Turbulent Wake
PAUL E. HARDISTY
For my mum
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
First Snow
March 5th. On the plane, flying to London
Collapsing Infinity
March 5th. Thirty-two thousand feet
Chub Cay
March 5th. Somewhere over Greenland
Rape
March 6th. Heathrow
Love
March 7th. On the plane to Geneva
Peru
March 7th. Still on the way to Geneva
Texas
March 7th. Geneva
Yuruk
March 8th. Geneva
Helena
A Bar Called Mexico
March 10th. Geneva
War News
March 12th. Geneva
Probabilities
Elephants
A Wedding
The Gulf of Guinea
March 13th. Geneva
Before the Revolution
March 13th. Still in Geneva
The Chef
Blue Nile
March 14th. London
New Year’s Eve
March 16th. London
Time Bomb
A Day in Aden
March 16th. London
Muskoka
March 17th. London
Red Sea
March 18th. London
Kingfisher
March 21st. Calgary
All the Good Places
March 30th. Heart Mountain, Alberta
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
First Snow
The world was different then.
Looking back, the old man was no longer sure if this realisation was new, had come upon him slowly over years, or if perhaps, somehow, he’d known it back then, as a child. This lack of certainty did not change the truth of it, however. The world was entirely different now. In tone and texture, in scale and colour and voice, in the abundance of animals and birds, in the everyday behaviour of people, in the places that were once covered in trees and bushes and meadows and later transformed into houses and roads and shopping centres. Even the weather was different, back then.
It was the year before the men came and cut down all the big elms on their street. Summer had been hot, had seemed to last forever. The first frost came as a profound surprise, as if the neighbourhood had been suddenly shifted north, closer to the Arctic Circle. The boy’s father piled the brown and gold elm leaves into mountains on the front lawn. The boy loved to jump into them and roll inside the piles until he was covered, the sweet smell of the new-dead leaves strong inside him, so that the old man could smell it now, so much closer to the end than the beginning.
The boy knew it was close. Days were shorter. Three mornings in a row now he’d awoken to see frost crusting the grass, icing the naked branches of the trees. Porridge for breakfast, mittens and hats to school, steam in your breath, Christmas coming. Hockey season imminent, perhaps a new pair of skates, if he was lucky. Time thick and heavy and viscous, unwilling to be rushed, infinite. Completely trustworthy. And the boy, who had not yet learned of relativity, had no conception of time’s variant properties, its fluidity or its ultimate dependency on the observer.
And every night the boy would lie in his bed and stare at the window and the glow from the streetlight through the curtains. He would watch the slow progress of a car’s passing headlights thrown as a wedge of light angling left to right across the ceiling, and he’d hope that tomorrow would be the day.
Sometimes, lying in the darkness, unable to sleep, he’d think about his father’s gun. He’d found it in the closet in his bedroom, hidden inside a shoe box in the back, among a pile of other boxes. It was a short thing, with a barrel that spun like the ones he’d seen cops carrying on TV, and spaces for six bullets. Smith & Wesson it said on the handle. He found the bullets, too. He wasn’t sure how to work it, how to open the barrel up so you could put the bullets in. He’d tried putting them in from the front, but they didn’t fit. He knew he wasn’t supposed to play with it, that it was dangerous. He didn’t tell anyone about it, put it all back the way he found it. Except for three bullets. Those he kept. There was a whole box. No one would miss them. He’d put them into his treasure tin, hidden it away in his desk drawer.
In his head he knew how it would be. He’d wake and it would still be dark. The first thing he’d notice would be the quiet. As if someone had thrown a blanket over the city, muffling its groans, its cries and complaints. He’d jump down from his bed and run to the window, duck under the heavy curtains. His little brother would be there beside him. He’d help him up on to the ledge, so he could see out. And there it would be. A new world. Everything transformed, softened somehow, all the hard edges rounded out, corniced and bevelled, houses and cars and trees, the street and the kerbs and gutters made pure. And in the yellow cones of lamplight, thick heavy flakes streaming down and down.
The boy lay listening to his brother’s breathing, the slow, whispered rhythm drifting up from the lower bunk, and the occasional rattle of the radiator, the gurgle as the hot water flowed through the pipes. The wind in the trees outside the window. He was warm and safe and excited. Tomorrow might be the day.
March 5th. On the plane, flying to London
You never really know anyone. Especially the ones you love.
I push the stack of papers into the seatback pocket and take a deep breath of pressurised air. Seven miles below, the checkerboard prairie stretches away like a looping dream, one where you’re stuck in a place and you can’t get out, even though you know it’s a dream and if you could just wake up it would be over. Except, of course, it’s not. It’s my life, laid out before me in endless miles of iced-over prairie, a recurring pattern of abandoned hope and gutted wilderness that unspools at the terminal edge of a horizon that once held so much promise. The brother I didn’t get a chance to know. The mother who disappeared. The father who pushed me away. The wife who got sick of me and found someone else. And now, apparently, the uncle I never even knew I had.
If family defines you, then I am perilously fucking close to indeterminate.
And this is how he decides to tell me.
