I’ve only read the one so far, but they seem to cover his whole life. And as far as I can tell, he never told anyone. If I hadn’t changed my mind and looked around his study, it would have all been chucked out. It would have all disappeared into a landfill somewhere, or been recycled into newsprint pulp, or incinerated, who knows.
It pisses me off that he didn’t tell me about it. The last time I saw him he was lucid enough. He even said that it would be the last time. Said it with a smile. The bastard knew he was going to die. And you know, standing there, looking down at him, knowing it was going to be the last time, I felt ashamed for him. Ashamed for his weakness, ashamed that he was so frail, so powerless. When I was a boy, I used to think he was the biggest, strongest man in the world. There was nothing he couldn’t do. Even in his fifties he was still fit and active. He ran a marathon at fifty-four – did it in just over three hours. And then in the last couple of years he went downhill really fast. Just kind of got old one day. It must have killed him being there in that place, that way, the tubes in his nose and that stupid hospital gown they made him wear – the kind that opens in the back – and the way his skin looked so winter shut-in pale. Christ, when it’s my time, put a gun to my head. I’m still surprised he didn’t ask me to end it for him, just pull me close and whisper into my ear, ‘Just shut the door and put a pillow over my face, son. You owe me at least that.’
But I don’t owe you a thing, Dad. Not a goddamned thing.
What I don’t understand is this: why spend all those hours and days and years pouring out all this stuff, and then when you’re down to your last chance to connect, the one person on the planet who still gives even a partial shit, who you might think still holds a shred of love for you, you just send him packing out into the sleet, without telling him about it? He wasn’t stupid, my old man. Not by a long shot. Fucking smart, actually. With numbers and engineering and the like. Not so smart about people, though. And yet he took the time, over a forty-year period, to write all of this. He must have known that I had so many questions. About my mother, about what happened between them, about why he sent me away after she was gone. About my brother. And that last time, knowing it was all here in this stack of papers, in all those journals (I will call the contractor as soon as I land and make sure he saves the journals, and a couple of the masks and paintings) – that was his opportunity to make it, somehow, better. Not good. But better. An explanation. And yet he chose to look at me with those eyes, those still-piercing, desert-landscape eyes of his, and tell me to get out. Better things to do. Surely.
And so, yeah, you never really know anyone. I mean, they can sit there and look you in the eye and tell you how they feel, about what moves them, about what they hate. They might even, if you’re lucky, tell you that they love you. But it’s nothing. A breath, is all. Just a breath. Hell, most people don’t even know themselves, couldn’t describe what they were really about if they wanted to. And besides, even if you could, who wants ever to be that vulnerable, that naked? Everyone hedges. Maybe that’s what he was after. Maybe he was just trying to figure himself out, understand why he did some of the things he did, why some of what happened in his life went the way it did. I hope he got what he wanted from it. I really do. Although I never really knew him, I would like to think that at the end he came a little closer to knowing himself. We should all be so lucky.
Collapsing Infinity
He opens his eyes and looks out at the snow-covered parkway and across the steaming white rooftops, towards the dim memory of the mountains. A breakfast – cold porridge, a plastic bowl of gaily coloured fruit salad, slightly burned toast – sits on the bed tray before him, ignored. Overnight, snow had drifted up and swallowed the cars that had been abandoned the night before. He’d lain awake and watched their owners, one after the other, stall on the hill, trying for a while to free themselves as the snow piled higher around them, and then finally giving up, trudging towards the lights of the hospital. Now, a lone plough, its orange light flashing in the pre-dawn grey, fights against the burial, its big V-blade sending twin streams of road snow curling away, like surf breaking on a West African beach long ago.
