Vancouver: A novella (Wisdom Tree Book 3)

by Nick Earls

  The way he told it, New York was a Cary Grant-style place—men in grey suits and hats, with mid-twentieth-century movie voices, sitting around stuffing pipes and frowning about Hemingway. There was no writer Knut thought about more than Hemingway. He carried a paperback edition of The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories in one of his pockets, its spine hanging like a loose hinge, most of its corners turned over and fuzzed. In his suitcase he had an article clipped from a Time magazine from the fifties, an interview with Hemingway in which the writer sounded as cantankerous as anyone could have hoped for, and as brilliant in his observations about writing. Knut could quote whole paragraphs. He was ready for all the literary talk New York might throw at him, when he eventually got there. Meanwhile he would work on his craft, wear each pencil to a nub, punch each typewriter ribbon dry, night after night under our house, in a haze of smoke from mosquito coils.

  I don’t know how the subject of giants came up, since I wasn’t supposed to mention it. There’s every chance I did. Knut found and told me giant stories, but his giants weren’t dangerous lumbering types stamping their way through fairytales, not many of them anyway. His giants were thoughtful, or got by on their wits, or were questing for something, some kind of peace. They helped people who needed it. They often arrived as the perfect solution to a crisis larger than human scale.

  He told me about Finn McCool, the Irish giant who built a road into the sea and who fooled a particular Scottish giant again and again. The Scottish giant was bigger, and stronger, but Finn McCool always had a way of getting the better of him.

  They first met when the Scottish giant crossed the Irish Sea to hunt down Finn McCool and show him who was boss. But Finn was much loved in Ireland and got word that the Scottish giant was coming. So Finn and his wife, a woman of regular size, baked two loaves of bread, one a normal loaf and one with an iron griddle inside it. And they turned Finn’s giant bed into a cot, dressed him up as a baby and lay him in it, with a milk churn for a bottle.

  The Scottish giant turned up bellowing for Finn McCool to come out and fight him to see who was the greatest giant in the land. Finn’s wife pushed open the huge door to their house and politely said to the Scottish giant, ‘Sure, Finn’s out at the moment. It’s just me and the baby, but you’d be welcome to come in and wait.’

  The Scottish giant was thrown by the polite response to his bellowing, and all he could do was thank her, take off his cap and go quietly inside. That’s when he saw the baby—a baby almost as big as he was. He started to have second thoughts. If this was Finn McCool’s baby, exactly how big was Finn McCool? He started to imagine a giant twice his own height, even taller, and that didn’t sound like a fair fight at all.

  As he was sitting there, Finn McCool’s wife turned the two loaves of bread out of their tins. She took one across to the baby Finn McCool, who ate it in one bite.

  ‘You look like you’ve come a long way,’ she said to the Scottish giant. ‘You must be hungry. I’m afraid I don’t have a meal to offer you, but would you like this as a wee snack?’ She held up the loaf with the griddle in it, as if it weighed no more than bread.

  The fresh bread smelled good. And she was right. He had come a long way. And he wouldn’t want to disappoint so gracious a hostess, even if he was only waiting there to fight her husband. So he said yes.

  And because the baby had done it that way, he put the loaf in his mouth in one piece and bit down on it. With a crunch, his teeth cracked on the griddle and broke off at their roots. He spat the pieces out into his hand, along with the bread and the buckled iron. Across the room the baby chewed and smiled.

  If this was baby food in the family of Finn McCool, how tough was the giant himself? Finn McCool was a far more fearsome prospect than the Scottish giant had been led to believe. Right then, his hands still full of his own broken teeth, he made his apologies, and ed all the way back to Scotland, fearful with every step of the giant who might be in pursuit.

  ‘Of course, the Scottish might put it differently,’ Knut said when I pointed out that Finn seemed to win every time. ‘We have to remember we’re only getting the Irish side of it.’

  Then there was the Wrekin Giant, who was tricked by a cobbler and left a mountain behind him, and giants all over Cornwall—Cormoran who ate entire cows, Bolster who bled to death in a hole over his love of Saint Agnes, Anthony Payne who fought in a war and was wide as well as tall, but full of tales and wise ideas that came from looking at the whole world from above and seeing it as it truly was.

