Beach Reading

by Lorne Elliott

  “Shit, they don’t care,” said Robbie.

  I considered this. “Oh no!” I said. “That’s worse.”

  “Show time,” said Robbie.

  Show time! Now? No! It couldn’t be! Too soon! I wasn’t ready! Why me? “I don’t think I can go on,” I said.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” said Melissa. “It’s important to just keep cool when you’re stoned.”

  “I’m not stoned. I don’t get stoned.”

  “OK then. You’re not stoned,” said Melissa. “But everything is going to be fine. Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Say ‘Everything is going to be fine.’”

  “‘Everything is going to be fine.’”

  “Just keep repeating it.”

  So, Everything Is Going To Be Fine, I told myself as I walked toward the front of the house. Everything Is Going To Be Fine. Everything is going. To be fine. Fine, then, that everything is going to be. Going Fine is to be Everything? Then, my best so far: To be is everything. Going, fine.

  It almost overwhelmed me with its profundity. From its Shakespearean opening to the calm acceptance of a final parting, it seemed to sum up all of Life. It was brilliant. I would have to find some way to work it into my beach report. Then I remembered that I was no longer repeating what I was supposed to. Wouldn’t it be awful if I had forgotten what Melissa had told me I must recite?… And then I realized that I had forgotten it.

  Terror gripped me. I had forgotten that everything was going to be fine! Everything wasn’t going to be Fine. Fine was exactly what everything was not going to be! I was stoned! On pot. Which is illegal! …I’ll be thrown into jail! With Rattray! As my cellmate!…

  But wait…Everything is going to be fine. That was it. A close call! Everything is going to be fine. Every sing is going two bovine. A Very Thinnest Go In To Beef Vine. Avery thinks he’s going, Tubby Fein…

  “Ready?” said Melissa.

  “No.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  She and Robbie led me around the corner of the building into the sunlight. I concentrated on the details around me to stop myself from thinking about what was ahead.

  The crawling tides moved the eel-grass on the shore. Leaves trembled like coins in a breeze through the Balm of Gilead…a lovely tree with a lovely name. Is there no Balm in Gilead? Why yes there is. This lovely moment. Now this one…and now…Oh, here’s another. They just keep coming… until…until…

  I blinked my eyes and some quick figure flicked across my imagination. Better keep my eyes open, I thought. I hadn’t liked that. Make a mental note: Never blink again. This was better. Every song was going to be. Fine!

  And while we’re on the subject, I thought for no reason at all, this thing about me not crying at Dad’s funeral? Maybe crying at funerals was just one of those things which you were told you should do, was in fact unnatural, and as such would not, in its falseness, truly honour my father. So that was all right. “Everything was going. Too benign,” I muttered, and I giggled at my own wit.

  “What?” said Robbie.

  “Nothing.”

  “You OK?”

  “No.” I giggled again.

  There were maybe thirty people in front of the stage. Strangers and friends: Toe and Gump, El’ner and Dunbar, Fergie and Wallace. The three Barley Boys stood with their arms across their chests, holding their scotch in their fists, ready to let Wallace off with this one, maybe, if we were as harmless as we seemed and not the agents of some conspiracy to steal their name.

  Melissa turned off the fiddle music and went to the microphone. “Hi everybody! And welcome to the first annual MacAkern Family Picnic! Great to see you all here, and could you please welcome, for your listening pleasure…The Barely Boys!”

  There was some mild applause.

  Far too soon I found myself onstage, standing beside Brucie, looking out at the audience, with the bright dune behind them seeming to pulse toward me. I gave my banjolele a strum. More people turned toward us. Brucie struck a mock operatic pose and sang the note “mi mi mi” into the microphone. His voice rang out like a bell across the lawn.

  I strummed another chord and another, and laid down a rhythm. Natural. Brucie started singing, coming in perfectly on the beat, his voice beautiful.

