Believing Cedric (22 page)

Cedric Johnson had come into Neil's life in 1985 while playing on one of the local golf courses. They'd both heard of each other in the insurance business, and when a common acquaintance introduced them, they took the opportunity to shake hands, exchange cards, network amiably. It turned out they had a lot in common. They were both the leading brokers in each of their small agencies, loved cars, hated sports, had blasé marriages, an only daughter, and lived to golf. They'd also both had nightmarish run-ins with corrupt landladies, excitedly swapping details to see if it had been the same one. They began meeting to tee off together somewhat often, going for a drink after the last hole, and when Neil started complaining about the fact that his agency had just lost one of its major multinational insurance companies to write for and that his clients were more than unhappy about it, Cedric pointed out that there was a position opening over at
his
agency, complete with an empty office and that same multinational company to sell for. Allowing Neil to keep his clients, keep them happy, and even have a modest increase in his monthly income. It was a nice thing to do.

However, a year later, there was a management shift at this new office where both of them worked, and the person that Cedric and Neil had to answer to, and deal with on a day-to-day basis, was, in Neil's words, “a manipulative power-happy prick.” Cedric wholeheartedly agreed with this assessment, and as the atmosphere in their workplace disintegrated, he took to meticulously reading over the company's contracts of employment, looking for a way out. Which he found, a loophole that would allow them both to leave the agency and take with them the bulk of their clients as well. And, they theorized over beers and potato skins, with their two unencumbered portfolios—the two largest in the company—they would easily have the critical mass to set up their own agency, be their own bosses. They discussed it for months, met with lawyers, and, finally, made the bold move and put in their notices.

It worked flawlessly. Their new agency soon became a thriving and lucrative venture, with little overhead and heaps of profit. Each of them bought a new car, looked into cottage real estate, either did renovations on their existing house or bought a new one altogether. Bright kitchens, sterling pot sets hanging in a descending row, jars of olive oils crammed with aesthetic herbs, lined up on backlit shelves never to be touched, chic sofas and armchairs aligned to a new and towering entertainment system, complete with surround-sound speakers and state-of-the-art
VHS
.

The two families got together more often, even if their daughters didn't really get along, despite being about the same age. Neil's daughter was an outgoing and playful girl of eight, and Melissa, Cedric's daughter, was a nine-year-old who was brooding, reticent, and only wanted to be on her own to draw and paint pictures. And in Neil's household, there were no paints. They made a mess.

Until the time came, in 1989, that their client base had grown too large for them to deal with themselves, and they had to hire an additional broker. With the acquisition of another person into the company, they also needed to revisit their initial contract. Both of them would remain the co-owners but would have one and potentially more employees beneath them. Cedric, with his affinity for dealing with contracts, took care of it, and while doing so had his lawyer draft an extra item into it, known as a shotgun clause, which would allow either party to make a buyout offer to the other, at any time. However, if the offer wasn't fair, the other party could turn around and buy the company out from the offer
er
, for that same unfair sum of money. Meaning that if either of them were to come into financial hardship, the other could take complete advantage of his business partner's weakened position, swindling him out of his half of the company for very, very little cash. Neil noticed it, heard Cedric's plea to take it to a lawyer himself and have it looked over (costing Neil at least a thousand dollars in the process), thought about the unlikelihood of financial hardship coming his way, considered their friendship, the golf games, the endless banter of cars, the pitchers of beer, even the odd family holidays they'd taken together, and signed it.

He didn't think of it again until his marriage began to crumble, a fault line slipping between him and his wife, in the slow and steady way that fault lines do. He speculated that it had probably been there all along, unnoticed in the foundation of their relationship, steadily prying it apart.

Meanwhile Cedric had inherited a surprising figure from his passing parents, who'd been killed in a car wreck. Cedric was gloomy, but grateful, and the two men commemorated the bittersweet news with a bottle of single-malt Scotch, aged twenty-seven years.