  Knut found an American giant, too. Alfred Bulltop Stormalong was three fathoms tall at birth and grew to twice that, and whose ship, the Tuscarora, was five times the regular size and had jointed masts to avoid snagging the moon. I wanted that to be true, but I had to point out that a mast five times the regular height would still be nowhere near the moon, which is 250,000 miles away. We were in the backyard then and the sun was setting, and Knut took a long, thoughtful look at the blank sky and said, ‘Perhaps the moon was closer in those days.’

  I assumed he was related to all these giants in some way, and it was family history that he was sharing. I knew he got the stories from books, but somehow that didn’t spoil it. Some of those giants were as big as hills, which Knut Knutsen was not, and I started to wonder if they might be a race in decline, slowly coming back to the pack.

  He explained to me that giants were either born to be giant or had a glandular problem.

  ‘It’s the pituitary,’ he said, pointing to his forehead, just above his nose. I told him we called that the brain in Australia and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, we call the big thing in there the brain, too, but there’s this small thing we call the pituitary.’

  The only glands I knew were salivary and sweat glands. I had real doubts about the pituitary, which sounded as if it had been made up with less than Knut’s usual attention to detail.

  Some mornings, Knut and my father left early for meetings, a man and his giant, walking out into the day with a carousel full of slides, a box of folders and the ball Knut called ‘the ole pigskin’. I sat through several practice runs of my father’s pitch, so I knew how it went. The slides were photos of American players and stadiums, and graphs that kept going up, making success look inevitable for all parties. Then, at the end, Knut would walk in in his playing gear, helmet under one arm and ball clamped in his hand.

  My father would announce him as a former member of the Dallas Cowboys development squad—anyone who knew anything about America knew the Dallas Cowboys—and Knut would offer his slab of a right hand for shaking. Sometimes the recipient would take his hand in both of theirs and inspect it as the wonder it was, this thing in human form but not scale, a hand bigger than the ball it was chosen to throw.

  All giants, all oddities, probably endure this weighing and measuring more than they should, as if they’ve been brought in only for the sake of spectacle, and aren’t entitled to a normal- sized sense of privacy. With Knut, though, the spectacle was exactly why he was in the room.

  ‘They look at that,’ my father said, recounting one meeting over dinner, ‘they look at that hand and they know this is new, and bigger and better than anything they’ve seen before.’

  Knut stared at the table and his cheeks started to flush. He picked up his fork, then put it down quickly before anyone could comment, yet again, on what a tiny thing it seemed to be in his hand.

  ‘I’m paid by the yard,’ he once said to my mother when she asked him how it felt.

  It was my father who persuaded Knut to wear the Dallas Cowboys strip. I remember the discussion, Knut saying he only wanted what he was entitled to, his silence when my father told him to think of it as a costume, something to make a point. The uniform came from America, and I watched as my mother picked another name off the back and tacked on the letters that made up ‘Knutsen’. Somehow this act of fakery made their plans all the more authentic to me, as if a pro quarterback in Texas had just stepped out of these clothes and my mother was at work on t
hem while they were still warm. Knut was subbing in for the final quarter.

  Their presentation routine was my father’s, but built around the failings of Knut’s shoulder. After the potential backers had taken a close look at the uniform—touched the ball, tried Knut’s cavernous helmet, their skulls rattling around inside like dried peas—he would get Knut to throw a few short passes in the meeting room, all from the elbow. There was always competition to see who could catch the hardest pass. These were sport-loving men, all with the instinct to out-jock each other, quickly on their feet and away from the platters of sandwiches, arms ready.

  At the moment he judged to be right, my father led the troupe outside for the pass that, he said, they all wanted to see.

  ‘This is the one you don’t get in Aussie rules,’ he told them. ‘The one you don’t get in league or union. This,’ he would calmly say, ‘is the biggest pass in the world. I think Australians are going to want to see the biggest pass in the world, aren’t they?’

