You Could Believe in Nothing

by Jamie Fitzpatrick

“Haven’t been in here since your grandfather passed away,” whispered Lou. “You don’t remember that, I suppose.”

  Derek didn’t recall much, only that the funeral seemed a jaunty affair, ending with a big crowd in the backyard on an endless autumn evening. Steaks sizzling and bursts of adult laughter. Of his grandfather he had no memory at all.

  A tall, silver-haired brother offered the eulogy. He took the altar steps two at a time, as if bounding to the podium to accept his party’s nomination.

  “There is a saying: he who hesitates is lost. William did not lose. He took life head-on. And when we see his children and grandchildren, recall his devotion to work and community, to the salmon rivers he loved so well, a voice comes to us from the past. And that voice will say, ‘William Wright was here.’ ”

  A feminine sob broke from the front pew and echoed through the church. The voice-from-the-past thing was a bit much. The choir began overhead.

  Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day

  Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away

  Change and decay in all around I see

  Oh thou who change not, abide with me

  Derek watched the back of Kelly’s head. She sat between her son and her mother, with Billy holding the aisle. Kelly leaned over and whispered something to the boy, who was squirming in his seat. Whatever she said worked, as he straightened up and lifted his face to the pulpit. She tousled his hair, and let her hand rest on his shoulder.

  “God of the living and the dead,” said the minister. “We are burdened by the things we have done and the things we have not done. We remember our broken promises and missed opportunities.”

  “He only made it to sixty-eight,” whispered Lou, as the congregation murmured its response. “Didn’t do so well, eh?” That was about as much as he had ever said on the subject of death. As far as Derek knew, his father had no thoughts whatsoever on the big stumpers, like faith and eternity.

  The closing organ number was a poor choice, with crescendos more appropriate to circus music. Outside, the assembly dissolved like a picnic in a thunderstorm. Derek said a brief hello to Dave Sweetland from work and ran for the car. He should have offered a hand to Billy. But that would mean hugging Kelly, saying something to the boy, working around the sisters and teenagers, and creating the expectation that he might turn up at the graveyard or back at someone’s house for a bowl of soup. Lou was more one to hang about for the stout-hearted grimace and clap on the shoulder. Gauging the mood, he might even go for the gentle, uplifting joke. But this time he didn’t protest.

  “You can just drop me home, then.”

  They had to be quick, as a red pickup truck was slowly backing into their path to make way for the hearse. The opening was there for Derek to nip out ahead of the procession. But the Escort stalled and the gap closed.

  “Fuck,” said Derek, reaching for the ignition again.

  “May as well just wait,” said Lou. His hair held its shape, rainwater beading at the surface and down his lapels.

  “No news, then?” said Derek.

  “News?”

  Derek waited.

  “Well,” said his father finally. “It looks like we’re going to court.”

  Derek pulled the wheel hard to his right and inched towards the pickup. Lou put a hand to the dash.

  “It looks like there’s no avoiding it,” said Lou. “They have to press charges, go through the motions.”

  That would surely mean the mug shot on TV. Whoring scumbag.

  “Can’t Gerry Joseph cut a deal with them?” asked Derek. “Get around it somehow?”

  “Oh yes, there’s still a deal to be had. It all depends on Max Ivany. He’s always played square, right from the day he hired me.”

  The hearse passed in front of them and into the street. Derek looked at the radio in the dashboard, thought of the lifetime his father had lived there. Good looking week ahead…dreaming about blue skies!

  “It’ll be hard on Mom,” said Derek.

  “Yes, it’s hard.”

  “It’s just that Mom—”

  “We don’t need to talk about your mother. I’m looking out for your mother.”

  The idiot in the pickup had missed several opportunities to cut in. Derek pulled the handbrake and sat back. The windshield wipers churned.

  “I won’t have anyone getting up on their bloody high horse,” said Lou. “You think there weren’t men in that church who’ve done God knows what?”