“I'm sorry for your loss,” said Neil, holding his heavy tumbler within reach of Cedric's. A slow clank. Settling back into his armchair, Neil noted how glassy his friend's eyes were. After taking a sip, raising his eyebrows, he added, “And I want you to know, if you ever need any help, at all, finishing this bottle, I'd be happy to oblige.” It was the kind of remark Cedric would normally have chuckled at but this time only managed a cheerless smile.

A month later, Neil's wife filed for divorce.

Without surprise, and probably for the better, he was only given minimal custody of his daughter (every second weekend), he lost the house, the most expensive of his two cars, and had to pay what he learned was a steeper-than-usual alimony and child support. Neil was defeated, miserable, broke, and perhaps a touch guilty of neglecting his clients, and certainly of being seen less on the fairway than was good for business. Following Christmas, once the calendar had rolled around to 1991, with the
US
Congress authorizing Operation Desert Storm and a massacre in South Africa killing forty-five mourners at a funeral, Cedric chose to lay his offer down on the table. It was an absurd and petty sum, but a sum he knew perfectly well Neil would be forced to take.

Neil wasn't in the mood to beg or remonstrate. He'd almost become used to signing papers that were in the spirit of his losing streak. He did find another job easily enough, and when hired, asked for a full month before he would have to begin, feeling like he needed some time to reorganize his life, get his bearings back.

He found himself strolling through the underground mall system, looking for something he'd always wanted, though couldn't quite pin down what that was. He was in a peculiar mood, thinking too much, feeling like he was somehow on the verge, like he might do something out of the ordinary, at any moment. Something different, rash, impulsive.

He had sauntered into a novelty item store, lifted a few gadgets, ran his fingers across the illuminated bristles of a kitsch fibre-optics lamp. Then he noticed a prism. His mother had collected prisms when he was a boy in South Africa, and he remembered them being heavier as a child. He held it up to one of the ceiling lamps and grinned at the colours that came out the other side. It occurred to him that there was something there, something in this chunk of glass, in the light that was passing through it, in the movement of the rays as he tilted it in different angles. Something from another land, another sky, another time. Something that permeated quietly.

He bought the prism and put it on the kitchen counter of his new and echoingly empty condo. Whenever he passed it, it seemed to jog some other memory of his life—his life before it had all unravelled, that is. Some other hue in the landscape of his childhood, which, it felt, he'd almost forgotten.

He had been born in a coastal suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, in 1956, a time when apartheid was still quietly sinking its roots into the soil there. Though Neil recalls nothing about the politics, never having heard a word of the anti-gathering acts being passed or that segregation was being introduced into the cities, races being pushed out of them and into their respective townships and “Homelands.”

What he does remember is driving around in his father's Hudson, sitting in the backseat with his face just above the rolled-down window, hair flapping, bare legs dangling over the edge of the upholstery, watching the world float by through the sea-salt air, the drifting of colourful shapes and murky forms. When his father drove to the harbour district to drop off the family's nanny at her own apartment, it was squatters and shanties that streaked past, smoke from a cooking fire, then, perhaps, in the space between a set of buildings, a woman's body fluid with dance, two notes of a singing voice filling the car's interior for an instant, then trailing off behind them, emptying it.

Neil's family had had three coloureds that worked in and around their house—a maid, a gardener, and a nanny. Of these, he and his sister (there were only two of them, two years apart) preferred the nanny, Ollie. She was a large woman, had false teeth that she would take out to show when parents weren't around, and a vibrant scarf that she wore over her head at all times: crimson, ginger, azure, jade. Ollie was, as far as the children were concerned, part of the family, a second mother, the one that comforted them when they scraped their knees at play, who washed their hands before meals, made them check under their fingernails for dirt when they came in from their tree fort in the yard. She would even come along on holidays to take care of them, singing whenever she was alone with the children, alternating between humming and lyrics, both versions foreign and soothing to Neil's ear, both common and ethereal.

