Deluded Your Sailors (10 page)

Nichole nodded.

—Dorinda's into Settlement 250 up to her tits, too. Jesus, Nichole, there's fuckin millions on the go here, and that's just what's on the books, never mind what's stashed in the pork-barrels. Stakeholders, they call themselves. Stake through the heart is what they need. You all right? You wanna get a drink?

No, I want a two-litre pail of ice cream, a big bag of chips, and
my own toilet.
—We'd have to go to Harbour Grace. Port au Mal's dry.

—Ain't that the fuckin truth.

8) BOWGRACE
J
ULY
3, 2009, S
T
J
OHN
'
S
.

Gabriel Furey – that Gabe Furey fellah, as Seth Seabright called him – lived in Dorinda Masterson's basement apartment. Dorinda had been sweet on Gabriel since both were in their twenties but drifted away when she heard he'd not only shacked up but had a baby on the way. Now, each nearing sixty, they lived in the same house, assumed by many to be a couple, but no: separate doors and separate keys. Gabriel settled into a calm relief, making no move on Dorinda and believing she would make no move on him.

Gabriel had grown up in the Christian Brothers' St Raphael's Home for Boys, and he treasured both the concept and the reality of personal space. St Raph's had left marks predictably tragic and tragically predictable. When younger – dyslexic and usually drunk – Gabriel could not hold down what other men called a real job. He managed to fall in love with the prime minister's daughter, Callie Best. They had a daughter, Claire, but Gabriel remembered very little of Claire as a youngster. However, he did remember drunkenly studying Claire one evening the way paedophiles had once studied him. Monsters' hands not only bruised but stained him, tainted his heart and mind? The nightmares graced that fear with flesh and bone. Would he ooze poison? Touch his daughter like that?

No fuckin way.

So he'd run.

1979.

Claire had been young, but not so young that she forgot him, old enough and young enough to blame herself. Gabriel left a note to Callie, trying to say he'd felt smothered, that he needed to be an artist. Bullshit, but semi-plausible bullshit. Gabriel the janitor, Gabriel the rent-a-cop, he got the means to sculpt and paint and send some money home. He also kinda lied about his citizenship – his mother had been Canadian – getting several Canada Council grants after sweet-talking various women into filling out the forms for him. The City of Ottawa commissioned a statue, installed it on Sparks Street. Gabriel had called it
Sea Angel
. Then someone in the NDP asked him for a sculpture of Louis Riel, which he delivered, Riel life-size and looking at the ground, hesitant, but the sculpture had gone missing and remained so. When Gabriel returned to Newfoundland in 2005, he met Claire by accident, or at least without planning to, and a little late. Already sick then, Claire died within a few months. Watching this, Gabriel talked to Callie about the real reason he'd left. Callie –
God love ya, girl
– had guessed the most of it. But she wanted nothing to do with him. Gabriel listened – his turn. Callie had endured derision and then silence from her father for living common-law with Gabriel. Then Gabriel had beaten her and abandoned her, left her with a girl to raise on her own. The forces of Gabriel's past had strung him up and yanked him about, fed his demons. Callie knew that, but she said
What the
hell was I to you, a fish to split and splay out in the sun? A blow-up doll
that made breakfast?
He couldn't answer.

At their daughter's deathbed, Callie and Gabriel spoke civilly, shared tears. That was all.

Life continued to surprise him. A few years ago, Dorinda Masterson offered her basement apartment to him rent-free. Homeless, he'd quickly agreed. He'd sold some paintings and sculptures, gotten some commissions, and taught drawing workshops at the Penitentiary, much to the disgust of several politicians. He started to dry out. He sometimes had to accept Dorinda's invitations to supper or go hungry, but he had a bed. Four walls and a roof. Electricity for the kettle, and heat in winter. A draughty mock-up of heaven, he called it, privately. Now he also had a commission from the Admiral's Rooms for the
Peril on the
Sea
exhibit. And more loose tea than he knew what to do with. Someone – probably Dorinda, but possibly Claire's friend, Nichole Wright – had signed him up for three different tea-of-the-month clubs, a mystifying gift. His damaged taste buds, rotburnt from drink and cigarettes, took in very few of the promises on the packets.

