Hellgoing (2 page)

Jean Rhys used to cuddle up under blankets in her own hotel and boarding house rooms — as many blankets as she could — placing an arm over her eyes (she mentions this gesture in several stories, the supine, defeated woman on the bed, arm over the eyes). Then Jean would drift into dreams of her island home, Dominica — imagine herself growing moist and sultry from the tropical sun, not the heat of her body under thick woolen blankets. At one place, she took hot baths so often the landlady made remarks about it. Indecent implications. What kind of girl, she would ask in front of all the other boarders, took so many hot baths?

And what did Jean say? How did Jean react to this indignity? Jean said nothing. Jean went upstairs, lay down. Covered her eyes with her arm. Let the cold settle into her bones like rot.

SHE AND NED
are hiking Signal Hill. Ned is disinclined, keeps wanting to sit on a bench and smoke. Ned is a constant surprise to her — she'd thought the beard a sort of Grizzly Adams-ish indicator of his island-man's love of the outdoors.

“Ned,” says Jane. She stretches her hamstrings on the bench while he struggles to light his cigarette in the wind. “You've got to take better care of yourself. It's our responsibility as drunks to look after ourselves, make sure we eat right and get regular exercise and all that, because the bastards are just looking for any excuse to tell you how irresponsible you are, how you're ruining your health, how you're a drain on society. It's up to us to throw it all back in their faces, to say, What are you talking about, look at me, I'm fine. I earn money. I pay my rent or my mortgage or whatever. I have friends, I'm successful in what I do. Who are you to judge me, and on what possible basis?”

Ned's not saying anything. She looks over. He's still got the cigarette between his lips, the lighter poised, his hands cupped against the wind. But he's no longer flicking away.

“What?” she says.

“Who're you calling a drunk?” says Ned.

“Denial,” she lectures, “is even worse. Denial gives them all the ammunition they could possibly need. Allows for feelings of superiority. Don't give them the satisfaction, Ned.”

Ned stands, gestures at the bald rock on every side — smoke in one hand, lighter in the other. “Who's them?” He says. “Where they all at?”

“Everyone,” she insists, flapping her hands in the wind. A particularly violent gust rocks her, for a moment, takes Ned's smoke. He doesn't bother to chase it.

She wishes he would go because she'd like to be by herself when she first sees them. Once she and Ned clear the bend, beyond the harbour, the bergs stand in full view, dazzling white against two different, dazzling shades of blue. She wonders which whimsical, goofball description will work best for the article.
We rounded the bend and experienced our first breathtaking view. Like massive clouds had hardened in the heavens and fallen to the sea.
Awful. Jane's mind keeps lingering on the tooth analogy — but what kind of description would that make?
Like really, really big teeth
.

Then she realizes why she's having so much trouble. It's blasphemy, what she's doing — her deep-mind is rebelling. She has almost fooled herself, along with everyone else, into believing the article is what she's here for. She doesn't want to describe them, it would be wrong to describe them. She won't do it. This is part of the self-control she was advocating to Ned only a moment ago. Who's them? asks Ned. Them as in: Never let them see you sweat. Never let them see you drunk. Never let them know you look at icebergs.

She jogs a bit ahead on the narrow path. Ned calling, “Don't fall!” as she disappears behind a dip of rock. Stands by herself gazing seaward for the time it takes him to catch up. “Jeez, Ned,” she says when he does, pretending to have been bored, unoccupied.

They get to the top after an hour of this. Ned has no interest in going into the tower and neither does Jane, but she supposes she has to in order to make obligatory mention of it in the article.

“Nah,” says Ned. “It's just a gift shop and stuff about Marconi.” Jane has wandered over to the pay-telescope or whatever it's called as Ned settles on a bench and lights his fourth smoke of the hike. She digs around in her pack for a dollar.
 
“Of course, you'll get a better view from the tower,” he remarks before she can place it in the slot.

“Oh. There's a scope up there?”