  He sang the first verse, and the significance of the lyrics almost overwhelmed me. I felt like when I had first set eyes on Claire. And when I joined in on the chorus, supplying the easy harmony, I wasn’t nervous at all. The utter simplicity of things dazzled me. You could do anything on a day like this and it would work out. It was even okay when Brucie stumbled on the words and sang “La la la,” and I started talking, like the kind of filler I had heard on the Mighty Spear of Jah tape. In “Jeremiah,” they had sung, ‘Is there no balm in Gilead? No physician there? Why then is there no healing for our wounds?’ So I said that, but instead I said, ‘Feeling for our wounds,’ getting it wrong, but it still worked, so I added, ‘Healing for our feeling,’ And the full import of this suddenly hit me. “Here we are on a summer’s day,” I continued,

  “At MacAkerns’ picnic,

  With the tide going out,

  And the sun going down,

  Not yet, but soon, or soon enough…” I strummed the rest of the line without saying anything. I didn’t know what to say next.

  “Lalala la la la la,” sang Brucie.

  Then I heard myself talking again. “On this evening, in this beautiful home. And I want this family to do whatever they want….but I’m being paid by people who want to kick them off… so it’s all very confusing…”

  Then I stopped talking and just strummed and listened to Brucie. I had heard what I said as I was saying it, amplified and apart from myself, my own voice not from my mouth but from a different source in front of and to either side of me. It was the first time I had ever said anything over a microphone.

  It also sounded, strangely, like my father’s voice, and that reminded me that I should ask him about those Balm of Gilead trees when I next saw him, and then I realized, with a shock, that that was impossible now, and that I would never see him again, and my whole body filled with that realization and made me sadder than I’d ever been before. I stopped strumming.

  Never again.

  I was up to my neck in the world and he wasn’t around to guide me through it. I was lost, as I had lost Claire, and plunged into a pointless war with Rattray…And right then I suddenly knew who was on the beach in my dream as I was drifting away from the shore: not me, but my father, and I remembered that look in his eyes, not conquered by the world, but aware of its enormity. And there for the first time in my young life I felt the pangs of painful wisdom.

  I had never wept for him. That was the sad thing. And it was too late now, and this made me sad too. I had to blink my eyes a few times, as if I had opened them while swimming under salt water. I understood his demons; they were the same as mine. I saw what had saddened him, and they were the same things that saddened me. He’d had a father too, who’d had a father too, and all you could do in this world was weep.

  So, I wept.

  I wept for the dunes, for time, for life, I even wept for Rattray because we were all the same, after all, but mostly I wept for my father. Some dam I didn’t even know I had built cracked and released with a sigh, and I was standing in front of the microphone, my shoulders shaking and my chest heaving, sobbing in public.

  “I never wept for him,” I said. “ My father…when he died…at his funeral…afterward…”

  Robbie had come up to my side and had an arm around my shoulder. “Well, you’re weeping for him now,” she said to me. How did she understand so much?

  People looked on, concerned. I saw all the completely unearned care that had been given me, and I wept for my ingratitude. Then I saw how I would have to join this circle of responsibility
, and I wept for that. Robbie started to draw me away, but I turned back to the microphone.

  “I took the potatoes,” I said. “It was me. I said it was Rattray, but it was me… I left that note. I didn’t mean it to sound sarcastic.. I couldn’t change any of my money when I went to Barrisway….Really…”

  “That’s all right, Christian…” said Robbie.

  I was just eighteen years old, but sometimes I felt eighty and other times I felt eight. Melissa came over to my other side, put her arm around my shoulder, and even though I was shaking with sobs, I felt her un-brassiered breast against my side and it made me feel better and whole. Then sadder. I continued sobbing as they led me off stage. Toe and Gump were there, looking embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry Toe,” I said. “I’m sorry Gump.”

  “Don’t you worry,” said Gump. “You’re from Montreal. Home of the Habs.”

  “That prick had it coming to him anyway,” said Toe.

  “And you knew Rocket Richard.”

  “I only met him once…”

  “Still. Put it here.” He held out his hand.

