Happiness of Fish (22 page)

It is nearly dusk when Gerry gets back to the marina. He visits along the dock for a bit, chatting with other people who haven't gone anywhere. The evening gathers around them.

“The nights are starting to draw in,” somebody says. “It was only a couple of weeks ago we had the longest day.”

A small bunch of people sit in somebody's cockpit and chat until it is fully dark. Then Gerry ambles back to his own boat and crawls into his sleeping bag without bothering to light the oil-lamp. The hull makes little contented, clucking water noises. The halyards in the mast make a soft brushing as the boat rocks. The marina lights shine through the scratch-hazed plexiglass in the portholes, and everything in the boat is dimly visible. Gerry falls asleep quickly. Tomorrow, if the weather is decent, he may go for a sail somewhere. On Sunday, he'll try and round up a crew and race.

On the Tuesday after Labour Day, Gerry sits in a coffee shop and thumbs back through his Chinese notebook. He finds he has not made an entry since a day or two after Philip left at the end of June. When he made it, he was poking through the last of the books that Philip had left him, the discards from the humanist funeral project. One was a collection of haiku. He'd copied down the one by Issa about a puppy. Without fooling around with the syllables to be faithful to the form, he'd written:
The puppy who doesn't know it's autumn is a Buddha
. After that there were shopping lists and sketches of boat race courses with a couple of times and positions scribbled down.

Why am I surprised? he wonders. He has drawers full of notebooks with similar gaps.

Gerry finds himself hanging on at work past Labour Day this year. The reason is that a bunch of people have been taken off their regular jobs to do an anniversary special on 9/11. They're busily calling people who were stranded in Newfoundland. They head out to interview people
who billeted other people from all over the world. Several on-air reunions are arranged.

Gerry suggests they interview Vivian's older sister Nellie. She still lives in the tiny community of Burleigh, where Vivian's family resettled in the '50s. Nellie is on her church's flower committee. When marooned travellers were billeted in town, she went into the church one day and found a man from Kenya stretched out in the back pew.

“Scared the life out of me,” Nellie says. “Black as the ace of spades, with a three-piece suit on and his shoes off and a six-pack of beer. I don't suppose he knew where he was, no more than a child.”

Nellie and her husband Plemon took the man home. He was a government agronomist from Nairobi. They took him berry-picking. They still exchange Christmas cards.

Outside of Nellie, Plemon and the agronomist, Gerry has little to add to the local 9/11 remembrances. He and Vivian were on a holiday cruise in mid-Atlantic when it happened. With little else to do, he decides to get back to his writing and convert the cruise into a George and Ellen story.

Fragment: For Those in Peril on the Sea

The napkin-folding class was cancelled when they learned the planes had hit the towers
.

George had taken the galley tour that morning and had been waiting by the pool for napkin-folding to start as the cruise ship steamed west, a day out of the Azores. While he and Ellen were not exactly fighting, they had had a minor row over souvenir shopping in Punta del Gada the day before and were giving each other some space. George had gone napkin-folding because he thought it might be silly enough to write about some day. Ellen had gone to lunch with a school friend from Burleigh she'd only just encountered, between Lisbon and the Azores. George and Ellen had been walking off lunch when they overheard three women walking behind them
.

“They're Newfoundlanders,” Ellen said. She stopped, turned and smiled at the three. “Excuse me, aren't you from Newfoundland?”

The reunion followed. Ellen and her classmate, a woman called
Velma, recognized each other. Velma introduced the other two women with her. They were her sisters-in-law. They'd all had their bangs corn-row beaded at the ship's beauty salon. No one in Burleigh had beaded corn-rows and they were on vacation
.

“We married three brothers,” Velma said. “They're here somewhere.”

Presently the brothers had appeared. They were short grizzled men who ran a carpentry business together. They kept to themselves and walked the deck in a way which suggested they were measuring it and might build a cruise liner from memory later on
.

“They're hobbits,” George said to Ellen. “They've got furry feet, I bet you.”

