Edge, I tell her. I like a little edge.
It’s like the difference between AC/DC and Nickelback, I say, thinking that in these two rock acts I have found the perfect metaphor for the difference between my native country and the one I have chosen to live in.
AC/DC go for it, stamping and sweating, not caring if they are deaf tomorrow or if they dislocate their cervical vertebrae. They’re not tall, they’ve got bagpipes and a school uniform, they’re on the back of a ute, they’re melting the asphalt on Swanston Street and you’ve got to love them.
And representing Canada: Nickelback, tall and straight of tooth, nice boys, however borderline anti-social their lyrics. They always look like they might stop rocking to make sure their horses are properly tethered, that it isn’t after 10 pm and they aren’t too loud for anybody out there.
My sister turns from the toaster and looks at me. Who are you? she says. Other than that, she has no comeback and just hands me the toast.
Nickelback are from around here, I say. Just down the way. Hanna, Alberta, they hail from. They’re brothers I think, some of them.
Dad cuts the crusts off his toast, as he always has. Edge, he says, smiling craftily at me.
At the hospital, we don’t get edge. We get hostility from the nursing staff. It’s not at all the same thing, not that anybody wants to hear my analysis of that.
The nurses are interested to know why we haven’t brought our mother’s things in. Do we think she can go on wearing a hospital gown and someone else’s fuchsia boxer shorts?
I feel like I have just answered a knock at the front door and stand looking down at a delivery of dog poo on the porch, nobody in sight, sardonic laughter in the bushes. I have fallen into it again.
It has always been a strain trying to live with this. It’s no wonder I’m tired.
One of the few coherent messages my mother repeated to me and to my sister as we grew up, a message she sometimes delivered with deceptive gentleness and a touch of sadness that we weren’t more worthy prey, was this one, and I quote: I’ll get you and you won’t even know I’m doing it.
When you’ve been told, you shouldn’t forget. The nurses’ glares find me guilty of forgetting that my mother will get me if she can.
I try to explain that I have asked Mum, and asked again, what we should bring her, what clothes, what undies, what toiletries, a book? Does she want magazines, chocolate, a radio, socks?
She has told me that unfortunately she is not yet able to have her own things, that in this early and crucial phase of her rehab, she must remain in the hospital garb, including the fuchsia boxer shorts. It’s protocol and makes it easier for the staff to carry out her treatment. She will have her own things later. I need to understand. It’s different in here, in the hospital. She’ll tell me when to bring things.
The problem is that my mother is supernaturally persuasive. She makes anything sound reasonable. On her urging, Mormons have been known to consume alcohol.
I did ask her, I repeat to the nurses, but I know how lame I sound, especially given the boxer shorts. My words echo off the tiles and the head nurse, thin-lipped, interrupts and tells me, baddie that I am in the eyes of anyone interested in advocacy for abused elders, that they need cardigans, cotton underpants, flat shoes for when she can walk, and slip-on trousers with elastic at the waist. Everything, except the shoes, is to be capable of withstanding sloshing around in hot water and bleach in the huge tumbrels that rumble night and day in the hospital laundry in the basement of this building.
Of course, I say placatingly to the nurses, of course you need these things. Of course. It’s you I should have asked.
But I smother an urge to laugh dementedly. I could try to tell these women what is in the closet of the room I sleep in. Or better yet, I could tell them what is in the closet of Mum’s second bedroom, where my sister sleeps. In there we have found what I look upon as voodoo vestments, I don’t know how else to qualify them, garments hacked into with sewing scissors and pinking shears and left drooping on hangers like some senior-year high school art installation project gone horribly wrong. They scare the stuffing out of me, particularly one knitted jacket sliced jaggedly into ribbons from hem to neckline.
You can’t wash mink, I mutter as I walk away, writing the list of items on the back of my chequebook. And just for the record, I add, somewhat unfairly, I might have thought to ask you if I’d ever seen any of you around.
