Double Talk (7 page)

“Are you happy?” I asked my mother one day as we sat together in the kitchen after mid-day dinner. I had just filled out the university application I hoped would take me away from home, to a new life in Newfoundland. My father had gone back to work, and we were drinking fresh-perked coffee and whipped cream from green glass cups. It was our time of day to talk. “Are you happy?” I asked again. She was looking a bit grim, I remember. Hot days always made her wilt. She didn't answer for a while, though she didn't take her eyes off me, either. The dog, bothered by the sudden silence, walked with ticky-tacky nails across the linoleum and laid his big head in her lap. She stroked his ears mechanically, and he responded with pig-like grunts. Occasionally, her eyes narrowed as she worked through what appeared to be — if the length of time it took her to reply was any indication — a great number of possible answers. Finally, she took a long pull on her cigarette and, as she exhaled, raised her left eyebrow ever so slightly: “I'm as happy as it is possible to be in this life, son,” she said. Her answer shocked me, though not in a bad way; it was more the shock of surprise. I found myself trying not to laugh. I was sixteen years old and someone had finally spoken the truth to me. I knew it was truth because her words resonated so deeply, lit up a stretch of some barely perceived interior.

My last few months in Bridgetown had been a purgatory. I could only watch and wait as the town faded from photograph to negative, while the future, as always, remained a blank strip. At first, clown-footed, I was happy to tell everyone the where and the when and the why of my going. I squeezed the rubber ball on my brass horn and they gathered around: “Newfoundland, any day now, to study, to bang my head against wisdom and wait for a panel to mysteriously open.”

And at first, everyone was interested. “NewFOUNDland,” they said, crowding around me and nodding their heads like dashboard ornaments. They made a bodhran of my back, a pump handle of my arm; they squeezed my hand as if it might produce milk. They were so happy for me, weepy eyed that the little buds of opportunity still flourished abroad. Less happy to cultivate them at home. They looked at me as if I had quadrupled in size, as if before their eyes I was inflating with promise. They looked at me as if I might at any second ascend into the sky, climbing higher and higher until I disappeared behind the racing clouds.

But the months went by and I was still home. “Still waiting on that visa?” they would shout out to me as I walked the rain-washed streets, as I made the rounds past the cattle mart where every Wednesday the auctioneer's amplified voice reeled off a rhythmic and vigorous sales pitch, past Murphy's pub where sloth-like Pat behind the counter countered impatience with his mantra of “one-moment-if-you-please,” past the Garda Station with its tantalizing cannabis poster tacked to the cork bulletin board just inside the front door, past Touhy's Grand Hotel where anyone over the age of fourteen could expect service at the bar, past the bike repair shop where every December a mechanised Santy, his hobnailed boots bolted to the pedals, made slow progress towards Christmas; past butcher shops, bookies, sweet shops and more bars, turning at last in the town square, by the vandalized remains of a sculpture, a lost-wax bronze casting, by Bridgetown's one and only artist.

It didn't matter where I went; the question was always the same, “No sign of that visa yet?” or “Are you still here?” And the grin that said they knew very well I had tried to put one over on them. They didn't believe that soon I would be standing on the deck of the
Calypso
, at the right arm of a leathery but spry Jacques Cousteau, and beside us Jacques' biological son, Philippe, as together we set out to film
Eels of the Sargasso
or join forces with Greenpeace to chase Russian whalers through the Barents Sea. Had they felt what I had felt when I ticked the boxes for B.Sc. and Biology on the university application form, they would never have doubted. Through the clack of my pen on the tabletop came the roar of the zodiac's massive outboard engine and the boat's flat bottom banging the cold North Atlantic waves. For hours I had navigated those forms as though they were ocean charts, until at last it had all come down to my signature — my newly constructed signature. Had they felt the vigour in my cursive loop, had they seen the way it played out across the page, they would have known the strength of my conviction. They would not have doubted.

And then the long anticipated future arrived. One day I was in Bridgetown, the next I was in Boston, and the day after that in St. John's, Newfoundland. I awoke in a strange bed, in a strange room on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, half expecting to find a completely naked girl beside me.

I had made it. I was here. No, I was there. Ha! Ha!