They had been on the cruise for ten days. It was what the agency called a repositioning cruise, one where the ship crossed the Atlantic to be back in its winter cruising grounds. They got a spectacularly good rate by booking a September cruise the preceding winter
.

“We could die before then,” George told the girl in the travel agency. “We're ancient, you know.”

However, they had paid for cancellation insurance, kept their fingers crossed, and now had cruised from Italy to the Azores with only Boston left on the itinerary. Now the announcements were saying that on this repositioning cruise, more than the ship was being repositioned
.

The ship's PA speakers extinguished the afternoon like a sprinkler system. Activities were cancelled. Horse racing was postponed. Passengers were asked to please be patient trying to call the States. An ecumenical prayer service would be held in the Aloha Room. The ship's closed-circuit TV channel would give news as it became available
.

The pool deck cleared like a rained-on garden party. George wandered down into the central atrium of the ship. He found Ellen and Velma coming out of the dining room
.

“Should we try to call the kids?”

“Not much point. Besides, what do we tell them? There's nothing wrong here. If they're dropping planes on people, the middle of the ocean on a moving target's a pretty good place to be.”

Gerry sits at his computer and looks at the notebook he used for a travel diary on the trip.

Early internet news is garbled and poor. CNN wire stuff is better after supper, but still no attempt at casualty figures. We played a guess-the-word game with a bunch of comedy fatalists, then attended a sock hop, complete with Twist and hula-hoop competitions
.

Gerry remembers the hula-hoop competition. It was won by a sparrow-like British granny who managed to twirl eight hoops around her neck. She wore a floral-print summer dress and peeked out of the wreath of bright plastic hoops as if from a nest. Gerry guesses she'd have been a teenager in the Blitz. No sky-borne terrorist was going to stop her carousing with her grandkids.

The next morning he and Vivian had shared a table with a retired marine biologist and his wife. Gerry works them into his narrative.

Fragment: Armageddon Breakfast

They came from Mobile, Alabama, and their name was Hickson. Dr. Hickson had a sad-basset-hound air and a polite southern slowness of speech. He had done research on farmed shrimp. Work with tiny crustaceans had made him comfortable with big numbers. He had heard there might be forty-thousand dead in New York

Mrs. Hickson was at ease with big numbers because of her work with the Book of Revelation
.

“It's all prophesied,” she told George. “We are in the end times. We should all pray.”

In fact, Gerry's travel diary shows they did not pray. In the final days of the cruise, he recorded menus, weather – as the ship skirted the edges of a hurricane – and the scarcity of world news. He chronicled fights with the tour company reps as rumours spread that the ship was going to be diverted to any number of places. Finally, he noted that the almost-famous doo-wop group that was the final night's show was holding up pretty well, despite not having had a hit since 1966. The three grey-haired men and one bald man in Italian suits sang well. Like the hula-hooping granny, they were indomitable. Gerry's last entry says
he went to the show alone. The hurricane was nearby and Vivian was feeling seasick. She stayed in the cabin and started packing.

Gerry and Vivian had come most of the way back from their cruise on a bus to Halifax. The airline had arranged it. The planes were still not flying when their ship got to Boston. They called Tanya from a phone booth during a rest stop somewhere in Maine. She was house-sitting for them. She seemed to have trouble with them being on an un-planned activity.

“Where are you?” she demanded. “I was worried.”

“I don't know,” Vivian told her. “We're in some kind of public washroom. The sign says it's maintained by the blind. If you smelled it, you'd wonder if they're only just blind.”

The bus dropped them at Halifax Airport. After all night in the terminal, they got on a flight back to Newfoundland.

Having been insulated from the initial events, Gerry followed the run-up to the Afghanistan invasion closely. Work was slow. The budget for freelancers had been spent covering the stranded air passengers. Gerry was restless.

One day he called the local naval reserve unit. He talked to the commander, a woman he'd known for years.

