by John Metcalf
Heads turned to glare.
Rasputin raised his eyes to the quivering ceiling in a display of violent calm before gathering into himself again, communing with the lit board.
WHERE AM I?
127
WHAT DO I NEED?
174
treble 20
treble 17
double 8
“Oh, Christ!” said Skip. “Look at that! What he ‘needs’ is a boot up his arse. He’s been playing like a big girl’s blouse all night.”
He set his pint down on their table.
He held out three darts on his palm in array.
“How about it, Fordie? Do an honest day’s work for a change.”
Forde pointed at his snifter and shook his head.
Skip sighed.
”Ah, well…”
Anna made a small snore into her shoulder’s plumpness; Forde thought of a dormouse slumbering.
Skip considered her.
A Tenniel dormouse, thought Forde, a pastel Beatrix Potter dormouse.
“And who,” said Skip, “if I maybe so bold, is your companion?”
“Why not join us?” said Forde, stirring a chair outwards with his foot “This lady is Anna Tresillian. She is the granddaughter—”
“Aha!” said Skip. “I thought she was a bit long in the tooth for you.”
“—the granddaughter,” said Forde, “of a famous Canadian poet, a famous Fredericton poet, a Confederation Poet. Her grandfather was the illustrious Childe Chauncy, a figure revered by many in academe as iconic.”
“Blimey!”
“Tomorrow,” said Forde, “as an honoured guest of the University of New Brunswick, she will preside over the interment of her grandfather’s ashes in Poets’ Corner.”
“I see, I see,” said Skip.
“I have been charged and entrusted with her care until the conclusion of tomorrow’s obsequies.”
“Obsequies,” repeated Skip.
“Yes,” said Forde.
“And here was I,” said Skip, “thinking you were robbing the cradle.”
Forde refused complicity in Skip’s tiresome bonhomie.
“Mrs. Tresillian is a substantial figure in her own right, an actress, an ASM, an international connoisseur of lustre and commemorative transferware.”
“An ASM?” repeated Skip.
“In more than one venue,” said Forde, giving Skip a hard glance, a glance he thought of, and hoped would be received as, “steely.”
“And such accomplishments aside, I am much taken with her as a person and with her person.”
“Oh, quite!” said Skip. “Quite. No offence intended, old chap. No argument from me. Absolutely not.”
They considered her.
“She is a jewel among women. A gem,” said Forde, “of the first water. A dowager but a dilly.”
“She seems to be asleep,” observed Skip.
“Dozing, I venture,” said Forde.
“Does she, do you know… no, no.”
“What?”
“Play darts.”
“No idea.”
“I was thinking,” said Skip, “what with all her honours and the obsequies and so forth, we could make her an honourary, you-know, just for a hand?”
“An idea that does you credit, Skip.”
“Right. Jolly good. I’ll ah, just have an explanatory you-know with Cecil and the lads.”
Thunk
Thunk
He turned back.
“What was that word?”
“Obsequies?”
“Began with C.”
“Confederation?”
“Right.”
When he returned from these confabulations, Forde shook Anna’s arm. She started from her slumber and, putting a palm over the top of her snifter, said, “Thank you, no. I suspect I’ve had an ample sussficiency.”She slowly became aware of Skip’s presence, her head lifting to take in his height.
“Who is this person,” she said, “looming?”
She perked up as Forde explained to her the honour that the University and Legion teams wished to pay her. Leaning on the table, she pushed herself from her chair and, placing her hand across Skip’s gallantly proffered forearm, they made a progress through the room towards the lights. Forde couldn’t hear what was going on. It was like watching a play again. He deduced from the evident palaver that Skip, a stickler for silliness, was benching Rasputin and bringing Anna formally onto the field, voluble courtesies, beaming and bonhomie. He heard only an occasional word, a shout.
He drifted off into thinking about “steely,” the “steely” glance he’d given Skip. In his frequent fallow periods when, sodden with depression at the reception of his novels by what, with gross exaggeration, might be called his “public,” he had more than once toyed with the idea of betraying his life and committing a thriller, a genre-giant, a thriller so gorgeously written, so depraved, it would be seen as towering above the ruck of New York Times Best Sellers, swift, deft, featuring a suave, fastidious dandy. Of aristocratic background, something along the lines of Lord Peter Whimsey or Albert Campion, but deadly rather than goofy, and with a dash of James Bondish priapism though directed at the lubricated bottoms of boys, his monster from MI6 was called Johnny Sterling.
His mother’s body had lain in state for three days upon an elaborate Italian catafalque in the Great Hall of Castle Malpas, the ancestral home of the Sterlings, before being borne to the cemetery in a hearse pulled by six black horses, white plumes nodding, to be buried, according to her last wishes, in a harmonium.
Upon his succession, and following his mother’s death, Johnny Sterling had emerged.