  He was proud of that part of the script.

  I could imagine him delivering it, and Knut staying quiet and slouching his way down the stairwell or crouching in the lift, inside his helmet with his own thoughts. Which were back on the night of the bridge, maybe, or on the stadiums he might play around this country or his own if all his work could only fix his shoulder, or maybe on nothing more than the pain immediately ahead.

  One pass. He was good for one pass. One bomb, seventy yards.

  If the car park was big enough, my father would do it there. If not, he would find a park nearby beforehand, or some other appropriate space. He would tell the men—it was always men—to go as far back as they wanted. It would seem as if it was all their choice, but somehow he would marshal the one he most needed to impress into the right spot. And Knut would steady himself and throw.

  With every one of those passes the ball spun a perfect spiral, lifting from the ground as it travelled, more missile than pigskin. It went long and fast and was still travelling with bone-cracking force when it hit its mark. More than one potential catcher, when he weighed up the likely impact of the incoming ball, stepped out of the way.

  My father then did a round of pumping handshakes and turned the men back in the direction from which they had come, all of them starstruck, talking and mapping out the ball’s trajectory in the air with their hands.

  The moment they were gone, my father put Knut’s shoulder back in. When the two of them got to the car, he replaced the padding in Knut’s uniform with an icepack custom-made by my mother to fit the space. Back at our place, Knut cradled his wrecked arm with his other hand, took painkillers and lay on his giant’s bed. I wasn’t allowed to talk to him until he came upstairs.

  My father was always fine-tuning the pitch. One day I came home from school to find a photo shoot going on under the house. The cars had been cleared out and the photographer had set up lights and a wide roll of what seemed to be thick white paper, dropping from the height of the joists to the floor. It was summer, and a hot enough day already before the lights had added to it. The photographer’s white shirt was stuck to his back.

  My father was standing on the paper, holding the position as the cameras were lined up and the light checked. The photographer snapped a shot with a bulky camera that delivered a square picture, which he peeled and wafted in the air while the colours collected themselves. And there was my father, Hawaiian shirt, Sansabelt slacks and limp sweaty hair, against the perfect white background.

  Knut’s door opened and he emerged in a white loincloth, skin entirely bronzed, thigh muscles like blocks of solid metal, abdominals like two rows of cannonballs. He saw me, and looked at his feet. It had taken three women to do his make-up and colour him in completely, and they led out after him.

  ‘It’s a rotten job,’ one of them said, ‘but somebody has to do it.’

  The other two laughed.

  One of the women lifted a wreath of leaves from a plastic garden chair and passed it to him so that he could fit it on his head. There were no mirrors up there and he didn’t ask for one, pulling it approximately into place, all expression painted from his face. He was a Greek god, an Olympic statue. He was even less real than usual.

  ‘The Colossus of Rhodes,’ I said without meaning to.

  ‘Yeah, good one, Paul,’ my father said, and looked around clicking his fingers. ‘We should have made a torch.’ He glanced the photographer’s way. ‘Do you have anything that would do for a torch?’ He picked up a wad of sheets of bronze foil from a chair. ‘The Colossus of Rhodes had a torch, didn’t he?’

  That’s when I noticed the bronze-painted football, discus and javelin. My father was pulling out all the stops, pitching American football as some kind of sport of the gods. I had read enough books to know the idea didn’t make complete sense. Knut had read more, but seemed to be going along with it.

  ‘Can my skin breathe in all this?’ he said, his deep Midwestern voice all wrong from the bronze mouth of a Greek god. ‘It feels like it can’t breathe.’

  He touched his stomach and the bronze smeared. One of the make-up women moved in to tidy it up.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said softly, to her, to anyone else whose time was wasted for those few seconds.

  It took him three steps to move to the white paper, each one marking the concrete with a print of sweat. The paper clung to his feet and he had to peel his soles free carefully any time he adjusted his stance.

  ‘Okay, crouch down,’ the photographer said. ‘Or we’ll get the roof in.’ He stood up from the camera and turned to my father. ‘Crouching’s okay, isn’t it? Any time you see those Olympic bronzes, they’re kind of like this.’ He struck a pose, like a discus thrower with a wound-up body about to uncoil.