I went my whole life thinking that I had my old man pegged. Sure, he’d travelled some, even taken me with him a few times when I was younger, when my mother was still around. But my strongest memories are of him arriving and leaving, going away for hours at a time, returning red-faced and covered in sweat, and then for days and weeks for work, always on his way to the airport or coming back from it. Occasionally, he’d bring me something home: a stuffed baby alligator the time he went to Louisiana; a tiny woven prayer mat from Jordan (for a six-year old?); a Calgary Flames hockey jersey from Canada (now, that was cool). Most of the time, though, he was just absent, even when he was home. Usually, it was me and Mum and my brother, and then later just me and Mum, in whatever place he’d dragged us all to at the time. Now, it’s just me.
Everything about my old man was from another time. The clothes he wore. The way he spoke and acted around other people. The stories he told. I mean, what kid who has grown up with access to the internet wants to hear stories about steam trains and writing love letters (the old-fashioned kind with paper and pen and envelopes and stamps) and getting places by ship, making calls from phone boxes and using fax machines and typewriters and all that old museum stuff. I can remember now, looking back, just tuning out when he started one of his stories. Not that he did it that often; just every once in a while. Usually when he’d had a couple of whiskies after dinner – when we still sat down, the four of us, and ate dinner as a family – he’d s
tart into one. And then, well, I’d just sit there watching his mouth move and the way his neck would tense up as he spoke and that stupid way he’d furl his brow for emphasis, and I never heard a word. Now, I wish I’d listened.
No wonder he left all this shit behind.
The funeral was a pretty lame affair. Not many people showed up. A couple of his old friends came, guys with old names like Robert and Paul and Tobias, looking like they were planning to follow him in the not-too-distant future, with their thinning grey hair and grey beards and those watery, faraway eyes that weep regret. Makes you wonder. A whole life lived, and I bet not even those old guys with their burst-blood-vessel faces and dodgy, shuffling gaits had the slightest idea who he really was, what was really going on inside that head. I mean, I as sure as shit never did. And I know my mother never did either.
The funeral home did a crap job. I regret doing it that way, now. The pastor or whatever he was started out calling him Walter. Did it three times, Walter this and Walter survived by such and such. The prick didn’t see me waving at him till he’d blown it three times, me sitting there in the front row, mouthing Warren. Warren, for fuck’s sake. It wasn’t how he would have wanted it, I know. Mostly because he wouldn’t have wanted anything. ‘Just throw me over the side so the sharks can get me’, I remember him saying once, somewhere – was it on that last sailing trip we all took together, me, my brother Rhys, Mum and Dad, in the Greek Islands? I must have been eight, seven maybe. I still have vivid memories of some of it: the dolphins riding our bow wave that time, the way they looked up at me with those dark, knowing eyes; the view from the highest point on one of the islands – I can’t remember the name of the place now – looking out across the sea and all those pretty white buildings along the shore; rowing back to the boat one night in the dinghy, Dad at the oars, Mum in the bow laughing at something he’d said, the lights from the village dancing on the dark water all around us like stars.
She was beautiful, my mother. Everyone said so. I don’t have many photographs of her, or of him for that matter. In one of the few that have somehow survived, they are sitting under an old stone archway. The sea is faded blue behind them. Mum is in a short skirt. Her long legs are folded elegantly to one side, her honey and rosewood hair blows around her face. She is smiling. She had great teeth, a big mouth, high cheekbones, a ski-jump nose that was a little too big for anyone to call her looks perfect, but she was beautiful in a strong-looking kind of way – robust and healthy and symmetrical with lovely blue eyes. In contrast, he looks flawed. A nose broken one too many times. An inverted arch of teeth that left dark gaps on each flank of his rarely seen smile (other than his two front slabs and molars, his top adult teeth never came in, so the small baby teeth were still there). He is unshaven, his hair longish, sea-and-sun waved, unruly. Dad is holding Mum’s hand. In that moment, they look happy. He was never in her league, and I know for a fact that he knew it, too. He told me once, I can’t remember when or where. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘always marry up in the gene pool. I sure did.’
He would have hated it, today, the funeral. I don’t know why I did it. Seemed right at the time – to mark his passing somehow. I’ve always hated that use of the word: passing. Just call it what it is. Death. The End. And we never talked about it, of course, at the end. Not like we didn’t have the time. I went to see him, of course – more than once – but he didn’t want me there, made that very plain. ‘Don’t you have something better to do?’ he said to me. I mean, what does a guy say to that? Fact was, I did have better things to do. So in the end you get what you get, Dad. Not like it makes any difference. Not one bit.
And I suppose it makes finding all this stuff that much more of a mystery. I hadn’t been inside the place for ages, not since the year I moved to London, the year I met Maria and everything was so great – before it all started to go to shit. But that’s another story. From the outside, my dad’s place looked much the same, the caragana hedge out front that much taller, the paint on the shiplap siding peeling, the blue spruce we planted that spring when I was a kid, huge now, towering. I’d only gone to have a quick look, figure out what it would take to have someone come in and clean the place out, so I could put it on the market. I was only in town for a couple of days. I had to organise the funeral, sort out stuff with the lawyers, and then get back to London for an important work meeting. I knew the place would be a mess, but I was totally unprepared for what I found.
