Turbulent Wake

by Paul E. Hardisty

  ‘Stop,’ said Salim, reaching over to touch the driver’s arm. ‘Go back.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Bill.

  The driver reversed. Salim pointed to the far side of the lot where big trees cast dark shadows across the tarmac.

  ‘What are you doing, Salim?’

  The driver turned off the engine. They sat in the darkness.

  ‘Salim, what the fuck?’ said Bill.

  Salim reached inside his jacket, turned to face them. The pistol was in his hand. It was some kind of automatic, blunt and black and mean-looking. Salim ejected the magazine, inspected its contents, pushed it back into the grip, worked the slide.

  ‘No, Salim,’ said Bill, reaching for the driver’s shoulder. ‘Take us back to the guest house, now.’

  Just then, the couple from the bar appeared at the hotel entrance. They stood there awhile, under the lights, as if expecting someone. The woman’s hair glowed yellow in the bright overhead light. Then her father took her hand and they started across the parking lot.

  Salim tapped the driver on the arm. They rolled slowly towards the couple. They were within fifteen metres when Salim told the driver to stop. He got out of the car and walked up to the couple.

  Bill jumped out and ran after Salim. The engineer followed.

  The older man had put himself between Salim and his daughter, was backing away, one hand raised, palm open. Salim was speaking to him in Arabic.

  The older man shook his head, mumbled some reply.

  Bill reached for Salim’s arm. ‘You’ve made your point, Salim. Let’s go.’

  Salim ignored him, kept on at the older man. When Salim levelled his gun, the older man froze, eyes wide. The woman shrieked, tried to pull her father away.

  ‘Put that away, God damn it,’ said Bill.

  Salim looked back. ‘Don’t worry, Bill.’

  Then he turned and aimed his pistol and fired.

  Salim walked back to the car, got in. The engineer stood and looked down at the man, his daughter on the ground beside him, crying, pawing at the blood seeping from his leg. He stood and watched the man bleed. He watched the woman cry. Bill was speaking to him, pulling at his elbow.

  ‘We should do something,’ the engineer said.

  ‘Get in the car, Warren, for Christ’s sake.’

  Bill opened the door and pushed him inside, crowded in behind him. A few minutes later, they were flying along the causeway towards the city.

  Salim howled, waved his pistol out of the window.

  ‘What the fuck, Salim,’ said Bill, shouting over the noise of the engine and the wind buffeting through the windows. ‘Put that away, you fucking maniac.’

  ‘No trouble,’ said Salim. He pointed his pistol out into the night and fired off three shots.

  ‘Jesus,’ said the engineer. ‘We are in deep shit.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Bill. ‘He’s the police.’

  Salim turned and put his arm across the seatback. He’d put his gun away. ‘No problem, my friend,’ he said. ‘Ma’afi mushkilla. It is nothing. This other was garbage. Nothing will happen.’

  The next day, the engineer woke with a hangover. He ate a late breakfast in the company guest house and caught the flight to Cairo that afternoon. The wait in Cairo airport was more like six hours than three, and he ended up missing his flight to Larnaca.

  March 16th. London

  I stop reading, take a deep breath. Pure chaos, here, in my hands, all around me, now and then. It’s as if my skin has been hacked open and peeled back, revealing the wormed and decaying randomness beneath. Entropy, yes, but so much more. He never told me about any of it, never prepared me.

  I stack the pages of the manuscript, snap the elastic band around all of it and start back to the office. I know what I have to do. It is as if I have been grappling with a mathematical equation for which I could find no solution, no essential balancing, and then, suddenly, terms cancel and the whole thing simplifies down to something so elegant I wonder why it took me so long to see it. Truth is, it was always there. Just took me this long to understand it.

  I heft my father’s manuscript in my hands, as if it has taken on some new mass, an invisible density. I reach the bridge and start across the river. Halfway over, I stop and stand at the rail, looking down into the flowing Thames slate. Torn strips of grey cloud squall past, close enough to touch. A few drops of rain dot the pavement, touch my face. There is meaning in everything, even if you can’t see it. That’s what he is telling me. Meaning where there is none.