Neil's mother had—besides her family, of course—two great loves in life: Victorian literature and prisms. The latter was a hobby that came to her quite by accident, having toured through a well-lit house once where there were several prisms on display. There was something about them that captivated her immediately, the way this spectrum of tints and tones could exist, tightly bound, somehow encoded inside of a single ray of light, and she endeavoured to have a few around her own house. This “few” turned into many, and then to whole prism sets, prism apparatuses forming rings of glass triangles and hexagons where light was refracted and re-refracted through every one of them, creating impressive and vibrant patterns that changed throughout the day, even to—and this was Neil's personal favourite—a prism mobile, where a series of small Swarovski crystals dangled from glass rods like an invisible marionette, poised and waiting for a puppeteer. And when his father was having one of his cocktail parties, the heat and motion of bodies in the salon was enough to send this mobile turning on the axis of its nylon thread, casting colours in every direction like a disco ball, a projected net of spectral dots circling the open space of their living room, gliding over the yellowwood strips on the floor, between the churning bodies where it climbed the fabric of dresses and descended the broad shoulders of suit jackets.

But the real reason it was his favourite was that, sometimes, it moved for no reason at all. That is to say that there were mornings when there wouldn't be the slightest breath of wind, an immaculate calm. And still, the mobile found a way to stir, pivoting slightly, slyly, in miniscule degrees. Completely of its own volition.

If he noticed this when he was on his way outside to play, he would stop in his tracks to watch it for a minute, mesmerized. Because this was a mysterious thing, something he couldn't explain. And looking back at it, what Neil found interesting is that he never felt the
need
to explain it. Later on, as a Western adult, he would be surrounded by, and immersed in, a mentality that completely opposed this, where, if one were to encounter something they couldn't explain, it was understood that they should at least
try
to explain it, at least make an attempt, consult a resource, experiment. And for the most part, it was a mentality he subscribed to. Even if there was a part of him that still wondered whether or not it was the right thing to do, wondered if, perhaps, we were all, at every stage in our life, children first and learners—absorbers of knowledge, dissectors, and logical-conclusionists—second. Wondered if we all
understood
mystery long before we were ever taught to explain it away.

The first memory he has of this
need
for an explanation came with words. Scary words, which kept cropping up in his parents' discussions at the most unpredictable of times, discussions that were becoming tense and uneasy—loud when they shouldn't have been, quiet when they shouldn't have been. Words like: protest, bans, unrest, riot, treason, catalyst, Mandela, saboteur, militant, terrorist, Sharpeville, massacre, emigrate, stable, fellow, commonwealth, nation, Canada.

And then the news came.

“Hey.” Neil's father was standing in the centre of the room after work, clapping his hands together. “Guess what, you kids? Daddy got another job today. And you know where it is? It's in a place where you can make
snowmen
! Can you imagine that! How fun will that be?”

Neil exchanged a look with his sister, who turned to look outside, at the planks running out of their tree fort. She spoke at the window, “Um—Daddy, are we gonna take Ollie with us? Like on holidays?”

Her mother chortled from the sidelines, using her pet name, “No, Meisie, Ollie has to stay here with
her
family. We're going to go to this new place with just
our
family. With just us. Okay?”

His sister was confused with multiple things that were layered into this statement, panic rising, tears flooding her eyes.

“So . . .” Neil broke in before his sister could burst, “in this new place, how far's the walk to the beach?”

It was their parents turn to exchange a quick look. “Well, I don't know, son,” his father said, “I guess we'll just have to see, won't we?”

It was late October 1966 when their plane touched down on the Toronto runway. Neil remembers it well. It was overcast, drizzling, cold. And let alone was there no beach with sand, waves, or fisherfolk, nor any of this oft-alluded-to “snow” to build snowmen with, something, some disease probably, or maybe just the cold itself, had tragically killed every tree in the country. The elms and maples in their new neighbourhood stretched up into the grey air with nothing more than naked twigs, branches that were as devoid of leaves as the root systems buried under the soil in his native, and increasingly beloved, South Africa. Dead leaves rotted in the dark spaces under hedges, festered on yellow lawns, clotted the gutters beside the sidewalks.