Johnny Sterling was given to steely glances. A steely glance from Johnny Sterling caused panic scurrying in the demi-monde. A steely glance from Johnny Sterling caused hard men to pale. Johnny’s hobby was collecting Victorian mourning jewelry in jet, lockets containing hair of the dear-departed, and death masks. Intimate of Paco Sánchez, reigning darling of Madrid’s Las Ventas Plaza, Johnny was a frequent guest at Sánchez’s ganadería and on more than one occasion had joined Sánchez’s cuadrilla in Las Ventas, in La Maestranza, to place the banderillas.
Johnny’s weapon of choice was nothing so plebeian as the American K-bar, but rather, a deliciously balanced Sykes-Fairbairn fighting knife alive to his hand, a knife which had been carried by his perverted father, hero of the SOE and seventeenth in the line of succession, a knife which had often been lingeringly bloodied in repulsively sadistic incursions into Occupied France, incursions his father referred to as “going on my hols.”
Johnny Sterling’s underwear was bespoke silk.
Oh, fuck it thought Forde.
*
Bowing slightly, Skip was extending to Anna the first dart.
SKIP!
Quarter-after Lady!
No! No!
Leave her be!
SKIP!
Skip put an arresting arm on Anna’s and then turned away. Forde could not hear what was being said, couldn’t grasp what the kerfuffle was about. Skip turned his head to another red-faced, blustering player as if seeking confirmation of what the player at the other side of the scrum had shouted. He raised both hands in a STOP, WAIT gesture, calming, placatory, and turned to Anna, hands still upraised, but she, bored or indifferent, had already started an ungainly roundhouse swing. At the apogee of her arm’s arc she let go of the dart, the momentum of her throw stumbling her away from the board.
Thunk
The dart struck into the double 6 at an extreme angle.
There was a sudden silence that deepened.
Glasses at the bar clinked.
The room looked and felt like a movie stopped mid-action, frame frozen.
Into the silence, a voice.
Fuck me!
<
br /> Then,
Oh, the Dear Lord!
I don’t freakin believe it!
“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” remonstrated Skip.
NO
NO!
Slowly, the dart was beginning to droop. It had not sunk squarely and deeply enough into the cork. It declined. Slowly. Declined. The room was holding its breath. Declined until the dart was lying almost its full length against the cork, its weight just counterbalanced, its point just holding against the wire. Silence held. The light blazed. The dart held every eye. The dart held.
The room exhaled.
“And, I believe,” said Skip into the silence, “match.”
Hubbub, swelling hubbub.
Anna made her way back to the table through smiles, clapping, heads nodding, whistles.
Skip clanged his key ring against an empty pint and shouted against the clamour OY! Then launched into a bumbling oompah oompah of a speech, a chunder of cheery verbiage, honours, obsequies, poets, Confederation, Childe Chauncy, sportsmanship, the place that poetry held in all hearts, that lived on in our hearts from school days, golden lads and girls all must as chimney-sweepers come to dust, such remembered glories conferring … well, conferring, and there you have it, to the victor the spoils, and so—Evan, without further ado, Evan, THE ENVELOPE PLEASE.
The bartender approached bearing a package, which drooped across both hands. The wrapping of the package was butcher paper. The butcher paper was secured with bindertwine.
Skip presented the package to Anna with further rhetorical fanfaronade.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
Forde, with minute gesture, prompted a greater show of enthusiasm.
“Moose steaks!” she said. “How kind!”
*
“Oops,” said Anna.
“Steps,” said Forde.
A street light shed a thin, sodium-vapour yellow on the road’s windrows, frozen sharp now by the wind, and on a wire-mesh waste bin chained to the street light’s pole. They’d left the jostling Legion Hall to a babble of friendly recipes. One man swore by a 24-hour marinade of Worcestershire sauce and vodka. In the fridge, mind. Broke down the fibres, he said, and you can drink it but the drinking it, that’s an option. Another had confided that his old woman boiled them for about five minutes with plenty of baking soda, took away that strong taste, the game taste, swamp she called it, then she fried them in bacon fat and you had yourself a real feed.
The road widened into a small circle in front of the Legion Hall and then ended. Behind the Legion Hall the trees began again. Where the road started to widen into the circle there were yellow No Exit signs scarred with bullet holes.
They stood waiting for the taxi, the yellow vapour light, the waste bin, the blackness of the trees.
In that dark, engines coughed, roared. Headlights and ruby brakelights sprang into the branches and trunks of pines.
“G’night, Rose.”
“G’night.”
“Now then, girls!”
“In your dreams.”
An engine revving.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight, said Forde.
To the receding lights declaimed, Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
Black silence sifting down.
Oul’ butty o’mine, said Anna. You’re a darlin’man, a daarlin’ man.
“Christ!” he said.
“What?”