  I keep going, reach the office. I brush the rain off my coat, take the stairs. I go straight to the fourth floor, Robertson’s corner office. Lorena, his PA, tries to wave me off, but I go straight in, closing the door behind me. Robertson is on the phone, sitting behind his desk. He opens his eyes wide and shakes his head at me, trying to concentrate on whatever is being said on his call. I stay where I am. He shakes his head again, points to the door. Get out, he mouths. I shake my head, stay put. He frowns. A few moments later, he says, ‘I will call you back’, and puts down the phone.

  ‘What do you want, Scofield?’ he says.

  I cycle a breath. ‘I want that promotion. I deserve it.’ As I say it, I realise that I don’t want it at all.

  ‘I told you, Grobelink got it.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. You told me. But what you’re doing, it’s not right. What happened to the only thing that matters here is results?’

  Robertson looks down at the papers on his desk, scalps his hand across the polished dome of his skull, front to back. ‘There are pressures,’ he says without looking up.

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘And you lost the Borschmann contract.’

  ‘The terms he wanted were outside our standard guidelines. Your guidelines, Andrew. I couldn’t push him any further.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘Fix it or I’m leaving.’ As I say it, I can’t quite believe the words are coming from my mouth.

  Robertson looks up, frowns. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that, Ethan.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  Robertson puts his face into that flatline smile look of his. ‘Look, I’ll tell you what. Put your head down, keep working hard. You had a good year, despite Borschmann. Maybe next year we can get you that promotion.’

  ‘That’s what you said last year, and the year before.’

  ‘It’s the best I can do.’

  I stand there, recognising the edge, scared to jump.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I say. Habits have a way of betraying you.

  ‘You do that.’

  I start towards the door, another fucking capitulation. I get to the door, step out into the open-plan area, head for my cubicle. And then I think of my old man in that café in Yemen, how close he came to being blown to pieces, trying to do the right thing by the people there. I stop, gaze across the ordered cells, combs in a hive, towards the far windows. The rain has stopped and the sun is shining on the wet metal roof of the building across the street. I turn around. Go back to Robertson’s office. Step inside. He looks up.

  ‘I’m off,’ I say.

  Robertson looks up. ‘Good idea. Take a few days.’ He’s not a bad guy, really.

  ‘No, I mean I’m out. You can hire yourself another woman.’ I turn and walk away without waiting for a reply. And as I walk back to my cubicle, collect my few things and head for the stairs, all I feel is pity. For all of them.

  Muskoka

  The summer of that new year they rented a cottage in Muskoka, in the northern lake country of the Canadian Shield in Ontario, where the engineer had spent summers when he was a boy. To help Helena with the kids, and give her some time to herself, they hired an au pair, a pretty French-Canadian girl from Chicoutimi.

  The cottage was on a small island of pink granite that sat in the crotch of a
big L-shaped lake. There was a wooden dock and an old boathouse with a sloping roof made of cedar shakes, and a swept pathway that led through the trees up to the cottage. The island and the cottage belonged to a friend of his from university who had inherited it from his father. He was working abroad so offered it them for the summer.

  They arrived in the second week of June when the lake was starting to warm. They had met Francine, the au pair, at the bus station in Toronto, and driven the three hours north to the lake country, the last of it on gravel roads through forests of maple and white pine. The engineer’s friend kept a boat in a small shed at the southern end of the long arm of the lake. They parked the car under an ancient, sprawling maple. It was quiet, after the noise of the city and the highway. The smell of sap and warming pine filled the air. Helena eased Adam out of his car seat and lifted him to her chest. She put a finger to her lips and mouthed: He’s still sleeping. Francine unloaded the groceries. Ethan jumped from the back seat and before anyone had noticed was running down towards the water.

  ‘Ethan, wait,’ said Helena. It was a half-shout. She didn’t want to wake Adam.

