Deluded Your Sailors (5 page)

Dig deep, deeper –

Breathe, girl, breathe, good, good girl.

Leaning her right cheek on the toilet seat, Nichole gasped and shook, spat, gasped again. She groped for tissue and wiped bile from her lips and chin. Bits of tissue stuck to her mouth. She examined her production. Slick globs – oh, look, an oil spill – floated round the bowl. Chunky mush of potato chips, sticky and somewhat-chewed Turkish delight, curdling milk and ice cream, soothing once but all acid burn now, and yep, found the burger.

Another thrust down the throat. Cramps already. Glycerine maddened her colon, then sweat and that curious, most unpleasant sensation she might vomit excrement – flush, flush again, rinse her mouth, sit on the toilet, and sweet, sweet relief.
Let's get you all
cleaned up down there, Nichole.
Like the cat with a hairball. The expanding pressure beneath her ribs: gone. Released. Swirling now towards the sewer pipe exit directly into St John's Harbour, Godspeed. Perfectly natural. And just fine, so long as she kept control of it. She'd always kept control. Never said a word.

Nichole supported herself on the vanity, stood up and looked in the mirror. She ran cold water until she seemed to smell the reeds from the bottom of Windsor Lake, then splashed it on her face. Nichole Laika Wright, aged 38, green eyes bloodshot, too-long hair sweated up, only surviving child of Stephen and Una Wright, the others lost to crib death, a particular problem for the Wrights. Yes, one of
those
Wrights, the over-reaching high-achieving risk-addicted business crowd connected for years to VOIC Radio, some days drowning in paralytic sadness and so desperate to
feel
that they'd seek out grand projects and heavy tasks and so self-medicate with pressure, deadlines and adrenaline. Not Nichole, though. Just an all-round failure there, as lost some days as a stray dog shot into space. Even the answering machine said so.

‘Hello! This is your captain speaking. You've just won a cruise holiday! Please call us back within the next hour to confirm your credit card number, and soon you'll be on your way to the sunny seas.'

‘Nichole, Evan Rideout. Can you come in to the Admiral's Rooms early tomorrow and look after the
Lady Voter
exhibit? I've got to meet Chris Jackman again over at Tourism, Culture and Recreation.'

‘Nicky? It's your mother. Remember me? Pick up. Oh, for God's sake, I don't even know why I try to talk to you some days.'

‘Hi, Nichole. It's Callie Best, Claire's mom. I found a photo album today from when you two were in school, looks like grades three to nine. Let me know when you want to come get it.'

I can't!

Photo albums meant proofs of the past and hard, sweet memories of Claire who just fucking died. Just died. Four years ago, come April. Four years?

‘Ms Wright, this is Reverend Elias Winslow of the Church of Prevenient Grace at the End of Things in Port au Mal. You may remember selling me some land last year. I'm calling on behalf of HARC, the Historical Accuracy Reproduction Committee, and as a personal favour, to caution you against overly rigorous research. No one wishes to see government time and funds wasted on careless digging. I would be happy to direct you further.'

Nichole, electrolytes wrecked, tottered and grasped a short bookcase. —The fuck?

‘Might I add: “There is no prince that will thus lightly lose his subjects, neither will I as yet lose you; but since you complain of my wages, be content to go back, and what our country will afford I do here promise to give you.” '

I need to sit down.

‘I trust you will be in touch soon.'

The answering machine clicked off.

This Reverend Winslow had quoted
Pilgrim's Progress
at her. Quoted from the very page she'd just marked.

—I hear all this
after
I've done the b-p? That's hardly fair.

Cat rubbing her ankles, Nichole hauled herself onto the couch, picked up remotes and flicked on the television and DVD player.
Star Trek
lulled her. Over the hissing racket of the poorly costumed Gorn fighting Captain Kirk, she heard Claire Furey chanting their rainy-day rhyme:

Little Sally Saucer, sitting in the water

Rise up, Sally, and wipe away your tears.

Turn to the east side, turn to the west side,

Turn to the very side that you like best!