I don’t care if they hear me or not. It doesn’t matter. Nothing I say could make these people like me less.
My sister knows where we need to go. We park in front of an emporium called Mark’s Workwear and buy several jaunty outfits in velveteen, pants with elastic and jackets with Velcro, in what my sister calls gem-tones, teal and maroon. My mother will hate them.
We go home to choose the least inappropriate shoes from those lined up in my closet, and to double-check that, in the shoe boxes stacked at the back of cupboards all over the house, there are no sensible shoes. We are pretty sure there aren’t, as we have already opened most of these boxes and closed them again quickly once we realised we were looking at cancelled cheques, the evidence of my mother’s frenzied bid to win her own money through frantic participation in any number of dodgy schemes, and to wound my father by spending all of his money in the process.
When you write a cheque on a Canadian chequing account, your bank honours it and pays the amount out, stamps ‘cancelled’ on your cheque and mails it back to you to keep or dispose of as you see fit. The length of a cheque is exactly the width of a standard shoe box.
On arrival in this house, my sister and I, surprised by the number of shoe boxes at the back of closets and cupboards, opened them to find not shoes but those cancelled cheques, thousands of them, paid out to gambling concerns, lotteries in foreign countries, mail scams from post office boxes in Philadelphia, Mexico City, several locations in Queensland and the Northern Territories, Pacific islands, places in Asia, dating back five or six years and representing an amount that would have ruined a lesser man than my father. We would have preferred to find that we were dealing with shoes, that our mother was, among other things, the Imelda Marcos of the Western Plains, than contemplate this.
Now we go through the motions, peeking into every third or fourth box and finding only paper.
We’ll buy a shredder, my sister says. What do you think?
I nod. Maybe a calculator too, I say. We don’t look at each other, but she squeezes my hand and we stand together like that, looking out the window at the smooth blue surface of the snow in the fading late-afternoon light.
Chapter 8
Christmas is upon us.
It’s not like we haven’t been warned. Every time we’ve gone out, all the loudspeakers at the gas station and in the parking lot at the Super Saver and all the shop fronts in town have been informing us, tinnily, that Santa Claus is coming to town.
His arrival is imminent, as is our departure.
My sister has sorted everything out with the helpers so Dad will be looked after when we leave, 24 hours a day. The only blank in the schedule is Christmas day itself, when nobody on the team of helpers can be coerced into working 8 am to 4 pm.
This is perplexing to me, given that everybody knows a family Christmas will always go badly, that even the most extremely lowered family expectations will not be met. Magazines publish the same articles from early December on, year after year, on why we harbour these wildly unrealistic expectations of family unity, and how to avoid disaster on the day.
I thought that at least one of our helpers would prefer a microwaved late lunch in front of the television, watching It’s a Wonderful Life with an accompaniment of periodic gasping from an old charge with sleep apnoea having a nap down the hall, to a day of way too much turkey and stuffing, not to mention wine and beer, bowls of whipped cream hitting the kitchen wall in reply to real or imagined slights muttered into the refrigerator, and brothers-in-law taking it outside where they would do each other serious damag
e if they could just coordinate their swing and stop falling face-down into the piles of freshly-shovelled snow scraped to the side of the footpath.
I personally would take the triple-time-and-a-half pay rate and the silent calm of the prairie night settling in over everything while it’s still only afternoon, stars snapping tiny Morse code greetings from the icy reaches of the boundless sky, O Holy Night, but what do I know.
And this is the country, so Christmas day will not be a problem. Here is why.
With my mother away in hospital, neighbours have taken to dropping in on us, as you do out here, normally. These are forgiving people and do not hold against my father anything my mother might have done. This is jaw-droppingly magnanimous of them, given that some of these people, in dealing with my mother, have found themselves up the proverbial. In one case, a dispute about a septic tank problem, perhaps literally.
They may also have other reasons, like a wish to see inside the house, or if my sister and I have two heads. Or an interest in the hay crop. Notwithstanding, props to them all.