I am not worth the effort.

So, on this summer afternoon, pot of tea made and forgotten, apartment draped with spattered plastic sheeting, fingers caked with clay, Gabriel worked smaller studies for his
Sea Sentry
piece. He felt free and clean, playing in the mud like a youngster. Happy.

Dorinda Masterson knocked on the apartment door, noise lost to John Lennon, cranked up loud.

Porthole. Slightly skew; water will flood through here.

—Gabriel?

Fuck off, I'm workin. Oh, Dory.
—Wha?

—I just got back from the ACHE board meeting. A total fiasco. The woman we've commissioned to write the play is really upset and ... can I come in?

Gabriel turned down Lennon's plea and opened the door.

—You own the place, Dory. I'm just the stray you took in.

—Do you have to be like that? Oh, my God.

—Yeah, bit of clay on the go. Excuse the mess.

—I thought you were doing this at the studio.

—The main piece, yes. These are just studies. I'm tryna figure out how to get this a decent size without havin it weigh forty fuckin pounds. That blows up, it'll take the kiln with it. You want a cup of tea? Pot's gone cold. Jesus, is that the time? Dory, honey, I'm sorry, but I'm after forgettin to meet Nichole at Mahon's Galley for tea.

—Nichole, who?

—No need to say it like that. Just that one, Nichole Wright, Claire's friend.

Nichole Wright? Jesus, this town is too small.
—Here, take my rig.

Gabriel accepted the key and kissed Dorinda on the cheek. She smiled as his stubble gently scraped her. Then she watched his sweet little arse animate his tight jeans as he loped up the stairs. She started to climb the stairs herself, head rattling with the ACHE meeting, with Nichole Wright's understandable dismay at TCR's new Tourist Friendly Arts Template – Dory's vigorous opposition to the template officially noted in the minutes, her moving to ram the TFAT up Chris Jackman's arse unrecorded.

She'd stepped in clay without noticing.

She slipped and fell.

The sound of her right ankle breaking sickened her nearly as much as the pain. Below her: Gabriel's apartment and, somewhere past the clay, his telephone. Above: her part of the house, and, somewhere on the kitchen counter, probably near her grandmother's china teapot, her cell phone.
Nan might get out the bar of soap if she
heard me curse like this.
Yes, Nan who had slipped on the stairs...

Dory yelled.—These very God damned stairs, in this very God damned Official Heritage House. Twisted Jesus in the garden, that hurts!

She tried to stand, but bearing weight proved impossible, and balance eluded her. She collapsed, smacking her chin off the edge of a step, cutting her lip and chipping a tooth. Feminism long ago liberated her tongue, but she still kept one word in storage, for special occasions. She howled it now.

—Fuck! Gabe? Gabriel, can you hear me?

Ignition.

Adjusting the driver's seat and the rear-view mirror, Gabriel tried to puzzle out why accepting favours from Dory felt like accepting charity when she probably loved him.
Does she?
He backed out of the driveway, straining to see past the various old trees, turned south.

Dorinda listened to Gabriel drive off.

Assess, Dory, use your brain. Wiggle your toes. Good. Feeling in
both legs. Good. Yes, damn strong feeling in the broken ankle. Roll
over, gently, gently. Good. Get my breath back. Gabriel won't be long
– oh right, sit on my arse and wait, Dorinda, Dorinda, let down your
hair.
Bracing her hands against the step, Dorinda pushed herself arse-first up to the next step. She rested a moment, heaved again, and repeated this exercise eight times until she sat in the main porch. The door to her part of the house lay ajar.
Just another few
scoots
... And Dorinda banged her temple off a radiator. Dizzy, she leaned against the wall a moment, resumed her journey. Kitchen. Success. Dorinda got to her knees, grabbed the counter and hauled herself up, caught the cell phone and slipped again, this time smacking the pointiest part of her right cheekbone against granite. Wrenching her back to avoid bearing weight on her ankle, Dorinda descended in jerks, landing on her left hip. Eyesight blurred with angry tears, she flipped open her phone and pushed the hotkey for 911.