That game, best played round a puddle, sometimes enticed Claire's grandfather to come outside, back when Claire and her mother lived with him. Nichole adored Claire's grandfather, only later coming to understand that Claire's Poppy had another name: Jack Best, architect of Newfoundland and Labrador's ‘responsible independence' and the republic's first prime minister. Nichole's grandfather, retired civil servant William Wright, always asked about Claire's Poppy in a strange way, like he hoped something bad had happened to him. Poppy Best liked to teach the girls games: Blind Man's Bluff, Freeze Tag, and a complicated variant on hopscotch:

Marlow, Marlow, Marlow bright,

How many miles to Babylon?

Threescore and ten.

Can I get there by candlelight?

Aye, if your legs be as long as the light,

But take care of the old grey witch at the roadside.

Jack Best, in his mid seventies, would then pretend to be the old grey witch and chase two pre-school girls round a huge backyard. Grand fun.

William Wright did not play such transparent games. Bring on the old grey witch, for, by comparison, she be harmless. Nichole still could not speak of most of what William Wright had done to her. Memories surfaced in pieces, timedulled, barely recognizable, unlabelled little movies so disconnected from the rest of her that they could not possibly be true, just compelling, hypnotic, and tyrannical. Simplistic, when narrated, crassly symbolic:
He treated
me like I was special – thought it meant some kind of love – he took me
across a pond to a storage shed – out on a yacht, him and some other
old men, singing that rant and roar song, endless –

The answering machine beeped.

‘Ms Wright, Reverend Winslow. I came across this verse and thought of you: “Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land be termed Desolate; but thou shalt be called Hepzibah and thy land Beulah...” '

Stand there, now: pretty girl against the summer landscape.

Captain Kirk hove a cardboard rock at the Gorn. Nichole listened to Reverend Winslow, knowing the telephone had not rung.

‘I have known your family for many years, Ms Wright, tilled the thin soil those roots penetrate. Did you know some plants will break rocks? And the barrens, Ms Wright: your cousin, Lewis, dreams he's crucified on the barrens. Moss and bog, worn rocks white and dead as the moon, everlasting wind eating his eyes, his skin, finally his bones. Nailed to a bent starrigan. Caribou run past, fog hiding them. Stains in the blood haunt him. You need me. Whatever it takes to jig yourselves free of dark water, hey, my dear.'

I am not your fucking ‘dear.'

The cat kneaded Nichole's lower belly, purred. The Gorn hissed and growled.

And – God love him – Reverend Winslow sang. He clearly had a thing for Bunyan.

‘Who would true valour see,

Let him come hither;

One here will constant be,

Come wind, come weather.

There's no discouragement

Shall make him once relent

His first avowed intent

To be a pilgrim.'

Nichole compared the Reverend's performance of the song to Maddy Prior's and found the Reverend wanting.

‘Addicted to risk, anything to crack your calloused shell and allow feeling in. And out. You'd better come and see me.'

Nichole forced herself to stand. Then she staggered back to the bathroom, the vomiting involuntary now. And hard. Ribbons of thick yellow bile landed in the water.

Reverend Winslow's telephone-dusty voice changed timbre as it emerged from the toilet bowl. ‘And here is the chasm between the official version and what really happened.'

The nurses at the old Janeway Children's Hospital, helping six-year-old Nichole after a disastrous bout of seasickness and something else:
Let's get you cleaned up down there.

Winslow continued as Nichole retched. ‘What really happened? Tell us what happened. The full story. All of it.'

Omnipotent, condescending aliens complimented Captain Kirk for showing mercy. Nichole grabbed the word, spoke it to Winslow, her grandfather and his friends that day out on the yacht, Almayer Foxe, the toilet bowl: —Mercy.

‘Come see me. I dare you.'

Galled mouth burning, Nichole recognized that begging mercy from the toilet bowl marked the first time she had spoken of the abuse outside her psychiatrist's office.

She smiled.

Because she hadn't swallowed; she'd spit.

5) ‘WHERE ONCE'
F
EBRUARY
11, 2009, S
T
J
OHN
'
S
.

