said. “Gin and tonics, white shoes, and tartan pants, and making serfs of innocent youth by requiring them to haul the weight of their overpriced equipment in severe heat at peasant rates …”
“We do not have a country club, Dad,” Billy replied. “It’s called Spinner’s Inlet Golf Course. There’s nothing elite about it because anybody can play if they can pay, including people like Samson Spinner, who wears shorts and runners, even with legs like his, and carries his own bag with five clubs. The only dress rules are no cut-offs and no T-shirts with rude messages. There’s just a beer-and-wine licence. I think the only gin is in the flask carried by old Dr. Timothy, who says it’s for medicinal purposes after the front nine. When I caddy I get paid twenty-five bucks for a four-hour round. I did two yesterday and got a ten-dollar tip on each.”
Randolph’s eyebrows moved. “Still,” he said.
From selling found balls and caddying, Billy had earned enough to begin playing the game, renting a set of clubs donated to the facility by Annabelle Bell-Atkinson. She had bought them originally for the geeks to share in the hopes of getting them out of the house, but those two had proven mutually and extraordinarily incompetent. They had been asked to leave and stay away from the course following a sudden mood swing and an outburst of vulgarity that had alarmed a group of women golfers and required the posting of an embarrassing apology on the public notice board.
Billy had taken to the game and was showing potential, especially with help from two regular players: Cameron Girard—a relentlessly enthusiastic if marginally skilled golfer—and former Canadian Armed Forces Corporal Harry Dyson. As a youth Harry had played in the Rocky Mountain Amateur Golf Tour, and he was finding that coaching and playing alongside Billy Champion, and seeing the results, was helping him emerge from the gloom that his Kabul experience had brought him. He was back to a respectable six-handicap, and a brighter outlook on life.
One of Cameron’s sports roundups mentioned that Billy’s potential could one day take him to the riches-loaded Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) TOUR.
Randolph grunted and said, “We’ll see about that!”
The next day he stood outside the gate to the golf course and, for reasons no one could quite discern, loudly quoted the late Groucho Marx’s famous words: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”
Michael’s announcement that Gilbert Chen had already promised him a fifty-cent-an-hour raise and could see him having management potential, seemed to be what spurred Kylie, his younger sister, into her own declaration that she was accepting a post as dishwasher, cash in hand, at the Cedars pub, where owner Matthew Blacklock had guaranteed that he would personally deliver her home safely after each shift and that it would not surprise him to see her become a full-fledged server soon.
Randolph’s habitual protest concluded with, “You’re thirteen! We’ll see about this!”
And indeed, he visited the Cedars, where Matthew showed Kylie efficiently and happily taking care of the dishes in an immaculate, air-conditioned kitchen, where most of the work was handled by a massive and silent-running dishwasher that Kylie loaded, after having given the dishes a cursory dipping in a deep sink, and started by pressing a button.
“Nothing to it, Dad,” the girl said.
“Humph,” Randolph replied. Then he told Matthew, “I will pick her up, when she finishes.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“To the victor,” Blacklock murmured.
Storm was perusing a flyer from BC Ferries when Randolph entered the room. The paper was an ad for a part-time position at the Spinner’s Inlet terminal—ticket selling and directing cars and so on. Storm, who had never held a job in their seventeen years of marriage, said, “This looks interesting. Coupla hours every other day, twenty-three bucks an hour …”
Randolph’s lips were set to say, “We’ll see about that,” but he turned away. He had learned over their time together that his wife’s parents had been something more than prescient when they chose her name.
Instead, he quietly took comfort in knowing that he had been saved from the demands of daily labour in order to be always available to deal with family issues when they arose.
Family Ties
For two decades Rachel Spinner had put great effort and endless hours into researching the history of the Spinner family. Some of it was fairly simple, starting with the family Bible begun by the original Samson Spinner and his wife, Maud.
Rachel had wondered what had happened before that pair’s arrival and their naming of the Inlet. She had learned of the vast collection of family history stored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—and that a branch existed in Surrey, where she went and learned how to access their Family Search data. From there she had moved on to the websites of Find My Past and Ancestry.com, and ordered copies of birth, marriage, and death certificates from the General Register Office in the United Kingdom.
From all of those sources she eventually had a family history going back as far as the early 1700s. This included one parish record showing that a certain family member was a “bastard child of …” and named a local farmer as the errant father, as they did in those earlier days, and a newspaper report from the mid-1880s of a distant female relative who had been fined ten shillings for the use of obscene language and lewd behaviour at the marketplace in the town of Whitehaven.
Those two she omitted (because who would be interested in such rubbish?) when proudly reproducing her findings for a feature in The Tidal Times, which she had persuaded owner-publisher-executive editor Silas Cotswold to run weekly, offering it to him at no cost. Silas had not taken much persuading. Like any owner of a print publication faced with vanishing advertising revenue in the face of the monster known as the internet, he grabbed at the chance of a freebie space-filler. Thus was born the feature “Our Families.”
Soon after its appearance, an anonymous letter to the editor noted there was a lack of families other than “the damn Spinners” in the feature, and ended with, “What about the rest of us, the ordinary workers?”
Rachel ascribed this, correctly, to the self-appointed social activist Randolph Champion, though she thought he might have a point. She announced that henceforth, she would pick a name from the Inlet and, using her substantial research skills, begin tracing that family’s history and would print the results weekly.
In fairness, because it was he who had implied that the Spinners had a monopoly, she thought she should begin with Randolph. This turned out to be less than a thundering success.
“Let me tell you right now,” Randolph said, “before you even start your probing. You need to know that despite the scurrilous reports of the day, my great-great-uncle Ned was not guilty of those fraud charges he was convicted for. It was a set-up by the Wolverhampton constabulary and the damned judge who was biased against Ned because of the number of times he had appeared in his court, so if that’s the kind of thing you’re hoping to dig up …”
>
Rachel hoped for more fertile ground with Finbar O’Toole, given his claims of greatness in his forebears.
“I could tell you many stories,” Finbar said. “Great stories—if only so many of our records had not been lost in the fire in the civil war Battle of Dublin in 1922. Stories of the real heroes of those times, heroes who will go unnamed because their names and their deeds were lost in that fire and could only be recalled in the memories of those now long dead. So you will have to go with what I have always been told of the O’Toole contributions to history.”
Since he declined to say even which side the O’Tooles had supported during that civil war, Rachel thought it best she move on.
Annabelle Bell-Atkinson preened as Rachel accepted a cup of tea and prepared for a lengthy lecture beginning with how Annabelle had overcome many (unspecified) challenges as a child to rise in academic circles and acquire three degrees, all of it due to her genetic gifts from the Atkinson line, all of whom were …
Annabelle would have pursued this thread, but was distracted by her nephews, the geeks, erupting into a raucous argument that threatened to become physical over a computer chess match and could not be stilled.
Rachel said she would return another time.
“Do the Wilsons,” Samson Spinner suggested, while Rachel frowned and fretted over Silas’s deadline for the week’s piece. “Surely it couldn’t get much simpler than them, at least judging by Lennie. And Charlie.”
Rachel thought the Wilson name was somewhat pedestrian, until she recalled that Lennie’s wife Maggie, before her marriage, had had one of those foreign-sounding monikers and it might be interesting to delve into something different.
Maggie’s pre-marriage name was Margarita Consuela Pereyra-Mendez.
“Spanish, then,” Silas said helpfully. “I speak a bit of the lingo—foreign correspondent and all that, you know.” He had once filed copy from Keflavik airport when his holiday flight was delayed by an ice storm “Let me help with this one.”