“Up the top,” he says.
“You can see the gulls landing on the bergs.”

“You know what,” remembers Jane, “I didn't even think to buy souvenirs yet.”

“Do you need any money?” he calls as she darts away. The man is one exotic bird.

Marconi is a serene-looking man, sitting in front of his wire-thing — it really is just a bundle of wires, wires for a so-called “wireless” transmission. He's in a desolate room but a dapper hat and suit, dressed for the occasion, to change the world. Head turned slightly to glance at the camera as if to say,
Oh, this? No big deal.
She tries to read about him and his world-changing wire-thing. Marconi, she notes, was an “amateur” in the burgeoning world of radio communication at the turn of the last century. Of course. He was like Jane, like the glennerd, an aficionado, only with more commitment, consistency and breadth of vision. Marconi wouldn't have wasted his time on
Robo-friendz
. But Jane is certain he was after the same sort of thing, up here with his bundle of wire and big crazy kite in the middle of December. The single-mindedness is what's key, the tunnel vision — precisely what's required and precisely what makes you seem a freak to the rest of the world. Visionaries and drinkers: obsessed with away, looking for
else
.

Something to guard against, though, Jane reminds herself. Classic drunkard mentality. That appalling self-absorption — relating everything back to one's own experience, no matter how trifling one's own experience might be. Marconi? Oh, yeah, he's just like me. And icebergs are my thing, by the way, I'm the only one in the world who's ever been interested in icebergs. She recalls a humiliatingly defining moment in a restaurant, visiting with a long-lost friend to whom she'd always felt a pinch inferior. She'd been so deep into her own navel the entire time that, as the friend detailed the difficulties of married life, Jane had finally glared across the table and spoke. “I guess I'm not like you. I'm not looking to settle down.” She'd said it in a strained, defensive way, as if the woman across the table had been sitting there smirking at her, lording her wifely status. But then Jane noticed her old friend's face, registered her sadness and then her astonishment, followed by an ironic sort of wilt to the shoulders. The blood roared into Jane's ears and cheeks as the sheer, breathless scale of her mistake sunk in. The friend rested her face on an open hand, weary. She spoke Jane's name as if calling from a distance. “I'm telling you my relationship is falling apart,” she said, leaning toward Jane. “We're splitting up. It's hard for me.”

Rhys, too, had the drinker's megalomania. Jean thought everyone was out to get her, men in particular. She even spent her spare time writing elaborate fictional court transcripts, fashioning herself as the eternal defendant. But it wasn't that men were out to get her. They just had no idea about this woman — a woman of the world, of Paris cafés and London dance halls, a married and divorced woman, a woman who lived through two world wars and had two husbands arrested and jailed. What kind of woman emerges at the end of all this with an emotional skin like the membrane between shell and egg? You couldn't blame the men—they didn't want to hurt Jean. But who could have fathomed a creature so hurtable?

AT FOUR IN
the morning, a man out on the street is banging on somebody's door. St. John's is a shockingly quiet place at night, like the middle of the woods. Except for this man, a drunk of course, banging on somebody's door on the street below. He exists, thinks Jane, like an avatar of her mind, a golem shaped from the muck of her obsessions. The Bad Drunk. The creature Jane will never be.

He's yelling someone's name, it sounds like
Ray!
or
Jay!
A long
a
sound — maybe even just
Hey!
He'll hammer a good ten or so hammers, machine-gun quick on Ray or Jay's screen door before screaming out Ray or Jay's name. No inkling that Ray or Jay may not be inclined to open his door to a raging drunk at four in the morning. Drunks — as innocent as lambs sometimes.
We can't afford it
, Jane wants to holler down at him.

Now the lone car starts up on the other side of town. Someone has called the cops. She grins to herself, lying there, listening to the car meander its way through the streets. No element of surprise at work here. They might as well just call to the crooks across town — from the Tim Hortons or wherever —
Yeah, we hear you; now just stay put
.
 