“Just in case you needed an elderly sub-lieutenant to count the paper clips or answer the phone or something. Free up some of the younger ones. I did have a commission, years ago.”

“You're over the age, Gerry,” she told him. “It's all different now. They don't let people hang around like they used to. You're not the first I've had a call from. Thanks anyway.”

“Apparently my reserve status is somewhere just after nuns and just before Cubs and Beavers,” Gerry told Vivian. Still, he felt old that fall.

On a fine September day, Gerry meets his ex, Patricia, in the parking lot of the Family Life Centre of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. He is there because of a phone call from a man he used to work with at the newspaper in the '70s. The man's name is Michael. Michael and his wife Maureen were friends of Patricia's and Gerry's. They used to go to clubs
together and invite each other for meals. Then everybody had changed jobs and moved a few times and Patricia and Gerry split up. So had Michael and Maureen, but later on. Gerry recalls that he and Vivian had encountered them somewhere in the mid-'90s and they were still a couple, but barely. They'd had dinner together and promised to do it again and hadn't. He heard they'd separated not long after that. Michael had moved to Vancouver. Now, it seems Michael wants to remarry. His new bride, like Maureen, is a Catholic.

“We're going for an annulment,” Michael told Gerry on the phone. “They'll want to talk to people who knew us when we were just married. You can give a deposition there. Somebody from the church will be in touch.”

To say what? Gerry wondered at the time. To prove what? However, here he is today in the family centre parking lot. He's early because he left himself lots of time to find the place. It's a beautiful day, with bright sun and big, towering clouds. Gerry lounges in the warm seat of his wagon. Every city sound seems muted and remote. He's been sitting listening to Mozart on Radio Two when Patricia pulls in.

She drives a minivan these days. Gerry reflects that she must be emerging from the kids'-chauffeur period of the twins' development. She pulls into a space a couple away from where he's parked and gets out of her van. Gerry turns off the radio and gets out too.

“Hey, kid. How are you doing?”

“Gerry, I haven't seen you for ages. How's Vivian?”

They press cheeks, movie-star air-kissing, distant though touching and civil. Gerry wonders if she remembers she once slipped a pair of lurid knickers with cats on them into his suit pocket before a job interview.

“For inspiration,” she said afterwards.

Patricia has had her off-the-shoulder hair done a silver grey. It looks surprisingly good over a face that has stayed youngish looking. She is wearing a khaki-coloured skirt and a Madras blouse. She has a blue blazer on. Her shoes are brown suede.

“We're fine,” Gerry says, circling the wagons in the plural.

“You're here for this thing with Michael?”

“Yeah. I guess you got a call too.”

“I don't know what I'm going to say. I mean they split up. It's over right? What do these people want to hear?”

“I guess we'll just have go in and see what they have to say.”

“God, I'm glad we didn't have to do all this bullshit.”

They climb the steps and Gerry opens the door for her. “After you, madam.”

“I'll see you out here after. We'll compare notes.”

The Family Life Centre is like a '50s Russian trade show. It is full of ugly chemical colours and lotion-bottle shapes. Perhaps it's been furnished by donations from parish attics, but the stuff looks too new. They tell an elderly secretary why they're there and she tells them that Sister Angela will be taking their depositions.

Sister Angela looks sixty-something, with steel-grey hair and the eyes of a jaded loans officer. She wears a navy suit and a white blouse. There's a brassy brooch with a black cross at her throat.

“Mrs. Pearce, come in please. Mr. Adamson, you're very punctual, early in fact.”

“I know,” Gerry says apologetically. “I left myself time to get lost and then didn't. I'll just wait right here.”

Sister Angela nods and takes Patricia into an inner office. Gerry picks up an old issue of
Canadian Living
and reads about all the great things you can do with pinto beans. The elderly secretary answers her phone once and goes to a sideboard where there's an electric urn of hot water. She makes an instant coffee in a plastic cup in an orange holder and takes it in to where Patricia is doing her thing. The air has a waxy smell. Gerry is almost dozing when his turn comes.