“Then the money started to run out, and…and she was out of it by then. Out of it from the pain. She’d stopped chemo, refused treatment. I never got up the sac to ask what kind of cancer it was, and don’t care to know, now. Aggressive, killing cancer is all I know. She was going to die and she knew it, fought it for a while to try and keep things in some semblance of the shitty normal I knew, but then it just became obvious death was…the only possible outcome, and soon. So, when she started to pass out from the pain, when money to buy food and all ran out, I had to call Dad. I never even—I never even knew she had a way to call him. Figured he just showed up when he felt like it, and they never talked during his tour. Turns out, they had a system in place. He’d send her postcards with his next location, and a hotel phone number, in case of emergencies.”
“She never called him?” I asked.
“Not in front of me, no.” He walked into the water, knee-deep; I waded in after him, and the bottom was squishy, muddy, soft, cool, and the water was blood-warm.
“Did he come back?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
He glanced at me, and the moon was the only light but for the dull orange flicker of the low fire behind us. The moon’s silvering shine was brighter, though, washing the lake and our skin and his hair till everything seemed to bloom silver, the color of melted mirrors.
“How long what?” he asked.
“How long did she…last?”
“Six months.” He swallowed, ducked his head. I didn’t dare look at him for fear of seeing tears, seeing pain too deep to put into human expression; another weight I was reticent to pick up. “Six months from finding her on the floor of her studio to the moment I watched her breathe her last.”
“When did your dad show up?”
“Two months before. I took care of her alone for four months.”
“Fucking god, Errol. You were twelve.”
“She was my mom,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “I would sit on the bed next to her and read to her. Her favorite was Nora Roberts. I read so many books to her. Books a twelve-year-old boy had no business reading, but she was too weak to even hold the book at that point.”
“You dropped out of school?”
He nodded. “It didn’t seem to matter, and she needed me. People would come by asking about me not going to school, but I always managed to talk them around to buggering off and leaving us be. Mom just wanted to die in peace, and I wasn’t about to leave her alone for something so stupid as fucking school.”
“Then your dad showed up.”
“Yeah. Dad.” He kicked at the water gently, sending circling ripples skimming across the glassy lake. “He was fucking useless. Didn’t know how to understand her dying. He paid bills. Took care of her…estate, I guess you call it. Sold off her paint stuff, put the house up for sale, whatever other stuff a kid my age had no understanding of. Stayed gone, couldn’t help her to the bathroom. He’d sit with her late at night, in the mornings. Talk to her, play for her. The fiddle was his instrument, but he played guitar and sang too, and he’d sing her these old French folk songs.”
Crickets chirped, a frog croaked; a night bird sang.
“We both knew the end was close. She was passed out most of the time, thankfully. When she was awake, she was in…just…just unutterable fucking agony. Unbearable to watch, not a damn thing we could do. She refused to go to the hospital. They’d drug her up and for some reason she wanted to…to know when the end came. She made Dad leave. He threw a fit, but he left. She told me to find what was beautiful in the world.” He swallowed. “‘Find what’s beautiful in this world, Errol. Make art out of the beautiful. Be the beautiful. There’s beauty out there, Errol. Find it. Play it as music, paint it, photograph it, write about it, dance about it, whatever it is. You have art inside you, Errol. I see it in you.’” He quoted her words with a soft, quiet inflection to his voice. “‘Just don’t let it consume you like it did me.’”
“What did that mean?” I asked.
I could feel the weight of his pain gathering in me, felt myself taking it up.
“Wondered that a long time myself. Best I can figure, she drowned herself in painting because it was the only way she could deal with…with whatever her deal was with Dad.” A shrug. “I took it to heart. I never let art consume me. I take time off. I read books. I go for drinks. I watch sunsets.” A harsh laugh. “I think she meant something else, though.”
“Like?”
He ducked his head again, bent and scooped the lake bottom muck in his hands, splatted it from palm to palm. “Like…” a pause. “Like love. Like…not letting art push away…people. Relationships.”
“Oh.”
“Art didn’t push people away.” Another harsh laugh. “Life did that.”