  Lifting a sleeve, he mopped the fog from the window. And there was Kelly, red hair and white face, in the back of a minivan. She looked to be alone, but the boy was surely at her side, and Billy at the wheel. Their eyes met, Derek nodded, she didn’t, and the minivan rolled out of sight behind the pickup.

  “I’ll take what’s coming to me. But I won’t have anybody up on their bloody high horse.”

  The rain was slacking off again. The minivan reappeared, crawling into the street. Kelly did not look back.

  Cindy’s car was parked on the street outside Lou and Elizabeth’s house. Her head appeared in the kitchen window, one hand pushing her hair back.

  “I suppose she’s in there making a racket,” said Lou, releasing his seat belt.

  A light rain cycled on and off, the air milder than it had been down by the church. But the house was still heated for winter. The kitchen smelled of stale dishcloths. Derek slipped out of his jacket and pulled the shirttails from his trousers.

  “We have to keep it out of court,” said Cynthia.

  “I agree,” said Derek’s mother, nodding slowly. If not for the long, floral housecoat, she could have been the lawyer in the room. Leaning back in her chair, legs crossed, barely moving except to raise the cigarette in her left hand. “But only with the right terms. Retirement isn’t the end. It’s the rest of your life.”

  “That’s what Gerry Joseph has been saying,” said Lou.

  “Dad, I wish you’d let me call Lynette,” said Cynthia. “She’s about to make partner over at Joyce-McGrath.”

  “When it’s your own affair you can call who you like,” said Lou, rising from his chair. “I been with Gerry Joseph all my life.” Leaving the kitchen, he briefly gripped the doorway for support. Derek was gratified to see the burden finally show.

  His mother hugged herself and smoked for a few moments.

  “He wasn’t well for many years, you know,” she said. “Not when he was a boy, and not for a long time after.”

  She directed this to Cynthia, continuing a conversation that must have started when they were alone. She rolled the end of her cigarette in the ashtray. From the hallway came the click of the bathroom door.

  “Even when we met he was still having respiratory trouble.” She tapped her chest with an open hand. “He missed some of the things you learn at that age. And Newfoundland back then, you would not believe how different it was.”

  “I’m sure it was different for everyone,” said Derek.

  She turned to Derek as if seeing him for the first time.

  “I can’t speak for everyone. He was on radio and on TV and everything was happening so fast. In those days the world kept getting bigger.” She brought her fingertips together and curved them apart like water breaking from a fountain. “In the end it just overthrew everything.”

  Derek wasn’t satisfied by this version. It made his father’s life seem common and schematic. The sixties were an excuse for everything.

  “You could have walked away from it all,” said Cynthia in a low voice, examining her fingernails. “You could still. You could pack some things and come stay with me and Joe right now.”

  Their mother rocked gently in her seat, speaking to the cupboards.

  “If you want to know where I’m coming from, it’s this,” she said. “You can talk about love and loyalty all you want. Fancy words. But the only thin
g that will stand you in any kind of stead is whether you can make a decision and stick with it.”

  “So we just have to, what? Get over it?” asked Cynthia.

  “I don’t think anyone gets over anything. I could see what he was like when I married him. That he was unsteady. I never expected him to get over that.”

  At home, Derek found an elongated chunk of meat in the freezer, under a bag of ice. Pork was his best guess, pink and fatty and preserved by layers of cling wrap, like a small, severed limb. What could he do with it?

  The slow cooker was at the back of a cupboard, behind a sack of rice he had forgotten about. He had heard Nicole say it could cook anything. He sat with it on the floor, trying to decipher the settings on the dial. That’s when the doorbell rang. By leaning to one side and dropping his head back, Derek could see down to the porch without getting up. Kelly’s face pressed against the window, a hand cupped over her brow.

  “Jesus,” she said, balancing in the porch to pull off black pumps and tug at her stockings, cheeks shining with rainwater.

  “I’ll get you a towel,” said Derek.

