Help Me, Jacques Cousteau
Page 11
“Look,” he says, and takes my head in his hands and turns it, and I see the white rump of a deer walking lazily into the darkness of the trees. Its white tail flashes, blends in, and disappears. We walk on into town.
The new clerk behind the desk in the lobby is smiling at guests with his nice white teeth. It’s a dull, businesslike smile, and when he drops it he looks nasty, devious, interesting. He’s twice my age, but I sit down on a plush sofa and consider him anyway. He’s probably married. I am drowning in my own family, have no privacy, no room to manoeuvre. I have an overwhelming urge to go over to the desk and be frank with that man, watch his face fall, watch those white teeth stop smiling. Maybe he’d turn me down. Maybe he wouldn’t.
Instead, I pace around the halls.
I enter a dim hallway, stare up at the beards of moose, the strange plastic noses of deer, their tongues stuck out a little, as if bleating. I am deep into a fit of the creeps when I remember Andrew’s words about dogs being as smart as children. How smart are deer? I look at a mounted head and decide: not smart enough. What a horrible way to end up: wood and sawdust inside your skin, holding plastic nose and eyes in place. A woman ambles past, humming. People are milling about the lobby, huge animal heads lolling over them, and no one minds. Just me.
An enormous number of hotel guests are crammed into the church as the funeral is about to begin. The minister comes in, to rousing organ music and children’s babbling and the sound of dogs howling everywhere outside.
Andrew leans over. “If the organist is dead, then who’s playing the organ?”
During the funeral service, my father sits at one end of the pew and my mother sits at the other. The rest of the family is wedged between them. Trying not to doze, I watch a man’s smooth leather toe rise and fall gently in the quiet cavern of the church, as if the man is hearing music in his head. I fight the horrible wooze of sleepiness while the rector delivers the eulogy.
Otto, he says, was a good, kind, decent person, a man who gave such love to his children that he was wealthy in his soul as a result. He was generous to his friends, and generous to the world, since he gave the gift of music. My mother sniffles and takes my hand. There are a few quotes from the Bible about music and God’s breath. I can smell Christmas dinner cooking across the street at the hotel. Dogs whine and scratch at the closed chapel door.
Two very old men are seated in front of my mother and me. One leans over and tells the other in a hoarse stage whisper, “We must be at the wrong funeral.”
“Should have worn earplugs,” hisses the other.
The rector, who is new, never met Otto, the man he is eulogizing. By the end of the service, the pews are boiling with unrest. This was Otto, finally falling dead in the pine grove, reeking of liquor, eighty-seven years old and halfway home. Otto, who threw things, who harried local girls and terrorized his many children, who badgered money out of people and never paid it back. Otto, tossing a cigarette down a bartender’s blouse. Otto, drinking in church, the floor around his organist’s bench foul with phlegm. Otto, called “the nickel man” by children in town.
At the reception afterwards, we all huddle like cattle in case someone should ask us what we are doing there, or in what way we knew the deceased. One by one we check our watches while the aroma of turkey and beef and steaming vegetables vexes and distracts us.
“Well,” says Merry finally, in a tiny voice, “I don’t think Otto would mind if we had dinner now, do you?”
We have all discovered, to our secret pleasure, that Merry is a glutton. She is furious and impatient, trying now to ignite the plum pudding with her plastic lighter, but it just won’t start. She had wanted to give up and eat it unlit, but was vetoed. Netty keeps pouring rum over the pudding, so that by now it’s sitting in a puddle half an inch deep. My mother is sitting beside me with her napkin at the ready in case anyone singes their eyebrows off. As usual when Castor is around, the noise in the room is almost unbearable. It’s lucky we’ve got a little room to ourselves.
A beautiful waiter wanders around behind our chairs, making helpful suggestions to Merry, tripping on wrapped presents, and generally being a distraction. He has the outrageous name of Felton, he speaks English, and he has no idea how to kiss. His breath, I have discovered, tastes like cherries. I am gazing at his long face in the wavering glow of candles and the dim overhead light. He winks at me and my mother catches him; Felton turns red, grasps a few empty glasses, and rushes from the room.
“His name is Felton,” I tell my mother, and she fixes me with an appraising look.
She’s starting to catch on about me.
I take another drink of wine, sigh, wonder when we are going to open presents. For the last few minutes my father has been kicking me lightly, trying to find a comfortable position in which to sleep, and it looks like he’s found one. I am always stunned at the way my father sleeps. Castor is laughing derisively at Bishop.
“What a crock!” he bellows. “I suppose you believe in the Loch Ness monster.”
“Look, it’s absolutely true!” Bishop is grinning.
“… and UFOS and ghosts. I suppose you pray, too. Does he pray, Merry?”
“Oh, you swine,” says Bishop. Merry looks up from the alcoholic lump before her, lighter still hissing in her hand.
“What’s so funny about praying?” She’s saying it as much to Bishop as to Castor.
“Ignore him, dear,” Netty says. “He’s running his mouth.”
We must be the worst guests in the hotel, which is probably why we have our own little room to eat in. Still, I’m feeling all right about the world. I’ve had more wine than I’m used to and everything seems gracious and happy and secure for once. I look at my mother, whom I miss a lot sometimes, and at Andrew, whose body seems to change every week, and for a moment I wish we could all stay like this. I think: wouldn’t it be nice if we all died suddenly, without hurting, without knowing anything had happened, and went on as ghosts, having dinner and arguing and never growing old? What would be wrong with that? I wonder about my grandparents, old and wild as they are, without the first thought in their minds about mortality. And I wonder if Otto is anywhere around here, drifting through the halls, pissed off, invisible, throwing things at tourists.
I’m thinking about that, thinking about all of us, and the afterlife, and how maybe I could take the waiter with us, when, without any particular reason or warning, the pudding bangs on like a blowtorch. Blue flames leap at the light fixture overhead; chairs are shoved back in alarm, barking against the floor; Merry and Castor both scream.
One minute the room is noisy, the next, it’s thunderous. Poor Andrew wakes with a jolt, blithering and confused.
“Substitute real oranges,” he says.
The flames streak upward, and the air is filled with the aroma of hot butter, currants, and failing fireproof ceiling tiles. It’s an emergency: my mother, with her napkin held up in absurd defence; Castor with both hands pressed to his mouth, roaring through his fingers; my father rising unwilling from sleep, smacking his lips, one serene eye open and unfocused on the blaze. It’s fantastic, brilliant. I know then, this is the moment I’ve been waiting for: this is us, a picture of us, my whole family caught mid-sentence, mid-gesture, light pouring out, bright as a flash.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I wish to thank the publishers of the original book, Tim and Elke Inkster of The Porcupine’s Quill, for their integrity and goodwill; I also wish to thank John Metcalf for his editorial honesty, and for speaking to me like a writer. This new edition has been slightly revised to fit house style and to address the occasional awkwardness. Many thanks to Lynn Henry for bringing an older text up to speed. And thanks, too, to Sarah MacLachlan. Without them, this title would be out of print.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Gil Adamson has written two acclaimed books of poetry, Primitive and Ashland, and a collection of stories, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau. Her work has also been widely published in magazines and literary jou
rnals. Her first novel, The Outlander, won the International Association of Crime Writers’ Dashiell Hammett Prize and the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Prize. It has also been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has recently been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She lives with writer Kevin Connolly in Toronto.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Primitive
Ashland
The Outlander
First published in Great Britain 2011
Copyright © 2009 by Gil Adamson
This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
The right of Gil Adamson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978 1 4088 2070 4
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