Authors: Carol Mason
Another pause... ‘In Xambidny in the far reaches of Africa, the Pogs believe that if they eat the tail off a hippo they’ll grow a massive penis overnight.’
I grin my face off. ‘But hang on, I didn’t think hippos had tails. Only funny little stumps for tails.’
‘And now you know why.’
I chuckle. She chuckles. ‘And, again, your point would be…?’ I ask her.
‘That I suppose there’s no harm in believing something if it makes you feel good. Even if it is a serious load of crapology.’
I shake my head. ‘Goodnight Sherrie. Whenever I need a bit of perspective on things, I always know where to turn.’
In bed, I try, but fail, to fall asleep, a restless ache running down my legs, the speech going through my head again, sounding even more hopeless than before. I’m trying to care about the people of Vancouver who don’t have a bed for the night, but I can’t quite feel it right at this minute, at least, not enough to make it sound like it’s coming from the heart. I sigh and snow-angel my arms and legs out, my feet and hands reaching to the far side of the mattress. Sometimes I’ll do this, and I’m convinced I’m going to touch him.
‘Alright then,’ I say, feeling an idiot speaking to ghosts, especially as I don’t believe in them. It’s the wine, I tell myself. The wine.
‘Paging heaven…’ This really does sound mad, as though I’m a pointer short of a Ouija board. ‘If you’re listening up there, Jonathan, and if you’re so damned sure that you can really do this. Then do what you promised. Send me someone. Someone I can love.’
My eyes search the ceiling.
While I’m waiting to see if he’s going to answer, I fall asleep.
When I open my door the next morning, I’m surprised to find Richard hovering there, looking as though he has landed from outer space.
‘So this is where you live,’ he says, gazing past me at the view. He’s being facetious. He knows where I live because he helped me move in here after I had to sell my house. What he means is, in the three months since I’ve been here, I’ve never asked Richard over here, even though Richard and Jessica still have me over to their place for dinner virtually every second Friday.
‘Neat view,’ he says, walking over to my window and standing with his back to me.
‘Not really.’
‘You can see the mountains.’ He looks at me over his shoulder.
‘I can see where the mountains would be if they didn’t have a million high rises in their way.’
He turns fully now, looking mildly entertained. ‘You love it here, really, don’t you?’
‘Love it’s not quite the word Richard.’ I used to love the home I shared with my husband.
He stares at all the boxes piled in the corner. ‘You still haven’t unpacked!’
‘I’m in the process of unpacking. I emptied one yesterday. And I plan on doing another one today.’
No I don’t. Because I hate this place and I’m moving out. I just have to work out where I’m going and how I can afford more rent.
‘How’s the neighbourhood treating you?’
‘Fine. I love living among gay men. I’ve discovered I’ve got a particular affection for transvestites. I love that there must be a male prostitute living upstairs because somebody up there has sex sixteen hours a day.’ When I had to sell our lovely home because I couldn’t afford the mortgage on my own, the gay district was about the only area of the city where I could find cheap rent. It’s really not that bad. Just makes me feel even lonelier sometimes.
He smiles, as though he knows that under my bravado I’m a wounded bird. ‘You’ve got to unpack, Angie. Start making this place… comfortable.’ He looks caught-out because we both know he was going to say ‘home.’
‘Baby steps, Richard.’ I brush over his clanger. ‘Baby steps.’
‘Speaking of steps…’ he stares at my feet in my one red ladybird slipper, because the other one has been missing since the move.
‘You should try seeing what I look like when I go out in only one shoe.’
Yet I know exactly where I keep Jonathan’s blue T-shirt that he’d go running in, Jonathan’s wedding ring and Tag watch that they gave me straight from his dead body, Jonathan’s well-worn sandals with his toe-prints on the leather of the sole.
‘I’ll make us a cup of tea. Just don’t expect a teapot.’ I fish in my cutlery drawer. ‘Actually, even a teaspoon could be stretching it.’
‘I have something for you,’ he says as he watches me put the kettle on. ‘Or rather w
e
have something for you,’—meaning he and Jessica.
Jessica is Richard’s ‘hot’ wife who disproves the myth that you can’t be blonde, beautiful, have size E breast implants and still have a brain. Although for a while I had wondered. For starters, she has never worked or gone to college. All she ever talks about is beauty and exercise. But two years ago she started up an Internet blogspot, called
Goddess Girl
. It was a hobby—just her blabbing on about beauty products she likes/dislikes. But now, much to everybody’s surprise, it has morphed into one of the biggest Internet sites of its kind, attracting several thousand hits a day. Aside from receiving free products to review that would fill a warehouse, she is now raking in dollars from businesses advertising on her site. Business in Canada magazine recently did a two-page feature on her, and her new spin-off charity,
Powder Power,
that helps underprivileged women get into the workforce by ‘making them up’ for their interviews. Yet when you talk to her you feel you’re talking to a moron. It’s very weird.
Richard hands me a shiny,
British Airways
envelope, then he runs his hand through his dark auburn/chestnut hair, pushing back the piece that always tends to flop forward over his eyebrows. When Jonathan first introduced me to Richard at a house party, I thought he was quite attractive. Something about his eye-colour and his hair-colour being a close match. Not quite auburn-haired; he doesn’t have a single freckle. But warmer than light brown. Then I noticed his very odd habit: when he sits he wraps his feet around the front legs of the chair so his knees look primly glued together. This small detail made me realise I could never fancy Richard. But then again, I was so busy fancying Jonathan that Richard could have been Richard Gere and it probably wouldn’t have made one iota of difference.
