Stray Love (32 page)
“Are you meeting a Swami?” asked Oliver.
“You look biblical,” said Iris.
I drank coffee instead of tea. Chose muesli over toast. All morning I made infinitesimal changes.
Just as I was leaving, Iris walked over to the hallway and grabbed from a hook my hat, the only heirloom I possess of my birth father. It is a dark brown trilby with a narrow brim. She placed it on my head, adjusted it. Tipped it forward: suave. Cocked it to the side: jaunty.
“There,” she said. “You look a bit better now.”
Iris will not be parted from Oliver. All morning long, she has been bouncing behind him, telling Oliver she wants to be a reporter just like him.
It was Iris’s idea to make a birthday mural, which is what they were doing when I left. They have chosen a birthday theme: “The Circus.” Iris’s first theme suggestion was “The Jungle” but then she nixed that as too “Nammy”—which Oliver and I understood to mean too “Vietnammy.”
Now I am driving along the M4 about to reach the turnoff for Heathrow. I have Solomon Burke playing on the stereo. His songs are all slow build and aching lift. I can feel my heart plumping up with expectation, a helium fullness rising in my chest, and I have a stupid grin on my face.
Kiyomi saw my mother differently, even at the end. Where I saw her as this tragic and formless person, Kiyomi saw her as someone who never dodged life.
She was always in the moment,
she wrote in her condolence card.
When everyone else became more conventional, she never changed. I loved the crazy way she dressed and the unphony words she used to greet me. She was always getting right to the heart of things, living her life in a very fluid and full way.
She included a tiny drawing of my mother and, as I looked at it, it became more and more beautiful.
There is still time before Kiyomi arrives. I’ll find a coffee and sit with this blank book for a while. A blank book is nothing like the blank of a bomb falling or a parent leaving, nothing like loving and losing, or daring and failing, though it might contain those blanks too. I’ll sit and maybe ease into the full range of it, the emptiness, the boundlessness, the certainty of uncertainty. Surrender. Receive. I’ll weep onto this page that can hold anything.
I
WOULD LIKE TO THANK
the people who helped in the creation of this novel in so many different ways.
Thank you to my parents, Michael and Mariko Maclear, for raising me on an excellent diet of news and art.
Thank you to my four pillars, David Wall, Naomi Klein, Nancy Friedland, Avi Lewis; and to Naomi Binder Wall, David Chariandy, Hiromi Goto, Mike Hoolboom, Kelly O’Brien, Terence Dick, Cindy Mochizuki, Brett Burlock, Tara Walker, Nobu Adilman, and my teachers at Octopus Garden and Centre of Gravity for sukha and friendship during the writing of this story.
For grants and writing space, thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Chalmers Family Fund, the Hunter family and the K.M. Hunter Artist Awards, the Toronto Arts Council, the National Association of Japanese Canadians Endowment Fund, the Gladstone Hotel and the Banff Centre.
Thank you to legendary reporters Malcolm W. Browne, Martha Gellhorn, Gloria Emerson, Ryszard Kapuściński, John Pilger, Horst Faas, Peter Arnett, Pham Xuan An, Henri Huet,
David Halberstam, Michael Rubbo and, again, Michael Maclear, for setting the gold standard against which engaged journalism is still measured.
And to artists Mieko Shiomi, George Brecht, Ben Vautier, Yoko Ono and Dick Higgins, for dreaming up an alternative world of flux.
Thanks to my hosts in London and Saigon, particularly Kirsty Shields, Patricia Manning, Robin Maclear and Andrew Maclear.
Thank you to the ever-trustful Heather Frise for giving me her beautiful drawings before she knew anything about this story.
Many thanks to the following works from which passages in the novel appear:
Just Kids
by Patti Smith (Ecco, 2010), quoted on p. ix;
Saigon AP Bureau Handbook
by Malcolm W. Browne (1963), quoted on p. 198;
The Phantom Tollbooth
by Norman Juster (Yearling, 1996), quoted on p. 279;
Just So Stories
by Rudyard Kipling (Chartwell Books, 2009), quoted on p. 279.
Thank you to Allyson Latta (whose wonderful assistance went above and beyond the call of duty), Noelle Zitzer, Ingrid Paulson, Carolyn Ovell, Allegra Robinson, Deborah Viets … and the rest of the lovely people at HarperCollins Canada for making the book come true. Thank you to Natasha Haines and Alexandra Craig for helping it travel.
Finally, and above all, thank you to my editor, Phyllis Bruce, and my agent, Jackie Kaiser, who worked resolutely, waited patiently and who provided a compass, whenever I needed one, along the way.
This story about a lonely boy yearning to belong really couldn’t have found a more amazing family.
KYO MACLEAR
was born in London and grew up in Toronto as the only child of a foreign correspondent; her father recorded the first interviews with American POWs in North Vietnam. While Stray Love is entirely a work of fiction, it is informed by Maclear’s experiences living with her father. Her first novel, The Letter Opener (2007), was awarded the K. M. Hunter Artist Award and shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. She is also an award-winning visual arts writer and the author of two children’s books, Spork (2010) and Virginia Wolf (2012). Visit her online at www.kyomaclear.ca.
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He gave [the drawing] to me without hesitation and I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
—
Patti Smith,
Just Kids
Stray Love
Copyright © 2012 by Kyo Maclear.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © MARCH 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-41611-5
published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
First edition
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Both drawings by “Kiyomi” are by Toronto artist Heather Frise. Illustrations copyright © 2012 by Heather Frise. Reproduced by permission of Heather Frise.
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