‘How are we this morning, Mister Scofield?’ It’s the nurse, the pretty one with the freckles and the face of a ten-year-old, open and innocent, the skin so smooth and supple, her bottom lip in a pout. He notices that she has applied some balm or gloss that makes her lips look wet. Something stirs deep inside of him, shivers like an echo for a moment, retreats. She reaches under him and plumps his pillow, then winds up his bed a bit, so he can look outside without straining. She knows that’s what he likes to do, does all day, every day: stares out of the window across the winter city and the foothills that he can sometimes see in the distance if the day is cold and the cloud has moved off. Never the television. They must think he is crazy, all of them, with their drapes closed against the day and screens flickering the remaining hours away in front of their faces.
‘Did you sleep well?’ she asks.
He nods, doesn’t smile. He has never been big on smiling. Perhaps it was because he’d never had his teeth fixed to make them look straight and white. They were good teeth, had outlasted other parts of the machinery – no decay, strong, did their job. It hadn’t been until later in life, after he’d married again and divorced, that he’d even realised they were an issue for others. He’d never smiled much before, anyway. He’d always wanted to be taken seriously, to be serious. Smiling wasn’t serious.
‘No breakfast again?’ says the nurse, checking his IV.
He shakes his head. ‘No, thank you.’
‘The doctor says you must eat.’
He pushes the tray away. This was not how he’d imagined it would be, not how he’d ever wanted it. How did it happen? Your life unfolded, you made decisions or didn’t, things happened and didn’t, and what you thought was an ocean stretched out before you turned out to be only a teardrop.
‘I want you to help me,’ he says to the nurse.
She smiles at him. Her teeth are even and white, lovely. For a moment he imagines that she was the girl who’d married his son, had borne his grandsons.
‘Of course, what can I do?’ she says.
He pointed to the IV line. ‘Morphine.’
She checks the line again, his chart. ‘You can dose yourself, as you like.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I want more.’ He is conscious of his own voice, cracked and dry and old. ‘A lot more.’ He looks straight into her clear, pale eyes. What beautiful children she would have made. He wonders if she knows yet that nothing else matters.
She stands a moment looking down at him. ‘You know I can’t do that, Mister Scofield.’
‘Why not? I’ll never tell.’ He curls the corner of his lip.
She doesn’t flinch. ‘If you are in pain, I will speak to the doctor about changing your dosage.’
He shakes his head. ‘I like the pain.’
She doesn’t understand, he knows. How can she? She still sees time as an ocean, can’t fathom this most cruel of illusions. Maybe that’s not so bad either, he thinks. Regardless, we’re looking back at each other from different shores of this same ocean. The only difference is that I can see you, but you can’t see me. Time has accelerated for me, and passes still so slowly for you. Relativity applies. My only language now is the handful of events that I can recall, that stand out among the thousands of hours and days passed undifferentiated in offices and schoolrooms and bedrooms. Necessary, perhaps, but now I regret each of those wasted days.
But these two dozen or so times of my life, he thinks, these might be worth telling, remembering. The problem is I have no one to tell them to. No one left. Perhaps that, in itself, is one of the stories: how I came to be alone. And he wonders if these few moments are not shared, not somehow transcribed, will it be as if they had never occurred at all, and would it matter? He wonders if she would want to listen to his stories, those that might provide her with some glimpse of how to navigate the c
ollapsing infinity between them.
The nurse is standing there, looking at him while he is thinking this. ‘Do you want me to get the doctor?’ she asks.
He shakes his head slowly. ‘The doctor can’t help me,’ he says. ‘But you can.’
March 5th. Thirty-two thousand feet
It’s my second trip back to London from Calgary in as many weeks. Last week, he was still alive. Now he isn’t.
Both times, it was Dad’s lawyer, an old friend of his, who contacted me. You better come out here, he said, if you want to see him. He doesn’t have long. And then: there is the matter of the will, the house. You should be here in person.
Robertson isn’t happy about all the extra time off I’ve had to take. It’s busy right now at work, some big deals we are working on. Rachel, my daughter, isn’t happy either. She makes that very clear now, every time I see her. Last month on our weekend together I took her to the Imperial War Museum. She hated it. Complained every step of the way. Finally, I gave up. We walked out into the rain and took the Tube back to my flat, where she spent the rest of the day messaging her friends until it was time for me to take her back to her mother’s.