  But the boy was already at the boathouse and was sprinting along the uneven planking towards the far end of the dock.

  ‘Slow down,’ shouted Helena again. ‘You’ll fall. Warren, do something.’

  Before the engineer could reply, Francine dropped her bags and sprinted after the boy. She moved like an athlete, with long, powerful strides. Just as the boy reached the end of the dock, she swooped down and took him in her arms.

  ‘Leave the boy be, Hel,’ said the engineer, lowering his voice, so it wouldn’t carry. ‘He’s excited.’

  ‘He’s only ten, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Give him some rope, Hel. Please.’

  ‘Easy for you. You’re never here.’

  ‘Please let’s not start that. Not here. Not now.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right. Not here.’

  They carried the bags of food and the cases down to the boathouse. Soon they had the little flat-bottomed boat loaded up. The engineer pulled the starter cord on the small ten-horsepower Evinrude outboard, and the motor coughed to life. He closed the choke, pushed the boat away from the dock, put the motor in gear and turned the throttle. They started down the lake. The boat was heavily loaded and deep in the water.

  Helena sat in the bow with Adam on her lap and one hand trailing in the water. Francine sat in the middle bench with Ethan beside her.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely,’ said Helena. ‘So green and cool.’

  The engineer, just back from Yemen, closed his eyes and breathed in the cool lake air.

  ‘Can we go fishing, Daddy?’ said Ethan, leaning over the gunwale to reach the water. Francine had one hand hooked into the waistband of the boy’s trousers.

  ‘You bet, Etho. We’ll go this afternoon, after we’ve unpacked.’

  ‘What kind of fish are there here, Daddy?’

  ‘Pickerel, and bass, and sunfish and some big pike.’

  ‘How big, Daddy?’

  ‘Bigger than you, Etho.’

  The boy pulled his hand from the water and sprang away from the side of the boat. The engineer laughed. ‘Don’t worry, son. They don’t eat children.’

  Francine smiled at him. Her eyes were very pale, and in the sunlight, took on the aspect of a sandy lakebed. Helena was still trailing her hand in the water, gazing out at the shoreline. The engineer smiled at Francine and opened the throttle a little more. The little boat surged ahead.

  ‘Slow down, Warren,’ said Helena. ‘The water’s almost coming over the side.’

  The engineer slowed the boat. The lake here was very deep.

  He stayed with them for a week. The weather was perfect. Cool in the evenings, when they slept with the windows open and the breeze flowed through the flyscreens, carrying the smells of the forest, and sunny during the day, when they would warm themselves on the pink rocks after emerging cold and goose-pimpled from the dark water of the lake. In the mornings, the engineer would take the second, smaller motorboat and go fishing with whoever wanted to come with him – always Ethan, sometimes Helena. They caught pickerel, which was good eating, and on the fifth morning, a big long-nosed pike, which he released. On the Sunday, he said goodbye to his boys and to Francine and walked to the dock with his small day pack. Helena walked him to the boat.

  ‘I wish you didn’t have to go,’ she said, holding his hand.

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can. A week at the most. We have all summer,’ he said.

  She squeezed his hand. ‘Don’t forget to bring more food,’ she said. ‘You have the list.’

  He patted the pocket of his pack. ‘You’ll be OK?’

  She smiled. It was her ‘of course’ smile. She was a very competent woman. It was one of the things he loved about her.

  ‘The MacDougalls are just down the lake, about a mile. If you need anything, take the boat. They have a phone there, and a car.’

  She nodded, kissed him on the cheek. ‘Work hard,’ she said.

  He pulled her close, threaded his arm around her waist, reached his hand up inside her shirt and put his hand on her breast. He held her like that for a long time.

  ‘You’d better go, before I end up keeping you here,’ she said.

  She stood on the end of the dock and waved to him as he started the boat along the lake. He looked back, watching her for a long time. Then he raised his hand and turned away. A few minutes later he looked back again, and she was still there, standing on the dock, staring out at the water.