Some of their reactions bear the stamp of interaction with my mother. Their shiny big all-wheel-drive vehicles cruise cautiously down the drive from the road and manoeuvre to park nose-out, ready for a quick get-away. They hover on the doorstep even as we insist they come in out of the cold for just a minute, for a quick cup of coffee and a mincemeat tart. They keep their coats on, but bend to remove their shoes. It’s like dealing with skittish horses.
New regime, my sister tells them heartily, new regime. Remain shod.
One who visits is ranching royalty, the mum of a big family from over the rise and down the road. My mother, in her will, has written about the parcel of land she and my father own out here, which she is not leaving to us and which, she writes, extends as far as the eye can see. This is delusion. Most of what we can see to the west belongs to the family of this nice neighbour lady, soft-spoken, the one who had to sort out the terrible septic tank dispute with my mother. Yet here she is, offering help if she can and commiserating about Mum, talking about the sadness of having to put a loved one into care.
You hum and haw, she says. You don’t want to do it, to believe you have to do it. Then you do it, and it is better. It’s ok. It’s better than you thought.
She will fetch Dad on Christmas morning and he will have Christmas lunch with her family, with her and her husband, her boys and their wives and children, and she will bring him home in the afternoon for his nap. By the time he wakes up, his helper will have arrived for the first shift of the new order.
That’s the plan.
My sister and I think about a little Christmas lunch for the 24th, just for the three of us, before she and I fly out from Calgary late that evening.
What to serve is a no-brainer. Dad is already tetchy about us leaving so, to avoid perturbing him further, it has to be the usual: chicken, asparagus, baked potato, with vanilla ice cream for dessert.
I know this is right out there, I say to my sister, but I suggest you and I go all festive on that chicken’s ass and serve some cranberry sauce. You up for that?
She rolls her eyes. Just help me find the decorations, she says.
We poke warily into recesses in the house that we haven’t yet begun to excavate, places on the too-hard list that we will have a go at in the summer when I come back. We are looking for evidence of Christmases past, a string of lights, an indication that they celebrated.
We find nothing but a couple of bent candles in a sideboard drawer.
This is the part of the year when North Americans above the Mason–Dixon line, and some of those below, are united doggedly in facing trips to and from work in the dark. Snow tyres, flat car batteries, large square packets of snow sliding off roofs and thumping you, icicles falling dead straight from the eaves on your head, your eyelashes freezing together and snow over the tops of your boots. This is the time when your average Canadian Joe goes inside and feels a little better about all this by plugging in the Christmas lights and sitting on his sofa in the blinking multicolour ambiance with a few fingers of rye in a glass, straight up, no ice.
The Yule void in this house is sadder than the purely personal, sadder than being starved, or not seeing a dentist for years while your wife goes for check-ups with no appointment, bursting in and demanding to be seen immediately because her husband is dying and she must get back to him. This lèse-tinsel is a denial of the deep cultural reasons for festivals involving lights and shiny things and piles of food and barrels of drink all being glommed together at the end of the calendar year: Canadian Thanksgiving, Halloween, American Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve. It’s because baby, it’s cold outside, and dark too.
I try to make us feel better by inventing a little fiction, suggesting that all the Christmas things must be in the bomb shelter. We can’t go in there without a hazmat team, I say.
We can’t have a tree, my sister says. Who will take it down? Can you imagine? We come back in the spring and the tree has lost all its needles and is still standing there, lights blinking? Fire hazard.
We settle on a table decoration with a fuzzy-furred styrofoam reindeer motif. No candles because we don’t want him lighting anything and falling asleep in the few moments he will be alone on Christmas day. We wrap his gifts – books and fur-lined gloves. But what I would like to give him, and us, is something different.
What I really want is a 14-foot Douglas fir in the middle of the great room, baubles and candy canes and gingerbread Santas with hard icing sugar frosting on their beards, tinsel you throw strand by strand so it drapes properly, a great big exorcism Christmas tree with candles blazing and an angel in golden robes on top singing, Rejoice! It’s over!