  “I think you were kind of expected over there,” she said, following him into the kitchen.

  “Why would they expect me?”

  “There was a crowd from work, all hands rallying round.”

  Derek handed her a cup towel. She buried her face in it and voiced a loud, descending sigh.

  “You know these things. Somebody dies. Everyone has to do everything.”

  “So where did everyone—”

  “Our house. Bill’s house. Of course I’m the wicked witch.” She sat in a chair and shifted a canvas shoulder bag to her lap, pulling out a bottle of red wine. “If Jeanie saw me take this. Oh, what odds. They’re like something from a movie, those two.”

  Derek reached above the stove for a pair of goblets. He hadn’t been in these cupboards since Nicole left.

  “Those are hideous,” said Kelly.

  They were. Green globs of craft-fair pottery. She unscrewed and poured. They drank.

  “Sebastian’s a genius. He says, ‘Mom, are you sick? Just tell Daddy you’re sick.’ He’ll be a conniving bastard, just like his mother.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “I dropped her off after.”

  “She looked great, actually.”

  “I’ve got to get her out of that house. Alone in that house, it’s just not on.”

  She drank, rubbed the corners of her eyes, and tossed the hair, sending pellets of water to the wall behind her.

  “All these parents dropping dead everywhere. It’s like picking up after toddlers.”

  Crisis suited Kelly. In her mannish black suit she looked robust, far more self-possessed than the formless woman he had seen downtown at Auntie Crae’s. It was like sitting with a war veteran, trying to imagine whether you might have the same courage.

  “Your dad was at church,” she said.

  “I’m surprised he wanted to come. I didn’t think they knew each other much.”

  “They keep track of each other, the older guys. Their St. John’s will be gone when they’re gone.”

  Kelly sniffed her wine and lifted the bottle, wrinkling her nose at the label.

  “Oh shit,” she said. Her cheeks lifted and Derek thought she might cry. Instead, her face rounded into a smile. “I almost forgot.” She pulled a wrinkled newspaper from the canvas bag.

  “That was you guys on the news the other night, right? Playing hockey? Mom saw it.”

  She handed him the paper, open to the centre page. There was a large photo of a dreadlocked white girl with her hands in a bucket of water, grinning black children gathered around. “Sierra Leone: a Newfoundlander’s Photo Diary” read the caption.

  Backbone was a giveaway, a tabloid devoted to arts and activism, scattered about downtown shelves and windowsills like lint. Unfolding the paper, Derek recognized the front-page photo, a retaining wall at the west end of the harbour where a hooligan had painted a human figure bent at the hips, the words transfer payments scripted on the buttocks.

  “Here,” said Kelly, reaching to turn the pages in his hand. “Read here.”

  Her thumb, with its red, ragged cuticle, indicated a winking cartoon face at the top of the page. Pointy nose, horseshoe of black hair, and a dog collar around the neck.

  Jill Off

  JILL GELATELY

  Were they to access television signals in their study of human behaviour, the proverbial aliens of distant galaxies would no doubt conclude that the female of the species is a bothersome hag, useful only for child-rearing and as a receptor of the male member.

  Such stereotypes continue to dominate the television wasteland, from the harridan housewife of sitcoms and siliconed bimbos of celebrity culture to the “freshness” paranoia whipped up by the peddlers of sanitary napkins and douches.

  Turn to the news and the message is the same. Journalism is a notoriously he-man culture. Tireless advocates of equality, inclusive language and the activist agenda have made progress. But much more needs to be done.

  So I don’t expect enlightenment from our testosterone-soaked newsrooms. But imagine my chagrin when our local news show, our public broadcaster, our own little Citywide at Six, devotes a lengthy segment of last Friday’s “newscast” to male-only jock culture.

  “No job, no girlfriend, just the boys,” declares one of our featured losers, articulating the grubby adolescent ethos of this love letter to “regular guys” and their juvenile rough and tumble, lovingly portrayed in all its cock-fighting, chest-thumping, show-us-your-tits glory.

