The Republic of Nothing (44 page)

They walked for exactly sixteen minutes; I timed them. Then my father was in his borrowed government car and gone in a cloud of stone and dust, not even having said goodbye. But I gave him credit for those extra six minutes more than he had committed himself to. I gave him credit for coming home to my mother against the wishes of his advisors. My mother returned inside and picked up the pages she had written the night before from the chair where my father had left them.

She straightened them and handed them to me. With a sad smile, she said, “Your father is a good man. But he's stubborn. He doesn't believe this actually happened to me. He says it was just a bad dream and it was healthy for me to get it out of my system. He said I was a much better storyteller than he realized and that I should start writing fiction.”

“How could he say that?”

“I don't know. Your father believes what he wants to believe. I think he feels I went crazy last night so you would call him and he would come running. He says that it was a natural response to him ignoring the family like he does.”

“Is that all he said?”

“He apologized for being away so much, tried to get me to move to Halifax again. When I said no, he said that he'd probably be premier for five years, tops. Then he'd get out before he became too much like the rest.”

“Bull,” I said.

“Your father's a very determined man,” she said. She put the record of her dream into my hands. “Now it's your turn, Ian. Read it. Tell me what you think.”

Trying to read my mother's handwriting was like gazing at flowers in a garden. Even a story as horrific as this was written in a graceful hand that was hard to resist, the letters were well shaped, attractive and appealing. At first, I could hardly make my eyes focus on the words; I just stumbled around the garden of the flowery script. Maybe I was still afraid of what I would actually read. Nonetheless, I would sit there in my father's chair and read all of it. I would learn the story that had been locked up inside for so many years.

It starts out on a ship travelling along the coast of Nova Scotia. It's dark and I smell oil or kerosene maybe, or diesel fuel. I'm in my bed in a hot cabin beneath deck. I'm afraid of something and I don't know what, but this does not seem unfamiliar to me. I am acquainted with fear. It is an old companion. There are sounds of creaking and moaning. When I am fully awake, I am very confused. It is like waking up from a dream where you are certain you are already awake. Now you're not sure which is real and which is imagined.

I am so used to this confusion that I have a little ritual to calm me down. First I say my name to my-self. I am Anna. Then I tell myself where I am. I am on the ship,
Night Sky. Why am I here?
My father is the captain. It is a creaky old steamer that travels to the harbours, the deep ones along the shore of mainland
Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and Newfoundland.
Why, again, am I here?
Because my father loves us very much and wants us near him on his trips.
Us?
My mother and me. She is somewhere in the cabin with my father, somewhere in the darkness. I want to call to my mother but something stops me. It is my father. He scares me.

If it were light, I could see him — he is a handsome man who is always perfectly dressed and well-shaven except for long sideburns. My mother is a delicate, beautiful woman who always speaks in soft whispers. My mother would like to have a permanent house on land, a little cottage with a place for planting flowers and kale. But my father says it would be a waste. So some-times we live in rented rooms in Halifax or Sydney. Other times we go with him at sea if the season is not too rough.

I want to know why I feel the way I do. I want to know why I am so scared, why I am always scared. I remember that it is because of my father's temper. Among the men, my father is highly respected. He treats his men well and they treat him with great respect. My father's favourite word is “dignity.” “The men are creatures,” he often says of his crew, “but all it takes is a captain who is well-bred and full of dignity to preserve order.” My father tolerates no drinking or fighting. He runs an orderly ship.

Then why am I so afraid?
It is because I hear things in the dark. I hear the engines and the moaning ship. That does not bother me. On quiet nights I sometimes hear nothing at all except for the low, almost soothing, rumble of the engine. But then the bad weather comes. It is not the sea, however, that I am afraid of. I love the sea, even though I sometimes get sick to my stomach and throw up in the sink. My mother says
this is natural. But when I throw up, it is not because of the sea. It's something else.

At night, during the storms, I hear things in our cabin. I wake up in the morning and I see my mother putting on make-up. She looks different. Sometimes she has fallen out of her bunk at night, or gotten up to go to the bathroom and fallen over, bumped into things as people do on rolling ships sometimes. My mother has bruises on her face and marks on her neck. She is very good at covering them up with heavy powder but then she looks so much like someone who could not be my mother.
What happens on stormy nights when the sea thuds against the hull and the winds whip up nuisances of noise?
I wake this night and wonder. It was stormy the night before and my mother woke up with a swollen face, a cut over her eye. I wonder why I did not hear her wake up or cry out when she accidentally walked into the door.

But tonight it is still. So I should be able to sleep. I lay awake for hours until a new wind comes up and the sea begins to add familiar noises to those of the ship. Always I will fall asleep at this point. I don't know why, but I have learned to fall asleep immediately during a storm. I can never remember being awake during a night of choppy seas. And now I hear it. A dull thud and the sound of pain. My mother has bumped into something in the night.
Why doesn't she turn on the light?
I hear a muffled cry again. I want to call out but my voice does not work. Maybe my father is not there. Perhaps he's gone above to see that everything is tied down on deck. He is a very conscientious captain. Maybe he is not here.

No, I hear the sound of a man in the cabin. I recognize it as my father's voice, but barely discernable. It is hushed and full of anger.
I hear bodies moving.,
wrestling.
He is fighting with someone in my cabin.
Who would he be fighting with?
Then I hear the sound of a fist striking flesh, a hard thud followed by the sound of a hand slapping something.
Can it be the sea, the sea stirred to its usual anger by the east winds and a newly arrived storm?
No, it's not outside. It's in here.