I looked around the room: unadorned cough-syrup pink walls, with here and there a darker patch where pictures or mirrors had been removed. Directly at the foot of the bed was a dresser, its bare wood surface scorched, as though it had been finished with a blow torch. The only appealing piece of décor was a set of cool looking split-bamboo blinds that were slightly wider than the window they covered.

I felt giddy and slightly unreal, as though I were stuck in the transporter beam of the
Starship Enterprise
and could not quite materialize. Was this what it felt like to have a hangover? I thought back to the previous night, the dope, the beer and then my abrupt dash from the kitchen with Wallace shouting directions to the bathroom.

But I wasn't sick any more. The rumble in my stomach was my body's response to the smell of coffee wafting up from downstairs. I could also smell rashers and sausages frying. It occurred to me that I had not eaten since lunchtime the day before. Listening, I heard the fat in the pan flare and sputter as though Wallace — or whoever was down there — had just dropped a couple of eggs into it. Now someone was stacking dishes.

Uncle Wallace was alone in the kitchen, looking just as harried as he had the night before. Was this his usual demeanour, I wondered, or had my arrival just put him into a spin? He was wearing a different tracksuit, this time brown with cream stripes, and his hair had a fresh shine.

“We have to be at the university by 10:00, so we can't hang about,” he said. No good morning, did you sleep well, or how are ya.

I sat at the counter, sipping coffee and taking in the view from the kitchen window while he dished up the breakfast. The back garden was overgrown. Its heart was a patch of bare earth with bumps that once might have been drills. One particularly bumpy spot sported a plastic trident that still held between its tines a weather-bleached seed card. At the end of the garden was a shed with a swayback roof. Through the partially open door I could see the back wheel of a bicycle. The garden's perimeter was marked by a wooden fence, one section of which had collapsed and was hidden by tall grass. My father would have been appalled by the neglect. Beyond the garden was a large parking lot which Wallace told me belonged to the Grace Hospital.

Twenty minutes later we were driving together through the streets of St. John's. My heart was pounding with excitement. Newly sprung from the purgatory of Bridgetown, I looked out on this novel world with eyes wide open. I wanted only to prolong the experience of newness. I wanted to be refreshed by it, and in return, wanted to view it uncritically, to see it only in the terms it wished to present itself, wanting to keep at bay the thing that sooner or later would stick in my craw.

Marvellous were the cars and pick-up trucks, the makes of which eluded me. Marvellous was Wallace's Chevrolet El Camino Conquista. There were no Chevrolets in Ireland. Until that moment, the name had existed for me only in rock ‘n' roll songs. Marvellous were the houses — I had never before seen a wooden house except in films — marvellous their sloped roofs with dormer windows, their lack of eavestroughing, marvellous their triple and quadruple colour schemes: blood red clapboard, black door, blue window frames; mint green clapboard, cream soffits, orange window sashes. Everything was fascinatingly different. And yet, we had not driven six blocks — marvellous the concept of the city block — when I noticed that these “jellybean houses,” as Wallace called the colourful ones, were the exception. Many more were painted a monotone camouflage green or a faded maroon, and many were so rundown they looked like glorified sheds.

I was a bit shocked, as well, at the state of the roads: potholes everywhere, which Wallace was having fun avoiding. “They're called Dottie's potties, after our eccentric mayor,” he said. I noticed that whole sections of footpath tilted upward or sunk into the ground. “Frost heave,” Wallace grunted when I asked him what caused it.

There were few pedestrians about, despite the fact that it was sunny and warm. The only person I saw appeared to be dragging a dog which had decided to sit down and not get up again. Where were the crowds? Where were the high-rises, the glass skyscrapers like those I had caught sight of in Boston? Driving across Harvey Road, I had my first view of the downtown, the descending flat tar roofs of row houses stepping all the way down to the harbour.

All the more refreshing then was the majestic façade of the Basilica of St. John the Baptist and, across the road from it, a sudden and breathtaking vista — I had no idea that I would be living so close to the ocean. Now that was exotic. Bridgetown was forty miles from the nearest salt water. My mind filled with images of childhood Sundays spent by the seaside: the sandy beach at Old Head, where I feasted on cold roast chicken and ham and watched my father battle his aversion to sand, then afterwards, obeying my mother's stricture not to swim for an hour after eating, paddled in an Atlantic Ocean warmed by the Gulf Stream. I imagined such beaches nearby, but golden beaches where topless Canadian girls sunbathed until they turned the colour of hazelnut shells. When I shared my vision with Wallace he laughed out loud and slapped me on the knee. “All the beaches around here are shingle beaches,” he said. “Besides, the ocean is far too cold to swim in. Hypothermia would set in within half an hour.”

