Something Fishy (6 page)

Chapter Eight

Newton was shivering – not his usual shivering from blood that ran cold. He was shaking with excitement that the rungs welded onto the turbine and the platform at the top were finally ready to be used.

The metal had cooled and hardened. He stepped on the first rung, and though he was weak, he was so light that he slipped up the tower with ease. Rung by rung he went, his heart pounding in his chest, pounding with excitement to reach the top. Halfway. A few more steps. He was tempted to stop and look around, but he didn't want to distill the experience. Eyes half shut, focusing only on the metal bars in front of him, the cold metallic shaft of the tower, he kept on pushing up, up, to his destination – the platform behind the blades.

Fiona was watching him from her trailer, wondering what he was doing. She'd already talked herself into love with him, and her hands gripped the counter in fear for his safety. Smoke filling the trailer and the burning smell coming from the stove made her look away from him. Not for long. She grabbed the pot, yanked it off the stove, and set it down on the counter, where it proceeded to burn a dark ring.

Then back to the window.

He had reached the top. He stood there, arms outstretched, his image jerky as the blades passed in front of his body.

He could see almost the full shape of the north shore of Red Island. He peered down the coast all the way to the east, where a lone lighthouse stood at the edge of a cape descending into a trail of rocks, reaching out into the water, ready to capture an unsuspecting boat. He saw the ocean side of New London Bay and the spit of sand drifting across it. To the other side, all of Big Bay and its islands. Beyond that, in the far distance, Red Island came to an end in a whirr of experimental wind turbines, and a trickle of stones that stretched out from the shore, washed by a shallow kiss of water. People would walk out as if walking on water. A stunning view, here, on top of his world, the whirr of the blades and their rhythmic movement lulling him into a semi-hypnotic state.

Eyes closed, arms outstretched, he remembered being born. He remembered the moment of his conception. He remembered it in the deepest part of him. He had always been aware of the time when there was nothing, the floating darkness, and then light. Surrounded in fluid – the water of life – swimming, fighting to be first. Did others experience this? No one he knew had ever claimed to remember being born, and certainly not conceived.

He'd thought about discussing it with a doctor, a psychiatrist, but, on the point of doing so, had drawn back. That moment of his conception was a treasure to him, a secret that he hugged to himself.

He was more certain about what followed. The memory of the womb. He remembered the rhythm of his mother's heartbeat, steady, comforting. It pulsed through his tiny body and veins, his own small heart.

He remembered his brother. The intruder in the womb. He'd done what he could to strangle him with the umbilical cord, but then came that frightening time when they took him away. Scraped him out. Newton had huddled in the darkest recess of the womb, hiding from the cold metal killer. He'd succeeded. And even when the time came for him to kick, he held back, not wanting to announce his presence and suffer the same fate as his brother.

Slowly he began conscious movements, ones that wouldn't be perceived – sucking his thumb, scratching parts of his body, experiencing these small tactile pleasures. He remembered hearing voices for the first time. Hers, of course. It came from without and within. The others vibrated to him in the womb, voices talking, singing, and music, too. Still he did not announce himself, but surrendered to the pleasure of his isolated water world. In retrospect, it was the most pleasant time of his life. It gave him an immutable belief about when life starts. He'd never faced the challenge himself of deciding whether to keep a child. No one had wanted to make him a parent.

But the birth. What a shock. At first, he felt as if it were the end. Pushed from the shelter of his pre-birth home. Inexorably pushed, trying to fight, to stay in the warm place with the comforting beat of the heart. Struggling to hold on there, claw his way back in.

Pushed. Pushed. Shoved. Squeezed. Finally, worst of all, steel tongs grasping his head, squishing it, pulling him out while he tried to cling to his mother's womb.

There was no turning back. He must be born.

He cried. Of course he cried. All babies cry when they come into the world.

It is a very rude awakening.

Newton thought that was why he was always shaking, shivering, that he had never been truly warm again after he was expelled from the womb. That's how he thought of it. Because his mother had wanted little to do with him after pushing him out into the cold world.