  “We’ll go beat that fucker up again anytime. Just say the word.”

  “No really. Don’t…”

  “What’s this?” said El’ner, moving in.

  “Nothing, Mom.”

  “Did I hear you were going to beat up somebody again?”

  “No.”

  “I’m fairly sure that that is what I heard.”

  “We didn’t mean it.”

  I heard behind me the scrape of a microphone stand, amplified. I looked up and saw that the Barley Boys had mounted the stage.

  “All right,” said Niall. “I gotta say that when we came here today we thought we were being ripped off…Our name, you know…But then, well, seeing those two, the little one with that voice of his, beautiful, and the taller one with the beat-up face…weeping like that for his da…I mean, publicly humiliating himself…groveling…sniveling…pathetic…My God… I think…Ah Jesus fuck…I mean, you can’t…” He was close to tears himself, then he snapped out of it. “We’re all here to teach the pricks who are doing this to our friends a lesson they won’t forget.” He jabbed his finger with his whole arm behind it at the house. “I suggest, right now, we take a can of gasoline and burn this fucking place to the ground!”

  People in the crowd looked at each other. Bailey took two steps, tugged on Niall’s sleeve and Niall leant away from the microphone. They conferred. You could see Niall off-mic talking with annoyance at being interrupted, then with an oh-I-didn’t-know-that look on his face as he was re-briefed. He leant back to the mic. “Everything I’ve said before?” he said. “Well, what I meant to say of course was…that’s just the sort of prickish thing they would be saying. What we’re here for is to defend the right of our friends to stay here, and any prick who wants to come in and take away their home for the sake of some friggin’ park is gonna have to come through us first!”

  The crowd whistled and applauded, even Fergie.

  “Boys,” said Niall, “let’s give ‘em ‘My Love Has To The Lowlands Gone.’”

  It was an unaccompanied sea-shanty in three-part harmony, and a beautiful tale. Love was the cause of grief, but was worth it. I almost wept again.

  11

  “The great thing about being from some shithole back-water in the sticks,” said Wallace, “is that the competition is so lame.”

  “If I were you I wouldn’t bring that up in your opening remarks,” said Bailey.

  “Don’t worry. I’m gonna give ‘em my stirring message to the grassroots.”

  “A clarion of hope for these troubled times?”

  “A grand oration to make the welkin ring.”

  We were in the truck on the way to the All Parties Debate at the Barrisway Legion. Robbie and Brucie were riding in the back with Melissa, I was in the front with Wallace and Bailey. Three days had passed since the picnic and things were getting interesting on the electoral front. Bailey kept saying that there seemed to be a growing groundswell of support out there, but when anybody asked for specifics, he’d just say “Never mind. We’ll see.” Robbie and Brucie would mention that somebody or other had asked them about Wallace, and since the picnic, while working door-to-door, Wallace had been met with courtesy and curiosity.

  I think I may have been partly responsible for all this. A story had spread about how at the picnic a mentally deranged and battered orphan boy (who out of the kindness of his heart Wallace had taken into his home and cared for) had burst into tears in public at the thought of being dispossessed by those heartless bastards in government.

  As we approached the Legion, we saw a sea of cars and pick-up trucks parked side to side and nose to nose. And still there was a line-up both sides of the road coming in.

  “It seems that you’re a draw, Wallace,” said Bailey.

  We all looked wide-eyed at the crowd, but when I glanced at Wallace I saw his eyes staring with something I’d never seen before.

  “What’s wrong?” said Bailey.

  “What…do I do?” Wallace said. “All these people…”

  “This part’s easy. It’s just a meet and greet. The petting zoo. I’ll go park, you go mingle. Chat ‘em up. Shake hands, kiss babies. Make your presence felt.”

  “But…”

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” said Bailey. “Brucie, you go with him. You too, Christian. And remember to look pathetic. It seems to work for you. Ah!” he added, as if he’d been missing this. “The killing floor!”