I was relieved to have made Wallace laugh. I now knew his dourness was just his morning mood. He wasn't angry with me. I hadn't embarrassed him in front of his friends the night before. He was totally cool about everything. No explanation was necessary. No apologies were required.

As we approached the scour-yellow brick building of the university, I burped, regurgitating a piece of bacon. In an instant I was three years old; it was the day I almost choked at the breakfast table. I felt my father's big fingers in my mouth and then the tickle in my throat as he extracted the long bacon rind. Strange to think there had been a time when my father sat me on his knee and fed me pieces of rasher from his plate. That memory was alkali to my more recent acidic memories of him. In my last few years at home he had become suspicious of me, laying down rules each time I went out; he seemed to think my every action was an attempt to undermine his authority. And he often treated my mother with suspicion as well, as though she were in cahoots with me, the two of us devoted to making a fool out of him. How I had hated him for that, for spoiling my last years at home with my mother. But now I suddenly wondered if I had been mistaken. Perhaps I had not given him his due? Or maybe my second thoughts were just a symptom of my being homesick for the first time.

My closest companion during those first weeks in Newfoundland was a fourteen-inch black and white television, which, when turned on, displayed only snow. When I finally figured out how to attach the rabbit ears antenna, a picture appeared, though one with a flickering black line down the left-hand side which bent inward about every thirty seconds, warping the screen image around itself. The Picasso effect I called it. To divine the spot with the best reception, I plugged the set into a thirty-foot extension cord and walked around the downstairs, holding the television in front of me. The clearest signal was to be found in the living room, between the fireplace and the bay window. Still, no matter how much I twiddled the ears, I could only get one English language channel, NTV. Sometimes I could tune in French CBC, but that channel only showed ice hockey, and the snowy picture made it impossible to see the puck. There was no soccer to be found anywhere. Game shows were rampant and proved addictive, particularly
The Price is Right
. I would stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout, “Come-On-Down!” Then I'd run to the top of the stairs, turn around, and make my descent a-whoopin'-and-a-hollerin'. I was the next contestant, the newest arrival to the New World.

Some days it struck me as miraculous that after years of gazing longingly into my father's 26” colour Telefunken, I had, as if by a marvellous feat of imagination, walked right through that looking glass. I'd arrived. And yet the pictures I had seen on TV and the pictures I could now see through the window of my new home were not at all the same. No matter how I positioned the rabbit ears, I could not get those separate visions to blend. Time, I assumed, would remedy the situation.

The days passed and I fell into new routines. Still, there were moments during those first weeks when it occurred to me — albeit in passing (the thought whispering on the lowest frequency) — that I had simply traded one purgatory for another. For the most part, though, newness was still everywhere, and each day brought fresh experiences and revelations. After all, I was now a university man. Mornings and afternoons I attended fifty-minute classes in which formally spoken and sometimes eccentric professors took centre stage. English 1000 introduced me to Professor Hutchins. He had uncombed grey hair that he kept raking back with his fingers. He kept a cigarette in his mouth while he lectured, which accounted for the budgie-coloured streak on the left side of his salt and pepper moustache. He had an English accent, and his diction was as theatrical as Richard Burton's. Everything he said seemed to have simmered for a few years in a hot-pot of bitterness and contempt. He tried to teach us about irony, which — to borrow a phrase from a Newfoundland satirist — was like trying to catch eels in a barrel of snot. I mean, if the actual meaning of what was being said was the opposite of what was literally being said, then how could you know what was really being said — huh? I knew my ability to make that distinction would eventually come, and on that day I would be able to say that I was now an educated man. Thus irony was also a kind of sales pitch. And was Professor Hutchins' manner of dress meant to be ironic? Absurd was the sight of my black-robed teacher striding around a prefabricated classroom in St. John's, Newfoundland, as though he were in Cambridge. Boredom soon followed.