“It’s running up my sleeve.”
“What?”
“Blood.”
… who would have thought said Anna the old man to have had so much blood in him?
“Funny, funny,” said Forde, plucking his shirt and pullover and jacket sleeves away from the wetness.
“It’s all sticky,” he said. “It’s cold and sticky.”
Go get some water
said Anna
And wash this filthy witness from your hand.
“Oh, it’s The Scottish Play, is it? Well—” gesturing at the concrete-block façade of the Legion Hall—This castle—at the rucked coconut matting on its steps, the squat portico, the stubby pillars—
hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
Anna said,
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine
and stopped.
Forde waited.
Making he said the green one red.
The breath of their declamations visible on the frigid air.
“That is not a line,” she said, “of which I can approve.”
Forde stared at her, astonished.
“So I don’t say it.”
“Really?”
“It’s the swoop,” she said, “that’s hokum.”
“What do you mean, ‘swoop’?”
“From Latin, from boomy words to everyday words. It’s meant to suggest depth of feeling. Pathos, even. But it’s hokum.”
“When you say, ‘hokum’—”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“I’m not looking at you like anything, particularly. I merely asked—”
“It’s hokum,” she said, “because we can see the trick being done. We’re supposed to be moved by the swoop, but real feeling’s destroyed because—because—we’re also meant to be admiring the neatness of the trick. There’s a word they used then…”
She paused, struggling.
“No, ah, it’s gone. A special word for that kind of cleverness.”
She dismissed this lapse of memory with one of her throwaway gestures.
“I never did much trust cleverness,” she said. “I never thought cleverness had anything much to do with feeling. Do you?”
“Conceit!” said Forde, “Was that the—?”
“Well done! Exactly! Yes, yes. It’s a conceit and we’re supposed to be aware of it and to admire it. And that,” she said, “is why it’s hokum.”
“Hmmm,” said Forde.
“Had you ever thought that ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’ is saying exactly the same thing as ‘making the green one red’?”
Forde made a “considering” face.
“He’d have done much better to end with real feeling, boomy but real, he’d have been much better served to end, as I do, with ‘incarnadine.’”
Forde nodded to convey that he was following the argument.
“But the green-red stuff dilutes it all away from guilt, enormous guilt, ENORMITY, to poor little ultra-contrite, ga-ga-driven woman gliding about in her nightie. Pathetic,” she said, “on all fronts.”
She raised her arm.
“BUT, all you need to do is stop the cleverness. All you have to do is—
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous SEAS incarnadine.
“Zing ‘seas’ and end on ‘incarnadine’ and there you are, BINGO. I have broached this, this …”
“interpretation?” suggested Forde.
“Rendering,” she said. “This rendition. I have encountered and endured much … it begins with ‘C’,”
“Contempt?”
“It’s something like ‘calamine.’”
“Hmmm,” said Forde. “Right, rashes, white stuff.”
“What I have had to say has fallen on deaf and hidebound ears.”
“Hmmm,” said Forde again. “Well, I hadn’t thought of any of this.”
“Well,” said Anna, “I had.”
She was impassioned, her words slurred slightly.
She drew away
from him.
“Calumny!” she said suddenly.
Stood shivering.
The silence between them was becoming uncomfortable, he felt; she was unaccountably angry.
Hoping to break this tension, Forde said, “Hey, Anna, what about this?”
He put his left arm across his chest and gripped his right shoulder. His head down and slightly turned, he directed the words towards his left elbow, sculpting by this pose, he thought, except for the package, withdrawal, introspection, weary resignation.
I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er
Come ON bloody taxi
But Anna was not watching him or listening.
She had drifted away and seemed to be addressing the ditch. He could hear her voice but not the words. As he came up behind her he heard:
It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood.
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;
Augures and understood relations have
By maggot-pies and choughs …
and choughs …
By maggot-pies and choughs …
and choughs …
He put his hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off. She resisted, rigid for a moment or two, then turned.
There was something in her face.
Had there been tears?
Difficult in this light to make things out.
She made a noise, something between a sigh and a soft cry.
“I can’t remember,” she said. “I can’t remember. It’s what I do. And I can’t remember.”
“My Lady,” said Forde, doffing his gallant hat, survivor, reluctant herald, pointing down the road in the direction of Fredericton,
he i’th’ blood-sized field lies swollen …
He lumbered himself down until he was half-kneeling before her, the package balanced across his sticky palm, and beseeched her,
Yet let this not make thee bloody-minded.
“Forde, Forde,” she said, “so kind, so very kind.”
“Oh, Christ!” he said it. “I can feel it.”
She patted his head.
“I think I’m feeling,” she said, “somewhat odd.”
“It’s pooling—”
“More,” she said, “possibly, than somewhat.”
“Pooling—” said Forde.
“Your knee’ll get wet,” she said.