“Life. Meaning loss. Tragedy. Pain.” I felt my voice drop to a whisper. “I know a little something about that myself.” Louder, then. “So…after.”
“He sold the house.” Bent again, scrubbed his hands clean in the water. “Let me pick a few things as keepsakes, which he then put in storage, except a few photos and little knickknacks. Put his stuff in storage, got rid of a lot. Basically, cut ties with Christchurch except a storage unit which I think he meant for me, for…eventually.”
“And you still have that?”
A nod. “Yeah, but I haven’t been back in years. Been considering just cutting it loose, having someone sell it all off. Everything that matters to me is there,” he said, pointing at the van. “Once ends were tied up, we left. I got on a plane for the first time, and that was the beginning of my life with Dad, on the road. That was when I got into photography. We’d tour for three or four months, and then the band would unplug in London or Dublin or Glasgow or thereabouts, and they’d all scatter for a bit, then come together and write new songs and practice, and Dad would hire a tutor for me, so I could get my basic education finished. But schooling was irrelevant.”
“What’d you do?”
“I played with them. Father and son dueling fiddles? It was gold. Turns out I had a talent, and getting to play on stage sort of lit me up. Plus, staying up late, skipping school, nicking a pint or a glass of whiskey when Dad was playing? What kid wouldn’t want that life? I grew up in a hurry, or rather, finished the growing up that Mum’s dying hadn’t done. The usual suspects applied to a teenage boy living with a touring band of single men—drinking, drugs, women. They kept their tour tightly spaced, so each date was close in terms of kilometers to the next, so we’d drive part of the day and have time free. I had Mum’s camera and with nothing better to do while Dad and Jonesey and the others did their adult stuff—pubs and chasing fanny—I would go exploring wherever we were, with the camera. It was just something to do, something that connected me to Mum. When I was with her, and Dad was gone, the fiddle was my connection to him. With Mum gone, living with Dad, the camera was my connection to her. As the years went on, I got more passionate about the photography, and playing in the band with Dad was just…part of life. Something I did because…just because it was what I did.”
“You were part of a touring band at twelve?”
“Oh, yeah. Played all over Europe. Not huge crowds—they weren’t a great big famous draw, but they could pack out pubs and kept booking shows for decades.” He shrugged. “That was life, touring and playing and photography. And then…” a ragged, bitter sigh. “And then.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.” Hand through his hair. “That playlist you turned on. It was in a pub in Dublin. Recorded live. My first-time solo opening with the band. Dad was so fucking proud.”
“That was you? On that song?”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah.” Pause. “I was sixteen. Packed-out pub, spilling out onto the footpath. It was some holiday or other. We played for six hours nonstop, just went through our whole song list over and over, and then just started jamming. Dad and me dueled, he’d play this amazing riff on the fiddle and I’d try to match it, you know? It was kind
of a joke, obviously, because Dad wasn’t just talented naturally, he was a consummate professional. He’d been playing professionally every day of his life since he was my age, and I was just this kid with raw talent and zero real experience. But they loved it, and I loved it.”
I swallowed hard, feeling the weight of what was coming. “It’s amazing that you had that.”
He nodded, a jerky movement, his chin coming to rest on his chest. “It was. It really was amazing. Best day of my life, in some ways. Next day, we slept in as we’d played till some ungodly hour. Came time to load up and make for the next stop, and nobody could find Dad. We checked the hotel, hospitals, checked with the police, asked the barman if he’d seen Dad leave with anyone.”
He chewed on the silence, teeth grinding, breathing harshly.
I couldn’t breathe.
“I found him. He was in the van. We had a big old caravan, a proper one, with a kitchen and a bathroom and all, and we lived in it. If our stop didn’t have decent accommodations, we’d stay in the caravan, but once in a while we’d treat ourselves and stay in a proper hotel. That night, we’d stayed in a hotel. I figured I’d check the caravan, because sometimes Dad would get restless, reclusive, sort of. Need to be alone. Missing Mum, I always thought, but he’d never say as much to me. So, yeah. I checked the caravan. He was in the dinette booth. Facedown on the table in a pool of bloody vomit. Bag of coke open nearby.”