Nichole tried to keep her voice quiet, but her words pattered quickly. She knew she sounded manic.
Lithium, oh, lithium, oh,
have you met lithium.
—And then I report to the ACHE Board of Directors, and it turns out not one of them has read the outline I e-mailed them because they're all too busy freaking out over Seth Seabright being cast, when it was them all along who told me to cast him. And now it turns out he's Actors' Queue all right, but not TFAT –

—Tea fat?

—Tourist. Friendly. Arts. Template. Remember all that stink over Seabright's last play, language and whatever, and how he got invited to Toronto and flew up on the NL-Canada Tourism Ambassador Program, but then couldn't stage the show once he got there because they couldn't understand his accent?

—Bit more to it than that, I heard. That young fellah came out drunk to the dress rehearsal and took a piss on stage. I saw that play here, just before TCR closed down the Hall. Really good.

—I am
never
gonna get this done! Now ACHE needs a new draft per TFAT submitted to a committee at TCR so they can study it before granting funding approval. I might not even get paid for this. I've worked my arse off drafting this play, and they just feed me some line about tourism. On top of that, they're all upset because they think I've changed the dates, that I'm making up my own play and defying the mandate. But I'm not. Port au Mal had settlement before 1760. I've got written proof. I can't just ignore it.

—You'd think the ACHE crowd could take a little creative license of their own and realize the history they started with is wrong.

—Incomplete, at least.

—You want my advice, ducky? Fuck TFAT, and fuck Settlement 250.

Nichole sat back hard in her chair. —All the money's tied up in Settlement 250.

—If you don't mind me askin, what did you do with that load of money you got from that land sale? Didn't some church buy a few acres off you?

Nichole blushed. —Church of Prevenient Grace out in Port au Mal. Land my grandfather Wright left me. I took the money just before I decided to go off the lithium, and that fucked me up, because I shouldn't have been on that shit in the first place. I got to feeling the money was dirty, so I gave it away.

Gabriel stared at her a moment, then laughed. —Who'd ya give it to?

—Women's shelters. Spent a few dollars on some new clothes; my weight goes up and down. I just – hated having that money.

—The day I left St Raphael's, the brother in charge gave me fifty dollars.

—But you didn't spend it.

—I most certainly did. Twas either that or starve, now, wasn't it?

—I never thought of it that way.

They finished their tea in a mostly comfortable silence, and then Gabriel decided he should get back to work. As he pushed his chair back, Nichole flushed and paled.

—Y'all right, ducky?

—Do you think I should testify against Almayer Foxe?

—You should be testifyin against the likes of that with a birch junk. Studded with nails.

—Like telling a roomful of strangers is going to make this better. I don't want to. I just – can't.

Gabriel tried to say
I know
but failed, throat too tight. He passed Nichole a napkin. As he'd once drunkenly passed crying Claire a napkin, when she sat across from him in a dark little pub, angry, betrayed and already sick.
Shouldn't be me doin this. Not
right. Where's your father to, Nichole?

Claire had thrown her tea in Gabriel's face.

Nichole blew her nose and made a mess of it. —The worst of it's – my parents won't even – my mother asked me how I could let Foxe –

—You didn't
let
him do anythin. Nichole, look at me. Nichole. You are not the criminal here. This Foxe prick, he's goin to prison regardless of what you say. Question is for how long, and where. You don't participate, don't tell your story, then maybe enough years get knocked off his sentence that he strolls out of HMP next summer. Because you hide the past.