There is now serious forward momentum. We are trying hard to tamp down the feelings. They well up like water around your boots when you step into a bog. We try not to feel how strongly we wish to flee, and how strongly we wish to stay. I say ‘we’ but I am aware that I don’t know what my sister is feeling.
I am missing mangoes and platters of prawns and lychees, photos in the paper of boozed-up Brits on Bondi beach getting the sunburn of their life. I am missing my life far away, as far away as you can get. I know why my life is that far away, and what it has cost me to go that far.
We apply ourselves to the last details.
We take flowers to Mum. She grips my shoulders tightly in her bony fingers and I can’t help it, I think of Hansel and Gretel. She says in a stage whisper, I hope you have a good life. She says tearfully to my sister, I thought I had lost you. My sister and I are silent, in spite of the disapproving presence of the nursing sister. There is no comeback, or too much comeback – either way, there are no words. We are petrified in grief, like flies in amber.
It should end like that with my mother, with those two sentences, spoken into the silence at Christmas. It would make a good story, but that’s not how life works.
We drive back to Dad’s and make him promise again to keep his Supportline bracelet on. He doesn’t want to. He says he doesn’t need it.
The hospital coordinator has set this up, we remind him. She drove all the way out here to set this up. You have to wear it, and you push that big red button on the top of the bracelet if you are in trouble. They’ll talk to you through the P/A system they installed on the telephone and you can talk back, from anywhere in the house.
You promised, we say. You are a man of your word.
Oh, all right, he says. Yes.
In the airport, the woman sitting next to us in the waiting area spills coffee on herself. Oh fudge, she says, and my sister, giddily, pulls a detergent pen from her purse and, carrying on a nice little patter of information about how to use this instrument, banishes the stains from the lady’s lapel to the bemused admiration of the other travellers, most of whom seem to be carrying animals in their appropriate travel boxes.
The employee at the gate tells me that they have relaxed the quota of animals able to travel on the flight, since it
is the last one out on Christmas Eve, and people do need to get where they are going with their pets.
Can you imagine, I hiss, the headlines if we go down over Kicking Horse Pass? ‘Christmas tragedy: plane lost with all on board, including four dogs, three cats, a ferret, a bunny, a toucan and a tortoise, and a partridge in a pear tree.’
First my sister laughs. Do shut up, she says, and then bursts into tears. I walk her around the coffee island with my arm around her shoulder. It’s ok, I say, it’s ok. Just please don’t faint.
Chapter 9
I sleep heavily and wake on Christmas day stiff and cumbersome, like a bear from hibernation. The dawn spreads, chill and damp, over the flat suburb to the far south of Vancouver where my sister and her partner live and work. I see no wildlife from my window, just an occasional black squirrel breaking cover and barrelling down the trunk of the weeping willow, before sprinting across the grass with its fur silvered by the micro-moisture misting down from a pearly sky.
I am just passing through. I fly out of here tomorrow morning for Hong Kong.
There will be snow visible on the eastern slopes of the Rockies where Dad is, but here at sea level it rarely snows. We are just miles from the Tsawassen ferry terminal where you can embark for a trip through a postcard mauve and baby-blue seascape of islands and ocean to Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, or to Seattle.
If it does snow here, the flakes only survive in the air, melting to mush as they touch the earth, which stretches like cling-film across the water-table, right there under the spongy soil, making itself felt occasionally by a quick bubble up through the toilet bowl, propelling a few drops onto the seat and the bathroom floor.
People move about here, walk and drive and shop, on this shard of the earth’s crust that rests uneasily on the Queen Charlotte Fault, Canada’s answer to the San Andreas Fault which runs down the coast under LA and San Francisco. I don’t like to bring it up, but I personally would not buy real estate here, as we are well overdue for a good grind of the tectonic plates and a millisecond away from liquefaction.
The Erratics Page 4