The first thing I noticed was the smell. How can I describe it? Not unpleasant, exactly. There wasn’t food rotting in the sink or a dead cat in the bathtub or anything. It was complex. Old books. Smoke from his wood-burning stove. The varnish he used on his pine floors. Tobacco and whisky and stale sweat from the dozens of old pairs of running shoes piled in the front entranceway. Him. Hints of what had killed him.
The place was a museum. That’s what it was. His own museum. Stacks of books everywhere, old furniture, junk from his travels – carved stuff from Africa and the Middle East, ceremonial masks on the walls, carpets on the floors, pictures his grandfather had painted, a few bad watercolours he’d done himself. The basement was full of old junk – old-style skis and boots, hiking gear, ice axes and pitons, three or four old bicycles, a bench full of tools, everything covered in rust and dust. There were traces of Mum there, too: some of her old clothes in the laundry-room closet that he’d never bothered to clean out, a half-used bottle of her perfume under the downstairs sink, an old cookbook layered in dust. Relics. Hints. Archaeology.
He never told me what he wanted done with all of it. The will left me the house. I guess that meant everything inside it, too.
I was about to leave when I decided to check upstairs. An unmade bed, his tatty, ancient clothes in the closet. The room he used as a study was up there, too. And that’s where I found them, in the back of the room, on the lower shelves, almost lost in a lifetime of dust-covered books and ledgers and files: thirty-seven black bound journals. No markings, nothing to indicate what they contained. And set on top of the journals, a stack of unbound papers held together with a single elastic band. I grabbed the papers – I’m not sure why, perhaps because they were the only things in the room not buried under half an inch of fine grey powder – and stuffed them in my bag along with a few old photos I found of my mother and my brother. There were even a couple of me there, propped up in old frames on the desk, a forgotten past staring out at me like a reminder of who I might have been, of who he wanted me to be.
And now I’m sitting on the plane on the way home. Home? Back to London, anyway – and I’m going through that stack of papers. And who would ever have believed it? My old man – the crusty old engineer with the arthritic knees and the dodgy shoulder, whose bookshelves were always filled with awesome stuff like Geomorphology and Sedimentary Geology and Finite Element Analysis for Structures (all of it headed for the bin – no one wants that old crap), whose favourite activities until his joints gave out were long-distance running and swimming – was a wannabe author. Yep. A goddamned writer.
I mean, I’m laughing here. If you’d come up to me and told me my old man had been a make-up artist, or a closet thespian or even a politician, I couldn’t have been more surprised. He was the least artistic person I ever knew. The least expressive. The least, well, sensitive. All that stuff. I mean, after Mum died and he decided to send me off to boarding school in England, he drove me to the airport. He got me checked in and we walked to the security screening together, me with my carry-on bag and all my fears, standing there in that big echo chamber. And when they called my flight, he just shook my hand and said, ‘Good luck, son’. And that was it. No hug, no last words of advice. Nothing a normal person might expect a father to say to his twelve-year-old son who is about to travel to a new school in a new country. Sure, I’d travelled. I was an international kid – third-culture kid they call us – but this was something different. There was no one I knew waiting for me at the other end. Just the lady from the school who was supposed to
meet me at Heathrow. She would be holding up a sign for me when I exited Terminal 4.
So, I went. After security, I found a place where I could look back and see him standing there. I waved and tried to smile, as much for him as for me – I knew the strain he’d been under. I swear he was looking right at me, staring with that stupid, sag-faced expression of his. I waited, thinking that maybe he hadn’t seen me, after all. I waved again, but you know, he never waved back. And so yeah, I’m laughing. Because now I’m imagining him sitting somewhere in front of his typewriter, or just long-handing it in one of those dozens of journals that fill the lower shelves of his study, cranking out all of these stories, and yet that one thing, just waving to me that day at the airport, he couldn’t do.
I leaf through the papers. The first story, the one I just read, is handwritten on yellow lined foolscap, dated the day before he died. You can see the tremors that were shaking his body apart in every fractured vowel, each mutilated consonant. I thumb the corner of the next one. He has scrawled the title, ‘COLLAPSING INFINITY’, in capital letters across the top of the page so that the curved spine of the C inks the left-hand edge of the foolscap, and the face, chest and feet of the terminal Y perch on the cliffside and stare out into the abyss. He must have written them both in hospital, but I have no idea how they got into the manuscript. They are at the top of the pile, a stack of unbound A4 papers about the thickness of a Petit Larousse dictionary. I flip through the whole thing, count twenty-five stories in all. The earliest is dated May 1990. It’s called ‘Chub Cay’. I was ten months old when he wrote it. We were living in Calgary at the time. It looks as if it was typed out on one of those old manual typewriters where you fed the paper into a roller and the key stroke would send a hammer on to a carbon ribbon set against the paper. Slow and noisy. I can remember the sound coming from his office when I was small. Always just figured he was working. I would never have dreamed that he was writing this stuff.
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