So meeting Fiona was exactly what he needed. She was warm. Embracing. Bursting with life.

She was there, as if summoned, when he climbed down the tower. She watched as he descended, the sun behind his head like a halo, a man who needed her as much as she needed him. That had never happened to her before.

When he slid down the last few rungs, slipped and fell into the safety of her open arms, it was like being enfolded in the womb again. He didn't question it. Didn't question her, but felt himself melt into her abundance, disappear into her flesh.

Gus saw it all happen. It had stopped her from turning on the soaps on a dull afternoon.

She smiled.

This was much better than television.

Viola's heart was beating in her temples, her lungs ready to explode, but she was doggedly determined to do what she'd set out to do. The chauffeur had refused to drive her up to the village, having just cleared the worst of the smell of smoke out of his car. When she'd asked, he hadn't even answered. He jumped in the car and took off for Charlottetown. Viola was determined to find the power broker at The Shores – the person who could get rid of the trailer and the wind turbine, killer of birds, the species dearest to her heart.

April Dewey and Annabelle Mack were having a natter at the side of April's house. Annabelle had been admiring April's garden, which had given her lettuce, beans, and strawberries in abundance this year. They stopped talking at the sight of Viola, puffing her way up the Shore Lane.

I need a cigarette, she thought, but she didn't dare have one. She hardly had the lungs to make this trek, and hoped she didn't have to go much farther.

She crossed over the lane when she got to April's house.

“Who runs this place?” she gasped, after taking a moment to catch her breath.

Annabelle smiled and pointed up the lane.

“Gus Mack,” she said.

“The mayor?”

“Of all you survey.”

Viola continued on her way, with Annabelle and Alice holding their laughter until she was out of earshot.

A knock at the door. Gus pried herself out of the purple chair. It seemed to be getting harder to do every day. She shuffled over the beige vinyl flooring that still shone like new after forty years.

More knocking. Desperate-sounding.

“I'm coming. I'm coming.” Who could it be? No one she knew. No one from the village.

“Viola Featherstonehaugh,” said the wizened old woman on the Macks' stoop. She handed Gus a business card. Gus looked at it blankly. Her lips moved silently as she read the name. What a mouthful.

“Call me Viola. Everyone does.” The woman extended a hand.

Shaking hands was something Gus rarely did.

“I'm looking for your husband.”

“Abel? You might be looking a long time.”

“No, not Abel. Gus. I was told Gus Mack.”

“Well, I'm Gus Mack, as anyone will tell you.” The woman was quite out of breath. “Come in. Come in. Please, take a seat. Cuppa tea?”

“No, thank you.” Viola sat down. “Got tuckered out on my way up here, but I have my own medicine.” She pulled off her white gloves, and fished for her cigarette case and holder.

Gus had gone into the pantry to make tea and a plate of biscuits, as she did when anyone, especially a stranger, showed up at her door.

She came back into the room, to be confronted by billows of smoke.

“My land, a fire! We best get out of here.” She dumped the tray with the teapot, two cups and saucers, and plate of cookies on the table next to Viola.

A cackle from Viola was followed by a round of hacking and coughing. Gus joined her, because she wasn't used to cigarette smoke. There had been a time when Abel smoked, but he hadn't in years, not in the house.

Gus opened a window on either side of the room, and the fresh air soon cleared it.

Viola stabbed her cigarette in one of the saucers, dug in her purse again, and drew out an ornate silver flask. She opened it and poured a generous dollop into a teacup.

Gus had been about to ask the woman not to smoke, but faced with this new problem, didn't know what to say. She wondered why Viola had come. She couldn't ask that flat out. It wouldn't be polite.

“What brings you to The Shores?”

“I'm a business partner,” Viola smiled coyly, “of Anton Paradis. Also his very good friend.” Viola winked.

Nobody had winked at Gus in sixty-five years. She knew it to the year and day. Setting day, when the fishermen put their lobster traps out for the season. Cheeky young fella, very good-looking, mind, did odd jobs for Abel. She'd given him a thermos of tea. It would be cold on that boat, and him on his first time out.

He had saluted her with the thermos.

