This All Happened (12 page)

Lydia is sitting with palms up and outstretched, Tinker Bumbo at her feet, the phone crooked to her shoulder. She is flapping a man-made shoe in the air. She is talking to Craig Regular.

16      Boyd Coady is standing inside his pickup truck's open door, adjusting the knot in his tie. As if he's releasing energy, a clenched muscle.

I'm giving Max a hand with a job. I love seeing weight displaced. A lintel over a door. The lines of energy being diverted over the weak spots, such as windows. The crush of weight detoured. Dams on gravity. The turn of bricks into a bridge over a window. A bridge is a prayer.

Max has a photo of a fly's enlarged head glued to his tool chest. This photo tells him a lot about the twentieth century. The beauty of science and the power of life. His father once scraped the inside of his lip with a spoon. Not telling him why. Then showed him the cells under a microscope. That vitality taught him insignificance.

17      Iris lends me her flashing rear light and a small triangle of reflecting banner. I bicycle out to Cape Spear in the dark. The name Shea Heights painted on a water tower like some military post. Strickland's Salvage hidden behind a tall wooden fence. As though if you saw the beautiful wrecks behind it, you'd feel compelled to steal them. The beautification committee has bulldozed and paved an area for an open market. You could land a small plane on it.

It takes an hour to ride to Cape Spear. I claim a spot on the grass above the World War II cannon in front of the bunker. The cannon faces a bonfire licking the cement wall below the stage. The singers look nervous about the cannon facing them. Or are they cold. I huddle into the grass as the wind picks up. An anonymous thermos of good Scotch is passed around. Then I see it's Max's. They wave and I join them.

Clear night, dark sky, streak of milky way, Daphne calls it a fried egg on its side. The city to the north is two pots of jewels separated by Signal Hill.

Max offers a ride home, throw the bike in the truck, but I want to whoosh back in the dark. There are no streetlights and I have no light. I pull up hills and then descend, plunge into the valleys of the road. I can make out the centre line and the side line and keep in the middle. But the condition of the road is a mystery. All I can sense is the whirring of my wheels and I can tell their distance from the sound they make. There is no motion except wind. It could be that I'm standing still. I look back and notice the frenetic blinking of Iris's red light.

18      Woke at six-thirty, the mist anchored in the harbour. Propped on an elbow I can see this bed of sneaky fog. And then coffee with Iris and Helmut. Hot sun. Everything lit.

On the table is our box of co-op vegetables from Daphne's organic farm: deep green bok choy, rhubarb, a green onion, parsley, tatsoi (a small bouquet of greens with a slender peach-coloured flower in the centre), spinach. Everything special and select.

I wait for Lydia to call, and she does. She invites me down and I go.

19      The rain wakes me at six, and I get up and make coffee. I wrap Lydia's Bodum in a cup towel. I notice her faucet is fixed. I watch the rain, tons of it, slash down. Lydia smells the coffee and comes down for some.

Me: You fixed your faucet.

I didnt fix the faucet.

Well, someone fixed the faucet.

It wasnt me.

She's got an admirer who fixes faucets. Craig Regular fixed that faucet.

20      At the Ship with Maisie and Lydia. Theyre having brandies and Earl Quigley says he's alone at the bar could he sit with us and listen.

It's rare to see Lydia and Earl together. I like to see it. To see the one youre with talking to her ex provides a window onto a previous life in action.

We had been to Alex Fleming's photograph exhibit. And there was a picture of Maisie and Oliver wearing cowboy boots. It was seeing them again in their life together. Maisie said, Even though Oliver's affair was the catalyst for my departure, I had already begun to drift from him. She hated how, when they married, his sink became their sink. His mess was their mess.

Maisie: I dont ever want to clean up our dishes. Una's I dont mind. But not the man I'm sleeping with. There's no fun in that.

Me: What about a guy who fixes your faucet? Just on the side?

Maisie: That's what I want. I want a weekend man.

And yet there is something in possession, marriage. In becoming an object. Something erotic in that. We all agree with this admission, even Earl.