Maria is never happy. I’ve reconciled myself to that now. It started years ago, and just deepened. Looking back, I knew it was happening, and for a long time, I tried to make her happy, to conform to her expectations. It took years, but when I finally realised what she actually wanted, I gave up. It’s been worse since we split, somehow. Angrier, more specific.
Does someone always have to lose?
I try to stretch my back, push my legs out, but the aluminium frame of the seat in front digs into my shins. Twisting on to one side helps a bit, but the pain in my lower back won’t abate. I’ve gotten soft. I would never admit it to anyone, but I know it’s the truth. My core is weak. Fat has settled around my waist. All this time in aeroplanes and cars and offices has made me soft. Everything now seems an exercise in control – hold back my emotions, rein in my temper, restrain the physical side of myself, that part of me that always felt the most natural, the most real. Working with my hands. Fighting. Riding fast. Really fast.
I try to get to the dojo or out for a run whenever I can, but there always seems to be a reason not to go now. Weakness breeds weakness. I am a shadow. Unsexed.
And though I know there are no answers there, I keep reading.
Chub Cay
The plane banked low over the water. The boy could see the white arc of the beach and the green of the palms and, further out, the many different colours and patterns of the sea. It was his first time in a small plane and he clutched the arm of his seat hard, his face pressed up against the window. The plane righted and he could hear the sound of the engines change, see the flap along the back edge of the wing starting to come down and feel the hole in his stomach as the plane started to lose altitude. They were coming in to land.
The boy looked through to the cockpit and watched the pilots. He liked the way they reached up to the overhead panel to work the switches, the way they flew the plane with small movements of the wheel and the throttle levers. He liked the light-green headphones they wore, the way they spoke calmly into their headset microphones as they guided the plane down. Outside, the island was gone and there was only the deep-blue colour of the sea and the puffy white clouds in the distance and the line where the sky met the sea. Soon they were low enough that he could make out individual waves on the surface of the sea, the little white crests where they curled over and the dark furrows between them. And then the sky-coloured shallow water appeared beneath them, and it was so clear the boy could see down through to the sandy bottom and the darker patches scattered there, the brown of rocks or perhaps the corals that he had read about and looked at pictures of, but never seen. And then quickly the shallows were gone and there was a white beach and a flash of green and then the rocky grey of the centre of the island rushing up towards them.
The plane landed with a thump and rolled to a stop.
The boy looked over at his mother. Her hair was up in a colourful scarf, her eyes hidden behind a pair of oversized sunglasses. She was wearing a short dress made of some light material that left her arms and her legs bare. He thought she looked cold. But he could tell that she was happy and excited. They had arrived. They were in what she called one of their ‘times of feast’. To him, these times meant presents at Christmas and on birthdays, parties, holidays in warm places. But he knew they meant other things to his mother.
The chief pilot, the one with four yellow stripes on his epaulettes, unclipped his seat belt, got out of his seat and walked back into the cabin. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt with a pair of wings sewn above the left pocket and green-tinted sunglasses. He looked very young for a pilot, the boy thought, much younger than the ones he’d seen flying the jets that took off and landed at the big airports.
‘Welcome to Chub Cay,’ said the young pilot. He pronounced it key, like the thing you put in a lock. He had fair hair and the hair on his forearms looked almost white against his tanned skin. ‘We’ll be back here in a month to take you out,’ he said, smiling at the boy’s mother. ‘Have a great Christmas.’
‘Say thank you to the captain, boys,’ his mother said. She was smiling at the young pilot, and the pilot was looking back at her through his sunglasses.
The boy and his brother chimed up with overlapping thank you sirs, and the young pilot reached out and tousled their hair, all the while looking at their mother.
‘Where is your dad, young fella?’ said the pilot to the younger boy, who was only nine and a half.