“Thanks, missus,” he'd said, and winked.

Gus, a young wife not twenty years old, had flushed and covered her face with an apron.

She wouldn't be doing either of those things now. She did find it odd, though, for a woman to wink at another woman. What did it mean?

Viola had no idea that Gus would get flustered over a wink.

People were different here. That's why she was here – with Gus. Not the mayor, obviously, but able to fill her in on that turbine and trailer.

She downed the scotch and poured more from the flask.

“That…uh…trailer.” She was looking out the window, frowning twice. Once for the trailer, and once for the wind turbine. “Will that be there all summer?”

“She'll not be moving from there this summer, nor anytime, don't matter what you do, I 'spec.”

“Not even an offer to purchase?”

Gus had her eyes glued to Viola's hands, reaching into her purse again, this time for her silver cigarette case.

“I doubt it. She's sitting on a gold mine and she knows it. Could get a lot for it today, more tomorrow, and she's young. She'll be around for a while.”

“And she is?”

“Fiona…” At the moment, Fiona's last name escaped Gus. Then it came to her. Winterbottom. How could you forget that? “Fiona Winterbottom. She's the fudge lady.” As if that explanation made up for forgetting the woman's surname.

“Winterbottom. My God. How unfortunate.”

“She goes by Winter.”

“I'm not surprised. If I had such a name, I'd change it.”

Gus didn't add that everyone called Fiona Winterbottom anyway. And didn't this woman have a peculiar name of her own?

Viola stared at the trailer, disgust in her eyes, saying nothing. No, she would not be giving Anton hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy it. He'd have to find some other way.

Viola lit the cigarette and stuffed it in the holder. She waved it in the direction of the cape. Some ash fell off. Gus's eyes were attached to the burning red tip of the cigarette, expecting it to drop and set her quilt bits on the floor on fire.

“Whose is that?”

Gus looked up.

“The dome? Or the windmill?”

“Both, I suppose. Start with the dome.”

“Newton Fanshaw's the latest owner. New around here. Come this spring. Put up that windmill.”

“Newton Fanshaw?”

Gus nodded.

“Who's he?”

“Don't rightly know. Some kind of scientist.”

“Really?”

“Odd duck. Skinny and lonely – ‘'cept he seems to have something going with that Fiona lass.”

“And the windmill's his?”

Gus nodded again.

“I'll be damned. Bloody things are a menace. They'll be killing off your shore birds.”

Privately, Gus thought they could use fewer seagulls, but the rest of the birds – wouldn't they learn to avoid the blades?

Viola aimed angry stabs of her cigarette at the plate of cookies.

Gus tried not to notice, or appear to notice. It wouldn't be polite. She tried to change the subject to a harmless topic between women.

“Do you have children?”

In Gus Mack's world that was a perfectly polite question. Not, apparently, in Viola's. She screwed up her face in distaste.

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

Gus pursed her lips. “Eight I had. Four dead.”

“Stillborn? Abortions?”

Gus couldn't keep the shock out of her voice. “No, oh no, all born healthy. Heart attacks in their sixties. Certainly not abortions.”

“No one would blame you for getting rid of some of them. Eight. That's like a farm animal. Like a pig with its piglets.” Viola smiled, amused at herself. “Though, of course, you wouldn't have had them all at once.”

Gus picked up her knitting and began plain and purling furiously to try to soothe the agitation the conversation had caused. Could she ask the woman to leave? She should ask the woman to leave.

Viola herself made the decision. She'd run out of scotch. She was nearly out of cigarettes, and she thought Gus Mack was a very boring woman.

When Viola left, Gus picked up the defiled plate, screwed up her face in distaste, and dumped everything, plate and all, in the garbage.

She was relieved that she hadn't used her company china.

Newton was diving into Fiona's fudge – three varieties of creamy, addictive sweetness. Butterscotch, chocolate, and marble. He ate it as if it were life-sustaining, as if it could flow through his veins, bring him truly alive. Something of the same feeling coursed through him for Fiona herself. She intrigued and disgusted him with her large appetite for love, life, and lust.