21      Wilf walks into the Ship looking uncomfortable. Then he sees us and relaxes. He is in a suit he wants to wear in Lydia's film. He looks like a Beatle in it. Wilf, at the age of fifty-two, has become a promising actor. That word, promising. Wilf buys a pint and sits with us and sighs with relief. Wilf: When you open up the Ship Inn door all by yourself. Youve walked downtown alone. You dont want to be alone. You feel like a dog and you want a bit of company. Well, you open up that door and you steel yourself. It's got to be all one motion, no hesitation. Open the door and stride in, but a slow stride, maximum exposure. And you make your way to the bar. And all the way there you keep your eyes on the bottles and the mirrors and youre hoping, youre hoping there's someone in there who knows you. You hope you dont make it to the bar before someone waves you over, grasps your arm, says, Hey Wilf, how's it going? Yes, sir, that walk to the bar is the loneliest walk in the world.

22      I lurch for the birdie. I lurch and a hockey player strikes a two-handed blow across my calf. I fall, twist, turn to face my attacker. No one. The floor hockey crowd is on their half of the gym, separated by a net curtain. Badminton players look down at me. I roll, seize my leg, grimace. I see Lydia looking down. Oliver: Would you mind rolling over into your own court? And Lydia: Okay, let's keep playing.

But there must be an image of agony that transcends their lust to play, for they form a huddle again, over me. Lydia kneels. Oliver offers a tensor bandage and a shoulder.

I'm wheeled into emerge. Dr Singh feels the calf. He recommends ice. Lydia wheels me over to get crutches. I swing on the crutches back to the car.

Want to get fish and chips from Scampers?

Lydia loves getting the fish and chips, she skips in, as if she knows I really want it and getting me what I want pleases her. I realize I'm a hard man to get something for.

I watch her from the passenger side. She stands under fluorescent lighting and orders, both elbows on the counter. She turns and mouths to me, through the take-out window: A drink? I write NO backwards in my breath on the car window. I try to write it in a soft way. To incorporate the thanks.

23      In bed with my leg up. Lydia brings me juice, toast, poached eggs, and coffee. I try the bathroom. When the foot is below my hips, that's when the pain rushes down. A bucket of liquid needles sloshing heavy into my foot. It's as if blood can't return to the heart.

I have eaten a bowl of grapes and a clementine. I watch Lydia fill a grocery bag with wet lettuce. She slashes holes in the bottom of the bag, knots it, and, outside, whirls the bag over her head, like a pail of water at the beach. She is drying lettuce. She turns quickly and I watch her hair twist to meet her head. She is so determined.

Max delivers frozen pea soup and a bag of cherries and a loaf of bread and a salad with a cookie. It hurts to even stand up straight. The blood burning in the back of my leg.

24      The laburnum is floating, yellow cobs of dots. A woman, who has forgotten the name of palliative care, calls it that place where you goes and that's it. Daphne's on duty and she props my leg over folded hot blankets.

They tilt the X-ray bed. Tie two rubber tourniquets around my ankle to find a vein. Daphne tries twice, sticking me with a small needle attached to a thin glass tube. It's called contrast dye. They wheel me in for an ultrasound. The specialist is wet from the rain. He hasnt operated the computer in three weeks. He coats my leg in cold gel. He sticks the scanner up to my groin. I see, on the screen, the vein and artery in cross-view He pushes and my vein flattens. My artery doesnt budge.

25      Lydia's father fries me a splendid mackerel after my venogram. We have the mackerel with cauliflower and lettuce.

On crutches, I swing back home. I can't push the clutch down, so I have to walk. I remember the man in Corner Brook who had one leg. Lived in the Bean and wore denim. He was active, tough, and got around on wooden crutches. He had strong hands. Amputees no longer do this. They have prosthetics or wheelchairs. It was a time when missing limbs were visible, the drains open, the sewers flooded over Valley Road when it was just dirt.

At the fire station four firemen in blue shirts sit in portable chairs on the wall looking over the road. They watch my progress.

Maisie and Una visit with a loaf of bread, an apple, a grapefruit, and a sesame-seed snack. Maisie's given up smoking and resumed running, to supplement her rowing. Yesterday, twenty-eight minutes. There's so much to do, she says, and here's another thing.

What thing.

The not smoking, she says.