Lewis Wright fingered the two-pronged electrical cord wrapped in green, yellow and brown threads. An elegance missing today, when cords lay exposed to their dull plastic casing.
Fabric-wrapped
electrical cords. Almost an argyle going here. Why must we
lose beauty for the uniform goo coating transmission lines – electricity,
telephones, radio, internet? Do we dip communication into a toxic
bog? And why must perching birds die?

Carefully re-sealing the box containing what his brother, Matt, called the Ghostometer, Lewis Wright blew greying blond hair out of his green eyes and winced at the stiffness in his lower back. His father, Thomas, suffered stiffness in knees, hips and sacroiliac joints but dismissed it as simple age and happily swallowed glucosamine and seal oil. Yet Thomas lost mobility. He lost height, too, a good inch over the last year. During a photo op at the Admiral's Rooms, when they opened the radio exhibit, Lewis met Matt's eyes over their father's head. Taller than Skipper, whose voice could still frighten them? Nonsense.

Lewis sang as he gently hoisted boxes and crates, folk songs on sighs, hardly knowing he did so.

—‘I will die, I will die, this young captain did cry, if I can't get that maid from the shore... ' Familiar, beloved topography: his father's attic. Old portraits, clothes, radio gear, talismans of his grandfather, Robert Wright, who'd founded VOIC Radio. Lewis had never known his grandfather, except though stories and photos. Despite chairing the Royal Republic Historical Society of Newfoundland and Labrador, Lewis had cared only sporadically about his father's attic. Until a few months ago. Not long after Thanksgiving. When the fluoxetine took root in his brain.

—‘Then she took his broad sword instead of an oar and paddled her way to the shore, shore, shore, and paddled her way to the shore.'

Depressed? Me? I don't feel depressed. Separate, maybe. Detached. Not in the world with the rest of you. Lonely, yes, sometimes. But no,
not depressed. I came to see you about my insomnia, Doctor. Runs in
the family. I'm afraid I'll start drinking too much just to get a decent
night's sleep. I keep counting the dots in my ceiling tiles and mentally
drawing lines between them to form new constellations.

—‘It's of a pretty female, as you may understand, her mind been bent for rambling into some foreign land.'

Pills? Prozac? I don't know about that. I think I can pull myself
up by my – you know, I've never seen a bootstrap.

Lewis cradled the old ledger in his elbow and sneezed over his shoulder. He knelt down, placed the ledger on top of the Ghostometer box, pulled on archivist's white cotton gloves, and turned over several pages: stains, mildew, decay, and many notes and tallies. On the left-hand side, opposing counts of rope and salt, strange handwriting.

Cast away. A castaway for fourteen years in this settlement of
thin-stilted draughty shacks perched (and praying not to slip) upon
this stone leviathan, this lonely rock sheared and broken out of the sea,
up out of the sea: Lucifer's fist shaken at God. Thrown off, unwanted
seed. Fourteen damned years, God far away, past fog and strange sky.

Lewis touched the old inkstains.

He suddenly cared nothing for the rarely acknowledged and forbidden Ghostometer beneath the ledger. The apparatus supposedly broadcast to the aether – to the dead. Or so the smudged 1930s magazine article buried in the box with it claimed. Teenaged Lewis had set it up one rainy afternoon, wire antenna, extension cords, Tesla coil and all, his brother Matt protesting but never really refusing to help. The final touch: Lew connected the apparatus to a reel-to-reel. The tape rolled, recorded Lew's callout:
CQ, CQ,
calling all stations, CQ, this is Lewis Wright, please acknowledge, over.
The boys heard no answer. The house's fuse box melted. The tape, however, when played back, gave up disturbing signals:
Acknowledged
... hear me? Glasses fell... hear me?
The chief engineer at VOIC erased the tape, for Lew's own good, he felt. God only knew where that signal originated. Disturbing, yes. Terrifying once. Perhaps the Prozac softened Lewis's instincts, rendered him happy, passive, and numb mush for predators, like that dream, runt spruce, rocks and fogbound caribou –