  So Knut crouched. He crouched, and bent, and contorted any way he was told, with the ball, with the discus, with the javelin. And sometimes he crouched because he seemed to need to—to breathe, to steady himself. The lights blazed from his metal skin and bronze sweat fell in big drips to the paper. His muscles started to tremble and spasm.

  ‘Goldfinger,’ he said as he went down on his knees. ‘Did the gold woman in Goldfinger die because of the gold they put on her? I think I read that somewhere.’

  It took both the photographer and my father to lift him to his feet, each of them shouldering an arm to lead him outside. In the afternoon shade at the back of the house, they turned two hoses on him and the make-up women scrubbed him down, his skin flaring red beneath the bronze.

  ‘Not sure we’ll be doing that again,’ my father said, working his hose up and down Knut’s chest. Knut was lying on the grass by then. ‘Reckon we nailed the pictures though.’

  He looked down at Knut, perhaps expecting a response, but Knut’s eyes were closed. His knees were bent and thigh-high up against my father. His arms were splayed out to the sides. He was a broken god, his shape fallen across the backyard all the way to the apex of the roof shadow.

  ‘I think the torch might be the Statue of Liberty, Frank,’ he said to my father as the hosing continued. His voice was back to normal. ‘Paul might correct me on this, but I think the reference on the dedication of the Colossus to a ‘torch of freedom’ had a lot of later artists thinking he must have held one. Even if it was metaphorical.’

  I talked about Knut at school, of course. I didn’t mean to, but no one else had a giant at their house.

  When my teacher, Miss Krebs, heard about it, she took me aside and told me not to lie. Each term we did two five-minute lecturettes, one on a set topic and one free choice. That day, on my walk home from school, I chose giants.

  ‘I’ll need Knut for a couple of hours on Tuesday in two weeks time,’ I told my father over dinner.

  ‘I think that might be Knut’s choice,’ he said, looking across at our giant. ‘What do you need him for?’

  I explained and he said, ‘Did she call you a liar? Did you actually say giant?’

  Knut leaned towards me. ‘I’m in.’ He turned to my fat
her. ‘If you can spare me that morning, Frank.’ He waited for my father to nod before continuing. ‘What’s she expecting? We might have to put some thought into this. What if I’m just tall to her? Not gianty enough?’

  ‘But you’re...’

  I couldn’t say it, in case anyone contradicted me. He was our giant. He wasn’t just some tall guy at one end of a range. Anyone could have a tall guy under their house. No one was going to do a lecturette on the topic of ‘just tall’.

  Knut sat back in his seat and folded his arms, giant arms. He rearranged his feet, and the toe of one of his shoes bumped against the fridge door. He smiled.

  ‘Finn McCool,’ he said, in an accent that was supposed to be Irish. ‘Finn McCool and the bread.’

  On the morning of the lecturette, Knut shaved closely.

  He put on a white collared shirt, with short sleeves and a bow tie. He and I had talked it through, and he was dressing the way an American boy would for church, or as close as he could manage from what was available.

  Knut towered over the gateposts as we walked into the school grounds. Handball games stopped. Hopscotch stopped. He took the steps up to the verandah three at a time, and ducked under the beam at the top. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet as we walked. Everyone paused.

  With the sense that something was up, that no silence could be trusted, Miss Krebs opened the classroom door earlier than usual and saw Knut making his way towards her.

  ‘Yes, well,’ she said to me as we got closer. She was stroking her throat, smudging some of her make-up onto her collar. She had a skin problem, and always used too much make-up on her face to cover it up. ‘I can see your friend is over two metres tall, but...’

  ‘Knut Knutsen, ma’am,’ Knut said, holding out his hand before she could bring up any of the claims I had made. He was not the height of a hill. He was unlikely, ever, to captain a ship with moon-scraping masts.

  Miss Krebs looked up at his neck, at his Adam’s apple jumping up and down as he swallowed.