26      At about two Helmut calls. He is leaving port at four oclock.

There is a defined half moon accompanying the sun. Lydia and I drive down to say bon voyage to the crew and their company boat. Helmut invites us on. All the men are tanned, with thick forearms and tall. Most are American. I leave the crutches and hop aboard. A famous marine artist has painted a school of tuna across the bow The navigation is tied to satellite imagery. Helmut shows us St John's harbour on a screen as it looks from the sky. We let him have a minute with Iris.

Boyd Coady says, loudly, I'd rather fly to Boston. Saw one of those tupperware boats caught in ice last year. Sunk before you could blink.

Helmut asks Lydia to take the video camera, to catch them heading for the Narrows. He starts up the auxiliary outboard and spews forward, ducking under the boom. He describes a wide curve and returns to the dock, cutting power. Helmut leans to collect the camera, waves, then slips on the wet gunwale. He falls into the boat, hitting his head, and two of the crew come to assist him. But he's up quickly and laughing and opens the outboard throttle, embarrassed.

Iris jogging to Cabot Tower, to wave them off. Gulls sit with their chests against the pavement.

They will sail to Boston on a dry run before heading to Brazil, where Iris will meet them.

Boyd: You wouldnt catch me in one of those contraptions. He's German, I say, as if that explains something.

27      As I walk up Cabot Street a ten-year-old girl asks me to stop the ball. I stop it with my crutch. I look tough with the crutches swung over my shoulder. The neighbourhood so shoddy. A dog in a second-storey window, silently clawing at the inside glass. A man with an apron opens the door to a house adjacent to Leo's Fish and Chips. He's smoking. He goes back inside.

Often I am afraid of new life. Of pushing into the new. Maisie says when you have a kid there's an eight-hundred-dollar-a-month grocery bill. I watch Boyd Coady feeding a baby in the back seat of a Chevette, his seven-year-old standing beside him Boyd looks fiercely down Long's Hill to the Narrows. Helmut in that storm last night. Lydia saying to Iris, He must be some loner to do that. And Iris: Helmut is looking for love. He's mad at me.

28      The caplin are sighted in Flatrock and Torbay. I have two five-gallon buckets in Jethro's trunk. I pick up Lydia and Tinker Bumbo and we head north.

There are men on the stone beach preparing cast nets and as evening falls they light three bonfires on the landwash and this will guide the fish in. There are wheelbarrows and buckets and families making it a picnic.

The caplin will look like a force of bad weather. And they will strike fast and roll.

The men wade in a little with their cast nets.

The water is green and darker green and there are white boulders and kelp fanning in slow motion and I can see a flounder sitting passively in the green.

The green pitches to black. It swarms black and darts like a vision behind the eyelid. About ten square feet of soft grey-black curve and then a slick of silver pins as the curve darts and separates around our feet like a beaded curtain. There's no way to get them in a bucket.

But in a few minutes a wave launches in full of their silver bellies. The bonfires light up their silver and they wriggle in the smooth wet sand and stone.

The caplin crest and tumble on a high tide and we fill the two buckets in a minute. We watch children scooping up these frantic deaths into carts and dumping them into buckets. The rims of these buckets flicking and dying.

29      We are in a Chinese restaurant ordering won ton soup, spring rolls. Lydia puts her hand on the belly of the teapot. It's hot, she says. The restaurant is full, bathed in yellow spotlights. Lydia admits she assumed she'd be with a social animal. Her idea of a partner.

This makes me wonder if Lydia is good for me. How her work requires her to be in the centre, where possibilities can grab her. The world notices her waiting and snaps her up to direct and act. Whereas I need the small, ignored corners of the earth, to write about them so that people won't forget. Or even know for the first time.

There's a woman two tables down who looks like Lydia at forty-two. I could love that look.

30      I am making lamb as the Moroccans might cook it. Lydia: Youre a good cook for a guy. But then, I've always gone out with good cooks. Usually, men dont waste time on salads.

She says she's been keeping tabs on her food and noticed a bunch of bananas and a jar of caviar went missing.

Lydia, I dont know what to say. You think I'm sneaking stuff out of the house?

She looks at my heel and says it's full of blood. The bruise in my calf has sunk to my foot. I can't forget that she has said she's keeping tabs.