‘He has important business to do,’ the boy said, before his brother could answer.
‘I’m sure he does,’ said the pilot.
‘His company owns this island,’ said the boy.
‘Well, that’s what I’ve heard,’ said the pilot. ‘And that’s why we’re taking very good care of you and your pretty mama here.’ The young pilot smiled and reached out to tousle the boy’s hair as he had done with his brother’s, but the boy pulled away. He didn’t like this young pilot anymore.
‘My father will be here for Christmas,’ said the boy.
‘Then I’ll see you all then. I’ll be flying him in.’ The young pilot started towards the back of the plane, then threw open the rear door and let down the stairs. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if you will please disembark by the rear stairs,’ he said with a bow.
The boy’s mother laughed and stood and smoothed her dress. She was tall for a lady and had to stoop to avoid hitting her head on the cabin roof. ‘Come on, boys,’ she said. ‘You heard the nice captain.’
The boy unbuckled his seat belt and followed his mother and brother down the stairs. The pilot started to unload their suitcases and line them up on the crushed coral. A strange-looking car was waiting at the edge of the runway. It was open and low to the ground and had very small wheels. A man in a big white hat was in the driver’s seat. He waved to them and the car started out towards them.
‘That’ll be the colonel,’ said the young pilot as he unloaded the last of the bags. ‘Better watch out for that one,’ he said, smiling and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘If you know what I mean.’
‘Thanks for the warning,’ said the boy’s mother. She was smiling as she said it.
‘You bet,’ said the young pilot, handing her a card. ‘Well if you need us, just call. No job too small, no ask too tall.’
The boy’s mother laughed, and taking the young pilot’s hand in hers, she leaned her head towards his and said something that the boy could not make out. The young pilot looked back at her for a moment with his mouth slightly open, and then he smiled at her, clambered back into the plane and pulled the door closed. The boy decided that he did not want to be a pilot, after all.
The strange car pulled to a stop and the man in the white hat – the one the young pilot had called the colonel – jumped out. He was a big man, with square shoulders and thick legs. ‘Mrs Clifton,’ h
e said, taking her hand in his big bear’s paw. ‘I’m Colonel Rafferty. Everyone calls me Raff. Welcome. Welcome to the island. We’re so glad you could make it.’ He kissed the boy’s mother on the cheek and, as he did it, he put his big hand on the small of her back.
‘Boys,’ she said, pushing herself away from the colonel with one hand and holding her scarf in place against the breeze with the other, ‘say hello to the colonel. He works for your father’s company. He runs the island. Isn’t that right, Colonel?’
‘I certainly do,’ he said.
The boys shook hands with the man. They all got into the car and drove to the far end of the runway. The colonel stopped the car and they sat with the sea breeze flowing over them, the smell of the sea strong now, as they watched the twin-engine plane taxi to the far end of the gravel strip and turn to face them. Then the engines roared and the plane started down the runway. As it gained speed, the boy saw the front wheel come off the ground and the rudder on the tail moving. Then one wing dipped slightly towards where the wind was coming from and it was up and crabbing sideways as it climbed. When the plane flashed over them with a roar the boy heard his mother let out a little ‘oh’ as her headscarf flew away.
After the colonel had retrieved the scarf, he drove them along a rocky shore where the waves sent towers of white spray foaming into the sky. ‘We call this the blowholes,’ he said, looking back over his shoulder at the boys as he drove. ‘We can come and explore here later, if you like. But don’t come here without an adult, OK? It’s very dangerous. It’s an old coral reef. There are miles of tunnels and caves under this rock, and the currents are strong. Years ago, they say a boy, the son of a local fisherman, got lost in here. They never found him. The old timers say his body was swept out to sea and the sharks got him.’
‘Do you hear that, boys? This is a dangerous place.’ The boy’s mother had unpinned her hair and as she looked back at them it streamed across her face.
Turbulent Wake Page 2