“Mother,” I cry out. “Mother, are you there?”

But there is no answer. Only my father in that hushed growl of his, a voice I swear I had never heard him use in daylight, cursing at her. “Shut up! Shut up, you bitch.” Then another slap and a high pitched wail, cut off unnaturally. Then the sound of someone trying to breathe, the sound of my mother choking for air, unable to get air to her lungs.

I lay still, frozen for several seconds, waiting again to wake up, telling myself this is all a product of my night fears, of too many nights sleeping in hot dark cabins on this ship. Until I am swept into a whirlpool of sounds and images. I realize that what is happening has happened before.
I've woken to scenes like this be-fore. Only on the stormy nights. And I have always gone back to sleep.
But I'm older now. I'm fifteen. To-night, it is hard to make myself believe that these are merely the fears of my insecure mind. I find that, almost against my will, I am up out of my bed and my hand is on the light switch by the door. I don't want to turn it on but I must. And then suddenly it is on. My hand has moved on its own.

I am looking at my father in his nightshirt sitting up on the bed, his legs straddling my mother who is flat on her back. He has pinned her down and his hands are on her throat. In the cold, terrible light, I see his hands on her throat. I can see that his hands have gone white, he is squeezing so hard. I can see that my
mother's face looks swollen. Her mouth is open. His hands are on still on her throat. All at once I remember the other nights. I had never seen anything but I had heard it all before. Despite the light, my father does not turn around. He does not let go. I know that my mother, that fragile, gentle person who brought me into this world, is already dead. My father, only now reacting to my desperate act of turning on the light, turns his head my way and I see the look of anger and hate begin to turn to confusion and disbelief. It is almost as if he had acted in his sleep, that he is now shocked at what he has done and cannot believe any of it. I put one hand on the door handle, turn off the light and run out of the cabin.

Up above, outside in the cold, chill Atlantic air, I stumble around barefoot on the iron plating of the deck. I am alone. Then I hear my father's voice calling to me. “Anna,” he is saying. “It's all a mistake. You don't really understand.”

But I do understand. I say nothing. I hide from him behind some crates.

“Then to hell with you,” he shouts at me. And I know that I cannot live with what I have just seen. I cannot live with all the memories of the other nights along with the true horror of this night. I jump over the rail and into the dark water. The cold water paralyses me and I want to die in it. I want the pain of the cold to punish me for letting this happen. I want to sink beneath the waves but I find I cannot sink. something is making me swim. It's the pain of the cold water that makes me thrash about and I see that I am swimming away from the ship. I want to die alone at sea like this. I want it very badly.

My arms work to keep me afloat no matter how much I tell them to stop. I try to swallow water to
speed up the process but cannot. I am looking back at the ship. I see a man on deck in the cold white lights. I know it is my father. He is swinging an axe high above his head and bringing it down hard onto one of the fuel drums near the bow. I hear the clang of metal against metal. Then I see him kick the barrel along the deck. He leans over and then there is a surge of fire, a leaping flame that shoots across the deck. I want to turn away but I can't.

Then I see my father himself aflame, outlined against the dark night. He stands with his arms out-stretched calling out to me. I watch this human torch burn and think it is not enough. It is too easy. He deserves worse. I watch as he walks to the mounted life boat, unhitches it — this a man whose clothes are on fire and who must be able to smell the stench of his own flesh burning. He succeeds in dropping the life-boat over the side. Then he falls back against a bulkhead, I see the lick of the flame has nearly encircled the deck now. I hear a horrible deep roar, an explosion surges upward as the ship convulses and erupts into a reddish yellow ball of light. I feel the heat on my face and I like it. With my eyes closed, it feels warm like sunlight on a fine summer day. It is all I have and I decide it is enough to carry me some place else, this warmth.

I clasp my fingers together tightly before me. I feel the heat on my face. With my eyes closed like this, I imagine I can see the sun. I fight the urge to splash and thrash and, at last, bless whatever force allows me to sink.

I expect to lose the light, to lose the sun, the blinding fireball that was once my home but it stays inside my eyelids as I sink. Each time panic and fear burst inside my head, I see the light again, and I hear the song of the sea. I don't know why I begin to struggle again
but I do. I am beneath the sea when all goes black and I am afraid. I have lost the light. And now I want it back. I scream and my lungs fill with sea water. Inside my head I go on screaming.

Until I stop. And I am free. Released. Floating. It is less like an ocean and more like a sky but it is because I have been released from my body. My eyes are somehow open, though, and I can see the water all around. I no longer feel any sense of cold. I am released. There is another light now, beneath the water and far off but it is all there is and I must go towards it.

But now a hand has touched mine. A warm, human hand. It is my father. I want to scream again but he smiles — a smile that is at once unbearably sad and full of regret but also it is a fatherly smile.

I begin to try to swim towards the light which now seems farther away, but I must go towards it to get away from him. He does not pull me back. His hand is but a gentle tug and then a request that comes to me in a voice that is truly my father's but also sounds like that of a choir or a chorus speaking to me in many voices, all telling me that I should not swim towards the light. I can barely see the light now. I'm confused. It seems so far away. As I try to focus on my father, his face shifts. I see the torturous expression from the cabin shift to soft sadness, then compassion, then a plea.
Follow me up.

In the morning I wake up in a small wooden boat drifting at sea. I can remember nothing. The sun is coming up and I feel its warmth. A fiery red-headed young man is rowing towards me. I wonder who I am.