  Wallace took one step out of the truck, wobbling.

  “Hey, Wallace!” said somebody in the crowd. Strangers looked around.

  “Wallace! How you doing?” said somebody else.

  “There he is!” said another.

  “How’s it going, Wallace? Ready for the big debate?” Smiling, greeting people were all over the place. He smiled back and nodded but it was as if he didn’t recognize anybody.

  A groundswell indeed had been building out there. Something Wallace had said or done, or more likely a combination of a lot of little things, had created a buzz. He had clicked. But from his point of view, it was a nightmare, or some neurological condition like The Old Hag where he was locked inside his consciousness, regarded but unable to regard. As I looked at his face, I thought: This is what fame is. This is what the media does to you. Our politicians and the people we go to for our public information, under their assured and acquired style, this is the terror in their lives.

  “MacAkern!” yelled a no-nonsense stranger in a straw fedora and suspenders, striding toward him. “If you get in, I want you to see about my driveway. There’s a huge pothole right where it joins the main road, so it’s government jurisdiction, I’ve checked, and I’ve written four letters for Chrissakes, but nobody cares. Now, I don’t plan to vote for you. Christ, I got screwed over by your uncle so bad once it’s unlikely I’d ever vote for anybody in your family, that’s for sure. And it’s not likely that anything you could do or say could convince me otherwise, but still, just in case you do win, I’d like your promise that you’ll do something about that goddamn pothole. Would ya? Would ya give me your word on that, here in front of all these people?”

  Wallace smiled back. “How ya doing?” he squeaked.

  “Fine. Now, will ya do that for me?”

  “Hi,” said Wallace and held out his hand again.

  The man looked at him more closely. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s his voice,” I said. “He’s got a touch of laryngitis, and he wants to save it for the debate. But I know that he will address your problem personally as soon as he is in the position to do so. Vote Wallace MacAkern.”

  “All right then,” said the man and he moved away.

  “G-g-good one, Christian.”

  A mother with thre
e daughters in tow came up.

  “Give ‘em hell, Wallace. I saw you on the tube, and it’s high time somebody shook these bastards up.”

  “Hi,” croaked Wallace.

  “Sorry,” I said. “With all the speaking engagements and public demands on his time, Mr. MacAkern has developed a mild case of laryngitis, so he has to save his voice for the debate. It should be a good one, don’t you think?”

  “We’re hoping,” said the lady. “And lemonade and honey’s best for the throat. We’ll leave you, then. Be sure to crucify them for me, though, will you, Wallace?”

  I took Wallace by the arm and we stepped around back of a van and away from the crowd.

  Bailey rejoined us with Robbie and Melissa.

  “Give me a cigarette,” said Wallace.

  “You don’t smoke.”

  “I’m gonna start.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Full house.”

  “That’s a good thing, Wallace.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I see.” said Bailey. “So, it’s stage fright…”

  “It’s not stage fright,” said Wallace, peeved in a way I’d never seen him. “Why do you say it’s stage fright? It’s just…I’ve got this sudden deep terror in the pit of my stomach that I’m heading for a pointless and crushing public humiliation.”

  “In that case, I’m sorry. It’s not stage fright then. Look, Wallace, what you’re feeling is perfectly natural…”

  “Natural? Natural? This is anything but…My God. I can’t breathe.”

  “Of course you can breathe,” said Bailey. “Inhale. Exhale. Ssssssssss…..Again…Good…Now. Better?”

  “No.”

  “It will have to do. A lot of people have gone to the trouble to come here tonight…”

  “Yeah…to laugh at me.”

  “No. To hear you debate.”

  “Why? What have I ever done? I’m a loser. I’ve always been a loser. I’m a useless mound of crap. Everything I do is a failure. I got nothing to say to anybody. I just want to crawl away somewhere and die. They can have our house and land, I don’t care. Oh Christ. I’m gonna join a monastery, though they probably wouldn’t let me in. I’m a liar and I don’t go to church…”