  “I like the part where you’re checking each other out. Did you get to that yet?”

  See the balding, pot-bellied heroes don S&M-inspired plastics and leathers, bulking up the shoulders and plumping the ass. See them insist on a “physical” bump-and-grind style of play. See them penetrate each other’s “zone.” Check out the little room where they compare willies before showering together. You don’t have to be Freud to draw the obvious conclusions. But the reporter, blinded by his schoolboy crush on these BMOC deadbeats, never so much as gestures in that direction.

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “Isn’t it great?”

  “Who is this slut?”

  “Derek, Derek.” She put a hand on the back of his neck. “It’s all good. You pissed her off.”

  It was plumping the ass that bothered him most.

  “Fucking bitch,” he said.

  “Shush.” Kelly removed her sticky hand and dried it on her leg. “It’s hilarious. You should be proud.”

  “I had nothing to do with it.” But his anger was dissolving, as it always did, leaving him frustrated. His capacity for outrage seemed to diminish with each missed chance.

  “Oh my,” said Kelly, with a laugh that turned into a sigh. She leaned over, resting her chin in her hands. They were quiet for a moment. Derek set the paper aside and refilled the goblets.

  “I blew it, Derek. I left my husband and his dad died. There’s nothing to be done about it. Bad timing. Do you know, after Sebastian was born, my brain sort of went snaky.”

  “Snaky?”

  “Billy started doing this thing.”

  She picked up the towel again, looked to the ceiling, and closed her eyes.

  “We’d be in the car, tearing off to the daycare or getting groceries or something, and he’d say, ‘This is what it’s all about. It all comes down to family and being together.’ ”

  The eyes opened.

  “Just out of the blue. You should have heard some of it. We’re putting Sebastian to bed and he’s like, ‘I just live for those quiet moments. When I look into his eyes it gives me new hope.’ Blah, blah, fucking blah.” She did Billy’s lines in a fruity singsong voice, and Derek was struck by the coldness in it, her dismissal of h
usband-and-wife intimacies. “Some nights you just want to have dinner, you know?” All this was said to the ceiling, the towel pressed to her throat.

  “So of course it’s me. It couldn’t be him because he’s so friggin’ happy and can’t stop talking about it.”

  She drank and poured, and rolled the base of the goblet on the corner of the kitchen table between them. Derek watched her hands closely, as if she were performing a card trick.

  “I used to look at Sebastian, he was walking around by then, and I asked myself, what I would give up for him? My life? Absolutely, that’s easy. But would I give up everything? That’s different. Do you see, Derek?”

  He didn’t, exactly. He wanted to go back to the paper and read the rest of that article. But he couldn’t stop Kelly now.

  “And if you hesitate for even a second, you’re a bad mother. So there I am, a shit wife and a bad mother.”

  “A bit snaky, as you say.”

  She shook her head and drank.

  “And I think Bill sensed something, without even knowing it, and he started in with this heavy passive-aggressive thing…” She pushed her hands towards the floor. “…it all kind of came down around us. Everything.”

  Derek tried to picture the house on Cochrane Street with everything coming down. A dead weight in the air when you came through the front door.

  Decisive action.

  At critical moments, a motivational phrase would occasionally spring to Derek’s mind. When Nicole started talking about Ottawa, impregnate rose like an incantation every time he looked at her. Had he believed in the muse he might have broken through her defenses and she might be at the table with him right now, fat and miserable and happy. Instead here was Kelly, a casualty of the last time he had made a firm decision about anything.

  He took the damp hands and pulled her to her feet, then held her by the hips. She broke the grasp with one of those slippery moves women learn in self-defense class, and pressed her fingers to his cheeks.

  “I just came from my father-in-law’s funeral.”

  “So?”

  “They’re a good family. He’s a good guy.”

  “A good guy with his skin flicks, jerking off in the living room.”