He hears them too — the desperate man in the street. The door-banging stops all at once. Seconds before the cop car arrives. Feet against pavement, hurrying. Jane breathes relief for him.

Ned isn't around. She ditched Ned this evening, for Ned became a downer. She did some work on the piece after the hike, took a shower, and they met at the bar around eight. It was Friday night and she wanted to meet people. She mentioned Ned's band, how great it would be to see them play, maybe she could plug them in the magazine. Ned responded it wouldn't be possible — they had recently gotten back from a tour, he said, and none of them could stand to look at each other for weeks after a tour. She later learned by “tour” Ned meant a weekend stint in Cape Breton.

But publicity, enticed Jane.

“We're not really into that sort of thing,” replied Ned.

She waited for more but he just looked around the bar, scratching, sweat-moons in the armpits of his shirt.

Jane wanted a Guinness, stood up to get it, but Ned motioned for her to sit, waving a waitress over simultaneously. Jane felt thwarted, her butt was sore from sitting. They were alone at their table, a cramped table for two, crowd roiling on either side of them. Where were all Ned's friends?

“My legs are killing me,” he groused.

“What?” said Jane. “From the walk?”

“Yeah.”

She picked up one of his cigarettes and pointed at him with it. “You should be doing that sort of thing every day, Ned.”

He smiled and looked away from her again. Jane felt bored. “Where does all that Guinness enter into your fitness routine?” he asked after a moment.

Jane stretched. “The whole point of the routine is to be able to drink the Guinness. That's the whole point of everything, at the end of the day. This is how we orchestrate our lives.”

“You talk about ‘everything' a lot,” Ned said.

“Breadth of vision,” replied Jane, thinking of Marconi. “As alcoholics, we have a responsibility to see the big picture. We have to be unflinching. We can't afford to lie to ourselves about what it is we're engaged in exactly.”

Ned looked worried. His eyebrows, already joined, bunched up in the middle.

“I mean we're engaged in drinking, yes, on the surface.” She leaned forward. “Over-drinking. Self-medication. But we have to be precise about why that is, don't you think? If we're going to withdraw from the world, we'd better have damn good reasons why — if,
if
you accept that's what it is we're doing. We'd better be able to rhyme off those reasons if called upon to do so. If people accuse us of being afraid, we can explain that fear is a perfectly reasonable response to the world in which we live. The trick is, we can't be afraid of being afraid. We can't cower behind locked doors with our gin bottles and our arms across our eyes, if you know what I mean.”

Jane waited for Ned to say something and stop looking worried. She added, “I think about this stuff a lot,” almost by way of apology. “I'm thinking of writing a book or doing a blog or something.”

“Who would wanna read a book like that?” Ned asked in a naked sort of way.

“You know, Ned,” said Jane, stretching again. “I think I'll get going.”

He nodded, pinched his eyebrows together some more, and stood up to walk her to the hotel. Jane waved him back down. Had to use both hands, stand there pushing air for five minutes at least.

“I THOUGHT,” HE
says, “you'd like to see an iceberg.”

She sits up, adrift in the king-size bed, says nothing, then forces a yawn into the receiver just to let him know it's kind of early to be calling. “I've already seen the icebergs,” she says in a voice like she's packing, or blowing languidly on her nails. “I've pretty much got everything I need.”

“No but my brother can take us,” says Ned. “He's got a boat.”

“Can take us where?” asks Jane, stiffening for some reason.

“Out to see the icebergs.”

“To? He can take us to them?”

“To,” says Ned. “Right
to
'em.”

“When?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Oh, Ned, I leave tomorrow morning.”

“I know,” says Ned. “But that's the only day he can do it.”

“Why?” says Jane.

“Why?” Ned repeats, stymied. “I don't know, you'll have to ask him.”

“I can pay him,” says Jane.

“No, no, no, no,” goes Ned, all east coast hospitality again.

“No, but, like, to go today or tomorrow, if it's a matter of money or something, I'll just pay him.”