‘A return ticket to the UK!’ I look at him rather confused. ‘Richard! What’s this?’
‘It’s for you.’
I smile. This is obviously a joke of some sort.
‘I’m being serious. It’s time you went home.’
‘Really? You have? How do you know I’ve been thinking of going back a lot lately?’
‘Haven’t you been thinking of going back a lot for ten years?’
‘No—well, yes—but that’s a different story. But just yesterday I was actually thinking of going back to see my mother, but then I was wondering how I could possibly afford to go…’ And now Richard walks in bearing a ticket.
In my low moments I’ve thought of going back for good. My mother is on her own over there. I’m on my own over here. We’re the only family each other has. But after living in Canada for so long, I don’t quite know where I belong any more. I’m not Canadian, because I constantly remind everybody I’m British. But I’m not quite British either. I don’t know the new names for the old institutions like British Gas and British Rail. I wouldn’t know who to ring to set up the Internet. I call a toilet a washroom, and I have an annoying habit of saying Hello to strangers and asking how they are. Going back would be a bit like moving to a foreign country, and that would be depressing, because I’d be expecting it to feel like going home.
‘I didn’t know you were seriously thinking of going back Angie. I just thought—Jessica and I thought—that it might be a good idea for you to get away from here. You haven’t had a vacation since…’
Jonathan died. I drag my ponytail over my shoulder and look at my feet. I somehow can’t imagine this being Jessica’s idea. Not that I’ve anything against her, just we’ve never really clicked. Which only adds to the fact that I have to say, ‘I’m sorry Richard. It’s marvellous of you both, but I can’t accept this.’
This isn’t the first time Richard has been a bit of a fairy godfather to me. When I was going into default on my mortgage, Richard bought Jonathan’s partnership interest in the law firm they’d started up together three years ago. I suspect that what he paid me was over-generous. But even so, I didn’t have a job at the time, because I’d recently got fired from the advertising agency where I was a senior executive, and I was taking time—Jonathan’s idea—to think what I might want to do next. Plus we had debts, and I’d discovered, much to my surprise, that Jonathan and I had very little saved. I knew we spent a lot, but I didn’t think we were
that
bad. Richard knew how much I didn’t want to lose our house—the fabulously dilapidated Cape Cod-style home Jonathan and I were renovating together, with its hazardous wrap-around deck overlooking the ocean, its springy floorboards, its mysterious musty smell in the airing cupboard, and the cathedral ceiling in the bedroom that somehow echoed all of our sexy moans and laughter, and every petty scrap we ever had. So much of Jonathan was in that house, and I worried that maybe if you took me out of that house, you took Jonathan out of me. I wasn’t ready to lose the house as though it were a shell that contained Jonathan’s soul, even though his body had moved on somewhere else.
But then again I wasn’t ready to have him die either, was I? So being ready for things really means very little in this life, I have found.
I sat for hours calculating how much I’d have to earn to still keep our home if I went back to my high-flying career in another big agency, hoping each time I ran the numbers that they’d turn up a different figure. But it was hopeless. So the real estate agent dug the For Sale sign into the lawn. Old Ms Elmtree, our neighbour across the street, who Jonathan had helped out with a legal problem, even offered to loan me five thousand dollars. But I couldn’t take her money, not that five grand would have done any good.
‘You’ve got to take the ticket,’ he says now as I stand there in a fug of wanting to take the ticket, yet my pride having a problem with the whole idea. ‘You don’t have a choice in the matter. It’s in your name. It’s not much use to anybody else.’
Some people will always feel they owe you something, even when they don’t.
‘But Richard… I have my job…’
‘That you don’t like, in an industry you hate, working for a goof. England or that… Hard choice.’
‘My mother or my boss… It might be.’
Despite my saying I’d never work in another advertising agency, I am back doing just that. Only this one’s much smaller and run by a middle-aged British man who lost his wife to cancer six months ago. David hardly has any clients, which makes me wonder why he hired me. As a substitute for dealing with his grief, he sits for eight hours a day telling me all about how fantastic his career used to be. I see him as one of those helpless, befuddled Brits who fall apart when their wife isn’t there to give them a daily purpose, and they walk around with urine stains on their trousers, covered in their own drool.
‘It’s not the job. I could leave there tomorrow if I wanted.’ Even though I have developed a good bit of affection for my pathetic, entertainingly self-congratulating boss. ‘It’s… well, I’ve been thinking about
Write Strategies
again…’
Thinking, not doing
, Jonathan would have reminded me. And I’d have probably said
back off, bossy clogs; I’ll get there in my own time
.
It was Jonathan’s idea that I start a business as a writing consultant. Originally I’d wanted to be the person in the advertising agency who wrote the clever adverts. But in an interview they asked me to come up with a tag-line for Imodium. The best I could say was
Stop the Diarrhoea,
which went down like a lead potato. Then when I came up with my other piece of brilliance:
Walk don’t Run
, I was quickly shown to the door. So I ended up as ‘a suit’, taking care of the clients. And the job somehow got under my skin as jobs do, and I grew the sort of goals that were expected of me. And for a while there, it felt like that thing called life. But it all boiled down to a career I gave my blood to, that wasn’t as loyal to me as I was to it.
We decided I was going to farm myself out to corporations whose staff might need to improve how they communicated in proposals, reports, presentations and speeches. I’d do small groups, or one-on-one coaching. I’d put on seminars, whatever was needed. I was going to call my company
Write Strategies
. I even had the business cards designed.