“God, Errol.”
“He’d overdosed. Police later tested the coke he’d been taking and turns out it was laced with something. Not just impure coke, but something awful, something poisonous. All I remember was a big long compound name, don’t remember what, doesn’t matter.”
“No. God, no.”
He swallowed hard. “His eyes were open.” A whisper, raspy, hoarse. “I couldn’t get up. I’d fallen down, sitting on the step up in to the camper van, and I couldn’t get up. Just sat there staring at my dad. Eventually Jonesey, Murray, O’Brien, and Connor found me.”
“Orphaned at sixteen, Errol. God, I’m so sorry.”
“The band nearly broke up. I stayed with Jonesey, who was always closest to Dad. Jonesey plays the penny whistle, flute, Uilleann pipes. He took me off to the coast, and we camped out on the beach in the freezing cold, and he got me drunker than I’ve ever been, before or since. Just absolutely pissed. Let me cry and yell and all that. Then we went back to Dublin and the rest of the guys convinced me to carry on with them. So, I took Dad’s place. Sixteen, and I was the fiddler for a touring band. I wasn’t as good as Dad, but I could keep up, and I learned.” He stared out over the darkened lake, the glow of the fire behind us dying. “That was when I properly got into what I do now. I had nothing to live for. Playing in the band was…it reminded me of Dad, and part of me hated it. But I had nowhere to go, and the mates from the band were the only thing like family I had left. I needed Mum more than ever, and her camera was the best thing I had to feel her. But I needed…I needed a rush. So I’d climb up to the top of skyscrapers and hang over the edge and take ridiculous photos. Or jump onto a moving freight train and take one from the top as it went under a tunnel. Hang off bridges over big ravines. Crazy stuff, just to make my heart pound, to feel like I was alive. Then, it wasn’t about the art, it was about the rush. But gradually, I started to really appreciate the art of it. The guys from the band were pissed off at me more often than not, because I’d be impossible to find, off taking photos and climbing the sides of old castles and banging about ruins.”
“You said that was how you ended up working for National Geographic.”
He nodded. “Eventually. Not before the guys got fed up with my bullshit. We broke up. And, honestly, it was my fault. The fiddle, the band, it wasn’t my future. It made me miss Dad more than anything, and I was this angry, angsty, lonely, confused boy with no family, no clue who the fuck I was, or what I wanted. We broke up in Prague. They all went their separate ways, except Jonesey. He stayed with me a week or two, but eventually I pushed even him away. I was eighteen. I spent the next year, maybe two, just sort of…floating around. I’d saved money, and Dad had saved a lot too, so I was able to live off that as long as I was frugal. And I was. I barely ate, walked everywhere or took a train. Just sort of wandered Europe on my own. I took…god, hundreds of thousands of photos during that time, and that’s when I really discovered a passion for it. For myself, not just to connect me back to Mum.
“And yeah, I’d run into Jerry in a hotel bar not long before the band broke up, and he’d said I needed more experience, a broader portfolio, and gave me his card. I knocked about Europe basically just getting distance from Dad dying, and started focusing on really learning to take artistic level photos. Finally, I felt I had something to show him, and we met up in London, and that’s when what I told you earlier happened. He pulled strings and got a barely educated kid, not even twenty, on the staff of National Geographic as an adventure photographer. Out of duty to Mom, yes, but I think also because he saw himself in me. He’d lost his own parents young, and had gotten his own break in photojournalism as a war correspondent in Vietnam. So yeah, I think he saw me as a chance to sort of pay back the breaks he’d gotten as a young man. Take care of someone he saw as a lot like himself. More’s the luck for me.”
“And the rest is history?”
He nodded. “And now you know. I’ve never talked about any of that, not since it happened. Jerry was at Mom’s funeral, of course, but it was only the band at Dad’s. I’ve never talked about Mum dying, about taking care of her. Dad, the overdose, none of it.”
“Never?”