  As so often happens, the urgent meetings of critical importance to the project turned out to be not so urgent, and even less important. After three days, he had done what was needed, and was preparing to drive back up to the lake country when the phone in his hotel room rang. It was his boss, phoning from Calgary. The Yemen client was requesting an urgent meeting with him, at their head office in Oslo.

  ‘What, Norway?’

  ‘Yes, Norway.’

  ‘Jesus. When?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow. Get yourself over there.’

  ‘Jesus, Fred. I’m supposed to be on holiday.’

  Silence. He’d had to say it. He knew he had to go, that he would go. But it had to be said.

  ‘Do you know what it’s about?’

  ‘They want to discuss your report. The produced water-disposal issue.’

  That night, he phoned the MacDougalls and left a message for Helena that he would be delayed. The next morning, he flew to London, and then to Oslo.

  Three days later he was back on the lake, the little boat loaded with groceries, everything on Helena’s list carefully packed and double-checked. It was late afternoon, and the shadows of the trees reached out across the water. A breeze was blowing down the lake, pushing up little waves that buffeted the boat’s bow and occasionally sent spray flying over the gunwales and into his face.

  When the island came into view, it was almost dusk. Little pink clouds dotted the sky, ranged out in high-blown rows. He could just make out the boathouse and, through the trees, the flicker of lamplight from the cottage windows.

  He killed the motor and glided the boat to the dock. The aluminium gunwale bumped the big, tarred log upright, and he reached the stern line over the cleat on the edge of the dock. It was dark now, and he could see Helena moving about in the kitchen, silhouetted in the yellow kerosene light, her long hair down. Voices came faint and disaggregated through the trees, the soft voices of women and the laughter of children. He sat in the boat for a long time, watching and listening.

  He would tell her, later that night, about the meeting in Oslo. He hoped she would be proud of him. He was proud of what he’d done. Whatever the consequences might be, he knew it was what she would have done. It made him happy to think of it.

  When he finally walked in the front door, three bags of groceries in each hand, Helena jumped up and threw herself into his arms. Ethan hugged his leg. Adam sat at th
e table, beaming, a spoon in one hand and apple sauce all over his face. Francine, too, in shorts and an apron, turned from the stove and smiled. He had never been so happy.

  Ten days later, Ethan caught a fever. They put him to bed, nursed him, but he got worse. Helena decided to take him into town to see a doctor. She left early the next morning. The engineer stood on the dock and watched them go, waited there until they were nothing but a distortion on the horizon, an aberration of light. He stripped off and went for a swim. The water was cold. He swam across to the other side of the lake and climbed out and warmed himself in the sun a while, and then started back.

  As he neared the island, he could see Francine standing on the big granite outcrop near the dock. She waved, pulled off her top and stepped out of her shorts, then dived into the water. After a while, she broke surface, pulled back her hair, smiled and started breast-stroking towards him.

  He waited for her. Through the dark water, he could see her long, tanned legs and the pale skin of her buttocks, and as she kicked and raised her chest and head to breathe, the pale crests of her breasts.

  ‘It is so beautiful,’ she said, breathing hard through her accented English. ‘Shall we swim?’

  ‘Where is Adam?’ he said.

  ‘He is still sleeping.’

  He smiled at her. She was very young and very pretty. It made him feel strong, being here with her like this. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s go. But we can’t be long.’

  She was a good swimmer. He struggled to keep up. Soon she was three, then five body lengths ahead. All that sitting in meetings and planes and cars was making him soft. He determined to start exercising hard again. He would swim each morning that remained of the holiday, and when they got back to Cyprus, he would join a triathlon club again, get back to some serious training, do a few races.

  When he climbed out of the water she was lying on the rock. She was on her side, facing him, up on one elbow, one leg crossed over the other, accentuating the curve of her hip. Water beaded on her skin, dripped from her nipples, rivered across her thighs and stomach to pool on the rock around her.

  ‘I heard you talking about your meeting in Norway,’ she said. ‘What happened?’