He shook his head. “Who would I talk to about it? I work alone, mostly. I send in the photos and Jerry takes care of putting an article to it. Sometimes I’ll work with a writer to create a specific piece, but usually it’s just me. I’ve never had any close mates. I call Jonesey once in a while, check in with him. He’s married, now, living on a sheep farm in the English countryside. Women? Never saw the point in sharing that shit with them. Women have always just been…for fun. For a bit of companionship. Except Leslie, but even she couldn’t get me to share that shit.”
“Who’s Leslie?”
He laughed. “Closest thing I’ve ever allowed to…” He pivoted, waved between him and me. “To whatever the fuck this is.” A shake of his head, disbelief and amazement and confusion and pain conflicting his expression. “I lived with her for six months in Perth. I was doing a long-term piece on Aborigine life, so I’d take day trips, weekend trips, sometimes a week or two at a time out into the bush researching and shooting. Leslie was…comforting. And comfortable. But she wanted me to share, to open up, to be all…”
“Gushy?” I suggested.
“Yeah. You get it.”
“Oh boy, do I get it.”
“I just couldn’t. I cared about her, but I just…I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it.”
“It feels selfish, in a way,” I said. “To put that kind of burden on someone.”
He nodded, sighing in relief. “Exactly. It’s too much for most people.”
“Especially if they’ve never lost anyone. That kind of pain is very lonely.”
“She was steady and stable, sweet, kind, affectionate, totally vanilla. Worst thing she’d ever experienced was some secondary school bullying about her weight.”
“Not the same.”
“Not making light of it, because I guess it was pretty bad. She struggled with it, even when I was with her, years out of school. She’d lost a lot of weight but still had trouble seeing herself as beautiful. Which she was, very. So, I’m not saying her pain was less than mine. But it’s just…”
“Not the same.”
“No.” He went back to the fire, added a couple larger sticks to brighten it back up.
I sat in the sand beside him. “Errol…” I fought with myself over how to ask the question. “Why? Why me? Why now? Why go back for me, why look for me? Why tell me all this?”
He poked at the
fire, adjusting the sticks. “I don’t know, Poppy. Truly I don’t. I just know I got about two hours away from the hotel and realized…” He swallowed hard. “Realized it just…it wasn’t the same.”
“What wasn’t?” I asked, my voice not quite a whisper.
“Driving. Being in the van. The road.” A long, boiling pause. “Me.”
I’d been ignoring my emotions all day. Fighting them. Focusing on my feet taking one step after another, and wishing I had something strong to drink. Then I’d been in the semi with Marty and he was a nonstop font of rambling conversation about everything from politics to raising his daughters to the crazy shit he’d seen as a trucker, and he’d made it easy to push things away.
“You, how?”
He shook his head. “Pop, I…”
“Errol, you can’t hunt me down and throw your life story at me and open up my own fucking bullshit wounds, and not tell me why.”
“I don’t fucking know!” He shot to his feet, paced away. “Okay? I don’t fucking know why. I just couldn’t go another mile. The van was fucking empty. Music was pointless. Even when I stopped and got these great shots of a ghost town, it wasn’t the same.” He pivoted to stand staring down at me—glaring, more accurately. Seething. “It wasn’t the fucking same without you, Poppy. I can’t explain it beyond that. I just know that that moment in the hotel room, before we went separate directions. It was a moment where we could have…done something different than we’re both used to doing. I run, you run. We’re runners, Poppy. Someone threatens to get close, to get inside, to get under our walls, threatens to understand our pain, and we run. I’d rather jump out of a fucking airplane than talk about Mum dying, about watching her die, about…about how she’d cry in her sleep…” He turned away, wiping his face. “How I’d hold her and beg her to stop crying. How do you fucking talk about that? Why bother in the first place? So the other person can feel sorry for me? Fuck no. No thanks, and piss off. And yet with you, there’s something else.”
He turned back. Crouched in front of me, eyes damp. “I threw my life story at you, yes. I shared my shit with you. Shared the sad bits. Because…because I don’t have a choice. I had to find you, had to…to figure what this connection is, between us. What it means. Because it’s real, Poppy. What it is, I don’t fucking know. But it’s there and I know you know it.”
Goode Vibrations Page 19